Cibola Burn (The Expanse) (66 page)

Elvi stepped forward. The plating was all knifepoints and sharp edges. She felt the sting where it cut her palms, and the burning where the robotic fluids flowed into the wounds.

“I don’t mean to be that guy,” Miller said. “But you also need to hurry.”

“Trying,” she said.

“Just saying there are more bad guys and they’re getting a little closer than I like.”

“All right. I have it,” Elvi said. “It’s right here.”

“Good. Nice work. Now I need you to pick that up and walk it into the dead spot.”

The blue thing was the shape of a huge elongated almond. The surface was slick and soft. She put her hands around it, strained, grunted, and slid forward, panting. “You have got to be kidding me,” she said.

“It may be a little heavy,” Miller said.

“It’s like ninety kilos.”

“And I’m really sorry about that, but we need to get it into that dead spot now. Try sliding your arms under it and lifting with your back and legs. Just like it was a baby.”

“Baby made from fucking tungsten,” Elvi muttered.

“You’re exaggerating,” he said as she shoved her hands under the thing.

“I can’t throw this,” she said. “I have to walk it in.”

“All right.”

“Is that thing going to kill me if I go into it?”

A new sound rose behind the chittering. A deep booming sound like a massive drum. She didn’t want to think of what might be making it.

“If I say yes, does that mean you won’t do it?”

Elvi braced herself, straining her back. The blue thing shifted up into her lap. She bent her head, trying to catch her breath.

“No,” she said, surprised at the answer even as she spoke it. “I’ll still do it.”

“Maybe, then. I don’t know.”

Elvi rocked back, keeping the thing – Miller – on her thighs and still getting her feet under her. She felt it start to slide to her left. If she dropped it now, she didn’t think she’d be able to get it up again. The booming came closer. Elvi pushed with her legs. Her knees ached. Her back was a single, vast sheet of burning. She pressed the blue thing to her chest, crying out from the pain.

“You’re doing great, kid. You’re doing great. You can do this. Just a little more. But do it
now
.”

She didn’t step forward. Just slid one foot a little ahead, shifted her weight, pulled the other foot in. The floor was slick as ice. Not quite frictionless, but close. The booming came again, near enough that she felt the room vibrate with it. She set her gaze on the blackness of the dead spot and moved forward. Another step. Another. Another. She was close now. Her back was on fire. Her arms were numb. Her fists something that belonged to someone else, and only happened to be connected to her.

A swarm of silver and blue gushed in the doorway, flowing in at her like a cloud of flies. Elvi pushed, slipped, fell forward —

The closest analogy, the one her brain reached for and rejected and reached for again, was splashing into a lake. It was cold, but not cold. There was a smell, rich and loamy. The smell of growth and decay. She was aware of her body, the skin, the sinew, the curl of her gut. She was aware of the nerves that were firing in her brain as she became aware of the nerves firing in her brain. She unmade herself and watched herself being unmade. All the bacteria on her skin and in her blood, the virii in her tissues. The woman who had been Elvi Okoye became a landscape. A world. She fell farther in.

Cells became molecules – countless and complex and varied. The demarcation of one thing and another failed. There was only a community of molecules, shifting in a vast dance. And then the atoms that made the molecules gave up their space, and she was a breath. A mist. A tiny play of fields and interactions in a vacuum as perfect as space. She was a vibration in nothingness.

She rolled onto her side. Something hurt. Everything hurt, and the pain was interesting. A subject of curiosity more than distress. She was breathing. She could feel the air moving through her throat and into the complex network of soft caverns behind her ribs. It was a strange and beautiful sensation. She stayed with it until she began to realize that time existed. That moments were passing. That meant basal ganglia and cerebellum and cerebral cortex were all actually starting to work. She felt distantly surprised about that. She opened her eyes to nothing.

She was holding something pressed to her like it was precious. The blue thing. Miller. Only it wasn’t blue anymore. It was the closed-eyes blackness of everything else. She let it go and sat up. The world was silent. No booming. No chittering. Her breath. The hush of her blood. After a few moments, she drew her hand terminal out of her pocket and turned up the screen brightness, using it like a lamp.

All around her, the artifacts of New Terra lay dead. Knife-sharp legs were still. Vast, inhuman claws that could have been carved from stone. A spray of silver flecks on the ground showed where the cloud of tiny mechanisms had fallen, a million tiny bodies turned off at once. The light was too dim for colors. Everything was only gray.

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.”

— 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.

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…?”