Caliban;s war e-2

by James S. A. Corey

  The only home he’d really known was falling apart around him. Thousands of people were going to die in the next few hours. Prax knew that, and part of him was horrified by it. But Mei had been on that ship, so she wasn’t one of them. He still had to rescue her, just not from this. It made it bearable.

  “Alex says it’s hot out there,” Naomi said as the four of them trotted through the ruins. “Really hot. He’s not going to be able to make it to the port.”

  “There’s the other landing pad,” Prax said. “We could go there.”

  “That’s the plan,” Holden said. “Give Alex the coordinates for the science base.”

  “Yes, sir,” Naomi said at the same moment Amos, raising a hand like a kid in a schoolroom, said, “The one with the protomolecule?”

  “It’s the only secret landing pad I’ve got,” Holden said.

  “Yeah, all right.”

  When Holden turned to Prax, his face was gray with strain and fear.

  “Okay, Prax. You’re the local. Our armor is vacuum rated, but we’ll need environment suits for you and Naomi. We’re about to run through hell, and not all of it’s going to be pressurized. I don’t have time to take a wrong turn or look for something twice. You’re point. Can you handle it?”

  “Yes,” Prax said.

  Finding the emergency environment suits was easy. They were common enough to have essentially no resale value and stowed at brightly colored emergency stations. All the supplies in the main halls and corridors were already stripped, but ducking down a narrow side corridor that linked to the less popular complex where Prax used to take Mei to the skating rink was easy. The suits there were safety orange and green, made to be visible to rescuers. Camouflage would have been more appropriate. The masks smelled of volatile plastic, and the joints were just rings sewn into the material. The suit heaters looked ill cared for and likely to catch on fire if used too long. Another blast came, followed by two others, each sounding closer than the one before.

  “Nukes,” Naomi said.

  “Maybe gauss rounds,” Holden replied. They might have been talking about the weather.

  Prax shrugged.

  “Either way, a hit that gets into a corridor means superheated steam,” he said, pressing the last seal along his side closed and checking the cheap green LED that promised the oxygen was flowing. The heating system flickered to yellow, then back to green. “You and Amos might make it if your armor’s good. I don’t think Naomi and I stand a chance.”

  “Great,” Holden said.

  “I’ve lost the Roci,” Naomi said. “No. I’ve lost the whole link. I was routing through the Somnambulist. She must have taken off.”

  Or been slagged. The thought was on all their faces. No one said it.

  “Over this way,” Prax said. “There’s a service tunnel we used to use when I was in college. We can get around the Marble Arch complex and head up from there.”

  “Whatever you say, buddy,” Amos said. His nose was bleeding again. The blood looked black in the faint blue light inside his helmet.

  It was his last walk. Whatever happened, Prax was never coming back here, because here wouldn’t exist. The fast lope along the service corridor where Jaimie Loomis and Tanna Ibtrahmin-Sook had taken him to get high was the last time he’d see that place. The broad, low-ceilinged amphitheater under the old water treatment center where he’d had his first internship was cracked, the reservoir compromised. It wouldn’t flood the corridors quickly, but in a couple of days, the passageways would be filled in. In a couple of days, it wouldn’t matter.

  Everything glowed in the emergency LEDs or else fell into shadow. There was slush on the ground as the heating system struggled to compensate for the madness and failed. Twice, the way was blocked, once by a pressure door that was actually still functional, once by an icefall. They met almost no one. The others were all running for the port. Prax was leading them almost directly away from it now.

  Another long, curved hall, then up a construction ramp, through an empty tunnel, and…

  The blue steel door that blocked their way wasn’t locked, but it was in safety mode. The indicator said there was vacuum on the other side. One of the God-like fists pummeling Ganymede had broken through here. Prax stopped, his mind clicking through the three-dimensional architecture of his home station. If the secret base was there, and he was here, then…

  “We can’t get there,” he said.

  The others were silent for a moment.

  “That’s not a good answer,” Holden said. “Find a different one.”

