Cibola Burn (The Expanse) (47 page)

“Wei will handle the supply pickup.”

“How’s her vision doing? How many more of these runs does she have in her, do you think?”

“She’s on her way,” Murtry said with a humorless smile. “So at least one more, I’d say.”

“Great,” Holden said. “Tell her I said thanks.”

“Will do,” Murtry replied, ignoring the irony. “But I need something from you.”

“You need, or RCE needs?”

“Consider those the same thing at this point,” Murtry said. “Should be some construction materials in this load. I need to assemble a work crew to set up my structure before everyone is too blind to do the job.”

“What’s it for? There’s a ton of other work we need to do while we can. And in a turn of luck,” Holden said, pointing at the alien tower behind him, “shelter is not one of our pressing problems.”

“These people,” Murtry said, “are eating my food, drinking my water, and taking my medicine. My team is gathering the supplies and doing the dangerous salvage work that makes any of this possible. You know what? As long as that remains true, they can throw up a few walls for me when I ask.”

“Then what do you need from me?”

“They have the mistaken impression you’re in charge. Correcting them seemed impolite.”

Holden had a sudden mental image of dragging the soon-to-be-blind Murtry out into the middle of the rain-soaked desert and abandoning him at the center of a swarm of the lethal slugs.

“Did I say something funny?” Murtry asked.

“Inside joke,” Holden replied with a smile. “You had to be there. I’ll let Carol know you’re looking for volunteers.”

Before Murtry could object, Holden turned and walked away.

Inside, the tower was a buzzing hive of activity as the colonists hurried to finish their last preparations for the coming long night. Lucia had a group working to fill everything that could hold water with supplies from the chemistry deck. Carol Chiwewe was leading a team through the interior of the tower hunting out any remaining death-slugs and plugging any holes they could find.

Holden climbed a ramp and then a set of steps made out of empty packing crates to reach the third floor of the tower. Inside the chamber they’d optimistically named the lab, he found Elvi, Fayez, and a third member of the RCE science team whom Holden thought was named Sudyam.

“Who is that?” Elvi asked. She poked Fayez in the bicep. “Is that Jim?”

Fayez squinted at him for a second then said, “Finally.”

“Sorry I was late, but Murtry wanted —”

“I need you to come read this,” Elvi said over the top of him. She was pointing at the chemistry deck’s small screen. Holden walked over and looked at the display, but had no idea what any of the confusion of symbols and acronyms meant.

“What am I looking for?”

“First we want to check the CBC,” Elvi said, coming over to point at the screen. Nothing on it said CBC.

“Okay,” Holden said. “Will it say CBC? I don’t see CBC here.”

Elvi sighed, then began speaking slowly. “Does the screen say ‘results’ at the top?”

“No. It says ‘tools’ at the very top. Is that what you mean?”

“Wrong menu. Hit the back button,” Elvi said, pointing at a button on the screen. Holden pushed it.

“Oh, I see a results option now.”

“Hit that. Then we’re going to be looking for numbers on the CBC, RBC, WBC, hemoglobin, hematocrit, and platelet count readouts.”

“Hey,” Holden said happily, “I see all that stuff.”

“Tell us what they are.”

Holden did so, while Elvi made notes on her terminal. She had the display blown up to the point where Holden could read it from across the room.

“Back up now and let’s look at blood gases,” she said when they were done. It took over an hour, but in the end Holden had given them all the results they were looking for. They decided to take some more of his blood and let him go.

When they were done, he stood next to Elvi pressing a scrap of bandage against the puncture wound. “Are we any closer?”

“It’s not an easy process,” she replied. “Even with access to all these minds and the
Israel
’s computer. We’re looking for a needle in a complex organism.”

“How much time do we have left?”

Elvi tilted her head up so the light shone into her pupils. Holden could see the faint green tinge there. “Almost none,” she said. “But you should go get some sleep. You’re exhausted.”

“My blood told you that?”

“You haven’t slept in two days,” she said with a laugh. “Math tells me that.”

