Cibola Burn (The Expanse) (62 page)

Fayez hit Murtry in the nose. The movement was so fast and awkward and artless that at first Elvi wasn’t sure it had really happened. She watched the expression in Fayez’s widening eyes as he understood what he’d done, and then when he committed to doing it again. Murtry turned his pistol away from Amos, swinging it toward Fayez, and the geologist ran into him with a shout. Murtry stumbled back but didn’t fall.

“Elvi!” Fayez shouted. “Run!”

She took a step forward. Amos was writhing on the ground, blood pouring from somewhere in his suit. His teeth were bared and crimson. He was grinning.

“Run!” Fayez screamed.

The great gray walls rose around them. False stars glittering. She couldn’t breathe. She took one tentative step forward. Then another. She felt like she was moving through a gel, forcing every motion.
Shock
, she thought.
I’m in shock. People die from shock, don’t they?
In her memory, Fayez shook his head and said,
Oh look, another excuse to go talk to Holden
.

Holden. She had to find Holden. She took another step, then another. And then she was sprinting, her legs and arms pumping, small animal grunts forcing their way out of her throat. Somewhere behind her, a pistol fired twice, and then a third time. She didn’t look back. Everything in her, everything she was, focused only forward, along the wide, dark veins of the structure, forward to where they converged.

Elvi ran.

B
asia reached out to touch the tether, and it vibrated under his gloved fingers like a living thing.

Alex,” Naomi didn’t quite yell over the general comm channel, “I’m sending you a burn program. We have to keep that cable taut until Basia cuts it or the
Barb
is going to rip us both apart.”

“I’m not cutting it,” Basia repeated, but no one replied. He checked to see if his microphone was on.

“One,” Havelock said, ending his countdown. “Out of time guys.”

If the security man’s threats had any effect, Basia couldn’t tell. His HUD was still displaying the red lines of incoming gunfire. He ignored them.

Above him, the
Rocinante
began shifting and firing its remaining maneuvering thrusters in response to the slow rotation of the
Barbapiccola
, desperately trying to keep slack out of the cable. Two massive ships, each rotating in different axes, the cable could go from slack to thousands of tons of tension fast enough to tear the mounts out of the ships, and a chunk of the ship’s structure along with it.

“Basia,” Naomi said, her voice gentle. “I can’t give you much time. And you know this ends the same way no matter what.”

“I’m checking the connection to the
Barb
,” he said instead of answering her.

The mount was a mess of twisted metal and frayed cable. Pieces of the hull had been torn free by dislodged footings, and the ones that were still connected stretched and flexed with each gyration of the ship. Basia tried to calculate how much tension must be on the rigging and cable and failed. If it snapped free, it would probably cut him in half. If he did cut it, he’d need Alex to put slack on it first.

“I’m not cutting it,” he said again, more to himself than anyone else. Cutting it meant letting the
Barb
drift away, down into the upper atmosphere to rip apart and burn. To let Felcia burn. Alex had promised not to let that happen.

A pair of red lines drew themselves across his HUD and the words DANGER CLOSE flashed there briefly. He wasn’t up on all his military jargon, but he could guess what that phrase meant. He pulled himself around the cable footing and took cover. Out in the blackness between the
Israel
and the
Barb
, twelve men in suits floated toward him on puffs of gas. They still had a few of their improvised missiles.

“Guys,” Havelock said, real sadness in his voice.

“Havelock,” Naomi yelled, “if you let those assholes shoot Basia you don’t get to come back on my ship.”

“Roger that,” Havelock said sorrowfully. One of the twelve attackers spun sideways as a puff of white mist shot out of his EVA pack. The man continued to rotate wildly as he flew at high speed away from the others.

“One of you should go get him,” Havelock said. “His EVA pack is toast.”

Almost before he finished saying it, two of the remaining attackers jetted toward the disabled man, bringing their grapnel guns to bear.

“Havelock, you asshole,” Koenen said on the open frequency where everyone could hear him. “I’m going to enjoy stomping a mudhole in you.” He and his team opened fire on Havelock’s position in the airlock, driving him back into cover.

