Cibola Burn

Chapter Fifty-One: Basia

Basia reached out to touch the tether, and it vibrated under his gloved fingers like a living thing.

“Alex,” Naomi didn’t quite yell over the general comm channel, “I’m sending you a burn program. We have to keep that cable taut until Basia cuts it or the Barb is going to rip us both apart.”

“I’m not cutting it,” Basia repeated, but no one replied. He checked to see if his microphone was on.

“One,” Havelock said, ending his countdown. “Out of time guys.”

If the security man’s threats had any effect, Basia couldn’t tell. His HUD was still displaying the red lines of incoming gunfire. He ignored them.

Above him, the Rocinante began shifting and firing its remaining maneuvering thrusters in response to the slow rotation of the Barbapiccola, desperately trying to keep slack out of the cable. Two massive ships, each rotating in different axes, the cable could go from slack to thousands of tons of tension fast enough to tear the mounts out of the ships, and a chunk of the ship’s structure along with it.

“Basia,” Naomi said, her voice gentle. “I can’t give you much time. And you know this ends the same way no matter what.”

“I’m checking the connection to the Barb,” he said instead of answering her.

The mount was a mess of twisted metal and frayed cable. Pieces of the hull had been torn free by dislodged footings, and the ones that were still connected stretched and flexed with each gyration of the ship. Basia tried to calculate how much tension must be on the rigging and cable and failed. If it snapped free, it would probably cut him in half. If he did cut it, he’d need Alex to put slack on it first.

“I’m not cutting it,” he said again, more to himself than anyone else. Cutting it meant letting the Barb drift away, down into the upper atmosphere to rip apart and burn. To let Felcia burn. Alex had promised not to let that happen.

A pair of red lines drew themselves across his HUD and the words DANGER CLOSE flashed there briefly. He wasn’t up on all his military jargon, but he could guess what that phrase meant. He pulled himself around the cable footing and took cover. Out in the blackness between the Israel and the Barb, twelve men in suits floated toward him on puffs of gas. They still had a few of their improvised missiles.

“Guys,” Havelock said, real sadness in his voice.

“Havelock,” Naomi yelled, “if you let those assholes shoot Basia you don’t get to come back on my ship.”

“Roger that,” Havelock said sorrowfully. One of the twelve attackers spun sideways as a puff of white mist shot out of his EVA pack. The man continued to rotate wildly as he flew at high speed away from the others.

“One of you should go get him,” Havelock said. “His EVA pack is toast.”

Almost before he finished saying it, two of the remaining attackers jetted toward the disabled man, bringing their grapnel guns to bear.

“Havelock, you asshole,” Koenen said on the open frequency where everyone could hear him. “I’m going to enjoy stomping a mudhole in you.” He and his team opened fire on Havelock’s position in the airlock, driving him back into cover.

Now that everyone wasn’t looking at him, Basia took a moment to look over the mangled footing. “Naomi, I’m having the suit send you pictures of the damage.”

“Basia, I—” she started.

“Help me fix this,” he said, cutting her off. “If the Barb has more cable, I can reattach it here while Alex keeps us from totally losing our remaining connection.”

“Basia,” Naomi said, her voice gentle and sad. “This can’t be fixed. The Barbapiccola is going down. Nothing is gained by her taking us with her.”

“I do not accept that!” Basia shouted back at her, loud enough that his own suit’s speakers distorted. “There has to be a way!”

His suit flashed a warning at him, and he pulled back into cover just in time to avoid a fusillade of shots that bounced off the hull, leaving shiny streaks in the dull metal. One of the remaining nine attackers threw his arms up like he was surrendering, then went motionless, spinning slowly toward the Barbapiccola.

“Williams is flatlined,” the chief engineer said. “You just killed an RCE employee. You’ll burn for that, Havelock.”

“You know what, chief? Fuck you,” Havelock replied, his tone low, but real anger in his voice for the first time. “You are the one who escalated this. I didn’t ask for any of it. Pull out. Marwick, get your men out of here! Don’t let him force this anymore!”

Another voice, older, sadder, replied on the radio. “Those aren’t my men, Mister Havelock. You know as well as I do that I have no authority over the expeditionary team.”

“That’s right, motherfucker,” the chief said. “We’re acting on orders from Chief of Security Murtry.”

While Havelock, Marwick, and the chief engineer argued, Basia tuned them out. They’d either agree or they wouldn’t. Havelock would kill more of them or he wouldn’t. The captain would assert authority or he wouldn’t. None of that changed Basia’s real problem. His daughter was on board a ship that was slowly spinning out of control and losing altitude. At some point, it would hit enough atmosphere to get noticeable drag, which would slow it and let it fall deeper into the killing air, and shortly after that, it would burn up. The Rocinante couldn’t save it. Helplessness and grief washed over him, but he willed himself not to weep. He wouldn’t be able to see with the water sheeting across his eyes. There had to be another way.

“Basia,” Naomi said on a private channel to him. He could tell she’d switched him to a private channel because the argument between Havelock and the RCE people stopped suddenly mid-word. “Basia, I’m getting your daughter out.”

“What?”

