Cibola Burn

  “Hell, I got acetylene right here. But these here don’t run on fire,” Amos said.

  “They don’t have to,” Elvi said. “The chemistry deck has a combustion chamber that runs assays by converting exothermic reactions into current and then measuring the output. It’s not much of a chamber, but if you take that out and build a decent-sized combustion chamber – maybe a ten-centimeter surface – you could probably capture enough of the chemical energy from the burn to make the same current coming out of one of those things. We might need to build a transformer to get the amps and volts just right, but that’s not actually hard.”

  Amos scratched his neck and rocked back on his heels. His eyes were narrow.

  “You just come up with that on the spot?”

  Elvi shrugged. “Does that mean I can come with you?”

  Amos turned his head and spat on the ground. “Sure,” he said.

  “I just want to know why,” Fayez said.

  “Why what?” Elvi asked, walking through the main chamber of the ruins. She had two thick plastic sacks of fresh-ish water. Potable, at least. And a box the size of her hand with protein rations in it. It was supposed to be enough for one person for one day, and it was all they were going to have until they came back to the camp in the ruins. She’d also found a satchel with a wide fake-leather belt to strap it closed.

  “Why you’re chasing after Holden again,” Fayez said, ducking around a passing woman.

  “I’m not chasing after Holden,” Elvi said, then stopped and turned, putting her palm against Fayez’s chest. She could feel his heartbeat against her fingertips. “You know I’m not chasing after Holden, don’t you? Because that’s… I mean, no.”

  “Then why?” he said.

  The organisms still dying in Elvi’s eyes had lost all their green tinge, but they left the world a little blurry. She felt like she was seeing Fayez through a filter that softened his features, smoothed his skin. He looked like a media star in some particularly unflattering role that involved a lot of mud and not many showers.

  “Because I want to see,” she said. “It’s why I came out here. It’s why I’ve been spending all my time taking samples and running assays. I love what I do, and what I do is go look at things. Holden said he was talking to aliens, and that he might be able to turn off the defense grid, and it means we’re going to drive through the wilderness —”

  “What’s left of it,” Fayez said.

  “And because I’m going to die,” Elvi said.

  Fayez looked away.

  “We’re all going to die,” Elvi said. “And we’re all very probably going to die very, very soon. And my choices are to go out and look at this amazing, strange, beautiful, ruined world or else stay in the camp and watch everyone around me die by centimeters. And I’m a coward and a hedonist and I’m sometimes very, very selfish.”

  “You know. Between the two of us, I always thought of myself as more along those lines.”

  “I know.”

  Outside, Amos’ kludged cart was roaring, the constant burn of the combustion chamber was like a synthesizer stuck on a particularly ragged and unpleasant G under middle C. Amos was in the cab, sitting at the controls. Fayez walked with her to the side of the cart and then helped her scramble up into the cab. When he stepped back, he had his hands shoved deep in his pockets. She couldn’t see quite well enough to know if there were tears in his eyes too.

  “Those the supplies, doc?” Amos asked.

  “They’re what we’ve got to work with.”

  “All right then. I got the signal from the captain’s hand terminal locked in. We got maybe a week’s worth of gas, and the guy I’m after’s got a day’s head start.”

  “I wish we had sunglasses,” she said. “Or a pizza.”

  “Fallen fucking world, doc.”

  “Let’s go.”

  The cart lurched once, the tires spinning in the mud for a moment, then catching and lurching again. The rain made tiny dots on the windshield, and a wide, smeary wiper cleared them away. The world before her was a vast plain of mud. She checked Amos’ hand terminal. The path toward James Holden would take them through territory that had been forestlike, past the shoulder of a massive freshwater lake, through a maze of canyons that defied any standard geological explanation. She was going to see a world in the aftermath of utter disaster, but she would still see it. And the state of nature was always recovering from the last disaster.

  “Stop,” she said. “Could you please stop. Just for a minute?”

  “You need a potty break, you should have thought of that before we started,” Amos said, but he stopped the drive. She couldn’t even hear the electrical motors winding down over the roar of the acetylene-powered generator. She opened the door of the cab and leaned out. They’d only gone a hundred meters. She could still see Fayez, even though he was mostly a dark, fuzzy blot. She waved, and he waved back. She gestured that he should come toward her, and he did. She watched him trot across the mud field, looking down and watchful for slugs.

  When he reached the cab, he looked up at her. She was sure there were tears in his eyes now.

  “Chances are I’m not coming back,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Kind of need to get a move on, doc,” Amos said. “Don’t mean to be a buzz-kill or nothing.”

  “I understand,” Elvi said. She looked down again. Her gaze met his dark eyes. “Are you getting up here?”

  “Is he what?” Amos asked at the same moment Fayez said, “Of course I am.”

