Cibola Burn (The Expanse) (3 page)

The copper taste of fear flooded Basia’s mouth. He looked up at the darkness. A billion unfamiliar stars, his same Milky Way galaxy, everyone figured, just seen from a different angle. His eyes shifted frantically, and then he caught it. The movement was subtle as the minute hand on an analog clock, but he saw it. The drop ship was dropping. The heavy shuttle was coming for the landing pad.

“I was going to get on the radio, but Coop said they monitor radio spectrum and —” Pete said, but by then Basia was already running back to the landing pad. Scotty and Coop were just pulling themselves out. Coop clapped clouds of dust off his pants and grinned.

“We got a problem,” Basia said. “Ship’s already dropped. Looks like they’re in atmosphere already.”

Coop looked up. The brightness from his flashlight threw shadows across his cheeks and into his eyes.

“Huh,” he said.

“I thought you were on this, man. I thought you were paying attention to where they were.”

Coop shrugged, neither agreeing nor denying.

“We’ve got to get the bombs back out,” Basia said. Scotty started to kneel, but Coop put a restraining hand on his shoulder.

“Why?” he asked.

“They try to land now, they could set it all off,” Basia said.

Coop’s smile was gentle. “Could,” he said. “And what if?”

Basia balled his fists. “They’re coming down
now
.”

“See that,” Coop said. “Doesn’t inspire a great sense of obligation. And however you cut it, there ain’t time to pull them.”

“Can take off the primers and caps,” Basia said, hunkering down. He played his flashlight over the pad’s superstructure.

“Maybe could, maybe couldn’t,” Coop said. “Question’s should, and it’s a limp little question.”

“Coop?” Scotty said, his voice thin and uncertain. Coop ignored him.

“Opportunity, looks like to me,” Coop said.

“There’s people on that thing,” Basia said, crawling under the pad. The nearest bomb’s electronics were flat against the dirt. He put his aching shoulder against it and pushed.

“Isn’t time, mate,” Coop called.

“Might be if you got your ass in here,” Basia shouted. The blasting cap clung to the barrel’s side like a tick. Basia tried to dig his fingers into the sealant goo and pry the cap away.

“Oh shit,” Scotty said with something too much like awe in his voice. “Baz, oh
shit
!”

The cap came loose. Basia pushed it in his pocket and started crawling toward the second bomb.

“No time,” Coop shouted. “Best we get clear, try and blow it while they can still pull up.”

In the distance, he heard one of the carts taking off. Pete, going for distance. And under that, another sound. The bass roar of braking engines. He looked at the three remaining bombs in despair and rolled out from under the pad. The shuttle was massive in the black sky, so close he could make out the individual thrusters.

He wasn’t going to make it.

“Run!” he shouted. He and Scotty and Coop sprinted back toward the cart. The roar of the shuttle rose, grew deafening. Basia reached the cart and scooped up the detonator. If he could blow it early, the shuttle could pull out, get away.

“Don’t!” Coop shouted. “We’re too close!”

Basia slammed his palm on the button.

The ground rose up, hitting him hard, the rough dirt and rocks tearing at his hands and cheek as he came to a stop, but the pain was a distant thing. Some part of him knew he might be hurt very badly, might be in shock, but that seemed distant and easy to ignore too. What struck him most was how quiet everything was. The world of sound stopped at his skull. He could hear his own breath, his heartbeat. Everything past that had the volume turned down to one.

He rolled onto his back and stared up at the star-speckled night sky. The heavy shuttle streaked overhead, half of it trailing fire, the sound of its engines no longer a bass roar but the scream of a wounded animal that he felt in his belly more than heard. The shuttle had been too close, the blast too large, some unlucky debris thrown into just the right path. No way to know. Some part of Basia knew this was very bad, but it was hard to pay much attention to it.

The shuttle disappeared from view, shrieking a death wail across the valley that came to him as a faint high piping sound, then sudden silence. Scotty was sitting beside him on the ground, staring off in the direction the ship had gone. Basia let himself lie back down.

