Cibola Burn (The Expanse) (11 page)

“Oh,” Elvi said. “Well. I don’t know. I mean, I’ve never seen your academic work —”

“Seriously?” Fayez said with a snort. “Elvi, it’s a letter of recommendation. You’re not under oath for it. Cut the kid a break.”

“Well, I just thought it would be better if I could actually say something I know about.”

“When I went to lower university, I wrote my own letters of recommendation. Two of them came from people I made up. No one checks.”

Elvi’s jaw dropped a centimeter. “Really?”

“You are an amazing woman, Elvi, but I don’t know how you survive in the wild.” Fayez turned to Felcia. “If she won’t, I will. You’ll have it by morning, okay?”

“I don’t know how I can repay you,” Felcia said, but she already looked calmer.

Fayez waved the comment away. “Your undying gratitude is thanks enough. What’s your field of study going to be?”

For the next hour, Felcia talked about her mother’s medical career, and her dead brother’s immune disorder, and intracellular signaling regulation. Elvi began to realize that she’d unconsciously thought of the girl as younger than she really was. She had the long, slightly gangly build and comparatively large head of a Belter, and somewhere in Elvi’s mind, she’d mistaken it for youth. Felcia would have fit right in at the commons of lower university. The light shifted from beige to deep brown to a burnt umber, and then darkness. The wind calmed. When Elvi opened her door, two centimeters of fine dust covered the walkway and the stars glimmered in the sky. The air smelled like fresh-turned earth. Some sort of actinomycete analog, Elvi thought. Maybe one that was actually carried by the wind. Or maybe something else. Something stranger.

Felcia headed back for the town, Fayez for his own hut. As far as she could tell, Fayez was one of maybe two or three other people on the science team who was still sleeping alone. Sudyam and Tolerson were the latest pairing. Laberge and Maravalis had just broken off the relationship they’d started on the journey out, and each of them was already involved with someone else.

Sex wasn’t a strange thing among the scientific teams. That it was unprofessional behavior was set in balance against the fact that – especially on a years-long field expedition like this – the pool of potential mates was both very restricted and generally fairly high-value. People were people. If she felt any jealousy at all, it wasn’t for any of the particular relationships, but for intimacy itself. It would be nice to have someone to walk with in the darkness after the storm. Someone to wake up with in the morning. She wondered what the sexual politics were among the families of First Landing. If RCE had thought to send a social science team, it might have made a good paper.

Ahead of her and to the right, the alien ruins stood against the horizon, hardly more than a deeper darkness. Only a light was moving in them. It was small and faint. Less than a star, and only visible at all because it was moving. Someone was in the ruins again. Contaminating the site. She knew intellectually that she was letting herself be angry about it because it was better than feeling lonesome or guilty, but that didn’t keep the rage from feeling real. She turned back to her hut, her lips pressed together. She scooped up a flashlight, checked the battery charge, and stalked out toward the ruins, the thin blue circle of light bobbing ahead of her and illuminating her way. The fine dust shifted under her feet like snow, and her thighs ached from the speed of her hike.

As she neared the ruins, she thought she saw a dim light heading the other way. Back toward the town. But when she called after it, no one answered. She stood in the darkness for almost a minute feeling first unsure of herself, then embarrassed, then angry at feeling embarrassed.

A path led into the ruins that even the recent dustfall couldn’t conceal. Tracks as wide as a wagon where wheels had gone over the land often enough to leave ruts. Elvi shook her head and followed the path up, twisting around a high shoulder of land and into the huge alien structures.

Inside, the beam of her flashlight caught the walls and surfaces, sending off glittering reflections that seemed to shift whether she did or not. Where there was shelter from the wind, there were footprints. Lots of them. It wasn’t just someone from town exploring on their own. They were treating the ruins like some sort of clubhouse. Any samples the science team took from the soil here would already be compromised. The microorganisms, a mixture of known and unknown and whatever emerged when the two encountered each other in a totally uncontrolled environment. That the same was true of the whole township seemed insignificant. These were alien structures. They’d been built by a vast, vanished civilization about which humanity still knew almost nothing. It wasn’t some kind of
treehouse
.

