Cibola Burn

She considered his body, the color of raw honey, with more hair on his chest and legs then she’d expected. Like a caveman, only without any Neanderthal brow ridge. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, just to see how it felt. She’d always made a rule of not sleeping with her coworkers. She hadn’t so much as held someone’s hand since the Israel had started its long burn for the gate. She’d almost forgotten what sex felt like. And its aftermath.

Fayez coughed, shifted, and she took the chance to draw herself away from him. He sprawled on the floor, face pressed against her clothes, eyes shut. She thought about James Holden, her mind touching gently at her heart, half afraid of what it would find.

“Huh,” she said to the room, softly so as to keep Fayez from waking. “I wasn’t in love with Holden.”

Fayez’s breath shifted and his eyes fluttered but didn’t open. She thought about trying to get her jumpsuit from him, but he looked so peaceful, she decided to wait. She had expected to feel embarrassed by her nakedness. Ashamed. She didn’t.

She sat cross-legged by the chemical assays. In the dish, the green smear from the water sample had shifted a little, throwing off hair-thin runners, exploring its environment. She pulled up the chemical information and started going through it again from the start. When she came to the strange reading of light-activated compounds, she coughed out an impatient sigh. They were chiral, and this was a bi-chiral environment. She was seeing both conformations, and probably for completely different functions. That made sense, then.

She stretched, her spine popping between the shoulder blades, and folded herself forward, her eyes skimming though the data. She took notes of questions to ask Lucia or send back home. She fell into the data, not noticing when Fayez woke, dressed, and left until he draped a blanket over her shoulders. She looked up. Her jumpsuit was still in a pile on the floor. Fayez put a cup of hot tea beside her and kissed the top of her head.

“Good morning, sunshine,” he said.

Elvi smiled, leaning back against his shins. “I bet you say that to all the girls.”

“You okay?” he asked gently.

Elvi frowned. Was she? Given the circumstances, maybe so.

“I’m looking at this organism,” she said, “and, you know, I think I’m beginning to understand it. Here, take a look at these numbers…”

Chapter Thirty-Six: Havelock

The air recycling systems on the Edward Israel didn’t care where their power came from. Fusion reactor or battery power, it was all the same to them. Havelock’s sense that the air had changed, grown hotter and thicker and less able to sustain life, was all in his head. He was aware of being in a steel-and-ceramic tube of air, closed off from any larger, sustaining environment. He’d spent most of his adult life in that situation, and the fact had become as invisible to him as someone on Earth thinking about being held to a spinning celestial object by nothing more than mass, shielded from the fusion reaction of the sun by only distance and air. It wasn’t something you thought about until it was a problem.

His monitor was split between Captain Marwick on the left looking harried and cross and the chief of RCE’s engineering team and Havelock’s own militia on the right.

“I can up the efficiency of the grid enough to get us two, maybe three days,” the chief engineer said. His face was flushed, and his jaw jutted forward.

“In theory,” Marwick said. “This is an old ship. Things based on theory don’t always play out well here.”

“We know what kind of grid this is,” Koenen said. “It’s not guesswork. We have the numbers.”

“It’s hard facing the fact that numbers are a kind of guesswork, isn’t it?” Marwick said.

“Gentlemen,” Havelock said, his voice taking the same intonation Murtry’s would have had. “I understand the issue.”

“She may be dead, but she’s still my ship,” Marwick said.

“Dead?” the chief engineer said. “We’re going to be dead if —”

“Stop now,” Havelock said. “Both of you. Just stop. I understand the issue, and I appreciate both of your views. We’re not going to do a goddamn thing with any ship modifications until we’ve loaded the next supply drop for the folks downstairs. Captain, can I have permission for the engineering team to do a sight-only inspection of the grid lines and couplings?”

“Sight only?” Marwick said, eyes narrowed. “If you’ll commit to that. Fine line between seeing something and wanting to give it a little pet.”

Havelock nodded as if that had been permission. “Chief, put together a crew. Visual inspection only. Give me a report once the drop’s gone.”

“Sir,” the chief engineer said. The word was crisp and a little too loud. The way someone who wasn’t in the military thought people in the military sounded. The connection on the right dropped and Captain Marwick resized automatically to fill the screen.

“That man’s an asshole.”

“He’s scared and he’s trying to exercise control over… well, anything he can actually exercise control over.”