The bubbles floated up away from the planet, the vacuum around them making them puff all the way up, little plump pockets of air for a dozen or more people to hide in, surrounded by the frozen mist of what had once been their ship’s atmosphere. Ilus’ star peeked around the limb of the planet, backlighting the bubbles and turning the floating people inside into black silhouettes, amazingly sharp against the blurry plastic walls. Like cardboard cutouts with a floodlight behind them.
Basia had a sudden memory of bathing Jacek in the kitchen sink when he was a baby, and his little boy farting in the water, a burst of small bubbles drifting up and then popping at the surface. The thought made him laugh until his stomach hurt. He recognized this was more about the relief that his daughter might live than it was about the flatulence of a small boy, but he laughed anyway.
“You okay out there?” Naomi asked.
“You ever bathed a kid in a sink?”
“Yeah,” she said, “I have.”
“They ever have gas?”
“I don’t —” she started, then got it and laughed along with him.
Ten tow lines looped down from the open airlock of the Israel, and one by one Basia caught them and attached them to the bubbles. Felcia’s bubble was last. As he pulled the strip at the end of the tether to activate the adhesive, he saw her look out of the airlock door’s tiny transparent window. The sun had moved behind the planet, so Basia’s visor had lost its opacity. He activated the light inside the helmet so she’d be able to see him. Her face lit up, and the word Papa was so obvious on her lips that he would have sworn he could hear it.
“Hi, baby,” he said, and put his gloved hand against the window. She put hers on the other side, small clever fingers against his big clumsy ones.
She smiled and pointed past him, mouthing the word “wow.”
He turned to look. The Israel had started reeling the bubbles in one by one. A dozen humans being pulled through the vacuum of space inside an envelope of air barely larger than they were. When Felcia’s line started to reel in, Basia kept his hand against it until it pulled gently, gently away from him. His little girl going up to safety. Temporary, sure, but all safety was.
In that moment, Basia felt something like a hammer blow to his chest. Everyone in those little pockets of air was a Felcia to someone. Every life saved there filled someone somewhere else with relief and joy. Every life snuffed out before its time was another Katoa. Someone, somewhere, having their heart torn out.
Basia could feel the detonator in his hands, the horrible click transferring to his palm as the button depressed. He could feel that terrible shock wave again as the landing pad vanished in fire. He could feel the horror replaced by fear as some unlucky combination of events put the shuttle too close to the blast and knocked it from the sky.
He could feel all of it so clearly it was as if it were happening right then. But more than that, he felt sorrow. Someone had just tried to do the same thing to his baby girl. Had tried to kill her, not because he hated her, but because she was standing in the path of his political statement. Everyone who died on that shuttle had been a Felcia to someone. And with the click of a button he’d killed them.
He hadn’t meant to. He’d been trying to save them. That was the little lie he’d kept close to his heart for months now. But the truth was much worse. Some secret part of him had wanted the shuttle to die. Had reveled in watching it fall from the sky in flames. Had wanted to punish the people who were trying to take his world away.
Except that was a lie too.
The real truth, the truth beneath it all, was he’d wanted to spread his pain around. To punish the universe for being a place where his little boy had been killed. To punish other people for being alive when his Katoa wasn’t. That part of him had watched the shuttle burn and thought, Now you know how it feels. Now you know how I feel.
But the people he’d hurt had just saved his daughter because they were the kind of people who couldn’t let even their enemies die helpless.
The first sob took him by surprise, nearly bending him double with its power. Then he was blind, his eyes filled with water, his throat closed like someone was choking him. He gasped for air and every gasp turned into another loud sob.
“Basia!” Naomi said in alarm. He’d just been cackling manically, and now he was sobbing. He must sound insane to her. “Basia, come back in!”
He tried to answer her, to reassure her, but when he spoke the only words he could say were, “I killed them.”
“No,” she said. “You saved them. You saved all of them.”
“I killed them,” he said again, and he meant the governor and Coop and Cate and the RCE security team, but most of all Katoa. He’d killed his little boy over and over again every time he’d let someone else die to punish them for his son’s death. “I killed them,” he said again.
“This time you saved them,” Naomi repeated, as though she could read his mind. “These ones, you saved.”
~
Havelock was waiting for him in the airlock. Basia knew the RCE man must have heard the breakdown he’d had. When Havelock looked at him, he felt nothing but shame. But while Havelock’s face was tight with pain, there was no mockery in it when he gripped Basia’s arm and said, “You did good out there.”
Basia nodded back at him, not trusting himself to speak.
“Look,” Havelock said, and pointed out the airlock door.
Basia turned around and saw the Barbapiccola leaving long thin streamers in its wake. It was entering Ilus’ atmosphere. The front of the ship began to glow.
Havelock closed the hatch, but while the airlock cycled and they removed their gear, they watched the freighter’s death on the wall monitor. Alex kept the Roci’s scopes trained on it the entire time. It drifted for a while, the streamers in the upper atmosphere eventually turning into white smoke with a black heart as the hull burned.
When the end came, it was sudden and shocking. The hull seemed to go from a solid object to many small fiery pieces in the blink of an eye, with no transition. Basia switched the monitor to the death clock to see how much time he’d bought Felcia.
Four days. The Israel had four days.
Chapter Fifty-Two: Elvi
Elvi sat in the darkness, her hand terminal in her lap. She was trembling, and the fear and the anger and the sorrow were like she’d walked back into the worst of the storm. She couldn’t feel that now. She didn’t have time. She needed to think.