Cibola Burn (Expanse)

by James S. A. Corey

  “Ops is holed!” Naomi shouted into the radio.

  “Cockpit’s sealed,” Alex said. “I’m good.”

  “I’m hurt,” Havelock said, trying to move his bleeding arm. The muscles still functioned. Whatever had hit him – shuttle debris or shrapnel from the crash couch – it hadn’t crippled the limb. The crimson globe inching its way along his arm was getting fairly impressive, though. Someone was tugging at him. Basia, the Belter.

  “Get off the couch,” the Belter said. “We’ve got to get off the deck.”

  “Yes,” Havelock said. “Of course.”

  Naomi was moving through the compartment. Bits of anti-spalling foam swirled in the thinning air like snowflakes.

  “Are you gettin’ anything over those holes?” Alex asked, his voice disconcertingly calm.

  “I’m counting ten down here,” Naomi said as Havelock hauled himself out of the crash couch and kicked off toward the hatch leading deeper into the ship. “I didn’t bring that many beer coasters. I’m taking the civilians down to the airlock, putting them in suits. Havelock’s hit.”

  “Dead?”

  “Not dead,” Havelock said.

  Naomi finished keying in the override and the deck hatch opened with a little puff of incoming air. Havelock’s ears popped as he pulled himself down into the airlock deck.

  “How’s the tether?” Basia asked, following close behind.

  “No damage to the main line,” Alex said. “We lost one of the foot supports, but I can try to adjust.”

  “Do it,” Naomi said, and grabbed Havelock by the shoulder. The emergency aid station by the airlock door had a roll of elastic bandage and a small wound vacuum. Naomi pulled his arm out straight and pressed that vacuum’s clear plastic nozzle into the center of the globe of blood. “What am I looking at, Alex?”

  “Checking, XO. All right. We’ve got a slow leak in the machine shop. The port side’s pretty messed up. Sensor arrays and PDCs on that side. Maneuvering thrusters aren’t responding. They may not even be there. There’s a lot of power conduits right around there too, but with the reactor off-line, I don’t know if they’re hit or not.”

  The gouge in Havelock’s arm was as long as his thumb in a sharp V shape. Where the flesh had peeled back, his skin looked fish-belly white. The margin of the wound was nearly black with pooling blood. Naomi put absorbent bandage on it and started wrapping it down with an wide elastic band. She had tiny dots of his blood in her hair.

  “How are we for moving?” she asked.

  “I can go anyplace you want, so long as it’s counter-clockwise,” Alex said. “If there were a dock anywhere within a year of here and we had a reactor, I’d have a vote where to go next.”

  “We’ll work on a plan B. How’s the Barb?”

  Basia almost had his welding rig back on. Naomi patted Havelock’s wounded arm, a small physical statement. You’re good to go. She turned to the lockers and started pulling out an environment suit of her own.

  “She’s still coming up,” Alex said. “But I’m starting to get worried about that missing foot support.”

  “All right,” Naomi said. “Back the thrust down for now. We’ll see if we can get it stuck back on.”

  Havelock pulled the thick leggings on, shrugged into the suit. He checked the seals automatically, long years of living in vacuum making it all as quick and automatic as reflex. The suit’s medical array kicked on and immediately injected him with a cocktail of anti-shock medicines. His heart raced and his face flushed.

  “Well, the good news is they’re out of shuttles,” Basia said. “They won’t be doing that again.”

  “What are they going to do,” Naomi said. It took Havelock a long moment to realize she was talking to him.

  These were his people. Marwick and Murtry. The militia of engineers. The RCE team had launched the shuttle at the Rocinante and tried to break up a civilian rescue operation. It was a strangely dislocating thought. He’d spent a countable fraction of his life protecting these people, keeping the shipboard politics that always rose up on a long voyage to a minimum, protecting them from outside threats and internal ones. They’d tried to kill not only him, but the crew of the Rocinante and the Barbapiccola too. And the worst of it was that he wasn’t actually surprised.

  “XO? I think we’ve got a hole in the port torpedo rails too. Might want to see if everything’s still in place down there. Failsafes are pretty good, but we’ll want to check them all if we ever plan to fire one. It’d be a real pity for our own ordnance to blow us up.”

  “Roger that,” Naomi said. “I’m on my way. Basia, can you coordinate with Alex and get that foot support back where it’s supposed to be?”

  “Sure can,” the Belter said. The one who’d been part of that first conspiracy to have the RCE people killed. Who had Governor Trying’s blood on his hands. For a moment, their eyes met through the doubled windows of their helmets. Basia’s eyes were hard, and then Havelock thought there was something else. A flicker of shame, maybe. Havelock watched as he cycled the airlock open, and then he watched it close.

  “Havelock,” Naomi said. “I need you to answer the question.”

  “Which question?”

  “What are they going to do next?”

  He shook his head. His arm throbbed. There was no point to the attack except spite and the kind of violence that passed for meaning in the face of despair. If Murtry was behind it, all he’d care was that the Barbapiccola went down before the Israel. If it was the engineering militia, they’d done it to show that they hadn’t lost.

