Cibola Burn

Chapter Fifty: Elvi

The cart had been designed for use on rough terrain and shipped out to a planet without roads. It wasn’t smooth, but it was fast, and the roar of the generator and the whirring of the motors had made a kind of white noise that Elvi’s brain tuned out after the first few hours, leaving her in something like silence. And all around them, the ruins of New Terra rose up and then passed away. The storm that had scoured First Landing into scraps and mud hadn’t been local. All of the landscapes they passed through were shattered and drowned, but they were still fascinating. Still beautiful.

A forest of thin red bodies halfway between trees and gigantic fungi lay on their sides, the cart’s wheels leaving tire tracks across their flesh. Flying creatures no larger than her splay-fingered hand fell into line behind the cart for hours, attracted by the noise or the movement of the spray of atmospheric hydrocarbons. She wondered how the frail creatures had survived the planetary disaster. When night fell, three vast columns of luminous dots rose up into the sky like skyscrapers built from fireflies. She didn’t know if they were organisms like the mimic lizards or artifacts like her butterflies. A huge animal, as tall and wide across as an elephant but segmented like a caterpillar, lay dead and rotting along the crest of a low hill, structures like two interlocking sets of ribs crossing its massive sides and gnat-small carrion eaters flying around it like a fog. A silver-and-blue structure rose from a pool of grayish rainwater, collapsed, and rose again. It could have been anything, but she could only see its behaviors as play. Splashing in puddles. It was all she could do to keep from stopping and looking at it all.

A whole biosphere—or two or three—passed by her, teasing and hinting. She wished she could have seen it all before the storm. At best now, they would be able to guess at what had come before and see what came after. She took consolation by reminding herself that was always true. All of nature was a record of crisis and destruction and adaptation and flourishing and being knocked back down again. What had happened on New Terra was singular and concrete, but the pattern it was part of seemed to apply everywhere and maybe always. Even the aliens that had made the artifacts, the protomolecule, the rings, had suffered some vast and cosmic collapse.

At dawn the three of them shared the last of their food. There was still enough water to last a few days, but they would be hungry ones, and after that, she guessed they’d try to find something on the planet that they could stomach. They would fail and die. Unless Holden really could turn the reactors back on and drop something from the ships. A steep-walled canyon blocked their way, the erosion of centuries exposing strata of rock as even and unvarying as the pages of a book. It took the cart’s expert system half an hour to find a path down and back up.

When she had mentioned how lucky they were that they hadn’t hit anything like a mountain range, Fayez had laughed.

“You’d need tectonic plates first,” he’d said. “This planet doesn’t have mountains, it has hemlines.”

None of them talked much, the noise of the cart drowning out anything short of shouting, but even if they’d been driving in silence, she didn’t have the sense that Amos Burton would have spoken. He spent the day and a half of travel sitting at the cart’s front edge, legs folded, his eyes on his hand terminal or the horizon. She thought there was a growing anxiety in the man’s broad face, fear for Holden and for the ships above them and the planet all around, but she could also have been projecting her own feelings on him. He had that kind of face.

In some places, the tracks of the other cart—Murtry and Wei’s cart—had wandered off on a different heading from their own. Sometimes the tracks got lost in the soft mud or vanished as they crossed wide, wet expanses of stone. But it always returned, the doubled track of their tires leading the way north into with wilderness. The headlights showed a swath of gravel and pale yellow snail-like organisms that were crushed under the cart’s wheels. The air was colder, either because they were heading north or because the permanent cloud cover was keeping the energy of the sun up away from the planet’s surface. Elvi had dozed as much as the emptiness in her belly permitted, her head on Fayez’s lap, then they traded and he dozed in hers. Her dreams had been of Earth and trying to guide a pizza delivery service through the hallways of her university lab. She woke knowing that something had changed, but it took her a long moment to realize what. The cart was silent. She sat up, rubbing her eyes.

The other cart was in the headlights, spattered with mud and scarred along the side where it had scraped against something harder than its alloy siding. Amos dropped down and walked slowly around it twice, once looking at the cart and once looking out into the darkness.

“What is it?” she asked. “Is everything okay?”

“Their motors burned out,” Amos said as he hauled himself back up to the cart bed. “Got mud in the axles and didn’t clean it out. Wherever they went from here, it was on foot.”

“Are we close to Holden?”

“Oh yeah,” Amos said, holding up his hand terminal. “This was the last blip we saw. It was short, but it gave us a pretty good lock on his position. We’ll move toward it and hope he pops up again soon.” The map didn’t give her a sense of scale, but there were two indicators on it—one for them and the other for the captain. “If I’m right, we’re getting right toward the end of this. And we’re still the ones with the wheels. You two’d better lie down on the deck from here on in.”

