Cibola Burn

Chapter Forty-Five: Havelock

Havelock still wasn’t convinced that Naomi Nagata was the best engineer in the system, but after watching her work, he had to concede there probably wasn’t a better one. If some of the people on the Israel had more degrees or specialties in which they outpaced her, Naomi could make it up in sheer, bloody-minded wildness.

“Okay, we can’t wait any longer,” she said to the muscle-bound bald man on the screen. “If he shows back up, tell him where we stand up here.”

“Pretty sure the cap’n trusts your judgment,” Amos said. “But yeah. I’ll tell him. Anything else I should pass on?”

“Tell him he’s got about a billion messages from Fred and Avasarala.” Alex’s voice came across the comm and also through the hatchway to the cockpit. “They’re talkin’ about building a mass driver, sending us relief supplies.”

“Yeah?” Amos said. “How long’s that gonna take?”

“About seven months,” Naomi said. “But at the outside, we’ll only have been dead for three of them.”

Amos grinned. “Well, you kids don’t have too much fun without me.”

“No danger,” Naomi said and broke the connection.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Havelock asked.

“Nope,” Naomi replied. She pulled herself closer to the command console. “How’s it going out there, Basia?”

The comm channel clicked and the Belter’s voice hissed into the operations deck. The sound reverberated without giving any sense of spaciousness. A whisper in a coffin. “We’re getting close out here. This is a lot of ugly.”

“Good thing we’ve got a great welder,” she said. “Keep me in the loop.”

The screens on the ops deck showed the operation in all its stages: what they’d managed so far, what they still hoped. And the countdown timer that marked the hours that remained before the Barbapiccola started to scrape against Ilus’ exosphere and changed from a fast-moving complex of ceramic and metal into a firework.

Not days. Hours.

The tether itself looked like two webs connected by a single, hair-thin strand. All along the belly of the Rocinante, a dozen ceramic-and-steel foot supports made for a broad base, the black lines meeting at a hard ceramic juncture a few hundred meters out. The Barbapiccola underneath them almost had all of the answering structures in place. Once the Belter had the foot supports installed there too, it would be time for the Martian corvette to use its battery power to tug the Belter ship into a more stable orbit, along with its cargo of lithium ore. The complexity of the situation made Havelock a little lightheaded. As he watched, the display showing the surface of the Barbapiccola stuttered, and one of the red-flagged foot supports changed to green.

“Okay,” Naomi said over the open channel. “We’re reading solid on that one. Let’s move on.”

“Yeah, give me one more minute here,” Basia’s compressed voice said. “There’s a seam here I don’t like. I’m just going to…” The words trailed off. The readout stuttered red and then green again. “Okay. That’s got it. Moving on.”

“Be careful,” Alex broke in. “Keep the torch cold when you’re moving. These lines’ve got great tensile strength, but they’re crap for heat resistance.”

“Done this before,” Basia said.

“Partner,” Alex said. “I don’t think anyone’s done this before.”

The tether lines were standard filament design, built for retrieving dropped Martian marines. Using them to haul a full-sized spaceship was like using a thread to pull a bowling ball: possible with enough patience and skill, and easy as hell to get wrong. Naomi had spent three long hours strapped into her crash couch before she’d decided it was plausible, and even then, Havelock half thought she’d talked herself into believing it because she knew that nothing else was.

Havelock had spent the time having his connections to Murtry’s terminal refused and reflecting on the fact that he’d just spectacularly quit his job. It was odd that it weighed on him as much as it did. He was eighteen months from home and probably days at the most from death, and his mind kept turning back to the uneasy surprise with himself that came from walking out on a contract. He’d never done that before. And, since he’d gone with Naomi, he wasn’t even sure what his legal status was. Somewhere, he guessed, between former employee and accomplice to criminal conspiracy. It was a wider range than he knew what to do with. If he was really the face of what was happening on New Terra back home, they were all going to be at least as confused as he was.

