Caliban;s war e-2

by James S. A. Corey

  “When did this happen, ma’am?”

  “Before the attack,” Prax said.

  “A couple hours ago,” the woman said. “Fourth level. Blue sector. Apartment 1453.”

  “Okay, ma’am. I’m going to take you over to a desk here. I need you to fill out a report.”

  “My brother’s dead. They shot him.”

  “And I’m very sorry about that, ma’am. I need you to fill out a report so we can catch the men who did this.”

  Prax watched them walk away. He turned back to the line of the traumatized and desperate waiting their turns to beg for help, for justice, for law. A flash of anger lit him, then flickered. He needed help, but there wasn’t any to be had here. He and Mei were a pebble in space. They didn’t signify.

  The security man was back, talking to a tall pretty woman about something horrible. Prax hadn’t noticed the man returning, hadn’t heard the beginning of the woman’s tale. He was starting to lose time. That wasn’t good.

  The small sane part of his brain whispered that if he died, no one would look for Mei. She’d be lost. It whispered that he needed food, that he’d needed it for days. That he didn’t have very much time left.

  “I have to go to the relief center,” he said aloud. The woman and the security man didn’t seem to hear. “Thanks anyway.”

  Now that he had started to notice his own condition, Prax was astonished and alarmed. His gait was a shuffle; his arms were weak and ached badly, though he couldn’t remember having done anything to earn the pain. He hadn’t lifted anything heavy or gone climbing. He hadn’t done his daily exercise routine any time that he could remember. He didn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. He remembered the shudder of the falling mirror, the death of his dome, like it was something that had happened in a previous lifetime. No wonder he was falling apart.

  The corridors by the relief center were packed like a slaughterhouse. Men and women, many of them who looked stronger and healthier than he was, pushed against each other, making even the widest spaces feel narrow. The closer he got to the port, the more light-headed he felt. The air was almost warm here, the barn-hot of bodies. It stank of keytone-acrid breath. Saint’s breath, his mother called it. The smell of protein breakdown, of bodies eating their own muscles to survive. He wondered how many people in the crowd knew what that scent was.

  People were yelling. Shoving. The crowd around him surged back and forth the way he imagined waves might press against a beach.

  “Then open the doors and let us look!” a woman shouted, far ahead of him.

  Oh, Prax thought. This is a food riot.

  He pushed for the edges, trying to get out. Trying to get away. Ahead of him, people were shouting. Behind him, they pushed. Banks of LEDs in the ceiling glowed white and gold. The walls were industrial gray. He put a hand out. He’d gotten to a wall. Somewhere, the dam burst, and the crowd flowed suddenly forward, the collective movement threatening to pull him swirling away into the flow. He kept a hand on the wall. The crowd thinned, and Prax staggered forward. The loading bay doors stood open. Beside them Prax saw a familiar face but couldn’t place it. Someone from the lab, maybe? The man was thick-boned and muscular. An Earther. Maybe someone he’d seen in his travels through the failing station. Had he seen the man grubbing for food? But no, he looked too well fed. There was no gauntness to his cheeks. He was like a friend and also a stranger. Someone Prax knew and also didn’t. Like the secretary-general or a famous actor.

  Prax knew he was staring, but he couldn’t stop. He knew that face. He knew it. It had to do with the war.

  Prax had a sudden flashbulb memory. He was in his apartment, holding Mei in his arms, trying to calm her. She was barely a year old, not walking, the doctors still tinkering to find the right pharmaceutical cocktail to keep her alive. Over her colic wail, the news streams were a constant alarmed chatter. A man’s face played over and over.

  My name is James Holden and my ship, the Canterbury, was just destroyed by a warship with stealth technology and what appear to be parts stamped with Martian Navy serial numbers.

  That was him. That was why he recognized the face and felt that he’d never seen it before. Prax felt a tug from somewhere near the center of his chest and found himself stepping forward. He paused. Beyond the loading doors, someone whooped. Prax took out his hand terminal, looked at his list. Sixteen names, sixteen children gone. And at the bottom of the page, in simple block characters: Get help.

