Cibola Burn (The Expanse) (4 page)

“You look troubled.”

Fayez Sarkis sat on a crash couch, strapping the wide belts across his chest and waist. He’d grown up on Mars, and had the tall, thin frame and large head of low gravity. He looked at home in a crash couch. Elvi realized her hand terminal was telling her that she’d found her own place. She sat, the gel forming itself around her thighs and lower back. She always wanted to sit up in a crash couch, like a kid in a wading pool. Letting herself sink into it felt too much like being eaten.

“Just thinking ahead,” she said, forcing herself to lie back. “Lot of work to be done.”

“I know,” Fayez said with a sigh. “Break time’s over. Now we have to actually earn our keep. Still, it was fun while it lasted. I mean apart from burning at a full g.”

“New Terra’s a little over that, you know.”

“Don’t remind me,” he said. “I don’t know why we couldn’t start with some nice balsawood planet with a civilized gravity well.”

“Luck of the draw,” Elvi said.

“Well, as soon as we get papers for a decent Mars-like planet, I’m transferring.”

“You and half of Mars.”

“I know, right? Someplace with maybe a breathable atmosphere. A magnetic field so we don’t all have to live like mole rats. It’s like having the terraforming project done already, except I’m alive to see it.”

Elvi laughed. Fayez was on the geology team and the hydrological workgroup both. He’d studied at the best universities outside Earth, and she knew from long acquaintance that he was at least as frightened and delighted as she was. Eric Vanderwert came by, easing himself into the couch beside Elvi. She smiled at him politely. In the year and a half out from Ceres, there had been any number of romantic or if not romantic at least sexual connections made between members of the science teams. Elvi had kept herself out of that tangle. She’d learned early that sexual entanglements and work were a toxic and unstable mixture.

Eric nodded to Fayez, then turned his attention to her.

“Exciting,” he said.

“Yes,” Elvi said, and across from her, Fayez rolled his eyes.

Murtry walked through, stepping between the crash couches. His gaze flickered over everything – the couches, the belts, the faces of the people preparing for drop. Elvi smiled at him, and he nodded to her sharply. It wasn’t hostile, just businesslike. She watched him size her up. It wasn’t the sexual way that a man considered a woman. It was like a loader making sure a crate’s magnetic clamps were firing. He nodded to her again, apparently satisfied that she’d gotten her belts right, and moved on. When he was out of sight, Fayez chuckled.

“Poor bastard’s chewing the walls,” he said, nodding after Murtry.

“Is he?” Eric said.

“Had us all under his thumb for a year and a half, hasn’t he? Now we’re going down and he’s staying in orbit. Man’s petrified that we’re all going to get ourselves killed on his watch.”

“At least he cares,” Elvi said. “I like him for that.”

“You like everyone,” Fayez teased. “It’s your pathology.”

“You don’t like anyone.”

“That’s mine,” he said, grinning.

The tritone alert came and the public-address system clicked.

“Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Patricia Silva and I’m your pilot on this little milk run.”

A chorus of laughter rose from the crash couches.

“We’re going to be detaching from the
Israel
in about ten minutes, and we’re expecting the drop to take about fifty. So an hour from now, you’re all going to be breathing entirely new air. We’ve got the governor on board, so we’re going to make sure this all goes smooth and easy so we can put in for a performance bonus.”

Everyone was giddy then. Even the pilot. Elvi grinned and Fayez grinned back at her. Eric cleared his throat.

“Well,” Fayez said with mock resignation. “We came all this way. I suppose we should finish it.”

~

The pain didn’t have a location. It was too large for that. It spread everywhere, encompassed everything. Elvi realized that she’d been looking at something. A massive, articulated crab leg, maybe. Or a broken construction crane. The flat ground of the lake bed stretched out toward it, and then grew rougher until it reached the thing’s base. She could imagine it had pushed its way out of the dark, dry soil or that it had crashed down into it. Her agonized mind tried to make it into debris from the shuttle and failed.

It was an artifact. Ruins. Some arcane structure left from the alien civilization that had designed the protomolecule and the rings, abandoned and empty now. Elvi had the sudden, powerful and disjointed memory of an art exhibit she’d seen as a girl. There had been a high-resolution image of a bicycle in a ditch outside the ruins of Glasgow. The aftermath of disaster in a single image, as compressed and eloquent as a poem.

