Cibola Burn

Chapter Forty-Seven: Basia

“How’s it look in there?” Naomi said in Basia’s helmet. She had a nice voice, a singer’s voice. It sounded good even over the tiny suit speakers. Basia recognized that his cognition was drifting and shook his head once, sharply. A glance at his HUD told him his O₂ levels were low, and he pulled out a replacement bottle.

“I’ve found the other five holes,” he said while he worked at the air intake nipple. “You were right. Two were behind a console. Tough to see from that side. But I think this is all of them in ops.”

“Machine shop is next,” she replied. “Got one slow leaker there. It’s cramped. We’ve got some after-market equipment using up a lot of the space between hulls.”

“I’ll squeeze,” Basia said, then pulled out a small metal disk and started welding it over one of the five holes.

“She is over the horizon… now,” Alex said over the channel. Naomi was sitting in her vacuum suit on the ops deck coordinating the work, so the only way anyone could talk to her was on her suit radio. Basia wanted to ask who she was, but started welding a second patch instead. A tiny red glob of molten metal spun off the bead and stuck to his faceplate, cooling to a black dot over his left eye. There wasn’t much danger of it hurting his suit, but it was a rookie mistake anyway. A sign he was tired. The gentle rotation of the Rocinante at the end of the tether made free-floating objects drift toward the walls. He’d need to remember that.

“Didn’t leave any presents for us?” Naomi asked, still talking about the mysterious she.

“Nope,” Alex said. “I keep hitting her with our targeting laser when she goes by. A warning.”

“The PDCs are totally shut down, and plasma torpedoes don’t work now,” Naomi said.

“Yeah, but they don’t know that. Last they saw, I chopped their shuttle into sushi with a PDC burst.”

“Kinda wish we hadn’t done that.”

“Well, do you like one big hole or lots of little ones?”

“Fair point,” Naomi said. “Almost done down there?”

It took Basia a second to realize she’d started talking to him again. “Yeah, last one going up now.”

“I’ll guide you to the machine shop exterior bulkhead.”

Naomi hadn’t been kidding about cramped. There was some kind of large, blocky device taking up almost all of the space between the inner and outer hull. A long metal tube projected from one side of it, and seemed to run the entire length of the ship’s hull like a sewer pipe. On the opposite side of the device, a complex-looking feed mechanism sat. Flanking the central mechanism, and also down almost the entire length of the tube, sat twin rows of powerful-looking industrial batteries.

“Sixty-two percent, XO,” Alex said. “Droppin’ fast. And the clock’s down to about twelve hours for the Barb. If I had thrusters that worked, I’d be wantin’ to do a burn about now.”

“I’ve shut down everything I can think to shut down,” Naomi replied. “So our power is what it is. I’m trying to come up with a plan for moving working thrusters to replace broken ones, and wind up with some semblance of maneuverability. But it’s not a trivial problem. We’re pretty beat up.”

Basia played his suit’s light around the space until he found the faintest trace of frozen vapor. It led him to the tiny hole in the machine shop’s bulkhead, and seconds later he was patching it with another metal disk. The actinic blue of his torch threw the space into bright relief, the shadows of conduits and thruster housings dancing madly in the glare.

“Alex?” Basia said as he worked.

“Yo.”

“What is this thing I’m next to? It looks high-powered. Should I avoid getting any hot residue on it?”

“Uh, yeah,” Alex said, then gave a humorless laugh. “Please avoid that.”

“It’s a rail gun,” Naomi said. “We had it added to the ship. You might damage it, but it won’t blow up or anything. It fires solid metal slugs, not explosives.”

“Okay,” Basia replied. “Just about done here.”

“It cost about three hundred thousand Ceres new yen,” Alex said. “So don’t break it, or you bought it.”

By the time Basia had returned through the airlock, stripped off his welding rig and vacuum suit, then put everything away, Naomi had replaced the lost atmosphere on the ops deck and everyone was gathered there. She floated near the command console, still wearing her lightweight atmosphere suit, but with the helmet off. Havelock and Alex were across the deck from her, clinging to the combat operations crash couch. The three of them were floating in the sort of intense silence that only follows a heated conversation.

“There a problem?” Basia asked when the deck hatch had closed behind him.

Alex and Havelock both looked away from him, something like embarrassment on their faces. Naomi did not look away. She said, “We’re going to lose the Barbapiccola.”

“What?”

“I have a plan for moving five maneuvering thrusters from the starboard side of the ship to port. This will give us close to sixty percent maneuverability. It’ll be enough to keep us in the sky until the power runs out. But we can’t do it fast enough to tug the Barb out of her descent. She’ll start scraping atmo before we’re even halfway done. We have to cut her loose.”

“No,” Basia said.

“We tried,” Naomi continued as though he hadn’t spoken. “But the damage caused by the shuttle was just too serious. I’m going to call the captain of the Barb and ask that your daughter be transferred to this ship. The price is there will be a few others that come with her. Just a few, though.”

Basia felt an almost overwhelming sense of relief, followed by an equally powerful rush of shame. “There are a hundred-some people on the Barbapiccola. We just let them all die?”

“Not all of them, but even if we wanted to bring them all here, they wouldn’t fit. A full company on the Roci would be twenty-two. Our other choice is to die with them,” Naomi said. Her voice trembled, but her gaze was steady. She knew exactly how awful her words were, but she wasn’t backing away from them. Basia found himself suddenly very afraid of the Rocinante’s executive officer. “But we’re not buying ourselves much in the process. With our power failing and running on a little over half thrust, we’re getting very close to the point that we won’t be able to get to a stable orbit where we can die slowly when the environment systems shut down. And, of course, we’ll have moved as many of the Barb’s crew as we can to this ship. Which just means we’ll burn through our power that much faster. This is lose, lose, lose, Basia. There aren’t any good choices anymore.”

