Cibola Burn

“He’s an asshole, and he’s forgotten that a few paintball games aren’t enough to make him Admiral fucking Nelson.”

“I’ll keep him in line,” Havelock said. For another ten days, and then it won’t matter.

Marwick nodded once and dropped his connection as well. Havelock took a deep breath and let it out slowly through his nose. He flipped back to his connection request queue. Another thirty messages had come in just while he’d been talking to the captain and the chief. They were all messages from home. From Sol. Requests for interviews and comment from people he’d never met, but not all from people he hadn’t seen. Sergio Morales from Nezávislé News. Amanda Farouk from First Response. Mayon Dale from Central Information OPA. Even Nasr Maxwell from Forecast Analytics. The faces and personalities of all the newsfeeds he followed to stay in touch with how things were going back at home were coming to him now. Humanity’s attention was pointed out to New Terra. To him.

He didn’t like it, and it didn’t help.

He went through them one by one, replying with the same canned recording he’d made the first time: “Our hands are full right now addressing the situation on New Terra. Please refer your questions to Patricia Verpiske-Sloan with Royal Charter Energy’s public relations division.” Blah blah blah. He’d probably be dressed down at some point for doing that much. He was already a little worried that he shouldn’t have said his hands were full.

“You all right?” Naomi asked from her cell.

“I’m fine.”

“I just ask because you’re sighing a lot.”

“Am I?”

“Five times in the last minute,” Naomi said. “Before the reactor died, it was one every two minutes. On average.”

Havelock smiled. “You need a hobby.”

“Oh, I really do,” Naomi said.

He pulled up the drop shipment status page. The insertion point was still eight hours away. The longest fabrication run he could do was about six hours, then. If Murtry and the others needed anything that took longer than that, they’d have to wait. He started cycling through the list. Food. Spare water bags for the chem deck they’d salvaged. Acetylene and oxygen for the salvage and repair crew. He checked the weight. He didn’t want to skip anything that might be useful downstairs, but it wouldn’t help anyone to scatter it all across the upper atmosphere because a chute failed.

“You’re going to be famous when we get back,” Naomi said.

“Hmm?”

“You’re the face of it now. Everything that’s happening here? That message you made is what all the feeds are going to be playing.”

“That message was so information-free it was almost sterile,” Havelock said. “It’s how you say ‘no comment’ without sounding like you’re trying to hide something.”

“They won’t care. Maybe they don’t even run your words. Just the image of you with the audio turned low while they talk over it.”

“Well, that’s just great,” Havelock said, sifting the drop contents. The emergency lighting had batteries, and while they probably wouldn’t be enough to set off the planetary defenses, he didn’t want to risk it. He tried to remember if there was anything else that carried its own energy supply. It wasn’t an issue he was used to worrying about.

“It was like that for us,” Naomi said. “Well, for him, really. Even before Eros.”

“What was?”

“Being the face of something. Looking back, I can see where it happened. And then he was that guy who’d been shot at by Mars. And then Eros.”

“True enough,” Havelock said. “There are probably people who haven’t heard of James Holden and the Rocinante, but they’re not the kind of people who watch newsfeeds. He seems to bear up under it pretty well, though.”

“Why Mister Havelock, I do believe that was sarcasm.”

He switched to the packing schematic. The computer had taken all the packages and lined them up in six different configurations, depending on whether density, aerodynamics, or even weight distribution was the highest priority. He turned the imaged with his fingers, imagining each of them in turn falling through the buffeting, violent high atmosphere of New Terra.

“I just mean that it doesn’t seem to bother him,” he said.

“Honestly, he’s barely aware of it,” Naomi said.

“Come on. You’re telling me he doesn’t get off on it? Just a little?”

“He doesn’t get off on it, even a little,” Naomi said. “I’ve known men that would. But that’s not Jim.”

“You two are a couple, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’d call him a lucky man, except he’s involved with this utter clusterfuck of a planet,” Havelock said as he chose one of the compromise packing schemes. “The only thing I’m going to be the face of is a long, slow death that everyone in the system can watch and be glad they aren’t here.”

He switched to the fulfillment tree view. The remaining jobs that needed to be fabbed were all in queue. He had the feeling he was missing something, but it took a few seconds to remember what. He switched back to the inventory and added in a little box of oncocidals. For James Holden.