Cibola Burn

by James S. A. Corey

  She sat up and turned reluctantly to the side. It was there. Black and bright at the margins. She felt a stab of almost supernatural fear. She’d thought – hoped – it would be gone. Whatever it was, she had passed through it, been ripped apart by it, and still been simple enough to reassemble herself on the other side. It had saved her, and she had never seen anything in her life that filled her with a deeper dread than that complex darkness.

  She moved back, her legs aching. She stood. She was aware that she was weeping without knowing why exactly she was doing it. Hunger and fear and relief and exultation and mortal fear. It was too much. That was fine.

  The voice that came to her was human and distant. Was Holden.

  “Elvi? Elvi! Are you there?”

  “I’m here,” she shouted.

  “Did we win?”

  She took one long breath. Then another.

  “Yes,” she called. “We won.”

  Interlude: The Investigator

  — it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out —

  One hundred and thirteen times a second, it reaches out to report that the work is done. If something accepted the report, it could stop. It will never stop. It feels no frustration and no fear. It feels the investigator moving within it and around it. The investigator exceeds its boundary conditions. It tries to kill the investigator. It fails. It feels no distress at the failure, and it reaches out, it reaches out, it reaches out —

  The investigator looks into the eye of death, and can’t see it. It knows, and that is enough. It feels pleasure and regret because they are part of the template. It says a name – Julie. It remembers taking a woman’s hand in its own.

  The investigator reaches out, reaches down. It broadens like an eternal, endless inhalation, and spreads to fill all the places that it can reach, that have been reached. That are. It reaches out it reaches out it reaches out, the ticking on an insectile leg, a spark closing a gap, endlessly, and the investigator feels it, encompasses it. The scars reach out, the other minds. Some are frightened, some are lost in dreams that have been going on for years, some are grateful. They sing to the investigator, or they accuse it, or they plead with it, or they scream. They are aware, and powerless as they have ever been. The investigator touches them as it touches everything. It tells them not to worry. That it’s driving this bus.

  Don’t worry, it says. We’re gonna be fine.

  The investigator pushes his hat back, wishes he had a beer. He likes this woman. This Elvi. He wishes he’d had a little more time to know her. He wishes he had a little more time. He doesn’t care. He has died a million times since he died. The void has no mysteries for him now.

  He connects, and the investigator becomes the world. He feels it everywhere. The orbital bases, the power cores in the crushing depth of the ocean, the library vaults where the old ones had lived, the signaling stations high in the mountains, the cities deep beneath the ground. He is the world.

  There is a struggle at the end. There’s always a struggle at the end. He’s not scared, and so all through the world, the others aren’t either. You’re like Peter Pan, she says. When a child died, Peter Pan would fall halfway with them. So they wouldn’t be scared.

  Weird. And that’s a kid’s story? Anyway, it’s not me, the investigator says, smiles at her. Holds her hand. I don’t go for half.

  — it reaches out and it reaches out and it reaches out and then it stops.

  Chapter Fifty-Five: Havelock

  B

  lue. That was what he forgot every time. He knew it intellectually, sure. Sky-blue sky, after all, but spend a few years on a station or a ship and it was one of those details that slipped away. He didn’t even know he’d forgotten it until he had a moment like this. He leaned on his cane and lifted a hand to shade his eyes and looked up past the green-gray clouds to the wider blue sky.

  It’s pretty, isn’t it?” the woman asked. Lucia, her name was. First Landing’s physician, Basia’s wife, Felcia and Jacek’s mother. “Makes you want to stay.”

  “No,” he said. “Makes me want to be home already.”

  “If you lived here…” she said.

  “Not a chance,” he replied, and chuckled.

  The Rocinante sat on the muddy ground behind him, more or less where the landing pad had been back when there had been a landing pad. All of that was gone now. The scientific huts, the buildings of First Landing, even most of the mining operation. Everything had been scraped flat and clean. Only the erosion ditches showed where the flood had been now that the waters had gone.

  The Roci’s cargo bays were open. Men and women were hauling formed plastic boxes of supplies and equipment out and stacking them on the soft ground. He saw Naomi in a lift suit directing them, calling out information, coordinating the responses. Alex and Basia stood on a thin scaffold they’d erected against the side of the ship with the other one – Amos Burton, he thought the name was – surveying the damage and planning out what repairs they could manage in humanity’s most primitive and ill-equipped dry dock. The big bald man’s right hand was locked in a medical casing, and his frustration with it showed in the way he moved his arms and held his shoulders.

  “Are you ready?” Lucia asked.

  “If you’d like,” Havelock said. “Sure.”

  They walked together to the first pile of crates. Havelock took out his hand terminal, and Lucia took out one of the ones they’d dropped before. It was hers now. They started marking off boxes from the lading bills, recording carefully what help was being delivered and being accepted.