When the bright spots it had left in his vision faded, the stars returned. Basia watched them twinkle, and wondered which one was Sol. So far away. But with the gates, close too. He’d knocked their shuttle down. They’d have to come now. He’d left them no choice.

A sudden spasm of coughing took him. It felt like his lungs were full of fluid, and he coughed it up for several minutes. With the coughing the pain finally came, wracking him from head to foot.

With the pain came the fear.

T
he shuttle bucked, throwing Elvi Okoye against her restraints hard enough to knock the wind out of her and then pushing her back into the overwhelming embrace of her crash couch. The light flickered, went black, and then came back. She swallowed, her excitement and anticipation turning to animal fear. Beside her, Eric Vanderwert smiled the same half-leering, half-hopeful smile he’d flickered toward her over the past six months. Across from her, Fayez’s eyes had gone wide, his skin gray.

“It’s okay,” Elvi said. “It’s going to be okay.”

Even as she spoke the words, a part of her cringed away from them. She didn’t know what was going on. There was no earthly way she could know that anything was going to be okay. And still her first impulse was to assert it, to say it as if saying it made it true. A high whine rippled through the flesh of the shuttle, overtones crashing into each other. She felt her weight lurch to the left, the crash couches all shifting on their gimbals at the same time like choreographed dancers. She lost sight of Fayez.

A tritone chime announced the pilot, and her voice came over the shuttle’s public-address system.

“Ladies and gentlemen, it appears there has been a critical malfunction at the landing pad. We will not be able to complete the landing at this time. We will be returning to orbit and docking with the
Edward Israel
until such time as we can assess…”

She went quiet, but the hiss of an open line still ran through the ship. Elvi imagined the pilot distracted by something. The ship lurched and stuttered, and Elvi grabbed her restraints, hugging them to her. Someone nearby was praying loudly.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the pilot said. “I’m afraid the malfunction at the landing pad has done our shuttle some damage. I don’t think we’re going to make it back upstairs right away. We have a dry lake bed not too far from here. I think we’re going to go take a look at that as a secondary landing site.”

Elvi felt a moment’s relief –
We still have a landing site
– followed at once by a deeper understanding and a deeper fear –
She means we’re going to crash
.

“I’m going to ask everyone to remain in their couches,” the pilot said. “Don’t take off your belts, and please keep your arms and legs inside the couch’s shell where it won’t bang against the side. The gel’s there for a reason. We’ll have you all down in just a couple minutes here.”

The forced, artificial calmness terrified Elvi more than shrieking and weeping would have. The pilot was doing everything she could to keep them all from panicking. Would anyone do that if they didn’t think panic was called for?

Her weight shifted again, pulling to the left, and then back, and then she grew light as the shuttle descended. The fall seemed to last forever. The rattle and whine of the shuttle rose to a screaming pitch. Elvi closed her eyes.

“We’re going to be fine,” she said to herself. “Everything’s okay.”

The impact split the shuttle open like lobster tail under a hammer. She had the brief impression of unfamiliar stars in a foreign sky, and her consciousness blinked out like God had turned off a switch.

~

Centuries before, Europeans had invaded the plague-emptied shell of the Americas, climbing aboard wooden ships with vast canvas sails and trusting the winds and the skill of sailors to take them from the lands they knew to what they called the New World. For as long as six months, religious fanatics and adventurers and the poverty-stricken desperate had consigned themselves to the uncharitable waves of the Atlantic Ocean.

Eighteen months ago, Elvi Okoye left Ceres Station under contract to Royal Charter Energy. The
Edward Israel
was a massive ship. Once, almost three generations before, it had been one of the colony ships that had taken humanity to the Belt and the Jovian system. When the outpouring had ended and the pressure to expand had met its natural limits, the
Israel
had been repurposed as a water hauler. The age of expansion was over, and the romance of freedom gave way to the practicalities of life – air, water, and food, in that order. For decades, the ship had been a workhorse of the solar system, and then the Ring had opened. Everything changed again. Back at the Bush shipyards and Tycho Station a new generation of colony ships was being built, but the retrofit of the
Israel
had been faster.