“Why?” Fayez asked.

“Case they decide to shoot someone,” Amos said, restarting the generator.

Over the roar, she didn’t think Amos heard Fayez say, “All right. That makes sense.” But she did.

It was still the small hours of the morning—the long stretch between midnight and dawn—when they came to the structure. At first it was only a glittering in the darkness, like a bit of starfield. For a time, she thought it might be a break in the clouds. But the closer they came, the more obvious it became that it was something else.

In the darkness, the details were hard to make out, but it seemed to share the same almost organic architecture with the ruins back in First Landing, but a couple orders of magnitude larger. She had the sense of being at the edge of one of the huge industrial ruins of the European west coast, a place where something world-shatteringly huge had once made its power felt, and now had left its carapace behind. When the first pale flakes of snow filtered down through the headlights, she thought at first they were ashes.

“Is that where we’re going?” Fayez asked.

“Think so,” Amos said. “We haven’t had a solid update on the captain in a couple hours, and that up there’s about where the last reading came. Figure once you get inside, the signal don’t penetrate.”

“Or it ate him,” Fayez said. “It could have just eaten him.”

“Captain’d be a tough meal to swallow,” Amos said.

The cart rolled on, moving toward Holden’s last known position. Huge black spikes rose out of the ground, some of them swiveling to track their passage. The snow thickened, sticking to the ground and the cart. The structure remained clean, though, the white melting away. It’s warm, Elvi thought, and couldn’t explain why she found the idea so unnerving.

The cart passed under an archway ten meters high and into the structure itself. The snowfall stopped. All around them, the walls glowed, filling the space with a soft, shadowless light. The air was warmer and smelled of something sharp and acrid, like alcohol fumes, but harsher. The cart shifted one way and then another, hunting for the last, fading traces of Holden’s electrical scent before giving up and stopping. Amos flipped it over to manual and took direct control. The pathways moved in swirls and loops for a time, then broadened, opening. The roof of the place was lost in darkness, and long tubes of what could have been conduits or vasculature rose up out of the earth and flowed together, inward, forward, toward whatever the functional heart of the place had been. The cart slowed. Amos took his shotgun from the deck and fired it. The report echoed.

“What are you shooting at?” Elvi asked.

Amos shrugged. “Nothing in particular. Just thought, you know, loud.” He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted. “Captain! You out there? Holden!”

“Are we sure he’s in here?” Fayez said.

“Nope,” Amos said, then went back to shouting. “Captain!”

A figure stepped from behind a massive machine, fifty meters in front of them. It was the size and shape of a human, and Elvi felt a moment’s disorientation at how utterly out of place it seemed. Amos took a fresh grip on the shotgun and angled toward it. The figure stood, feet shoulder width apart, hands at its sides, as the cart approached. When they were within ten meters, Amos shut the generator down.

“Hey there,” he said, his voice open and friendly and insincere.

“Hey yourself,” Wei answered, lifting her chin.

Amos dropped from the side of the cart, his shotgun in his hand almost as if he’d forgotten it was there. Elvi looked at Fayez, who shrugged. She slid down to the ground, moving forward slowly. She kept her hand against the front tire, the tread warm against her palm, but cooling.

“What’re you up to?” Amos asked.

“Work,” Wei said, nodding to the vast structure all around them. “RCE’s got a claim on all of this. I’m just making sure no one infringes on it.”

“Meaning the cap’n.”

“Meaning anyone,” Wei said. Her voice was harder now.

“Well, it’s a fucking ugly place if you ask me.”

“It is.”

“We really going to do this? Because I think it’d be a hell of a lot more fun for me to get Holden and you to get Murtry and we all see if there’s not some way for the doc back there to find something with alcohol in it on this mudball.”

“Yeah, that does sound like fun,” Wei said. “But I’m on duty.”

Fayez came up from behind Elvi, his arms crossed over his chest. His eyebrows were pulled together in distress.

“So thing is?” Amos said. “Yeah, Holden’s in there someplace, and I’m figuring Murtry’s in there looking for him.”

“Could be.”

“So when I get back up there and drive on by—”

“You don’t want to do that, Amos. My orders are no one goes in. Hop back on and head the other way, you and me have no problems. Try to infringe further on RCE property, and I’m going to have to shoot you.”

Amos rubbed his scalp with his left hand. The shotgun in his right seemed larger somehow. Like the threat of violence gave it significance and the significance gave it weight. Elvi found herself breathing in quick, short gasps and thought for a moment that something had changed about the air itself. But it was only fear.

“Captain’s in there trying to get the reactors back on,” Amos said.

