Cibola Burn, Page 39

  “Not as efficiently,” Lucia said. She sounded tired. “But if the storm was loaded with them, they’d swamp what defenses we do have.”

  “And then,” Elvi said, “everyone gets it.”

  “Yes,” Lucia said. “Only no.”

  Elvi opened her eyes again. Lucia was smiling. “Good and bad, remember? We have one man with no growth.”

  “None?”

  “Even if it were only massively delayed growth, I know what the early signs should look like. Nothing.”

  “Could he… could he not have been exposed?”

  “He was exposed.”

  Elvi felt a bubble of pure joy open in her chest. It was like getting an unexpected present. A flash of lightning brightened the room for a moment, and she wondered why it was green until she remembered.

  “So we’ve got the one-eyed man who’s going to be king?” Fayez said. “I mean, better one than none, but I’m not seeing the long-term solve here.”

  “We’ve found treatments and vaccines for any number of diseases by studying people who were naturally immune,” Elvi said. “This is a toehold.”

  “Right,” Fayez said, rubbing his eyes. “I’m sorry. I may not be at my best right now. I’ve been under a little stress lately.”

  Elvi smiled at the little joke. “Will he consent to testing?” she asked.

  “Do we care?” Fayez said.

  “I haven’t had the chance to ask yet,” Lucia said. “It was hard enough getting the initial screening done.”

  “Why?” Elvi asked. “Who is it?”

  Holden was at the entrance to the main room. Whatever hues his clothes had been, they were the color of mud now, same as for everyone else; mud, exhaustion, tears, and fear were the new uniform for the RCE and the citizens of First Landing alike. His hair was slicked back and greasy. The beginnings of a spotty, moth-eaten beard mottled his cheeks and the top of his neck. Her failing vision softened away the lines of age and stress and left him a pleasant-enough-looking but unremarkable man. She remembered all the times she’d generated excuses to spend time in his company. It hardly seemed plausible that it was the same person.

  She steeled herself and crossed the room.

  “Captain Holden? Can I have a moment?”

  “I’m really busy right now. Is this something that can wait?”

  “It isn’t,” she said.

  Holden grimaced, the expression there and gone again almost too quickly to register. “All right. How can I help you?”

  Elvi licked her lips, thinking about how to present the explanation. She didn’t have any idea how much background he had in biology, so she figured it was better to start low.

  “Captain, you are a very special, very important person —”

  “Wait.”

  “No, no, I —”

  “Really. Wait. Look, Doctor Okoye. Elvi. I’ve been feeling a kind of tension between us for a while now, and I’ve just been pretending not to. Ignoring it. And that was probably a bad call on my part. I was just trying to make it all go away so we wouldn’t have to say anything, but I’m in a very committed, very serious relationship, and while some of my parents weren’t monogamists, this relationship is. Before we go any farther, I need to be clear with you that nothing like that can happen between us. It’s not you. You’re a beautiful, intelligent woman and —”

  “The organism that’s blinding us,” she said. “You’re immune to it. I need to get blood samples. Maybe tissue.”

  “I’ll help any way I can, but you have understand that —”

  “That’s why you’re special. You’re immune. That’s what I was talking about.”

  Holden stopped, his mouth half open, his hands out before him, patting the air reassuringly. For three interminable heartbeats, he was silent. And then, “Oh. Oh. I thought you were —”

  “The eye assessment that Doctor Merton did —

  “Because I thought… Well, I’m sorry. I misunderstood —”

  “There was. The tension? You were talking about? There was some tension. But there’s not anymore,” Elvi said. “At all.”

  “Okay,” Holden said. He looked at her for a moment, his head turned a degree to the side. “Well, this is awkward.”

  “It is now.”

  “How about we never mention this again?”

  “I think that would be fine,” Elvi said. “We will need you to come let us take some blood samples.”

  “Of course. Yes. I’ll do that.”

  “And as my vision starts failing, I may need you to come read some of the results to me.”

  “I will do that too.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And thank you, Doctor Okoye.”

  They each nodded to the other two or three times, apparently unable to break free of the moment. In the end, she spun on her heel and headed back, navigating between the knots and clusters of people camped on the floor of the ruins. One of the squatters was weeping and shaking back and forth. Elvi stepped past him and trotted back to the lab. Yma had arrived in her absence, sitting cross-legged on the floor with Lucia as they compared data. Elvi didn’t think her eyes were getting markedly worse until she tried to look over their shoulders. Yma’s hand terminal was a blur of white and blue, as empty of usable information as the clouds.

  “Did he agree?” Yma asked, her voice tense as stretched wire.

