He didn’t know he was going to punch the screen until he’d already done it. The panel shifted in its seating a little, but he hadn’t left a mark on it. The gimbals of his crash couch hissed as they absorbed the momentum. He’d split his knuckle. A drop of blood welled on his skin, growing to the size of a dark red marble, the surface tension pulling it out along his skin as he watched. When he moved, he left a spray of droplets hanging in the air like little planets and moons.
“You know,” Naomi said, “if you’re looking at hundreds of people burning to death as a problem solving itself, that may be more evidence that you’re on wrong side.”
“We didn’t plant the bombs,” Havelock said. “That was them. They started it.”
“Does that matter to you?”
“At this point? Not as much as it probably should.”
Naomi was floating close to her cage door. He was always amazed at a Belter’s capacity to endure small spaces. Probably claustrophobia had been selected out of their gene pool. He wondered how many generations of Naomi’s family had lived up the well.
“You’re bleeding,” she said.
“Yep. That’s not going to matter much either.”
“You know you could let me out. I’m a very good engineer, and I have the best ship out here. Get me back on the Roci, and I might be able to figure out a way to make things better.”
“Not going to happen.”
“And here I thought it didn’t matter to you,” she said with a smile in her voice.
“I don’t know how you can be so calm about all this.”
“It’s what I do when I’m scared. And really, you should let me out.”
Havelock gathered the blood out of the air. His knuckle had scabbed over already. He logged into the autodoc with the sick sense of taking the first step toward giving up. But it had to be done. A crew full of panicking people wasn’t going to make anything better. Especially since the closest thing he had to a full staff was down on the planet with Murtry.
Havelock’s newsfeeds from back home were filled with hyperbolic pieces about the tragedy at New Terra. The sensor data of the explosion had found its way to a few of the reputable feeds, but there were also three or four other forged versions out there too. The faked data wasn’t particularly more impressive than the truth. He spooled through a dozen commentators. Some of them seemed angry that the expedition had been allowed to go out, some were somber and sad. None of them seemed to think there was much chance of anyone surviving. His message queue had over a thousand new entries. People in the media. People from the home office. A few – just a few – from people he’d known. An old lover from when he was at Pinkwater. A cousin he hadn’t seen in a decade and a half who was living on Ceres Station now. A couple of classmates from school.
There was nothing like dying publicly on a few billion screens to help reconnect with folks. He wasn’t going to answer any of them. Not even the ones from his employers. Not even the ones from his friends. All of it felt like he was trapped underwater and drowning, looking up at the water’s surface and knowing he’d never make it there.
He undid his straps.
“Goodnight, Havelock,” Naomi said.
“I’ll be back,” he said, launching himself across the office.
It had been a long time since he’d done a patrol, even just an informal one. He pulled himself along the narrow corridors of the Israel, moved through the common spaces – commissary, gym, open lab, bar. In the months – years now – that he’d lived on the Israel, it had become invisible the way that anyplace did. Looking at it now was like seeing it for the first time. It was an old ship. The carefully symmetrical shape of the corridors, the keyed mechanism on the doorways. All of it was the kind of thing he’d seen in pictures of his grandparents. Seeing the people was much the same. There was a distance between security and the rest of the crew. If there wasn’t, then something had gone badly wrong. Havelock didn’t think of himself as being part of the Israel’s complement, but every face he passed he recognized. Hosni McArron, the food science head. Anita Chang, systems tech. John Deloso, mechanic. Even if he didn’t know how he knew them, they were all part of the context of his life now.
And they were all going to die because he couldn’t stop it from happening.
Forward observation was a dark room. The screens were built to give the illusion of looking out a window at the vastness of space, but no one ever actually used it that way. When he came in, it was empty. The screens were filled with sensor data spooling past too quickly to read, a musical composition by a dark-skinned Belter he didn’t recognize, and a false-color temperature map of New Terra. The security camera had a bit of cloth tacked over it and the air recyclers hadn’t quite managed to clear out the smell of marijuana. Probably someone had been using it as a meeting place for sex. Havelock pulled the cloth free of the camera. Well, and why shouldn’t they? It wasn’t as if anything they did now was going to matter in three weeks. He shifted the screens to show the planet below them. New Terra, wrapped in clouds. No lights, no cities, no sign of the small, struggling human presence. The planet that had killed them all.
And still, it was beautiful.
His hand terminal buzzed. The red border of the incoming connection meant it was a security alert. Adrenaline hit his bloodstream and set his heart racing even before he turned it on. Marwick and Murtry were already in the middle of a conversation when he dropped in.
