Cibola Burn

Chapter Fifty-Two: Elvi

Elvi 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.

She screamed.

Holden was there not three meters away, a huge, insectile thing looming above him. Cruel claws reached out and spikes like daggers caught the dim and eerie light. She pressed her knuckles to her mouth, unable to look away from Holden’s last moments.

The artifact shifted toward her, paused, and lifted a claw like it was waving. Holden followed the gesture.

“Elvi?” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“I was… We were…” She sank down to her knees, relief running through her like water. She took a deep breath and tried again. “Murtry took one of the carts when you disappeared. He followed the signal from your hand terminal. He knows you’re trying to shut down all the artifacts.” A stab of panic took her and she glanced at the clawed thing.

“That’s all right, kid,” the robot-thing said in a tinny Belter accent. “It ain’t news to me.”

“Amos and Fayez and I got another cart going, and we came after them. To warn you.”

“Okay,” Holden said. “You did great. We’re going to be fine now. How did you find us?”

Elvi held up her hand terminal, took a breath, let it out. “It was complicated.”

“Fair enough. What about Amos? Where’s he?”

“Murtry shot him. I think he’s dead.”

Holden’s face went pale and then flushed. He shook his head, and when he spoke, his voice was low and careful. “Amos isn’t dead.”

“How do you know?”

“If Amos goes down, it’s because literally everyone else there has already died. We’re still alive, so Amos is too.”

“Don’t pay too much attention to him,” the robot monster said. “He gets a little romantic about these things. If you say the bald guy’s dead, I believe you.”

“Thank you,” Elvi said by reflex.

“I am sorry about it, though. I liked him.”

“I did too,” Elvi said. “And Fayez. I heard gunshots when I was running. I think Fayez—”

“How about Murtry?” Holden asked.

“He’s coming. He’s behind me. I don’t know how far. But he’s coming to find you. To stop you.”

“Why the fuck would he stop me?” Holden asked, biting the words.

“He wants RCE to have the artifacts still working.”

“That man’s kind of an asshole,” the alien said. “We’ve got a pretty full plate, though. We’re close.”

“Close to what?” Elvi said.

“That would be the question,” the alien answered, but Holden’s gaze was fixed over her shoulder. His jaw was tight and angry.

“All right,” he said. “We’ve got two things we need to do.”

“We do?” the alien said. It occurred to Elvi that they were talking to an alien. She thought that was remarkable, and she was a little confused that Holden hadn’t remarked on it.

“Someone has to find this whatever-it-is and shut off the planetary defenses, and someone has to shoot Murtry.”

“Not to disagree with you,” the alien said, shifting its weight on six articulated legs. “One of those seems a little more important to me.”

“Me too,” Holden said, “but I don’t think it’s the same one. Elvi, I’m going to need you to go save everyone, okay?”

“Um,” she said. “All right?”

“Good. This is Detective Miller. He died when Eros hit Venus and now he’s a puppet of the protomolecule.”

“Semi-autonomous,” the alien said.

“Pleased to meet you.”

“Likewise.”

“Okay,” Holden said. “I’m going to go take care of this.”

To Elvi’s surprise and unease, Holden walked away, following the passage she’d taken. The alien thing cleared its throat apologetically, only she was fairly sure it didn’t have a throat. So the sound was just a kind of conversational inflection.

“Sorry about that,” the alien—Miller—said. “He gets an idea in his head sometimes and there’s no talking to him.”

“It’s all right,” Elvi said. “So… um.”

“Right, saving everyone in the world. Follow me, kid. I’ll get you up to speed.”

“So it’s a distributed consciousness,” she said, following Miller through a low archway. She felt lightheaded, and not just from hunger. Fayez was dead. Amos was dead. She was going to die. She was on an alien world. She was talking to a dead man wearing an alien robot. The part of her that could feel things was done, shut off. Her heart was a numbness behind her ribs, and when—if—it came back, she couldn’t guess who or what she would be.

“Except it’s not exactly conscious,” Miller said. “There’s nodes in it that are, but they don’t run the joint. I’m not actually one of them. I’m a construct based on the dead guy, only I’m based really closely on him, and he was kind of a bulldog about this kind of thing. At least by the end he was.”

“So are you conscious?”

The alien robot—the skin the Miller construct was using—shrugged. It was strange how well the gesture translated. “Don’t know. Seems like I’m acing my Turing test, though.”

Elvi thought about it and nodded. “Fair enough.”

“So I sort of… well, triangulated where the dead spot was in space. If you see what I mean.”

“Sure, yes. Triangulation. I totally understand that,” Elvi said. “So. Four now.”

“Four?”

“Our biosphere, the local organisms, the things that made the gates, and the things that killed them. Four.”

Miller stopped at a seam in the wall and placed his claws on it, ready to push. “In through here? It used to be one of the major control centers for the planet. Like a… like a nerve cluster or something. As near as I can figure it, the dead spot’s in here.”

He pushed. The wall retracted, not sliding back so much as changing conformation. Beyond it, a wide, tall space opened. Hundreds of niches rose, level after level, one above the other, with mechanisms like Miller in each of them. Dots of bright blue light like fireflies swirled spiral patterns in the air, riding currents of air that Elvi couldn’t feel. And in the center, floating a meter above the floor, was…

She looked away, putting her hand on Miller’s side to steady herself, then forced her gaze back up. It was hard to look at directly. The margins of the space were bright without illuminating anything or casting shadows, sharp and terrible. It reminded her of the way schizophrenics and people suffering migraines would describe light as assaulting and dangerous. And within that boundary, darkness swirled. It was more than an absence. She could sense a structure within it, layers interpenetrating, like shadows casting shadows. It throbbed with an inhuman power, tidal and deep and painful. Look at this too long, Elvi thought, and I will lose my mind in it. She took a step toward it, feeling the structures in the blackness respond to her. She felt as if she could see the spaces between molecules in the air, like atoms themselves had become a thin fog, and for the first time she could see the true shape of reality looming up just beyond her reach.

Once, there had been a civilization here beyond anything Elvi had ever imagined. Beings that could design tools like the protomolecule, like the rings. They had peopled a thousand worlds, and more, spread through time and through space, and they were gone now. And this—she had no doubt at all—this was the footprint of the thing that had killed them.

“So,” Miller said, moving his claws in a wide, spreading gesture, “you need to look for anything, you know, odd. Something that doesn’t seem like it fits.”

She turned to him, confused, and pointed at the uncanny thing in the center of the room. “You mean like that?”

Miller shifted, alien eyes moving their lenses in the complexity of the mechanism. “Like what?”

“That. In the middle of the room. That.”

“I don’t see anything,” Miller said. “What’s it look like?”

“The eye of an angry God?” Elvi said.

“Oh,” Miller said. The heavy plates of his robotic body clicked and hissed against each other as he shifted. “Yeah, well that’s probably it, then. Good work.”