Cibola Burn (Expanse)

by James S. A. Corey

  “Huh,” Basia said. “Well, they’re shooting at me.”

  “Get back in the ship,” Havelock said.

  “I will. In a minute. Now where did you… Ah! There you are.”

  The grapnel struck his left arm, the gel splashing out and hardening in almost the same moment. At the first tug, his right leg shrieked in pain. But the vectors were such that his uncontrolled spinning slowed. The red dots of the militia were much closer now. Basia was in real danger of being shot. And there were still eight more improvised missiles.

  The Rocinante jumped. The rail gun path through the high atmosphere glowed. Had it really only been five minutes? He had to have missed a couple of rounds. Or maybe getting blown out into space just changed how he experienced time. Or maybe he’d seen them and then forgotten.

  “Don’t pull me too fast,” Havelock said. “You’re going to have to put just as much energy into stopping me once I’m there. I could knock you off.” Or smash against the hull, he didn’t say.

  “I’ve been in low g more than I haven’t,” Basia said, a real amusement in his voice. “Don’t worry yourself.”

  The slow-spinning Rocinante came closer, Havelock’s own spin making it seem like the universe and the ship and his own body were all in slightly different realities. Basia was a darker blot against gray ceramic and metal. Havelock’s HUD cheerfully informed him that his blood pressure had been stabilized. He hadn’t realized that it was unstable. The suit’s attitude jets were still off-line, but Basia jumped up to meet him before he touched the deck, wrapping arms around his shoulders in a bear hug while Basia’s suit slowed them.

  “You need to get inside,” Havelock said as his left mag boot locked against the hull.

  “I was about to say the same to you,” Basia said. “How much shrapnel did you take?”

  Havelock looked at his leg for the first time. The suit was dotted with emergency sealant, the result of a dozen holes at least. “All of it, apparently.”

  “I’ve got fast movers,” Alex said.

  Havelock turned, rifle up, ready to shoot the missiles down before they reached him or die trying. It took a few seconds to find them. The green dots weren’t heading for him. They were tracking down toward the planet. Toward the Barb.

  “Okay,” he said. “Hold on.”

  “I think they’re still shooting at you,” Naomi said. He moved forward, his leg not painful now so much as eerily numb. The shifting of the Rocinante was throwing off his aim. His HUD showed a lock and he pulled the trigger. One of the missiles exploded. Basia was hunched down, hands and legs against the decking, a stream of obscenity coming from him sounding like a chant. Havelock tried to move his mag boots, but he couldn’t get them to respond. The Roci bucked.

  “The crew of the Barb’s braced,” Alex said. “First impact in —”

  A new brightness bloomed below them. Havelock felt it, the impact traveling through the tether to the Roci to his boots almost instantaneously. Through the radio, he could hear Alex groan.

  “Okay,” Naomi said. “This is a problem.”

  Below them, the Barbapiccola was starting to tilt. The force of the explosions just enough to give it a little velocity, a tumble so slow, he could almost pretend it wasn’t there. Almost. Not quite. The webwork of the tether was shredded. Two strands still held, but the others were drifting. One was cut in two, the others might have broken free of their foot supports or pulled the supports off the skin of the ship. He wasn’t sure. New Terra was so large below, it filled his field of vision. A wave of vertigo washed over him, and he had the near-hallucinatory sense that the planet was a monster rising up through a vast ocean to swallow them all.

  “Alex,” Naomi said, “drop the cable.”

  “No!” Basia shouted at her.

  “Not responding,” Alex said. “The release seems to be damaged.”

  The Roci bucked, and the tether snapped taut.

  “Cease firing!” Basia shouted. “Stop firing the rail gun!”

  “Sorry,” Alex said. “It was on automatic. It’s shut down now.”

  “I’m going to the Barb,” Basia said. “I’ve got my welding rig. May be something I can do.”

  “That’s not going to work,” Naomi said. “Just cut it.” The Barbapiccola was a good ten degrees off the stable orbit she’d had. Tumbling.

  “I’m not coming back in,” Basia said. “And I’m not cutting it. I gotta go look.”

  “You remember they’re still shooting at you, right?” Naomi said.

  “I don’t care,” Basia said.

  “I’ll cover him,” Havelock said. “I can do that.”

  “Can you move?”

  Havelock consulted his HUD. His shredded leg was immobilized and under pressure to contain the bleeding. One of his attitude jets had been holed. The air in his suit smelled sharp, like melting plastic. That couldn’t be a good sign.

  “Not really, no,” he said. “But Basia can get me to cover. The outer airlock hatch on the Roci, maybe. I can stay there and snipe.”

  “Hurry, then,” Naomi said. “They’re still getting closer, and eventually they’ll get to a range they might hit something.”

  Havelock disengaged his mag boots and turned toward the Belter. “All right. If we’re going to do this, let’s go.”