When she’d stepped inside it the first time, Elvi had felt a sense of wonder and hope and excitement in the hum of the
Israel
’s air recyclers and the angles of her old-fashioned corridors. The age of adventure had come again, and the old warrior had returned, sword newly sharpened and armor shining again after tarnished years. Elvi had known that it was a psychological projection, that it said more about her own state of mind than anything physical about the ship, but that didn’t diminish it. The
Edward Israel
was a colony ship once more, her holds filled with prefabbed buildings and high-atmosphere probes, manufacturing labs and even a repeat-scatter femtoscope. They had an exploration and mapping team, a geological survey team, a hydrology team, Elvi’s own exozoological workgroup, and more. A university’s worth of PhDs and a government lab’s load of postdocs. Between crew and colonists, a thousand people.

They were a city in the sky and a boat of pilgrims bound for Plymouth Rock and Darwin’s voyage on the
Beagle
all at the same time. It was the grandest and most beautiful adventure humanity had ever been on, and Elvi had earned a place on the exobiology team. In that context, imagining that the steel and ceramic of the ship was imbued with a sense of joy was a permissible illusion.

And all of it was ruled over by Governor Trying.

She’d seen him several times in the months they’d spent burning and braking, then making the slow, eerie transit between rings, and then burning and braking again. It wasn’t until just before the drop itself that she’d actually spoken with him.

Trying was a thin man. His mahogany skin and snow-dust hair reminded her of her uncles, and his ready smile reassured and calmed. She had been in the observation deck, pretending that the high-resolution screens looking down on the planet were really windows, that the light of this unfamiliar sun was actually bouncing off the wide, muddy seas and high frosted clouds and passing directly into her eyes even though the deceleration gravity meant they weren’t in free orbit yet. It was a strange, beautiful sight. A single, massive ocean scattered with islands. A large continent that sprawled comfortably across half of a hemisphere, widest at the equator and then tapering as it reached north and south. The official name of the world was Bering Survey Four, named for the probe that had first established its existence. In the corridors and cafeteria and gym, they’d all come to call it New Terra. So at least she wasn’t the only one swept up by the romance.

“What are you thinking, Doctor Okoye?” Trying’s gentle voice asked, and Elvi had jumped. She hadn’t heard him come in. Hadn’t seen him beside her. She felt like she was supposed to bow or make some sort of formal report. But his expression was so soft, so amused, she let it go.

“I’m wondering what I did to deserve all this,” she said. “I’m about to see the first genuinely alien biosphere. I’m about to learn things about evolution that were literally impossible to know until now. I must have been a very, very good person in a past life.”

In the screens, New Terra glittered brown and gold and blue. The high atmospheric winds smudged greenish clouds halfway around the planet. Elvi leaned in toward it. The governor chuckled.

“You will be famous,” he said.

Elvi blinked and coughed out a laugh.

“I guess I will be, won’t I?” she said. “We’re doing things humanity’s never done before.”

“Some things,” Trying said. “And some things we have always done. I hope history treats us gently.”

She didn’t quite know what he’d meant by that, but before she could ask, Adolphus Murtry came in. A thin man with hard blue eyes, Murtry was the head of security and as hard and efficient as Trying was avuncular. The two men had walked off together, leaving Elvi alone with the world that was about to be hers to explore.

The heavy shuttle was as large as some ships Elvi had been on. They’d had to build a landing pad on the surface just to support it. It carried the first fifty structures, basic array laboratories, and – most important – a hard perimeter dome.

She had filed through the close-packed hallway of the shuttle, letting her hand terminal lead her toward her assigned crash couch. When the first colonies had begun on Mars, the perimeter domes had been a question of survival. Something to hold in air and keep out radiation. On New Terra, it was all about limiting contamination. The corporate charter that RCE had taken required that their presence have the smallest possible footprint. She’d heard that there were other people already on the planetary surface, and hopefully they were also being careful not to disturb the sites they were on. If they weren’t, the interactions between local organisms and the ones that had been shipped in would be complex. Maybe impossible to tease apart.