Cibola Burn

The RCE science team huddled together in one rounded corner of the building’s large central room, Elvi among them. Several scientists were fiddling with a large machine. Getting it ready to purify large quantities of water, Holden hoped. Lucia drifted across the room to exchange a few words with Elvi, her son Jacek in tow. Holden breathed a sigh of relief they’d both made it. Basia would be up on the Rocinante going out of his mind with worry, and Holden was happy he’d be able to report that they were as safe as he could make them.

“Hey, Cap,” Amos said, coming out of a side room with several colonists trailing. “We got a problem.”

“Another one? Worse than the cataclysmic storm heading our way?”

“Related, I guess you’d say,” Amos replied. “We’ve been going through the head counts and looks like the Dahlke family is missing.”

“We’re sure about that?”

“Pretty,” Amos said with a shrug.

Carol saw them talking and made her way through the crowded room toward them. “One hundred percent sure,” she said. “Clay Dahlke was in town picking up supplies when we warned him. He headed out to get his wife and daughter. They’ve got the house farthest outside of town. I should have sent someone along but I was stupid —”

“You had plenty to do,” Holden reassured her. “How far from here is the Dahlke place?”

“Three klicks,” Amos said. “I’m about to head out with these guys and see if we can find them.”

“Wait a minute,” Holden said. “I’m not sure you can make a six-kilometer round trip with the time we have left, let alone look for someone.”

“Not leaving that little girl out there, chief,” Amos said. He kept his voice carefully neutral, but Holden could hear the barest presentiment of a threat hiding in it.

“All right,” Holden said, giving in. “But let me call up to the Roci and get an update. At least let me do that.”

“Sure,” Amos said agreeably. “Someone’s looking for a poncho for the kid right now anyway.”

Holden headed out of the main room and through the confusion of smaller chambers around it, trying to find the entrance. The alien building was a maze of connecting passages and rooms. As he walked, he pulled out his hand terminal. “Alex, this is Holden, you listening?”

The sound coming out of the terminal was filled with static from the atmosphere’s heavy ionization, but Holden could still hear Alex when he said, “Alex here. What’s the word?”

“Give me an update. How close are we?”

“Oh, boss, you just need to look west.” The fear in Alex’s voice was audible even over the heavy static.

Holden stepped out of the alien tower’s main entrance and looked toward the slowly setting sun.

A curtain of black covered the horizon as far as the eye could see. It was moving so quickly that even from dozens of kilometers away it appeared to hurtle toward him, a black roiling cliff shot through with lightning. The ground beneath his feet trembled and shook, and Holden remembered that sound moved more quickly through a solid than through the air. The vibration he felt now was the sound of all that fury, coming through the earth like an early warning. Even as he thought it, a rising roar started in the west.

“What’s it look like?” Amos had come into the antechamber and was pulling a light backpack on. His colonist friends stood behind him, their faces a mixture of hope and fear.

“It’s too late, big man,” Holden said, looking west and shaking his head. “It’s way too late.”

He wasn’t sure as he said it if he meant for the Dahlkes, or for all of them.

Chapter Thirty: Elvi

The storm front came, seeming slow at first – a tall purple-black churn higher than skyscrapers with only the slightest stirrings in the warm air to show that it was real – and then between one breath and the next, hit with the violence of a blow. Air and water and mud jetted through the windows, archways, and holes in the ruin like the stream from a firehose. It did not simply roar; it deafened. Elvi curled with her back against the wall of the ruin, her arms wrapped around her knees, and endured. The walls shuddered against her spine, vibrating with the hurricane gusts.