Cibola Burn

Once, on Ceres, Havelock had been assigned to close down an illegal club up near the center of the station where the Coriolis had been vicious and the spin gravity at its least. When he’d gotten to the place, the combination of bright lights, shrieking dub, and his unaccustomed inner ear had left him vomiting in the carved corridors. An image of him had made its way onto the board back in the offices. He’d played along because objecting would have made it worse. He hadn’t thought about that case in years.

If you were the only Earther.

“Fuck,” Havelock said to the empty air. He cleared the screen.

It has come to my attention that some RCE employees and team members have been singled out for harassment because they are from the outer planets. It is critical under these stressful conditions that we not confuse our teammates with our enemies because of accidents of physiology and environments of origin. As such, I am taking the following actions:

“I’m gonna regret this,” Havelock said to the screen, but by the time he’d finished the announcement, checked it for grammar, and sent it out, he felt almost good.

Chapter Twenty: Elvi

Sitting outside her hut, her hand terminal resting on her knees, the now-familiar sunlight warming her neck and back, Elvi waited for the reports from Luna to buffer. The comm laser on the Edward Israel was the only conduit back to the worlds she’d known, and it was swamped with technical data flowing out from the workgroups on the planetary surface and the sensor data from the Israel. It was sobering to realize that for all the tragedies and fear and death that wracked New Terra, most of the raw data going back home was still technical. And her slow connection was more than the townspeople of First Landing had. The Barbapiccola didn’t even support a feed for them. Their hand terminals were strictly ad hoc, local, line-of-sight networks if they functioned at all.

A breeze lifted a whirl of sand, then set it gently down again. High above, the green clouds scattered apart and rejoined, lacing the blue sky like algae floating on the surface of a pond. The air smelled of heat and dust and the distant presentiment of rain. The reports finished loading and Elvi pulled them up and spent a long hour reading them, listening to the debates, putting together her perspective. It was harder than she liked. Her mind kept jumping around without her.

Everything was changing on the planet so quickly, everything was so different than she’d expected it to be, that just maintaining focus was hard. The voyage into the desert, seeing a two-billion-year-old mechanism actually still functioning, if only barely, had been revelatory. Then the exposure and destruction of the terrorists among the squatters, which should have been a relief, had left her oddly unsettled. And, though she hadn’t mentioned it to anyone and never would, she’d been suffering recurring and intrusive dreams about James Holden.

On the screen, the research coordinator’s report ended, and Elvi realized she hadn’t heard any of it. She sighed, restarted it, and stopped it again before the woman back at the RCE labs on Earth could say anything. Elvi looked up at the sky, wondering where the Rocinante and the Barbapiccola and the Edward Israel were, hidden by the atmosphere-scatter of blue. One of the plant analogs beside the path leading back to the town let out a volley of rising clicks. It was something she’d wanted to investigate, but she hadn’t had the time. Not yet. “Doctor Okoye,” the research coordinator said from sixty AU away, or half a galaxy depending on how you looked at it, “I’ve just come from a meeting with the stats team, and I wanted to bring you up to speed on the plan for how we’d like to proceed with the data collection in the next weeks. The Luna group especially was hoping to request additional sampling on several of your initial subjects so that we can narrow our error bars…”