“Not the people in First Landing. They didn’t agree.”
“No, because they were breaking the rules that we were following. I’m just… I know how weird and dangerous this all is, but before your friends start blasting rail gun rounds through our reactor, I want you to see that we’re not the bad guys here.”
His voice had gotten thinner and higher as he spoke. At the end, he was almost shouting. He pressed his hands together. Bit his lips.
“Under a little pressure,” she said.
“Some,” he agreed.
“Let me out, I’ll put in a good word for you,” she said. “And it’ll keep Holden from doing anything stupid.”
“Really?”
“It’ll keep him from doing a couple particular stupid things,” she said. “He may come up with something else. He’s clever that way.”
“I can’t,” he said.
“I know.”
The ship passed invisibly into the planet’s shadow, the decks clicking and groaning as the expansion plates adjusted to the change in radiant heat. Havelock felt a little rush of shame. She was his prisoner. He was the jailer. He shouldn’t need her approval. If she thought he and his people were baby-killing fascist power freaks, it didn’t change anything he had to do. Naomi went back to humming. It was a different song now. Something slow, in a minor key. After a while, she let it drift into silence.
“They weren’t the only ones,” she said as he finished the week’s duty roster. “They were the only ones that were trapped in the outbreak, but the place was locked down before that. A bunch of thugs in stolen riot armor making sure everyone did what they were told, and shooting the ones who didn’t. Getting ready for it. A few people made it past them.”
“Really? Who?”
Naomi shrugged.
“Me,” she said.
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Elvi
Elvi sat on the crest of the hill, looking west. The morning light behind her caught the wings of thousands of butterfly-like animals. She hadn’t seen them before, but today they filled the air from the ground to twenty meters high. A vast school of tiny animals. Or insects. Or whatever other name humanity eventually assigned to this foreign kingdom of life. For her, right now, they were butterflies.
They moved together like a school of fish, independent and coherent. Bursts of color—blue and silver and crimson and green—flashed through them, seeming almost to come in patterns for a moment and then dissolving into chaos. The column of them rose, narrowing, then broadened and flattened. They moved past her in a rush, and for a few seconds she was inside the cluster, palm-sized wings fluttering gently against her with a sound like sheets of paper falling and a clean, astringent smell like mint without being mint. She smiled and raised her arms up into the cloud of them, taking joy in the beauty and the moment, and then they passed, and she turned to watch them flow through the air, tumbling to the south as if they were going somewhere in particular.
She stood and stretched, adjusting her collection satchel against her hip. The sunlight pressed against her shoulders and the nape of her neck as she walked forward into the dusty, stone-paved field. The ruins rose to the north, with First Landing not even a smudge next to them, all human artifacts hidden by the curve of the planet and the shape of the hills. All except her.
Here and there, a few butterflies remained, possibly dead. Possibly quiescent. She squatted beside one, looking into the vibrant blue of its wings, the coppery complication of flesh where its body—what she thought of as its body—folded together, interarticulated like a hinge. She put on her gloves and lifted the tiny body. It didn’t so much as flutter. Even though it meant getting less physiological data, she hoped it was already dead.
“Sorry, little one,” she said, just in case. “It’s in the name of science.”
She folded it into the black lattice, sealed it, and triggered the collection sequence. The array of sampling needles clicked and muttered to themselves. Elvi squinted up into the white-blue arch of the sky. The red dot floated about fifteen degrees above the horizon, bright enough to show through the thin, greenish clouds.
The satchel coughed, throwing out an error code Elvi hadn’t seen before. She took out her hand terminal, connecting it to the satchel’s output channel. The preliminary dataset was a mess. Elvi felt a deep, cold stab of fear. If the satchel was broken, it could take days before the one functioning shuttle could bring her a spare from the Israel. She wasn’t even positive they had a spare in the toolkit or if they’d all been lost in the wreck of the heavy shuttle. The prospect of years going by collecting data by hand and spending her nights doing dissections like she was back in lower university reared up like a ghost. She took the butterfly out. Its corpse looked almost the same as when she’d put it in. She sat cross-legged beside it and ran the satchel’s system diagnostics, chewing her lips as she waited for a fresh error code.
The readout came up clean. She looked from the satchel to the butterfly, then back again. A second hypothesis formed, as chilling as the first. Maybe worse. She picked up the dead butterfly and marched back toward the huts. Fayez’s was a small green geodesic design he’d constructed halfway down a thin hill, high enough that any storm runoff would pass it by, but not at the crest where the wind would catch it. He was sitting on a stool, leaning back against the hut. He was wearing a pair of polyfiber work pants, a T-shirt, and an open bathrobe. He hadn’t shaved in days, and the stubble on his cheeks made him look older.
“This isn’t an animal,” she said, holding out the butterfly.
He let the stool come down, its legs tapping the ground. “Good to see you too,” he said.
“This isn’t two biomes coming together. It’s three. This… whatever it is? It doesn’t have any of the chemical or structural commonalities that you’d expect to see.”
“Lucia Merton was up looking for you. Did you run across her?”
“What? No. Look, this is another machine. It’s another thing like”—she pointed at the low red moon—“like that.”
“All right.”
“What if they’re really not coming awake just because we’re here? What if they’re consistent? It complicates everything.”
Fayez scratched his scalp just above his left ear. “You seem to want something here, Elvi, but I don’t know what it is.”
“How am I supposed to make any sense of this place when it keeps changing all the rules?” she said, and her voice sounded shrill even to her. She threw the butterfly down angrily, then immediately wished she hadn’t. Not that it cared, just that the gesture seemed cruel. Fayez smiled his sharp little smile.
“You’re preaching to the choir. You know what I’ve been doing all morning?”
“Drinking?”
“I wish. I’ve been going over surface data from the Israel. There’s a chain of islands on the far side of the planet with what looks like a metric ass-ton of volcanic activity. Only so far as I can tell, this planet doesn’t have, you know, tectonic plates. So what the hell is mimicking vulcanism? Do you know what Michaela’s working on?”
“No.”
“There’s a pattern in the ultraviolet light that reaches the ground here, like it’s some kind of carrier signal. Doesn’t exist before the sunlight hits the exosphere, and by the time it comes here, complex, consistent patterning. She’s got no idea where it’s coming from. Sudyam’s workgroup has what they think might be complex molecules that incorporate stable transuranics.”
“How does that work?”
“I know, right?” Fayez said.