“I’m on the line with the captain of the Barbapiccola. I’ve explained the situation. He’s… well, he’s not happy. But he understands. Alex promised you that if the ships went down, Felcia would be on the Rocinante when it happened. We’re keeping that promise.”

“How?” Basia asked. The way the ships were tumbling, he couldn’t imagine how dangerous a docking attempt would be. The ship-to-ship docking tubes were flexible, but not that flexible.

“They’re bringing her to the airlock now. They’ll put her in a suit and send her out to you. You’ll need to get her back to this ship and then… you need to cut the cable.”

Something about the docking tube stuck in his mind. The Rocinante couldn’t dock with the Barbapiccola to pull the doomed crew off, but a space suit was, at heart, just a bubble of air to keep its wearer alive.

“The docking tube,” he said. “Is there a way to seal it on both ends? We could put it on the Barb, seal it around some people, then move them across to the Roci.”

“We’d have to cut it free from the airlock housing,” Naomi said. A spray of bullets hit the cable footing as she spoke, like visual punctuation for her words. Another of the engineers spun away, his EVA pack holed in two places. Naomi continued talking but Basia wasn’t listening.

“What about emergency airlocks,” he said. “The plastic blister kind, you know? They’re made to hold atmosphere and supply oxygen.”

“You have to attach them to something,” Naomi said.

“What if,” Basia answered, “we attach them to each other? Seal to seal?”

Naomi was silent for a long moment. When she spoke again, her words were slow, measured. Like she was thinking them through as she spoke. “A life-support bubble.” Basia could tell she’d switched them back to the general channel because Havelock’s argument came thundering back. “Gentlemen, we have an idea. We’ll pull the crew off the Barbapiccola on escape pods made of two emergency airlocks sealed together. The Roci only carries one, but if the Barb has one—”

“You kidding me?” a new voice said. Basia recognized it. The captain of the Belter ship. “I think somebody turned ours into parts for a still back before we shot the pinche ring.”

“We have plenty of them,” Havelock said. “The Israel came out here with too much of everything. I’d bet we have twenty in storage.”

“That’s ten bubbles,” Basia said. “That’s plenty to hold the whole crew for a short trip.”

“Captain Marwick,” Koenen said, “you cannot give these people vital RCE supplies.”

“Marwick,” Havelock said. “Do not let over a hundred innocent people die over this bullshit. Do not do that.”

“Ah fuck. What are they going to do? Cancel my contract?” Marwick replied, followed by a long sigh. “The Israel is moving in to transfer the escape bubbles. I’ll have the materials team start sealing them right now.”

“Captain,” the chief engineer growled, “we are acting out here on Security Chief Murtry’s direct orders to disable the squatters’ ship. You will not render them aid.”

“You,” Havelock said, “are such an asshole. Have you gone completely insane?”

“I will shoot down any attempt to—” the chief started, then stopped suddenly. The cable next to Basia snapped taut, almost tearing the few remaining attachments out of the Barb’s skin. Below, a rail gun shot streaked across Ilus, the fire from the defense moons stabbing at it as it fell. One of the red enemy dots on Basia’s HUD disappeared.

“Sorry,” Alex said, his accent as slow and heavy as Basia had ever heard it. “That was me. But that guy was pissin’ me off and I had the shot. Am I in trouble?”

There was a long moment of silence, and then Captain Marwick said, “Israel’s on her way.”

It took them nearly three hours to fabricate and then transfer the makeshift escape bubbles from the Israel. Basia kept track of the time by counting oxygen recharges for his suit. He flatly refused to return to the Rocinante until his daughter was off the dying Belter freighter. Alex had put some slack on the tether with carefully calculated bursts of thrust, and Basia had cut the line. No reason to keep the ships connected.

One by one the Israel’s expeditionary engineering team turned amateur militia contacted Havelock and apologized for how dramatically out of control the situation had gotten. Most of them blamed the chief engineer. Whether or not he was entirely responsible for the escalations that had occurred, Basia felt certain that history wouldn’t remember him kindly. One of the engineers admitted to being the person who’d fired the missile at the Barbapiccola and offered to help Basia fix the damage. Basia had offered to kill him if he tried. They agreed to disagree on it.

Even after the reconfigured emergency airlocks had been delivered, it had taken the crew of the Barbapiccola and the colonists still on board two more hours to charge the air tanks and get everyone sealed inside. By that point, the computers on the Rocinante were saying the freighter should already be scraping upper atmosphere. The clock had run out.

But now Basia floated above the massive cargo bay doors of the Barbapiccola, waiting for them to open and set his daughter free.

It began as a line of white light cutting through the side of the massive freighter. Then, slowly, as the doors slid farther and farther apart, the ship’s enormous cargo hold came into view. Against the backdrop of thousands of tons of raw lithium ore floated ten faintly translucent bubbles. Someone toggled a remote to open the cargo bay’s airlock, and the air of the Barbapiccola rushed out, gently pushing the bubbles out the cargo bay door ahead of it.

