Cibola Burn

by James S. A. Corey

  After we saw the power spike,” Holden said, “the Rocinante did a sweep of the location. Several of them, actually.”

  He held out his hand terminal, and Elvi took it. She tried to look serious, not to seem impressed. She was a scientist, for God’s sake, facing a serious question, not a girl who’d get on her family’s shared feed and burble about how James Holden had been in her hut. She flipped the images back and forth. Human brains were wired to see movement, and so the shifting shadows were easy to spot when she went quickly.

  “Something’s moving,” she agreed. “Can we see what it is?”

  “Not a lot of imaging satellites up there yet,” Holden said. “The Roci’s built for ship-to-ship combat more than ground visualization.”

  Anywhere in the solar system, it wouldn’t have been like this. There were so many cameras of such exquisite sensitivity, almost nothing could happen in the vast emptiness inside the orbit of Neptune that couldn’t be seen if someone wanted to look for it. It was another reminder of how far from home they were, and how many axioms of daily life didn’t apply here.

  “What does the Israel see?” she asked.

  “Nothing that’s a lot better,” Holden said. “That’s why we’re going out. It’s right at the range of the vehicles. It’s going to take the better part of the day to get out there.”

  “Why?” she asked. “I mean, I see it’s decently large, but there are likely to be any number of large organisms in the ocean and colder environments.”

  “Organisms don’t make power spikes,” Holden said. “All sorts of things are moving on this planet. All the time. This just started.”

  Elvi touched the image, expanding it until the shadows blurred.

  “You’re right. We should check it out,” she said. “Let me get my instruments.”

  An hour later, she was in the back of an open loader, Fayez at her side. Holden sat in front of them, in the passenger’s seat, while Chandra Wei drove. A vicious-looking rifle jounced at Wei’s side, in easy reach if violence came on them unexpectedly. The loader’s engines whined, and the wheels ground against the stones of the wind-paved desert.

  “Why didn’t Sudyam come?” Elvi asked, shouting to be heard over the loader and the wind.

  Fayez leaned close to her shoulder. “Wei thought it would be good to have someone on the exobio workgroup still alive if this went poorly.”

  Elvi’s felt her eyes go wide, and she glanced at the woman in the driver’s seat. “Really?”

  “She phrased it more gently,” Fayez said.

  There was no demarcation of the border, no fence or road to show that they had left First Landing. The stone-and-dirt hills rose and fell, organisms like grass or fungus clinging to the land and being crushed under the loader’s wheels. Slowly, the ruins that had become Elvi’s landmark on New Terra thinned and shrank and fell out of view. She leaned her head against the loader’s roll bar, letting the vibrations of the land translate themselves through her skull. Wei looked over her shoulder, and Elvi smiled at her. The memories of a hundred field excursions in graduate school left her body expecting beer and marijuana, and the anxiety of the actual errand tugged at her. Every day for weeks, she had found some new organism or fact that humanity had never seen before, and now she was going to something possibly even more alien. No one had said the word protomolecule, but the implication was thick as cement. Animals didn’t make a power surge. The aliens did.

  In the wide, bright sky above them, high-altitude winds pulled a huge green-and-pink cloud into thin streamers. The speculation on Luna was that the strange cloud coloration meant an organism was present in them, something that packed its own minerals up into the sky and used the vapor the way salmon used spawning pools. It was only a hypothesis. The truth could be a thousand times stranger. Or it could be utterly mundane. Elvi watched the bright fleece of cloud stretch, and the sun track a little too slowly past it. Fayez was typing furiously on his hand terminal. Wei drove with a focus and intensity that seemed to be her signature ever since she’d come to the surface. Which meant ever since Reeve and the others had gone missing.

  Elvi wondered what it meant that she could go out into the absolute unknown, tracking across a planet with no idea what the local dangers might be, and it was thoughts of the people back in First Landing that frightened her. New Terra was supposed to be dangerous and wild and unknown. It was only living up to expectations. The dangers that the people posed were worse because she hadn’t seen it coming. And so she was afraid she wouldn’t next time either.

  She wasn’t aware of drifting into a doze until Fayez put his hand on her shoulder and shook her gently back to herself. He pointed up. A bright spot lit the blue of the sky like Venus seen from Earth. It grew slowly brighter as it tracked west. A thin white contrail formed behind it, the only perfectly straight line in the organically twisting sky. A shuttle. Elvi frowned.

  “Were we expecting the shuttle?” she asked.

  “That’s not ours,” Fayez said. “That’s the Barbapiccola’s. The mining operation’s under way again.”

  Elvi shook her head. It was all one stupid, shortsighted mistake after another, strung together so that each one seemed inevitable. The colony would sell the ore, get lawyers, make deals. The containment dome would never be set up. What should have been clean, solid biology would turn into a salvage job of correcting for this and discarding the impurities that. Fayez seemed to know what she was thinking.

