Cibola Burn

by James S. A. Corey

  Anyone but him.

  He headed off to find Amos and their potential solution to that problem. The mechanic had set up his little workshop a few hundred meters away from the tower under an A-frame shelter made of corrugated plastic sheeting. A variety of tools, salvaged electric cart parts, and welding supplies littered the cramped space beneath.

  “How’s it looking?” Holden asked, then walked into the shelter and sat on a plastic crate filled with odds and ends.

  Amos sat cross-legged on a sheet of plastic surrounded by battery housings in various states of disassembly. “Well, here’s the problem,” he said, waving at the batteries with one thick arm.

  “As in?”

  “As in, I got a couple carts they hauled out of the soup around the mines that I can have ready to roll in hours if I throw my back into it. Turns out they don’t mind being submerged all that much. The drive assemblies need the mud cleaned out and shit, that’s an easy job.”

  “But the batteries are hosed.”

  “Yeah, that’s about the size of it.” Amos picked up a delicate-looking strip of metal covered in rust spots. “They minded.”

  Holden took the corroded lead out of Amos’ hand and looked it over for a few seconds, then tossed it on a growing pile of bad parts. “The ships say high-altitude winds are making precise drops impossible,” he said. “Right now, I can send out search teams to track them down.”

  “Right up until your searchers can’t see to piss without hitting their shoes.”

  “Right up until then. And then I’m the only person who can go get the supplies. And I can’t keep up with that and everything else without some wheels.”

  “Okay,” Amos said. “Good news is I think I can assemble two or three working batteries off the parts. Bad news is I’ll probably only be able to charge one.”

  “One is all I need. And a functioning cart to put it in.”

  “I can make that happen,” Amos said. He slowly reached across his body and grabbed the oxyacetylene torch. It popped to life with a bright blue flame that he pointed at something on the ground. A death-slug that had been creeping up on him died with a hiss and a sizzle.

  “How are your eyes doing?” Holden asked, keeping his tone casual.

  “Okay so far,” the mechanic replied. “We haven’t been here as long, maybe. But I can see green flaring at the edges of my vision, so I know I got the bug same as everyone else.”

  “You should be inside with the rest of us.”

  “Naw,” Amos said. As he spoke, he grabbed one of the partial batteries and began pulling it apart. “Lot of this salvage Wei’s people are bringing in is leaking toxic shit you wouldn’t want in the air in there. Plus, I don’t want those people getting touchy-feely with my stuff.”

  “You know what I mean. This shelter you’ve set up makes an attractive dry spot. The slugs will be swarming you by nightfall.”

  “Maybe,” Amos agreed with a nod. “But I got my plastic sheet to keep ’em from popping up out of the ground. And the ones that try to crawl in get fried by the torch. I leave their little smoking corpses out there. The live ones seem to avoid ’em. I think I’m okay.”

  Holden nodded, and sat with Amos in companionable silence for a few minutes while the mechanic finished stripping the battery and laying out the parts based on how damaged they were. He was building a pile of clean parts to assemble new battery housings out of. Holden knew if he offered to help he’d just get in the way, but it was so nice to be both out of the rain, and out of sight of the anxious colonists, that he didn’t want to leave.

  “You know,” he finally said, “if your eyes get much worse I’m going to have to make you come inside. Finished with this or not.”

  “I guess you can try,” Amos said with a laugh.

  “Don’t fight me on this,” Holden said. “Please. Can I have one thing no one is fighting me on? I’m not leaving you out here to get poisoned. And if you’re blind, I think I can take you.”

  “Might be fun to find out,” Amos laughed again. “If it’s anybody, it’s you, I guess. But I’m not being obstinate to be a pain in your ass, Cap. I hope you know that.”

  “Then what?”

  “Everybody in there has the same fucking problem. Running out of food, going blind, planet blew up,” Amos said. He began assembling a battery out of spare parts while he spoke. His deft fingers knew the work so well he almost didn’t have to look at it. “Know what they’ll be talking about?”

  “That?”

  “Yeah. ‘Boo hoo, I ain’t got no food, I’m going blind, holy shit there’s poison slugs.’ I don’t do group therapy. Couple minutes of bitching and moaning, I’m gonna start knocking people out just to get some peace.”

  Holden slumped on the crate, putting his soggy head in his hands. “I know. I get to listen to that instead. It’s making me a little cranky.”

  “You’re cranky because you’re tired,” Amos said. “You got that I-have-to-save-everyone hangup, so I make it that you haven’t slept in about two days. But listening to people bitch? Yeah, that’s sorta your job. It’s why you make the big money.”

  “We make the same money.”

  “Then I guess you’re doing it for the fame and glory.”