  “He did,” Elvi said, sitting down at the chemistry deck. The water bag needed to be refilled. A time was going to come – and soon – when the little deck was going to have to stop generating drinking water so that she could use its full resources to run her tests. It wasn’t yet. She swapped out the water bags.

  “Did you get a history?” Lucia asked.

  “A medical history? No. I was thinking perhaps you could do that.”

  “If you’d like,” Lucia said, levering herself up from the ground. “He’s back in the main room?”

  “He is,” Elvi said, kneeling at the deck controls. A smear of mud darkened the readout, but when she wiped it away, she could still make out the letters. “I’ll set up a few screenings for his blood.”

  “Lachrymal fluid too?”

  “Probably a good idea,” Elvi said. “Just see if there’s anything out of the ordinary.”

  “All right then,” Lucia said. When she walked toward the door, her steps had a little hitch in them. A hesitation. Elvi wondered how much longer the doctor would be able to function. The same question for all of them. There wasn’t time.

  “Anything new in your data?” she asked.

  “Consistent,” Yma said. “Whatever it is, it doesn’t draw a distinction between us and the squatters.”

  “Well, it’s the only one.”

  The hours passed without Elvi being aware of it. Her mind and attention had taken her outside the world of minutes and hours to a place defined by test runs, transmission lag, and slowed only by her failing sight. Even before Holden’s test results came back, she was prying what information she could from the samples of the organism, categorizing it only to find analogies with other plants or animals or fungi. The sense of time running short was a constant, and so, like a noxious smell over an extended period, before long it stopped being something she noticed. And instead, she felt the simple joy of doing what she did best. They had chosen her for the assignment because biological systems made sense to her, working through knotty problems was what she did for fun. For months now, she had been doing a long run of data collection. It had been lovely to see this new world, to watch its first secrets unfold, but it had also been easy. A graduate assistant could have gathered all the same samples she had.

  This work was hard, and it was her. And while the life or death of everyone on New Terra resting on it scared her, it didn’t take away the essential joy of her work.

  “You need to eat,” Fayez said.

  “I just did,” she said. “You gave me that bar.”

  “That was ten hours ago,” he said gently. “You need to eat.”
>
  Elvi sighed and leaned back from the screen. She’d been bent almost double trying to make out the results. Her back ached and there was a headache building all across the front of her skull. Fayez held something out. Another bar of emergency cake. When she took it, his fingers stayed with hers.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” Elvi said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Well, apart from the obvious. Why?”

  “You seemed a little distant.”

  “I’ve been working.”

  “Sure. Of course. I’m sorry. I’m just being stupid.”

  “I don’t understand,” Elvi said. “Haven’t I been acting the same way I always do?”

  “Yes, you have,” Fayez said, letting go of her hand. “That was kind of my point. After… after, you know —”

  “The sex?”

  He shifted. She imagined him closing his eyes. Wincing a little bit. With her eyes as bad as they were, it wasn’t much more than a guess, but it filled her with a surprising glee. Who would have guessed? Fayez with tender feelings.

  “The sex,” he said. “I just wanted to make sure that we were okay. That things were all right between us.”

  “Well,” she said, “orgasm does release a lot of oxytocin, so I’m probably more fond of you than before.”

  “Now you’re teasing me.”

  “That too,” she said, and took another bite of the cake. It really was awful stuff.

  “I wanted to make sure that I knew where we stood.”

  “I haven’t really thought about it,” Elvi said, gesturing at the chemistry deck. “You know. Busy.”

  “Of course,” Fayez said. “I understand.”

  “Once we’re not all going to die, though, maybe we could talk about it? Would that be okay?”

  “That would be fine.”

  “All right, then. It’s a date,” Elvi said, and sat back down at the deck. Her back hurt. Especially between the shoulder blades. She went through the tools screen, trying to find a way to bump the font up another level, but the deck’s options were very limited. She was going to need help, and soon. In the main room, someone called out sharply, and a dozen voices rose in an answering chorus of complaint.

  “Okay, that wouldn’t be fine,” Fayez said. “Elvi, listen. You are the smartest woman I’ve ever met, and I’ve been at some of the best universities there are. If there’s anyone, anywhere that can get us out of this, it’s you, and I would very much like to grow very, very old and decrepit and probably incontinent and senile in your company. So if you could save my life and everyone else’s, I’d very much appreciate it.”

  That’s sweet and Please don’t put more pressure on me right now and I’ll try warred in her mind. Somewhere at the edge of the ruins, someone shouted. She hoped it wasn’t a slug, that it wasn’t another death. That it wasn’t something else that had gone wrong.

  “Okay,” she said.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: Holden

  H

  olden shuffled his way around the tower again.

