Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

“Yes, sir,” Wei said. “That’s why I killed it.”

“Did you?” Holden said, his voice continuing to climb. “Are you sure? What if it’s not all the way dead? Can we… burn it or something?”

Wei smiled.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, we can.”

An hour later, the great ruddy disk of the sun touched the horizon. The flames danced around the thing’s corpse, rising up higher than a bonfire. Greasy black smoke spiraled up toward the clouds, and the whole world seemed to reek of accelerants. Wei had taken a small tent from the loader’s storage, and Fayez had set it up. Elvi stood, the heat of the sun and the fire pressing against her face. The night was going to be long. They all were, here.

“You all right?” Fayez asked.

“I’m fine. I wish I’d gotten some samples, though.”

In the heart of the fire, the thing glowed. Its shell was white-hot, and thin cracks had started to show, radiating out from its joints. It was beautiful in its way, and she was sorry to see it destroyed and relieved in almost equal measures. It wasn’t an emotional mixture she was used to.

Wei insisted on setting up watches through the night, and Holden volunteered to take the first of them. He seemed uneasy in a way that Elvi wouldn’t have thought James Holden, captain of the Rocinante, was capable of. Vulnerable. Elvi lay in the tent, her head poking out. Fayez snored softly beside her. Wei, curled in the back of the loader with a thin blanket, was silent as stone. Elvi watched Holden and listened while he hummed to himself, a lonely human sound in the vast inhuman planet. Sleep didn’t come. After two hours, she gave up, rose from her uncomfortable bed, and went to sit at the man’s side. In a world without moonlight, there was only the orange glow of the alien’s dying pyre and a thin silver highlight of stars. It reduced him to a few lines and a sense of mass and warmth.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said.

“I don’t think I will either,” he said. “I hate the way those things scare me.”

“I’m surprised to hear you say that.”

“You were expecting me to enjoy it?” She could hear the smile. Far above them, a falling star streaked across the sky, bright, and then gone.

“I’m not used to hearing men admit to having emotions,” she said. “You were on Eros when the outbreak came, weren’t you? I’d think after that, nothing would frighten you.”

“Doesn’t work that way. After Eros, everything frightened me. I’m still trying to calm down.” He chuckled. When he spoke again, his voice had sobered. “Do you think that thing was a machine? Or was that an animal?”

“I don’t think that’s a distinction they would have made.”

“You mean the designers? Who the hell knows how they would have seen anything?”

“Oh, we can say some things,” Elvi said. “What they cared about was in what they designed. And still is, in a way. We know that they respected the power of self-replicators and knew how to harness it.”

She felt him turn toward her more than saw it. She was profoundly aware of being a woman in a dark wilderness with a man beside her. It made the vast night seem intimate.

“How do we know that?” he asked.

“Where they sent the protomolecule,” she said. “The universe has some things that are fairly consistent. The elements are the same. Carbon is always carbon. Nitrogen’s always nitrogen. They make the same bonds and can build the same structures. All the systems we’ve surveyed have at least one planet that has the possibility of generating organic replicators.”

“Meaning things with DNA?”

“Or things that act like DNA. They sent out bridge builders to use those basic biological replicators, whatever their form. They can take a biosphere and turn it into a massively networked factory. It’s probably how they spread. Target the places that can be hijacked into making the things that let you get there. Also, they really built structures to last. They seem to have taken the long view on galactic colonizing.”

She leaned back, letting her hand rest on the front of the loader. Not reaching out to him, but putting her fingers where, in the darkness, he might accidentally brush against them. To the north, some small animal called, its voice high and chirping.

“It was there for billions of years,” Holden said. “And we killed it with a rifle and some mineral spirits.”

“In our defense, it wasn’t looking healthy. But yes. It wasn’t expecting anything as advanced or aggressive as we are. They built structures that lasted billions of years. The ruins. That thing. The rings. All of it.”

“They sound like gods sometimes. Angry spiteful gods, but still.”

“No,” Elvi said. “Just organisms that we don’t understand. And with their own constraints. They were specialized for their ecosystem, just like we are. Thirteen hundred worlds seems a lot when you’ve only ever had the one, but it’s a raindrop in the ocean compared with what’s out there, just in our galaxy.”

“They had more.”

Elvi made a small inquiring sound.

“They had more,” Holden said. “But something attacked them, and they tried to stop it. They burned up entire solar systems. A lot of them. Then, when that didn’t work, they shut down the whole network. Quarantined themselves and died anyway.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I saw it. Sort of. A guy I used to know is kind of looking into it.”

“I’d like to talk to him,” she said.

“Yeah, he’s less helpful than you’d expect.”

Wei shifted in her sleep. Elvi yawned, though she wasn’t particularly tired.

“Why did it wake up?” he said, nodding toward the alien corpse. “Was it because of us? Did it know we were here?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe they cycle up and down every so often. We’ve only seen one. There may be a lot of these and seeing them will be common. There may be a few and it will be rare. There could only have been one. Not enough data yet.”

“I guess not. Still, I wish I knew what was going to happen.”

“I don’t. So much of my life has been better than what I imagined, I’ve come to enjoy being surprised. When I was doing my undergraduate at Kano, I was imagining I’d be doing environmental assays on Europa for my whole career. Instead, this.”

“Kano?”