At least I got to see it
, she thought.
At least I got to be here before I died.

Someone had dragged her out of the ruined shuttle. When she turned her head, she could see construction lights burning yellow-white and the others laid out on the flat ground in rows. Some were standing. Moving among the injured and the dead. She didn’t recognize their faces or the way their bodies moved. After a year and a half on the
Israel
, she knew everyone on sight, and these were strangers. The locals, then. The squatters. Illegals. The air smelled like burning dust and cumin.

She must have blacked out, because the woman seemed to appear at Elvi’s side in the blink of an eye. Her hands were bloody and her face smeared with dirt and gore not her own.

“You’re banged up, but you’re not in any immediate danger. I’m going to give you something for the pain, but I need to you stay still until we can splint your leg. All right?”

She was beautiful, in a severe way. Her dark cheeks had dots of pure black scattered across them like beads in a veil. Threads of white laced the black waves of her hair like moonlight on water. Only there was no moonlight on New Terra. Only billions of strange stars.

“All right?” the woman asked again.

“All right,” Elvi said.

“Tell me what you just agreed to.”

“I don’t remember.”

The woman leaned back, her hand pressing gently against Elvi’s shoulder.

“Torre! I’m going to need a scan on this one’s head. She may be concussed.”

Another voice – a man’s – came from the darkness. “Yes, Doctor Merton. Soon as I’m done with this one.”

Doctor Merton turned back to her. “If I get up right now, are you going to stay where you are until Torre gets here?”

“No, it’s all right. I can come help,” Elvi said.

“I’m sure you can,” the beautiful woman said with a sigh. “Let’s just wait for him, then.”

A shadow loomed up from the darkness. She recognized Fayez by the way he walked. “Go ahead. I’ll sit with her.”

“Thank you,” Doctor Merton said, and then vanished. Fayez lowered himself to the ground with a grunt and crossed his legs. His hair stood out from his slightly oversized head at all angles. His lips were pressed thin. Elvi took his hand without intending to, and she felt him pull back for a second before permitting her fingers to stay touching his.

“What happened?” she asked.

“The landing pad blew up.”

“Oh,” she said. And then, “Do they do that?”

“No. No, they really don’t.”

She tried to think through that.
If they don’t, then how could it have happened?
Her mind was clearing enough for her to notice how compromised she was. Unnerving, but probably a good sign.

“How bad is it?”

She felt Fayez’s shrug more than saw it. “Bad. Only significant good news is that the village is close, and their doctor’s competent. Trained on Ganymede. Now, if our supplies weren’t all on fire or smashed under a couple tons of metal and ceramics, she might be able to do something.”

“The workgroup?”

“I saw Gregorio. He’s all right. Eric’s dead. I don’t know what happened to Sophie, but I’ll go look some more once they get to you.”

Eric was dead. Minutes before, he’d been in the couch beside her, trying to flirt and being annoying. She didn’t understand it.

“Sudyam?” she asked.

“She’s back on the
Israel
. She’s fine.”

“That’s good then.”

Fayez squeezed her hand and let it go. The air felt cool against her palm where his skin had abandoned it. He looked out over the rows of bodies toward the wreckage of the shuttle. It was so dark, she could hardly make him out except where he blotted out the stars.

“Governor Trying didn’t make it,” he said.

“Didn’t make it?”

“Dead as last week’s rat. We’re not sure who’s in charge of anything now.”

She felt tears forming in her eyes and an ache bloomed in her chest that had nothing to do with her injuries. She recalled the man’s gentle smile, the warmth of his voice. His work was only starting. It was strange that Eric’s death should skip across the surface of her mind like a stone thrown over water and Governor Trying’s should strike so deep.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

“Yeah, well. We’re on an alien planet a year and a half from home with our initial supplies in toothpick-size splinters, and the odds-on bet for what happened is sabotage by the same people who are presently giving us medical care. Dead’s not good, but at least it’s simple. We may all envy Trying before this is over.”

