Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

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.