Cibola Burn

Chapter Twenty-Five: Basia

Basia sat alone on the operations deck of the Rocinante. He was belted into a crash couch next to what he’d been told was the comm station. The controls were quiet, waiting for someone to request a connection, occasionally flashing a system status message across its screen. The messages were incomprehensible mixtures of acronyms, system names, and numbers. The text was in a gentle green font that made Basia think they weren’t particularly urgent.

Alex was in the cockpit, the hatch closed. That didn’t mean anything. The hatches closed automatically to seal each deck from the others in case of atmosphere loss. It was a safety measure, nothing more.

It still felt like being locked out.

The panel startled him with a burst of static followed by a voice. The volume was just loud enough that Basia could tell it was a conversation between two men without understanding any of the words. A red RECORDING status blinked in one corner of the screen. The Rocinante, monitoring and recording all of the radio transmissions around Ilus. Maybe Holden was doing that on purpose to have a record of his mission when he returned to Earth. Or maybe warships did it by default. It wasn’t something that a welder had to worry about. Or a miner. Or whatever he’d been with Coop and Cate.

Basia was looking for a way to turn up the volume and listen in when Alex’s voice blared from the panel. “Got a call comin’ in.”

“Okay,” Basia said, not sure if the pilot could hear him. He didn’t know if he needed to press a button to respond.

The message on the comm panel changed, and a male voice said, “You don’t need to do anything.”

For a moment, Basia had the irrational feeling that the person speaking had read his mind. He was about to reply when another voice, younger, male, said, “Just talk?” Jacek. The second voice was Jacek. And now Basia recognized the older voice as Amos Burton. The man who’d guarded him at the landing field. “Yeah,” Amos said. “I’ve opened a connection to the Roci.”

“Hello?” Jacek said.

“Hey, son,” Basia replied around the lump in his throat.

“They made our hand terminal work again,” Jacek said. By they Basia guessed he meant Holden and Amos.

“Oh yeah?” Basia said. “That’s real good.”

“It only talks to the ship,” Jacek said, his young boy’s voice bright with excitement. “It doesn’t play videos or anything like it used to.”

“Well, maybe they can make it do that too, later.”

“They said someday we’ll be on the network, like everyplace in Sol system. Then we can do whatever.”

“That’s true,” Basia said. Water was building up in his eyes, making it hard to see the little messages flashing by on the screen. “We’ll get a relay and a hub and then we can send data back and forth through the gates. We’ll have everything on the network then. There’s still going to be a lot of lag.”

“Yeah,” Jacek said, then stopped. There was a long silence. “What’s the ship like?”

“Oh, it’s pretty great,” Basia said with forced enthusiasm. “I have my own room and everything. I met Alex Kamal. He’s a pretty famous pilot.”

“Are you in jail?” Jacek asked.

“No, no, I get to go anywhere I want on the ship. They’re real nice. Good people.” I love you. I am so sorry. Please, please be all right.

“Does he let you fly it?”

“I never asked,” Basia said with a laugh. “I’d be scared to, though. It’s big and fast. Lots of guns on it.”

There was another long silence, then Jacek said, “You should fly it and blow up the RCE ship.”

“I can’t do that,” Basia said, putting as much smile in his voice as he could. Making it a joke.

“But you should.”

“How’s your mom?”

“Okay,” Jacek said. Basia could almost hear the shrug in his voice. “Sad. I started playing soccer more. We have enough for two teams, but we trade players a lot.”

“Oh yeah? What do you play?”

“Fullback right now, but I want to play striker.”

“Hey, defense is important. That’s an important job.”

“It’s not as fun,” Jacek said, again with the verbal shrug. There was a long silence while both of them reached for something to say. Something that could be said. Jacek gave up first. “I’m gonna go now, okay?”

“Hey, wait a minute,” Basia said, trying to keep the thickness in his throat from changing his voice. Trying to keep his tone light, fun. “Don’t run off yet. I need to ask you to do something.”

