“Good morning, sunshine,” he said.
Elvi smiled, leaning back against his shins. “I bet you say that to all the girls.”
“You okay?” he asked gently.
Elvi frowned. Was she? Given the circumstances, maybe so.
“I’m looking at this organism,” she said, “and, you know, I think I’m beginning to understand it. Here, take a look at these numbers…”
Chapter Thirty-Six: Havelock
The air recycling systems on the Edward Israel didn’t care where their power came from. Fusion reactor or battery power, it was all the same to them. Havelock’s sense that the air had changed, grown hotter and thicker and less able to sustain life, was all in his head. He was aware of being in a steel-and-ceramic tube of air, closed off from any larger, sustaining environment. He’d spent most of his adult life in that situation, and the fact had become as invisible to him as someone on Earth thinking about being held to a spinning celestial object by nothing more than mass, shielded from the fusion reaction of the sun by only distance and air. It wasn’t something you thought about until it was a problem.
His monitor was split between Captain Marwick on the left looking harried and cross and the chief of RCE’s engineering team and Havelock’s own militia on the right.
“I can up the efficiency of the grid enough to get us two, maybe three days,” the chief engineer said. His face was flushed, and his jaw jutted forward.
“In theory,” Marwick said. “This is an old ship. Things based on theory don’t always play out well here.”
“We know what kind of grid this is,” Koenen said. “It’s not guesswork. We have the numbers.”
“It’s hard facing the fact that numbers are a kind of guesswork, isn’t it?” Marwick said.
“Gentlemen,” Havelock said, his voice taking the same intonation Murtry’s would have had. “I understand the issue.”
“She may be dead, but she’s still my ship,” Marwick said.
“Dead?” the chief engineer said. “We’re going to be dead if—”
“Stop now,” Havelock said. “Both of you. Just stop. I understand the issue, and I appreciate both of your views. We’re not going to do a goddamn thing with any ship modifications until we’ve loaded the next supply drop for the folks downstairs. Captain, can I have permission for the engineering team to do a sight-only inspection of the grid lines and couplings?”
“Sight only?” Marwick said, eyes narrowed. “If you’ll commit to that. Fine line between seeing something and wanting to give it a little pet.”
Havelock nodded as if that had been permission. “Chief, put together a crew. Visual inspection only. Give me a report once the drop’s gone.”
“Sir,” the chief engineer said. The word was crisp and a little too loud. The way someone who wasn’t in the military thought people in the military sounded. The connection on the right dropped and Captain Marwick resized automatically to fill the screen.
“That man’s an asshole.”
“He’s scared and he’s trying to exercise control over… well, anything he can actually exercise control over.”
“He’s an asshole, and he’s forgotten that a few paintball games aren’t enough to make him Admiral fucking Nelson.”
“I’ll keep him in line,” Havelock said. For another ten days, and then it won’t matter.
Marwick nodded once and dropped his connection as well. Havelock took a deep breath and let it out slowly through his nose. He flipped back to his connection request queue. Another thirty messages had come in just while he’d been talking to the captain and the chief. They were all messages from home. From Sol. Requests for interviews and comment from people he’d never met, but not all from people he hadn’t seen. Sergio Morales from Nezávislé News. Amanda Farouk from First Response. Mayon Dale from Central Information OPA. Even Nasr Maxwell from Forecast Analytics. The faces and personalities of all the newsfeeds he followed to stay in touch with how things were going back at home were coming to him now. Humanity’s attention was pointed out to New Terra. To him.
He didn’t like it, and it didn’t help.
He went through them one by one, replying with the same canned recording he’d made the first time: “Our hands are full right now addressing the situation on New Terra. Please refer your questions to Patricia Verpiske-Sloan with Royal Charter Energy’s public relations division.” Blah blah blah. He’d probably be dressed down at some point for doing that much. He was already a little worried that he shouldn’t have said his hands were full.
“You all right?” Naomi asked from her cell.
“I’m fine.”
“I just ask because you’re sighing a lot.”
“Am I?”
“Five times in the last minute,” Naomi said. “Before the reactor died, it was one every two minutes. On average.”
Havelock smiled. “You need a hobby.”
“Oh, I really do,” Naomi said.
He pulled up the drop shipment status page. The insertion point was still eight hours away. The longest fabrication run he could do was about six hours, then. If Murtry and the others needed anything that took longer than that, they’d have to wait. He started cycling through the list. Food. Spare water bags for the chem deck they’d salvaged. Acetylene and oxygen for the salvage and repair crew. He checked the weight. He didn’t want to skip anything that might be useful downstairs, but it wouldn’t help anyone to scatter it all across the upper atmosphere because a chute failed.
“You’re going to be famous when we get back,” Naomi said.
“Hmm?”
“You’re the face of it now. Everything that’s happening here? That message you made is what all the feeds are going to be playing.”
“That message was so information-free it was almost sterile,” Havelock said. “It’s how you say ‘no comment’ without sounding like you’re trying to hide something.”
“They won’t care. Maybe they don’t even run your words. Just the image of you with the audio turned low while they talk over it.”
“Well, that’s just great,” Havelock said, sifting the drop contents. The emergency lighting had batteries, and while they probably wouldn’t be enough to set off the planetary defenses, he didn’t want to risk it. He tried to remember if there was anything else that carried its own energy supply. It wasn’t an issue he was used to worrying about.
“It was like that for us,” Naomi said. “Well, for him, really. Even before Eros.”
“What was?”
“Being the face of something. Looking back, I can see where it happened. And then he was that guy who’d been shot at by Mars. And then Eros.”
“True enough,” Havelock said. “There are probably people who haven’t heard of James Holden and the Rocinante, but they’re not the kind of people who watch newsfeeds. He seems to bear up under it pretty well, though.”
“Why Mister Havelock, I do believe that was sarcasm.”
He switched to the packing schematic. The computer had taken all the packages and lined them up in six different configurations, depending on whether density, aerodynamics, or even weight distribution was the highest priority. He turned the imaged with his fingers, imagining each of them in turn falling through the buffeting, violent high atmosphere of New Terra.
“I just mean that it doesn’t seem to bother him,” he said.
“Honestly, he’s barely aware of it,” Naomi said.
“Come on. You’re telling me he doesn’t get off on it? Just a little?”
“He doesn’t get off on it, even a little,” Naomi said. “I’ve known men that would. But that’s not Jim.”