Now that everyone wasn’t looking at him, Basia took a moment to look over the mangled footing. “Naomi, I’m having the suit send you pictures of the damage.”

“Basia, I —” she started.

“Help me fix this,” he said, cutting her off. “If the
Barb
has more cable, I can reattach it here while Alex keeps us from totally losing our remaining connection.”

“Basia,” Naomi said, her voice gentle and sad. “This can’t be fixed. The
Barbapiccola
is going down. Nothing is gained by her taking us with her.”

“I do not accept that!” Basia shouted back at her, loud enough that his own suit’s speakers distorted. “There has to be a way!”

His suit flashed a warning at him, and he pulled back into cover just in time to avoid a fusillade of shots that bounced off the hull, leaving shiny streaks in the dull metal. One of the remaining nine attackers threw his arms up like he was surrendering, then went motionless, spinning slowly toward the
Barbapiccola
.

“Williams is flatlined,” the chief engineer said. “You just killed an RCE employee. You’ll burn for that, Havelock.”

“You know what, chief? Fuck you,” Havelock replied, his tone low, but real anger in his voice for the first time. “You are the one who escalated this. I didn’t ask for any of it. Pull out. Marwick, get your men out of here! Don’t let him force this anymore!”

Another voice, older, sadder, replied on the radio. “Those aren’t my men, Mister Havelock. You know as well as I do that I have no authority over the expeditionary team.”

“That’s right, motherfucker,” the chief said. “We’re acting on orders from Chief of Security Murtry.”

While Havelock, Marwick, and the chief engineer argued, Basia tuned them out. They’d either agree or they wouldn’t. Havelock would kill more of them or he wouldn’t. The captain would assert authority or he wouldn’t. None of that changed Basia’s real problem. His daughter was on board a ship that was slowly spinning out of control and losing altitude. At some point, it would hit enough atmosphere to get noticeable drag, which would slow it and let it fall deeper into the killing air, and shortly after that, it would burn up. The
Rocinante
couldn’t save it. Helplessness and grief washed over him, but he willed himself not to weep. He wouldn’t be able to see with the water sheeting across his eyes. There had to be another way.

“Basia,” Naomi said on a private channel to him. He could tell she’d switched him to a private channel because the argument between Havelock and the RCE people stopped suddenly mid-word. “Basia, I’m getting your daughter out.”

“What?”

“I’m on the line with the captain of the
Barbapiccola
. I’ve explained the situation. He’s… well, he’s not happy. But he understands. Alex promised you that if the ships went down, Felcia would be on the
Rocinante
when it happened. We’re keeping that promise.”

“How?” Basia asked. The way the ships were tumbling, he couldn’t imagine how dangerous a docking attempt would be. The ship-to-ship docking tubes were flexible, but not that flexible.

“They’re bringing her to the airlock now. They’ll put her in a suit and send her out to you. You’ll need to get her back to this ship and then… you need to cut the cable.”

Something about the docking tube stuck in his mind. The
Rocinante
couldn’t dock with the
Barbapiccola
to pull the doomed crew off, but a space suit was, at heart, just a bubble of air to keep its wearer alive.

“The docking tube,” he said. “Is there a way to seal it on both ends? We could put it on the
Barb
, seal it around some people, then move them across to the
Roci
.”

“We’d have to cut it free from the airlock housing,” Naomi said. A spray of bullets hit the cable footing as she spoke, like visual punctuation for her words. Another of the engineers spun away, his EVA pack holed in two places. Naomi continued talking but Basia wasn’t listening.

“What about emergency airlocks,” he said. “The plastic blister kind, you know? They’re made to hold atmosphere and supply oxygen.”

“You have to attach them to something,” Naomi said.

“What if,” Basia answered, “we attach them to each other? Seal to seal?”

Naomi was silent for a long moment. When she spoke again, her words were slow, measured. Like she was thinking them through as she spoke. “A life-support bubble.” Basia could tell she’d switched them back to the general channel because Havelock’s argument came thundering back. “Gentlemen, we have an idea. We’ll pull the crew off the
Barbapiccola
on escape pods made of two emergency airlocks sealed together. The
Roci
only carries one, but if the
Barb
has one —”

“You kidding me?” a new voice said. Basia recognized it. The captain of the Belter ship. “I think somebody turned ours into parts for a still back before we shot the pinche ring.”

