Cibola Burn

“Almost there,” she said. “The trick is that we’ll have a lot of thrust coming from one vector and not along our center of mass with the cable attached, and we only have maneuvering thrusters on three sides of the ship. So, we have to minimize rotation to port. But, we can’t use the starboard fore thruster to counteract that rotation because the cable changes where our center of mass is. It’s actually a fun problem to figure out.”

“I have no idea what any of that means,” Basia said. “Is it working?”

“I think it will. Alex agrees. We’ll fire in a couple of minutes on the next rotation. Then we’ll know.”

“Great,” Basia said.

The deck hatch clanged open and then closed again as Havelock pulled himself up into the ops deck. He’d changed out of his RCE jumpsuit and armor into loose-fitting gray sweats with the name ROCINANTE across the chest. The security officer was bigger than Holden, so if the clothes hung loose on him, they must belong to Amos. Basia thought maybe he wouldn’t wear Amos’ clothes without asking.

“The emergency stuff is in the airlock,” Havelock said to Naomi’s back. She hadn’t looked up from her work when he came in. “I also threw a couple of EVA packs, some extra air bottles, and Basia’s welding rig in there. I can’t think of anything else we might need.”

“Thank you, Dimitri,” Naomi said.

“Dimitri?” Basia asked with a raised eyebrow.

“You’ve got a problem with that? Isn’t Basia a girl’s name?” Havelock shot back.

“It was my grandmother’s name, and she was a solar-system-wide famous physicist, so it’s a great honor to be named after her. I was the first grandchild.”

“You two can shut up or leave the deck,” Naomi said. Then she hit the wall comm and added, “Alex, you ready up there?”

“Think so,” Alex replied with his heavy drawl. “Just a sec, lemme tweak one thing here…”

“Can we throw this up on the big screen?” Basia asked. “I’d like to see what happens.”

Naomi didn’t answer, but the main screen on the deck shifted from a tactical map to a forward telescopic view. The image rotated slowly past the brown-and-gray ball of Ilus, and then past the distant gray hulk of the Barbapiccola, and then on to the starry black.

“Missed our window,” Naomi said. “You almost ready?”

“Yeah,” Alex replied, dragging the word out to three syllables. “Now. Good to go.”

“Executing,” Naomi said and tapped a button on her screen, but nothing happened. The view on the big screen continued to slowly pan until Ilus came back into view. Then the Barbapiccola. Then, without warning, the Rocinante tipped violently forward and something very loud happened in the belly of the ship. A bright dot of fire and a curve of flame appeared in the planet’s atmosphere. Basia found that the far bulkhead was now traveling toward him at a slow but noticeable speed. The ship pitched again, the various maneuvering thrusters firing in staccato bursts. When the noise and movement was over, the view on the main screen was steady, locked onto the Barbapiccola.

“Huh,” Alex said. “I’m seeing activity from the moons.”

“Are they shooting at us?” Havelock said.

“Nope. Looks like they’re trying to knock down the gauss round,” Alex said. “Full points for optimism.”

“We’re not rotating anymore,” Basia said.

“No,” Naomi replied. “Give me any three directions of thrust and I can find a way to stop us. Now we just keep it here firing and adjusting, and we should be adding some speed to our orbit.”

Basia looked down at the timer counting away the Barbapiccola’s remaining life. It had added a little over four minutes. “How often can you fire?”

“About every five minutes or so, if we don’t want to overheat the rails and burn the batteries out. At least, every five minutes until the batteries are dead.”

“But —”

“We’ve just stopped the degrading orbit, but not much more,” Naomi said.

“Israel’s coming back around,” Alex said. “She dumped something off.”

“Goddammit,” Naomi muttered. “Give us a fucking break, will you guys? What are they dropping?”

“Men in suits,” Alex said.

“It’s the militia,” Havelock said. He’d pulled himself over to a tactical display and was zooming it in and out. “Twelve of them, in vacuum armor with EVA packs. Plus an equal number of metallic objects of about human size. Not sure what those are.”

“Any speculation on what they’re doing?” Naomi said, switching her view to match his.

“They’re engineers. They know how crippled we are. How vulnerable. So my guess is they’re going to try to kill us.”

Chapter Forty-Eight: Holden

Life at the naval academy had been so stressful for Holden that at the end of his first term he’d celebrated by going to a party and drinking until he passed out for twenty hours. It had been his first lesson on the difference between unconsciousness and sleep. They might seem the same, but they weren’t. After twenty hours, he’d woken feeling totally unrested, and the morning PT the next day had almost killed him.