Caliban;s war e-2

by James S. A. Corey

  “Shit, Cap, the Roci does all the work,” Amos said. “I just encourage her to express herself.”

  “Going to duck and cover around Callisto. I’d appreciate a distraction,” Alex said to Holden.

  “Okay, Naomi, another ten seconds or so,” Holden said. “Then hit them with everything you’ve got. We’ll need them blind for a few seconds.”

  “Roger,” Naomi said. Holden could see her prepping a massive assault package of laser clutter and radio jamming.

  The Rocinante lurched again, and the moon Callisto suddenly filled Holden’s forward screen. Alex hurtled toward it at a suicidal rate, flipping the ship and hard burning at the last second to throw them into a low slingshot orbit.

  “Three… two… one… now,” he said, the Roci diving tail first toward Callisto, whipping past it so low that Holden felt like he could have reached out the airlock and scooped up some snow. At the same time, Naomi’s jamming package hammered the sensors of the pursuing missiles, blinding them while their processors worked to cut through the noise.

  By the time they’d reacquired the Rocinante, she’d been thrown around Callisto by gravity and her own drive in a new vector and at high speed. Two of the missiles gamely tried to come about and pursue, but the rest either limped off in random directions or slammed into the moon. When their two pursuers had gotten back on course, the Roci had opened up an enormous lead and could take her time shooting them down.

  “We made it,” Alex said. Holden found the disbelief in his pilot’s voice fairly disconcerting. Had it been that close?

  “Never doubted it,” Holden said. “Take us to Tycho. Half a g. I’ll be in my cabin.”

  When they were finished, Naomi flopped onto her side in their shared bunk, sweat plastering her curly black hair to her forehead. She was still panting. He was too.

  “That was… vigorous,” she said.

  Holden nodded but didn’t have enough air to actually speak yet. When he’d climbed down the ladder from the cockpit, Naomi had been waiting, already out of her restraints. She’d grabbed him and kissed him so hard his lip had split. He hadn’t even noticed. They’d barely reached the cabin with their clothes on. What had happened afterward was sort of a blur now to Holden, though his legs were tired and his lip hurt.

  Naomi rolled across him and climbed out of the bunk.

  “I’ve got to pee,” she said, pulling on a robe and heading out the door. Holden just nodded to her, still not quite capable of speech.

  He shifted over to the middle of the bed, stretching out his arms and legs for a moment. The truth was the Roci’s cabins were not built for two occupants, least of all the crash couches that doubled as beds. But over the course of the last year, he’d spent more and more time sleeping in Naomi’s cabin, until it sort of became their cabin and he just didn’t sleep anywhere else anymore. They couldn’t share the bunk during high-g maneuvers, but so far they’d never been asleep anytime the ship had needed to do high-g maneuvering. A trend that was likely to continue.

  Holden was starting to doze off when the hatch opened and Naomi came back in. She tossed a cold, wet washcloth onto his belly.

  “Wow, that’s bracing,” Holden said, sitting up with a start.

  “It was hot when I left the head with it.”

  “That,” Holden said while he cleaned up, “sounded very dirty.”

  Naomi grinned, then sat on the edge of the bunk and poked him in the ribs. “You can still think of sex? I would’ve thought we got that out of your system.”

  “A close brush with death does wonderful things for my refractory period.”

  Naomi climbed into the bunk next to him, still wrapped in her robe.

  “You know,” she said, “this was my idea. And I’m all in favor of reaffirming life through sex.”

  “Why do I get the feeling that there is a ‘but’ missing at the end of that sentence?”

  “But-”

  “Ah, there it is.”

  “There’s something we need to talk about. And this seems a good time.”

  Holden rolled over onto his side, facing her, and pushed up onto one elbow. A thick strand of hair was hanging in her face, and he brushed it back with his other hand.

  “What did I do?” he said.

  “It’s not exactly anything you’ve done,” Naomi said. “It’s more what we’re heading off to do right now.”

