Cibola Burn

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.

Chapter Forty: Havelock

“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?”