  Prax took a long breath. If they doubled back, they could go down a level, head to the west, and try getting to the corridor from below, except that a blast strong enough to break through here would almost certainly have compromised the level below too. If they kept going to the old tube station, they might be able to find a service corridor-not that he knew there was one, but maybe-and it might lead in the right direction. Three more detonations came, shaking the ice. With a sound like a baseball bat hitting a home run, the wall beside him cracked.

  “Prax, buddy,” Amos said, “sooner’d be better.”

  They had environment suits, so if they opened the door, the vacuum wouldn’t kill them. But there would be debris choking it. Any strike hard enough to break through to the surface would…

  Would…

  “We can’t get there… through the station tunnels,” he said. “But we can go up. Get to the surface and go that way.”

  “And how do we do that?” Holden asked.

  Finding an access way that wasn’t locked down took twenty minutes, but Prax found one. No wider than three men walking abreast, it was an automated service unit for the dome exteriors. The service unit itself had long since been cannibalized for parts, but that didn’t matter. The airlock was still working under battery power. Naomi and Prax fed it the instructions, closed the inner door, and cycled the outer open. The escaping pressure was like a wind for a moment, and then nothing. Prax walked out onto the surface of Ganymede.

  He’d seen images of the aurora from Earth. He’d never imagined he’d see anything like it in the blackness of his own sky. But there, not just above him but in lines from horizon to horizon, were streaks of green and blue and gold-chaff and debris and the radiating gas of cooling plasma. Incandescent blooms marked torch drives. Several kilometers away, a gauss round slammed into the moon’s surface, the seismic shock knocking them from their feet. Prax lay there for a moment, watching the water ejecta geyser up into the darkness and then begin to fall back down as snow. It was beautiful. The rational, scientific part of his mind tried to calculate how much energy transfer there was to the moon when a rail-gun-hurled chunk of tungsten hit it. It would be like a miniature nuke without all the messy radiation. He wondered if the round would stop before it hit Ganymede’s nickel-iron core.

  “Okay,” Holden said over the cheap radio in Prax’s emergency suit. The low end of the sound spectrum was lousy, and Holden sounded like a cartoon character. “Which way now?”

  “I don’t know,” Prax said, rising to his knees. He pointed toward the horizon. “Over there somewhere.”

  “I need more than that,” Holden said.

  “I’ve never been on the surface before,” Prax said. “In a dome, sure. But just out? I mean, I know we’re close to it, but I don’t know how to get there.”

  “All right,” Holden said. In the high vacuum over his head, something huge and very far away detonated. It was like the old cartoon lightbulb of someone getting an idea. “We can do this. We can solve this. Amos, you head toward that hill over there, see what you can see. Prax and Naomi, start going that direction.”

  “I don’t think we need to do that, sir,” Naomi said.

  “Why not?”

  Naomi raised her hand, pointing back behind Holden and Prax both.

  “Because I’m pretty sure that’s the Roci setting down over there,” she said.

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Holden

&nbs
p; The secret landing pad lay in the hollow of a small crater. When Holden crested the lip and saw the Rocinante below him, the sudden and dizzying release of tension told him how frightened he’d been for the last several hours. But the Roci was home, and no matter how hard his rational mind argued that they were still in terrible danger, home was safe. As he paused a moment to catch his breath, the scene was lit with bright white light, like someone had taken a picture. Holden looked up in time to see a fading cloud of glowing gas in high orbit.

  People were still dying in space just over their heads.

  “Wow,” Prax said. “It’s bigger than I expected.”

  “Corvette,” Amos replied, obvious pride in his voice. “Frigate-class fleet escort ship.”

  “I don’t know what any of that means,” Prax said. “It looks like a big chisel with an upside-down coffee cup on the back.”

  Amos said, “That’s the drive-”

  “Enough,” Holden cut in. “Get to the airlock.”

