Cibola Burn (The Expanse) (63 page)

“You okay out there?” Naomi asked.

“You ever bathed a kid in a sink?”

“Yeah,” she said, “I have.”

“They ever have gas?”

“I don’t —” she started, then got it and laughed along with him.

Ten tow lines looped down from the open airlock of the
Israel
, and one by one Basia caught them and attached them to the bubbles. Felcia’s bubble was last. As he pulled the strip at the end of the tether to activate the adhesive, he saw her look out of the airlock door’s tiny transparent window. The sun had moved behind the planet, so Basia’s visor had lost its opacity. He activated the light inside the helmet so she’d be able to see him. Her face lit up, and the word
Papa
was so obvious on her lips that he would have sworn he could hear it.

“Hi, baby,” he said, and put his gloved hand against the window. She put hers on the other side, small clever fingers against his big clumsy ones.

She smiled and pointed past him, mouthing the word “wow.”

He turned to look. The
Israel
had started reeling the bubbles in one by one. A dozen humans being pulled through the vacuum of space inside an envelope of air barely larger than they were. When Felcia’s line started to reel in, Basia kept his hand against it until it pulled gently,
gently
away from him. His little girl going up to safety. Temporary, sure, but all safety was.

In that moment, Basia felt something like a hammer blow to his chest. Everyone in those little pockets of air was a Felcia to someone. Every life saved there filled someone somewhere else with relief and joy. Every life snuffed out before its time was another Katoa. Someone, somewhere, having their heart torn out.

Basia could feel the detonator in his hands, the horrible click transferring to his palm as the button depressed. He could feel that terrible shock wave again as the landing pad vanished in fire. He could feel the horror replaced by fear as some unlucky combination of events put the shuttle too close to the blast and knocked it from the sky.

He could feel all of it so clearly it was as if it were happening right then. But more than that, he felt sorrow. Someone had just tried to do the same thing to his baby girl. Had tried to kill her, not because he hated her, but because she was standing in the path of his political statement. Everyone who died on that shuttle had been a Felcia to someone. And with the click of a button he’d killed them.

He hadn’t meant to. He’d been trying to save them. That was the little lie he’d kept close to his heart for months now. But the truth was much worse. Some secret part of him
had
wanted the shuttle to die. Had reveled in watching it fall from the sky in flames. Had wanted to punish the people who were trying to take his world away.

Except that was a lie too.

The real truth, the truth beneath it all, was he’d wanted to spread his pain around. To punish the universe for being a place where his little boy had been killed. To punish other people for being alive when his Katoa wasn’t. That part of him had watched the shuttle burn and thought,
Now you know how it feels
.
Now you know how I feel.

But the people he’d hurt had just saved his daughter because they were the kind of people who couldn’t let even their enemies die helpless.

The first sob took him by surprise, nearly bending him double with its power. Then he was blind, his eyes filled with water, his throat closed like someone was choking him. He gasped for air and every gasp turned into another loud sob.

“Basia!” Naomi said in alarm. He’d just been cackling manically, and now he was sobbing. He must sound insane to her. “Basia, come back in!”

He tried to answer her, to reassure her, but when he spoke the only words he could say were, “I killed them.”

“No,” she said. “You saved them. You saved all of them.”

“I killed them,” he said again, and he meant the governor and Coop and Cate and the RCE security team, but most of all Katoa. He’d killed his little boy over and over again every time he’d let someone else die to punish them for his son’s death. “I killed them,” he said again.

“This time you saved them,” Naomi repeated, as though she could read his mind. “These ones, you saved.”

~

Havelock was waiting for him in the airlock. Basia knew the RCE man must have heard the breakdown he’d had. When Havelock looked at him, he felt nothing but shame. But while Havelock’s face was tight with pain, there was no mockery in it when he gripped Basia’s arm and said, “You did good out there.”

Basia nodded back at him, not trusting himself to speak.

“Look,” Havelock said, and pointed out the airlock door.