Basia nodded, accepting her statements without argument. She was the expert. But he felt like there was something missing. It itched at the back of his mind. To distract himself, he traced with his finger in the condensation building up on the nearest wall panel. That shouldn’t be happening. The atmosphere system shouldn’t be allowing humidity to build up like that. But now that he thought about it, he realized that the air did feel thick, and too hot. Naomi, running the environmental systems at minimum power. She wasn’t lying. They’d run to the very edge of their ability to keep themselves in the sky.

“When do they come, and how do they get here?” Havelock asked, talking about refugees from the Barbapiccola.

“Three hours. I want you to go down and escort them. I don’t know how good their suits are, but I don’t expect much. We may have to haul some EVA suits of our own down to them.”

“Roger that,” Havelock said with a nod. An Earthman’s nod. Tipping the head back and forth. A move totally invisible in a space suit. Without thinking about it, Basia tipped his fist back and forth to show him how to do it right. Havelock ignored him.

But thinking about something else for a moment broke the logjam in his brain, and the idea he’d been fumbling toward popped fully formed into his head.

“Why don’t we use the batteries for the rail gun?”

“The what?” Havelock said.

“Huh,” Naomi said. “Not a terrible idea. They’re topped off, right?”

“They pull power to keep themselves full when the reactor’s on, and we haven’t fired the gun and they discharge really slow when not in use,” Alex replied. “But they’re on a separate system. No way to pull power the other direction without some work.”

“I can work,” Basia said. “I’ll do it. Tell me what to do. I’ll recharge my suit and the welding rig right now.”

“Wait,” Naomi said. Her face had gone strangely blank, except for her eyes moving rapidly back and forth like she was reading something in the air. “Wait a minute…”

Havelock started to say something, but Alex grabbed his arm and silently shook his head.

“We’ll pull power off the rail gun grid, transfer it over to the main grid, and use it to heat propellant mass for thrust,” she finally said.

“Yep,” Alex agreed.

“With loss at every step. That’s really inefficient.”

“Yep,” Alex repeated.

“When we have propellant mass already in the system without moving the power,” she continued. “Alex, how much acceleration does a two-kilo slug traveling at five thousand meters per second give the ship?”

“Enough,” Alex replied with a sly grin, “that we’re supposed to only fire it with the main drive on.”

“Sounds like a thruster to me,” Naomi said, grinning back at him.

“Uh,” Havelock cut in, “the ship is spinning a little after that shuttle strike and all? Won’t that make it tough to, you know, aim?”

“It’s not a trivial problem,” Naomi admitted. “We’d need to make sure we fire at the exact millisecond the two ships and the cable are aligned. No way a human could judge it. But the Roci can if I tell her what we need.”

“Isn’t the Barb in the flight path?” Havelock asked.

“Right,” Naomi said, her voice soft and uninflected. “So the sequence will have to be tipping the Roci nose down as we spin past the firing point, launching a round, then tipping her back nose up to keep from spinning out of control on that new axis. Fortunately, those thrusters work.”

“This sounds,” Basia said, “pretty hard.”

“Well,” Naomi said with a smile and a wink. “It’s only the most complicated nav program I’ll have ever written, but I have a couple hours to do it in.”

“I don’t know about you folks, but I’m excited to be part of this plan,” Alex said. “Let’s get going.”

Basia watched the clock tick away the hours and minutes to his daughter’s death.

Naomi sat at her console rapidly typing. The symbolic language she used to program the Rocinante’s navigation systems meant nothing to him. Watching her work was like listening to someone speak in a foreign language: the awareness of information without actual meaning. But he watched her anyway, knowing that she was building a program that might add precious minutes back to the clock. Maybe hours. Not days.

Alex was back up in his cockpit, out of sight. But periodically he called down on the ship’s comm to talk to Naomi about her work, so he was apparently following along from his own station. He would ask for clarifications or make suggestions, but his words were as empty of content to Basia as the symbols on Naomi’s screen.

Havelock had gone belowdecks to move the emergency escape bubbles out of the cargo hold and up to the main airlock. The rail gun plan might not work, and the next step was to evacuate as many people from the Barbapiccola as the Rocinante could handle.

It was all just delaying games. Try to save the Barb a little longer with their rail gun heroics. If not, save a few people by moving them to the Roci before she fell out of the sky or turned into a killing jar with twenty more people breathing her air and overloading her life support.

But they all did it without question. They fought and worked and devised intricate plans to buy more time. Basia had no doubt that they’d work just as hard to keep each other alive for even a few more minutes. It wasn’t something he’d ever had to think about before. But it did seem to be a microcosm of everything in life. No one lived forever. But you fought for every minute you could get. Bought a little more with a lot of hard work. It made Basia proud and sad at the same time. Maybe that was how a warrior felt, standing on ground he knew he’d never leave alive. Making the choice to fight as long and hard as he could. Basia couldn’t think why I went out, but I didn’t go out easy was such an appealing and romantic notion, but it was.

Looking at the angry brown ball of Ilus, rotating past on his screen, Basia thought, You’ll kill us, but you won’t kill us easy. He took a deep breath and worked hard not to thump himself on the chest.

“You okay over there?” Naomi asked, not looking up from her work.

“Fine, fine. How are you?”

“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.”