  Holden put his hand on her arm but waited for her to continue. The soft cloth of her robe clung to the wet skin beneath it.

  “I’m worried,” she said, “that we’re flying off to Tycho to do something really rash.”

  “Naomi, you weren’t there, you didn’t see — ”

  “I saw it, Jim, through Amos’ suitcam. I know what it is. I know how much it scares you. It scares the hell out of me too.”

  “No,” Holden said, his voice surprising him with its anger. “No you don’t. You weren’t on Eros when it got out, you never-”

  “Hey, I was there. Maybe not for the worst of it. Not like you,” Naomi said, her voice still calm. “But I did help carry what was left of you and Miller to the med bay. And I watched you try to die there. We can’t just accuse Fred of-”

  “Right now-and I mean right now — Ganymede could be changing.”

  “No-”

  “Yes. Yes it could. We could be leaving a couple million dead people behind right now who don’t know it yet. Melissa and Santichai? Remember them? Now think of them stripped down to whatever pieces the protomolecule finds most useful at the moment. Think of them as parts. Because if that bug is loose on Ganymede, then that’s what they are.”

  “Jim,” Naomi said, a warning in her voice now. “This is what I’m talking about. The intensity of your feelings isn’t evidence. You are about to accuse a man who’s been your friend and patron for the last year of maybe killing an entire moon full of people. That isn’t the Fred we know. And you owe him better than that.”

  Holden pushed up to a sitting position, part of him wanting to physically distance himself from Naomi, the part of him that was angry with her for not sympathizing enough.

  “I gave Fred the last of it. I gave it to him, and he swore right to my face he’d never use it. But that’s not what I saw down there. You call him my friend, but Fred has only ever done what would advance his own cause. Even helping us was just another move in his political game.”

  “Experiments on kidnapped children?” Naomi said. “A whole moon-one of the most important in the outer planets-put at risk and maybe killed outright? Does that make any sense to you? Does that sound like Fred Johnson?”

  “The OPA wants Ganymede even more than either inner planet does,” Holden said, finally admitting the thing he’d feared since they’d found the black filament. “And they wouldn’t give it to him.”

  “Stop,” Naomi said.

  “Maybe he’s trying to drive them off, or he sold it to them in exchange for the moon. That would at least explain the heavy inner planets traffic we’ve been seeing-”

  “No. Stop,” she said. “I don’t want to sit here and listen to you talk yourself into this.”

  Holden started to speak, but Naomi sat up facing him and gently put her hand over his mouth.

  “I didn’t like this new Jim Holden you’ve been turning into. The guy who’d rather reach for his gun than talk? I know being the OPA’s bagman has been a shitty job, and I know we’ve had to do a lot of pretty rotten things in the name of protecting the Belt. But that was still you. I could still see you lurking there under the surface, waiting to come back.”

  “Naomi,” he said, pulling her hand away from his face.

  “This guy who can’t wait to go all High Noon in the streets of Tycho? That’s not Jim Holden at all. I don’t recognize that man,” she said, then frowned. “No. That’s not right. I do recognize him. But his name was Miller.”

  For Holden, the most awful part was how calm she was. She never raised her voice, never sounded angry. Instead, infinitely worse, there wa
s only a resigned sadness.

  “If that’s who you are now, you need to drop me off somewhere. I can’t go with you anymore,” she said. “I’m out.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Avasarala

  Avasarala stood at her window, looking out at the morning haze. In the distance, a transport lifted off. It rode an exhaust plume that looked like a pillar of bright white cloud, and then it was gone. Her hands ached. She knew that some of the photons striking her eyes right now had come from explosions light-minutes away. Ganymede Station, once the safest place without an atmosphere, then a war zone, and now a wasteland. She could no more pick out the light of its death than pluck a particular molecule of salt from the ocean, but she knew it was there, and the fact was like a stone in her belly.

