Cibola Burn

Chapter Thirty-Nine: Basia

“Hey Papa!” the Jacek on the screen said. The boy’s voice almost vibrated with fear and exhaustion.

“Hey son,” the recorded Basia and the real one said at the same time. Jacek began talking about death-slugs and lightning and living in the alien ruins, reciting words of reassurance and explanation that Basia could recognize as Lucia’s. Jacek soberly repeated all the reasons his mother had given him that things might end well, telling Basia as an excuse to hear them again himself. It was the third time Basia had watched the recorded video of his conversation with his boy. When it finished, he cued up the recording of his conversation with Lucia and watched it for the tenth time.

He considered asking Alex to call them again, get new conversations to record, but he recognized this as a selfish impulse and quashed it.

Jacek looked dirty, covered with mud, tired. He described the horror of the poisonous slug worms with dread and fascination. The constant lightning storms and rain were amazingly exotic to a child who’d only ever lived in ice tunnels and ship holds before coming to Ilus. He never said he wished his daddy was there, but the fact sang in his words. Basia wanted nothing more than to take his boy by the hand, tell him it was all right to be scared. That bravery was being scared and doing it anyway.

Lucia, when her turn had come, looked less fearful than exhausted. Her smiles for him were all perfunctory. Her report was vague because, he knew, she had nothing to say that would help either of them to hear.

Felcia’s videos had been the ones that brought him peace. She was the one member of his family he had felt like he hadn’t failed. She’d wanted to go to school, and he’d managed to push down his fears and needs and the burdens that he carried long enough to actually let her go. It had felt like a victory.

Until now.

Now he only saw the ticking clock Alex had left running, showing the remaining time until she burned up across Ilus’ sky.

The simulation and timer ran out their terrible program on the panel behind him. He tried never to look. When he needed to use the screens on the operations deck, he drifted through the compartment trying not to even glance in its direction. He tried very hard to forget that it existed at all.

He failed.

Watching his most recent conversation with Felcia for the fourth time, he felt the timer behind him, like a warm spot on his back. Like the stare of someone from across a crowded room. The game became how long he could go without looking. Or whether he could distract himself sufficiently to forget it was there.

On the screen, Felcia told him about learning to change air scrubbers on the Belter freighter. It wasn’t the sort of things she’d had to do in the long months when the Barbapiccola had been their home. Her graceful fingers were demonstrating some complex function necessary to the process. She made it seem light. Fun. Amusing. He was her father. He knew that she was scared.

Tick tick tick, the clock burned soundlessly at his back.

He adjusted the air recycling system nozzle near his panel and sent a cool breeze across his face. He finished the recording and spent some time organizing his files by content and date. Then decided it was better by date and name, and reorganized them again.

Tick tick tick, hot like the sun on a dark shirt at noon. Burning without burning.

He opened up the file Alex had set up with repair tasks and scrolled through the list. He’d already checked off the ones he was actually capable of doing. He spent some time looking over the rest of the items, trying to decide if there were any he could help out with. Nothing jumped out at him. Not surprising, since it was his fifth time through the list.

Tick tick tick.

Basia turned around. The first thing he noticed was that the simulated orbital paths looked different. The changes were so slight that he probably shouldn’t have been able to see them, but the bright hateful lines that described his only daughter’s demise had burned themselves into his brain. There was no doubt, they were different. For some reason, it took him longer to notice that the clock had changed.

There were three fewer days.

Last time he’d looked at the clock, just a few hours before, there had been slightly over eight days on it. Now there were just under five.

“The clock is broken,” he said to no one.

Alex was up in the cockpit, where he seemed to spend most of his time. Basia yanked at the straps holding him to the chair, fighting with them without success until he forced himself to calm down and just press the release latches. Then he kicked off to the crew ladder and climbed up.

Alex had a complex-looking graphic on his main display. He was working at it with gentle touches on the screen and a steady stream of muttering under his breath.

“The timer’s wrong,” Basia said. If it weren’t for the fact that he found himself inexplicably out of breath, he probably would have yelled it.

“Hmmm?” Alex swiped at the panel and it shifted to a graph filled with numbers. He began entering new figures into it.

“The clock—the orbital timer thing is broken!”

“Workin’ on it right now,” Alex said. “It ain’t broke.”

“It’s down to five days!”

“Yeah,” Alex said, then stopped working to rotate his chair and look at Basia. “Was going to talk to you about that.”

Basia felt all the strength go out of him. If there had been gravity, he would have slumped to the floor on legs made out of rubber. “It’s right?”

“It is,” the pilot said, swiping the screen behind him again to get back to the graphical display. “But it ain’t unexpected. The initial estimates about their batteries were gonna change. They were back-of-the-napkin kind of shit to start with.”

