Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

Here and there, a few butterflies remained, possibly dead. Possibly quiescent. She squatted beside one, looking into the vibrant blue of its wings, the coppery complication of flesh where its body – what she thought of as its body – folded together, interarticulated like a hinge. She put on her gloves and lifted the tiny body. It didn’t so much as flutter. Even though it meant getting less physiological data, she hoped it was already dead.

“Sorry, little one,” she said, just in case. “It’s in the name of science.”

She folded it into the black lattice, sealed it, and triggered the collection sequence. The array of sampling needles clicked and muttered to themselves. Elvi squinted up into the white-blue arch of the sky. The red dot floated about fifteen degrees above the horizon, bright enough to show through the thin, greenish clouds.

The satchel coughed, throwing out an error code Elvi hadn’t seen before. She took out her hand terminal, connecting it to the satchel’s output channel. The preliminary dataset was a mess. Elvi felt a deep, cold stab of fear. If the satchel was broken, it could take days before the one functioning shuttle could bring her a spare from the Israel. She wasn’t even positive they had a spare in the toolkit or if they’d all been lost in the wreck of the heavy shuttle. The prospect of years going by collecting data by hand and spending her nights doing dissections like she was back in lower university reared up like a ghost. She took the butterfly out. Its corpse looked almost the same as when she’d put it in. She sat cross-legged beside it and ran the satchel’s system diagnostics, chewing her lips as she waited for a fresh error code.

The readout came up clean. She looked from the satchel to the butterfly, then back again. A second hypothesis formed, as chilling as the first. Maybe worse. She picked up the dead butterfly and marched back toward the huts. Fayez’s was a small green geodesic design he’d constructed halfway down a thin hill, high enough that any storm runoff would pass it by, but not at the crest where the wind would catch it. He was sitting on a stool, leaning back against the hut. He was wearing a pair of polyfiber work pants, a T-shirt, and an open bathrobe. He hadn’t shaved in days, and the stubble on his cheeks made him look older.

“This isn’t an animal,” she said, holding out the butterfly.

He let the stool come down, its legs tapping the ground. “Good to see you too,” he said.

“This isn’t two biomes coming together. It’s three. This… whatever it is? It doesn’t have any of the chemical or structural commonalities that you’d expect to see.”

“Lucia Merton was up looking for you. Did you run across her?”

“What? No. Look, this is another machine. It’s another thing like” – she pointed at the low red moon – “like that.”

“All right.”

“What if they’re really not coming awake just because we’re here? What if they’re consistent? It complicates everything.”

Fayez scratched his scalp just above his left ear. “You seem to want something here, Elvi, but I don’t know what it is.”

“How am I supposed to make any sense of this place when it keeps changing all the rules?” she said, and her voice sounded shrill even to her. She threw the butterfly down angrily, then immediately wished she hadn’t. Not that it cared, just that the gesture seemed cruel. Fayez smiled his sharp little smile.

“You’re preaching to the choir. You know what I’ve been doing all morning?”

“Drinking?”

“I wish. I’ve been going over surface data from the Israel. There’s a chain of islands on the far side of the planet with what looks like a metric ass-ton of volcanic activity. Only so far as I can tell, this planet doesn’t have, you know, tectonic plates. So what the hell is mimicking vulcanism? Do you know what Michaela’s working on?”

“No.”

“There’s a pattern in the ultraviolet light that reaches the ground here, like it’s some kind of carrier signal. Doesn’t exist before the sunlight hits the exosphere, and by the time it comes here, complex, consistent patterning. She’s got no idea where it’s coming from. Sudyam’s workgroup has what they think might be complex molecules that incorporate stable transuranics.”

“How does that work?”

“I know, right?” Fayez said.

Elvi hung her hand on her shoulder, letting her elbow hang loose. Sweat trickled down her spine.

“I have to —”

“— tell Holden,” Fayez said. “I know.”

“I was going to say ‘review my data.’ See if maybe there’s a common structure between that” – she nodded at the butterfly – “and the big thing in the desert. Maybe I can make sense of it.”

“If you can’t, no one can,” Fayez said.

Something in his voice caught her attention, and she looked at him more closely. His fox-sharp face looked softer around the eyes and jowls. The flesh around his eyes was puffier than usual. “Are you all right?”

He laughed and spread his arms toward the horizon, gesturing at the whole planet – the whole universe – at once. “I’m great. Just spiffy. Thanks for asking.”

“I’m sorry. I just —”

“Don’t, Elvi,” he said. “Don’t be sorry. Just go on dealing with all of this the way that you do. Pile on another few layers of not thinking about it, and sail on, my dear, sail on. Whatever keeps you sane and functioning in a place like this, I will carry a flag for it. I’ll even pray with Simon on Sunday mornings. That’s how bad I’ve got it. Whatever works for you has my blessings.”

“Thank you?”

“Afwan,” he said, waving his hand. “Only before you bury your head back in your datasets again? Go see Doctor Merton. She looked worried.”

~

The boy sitting on the clinic table was six years old. His skin was the same deep brown as Elvi’s own, but with an ashy color to it. Not dryness, but something deeper. His eyes were bloodshot like he’d been weeping. Maybe he had been. His mother stood in the corner, her arms crossed and a vicious scowl on her lips. Lucia’s voice was crisp and calm, but her shoulders rode high up beside her ears.

“So I’m seeing this here,” she said, as her finger pulled down on the boy’s cheek, opening a thin gap between the lower lid and the roughened surface of the eyeball. The discoloration was almost invisible in the redness, but it was there. The faintest hint of green.