Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

~

“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.