Cibola Burn

by James S. A. Corey

  “All right,” Holden said. “But I need Murtry first. Seen him?”

  “Directing traffic by the front door last I saw,” Amos replied. “Need me for that?”

  Holden noticed that Amos’ hand fell to the butt of his pistol when he asked. “What else have you been working on?”

  “Death-slug patrol.”

  “Go do that. I’ll chat with Murtry.”

  Amos gave a mock salute and trotted off toward the tower entrance. Holden pulled out his hand terminal and left a message for Alex filling him in on the supply drop plan. As Amos had said, Holden found Murtry talking to a few members of his security team near the tower’s entrance.

  “We’ve found some buried foundations,” Wei was saying, pointing over her shoulder in the direction First Landing had once been. “But unless these people had basements, there’s nothing left attached to them.”

  “What about the mines?” Murtry asked her.

  “What isn’t filled with mud is submerged,” Wei replied.

  “Well,” Murtry said, cocking his head to one side and giving her a humorless smile. “Do we have people who know how to hold their breath?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then send them down to see if anything we can use is under that water, soldier.”

  “Sir,” Wei replied and snapped off a salute. She and two other security people ran off, leaving Murtry and Holden alone.

  “Captain Holden,” Murtry said, keeping his empty smile.

  “Mister Murtry.”

  “How can I help you today?”

  “I think I might have a solution to our resupply problem,” Holden said. “If you’re willing to work with me on it.”

  Murtry’s humorless grin relaxed a bit. “That’s pretty high on my to-do list. Fill me in.”

  Holden summed it all up – the hypothesis of the alien systems tracking high-energy sources, the possibility of slow air drops. He couched it in terms of what they’d seen in the slow zone the first time humanity had gone through the gates and left Miller out. Murtry stood utterly still as he spoke, his expression not changing so much as a millimeter. When Holden finished, Murtry nodded once.

  “I’ll call up to the Israel and start having them put packages together,” Murtry said.

  Holden breathed a sigh of relief. “I have to admit, I kind of expected you to fight me on this.”

  “Why? I’m not a monster, Captain. I will kill if it’s necessary to do my job, but your Mister Burton’s much the same. All of these people dying down here helps my cause not at all. I just want the squatters to go away as soon as we figure out the power problem.”

  “Great,” Holden said, and then a moment later, “You don’t actually care about them, do you? All this time you were fighting against them. Now you’re willing to help, but it’s only because it’s helping them leave. You’d be just as happy if they all died.”

  “That would also solve my problems, yes,” Murtry said.

  “Just wanted to make sure you knew I knew,” Holden said, biting back the asshole that tried to follow.

  He found Amos working with the locals on death-slug defense. They were using the wadded ponchos and plastic water jugs split into squares to block off the smaller entrances to the alien ruins. They put sheeting over the windows, stuffed shirts and torn pant legs into the smaller holes, and dug trenches in front of the large openings. The trenches filled with muddy rainwater like tiny moats, and the slugs avoided them.

  Without a word, Holden pitched in with the trench digging. It was unpleasant work, with rain and muck getting under his clothes and chafing his skin as he moved. They dug with makeshift tools made out of tent poles and flat pieces of plastic that fell apart periodically and had to be put back together. The soil was stony and heavy with moisture and the occasional slug corpse. It was the sort of miserable physical labor that drove all other thoughts from Holden’s mind while he worked. He didn’t think about starving to death or Naomi trapped in a prison cell drifting slowly toward a fiery death or his own inability to make anything on the planet safe or sane or better.

  It was perfect.

  Carol Chiwewe asked him to check around to the back of the tower for a tarp they had left behind, and Miller ruined it all by reappearing the second he rounded the corner away from other eyes.

  “— get into the material transfer network,” he said as if he’d never stopped talking. “I think we can use it to move north to the spot we’re looking for, or at least get pretty close.”

  “Dammit, Miller, I was this close to not thinking about you.”

  Miller looked him over with a critical eye, taking in his soggy muck-covered exterior. “You look like hell, kid.”

  “See the lengths I’m willing to go for a moment’s peace?”

  “Impressive. So when can we head out?”

  “You don’t quit,” Holden said. He walked across the muddy ground to the tarp he’d been looking for. It was covered with the deadly slugs. He grabbed it by one corner and slowly lifted, trying to get all the slugs to slide off away from him. Miller followed, hands in pockets, watching him work.

  “Watch out for that one,” he said, pointing at a slug close to Holden’s fingers.

  “I see it.”

  “You’re no good to me if you drop dead.”

  “I said I see it.”

  “So, about going north,” Miller continued. “Not sure how much of the material transfer network is actually functioning, so it won’t necessarily be an easy trip. We should start as soon as we can.”

  “Material transfer network?”

  “Big underground transport system. Faster than walking. Ready to go?”