  Elvi scooted across the seat, making room for him. Fayez climbed up beside her and slammed closed the door. Amos looked at them both, his eyebrow lifted. Elvi smiled at him and pulled Fayez’s arm over her shoulder.

  “Don’t remember this was part of the deal, doc,” Amos said.

  “It’s kind of like our honeymoon,” Elvi said. She felt Fayez stiffen for a moment, and then almost melt against her.

  Amos considered that for a moment, then shrugged. “Whatever floats your boat.”

  Chapter Forty-Seven: Basia

  “H

  ow’s it look in there?” Naomi said in Basia’s helmet. She had a nice voice, a singer’s voice. It sounded good even over the tiny suit speakers. Basia recognized that his cognition was drifting and shook his head once, sharply. A glance at his HUD told him his O2 levels were low, and he pulled out a replacement bottle.

  I’ve found the other five holes,” he said while he worked at the air intake nipple. “You were right. Two were behind a console. Tough to see from that side. But I think this is all of them in ops.”

  “Machine shop is next,” she replied. “Got one slow leaker there. It’s cramped. We’ve got some after-market equipment using up a lot of the space between hulls.”

  “I’ll squeeze,” Basia said, then pulled out a small metal disk and started welding it over one of the five holes.

  “She is over the horizon… now,” Alex said over the channel. Naomi was sitting in her vacuum suit on the ops deck coordinating the work, so the only way anyone could talk to her was on her suit radio. Basia wanted to ask who she was, but started welding a second patch instead. A tiny red glob of molten metal spun off the bead and stuck to his faceplate, cooling to a black dot over his left eye. There wasn’t much danger of it hurting his suit, but it was a rookie mistake anyway. A sign he was tired. The gentle rotation of the Rocinante at the end of the tether made free-floating objects drift toward the walls. He’d need to remember that.

  “Didn’t leave any presents for us?” Naomi asked, still talking about the mysterious she.

  “Nope,” Alex said. “I keep hitting her with our targeting laser when she goes by. A warning.”

  “The PDCs are totally shut down, and plasma torpedoes don’t work now,” Naomi said.

  “Yeah, but they don’t know that. Last they saw, I chopped their shuttle into sushi with a PDC burst.”

  “Kinda wish we hadn’t done that.”

  “Well, do you like o
ne big hole or lots of little ones?”

  “Fair point,” Naomi said. “Almost done down there?”

  It took Basia a second to realize she’d started talking to him again. “Yeah, last one going up now.”

  “I’ll guide you to the machine shop exterior bulkhead.”

  Naomi hadn’t been kidding about cramped. There was some kind of large, blocky device taking up almost all of the space between the inner and outer hull. A long metal tube projected from one side of it, and seemed to run the entire length of the ship’s hull like a sewer pipe. On the opposite side of the device, a complex-looking feed mechanism sat. Flanking the central mechanism, and also down almost the entire length of the tube, sat twin rows of powerful-looking industrial batteries.

  “Sixty-two percent, XO,” Alex said. “Droppin’ fast. And the clock’s down to about twelve hours for the Barb. If I had thrusters that worked, I’d be wantin’ to do a burn about now.”

  “I’ve shut down everything I can think to shut down,” Naomi replied. “So our power is what it is. I’m trying to come up with a plan for moving working thrusters to replace broken ones, and wind up with some semblance of maneuverability. But it’s not a trivial problem. We’re pretty beat up.”

  Basia played his suit’s light around the space until he found the faintest trace of frozen vapor. It led him to the tiny hole in the machine shop’s bulkhead, and seconds later he was patching it with another metal disk. The actinic blue of his torch threw the space into bright relief, the shadows of conduits and thruster housings dancing madly in the glare.

  “Alex?” Basia said as he worked.

  “Yo.”

  “What is this thing I’m next to? It looks high-powered. Should I avoid getting any hot residue on it?”

  “Uh, yeah,” Alex said, then gave a humorless laugh. “Please avoid that.”

  “It’s a rail gun,” Naomi said. “We had it added to the ship. You might damage it, but it won’t blow up or anything. It fires solid metal slugs, not explosives.”

  “Okay,” Basia replied. “Just about done here.”

  “It cost about three hundred thousand Ceres new yen,” Alex said. “So don’t break it, or you bought it.”

  By the time Basia had returned through the airlock, stripped off his welding rig and vacuum suit, then put everything away, Naomi had replaced the lost atmosphere on the ops deck and everyone was gathered there. She floated near the command console, still wearing her lightweight atmosphere suit, but with the helmet off. Havelock and Alex were across the deck from her, clinging to the combat operations crash couch. The three of them were floating in the sort of intense silence that only follows a heated conversation.

  “There a problem?” Basia asked when the deck hatch had closed behind him.

  Alex and Havelock both looked away from him, something like embarrassment on their faces. Naomi did not look away. She said, “We’re going to lose the Barbapiccola.”