  “I hate you,” Holden said.

  “I’ll have that first cart up and running by the end of the day,” Amos replied, snapping the battery housing together with a plastic click.

  “Thanks,” Holden said, then pushed himself to his feet with a grunt and started slogging his way back toward the tower.

  “Anytime,” Amos said to his back.

  Holden’s terminal started buzzing again. “Jim, where are you?” Elvi said the moment he accepted the connection. “I need this data —”

  “On my way,” he replied. “Sort of wearing a lot of hats right now. But I should be there in a minute.”

  He killed the connection just in time to for Murtry to come out of the tower’s main entrance and make him a liar.

  “Captain,” Murtry said.

  “Mister Murtry. How are things on your end? Amos seems to be making good use of the salvaged carts.”

  “He’s a good mechanic,” the RCE security chief replied. “There was another drop.”

  “Saw it. My terminal marked and mapped it. Let me transfer the location so you can send a team.”

  As he transferred the data, Murtry said, “We lost a man.”

  “Who?”

  “Paulson. One of my drivers. Slug crawled into his boot when no one was looking.”

  “I’m very sorry,” Holden said, trying to remember if he knew which one Paulson was, and feeling guilty that someone had died to help them out and he couldn’t even put a face with the name.

  “Stupid mistake,” Murtry said. He tapped out some rapid commands on his terminal. “And I wasn’t looking for your sympathy. Just apprising you of the situation and our reduced team strength.”

  “Okay,” Holden said, surprised that the man’s lack of empathy still surprised him.

  “Wei will handle the supply pickup.”

  “How’s her vision doing? How many more of these runs does she have in her, do you think?”

  “She’s on her way,” Murtry said with a humorless smile. “So at least one more, I’d say.”

  “Great,” Holden said. “Tell her I said thanks.”

  “Will do,” Murtry replied, ignoring the irony. “But I need something from you.”

  “You need, or RCE needs?”

  “Consider those the same thing at this point,” Murtry said. “Should be some construction materials in this load. I need to assemble a work crew to set up my structure before everyone is too blind to do the job.”

  “What’s it for? There’s a ton of other work we need to do while we can. And in a turn of luck,” Holden said, pointing at the alien tower behind him, “shelter is not one of our pressing problems.”

  “These people,” Murtry said, “are eating my food, drinking my water, and taking my medicine.
My team is gathering the supplies and doing the dangerous salvage work that makes any of this possible. You know what? As long as that remains true, they can throw up a few walls for me when I ask.”

  “Then what do you need from me?”

  “They have the mistaken impression you’re in charge. Correcting them seemed impolite.”

  Holden had a sudden mental image of dragging the soon-to-be-blind Murtry out into the middle of the rain-soaked desert and abandoning him at the center of a swarm of the lethal slugs.

  “Did I say something funny?” Murtry asked.

  “Inside joke,” Holden replied with a smile. “You had to be there. I’ll let Carol know you’re looking for volunteers.”

  Before Murtry could object, Holden turned and walked away.

  Inside, the tower was a buzzing hive of activity as the colonists hurried to finish their last preparations for the coming long night. Lucia had a group working to fill everything that could hold water with supplies from the chemistry deck. Carol Chiwewe was leading a team through the interior of the tower hunting out any remaining death-slugs and plugging any holes they could find.

  Holden climbed a ramp and then a set of steps made out of empty packing crates to reach the third floor of the tower. Inside the chamber they’d optimistically named the lab, he found Elvi, Fayez, and a third member of the RCE science team whom Holden thought was named Sudyam.

  “Who is that?” Elvi asked. She poked Fayez in the bicep. “Is that Jim?”

  Fayez squinted at him for a second then said, “Finally.”

  “Sorry I was late, but Murtry wanted —”

  “I need you to come read this,” Elvi said over the top of him. She was pointing at the chemistry deck’s small screen. Holden walked over and looked at the display, but had no idea what any of the confusion of symbols and acronyms meant.

  “What am I looking for?”

  “First we want to check the CBC,” Elvi said, coming over to point at the screen. Nothing on it said CBC.

  “Okay,” Holden said. “Will it say CBC? I don’t see CBC here.”

  Elvi sighed, then began speaking slowly. “Does the screen say ‘results’ at the top?”

  “No. It says ‘tools’ at the very top. Is that what you mean?”

  “Wrong menu. Hit the back button,” Elvi said, pointing at a button on the screen. Holden pushed it.

  “Oh, I see a results option now.”

  “Hit that. Then we’re going to be looking for numbers on the CBC, RBC, WBC, hemoglobin, hematocrit, and platelet count readouts.”

