Cibola Burn

The structure was vast, and the soft glow that permeated everything made the space seem strange. Dreamlike. She perched in the crevice where two conduits or arteries met, wedging her leg into the gap. She pulled out her hand terminal. Twice on her way up, the ad hoc network alert had sounded and she hadn’t noticed. Twice, Murtry had been in line of sight. The thought made her throat feel tight. She looked at the reply times. Two thousandths of a second? That couldn’t be right. Radio waves moved at light speed, but they were in air, so that made it… what? Three times ten to the eighth? Something like that. Close enough as to make no difference. That’d put him something like half a million meters away. There had to be some kind of processing lag in the terminals that was swamping…

A new entry popped into the log, and her heart lept to her throat. Connection refused. She blinked at it. Why would Murtry’s terminal accept connections when she was climbing up and reject them when she’d paused? That didn’t make sense. Another line. Connection refused. Something like hope bloomed in her. It wasn’t Murtry. It was someone else. Someone who wasn’t in the charmed circle of RCE trusted networks.

It was Holden.

She craned her neck, as if by just looking she could find him. The structure was too big. She thought of calling out, but there was no reason to think he’d hear. And even if he did, Murtry would be closer.

Murtry. There was a thought. She opened the hand terminal’s routing interface again. It had been years since she’d played with network protocols. Most of what she did was about signaling proteins in cells and protein regulation. Her leg was starting to tingle where her weight pressed it into the tube. There was a way to get a copy of Murtry’s logs too. She just had to remember how to set up distributed logging.

Something in the structure clanged, the echoes reverberating through the space like a scream in a cathedral. She wondered if Murtry looked up whether he would see the light of her screen, up here in her crow’s nest. She waited. Waited. The alert sounded. Murtry connected. She closed her eyes. Okay, she thought. Go away now. Just go away.

The alert dropped, and she pulled up the logs, and Murtry’s records were there now too, and one – one – line of them was a refused connection. It was like being in maths again. Posit a frightened exobiologist four meters off the ground and a violent, predatory security man in a direct line from her at points a, b, and c. At point d, the predator had a refused connection with a lag time just under two-tenths of a second because the goddam fucking processing lag was swamping the signal time and making the whole thing…

Only it would be the same lag, wouldn’t it? So if she could pull out the difference…

The world fell away. Her fingers tapped the screen, shifting to the calculation displays, pulling numbers from the logs, setting up the diagrams. The fear and sorrow and raw, animal terror were all still there, but they were just messages and she could ignore them. Her leg started to hurt and then go numb. She shifted a few centimeters until it hurt again.

Holden had been a hundred and ten meters from her. He’d been a hundred and fifty meters from Murtry. She could estimate where Murtry had been based on the contacts he’d made with her. It was like basic trigonometry where a wrong answer meant death. Holden was – approximately, roughly, assuming she hadn’t biffed the equations and that the hand terminal’s processing lags were identical – in the complex junctions at the center right of the structure where the conduits joined together into something like a massive black wing. Elvi turned off her hand terminal and started back down. When she reached a surface she could walk on, her leg screamed. Pins and needles. She ignored it and started limping as quickly as she could toward the landmark she’d found. She didn’t care about Murtry now. She had something to focus on.

It was less like making her way through an industrial complex than tramping through a vast forest without a machete. She squeezed through the cracks between dark structures as much growth as machine, ducked and climbed and once got down on her belly and crawled. She was sure she was making progress, sure that she would get there and find out at least whether her figures had been right, when she stepped out across a flat ledge and almost fell into a chasm.

A rumbling came from below, maybe a hundred meters deep. A tiny band of lights shifted down there, swirling one way and then the other and then moving on. It cut through the floor of the structure to both sides, all the way to the distant walls. A network of conduits branched above it, and wide, tendonlike connections bridged it far below. She started off along the rim, stepping over white, lumpy growths that seemed to sprout up out of the depths. It only took a few minutes to find a structure that crossed it, but it wasn’t a bridge.