  The reasons behind it didn’t matter.

  “I don’t know,” Havelock said, then sighed. “But it will probably be bad for everyone.”

  Chapter Forty-Six: Elvi

  E

  lvi thought her eyesight’s return was like coming out of a fog. The green that had enveloped the world was just as vivid at first. It lasted long enough that she was afraid she’d been wrong, or that the long-term use of the oncocidals had made some other change to Holden’s physiology that short-term use wasn’t having. And then the shadows had lines around them again, little zones of definition. And then within hours, she could see the doorway arch and the shape of the chemistry deck. By the time she’d been able to see clearly enough that she could tell Holden for certain that they’d solved the problem, the man had been in what looked like a sleep-deprivation psychosis. It made her feel a little guilty that she hadn’t figured it out earlier. But he’d gone off to talk to Amos, and she was fairly sure that the big man would be able to take care of his captain. And Elvi had too many other things to do.

  The chemistry deck’s slowed water purification turned out to be a bigger issue than she’d expected. The distillation filters were exhausted; material that had gone in as white, puffy pads of spun glass embedded with ionic scrubbers came out slick and green. But the other people from the science team and the survivors of First Landing were all starting to get function back too. It took almost four hours, but Elvi and Fayez and two of the mining technicians had rigged a still just outside the ruins that was converting the fallen rainwater to something potable at nearly three gallons an hour. It tasted like fake spearmint flavoring and alfalfa, but it would sustain life.

  When Elvi found Lucia, the doctor looked as bad as Holden had sounded. Her skin had an ashy tone and the whites of her eyes were so pink Elvi was surprised they weren’t bleeding. Jacek was following his mother around, carrying her medical scanner and a little sack of bandages. Elvi watched them check on the patients. Everyone was covered in mud and grit. The differences between RCE and squatters were buried under the layers of filth and the shared joy in their returning sight. When Jacek caught her gaze, she smiled. He hesitated, then nodded almost shyly and smiled back.

  “Clouds are starting to thin,” Lucia said. “I saw a patch that was actually white.”

  “Really?” Elvi asked.

  “Still looked greenish to me, of course, but it was actually white,” the doctor
said. When she shook her head, it seemed to take her a fraction of a second to start. “You did good work. I’ve only got three people the treatment’s not working on.”

  “Why isn’t it working for them? Maybe we should —”

  “This isn’t science,” Lucia said. “It’s medicine. A success rate this high on a new treatment for a novel illness? We’re doing brilliantly. None of us are back to baseline yet, though. If it happens at all, it will take time.”

  “Time,” Elvi said. “Strange to think we’ve got any of that.”

  “We’ve traded up from dying in the storm to dying from the slugs to dying of hunger in a few weeks.”

  “We’re pushing the crisis point back. If it’s not winning, at least it’s a way not to lose.”

  “If we can keep pushing it back.”

  But we can’t. The words hadn’t been said, but they didn’t need to be. With the ships fighting each other and falling out of orbit and the native ecology basically inedible, extending the group’s horizon past a few weeks of starvation was going to be difficult. Maybe impossible. The stress was showing in the people, RCE and First Landers both. Elvi saw it, the segregation into tribes again now that the immediate danger had passed. She wondered whether it would come back when the food ran out.

  “You need rest,” Elvi said, and a hand touched her shoulder. Wei and Murtry were behind her. Wei’s expression was bleak. Murtry, on the other hand, was smiling his customary smile. Of all of them, the coating of mud on his skin and in his hair looked almost natural. Like he was in his native element.

  “Doctor Okoye,” Murtry said, “I was hoping we could have a private word.”

  “Of course,” Elvi said. Lucia nodded curtly and turned away. Elvi felt a little pang of disappointment. After all the trials of the storm and the blindness, the political divisions between the RCE and First Landing were still there, just below the surface. Murtry was still the man who’d burned a building full of terrorists. Lucia was still the wife of a man who’d conspired to destroy the heavy shuttle. It seemed like it should have mattered less now, like the rains should have washed something clean. Anything.

  “I was wondering what you could tell me about the last conversation you had with Captain Holden,” Murtry said. His voice sounded perfectly calm and reasonable. It was like they were back on the Israel and he was asking her to think back to the last time she’d used some tool she couldn’t find.

  “Well, he was very, very tired. Exhausted. It seemed to be having some real cognitive effects.”

  “Cognitive effects like what, please?” Murtry asked.

  “He was babbling,” Elvi said. “Bounding from jokes about mind-controlling aliens to Charles Dickens to insisting that he had some way to shut down the defense network. He was really all over the place. I tried to get him to rest, but —”

  “Do I understand you that he intended to disable the alien technology presently functioning on this planet?”

  “Yes. I mean, why wouldn’t he?”

  “Doesn’t belong to him. Did he say how he intended to accomplish this?”

  “He didn’t. But I don’t think there really was anything. It was just his brainstem attaching to his vocal cords. I’m pretty sure he was only half aware that he was talking at all.”

  “Did he mention going north?”

