Cibola Burn

But thinking about something else for a moment broke the logjam in his brain, and the idea he’d been fumbling toward popped fully formed into his head.

“Why don’t we use the batteries for the rail gun?”

“The what?” Havelock said.

“Huh,” Naomi said. “Not a terrible idea. They’re topped off, right?”

“They pull power to keep themselves full when the reactor’s on, and we haven’t fired the gun and they discharge really slow when not in use,” Alex replied. “But they’re on a separate system. No way to pull power the other direction without some work.”

“I can work,” Basia said. “I’ll do it. Tell me what to do. I’ll recharge my suit and the welding rig right now.”

“Wait,” Naomi said. Her face had gone strangely blank, except for her eyes moving rapidly back and forth like she was reading something in the air. “Wait a minute…”

Havelock started to say something, but Alex grabbed his arm and silently shook his head.

“We’ll pull power off the rail gun grid, transfer it over to the main grid, and use it to heat propellant mass for thrust,” she finally said.

“Yep,” Alex agreed.

“With loss at every step. That’s really inefficient.”

“Yep,” Alex repeated.

“When we have propellant mass already in the system without moving the power,” she continued. “Alex, how much acceleration does a two-kilo slug traveling at five thousand meters per second give the ship?”

“Enough,” Alex replied with a sly grin, “that we’re supposed to only fire it with the main drive on.”

“Sounds like a thruster to me,” Naomi said, grinning back at him.

“Uh,” Havelock cut in, “the ship is spinning a little after that shuttle strike and all? Won’t that make it tough to, you know, aim?”

“It’s not a trivial problem,” Naomi admitted. “We’d need to make sure we fire at the exact millisecond the two ships and the cable are aligned. No way a human could judge it. But the Roci can if I tell her what we need.”

“Isn’t the Barb in the flight path?” Havelock asked.

“Right,” Naomi said, her voice soft and uninflected. “So the sequence will have to be tipping the Roci nose down as we spin past the firing point, launching a round, then tipping her back nose up to keep from spinning out of control on that new axis. Fortunately, those thrusters work.”

“This sounds,” Basia said, “pretty hard.”

“Well,” Naomi said with a smile and a wink. “It’s only the most complicated nav program I’ll have ever written, but I have a couple hours to do it in.”

“I don’t know about you folks, but I’m excited to be part of this plan,” Alex said. “Let’s get going.”

~

Basia watched the clock tick away the hours and minutes to his daughter’s death.

Naomi sat at her console rapidly typing. The symbolic language she used to program the Rocinante’s navigation systems meant nothing to him. Watching her work was like listening to someone speak in a foreign language: the awareness of information without actual meaning. But he watched her anyway, knowing that she was building a program that might add precious minutes back to the clock. Maybe hours. Not days.

Alex was back up in his cockpit, out of sight. But periodically he called down on the ship’s comm to talk to Naomi about her work, so he was apparently following along from his own station. He would ask for clarifications or make suggestions, but his words were as empty of content to Basia as the symbols on Naomi’s screen.

Havelock had gone belowdecks to move the emergency escape bubbles out of the cargo hold and up to the main airlock. The rail gun plan might not work, and the next step was to evacuate as many people from the Barbapiccola as the Rocinante could handle.

It was all just delaying games. Try to save the Barb a little longer with their rail gun heroics. If not, save a few people by moving them to the Roci before she fell out of the sky or turned into a killing jar with twenty more people breathing her air and overloading her life support.

But they all did it without question. They fought and worked and devised intricate plans to buy more time. Basia had no doubt that they’d work just as hard to keep each other alive for even a few more minutes. It wasn’t something he’d ever had to think about before. But it did seem to be a microcosm of everything in life. No one lived forever. But you fought for every minute you could get. Bought a little more with a lot of hard work. It made Basia proud and sad at the same time. Maybe that was how a warrior felt, standing on ground he knew he’d never leave alive. Making the choice to fight as long and hard as he could. Basia couldn’t think why I went out, but I didn’t go out easy was such an appealing and romantic notion, but it was.

Looking at the angry brown ball of Ilus, rotating past on his screen, Basia thought, You’ll kill us, but you won’t kill us easy. He took a deep breath and worked hard not to thump himself on the chest.

“You okay over there?” Naomi asked, not looking up from her work.

“Fine, fine. How are you?”