Cibola Burn

“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.