  Amos led the way, sliding down the crater’s icy wall hunched down on his heels and using his hands for balance. Prax went next, for once not needing any help. Naomi went third, her reflexes and balance honed by a lifetime spent in shifting gravities. She actually managed to look graceful.

  Holden went last, fully prepared to slip and go down the hill in a humiliating tumble, then pleasantly surprised when he didn’t.

  As they bounded across the flat floor of the crater toward the ship, the outer airlock door slid open, revealing Alex in a suit of Martian body armor and carrying an assault rifle. As soon as they were close enough to the ship that they could cut through the orbital radio clutter, Holden said, “Alex! Man, is it good to see you.”

  “Hey, Cap,” Alex replied, even his exaggerated drawl not able to hide the relief in his voice. “Wasn’t sure how hot this LZ would be. Anyone chasin’ you?”

  Amos ran up the ramp and grabbed Alex in a bear hug that yanked him off his feet.

  “Man, it’s fucking good to be home!” he said.

  Prax and Naomi followed, Naomi patting Alex on the shoulder as she went by. “You did good. Thank you.”

  Holden stopped on the ramp to look up one last time. The sky was still filled with the flashes and light trails of ongoing battle. He had the sudden visceral memory of being a boy back in Montana, watching massive thunderheads flash with hidden lightning.

  Alex watched with him, then said, “It was a bit hectic, comin’ in.”

  Holden threw an arm around his shoulder. “Thanks for the ride.”

  Once the airlock had finished cycling and the crew had removed their environment suits and armor, Holden said, “Alex, this is Prax Meng. Prax, this is the solar system’s best pilot, Alex Kamal.”

  Prax shook Alex’s hand. “Thank you for helping me find Mei.”

  Alex frowned a question at Holden, but a quick shake of the head kept him from asking it. “Nice to meet you, Prax.”

  “Alex,” Holden said, “get us warmed up for liftoff, but don’t take off until I’m up in the copilot’s chair.”

  “Roger,” Alex said, and headed toward the bow of the ship.

  “Everything’s sideways,” Prax said, looking around at the storage room just past the inner airlock door.

  “The Roci doesn’t spend much time on her belly like this,” Naomi said, taking his hand and leading him to the crew ladder, which now appeared to run across the floor. “We’re standing on a bulkhead, and that wall to our right is normally the deck.”

  “Grew up in low grav and don’t spend much time on ships, apparently,” Amos said. “Man, this next part is really gonna suck for you.”

  “Naomi,” Holden said. “Get to ops and get belted in. Amos, take Prax to the crew deck and then head down to engineering and get the Roci ready for a rough ride.”

  Before they could leave, Holden put a hand on Prax’s shoulder.

  “This takeoff and flight is going to be fast and bumpy. If you haven’t trained for high-g flight, it will probably be very uncomfortable.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Prax said, making what he probably thought was a brave face.

  “I know you’re tough. You couldn’t have survived the last couple weeks otherwise. You don’t have anything to prove at this point. Amos will take you to the crew deck. Find a room without a name on the door. That will be your room now. Get in the crash couch and buckle in, then hit the bright green button on the panel to your left. The couch will pump you full of drugs that will sedate you and keep you from blowing a blood vessel if we have to burn hard.”

  “My room?” Prax said, an odd note in his voice.

  “We’ll get you some clothes and sundries once we’re out of this shit. You can keep them there.”

  “My room,” Prax repeated.

  “Yeah,” Holden said. “Your room.” He could see Prax fighting down a lump in his throat, and he realized what the simple offer of comfort and safety probably meant to someone who’d been through what the small botanist had over the last month.

  There were tears in the man’s eyes.

  “Come on, let’s get you settled in,” Amos said, leading Prax aft toward the crew deck.

  Holden headed the other way, past the ops deck, where Naomi was already strapped down into a chair at one of the workstations, then forward into the cockpit. He climbed into the copilot’s seat and belted in.

  “Five minutes,” he said over the shipwide channel.

  “So,” Alex said, dragging the word out to two syllables while he flicked switches to finish the preflight check, “we’re lookin’ for someone named Mei?”