  Elvi blinked, scowled, shook her head.

  Murtry pulled up his hand terminal, tapped it three times, and held it out to her. A rough map of Ilus’ only continent showed on the screen with two dots. One, she knew, was the location of First Landing, or where the place had been, anyway. She assumed it indicated where they were. A second dot was almost an inch and a half away.

  “I took the liberty of tracking the captain’s hand terminal signal,” Murtry said. “Signal’s patchy and intermittent, but it seems he’s been traveling north at an average of two hundred klicks an hour. I find that very interesting.”

  Elvi handed the terminal back to him. “He didn’t say anything about it. Just that he had something to do. He talked to Amos afterward. I thought that was probably what he meant. Honestly, I’m surprised he can even drive a cart.”

  “He isn’t driving a cart,” Murtry said. “We’ve only got two carts, they’re both right outside, and one of them doesn’t even have a power cell.”

  “I don’t understand,” Elvi said. “Then how is he…”

  “Going two hundred kilometers an hour?” Murtry said. “That would be one of many, many questions I’d like to have answered. Thank you for your time, Doctor.”

  Murtry nodded, turned, and walked toward the archway that led outside. Elvi watched him go, scowling. Had Holden said anything else? She couldn’t think of anything. But maybe he’d said something to Amos.

  She found the big man standing in the mud outside the work tent where the carts were parked, arms folded across his bare, mud-streaked chest. He had a nasty scar across his belly and a tattoo of a woman over his heart. She wanted to ask about them both, but didn’t. The one working cart was rolling out, Murtry and Wei at the controls. The big silica-gel wheels made wet smacking sounds in the mud, but the cart picked up speed quickly, bouncing along the ruined landscape in the soft rain.

  “Was there a drop?” Elvi asked.

  “Nope,” Amos said.

  “Is there going to be a drop?”

  “If there is, they’d better get it in walking range. Unless I can get another fuel cell up, that right there was our one working set of wheels.”

  “Oh,” she said. And then, “Did Holden say anything to you before he, ah, left?”

  “Yep,” Amos said, still scowling after the cart.

  “Was it about going north?”

  “Not in particular, but I knew he was going someplace in case he could get Miller to turn the fusion reactors back on for us.”

  “Miller?” Elvi said with a shake of her head.

  “Yeah, that’s a long story. Pretty much all the cap had for me was to make sure that one” – Amos nodded at the retreating cart – “didn’t get uppity and start killing folks again.”

  “He’s going after Holden.”

  “Hmm. Don’t know if that makes my job harder or easier.”

  The big man shrugged and walked into the repair tent. The remains of half a dozen fuel cells were laid out on a thin plastic tarp. Amos squatted beside them, then started arranging the cells by size and the extent of their obvious damage.

  “This’d be a lot easier if the Roci could just drop me down a fresh cell,” he said.

  “You’re going after Holden too?”

  “Well, the way I figure it, I’m supposed to make sure Murtry doesn’t hurt anyone. He ain’t here, so all these folks are looking pretty safe. Might as well go where he is, make sure he don’t hurt no one there either.”

  Elvi nodded and looked north. The cart was a small dot near the horizon throwing up a plume of spattered mud. She couldn’t judge how quickly they were going, but she was sure they’d be beyond the horizon soon.

  “If you get that working, can I come too?”

  “Nope.”

  “Seriously, let me come with you,” Elvi said, kneeling beside him. “You’ll need backup out there. If anything goes wrong. What if you go blind again? Or if something stings you? I know the ecology out here better than anyone. I can help.”

  Amos picked up a fuel cell, squeezing the casing until the metal bowed out a degree, and slid the internal cell out into his hand. A slurry of green-yellow mud came with it.

  “Holden was talking about aliens. Like living, thinking, communicating, mind-controlling aliens,” Elvi said. “If that’s true, I could talk with them. Document them.”

  Amos wiped the mud from the cell with his palm and squinted at it, sighing. He put it down and picked up the next one.

  “We’re going to die here,” Elvi said, her voice soft, gentle, pleading. “The food’s going to run out. You go out there, and you’ll be passing through a whole biosphere no one’s ever seen before. The
re are going to be things you and I haven’t even imagined. I want to see those before I die.”

  The next cell opened. There was no mud, but the acrid stink of melted plastic filled the air, stinging her nose and eyes. Amos closed it again.

  “You need to get electricity to drive that cart,” she said. “If I tell you how to do that, will you take me with you?”

  Amos turned his head to her, his gaze fastening on her like he was noticing her for the first time. His smile came slowly.

  “You got something you want to tell me, doc?”

  Elvi shrugged. “The alien moon defense grid thing shot down the shuttle with the fusion drive and the drop with batteries and fuel cells in it, but it let the food and medicine come through. It also isn’t busy shooting the clouds, even though there are a bunch of organisms living in them that are made of complex organic compounds. It doesn’t care about chemical energy inside compounds. You could have the Rocinante drop you a chemical fuel source. Acetylene, maybe. You’ve got acetylene tanks up there, don’t you?”