Cibola Burn

by James S. A. Corey

  “Be careful,” Holden replied after a long moment.

  “That ship may have sailed, but I’ll do what I can.”

  Wei walked toward them. She’d taken off her armor, but she still had an automatic rifle strapped to her back. She nodded at Amos. “I’ve got a couple more who want to tag along.”

  “Don’t matter to me if it don’t matter to you,” Amos said. Wei nodded. There was a darkness in her eyes that seemed to echo Amos’.

  Elvi looked over. A half dozen other people were struggling into the same kind of poncho Amos wore. In the dimness and the wreckage, it was hard to tell which of them were squatters and which were RCE. Even Belters and Earthers were hard to differentiate now. Elvi didn’t know if that was an artifact of the darkness or if some deeper part of her brain was changing her perceptions, making anything human into something like her. Minds could be tricky that way.

  Among them, she caught a glimpse of Fayez and her mouth went coppery with sudden fear. “Wait,” she said, hopping across the space. “Fayez, wait. What are you doing?”

  “Helping out,” he said. “Also, getting out of this sardine can. I’ve gotten used to having a couple feet of social distance. Just being around all these people stresses me out.”

  “You can’t. It’s dangerous out there.”

  “I know.”

  “You stay here,” she said, grabbing at his poncho and tugging it up, trying to get it back over his head. “I can go.”

  “Elvi,” he said. “Elvi! Stop it.”

  She had a double handful of plastic sheeting in her fingers. It was already wet.

  “Let them go,” she said. “They’re professionals. They can take care of this. We… people like us…”

  “We’re past us and them at this point. We’re just people in a bad place,” Fayez said. And then a moment later, “You know what I am, Elvi.”

  “No. No, you’re a good man, Fayez.”

  He tilted his head. “I meant that I’m a geologist. It’s not like they need me to talk about plate tectonics. What were you thinking?”

  “Oh. Ah. I just…”

  “Come on, Professor,” Wei said, tapping Fayez on the arm. “Time to go for a walk.”

  “How can I refuse?” Fayez said, gently taking the plastic sheeting out of Elvi’s hands. She stood watching as six of them walked together toward the entrance. Amos, Wei, Fayez, and three of the squatters – no, two squatters and Sudyam – one-use chemical lanterns glowing in their hands. They walked out into the gale. She stood at the window, ignoring the rain that soaked her. Amos and Wei took the lead, their heads down, their ponchos blowing out behind them. The others followed close behind, clustered like ducklings. The night around them was black and violent, and they moved into the downpour, growing fainter with every minute until she couldn’t make them out at all. She stood there a while longer, her mind empty and exhausted.

  She found Lucia and Jacek in one of the larger chambers. Two Belters were struggling to place a wide plastic panel over one of the windows to block the rain now that the wind wasn’t so violent that it would simply shatter. A half dozen others were scraping out the muck. They’d already done so much work, Elvi could see pale strips of the ground. Everywhere people were sleeping, curled into and against each other. The sound of the storm was still enough to drown out their moans. Or most of them.

  Lucia looked up at her. The woman seemed to have aged a decade, but she managed a smile. Elvi sat down beside her. They were both covered in salt mud, and the muck was starting to reek a little. Putrescence or something like it. All the small life forms living in the planet’s great ocean that had been broken and thrown to the sky, starting to decay. It broke her heart to think of the scale of the death that surrounded them, so she didn’t.

  “Can I help you?” Lucia said.

  “I came to ask the same thing,” Elvi said. “Tell me what I can do.”

  The long, terrible night went on, the rain slackening only slightly. No light came through the clouds. No rainbows promised that the disaster was ended. Elvi moved from one group to another, talking and checking. Some were the squatters, some were RCE. All had the same stunned expressions, the same sense of amazement that they were still alive. The scent of the muck was getting richer and more pungent as whatever organic structures it had held broke down. Elvi hated to imagine how the world would stink when the last of the rains fell and the sun came back to warm the landscape. That was a problem for another time.

  She didn’t notice it when she fell asleep. She’d been at the window, looking out in hopes of catching a glimpse of the search party’s return. She remembered very clearly hearing Holden’s voice behind her and a woman replying to him. She’d meant to turn back, find him, ask if she could help. If she could do something to stay in motion, to keep from thinking or feeling for another hour more. But instead she woke up.

  For a moment, she didn’t know where she was. Her exhaustion-drunk mind tried to make the close quarters into her cabin on the Israel, as if she were still on the journey out to New Terra. As if none of this had ever happened. Then the present reasserted itself.

  She was in the corner of a smaller chamber. Eight other people were stretched out on the damp ground around her, heads pillowed by their arms. Someone was snoring, and a body was pressed up against hers. Lightning stuttered in the distance, and she saw the body beside hers was Fayez. The thunder came a long time later, and softly. Then there was only the patter of rain. She touched his shoulder, shaking him gently.

