“Don’t think about the odds,” Bobbie said. “Think about the stakes. Think how much we lose if we take the risk and it goes wrong.”
Alex’s head felt thick, like the first stages of illness. He looked back at his nav panel. The distance between the Razorback and Chetzemoka increased with every second. He took a deep breath, blew out. Naomi’s voice came softly from the feed. “Tell James Holden I am in distress. Comm is not responding. I have no nav control…”
The voice that came from the cabin space was soft, gentle, conversational. “An interesting analysis, but incomplete.”
Nathan Smith stood in the doorway. His hair was greasy and disarrayed. His clothes looked like they’d been slept in. His eyes were bloodshot, the rims red and angry. Alex thought he looked a decade older than when they’d taken off. The prime minister smiled at Alex, then Bobbie, then Alex again.
“Sir,” Bobbie said.
“You’ve neglected a term, Sergeant. Consider what we stand to lose if we don’t make the attempt.”
“The reason for doing this,” Alex said. “The reason for doing any of this. If there’s a chance – and I think there’s a pretty damned good one – that Naomi managed her own escape, and she’s out there and in distress, and she’s called for help, you know what the rules are? That we stop and help. Even if she’s not someone we know. Even if it was someone else’s voice. That’s the rule, because out here, we help each other. And if we stopped doing that because we’re more important or because the rules don’t apply to us anymore, I can make a decent case that we’ve stopped being the good guys.”
Smith beamed. “That was beautiful, Mister Kamal. I had been thinking of explaining to Chrisjen Avasarala that we’d left our only solid witness to the Pella behind, but I think I like your version better. Set course and alert the UN escort to our change of plans.”
“Yes, sir,” Alex said. When the door closed, he turned to Bobbie. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Bobbie said. “It’s not like I didn’t want to go after her.”
“And if it turns out the ship’s full of soldiers?”
“I can take this suit out for a drive,” Bobbie said. “Won’t hurt my feelings.”
It only took a few minutes to set the optimal intercept course and fire off a flight plan to the UN escort ships. Afterward, he recorded a tightbeam message for Holden. “Hey there, Cap’n. We’re on our way, but we’ll be careful. Get in, take a good look, and if anything’s getting our hackles up, we won’t board. Meantime, you tell that pilot you’ve got that whoever makes rendezvous first owes the other fella a beer.”
Chapter Forty-four: Naomi
Even a steady one g could be unpleasant for her. The constant press of two was a slow torture. It began as a deep ache in her knees and the base of her spine, then progressed quickly to sharp pain, like a needle stuck into the joints. Naomi surveyed the Chetzemoka in stages, moving through a deck, then lying down until the pain lessened, then the next deck. Her hands and feet hurt even as the swelling subsided. Her cough didn’t get better, but it didn’t get worse.
The first disappointment was that the controls were in lockdown. She tried a few passwords – FreeNavy and Marcoisgreat and Filip – but even if she got it right, there was no reason to expect that they’d left the biometrics profiles turned off.
The lockers by the airlock hung open and empty. The three EVA suits that remained didn’t have batteries or air bottles. The emergency rations were gone. She expected the toolboxes to be gone from the machine shop, but they’d taken out the racks that held them too, the drawers from the cabinets, the LEDs from the wall lights. The crash couches were all slit open, gel and padding pooled on the deck beside them. The drug delivery system and reservoirs were gone. The only water was in the drives; ejection mass to be spit out the back of the ship. The only food was the residue in the recyclers that hadn’t been processed back into anything edible. The stink of welding rigs and burning still hung in the air, so the air recycler was probably running unfiltered.
Naomi lay on the deck, her head resting on her hands, and her eyes closed. The ship had been constructed for one use and as an insurance write-off. Its working life had begun with it being disposable, and it had been looted from there. Even the physical panels and monitors had been salvaged and carried away. As presents to Filip went, it was actually pretty crappy. The deck shook under her, the vibration of thrust setting up resonances that no system even tried to damp down. Between the high g and the vacuum damage leaking fluid
into her lungs, breathing took more effort than it should have.
The ship wasn’t a ship. She needed to stop thinking of it that way. It was a bomb. It was what she’d done to the Augustín Gamarra years ago and had carried with her ever since like a weight around her throat. Jim had known the kind of person that landed on water haulers like the Canterbury. He’d said that everyone there had reasons for being there. There were reasons the ship she’d tried to give to her son was stripped empty and triggered to kill. Not just her but anyone who came close to her. There were reasons. If she could defuse it, undo the threat, then she could follow it back, though. Take it to Ceres, where it had all started. There should be a way through the machine shop. All machine shops were supposed to be connected at the back.
She reached out her hands, only they weren’t her hands. She was dreaming. She forced her eyes open and rolled to her back with an exhausted sob.
Okay. If she stopped moving now, she was going to sleep. That was good to know. She sat up, rested her head against the wall. Sleep later. Sleep when you’re dead. Or even better, sleep when you’re safe. She grinned to herself. Safe. That sounded like a good plan. She should try that for a change. She balled her hands into tight fists. The joints all screamed in pain, but when she opened them, her fingers moved better. That was probably a metaphor for something.
She had to set priorities. She didn’t have a lot of resources. If she just grabbed at the first idea that came to her, it would be easy to exhaust herself without getting the critical work done. She needed to get food and water and make sure the air supply was reliable. She needed to warn anyone coming to save her not to approach. She needed to disarm the trap. Maybe dump core, maybe replace the drivers with a copy that didn’t carry her poisoned code.
And she needed to do it before the ship blew up. At two g. Without tools or access to the controls. Or… was that right? Access to the controls was going to be hard, but she should be able to improvise some tools. The EVA suits weren’t powered and didn’t have bottles, but they had seals and reinforcement. She could take the cloth apart, and salvage some lengths of wire. Maybe something solid enough to cut with. And could she use the helmet clamps as a kind of vise grip or clamp? She wasn’t sure.
Even if she could, what would that gain her?
“More than you’ve got now,” she said aloud. Her voice reverberated in the empty space.
All right. Step one, make tools. Step two, drop core. Or warn anyone coming in. She stood up and forced herself back to the airlock lockers.
Five hours later, she was on the ship’s perfunctory little engineering deck, sealing the hatch manually. Two of the EVA suits had given up what little they had to offer to make a tiny, sketchy tool kit. Doing anything with the controls had failed. So she could be a rat in a box, or she could take out the middleman. After all, the controls all connected to machinery, and the machinery – some of it – was where she could put her hands on it.
The space between the hulls was in vacuum, and she didn’t have any great faith that the outer hull was actually sealed. The one remaining suit held about five minutes’ worth of air without a bottle and she could set the radio to passive and pick up the faintest echo of her own voice making the false message with the residual charge in the wires. The lock that should have let her get into and out of the maintenance access had been hauled off as salvage, but she could turn the full engineering deck into a makeshift airlock. Close the hatch to the rest of the ship, force the access panel into the space between hulls. She budgeted two minutes to locate something useful – a power repeater she could sabotage to force the drive to shut down, the wiring for the comm system, an unsecured console that was talking to the computers – then two minutes to get back out. Thirty seconds to close and seal the maintenance panel and pop the engineering hatch. She’d lose a roomful of air every time, but she’d only lose a roomful.
She put on the helmet and checked the seals, then opened the access panel. It fought her at first, then gave all at once. She thought she felt a rush of escaping air go past her, but it was probably her imagination. Twenty seconds already gone. She crawled into the vacuum between the hulls. The darkness was so complete, it was like closing her eyes. She tapped the suit’s controls, but no beam of light came from them.