Cibola Burn / Пожар Сиболы (by James S. A. Corey, 2015) - аудиокнига на английском

Prologue: Bobbie Draper A thousand worlds, Bobbie thought as the tube doors closed. And not just a thousand worlds. A thousand systems. Suns. Gas giants. Asteroid belts. Everything that humanity had spread to, a thousand times over. The screen above the seats across from her showed a newsfeed, but the speakers were broken, the man’s voice too fuzzed to make out the words. The graphic that zoomed in and out beside him was enough for her to follow. New data had come in from the probes that had gone through the gates. Here was another image of an unfamiliar sun, circles to mark the orbits of new planets. All of them empty. Whatever had built the protomolecule and fired it toward Earth back in the depths of time wasn’t answering calls anymore. The bridge builder had opened the way, and no great gods had come streaming through. It was astounding, Bobbie thought, how quickly humanity could go from What unimaginable intelligence fashioned these soul-wrenching wonders? to Well, since they’re not here, can I have their stuff? “’Scuse me,” a man’s phlegmy voice said. “You wouldn’t have a little spare change for a veteran, would you?” She looked away from the screens. The man was thin, gray-faced. His body had the hallmarks of a childhood in low g: long body, large head. He licked his lips and leaned forward. “Veteran, are you?” she said. “Where’d you serve?” “Ganymede,” the man said, nodding and looking off with an attempt at nobility. “I was there when it all came down. When I got back here, government dropped me on my ass. I’m just trying to save up enough to book passage to Ceres. I’ve got family there.” Bobbie felt a bubble of rage in her breast, but she tried to keep her voice and expression calm. “You try veteran’s outreach? Maybe they could help you.” “I just need something to eat,” he said, his voice turning nasty. Bobbie looked up and down the car. Usually there would be a few people in the cars at this time. The neighborhoods under the Aurorae Sinus were all connected by evacuated tube. Part of the great Martian terraforming project that had begun before Bobbie was born and would go on long after she was dead. Just now, there was no one. She considered what she would look like to the beggar. She was a big woman, tall as well as broad, but she was sitting down, and the sweater she’d chosen was a little baggy. He might have been under the misapprehension that her bulk was fat. It wasn’t. “What company did you serve with?” she asked. He blinked. She knew she was supposed to be a little scared of him, and he was uneasy because she wasn’t. “Company?” “What company did you serve with?” He licked his lips again. “I don’t want to —” “Because it’s a funny thing,” she said. “I could have sworn I knew pretty much everyone who was on Ganymede when the fighting started. You know, you go through something like that, and you remember. Because you see a lot of your friends die. What was your rank? I was gunnery sergeant.” The gray face had gone closed and white. The man’s mouth pinched. He pushed his hands deeper into his pockets and mumbled something. “And now?” Bobbie went on, “I work thirty hours a week with veteran’s outreach. And I’m just fucking sure we could give a fine upstanding veteran like you a break.” He turned, and her hand went out to his elbow faster than he could pull away. His face twisted with fear and pain. She drew him close. When she spoke, her voice was careful. Each word clear and sharp. “Find. Another. Story.” “Yes, ma’am,” the beggar said. “I will. I’ll do that.” The car shifted, decelerating into the first Breach Candy station. She let him go and stood up. His eyes went a little wider when she did. Her genetic line went back to Samoa, and she sometimes had that effect on people who weren’t expecting her. Sometimes she felt a little bad about it. Not now. Her brother lived in a nice middle-class hole in Breach Candy, not far from the lower university. She’d lived with him for a time after she got back home to Mars, and she was still putting the pieces of her life back together. It was a longer process than she’d expected. And part of the aftermath was that she felt like she owed her brother something. Family dinner nights was part of that. The halls of Breach Candy were sparse. The advertisements on the walls flickered as she came near, face recognition tracking her and offering up the products and services they thought she might want. Dating services, gym memberships, take-out shwarma, the new Mbeki Soon film, psychological counseling. Bobbie tried not to take it personally. Still, she wished there were more people around, a few more faces to add variety to the mix. To let her tell herself the ads were probably meant for someone walking nearby. Not for her. But Breach Candy wasn’t as full as it used to be. There were fewer people in the tube stations and hallways, fewer people coming to the veteran’s outreach program. She heard that enrollment at the upper university was down six percent. Humanity hadn’t managed a single viable colony on the new worlds yet, but the probe data was enough. Humanity had its new frontier, and the cities of Mars were feeling the competition. As soon as she stepped in the door, the rich scent of her sister-in-law’s gumbo thickening the air and making her mouth water, she heard her brother and nephew, voices raised. It knotted her gut, but they were family. She loved them. She owed them. Even if they made the idea of take-out shwarma seem awfully tempting. “— not what I’m saying,” her nephew said. He was in upper university now, but when the family started fighting, she could