Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

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.