“I promise, I’ll hit the rack as soon as I can,” he lied to her.

He climbed down the makeshift steps and the weirdly alien curve of the ramp to the tangle of people at the ground floor. Lucia had turned over water duty to her assistants, and was shining a penlight into the eyes of a small child. She gave Holden a tired smile as he walked by. Someone gave an alarmed shout, then rushed through the room carrying a slug on a stick and threw it outside. Holden followed it outside and stomped on it.

The sky was darkening to the color of damp ash, and the rain was becoming heavier. Distant thunder rumbled to the east, the lightning visible only as dim flashes in the heavy clouds. The air smelled of ozone and mud.

Holden shuffled his way around the tower again.

“H
ey Papa!” the Jacek on the screen said. The boy’s voice almost vibrated with fear and exhaustion.

Hey son,” the recorded Basia and the real one said at the same time. Jacek began talking about death-slugs and lightning and living in the alien ruins, reciting words of reassurance and explanation that Basia could recognize as Lucia’s. Jacek soberly repeated all the reasons his mother had given him that things might end well, telling Basia as an excuse to hear them again himself. It was the third time Basia had watched the recorded video of his conversation with his boy. When it finished, he cued up the recording of his conversation with Lucia and watched it for the tenth time.

He considered asking Alex to call them again, get new conversations to record, but he recognized this as a selfish impulse and quashed it.

Jacek looked dirty, covered with mud, tired. He described the horror of the poisonous slug worms with dread and fascination. The constant lightning storms and rain were amazingly exotic to a child who’d only ever lived in ice tunnels and ship holds before coming to Ilus. He never said he wished his daddy was there, but the fact sang in his words. Basia wanted nothing more than to take his boy by the hand, tell him it was all right to be scared. That bravery was being scared and doing it anyway.

Lucia, when her turn had come, looked less fearful than exhausted. Her smiles for him were all perfunctory. Her report was vague because, he knew, she had nothing to say that would help either of them to hear.

Felcia’s videos had been the ones that brought him peace. She was the one member of his family he had felt like he hadn’t failed. She’d wanted to go to school, and he’d managed to push down his fears and needs and the burdens that he carried long enough to actually let her go. It had felt like a victory.

Until now.

Now he only saw the ticking clock Alex had left running, showing the remaining time until she burned up across Ilus’ sky.

The simulation and timer ran out their terrible program on the panel behind him. He tried never to look. When he needed to use the screens on the operations deck, he drifted through the compartment trying not to even glance in its direction. He tried very hard to forget that it existed at all.

He failed.

Watching his most recent conversation with Felcia for the fourth time, he felt the timer behind him, like a warm spot on his back. Like the stare of someone from across a crowded room. The game became how long he could go without looking. Or whether he could distract himself sufficiently to forget it was there.

On the screen, Felcia told him about learning to change air scrubbers on the Belter freighter. It wasn’t the sort of things she’d had to do in the long months when the
Barbapiccola
had been their home. Her graceful fingers were demonstrating some complex function necessary to the process. She made it seem light. Fun. Amusing. He was her father. He knew that she was scared.

Tick tick tick, the clock burned soundlessly at his back.

He adjusted the air recycling system nozzle near his panel and sent a cool breeze across his face. He finished the recording and spent some time organizing his files by content and date. Then decided it was better by date and name, and reorganized them again.

Tick tick tick, hot like the sun on a dark shirt at noon. Burning without burning.

He opened up the file Alex had set up with repair tasks and scrolled through the list. He’d already checked off the ones he was actually capable of doing. He spent some time looking over the rest of the items, trying to decide if there were any he could help out with. Nothing jumped out at him. Not surprising, since it was his fifth time through the list.

Tick tick tick.

Basia turned around. The first thing he noticed was that the simulated orbital paths looked different. The changes were so slight that he probably shouldn’t have been able to see them, but the bright hateful lines that described his only daughter’s demise had burned themselves into his brain. There was no doubt, they were different. For some reason, it took him longer to notice that the clock had changed.

There were three fewer days.