  “What?”

  “I have a plan for moving five maneuvering thrusters from the starboard side of the ship to port. This will give us close to sixty percent maneuverability. It’ll be enough to keep us in the sky until the power runs out. But we can’t do it fast enough to tug the Barb out of her descent. She’ll start scraping atmo before we’re even halfway done. We have to cut her loose.”

  “No,” Basia said.

  “We tried,” Naomi continued as though he hadn’t spoken. “But the damage caused by the shuttle was just too serious. I’m going to call the captain of the Barb and ask that your daughter be transferred to this ship. The price is there will be a few others that come with her. Just a few, though.”

  Basia felt an almost overwhelming sense of relief, followed by an equally powerful rush of shame. “There are a hundred-some people on the Barbapiccola. We just let them all die?”

  “Not all of them, but even if we wanted to bring them all here, they wouldn’t fit. A full company on the Roci would be twenty-two. Our other choice is to die with them,” Naomi said. Her voice trembled, but her gaze was steady. She knew exactly how awful her words were, but she wasn’t backing away from them. Basia found himself suddenly very afraid of the Rocinante’s executive officer. “But we’re not buying ourselves much in the process. With our power failing and running on a little over half thrust, we’re getting very close to the point that we won’t be able to get to a stable orbit where we can die slowly when the environment systems shut down. And, of course, we’ll have moved as many of the Barb’s crew as we can to this ship. Which just means we’ll burn through our power that much faster. This is lose, lose, lose, Basia. There aren’t any good choices anymore.”

  Basia nodded, accepting her statements without argument. She was the expert. But he felt like there was something missing. It itched at the back of his mind. To distract himself, he traced with his finger in the condensation building up on the nearest wall panel. That shouldn’t be happening. The atmosphere system shouldn’t be allowing humidity to build up like that. But now that he thought about it, he realized that the air did feel thick, and too hot. Naomi, running the environmental systems at minimum power. She wasn’t lying. They’d run to the very edge of their ability to keep themselves in the sky.

  “When do they come, and how do they get here?” Havelock asked, talking about refugees from the Barbapiccola.

  “Three hours. I want you to go down and escort them. I don’t know how good their suits are, but I don’t expect much. We may have to haul some EVA suits of our own down to them.”

  “Roger that,” Havelock said with a nod. An Earthman’s nod. Tipping the head back and forth. A move totally invisible in a space suit. Without thinking about it, Basia tipped his fist back and forth to show him how to do it right. Havelock ignored him.

  But thinking about something else for a moment broke the logjam in his brain, and the idea he’d been fumbling toward popped fully formed into his head.

  “Why don’t we use the batteries for the rail gun?”

  “The what?” Havelock said.

  “Huh,” Naomi said. “Not a terrible idea. They’re topped off, right?”

  “They pull power to keep themselves full when the reactor’s on, and we haven’t fired the gun and they discharge really slow when not in use,” Alex replied. “But they’re on a separate system. No way to pull power the other direction without some work.”

  “I can work,” Basia said. “I’ll do it. Tell me what to do. I’ll recharge my suit and the welding rig right now.”

  “Wait,” Naomi said. Her face had gone strangely blank, except for her eyes moving rapidly back and forth like she was reading something in the air. “Wait a minute…”

  Havelock started to say something, but Alex grabbed his arm and silently shook his head.

  “We’ll pull power off the rail gun grid, transfer it over to the main grid, and use it to heat propellant mass for thrust,” she finally said.

  “Yep,” Alex agreed.

  “With loss at every step. That’s really inefficient.”

  “Yep,” Alex repeated.

  “When we have propellant mass already in the system without moving the power,” she continued. “Alex, how much acceleration does a two-kilo slug traveling at five thousand meters per second give the ship?”

  “Enough,” Alex replied with a sly grin, “that we’re supposed to only fire it with the main drive on.”

  “Sounds like a thruster to me,” Naomi said, grinning back at him.

  “Uh,” Havelock cut in, “the ship is spinning a little after that shuttle strike and all? Won’t that make it tough to, you know, aim?”

  “It’s not a trivial problem,” Naomi admitted. “We’d need to make sure we fire at the exact millisecond the two ships and the cable are aligned. No way a human could judge it. But the Roci can if I tell her what we need.”

  “Isn’t the Barb in the flight path?” Havelock asked.

  “Right,” Naomi said, her voice soft and uninflected. “So the sequence will have to be
tipping the Roci nose down as we spin past the firing point, launching a round, then tipping her back nose up to keep from spinning out of control on that new axis. Fortunately, those thrusters work.”

  “This sounds,” Basia said, “pretty hard.”

  “Well,” Naomi said with a smile and a wink. “It’s only the most complicated nav program I’ll have ever written, but I have a couple hours to do it in.”