Cibola Burn

A green square appeared on Basia’s HUD, then zoomed in like a telescope until the distant freighter was the size of his thumbnail.

“That’s at 50X,” Alex said.

“Space is too big,” Basia replied.

“It’s been said. And this is just the space in low orbit around one planet. Breaks the head a bit to think about.”

“I try not to.”

“Wise man.”

The Barbapiccola looked like a big metal shipping container with the squat bell housing of a drive at one end, and the blocky superstructure of command and control on top. She was ugly and utterly functional. A thing of the vacuum that would never know the heat of atmospheric drag.

The large cargo bays that took up most of her interior would be full of the raw lithium ore they’d already pulled off of Ilus. Waiting to fly to the refineries on Pallas Station. Waiting to be traded for food and medicine and soil enrichments. All the things the fledgling colony needed to survive.

Waiting to take his daughter away.

“Can we talk to them?” he asked.

“Huh? The Barb? Sure. Why?”

“My daughter is over there.”

“Alrighty,” came the reply, followed by a burst of static. A few moments after that, a voice with a thick Belter accent replied.

“Que?”

“Sa bueno. Basia Merton, mé. Suche nach Felcia Merton. Donde?”

“Sa sa,” the voice said, the tone a fight between curiosity and irritation. The connection stayed open but silent.

While he waited, Basia finished mounting the actuator arm and plugged it in. He called down on the ship channel to have Alex test it, and it opened and closed several times without binding or twisting the hatch. The motor made a smooth vibration in the hull beneath his magnetic boots that set his helmet to humming.

“Papa?” came a hesitant voice.

“Baby, Felcia, it’s me, honey,” he replied, trying to keep from babbling like an idiot and mostly failing.

“Papa,” she said, delight coloring her voice. Deeper now, richer, but still the voice of the little girl that had squealed Papa when he came home from work. It still melted all the hard, angry, adult places in his heart.

“I’m up here with you, honey.”

“On the Barbapiccola?” she said in confusion.

“No, I mean, in orbit. Over Ilus. I can see your ship, honey. Flying by.”

“Let me find a screen! Where are you? I can look for you.”

“No, don’t worry about that. I’m pretty far away. Had to magnify a lot to see you. Just keep talking to me for a minute before you go around the planet again.”

“Okay,” she said. “Are they nice to you over there?”

Basia laughed. “Your brother wanted to know the same thing. They’re fine. The best jailers ever. And you?”

“Everyone is nice, but worried. Maybe the RCE ship won’t let us leave.”

“Everything will be fine, honey,” Basia said, patting at the empty space as if she could see him and take comfort from it. “Holden’s working it out.”

“He made you a prisoner, Papa.”

“He did me a favor, Felcia. He saved me,” Basia said, and realized it was true as he said it. Murtry would have killed him. And his son and wife were still down on the planet. “I just wanted to say hello. Not talk about that stuff.”

“So hello, Papa,” she replied with her grown-up little girl’s voice.

“Hello, podling,” he replied, calling her by a nickname he hadn’t used in years.

She made a strange noise, and it took Basia a moment to realize she was crying. “Never going to see you again, Papa,” she said, her voice thick.

He started to reply with objections, with reassurances. But his conversation with Alex came back to him, and instead he said, “Maybe, podling. That’s nobody’s fault but mine. Remember that, okay? I tried to do what I thought was right, but I messed up and it’s on no one but me if I have to pay for it.”

“I don’t like that,” Felcia said, still crying.

Me either, honey, he thought, but said, “Is what is, sa sa? Is what is. Doesn’t change that I love you, and your mama, and Jacek.” And Katoa, who I left to die.

“They say I have to go,” Felcia said. The tiny green dot that hid the massive spaceship his daughter lived on was moving away, toward the horizon, into radio blackout. He could see it happening. Watch the unimaginable distance between them getting wider until a planet came between them.

“Okay, honey,” he said. “Bye now. I love you.”

Whatever she might have said in reply was lost, as the Barbapiccola slipped behind Ilus and the channel broke up into static and died. No relay satellites in orbit around the new world yet. Back to line of sight, like nineteenth-century primitives bouncing radio around inside their atmosphere. Basia thought of his home, really just a shack in a tiny village with two dusty roads. Maybe that was appropriate.

Seventeen hundred kilometers below, his world spun. Beneath his feet, a spaceship capable of flying across the solar system hummed to itself with barely restrained power.

Maybe not just like a nineteenth-century primitive.

“You ready to come back in?” Alex said, breaking into his reverie.