  The slug slid a few centimeters closer to his fingers, and Holden dropped the tarp with a curse. “Miller,” he said, rounding on him suddenly. “I am so far from giving a shit about your needs I can’t even see it from here.”

  The old detective had the grace to look chagrined before he gave a tired shrug. “It might help.”

  “What,” Holden said, “might help?”

  “Going north. Whatever’s up there seems to damp out the network. Maybe we can use it to kill the defenses and get your ship off lockdown.”

  “If you’re lying to me to get me to do what you want, I swear I will have Alex tear the Roci apart looking for whatever clump of goo you’re connected to and take a flamethrower to it.”

  The ghost grimaced, but didn’t back down. “I’m not lying because I’m not making any assertions here. This dead spot is exactly what I’m saying it is. A dead spot. Everything else? That’s guesswork. But it’s more than you’ve got now, right? Help me, and if there’s a way for me to do it, I’ll help you. That’s the only way this works.”

  Holden kicked the slug off of his corner of the tarp and waited for the rain to wash its slime trail away, then picked it back up and resumed sliding the rest of the creatures off.

  “Even if I wanted to, I can’t yet,” he said. “Not until I’m sure the colonists aren’t going to die here. Let me get some supply drops safely down, get everyone in a decent shelter away from the death-slugs, and then we’ll talk about it.”

  “Deal,” Miller said, then disappeared in a puff of blue fireflies. One of the men from the colony, a tall skinny Belter with dark skin and an amazing shock of white hair, rounded the corner.

  “What you doin’? Kenned babosa malo got you.”

  “Sorry,” Holden said, giving the tarp a sharp snap to flick the rest of the slugs off it. He helped the Belter fold it up.

  Only he’d have to stop thinking of them as Belters, wouldn’t he? These people lived on a planet, in a solar system across the galaxy from Sol. Belter was no longer a word with any meaning for them. They called themselves colonists now. And someday, if they were able to stay on Ilus and actually make a home of it, what? Ilusites?

  “Médico buscarte,” the Ilusian said.

  “Lucia?”

  “Laa laa, RCE puta.”

  “Oh, right, Amos told me,�
�� Holden said. “Guess I better go find out what she wants.”

  The Belter, the Ilusite, whatever he was, muttered “puta” again and spat to one side. Holden walked through the miserable warm rain past the trenches full of water and dead slugs and the plastic glued over the walls and the cracks stuffed with muddy rags. He hopped over the last trench to get inside the tower, then scraped the mud off his boots and followed the passageways to the structure’s large central chamber. Lucia was there working with the chemical analysis team on the water purifying project. She shot him a tight smile as he entered, and he started walking toward her simply because she seemed like the only one happy to see him.

  “Holden. I mean, um, Jim,” Elvi said, stepping in front of him. “We have a problem?”

  “Several,” Holden said.

  “No, I mean a new one. In about four days everyone in the colony is going to be blind.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five: Elvi

  H

  olden blinked, shook his head, and then he laughed. Elvi was torn between worry that he thought she was joking and a kind of glowing admiration. She’d been afraid that he’d be angry. She’d heard about people laughing in the face of danger, and that was exactly what this was. She smoothed her hands against her jumpsuit, uncomfortably aware of how dirty she was, how dirty they all were.

  This day just keeps on giving,” he said. Then, “Blind why?”

  “It’s the clouds,” Elvi said. “Or really, what’s in them. They’re green. I mean, when they’re not —” She nodded toward the window at the low gray overcast sky. “Normally, they’re green. There’s a photosynthetic organism that spends part of its life cycle in the clouds, and apparently it’s a pretty successful organism all around the planet, because all of this that’s come down has some in it. It was a very dry climate before this, so there probably wasn’t much opportunity for exposure. But with the rain and the flood, pretty much everyone’s come in contact. And it’s salt tolerant.”

  The chemical deck chimed, and Elvi moved toward it automatically, her eyes still on Holden. But Fayez, Lucia, and one of the other squatters were already lifting out the sack of clean water and fitting a new bag in place.

  “Is that a problem?” Holden said. “How does salt figure into it?”

  “We’re salty,” Elvi said, and was immediately uncomfortable with her phrasing. Her hands seemed too large and awkward in a way they usually weren’t. “What I mean is, we’ve seen infections with this organism before. It does well in tears and tear ducts. And then eyes.”

  “Eyes,” Holden said.

  “Lucia saw one case before the… the storm? Once the organism got into the vitreous humor, it’s in a novel environment that seems to suit it really well, and exponential growth’s pretty normal in those conditions. So that winds up blocking the light from hitting the retina, and —”

  Holden held up his hands, palm out. She found herself moving in toward him, ready to put her palms against his. She stopped herself.

  “I thought the things that lived here had a whole different biology. How can they infect us?”

