Cibola Burn

Holden kicked the deck hatch release and it slid open with a hiss. He climbed down the ladder past the crew decks to the machine shop, where Amos was taking apart something complex-looking on one of the benches. Holden nodded to him and kicked open the final hatch into the reactor room. Amos shot him a questioning look, but Holden just shook his head and the mechanic turned back to his work with a shrug.

When the hatch slid closed above him, the reactor room flashed with blue light. Holden slid down the ladder to the deck, then leaned back against the wall.

“Hey,” Miller said, coming around the reactor that dominated the center of the room as though he’d been standing on the other side of it waiting for Holden to arrive.

“We need to talk,” Holden replied.

“That’s my line.” The detective gave him a sad, basset-hound smile.

“We’re doing what you wanted. We’ve come through a ring into one of the other systems. You’ll get to, I assume, ride me to the planet and take your look around.”

Miller nodded, but didn’t speak. How much of what I’m about to say does he already know? How predictive is the brain model they’ve made of me? Holden decided wondering that was the path to madness.

“I need to know two things,” Holden said, “or this trip ends right now.”

“Okay,” Miller said with a palms-up, Belter version of a shrug.

“First, how are you following me around? You first showed up on this ship after Ganymede, and you’ve been everywhere I go ever since. Am I infected? Is that how you stay with me? I’ve gone through two gates without ditching you, so either you’re inside my head or you’re a galaxy-wide phenomenon. Which is it?”

“Yeah,” Miller said, then took off his hat and rubbed his short hair. “Wrong on both counts. First answer is, I live here. During the Ganymede incident, which is a stupid name for it, by the way, the protomolecule put a local node inside this ship.”

“Wait. There’s protomolecule stuff in the Roci?” Holden said, fighting down the surge of panic. If Miller wanted to hurt him and had the means to do so, it would already have happened.

“Yeah,” Miller said with a shrug, like it wasn’t a big deal. “You had a visitor, remember?”

“You mean I had a half-human monster,” Holden said, “that almost killed Amos and me. And that we vaporized in our drive trail.”

“Yeah, that’d be him. To be fair, he wasn’t exactly running a coherent program, that one. But he had enough of the old instructions left that he placed some material on the ship. Not much, and not what you’d call live culture. Just enough to keep a connection between the Ring Station’s processing power and your ship.”

“You infected the Roci?” Holden said, fear and rage briefly warring in his gut.

“Don’t know I’d use that verb, but all right. If you want. It’s what lets me follow you around,” Miller said, then frowned. “What was the other thing?”

“I don’t know if I’m done with this thing,” Holden said.

“You’re safe. We need you.”

“And when you don’t?”

“Then no one’s safe,” Miller said, his eerie blue eyes flashing. “So stop obsessing. Second thing?”

Holden sat down on the deck. He hadn’t wanted to ask how Miller was in his head, because he was terrified the answer would be that he was infected. The fact that he wasn’t, but his ship was, was both a relief and a new source of fear.

“What will we find down on Ilus? What are you looking for?”

“Same thing as always. Who done it,” Miller said. “After all, something killed off the civilization that built all this.”

“And how will we know when we’ve found it?”

“Oh,” Miller said, his grin vanishing. He leaned toward Holden, the smell of acetate and copper filling the air or else only his senses. “We’ll know.”

Chapter Eight: Elvi

The sandstorms tended to start in the late afternoon and last until a little after sundown. They began as a softening of the western horizon. Then the little plant analogs in the plain behind her hut would fold their photosynthetic surfaces into tight puckers like tiny green mouths that had tasted lemon, and twenty minutes later the town and the ruins and the sky would all disappear in a wave of dry sand.

Elvi sat at her desk, Felcia at the foot of the bed, and Fayez with his back against the headboard.

Felcia had become a regular visitor, more often than not to talk with Elvi or Fayez or Sudyam. Elvi liked having her around. It made the division between the township and the RCE teams seem… not less real, but less terrible. Permeable.

Today, though, felt different. Felcia seemed more tightly wound than usual. Maybe it was the fact that the UN mediator’s ship was getting close. Maybe it was the weather.

“So, our solar system only has one tree of life,” Elvi said, moving her hands in the air as if to conjure it up. “It started once, and everything we’ve ever found shares that ancestry. But we don’t know why.”

“Why we all share?” Felcia asked.