Cibola Burn

by James S. A. Corey

  “Captain?” a tentative voice said to his back. He turned around to find Elvi Okoye smiling up at him, a large sack thrown over one shoulder.

  “Hello,” he said. “What’ve you got there?”

  “It’s blankets. Fayez and Sudyam and I are bringing all the blankets we had at the compound. The temperature’s sure to drop significantly once the debris cloud covers us. The nights will get cold.”

  “Good thinking. We should probably tell some more people to bring blankets.”

  “So,” she added, still with her unsure half smile, “I wanted to ask for some help for the chemical sciences group.”

  “Help?”

  “The chemical analysis deck is pretty heavy, and they’re having trouble moving it. One or two more people would make the job a lot easier.”

  Holden laughed in disbelief. “We won’t be doing science up there, Elvi. Tell them to ditch it and carry water or food instead.”

  “It makes water,” she said.

  “They can carry – It makes what?”

  “It can sterilize and distill water,” she said, nodding as if by doing so she could make him agree faster. “We might need it. For when, you know, the bottles run out.”

  “Yes,” he said, feeling like an idiot.

  “Yes,” she agreed, smiling helpfully.

  “Amos!” he yelled. When the big man came over he pointed at Elvi and said, “Find someone to help you, then follow her. There’s a big piece of equipment they need help moving.”

  “Equipment?” Amos frowned. “Wouldn’t food or water be —”

  “It makes water,” Holden and Elvi said at the same time.

  “Roger,” Amos said and left in a hurry.

  Holden noticed that a subtle darkening of the sky had begun. The sun was still high. It was barely past midday and into the early afternoon. But the sunlight was shifting toward red and the world was darkening along with it, as though a beautiful sunset were starting about five hours early. Something about the change sent a shiver up his spine.

  “Get up there,” Holden said, giving Elvi a gentle push toward the alien towers. “Go now. Tell your people to hurry.”

  To her credit, she didn’t argue, just took off at a dead run back toward the RCE science compound. All around him the colonists were moving faster, arguing less, and casting the occasional frightened glance at the sky.

  Holden hadn’t been inside the alien structure since he’d looked it over as a crime scene. It had the same eerie and inhuman aesthetic sense he’d seen before, first on Eros after the infection, and later on the Ring Station at the heart of the gate network. Curves and angles that were subtly wrong and yet weirdly beautiful at the same time. He tried to imagine what use the protomolecule masters had made of the buildings, and failed. He couldn’t picture them housing machines like a factory, nor could he picture them as dwellings, scattered with furniture and personal items. It was as if, standing empty as they were, they still fulfilled whatever alien function they’d always been meant to serve.

  It was also where Basia Merton and the others had hidden their explosives. Where they’d killed the security team. The bloodiest crimes that had been committed on the planet had all been centered right here, where they were all going now.

  “Give me another recount,” Carol Chiwewe said to her aides. “Who are we missing? Find out who we’re missing.”

  She’d been doing head counts of the colonists ever since she’d arrived, almost the last person in. They kept coming up with new numbers over and over as stragglers drifted in and people milled around. It was an impossible task, but Holden respected her commitment to ensuring they left no one behind.

  The RCE science team huddled together in one rounded corner of the building’s large central room, Elvi among them. Several scientists were fiddling with a large machine. Getting it ready to purify large quantities of water, Holden hoped. Lucia drifted across the room to exchange a few words with Elvi, her son Jacek in tow. Holden breathed a sigh of relief they’d both made it. Basia would be up on the Rocinante going out of his mind with worry, and Holden was happy he’d be able to report that they were as safe as he could make them.

  “Hey, Cap,” Amos said, coming out of a side room with several colonists trailing. “We got a problem.”

  “Another one? Worse than the cataclysmic storm heading our way?”

  “Related, I guess you’d say,” Amos replied. “We’ve been going through the head counts and looks like the Dahlke family is missing.”

  “We’re sure about that?”

  “Pretty,” Amos said with a shrug.

  Carol saw them talking and made her way through the crowded room toward them. “One hundred percent sure,” she said. “Clay Dahlke was in town picking up supplies when we warned him. He headed out to get his wife and daughter. They’ve got the house farthest outside of town. I should have sent someone along but I was stupid —”

  “You had plenty to do,” Holden reassured her. “How far from here is the Dahlke place?”

  “Three klicks,” Amos said. “I’m about to head out with these guys and see if we can find them.”

  “Wait a minute,” Holden said. “I’m not sure you can make a six-kilometer round trip with the time we have left, let alone look for someone.”

  “Not leaving that little girl out there, chief,” Amos said. He kept his voice carefully neutral, but Holden could hear the barest presentiment of a threat hiding in it.

  “All right,” Holden said, giving in. “But let me call up to the Roci and get an update. At least let me do that.”

