Cibola Burn

Fingertips brushed against her knee, the physical act of reaching out undercutting the cynicism of his words. She took his hand in hers, squeezing the pad at the base of his thumb. He shifted closer to her. She could smell his body. None of them had been able to bathe since the storm came, and they probably all reeked, but her nose had become accustomed to the worst of it. She only experienced his scent as an almost pleasant funk, like a wet dog.

“Not the one I’d have chosen,” she said.

“And yet our names will live forever. You as the first discoverer of a new planet full of species. Me as the simple geologist who waited on you hand and foot.”

“Why are you flirting?”

“Flirting’s the last thing to go,” Fayez said. She wished she could see his face. “You do science. I hit on the smartest and prettiest woman in the room. Everyone has their ways of coping with the brutal specter of mortality. And rain. Coping with rain. My next assignment, I want someplace without so much rain.”

In the next room, a child started crying. An exhausted, frightened sound. A woman – Lucia, maybe – sang to it in a language Elvi didn’t know. She popped the last of the bar into her mouth. She needed to get some water. She wasn’t sure how long it had been since the chemistry deck had pumped out a clean bag. If it wasn’t time to switch out yet, it would be soon. Holden had said he’d come by and do it, but she wasn’t sure that was true. He was dead on his feet already, and he didn’t rest. Even when he needed to. Well, she could probably figure out how to switch out a water bag she couldn't see.

“We shouldn’t have come,” Fayez said. “All those crazy bastards talking about how the worlds beyond Medina Station were going to be tainted and evil? They were right.”

“No one said that, did they?”

“Someone probably did. If they didn’t, they should have.”

“You could really have stayed away?” she asked as she rose to her knees and started reaching for the chemistry deck. She could hear the soft ticking of the clean water coming through the outtake filter, a different timbre than the constant rain. “If they came to you with the chance to go to the first really new world, you’d have been able to say no?”

“I’d have waited for the second wave,” Fayez said.

She found the bag. The soft, cold curve wasn’t as heavy as she’d expected. The deck wasn’t putting out water as quickly as it had been, but if there was an error in the system, it hadn’t made a noise. Something else for Holden to check.

“I’d still have come,” she said.

“All this? And you’d still have come?”

“I wouldn’t have known about this. This wouldn’t have happened yet. I’d know I was taking a risk. I did know. Of course I’d get on that ship.”

“What if you knew it was going to be like this? What if you could look into some crystal ball and see us here, the way it’s all happened?”

“If we could do that, we’d never explore anything,” she said.

It was very strange to think that they were all going to die. She knew it, but it still seemed unreal. In the back of her mind, a small, insistent voice kept saying that a ship would arrive to help them. That another group on the planet would show up with extra food or water or shelter. She’d catch herself wondering if they shouldn’t be signaling for help, and have to make the effort to recall that there were no other bases. No other ships. In the whole solar system, there were just the crews and passengers of three ships. And fewer now than there had been before. Even with all of them packed into the ruins together like refugees so close they could hear each other snore, it made the universe seem very empty. And frightening.

“We should find Holden,” she said. “The water’s coming slow. I wonder… Maybe he has a really good immune system? The fact that we’re all getting discharge means we’ve got some immune response to it. Like a splinter, maybe. It just grows faster than we can knock it out. Maybe Holden has some exposure that gives him antibodies to it.”

“Did the blood scans find anything?”

“No,” she said. “His white cell count is lower than ours too.”

“Maybe his eyeball juice tastes bad,” Fayez said. “What?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“No, but you made that little I’ve-got-an-idea grunt. I’ve heard that grunt. It means something.”

“I was just thinking that it can’t be his immune system,” she said. “I mean, we’re all traveling in hard vacuum all the time. The radiation just on the way out here probably left all of us a little immunocompromised. And especially after Eros Station, he’s had more… more radiation damage…”

Elvi closed her eyes, shutting out the green. A beautiful cascade of logic and implication opened before her like stepping into a garden. She caught her breath, and grinned. The joy of insight lifted her up.

“What?” Fayez said. “He’s overcooked? The eye thing only likes us rare, and he’s well done?”

“Oh,” Elvi said. “It’s his oncocidals. After the Eros incident, he had to go on a permanent course of them. And that means… oh! That’s so pretty.”