Cibola Burn (The Expanse) (27 page)

“Analysis suggests that this is not evidence of a long-term amity between the OPA and Mars, but a tactical alliance intended to forestall the UN and Earth-Luna corporate structures from establishing a greater foothold in these new worlds. Given the time it will take a UN and RCE group to be assembled and make the journey to Medina Station, we predict that the situation on New Terra will be evolving without immediate physical involvement from in-system players for the foreseeable future, and the greater question of how traffic through the gates will be regulated will be a source of high-level tension and probable military action in the coming months and years.”

Havelock scratched his ear. Prior experience told him that Forecast Analytics was usually about a day ahead of the mainline, non-proprietary feeds. Which would mean that in about thirty hours they’d be getting flooded with news and opinion pieces about themselves from people who’d never been farther than the Jovian system. Even if it only changed the stories that the people downstairs were telling about themselves, it could make things even worse. If the squatters knew there were more RCE ships coming – even if they weren’t going to be here for years – maybe they’d get even more desperate. Or maybe Mars getting in bed with the OPA would make them think they had support back home. Either way, nothing good could come of it.

Havelock wished there was a way to shut down the communication to the ring, just as a way to keep the dramatics of national politics contained. Things were screwed up enough without getting the professional-class screwups at the UN involved. More than they already were, anyway. At least they hadn’t picked up on the UN/OPA mediator deciding the planet was full of boojams and was telling everyone to run away and hide under their blankets. Or, on second thought, maybe it would have been better if they had. It would be a distraction, anyway.

His hand terminal squawked, and he accepted the connection.

“I think we’re about ready,” Chief Engineer Koenen said.

“I’ll be right there,” Havelock replied, releasing the couch straps. He pushed off toward the door and hauled himself hand over hand toward the airlock.

He slid into the storage deck where his little militia was waiting, his brain arbitrarily deciding that the bank of lockers was down, the airlock door up. Human brains needed an answer, even if they had to make up something they knew was bullshit. A dozen people floated in the space. Havelock started talking to them as he lifted his own vacuum suit out of the locker at his feet.

“Good to see you today, team. So we’re going to do a practice breaching. It’s going to be a lot like last time, except this time we’re going to have a squad that’s trying to stop you.”

One of the men at the back shook a paint gun and hooted. The others around him laughed. Havelock pulled on the vacuum suit and started working the seals. He left the helmet off for the moment so that he could speak through the free air.

“Do we have teams set up?”

“I’m taking Alpha and Beta,” Koenen said. “Figured you could lead the Gamma on attack.”

“That works,” Havelock said. He shifted his paintball gun from side to side, getting a feel for its mass. “You have the emergency airlock?”

“Here,” one of the Beta team said, twisting to show his backpack. The bright yellow box held a bubble of adhesive-backed polymer bound to a second sheet that was fitted with a seal and an inflating tank the size of Havelock’s thumb. Laid out properly on the hull of a ship, it would look like a hemispherical blister and contain up to two atmospheres of pressure indefinitely or eight for a full tenth of a second. Havelock wasn’t actually going to let the engineers cut through the hull of the
Israel
, but he was going to make sure they could get everything ready up to the moment when they’d fire up the torch welders.

“All right,” he said. “Now before we get out there, remember we’re on the outside of a ship, and the shuttle is on the planet. The chances of your drifting to where we can’t get you back are non-zero.”

The little bit of joking and whispering stopped. Havelock looked through the room, making eye contact with several of them as if his gaze were enough to make them safe.

“All these suits have mag boots,” he said. “They only work for a few centimeters, so they’ll keep you against the ship, but they won’t pull you back to it. For that you have the grapnel lines. You’ve all trained with those?”

A murmur of general assent answered him.

“All right. If you’re drifting, the grapnel line will adhere to any metal surface on the hull. They’ve got their own propellant, so there won’t be any kick. Do not under any circumstances pass through or stop in any of the areas marked in red. Those are maneuvering thruster outlets, and while we aren’t planning to make any adjustments, don’t assume it. We’re not doing this to lose anyone else.