  “Sure,” Amos said agreeably. “Someone’s looking for a poncho for the kid right now anyway.”

  Holden headed out of the main room and through the confusion of smaller chambers around it, trying to find the entrance. The alien building was a maze of connecting passages and rooms. As he walked, he pulled out his hand terminal. “Alex, this is Holden, you listening?”

  The sound coming out of the terminal was filled with static from the atmosphere’s heavy ionization, but Holden could still hear Alex when he said, “Alex here. What’s the word?”

  “Give me an update. How close are we?”

  “Oh, boss, you just need to look west.” The fear in Alex’s voice was audible even over the heavy static.

  Holden stepped out of the alien tower’s main entrance and looked toward the slowly setting sun.

  A curtain of black covered the horizon as far as the eye could see. It was moving so quickly that even from dozens of kilometers away it appeared to hurtle toward him, a black roiling cliff shot through with lightning. The ground beneath his feet trembled and shook, and Holden remembered that sound moved more quickly through a solid than through the air. The vibration he felt now was the sound of all that fury, coming through the earth like an early warning. Even as he thought it, a rising roar started in the west.

  “What’s it look like?” Amos had come into the antechamber and was pulling a light backpack on. His colonist friends stood behind him, their faces a mixture of hope and fear.

  “It’s too late, big man,” Holden said, looking west and shaking his head. “It’s way too late.”

  He wasn’t sure as he said it if he meant for the Dahlkes, or for all of them.

  Chapter Thirty: Elvi

  T

  he storm front came, seeming slow at first – a tall purple-black churn higher than skyscrapers with only the slightest stirrings in the warm air to show that it was real – and then between one breath and the next, hit with the violence of a blow. Air and water and mud jetted through the windows, archways, and holes in the ruin like the stream from a firehose. It did not simply roar; it deafened. Elvi curled with her back against the wall of the ruin, her arms wrapped around her knees, and endured. The walls shuddered against her spine, vibrating with the hurricane gusts.

  Across from her, Michaela had her hands over her ears, her mouth open in a shriek that Elvi couldn’t hear. She had thought the rain would be cold, but it w
asn’t. The slurry that soaked up on the ruin’s floor was warm and salty, and somehow that was worse. She laced her fingers together, squeezing until her knuckles ached. The mud-thick water filled the air until the spray made it hard to breathe. Someone lurched through the archway to her left, but she could no more make out who than stop the catastrophe by willing it. She felt certain that the ruins would fail, the more-than-ancient walls snap apart, and she and all the rest of them would be thrown into the storm, crushed or drowned or both. All she could think of was being in the heavy shuttle, the confusion and the panic when it was going down, the trauma of the impact. This felt the same, but it went on and on and on until she found herself almost missing the sudden impact of the crash. That, at least, had ended.

  She knew that it was daytime, but the only lights were the cold white of the emergency lights and the near-constant barrage of lightning that caught people’s faces like a strobe. A young man, his face set and stony like an image of suffering and endurance. A child no more than eight years old, his head buried in his mother’s shoulder. Wei and Murtry in uniform, standing as close as lovers and shouting into each other’s ears in the effort to be heard, their faces flushed red. The vast shifts of barometric pressure were invisible, but she felt them in the sense of overwhelming illness, of wrongness, that washed through her body. She couldn’t tell if the shaking came from the walls of the storm-battered ruins, more little earthquakes, or her own overloaded nervous system.

  At some point, her perception of time changed. She couldn’t say if the storm had been hours or days or minutes. It was like the half-awareness of trauma, the doomed patience of being assaulted and knowing the only thing that would end it was the mercy of the attacker. Now and then, she would feel herself rising to some fuller consciousness, and will herself back into the stupor. Shock. Maybe she was going into shock. Her awareness seemed to blink in and out. She was curled against Fayez, both her hands squeezing at his elbow, and didn’t remember how she’d gotten there. The dark slurry of mud was ankle high all through the ruins, brown and green. She was covered in it. They were all covered in it.

  When this is over, I’m going to go back to my hut, take a long bath, and sleep for a week, she thought. She knew it was ridiculous. Her hut would no more have withstood this than a match could stay lit underwater, but she still thought it and some part of her believed it was true. A blinding-bright flash and crackling detonation came almost simultaneously. She gritted her teeth, closed her eyes, and endured.

  The first change she noticed was a baby screaming. It was an exhausted sound. She shifted, her shirt and pants soaked and cold and adhering to her skin with the muck. She craned her neck, trying to find where the grating noise was coming from. She felt the thought shifting at the base of her skull before she knew what it was, a surreal lag between the realization and being conscious of it. She could hear a baby crying. She could hear something – anything – that wasn’t the malice and venom of the storm. She tried to stand up, and her legs buckled under her. Kneeling in the muck, she gathered herself, squared her shoulders, and tried again. The rain slanted in through the windows of the ruin, but only at about twenty degrees. It still fell in buckets out of a black sky. The wind gusted and pushed and howled. In any other context, it would have been the teeth of a gale. Here and now, it meant the worst was over.

