Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

“Alex?” Naomi shouted. “What’s going on? Why aren’t we shooting it?”

“Oh, we shot the hell out of it,” Alex said. “Busted that shit right on up. But this right now is when I’d normally be dodging out the debris path? That’s not really an option.”

“I don’t understand,” Havelock said. And then he did. The shuttle had been a great big hunk of metal when the point defense cannons hit it. Now it was almost certainly a great number of relatively small pieces of metal with pretty close to the same mass moving at very nearly the same speed. They just traded being hit with a shuttle-sized slug for being hit with a shuttle’s mass of shrapnel.

Naomi pressed her hand to her lips. “How long before —”

The ship shuddered. For a second, Havelock thought it was the PDCs kicking in again. Something was hissing and his crash couch had a sharp edge that he didn’t remember. The death clock had gone black. A growing mass of blood around his elbow was the first concrete sign he had that he’d been hurt, but as soon as he saw it, the pain detonated.

“Ops is holed!” Naomi shouted into the radio.

“Cockpit’s sealed,” Alex said. “I’m good.”

“I’m hurt,” Havelock said, trying to move his bleeding arm. The muscles still functioned. Whatever had hit him – shuttle debris or shrapnel from the crash couch – it hadn’t crippled the limb. The crimson globe inching its way along his arm was getting fairly impressive, though. Someone was tugging at him. Basia, the Belter.

“Get off the couch,” the Belter said. “We’ve got to get off the deck.”

“Yes,” Havelock said. “Of course.”

Naomi was moving through the compartment. Bits of anti-spalling foam swirled in the thinning air like snowflakes.

“Are you gettin’ anything over those holes?” Alex asked, his voice disconcertingly calm.

“I’m counting ten down here,” Naomi said as Havelock hauled himself out of the crash couch and kicked off toward the hatch leading deeper into the ship. “I didn’t bring that many beer coasters. I’m taking the civilians down to the airlock, putting them in suits. Havelock’s hit.”

“Dead?”

“Not dead,” Havelock said.

Naomi finished keying in the override and the deck hatch opened with a little puff of incoming air. Havelock’s ears popped as he pulled himself down into the airlock deck.

“How’s the tether?” Basia asked, following close behind.

“No damage to the main line,” Alex said. “We lost one of the foot supports, but I can try to adjust.”

“Do it,” Naomi said, and grabbed Havelock by the shoulder. The emergency aid station by the airlock door had a roll of elastic bandage and a small wound vacuum. Naomi pulled his arm out straight and pressed that vacuum’s clear plastic nozzle into the center of the globe of blood. “What am I looking at, Alex?”

“Checking, XO. All right. We’ve got a slow leak in the machine shop. The port side’s pretty messed up. Sensor arrays and PDCs on that side. Maneuvering thrusters aren’t responding. They may not even be there. There’s a lot of power conduits right around there too, but with the reactor off-line, I don’t know if they’re hit or not.”

The gouge in Havelock’s arm was as long as his thumb in a sharp V shape. Where the flesh had peeled back, his skin looked fish-belly white. The margin of the wound was nearly black with pooling blood. Naomi put absorbent bandage on it and started wrapping it down with an wide elastic band. She had tiny dots of his blood in her hair.

“How are we for moving?” she asked.

“I can go anyplace you want, so long as it’s counter-clockwise,” Alex said. “If there were a dock anywhere within a year of here and we had a reactor, I’d have a vote where to go next.”

“We’ll work on a plan B. How’s the Barb?”

Basia almost had his welding rig back on. Naomi patted Havelock’s wounded arm, a small physical statement. You’re good to go. She turned to the lockers and started pulling out an environment suit of her own.

“She’s still coming up,” Alex said. “But I’m starting to get worried about that missing foot support.”

“All right,” Naomi said. “Back the thrust down for now. We’ll see if we can get it stuck back on.”

Havelock pulled the thick leggings on, shrugged into the suit. He checked the seals automatically, long years of living in vacuum making it all as quick and automatic as reflex. The suit’s medical array kicked on and immediately injected him with a cocktail of anti-shock medicines. His heart raced and his face flushed.

“Well, the good news is they’re out of shuttles,” Basia said. “They won’t be doing that again.”

“What are they going to do,” Naomi said. It took Havelock a long moment to realize she was talking to him.

These were his people. Marwick and Murtry. The militia of engineers. The RCE team had launched the shuttle at the Rocinante and tried to break up a civilian rescue operation. It was a strangely dislocating thought. He’d spent a countable fraction of his life protecting these people, keeping the shipboard politics that always rose up on a long voyage to a minimum, protecting them from outside threats and internal ones. They’d tried to kill not only him, but the crew of the Rocinante and the Barbapiccola too. And the worst of it was that he wasn’t actually surprised.

“XO? I think we’ve got a hole in the port torpedo rails too. Might want to see if everything’s still in place down there. Failsafes are pretty good, but we’ll want to check them all if we ever plan to fire one. It’d be a real pity for our own ordnance to blow us up.”

“Roger that,” Naomi said. “I’m on my way. Basia, can you coordinate with Alex and get that foot support back where it’s supposed to be?”

“Sure can,” the Belter said. The one who’d been part of that first conspiracy to have the RCE people killed. Who had Governor Trying’s blood on his hands. For a moment, their eyes met through the doubled windows of their helmets. Basia’s eyes were hard, and then Havelock thought there was something else. A flicker of shame, maybe. Havelock watched as he cycled the airlock open, and then he watched it close.

“Havelock,” Naomi said. “I need you to answer the question.”

“Which question?”