still hear the six-year-old in his voice. Her brother boomed in reply. Bobbie recognized the percussive tapping of his fingertips against the tabletop as he made his points. Drumming as a rhetorical device. Their father did the same thing. “Mars is not optional.” Tap. “It is not secondary.” Tap. “These gates and whatever’s on the other side of them isn’t our home. The terraforming effort —” “I’m not arguing against the terraforming,” her nephew said as she walked into the room. Her sister-in-law nodded to her from the kitchen wordlessly. Bobbie nodded back. The dining room looked down into a living space where a muted newsfeed was showing long-distance images of unfamiliar planets with a beautiful black man in wire-rimmed glasses speaking earnestly between them. “All I’m saying is that we’re going to have a lot of new data. Data. That’s all I’m saying.” The two of them were hunched over the table like there was an invisible chessboard between them. A game of concentration and intellect that wrapped them both up until they couldn’t see the world around them. In a lot of ways, that was true. She took her chair without either of them acknowledging she’d arrived. “Mars,” her brother said, “is the most studied planet there is. It doesn’t matter how many new datasets you get that aren’t about Mars. They aren’t about Mars! It’s like saying that seeing pictures of a thousand other tables will tell you about the one you’re already sitting at.” “Knowledge is good,” her nephew said. “You’re the one who always told me that. I don’t know why you’re getting so bent about it now.” “How are things for you, Bobbie?” her sister-in-law said sharply, carrying a bowl to the table. Rice and peppers to use as a bed for the gumbo and a reminder to the others that there was a guest. The two men scowled at the interruption. “Good,” Bobbie said. “The contract with the shipyards came through. It should help us place a lot of vets in new jobs.” “Because they’re building exploration ships and transports,” her nephew said. “David.” “Sorry, Mom. But they are,” David replied, not backing down. Bobbie scooped the rice into her bowl. “All the ships that are easy to retrofit, they’re retrofitting, and then they’re making more so that people can go to all the new systems.” Her brother took the rice and the serving spoon, chuckling under his breath to make it clear how little he respected his son’s opinion. “The first real survey team is just getting to the first of these places —” “There are already people living on New Terra, Dad! There were a bunch of refugees from Ganymede —” He broke off, shooting a guilty glance at Bobbie. Ganymede wasn’t something they talked about over dinner. “The survey team hasn’t landed yet,” her brother said. “It’s going to be years before we have anything like real colonies out there.” “It’s going to be generations before anyone walks on the surface here! We don’t have a fucking magnetosphere!” “Language, David!” Her sister-in-law returned. The gumbo was black and fragrant with a sheen of oil across the top. The smell of it made Bobbie’s mouth water. She put it on the slate trivet and handed the serving spoon to Bobbie. “And how’s your new apartment?” she asked. “It’s nice,” Bobbie said. “Inexpensive.” “I wish you weren’t living in Innis Shallow,” her brother said. “It’s a terrible neighborhood.” “No one’s going to bother Aunt Bobbie,” her nephew said. “She’d rip their heads off.” Bobbie grinned. “Naw, I just look at them mean, and they —” From the living room, there was a sudden glow of red light. The newsfeed had changed. Bright red banners showed at the top and bottom, and on the screen, a jowly Earth woman looked soberly into the camera. The image behind her was of fire and then a stock image of an old colony ship. The words, black against the white of the flames, read TRAGEDY ON NEW TERRA. “What happened?” Bobbie said. “What just happened?” Chapter One: Basia Basia Merton had been a gentle man, once. He hadn’t been the sort of man who made bombs out of old metal lubricant drums and mining explosives. He rolled another one out of the little workshop behind his house and toward one of First Landing’s electric carts. The little stretch of buildings spread to the north and south, and then ended, the darkness of the plain stretching to the horizon. The flashlight hanging from his belt bounced as he walked, casting strange moving shadows across the dusty ground. Small alien animals hooted at him from outside the circle of light. Nights on Ilus – he wouldn’t call it New Terra – were very dark. The planet had thirteen tiny, low-albedo moons spaced so consistently in the same orbit that everyone assumed they were alien artifacts. Wherever they’d come from, they were more like captured asteroids than real moons to someone who grew up on the planet-sized satellites of Jupiter. And they did nothing to catch and reflect the light of Ilus’ sun once it set. The local nighttime wildlife was mostly small birds and lizards. Or what Ilus’ new human inhabitants thought of as birds and lizards. They shared only the most superficial external traits and a primarily carbon base with their terrestrial namesakes. Basia grunted with effort as he lifted the barrel onto the back of the cart, and a second later an answering grunt came from a few meters away. A mimic lizard, curiosity drawing it right up to the edge of the light, its small eyes glittering. It grunted again, its wide, leathery, bullfrog-shaped head bobbing, and the air sac below its neck inflating and deflating with the sound. It waited for a moment, staring at him, and when he didn’t respond, it crawled off into the dark. Basia pulled elastic straps out of