Basia turned around and saw the
Barbapiccola
leaving long thin streamers in its wake. It was entering Ilus’ atmosphere. The front of the ship began to glow.

Havelock closed the hatch, but while the airlock cycled and they removed their gear, they watched the freighter’s death on the wall monitor. Alex kept the
Roci
’s scopes trained on it the entire time. It drifted for a while, the streamers in the upper atmosphere eventually turning into white smoke with a black heart as the hull burned.

When the end came, it was sudden and shocking. The hull seemed to go from a solid object to many small fiery pieces in the blink of an eye, with no transition. Basia switched the monitor to the death clock to see how much time he’d bought Felcia.

Four days. The
Israel
had four days.

E
lvi sat in the darkness, her hand terminal in her lap. She was trembling, and the fear and the anger and the sorrow were like she’d walked back into the worst of the storm. She couldn’t feel that now. She didn’t have time. She needed to think.

The screen didn’t have maps, of course. There wasn’t a survey of any of this to draw from, and even if there was, she didn’t have a connection to the
Israel
, if the
Israel
was still in orbit and hadn’t fallen into the atmosphere and burned and killed everyone to death and —

She couldn’t feel that now. She needed to think. The structure, ruins, whatever they were had to be at least seven or eight square kilometers. They’d entered the ruins near Holden’s last live signal, but there was still a lot of territory to cover. The locator on the hand terminal screen showed only the local nodes. The other two were Fayez and Murtry, and they were grayed out. No line of sight, which was good because it meant that wherever Murtry was, he couldn’t see her, and bad because she didn’t know where he was. It was a low-level diagnostic. The kind that built ad hoc routing networks on the fly. She’d set it to ask for a renewed route anytime it made a connection and alert her when it did. It wasn’t much, but it would give her a little warning when Murtry was close. When he had line of sight. When he could shoot her the way he had Amos and probably Fayez and they were dead now and she couldn’t feel that. She had to think. How to find Holden. She had to find him. Warn him. Keep Murtry from stopping him. She took a deep breath and looked up. Line of sight was a hard thing to manage on the ground, but the space above her was vast and open. If she could find a vantage point, the hand terminal would point Murtry out to her. And if she couldn’t find her friend, at least she could locate her enemy. Basic problem solving. If you don’t have the data you need, play with the data you have, see if something comes out of it. She’d made it through three semesters of combinatorics that way. All right.

Her body was still shaking. Still weak. Her mind felt fuzzy. Adrenaline and hunger and Fayez was probably dead and she couldn’t feel that. She stuffed the hand terminal in her pocket and looked around for a way up. Nothing here was built for a human form. There weren’t any ladders or walkways, no catwalks with convenient handrails. It was like a vast body. Or a vast body that had turned halfway into a machine. She ran quietly, making as little noise as she could with every footfall. An upwelling of conduits rose from the floor to her right, and she clambered up them, wedging her feet and fists into the narrow spaces between the tubes and hauling up and up and up. There were so many other people who would have done better. Fayez was stronger than she was. Sudyam used to climb mountains back on Earth. Elvi didn’t particularly enjoy climbing trees, much less strange alien webworks. She went up, not looking back, not looking down.

The structure was vast, and the soft glow that permeated everything made the space seem strange. Dreamlike. She perched in the crevice where two conduits or arteries met, wedging her leg into the gap. She pulled out her hand terminal. Twice on her way up, the ad hoc network alert had sounded and she hadn’t noticed. Twice, Murtry had been in line of sight. The thought made her throat feel tight. She looked at the reply times. Two thousandths of a second? That couldn’t be right. Radio waves moved at light speed, but they were in air, so that made it… what? Three times ten to the eighth? Something like that. Close enough as to make no difference. That’d put him something like half a million meters away. There had to be some kind of processing lag in the terminals that was swamping…

A new entry popped into the log, and her heart lept to her throat. Connection refused. She blinked at it. Why would Murtry’s terminal accept connections when she was climbing up and reject them when she’d paused? That didn’t make sense. Another line. Connection refused. Something like hope bloomed in her. It wasn’t Murtry. It was someone else. Someone who wasn’t in the charmed circle of RCE trusted networks.

