Cibola Burn (The Expanse) (48 page)

“I don’t see how,” Alex said.

“Which means there’s a non-zero chance that we’ll wind up needing to go get her ourselves. You know there’s only two of us. You and me. That’s it.”

“There’s three of us,” Alex said, patting the control panel. “Don’t forget. We’ve got the
Roci
.”

Basia nodded, waited for his gut to clench up again, was surprised to find he felt a warm sense of peace flowing through him. “What will I need to do?”

~

“This is an LVA suit,” Alex said, pointing to the equipment secured in an open locker. They were on the airlock deck, which, other than the airlock, consisted almost entirely of lockers and storage closets. The contents of that particular locker looked like a rubber body suit with lots of attachments.

“Elveeaye?”

“El. Vee. Ay. Light vacuum armor. Lets you move around outside, with enough air and shielding to keep you breathin’ and mostly unradiated in normal applications.” Alex pulled the rubber-looking suit out and left it floating next to the locker for Basia to examine. “Self-sealing in case of puncture, with life support and injury sensors, and basic medical supplies built in.” He then pulled out a red, metallic-looking breastplate. “It also keeps you from getting
too
many holes poked in you by small-arms fire.”

As Alex pulled out each piece and showed it to Basia, explaining its function, Basia dutifully examined them and made what he hoped were appropriate noises. He’d worn vacuum suits for work almost his entire adult life. Their form and function were well known to him. But the various pieces of armor and technology that made the suit into a weapon of war were outside his experience. Certainly something Alex described as “automatic IFF and hostile tracking available through the HUD display” sounded impressive and useful, but Basia had no idea for what. So he nodded his head and looked thoughtful and examined the helmet when Alex handed it to him.

“You ever fired a gun?” Alex asked when the armor had all been pulled out of the locker.

“Never,” Basia said. He had a brief, vivid memory of the assault on the RCE security team. Of the horrible injuries the gunshots left. Of the surprised looks on their faces as they died. Basia waited for the nausea to start, but still felt only the warmth and calm. “Held one once. Pretty sure I didn’t fire it.”

“This,” Alex said, holding up a thick black pistol, “is a 7.5mm semi-automatic handgun. Twenty-five-round magazine. Standard sidearm of the MCRN. It’s fairly idiot-proof, so this’ll be the one I send you in with.”

“If I go in at all,” Basia said.

“Sure,” Alex agreed with a smile. “Don’t really have a range to practice on here, but you can dry fire it a few times to get the feel. Honestly, though, if you get over there and need to be dead-eye Dick to make it back, you’re pretty much fucked.”

“Why carry it at all, then?”

“Because people do what you want them to do when you point one of these at them,” Alex said.

“Might as well be empty, then,” Basia said, taking the gun from him and waving it through the air to feel the weight.

“If you want,” Alex replied.

“No. Show me what to do. Then let’s load it.”
For Felcia. I can do it for her.

“Okay,” Alex said, then proceeded to do just that.

~

Holden called back several hours later. When he spoke, his voice was tight, angry. “Holden here. Murtry isn’t going to bend an inch, so fuck him. Go get Naomi back. Out.”

“Well,” Alex said, dragging the word out to a long sigh. “That’s it. I think we’re officially not mediators anymore.”

Basia nodded with his fist, causing his body to rotate slightly. They were floating on the ops deck. The various pieces of the disassembled pistol hung in the air next to Basia. Alex had insisted that he know how to take the gun apart and put it back together again. Basia had no idea why that would be important, but had gone along with it anyway.

“What now?” he asked.

“Better start puttin’ that back together. I’ll pull the
Israel
’s specs up again and we can give them one last look. Remember, stuff gets moved around on a working ship. Things ain’t always where the standard blueprints say they are. You’re gonna want alternate ingress and egress points in case someone sealed off a corridor you wanted to use.”

“I have a good memory,” Basia said. It sounded like a brag, but it was true. He’d grown up in corridors and hallways. His sense of direction was excellent.

“That’ll help. Then we get you suited up, and I drop you off,” Alex said, then paused. “But there is one issue we haven’t discussed. I got plenty of juice to get you over there. And the
Roci
can make sure no one messes with you in space. But I can’t get you inside.”

