Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

The last foot support indicator went green.

“Okay,” Naomi said. “That’s looking good from here. What’s it like out there, Basia?”

“Ugly as shit, but solid.”

“How’s your air?”

“I’m all right,” the Belter said. “Thought I’d stay here, in case anything breaks that I’d be able to fix.”

“No,” Naomi said. “If this fails, those lines will snap fast enough to cut you in half. Come back to the barn.”

Basia’s percussive snort was more eloquent than words, but the small yellow dot began to move from the surface of the Barbapiccola up through the vacuum toward the Rocinante. Havelock watched, his fingers laced tightly together.

“Alex,” Naomi said, “can you check the release?”

“It’s good,” Alex said, his voice coming from the cockpit and the radio link both. “We start going pear-shaped, we can let go.”

“All right,” Naomi said. And then, softly to herself, “All right.”

“If this doesn’t work,” Alex said though the deck hatch between ops and the cockpit, “our man Basia’s going to watch his baby girl burn to death. I sort of promised him that wouldn’t happen.”

“I know,” Naomi said. Havelock had hoped she’d say, She won’t.

It took Basia eighteen minutes to get back to the Roci and another five to negotiate the airlock. Naomi spent most of that time on the radio to the captain and engineer of the Barbapiccola. Half the conversation was in Belter patois – ji-ral sabe sa and richtig ane-nobu – that might as well have been in code for all he could follow it. Havelock requested a connection to Murtry’s hand terminal and was refused again. He wondered whether he should write some sort of press release or letter of resignation to the company.

“All right,” Basia said, sloping up into the ops deck. His face still had the thin, watery layer of sweat adhering to it. “I’m here.”

The readout counting down to the Barbapiccola’s atmospheric impact was down under an hour. It was hard for Havelock to remember that the stillness of the deck was an illusion. The velocities and forces involved in anything at orbital altitudes were enough to kill a human with just the rounding error. At their speeds, the friction from air too thin to breathe would set them on fire.

“Strap in,” Naomi said, nodding to the crash couches. Then, to the radio, “Rocinante bei here. Dangsin-eun junbiga?”

“Ready con son immer, sa sa?”

Naomi smiled. “Counting down,” she said. “Ten. Nine. Eight…”

At four, the displays on the consoles began to shift color, mapping the two ships, the tether lines, the engines in psychedelic false color. Basia was muttering under his breath, and it sounded like prayer. Naomi reached one.

The Rocinante moaned. The sound was deep as a gong, but it didn’t fade like one. Instead the overtones seemed to grow, one layering over another. On the displays, the tethers shimmered, the internal forces racing along the spider-web lines in crimson and orange and silver.

“Come on, baby,” Naomi said, petting the console before her. “You can do this. You can do it.”

“Getting pretty close to tolerance up here,” Alex said.

“I see it. Keep it gentle and steady.”

The Rocinante shrieked, a high scraping scream like metal being ripped apart. Havelock grabbed the sides of his crash couch, squeezing until his hands ached.

“Alex?” Naomi said.

“Just passing through a resonance window. Nothing to worry about.”

“I’m trusting you here,” Naomi said.

“Always can,” Alex said, and Havelock could hear the grin he couldn’t see. “I’m the pilot.”

Basia gasped. Havelock turned, but it took a few seconds to see what the Belter was reacting to. The countdown timer – the death timer – had changed. The Barbapiccola was slated to burn in three hours and fifteen minutes. Four hours and forty-three minutes. Six hours and six minutes. It was working. As Havelock watched, the life span of everyone on the ship below him ballooned out. Havelock felt like shouting. It was working. It had no right at all to have worked, and it was working.

The alarm Klaxon cut through the other noise. Naomi snapped back to her console.

“What am I lookin’ at, XO?” Alex said. The sound of the grin was gone. “Why am I seeing a bogie?”

“Checking it out,” Naomi shouted, not bothering with the radio. Havelock turned his own console to the sensor arrays. The new dot was approaching from the horizon, speeding above them in its own arc above cloud-choked Ilus.

“Where’s the Israel?” Havelock shouted.

“Occluded,” Naomi said. “We should be passing each other in an hour. Is that —”

“That’s the shuttle.”

The death timer showed seventeen hours and ten minutes.

“The shuttle you turned into a fucking torpedo?” Basia asked. His voice was surprisingly calm.

“Yeah,” Havelock said. “But the payload was the reactor overload, and there aren’t any reactors working, so —”

“It’s running on battery, then. That’s still going to be a hell of a lot of kinetic energy,” Naomi said.

“Is it going to hit us?” Havelock asked, and felt stupid as soon as the words were out of his mouth. Of course it was going to hit them.

“Alex?” Naomi said. “Give me options here.”

“PDCs are online, XO,” Alex said. “All I’ve got to do is put a little battery power to ’em, set ’em to automatic, and point defense can slag that thing before it comes close.”

Twenty hours and eighteen minutes.

“Power to the PDCs,” Naomi said. “Watch the tethers.”

“Sorry,” Alex said. “Just trying to do a few too many things at once here. Powering up the PDCs.”

That won’t work, Havelock thought. We’re forgetting something.

The red dot drew closer. The Israel itself hauled up over the edge of the horizon, visual contact still blocked by the curve of the atmosphere. The shuttle sped toward them. The firing of the point defense cannons was hardly more than a brief vibration in the overwhelming strain of dragging up the Barbapiccola. If he hadn’t known to expect it, he’d have missed it entirely. The red dot blinked out, and then back in.

“Oh,” Alex said. “Huh.”