  He was supposed to have died three weeks before. His body should have been a stream of ionized atoms and complex molecules floating somewhere in Ilus’ upper atmosphere. The Israel should have been dead before him.

  He’d been in the medical bay when it happened, doped by the autodoc and having half a liter of artificial blood shoved into his veins. He could still remember the feeling of the restraints holding him to the medical couch, the soft ticking of the expert system’s tool arm, the cold feeling of fluid coming into his body. His lips and tongue had felt cold and tingled, but Alex assured him that was normal. Basia had come in, eaten, and gone out again to clean up the last remnants of the tether that were still clinging to the Rocinante’s belly.

  He’d said something about how it seemed kind of a pointless exercise.

  “He’s that kind of guy, I guess,” Alex said. “Doesn’t like to leave things half done.”

  “Belter.”

  “Yeah,” Alex agreed. “They’re all kind of like that.”

  Alex’s hand terminal chimed, and the pilot frowned at it. “Cap? That you?”

  The voice that came from the speaker was recognizable James Holden, but he sounded rougher. Like he’d been shouting a lot. “Alex! Turn on the reactor.”

  “Not sure I can do that, Cap,” Alex said.

  “We killed the defense grid. I think we killed everything. See if you can get the reactor on.”

  Alex’s expression went very still, very sober. The gallows humor was gone, the brave mask that had covered the fear of death vanished. Havelock understood, because he felt the same rush of hope and also of fear that the hope would be disappointed. Without a word, Alex pulled himself to one of the medical bay’s computers and shifted it to engine controls. Havelock squeezed his fists until they ached and fought not to interrupt Alex by asking if it was working.

  “Is it working?”

  “I think… it is,” Alex said, then turned to the hand terminal. “I’m getting power, Cap. The diagnostics are throwing some errors, but I’m pretty sure that’s just ’cause we got shook up a little. I’ll put Naomi and Basia on it, and I’ll bet we can get up to functional. It’d help a lot if we had Amos, though.”

  “Amos is a little shook up too,” Holden said, and Havelock could hear the grin in his voice.

  “He all right?”

  “He’s gonna need to grow some new fingers.”

  Alex shrugged. “We
can do that. Um. Give me a couple days, I might be able to bring the Roci down to the surface. Get him into the med bay.”

  “Don’t hurry,” Holden said. “Take your time, make sure everything’s working. We can’t take another crisis.”

  “There’s always going to be another crisis, Cap. That’s just how it goes.”

  “Let’s just put it off until we’ve recovered from the last one, all right? Can you get in touch with Barbapiccola and the Israel? I don’t want anyone dying because they don’t know to turn the engines back on. And we may need to use the Israel’s shuttle, if we can talk them out of it.”

  “We may need to do a little debrief at some point here,” Alex said. “Things have been kind of dynamic. But let me go make sure everybody’s reactors are ticking over first, all right?”

  “Okay,” Holden said. “And if you could drop us some food?”

  “Soon as I get the galley powered up,” Alex said.

  “Right. Good. And Naomi… she’s…?”

  “Everybody’s all right,” Alex said. “We’re all going to be fine.”

  By the time Havelock and Doctor Merton had finished the inventory, a team of builders were already fitting batteries into fabrication units and measuring out the places where walls would be going up. Real human shelters. A new First Landing. The self-selected construction crew was a mix. Some were squatters who’d come on the dead refugee ship. Some were people Havelock had shipped out with. The divide between them still existed in his mind, but didn’t seem to be playing out on the ground. The death of the heavy shuttle and the burning of the terrorist cell seemed like things that had happened in some other epoch. He supposed it was something about the storm, the blindness, the death-slugs, and the constant awareness of mortality just outside the door, clearing its throat. It wasn’t a model of community building that he’d recommend trying to scale up, but it had worked here. Temporarily. For now.

  A dark-skinned woman with long black hair detached from the group. She looked familiar, but it still took Havelock a few seconds to place her. The time downstairs had taken all the padding out of her cheeks.

  “Doctor van Altricht.”

  “Call me Sudyam,” she said. “Everyone else does.”

  “Sudyam, then,” he said, holding out his hand terminal. “I’ve got some paperwork for you.”

  “Excellent,” she said, taking it. Her gaze flickered over the contract addendum too quickly for her to really be taking it all in. At the bottom, she signed her name with a fingernail and pressed the pads of her index and middle fingers to the screen. The hand terminal chimed, and she handed it back.

  “Congratulations,” Havelock said. “You are now the official field lead for the RCE research team.”

  “And a worse job, I can’t imagine,” she said, smiling. “Now that I’m official, can you tell me when we’re getting replacement equipment?”

  “There’s an unmanned supply pod under heavy burn to Medina,” Havelock said. “Assuming the OPA doesn’t impound it or call it salvage, it should be here in six, maybe seven months.”

  “And the chance of the OPA stopping it?”

