Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

So since we’ve got nothing, we’d really appreciate it if those of you who know who set the charges would just tell us. And also please consider not murdering us in our sleep. Thanks for that.

Sudyam coughed to hide her laughter and Fayez flashed a grin. At the front of the room, Reeve nodded and stepped down. The coordinator stood up, looking toward the back of the room. Elvi felt the sudden, powerful need to urinate.

“Doctor Okoye?” the coordinator said. “You wanted to speak?”

Elvi nodded and rose to her feet. It was about ten meters to the front of the room, and Elvi walked forward with her nerves screaming. The heat of the crowd’s bodies seemed suddenly oppressive, the smell of sweat and dust overwhelming. Her tongue felt sticky and thick in her mouth, but she smiled. At an estimate, two hundred people sat before her, their eyes on her. Her heart ticked over so fast she had to wonder whether there was enough air in the room. She remembered someone telling her once to look for a friendly face in the crowd and pretend she was only speaking to them. Four rows in on the left, Lucia Merton was sitting with her hands folded in her lap. Elvi smiled, and the woman smiled back.

“I just wanted to take a minute,” Elvi said, “to talk about how we can limit cross-contamination with the environment? Because we lost the dome? The hard perimeter dome?”

Lucia looked grave. Elvi chanced a look at the rest of the crowd and then wished she hadn’t.

“Part… um. Part of the RCE’s agreement with the UN was that we do a complete environmental study. We’re in just the second biosphere that we’ve ever seen, and there’s so much we don’t know about it that the more we can keep it pristine, the better we’ll be able to understand it. Ideally, we’d have a totally enclosed system here on the surface. Tight as a ship. Airlocks and decontamination rooms and…”

She was babbling. She grinned, hoping that someone would smile back. No one did. She swallowed.

“Every time we breathe, we’re taking in totally unknown microorganisms. And even though we’ve got different proteomes, we’re still big blobs of water and minerals. Sooner or later one of the indigenous species is going to find a way to exploit that. And it goes the other way too. Every time we defecate, we’re introducing billions of bacteria into the environment.”

“So now you’re going to tell us how we can shit?” a man’s voice said.

Elvi felt the sudden heat of a blush in her neck and cheeks. Even Lucia’s expression had gone cold and distant, the woman’s gaze fixed on nothing.

“I only meant that if we were doing this right, we’d have a protected, sterile environment and we wouldn’t be going out into the ruins or cultivating crop plants in the open air because —”

“Because you think we did it wrong,” the man sitting at Lucia’s side said. He was a big man with a dusting of gray at his temples and in the stubble of beard and a permanently angry face. “Only you don’t get to decide that.”

“I understand that we’re working with a complex situation here,” Elvi said, her voice getting rough with desperation. “But we’re all living in this massive Petri dish already, and I have a list of a few little sacrifices that we can all make that, from a scientific perspective —”

The man beside Lucia Merton flushed, and he leaned forward, his fists on his thighs. His eyes fixed on her like a predator’s.

“I’m done sacrificing things to science,” he said, and the buzz in his voice was a promise of violence. Lucia put a restraining hand on the man’s wrist, but others around the room had taken up the man’s disdain. The sounds of their bodies shifting in the seats, the murmur of voices in small conversations of their own filled the air. Whoever killed Trying is probably in this room, she thought. And then, immediately after that, What the hell am I doing here?

Carol Chiwewe stood up, her expression pained. Embarrassed on Elvi’s behalf.

“Maybe we better come back to that another time, Doctor Okoye,” she said. “It’s late and people are tired, ne?”

“Yes,” Elvi muttered. “Yes, of course.”

Her skin burning with shame, she walked back toward her seat, and then past it, out into the street and alone in the deepening night toward her hut. Her shoes scraped in the gravel and dirt. The air was cool and smelled like coming rain. She wasn’t more than halfway there, moving slowly in the near-black starlight, when a voice stopped her.

“I’m sorry about my dad.”

Elvi turned. The girl was little more than a deeper darkness in the night. A slightly more solid shadow. Elvi found herself thankful that the voice wasn’t a man’s.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I don’t think I did that very well.”

“No, it’s him,” the girl said, stepping closer. “You couldn’t have done right with him. My brother died, and now Dad’s not that kind of man anymore.”

“Oh,” Elvi said. And then, “I’m sorry.”

The girl nodded, shuffled with something, and a pale green light no brighter than a candle bloomed in her palm, casting shadows up over the girl’s face. She was pretty the way youth is always pretty, but when she got older, Elvi thought she might be beautiful the way her mother was.

“You’re Doctor Merton’s daughter,” Elvi said.

“Felcia,” the girl said.

“Good to meet you, Felcia,” Elvi said.

“I can walk you home. If you don’t have a light.”

“I don’t,” Elvi said. “I should have brought one.”

“Everyone forgets sometimes,” the girl said, setting off. Elvi trotted a little to catch up with her. For a dozen meters, they walked in silence. Elvi sensed that the girl was building up to something. A confession or a threat. Something dangerous. Elvi hoped that she was just being paranoid, and was certain that she wasn’t.

When the girl spoke at last, her voice was tight with anxiety and longing, and her words were the last thing Elvi would have guessed.

“What’s it like going to a real university?”

Chapter Seven: Holden

There should be fanfare, Holden thought.

Passing through a ring into another star system, halfway across the galaxy from Earth, should be a dramatic moment. Trumpets, or loud alarms, tense faces locked on viewscreens. Instead, there was nothing. No physical sign that the Rocinante had been yanked fifty thousand light-years across space. Just the eerie black of the hub replaced by the unfamiliar starfield of the new solar system. Somehow, the fact that it was so mundane made it stranger. A wormhole gate should be a massive swirling vortex of light and energy, not just a big ring of something sort of like metal with different stars on the other side.