“I don’t understand,” Basia said. His stomach had clenched tight. If he’d bothered to eat anything in the last day or two, he’d probably have vomited.

“The first estimate was based on orbital distance, ship mass, and expected battery life versus consumption.” As Alex spoke, he pointed at various places on his graph. As though that explained anything. As though the graph made any sense. “Orbital decay’s just not something anyone worries about when the reactors are on. If any of us had wanted to, we coulda built orbits that were damn near permanent, but the Barb’s got that shuttle going up and down with the ore, so she went kind of low. Save a little on each trip. And, forgive me for saying it, she’s a flyin’ hunk of shit. Heavier than she should be, and batteries dyin’ fast. So, the new numbers.”

Basia floated next to the gunner’s seat watching the hateful math spool out across the screen.

“She lost three days,” he finally said when he found the breath to do it. “Three days.”

“No, she never had those days to start with,” Alex replied. His words were harsh, brutal, but his face was sad and kind. “I haven’t forgotten my promise. If the Barb goes down, your little girl will be on this ship when it happens.”

“Thank you,” Basia said.

“I’m goin’ to call the captain right now. We’ll work up a plan. Just give me some time. Can you do that?”

Five days, Basia thought. I have five days to give you.

“Yes,” he said instead.

“Okay,” Alex said and waited expectantly for Basia to leave. When he didn’t the pilot shrugged and turned around to call up the comm display. “Cap’n, Alex here. Come in.”

“Holden here,” the familiar voice said a few seconds later.

“So, ran the updated numbers like you asked. We’re definitely losing the Barb first.”

“How bad?” the captain asked. His connection seemed fuzzy. It took Basia a moment to realize it was the sound of rain.

“Just under five days until she starts scraping on more atmo than she can handle.”

“Dammit,” Holden said, then nothing. The silence went on long enough that Basia started to worry they’d lost their connection. “How’s the Roci?”

“Oh, we’re fine. Pretty much everything’s off but the lights and the air. Lots of slack.”

“Can we help?”

“Like,” Alex said, dragging the word out, “give ’em a tow?”

“Like that. What can we do?”

“Boss,” Alex said, “hooking two ships together like that can be done, but doing it in low orbit ain’t a trivial problem. I’m just a pilot. Sure would be nice if we had, you know, our engineer back to run those numbers.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” Holden said. He sounded angry to Basia. That was good. Angry was good. Basia found himself oddly comforted by the idea that someone other than him was upset by the situation.

“Any chance on that?” Alex prompted.

“Let me chat with Murtry again,” Holden said. “I’ll call back soon. Holden out.”

Alex sighed. His lips pressed thin.

“Talking’s not going to work,” Basia said. “Is it?”

“I don’t see how,” Alex said.

“Which means there’s a non-zero chance that we’ll wind up needing to go get her ourselves. You know there’s only two of us. You and me. That’s it.”

“There’s three of us,” Alex said, patting the control panel. “Don’t forget. We’ve got the Roci.”

Basia nodded, waited for his gut to clench up again, was surprised to find he felt a warm sense of peace flowing through him. “What will I need to do?”

“This is an LVA suit,” Alex said, pointing to the equipment secured in an open locker. They were on the airlock deck, which, other than the airlock, consisted almost entirely of lockers and storage closets. The contents of that particular locker looked like a rubber body suit with lots of attachments.

“Elveeaye?”

“El. Vee. Ay. Light vacuum armor. Lets you move around outside, with enough air and shielding to keep you breathin’ and mostly unradiated in normal applications.” Alex pulled the rubber-looking suit out and left it floating next to the locker for Basia to examine. “Self-sealing in case of puncture, with life support and injury sensors, and basic medical supplies built in.” He then pulled out a red, metallic-looking breastplate. “It also keeps you from getting too many holes poked in you by small-arms fire.”

As Alex pulled out each piece and showed it to Basia, explaining its function, Basia dutifully examined them and made what he hoped were appropriate noises. He’d worn vacuum suits for work almost his entire adult life. Their form and function were well known to him. But the various pieces of armor and technology that made the suit into a weapon of war were outside his experience. Certainly something Alex described as “automatic IFF and hostile tracking available through the HUD display” sounded impressive and useful, but Basia had no idea for what. So he nodded his head and looked thoughtful and examined the helmet when Alex handed it to him.

“You ever fired a gun?” Alex asked when the armor had all been pulled out of the locker.

“Never,” Basia said. He had a brief, vivid memory of the assault on the RCE security team. Of the horrible injuries the gunshots left. Of the surprised looks on their faces as they died. Basia waited for the nausea to start, but still felt only the warmth and calm. “Held one once. Pretty sure I didn’t fire it.”

“This,” Alex said, holding up a thick black pistol, “is a 7.5mm semi-automatic handgun. Twenty-five-round magazine. Standard sidearm of the MCRN. It’s fairly idiot-proof, so this’ll be the one I send you in with.”