Basia surprised himself by laughing.

“Somethin’ funny?” Alex said, raising an eyebrow at him.

“Funny that you’re worried about the only part of this where I actually know what I’m doing,” Basia said. “I’m a licensed class 3 vacuum welder. I weld in space. You
find
me a ship I can’t cut my way into. Just try.”

“Alrighty,” Alex said and gave him a light slap on one shoulder. “Let’s get to work.”

~

Basia drifted away from the
Rocinante
. Instead of a simple vacuum suit and air supply, he wore state-of-the-art Martian-made light combat armor. Instead of walking across the hull of the ship on magnetic boots, he moved across half a dozen kilometers of vacuum on gentle puffs of compressed nitrogen. Below his feet, Ilus spun, an angry gray world, wrapped in storms and flashing constantly with high-altitude lightning. Lucia and Jacek were down there, under all that atmospheric rage. But he couldn’t do anything to help them. So he would help the person he could. He would save Naomi from the RCE ship and she would save his daughter. There were a lot of holes in that logic that he carefully avoided thinking about.

He drifted closer to a massive island of gray metal in the darkness. The
Edward Israel
. The enemy.

“You okay out there?” Alex said over the comm. The helmet’s small speakers flattened his voice. There was also an aggressive background hiss to it.

“Fine. Everything is green.” Alex had shown him how to page through the status indicators on the suit’s heads-up display, and Basia was dutifully checking them every few minutes.

“So, I’m making all sorts of angry demands for the release of Naomi,” Alex said. “Got the
Israel
locked up with a targeting laser, and I’m floodin’ their sensors with radio noise and light scatter. Should keep their eyes, what eyes they got left, firmly planted on the
Roci
. Give you a minute or two before they realize you’re cuttin’ your way in.”

“That doesn’t sound like very long,” Basia said.

“Cut fast. Alex out.”

Alex had reassured him that the
Rocinante
had plenty of battery power. That shooting lasers and blasting out radio jamming wouldn’t affect it much. But Basia had come to view power as a precious and irreplaceable resource. Not something he’d ever needed to do in the age of readily available fusion. It gave everything a sense of permanence it hadn’t had before. No do-overs. No we’ll-get-it-right-next-time.

He checked his course toward the
Israel
’s midship maintenance airlock, found it good, and pulled out his welding torch, holding it in a white-knuckle grip.

The ship swelled until it blocked his view in every direction. The airlock hatch resolving from a tiny slightly lighter dot to a thumbnail-sized square to an actual door with a small round window in it. The pre-programmed EVA pack fired off a long blast of nitrogen in four cones of vapor, and he drifted to a gentle stop a meter away.

The welding rig came to life with a burst of bright blue fire. “Here I come,” Basia said to Naomi and to the RCE people guarding her and to his baby girl thousands of kilometers away on her dying ship.

Here I come.

“I
’ve shut down everything I can,” Marwick said on the screen. “Sensors, lights, entertainments. I’ve dialed back the cooling. With the batteries being what they are, I’ll give us just under seventeen days. And that’s with the solar collectors up at full. Less than that if they start failing. After that, it’ll be time to decide whether we’d rather suffocate or burn.”

Havelock rubbed his forefinger and thumb deep into his eye sockets. He hadn’t gone to the gym, and he was trying to make up for it by increasing the cocktail of null-g steroids. It wasn’t a long-term fix, but the more he looked at it, the less it seemed like he’d need one of those. It did give him a headache, though. If it hadn’t been for Naomi, he wouldn’t have spent as much time exercising as he had. Something to thank her for.

His office felt stuffy and close, and the temperature was climbing steadily. As a boy living planetside, he’d always thought of space as cold, and while that was technically true, mostly it was a vacuum. And so a ship, mostly, was a thermos. The heat from their bodies and systems would bleed off into the void over years or decades if it had the chance. If he could find a way to get them the chance.

“Have we mentioned it to the crew?” he asked.

“I haven’t, but the data’s hard to keep secret. Especially when it’s a can full of scientists and engineers with little enough else to do. We’re going to need to talk about dropping them. As many as we can.”

“So that they can starve and die on the planet if the moons don’t shoot them down?”