“If you get out there and you start feeling too hot or like there’s something wrong with your air feed, you’re probably having a panic attack. Just let me or the chief know, and we’ll pause the exercise and get you inside. If you start feeling wonderful and powerful and like you’ve seen the face of God, you’re having a euphoric attack, and those are more dangerous than the panic. You aren’t going to want to tell us about those, but you have to. All right?”

A ragged chorus of
Sir, yes sir
echoed through the room. Havelock tried to think of what else he should say. He didn’t want to insult their intelligence, but he didn’t want anything to go wrong either. In the end, he shrugged, fastened the helmet, and gave the order through the exercise frequency.

“Alpha and Beta teams, into the lock. You’ve got thirty minutes.”

There were three exercise-specific settings on the suit radio. One was open to all the people going out. One was just for Havelock’s team, and the last was between him and Koenen. The mom-and-pop channel, the chief engineer called it. Havelock opened all the channels, but all he could hear was the banter of his own group. The chief and his men weren’t transmitting. After ten minutes, Havelock switched to the mom-and-pop channel.

“Okay,” he said. “We’re coming out.”

There was a crackle as the chief switched.

“That wasn’t thirty minutes.”

“I know,” Havelock said, and the chief chuckled.

“Okay. Thank you for the heads-up. I won’t give it away.”

Astronomy had never been a particular interest of Havelock’s, and living in a ship or station, he’d seen actual stars less often than he did in his childhood on Earth. The starscape around New Terra was beautiful, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. The few constellations he knew – Orion, Ursa Major – weren’t there, but he still looked for them. The bright smear of the galactic disk was still part of the sky, and the local sun could pass for Sol. More or less, anyway. New Terra’s ring of tiny moons caught the light, their low albedo making them hardly more than the stars behind them. The
Edward Israel
was moving at something like eight thousand kilometers a minute. That this stillness masked a velocity that was orders of magnitude faster than a rifle shot was intellectual knowledge. What he felt was motionless. He stood on the skin of the ship, rooted by his mag boots, shifting gently like seaweed on the ocean floor. To his right, New Terra’s terminator seemed to inch across its vast ocean. To his right, the shuttle stood half a kilometer out, looking small and forlorn against the vast night. His strike force stood around him, craning their necks, in awe of the massive emptiness all around. He was almost sorry to pull his attention back to the small, vaguely intimate necessities of violence.

He checked to be sure he was speaking on the channel exclusive to his group. “All right. Their target area for setting up the emergency lock is aft of the main storage area. We’re going around clockwise. In ten minutes, we’ll be moving into eclipse. If we come up from between the primary maneuvering thrusters and hangar bay, we should have the sun behind us. So let’s get moving.”

The small chorus of excited
yessirs
told him they liked the idea. Coming out of the sun, raining death on the enemy. It was a pretty enough plan. The only things that kept it from happening were their unfamiliarity with the mag boots and the fact that Koenen had placed the emergency airlock a hundred meters farther away than Havelock had expected. The bright moment passed, and the sun shifted behind New Terra, where it would stay for almost twenty minutes.

“Okay,” Havelock said, “Plan B. Everyone turn off your helmet lights.”

“What about the indicators on our external batteries, sir?”

“We’re going to have to hope they’re dim enough that —”

One of the engineers to his left raised the paint gun and turned it on himself. The muzzle flash was like a spark.

“What the hell are you doing?” Havelock demanded.

“I figured if I got some paint on the indicator light, I could —” the man began, but it was too late. Koenen’s men had seen the muzzle flash. Havelock tried to get his forces to hunker down close to the skin of the ship and fire across the ship’s shallow horizon, but they kept rising up to see if they’d struck anything. In less than a minute, the last of his men reported an enemy hit and Havelock called the exercise to a halt. The massive dark bulk of the planet was almost above them now, the sunlight a soft ring where the atmosphere scattered it. The two groups gathered.

The airlock was only half attached, and three of his team’s paintballs had smeared it. Two of the chief engineer’s boarding party had been hit. The rest were elated. Havelock set his team and the wounded of the opposition to cleanup, and the disgraced soldiers started repacking the airlock.

“Nice work,” Havelock said on the mom-and-pop channel.

