Cibola Burn

“Teaching may not be my strong suit,” Havelock said. “And we do have the element of surprise on our side.”

“I guess,” Naomi said, her voice making her skepticism clear. “How are you doing?”

Havelock started to say I’m fine by reflex, and then paused. He had just attacked and disabled two of his crewmen who’d been working at the direct and explicit order of his superior officer. He’d betrayed the trust of men he’d been traveling with for years on behalf of a Belter saboteur. And they were all of them days from dying. And, maybe oddly, it was that last fact that made all the rest all right. He was a dead man. They were all dead men. So there was a sense in which what he did now didn’t matter. He was free to follow his conscience wherever it led.

It was the security man’s nightmare scenario. In the face of death, why wouldn’t there be riots? Why wouldn’t there be killing and theft and rape? If there were no consequences – or if all the consequences were the same – then anything became possible. It was his job to expect the worst of humanity, including himself. And now here he was, helping a lawfully bound prisoner escape because he liked the death she offered him better than Murtry’s plastic-and-ceramic sepulcher standing on an empty planet. He didn’t give a good goddamn about New Terra or Ilus or whatever the unpleasant ball of mud under them got called. He cared about the people. The ones on the Israel and the ones on the Barbapiccola and the ones on the surface. All of them. Staking a claim that the corporation could use to protect its assets after they all died just wasn’t good enough.

“I’m weirdly at peace with this,” he said.

“Probably a good sign,” she said, and a fresh round of shooting started. Havelock gestured for her to stay and pushed forward.

All the major corridors on the Israel had decompression hatches: thick circles of metal with hard polymer seals. Most of the time they were bumps in the walls, larger than the ship designs a generation or two later, but easy enough to ignore. If something holed the ship, the hatch would close with the speed and amorality of a guillotine. If someone got caught in it, one loss was better than venting the air. Havelock had seen training videos about misfires, and he’d been nervous around them ever since. One man was pressed to the wall, eyeing the corridor ahead anxiously. Havelock cleared his throat, and the man spun, pistol at the ready.

“Mfume,” Havelock said, his palms up. “Where’s Boyd?”

“He went forward,” Mfume said, gesturing with the gun, but not lowering it. “The chief’s getting shot at. And he told me to stay here. And I stayed, but —”

“It’s all right,” Havelock said, moving closer slowly, not making eye contact. He kept looking down the corridor, trying to shift the man’s attention there. The raised pistol made his chest itch. “You did the right thing.”

The radio crackled back to life, and the chief engineer spoke. He sounded winded. “We’ve locked the little bastard down. He winged Salvatore, but it’s not bad. I need everyone up here. We’re going to rush him.”

“That’s probably not a good idea,” Havelock said on the open channel.

“It’s all right,” the chief engineer said. “We can take him.”

“Not without casualties that you don’t have to take,” Havelock said. “Is he in armor?”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure I got one hit on him,” another voice said, its tone high and tight, like a kid on his first hunt who thinks he shot a deer.

“Everyone check in,” the chief said.

“Jones and I are in the brig, chief. Everything’s quiet.”

“Prisoner giving you any shit?” the chief asked.

“I moved her,” Havelock said. “She’s fine. I need you to pull back now. We have to do this by the numbers.”

Another half dozen gunshots peppered the air. Mfume twitched with each of them. Havelock gently pushed the barrel of the man’s gun away until it pointed at the wall. Mfume didn’t seem to notice he’d done it.

“No can do,” Koenen said. “If we let up, this Belter sonofabitch is going to get loose. We’ve got to finish this thing. Honneker! Walters! Get your nuts in your palms and head forward, boys. This piece of shit is going down.”

The silence on the radio was eerie.

“Walters?” the chief engineer said.

Havelock took Mfume’s wrist and twisted, bracing one leg against the wall for leverage. Mfume cried out, but he loosened his grip on the gun enough for Havelock to bat it away. The black metal spun down the corridor, and Mfume yelled and tried to push him away. Havelock shifted his grip, pulling out and down, peeling Mfume away from his bracing wall. The engineer screamed again, and Havelock fired the Taser into his back. Mfume bounced against the far wall, limp as a puppet, and Havelock pulled the shotgun off his back and shifted to jam one knee against the lip of the decompression hatch and the other foot behind him against a handhold.

“Nagata,” he shouted. “We’re about to have company.”