  He groaned and shifted, the poncho still on him crackling with the motion. “Well, good morning, Doctor Okoye,” he said. “Imagine meeting you here.”

  “Is it?”

  “Is it what?”

  “A good morning.”

  He sighed in the dark. “Honestly, I don’t even think it’s morning.”

  “Did you find them?”

  “We didn’t find anything.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I mean we didn’t find anything at all. The huts are gone. First Landing’s gone. The mine pit’s gone or else the landmarks are so different we couldn’t find it. The roads are gone.”

  “Oh.”

  “You know those pictures you see of a natural disaster where there’s nothing but mud and rubble? Imagine that without the rubble.”

  Elvi lay back down. “I’m sorry.”

  “If we only lose them, it’ll be a miracle. We managed to get a signal through to the Israel. The atmospheric data make it look like we’ll be going without a sunrise for a good long time. No one said the words ‘nuclear winter,’ but I think it’s safe to say things aren’t going to be business as usual around here for a nice long while. We’ve got the battery power we carried in with us, but no hydroponics. Only as much fresh water as the chemistry deck will pump out. I was hoping that some of the storage buildings might have made it. They were pretty well built, some of them.”

  “Still. Maybe some good can come out of it.”

  “I admire your psychotic optimism.”

  “I’m serious. I mean look at us all. You went out with Amos and Wei and the locals. We’re all here together. Working together. We’re taking care of each other. Maybe this is what it takes to resolve all the violence. There were three sides before. There’s only one side now.”

  Fayez sighed. “It’s true. Nothing points out shared humanity like a natural disaster. Or a disaster, anyway. Nothing on this mudball of a planet’s even remotely natural if you ask me.”

  “So that’s a good thing,” she said.

  “It is,” Fayez agreed. And then a moment later, “I give it five days.”

  Chapter Thirty-One: Holden

  H

  olden had witnessed the aftermath of a tornado as a child. They were rare in the Montana flatlands where he’d grown up, but not entirely unheard of. One had touched down on a commercial complex a few miles from his family’s farm, and the local citizens had gathered to help with the cleanup. His mother Tamara had taken hi
m along.

  The tornado had hit a farmers’ market at the center of the complex, while totally avoiding the feed store and fuel station on either side of it. The market had been flattened as if by a giant’s fist, the roof lying flat on the ground with the walls splayed out around it. The contents of the store had been scattered in a giant pinwheel that extended for hundreds of meters around the impact point. It was young James Holden’s first experience with nature’s fury unleashed, and for years afterward he’d had nightmares about tornadoes destroying his home.

  This was worse.

  Holden stood in what his hand terminal told him had been the center of First Landing, the constant rain sheeting off his poncho, and turned in a slow circle. All around there was nothing but thick mud occasionally cut by a rivulet of water. There were no flattened buildings. No wreckage strewn across the ground. With the fury and duration of the winds, it was entirely possible that the detritus of First Landing was hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away. The colonists would never rebuild. There was nothing to rebuild.

  A ripple of lights danced through the heavy cloud cover overhead, and a second later the booming of the thunder, like a barrage of cannon fire. The rain intensified, reducing visibility to a few dozen meters, and swelling the little streams cutting gullies across the muddy ground.

  “I’d say ‘what a mess,’ but it’s actually kind of the opposite of that,” Amos said. “Never seen anything like this, Cap.”

  “What if it happens again?” Holden said, shuddering either at that thought or at the cold rainwater trickling down his back.

  “Think they have more than one of whatever blew up?”

  “Anyone know what the first one was yet?”

  “Nope,” Amos admitted with a sigh. “Big fusion reactor, maybe. Alex sent an update, said it tossed a lot of radiation up around the initial blast.”

  “Some of that will be coming down in the rain.”

  “Some.”

  The mud at Amos’ feet moved, and a small, sluglike creature pushed its way up out of the ground, desperately trying to get its head above water. Amos casually kicked it into one of the nearby streams where the current whisked it away.

  “I’m running low on my cancer meds,” Holden said.

  “Radioactive rain ain’t gonna help with that.”

  “Was my thought. Bad for the colonists too.”

  “Do we have a plan?” Amos asked. His tone suggested he didn’t expect an answer.

  “Get off this hell-planet before the next catastrophe.”

  “A-fucking-men,” Amos replied.

  They walked back toward the alien towers, trudging through the thick mud and occasionally having to leap across a newly formed arroyo filled with fast-moving water. The ground was covered with small holes where brightly colored worm-slugs had pushed their way to the surface, and shiny trails of slime radiated in all directions showing their recent passage.

