Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

“Let’s go get her,” Basia said, taking deep breaths to keep his words calm and level. “Can we do that? Can we go to her ship without the reactor?”

“Sure. The Roci’s a warship. Her battery backups are robust. We can do quite a bit of maneuvering if we need to. But with the reactor down, every bit of power we pull off those batteries is gone. It ain’t gettin’ replaced. Lose too much of it to land, and we’ll be in the same position as them. We’re not doing anything until we make a plan. So calm down, or I’ll lock you in your cabin.”

Basia nodded, but didn’t trust himself to speak around the rising panic in his chest. His daughter was on a spaceship that was falling out of the sky. He might never be calm again.

“On top of which,” Alex continued, “you think everyone else on the Barb is just gonna be okay with us leaving without them? We don’t have room for everyone on that ship. Docking with a ship full of frightened people looking to get off is never plan A.”

Basia nodded again. “But if we don’t get a plan,” he said.

Alex’s grin went away. “We’ll get your girl. If it comes to that, if we all fall out of the sky, your daughter will be on this ship when it happens. So will Naomi.”

Basia’s panic and anger was replaced by a feeling of shame and a sudden lump in his throat. “Thank you.”

“It’s family,” Alex said, with a smile that was almost only baring his teeth. “We don’t let our family down.”

~

Basia drifted through the Rocinante like a ghost.

Alex was in engineering, tinkering with the reactor, trying to figure out what was causing the failure. Basia had offered to help, but Alex had declined. He couldn’t blame the pilot. His ignorance of nuclear engineering and ship’s systems was utter and complete. He doubted the reactor failing to work could be fixed by a really clean bead of weld.

If it turned out he was wrong, Alex would call.

In the meantime, Basia moved through the ship trying to distract himself from the idea that he was slowly drifting toward the planet and a fiery death. That Felcia was too. He went to the galley and made a sandwich that he didn’t eat. He went to the head and bathed with damp scrubbing pads and rub-on cleansers. He left with a few friction burns and all the same worries he’d brought in with him.

For the first time since coming to the Rocinante, he actually felt like a prisoner.

Alex had left a panel on the ops deck monitoring the other two ships. Basia could check on the Barbapiccola as often as he liked. The pilot seemed to think that the display showing hundreds of hours before the Barb’s orbit decayed enough to be dangerous would make him feel better. But Alex didn’t understand. It didn’t matter how long that number was. What mattered was that it was counting down. Every time Basia looked at the counter, there was less time than when he’d looked before. When he was looking at a countdown timer for the death of his child, the numbers on it were almost meaningless.

He avoided looking.

He returned to the galley and cleaned up the mess his sandwich preparations had made. He threw his used scrubbing pads and towels into the bin, and then went ahead and ran a cycle of laundry to clean them. He watched a children’s cartoon and then one of Alex’s noir films. Afterward, he couldn’t remember either. He wrote a letter to Jacek and then deleted it. Recorded a video apology to Lucia. When he watched it he looked like a madman, with hair flying wildly out from his skull, and sunken haunted eyes. He deleted it.

He returned to ops, telling himself that he would just double-check that nothing had changed, that the inexorable ticking of his daughter’s death clock was just data to be monitored. He watched the tiny icon that represented the Barbapiccola travel its glowing path around Ilus, every passage taking it an imperceptible increment closer to the atmosphere that would kill it.

Just data. No change. Just data. Tick tick tick.

“Alex, Holden here,” a voice blared from the communications console. Basia floated to the panel and turned on the microphone.

“Hello, this is Basia Merton,” he said, surprised at how calm his voice sounded. Holden was calling. Holden worked for the governments of Earth and the OPA. He’d know what to do.

“Uh, hi. Alex left me a message, but comms have been really spotty. He, uh, around?”

Basia laughed in spite of himself.

“I could probably find him.”

“Great, I’ll —”

“Hey, Captain,” Alex said. He sounded out of breath. “Sorry, took a sec to get to the panel. I was elbows deep in the Roci’s nethers when you called.”

Basia reached out to turn off his speaker and let them talk, but stopped with his finger hovering millimeters over the control. This was James Holden on the line. He was probably going to be talking to Alex about the reactor shutdowns. Feeling a little like a Peeping Tom, Basia left the connection on.

“There a problem?” Holden asked.

“Yeah, so, fusion don’t work no more,” Alex said, exaggerating his drawl.

“If that’s the punch line, I don’t get it.”

“Wasn’t a joke. Just yanked the reactor apart. Injector works, fuel pellets drop, laser array fires, magnetic bottle is stable. All the parts that make it a fusion reactor work just fine. Only, you know, without the fusing.”

“God damn it,” Holden said. Even Basia, who’d only just met the man, could hear the frustration in his voice. “Is it just us?”

“Nope,” Alex said. “We’re all flyin’ on batteries up here.”

“How long?”

“Well, even on batteries I can put the Roci up far enough we’ll all die of old age before she falls down, or I can slope on down planetside and park. The Israel’s got maybe ten days or so, depending on how much juice she stores. But she’s also got a ton of people sucking up air, so she’ll be burning through her batteries just keeping everyone warm and breathing. The Barb’s worse off than that. Same problems, shittier boat.”

Basia’s gut clenched at this casual description of his daughter’s peril, but kept silent.

“Our creepy friend said there was a defense grid,” Holden said. “Their power station blew up, so the old defenses are in lockdown.”

“They do seem to dislike big energy sources near their stuff,” Alex replied. Basia had the sense they were talking about something from their past, but didn’t know what it was.