a toolbox and began securing the barrels to the bed of the cart. The explosive wouldn’t go off just from falling on the ground. Or that was what Coop said, anyhow. Basia didn’t feel like testing it. “Baz,” Lucia said. He flushed with embarrassment like a small boy caught stealing candy. Lucia knew what he was doing. He’d never been able to lie to her. But he’d hoped she would stay inside while he worked. Just her presence made him wonder if he was doing the right thing. If it was right, why did it make him so ashamed to have Lucia see him? “Baz,” she said again. Not insisting. Her voice sad, not angry. “Lucy,” he said, turning around. She stood at the edge of his light, a white robe clutched around her thin frame against the chill night air. Her face was a dark blur. “Felcia’s crying,” she said, her tone not making it an accusation. “She’s afraid for you. Come talk to your daughter.” Basia turned away and pulled the strap tight over the barrels, hiding his face from her. “I can’t. They’re coming,” he said. “Who? Who’s coming?” “You know what I mean. They’re going to take everything we made here if we don’t make a stand. We need time. This is how you get time. Without the landing pad, they’ve got to use the small shuttles. So we take away the landing pad. Make them rebuild it. No one’s going to get hurt.” “If it gets bad,” she said, “we can leave.” “No,” Basia said, surprised to hear the violence in his voice. He turned and took a few steps, putting her face in the light. She was weeping. “No more leaving. We left Ganymede. Left Katoa and ran away and my family lived on a ship for a year while no one would give us a place to land. We’re not running again. Not ever running again. They took all the children from me they get to take.” “I miss Katoa too,” Lucia said. “But these people didn’t kill him. It was a war.” “It was a business decision. They made a business decision, and then they made a war, and they took my son away.” And I let them, he didn’t say. I took you and Felcia and Jacek, and I left Katoa behind because I thought he was dead. And he wasn’t. The words were too painful to speak, but Lucia heard them anyway. “It wasn’t your fault.” Yes, it was floated at the back of his mouth, but he swallowed. “These people don’t have any right to Ilus,” he said, struggling to make his voice sound reasonable. “We were here first. We staked claim. We’ll get the first load of lithium out, get the money in, then we can hire lawyers back home to make a real case. If the corporations already have roots here when that happens, it won’t matter. We just need time.” “If you do this,” Lucia said, “they’ll send you to jail. Don’t do that to us. Don’t do that to your family.” “I’m doing this for my family,” he said softly. It was worse than yelling. He hopped up behind the controls and stomped on the accelerator. The cart lurched off with a whine. He didn’t look back, couldn’t look back and see Lucy. “For my family,” he said again. He drove away from his house and the ramshackle town that they’d started out calling First Landing back when they’d picked the site off the Barbapiccola’s sensor maps. No one had bothered to rename it when it had moved from being an idea to being a place. He drove toward the center of town, two rows of prefab buildings, until he hit the wide stretch of flattened dirt that served as the main road and turned toward the original landing site. The refugees who’d colonized Ilus had come down from their ship in small shuttles, so the only landing pad they’d needed was a flat stretch of ground. But the Royal Charter Energy people, the corporate people, who had a UN charter giving the world to them, would be coming down with heavy equipment. Heavy lift shuttles needed an actual landing pad. It had been built in the same open fields that the colony had used as their landing site. That felt obscene to Basia. Invasive. The first landing site had significance. He’d imagined it someday being a park, with a monument at the center commemorating their arrival on this new world. Instead, RCE had built a giant and gleaming metal monstrosity right over the top of their site. Worse, they’d hired the colonists to build it, and enough of them had thought it was a good idea that they’d actually done it. It felt like being erased from history. Scotty and Coop were waiting for him at the new landing pad when he arrived. Scotty was sitting on the edge of the metal platform, legs dangling over the side, smoking a pipe and spitting on the ground below his feet. A small electric lamp that sat beside him colored him with an eerie green light. Coop stood a little way off, looking up at the sky with bared teeth. Coop was an old-school Belter, and the agoraphobia treatments had been harder for him than others. The thin-faced man kept staring up at the void, fighting to get used to it like a kid pulling off scabs. Basia pulled the cart up to the edge of the pad and hopped out to undo the straps holding the barrel bombs down. “Give me a hand?” he said. Ilus was a large planet, slightly over one gravity. Even after six months of pharma to build his muscles and bones everything still felt too heavy. The thought of lifting the barrels back to the ground made the muscles in his shoulders twitch in anticipated exhaustion. Scotty slid off the landing pad and dropped a meter and a half to the ground. He pushed his oily black hair out of his eyes and took another long puff on his pipe. Basia caught the pungent, skunky smell of Scotty’s bathtub-grown cannabis mixed with freeze-dried tobacco leaves. Coop looked over, his eyes fighting for focus for a moment, and then the thin, cruel smile. The plan had been Coop’s from the