“If I go in at all,” Basia said.

“Sure,” Alex agreed with a smile. “Don’t really have a range to practice on here, but you can dry fire it a few times to get the feel. Honestly, though, if you get over there and need to be dead-eye Dick to make it back, you’re pretty much fucked.”

“Why carry it at all, then?”

“Because people do what you want them to do when you point one of these at them,” Alex said.

“Might as well be empty, then,” Basia said, taking the gun from him and waving it through the air to feel the weight.

“If you want,” Alex replied.

“No. Show me what to do. Then let’s load it.” For Felcia. I can do it for her.

“Okay,” Alex said, then proceeded to do just that.

Holden called back several hours later. When he spoke, his voice was tight, angry. “Holden here. Murtry isn’t going to bend an inch, so fuck him. Go get Naomi back. Out.”

“Well,” Alex said, dragging the word out to a long sigh. “That’s it. I think we’re officially not mediators anymore.”

Basia nodded with his fist, causing his body to rotate slightly. They were floating on the ops deck. The various pieces of the disassembled pistol hung in the air next to Basia. Alex had insisted that he know how to take the gun apart and put it back together again. Basia had no idea why that would be important, but had gone along with it anyway.

“What now?” he asked.

“Better start puttin’ that back together. I’ll pull the Israel’s specs up again and we can give them one last look. Remember, stuff gets moved around on a working ship. Things ain’t always where the standard blueprints say they are. You’re gonna want alternate ingress and egress points in case someone sealed off a corridor you wanted to use.”

“I have a good memory,” Basia said. It sounded like a brag, but it was true. He’d grown up in corridors and hallways. His sense of direction was excellent.

“That’ll help. Then we get you suited up, and I drop you off,” Alex said, then paused. “But there is one issue we haven’t discussed. I got plenty of juice to get you over there. And the Roci can make sure no one messes with you in space. But I can’t get you inside.”

Basia surprised himself by laughing.

“Somethin’ funny?” Alex said, raising an eyebrow at him.

“Funny that you’re worried about the only part of this where I actually know what I’m doing,” Basia said. “I’m a licensed class 3 vacuum welder. I weld in space. You find me a ship I can’t cut my way into. Just try.”

“Alrighty,” Alex said and gave him a light slap on one shoulder. “Let’s get to work.”

Basia drifted away from the Rocinante. Instead of a simple vacuum suit and air supply, he wore state-of-the-art Martian-made light combat armor. Instead of walking across the hull of the ship on magnetic boots, he moved across half a dozen kilometers of vacuum on gentle puffs of compressed nitrogen. Below his feet, Ilus spun, an angry gray world, wrapped in storms and flashing constantly with high-altitude lightning. Lucia and Jacek were down there, under all that atmospheric rage. But he couldn’t do anything to help them. So he would help the person he could. He would save Naomi from the RCE ship and she would save his daughter. There were a lot of holes in that logic that he carefully avoided thinking about.

He drifted closer to a massive island of gray metal in the darkness. The Edward Israel. The enemy.

“You okay out there?” Alex said over the comm. The helmet’s small speakers flattened his voice. There was also an aggressive background hiss to it.

“Fine. Everything is green.” Alex had shown him how to page through the status indicators on the suit’s heads-up display, and Basia was dutifully checking them every few minutes.

“So, I’m making all sorts of angry demands for the release of Naomi,” Alex said. “Got the Israel locked up with a targeting laser, and I’m floodin’ their sensors with radio noise and light scatter. Should keep their eyes, what eyes they got left, firmly planted on the Roci. Give you a minute or two before they realize you’re cuttin’ your way in.”

“That doesn’t sound like very long,” Basia said.

“Cut fast. Alex out.”

Alex had reassured him that the Rocinante had plenty of battery power. That shooting lasers and blasting out radio jamming wouldn’t affect it much. But Basia had come to view power as a precious and irreplaceable resource. Not something he’d ever needed to do in the age of readily available fusion. It gave everything a sense of permanence it hadn’t had before. No do-overs. No we’ll-get-it-right-next-time.

He checked his course toward the Israel’s midship maintenance airlock, found it good, and pulled out his welding torch, holding it in a white-knuckle grip.

The ship swelled until it blocked his view in every direction. The airlock hatch resolving from a tiny slightly lighter dot to a thumbnail-sized square to an actual door with a small round window in it. The pre-programmed EVA pack fired off a long blast of nitrogen in four cones of vapor, and he drifted to a gentle stop a meter away.

The welding rig came to life with a burst of bright blue fire. “Here I come,” Basia said to Naomi and to the RCE people guarding her and to his baby girl thousands of kilometers away on her dying ship.

Here I come.