Cibola Burn

by James S. A. Corey

  Miller nodded, but didn’t speak. How much of what I’m about to say does he already know? How predictive is the brain model they’ve made of me? Holden decided wondering that was the path to madness.

  “I need to know two things,” Holden said, “or this trip ends right now.”

  “Okay,” Miller said with a palms-up, Belter version of a shrug.

  “First, how are you following me around? You first showed up on this ship after Ganymede, and you’ve been everywhere I go ever since. Am I infected? Is that how you stay with me? I’ve gone through two gates without ditching you, so either you’re inside my head or you’re a galaxy-wide phenomenon. Which is it?”

  “Yeah,” Miller said, then took off his hat and rubbed his short hair. “Wrong on both counts. First answer is, I live here. During the Ganymede incident, which is a stupid name for it, by the way, the protomolecule put a local node inside this ship.”

  “Wait. There’s protomolecule stuff in the Roci?” Holden said, fighting down the surge of panic. If Miller wanted to hurt him and had the means to do so, it would already have happened.

  “Yeah,” Miller said with a shrug, like it wasn’t a big deal. “You had a visitor, remember?”

  “You mean I had a half-human monster,” Holden said, “that almost killed Amos and me. And that we vaporized in our drive trail.”

  “Yeah, that’d be him. To be fair, he wasn’t exactly running a coherent program, that one. But he had enough of the old instructions left that he placed some material on the ship. Not much, and not what you’d call live culture. Just enough to keep a connection between the Ring Station’s processing power and your ship.”

  “You infected the Roci?” Holden said, fear and rage briefly warring in his gut.

  “Don’t know I’d use that verb, but all right. If you want. It’s what lets me follow you around,” Miller said, then frowned. “What was the other thing?”

  “I don’t know if I’m done with this thing,” Holden said.

  “You’re safe. We need you.”

  “And when you don’t?”

  “Then no one’s safe,” Miller said, his eerie blue eyes flashing. “So stop obsessing. Second thing?”

  Holden sat down on the deck. He hadn’t wanted to ask how Miller was in his head, because he was terrified the answer would be that he was infected. The fact that he wasn’t, but his ship was, was both a relief and a new source of fear.

  “What will we find down on Ilus? What are you looking for?”

  “Same thing as always. Who done it,” Miller said. “After all, something killed off the civilization that built all this.”

  “And how will we know when we’ve found it?”

  “Oh,” Miller said, his grin vanishing. He leaned toward Holden, the smell of acetate and copper filling the air or else only his senses. “We’ll know.”

  Chapter Eight: Elvi

  T

  he sandstorms tended to start in the late afternoon and last until a little after sundown. They began as a softening of the western horizon. Then the little plant analogs in the plain behind her hut would fold their photosynthetic surfaces into tight puckers like tiny green mouths that had tasted lemon, and twenty minutes later the town and the ruins and the sky would all disappear in a wave of dry sand.

  Elvi sat at her desk, Felcia at the foot of the bed, and Fayez with his back against the headboard.

  Felcia had become a regular visitor, more often than not to talk with Elvi or Fayez or Sudyam. Elvi liked having her around. It made the division between the township and the RCE teams seem… not less real, but less terrible. Permeable.

  Today, though, felt different. Felcia seemed more tightly wound than usual. Maybe it was the fact that the UN mediator’s ship was getting close. Maybe it was the weather.

  “So, our solar system only has one tree of life,” Elvi said, moving her hands in the air as if to conjure it up. “It started once, and everything we’ve ever found shares that ancestry. But we don’t know why.”

  “Why we all share?” Felcia asked.

  “Why it didn’t happen twice,” Elvi said. “Only one kind of Schrödinger crystal. One codon map. Why? If all the materials were there for amino acids to form and connect and interact, why wasn’t there one schema that started in one tide pool, and then another someplace else, and another and another? Why did life arise just the one time?”

  “So what’s the answer?” Felcia asked.

  Elvi’s let her hands wilt a little. A particularly strong gust drove a wave of hard grit against the side of the hut. “Which answer?”

  “Why it only happened once?”

  “Oh. I don’t know. It’s a mystery.”

  “Same reason there’s only one tool-using hominid left. The ones that still exist killed all the competition,” Fayez said.

  “That’s speculation,” Elvi said. “Nothing in the fossil record indicates that there was more than the one beginning of life on Earth. We don’t get to just make things up because they sound good.”

  “Elvi is very comfortable with mysteries,” Fayez said to Felcia with a wink. “It’s why she has a hard time relating with those of us who feel anxious with our ignorance.”

  “Well, you can’t know everything,” Elvi said, making it a joke to hide a tinge of discomfort.

  “God knows I can’t. Especially not on this planet,” Fayez said. “There was no point sending a geologist here.”

  “I’m sure you’re doing fine,” Elvi said.