start. “Mmm,” Coop said. “Pretty.” “Don’t get attached,” Basia said. “They won’t be around long.” Coop made a booming sound and grinned. Together they pulled the four heavy barrels off the cart and stood them in a row next to the pad. By the last one, they were all panting with effort. Basia leaned against the cart for a moment in silence while Scotty smoked off the last of his pipe and Coop set the blasting caps on the barrels. The detonators sat in the back of the cart like sleeping rattlesnakes, the red LEDs dormant for now. In the darkness, the township sparkled. The houses they’d all built for themselves and one another glittered like stars brought down from the sky. Beyond them, there were the ruins. A long, low alien structure with two massive towers rising up above the landscape like a termite hill writ large. All of it was run through with passageways and chambers that no human had designed. In daylight, the ruins shone with the eerie colors of mother-of-pearl. In the night, they were only a deeper darkness. The mining pits were off past them, invisible as all but the dimmest glow of the work lights on the belly of the clouds. Truth was Basia didn’t like the mines. The ruins were strange relics of the empty planet’s past, and like anything that was uncanny without posing a threat, they faded from his awareness after the first few months. The mines carried history and expectations. He’d spent half a lifetime in tunnels of ice, and tunnels that ran through alien soil smelled wrong. Coop made a sharp noise and shook his hand, cursing. Nothing blew up, so it couldn’t be that bad. “You think they’ll pay us to rebuild it?” Scotty asked. Basia cursed and spat on the ground. “We wouldn’t have to do this if it wasn’t for people wanting to suck on RCE’s tit,” he said as he rolled the last barrel into place. “They can’t land without this. All we had to do was not build it.” Scotty laughed out a cloud of smoke. “They were coming anyway. Might as well take their money. That’s what people said.” “People are idiots,” Basia said. Scotty nodded, then smacked a mimic lizard off the passenger seat of the cart with one hand and sat down. He put his feet up on the dash and took another long puff on his pipe. “We gonna have to get gone, if we blow this. That blasting powder makes serious boom.” “Hey, mate,” Coop shouted. “We’re good. Let’s make the place, ah?” Scotty stood and started walking toward the pad. Basia stopped him, plucked the lit pipe from between his lips, and put it on the hood of the cart. “Explosives,” Basia said. “They explode.” Scotty shrugged, but he also looked chagrined. Coop was already easing the first barrel down onto its side when they reached him. “It’s buena work this. Solid.” “Thank you,” Basia said. Coop lay down, back against the ground. Basia lay beside him. Scotty rolled the first bomb gently between them. Basia climbed under the pad, pulling himself through the tangle of crisscrossed I-beams to each of the four barrels, turning on the remote detonators and syncing them. He heard a growing electric whine and felt a moment of irritation at Scotty for driving off with the cart before he realized the sound was of a cart arriving, not leaving. “Hey,” Peter’s familiar voice yelled. “Que la moog bastard doing here?” Coop muttered, wiping his hand across his forehead. “You want me to go find out?” Scotty asked. “Basia,” Coop said. “Go see what Peter needs. Scotty hasn’t got his back dirty yet.” Basia shifted himself out from under the landing and made room for Scotty and the last of the four bombs. Peter’s cart was parked beside his own, and Peter stood between them, shifting from one foot to the other like he needed to piss. Basia’s back and arms ached. He wanted this all over and to be back home with Lucia and Felcia and Jacek. “What?” Basia said. “They’re coming,” Pete said, whispering as if there were anyone who could hear them. “Who’s coming?” “Everyone. The provisional governor. The corporate security team. Science and tech staff. Everybody. This is serious. They’re landing a whole new government for us.” Basia shrugged. “Old news. They been burning eighteen months. That’s why we’re out here.” “No,” Pete said, prancing nervously and looking up at the stars. “They’re coming right now. Edward Israel did a braking burn half an hour ago. Got into high orbit.” The copper taste of fear flooded Basia’s mouth. He looked up at the darkness. A billion unfamiliar stars, his same Milky Way galaxy, everyone figured, just seen from a different angle. His eyes shifted frantically, and then he caught it. The movement was subtle as the minute hand on an analog clock, but he saw it. The drop ship was dropping. The heavy shuttle was coming for the landing pad. “I was going to get on the radio, but Coop said they monitor radio spectrum and —” Pete said, but by then Basia was already running back to the landing pad. Scotty and Coop were just pulling themselves out. Coop clapped clouds of dust off his pants and grinned. “We got a problem,” Basia said. “Ship’s already dropped. Looks like they’re in atmosphere already.” Coop looked up. The brightness from his flashlight threw shadows across his cheeks and into his eyes. “Huh,” he said. “I thought you were on this, man. I thought you were paying attention to where they were.” Coop shrugged, neither agreeing nor denying. “We’ve got to get the bombs back out,” Basia said. Scotty started to kneel, but Coop put a restraining hand on his shoulder. “Why?” he asked. “They try to land now, they could set it all off,” Basia said. Coop’s smile was gentle. “Could,” he said. “And what if?” Basia balled his fists. “They’re coming down now.” “See that,” Coop