  “I wouldn’t make it better than three in ten,” Havelock said. “But honestly, don’t sniff that number. You don’t know where it’s been.”

  The biochemist shook her head in mild disgust. “Well, it’ll have to do,” she said.

  For almost a week after the power came back on, the Rocinante and the Israel had been in a very delicate political state. The Belters on the Israel had been taken in as a gesture when it was pretty certain that the thing was symbolic because they were all going to be dead anyway. Now that they weren’t going to die, the question of status – were the Belters refugees, prisoners, or paying passengers? – became a much more contentious issue. Marwick had to decide whether they were going to be on his ship for the full eighteen months back to Medina, or if he was going to try to place them all downstairs. It didn’t help matters that with all the shuttles slagged, the only ways down to the surface were on board the Rocinante or a really long, unpleasant jump.

  In the end, the break was almost even. About half of the crew of the Barb elected to stay with the colonists and scientists on the ground. About half of the RCE staff still in orbit, having come this far and being profoundly uninterested in just looking at the promised land from the mountaintop, elected to stay on the planet. Of the science teams that had been on the ground from the start – Vaughn, Chappel, Okoye, Cordoba, Hutton, Li, Sarkis, and a dozen others – only Cordoba elected to come back up the well and go home, and that apparently had more to do with grief over a failed romantic relationship than the fact the entire planet had been doing its best to kill them. It wasn’t something Havelock understood, but it didn’t need to be.

  The ship repairs were under way when night fell, the scaffolding and the hull of the ship flickering brightly and then going dark as the welding torches did their work. The sunset was a massive canvas of gold and orange, green and rose, gray and indigo and blue. It reminded him of beaches on the North American west coast, except there were no vendors clogging the place and no advertising drones muttering about the joys of commerce. It was beautiful, in its way. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see a bonfire burning, and a bunch of the colonists sitting around it playing guitars and getting high, except that there was nothing left in the aftermath of the flooding that would burn and if there was anything on the planet that would give you a safe buzz, they’d grown it on the Israel.

  He hauled himself up into the Rocinante and limped back to the bunk Naomi had assigned him. It was the first time he’d been in the Roci when it had an up and down, and because the ship didn’t land along the thrust vector, he walked along walls for the most part. The shredded muscles in his thigh and calf were regrowing slowly, and his knee might need another round of repairs to swap out the cartilage. Considering everything else that had happened, it was a great set of problems to have.

  In his bunk, he checked his personal messages. The message he’d been dreading was there. Williams’ family was filing criminal and civil charges against him for wrongful death. His union representative was already counterfiling and RCE was being strangely cooperative. By the time the Israel returned to her home port, he hoped everything would be cleared up. He wished there was a way to send a message to Williams’ people and apologize. Explain that he’d tried to just disable the suit, and that he was very, very sorry that it had happened the way it did. His union rep had made him promise not to, though. There would be a chance for that when the issue was settled.

  There was also a message from Captain Marwick with the subject header of I BELIEVE I OWE YOU A DRINK and a pass-through to one of the major newsfeeds. Havelock followed it.

  The screen filled with the banner insets of the feed, but the central image was weird to look at. As he watched, the Barbapiccola, tumbling slowly on its tether, bloomed and a puff of perfectly round plastic bubbles came out. It was like watching a flower releasing seeds to the wind. A man’s voice, gentle, deep, and reassuring, came under the image, speaking Belter-accented English.

  “New footage today from the stunning rescue operations on New Terra. What you’re seeing now are images captured by the Royal Charter Energy ship Edward Israel of the mass evacuation of the disabled freighter Barbapiccola. For those of you new to this story, all three ships were reduced to working under battery power at the time this occurred, and while the Barbapiccola was lost to an uncontrolled atmospheric entry, all hands and passengers were transferred to the Israel for medical evaluation and aid under the supervision of acting security director Dimitri Havelock.”

  The image shifted to an image of him from his official report back to RCE. His hair stood away from his head, making him look like he was trying to be a Belter, and his voice sounded weirdly high and whiny.

  “The transfer was completed in under three hours. I would specifically like to commend Captain Toulouse Marwick for his prompt and professional aid, without which
we could not have managed this without considerable loss of life.”

  The feed ended, and Havelock laughed. He requested a connection to Marwick, and the red-haired man appeared almost immediately.

  “So I guess they aren’t firing us,” Havelock said.

  “They’d be giving us a ticker-tape parade when we got home if anyone still used ticker tape,” Marwick said. “This right now is when we should all be asking for raises.”

  “Hazard pay,” Havelock said, propping his head up with his arm.

  “Heroes of the hour, we are,” Marwick said. “Not that they really have much clue back there what it was really like. One of those things you can explain as clearly and concretely as you want, and they still don’t get it.”

  “That’s fine,” Havelock said. “They don’t need to. I’m going to have a request list from the research and survey team. Do you think there’s anything else we can give them?”