“Hello?” she shouted. “Is anyone in here?”

Nothing answered her. Not even the wind. Shaking her head, she stalked deeper into the shadows. If anyone was here, she’d give them the talk she’d meant to give before. She would make them understand the issues, even if it took hectoring them all night.

The walls around her rose at strange and unsettling angles from the ground, organic and also not, like a machine that was built to pass for the product of nature. Arches rose, looking out over the bare, dark land. The deeper Elvi went, the more there seemed to be, until she had the illusion that the ruins were larger inside than out.

She was about to give up and turn back home when she saw something square. Simply being rectilinear made it stand out. The boxes were plastic and ceramic, functional gray where they weren’t the bright red and yellow of warning labels. DANGER HIGH EXPLOSIVE. DO NOT STORE NEAR HEAT OR CLASS THREE RADIATION SOURCES.

“Oh no,” Elvi said to herself. “Oh
hell
no.”

~

“Doctor Okoye,” Reeve said. “I’m hearing you tell me that you found explosives hidden outside of the town.”

“Yes,” Elvi said. “Of course that’s what you’re hearing me say.”

“And that there is evidence of several people having been to this clandestine site.”

They were sitting in Reeve’s office now. The light from his lamp shone warm and soft, and his rough pants and untucked shirt suggested she’d rousted him out of bed. It felt like the middle of the night, though the extended rotational period meant the darkness would be stretching on for almost another ten hours.

“Yes,” she said.

“All right,” Reeve said. “It’s all right. This is a good thing. I need you to tell me how to find this place.”

“Yes. Of course. I’ll take you.”

“No, I need you to stay right here. Not back to your hut. Not out to the ruins. I need you right here where it’s safe. You understand?”

“There was someone out there. I saw the light, and that’s why I went. What if they’d still been there?”

“We don’t have to worry about that, because it didn’t happen,” Reeve said in a carefully reassuring tone of voice that meant
You’d be dead
. Elvi dropped her head into her hands. “Can you give me directions?”

She did her best, her voice trembling. Reeve constructed a map on his hand terminal, and she was fairly sure it was accurate. Her mind seemed to be shifting on her a little, though.

“All right,” Reeve said. “I’m going to have you stay here for a little while.”

“But my work is all back at the hut.”

The security man put a reassuring hand on her shoulder, but his gaze was already focused inward, planning some next step that didn’t include her.

“We’re going to see you’re safe first,” he said. “Everything else will come after that.”

For the next hour, she sat in the little room or paced. The voices of Reeve and his security team filtered in through the wall, the tones serious and businesslike. And then there were fewer of them.

A young woman came to get her. Elvi had seen her before, but didn’t know her name. It seemed wrong that they could have spent almost two years traveling out here together, and Elvi still didn’t know her. It should mean something about populations and how they mixed. And how they didn’t.

“Do you need anything, Doctor Okoye?”

“I don’t know where to sleep,” Elvi said, and her words seemed thin. Fragile.

“I’ve got a bunk ready,” the girl said. “Please come with me.”

The rooms were empty. The others gone out into the alien darkness to face a terribly human threat. The girl leading her to the bunk had a sidearm strapped to her belt. Elvi glanced out the front window as they passed. The street was the same one she’d walked down the day before, and it was also wholly changed. A sense of threat hung over everything like the promise of a storm coming. Like the haze on the horizon. She saw Felcia’s brother walking down the street, not looking at her or anything else. Her fear was cold and deep.

B
asia had volunteered for the night shift at the mine. Fewer people to hide from. Less open sky to make him jittery. The work, as backbreaking as it was, was a relief. The fabricator they’d brought down from the
Barbapiccola
was building tracks and carts as fast as they could load raw material into it. His team was trying to keep up with its output by assembling the rail system that would move ore from the pit to the sifters to the silos. There, it would wait for the
Barbapiccola
’s shuttle to take it up into orbit. Everything they’d mined so far had been moved with wheelbarrows by hand. A motorized cart system would increase production by an order of magnitude.