  Prax turned toward the man who’d started wars and saved planets, suddenly shy and uncertain.

  “Get help,” he said, and walked forward.

  Chapter Eleven: Holden

  Santichai and Melissa Supitayaporn were a pair of eighty-year-old earthborn missionaries from the Church of Humanity Ascendant, a religion that eschewed supernaturalism in all forms, and whose theology boiled down to Humans can be better than they are, so let’s do that. They also ran the relief depot headquarters with the ruthless efficiency of natural-born dictators. Minutes after arriving, Holden had been thoroughly dressed down by Santichai, a frail wisp of a man with thinning white hair, about his altercation with customs officials at the port. After several minutes of trying to explain himself, only to be shouted down by the tiny missionary, he finally just gave up and apologized.

  “Don’t make our situation here any more precarious,” Santichai repeated, apparently mollified by the apology but needing to drive this point home. He shook a sticklike brown finger in Holden’s face.

  “Got it,” Holden said, holding up his hands in surrender. The rest of his crew had vanished at Santichai’s first angry outburst, leaving Holden to deal with the man alone. He spotted Naomi across the large open warehouse space of the relief depot, talking calmly to Melissa, Santichai’s hopefully less volatile wife. Holden couldn’t hear any shouting, though with the voices of several dozen people and the grinding gears and engine whine and reverse alerts of three lift trucks, Melissa could have been flinging grenades at Naomi and he probably wouldn’t have heard it.

  Looking for an opportunity to escape, Holden pointed at Naomi across the room and said, “Excuse me, I-”

  Santichai cut him off with a curt wave of one hand that sent his loose orange robes swirling. Holden found himself unable to disobey the tiny man.

  “This,” Santichai said, pointing in the direction of the crates being brought in from the Somnambulist, “is not enough.”

  “I-”

  “The OPA promised us twenty-two thousand kilos of protein and supplements by last week. This is less than twelve thousand kilos,” Santichai said, punctuating his statement with a sharp poke at Holden’s bicep.

  “I’m not in charge of-”

  “Why would they promise us things they have no intention of delivering? Promise twelve thousand if that is what you have. Do not promise twenty-two thousand and then deliver twelve,” he said, accompanied by more poking.

  “I agree,” Holden said, backing out of poke range with his hands up. “I totally agree. I’ll call my contact on Tycho Station immediately to find out where the rest of the promised supplies are. I’m sure they’re on the way.”

  Santichai shrugged in another swirl of orange.

  “See that you do,” he said, then steamed off toward one of the lift trucks. “You! You! Do you see the sign that says ‘medicine’? Why are you putting things that are not medicine in that place?”

  Holden used this distraction to make good his escape, and jogged over to Naomi and Melissa. Naomi had a form open on her terminal and was completing some paperwork while Melissa watched.

  Holden glanced around the warehouse space while Naomi worked. The Somnambulist was just one of almost twenty relief ships that had landed in the last twenty-four hours, and the massive room was quickly filling up with crates of supplies. The chill air smelled of dust and ozone and hot oil from the lift trucks, but under it there was a vaguely unpleasant smell of decay, like rotting vegetation. As he watched, Santichai darted across the warehouse f
loor, shouting instructions to a pair of workers carrying a heavy crate.

  “Your husband is something else, ma’am,” Holden said to Melissa.

  Melissa was both taller and heavier than her tiny husband, but she had the same shapeless cloud of thinning white hair he had. She also had bright blue eyes that nearly disappeared in her face when she smiled. As she was doing now.

  “I’ve never met anyone else in my life who cared more about other people’s welfare, and less about their feelings,” she said. “But at least he’ll make sure everyone is well fed before he tells them all the many things they did wrong.”

  “I think that does it,” Naomi said, hitting the key to send the filled-out form to Melissa’s terminal, a charmingly outdated model she pulled out of a pocket in her robe when it chimed receipt.

