“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.”
“Any speculation on what they’re doing?” Naomi said, switching her view to match his.
“They’re engineers. They know how crippled we are. How vulnerable. So my guess is they’re going to try to kill us.”
Chapter Forty-Eight: Holden
Life at the naval academy had been so stressful for Holden that at the end of his first term he’d celebrated by going to a party and drinking until he passed out for twenty hours. It had been his first lesson on the difference between unconsciousness and sleep. They might seem the same, but they weren’t. After twenty hours, he’d woken feeling totally unrested, and the morning PT the next day had almost killed him.
Riding on Miller’s material transfer network, it was difficult to get any sense of the passage of time. The first time Holden came to, his hand terminal told him ten hours had passed. He could tell he’d spent it unconscious rather than sleeping because he felt exhausted and sick. His throat hurt, his eyes burned like they’d been sandpapered, and all of his muscles ached. It almost felt like a flu, except that the antivirals he took every three months made that pretty much impossible. He turned on his armor’s diagnostic system, and it gave him a series of shots. He had no idea what. He drank half the water in his canteen and closed his eyes.
It was nine hours later when he woke again, and this time he was almost rested, the soreness in his throat gone. At some point he’d passed the threshold from unconsciousness to sleep, and his body was rewarding him for it. He stretched out on the metal floor until his joints popped, then drank the rest of his water.
“Wakey wakey,” Miller said. He slowly appeared in the darkness, surrounded by a halo of blue light, as if someone were turning up his dimmer switch.
“I’m awake,” Holden replied, then rattled his empty canteen at Miller. “But you stuffed me into this cattle car so fast I wasn’t able to get supplies. Gonna get pretty thirsty if there isn’t, you know, an alien drinking fountain for something.”
“We’ll see. But that’s actually the least of our problems right now.”
“Says the guy who doesn’t drink.”
“There’s a damaged piece of the system ahead,” Miller continued, “and I’d hoped we’d be able to get around it. No such luck. We’re on foot from here.”
“Your fancy alien train is broken?”
“My fancy alien material transfer system has been sitting unused for over a billion years and half the planet just exploded. Your ship was built less than a decade ago and you can barely keep the coffee pot running.”
“You are a sad, bitter little man,” Holden said as he climbed to his feet and pushed against the train door. It didn’t open.
“Hold on,” Miller said and vanished.
Holden turned the brightness up on his terminal and spent a few minutes checking over his equipment while he waited. Miller had grabbed him right after his final patrol around the settlement, which meant he had his armor, his pistol, and quite a few magazines of ammunition, all of which was pretty likely to be useless. He also had one empty canteen, no food, and a suit medical pack that was running low on almost everything, all of which would have been much handier to have fully stocked. When his body finally woke up enough to be hungry, he expected to be quite willing to trade his gun in for a sandwich. He didn’t think the alien structures would have many vending machines.