Cibola Burn

“Oh,” Elvi said, her heart suddenly picking up its pace. The XO is Holden’s lover and Holden has a lover and Holden may not have a lover anymore and Jesus, what am I doing here all collided somewhere in her neocortex. Elvi found she was very unsure what to do with her hands. She tried putting them in her pockets, but that felt wrong so she took them out again.

“I’d been thinking?” she said, her voice rising at the end of the word even though it wasn’t a question. “About the thing. In the desert. And now with the moon?”

“Which moon?”

“The one that’s melting down, Cap,” Amos said.

“Right, that one. I’m sorry. I’ve got a lot of things going on right now. If it’s not something I can actually do something about, it’s not sinking in the way it probably ought to,” Holden said. And then, “I’m not supposed to do anything about the moon thing, am I?”

“We can let the scientists tell us if we’re supposed to freak out,” Amos said. “It’s all right.”

“I’ve been thinking about hibernation failure rates, and that maybe what we were seeing was analogous.”

Holden lifted his hands. “I couldn’t tell you.”

“It’s just that hibernation is a really very risky strategy? We only see it when conditions are so bad that the usual kinds of survival strategy would fail. Bears, for instance? They’re top predators. The food web in wintertime couldn’t sustain them. Or spadefoot toads in the deserts? In the dry periods, their eggs would just desiccate, so the adults go dormant until there’s rain, and then they come back awake and go out to the puddles and mate furiously, just this mad kind of puddle orgy and… um, anyway, and then they, they lay their eggs in the water before they can dry out again.”

“Ok-ay,” Holden said.

“My point is,” Elvi said, “not all of them wake up. They don’t have to. As long as enough of the organisms reactivate when the time comes, enough that the population survives, even if individuals don’t. It’s never a hundred percent. And shutting down and coming back up is a complicated, dangerous process.”

Holden took a deep breath and ran his hands through his hair. He had thick, dark hair. It looked like he hadn’t washed it in a while. Amos lost his game, scooped up the cards, and started shuffling them with slow, deliberate movements.

“So,” Holden said, “you think that these… things we’re seeing are artifacts or organisms or something trying to wake up?”

“And failing. At least sometimes,” she said. “I mean, the moon melted. And that thing in the desert was clearly broken. Or anyway, that’s what it was looking like to me.”

“Me too,” Holden said. “But just because it was moving, we kind of knew things were waking up.”

“No, that’s not the point,” Elvi said. “There are always a small percentage of organisms that don’t wake up, or wake up wrong. These things? If that’s the model, they’re the ones waking up wrong.”

“Following you so far,” Holden said.

“Failure rates are usually low. So why aren’t we seeing a bunch of things waking up right?”

Holden went over to the table and sat on its edge. He looked frightened. Vulnerable. It was strange seeing a man who’d done so much, who’d made himself known across all civilization by his words and deeds, look so fragile.

“So you think there are more of these things – maybe a lot more – that are activating, and we’re just not seeing it?”

“It would fit the model,” she murmured.

“All right,” he said. And a moment later, “This isn’t making my day better.”

Chapter Twenty-Five: Basia

Basia sat alone on the operations deck of the Rocinante. He was belted into a crash couch next to what he’d been told was the comm station. The controls were quiet, waiting for someone to request a connection, occasionally flashing a system status message across its screen. The messages were incomprehensible mixtures of acronyms, system names, and numbers. The text was in a gentle green font that made Basia think they weren’t particularly urgent.

Alex was in the cockpit, the hatch closed. That didn’t mean anything. The hatches closed automatically to seal each deck from the others in case of atmosphere loss. It was a safety measure, nothing more.

It still felt like being locked out.

The panel startled him with a burst of static followed by a voice. The volume was just loud enough that Basia could tell it was a conversation between two men without understanding any of the words. A red RECORDING status blinked in one corner of the screen. The Rocinante, monitoring and recording all of the radio transmissions around Ilus. Maybe Holden was doing that on purpose to have a record of his mission when he returned to Earth. Or maybe warships did it by default. It wasn’t something that a welder had to worry about. Or a miner. Or whatever he’d been with Coop and Cate.

Basia was looking for a way to turn up the volume and listen in when Alex’s voice blared from the panel. “Got a call comin’ in.”