  “Mrs. Supitayaporn,” Holden said.

  “Melissa.”

  “Melissa, how long have you and your husband been on Ganymede?”

  “Almost,” she said, tapping her finger against her chin and staring off into the distance, “ten years? Can it be that long? It must be, because Dru had just had her baby, and he-”

  “I’m wondering because the one thing no one outside of Ganymede seems to know is how this”-Holden gestured around him-“all got started.”

  “The station?”

  “The crisis.”

  “Well, the UN and Martian soldiers started shooting at each other; then we started seeing system failures — ”

  “Yes,” Holden said, cutting in again. “I understand that. But why? Not one shot during the entire year that Earth and Mars have jointly held this moon. We had a war before the whole Eros thing, and they didn’t bring it here. Then all at once everyone everywhere is shooting? What kicked that off?”

  Melissa looked puzzled, another expression that made her eyes almost disappear in a mass of wrinkles.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’d assumed they were shooting each other everywhere in the system. We don’t get much news right now.”

  “No,” Holden said. “It’s just here, and it was just for a couple of days. And then it stopped, with no explanation.”

  “That is odd,” Melissa said, “but I don’t know that it matters. Whatever happened, it doesn’t change what we need to do now.”

  “I suppose not,” Holden agreed.

  Melissa smiled, embraced him warmly, then went off to check someone else’s paperwork.

  Naomi hooked her arm through Holden’s, and they started toward the warehouse exit into the rest of the station, dodging crates of supplies and aid workers as they went.

  “How can they have had a whole battle here,” she said, “and no one knows why?”

  “They know,” Holden said. “Someone knows.”

  The station looked worse on the ground than from space. The vital, oxygen-producing plants that lined the corridor walls were turning an unhealthy shade of yellow. Many corridors didn’t have lights, and the automatic pressure doors had been hand cranked and then wedged open; if one area of the station suddenly lost pressure, many adjoining sections would as well. The few people they ran into either avoided their eyes or stared at them with open hostility. Holden found himself wishing he were wearing his gun openly, rather than in a concealed holster at the small of his back.

  “Who’s our contact?” Naomi asked quietly.

  “Hmmmm?”

  “I assume Fred has people here,” she replied under her breath as she smiled and nodded at a passing group of men. All of them openly carried weapons, though most were of the stabbing and clubbing variety. They stared back at her with speculative looks on their faces. Holden moved his hand under his coat and toward his gun, but the men moved on, only giving them a few backward glances before they turned a corner and disappeared from view.

  “He didn’t arrange for us to meet someone?” Naomi finished in a normal voice.

  “He gave me some names. But communication with this moon has been so spotty he wasn’t able to-”

  Holden was cut off by a loud bang from another part of the port. The explosion was followed by a roar that gradually resolved into people shouting. The few people in the corridor with them began to run, some toward the noise, but most away from it.

  “Should we…” Naomi said, looking at the people running toward the commotion.

  “We’re here to see what’s going on,” Holden replied. “So let’s go see.”

  They quickly became lost in the twisting corridors of Ganymede’s port, but it didn’t matter as long as they kept moving toward the noise and along with the growing wave of people running in the same direction. A tall, stocky man with spiked red hair ran alongside them for a while. He was carrying a length of black metal pipe in each hand. He grinned at Naomi and tried to hand her one. She waved it off.

  “’Bout fookin’ time,” he yelled in an accent Holden couldn’t place. He held his extra club out to Holden when Naomi didn’t take it.

  “What is?” Holden asked, taking the club.

  “Fookin’ bastahds flingin’ the victuals up, and the prols jus gotta shove, wut? Well, fook that, ya mudder-humpin’ spunk guzzlas!”

  Spiky Redhead howled and waved his club in the air, then took off at a faster run and disappeared into the crowd. Naomi laughed and howled at his back as he ran. When Holden shot her a look, she just smiled and said, “It’s infectious.”