Koenen grunted. His arms were crossed awkwardly over his chest, the bulk of the suit defying the pose. Havelock frowned, not that anyone could see him.

“Something the matter, chief?”

“You know,” the chief engineer said, “I don’t mind that the
Israel
has her own engineering crew. I understand that we’ve got separate mandates. But we’re working with the same equipment and supplies, and as a courtesy, I would like to be kept in the loop when the ship crew are sending out a team.”

“Okay,” Havelock said. “I can talk to them when we get in. Is it something that’s been happening often?”

“It’s happening right now,” the chief said, pointing out into the darkness.

It took Havelock a moment to see it. A flicker where no flicker should be. The weaponized shuttle brightened and dimmed. A welding torch, half a klick away in the darkness. Panic felt strange in null g, the blood flowing away from his hands and feet.

“Do you have enhanced magnification on your helmet?” Havelock asked.

“Yeah,” the chief said.

“Could you take a look at who’s out there?”

The chief engineer bent back. The surface of his helmet glittered for a moment, the HUD taking over. “Red EVA suit. Got a decent-sized pack on it too. Long-distance travel. And a welding kit.”

Havelock said something obscene, then switched to the all-group channel. “Everyone stop. We have a problem. There’s someone at the shuttle over there, and he isn’t one of ours.”

For a moment, no one spoke. Then one of the militiamen, his voice calm and matter-of-fact, said, “Let’s go kick his ass.”

It was exactly not what Havelock wanted to do. If the enemy had a rifle, he could pick half the team off before they got close. Even then, they had paint guns. But the alternative was to let whoever they were do whatever they were doing to the only ace up the
Israel
’s sleeve.

“Okay,” Havelock said. “Here’s the plan. Everyone sync up with the ship’s computer. We’re going to let the
Israel
calculate our burns. Turn off the mag boots.” He plucked out his hand terminal, fed in the emergency security override, and coded in his request. Their vacuum suits had more then enough propellant to get them all to the shuttle and back again, provided nobody missed or tried to do something clever. Above them, the penumbra around New Terra grew lopsided, the sun preparing to reemerge. Another tiny dawn. The computer announced the burns were ready.

“Okay,” Havelock said. “These are the bad guys. We don’t know how many there are. We don’t know how they’re armed. So we’re going to try to scare them off. Everyone get your gun at the ready. Look threatening, and
don’t fire
. If they figure out our guns aren’t real, we may be in for a bad time.”

“Sir?” one of the men said. “You remember we’re covered with target paint, right?”

Before Havelock could answer, the thrusters started, pushing compressed gas out behind them like a fog and smoke. All their suits rose together into the night. Or else fell. The acceleration pushed the blood into Havelock’s legs, and the suit squeezed, pressing it back. It wasn’t even a full g. It was hardly a third, but it felt like something much, much faster. Much more dangerous. Now that he knew to look for it, the welding flicker was obvious. It didn’t stop. The main burn cut out, and the suits rotated, starting the braking burn. The perfect synchrony meant the
Israel
was still coordinating them.

This time, the intruder saw them. The welding torch died. Havelock looked down between his feet, his paint gun centered between his toes, waiting for the bullets to start streaming out and praying that they wouldn’t.

They didn’t.

“It’s working!” one of the men shouted. “Motherfucker’s running away!”

And there it was. A red EVA suit on the skin of the shuttle. It struggled with something, looked up toward Havelock and his militia descending upon him, and turned back. Whoever it was, there was only one of them. The braking thrust stuttered. They were almost at the shuttle now. Fifty meters. Forty. Thirty. Havelock opened a standard general-response channel.

“Attention unidentified welder. You will stand down.”

The red suit stood, the EVA suit firing off. The person lifted at a ninety-degree angle, not going directly away from them, but diving down toward the planetary surface and whatever lower orbit would mean a safe rendezvous. Havelock felt the relief flooding him. They weren’t shooting. His HUD promised him that the shuttle’s basic functions were unchanged. It hadn’t been set to detonate. And the militia boys weren’t in charge of their own burns, so they wouldn’t be taking off after the intruder.