“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.”
“I don’t know about you folks, but I’m excited to be part of this plan,” Alex said. “Let’s get going.”
Basia watched the clock tick away the hours and minutes to his daughter’s death.
Naomi sat at her console rapidly typing. The symbolic language she used to program the Rocinante’s navigation systems meant nothing to him. Watching her work was like listening to someone speak in a foreign language: the awareness of information without actual meaning. But he watched her anyway, knowing that she was building a program that might add precious minutes back to the clock. Maybe hours. Not days.
Alex was back up in his cockpit, out of sight. But periodically he called down on the ship’s comm to talk to Naomi about her work, so he was apparently following along from his own station. He would ask for clarifications or make suggestions, but his words were as empty of content to Basia as the symbols on Naomi’s screen.
Havelock had gone belowdecks to move the emergency escape bubbles out of the cargo hold and up to the main airlock. The rail gun plan might not work, and the next step was to evacuate as many people from the Barbapiccola as the Rocinante could handle.
It was all just delaying games. Try to save the Barb a little longer with their rail gun heroics. If not, save a few people by moving them to the Roci before she fell out of the sky or turned into a killing jar with twenty more people breathing her air and overloading her life support.
But they all did it without question. They fought and worked and devised intricate plans to buy more time. Basia had no doubt that they’d work just as hard to keep each other alive for even a few more minutes. It wasn’t something he’d ever had to think about before. But it did seem to be a microcosm of everything in life. No one lived forever. But you fought for every minute you could get. Bought a little more with a lot of hard work. It made Basia proud and sad at the same time. Maybe that was how a warrior felt, standing on ground he knew he’d never leave alive. Making the choice to fight as long and hard as he could. Basia couldn’t think why I went out, but I didn’t go out easy was such an appealing and romantic notion, but it was.
Looking at the angry brown ball of Ilus, rotating past on his screen, Basia thought, You’ll kill us, but you won’t kill us easy. He took a deep breath and worked hard not to thump himself on the chest.
“You okay over there?” Naomi asked, not looking up from her work.
“Fine, fine. How are you?”
“Almost there,” she said. “The trick is that we’ll have a lot of thrust coming from one vector and not along our center of mass with the cable attached, and we only have maneuvering thrusters on three sides of the ship. So, we have to minimize rotation to port. But, we can’t use the starboard fore thruster to counteract that rotation because the cable changes where our center of mass is. It’s actually a fun problem to figure out.”
“I have no idea what any of that means,” Basia said. “Is it working?”
“I think it will. Alex agrees. We’ll fire in a couple of minutes on the next rotation. Then we’ll know.”
“Great,” Basia said.
The deck hatch clanged open and then closed again as Havelock pulled himself up into the ops deck. He’d changed out of his RCE jumpsuit and armor into loose-fitting gray sweats with the name ROCINANTE across the chest. The security officer was bigger than Holden, so if the clothes hung loose on him, they must belong to Amos. Basia thought maybe he wouldn’t wear Amos’ clothes without asking.
“The emergency stuff is in the airlock,” Havelock said to Naomi’s back. She hadn’t looked up from her work when he came in. “I also threw a couple of EVA packs, some extra air bottles, and Basia’s welding rig in there. I can’t think of anything else we might need.”
“Thank you, Dimitri,” Naomi said.
“Dimitri?” Basia asked with a raised eyebrow.
“You’ve got a problem with that? Isn’t Basia a girl’s name?” Havelock shot back.
“It was my grandmother’s name, and she was a solar-system-wide famous physicist, so it’s a great honor to be named after her. I was the first grandchild.”
“You two can shut up or leave the deck,” Naomi said. Then she hit the wall comm and added, “Alex, you ready up there?”
“Think so,” Alex replied with his heavy drawl. “Just a sec, lemme tweak one thing here…”
“Can we throw this up on the big screen?” Basia asked. “I’d like to see what happens.”
Naomi didn’t answer, but the main screen on the deck shifted from a tactical map to a forward telescopic view. The image rotated slowly past the brown-and-gray ball of Ilus, and then past the distant gray hulk of the Barbapiccola, and then on to the starry black.
“Missed our window,” Naomi said. “You almost ready?”
“Yeah,” Alex replied, dragging the word out to three syllables. “Now. Good to go.”
“Executing,” Naomi said and tapped a button on her screen, but nothing happened. The view on the big screen continued to slowly pan until Ilus came back into view. Then the Barbapiccola. Then, without warning, the Rocinante tipped violently forward and something very loud happened in the belly of the ship. A bright dot of fire and a curve of flame appeared in the planet’s atmosphere. Basia found that the far bulkhead was now traveling toward him at a slow but noticeable speed. The ship pitched again, the various maneuvering thrusters firing in staccato bursts. When the noise and movement was over, the view on the main screen was steady, locked onto the Barbapiccola.
“Huh,” Alex said. “I’m seeing activity from the moons.”
“Are they shooting at us?” Havelock said.
“Nope. Looks like they’re trying to knock down the gauss round,” Alex said. “Full points for optimism.”
“We’re not rotating anymore,” Basia said.
“No,” Naomi replied. “Give me any three directions of thrust and I can find a way to stop us. Now we just keep it here firing and adjusting, and we should be adding some speed to our orbit.”
Basia looked down at the timer counting away the Barbapiccola’s remaining life. It had added a little over four minutes. “How often can you fire?”
“About every five minutes or so, if we don’t want to overheat the rails and burn the batteries out. At least, every five minutes until the batteries are dead.”
“But—”
“We’ve just stopped the degrading orbit, but not much more,” Naomi said.
“Israel’s coming back around,” Alex said. “She dumped something off.”
“Goddammit,” Naomi muttered. “Give us a fucking break, will you guys? What are they dropping?”
“Men in suits,” Alex said.
“It’s the militia,” Havelock said. He’d pulled himself over to a tactical display and was zooming it in and out. “Twelve of them, in vacuum armor with EVA packs. Plus an equal number of metallic objects of about human size. Not sure what those are.”