Cibola Burn

“I will,” Elvi lied. Her eyes – all their eyes – would soon be getting plenty of rest. Growing up, Elvi’s aunt had been blind and still perfectly functional, but she’d been living in a farming arcology in Trento. Elvi was on a planet with no sustainable agriculture, an inedible ecosystem, and where touching the wrong thing would kill her on the spot. Context was everything. Her hand terminal chimed. A new batch of reports and letters from the Ganymede group. She opened them with a sigh. If she took time to read all the suggestions they were coming up with, she wouldn’t have time for anything else. She picked one at random and opened it. She had to increase the font to read it, but switching to bright red lettering on a black background helped a little. If the invading organism followed the same growth curve as yeast…

“Success!” Fayez said. “I have returned with sustenance and Lucia. And you aren’t even pretending to have taken a break.”

“Nope,” Elvi said, taking the hard, palm-sized cake of emergency rations from him and turning to the doctor. “What have we found?”

“Good news and bad. Almost a hundred percent infection rate,” Lucia said, sinking to the floor beside her. “The progression is slower in children than adults, it seems, but only slightly.”

“What about RCE versus First Landers?”

“I haven’t seen all the data Yma collected. She was working with your people mostly. My impression is that there’s no difference. Also in the bad news column, it appears to be much more aggressive than the earlier, isolated cases.”

Elvi took a bite of the bar. It tasted like unsweetened fruitcake and smelled like potting soil and it sucked up all the saliva in her mouth like a sponge.

“Higher initial load?” Elvi said around the puck of food in her mouth. “It was so arid before, there might not have been as many infectious particles.”

“Few enough that our immune systems could identify them as foreign and kick them out,” Lucia said.

“Can they do that?” Fayez asked. “I thought these things were a completely different biology. Do our immune systems even work on them?”

“Not as efficiently,” Lucia said. She sounded tired. “But if the storm was loaded with them, they’d swamp what defenses we do have.”

“And then,” Elvi said, “everyone gets it.”

“Yes,” Lucia said. “Only no.”

Elvi opened her eyes again. Lucia was smiling. “Good and bad, remember? We have one man with no growth.”

“None?”

“Even if it were only massively delayed growth, I know what the early signs should look like. Nothing.”

“Could he… could he not have been exposed?”

“He was exposed.”

Elvi felt a bubble of pure joy open in her chest. It was like getting an unexpected present. A flash of lightning brightened the room for a moment, and she wondered why it was green until she remembered.

“So we’ve got the one-eyed man who’s going to be king?” Fayez said. “I mean, better one than none, but I’m not seeing the long-term solve here.”

“We’ve found treatments and vaccines for any number of diseases by studying people who were naturally immune,” Elvi said. “This is a toehold.”

“Right,” Fayez said, rubbing his eyes. “I’m sorry. I may not be at my best right now. I’ve been under a little stress lately.”

Elvi smiled at the little joke. “Will he consent to testing?” she asked.

“Do we care?” Fayez said.

“I haven’t had the chance to ask yet,” Lucia said. “It was hard enough getting the initial screening done.”

“Why?” Elvi asked. “Who is it?”

~

Holden was at the entrance to the main room. Whatever hues his clothes had been, they were the color of mud now, same as for everyone else; mud, exhaustion, tears, and fear were the new uniform for the RCE and the citizens of First Landing alike. His hair was slicked back and greasy. The beginnings of a spotty, moth-eaten beard mottled his cheeks and the top of his neck. Her failing vision softened away the lines of age and stress and left him a pleasant-enough-looking but unremarkable man. She remembered all the times she’d generated excuses to spend time in his company. It hardly seemed plausible that it was the same person.

She steeled herself and crossed the room.

“Captain Holden? Can I have a moment?”

“I’m really busy right now. Is this something that can wait?”

“It isn’t,” she said.

Holden grimaced, the expression there and gone again almost too quickly to register. “All right. How can I help you?”

Elvi licked her lips, thinking about how to present the explanation. She didn’t have any idea how much background he had in biology, so she figured it was better to start low.

“Captain, you are a very special, very important person —”

“Wait.”

“No, no, I —”