Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

“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.