Last time he’d looked at the clock, just a few hours before, there had been slightly over eight days on it. Now there were just under five.

“The clock is broken,” he said to no one.

Alex was up in the cockpit, where he seemed to spend most of his time. Basia yanked at the straps holding him to the chair, fighting with them without success until he forced himself to calm down and just press the release latches. Then he kicked off to the crew ladder and climbed up.

Alex had a complex-looking graphic on his main display. He was working at it with gentle touches on the screen and a steady stream of muttering under his breath.

“The timer’s wrong,” Basia said. If it weren’t for the fact that he found himself inexplicably out of breath, he probably would have yelled it.

“Hmmm?” Alex swiped at the panel and it shifted to a graph filled with numbers. He began entering new figures into it.

“The clock – the orbital timer thing is broken!”

“Workin’ on it right now,” Alex said. “It ain’t broke.”

“It’s down to five days!”

“Yeah,” Alex said, then stopped working to rotate his chair and look at Basia. “Was going to talk to you about that.”

Basia felt all the strength go out of him. If there had been gravity, he would have slumped to the floor on legs made out of rubber. “It’s right?”

“It is,” the pilot said, swiping the screen behind him again to get back to the graphical display. “But it ain’t unexpected. The initial estimates about their batteries were gonna change. They were back-of-the-napkin kind of shit to start with.”

“I don’t understand,” Basia said. His stomach had clenched tight. If he’d bothered to eat anything in the last day or two, he’d probably have vomited.

“The first estimate was based on orbital distance, ship mass, and expected battery life versus consumption.” As Alex spoke, he pointed at various places on his graph. As though that explained anything. As though the graph made any sense. “Orbital decay’s just not something anyone worries about when the reactors are on. If any of us had wanted to, we coulda built orbits that were damn near permanent, but the
Barb
’s got that shuttle going up and down with the ore, so she went kind of low. Save a little on each trip. And, forgive me for saying it, she’s a flyin’ hunk of shit. Heavier than she should be, and batteries dyin’ fast. So, the new numbers.”

Basia floated next to the gunner’s seat watching the hateful math spool out across the screen.

“She lost three days,” he finally said when he found the breath to do it. “Three
days
.”

“No, she never had those days to start with,” Alex replied. His words were harsh, brutal, but his face was sad and kind. “I haven’t forgotten my promise. If the
Barb
goes down, your little girl will be on this ship when it happens.”

“Thank you,” Basia said.

“I’m goin’ to call the captain right now. We’ll work up a plan. Just give me some time. Can you do that?”

Five days
, Basia thought.
I have five days to give you.

“Yes,” he said instead.

“Okay,” Alex said and waited expectantly for Basia to leave. When he didn’t the pilot shrugged and turned around to call up the comm display. “Cap’n, Alex here. Come in.”

“Holden here,” the familiar voice said a few seconds later.

“So, ran the updated numbers like you asked. We’re definitely losing the
Barb
first.”

“How bad?” the captain asked. His connection seemed fuzzy. It took Basia a moment to realize it was the sound of rain.

“Just under five days until she starts scraping on more atmo than she can handle.”

“Dammit,” Holden said, then nothing. The silence went on long enough that Basia started to worry they’d lost their connection. “How’s the
Roci
?”

“Oh, we’re fine. Pretty much everything’s off but the lights and the air. Lots of slack.”

“Can we help?”

“Like,” Alex said, dragging the word out, “give ’em a tow?”

“Like that. What can we do?”

“Boss,” Alex said, “hooking two ships together like that can be done, but doing it in low orbit ain’t a trivial problem. I’m just a pilot. Sure would be nice if we had, you know, our engineer back to run those numbers.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” Holden said. He sounded angry to Basia. That was good. Angry was good. Basia found himself oddly comforted by the idea that someone other than him was upset by the situation.

“Any chance on that?” Alex prompted.

“Let me chat with Murtry again,” Holden said. “I’ll call back soon. Holden out.”

Alex sighed. His lips pressed thin.

“Talking’s not going to work,” Basia said. “Is it?”