  “Me? Yes, I’m wonderful. It’s the planet’s fault. It’s got no geology. It’s all manufactured.”

  “How do you mean?” Felcia asked.

  Fayez spread his hands as if he were presenting her with the whole world. “Geology is about studying natural patterns. Nothing here’s natural. The whole planet was machined. The lithium ore you people are mining? No natural processes exist that would make it as pure as what you’re pulling out of the ground. It can’t happen. So apparently, whatever built the gates also had something around here somewhere that concentrated lithium in this one spot.”

  “That’s amazing, though,” Elvi said.

  “If you’re into industrial remediation. Which I’m not. And the southern plains? You know how much they vary? They don’t. The underlying plate is literally as flat as a pane of glass. Somewhere about fifty klicks south of here, there’s some kind of tectonic Zamboni machine about which I am qualified to say absolutely nothing. Those tunnel complexes? Yeah, they’re some kind of old planetary transport system. And yet here I am —”

  “I need a letter of recommendation,” Felcia blurted, then looked down at her hands, blushing. Elvi and Fayez exchanged a glance. The wind howled and muttered.

  “For what?” Elvi asked gently.

  “I’m going to apply for university,” the girl said. She spoke quickly, like the words were all under pressure, and then more slowly until at last she trailed away. “Mother thinks I’ll probably get in. I’ve been talking with the Hadrian Institute on Luna, and Mother arranged that I can get back to Pallas when the Barbapiccola takes the ore, and then take passage on my own from there, only the application needs a letter of recommendation, and I can’t ask anyone in the town because we haven’t told Daddy, and…”

  “Oh,” Elvi said. “Well. I don’t know. I mean, I’ve never seen your academic work —”

  “Seriously?” Fayez said with a snort. “Elvi, it’s a letter of recommendation. You’re not under oath for it. Cut the kid a break.”

  “Well, I just thought it would be better if I could actually say something I know about.”

  “When I went to lower university, I wrote my own letters of recommendation. Two of them came from people I made up. No one checks.”

  Elvi’s jaw dropped a centimeter. “Really?”

  “You are an amazing woman, Elvi, but I don’t know how you survive in the wild.” Fayez turned to Felcia. “If she won’t, I will. You’ll have it by morning, okay?”

  “I don’t know how I c
an repay you,” Felcia said, but she already looked calmer.

  Fayez waved the comment away. “Your undying gratitude is thanks enough. What’s your field of study going to be?”

  For the next hour, Felcia talked about her mother’s medical career, and her dead brother’s immune disorder, and intracellular signaling regulation. Elvi began to realize that she’d unconsciously thought of the girl as younger than she really was. She had the long, slightly gangly build and comparatively large head of a Belter, and somewhere in Elvi’s mind, she’d mistaken it for youth. Felcia would have fit right in at the commons of lower university. The light shifted from beige to deep brown to a burnt umber, and then darkness. The wind calmed. When Elvi opened her door, two centimeters of fine dust covered the walkway and the stars glimmered in the sky. The air smelled like fresh-turned earth. Some sort of actinomycete analog, Elvi thought. Maybe one that was actually carried by the wind. Or maybe something else. Something stranger.

  Felcia headed back for the town, Fayez for his own hut. As far as she could tell, Fayez was one of maybe two or three other people on the science team who was still sleeping alone. Sudyam and Tolerson were the latest pairing. Laberge and Maravalis had just broken off the relationship they’d started on the journey out, and each of them was already involved with someone else.

  Sex wasn’t a strange thing among the scientific teams. That it was unprofessional behavior was set in balance against the fact that – especially on a years-long field expedition like this – the pool of potential mates was both very restricted and generally fairly high-value. People were people. If she felt any jealousy at all, it wasn’t for any of the particular relationships, but for intimacy itself. It would be nice to have someone to walk with in the darkness after the storm. Someone to wake up with in the morning. She wondered what the sexual politics were among the families of First Landing. If RCE had thought to send a social science team, it might have made a good paper.

  Ahead of her and to the right, the alien ruins stood against the horizon, hardly more than a deeper darkness. Only a light was moving in them. It was small and faint. Less than a star, and only visible at all because it was moving. Someone was in the ruins again. Contaminating the site. She knew intellectually that she was letting herself be angry about it because it was better than feeling lonesome or guilty, but that didn’t keep the rage from feeling real. She turned back to her hut, her lips pressed together. She scooped up a flashlight, checked the battery charge, and stalked out toward the ruins, the thin blue circle of light bobbing ahead of her and illuminating her way. The fine dust shifted under her feet like snow, and her thighs ached from the speed of her hike.

  As she neared the ruins, she thought she saw a dim light heading the other way. Back toward the town. But when she called after it, no one answered. She stood in the darkness for almost a minute feeling first unsure of herself, then embarrassed, then angry at feeling embarrassed.