said. “Doesn’t inspire a great sense of obligation. And however you cut it, there ain’t time to pull them.” “Can take off the primers and caps,” Basia said, hunkering down. He played his flashlight over the pad’s superstructure. “Maybe could, maybe couldn’t,” Coop said. “Question’s should, and it’s a limp little question.” “Coop?” Scotty said, his voice thin and uncertain. Coop ignored him. “Opportunity, looks like to me,” Coop said. “There’s people on that thing,” Basia said, crawling under the pad. The nearest bomb’s electronics were flat against the dirt. He put his aching shoulder against it and pushed. “Isn’t time, mate,” Coop called. “Might be if you got your ass in here,” Basia shouted. The blasting cap clung to the barrel’s side like a tick. Basia tried to dig his fingers into the sealant goo and pry the cap away. “Oh shit,” Scotty said with something too much like awe in his voice. “Baz, oh shit!” The cap came loose. Basia pushed it in his pocket and started crawling toward the second bomb. “No time,” Coop shouted. “Best we get clear, try and blow it while they can still pull up.” In the distance, he heard one of the carts taking off. Pete, going for distance. And under that, another sound. The bass roar of braking engines. He looked at the three remaining bombs in despair and rolled out from under the pad. The shuttle was massive in the black sky, so close he could make out the individual thrusters. He wasn’t going to make it. “Run!” he shouted. He and Scotty and Coop sprinted back toward the cart. The roar of the shuttle rose, grew deafening. Basia reached the cart and scooped up the detonator. If he could blow it early, the shuttle could pull out, get away. “Don’t!” Coop shouted. “We’re too close!” Basia slammed his palm on the button. The ground rose up, hitting him hard, the rough dirt and rocks tearing at his hands and cheek as he came to a stop, but the pain was a distant thing. Some part of him knew he might be hurt very badly, might be in shock, but that seemed distant and easy to ignore too. What struck him most was how quiet everything was. The world of sound stopped at his skull. He could hear his own breath, his heartbeat. Everything past that had the volume turned down to one. He rolled onto his back and stared up at the star-speckled night sky. The heavy shuttle streaked overhead, half of it trailing fire, the sound of its engines no longer a bass roar but the scream of a wounded animal that he felt in his belly more than heard. The shuttle had been too close, the blast too large, some unlucky debris thrown into just the right path. No way to know. Some part of Basia knew this was very bad, but it was hard to pay much attention to it. The shuttle disappeared from view, shrieking a death wail across the valley that came to him as a faint high piping sound, then sudden silence. Scotty was sitting beside him on the ground, staring off in the direction the ship had gone. Basia let himself lie back down. When the bright spots it had left in his vision faded, the stars returned. Basia watched them twinkle, and wondered which one was Sol. So far away. But with the gates, close too. He’d knocked their shuttle down. They’d have to come now. He’d left them no choice. A sudden spasm of coughing took him. It felt like his lungs were full of fluid, and he coughed it up for several minutes. With the coughing the pain finally came, wracking him from head to foot. With the pain came the fear. Chapter Two: Elvi The shuttle bucked, throwing Elvi Okoye against her restraints hard enough to knock the wind out of her and then pushing her back into the overwhelming embrace of her crash couch. The light flickered, went black, and then came back. She swallowed, her excitement and anticipation turning to animal fear. Beside her, Eric Vanderwert smiled the same half-leering, half-hopeful smile he’d flickered toward her over the past six months. Across from her, Fayez’s eyes had gone wide, his skin gray. “It’s okay,” Elvi said. “It’s going to be okay.” Even as she spoke the words, a part of her cringed away from them. She didn’t know what was going on. There was no earthly way she could know that anything was going to be okay. And still her first impulse was to assert it, to say it as if saying it made it true. A high whine rippled through the flesh of the shuttle, overtones crashing into each other. She felt her weight lurch to the left, the crash couches all shifting on their gimbals at the same time like choreographed dancers. She lost sight of Fayez. A tritone chime announced the pilot, and her voice came over the shuttle’s public-address system. “Ladies and gentlemen, it appears there has been a critical malfunction at the landing pad. We will not be able to complete the landing at this time. We will be returning to orbit and docking with the Edward Israel until such time as we can assess…” She went quiet, but the hiss of an open line still ran through the ship. Elvi imagined the pilot distracted by something. The ship lurched and stuttered, and Elvi grabbed her restraints, hugging them to her. Someone nearby was praying loudly. