Cibola Burn, Page 53

  “What’re you up to?” Amos asked.

  “Work,” Wei said, nodding to the vast structure all around them. “RCE’s got a claim on all of this. I’m just making sure no one infringes on it.”

  “Meaning the cap’n.”

  “Meaning anyone,” Wei said. Her voice was harder now.

  “Well, it’s a fucking ugly place if you ask me.”

  “It is.”

  “We really going to do this? Because I think it’d be a hell of a lot more fun for me to get Holden and you to get Murtry and we all see if there’s not some way for the doc back there to find something with alcohol in it on this mudball.”

  “Yeah, that does sound like fun,” Wei said. “But I’m on duty.”

  Fayez came up from behind Elvi, his arms crossed over his chest. His eyebrows were pulled together in distress.

  “So thing is?” Amos said. “Yeah, Holden’s in there someplace, and I’m figuring Murtry’s in there looking for him.”

  “Could be.”

  “So when I get back up there and drive on by —”

  “You don’t want to do that, Amos. My orders are no one goes in. Hop back on and head the other way, you and me have no problems. Try to infringe further on RCE property, and I’m going to have to shoot you.”

  Amos rubbed his scalp with his left hand. The shotgun in his right seemed larger somehow. Like the threat of violence gave it significance and the significance gave it weight. Elvi found herself breathing in quick, short gasps and thought for a moment that something had changed about the air itself. But it was only fear.

  “Captain’s in there trying to get the reactors back on,” Amos said.

  “Then he’s trespassing and he’ll need to leave.” Wei’s stance softened for a moment, and when she spoke there was something like sorrow in her voice. Not the thing itself, but like it. “When it’s time to go, there’s worse ways than dying at your post.”

  Amos sighed, and Elvi could see his shoulders slump. “Your call,” he said, raising the shotgun.

  The report came from behind them, and Amos pitched forward.

  “Down!” Murtry shouted at their backs, and Elvi hunched as automatically as a reflex. Fayez was pressed against her on one side, the massive tire on the other. The shotgun boomed at the same time as a sharp crack of a pistol sounded. Elvi looked out, and Wei was on the ground, her arms thrown out at her sides. Amos was struggling to his knees. His back was to her, and there was blood on the back of his neck, but she couldn’t see where it was coming from. Murtry strode past her, firing his pistol, two, three, four times. She could see Amos’ armored back quiver with every shot. Murtry wasn’t missing. Her own scream sounded high and oddly undignified.

  Murtry rounded the cart as Amos turned with a roar, the shotgun fired three times, the concussions beating at the air. Murtry stumbled back, but didn’t fall. His next shot drew a small fountain of blood from Amos’ thigh, and the big man collapsed. Murtry lowered his gun and coughed.

  “Doctor Okoye. Doctor Sarkis,” he said. The armor over his chest was shredded. If he hadn’t been wearing it, Amos’ blast would have blown the man’s heart back out through his spine. “I have to say I’m disappointed by your decision to come here. And your choice of company.”

  Amos was gasping, his breath ragged. Murtry stepped delicately across to him and shoved the shotgun away. The metal hissed against the strange chitinous flooring.

  “You shot him,” Fayez said.

  “Of course I did. He was threatening the life of one of my team,” Murtry said, walking over to Wei. He sighed. “My only regret is that I was unable to save Sergeant Wei.”

  Tears filled Elvi’s eyes. She felt sobs shaking her. Amos lifted a hand. The thumb and forefinger were missing, and bright pink bone showed through the blood. She looked away.

  “What are you talking about?” Fayez said. His voice was shaking.

  “Doctor Sarkis? You have something you’d like to add?” Murtry said, slipping a fresh magazine into his pistol.

  “You set this up. You set all of this up. You put her there to distract Amos and you shot him from behind. This isn’t just something that happened and you did the best you could and poor fucking Wei. You did this!”

  “If Mister Burton here had done as he was asked and left the site —”

  “He was trying to save us!” Fayez shouted. His face was red and he stepped forward. His hands were in fists at his sides. Murtry looked up, something a little less than polite interest in his eyes. “He and Holden are trying to save us! You and me and Elvi and everyone. What the hell are you doing?”

  “I’m protecting the assets, rights, and claims of Royal Charter Energy,” Murtry said. “What I’m not doing, and I hope you understand this, is running around in a circle with my dick in my hand whining about how nothing matters because we’re all going to die. We all knew when we got on the Edward Israel that we might not make it back. That was a risk you were willing to take because it meant you could do your job. I’m no different.”

  “You got Wei killed!” Fayez shouted. Elvi put her hand on his shoulder and he shrugged if off. “She’s dead because of you!”

  “Her turn now, my turn later,” Murtry said. “But there are some things I need to get done before that.”

  The security chief checked his gun and looked down at Amos Burton staring raw hatred up at him. Murtry leveled the barrel at the bleeding man’s face. Look away, Elvi thought. Don’t watch this happen. Look away.

  Fayez hit Murtry in the nose. The movement was so fast and awkward and artless that at first Elvi wasn’t sure it had really happened. She watched the expression in Fayez’s widening eyes as he understood what he’d done, and then when he committed to doing it again. Murtry turned his pistol away from Amos, swinging it toward Fayez, and the geologist ran into him with a shout. Murtry stumbled back but didn’t fall.

  “Elvi!” Fayez shouted. “Run!”

  She took a step forward. Amos was writhing on the ground, blood pouring from somewhere in his suit. His teeth were bared and crimson. He was grinning.

  “Run!” Fayez screamed.

  The great gray walls rose around them. False stars glittering. She couldn’t breathe. She took one tentative step forward. Then another. She felt like she was moving through a gel, forcing every motion. Shock, she thought. I’m in shock. People die from shock, don’t they? In her memory, Fayez shook his head and said, Oh look, another excuse to go talk to Holden.

  Holden. She had to find Holden. She took another step, then another. And then she was sprinting, her legs and arms pumping, small animal grunts forcing their way out of her throat. Somewhere behind her, a pistol fired twice, and then a third time. She didn’t look back. Everything in her, everything she was, focused only forward, along the wide, dark veins of the structure, forward to where they converged.

  Elvi ran.

  Chapter Fifty-One: Basia

  B

  asia 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 stre
aked 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.