Cibola Burn

  “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.

  “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 me
an 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.”