Cibola Burn

The forced, artificial calmness terrified Elvi more than shrieking and weeping would have. The pilot was doing everything she could to keep them all from panicking. Would anyone do that if they didn’t think panic was called for?

Her weight shifted again, pulling to the left, and then back, and then she grew light as the shuttle descended. The fall seemed to last forever. The rattle and whine of the shuttle rose to a screaming pitch. Elvi closed her eyes.

“We’re going to be fine,” she said to herself. “Everything’s okay.”

The impact split the shuttle open like lobster tail under a hammer. She had the brief impression of unfamiliar stars in a foreign sky, and her consciousness blinked out like God had turned off a switch.

~

Centuries before, Europeans had invaded the plague-emptied shell of the Americas, climbing aboard wooden ships with vast canvas sails and trusting the winds and the skill of sailors to take them from the lands they knew to what they called the New World. For as long as six months, religious fanatics and adventurers and the poverty-stricken desperate had consigned themselves to the uncharitable waves of the Atlantic Ocean.

Eighteen months ago, Elvi Okoye left Ceres Station under contract to Royal Charter Energy. The Edward Israel was a massive ship. Once, almost three generations before, it had been one of the colony ships that had taken humanity to the Belt and the Jovian system. When the outpouring had ended and the pressure to expand had met its natural limits, the Israel had been repurposed as a water hauler. The age of expansion was over, and the romance of freedom gave way to the practicalities of life – air, water, and food, in that order. For decades, the ship had been a workhorse of the solar system, and then the Ring had opened. Everything changed again. Back at the Bush shipyards and Tycho Station a new generation of colony ships was being built, but the retrofit of the Israel had been faster.

When she’d stepped inside it the first time, Elvi had felt a sense of wonder and hope and excitement in the hum of the Israel’s air recyclers and the angles of her old-fashioned corridors. The age of adventure had come again, and the old warrior had returned, sword newly sharpened and armor shining again after tarnished years. Elvi had known that it was a psychological projection, that it said more about her own state of mind than anything physical about the ship, but that didn’t diminish it. The Edward Israel was a colony ship once more, her holds filled with prefabbed buildings and high-atmosphere probes, manufacturing labs and even a repeat-scatter femtoscope. They had an exploration and mapping team, a geological survey team, a hydrology team, Elvi’s own exozoological workgroup, and more. A university’s worth of PhDs and a government lab’s load of postdocs. Between crew and colonists, a thousand people.

They were a city in the sky and a boat of pilgrims bound for Plymouth Rock and Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle all at the same time. It was the grandest and most beautiful adventure humanity had ever been on, and Elvi had earned a place on the exobiology team. In that context, imagining that the steel and ceramic of the ship was imbued with a sense of joy was a permissible illusion.

And all of it was ruled over by Governor Trying.

She’d seen him several times in the months they’d spent burning and braking, then making the slow, eerie transit between rings, and then burning and braking again. It wasn’t until just before the drop itself that she’d actually spoken with him.

Trying was a thin man. His mahogany skin and snow-dust hair reminded her of her uncles, and his ready smile reassured and calmed. She had been in the observation deck, pretending that the high-resolution screens looking down on the planet were really windows, that the light of this unfamiliar sun was actually bouncing off the wide, muddy seas and high frosted clouds and passing directly into her eyes even though the deceleration gravity meant they weren’t in free orbit yet. It was a strange, beautiful sight. A single, massive ocean scattered with islands. A large continent that sprawled comfortably across half of a hemisphere, widest at the equator and then tapering as it reached north and south. The official name of the world was Bering Survey Four, named for the probe that had first established its existence. In the corridors and cafeteria and gym, they’d all come to call it New Terra. So at least she wasn’t the only one swept up by the romance.

“What are you thinking, Doctor Okoye?” Trying’s gentle voice asked, and Elvi had jumped. She hadn’t heard him come in. Hadn’t seen him beside her. She felt like she was supposed to bow or make some sort of formal report. But his expression was so soft, so amused, she let it go.