It had taken her some time to put together a backup plan.
For hours, the looped message had played in her ear, whispering on the back of residual charge. “This is Naomi Nagata of the Rocinante. If you get this message, please retransmit. Tell James Holden I am in distress. Comm is not responding. I have no nav control. Please retransmit…”
Thirteen seconds long, and barely louder than the sound of her breath, even with her head less than a meter from the transmitter. With the leads to the transmitter exposed, she was ready. She’d have four times through. It had to be enough that it wouldn’t be mistaken for random interference. She pressed her head to the hull to distract from the whirling of her inner ear.
“This is Naomi Nagata,” she said, matching the timing and cadence of her false self. “If you get this message, please retransmit. Tell James Holden I am in—” She slammed the wire onto the exposed leads. A shiver of electricity bit her fingertips even through the suit’s gloves. The radio was silent, but she kept mouthing the words, replaying them like a song stuck in her head until the right moment, then yanked the wire free “—control. Please retransmit. This is Naomi Nagata of the Rocinante. If you get this message, please retransmit. Tell James Holden I am in—” Cut, pause. “—control. Please retransmit.”
After the fourth time, she took the length of steel spring she’d been using as a knife and cut the transmitter. Her false voice went dead. She scrambled down, moving from strut to strut, watching her hands and feet with every movement so she wouldn’t misjudge. The acceleration gravity made her ankles and wrists feel unstable. The air in her suit didn’t feel stale or close; the carbon dioxide scrubbers worked well enough on passive that she wouldn’t feel the panic of asphyxiation. She’d just gently pass out and die.
She ducked into the engineering deck, closed the access panel. On the way to the hatch, her knee buckled. She popped the hatch open, ripped off her helmet, and sank down, gasping. Her vision narrowed, bright sparkles filling in her peripheral vision. She dry heaved once, paused, did it again, and let her body’s weight sink deep into the deck below her.
Tell James Holden I’m in control for some really broad definition of control, she thought and laughed. Then coughed until her ribs hurt even worse. Then laughed again.
At her seventy-first sortie, she hit the wall. It wasn’t subtle. She had closed the hatch to the main body of the ship, closed the seals, and put her helmet onto the environment suit. Before she fixed it into place and started the next five-minute count, her hands dropped to her sides. She hadn’t consciously intended to do that; it had just happened. Alarmed in a vague, distant kind of way, she sat on the deck with her back against the wall and tried moving them. If she’d just become paralyzed or something, that would change the situation. Give her permission to stop. But her hands still flexed; her shoulders still moved. She was just exhausted. Even the effort to swallow seemed heroic. She closed her eyes, wondering if she’d instantly fall asleep, but she was too weary for that. So she sat.
If the suit had a battery, it would probably be cataloging the failures of her body right now. The dehydration headache was worse now, and moving in toward nausea. Her skin felt raw where the unshielded sun had burned her. Though she wasn’t producing as much, she was still coughing. And she figured her blood was probably about equal parts plasma and fatigue poisons by now.
Her two little victories—the thruster, the transmitter—had been the end. Since then, either her efforts had degraded or things had genuinely gotten more complicated, or both. The repeaters that would cause the core to shut down had either been omitted in the build or were tucked someplace that couldn’t be reached from between the hulls. The sensor array that would trigger the bottle failure when a rescue ship got too close would have been a lovely thing to access, but it appeared to be mounted on the exterior where she couldn’t get to it. There were half a dozen places she could have tried tapping into the computer system, but none of them had interfaces, and she didn’t have any she could bring. Other plans and strategies flickered through her mind from time to time like fireflies. Some of them might have been good. She couldn’t keep hold of them long enough to say.
She might have slept or the timeless skipping might just have been how her brain worked now. The voice she heard was just a whisper fainter than her own voice had been, but it snapped her back to herself.
“Hey there, Chetzemoka. This is Alex Kamal presently of the Razorback. Naomi? If you’re there, I’d appreciate you giving me a sign. I’d sort of like to make sure it’s you before we come over. Your ship’s been acting a mite odd, and we’re a little on the jumpy side. And, just in case it’s not Naomi Nagata? I’ve got fifteen missiles locked on you right now, so whoever you are, you might want to talk with me.”
“Don’t,” she said, knowing he couldn’t hear her. “Stay away. Stay away.”
Everything hurt. Everything whirled. Nothing was easy. When she got to her feet, her head swam. She was afraid she was going to pass out, but if she bent over, she wasn’t sure she’d have the strength to stand back up. She had to find a way to wave him off. She had to keep him from getting close enough to be caught in the blast. Whether it saved her life or not didn’t matter. She’d had her good day. It was more than she’d expected, and she was so deeply weary…
Breathing hard, she opened the engineering hatch for the last time and stumbled for the lift. And after the lift, the airlock.
Chapter Forty-five: Amos
Even though it was strictly local, running off the Zhang Guo’s system, it was nice having working hand terminals again. Amos lay on a support wedged in the narrow space between the hulls. The rest of his work team was only the soft clanging of magnetic clamps and the gentle, soothing smell of a welding torch. The meter he had clipped to the power line was at zero.
“Now?” Peaches said.
“Nothing.”
A couple seconds passed.
“Now?”
“Nothing.”
Another second. The meter chirped, the indicator going from zero to eighty-nine. Amos grinned. “That’s it, Peaches. I’m a little shy of ninety.”
“Locking that in,” she said, and even though the hand terminals were set for audio, he knew she was smiling. He plucked the meter free and sprayed sealant over the holes he’d made for the leads. “Erich? If you’re there, we’re ready for another run.”
“Of course I’m here,” Erich said. “Where would I go? Starting the diagnostics run now. You two go stretch your legs or something.”
Amos whistled once between his teeth, the shrill echo making the sound seem larger. “I’m taking a break. You guys get that conduit open, just wait for me. Don’t try to do something smart.”
There was a rough clatter of agreement as he swung out and up, climbing to the access panel with the handholds and the structural supports. The B-team wasn’t much by way of help, but they could do some of the time-consuming easy stuff while Amos and Peaches and Erich made the Zhang Guo skyworthy. So far, it had been as much cleaning up the servants’ half-assed attempts to fix the ship as it had been finding why she’d been grounded in the first place. As showy as the ship was, her internal design was pretty nearly off-the-shelf. On the engineering deck, Amos dug up a cleaning rag and wiped the hardening shell of sealant off his fingers and wrist. Where it was thinnest, it was already solid, coming away from his skin like the shell off a shrimp.