  “No research protocol survives contact with the subject population,” he said. “That’s not just this. It’s everything.”

  The sun had dipped to half a hand above the horizon when the loader topped another rise like a thousand before it. Wei braked and shut off the engines. Fayez stood up in his seat, his elbows resting on the roll bar. Holden said something obscene under his breath.

  “Well,” Fayez said, his voice hushed. “At least it wasn’t hard to find.”

  The thing hunkered down in the depression between two hills. Its vast carapace was the nacreous white that she’d seen in the walls of the ruins, but there was nothing architectural about this. It had an insectile form, long articulated limbs like legs pressing weakly out into the hardpack. Two larger appendages emerged from its back, one gray and splintered, the exoskeleton empty of anything but dust, the other swinging awkwardly. Five black circles on its abdomen recalled eyes, but didn’t shift to focus on them. At least not as far as Elvi could tell.

  “What is it?” Wei asked. Elvi noticed that the rifle had made its way to the woman’s hands. She hadn’t seen that happen.

  “I don’t know,” Elvi said. “I haven’t seen anything like it before.”

  “I have,” Holden said. “It’s one of their machines. Whatever designed the protomolecule had… things like this on the station between the rings. They were smaller, though. I saw one of them kill someone.”

  “You’re telling me,” Wei said, her voice even and calm, “that thing is a couple billion years old?”

  “That would be my guess,” Holden said.

  Fayez whistled low. “That is not dead which can eternal lie. Or, y’know, whatever.”

  The monster from the desert shifted drunkenly, its legs awkward. Its one functioning arm twisted toward them, then collapsed to the ground. Its body shifted and trembled as it tried to lift it again.

  “Look,” Elvi said. “Back there.”

  All along the contour line at the bottom of the valley between hills, the stones had been scraped clean. None of the quasi-fungal grasses remained. No lizards or birds. It was like a vast hand had come down with a sponge and wiped the landscape clean. Now that she knew to look, she saw the thing’s legs were pulling the native life up and feeding into tiny, chitinous orifices along its underbelly.

  “It’s… eating?” she said.

  “On the station,” Holden said, “soldiers tried to kill one with a grenade. The machines killed the man who threw it and used his body. Reprocessed it right there. Turned him into paste and u
sed him to repair the damage.”

  “That makes sense,” Elvi said. “The protomolecule repurposed biological systems during the Eros event as well.”

  “Glad you approve, Doctor Okoye,” Wei said dryly. “In your scientific opinion, could this pose a threat to the expedition?”

  “Sure, maybe,” Elvi said, and Holden made a gurgling sound in the back of his throat. The thing lurched forward, lost its footing, and scrambled back. It was like watching a broken toy or a car-struck dog that hadn’t quite died yet. It was fascinating and frightening, and she couldn’t look away.

  “I think we need to leave now,” Holden said, fear making the words come fast. “Like now now. Not later now.”

  “Isn’t what we came here for,” Wei said, raising the rifle to her shoulder.

  “What are you doing!” Holden shouted. “Did you not hear me about the putty making?”

  In reply, Wei opened fire. Tracer rounds drew bright red lines through the air, and small explosions lit every place they struck. The thing staggered back, swinging its arm, but Wei pulled a fresh clip from her pocket when the first one went dry and resumed firing. The thing tried to push in toward Wei, and then to move away from her. A green-gray liquid poured from the wounds in its side. The report of the rifle was deafening.

  The thing lurched one last time, and let out a high, teeth-clenching keen. It collapsed, legs splayed, in the pool of liquid. Wei let the gun’s barrel drift down until it pointed at the ground. When she looked at Holden, her eyes were hard. Holden hands were on the loader’s dash, the knuckles white. His face was gray.

  “I hope that’s not a problem, sir,” Wei said.

  “You are out of your fucking mind?” Holden said, his voice high and tight. “That thing could have killed you!”

  “Yes, sir,” Wei said. “That’s why I killed it.”

  “Did you?” Holden said, his voice continuing to climb. “Are you sure? What if it’s not all the way dead? Can we… burn it or something?”

  Wei smiled.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, we can.”

  An hour later, the great ruddy disk of the sun touched the horizon. The flames danced around the thing’s corpse, rising up higher than a bonfire. Greasy black smoke spiraled up toward the clouds, and the whole world seemed to reek of accelerants. Wei had taken a small tent from the loader’s storage, and Fayez had set it up. Elvi stood, the heat of the sun and the fire pressing against her face. The night was going to be long. They all were, here.

  “You all right?” Fayez asked.

  “I’m fine. I wish I’d gotten some samples, though.”

  In the heart of the fire, the thing glowed. Its shell was white-hot, and thin cracks had started to show, radiating out from its joints. It was beautiful in its way, and she was sorry to see it destroyed and relieved in almost equal measures. It wasn’t an emotional mixture she was used to.