  “Prax’s daughter.”

  “We do that now? Seems like the scope of our mission is creepin’ a bit.”

  Holden nodded. Finding lost daughters was not part of their mandate. That had been Miller’s job. And he’d never be able to adequately explain the certainty he felt that this lost little girl was at the center of everything that had happened on Ganymede.

  “I think this lost little girl is at the center of everything that’s happened on Ganymede,” he said with a shrug.

  “Okay,” Alex replied, then hit something on a panel twice and frowned. “Huh, we have a red on the board. Gettin’ a ‘no seal’ on the cargo airlock. Might’ve caught some flak on the way down, I guess. It was pretty hot up there.”

  “Well, we’re not going to stop and fix it now,” Holden said. “We keep the bay in vacuum most of the time anyway. If the inner hatch into the cargo area is showing a good seal, just override the alarm and let’s go.”

  “Roger,” Alex said, and tapped the override.

  “One minute,” Holden said over the shipwide, then turned to Alex. “So I’m curious.”

  “’Bout?”

  “How’d you manage to slip through that shit-storm up above us, and can you do it again on the way out?”

  Alex laughed.

  “Simple matter of never bein’ higher than the second-highest threat on anyone’s board. And, of course, not bein’ there anymore when they decide to get around to you.”

  “I’m giving you a raise,” Holden said, then began the ten-second countdown. At one, the Roci blasted off of Ganymede on four pillars of superheated steam.

  “Rotate us for a full burn as soon as you can,” Holden said, the rumble of the ship’s takeoff giving him an artificial vibrato.

  “This close?”

  “There’s nothing below us that matters,” Holden said, thinking of the remnants of black filament they’d seen in the hidden base. “Melt it.”

  “Okay,” Alex said. Then, once the ship had finished orienting straight up, he said, “Givin’ her the spurs.”

  Even with the juice coursing through his blood, Holden blacked out for a moment. When he came to, the Roci was veering wildly from side to side. The cockpit was alive with the sounds of warning buzzers.

  “Whoa, honey,” Alex was saying under his breath. “Whoa, big girl.”

  “Naomi,” Holden said, looking at a conf
using mass of red on the threat board and trying to decipher it with his blood-starved brain. “Who’s firing at us?”

  “Everyone.” She sounded as groggy as he felt.

  “Yeah,” Alex said, his tension draining some of the good-old-boy drawl out of his voice. “She’s not kidding.”

  The swarm of threats on his display began to make sense, and Holden saw they were right. It looked like half of the inner planets ships on their side of Ganymede had lobbed at least one missile at them. He entered the command code to set all the weapons to free fire and sent control of the aft PDCs to Amos. “Amos, cover our asses.”

  Alex was doing his best to keep any of the incoming missiles from catching them, but ultimately that was a lost cause. Nothing with meat inside it could outrun metal and silicon.

  “Where are we-” Holden said, stopping to target a missile that wandered into the front starboard PDC’s firing arc. The point defense cannon fired off a long burst at it. The missile was smart enough to turn sharply and evade, but its sudden course change bought them a few more seconds.

  “Callisto’s on our side of Jupiter,” Alex said, referring to the next sizable moon out from Ganymede. “Gonna get in its shadow.”

  Holden checked the vectors of the ships that had fired at them. If any of them were pursuing, Alex’s gambit would only buy them a few minutes. But it didn’t appear they were. Of the dozen or so that had attacked them, over half were moderately to severely damaged, and the ones that weren’t were still busy shooting at each other.

  “Seems like we were everyone’s number one threat there for a second,” Holden said. “But not so much anymore.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that, Cap. Not sure why that happened.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Holden said.

  The Roci shuddered, and Amos gave a whoop over the shipwide comm. “Don’t be trying to touch my girl’s ass!”

  Two of the closer missiles had vanished off the threat board.

  “Nice work, Amos,” Holden said, checking the updated times to impact and seeing that they’d bought another half minute.