“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
Scientific 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.
“My next assignment,” he said, “I’m working somewhere with maybe half Earth gravity. Weight. Who needs it?”
Elvi chuckled. He wanted her to, and she even meant it a little. The foil was slick under her fingertips. She felt like she was a little girl sneaking snacks under the covers when she was supposed to be asleep, doing everything by touch. The wrapping of Fayez’s bar crinkled brightly.
“How much more food do we have?” she asked.
“Not much. I think they’re trying for one more drop, though. There are a couple people who can still make out some shapes.”
“And Holden.”
“The one-eyed king,” Fayez said. “We should poke out one of his eyes just to make that fit better, don’t you think? Him having two eyes is a real missed opportunity.”