“Got a game,” Jacek said. “Pretty soon. They’ll get mad.”

“Your mom,” Basia said, then had to stop and blow his nose into the sleeve of his shirt.

“Mom what?”

“Your mom will work too much, if you don’t watch her. She gets to looking things up at night. Medical things. And she won’t get enough sleep. I need you to make sure she gets some sleep.”

“Okay.”

“It’s serious, boy. I need you to look after her. Your sister’s gone, and that’s good, but it just leaves you to help out. You gonna help out with this?”

“Okay,” Jacek said. Basia couldn’t tell if the boy was sad or angry. Or distracted.

“See you, son,” Basia said.

“See you, Pop,” Jacek replied.

“Love you,” Basia said, but the signal had already died.

Basia wiped his eyes with the sleeves of his shirt. He floated against his restraints, breathing deep, ragged breaths for a full minute, then pulled himself over to the crew ladder. He moved aft, deck hatches opening at his approach and slamming shut behind him as he went, the sound echoing through the empty ship.

He changed shirts in his room, then spent a few minutes in the head cleaning his face with wet towels. They had a large shower unit—he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a real shower—but it only worked when the ship was under thrust.

When he no longer looked like a man who’d been bawling, Basia floated back along the ladder to the cockpit. He was considering whether or not it was polite to knock before entering when he drifted too close to the hatch’s electronic eye and it snapped open with a hiss.

Alex was belted into the pilot’s chair, the large display directly in front of him spooling out ship status reports and a rendering of Ilus, its single massive continent dotted with red and yellow marks. And one green dot that was First Landing. The pilot scowling at the screen tensely as though he could will the universe to do something. Like he could make it give his crew back.

Basia was turning to leave when the deck hatch banged shut and Alex looked up.

“Hey,” he said and tapped out something on the panel.

“Hello,” Basia said.

“How’d your call go? Everything okay?”

“Fine. Thank you for letting me use the radio.”

“No problem, partner,” Alex said with a laugh. “They don’t charge us by the hour.”

An uncomfortable silence stretched out that Alex pretended not to notice by pressing buttons on his controls. “Am I allowed to be up here?” Basia finally asked.

“I don’t mind,” Alex said. “Just, you know, don’t mess with anything.”

Basia pulled himself into the chair behind Alex and belted in. The armrests of the chair ended with complex-looking joysticks, so Basia was careful not to bump them.

“That’s the gunner’s seat,” Alex said, turning his entire chair around to face Basia.

“Should I not—”

“Naw, it’s fine. It ain’t on. Push buttons there all you want. Hey, wanna see somethin’ cool?”

Basia nodded and put his hands on the two control sticks. They were covered with buttons. The gunner’s seat. Those sticks might control the Rocinante’s lethal weaponry. He wished Jacek could see him sitting there, holding the controls.

Alex turned around and did something on his own panel, and the screen in front of Basia came to life with a view matching Alex’s own. Basia looked at the bright limb of his planet, trying to find the location of First Landing. Without the green dot overlay it was impossible in daylight. If they were on the night side he could have spotted them as a spark of light.

Alex did something else, and the view shifted to a dull red blob of molten rock. “That’s the moon goin’ meltdown. It wasn’t a very big one, but still, kinda makes you wonder what could melt a hunk of rock that size.”

“Do we know?”

“Hell no. Some kind of alien protomolecule shit’d be my guess.”

Before Basia could ask for more details, the radio squawked at them. “Alex here,” the pilot said.

“Kid’s gone, wanted to check in,” Amos’ voice said.

“How’s the captain doing?” Alex asked.

“Not great. And once again he stopped me from doing the obvious thing.”

“Shooting the RCE chief in the face?”

“Awww,” Amos said. “Warms my heart how well you know me.”

“They got her, buddy,” Alex said, his voice firm but gentle. “Don’t do anything that makes it worse.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“You just watch the captain’s back down there,” Alex continued. “I’ll take care of our XO.”

“If they hurt her?”