  “Doctor Okoye?”

  Murtry’s face was lit from below, the emergency lantern hung over his shoulder. His expression was the same polite smile over sober, focused attention. Her battered mind wondered whether there was anything that could shake the man’s soul, and thought perhaps there wasn’t. She wanted to be reassured by his predictability, but her body wasn’t able to feel comfort. Not now.

  “Are you all right, Doctor?” he said, his hand on her shoulder.

  She nodded, and when he started to step away, she clutched at him. “How long?”

  “The front hit a little over sixteen hours ago,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she said, and turned back to the window and the rain. The lightning still played among the clouds and lanced down to the ground, but not so often now. The flashes showed her a transformed landscape. Rivers flowed where yesterday had been desert hardpan. The flowers, or what she thought of as flowers, were churned into nothing. Not even sticks remained. She couldn’t imagine how the mimic lizards could have survived. Or the birdlike animals she’d thought of as rock sparrows. She’d meant to go to the wash east of First Landing and collect samples of the pink lichen that clung in the shadows there. She wouldn’t get to now.

  The sense of loss was like a weight on her throat. She had glimpsed an ecosystem unlike anything anyone had ever seen before, a web of life that had grown up apart from anything she had known. She and her workgroups had been the only people ever to walk in that garden. And now it was gone.

  “The usual state of nature is recovering from the last disaster,” she said. It was a truism of ecological biologists, and she said it the way a religious person might pray. To make sense of what she saw. To comfort herself. To give the world some sense of purpose or meaning. Species rose in an environment, and that environment changed. It was the nature of the universe, as true here as it had been on Earth.

  She wept quietly, her tears indistinguishable from the rain.

  “Well, there’s something I wasn’t expecting,” Holden said. She turned to look at him. The dimness of the ruins rendered him in monochrome. He was a sepia print of James Holden. His hair was plastered back, clinging to his head and the nape of his neck. Mud streaked his shirt.

  She was too tired to dissemble. She took his hand in hers and followed his gaze toward the back of the ruins. His hand was solid and warm in hers, and if there was some stiffness and hesitation in it, at least he didn’t flinch away.

  Carol Chiwewe and four other squatters were bailing the storm muck out the window with stiff plastic utility panels, streaks of green-brown staining the pale gray. Behind them, twenty or thirty of the squatters from First Landing were clumped in groups, huddled together under blankets. RCE security moved among them with bottles of water and foil-packed emergency rations. Fayez and Lucia were standing together, talking animatedly. Elvi couldn’t make out the words.

  “I don’t see it,” she said. “What weren’t you expecting?”

  He squeezed her fingers and let go of her hand. Her palm felt colder without his in it.

  “Your security people helping the Belters,” he said. “I guess nothing brings people together like a disaster.”

  “That’s not true,” Elvi said. “We would always have helped. We came out here planning to help. I don’t know why everyone thinks that we’re so awful. We didn’t do anything wrong.”

  Her voice cracked on the last word, and she started weeping in earnest. She felt oddly distanced from her grief, as if she were watching it from the outside, and then Holden put his hand on her shoulder, and she felt the pain. For a time, it washed her away. Flooded her. Three lightning strikes came close by, loud and bright and sudden, the thunder from them rolling away in the distance.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, when she could say anything. “There’s just been… so much.”

  “No, I should apologize,” Holden said. “I didn’t mean to make you feel worse. It’s just…”

  “I understand,” she said, reaching for his hand again. Let him laugh at her. Let him turn her away. She didn’t care now. She just wanted to be touched. To be held.

  “Hey, Cap,” Amos said, looming up out of the darkness. He had a clear plastic poncho over his shoulders, the hood straining to fit the thick neck. “You going to be all right for a while?”

  Holden stepped back, retreating from her. She felt a brief, irrational flash of rage toward the big man for intruding. She bit her lip and scowled up at him. If he noticed, he gave no sign.

  “I don’t actually know how to answer that question,” Holden said. “I don’t see any reason I’d die right away. That’s about the best I’ve got.”

/>   “Beats the alternative, anyway,” Amos said. “So that Dahlke family that didn’t make it here before the shit hit the fan? Yeah, some of us are gonna go have a looksee.”

  Holden scowled. “You sure that’s a good idea? It’s still pretty bad out there. And this is more water than I’m guessing this place has seen in ever. There’ll be a lot of flooding, and there’s no good way to get help out if something goes south.”

  “They had a little girl,” Amos said. The two men exchanged a long look that seemed to carry the weight of some earlier conversation. Elvi felt like a stranger watching two family members communicate in the half-code of long familiarity.