The truth was that none of the standards of corporate law or governmental authority seemed to apply out here. He could follow the feeds, read the letters, even exchange recorded video with RCE’s home office, but those were only words and pictures. The models based on experience in human space—even in the attenuated civilization of the Belt—failed here.

Mostly what he felt, though, was relief. He was very aware of how inappropriate it was, given the context, but he couldn’t deny it. It didn’t leave him regretting his choices. Except maybe to have taken the job. All the tragedy and pain of Ilus would have been merely sad and distressing to see from a bar on Ceres Station. From where he was, the fear had stopped being an emotion and turned into an environment.

The last foot support indicator went green.

“Okay,” Naomi said. “That’s looking good from here. What’s it like out there, Basia?”

“Ugly as shit, but solid.”

“How’s your air?”

“I’m all right,” the Belter said. “Thought I’d stay here, in case anything breaks that I’d be able to fix.”

“No,” Naomi said. “If this fails, those lines will snap fast enough to cut you in half. Come back to the barn.”

Basia’s percussive snort was more eloquent than words, but the small yellow dot began to move from the surface of the Barbapiccola up through the vacuum toward the Rocinante. Havelock watched, his fingers laced tightly together.

“Alex,” Naomi said, “can you check the release?”

“It’s good,” Alex said, his voice coming from the cockpit and the radio link both. “We start going pear-shaped, we can let go.”

“All right,” Naomi said. And then, softly to herself, “All right.”

“If this doesn’t work,” Alex said though the deck hatch between ops and the cockpit, “our man Basia’s going to watch his baby girl burn to death. I sort of promised him that wouldn’t happen.”

“I know,” Naomi said. Havelock had hoped she’d say, She won’t.

It took Basia eighteen minutes to get back to the Roci and another five to negotiate the airlock. Naomi spent most of that time on the radio to the captain and engineer of the Barbapiccola. Half the conversation was in Belter patois—ji-ral sabe sa and richtig ane-nobu—that might as well have been in code for all he could follow it. Havelock requested a connection to Murtry’s hand terminal and was refused again. He wondered whether he should write some sort of press release or letter of resignation to the company.

“All right,” Basia said, sloping up into the ops deck. His face still had the thin, watery layer of sweat adhering to it. “I’m here.”

The readout counting down to the Barbapiccola’s atmospheric impact was down under an hour. It was hard for Havelock to remember that the stillness of the deck was an illusion. The velocities and forces involved in anything at orbital altitudes were enough to kill a human with just the rounding error. At their speeds, the friction from air too thin to breathe would set them on fire.

“Strap in,” Naomi said, nodding to the crash couches. Then, to the radio, “Rocinante bei here. Dangsin-eun junbiga?”

“Ready con son immer, sa sa?”

Naomi smiled. “Counting down,” she said. “Ten. Nine. Eight…”

At four, the displays on the consoles began to shift color, mapping the two ships, the tether lines, the engines in psychedelic false color. Basia was muttering under his breath, and it sounded like prayer. Naomi reached one.

The Rocinante moaned. The sound was deep as a gong, but it didn’t fade like one. Instead the overtones seemed to grow, one layering over another. On the displays, the tethers shimmered, the internal forces racing along the spider-web lines in crimson and orange and silver.

“Come on, baby,” Naomi said, petting the console before her. “You can do this. You can do it.”

“Getting pretty close to tolerance up here,” Alex said.

“I see it. Keep it gentle and steady.”

The Rocinante shrieked, a high scraping scream like metal being ripped apart. Havelock grabbed the sides of his crash couch, squeezing until his hands ached.

“Alex?” Naomi said.

“Just passing through a resonance window. Nothing to worry about.”

“I’m trusting you here,” Naomi said.

“Always can,” Alex said, and Havelock could hear the grin he couldn’t see. “I’m the pilot.”

Basia gasped. Havelock turned, but it took a few seconds to see what the Belter was reacting to. The countdown timer—the death timer—had changed. The Barbapiccola was slated to burn in three hours and fifteen minutes. Four hours and forty-three minutes. Six hours and six minutes. It was working. As Havelock watched, the life span of everyone on the ship below him ballooned out. Havelock felt like shouting. It was working. It had no right at all to have worked, and it was working.