  “Never seen these before,” Amos said, pointing at another of the creatures slowly making its way across the wet ground. They weren’t much bigger than Holden’s thumb, and eyeless.

  “Forced up by the rain. This was pretty arid land before. There’s a lot of subterranean life drowning right now I’d bet. At least these guys have a way to get out of it.”

  “Yeah,” Amos said, frowning down at one, “but, you know, gross. One of those things climbs into my sleeping bag, I’m gonna be pissed.”

  “Big baby.”

  As if in response to Amos’ worries, the ground shifted and dozens more of the slugs pushed their way up. Wrinkling his nose in disgust, Amos picked his way through them, trying not to get their slime on his boots. The trails they left were quickly washed away by the rain.

  Holden’s had terminal buzzed at him, and he pulled it out to find that a message had been downloaded. The terminal had been trying to connect to the Roci for hours. There must have finally been a break in the storm long enough for it to send and receive updates.

  He tried to open a channel to Alex, but got only static. Whenever his window had happened, he’d missed it. But the fact that there were occasional breaks in the atmospheric clutter was a hopeful sign that they’d get comms back soon. In the meantime, he could keep sending messages and hoping they’d slip through the static a bit at a time.

  The update waiting for him was a voice message. He plugged the bud into his ear and hit play.

  “This is a message for Captain James Holden, from Arturo Ramsey, lead counsel for Royal Charter Energy.”

  Holden had sent dozens of requests to the various senior vice presidents and board members of RCE for Naomi to be released. Getting a reply back from the company’s top lawyer was not a good sign.

  “Captain Holden,” the message continued, “Royal Charter Energy takes your request for the release of Naomi Nagata from detention on the Edward Israel very seriously. However, the legal landscape we’re navigating with this situation is murky at best.”

  “It’s not murky, give me my damn XO back, you smug bastards,” Holden muttered angrily. At Amos’ questioning look he shook his head and continued the recording.

  “Pending further investigation, we’re afraid we’re going to have to follow the advice of the security team on site and hold Naomi Nagata in protective custody. We hope you understand the delicate —”

  Holden turned off the recording in disgust. Amos raised an eyebrow.

  “That’s the legal wonk at RCE telling me they plan to keep holding Naomi,” Holden said. “ ‘Following the advice of the security team on site.’ ”

  “Murtry,” Amos grunted.

  “Who else?”

  “Sort of wondering why you haven’t let me off the leash on that, Cap,” Amos said.

  “Because, before this” – Holden waved an arm at the mud and rain and worms around them – “we had a job to do that would not have been aided by murdering the RCE security chief.”

  “Would’ve loved to give it a try, though. You know, just to see.”

  “Well, my friend, you might still get your shot,” Holden said. “Because I am about to order him to do something he really isn’t going to want to do.”

  “Oh,” Amos said with a smile, “goody.”

  When they returned to the ruins, the camp was in chaos. People were frantically sweeping something out of the tower entrance using blankets and sticks and other makeshift implements. An agonized howl echoed out of the structure, like someone in terrible pain.

  Doctor Okoye spotted them from the tower opening and ran to meet them. “Captain, we have a serious problem.” Before he could reply, she kicked one of the worms away from his feet with a squeal. “Look out!”

  Holden had watched her capture and sacrifice a number of the local fauna during their association. She’d never struck him as squeamish. He couldn’t picture a few slimy slug analogs being the thing that broke her.

  “What’s going on?” he asked when she’d finished kicking slugs away from him.

  “A man died,” she said. “The one who was married to the man and woman who took care of the carts. The taller one. Beth is her name, I think. The wife’s name. That’s her crying inside.”

  “And that relates to the worms how?”

  “That slime they secrete is a neurotoxin,” Elvi replied, wide-eyed. “He touched it, and it was almost instant paralysis. Full respiratory failure. One of the worms was climbing up a wall near their sleeping area and he grabbed it to throw it outside. By the time we realized what was happening, he was dead.”

  “Jesus,” Amos said, staring down at the worms surrounding them, something like respect mixed in with his disgust.

  “Some kind of defense toxin?” Holden asked.

  “I don’t know,” Elvi replied. “It might just be slime to aid in locomotion, like a terrestrial slug. It might not be toxic to the other life forms on New Terra. We’ve never even seen them before. How can we know anything? If I had my collection equipment, I could send the data back to Luna, if I could send the mess
age back to Luna, but —”

  Elvi’s voice was rising as she spoke. When she ended, she was almost in tears. “You’re right,” Holden said. “It was a stupid question, and it doesn’t matter anyway.”

  “Why doesn’t it —” Elvi started, but Holden pushed past her.

  “Where’s Murtry,” he asked.

  “Inside, organizing the people to find and remove all the slugs from the structure.”

  “Come on, Amos,” Holden said. “Let’s change his priorities.”