The bubbles floated up away from the planet, the vacuum around them making them puff all the way up, little plump pockets of air for a dozen or more people to hide in, surrounded by the frozen mist of what had once been their ship’s atmosphere. Ilus’ star peeked around the limb of the planet, backlighting the bubbles and turning the floating people inside into black silhouettes, amazingly sharp against the blurry plastic walls. Like cardboard cutouts with a floodlight behind them.

Basia had a sudden memory of bathing Jacek in the kitchen sink when he was a baby, and his little boy farting in the water, a burst of small bubbles drifting up and then popping at the surface. The thought made him laugh until his stomach hurt. He recognized this was more about the relief that his daughter might live than it was about the flatulence of a small boy, but he laughed anyway.

“You okay out there?” Naomi asked.

“You ever bathed a kid in a sink?”

“Yeah,” she said, “I have.”

“They ever have gas?”

“I don’t—” she started, then got it and laughed along with him.

Ten tow lines looped down from the open airlock of the Israel, and one by one Basia caught them and attached them to the bubbles. Felcia’s bubble was last. As he pulled the strip at the end of the tether to activate the adhesive, he saw her look out of the airlock door’s tiny transparent window. The sun had moved behind the planet, so Basia’s visor had lost its opacity. He activated the light inside the helmet so she’d be able to see him. Her face lit up, and the word Papa was so obvious on her lips that he would have sworn he could hear it.

“Hi, baby,” he said, and put his gloved hand against the window. She put hers on the other side, small clever fingers against his big clumsy ones.

She smiled and pointed past him, mouthing the word “wow.”

He turned to look. The Israel had started reeling the bubbles in one by one. A dozen humans being pulled through the vacuum of space inside an envelope of air barely larger than they were. When Felcia’s line started to reel in, Basia kept his hand against it until it pulled gently, gently away from him. His little girl going up to safety. Temporary, sure, but all safety was.

In that moment, Basia felt something like a hammer blow to his chest. Everyone in those little pockets of air was a Felcia to someone. Every life saved there filled someone somewhere else with relief and joy. Every life snuffed out before its time was another Katoa. Someone, somewhere, having their heart torn out.

Basia could feel the detonator in his hands, the horrible click transferring to his palm as the button depressed. He could feel that terrible shock wave again as the landing pad vanished in fire. He could feel the horror replaced by fear as some unlucky combination of events put the shuttle too close to the blast and knocked it from the sky.

He could feel all of it so clearly it was as if it were happening right then. But more than that, he felt sorrow. Someone had just tried to do the same thing to his baby girl. Had tried to kill her, not because he hated her, but because she was standing in the path of his political statement. Everyone who died on that shuttle had been a Felcia to someone. And with the click of a button he’d killed them.

He hadn’t meant to. He’d been trying to save them. That was the little lie he’d kept close to his heart for months now. But the truth was much worse. Some secret part of him had wanted the shuttle to die. Had reveled in watching it fall from the sky in flames. Had wanted to punish the people who were trying to take his world away.

Except that was a lie too.

The real truth, the truth beneath it all, was he’d wanted to spread his pain around. To punish the universe for being a place where his little boy had been killed. To punish other people for being alive when his Katoa wasn’t. That part of him had watched the shuttle burn and thought, Now you know how it feels. Now you know how I feel.

But the people he’d hurt had just saved his daughter because they were the kind of people who couldn’t let even their enemies die helpless.

The first sob took him by surprise, nearly bending him double with its power. Then he was blind, his eyes filled with water, his throat closed like someone was choking him. He gasped for air and every gasp turned into another loud sob.

“Basia!” Naomi said in alarm. He’d just been cackling manically, and now he was sobbing. He must sound insane to her. “Basia, come back in!”

He tried to answer her, to reassure her, but when he spoke the only words he could say were, “I killed them.”

“No,” she said. “You saved them. You saved all of them.”

“I killed them,” he said again, and he meant the governor and Coop and Cate and the RCE security team, but most of all Katoa. He’d killed his little boy over and over again every time he’d let someone else die to punish them for his son’s death. “I killed them,” he said again.

“This time you saved them,” Naomi repeated, as though she could read his mind. “These ones, you saved.”

Havelock was waiting for him in the airlock. Basia knew the RCE man must have heard the breakdown he’d had. When Havelock looked at him, he felt nothing but shame. But while Havelock’s face was tight with pain, there was no mockery in it when he gripped Basia’s arm and said, “You did good out there.”

Basia nodded back at him, not trusting himself to speak.

“Look,” Havelock said, and pointed out the airlock door.

Basia turned around and saw the Barbapiccola leaving long thin streamers in its wake. It was entering Ilus’ atmosphere. The front of the ship began to glow.

Havelock closed the hatch, but while the airlock cycled and they removed their gear, they watched the freighter’s death on the wall monitor. Alex kept the Roci’s scopes trained on it the entire time. It drifted for a while, the streamers in the upper atmosphere eventually turning into white smoke with a black heart as the hull burned.

When the end came, it was sudden and shocking. The hull seemed to go from a solid object to many small fiery pieces in the blink of an eye, with no transition. Basia switched the monitor to the death clock to see how much time he’d bought Felcia.

Four days. The Israel had four days.