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the pilot said. “I’m afraid the malfunction at the landing pad has done our shuttle some damage. I don’t think we’re going to make it back upstairs right away. We have a dry lake bed not too far from here. I think we’re going to go take a look at that as a secondary landing site.” Elvi felt a moment’s relief – We still have a landing site – followed at once by a deeper understanding and a deeper fear – She means we’re going to crash. “I’m going to ask everyone to remain in their couches,” the pilot said. “Don’t take off your belts, and please keep your arms and legs inside the couch’s shell where it won’t bang against the side. The gel’s there for a reason. We’ll have you all down in just a couple minutes here.” The forced, artificial calmness terrified Elvi more than shrieking and weeping would have. The pilot was doing everything she could to keep them all from panicking. Would anyone do that if they didn’t think panic was called for? Her weight shifted again, pulling to the left, and then back, and then she grew light as the shuttle descended. The fall seemed to last forever. The rattle and whine of the shuttle rose to a screaming pitch. Elvi closed her eyes. “We’re going to be fine,” she said to herself. “Everything’s okay.” The impact split the shuttle open like lobster tail under a hammer. She had the brief impression of unfamiliar stars in a foreign sky, and her consciousness blinked out like God had turned off a switch. ~ Centuries before, Europeans had invaded the plague-emptied shell of the Americas, climbing aboard wooden ships with vast canvas sails and trusting the winds and the skill of sailors to take them from the lands they knew to what they called the New World. For as long as six months, religious fanatics and adventurers and the poverty-stricken desperate had consigned themselves to the uncharitable waves of the Atlantic Ocean. Eighteen months ago, Elvi Okoye left Ceres Station under contract to Royal Charter Energy. The Edward Israel was a massive ship. Once, almost three generations before, it had been one of the colony ships that had taken humanity to the Belt and the Jovian system. When the outpouring had ended and the pressure to expand had met its natural limits, the Israel had been repurposed as a water hauler. The age of expansion was over, and the romance of freedom gave way to the practicalities of life – air, water, and food, in that order. For decades, the ship had been a workhorse of the solar system, and then the Ring had opened. Everything changed again. Back at the Bush shipyards and Tycho Station a new generation of colony ships was being built, but the retrofit of the Israel had been faster. When she’d stepped inside it the first time, Elvi had felt a sense of wonder and hope and excitement in the hum of the Israel’s air recyclers and the angles of her old-fashioned corridors. The age of adventure had come again, and the old warrior had returned, sword newly sharpened and armor shining again after tarnished years. Elvi had known that it was a psychological projection, that it said more about her own state of mind than anything physical about the ship, but that didn’t diminish it. The Edward Israel was a colony ship once more, her holds filled with prefabbed buildings and high-atmosphere probes, manufacturing labs and even a repeat-scatter femtoscope. They had an exploration and mapping team, a geological survey team, a hydrology team, Elvi’s own exozoological workgroup, and more. A university’s worth of PhDs and a government lab’s load of postdocs. Between crew and colonists, a thousand people. They were a city in the sky and a boat of pilgrims bound for Plymouth Rock and Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle all at the same time. It was the grandest and most beautiful adventure humanity had ever been on, and Elvi had earned a place on the exobiology team. In that context, imagining that the steel and ceramic of the ship was imbued with a sense of joy was a permissible illusion. And all of it was ruled over by Governor Trying. She’d seen him several times in the months they’d spent burning and braking, then making the slow, eerie transit between rings, and then burning and braking again. It wasn’t until just before the drop itself that she’d actually spoken with him. Trying was a thin man. His mahogany skin and snow-dust hair reminded her of her uncles, and his ready smile reassured and calmed. She had been in the observation deck, pretending that the high-resolution screens looking down on the planet were really windows, that the light of this unfamiliar sun was actually bouncing off the wide, muddy seas and high frosted clouds and passing directly into her eyes even though the deceleration gravity meant they weren’t in free orbit yet. It was a strange, beautiful sight. A single, massive ocean scattered with islands. A large continent that sprawled comfortably across half of a hemisphere, widest at the equator and then tapering as it reached north and south. The official name of the world was Bering Survey Four, named for the probe that had first established its existence. In the corridors and cafeteria and gym, they’d all come to call it New Terra. So at least she wasn’t the only one swept up by the romance. “What are you thinking, Doctor Okoye?” Trying’s gentle voice asked, and Elvi had jumped. She hadn’t heard him come in. Hadn’t seen him beside her. She felt like she was supposed to bow or make some sort of formal report. But his expression was so soft, so amused, she let it go. “I’m wondering what I did to deserve all this,” she said. “I’m about to see the first genuinely alien biosphere. I’m about to learn things about evolution that were literally impossible to know until now. I must have been a very, very good person in a past life.” In the screens, New Terra glittered brown and gold and blue. The high atmospheric winds smudged greenish clouds halfway around the planet. Elvi leaned in toward it. The governor chuckled. “You will be famous,” he said. Elvi blinked and coughed out a laugh. “I guess I will be, won’t I?” she said. “We’re doing things humanity’s never done before.” “Some things,” Trying said. “And some things we have always done. I hope