The alarm Klaxon cut through the other noise. Naomi snapped back to her console.

“What am I lookin’ at, XO?” Alex said. The sound of the grin was gone. “Why am I seeing a bogie?”

“Checking it out,” Naomi shouted, not bothering with the radio. Havelock turned his own console to the sensor arrays. The new dot was approaching from the horizon, speeding above them in its own arc above cloud-choked Ilus.

“Where’s the Israel?” Havelock shouted.

“Occluded,” Naomi said. “We should be passing each other in an hour. Is that—”

“That’s the shuttle.”

The death timer showed seventeen hours and ten minutes.

“The shuttle you turned into a fucking torpedo?” Basia asked. His voice was surprisingly calm.

“Yeah,” Havelock said. “But the payload was the reactor overload, and there aren’t any reactors working, so—”

“It’s running on battery, then. That’s still going to be a hell of a lot of kinetic energy,” Naomi said.

“Is it going to hit us?” Havelock asked, and felt stupid as soon as the words were out of his mouth. Of course it was going to hit them.

“Alex?” Naomi said. “Give me options here.”

“PDCs are online, XO,” Alex said. “All I’ve got to do is put a little battery power to ’em, set ’em to automatic, and point defense can slag that thing before it comes close.”

Twenty hours and eighteen minutes.

“Power to the PDCs,” Naomi said. “Watch the tethers.”

“Sorry,” Alex said. “Just trying to do a few too many things at once here. Powering up the PDCs.”

That won’t work, Havelock thought. We’re forgetting something.

The red dot drew closer. The Israel itself hauled up over the edge of the horizon, visual contact still blocked by the curve of the atmosphere. The shuttle sped toward them. The firing of the point defense cannons was hardly more than a brief vibration in the overwhelming strain of dragging up the Barbapiccola. If he hadn’t known to expect it, he’d have missed it entirely. The red dot blinked out, and then back in.

“Oh,” Alex said. “Huh.”

“Alex?” Naomi shouted. “What’s going on? Why aren’t we shooting it?”

“Oh, we shot the hell out of it,” Alex said. “Busted that shit right on up. But this right now is when I’d normally be dodging out the debris path? That’s not really an option.”

“I don’t understand,” Havelock said. And then he did. The shuttle had been a great big hunk of metal when the point defense cannons hit it. Now it was almost certainly a great number of relatively small pieces of metal with pretty close to the same mass moving at very nearly the same speed. They just traded being hit with a shuttle-sized slug for being hit with a shuttle’s mass of shrapnel.

Naomi pressed her hand to her lips. “How long before—”

The ship shuddered. For a second, Havelock thought it was the PDCs kicking in again. Something was hissing and his crash couch had a sharp edge that he didn’t remember. The death clock had gone black. A growing mass of blood around his elbow was the first concrete sign he had that he’d been hurt, but as soon as he saw it, the pain detonated.

“Ops is holed!” Naomi shouted into the radio.

“Cockpit’s sealed,” Alex said. “I’m good.”

“I’m hurt,” Havelock said, trying to move his bleeding arm. The muscles still functioned. Whatever had hit him—shuttle debris or shrapnel from the crash couch—it hadn’t crippled the limb. The crimson globe inching its way along his arm was getting fairly impressive, though. Someone was tugging at him. Basia, the Belter.

“Get off the couch,” the Belter said. “We’ve got to get off the deck.”

“Yes,” Havelock said. “Of course.”

Naomi was moving through the compartment. Bits of anti-spalling foam swirled in the thinning air like snowflakes.

“Are you gettin’ anything over those holes?” Alex asked, his voice disconcertingly calm.

“I’m counting ten down here,” Naomi said as Havelock hauled himself out of the crash couch and kicked off toward the hatch leading deeper into the ship. “I didn’t bring that many beer coasters. I’m taking the civilians down to the airlock, putting them in suits. Havelock’s hit.”

“Dead?”

“Not dead,” Havelock said.

