More than that, it knew how to die.
Chapter Forty-Five: Havelock
Havelock still wasn’t convinced that Naomi Nagata was the best engineer in the system, but after watching her work, he had to concede there probably wasn’t a better one. If some of the people on the Israel had more degrees or specialties in which they outpaced her, Naomi could make it up in sheer, bloody-minded wildness.
“Okay, we can’t wait any longer,” she said to the muscle-bound bald man on the screen. “If he shows back up, tell him where we stand up here.”
“Pretty sure the cap’n trusts your judgment,” Amos said. “But yeah. I’ll tell him. Anything else I should pass on?”
“Tell him he’s got about a billion messages from Fred and Avasarala.” Alex’s voice came across the comm and also through the hatchway to the cockpit. “They’re talkin’ about building a mass driver, sending us relief supplies.”
“Yeah?” Amos said. “How long’s that gonna take?”
“About seven months,” Naomi said. “But at the outside, we’ll only have been dead for three of them.”
Amos grinned. “Well, you kids don’t have too much fun without me.”
“No danger,” Naomi said and broke the connection.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Havelock asked.
“Nope,” Naomi replied. She pulled herself closer to the command console. “How’s it going out there, Basia?”
The comm channel clicked and the Belter’s voice hissed into the operations deck. The sound reverberated without giving any sense of spaciousness. A whisper in a coffin. “We’re getting close out here. This is a lot of ugly.”
“Good thing we’ve got a great welder,” she said. “Keep me in the loop.”
The screens on the ops deck showed the operation in all its stages: what they’d managed so far, what they still hoped. And the countdown timer that marked the hours that remained before the Barbapiccola started to scrape against Ilus’ exosphere and changed from a fast-moving complex of ceramic and metal into a firework.
Not days. Hours.
The tether itself looked like two webs connected by a single, hair-thin strand. All along the belly of the Rocinante, a dozen ceramic-and-steel foot supports made for a broad base, the black lines meeting at a hard ceramic juncture a few hundred meters out. The Barbapiccola underneath them almost had all of the answering structures in place. Once the Belter had the foot supports installed there too, it would be time for the Martian corvette to use its battery power to tug the Belter ship into a more stable orbit, along with its cargo of lithium ore. The complexity of the situation made Havelock a little lightheaded. As he watched, the display showing the surface of the Barbapiccola stuttered, and one of the red-flagged foot supports changed to green.
“Okay,” Naomi said over the open channel. “We’re reading solid on that one. Let’s move on.”
“Yeah, give me one more minute here,” Basia’s compressed voice said. “There’s a seam here I don’t like. I’m just going to…” The words trailed off. The readout stuttered red and then green again. “Okay. That’s got it. Moving on.”
“Be careful,” Alex broke in. “Keep the torch cold when you’re moving. These lines’ve got great tensile strength, but they’re crap for heat resistance.”
“Done this before,” Basia said.
“Partner,” Alex said. “I don’t think anyone’s done this before.”
The tether lines were standard filament design, built for retrieving dropped Martian marines. Using them to haul a full-sized spaceship was like using a thread to pull a bowling balclass="underline" possible with enough patience and skill, and easy as hell to get wrong. Naomi had spent three long hours strapped into her crash couch before she’d decided it was plausible, and even then, Havelock half thought she’d talked herself into believing it because she knew that nothing else was.
Havelock had spent the time having his connections to Murtry’s terminal refused and reflecting on the fact that he’d just spectacularly quit his job. It was odd that it weighed on him as much as it did. He was eighteen months from home and probably days at the most from death, and his mind kept turning back to the uneasy surprise with himself that came from walking out on a contract. He’d never done that before. And, since he’d gone with Naomi, he wasn’t even sure what his legal status was. Somewhere, he guessed, between former employee and accomplice to criminal conspiracy. It was a wider range than he knew what to do with. If he was really the face of what was happening on New Terra back home, they were all going to be at least as confused as he was.
The truth was that none of the standards of corporate law or governmental authority seemed to apply out here. He could follow the feeds, read the letters, even exchange recorded video with RCE’s home office, but those were only words and pictures. The models based on experience in human space—even in the attenuated civilization of the Belt—failed here.
Mostly what he felt, though, was relief. He was very aware of how inappropriate it was, given the context, but he couldn’t deny it. It didn’t leave him regretting his choices. Except maybe to have taken the job. All the tragedy and pain of Ilus would have been merely sad and distressing to see from a bar on Ceres Station. From where he was, the fear had stopped being an emotion and turned into an environment.
The last foot support indicator went green.
“Okay,” Naomi said. “That’s looking good from here. What’s it like out there, Basia?”
“Ugly as shit, but solid.”
“How’s your air?”
“I’m all right,” the Belter said. “Thought I’d stay here, in case anything breaks that I’d be able to fix.”
“No,” Naomi said. “If this fails, those lines will snap fast enough to cut you in half. Come back to the barn.”
Basia’s percussive snort was more eloquent than words, but the small yellow dot began to move from the surface of the Barbapiccola up through the vacuum toward the Rocinante. Havelock watched, his fingers laced tightly together.
“Alex,” Naomi said, “can you check the release?”
“It’s good,” Alex said, his voice coming from the cockpit and the radio link both. “We start going pear-shaped, we can let go.”
“All right,” Naomi said. And then, softly to herself, “All right.”
“If this doesn’t work,” Alex said though the deck hatch between ops and the cockpit, “our man Basia’s going to watch his baby girl burn to death. I sort of promised him that wouldn’t happen.”
“I know,” Naomi said. Havelock had hoped she’d say, She won’t.
It took Basia eighteen minutes to get back to the Roci and another five to negotiate the airlock. Naomi spent most of that time on the radio to the captain and engineer of the Barbapiccola. Half the conversation was in Belter patois—ji-ral sabe sa and richtig ane-nobu—that might as well have been in code for all he could follow it. Havelock requested a connection to Murtry’s hand terminal and was refused again. He wondered whether he should write some sort of press release or letter of resignation to the company.
“All right,” Basia said, sloping up into the ops deck. His face still had the thin, watery layer of sweat adhering to it. “I’m here.”
The readout counting down to the Barbapiccola’s atmospheric impact was down under an hour. It was hard for Havelock to remember that the stillness of the deck was an illusion. The velocities and forces involved in anything at orbital altitudes were enough to kill a human with just the rounding error. At their speeds, the friction from air too thin to breathe would set them on fire.