history treats us gently.” She didn’t quite know what he’d meant by that, but before she could ask, Adolphus Murtry came in. A thin man with hard blue eyes, Murtry was the head of security and as hard and efficient as Trying was avuncular. The two men had walked off together, leaving Elvi alone with the world that was about to be hers to explore. The heavy shuttle was as large as some ships Elvi had been on. They’d had to build a landing pad on the surface just to support it. It carried the first fifty structures, basic array laboratories, and – most important – a hard perimeter dome. She had filed through the close-packed hallway of the shuttle, letting her hand terminal lead her toward her assigned crash couch. When the first colonies had begun on Mars, the perimeter domes had been a question of survival. Something to hold in air and keep out radiation. On New Terra, it was all about limiting contamination. The corporate charter that RCE had taken required that their presence have the smallest possible footprint. She’d heard that there were other people already on the planetary surface, and hopefully they were also being careful not to disturb the sites they were on. If they weren’t, the interactions between local organisms and the ones that had been shipped in would be complex. Maybe impossible to tease apart. “You look troubled.” Fayez Sarkis sat on a crash couch, strapping the wide belts across his chest and waist. He’d grown up on Mars, and had the tall, thin frame and large head of low gravity. He looked at home in a crash couch. Elvi realized her hand terminal was telling her that she’d found her own place. She sat, the gel forming itself around her thighs and lower back. She always wanted to sit up in a crash couch, like a kid in a wading pool. Letting herself sink into it felt too much like being eaten. “Just thinking ahead,” she said, forcing herself to lie back. “Lot of work to be done.” “I know,” Fayez said with a sigh. “Break time’s over. Now we have to actually earn our keep. Still, it was fun while it lasted. I mean apart from burning at a full g.” “New Terra’s a little over that, you know.” “Don’t remind me,” he said. “I don’t know why we couldn’t start with some nice balsawood planet with a civilized gravity well.” “Luck of the draw,” Elvi said. “Well, as soon as we get papers for a decent Mars-like planet, I’m transferring.” “You and half of Mars.” “I know, right? Someplace with maybe a breathable atmosphere. A magnetic field so we don’t all have to live like mole rats. It’s like having the terraforming project done already, except I’m alive to see it.” Elvi laughed. Fayez was on the geology team and the hydrological workgroup both. He’d studied at the best universities outside Earth, and she knew from long acquaintance that he was at least as frightened and delighted as she was. Eric Vanderwert came by, easing himself into the couch beside Elvi. She smiled at him politely. In the year and a half out from Ceres, there had been any number of romantic or if not romantic at least sexual connections made between members of the science teams. Elvi had kept herself out of that tangle. She’d learned early that sexual entanglements and work were a toxic and unstable mixture. Eric nodded to Fayez, then turned his attention to her. “Exciting,” he said. “Yes,” Elvi said, and across from her, Fayez rolled his eyes. Murtry walked through, stepping between the crash couches. His gaze flickered over everything – the couches, the belts, the faces of the people preparing for drop. Elvi smiled at him, and he nodded to her sharply. It wasn’t hostile, just businesslike. She watched him size her up. It wasn’t the sexual way that a man considered a woman. It was like a loader making sure a crate’s magnetic clamps were firing. He nodded to her again, apparently satisfied that she’d gotten her belts right, and moved on. When he was out of sight, Fayez chuckled. “Poor bastard’s chewing the walls,” he said, nodding after Murtry. “Is he?” Eric said. “Had us all under his thumb for a year and a half, hasn’t he? Now we’re going down and he’s staying in orbit. Man’s petrified that we’re all going to get ourselves killed on his watch.” “At least he cares,” Elvi said. “I like him for that.” “You like everyone,” Fayez teased. “It’s your pathology.” “You don’t like anyone.” “That’s mine,” he said, grinning. The tritone alert came and the public-address system clicked. “Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Patricia Silva and I’m your pilot on this little milk run.” A chorus of laughter rose from the crash couches. “We’re going to be detaching from the Israel in about ten minutes, and we’re expecting the drop to take about fifty. So an hour from now, you’re all going to be breathing entirely new air. We’ve got the governor on board, so we’re going to make sure this all goes smooth and easy so we can put in for a performance bonus.” Everyone was giddy then. Even the pilot. Elvi grinned and Fayez grinned back at her. Eric cleared his throat. “Well,” Fayez said with mock resignation. “We came all this way. I suppose we should finish it.” ~ The pain didn’t have a location. It was too large for that. It spread everywhere, encompassed everything. Elvi realized that she’d been looking at something. A massive, articulated crab leg, maybe. Or a broken construction crane. The flat ground of the lake bed stretched out toward it, and then grew rougher until it reached the thing’s base. She could imagine it had pushed its way out of the dark, dry soil or that it had crashed down into it. Her agonized mind tried to make it into debris from the shuttle and failed. It was an artifact. Ruins. Some arcane structure