Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

“Eyes,” Holden said.

“Lucia saw one case before the… the storm? Once the organism got into the vitreous humor, it’s in a novel environment that seems to suit it really well, and exponential growth’s pretty normal in those conditions. So that winds up blocking the light from hitting the retina, and —”

Holden held up his hands, palm out. She found herself moving in toward him, ready to put her palms against his. She stopped herself.

“I thought the things that lived here had a whole different biology. How can they infect us?”

“It’s not an infection like a virus,” she said. “It’s not hijacking our cells or anything. We’re just a new, nutrient-rich environment and this little guy found a way to exploit it. It’s not trying to make us blind. It’s just that the extracellular matrix is a really easy path into the eyeball for it, and it’s really happy when it gets there. Explosive growth is something you see in any kind of invasive species coming into a new environment. No competition.”

Holden ran a hand through his hair. When he spoke, his voice was soft, like he was speaking mostly to himself.

“Apocalyptic explosions, dead reactors, terrorists, mass murder, death-slugs, and now a blindness plague. This is a terrible planet. We should not have come here.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, putting her hand on his arm. He had a very solid arm. Muscular. He put his own hand over hers and her heart picked up a little. She hated feeling like a schoolgirl with her first crush, but she also thrilled to it. Just stay focused, she thought, a little dignity.

“Okay, Doctor Okoye.”

“Elvi.”

“Elvi, I need you and Doctor Merton to do whatever you have to do to take care of this. I think I’ve found a way to get supplies down from orbit, but I don’t see any way to get anyone up the well, or where to put them if we did. So if I’m right, I can get you whatever supplies we have up there. But I need you to fix this.”

“I will,” Elvi said, nodding. She didn’t have any idea how she could keep that promise, but her heart was full to bursting with the determination that she would.

“Anything you need,” Holden said, “you just tell me.”

Elvi had a sudden, intrusive, and surprisingly graphic thought. She felt a blush crawling up her neck. “All right, Captain,” she said. “I want… um… if I could get a spare sampling bag from the Israel? I think it would really help.”

He let go of her, and she regretted the absence immediately. She shoved her hands into her pockets. He nodded to her, hesitated for a moment as if he were waiting for her to say something more, then moved away into the crowded main room. Elvi bit her lip and swallowed a couple of times until the thickness in her throat subsided. She knew she was being silly and even borderline inappropriate, but the knowledge did nothing to change it.

She stopped at the window, looking out at the gray rain. It was hard to believe that every drop of it contained something that would colonize her body the way that humanity had New Terra. It looked peaceful out there. Vast and rich and beautiful. Even the slow river of floodwater carried the calming, majestic, beautiful sense of nature playing out.

Most of Earth was covered in cities or managed nature preserves about as untamed as a service dog. Mars and the Belt were studded with colonies that had been built and designed to carve a human place in inhuman and lifeless circumstances. This, she realized, was the first place she’d been in her life where she could see true wilderness the way it had been for millennia on Earth. Red in tooth and claw. Deadly and uncaring. Vast, unpredictable, and complex as anything she could imagine.

“You all right?” Lucia asked.

“Overwhelmed,” Elvi said. “Fine.”

“I’ve harvested a new sample run from the water purifier,” the doctor said. “Help me with the assaying?”

“Of course,” Elvi said. “When the sampling bag comes, it’ll be easier to send the data back home. Maybe they’ll be able to help.”

“Well, if they find anything, make sure they send it in an audio file,” Lucia said. “I don’t know that we’re going to be reading much.”

“How are we going to do it?” Elvi asked.

“Do what?”

“Do any of it. Eat, rebuild, make clean water, keep the death-slugs out? How are we going to do any of that when none of us can see what we’re doing?”

“At a guess,” Lucia said, “poorly.”

~

The long New Terran day and the darkness of the clouds made time feel strange. Elvi sat hunched in the little side chamber that Fayez had appropriated for their research lab. The walls were curved in ways that left her thinking of bones. The only opening was high on the wall, and Fayez or Lucia or Sudyam had put a sheet of clear plastic over it to keep the death-slugs out. A bank of white LEDs splashed a cold light across the deep red wall and ceiling. The small green sludge in her makeshift Petri dish could have been algae or fungus or the remains of a salad left weeks too long in the back of her dormitory refrigerator back in upper university. But it wasn’t any of those things, and the more she looked at it, the more aware she was of the fact.

There were some similarities to the more familiar kingdoms of life she’d studied before. Lipid boundaries around cells, for instance, appeared to be a good move in design space just the way eyes were, or flight. They seemed to do something similar to mitotic division, though sometimes the cells divided in threes instead of pairs, and she didn’t know why. There were other anomalies too, concentrations of some photon-activated molecules that didn’t quite make sense.

And what was worse, she couldn’t think about it. Couldn’t concentrate. Whenever her focus slipped, it slipped onto James Holden. The sound of his voice, his despairing and undaunted laughter, the shape of his ass. He haunted her. She realized that she’d gone through four pages of chemical assay data without having any idea what she’d seen, sat back on her heels, and cursed.

“Problem?” Fayez said, stepping through the doorway. His hair was tied back, his face gray with fatigue and streaked with old mud. She wondered, looking at him, how long it had been since he’d slept. She wondered how long it had been since she’d slept. Or eaten for that matter.

“Yes,” she said.

He squatted down beside the arch that led back toward the main rooms. The plastic was dark. It was nighttime, then. She hadn’t been paying attention.