Cibola Burn

“Honestly, why? What’s this for? That ship down there and everyone on her is going to die. We’re doing everything we can to put that off, but you guys have done the math, right? You have the same numbers we do. You don’t gain anything from this. It’s just being mean. You don’t need to do that.”

One of the dots flinched. At a guess, the chief engineer was shouting on whatever frequency they were all using now. Drowning him out. Havelock let his sight drift to one of the other dots. The angle made it hard to parse exactly what he was seeing. A gas storage tube of some kind, with complications of wire and circuit board on either end. Some kind of improvised missile, he guessed. They would have been pointless if the PDC he was hiding behind had been working. He wondered whether the engineers knew the Roci’s defenses were down, or if they only guessed. Or if the prospect of their own deaths and their hatred of the Belters had taken them far enough that the risk of being killed in order to deny the Barbapiccola a little more life seemed worth it to them. No matter what, it was disappointing.

“Walters? Is this how you want to go down? Don’t listen to them for a second. Seriously, just turn off the radio. We don’t have to hurry here. Do you think you’re doing the right thing?”

They were visibly closer now than they had been. They weren’t accelerating toward him, but they weren’t braking either. Havelock’s HUD made the calculation. They’d be at the Roci or the Barb or the tether between them in about twenty minutes.

“You guys need to slow down now,” Havelock said. “You’re still my people, and I don’t want to hurt any of you.”

The radio clicked to life. The chief engineer’s voice was thick with anger and contempt. “Don’t try to play that on us, you traitorous bastard. Your little friend’s PDCs are powered down. We saw that before we dropped. Do you think we’re stupid? We have orders to bring you and the Belter bitch back to the Israel and put you both in the brig.”

“Orders?”

“Straight from Murtry.”

Because, Havelock figured, it was precedent. RCE would be able to assert that it had protected its claim down to the last minute. Murtry’s legacy would be that he hadn’t given up a centimeter. Not on the ground, not in space, not on the abstract legal battlefield. Nowhere.

There was a time not that long ago when Havelock would have thought there was a kind of hard purity in that. Now it just seemed weird and kind of pathetic.

“Okay,” he said. “You’re right. The PDCs are down, but you haven’t thought the rest of this through. I am outside the ship. I’m armored. I have an integrated HUD and a weapon that can reach any of you right now. None of you have any cover. The reason you guys are alive right now is because you’re my guys, and I don’t want any of you hurt.”

He watched them react. It was less than he’d hoped. The Roci bucked again. The bolt of the rail gun and the attacking streaks of energy from the moons. Havelock reacquired the targets. It took a fraction of a second for the HUD’s alert to make sense to him. Four of the targets were moving. Fast. Four of the gas tanks, accelerating hard, a cloud of thin mist flowing out behind them as whatever residual vapor had been trapped in it froze into snow.

“You’ve got incoming,” Alex snapped in his ear, and Havelock lifted his gun. One of the missiles was clearly flying off course, a vicious spiral wobble leading it down toward the planet. He took aim at one of the three remaining and blew holes on both sides of the tube. The improvised missile wobbled as whatever steering device the Israel’s engineers had put on the back struggled to use the last of the escaping ejection mass to correct the course, but the venting gases were too destabilizing. It drifted up and began to turn. He shifted to the two remaining targets. He wasn’t going to have time to get them both, but he managed to sink two rounds in the one that was heading straight toward him, trying to knock out the payload.

The one remaining tube hit the Roci’s skin eight meters to Havelock’s right, and the world went white. Something pushed him, and something hurt, and the sound of his suit radio was still there, but it was faintly distant. His body seemed very large, like it had expanded to fill the universe or the universe had shrunk down until it fit in his skin. His hands seemed a very long way away. Someone was shouting his name.