  Wei insisted on setting up watches through the night, and Holden volunteered to take the first of them. He seemed uneasy in a way that Elvi wouldn’t have thought James Holden, captain of the Rocinante, was capable of. Vulnerable. Elvi lay in the tent, her head poking out. Fayez snored softly beside her. Wei, curled in the back of the loader with a thin blanket, was silent as stone. Elvi watched Holden and listened while he hummed to himself, a lonely human sound in the vast inhuman planet. Sleep didn’t come. After two hours, she gave up, rose from her uncomfortable bed, and went to sit at the man’s side. In a world without moonlight, there was only the orange glow of the alien’s dying pyre and a thin silver highlight of stars. It reduced him to a few lines and a sense of mass and warmth.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she said.

  “I don’t think I will either,” he said. “I hate the way those things scare me.”

  “I’m surprised to hear you say that.”

  “You were expecting me to enjoy it?” She could hear the smile. Far above them, a falling star streaked across the sky, bright, and then gone.

  “I’m not used to hearing men admit to having emotions,” she said. “You were on Eros when the outbreak came, weren’t you? I’d think after that, nothing would frighten you.”

  “Doesn’t work that way. After Eros, everything frightened me. I’m still trying to calm down.” He chuckled. When he spoke again, his voice had sobered. “Do you think that thing was a machine? Or was that an animal?”

  “I don’t think that’s a distinction they would have made.”

  “You mean the designers? Who the hell knows how they would have seen anything?”

  “Oh, we can say some things,” Elvi said. “What they cared about was in what they designed. And still is, in a way. We know that they respected the power of self-replicators and knew how to harness it.”

  She felt him turn toward her more than saw it. She was profoundly aware of being a woman in a dark wilderness with a man beside her. It made the vast night seem intimate.

  “How do we know that?” he asked.

  “Where they sent the protomolecule,” she said. “The universe has some things that are fairly consistent. The elements are the same. Carbon is always carbon. Nitrogen’s always nitrogen. They make the same bonds and can build the same structures. All the systems we’ve surveyed have at least one planet that has the possibility of generating organic replicators.”

  “Meaning things with DNA?”

  “Or things that act like DNA. They sent out bridge builders to use those basic biological replicators, whatever their form. They can take a biosphere and turn it into a massively networked factory. It’s probably how they spread. Target the places that can be hijacked into making the things that let you get there. Also, they really built structures to last. They seem to have taken the long view on galactic colonizing.”

  She leaned back, letting her hand rest on the front of the loader. Not reaching out to him, but putting her fingers where, in the darkness, he might accidentally brush against them. To the north, some small animal called, its voice high and chirping.

  “It was there for billions of years,” Holden said. “And we killed it with a rifle and some mineral spirits.”

  “In our defense, it wasn’t looking healthy. But yes. It wasn’t expecting anything as advanced or aggressive as we are. They built structures that lasted billions of years. The ruins. That thing. The rings. All of it.”

  “They sound like gods sometimes. Angry spiteful gods, but still.”

  “No,” Elvi said. “Just organisms that we don’t understand. And with their own constraints. They were specialized for their ecosystem, just like we are. Thirteen hundred worlds seems a lot when you’ve only ever had the one, but it’s a raindrop in the ocean compared with what’s out there, just in our galaxy.”

  “They had more.”

  Elvi made a small inquiring sound.

  “They had more,” Holden said. “But something attacked them, and they tried to stop it. They burned up entire solar systems. A lot of them. Then, when that didn’t work, they shut down the whole network. Quarantined themselves and died anyway.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “I saw it. Sort of. A guy I used to know is kind of looking into it.”

  “I’d like to talk to him,” she said.

  “Yeah, he’s less helpful than you’d expect.”

  Wei shifted in her sleep. Elvi yawned, though she wasn’t particularly tired.

  “Why did it wake up?” he said, nodding toward the alien corpse. “Was it because of us? Did it know we were here?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe they cycle up and down every so often. We’ve only seen one. There may be a lot of these and seeing them will be common. There may be a few and it will be rare. There could only have been one. Not enough data yet.”

  “I guess not. Still, I wish I knew what was going to happen.”

  “I don’t. So much of my life has been better than what I imagined, I’ve come to enjoy being surprised. When I was doing my undergraduate at Kano, I was imagining I’d be doing envir
onmental assays on Europa for my whole career. Instead, this.”

  “Kano?”

  “I spent a lot of time in the West African Shared Interest Zone when I was growing up. Northern Nigeria. I went back there for university.”

  “Really?” Holden said, his voice bright. “One of my fathers had family in Nigeria.”

  “One of them?”

  “I have several,” he said. “Extended parental group.”

  “Oh. I’ve heard of those.”

  “Makes for a big nuclear family, and a huge extended one. We might be cousins.”

  “I hope not,” Elvi said, laughing, and then wished she could suck the words back. The silence was terrible. She couldn’t see his face clearly, but she could imagine it. The surprise. The embarrassment. She pulled her hand back and put it in her lap.