“Most part, yes,” Marwick said. “They’ve come a long way not to put foot on the surface. There’s more than one I know would prefer dying there.”

In her cage, Naomi coughed.

“I’ll talk to Murtry,” Havelock said. “Having a graveyard on the planet might be something he’d want. Especially if we could get more bodies in it than the squatters have.”

Marwick sighed. He’d stopped shaving, and when he rubbed his chin it sounded like someone throwing a handful of sand at a window. “We came close, though, didn’t we? All the way out here to start the whole damned world up again.”

“We saw the promised land,” Havelock said. “What about the
Barbapiccola
? What’s her situation?”

“Makes ours look good. That lithium ore’s going to be a high-atmosphere vapor in a little over four days.”

“Well, I guess we won’t need to worry about stopping them from taking it back to the market.”

“Problem’s about to solve itself,” Marwick agreed. “But to the point. Security? These people are facing a death they can’t fight and they can’t flee from. They’re going to get crazy if we don’t do something. And neither you nor I have the manpower to stop them if things get out of control.”

What would it matter?
Havelock wanted to say.
Let them riot. It won’t change how long before we hit air. Not even by a minute.

“I hear you,” he said. “I do have the security override codes. I’ll have the autodoc add a little tranquilizer and mood stabilizer, maybe some euphorics to everyone’s cocktail. I don’t want to do much, though. I need these people thinking straight, not doped to the gills.”

“If that’s how you want to play it.”

“I’m not putting this ship on hospice. Not yet.”

The captain’s shrug was eloquent, and left nothing more to say. Havelock dropped the connection. The screen went to its default. Despair rushed up over him like a rogue wave. They had done everything right, and it didn’t matter. They were all going to die – all the people he’d come to help protect, all the people on his team, his prisoner, himself, everyone. They were going to die and there wasn’t anything he could do about it but get them high before it happened.

He didn’t know he was going to punch the screen until he’d already done it. The panel shifted in its seating a little, but he hadn’t left a mark on it. The gimbals of his crash couch hissed as they absorbed the momentum. He’d split his knuckle. A drop of blood welled on his skin, growing to the size of a dark red marble, the surface tension pulling it out along his skin as he watched. When he moved, he left a spray of droplets hanging in the air like little planets and moons.

“You know,” Naomi said, “if you’re looking at hundreds of people burning to death as a problem solving itself, that may be more evidence that you’re on wrong side.”

“We didn’t plant the bombs,” Havelock said. “That was them. They started it.”

“Does that matter to you?”

“At this point? Not as much as it probably should.”

Naomi was floating close to her cage door. He was always amazed at a Belter’s capacity to endure small spaces. Probably claustrophobia had been selected out of their gene pool. He wondered how many generations of Naomi’s family had lived up the well.

“You’re bleeding,” she said.

“Yep. That’s not going to matter much either.”

“You know you could let me out. I’m a very good engineer, and I have the best ship out here. Get me back on the
Roci
, and I might be able to figure out a way to make things better.”

“Not going to happen.”

“And here I thought it didn’t matter to you,” she said with a smile in her voice.

“I don’t know how you can be so calm about all this.”

“It’s what I do when I’m scared. And really, you should let me out.”

Havelock gathered the blood out of the air. His knuckle had scabbed over already. He logged into the autodoc with the sick sense of taking the first step toward giving up. But it had to be done. A crew full of panicking people wasn’t going to make anything better. Especially since the closest thing he had to a full staff was down on the planet with Murtry.

Havelock’s newsfeeds from back home were filled with hyperbolic pieces about the tragedy at New Terra. The sensor data of the explosion had found its way to a few of the reputable feeds, but there were also three or four other forged versions out there too. The faked data wasn’t particularly more impressive than the truth. He spooled through a dozen commentators. Some of them seemed angry that the expedition had been allowed to go out, some were somber and sad. None of them seemed to think there was much chance of anyone surviving. His message queue had over a thousand new entries. People in the media. People from the home office. A few – just a few – from people he’d known. An old lover from when he was at Pinkwater. A cousin he hadn’t seen in a decade and a half who was living on Ceres Station now. A couple of classmates from school.