“Alex,” Naomi said, “drop the cable.”
“No!” Basia shouted at her.
“Not responding,” Alex said. “The release seems to be damaged.”
The Roci bucked, and the tether snapped taut.
“Cease firing!” Basia shouted. “Stop firing the rail gun!”
“Sorry,” Alex said. “It was on automatic. It’s shut down now.”
“I’m going to the Barb,” Basia said. “I’ve got my welding rig. May be something I can do.”
“That’s not going to work,” Naomi said. “Just cut it.” The Barbapiccola was a good ten degrees off the stable orbit she’d had. Tumbling.
“I’m not coming back in,” Basia said. “And I’m not cutting it. I gotta go look.”
“You remember they’re still shooting at you, right?” Naomi said.
“I don’t care,” Basia said.
“I’ll cover him,” Havelock said. “I can do that.”
“Can you move?”
Havelock consulted his HUD. His shredded leg was immobilized and under pressure to contain the bleeding. One of his attitude jets had been holed. The air in his suit smelled sharp, like melting plastic. That couldn’t be a good sign.
“Not really, no,” he said. “But Basia can get me to cover. The outer airlock hatch on the Roci, maybe. I can stay there and snipe.”
“Hurry, then,” Naomi said. “They’re still getting closer, and eventually they’ll get to a range they might hit something.”
Havelock disengaged his mag boots and turned toward the Belter. “All right. If we’re going to do this, let’s go.”
Basia clapped a hand on Havelock’s arm and started dead hauling him down the ruined side of the ship. The pockmarks and bright spots where the debris of the shuttle had struck were everywhere, now joined by the scar of the improvised missile. A soft white plume curved into the void where something was venting. Time seemed to skip, and he was at the airlock’s outer door. It was open, waiting for him. The red dots showed that his men were still ten minutes away. The Barb was above him now, and the planet above that. Not a beast rising to devour him, but a whole clouded sky falling down to crush him.
“Are you all right?” Basia said. “You can do this?”
“I’ll live,” Havelock said, and immediately realized how completely inappropriate that had been to say. “I’m all right. Lightheaded, but my blood pressure’s solid.”
“Okay, then. I’ll be right back. Don’t let those sons of bitches screw this up any worse.”
“I’ll do my best,” he said, but Basia had already launched himself up along the tether. Havelock checked his rifle, his HUD. He still had to adjust for the Roci’s spin, but he found the little red dots quickly.
“All right, guys,” he said. “You’ve made your point. Now let’s just dial this back. There’s still time. I don’t want to hurt anybody.” The words were surreal. Like a poem from some other century. A litany for deescalating conflict. No one really appreciated how much of security work was just trying to keep things under control for a few more minutes, giving everyone involved in the crisis a little time to think it all through. The threat of violence was just one tool among many, and the point was not making things worse. If there was any way at all, just not making things worse. It occurred to him that Murtry was actually really bad at that part of the job.
His HUD marked a fast-moving object. A bullet or a slow meteor. From the angle, probably a bullet. Another one was moving on a track to pass Basia. It was going to miss too, but not for much longer.
“All right,” Havelock said, raising his rifle. “I’m counting to ten, and anyone that’s still on approach, I’m going to have to put a hole in you. I’ll try to just disable your suits, but I’m not making any promises.”
The red dots didn’t change their vectors.
It was strange. He’d come all this way, faced all these dangers. He was falling by centimeters into a planet and struggling for a few more minutes or hours of life. And the thing that worried him most was still that he was going to have to shoot somebody.
Chapter Fifty: Elvi
The cart had been designed for use on rough terrain and shipped out to a planet without roads. It wasn’t smooth, but it was fast, and the roar of the generator and the whirring of the motors had made a kind of white noise that Elvi’s brain tuned out after the first few hours, leaving her in something like silence. And all around them, the ruins of New Terra rose up and then passed away. The storm that had scoured First Landing into scraps and mud hadn’t been local. All of the landscapes they passed through were shattered and drowned, but they were still fascinating. Still beautiful.
A forest of thin red bodies halfway between trees and gigantic fungi lay on their sides, the cart’s wheels leaving tire tracks across their flesh. Flying creatures no larger than her splay-fingered hand fell into line behind the cart for hours, attracted by the noise or the movement of the spray of atmospheric hydrocarbons. She wondered how the frail creatures had survived the planetary disaster. When night fell, three vast columns of luminous dots rose up into the sky like skyscrapers built from fireflies. She didn’t know if they were organisms like the mimic lizards or artifacts like her butterflies. A huge animal, as tall and wide across as an elephant but segmented like a caterpillar, lay dead and rotting along the crest of a low hill, structures like two interlocking sets of ribs crossing its massive sides and gnat-small carrion eaters flying around it like a fog. A silver-and-blue structure rose from a pool of grayish rainwater, collapsed, and rose again. It could have been anything, but she could only see its behaviors as play. Splashing in puddles. It was all she could do to keep from stopping and looking at it all.
A whole biosphere—or two or three—passed by her, teasing and hinting. She wished she could have seen it all before the storm. At best now, they would be able to guess at what had come before and see what came after. She took consolation by reminding herself that was always true. All of nature was a record of crisis and destruction and adaptation and flourishing and being knocked back down again. What had happened on New Terra was singular and concrete, but the pattern it was part of seemed to apply everywhere and maybe always. Even the aliens that had made the artifacts, the protomolecule, the rings, had suffered some vast and cosmic collapse.
At dawn the three of them shared the last of their food. There was still enough water to last a few days, but they would be hungry ones, and after that, she guessed they’d try to find something on the planet that they could stomach. They would fail and die. Unless Holden really could turn the reactors back on and drop something from the ships. A steep-walled canyon blocked their way, the erosion of centuries exposing strata of rock as even and unvarying as the pages of a book. It took the cart’s expert system half an hour to find a path down and back up.
When she had mentioned how lucky they were that they hadn’t hit anything like a mountain range, Fayez had laughed.
“You’d need tectonic plates first,” he’d said. “This planet doesn’t have mountains, it has hemlines.”
None of them talked much, the noise of the cart drowning out anything short of shouting, but even if they’d been driving in silence, she didn’t have the sense that Amos Burton would have spoken. He spent the day and a half of travel sitting at the cart’s front edge, legs folded, his eyes on his hand terminal or the horizon. She thought there was a growing anxiety in the man’s broad face, fear for Holden and for the ships above them and the planet all around, but she could also have been projecting her own feelings on him. He had that kind of face.