So Basia and his team worked the metal rails, pulling them out of the fabricator gleaming and new in the harsh white lights. They loaded them on handcarts and dragged them into the mining pit. Then unloaded them by hand and welded them into the growing railway system. It was the kind of physical labor people had mostly stopped doing in their mechanized age. And the process of welding inside an atmosphere was totally unlike welding in vacuum, so he had a new skill set to develop. The combination of mental challenge and physical toil left him exhausted. His world narrowed to the next task, the ache in his hands, and the distant promise of sleep. There was no time to dwell on other things.

Like being a murderer. Like the corporate security forces sniffing around for him and Coop and the others. Like the guilt he felt every time Lucia lied to them and said she didn’t know anything that would help.

Later, when he sat in the crew hut with his muscles twitching and cramping with fatigue, trying to sleep with the daylight streaming in through the windows, then he could revisit the death of the shuttle over and over again. Think about what he could have done to disable the explosives faster than he did. How he could have tackled Coop, taken the radio away from him. If his mood was especially bad, he would think about how if he’d just listened to his wife, none of it would have happened in the first place. On those days he felt such shame that he hated her a little for it. Then hated himself for blaming her. The pillow he pressed to his eyes kept the sunlight out, but not the images of the shuttle exploding over and over again, screaming like a dying beast as it went down.

But during the night, while he worked, he had some measure of peace.

So when Coop appeared at the work site, sauntering into the pit like he didn’t have a care in the world, Basia almost hit him in the face.

“Hey, mate,” Coop said. Basia dropped his hammer, shoulders slumping.

“Hey,” he said.

“So we got a thing,” Coop continued, throwing one companionable arm around Basia’s shoulders. “Need mi primero on it.”

That couldn’t be good. “What thing?”

Coop guided him away from the work site, smiling and nodding at the few other night-shift crew they passed. Just two chums out for a walk and a conversation. When they were out of earshot of everyone, he said, “Seen that RCE girl going up to the ruins. Sent Jacek to check on it.”

“Sent
Jacek
,” Basia echoed. Coop nodded.

“Good kid. Reliable.”

Basia stopped, pulling his arm away. “Don’t —”
Involve my son in this.
Before he could get the words out, Coop waved it off and kept talking.

“Está important.” Coop stepped close, voice lowering. “She went up to the ruins, then went straight to the RCE goons. Jacek says they’re planning to wait for us up there. Catch the resistance red-handed.”

“Then we don’t go back,” Basia said. It seemed so simple. No reason to panic.

“You crazy, primo? Toda alles been up there. Trace evidence up the ass. They wait long enough, they get bored and bring a real crime scene team down, we all done. All of us, y veh unless you stopped shedding skin when you were there.”

“Then what?”

“We go up first. A flare on that blasting powder, boom. No more evidence.”

“When?”

Coop laughed. “What you think? Next week some time?
Now
, coyo. Got to go now. Mediator’s landing in hours-not-days. Don’t want this to be what he sees when he steps off the ship, do you? You a team lead, you can take one of the carts. We got to get that shit and get gone.” Coop snapped his fingers impatiently. “Jetzt.”

Coop spoke about insanity like blowing up their stash of mining explosives with such an air of self-assurance and certainty, Basia found it hard to argue. Sure, blowing up the alien ruins was crazy. But Coop was right. If they found the explosives and traced them back to Basia, they’d know. He didn’t want to, but he had to. So he would.

“Okay,” he said and walked toward the cart charging station. Only one was left, and because the universe was a cruel and mocking place, it was the same one he’d been driving the night of the bombing. It still had the dents and scorch marks it had picked up that night. The scorch marks everyone in the colony was careful not to ask about.

Coop waited impatiently for him to unlock it and back it out of the stall, then hopped in and started tapping out a fast drumbeat on the plastic dashboard. “Let’s go let’s go let’s go.”

Basia went.

Halfway to the alien ruins, they came across four more of Coop’s inner circle. Pete and Scotty and Cate and Ibrahim. No Zadie. Her little boy had come down with a nasty eye infection, and she wasn’t around much lately. Cate had a duffel bag she threw into the back of the cart with a metallic thump, then the four of them climbed in after it.