  “I can ask for confirmation,” Soren said. “Nguyen should be filing his command report in the next eighteen hours. Once we have that-”

  “We’ll know what he said,” Avasarala snapped. “I can tell you that right now. The Martian forces took a threatening position, and he was forced to respond aggressively. La la fucking la. Where did he get the ships?”

  “He’s an admiral,” Soren said. “I thought he came with them.”

  She turned. The boy looked tired. He’d been up since the small hours of the morning. They all had. His eyes were bloodshot, and his skin pallid and clammy.

  “I took apart that command group myself,” she said. “I pared it down until you could have drowned it in a bathtub. And he’s out there now with enough firepower to take on the Martian fleet?”

  “Apparently,” Soren said.

  She fought the urge to spit. The rumble of the transport engines finally reached her, the sound muffled by distance and the glazing. The light was already gone. To her sleep-deprived mind, it was exactly like playing politics in the Jovian system or the Belt. Something happened-she could see it happen-but she heard it only after the fact. When it was too late.

  She’d made a mistake. Nguyen was a war hawk. The kind of adolescent boy who still thought any problem could be solved by shooting it enough. Everything he’d done was as subtle as a lead pipe to the kneecap, until this. Now he’d reassembled his command without her knowing it. And he’d had her pulled from the Martian negotiations.

  Which meant that he hadn’t done any of it. Nguyen had either a patron or a cabal. She hadn’t seen that he was a bit player, so whoever called his tune had surprised her. She was playing against shadows, and she hated it.

  “More light,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Find out how he got those ships,” she said. “Do it before you go to sleep. I want a full accounting. Where the replacement ships came from, who ordered them, how they were justified. Everything.”

  “Would you also like a pony, ma’am?”

  “You’re fucking right I would,” she said, and sagged against her desk. “You do good work. Someday you might get a real job.”

  “I’m looking forward to it, ma’am.”

  “Is she still around?”

  “At her desk,” Soren said. “Should I send her in?”

  “You better had.”

  When Bobbie came into the room, a film of cheap paper in her fist, it struck Avasarala again how poorly the Martian fit in. It wasn’t only her accent or the difference in build that spoke of a childhood in the lower Martian gravity. In the halls of politics, the woman’s air of physical competence stood out. She looked like she’d been rousted out of bed in the middle of the night, just like all of them; it was only that it looked good on her. Might be useful, might not, but certainly it was worth remembering.

  “What have you got?” Avasarala asked.

  The marine’s frown was all in her forehead.

  “I’ve gotten through to a couple of people in the command. Most of them don’t know who the hell I am, though. I probably spent as much time telling them I was working for you as I did talking about Ganymede.”

  “It’s a lesson. Martian bureaucrats are stupid, venal people. What did they say?”

  “Long story?”

  “Short.”

  “You shot at us.”

  Avasarala leaned back in her chair. Her back hurt, her knees hurt, and the knot of sorrow and outrage that was always just under her heart felt brighter than usual.

  “Of course we did,” she said. “The peace delegation?”

  “Already gone,” Bobbie said. “They’ll be releasing a statement sometime tomorrow about how the UN was negotiating in bad faith. They’re still fighting out the exact wording.”

  “What’s the hold?”

  Bobbie shook her head. She didn’t understand.

  “What words are they fighting over, and which side wants which words?” Avasarala demanded.

  “I don’t know. Does it matter?”

  Of course it mattered. The difference between The UN has been negotiating in bad faith and The UN was negotiating in bad faith could be measured in hundreds of lives. Thousands. Avasarala tried to swallow her impatience. It didn’t come naturally.

  “All right,” she said. “See if there’s anything else you can get me.”

  Bobbie held out the paper. Avasarala took it.

  “The hell is this?” she asked.

  “My resignation,” Bobbie said. “I thought you’d want all the paperwork in place. We’re at war now, so I’ll be shipping back. Getting my new assignment.”

  “Who recalled you?”

  “No one, yet,” Bobbie said. “But-”

  “Will you please sit down? I feel like I’m at the bottom of a fucking well, talking to you.”

  The marine sat. Avasarala took a deep breath.

