Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

“Oh,” Elvi said. “Well. I don’t know. I mean, I’ve never seen your academic work —”

“Seriously?” Fayez said with a snort. “Elvi, it’s a letter of recommendation. You’re not under oath for it. Cut the kid a break.”

“Well, I just thought it would be better if I could actually say something I know about.”

“When I went to lower university, I wrote my own letters of recommendation. Two of them came from people I made up. No one checks.”

Elvi’s jaw dropped a centimeter. “Really?”

“You are an amazing woman, Elvi, but I don’t know how you survive in the wild.” Fayez turned to Felcia. “If she won’t, I will. You’ll have it by morning, okay?”

“I don’t know how I can repay you,” Felcia said, but she already looked calmer.

Fayez waved the comment away. “Your undying gratitude is thanks enough. What’s your field of study going to be?”

For the next hour, Felcia talked about her mother’s medical career, and her dead brother’s immune disorder, and intracellular signaling regulation. Elvi began to realize that she’d unconsciously thought of the girl as younger than she really was. She had the long, slightly gangly build and comparatively large head of a Belter, and somewhere in Elvi’s mind, she’d mistaken it for youth. Felcia would have fit right in at the commons of lower university. The light shifted from beige to deep brown to a burnt umber, and then darkness. The wind calmed. When Elvi opened her door, two centimeters of fine dust covered the walkway and the stars glimmered in the sky. The air smelled like fresh-turned earth. Some sort of actinomycete analog, Elvi thought. Maybe one that was actually carried by the wind. Or maybe something else. Something stranger.

Felcia headed back for the town, Fayez for his own hut. As far as she could tell, Fayez was one of maybe two or three other people on the science team who was still sleeping alone. Sudyam and Tolerson were the latest pairing. Laberge and Maravalis had just broken off the relationship they’d started on the journey out, and each of them was already involved with someone else.

Sex wasn’t a strange thing among the scientific teams. That it was unprofessional behavior was set in balance against the fact that – especially on a years-long field expedition like this – the pool of potential mates was both very restricted and generally fairly high-value. People were people. If she felt any jealousy at all, it wasn’t for any of the particular relationships, but for intimacy itself. It would be nice to have someone to walk with in the darkness after the storm. Someone to wake up with in the morning. She wondered what the sexual politics were among the families of First Landing. If RCE had thought to send a social science team, it might have made a good paper.

Ahead of her and to the right, the alien ruins stood against the horizon, hardly more than a deeper darkness. Only a light was moving in them. It was small and faint. Less than a star, and only visible at all because it was moving. Someone was in the ruins again. Contaminating the site. She knew intellectually that she was letting herself be angry about it because it was better than feeling lonesome or guilty, but that didn’t keep the rage from feeling real. She turned back to her hut, her lips pressed together. She scooped up a flashlight, checked the battery charge, and stalked out toward the ruins, the thin blue circle of light bobbing ahead of her and illuminating her way. The fine dust shifted under her feet like snow, and her thighs ached from the speed of her hike.

As she neared the ruins, she thought she saw a dim light heading the other way. Back toward the town. But when she called after it, no one answered. She stood in the darkness for almost a minute feeling first unsure of herself, then embarrassed, then angry at feeling embarrassed.

A path led into the ruins that even the recent dustfall couldn’t conceal. Tracks as wide as a wagon where wheels had gone over the land often enough to leave ruts. Elvi shook her head and followed the path up, twisting around a high shoulder of land and into the huge alien structures.

Inside, the beam of her flashlight caught the walls and surfaces, sending off glittering reflections that seemed to shift whether she did or not. Where there was shelter from the wind, there were footprints. Lots of them. It wasn’t just someone from town exploring on their own. They were treating the ruins like some sort of clubhouse. Any samples the science team took from the soil here would already be compromised. The microorganisms, a mixture of known and unknown and whatever emerged when the two encountered each other in a totally uncontrolled environment. That the same was true of the whole township seemed insignificant. These were alien structures. They’d been built by a vast, vanished civilization about which humanity still knew almost nothing. It wasn’t some kind of treehouse.

“Hello?” she shouted. “Is anyone in here?”

Nothing answered her. Not even the wind. Shaking her head, she stalked deeper into the shadows. If anyone was here, she’d give them the talk she’d meant to give before. She would make them understand the issues, even if it took hectoring them all night.

The walls around her rose at strange and unsettling angles from the ground, organic and also not, like a machine that was built to pass for the product of nature. Arches rose, looking out over the bare, dark land. The deeper Elvi went, the more there seemed to be, until she had the illusion that the ruins were larger inside than out.

She was about to give up and turn back home when she saw something square. Simply being rectilinear made it stand out. The boxes were plastic and ceramic, functional gray where they weren’t the bright red and yellow of warning labels. DANGER HIGH EXPLOSIVE. DO NOT STORE NEAR HEAT OR CLASS THREE RADIATION SOURCES.

“Oh no,” Elvi said to herself. “Oh hell no.”

~

“Doctor Okoye,” Reeve said. “I’m hearing you tell me that you found explosives hidden outside of the town.”

“Yes,” Elvi said. “Of course that’s what you’re hearing me say.”

“And that there is evidence of several people having been to this clandestine site.”

They were sitting in Reeve’s office now. The light from his lamp shone warm and soft, and his rough pants and untucked shirt suggested she’d rousted him out of bed. It felt like the middle of the night, though the extended rotational period meant the darkness would be stretching on for almost another ten hours.

“Yes,” she said.

“All right,” Reeve said. “It’s all right. This is a good thing. I need you to tell me how to find this place.”