It was Holden.

She craned her neck, as if by just looking she could find him. The structure was too big. She thought of calling out, but there was no reason to think he’d hear. And even if he did, Murtry would be closer.

Murtry. There was a thought. She opened the hand terminal’s routing interface again. It had been years since she’d played with network protocols. Most of what she did was about signaling proteins in cells and protein regulation. Her leg was starting to tingle where her weight pressed it into the tube. There was a way to get a copy of Murtry’s logs too. She just had to remember how to set up distributed logging.

Something in the structure clanged, the echoes reverberating through the space like a scream in a cathedral. She wondered if Murtry looked up whether he would see the light of her screen, up here in her crow’s nest. She waited. Waited. The alert sounded. Murtry connected. She closed her eyes.
Okay
, she thought.
Go away now. Just go away.

The alert dropped, and she pulled up the logs, and Murtry’s records were there now too, and one – one – line of them was a refused connection. It was like being in maths again. Posit a frightened exobiologist four meters off the ground and a violent, predatory security man in a direct line from her at points a, b, and c. At point d, the predator had a refused connection with a lag time just under two-tenths of a second because the goddam
fucking
processing lag was swamping the signal time and making the whole thing…

Only it would be the same lag, wouldn’t it? So if she could pull out the difference…

The world fell away. Her fingers tapped the screen, shifting to the calculation displays, pulling numbers from the logs, setting up the diagrams. The fear and sorrow and raw, animal terror were all still there, but they were just messages and she could ignore them. Her leg started to hurt and then go numb. She shifted a few centimeters until it hurt again.

Holden had been a hundred and ten meters from her. He’d been a hundred and fifty meters from Murtry. She could estimate where Murtry had been based on the contacts he’d made with her. It was like basic trigonometry where a wrong answer meant death. Holden was – approximately, roughly, assuming she hadn’t biffed the equations and that the hand terminal’s processing lags were identical – in the complex junctions at the center right of the structure where the conduits joined together into something like a massive black wing. Elvi turned off her hand terminal and started back down. When she reached a surface she could walk on, her leg screamed. Pins and needles. She ignored it and started limping as quickly as she could toward the landmark she’d found. She didn’t care about Murtry now. She had something to focus on.

It was less like making her way through an industrial complex than tramping through a vast forest without a machete. She squeezed through the cracks between dark structures as much growth as machine, ducked and climbed and once got down on her belly and crawled. She was sure she was making progress, sure that she would get there and find out at least whether her figures had been right, when she stepped out across a flat ledge and almost fell into a chasm.

A rumbling came from below, maybe a hundred meters deep. A tiny band of lights shifted down there, swirling one way and then the other and then moving on. It cut through the floor of the structure to both sides, all the way to the distant walls. A network of conduits branched above it, and wide, tendonlike connections bridged it far below. She started off along the rim, stepping over white, lumpy growths that seemed to sprout up out of the depths. It only took a few minutes to find a structure that crossed it, but it wasn’t a bridge.

It was mostly flat, though the edges sloped down into the void; its surface was a wire mesh over what looked like an endless length of tongue. There was nothing like guardrails, and when she stepped out onto it, the tongue reacted to her, twitching and undulating like it was trying to drag her along. She put her arms out for balance and trotted across the gap. Two meters, four meters, five, and she was on the other side. She leaned against the wall, her head between her hands until the dizziness faded. The vast winglike structure was almost directly above her now, only close up she could see that it was more complex. Thousands of interweaving growths with deep, interlocking spirals and a shifting movement whose source she couldn’t identify.

She slipped down the far side of the ledge and into something more like a passageway than she’d seen since she fled into the dark. The passage shifted left and then right. She followed it, picking her way by guesswork and hope. The ratio of floor to wall to ceiling unnerved her for reasons she couldn’t quite say. Tiny flickers of blue light like fireflies glowed and went dark all around her. She followed a broad turn and it opened into a chamber.