“We have plenty of them,” Havelock said. “The
Israel
came out here with too much of everything. I’d bet we have twenty in storage.”

“That’s ten bubbles,” Basia said. “That’s plenty to hold the whole crew for a short trip.”

“Captain Marwick,” Koenen said, “you cannot give these people vital RCE supplies.”

“Marwick,” Havelock said. “Do not let over a hundred innocent people die over this bullshit. Do not do that.”

“Ah fuck. What are they going to do? Cancel my contract?” Marwick replied, followed by a long sigh. “The
Israel
is moving in to transfer the escape bubbles. I’ll have the materials team start sealing them right now.”

“Captain,” the chief engineer growled, “we are acting out here on Security Chief Murtry’s direct orders to disable the squatters’ ship. You will not render them aid.”

“You,” Havelock said, “are such an asshole. Have you gone completely insane?”

“I will shoot down
any
attempt to —” the chief started, then stopped suddenly. The cable next to Basia snapped taut, almost tearing the few remaining attachments out of the
Barb
’s skin. Below, a rail gun shot streaked across Ilus, the fire from the defense moons stabbing at it as it fell. One of the red enemy dots on Basia’s HUD disappeared.

“Sorry,” Alex said, his accent as slow and heavy as Basia had ever heard it. “That was me. But that guy was pissin’ me off and I had the shot. Am I in trouble?”

There was a long moment of silence, and then Captain Marwick said, “
Israel
’s on her way.”

It took them nearly three hours to fabricate and then transfer the makeshift escape bubbles from the
Israel
. Basia kept track of the time by counting oxygen recharges for his suit. He flatly refused to return to the
Rocinante
until his daughter was off the dying Belter freighter. Alex had put some slack on the tether with carefully calculated bursts of thrust, and Basia had cut the line. No reason to keep the ships connected.

One by one the
Israel
’s expeditionary engineering team turned amateur militia contacted Havelock and apologized for how dramatically out of control the situation had gotten. Most of them blamed the chief engineer. Whether or not he was entirely responsible for the escalations that had occurred, Basia felt certain that history wouldn’t remember him kindly. One of the engineers admitted to being the person who’d fired the missile at the
Barbapiccola
and offered to help Basia fix the damage. Basia had offered to kill him if he tried. They agreed to disagree on it.

Even after the reconfigured emergency airlocks had been delivered, it had taken the crew of the
Barbapiccola
and the colonists still on board two more hours to charge the air tanks and get everyone sealed inside. By that point, the computers on the
Rocinante
were saying the freighter should already be scraping upper atmosphere. The clock had run out.

But now Basia floated above the massive cargo bay doors of the
Barbapiccola
, waiting for them to open and set his daughter free.

It began as a line of white light cutting through the side of the massive freighter. Then, slowly, as the doors slid farther and farther apart, the ship’s enormous cargo hold came into view. Against the backdrop of thousands of tons of raw lithium ore floated ten faintly translucent bubbles. Someone toggled a remote to open the cargo bay’s airlock, and the air of the
Barbapiccola
rushed out, gently pushing the bubbles out the cargo bay door ahead of it.

The bubbles floated up away from the planet, the vacuum around them making them puff all the way up, little plump pockets of air for a dozen or more people to hide in, surrounded by the frozen mist of what had once been their ship’s atmosphere. Ilus’ star peeked around the limb of the planet, backlighting the bubbles and turning the floating people inside into black silhouettes, amazingly sharp against the blurry plastic walls. Like cardboard cutouts with a floodlight behind them.

Basia had a sudden memory of bathing Jacek in the kitchen sink when he was a baby, and his little boy farting in the water, a burst of small bubbles drifting up and then popping at the surface. The thought made him laugh until his stomach hurt. He recognized this was more about the relief that his daughter might live than it was about the flatulence of a small boy, but he laughed anyway.