  A final bend in the corridor brought them to another large warehouse space, looking almost identical to the one ruled over by the Supitayaporns, except that this room was filled with a mob of angry people pushing toward the loading dock. The doors to the dock were closed, and a small group of port security officers were trying to hold the mob back. When Holden arrived, the crowd was still cowed by the security officers’ Tasers and shock prods, but from the rising tension and anger in the air, he could tell that wouldn’t last long.

  Just behind the front line of rent-a-cops, with their nonlethal deterrents, stood a small clump of men in dark suits and sensible shoes. They carried shotguns with the air of men who were just waiting for someone to give them permission.

  That would be the corporate security, then.

  Looking over the room, Holden felt the scene snap into place. Beyond that closed loading bay door was one of the few remaining corporate freighters loaded down with the last food being stripped from Ganymede.

  And this crowd was hungry.

  Holden remembered trying to escape a casino on Eros when it went into security lockdown. Remembered angry crowds facing down men with guns. Remembered the screams and the smells of blood and cordite. Before he knew he’d made a decision, he found himself pushing his way to the front of the crowd. Naomi followed, murmuring apologies in his wake. She grabbed his arm and stopped him for a moment.

  “Are you about to do something really stupid?” she asked.

  “I’m about to keep these people from being shot for the crime of being hungry,” he said, wincing at the self-righteous tone even as he said it.

  “Don’t,” Naomi said, letting him go, “pull your gun on anyone.”

  “They have guns.”

  “Guns plural. You have gun singular, which is why you will keep yours in your holster, or you’ll do this by yourself.”

  That’s the only way you ever do anything. By yourself. It was the kind of thing Detective Miller would have said. For him, it had been true. That was a strong enough argument against doing it that way.

  “Okay.” Holden nodded, then resumed pushing his way to the front. By the time he reached it, two people had become the focus of the conflict. A gray-haired port security man wearing a white patch with the word supervisor printed on it and a tall, thin dark-skinned woman who could pass for Naomi’s mother were yelling at each other while their respective groups looked on, shouting agreements and insults.

  “Just open the damn door and let us look!” yelled the woman in a tone that let Holden know this was something she was repeating again and again.

  “You won�
�t get anything by yelling at me,” the gray-haired supervisor yelled back. Beside him, his fellow security guards held their shock sticks in white-knuckled grips and the corporate boys held their shotguns in a loose cradle that Holden found far more threatening.

  The woman stopped shouting when Holden pushed his way up to the supervisor, and stared at him instead.

  “Who…?” she said.

  Holden climbed up onto the loading dock next to the supervisor. The other guards waved their shock prods around a little, but no one jabbed him. The corporate thugs just narrowed their eyes and shifted their stances a bit. Holden knew that their confusion about who he was would only last so long, and when they finally got past it, he was probably going to get uncomfortably intimate with one of those cattle prods, if not just blasted in the face with a shotgun. Before that could happen, he thrust his hand out to the supervisor and said in a loud voice that would carry to the crowd, “Hi there, I’m Walter Philips, an OPA rep out of Tycho Station, and here as personal representative of Colonel Frederick Johnson.”

  The supervisor shook his hand like a man in a daze. The corporate gorillas shifted again and held their guns more firmly.

  “Mr. Philips,” the supervisor said. “The OPA has no authority…”

  Holden ignored him and turned to the woman he’d been shouting at.

  “Ma’am, what’s all the fuss?”

  “That ship,” she said, pointing at the door, “has almost ten thousand kilos of beans and rice on it, enough to feed the whole station for a week!”

  The crowd murmured agreement at her back and shuffled forward a step or two.

  “Is that true?” Holden asked the supervisor.

  “As I said,” the man replied, holding up his hands and making pushing motions at the crowd as though he could drive them back through sheer force of will, “we are not allowed to discuss the cargo manifests of privately owned-”

  “Then open the doors and let us look!” the woman shouted again. While she yelled and the crowd picked up her chant- let us look, let us look- Holden took the security supervisor by the elbow and pulled his head close.