  The sky was the iron gray of an overcast noon. The rain had tapered off to a faint drizzle just heavy enough to keep his hair and clothes soaked and send rivulets of water down his spine. The wet ground sucked at his boot heels with each step. The air smelled of ozone and mud.

  A small group of death-slugs were nosing at a crack in the tower’s base. A wad of fabric blocked their entrance, but they were using their narrow noses to probe at it, looking for a way in. Holden hefted his long-handled shovel recovered from the ruined mines and smashed them flat with one heavy blow. He scooped up the gooey corpses and threw them away from the tower, then let the light rain wash the slime off the blade.

  He moved on, finding only the occasional straggler on the tower wall. These he scraped off and flung away using the shovel like a catapult. At first, it had been sort of fun to see how far he could throw them. Now his shoulders and arms burned with fatigue and his distances were getting shorter and shorter.

  Miller followed along sometimes, not saying anything, just a gray basset-hound-faced reminder that Holden had more important things to be doing.

  He vanished when Holden rounded a corner and found a small work crew resting near a partially dug trench. They were trying to get at least a shallow water-filled ditch all the way around the tower, but it was slow work with their primitive implements.

  This particular group was made up of three women and two men with crude digging tools. They were stretching and drinking water from one of the bags the purifier put out. One of the women gave him a nod, the other four ignored him.

  One of the two men had a slug on his pants.

  It hung on the fabric, just above his right knee. There was no slime trail around it. None of the five diggers seemed to notice it was there. Holden knew that if he shouted in alarm, the man might take a swipe at it with his hand without thinking. So he calmly walked toward him and said, “Don’t move.”

  The man frowned back at him. “Que?”

  Holden grabbed the man by the shoulders and shoved him onto his back. “The fuck?” the other man said. They were all backing away from him like onlookers at the start of a fight. Holden leaned over the man on the ground and repeated, “Don’t move.” Then he grabbed the cuffs of the man’s pants and yanked them off with one hard pull. He threw them as far away as he could.

  “What just happened?” said the woman who’d first nodded at him. Holden recognized her now. Older, tough, one of the bosses at the mine. Probably in charge of the trench crew.

  “Didn’t anyone see that he had a slug on his knee?”

  “Babosa malo?” someone muttered.

  Holden reached down a hand and pulled the dazed man to his feet. “You had a death-slug on your pants. Were you leaning against this wall?”

  “No. I don’t know. Maybe, for a second,” the man started.

  “I told you people,” Holden said, first to the man then rotating to face the crew boss. “I told you not to touch the walls. The slugs climb them to get away from the water.”

  The crew boss nodded at him with one fist. “Sa sa.”

  “You didn’t see it,” Holden said, not asking a question. “How bad? Malo que sus ojos?”

  “Ojos?” the man asked.

  “Not ojos. Ah. Orbas. Eyes.”

  “Na khorocho,” the man agreed with a Belter shrug of his hands. Not good.

  “Well, the price you pay for not letting your boss know you couldn’t see well enough to avoid slugs is now you have no pants.”

  “Sa sa.”

  “So go back inside,” Holden said, giving the man a gentle shove toward the tower entrance, “and see if you can find some way to cover your shame.”

  “Sorry, boss,” the man replied, then trotted off.

  “Anyone else on the crew that bad?” Holden asked the team leader. She frowned and shrugged.

  “Not great. We all missed it.”

  “All right,” Holden said, rubbing his head. It sent the water clinging to his scalp and hair running down his neck. After a moment he said, “Take them all back.”

  “The trench.”

  “Too risky now. I’ll stay on patrol. Get your people inside.”

  “All right,” the woman said, then started leading her people toward the entrance.

  Holden’s hand terminal buzzed at him, and when he pulled it out he saw someone had been trying to connect for a while. He allowed the connection and after a few seconds Elvi appeared on the screen.

  “Jim, where are you? I need you back at the lab.”

  “Sorry,” Holden replied. “Kinda busy out here.”

  “Your bloodwork just finished. I need you to come read me the results.”

  The screen on the analysis rig was tiny. Who, in the age of implantable vision correctives, had bad eyesight? Holden felt he could make a usability argument to the designers now.

  “Let me finish this patrol,” Holden said.

  “This is important
.”

  “So is keeping alive the idiots who insist on working outside when they can’t see.”

  “Hurry then. Please,” she said and killed the connection.

  Holden was putting his terminal away when it started pinging at him. A quick glance at the screen showed it was alerting him to another supply drop. He held the terminal up to the skyline and let it direct him to the location of the drop. A distant white parachute popped into view as the terminal zoomed in on it. Too far. They were still coming in randomly scattered over too wide an area. They had teams out recovering the first several drops, but pretty soon they wouldn’t have anyone left who could see far enough to make a dangerous trek out to the supplies and back.