“Then he’s trespassing and he’ll need to leave.” Wei’s stance softened for a moment, and when she spoke there was something like sorrow in her voice. Not the thing itself, but like it. “When it’s time to go, there’s worse ways than dying at your post.”

Amos sighed, and Elvi could see his shoulders slump. “Your call,” he said, raising the shotgun.

The report came from behind them, and Amos pitched forward.

“Down!” Murtry shouted at their backs, and Elvi hunched as automatically as a reflex. Fayez was pressed against her on one side, the massive tire on the other. The shotgun boomed at the same time as a sharp crack of a pistol sounded. Elvi looked out, and Wei was on the ground, her arms thrown out at her sides. Amos was struggling to his knees. His back was to her, and there was blood on the back of his neck, but she couldn’t see where it was coming from. Murtry strode past her, firing his pistol, two, three, four times. She could see Amos’ armored back quiver with every shot. Murtry wasn’t missing. Her own scream sounded high and oddly undignified.

Murtry rounded the cart as Amos turned with a roar, the shotgun fired three times, the concussions beating at the air. Murtry stumbled back, but didn’t fall. His next shot drew a small fountain of blood from Amos’ thigh, and the big man collapsed. Murtry lowered his gun and coughed.

“Doctor Okoye. Doctor Sarkis,” he said. The armor over his chest was shredded. If he hadn’t been wearing it, Amos’ blast would have blown the man’s heart back out through his spine. “I have to say I’m disappointed by your decision to come here. And your choice of company.”

Amos was gasping, his breath ragged. Murtry stepped delicately across to him and shoved the shotgun away. The metal hissed against the strange chitinous flooring.

“You shot him,” Fayez said.

“Of course I did. He was threatening the life of one of my team,” Murtry said, walking over to Wei. He sighed. “My only regret is that I was unable to save Sergeant Wei.”

Tears filled Elvi’s eyes. She felt sobs shaking her. Amos lifted a hand. The thumb and forefinger were missing, and bright pink bone showed through the blood. She looked away.

“What are you talking about?” Fayez said. His voice was shaking.

“Doctor Sarkis? You have something you’d like to add?” Murtry said, slipping a fresh magazine into his pistol.

“You set this up. You set all of this up. You put her there to distract Amos and you shot him from behind. This isn’t just something that happened and you did the best you could and poor fucking Wei. You did this!”

“If Mister Burton here had done as he was asked and left the site—”

“He was trying to save us!” Fayez shouted. His face was red and he stepped forward. His hands were in fists at his sides. Murtry looked up, something a little less than polite interest in his eyes. “He and Holden are trying to save us! You and me and Elvi and everyone. What the hell are you doing?”

“I’m protecting the assets, rights, and claims of Royal Charter Energy,” Murtry said. “What I’m not doing, and I hope you understand this, is running around in a circle with my dick in my hand whining about how nothing matters because we’re all going to die. We all knew when we got on the Edward Israel that we might not make it back. That was a risk you were willing to take because it meant you could do your job. I’m no different.”

“You got Wei killed!” Fayez shouted. Elvi put her hand on his shoulder and he shrugged if off. “She’s dead because of you!”

“Her turn now, my turn later,” Murtry said. “But there are some things I need to get done before that.”

The security chief checked his gun and looked down at Amos Burton staring raw hatred up at him. Murtry leveled the barrel at the bleeding man’s face. Look away, Elvi thought. Don’t watch this happen. Look away.

Fayez hit Murtry in the nose. The movement was so fast and awkward and artless that at first Elvi wasn’t sure it had really happened. She watched the expression in Fayez’s widening eyes as he understood what he’d done, and then when he committed to doing it again. Murtry turned his pistol away from Amos, swinging it toward Fayez, and the geologist ran into him with a shout. Murtry stumbled back but didn’t fall.

“Elvi!” Fayez shouted. “Run!”

She took a step forward. Amos was writhing on the ground, blood pouring from somewhere in his suit. His teeth were bared and crimson. He was grinning.

“Run!” Fayez screamed.

The great gray walls rose around them. False stars glittering. She couldn’t breathe. She took one tentative step forward. Then another. She felt like she was moving through a gel, forcing every motion. Shock, she thought. I’m in shock. People die from shock, don’t they? In her memory, Fayez shook his head and said, Oh look, another excuse to go talk to Holden.

Holden. She had to find Holden. She took another step, then another. And then she was sprinting, her legs and arms pumping, small animal grunts forcing their way out of her throat. Somewhere behind her, a pistol fired twice, and then a third time. She didn’t look back. Everything in her, everything she was, focused only forward, along the wide, dark veins of the structure, forward to where they converged.

Elvi ran.