“— many of them, and I don’t care to find out now,” Marwick said. Shouted, almost. Murtry’s expression seemed angry and dismissive, but Havelock realized it was only that he wasn’t looking into the camera. He couldn’t see it.
“What’s going on?” Havelock asked.
“The Rocinante’s targeting us,” Marwick said.
Havelock was already pushing himself off, moving fast through the corridor. “Are they making demands?”
“Backed up by threats,” Marwick said, throwing up his arms.
“That’s hyperbole,” Murtry said. “They’re painting the Israel with their targeting lasers. And some mad bastard’s cutting through the midship maintenance airlock.”
“We’re being boarded?” Havelock said. He couldn’t keep the incredulity from his voice. “By who? What’s the point?”
“Motivation’s not our concern right now,” Murtry said. “Our priority is making sure the security of the ship is maintained.”
Havelock grabbed a handhold at the intersection of two corridors and spun himself down, feet first, toward the junction that would get him back to his desk. “All respect, sir, you know they’ve got to be after the prisoner. Why don’t we just give her to them? It’s not like it’s going to matter.”
Murtry tilted his head. His smile was thin and cruel. “You’re suggesting that we release the saboteur?”
“We’re all dead anyway,” Havelock said. And then there it was, spoken aloud. The one thing that all of them were thinking. All of them but Murtry.
“You were immortal before we shipped out?” he asked, his voice dry and cold as a rattlesnake. “Because whether you’re planning to die next week or seven decades from now, there’s still a way we do this.”
“Yes, sir,” Havelock said as he reached the last turning and hauled himself down toward his office. “Sorry, sir.”
The connection chimed as someone else joined. The chief engineer was grim-faced and angry in a way that Havelock immediately distrusted.
“Reporting for duty,” Koenen said.
“Wait. What’s he doing here?” Havelock said.
“I’ve included your militia in this,” Murtry said as Havelock slid into his office. “If we’re repelling boarders, we’re going to need them.”
“My men are ready,” the chief engineer said, not missing a beat. “Just let us know where the sons of bitches are coming through, and we’ll be there to meet them.”
Oh God, Havelock thought. He’s talking like he’s in a movie. This is a terrible idea.
“Mis
ter Havelock,” Murtry said, “I’m going to ask you to open the live ammunition supply to the militia forces.”
“With respect, sir,” Havelock said. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. This isn’t like a paintball exercise. We’re looking at a real fight. The risk of friendly fire alone —”
Murtry’s voice was calm and cool and viciously cutting. “Do I understand, Mister Havelock, that you’ve done such a poor job training these men that you feel we’d be safer repelling the attackers with paintballs?”
“No, sir,” Havelock said. And then, to his surprise, “But I am saying issuing live rounds at this point would be premature. I think we should find out a little more about what we’re looking at before we escalate that far.”
“That’s your professional opinion?” Murtry said.
“It is.”
“And if I ordered you to issue these men live rounds?”
Naomi was at her cage, her fingers clutching at the mesh. Her eyes were wide and serious. Havelock looked away from her. Murtry’s sigh was short and percussive.
“Well, I won’t put you in a position where you have to choose,” Murtry said. “Chief?”
“Yes, sir?” the chief engineer said.
“I’m transmitting you my personal security codes. You can take weapons and ammunition from the armory with it. Do you understand?”
“Hell yes, sir,” the chief engineer said. “We’ll poke those bastards so full of holes you can see stars through them.”
“I’d appreciate that,” Murtry said. “Now if you gentlemen will excuse me.”
The connection dropped.
“What’s going on?” Naomi asked. The warm tone was gone from her voice. Now she actually sounded scared. Or maybe angry. He couldn’t tell. Havelock didn’t answer. The armory was off the main security station, not the brig. Even if he hurried, he wouldn’t be able to get there before the others. And if he did, he didn’t know what he’d say to them.
He had a gun cabinet here. Maybe if he joined in, he could at least control the situation a little bit.
“Havelock, what’s going on?”
“We’re being boarded, and we’re going to resist.”
“Is it the Barbapiccola?”
“No. It’s the Rocinante.”
“They’re coming for me, then.”
“I assume so.”
Havelock took a shotgun out of the gun cabinet.
“If it’s Alex and you shoot him, I won’t help you,” Naomi said. “No matter what happens after this, if he’s hurt, we’re done. Even if I find a way to save you, I’ll let you burn.”
The monitor chimed. A connection request from the planet. Havelock accepted it immediately. Doctor Okoye’s face appeared on the screen, her forehead furrowed and her eyes shifting as if she was looking for something. There was actually a glint of green in her pupils that made Havelock’s skin crawl.
“Mister Havelock? Are you there?”