  “Hey,” Holden said happily, “I see all that stuff.”

  “Tell us what they are.”

  Holden did so, while Elvi made notes on her terminal. She had the display blown up to the point where Holden could read it from across the room.

  “Back up now and let’s look at blood gases,” she said when they were done. It took over an hour, but in the end Holden had given them all the results they were looking for. They decided to take some more of his blood and let him go.

  When they were done, he stood next to Elvi pressing a scrap of bandage against the puncture wound. “Are we any closer?”

  “It’s not an easy process,” she replied. “Even with access to all these minds and the Israel’s computer. We’re looking for a needle in a complex organism.”

  “How much time do we have left?”

  Elvi tilted her head up so the light shone into her pupils. Holden could see the faint green tinge there. “Almost none,” she said. “But you should go get some sleep. You’re exhausted.”

  “My blood told you that?”

  “You haven’t slept in two days,” she said with a laugh. “Math tells me that.”

  “I promise, I’ll hit the rack as soon as I can,” he lied to her.

  He climbed down the makeshift steps and the weirdly alien curve of the ramp to the tangle of people at the ground floor. Lucia had turned over water duty to her assistants, and was shining a penlight into the eyes of a small child. She gave Holden a tired smile as he walked by. Someone gave an alarmed shout, then rushed through the room carrying a slug on a stick and threw it outside. Holden followed it outside and stomped on it.

  The sky was darkening to the color of damp ash, and the rain was becoming heavier. Distant thunder rumbled to the east, the lightning visible only as dim flashes in the heavy clouds. The air smelled of ozone and mud.

  Holden shuffled his way around the tower again.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: Basia

  “H

  ey Papa!” the Jacek on the screen said. The boy’s voice almost vibrated with fear and exhaustion.

  Hey son,” the recorded Basia and the real one said at the same time. Jacek began talking about death-slugs and lightning and living in the alien ruins, reciting words of reassurance and explanation that Basia could recognize as Lucia’s. Jacek soberly repeated all the reasons his mother had given him that things might end well, telling Basia as an excuse to hear them again himself. It was the third time Basia had watched the recorded video of his conversation with his boy. When it finished, he cued up the recording of his conversation with Lucia and watched it for the tenth time.

  He considered asking Alex to call them again, get new conversations to record, but he recognized this as a selfish impulse and quashed it.

  Jacek looked dirty, covered with mud, tired. He described the horror of the poisonous slug worms with dread and fascination. The constant lightning storms and rain were amazingly exotic to a child who’d only ever lived in ice tunnels and ship holds before coming to Ilus. He never said he wished his daddy was there, but the fact sang in his words. Basia wanted nothing more than to take his boy by the hand, tell him it was all right to be scared. That bravery was being scared and doing it anyway.

  Lucia, when her turn had come, looked less fearful than exhausted. Her smiles for him were all perfunctory. Her report was vague because, he knew, she had nothing to say that would help either of them to hear.

  Felcia’s videos had been the ones that brought him peace. She was the one member of his family he had felt like he hadn’t failed. She’d wanted to go to school, and he’d managed to push down his fears and needs and the burdens that he carried long enough to actually let her go. It had felt like a victory.

  Until now.

  Now he only saw the ticking clock Alex had left running, showing the remaining time until she burned up across Ilus’ sky.

  The simulation and timer ran out their terrible program on the panel behind him. He tried never to look. When he needed to use the screens on the operations deck, he drifted through the compartment trying not to even glance in its direction. He tried very hard to forget that it existed at all.

  He failed.

  Watching his most recent conversation with Felcia for the fourth time, he felt the timer behind him, like a warm spot on his back. Like the stare of someone from across a crowded room. The game became how long he could go without looking. Or whether he could distract himself sufficiently to forget it was there.

  On the screen, Felcia told him about learning to change air scrubbers on the Belter freighter. It wasn’t the sort of things she’d had to do in the long months when the Barbapiccola had been their home. Her graceful fingers were demonstrating some complex function necessary to the process. She made it seem light. Fun. Amusing. He was her father. He knew that she was scared.

  Tick tick tick, the clock burned soundlessly at his back.

  He adjusted the air recycling system nozzle near his panel and sent a cool breeze across his face. He finished the recording and spent some time organizing his files by content and date. Then decided it was better by date and name, and reorganized them again.

  Tick tick tick, hot like the sun on a dark shirt at noon. Burning without burning.

  He opened up the file Alex had set up with repair tasks and scrolled through the list. He’d already checked off the ones he was actually capable of doing. He spent some time looking over the rest of the
items, trying to decide if there were any he could help out with. Nothing jumped out at him. Not surprising, since it was his fifth time through the list.