“Then it’ll be rainin’ RCE parts down on Ilus for a year.”

“Won’t actually help,” Amos said with a sigh.

“No,” Alex agreed. “No, it won’t. It’ll happen, though.”

“All right. Gonna go find the captain. Amos out.”

Alex tapped on his controls, and the view swung around away from the planet. For a moment, there was nothing, and then a tiny flicker of light, no more than a single pixel. The view zoomed in until it became a massive ship painted with the RCE colors. After a moment, it zoomed again, the rear of the ship swelling until it filled the screen, a small red crosshair glowing in the center of the view.

“Got my eyes on you,” Alex said under his breath.

“What’s that?” Basia asked, pointing at the crosshair.

“That’s where the reactor sits. The Roci’s got a lock on that location. I can send a gauss round right through her heart faster than her first alarm bell can ring.”

“Won’t that… you know…” He made an explosive motion with his hands.

“No, it’ll just vent. Probably kill a lot of their engineering staff.”

“Do they know you’re aiming at them?”

“Not yet, but I’m about to fill ’em in. That’s what’ll keep my XO breathin’.”

“Nice that you can do something to protect her,” Basia said, and meant to stop, but the words pressed out past his teeth. “My daughter is on the Barbapiccola. My wife and son are down on Ilus. I can’t do anything to help them or protect them.”

Basia waited for the empty words of reassurance.

“Yeah,” Alex said. “You really fucked that one up, didn’t you?”

Alex tapped something on his screen, and the words RAIL GUN ARMED glowed red for a second over the image of the Edward Israel.

“I need to call over to that ship in a sec,” Alex said.

“Warn them.”

“More like threaten them,” Alex said. “Pretty much the shittiest thing we have to offer for someone we all love, but it’s what we got left.” He reached out and fiddled with something on the bulkhead and a stream of cool air shot out of the vent. It ruffled the pilot’s thinning black hair and dried the sweat accumulating on his scalp. He closed his eyes and sighed.

“I don’t even have threats,” Basia said. It sounded like whining even to him. “I don’t even have that.”

“Yeah. So I flew for the Mars navy for twenty years,” Alex said, his eyes still closed.

“Oh?” Basia said. He wasn’t sure what the correct response was.

“I was married,” Alex continued, moving his head around to let the cool air strike every part of his neck and face. Basia didn’t reply. It had the feeling of a story, not a conversation. Alex would tell it or he wouldn’t.

“Life for a naval spouse is, frankly, pretty shitty,” Alex said after a few moments. “Typical tour on an MCRN boat can go from ninety days to four, maybe five hundred days. Depending on your MOS and fleet locations.”

“MOS?” Basia asked before he could stop himself.

“Your job. Anyway, while you’re out on a boat, your partner is back home, doin’ whatever they do. Lot of folks do plural marriages, group partnerships, things like that. But I’m a one-woman kind of guy, and I guess she was a one-man kind of woman. So we did it the old-fashioned way.”

Basia nodded, even though Alex couldn’t see him. When they were building new domes Basia had done work that kept him at a surface camp for four or five days straight. His wife’s medical practice wouldn’t have let her travel with him, even if they hadn’t had children. Those were long weeks. Basia tried to imagine stringing ten or twenty of those weeks in a row and failed.

“But that meant she stayed home while I flew,” Alex said after a quiet moment. “She had her own work. Software engineer. Good one, too. So it’s not like she was pinin’ away at home for me. But still, if you love somebody you want to be with ’em, and we loved each other. Faithful to each other, if you can imagine that. My tours were tough on us both. I’d get home and we’d break the bed.”

Alex reached out and turned down the air vent, then spun his chair to face Basia. His broad dark face held a sad smile. “It was a crap situation, but she stuck with me. Through twenty years of me bein’ on ships she stuck with me. And when I was in port things were good. She’d work from home and I’d take a lot of leave, and we’d wake up late and make breakfast together. Work in the garden.”

Alex closed his eyes again, and for a moment Basia thought he might have fallen asleep. “Ever been to Mars?”

