Cibola Burn

“This time you saved them,” Naomi repeated, as though she could read his mind. “These ones, you saved.”

~

Havelock was waiting for him in the airlock. Basia knew the RCE man must have heard the breakdown he’d had. When Havelock looked at him, he felt nothing but shame. But while Havelock’s face was tight with pain, there was no mockery in it when he gripped Basia’s arm and said, “You did good out there.”

Basia nodded back at him, not trusting himself to speak.

“Look,” Havelock said, and pointed out the airlock door.

Basia turned around and saw the Barbapiccola leaving long thin streamers in its wake. It was entering Ilus’ atmosphere. The front of the ship began to glow.

Havelock closed the hatch, but while the airlock cycled and they removed their gear, they watched the freighter’s death on the wall monitor. Alex kept the Roci’s scopes trained on it the entire time. It drifted for a while, the streamers in the upper atmosphere eventually turning into white smoke with a black heart as the hull burned.

When the end came, it was sudden and shocking. The hull seemed to go from a solid object to many small fiery pieces in the blink of an eye, with no transition. Basia switched the monitor to the death clock to see how much time he’d bought Felcia.

Four days. The Israel had four days.

Chapter Fifty-Two: Elvi

Elvi sat in the darkness, her hand terminal in her lap. She was trembling, and the fear and the anger and the sorrow were like she’d walked back into the worst of the storm. She couldn’t feel that now. She didn’t have time. She needed to think.

The screen didn’t have maps, of course. There wasn’t a survey of any of this to draw from, and even if there was, she didn’t have a connection to the Israel, if the Israel was still in orbit and hadn’t fallen into the atmosphere and burned and killed everyone to death and —

She couldn’t feel that now. She needed to think. The structure, ruins, whatever they were had to be at least seven or eight square kilometers. They’d entered the ruins near Holden’s last live signal, but there was still a lot of territory to cover. The locator on the hand terminal screen showed only the local nodes. The other two were Fayez and Murtry, and they were grayed out. No line of sight, which was good because it meant that wherever Murtry was, he couldn’t see her, and bad because she didn’t know where he was. It was a low-level diagnostic. The kind that built ad hoc routing networks on the fly. She’d set it to ask for a renewed route anytime it made a connection and alert her when it did. It wasn’t much, but it would give her a little warning when Murtry was close. When he had line of sight. When he could shoot her the way he had Amos and probably Fayez and they were dead now and she couldn’t feel that. She had to think. How to find Holden. She had to find him. Warn him. Keep Murtry from stopping him. She took a deep breath and looked up. Line of sight was a hard thing to manage on the ground, but the space above her was vast and open. If she could find a vantage point, the hand terminal would point Murtry out to her. And if she couldn’t find her friend, at least she could locate her enemy. Basic problem solving. If you don’t have the data you need, play with the data you have, see if something comes out of it. She’d made it through three semesters of combinatorics that way. All right.

Her body was still shaking. Still weak. Her mind felt fuzzy. Adrenaline and hunger and Fayez was probably dead and she couldn’t feel that. She stuffed the hand terminal in her pocket and looked around for a way up. Nothing here was built for a human form. There weren’t any ladders or walkways, no catwalks with convenient handrails. It was like a vast body. Or a vast body that had turned halfway into a machine. She ran quietly, making as little noise as she could with every footfall. An upwelling of conduits rose from the floor to her right, and she clambered up them, wedging her feet and fists into the narrow spaces between the tubes and hauling up and up and up. There were so many other people who would have done better. Fayez was stronger than she was. Sudyam used to climb mountains back on Earth. Elvi didn’t particularly enjoy climbing trees, much less strange alien webworks. She went up, not looking back, not looking down.