  A path led into the ruins that even the recent dustfall couldn’t conceal. Tracks as wide as a wagon where wheels had gone over the land often enough to leave ruts. Elvi shook her head and followed the path up, twisting around a high shoulder of land and into the huge alien structures.

  Inside, the beam of her flashlight caught the walls and surfaces, sending off glittering reflections that seemed to shift whether she did or not. Where there was shelter from the wind, there were footprints. Lots of them. It wasn’t just someone from town exploring on their own. They were treating the ruins like some sort of clubhouse. Any samples the science team took from the soil here would already be compromised. The microorganisms, a mixture of known and unknown and whatever emerged when the two encountered each other in a totally uncontrolled environment. That the same was true of the whole township seemed insignificant. These were alien structures. They’d been built by a vast, vanished civilization about which humanity still knew almost nothing. It wasn’t some kind of treehouse.

  “Hello?” she shouted. “Is anyone in here?”

  Nothing answered her. Not even the wind. Shaking her head, she stalked deeper into the shadows. If anyone was here, she’d give them the talk she’d meant to give before. She would make them understand the issues, even if it took hectoring them all night.

  The walls around her rose at strange and unsettling angles from the ground, organic and also not, like a machine that was built to pass for the product of nature. Arches rose, looking out over the bare, dark land. The deeper Elvi went, the more there seemed to be, until she had the illusion that the ruins were larger inside than out.

  She was about to give up and turn back home when she saw something square. Simply being rectilinear made it stand out. The boxes were plastic and ceramic, functional gray where they weren’t the bright red and yellow of warning labels. DANGER HIGH EXPLOSIVE. DO NOT STORE NEAR HEAT OR CLASS THREE RADIATION SOURCES.

  “Oh no,” Elvi said to herself. “Oh hell no.”

  “Doctor Okoye,” Reeve said. “I’m hearing you tell me that you found explosives hidden outside of the town.”

  “Yes,” Elvi said. “Of course that’s what you’re hearing me say.”

  “And that there is evidence of several people having been to this clandestine site.”

  They were sitting in Reeve’s office now. The light from his lamp shone warm and soft, and his rough pants and untucked shirt suggested she’d rousted him out of bed. It felt like the middle of the night, though the extended rotational period meant the darkness would be stretching on for almost another ten hours.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “All right,” Reeve said. “It’s all right. This is a good thing. I need you to tell me how to find this place.”

  “Yes. Of course. I’ll take you.”

  “No, I need you to stay right here. Not back to your hut. Not out to the ruins. I need you right here where it’s safe. You understand?”

  “There was someone out there. I saw the light, and that’s why I went. What if they’d still been there?”

  “We don’t have to worry about that, because it didn’t happen,” Reeve said in a carefully reassuring tone of voice that meant You’d be dead. Elvi dropped her head into her hands. “Can you give me directions?”

  She did her best, her voice trembling. Reeve constructed a map on his hand terminal, and she was fairly sure it was accurate. Her mind seemed to be shifting on her a little, though.

  “All right,” Reeve said. “I’m going to have you stay here for a little while.”

  “But my work is all back at the hut.”

  The security man put a reassuring hand on her shoulder, but his gaze was already focused inward, planning some next step that didn’t include her.

  “We’re going to see you’re safe first,” he said. “Everything else will come after that.”

  For the next hour, she sat in the little room or paced. The voices of Reeve and his security team filtered in through the wall, the tones serious and businesslike. And then there were fewer of them.

  A young woman came to get her. Elvi had seen her before, but didn’t know her name. It seemed wrong that they could have spent almost two years traveling out here together, and Elvi still didn’t know her. It should mean something about populations and how they mixed. And how they didn’t.

  “Do you need anything, Doctor Okoye?”

  “I don’t know where to sleep,” Elvi said, and her words seemed thin. Fragile.

  “I’ve got a bunk ready,” the girl said. “Please come with me.”

  The rooms were empty. The others gone out into the alien darkness to face a terribly human threat. The girl leading her to the bunk had a sidearm strapped to her belt. Elvi glanced out the front window as they passed. The street was the same one she’d walked down the day before, and it was also wholly changed. A sense of threat hung over everything like the promise of a storm coming. Like the haze on the horizon. She saw Felcia’s brother walking down the street, not looking at her or anything else. Her fear was cold and deep.

  Chapt
er Nine: Basia

  B

  asia had volunteered for the night shift at the mine. Fewer people to hide from. Less open sky to make him jittery. The work, as backbreaking as it was, was a relief. The fabricator they’d brought down from the Barbapiccola was building tracks and carts as fast as they could load raw material into it. His team was trying to keep up with its output by assembling the rail system that would move ore from the pit to the sifters to the silos. There, it would wait for the Barbapiccola’s shuttle to take it up into orbit. Everything they’d mined so far had been moved with wheelbarrows by hand. A motorized cart system would increase production by an order of magnitude.