“You don’t mean that. It’s going to be okay.”

“Elvi?” Fayez said, with a sardonic chuckle. “I believe that it isn’t.”

“H
ey,” the engineer said blearily from the cell. “Havelock. You’re not still pissed, are you?”

Not my job to be pissed, Williams,” Havelock replied from where he floated beside his desk. The internal security station of the
Edward Israel
was small. Two desks, eight cells, a space as much brig as office. And with the ship in high orbit, the loss of effective gravity made it seem even smaller.

“Look, I know I got out of line, but I’m sober now. You can let me out.”

Havelock checked his hand terminal.

“Another fifty minutes,” he said, “and you’ll be free to go.”

“C’mon, Havelock. Have a heart.”

“It’s policy. Nothing I can do about it.”

Dimitri Havelock had worked security contracts for eight different corporations over thirteen years. Pinkwater, Star Helix, el-Hashem Cooperative, Stone & Sibbets, among others. Even, briefly, Protogen. He’d been in the Belt, on Earth, Mars, and Luna. He’d done long-haul work on supply ships heading from Ganymede to Earth. He’d dealt with everything from riots to intimate violence to drug trafficking to one idiot who’d had a thing for stealing people’s socks. He hadn’t seen everything, but he’d seen a lot. Enough to know he’d probably never see
everything
. And enough to recognize that how he reacted to a crisis was more about the people on his team than with the crisis itself.

When the reactor had gone on Aten Base, his partner and supervisor had both panicked, and Havelock remembered the overwhelming fear in his own gut. When the riots had started on Ceres after the ice hauler
Canterbury
had been destroyed, his partner had been more weary than fearful, and Havelock had faced the situation with the same grim resignation. When the
Ebisu
had been quarantined for nipahvirus, his boss had been energized – almost elated – running the ship like a puzzle that had to be solved, and Havelock had been caught up in the pleasure of doing an important thing well.

Humans, Havelock knew from long experience, were first and foremost social animals, and he himself was profoundly human. It was more romantic – hell, more masculine – to pretend he was an island, unaffected by the waves of emotion around him. But it wasn’t true, and he’d made his peace with that fact.

When the word came that the heavy shuttle’s landing pad had exploded and the reports of casualties started coming in, Murtry’s response had been an efficient and focused rage, and so Havelock’s had been too. All the activity was on the planetary surface, so the only outlet had been on the
Edward Israel
itself. And how things went on the
Israel
were firmly in Havelock’s wheelhouse.

“Please?” Williams whined from the cell. “I need to get some clean clothes. It’s not going to make any difference, is it? A few minutes?”

“If it’s not going make any difference, it won’t matter if you see it through,” Havelock said. “Forty-five minutes, and you’re on your way. Just sit back and try to enjoy them.”

“Can’t sit back when you’re floating in orbit.”

“It’s a metaphor. Don’t be a literalist.”

The
Edward Israel
assignment had been a great contract. Royal Charter Energy was the first real expedition out into the new systems that the rings had opened up, and the importance the company put on the mission’s success were reflected in the size of the benefit package they were willing to put together. Every day on the
Israel
had been paid a hazard bonus, even when they were just loading on supplies and crew from Luna. And with almost a year and a half out, a six-year stretch before the scheduled return to Earth, and another eighteen months back – all at full pay – it was almost less a contract than a career plan.

And still, Havelock had hesitated before he signed up.

He’d seen the footage from Eros and Ganymede, the bloodbath in the so-called slow zone when the alien defenses had stopped the ships suddenly enough to slaughter a third of the people in them. With the massive density of scientists and engineers packed into the
Israel
, it was impossible to forget that they were going into the unknown. Here there be monsters.

And now Governor Trying was dead. Severn Astrapani, the statistician who’d sung Ryu-pop classics in the talent competition, was dead. Amanda Chu, who’d flirted with Havelock one time when they were both a little tipsy, was dead. Half the men and women on the first team were injured. The supplies on the heavy shuttle – and the heavy shuttle itself – were gone. And the quiet that came over the
Edward Israel
was like the moment of shock between the impact of a blow and the pain. And then the rage and the grief. Not only the crew’s. Havelock’s too.