  Basia clapped a hand on Havelock’s arm and started dead hauling him down the ruined side of the ship. The pockmarks and bright spots where the debris of the shuttle had struck were everywhere, now joined by the scar of the improvised missile. A soft white plume curved into the void where something was venting. Time seemed to skip, and he was at the airlock’s outer door. It was open, waiting for him. The red dots showed that his men were still ten minutes away. The Barb was above him now, and the planet above that. Not a beast rising to devour him, but a whole clouded sky falling down to crush him.

  “Are you all right?” Basia said. “You can do this?”

  “I’ll live,” Havelock said, and immediately realized how completely inappropriate that had been to say. “I’m all right. Lightheaded, but my blood pressure’s solid.”

  “Okay, then. I’ll be right back. Don’t let those sons of bitches screw this up any worse.”

  “I’ll do my best,” he said, but Basia had already launched himself up along the tether. Havelock checked his rifle, his HUD. He still had to adjust for the Roci’s spin, but he found the little red dots quickly.

  “All right, guys,” he said. “You’ve made your point. Now let’s just dial this back. There’s still time. I don’t want to hurt anybody.” The words were surreal. Like a poem from some other century. A litany for deescalating conflict. No one really appreciated how much of security work was just trying to keep things under control for a few more minutes, giving everyone involved in the crisis a little time to think it all through. The threat of violence was just one tool among many, and the point was not making things worse. If there was any way at all, just not making things worse. It occurred to him that Murtry was actually really bad at that part of the job.

  His HUD marked a fast-moving object. A bullet or a slow meteor. From the angle, probably a bullet. Another one was moving on a track to pass Basia. It was going to miss too, but not for much longer.

  “All right,” Havelock said, raising his rifle. “I’m counting to ten, and anyone that’s still on approach, I’m going to have to put a hole in you. I’ll try to just disable your suits, but I’m not making any promises.”

  The red dots didn’t change their vectors.

  It was strange. He’d come all this way, faced all these dangers. He was falling by centimeters into a planet and struggling for a few more minutes or hours of life. And the thing that worried him most was still that he was going to have to shoot somebody.

  Chapter Fifty: Elvi

  T

  he cart had been designed for use on rough terrain and shipped out to a planet without roads. It wasn’t smooth, but it was fast, and the roar of the generator and the whirring of the moto
rs had made a kind of white noise that Elvi’s brain tuned out after the first few hours, leaving her in something like silence. And all around them, the ruins of New Terra rose up and then passed away. The storm that had scoured First Landing into scraps and mud hadn’t been local. All of the landscapes they passed through were shattered and drowned, but they were still fascinating. Still beautiful.

  A forest of thin red bodies halfway between trees and gigantic fungi lay on their sides, the cart’s wheels leaving tire tracks across their flesh. Flying creatures no larger than her splay-fingered hand fell into line behind the cart for hours, attracted by the noise or the movement of the spray of atmospheric hydrocarbons. She wondered how the frail creatures had survived the planetary disaster. When night fell, three vast columns of luminous dots rose up into the sky like skyscrapers built from fireflies. She didn’t know if they were organisms like the mimic lizards or artifacts like her butterflies. A huge animal, as tall and wide across as an elephant but segmented like a caterpillar, lay dead and rotting along the crest of a low hill, structures like two interlocking sets of ribs crossing its massive sides and gnat-small carrion eaters flying around it like a fog. A silver-and-blue structure rose from a pool of grayish rainwater, collapsed, and rose again. It could have been anything, but she could only see its behaviors as play. Splashing in puddles. It was all she could do to keep from stopping and looking at it all.

  A whole biosphere – or two or three – passed by her, teasing and hinting. She wished she could have seen it all before the storm. At best now, they would be able to guess at what had come before and see what came after. She took consolation by reminding herself that was always true. All of nature was a record of crisis and destruction and adaptation and flourishing and being knocked back down again. What had happened on New Terra was singular and concrete, but the pattern it was part of seemed to apply everywhere and maybe always. Even the aliens that had made the artifacts, the protomolecule, the rings, had suffered some vast and cosmic collapse.

  At dawn the three of them shared the last of their food. There was still enough water to last a few days, but they would be hungry ones, and after that, she guessed they’d try to find something on the planet that they could stomach. They would fail and die. Unless Holden really could turn the reactors back on and drop something from the ships. A steep-walled canyon blocked their way, the erosion of centuries exposing strata of rock as even and unvarying as the pages of a book. It took the cart’s expert system half an hour to find a path down and back up.

  When she had mentioned how lucky they were that they hadn’t hit anything like a mountain range, Fayez had laughed.

  “You’d need tectonic plates first,” he’d said. “This planet doesn’t have mountains, it has hemlines.”

  None of them talked much, the noise of the cart drowning out anything short of shouting, but even if they’d been driving in silence, she didn’t have the sense that Amos Burton would have spoken. He spent the day and a half of travel sitting at the cart’s front edge, legs folded, his eyes on his hand terminal or the horizon. She thought there was a growing anxiety in the man’s broad face, fear for Holden and for the ships above them and the planet all around, but she could also have been projecting her own feelings on him. He had that kind of face.

