Cibola Burn

Holden shuffled his way around the tower again.

Chapter Thirty-Nine: Basia

“Hey Papa!” the Jacek on the screen said. The boy’s voice almost vibrated with fear and exhaustion.

Hey son,” the recorded Basia and the real one said at the same time. Jacek began talking about death-slugs and lightning and living in the alien ruins, reciting words of reassurance and explanation that Basia could recognize as Lucia’s. Jacek soberly repeated all the reasons his mother had given him that things might end well, telling Basia as an excuse to hear them again himself. It was the third time Basia had watched the recorded video of his conversation with his boy. When it finished, he cued up the recording of his conversation with Lucia and watched it for the tenth time.

He considered asking Alex to call them again, get new conversations to record, but he recognized this as a selfish impulse and quashed it.

Jacek looked dirty, covered with mud, tired. He described the horror of the poisonous slug worms with dread and fascination. The constant lightning storms and rain were amazingly exotic to a child who’d only ever lived in ice tunnels and ship holds before coming to Ilus. He never said he wished his daddy was there, but the fact sang in his words. Basia wanted nothing more than to take his boy by the hand, tell him it was all right to be scared. That bravery was being scared and doing it anyway.

Lucia, when her turn had come, looked less fearful than exhausted. Her smiles for him were all perfunctory. Her report was vague because, he knew, she had nothing to say that would help either of them to hear.

Felcia’s videos had been the ones that brought him peace. She was the one member of his family he had felt like he hadn’t failed. She’d wanted to go to school, and he’d managed to push down his fears and needs and the burdens that he carried long enough to actually let her go. It had felt like a victory.

Until now.

Now he only saw the ticking clock Alex had left running, showing the remaining time until she burned up across Ilus’ sky.

The simulation and timer ran out their terrible program on the panel behind him. He tried never to look. When he needed to use the screens on the operations deck, he drifted through the compartment trying not to even glance in its direction. He tried very hard to forget that it existed at all.

He failed.

Watching his most recent conversation with Felcia for the fourth time, he felt the timer behind him, like a warm spot on his back. Like the stare of someone from across a crowded room. The game became how long he could go without looking. Or whether he could distract himself sufficiently to forget it was there.

On the screen, Felcia told him about learning to change air scrubbers on the Belter freighter. It wasn’t the sort of things she’d had to do in the long months when the Barbapiccola had been their home. Her graceful fingers were demonstrating some complex function necessary to the process. She made it seem light. Fun. Amusing. He was her father. He knew that she was scared.

Tick tick tick, the clock burned soundlessly at his back.

He adjusted the air recycling system nozzle near his panel and sent a cool breeze across his face. He finished the recording and spent some time organizing his files by content and date. Then decided it was better by date and name, and reorganized them again.

Tick tick tick, hot like the sun on a dark shirt at noon. Burning without burning.

He opened up the file Alex had set up with repair tasks and scrolled through the list. He’d already checked off the ones he was actually capable of doing. He spent some time looking over the rest of the items, trying to decide if there were any he could help out with. Nothing jumped out at him. Not surprising, since it was his fifth time through the list.

Tick tick tick.

Basia turned around. The first thing he noticed was that the simulated orbital paths looked different. The changes were so slight that he probably shouldn’t have been able to see them, but the bright hateful lines that described his only daughter’s demise had burned themselves into his brain. There was no doubt, they were different. For some reason, it took him longer to notice that the clock had changed.

There were three fewer days.

Last time he’d looked at the clock, just a few hours before, there had been slightly over eight days on it. Now there were just under five.

“The clock is broken,” he said to no one.

Alex was up in the cockpit, where he seemed to spend most of his time. Basia yanked at the straps holding him to the chair, fighting with them without success until he forced himself to calm down and just press the release latches. Then he kicked off to the crew ladder and climbed up.

Alex had a complex-looking graphic on his main display. He was working at it with gentle touches on the screen and a steady stream of muttering under his breath.