Cibola Burn

“We’re going to die here,” Elvi said, her voice soft, gentle, pleading. “The food’s going to run out. You go out there, and you’ll be passing through a whole biosphere no one’s ever seen before. There are going to be things you and I haven’t even imagined. I want to see those before I die.”

The next cell opened. There was no mud, but the acrid stink of melted plastic filled the air, stinging her nose and eyes. Amos closed it again.

“You need to get electricity to drive that cart,” she said. “If I tell you how to do that, will you take me with you?”

Amos turned his head to her, his gaze fastening on her like he was noticing her for the first time. His smile came slowly.

“You got something you want to tell me, doc?”

Elvi shrugged. “The alien moon defense grid thing shot down the shuttle with the fusion drive and the drop with batteries and fuel cells in it, but it let the food and medicine come through. It also isn’t busy shooting the clouds, even though there are a bunch of organisms living in them that are made of complex organic compounds. It doesn’t care about chemical energy inside compounds. You could have the Rocinante drop you a chemical fuel source. Acetylene, maybe. You’ve got acetylene tanks up there, don’t you?”

“Hell, I got acetylene right here. But these here don’t run on fire,” Amos said.

“They don’t have to,” Elvi said. “The chemistry deck has a combustion chamber that runs assays by converting exothermic reactions into current and then measuring the output. It’s not much of a chamber, but if you take that out and build a decent-sized combustion chamber – maybe a ten-centimeter surface – you could probably capture enough of the chemical energy from the burn to make the same current coming out of one of those things. We might need to build a transformer to get the amps and volts just right, but that’s not actually hard.”

Amos scratched his neck and rocked back on his heels. His eyes were narrow.

“You just come up with that on the spot?”

Elvi shrugged. “Does that mean I can come with you?”

Amos turned his head and spat on the ground. “Sure,” he said.

~

“I just want to know why,” Fayez said.

“Why what?” Elvi asked, walking through the main chamber of the ruins. She had two thick plastic sacks of fresh-ish water. Potable, at least. And a box the size of her hand with protein rations in it. It was supposed to be enough for one person for one day, and it was all they were going to have until they came back to the camp in the ruins. She’d also found a satchel with a wide fake-leather belt to strap it closed.

“Why you’re chasing after Holden again,” Fayez said, ducking around a passing woman.

“I’m not chasing after Holden,” Elvi said, then stopped and turned, putting her palm against Fayez’s chest. She could feel his heartbeat against her fingertips. “You know I’m not chasing after Holden, don’t you? Because that’s… I mean, no.”

“Then why?” he said.

The organisms still dying in Elvi’s eyes had lost all their green tinge, but they left the world a little blurry. She felt like she was seeing Fayez through a filter that softened his features, smoothed his skin. He looked like a media star in some particularly unflattering role that involved a lot of mud and not many showers.

“Because I want to see,” she said. “It’s why I came out here. It’s why I’ve been spending all my time taking samples and running assays. I love what I do, and what I do is go look at things. Holden said he was talking to aliens, and that he might be able to turn off the defense grid, and it means we’re going to drive through the wilderness —”

“What’s left of it,” Fayez said.

“And because I’m going to die,” Elvi said.

Fayez looked away.

“We’re all going to die,” Elvi said. “And we’re all very probably going to die very, very soon. And my choices are to go out and look at this amazing, strange, beautiful, ruined world or else stay in the camp and watch everyone around me die by centimeters. And I’m a coward and a hedonist and I’m sometimes very, very selfish.”

“You know. Between the two of us, I always thought of myself as more along those lines.”

“I know.”

Outside, Amos’ kludged cart was roaring, the constant burn of the combustion chamber was like a synthesizer stuck on a particularly ragged and unpleasant G under middle C. Amos was in the cab, sitting at the controls. Fayez walked with her to the side of the cart and then helped her scramble up into the cab. When he stepped back, he had his hands shoved deep in his pockets. She couldn’t see quite well enough to know if there were tears in his eyes too.

“Those the supplies, doc?” Amos asked.

“They’re what we’ve got to work with.”

“All right then. I got the signal from the captain’s hand terminal locked in. We got maybe a week’s worth of gas, and the guy I’m after’s got a day’s head start.”

“I wish we had sunglasses,” she said. “Or a pizza.”

“Fallen fucking world, doc.”

“Let’s go.”