  In some places, the tracks of the other cart – Murtry and Wei’s cart – had wandered off on a different heading from their own. Sometimes the tracks got lost in the soft mud or vanished as they crossed wide, wet expanses of stone. But it always returned, the doubled track of their tires leading the way north into with wilderness. The headlights showed a swath of gravel and pale yellow snail-like organisms that were crushed under the cart’s wheels. The air was colder, either because they were heading north or because the permanent cloud cover was keeping the energy of the sun up away from the planet’s surface. Elvi had dozed as much as the emptiness in her belly permitted, her head on Fayez’s lap, then they traded and he dozed in hers. Her dreams had been of Earth and trying to guide a pizza delivery service through the hallways of her university lab. She woke knowing that something had changed, but it took her a long moment to realize what. The cart was silent. She sat up, rubbing her eyes.

  The other cart was in the headlights, spattered with mud and scarred along the side where it had scraped against something harder than its alloy siding. Amos dropped down and walked slowly around it twice, once looking at the cart and once looking out into the darkness.

  “What is it?” she asked. “Is everything okay?”

  “Their motors burned out,” Amos said as he hauled himself back up to the cart bed. “Got mud in the axles and didn’t clean it out. Wherever they went from here, it was on foot.”

  “Are we close to Holden?”

  “Oh yeah,” Amos said, holding up his hand terminal. “This was the last blip we saw. It was short, but it gave us a pretty good lock on his position. We’ll move toward it and hope he pops up again soon.” The map didn’t give her a sense of scale, but there were two indicators on it – one for them and the other for the captain. “If I’m right, we’re getting right toward the end of this. And we’re still the ones with the wheels. You two’d better lie down on the deck from here on in.”

  “Why?” Fayez asked.

  “Case they decide to shoot someone,” Amos said, restarting the generator.

  Over the roar, she didn’t think Amos heard Fayez say, “All right. That makes sense.” But she did.

  It was still the small hours of the morning – the long stretch between midnight and dawn – when they came to the structure. At first it was only a glittering in the darkness, like a bit of starfield. For a time, she thought it might be a break in the clouds. But the closer they came, the more obvious it became that it was something else.

  In the darkness, the details were hard to make out, but it seemed to share the same almost organic architecture with the ruins back in First Landing, but a couple orders of magnitude larger. She had the sense of being at the edge of one of the huge industrial ruins of the European west coast, a place where something world-shatteringly huge had once made its power felt, and now had left its carapace behind. When the first pale flakes of snow filtered down through the headlights, she thought at first they were ashes.

  “Is that where we’re going?” Fayez asked.

  “Think so,” Amos said. “We haven’t had a solid update on the captain in a couple hours, and that up there’s about where the last reading came. Figure once you get inside, the signal don’t penetrate.”

  “Or it ate him,” Fayez said. “It could have just eaten him.”

  “Captain’d be a tough meal to swallow,” Amos said.

  The cart rolled on, moving toward Holden’s last known position. Huge black spikes rose out of the ground, some of them swiveling to track their passage. The snow thickened, sticking to the ground and the cart. The structure remained clean, though, the white melting away. It’s warm, Elvi thought, and couldn’t explain why she found the idea so unnerving.

  The cart passed under an archway ten meters high and into the structure itself. The snowfall stopped. All around them, the walls glowed, filling the space with a soft, shadowless light. The air was warmer and smelled of something sharp and acrid, like alcohol fumes, but harsher. The cart shifted one way and then another, hunting for the last, fading traces of Holden’s electrical scent before giving up and stopping. Amos flipped it over to manual and took direct control. The pathways moved in swirls and loops for a time, then broadened, opening. The roof of the place was lost in darkness, and long tubes of what could have been conduits or vasculature rose up out of the earth and flowed together, inward, forward, toward whatever the functional heart of the place had been. The cart slowed. Amos took his shotgun from the deck and fired it. The report echoed.

  “What are you shooting at?” Elvi asked.

  Amos shrugged. “Nothing in particular. Just thought, you know, loud.” He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted. “Captain! You out there?
Holden!”

  “Are we sure he’s in here?” Fayez said.

  “Nope,” Amos said, then went back to shouting. “Captain!”

  A figure stepped from behind a massive machine, fifty meters in front of them. It was the size and shape of a human, and Elvi felt a moment’s disorientation at how utterly out of place it seemed. Amos took a fresh grip on the shotgun and angled toward it. The figure stood, feet shoulder width apart, hands at its sides, as the cart approached. When they were within ten meters, Amos shut the generator down.

  “Hey there,” he said, his voice open and friendly and insincere.

  “Hey yourself,” Wei answered, lifting her chin.

  Amos dropped from the side of the cart, his shotgun in his hand almost as if he’d forgotten it was there. Elvi looked at Fayez, who shrugged. She slid down to the ground, moving forward slowly. She kept her hand against the front tire, the tread warm against her palm, but cooling.