  “It’s not an infection like a virus,” she said. “It’s not hijacking our cells or anything. We’re just a new, nutrient-rich environment and this little guy found a way to exploit it. It’s not trying to make us blind. It’s just that the extracellular matrix is a really easy path into the eyeball for it, and it’s really happy when it gets there. Explosive growth is something you see in any kind of invasive species coming into a new environment. No competition.”

  Holden ran a hand through his hair. When he spoke, his voice was soft, like he was speaking mostly to himself.

  “Apocalyptic explosions, dead reactors, terrorists, mass murder, death-slugs, and now a blindness plague. This is a terrible planet. We should not have come here.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, putting her hand on his arm. He had a very solid arm. Muscular. He put his own hand over hers and her heart picked up a little. She hated feeling like a schoolgirl with her first crush, but she also thrilled to it. Just stay focused, she thought, a little dignity.

  “Okay, Doctor Okoye.”

  “Elvi.”

  “Elvi, I need you and Doctor Merton to do whatever you have to do to take care of this. I think I’ve found a way to get supplies down from orbit, but I don’t see any way to get anyone up the well, or where to put them if we did. So if I’m right, I can get you whatever supplies we have up there. But I need you to fix this.”

  “I will,” Elvi said, nodding. She didn’t have any idea how she could keep that promise, but her heart was full to bursting with the determination that she would.

  “Anything you need,” Holden said, “you just tell me.”

  Elvi had a sudden, intrusive, and surprisingly graphic thought. She felt a blush crawling up her neck. “All right, Captain,” she said. “I want… um… if I could get a spare sampling bag from the Israel? I think it would really help.”

  He let go of her, and she regretted the absence immediately. She shoved her hands into her pockets. He nodded to her, hesitated for a moment as if he were waiting for her to say something more, then moved away into the crowded main room. Elvi bit her lip and swallowed a couple of times until the thickness in her throat subsided. She knew she was being silly and even borderline inappropriate, but the knowledge did nothing to change it.

  She stopped at the window, looking out at the gray rain. It was hard to believe that every drop of it contained something that would colonize her body the way that humanity had New Terra. It looked peaceful out there. Vast and rich and beautiful. Even the slow river of floodwater carried the calming, majestic, beautiful sense of nature playing out.

  Most of Earth was covered in cities or managed nature preserves about as untamed as a service dog. Mars and the Belt were studded with colonies that had been built and designed to carve a human place in inhuman and lifeless circumstances. This, she realized, was the first place she’d been in her life where she could see true wilderness the way it had been for millennia on Earth. Red in tooth and claw. Deadly and uncaring. Vast, unpredictable, and complex as anything she could imagine.

  “You all right?” Lucia asked.

  “Overwhelmed,” Elvi said. “Fine.”

  “I’ve harvested a new sample run from the water purifier,” the doctor said. “Help me with the assaying?”

  “Of course,” Elvi said. “When the sampling bag comes, it’ll be easier to send the data back home. Maybe they’ll be able to help.”

  “Well, if they find anything, make sure they send it in an audio file,” Lucia said. “I don’t know that we’re going to be reading much.”

  “How are we going to do it?” Elvi asked.

  “Do what?”

  “Do any of it. Eat, rebuild, make clean water, keep the death-slugs out? How are we going to do any of that when none of us can see what we’re doing?”

  “At a guess,” Lucia said, “poorly.”

  The long New Terran day and the darkness of the clouds made time feel strange. Elvi sat hunched in the little side chamber that Fayez had appropriated for their research lab. The walls were curved in ways that left her thinking of bones. The only opening was high on the wall, and Fayez or Lucia or Sudyam had put a sheet of clear plastic over it to keep the death-slugs out. A bank of white LEDs splashed a cold light across the deep red wall and ceiling. The small green sludge in her makeshift Petri dish could have been algae or fungus or the remains of a salad left weeks too long in the back of her dormitory refrigerator back in upper university. But it wasn’t any of those things, and the more she looked at it, the more aware she was of the fact.

  There were some similarities to the more familiar kingdoms of life she’d studied before. Lipid boundaries around cells, for instance, appeared to be a good move in design space just the way eyes were, or flight. They seemed to do something similar to mitotic division, though sometimes the cells divided in threes instead of pairs, and she didn’t know why. There were other anomalies
too, concentrations of some photon-activated molecules that didn’t quite make sense.

  And what was worse, she couldn’t think about it. Couldn’t concentrate. Whenever her focus slipped, it slipped onto James Holden. The sound of his voice, his despairing and undaunted laughter, the shape of his ass. He haunted her. She realized that she’d gone through four pages of chemical assay data without having any idea what she’d seen, sat back on her heels, and cursed.

  “Problem?” Fayez said, stepping through the doorway. His hair was tied back, his face gray with fatigue and streaked with old mud. She wondered, looking at him, how long it had been since he’d slept. She wondered how long it had been since she’d slept. Or eaten for that matter.