Naomi finished keying in the override and the deck hatch opened with a little puff of incoming air. Havelock’s ears popped as he pulled himself down into the airlock deck.

“How’s the tether?” Basia asked, following close behind.

“No damage to the main line,” Alex said. “We lost one of the foot supports, but I can try to adjust.”

“Do it,” Naomi said, and grabbed Havelock by the shoulder. The emergency aid station by the airlock door had a roll of elastic bandage and a small wound vacuum. Naomi pulled his arm out straight and pressed that vacuum’s clear plastic nozzle into the center of the globe of blood. “What am I looking at, Alex?”

“Checking, XO. All right. We’ve got a slow leak in the machine shop. The port side’s pretty messed up. Sensor arrays and PDCs on that side. Maneuvering thrusters aren’t responding. They may not even be there. There’s a lot of power conduits right around there too, but with the reactor off-line, I don’t know if they’re hit or not.”

The gouge in Havelock’s arm was as long as his thumb in a sharp V shape. Where the flesh had peeled back, his skin looked fish-belly white. The margin of the wound was nearly black with pooling blood. Naomi put absorbent bandage on it and started wrapping it down with an wide elastic band. She had tiny dots of his blood in her hair.

“How are we for moving?” she asked.

“I can go anyplace you want, so long as it’s counter-clockwise,” Alex said. “If there were a dock anywhere within a year of here and we had a reactor, I’d have a vote where to go next.”

“We’ll work on a plan B. How’s the Barb?”

Basia almost had his welding rig back on. Naomi patted Havelock’s wounded arm, a small physical statement. You’re good to go. She turned to the lockers and started pulling out an environment suit of her own.

“She’s still coming up,” Alex said. “But I’m starting to get worried about that missing foot support.”

“All right,” Naomi said. “Back the thrust down for now. We’ll see if we can get it stuck back on.”

Havelock pulled the thick leggings on, shrugged into the suit. He checked the seals automatically, long years of living in vacuum making it all as quick and automatic as reflex. The suit’s medical array kicked on and immediately injected him with a cocktail of anti-shock medicines. His heart raced and his face flushed.

“Well, the good news is they’re out of shuttles,” Basia said. “They won’t be doing that again.”

“What are they going to do,” Naomi said. It took Havelock a long moment to realize she was talking to him.

These were his people. Marwick and Murtry. The militia of engineers. The RCE team had launched the shuttle at the Rocinante and tried to break up a civilian rescue operation. It was a strangely dislocating thought. He’d spent a countable fraction of his life protecting these people, keeping the shipboard politics that always rose up on a long voyage to a minimum, protecting them from outside threats and internal ones. They’d tried to kill not only him, but the crew of the Rocinante and the Barbapiccola too. And the worst of it was that he wasn’t actually surprised.

“XO? I think we’ve got a hole in the port torpedo rails too. Might want to see if everything’s still in place down there. Failsafes are pretty good, but we’ll want to check them all if we ever plan to fire one. It’d be a real pity for our own ordnance to blow us up.”

“Roger that,” Naomi said. “I’m on my way. Basia, can you coordinate with Alex and get that foot support back where it’s supposed to be?”

“Sure can,” the Belter said. The one who’d been part of that first conspiracy to have the RCE people killed. Who had Governor Trying’s blood on his hands. For a moment, their eyes met through the doubled windows of their helmets. Basia’s eyes were hard, and then Havelock thought there was something else. A flicker of shame, maybe. Havelock watched as he cycled the airlock open, and then he watched it close.

“Havelock,” Naomi said. “I need you to answer the question.”

“Which question?”

“What are they going to do next?”

He shook his head. His arm throbbed. There was no point to the attack except spite and the kind of violence that passed for meaning in the face of despair. If Murtry was behind it, all he’d care was that the Barbapiccola went down before the Israel. If it was the engineering militia, they’d done it to show that they hadn’t lost.

The reasons behind it didn’t matter.

“I don’t know,” Havelock said, then sighed. “But it will probably be bad for everyone.”