Cibola Burn

“Just saying there are more bad guys and they’re getting a little closer than I like.”

“All right. I have it,” Elvi said. “It’s right here.”

“Good. Nice work. Now I need you to pick that up and walk it into the dead spot.”

The blue thing was the shape of a huge elongated almond. The surface was slick and soft. She put her hands around it, strained, grunted, and slid forward, panting. “You have got to be kidding me,” she said.

“It may be a little heavy,” Miller said.

“It’s like ninety kilos.”

“And I’m really sorry about that, but we need to get it into that dead spot now. Try sliding your arms under it and lifting with your back and legs. Just like it was a baby.”

“Baby made from fucking tungsten,” Elvi muttered.

“You’re exaggerating,” he said as she shoved her hands under the thing.

“I can’t throw this,” she said. “I have to walk it in.”

“All right.”

“Is that thing going to kill me if I go into it?”

A new sound rose behind the chittering. A deep booming sound like a massive drum. She didn’t want to think of what might be making it.

“If I say yes, does that mean you won’t do it?”

Elvi braced herself, straining her back. The blue thing shifted up into her lap. She bent her head, trying to catch her breath.

“No,” she said, surprised at the answer even as she spoke it. “I’ll still do it.”

“Maybe, then. I don’t know.”

Elvi rocked back, keeping the thing – Miller – on her thighs and still getting her feet under her. She felt it start to slide to her left. If she dropped it now, she didn’t think she’d be able to get it up again. The booming came closer. Elvi pushed with her legs. Her knees ached. Her back was a single, vast sheet of burning. She pressed the blue thing to her chest, crying out from the pain.

“You’re doing great, kid. You’re doing great. You can do this. Just a little more. But do it now.”

She didn’t step forward. Just slid one foot a little ahead, shifted her weight, pulled the other foot in. The floor was slick as ice. Not quite frictionless, but close. The booming came again, near enough that she felt the room vibrate with it. She set her gaze on the blackness of the dead spot and moved forward. Another step. Another. Another. She was close now. Her back was on fire. Her arms were numb. Her fists something that belonged to someone else, and only happened to be connected to her.

A swarm of silver and blue gushed in the doorway, flowing in at her like a cloud of flies. Elvi pushed, slipped, fell forward —

The closest analogy, the one her brain reached for and rejected and reached for again, was splashing into a lake. It was cold, but not cold. There was a smell, rich and loamy. The smell of growth and decay. She was aware of her body, the skin, the sinew, the curl of her gut. She was aware of the nerves that were firing in her brain as she became aware of the nerves firing in her brain. She unmade herself and watched herself being unmade. All the bacteria on her skin and in her blood, the virii in her tissues. The woman who had been Elvi Okoye became a landscape. A world. She fell farther in.

Cells became molecules – countless and complex and varied. The demarcation of one thing and another failed. There was only a community of molecules, shifting in a vast dance. And then the atoms that made the molecules gave up their space, and she was a breath. A mist. A tiny play of fields and interactions in a vacuum as perfect as space. She was a vibration in nothingness.

She rolled onto her side. Something hurt. Everything hurt, and the pain was interesting. A subject of curiosity more than distress. She was breathing. She could feel the air moving through her throat and into the complex network of soft caverns behind her ribs. It was a strange and beautiful sensation. She stayed with it until she began to realize that time existed. That moments were passing. That meant basal ganglia and cerebellum and cerebral cortex were all actually starting to work. She felt distantly surprised about that. She opened her eyes to nothing.

She was holding something pressed to her like it was precious. The blue thing. Miller. Only it wasn’t blue anymore. It was the closed-eyes blackness of everything else. She let it go and sat up. The world was silent. No booming. No chittering. Her breath. The hush of her blood. After a few moments, she drew her hand terminal out of her pocket and turned up the screen brightness, using it like a lamp.

All around her, the artifacts of New Terra lay dead. Knife-sharp legs were still. Vast, inhuman claws that could have been carved from stone. A spray of silver flecks on the ground showed where the cloud of tiny mechanisms had fallen, a million tiny bodies turned off at once. The light was too dim for colors. Everything was only gray.