“No,” Basia replied. “But my wife has.”

“The newer areas, the ones built after we had some idea of what folks need to feel happy, were built different. No more narrow stone corridors. They built wide corridors with lots of green space down the middle for plants.”

“Like on Ceres,” Basia said. “I’ve been to Ceres.”

“Yeah, that’s right. They do that on Ceres too. Anyway, you could apply for a permit to care for a section of that space. Plant what you wanted. We had a little chunk in the corridor outside our home. My wife planted an herb garden, some flowers, a few hot pepper plants. We’d work in it.”

“Sounds nice,” Basia said.

“Yeah.” Alex nodded, eyes still closed. “I didn’t know it at the time. But it really was. I kinda thought it was a pain in the ass, to be honest. Never been much for gardening. But she liked it and I liked her and back then that was enough.”

“Did she die?” Basia asked.

“What? Goodness, no.”

“So what happened?”

“What happened is that she waited twenty years for me to retire. And I did, and then we didn’t have to spend time apart anymore. She went to part-time with her work, I took a part-time gig flying suborbital shuttles. We spent a lot of time in bed.”

Alex opened his eyes and winked. He seemed to be waiting for a response, so Basia said, “And then?”

“And then one day I put into port at the Mariner orbital transit, and while they were unloadin’ my cargo I almost walked into an MCRN recruiting office and signed up again.”

“Do they take—”

“No, I didn’t do it, and yeah, I was too damn old anyway. But when I landed we had a big fight over something stupid. I don’t even remember what. Hell, I didn’t know what we were fightin’ about even at the time, except I sorta did.”

“Leaving.”

“No, actually, it was never about leavin’ her. I never stopped wanting to be with her. But I needed to fly. She’d waited twenty years for me, and she’d done it thinkin’ we’d have all the time in the world after I was through. She’d done her tour, just as much as I had, and she deserved the part that came after.”

Basia felt what was coming like a punch in the stomach, unable to avoid comparing it to his own situation. “But you left anyway.”

Alex didn’t reply for a time, didn’t move, just floated in the straps of his pilot’s chair like a corpse in water. When he spoke again, his voice was strained and quiet, like a man admitting something shameful. Hoping no one will hear.

“One day I left work at the transit office and I walked across the street to the Pur’n’Kleen Water Company and I signed a five-year contract to fly long-haul freighters out to Saturn and back. That’s who I am. I’m not a gardener, or a shuttle pilot, or—turns out—a husband. I’m a long-flight pilot. Pushing a little bubble of air-filled metal across an ocean of nothing is what I was born to do.”

“You can’t blame yourself for what happened,” Basia started.

“No,” Alex said, a deep frown cutting into his forehead. “A person can fail the people they love just by being who they are. I’m who I am, and it wasn’t what my wife wanted me to be, and somethin’ had to break. You decided to do what you did down on that planet, and it put you up here with me instead of with your family.”

Alex leaned forward, grabbing Basia’s hands in his own. “It’s still on you. I will never live down not being the person my wife needed after she spent twenty years waitin’ for me. I can never make that right. Don’t go feelin’ sorry for yourself. You fucked up. You failed the people you love. They’re payin’ the price for it right now and you demean them every second you don’t own that shit.”

Basia recoiled as if from a slap to the face. He bounced off the chair and back into the straps. A fly caught in a spider’s web. He had to stop himself from ripping at the straps to get free. When he’d stopped struggling, he said, “Then what?”

“Shit,” Alex said, leaning back. “I barely figured out my own mess. Don’t ask me to figure out yours.”

“What was her name?” Basia asked.

“Talissa,” Alex said. “Her name is Talissa. Even just sayin’ it makes me feel like ten kilos of manure in a five-kilo sack.”

“Talissa,” Basia repeated.

“But I can tell you this. I’ll never let someone I care about down again. Never again. Not if I can help it. Speakin’ of which, I need to make a call,” he said with a bright, frightening smile.