“I’m afraid it’s not a good time, Doctor.”
“You’re coordinating the drops? I need to see if we can get —”
“Is this something where people are going to die if I don’t fix it in the next five minutes?”
“Five minutes? No.”
“Then it’s going to have to wait,” Havelock said and dropped the connection. The midship maintenance airlock was the closest to the brig. There would be choke points at the locker room, the emergency decompression hatch, and the intersection with the maintenance corridor. He guessed the chief engineer would set up his men at the second two and let the locker room go. He might send a couple men to the brig too, as a last ditch. He’d get pushback on that. The whole team was going to want to be in on the kill. And they’d have live ammunition. He wondered what the enemy would have. Power armor? Maybe. Maybe…
“We don’t have to do this,” Naomi said.
“I don’t like it any more than you do, but it’s how it’s coming down.”
“You’re talking about it like this is physics. Like there’re no choices involved. That’s crazy. They’re here for me. Let me go, and they’ll go too.”
“There’s a way we do this,” Havelock said, loading bag rounds into the shotgun.
“He said that, didn’t he? That was him.”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” Havelock said.
“Murtry. The big boss. Because you do that, you know? You listen to what he says and then say it like it was something you actually believe. This isn’t the time to do that. He’s wrong this time. He’s probably been wrong a few times before.”
“He’s not the one in lockup. I don’t know you’ve got a lot of right to brag.”
“That was dumb luck,” she said. “If you hadn’t happened to be out playing your war games, I’d have disabled your little bomb and been gone again before anyone knew it.”
“What good would it do if I let you go? It won’t make any difference. The ships are going down. There’s no one here who can help us. You can’t do anything to fix this.”
“Maybe not,” Naomi said. “I can die trying to help, though. Instead of trying to kill people or watching them die.”
Havelock’s jaw clenched. His finger pressed against the trigger guard and he closed his eyes. It would be so easy to turn the barrel on the cage. Fire a bag against the mesh and drive Naomi to the back of her cell.
Only he wasn’t going to do that. The release started in his chest and spread out to his fingers and toes in less than a heartbeat. He pushed himself over to her and thumbed his code into the keypad. The cage clicked open.
“Come on, then,” he said.
Chapter Forty-One: Elvi
S
cientific nomenclature was always difficult. Naming a new organism on Earth and even in the greater Sol system had a lengthy, tedious process, and the sudden massive influx of samples from New Terra would probably clog the scientific literature for decades. It wasn’t just the mimic lizards or the insectlike fliers. Every bacterial analog would be new. Every single-celled organism would be unfamiliar. Earth alone had managed five kingdoms of life. Six, if you agreed with the Fityani hypothesis. She couldn’t imagine that the ecosphere of New Terra would turn out to be much simpler.
But in the meantime, the thing living in her eyes – in all their eyes, except Holden’s – wouldn’t even officially be a known organism for years. Maybe decades. It would be officially nameless until it was placed within the larger context of life.
Until then, she’d decided to call it Skippy. Somehow it seemed less frightening when it had a silly nickname. Not that she’d be any less dead if she bumbled into a death-slug, but at this point anything helped. And she was getting a little punchy.
The interesting thing – one of the interesting things – about the organism was that it didn’t have chlorophyll or apparently anything like it. The green color came from a prismatic effect analogous to butterfly wings. The actual tissue growing in her eyes would have been a light brown that was almost clear if its structure had been even a little bit different. The scattering effect wouldn’t happen. It also meant that her blindness was a flooding of color and a loss of detail, but it wasn’t particularly dark. She could still close her eyes and see the world go black, and open them to the bright, vibrant green.
Anything else was beyond her now. Gone. She navigated her hand terminal by voice commands, touch, and memory. The reports she would have skimmed through, she listened to now: voices from the labs at Luna and Earth and Ganymede. They didn’t offer her much hope.
“While your immune subject does have a couple rare alleles in the genes regulating his sodium pumps, I’m not seeing anything in the final protein structure that’s changed. The ion concentrations are stable and within the standard error bars. I’ll keep looking, but I’ve got the feeling that we’re barking up the wrong tree here. Sorry to say it.”
Elvi nodded as if there were anyone there who could see her. The headache was still with her. It varied during the day, but she didn�
��t know if that was part of the infection or just her experience.
“Hey,” Fayez said. And then, “Elvi? Are you here?”
“I am,” she said.
“Well, keep talking a little. I’ve got food on both hands.”
Elvi hummed a pop melody from when she’d been a child and listened for Fayez’s shuffling feet, reaching out to touch his calf when he was near. He folded himself down beside with a soft grunt. Her hand found his, and he gave her the rations packet.
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