Cibola Burn

In the distance, he heard one of the carts taking off. Pete, going for distance. And under that, another sound. The bass roar of braking engines. He looked at the three remaining bombs in despair and rolled out from under the pad. The shuttle was massive in the black sky, so close he could make out the individual thrusters.

He wasn’t going to make it.

“Run!” he shouted. He and Scotty and Coop sprinted back toward the cart. The roar of the shuttle rose, grew deafening. Basia reached the cart and scooped up the detonator. If he could blow it early, the shuttle could pull out, get away.

“Don’t!” Coop shouted. “We’re too close!”

Basia slammed his palm on the button.

The ground rose up, hitting him hard, the rough dirt and rocks tearing at his hands and cheek as he came to a stop, but the pain was a distant thing. Some part of him knew he might be hurt very badly, might be in shock, but that seemed distant and easy to ignore too. What struck him most was how quiet everything was. The world of sound stopped at his skull. He could hear his own breath, his heartbeat. Everything past that had the volume turned down to one.

He rolled onto his back and stared up at the star-speckled night sky. The heavy shuttle streaked overhead, half of it trailing fire, the sound of its engines no longer a bass roar but the scream of a wounded animal that he felt in his belly more than heard. The shuttle had been too close, the blast too large, some unlucky debris thrown into just the right path. No way to know. Some part of Basia knew this was very bad, but it was hard to pay much attention to it.

The shuttle disappeared from view, shrieking a death wail across the valley that came to him as a faint high piping sound, then sudden silence. Scotty was sitting beside him on the ground, staring off in the direction the ship had gone. Basia let himself lie back down.

When the bright spots it had left in his vision faded, the stars returned. Basia watched them twinkle, and wondered which one was Sol. So far away. But with the gates, close too. He’d knocked their shuttle down. They’d have to come now. He’d left them no choice.

A sudden spasm of coughing took him. It felt like his lungs were full of fluid, and he coughed it up for several minutes. With the coughing the pain finally came, wracking him from head to foot.

With the pain came the fear.

Chapter Two: Elvi

The shuttle bucked, throwing Elvi Okoye against her restraints hard enough to knock the wind out of her and then pushing her back into the overwhelming embrace of her crash couch. The light flickered, went black, and then came back. She swallowed, her excitement and anticipation turning to animal fear. Beside her, Eric Vanderwert smiled the same half-leering, half-hopeful smile he’d flickered toward her over the past six months. Across from her, Fayez’s eyes had gone wide, his skin gray.

“It’s okay,” Elvi said. “It’s going to be okay.”

Even as she spoke the words, a part of her cringed away from them. She didn’t know what was going on. There was no earthly way she could know that anything was going to be okay. And still her first impulse was to assert it, to say it as if saying it made it true. A high whine rippled through the flesh of the shuttle, overtones crashing into each other. She felt her weight lurch to the left, the crash couches all shifting on their gimbals at the same time like choreographed dancers. She lost sight of Fayez.

A tritone chime announced the pilot, and her voice came over the shuttle’s public-address system.

“Ladies and gentlemen, it appears there has been a critical malfunction at the landing pad. We will not be able to complete the landing at this time. We will be returning to orbit and docking with the Edward Israel until such time as we can assess…”

She went quiet, but the hiss of an open line still ran through the ship. Elvi imagined the pilot distracted by something. The ship lurched and stuttered, and Elvi grabbed her restraints, hugging them to her. Someone nearby was praying loudly.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the pilot said. “I’m afraid the malfunction at the landing pad has done our shuttle some damage. I don’t think we’re going to make it back upstairs right away. We have a dry lake bed not too far from here. I think we’re going to go take a look at that as a secondary landing site.”

Elvi felt a moment’s relief – We still have a landing site – followed at once by a deeper understanding and a deeper fear – She means we’re going to crash.

“I’m going to ask everyone to remain in their couches,” the pilot said. “Don’t take off your belts, and please keep your arms and legs inside the couch’s shell where it won’t bang against the side. The gel’s there for a reason. We’ll have you all down in just a couple minutes here.”