  “Do you want to kill me?” Avasarala asked. Bobbie blinked, and before she could answer, Avasarala lifted her hand, commanding silence. “I am one of the most powerful people in the UN. We’re at war. So do you want to kill me?”

  “I…guess so?”

  “You don’t. You want to find out who killed your men and you want the politicians to stop greasing the wheels with Marine blood. And holy shit! What do you know? I want that too.”

  “But I’m active-duty Martian military,” Bobbie said. “If I stay working for you, I’m committing treason.” The way she said it wasn’t complaint or accusation.

  “They haven’t recalled you,” Avasarala said. “And they’re not going to. The wartime diplomatic code of contact is almost exactly the same for you as it is for us, and it’s ten thousand pages of nine-point type. If you get orders right now, I can put up enough queries and requests for clarifications that you’ll die of old age in that chair. If you just want to kill someone for Mars, you’re not going to get a better target than me. If you want to stop this idiotic fucking war and find out who’s actually behind it, get back to your desk and find out who wants what wording.”

  Bobbie was silent for a long moment.

  “You mean that as a rhetorical device,” she said at last, “but it would make a certain amount of sense to kill you. And I can do it.”

  A tiny chill hit Avasarala’s spine, but she didn’t let it reach her face.

  “I’ll try not to oversell the point in the future. Now get back to work.”

  “Yes, sir,” Bobbie said, then stood and walked out of the room. Avasarala blew out a breath, her cheeks ballooning. She was inviting Martian Marines to slaughter her in her own office. She needed a fucking nap. Her hand terminal chimed. An unscheduled high-status report had just come through, the deep red banner overriding her usual display settings. She tapped it, ready for more bad news from Ganymede.

  It was about Venus.

  Until seven hours earlier, the Arboghast had been a third-generation destroyer, built at the Bush Shipyards thirteen years before and later refitted as a military science vessel. For the last eight months, she’d been orbiting Venus. Most of the active scanning data that Avasarala had relied on had come from her.

  The event she was watching had been captured by two lunar telescopic stations with broad-spectrum in
telligence feeds that happened to be at the correct angles, and about a dozen shipborne optical observers. The dataset they collected agreed perfectly.

  “Play it again,” Avasarala said.

  Michael-Jon de Uturbe had been a field technician when she’d first met him, thirty years before. Now he was the de facto head of the special sciences committee and married to Avasarala’s roommate from university. In that time, his hair had fallen out or grown white, his dark brown skin had taken to draping a bit off of his bones, and he hadn’t changed the brand of cheap floral cologne he wore.

  He had always been an intensely shy, almost antisocial, man. In order to maintain the connection, she knew not to ask too much of him. His small, cluttered office was less than a quarter of a mile from hers, and she had seen him five times in the last decade, each of them moments when she needed to understand something obscure and complex quickly.

  He tapped his hand terminal twice, and the images on the display reset. The Arboghast was whole once more, floating in false color detail above the haze of Venusian cloud. The time stamp started moving forward, one second per second.

  “Walk me through,” she said.

  “Um. Well. We start from the spike. It’s just like the one we saw that last time Ganymede started going to hell.”

  “Splendid. That’s two datapoints.”

  “This came before the fighting,” he said. “Maybe an hour. A little less.”

  It had come during Holden’s firefight. Before she could bring him in. But how could Venus be responding to Holden’s raid on Ganymede? Had Bobbie’s monsters been part of that fight?

  “Then the radio ping. Right”-he froze the display-“here. Massive sweep in three-second-by-seven-second grid. It was looking, but it knew where to look. All those active scans, I’d assume. Called attention.”

  “All right.”

  He started the playback again. The resolution went a few degrees grainier, and he made a pleased sound.

  “This was interesting,” he said, as if the rest were not. “Radiative pulse of some kind. Interfered with all the telescopy except a strictly visible spectrum kit on Luna. Only lasted a tenth of a second, though. The microwave burst after it was pretty normal active sensor scanning.”