“Didn’t leave any presents for us?” Naomi asked, still talking about the mysterious she.
“Nope,” Alex said. “I keep hitting her with our targeting laser when she goes by. A warning.”
“The PDCs are totally shut down, and plasma torpedoes don’t work now,” Naomi said.
“Yeah, but they don’t know that. Last they saw, I chopped their shuttle into sushi with a PDC burst.”
“Kinda wish we hadn’t done that.”
“Well, do you like one big hole or lots of little ones?”
“Fair point,” Naomi said. “Almost done down there?”
It took Basia a second to realize she’d started talking to him again. “Yeah, last one going up now.”
“I’ll guide you to the machine shop exterior bulkhead.”
~
Naomi hadn’t been kidding about cramped. There was some kind of large, blocky device taking up almost all of the space between the inner and outer hull. A long metal tube projected from one side of it, and seemed to run the entire length of the ship’s hull like a sewer pipe. On the opposite side of the device, a complex-looking feed mechanism sat. Flanking the central mechanism, and also down almost the entire length of the tube, sat twin rows of powerful-looking industrial batteries.
“Sixty-two percent, XO,” Alex said. “Droppin’ fast. And the clock’s down to about twelve hours for the Barb. If I had thrusters that worked, I’d be wantin’ to do a burn about now.”
“I’ve shut down everything I can think to shut down,” Naomi replied. “So our power is what it is. I’m trying to come up with a plan for moving working thrusters to replace broken ones, and wind up with some semblance of maneuverability. But it’s not a trivial problem. We’re pretty beat up.”
Basia played his suit’s light around the space until he found the faintest trace of frozen vapor. It led him to the tiny hole in the machine shop’s bulkhead, and seconds later he was patching it with another metal disk. The actinic blue of his torch threw the space into bright relief, the shadows of conduits and thruster housings dancing madly in the glare.
“Alex?” Basia said as he worked.
“Yo.”
“What is this thing I’m next to? It looks high-powered. Should I avoid getting any hot residue on it?”
“Uh, yeah,” Alex said, then gave a humorless laugh. “Please avoid that.”
“It’s a rail gun,” Naomi said. “We had it added to the ship. You might damage it, but it won’t blow up or anything. It fires solid metal slugs, not explosives.”
“Okay,” Basia replied. “Just about done here.”
“It cost about three hundred thousand Ceres new yen,” Alex said. “So don’t break it, or you bought it.”
By the time Basia had returned through the airlock, stripped off his welding rig and vacuum suit, then put everything away, Naomi had replaced the lost atmosphere on the ops deck and everyone was gathered there. She floated near the command console, still wearing her lightweight atmosphere suit, but with the helmet off. Havelock and Alex were across the deck from her, clinging to the combat operations crash couch. The three of them were floating in the sort of intense silence that only follows a heated conversation.
“There a problem?” Basia asked when the deck hatch had closed behind him.
Alex and Havelock both looked away from him, something like embarrassment on their faces. Naomi did not look away. She said, “We’re going to lose the Barbapiccola.”
“What?”
“I have a plan for moving five maneuvering thrusters from the starboard side of the ship to port. This will give us close to sixty percent maneuverability. It’ll be enough to keep us in the sky until the power runs out. But we can’t do it fast enough to tug the Barb out of her descent. She’ll start scraping atmo before we’re even halfway done. We have to cut her loose.”
“No,” Basia said.
“We tried,” Naomi continued as though he hadn’t spoken. “But the damage caused by the shuttle was just too serious. I’m going to call the captain of the Barb and ask that your daughter be transferred to this ship. The price is there will be a few others that come with her. Just a few, though.”
Basia felt an almost overwhelming sense of relief, followed by an equally powerful rush of shame. “There are a hundred-some people on the Barbapiccola. We just let them all die?”
“Not all of them, but even if we wanted to bring them all here, they wouldn’t fit. A full company on the Roci would be twenty-two. Our other choice is to die with them,” Naomi said. Her voice trembled, but her gaze was steady. She knew exactly how awful her words were, but she wasn’t backing away from them. Basia found himself suddenly very afraid of the Rocinante’s executive officer. “But we’re not buying ourselves much in the process. With our power failing and running on a little over half thrust, we’re getting very close to the point that we won’t be able to get to a stable orbit where we can die slowly when the environment systems shut down. And, of course, we’ll have moved as many of the Barb’s crew as we can to this ship. Which just means we’ll burn through our power that much faster. This is lose, lose, lose, Basia. There aren’t any good choices anymore.”
Basia nodded, accepting her statements without argument. She was the expert. But he felt like there was something missing. It itched at the back of his mind. To distract himself, he traced with his finger in the condensation building up on the nearest wall panel. That shouldn’t be happening. The atmosphere system shouldn’t be allowing humidity to build up like that. But now that he thought about it, he realized that the air did feel thick, and too hot. Naomi, running the environmental systems at minimum power. She wasn’t lying. They’d run to the very edge of their ability to keep themselves in the sky.
“When do they come, and how do they get here?” Havelock asked, talking about refugees from the Barbapiccola.
“Three hours. I want you to go down and escort them. I don’t know how good their suits are, but I don’t expect much. We may have to haul some EVA suits of our own down to them.”
“Roger that,” Havelock said with a nod. An Earthman’s nod. Tipping the head back and forth. A move totally invisible in a space suit. Without thinking about it, Basia tipped his fist back and forth to show him how to do it right. Havelock ignored him.