left from the alien civilization that had designed the protomolecule and the rings, abandoned and empty now. Elvi had the sudden, powerful and disjointed memory of an art exhibit she’d seen as a girl. There had been a high-resolution image of a bicycle in a ditch outside the ruins of Glasgow. The aftermath of disaster in a single image, as compressed and eloquent as a poem. At least I got to see it, she thought. At least I got to be here before I died. Someone had dragged her out of the ruined shuttle. When she turned her head, she could see construction lights burning yellow-white and the others laid out on the flat ground in rows. Some were standing. Moving among the injured and the dead. She didn’t recognize their faces or the way their bodies moved. After a year and a half on the Israel, she knew everyone on sight, and these were strangers. The locals, then. The squatters. Illegals. The air smelled like burning dust and cumin. She must have blacked out, because the woman seemed to appear at Elvi’s side in the blink of an eye. Her hands were bloody and her face smeared with dirt and gore not her own. “You’re banged up, but you’re not in any immediate danger. I’m going to give you something for the pain, but I need to you stay still until we can splint your leg. All right?” She was beautiful, in a severe way. Her dark cheeks had dots of pure black scattered across them like beads in a veil. Threads of white laced the black waves of her hair like moonlight on water. Only there was no moonlight on New Terra. Only billions of strange stars. “All right?” the woman asked again. “All right,” Elvi said. “Tell me what you just agreed to.” “I don’t remember.” The woman leaned back, her hand pressing gently against Elvi’s shoulder. “Torre! I’m going to need a scan on this one’s head. She may be concussed.” Another voice – a man’s – came from the darkness. “Yes, Doctor Merton. Soon as I’m done with this one.” Doctor Merton turned back to her. “If I get up right now, are you going to stay where you are until Torre gets here?” “No, it’s all right. I can come help,” Elvi said. “I’m sure you can,” the beautiful woman said with a sigh. “Let’s just wait for him, then.” A shadow loomed up from the darkness. She recognized Fayez by the way he walked. “Go ahead. I’ll sit with her.” “Thank you,” Doctor Merton said, and then vanished. Fayez lowered himself to the ground with a grunt and crossed his legs. His hair stood out from his slightly oversized head at all angles. His lips were pressed thin. Elvi took his hand without intending to, and she felt him pull back for a second before permitting her fingers to stay touching his. “What happened?” she asked. “The landing pad blew up.” “Oh,” she said. And then, “Do they do that?” “No. No, they really don’t.” She tried to think through that. If they don’t, then how could it have happened? Her mind was clearing enough for her to notice how compromised she was. Unnerving, but probably a good sign. “How bad is it?” She felt Fayez’s shrug more than saw it. “Bad. Only significant good news is that the village is close, and their doctor’s competent. Trained on Ganymede. Now, if our supplies weren’t all on fire or smashed under a couple tons of metal and ceramics, she might be able to do something.” “The workgroup?” “I saw Gregorio. He’s all right. Eric’s dead. I don’t know what happened to Sophie, but I’ll go look some more once they get to you.” Eric was dead. Minutes before, he’d been in the couch beside her, trying to flirt and being annoying. She didn’t understand it. “Sudyam?” she asked. “She’s back on the Israel. She’s fine.” “That’s good then.” Fayez squeezed her hand and let it go. The air felt cool against her palm where his skin had abandoned it. He looked out over the rows of bodies toward the wreckage of the shuttle. It was so dark, she could hardly make him out except where he blotted out the stars. “Governor Trying didn’t make it,” he said. “Didn’t make it?” “Dead as last week’s rat. We’re not sure who’s in charge of anything now.” She felt tears forming in her eyes and an ache bloomed in her chest that had nothing to do with her injuries. She recalled the man’s gentle smile, the warmth of his voice. His work was only starting. It was strange that Eric’s death should skip across the surface of her mind like a stone thrown over water and Governor Trying’s should strike so deep. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Yeah, well. We’re on an alien planet a year and a half from home with our initial supplies in toothpick-size splinters, and the odds-on bet for what happened is sabotage by the same people who are presently giving us medical care. Dead’s not good, but at least it’s simple. We may all envy Trying before this is over.” “You don’t mean that. It’s going to be okay.” “Elvi?” Fayez said, with a sardonic chuckle. “I believe that it isn’t.” Chapter Three: Havelock “Hey,” the engineer said blearily from the cell. “Havelock. You’re not still pissed, are you?” Not my job to be pissed, Williams,” Havelock replied from where he floated beside his desk. The internal security station of the Edward Israel was small. Two desks, eight cells, a space as much brig as office. And with the ship in high orbit, the loss of effective gravity made it seem even smaller. “Look, I know I got out of line, but I’m sober now. You can let me out.” Havelock checked his hand terminal. “Another fifty minutes,” he said, “and you’ll be free to go.” “C’mon, Havelock. Have a heart.” “It’s policy. Nothing I can do about it.” Dimitri Havelock had worked security contracts for eight different corporations over thirteen years. Pinkwater, Star Helix, el-Hashem Cooperative, Stone