Caliban;s war e-2

by James S. A. Corey

  “The captain was on Eros,” Alex said.

  “It must have been a loss for him when it happened,” Prax said to have something to say.

  “No, I don’t mean he lived there. He was on the station when it happened. We all were, but he was on it the longest. He actually saw it starting. The initial infected. That.”

  “Really?”

  “Changed him, some. I’ve been flyin’ with him since we were just fartin’ around on this old ice bucket running from Saturn to the Belt. He didn’t used to like me, I suspect. Now we’re family. It’s been a hell of a trip.”

  Prax took a long pull from his food bulb. Cool, the paste tasted less of wheat and more of honey and raisin. It wasn’t as good. He remembered the look of fear on Holden’s face when they’d found the dark filaments, the sound of controlled panic in his voice. It made sense now.

  And as if summoned by the thought, Holden appeared in the doorway, a formed aluminum case under his arm with electromagnetic plates along the base. A personal footlocker designed to stay put even under high g. Prax had seen them before, but he’d never needed one. Gravity had been a constant for him until now.

  “Cap’n,” Alex said with a vestigial salute. “Everything all right?”

  “Just moving some things to my bunk,” Holden said. The tightness in his voice was unmistakable. Prax had the sudden feeling that he was intruding on something private, but Alex and Holden didn’t give any further sign. Holden only moved off down the hall. When he was out of earshot, Alex sighed.

  “Trouble?” Prax asked.

  “Yeah. Don’t worry. It’s not about you. This has been brewin’ for a while now.”

  “I’m sorry,” Prax said.

  “Had to happen. Best to get it over with one way or the other,” Alex said, but there was an unmistakable dread in his voice. Prax felt himself liking the man. The wall terminal chirped and then spoke in Amos’ voice.

  “What’ve you got now?”

  Alex pulled the terminal close, the articulated arm bending and twisting on complicated joints, then tapped on it with the fingers of one hand while keeping hold of the coffee with the other. The terminal flickered, datasets converting to graphs and tables in real time.

  “Ten percent,” Alex said. “No. Twelve. We’re moving up. What’d you find?”

  “Cracked seal,” Amos said. “And yeah, you’re very fucking clever. What else we got?”

  Alex tapped on the terminal and Holden reappeared from the hallway, now without his case.

  “Port sensor array took a hit. Looks like we burned out a few of the leads,” Alex said.

  “All right,” Amos said. “Let’s get those bad boys swapped out.”

  “Or maybe we can do something that doesn’t involve crawling on the outside of a ship under thrust,” Holden said.

  “I can get it done, Cap,” Amos said. Even through the tinny wall speaker, he sounded affronted. Holden shook his head.

  “One slip, and the exhaust cooks you down to component atoms. Let’s leave that for the techs on Tycho. Alex, what else have we got?”

  “Memory leak in the navigation system. Probably a fried network that grew back wrong,” the pilot said. “The cargo bay’s still in vacuum. The radio array’s as dead as a hammer for no apparent reason. Hand terminals aren’t talking. And one of the medical pods is throwing error codes, so don’t get sick.”

  Holden went to the coffee machine, talking over his shoulder as he keyed in his preferences. His cup said Tachi too. Prax realized with a start that they all did. He wondered who or what a Tachi was.

  “Does the cargo bay need EVA?”

  “Don’t know,” Alex said. “Lemme take a look.”

  Holden took his coffee mug out of the machine with a little sigh and stroked the brushed metal plates like he was petting a cat. On impulse, Prax cleared his throat.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “Captain Holden? I was wondering, if the radio gets fixed or there’s a tightbeam available, if maybe there was a way I could use some time on the communications array?”

  “We’re kind of trying to be quiet right now,” Holden said. “What are you wanting to send?”

  “I need to do some research,” Prax said. “The data we got on Ganymede from when they took Mei. There are images of the woman who was with them. And if I can find what happened to Dr. Strickland… I’ve been on a security-locked system since the day she went missing. Even if it was just the public access databases and networks, it would be a place to start.”

  “And it’s that or sit around and stew until we get to Tycho,” Holden said. “All right. I’ll ask Naomi to get you an access account for the Roci’s network. I don’t know if there’ll be anything in the OPA files, but you might as well check them too.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure,” Holden said. “They’ve got a pretty decent face-recognition database. It’s inside their secure perimeter, so you might need to have one of us make the request.”

  “And that would be all right? I don’t want to get you in trouble with the OPA.”

  Holden’s smile was warm and cheerful.

  “Really, don’t worry about that,” he said. “Alex, what’ve we got?”

  “Looks like cargo door’s not sealin’, which we knew. We may have taken a hit, blown a hole in her. We’ve got the video feed back up… hold on…”

  Holden shifted to peer over Alex’s shoulder. Prax took another swallow of his food and gave in to curiosity. An image of a cargo bay no wider than Prax’s palm took up one corner of the display. Most of the cargo was on electromagnetic pallets, stuck to the plates nearest the wide bay door, but some had broken loose, pressed by thrust gravity to the floor. It gave the room an unreal, Escher-like appearance. Alex resized the image, zooming in on the cargo door. In one corner, a thick section of metal was bent inward, bright metal showing where the bend had cracked the external layers. A spray of stars showed through the hole.

  “Well, at least it ain’t subtle,” Alex said.

  “What hit it?” Holden said.

  “Don’t know, Cap,” Alex said. “No scorching as far as I can see. But a gauss round wouldn’t have bent the metal in like that. Just would have made a hole. And the bay isn’t breached, so whatever did it didn’t make a hole on the other side.”

  The pilot increased the magnification again, looking closely at the edges of the wound. It was true there were no scorch marks, but thin black smudges showed against the metal of the door and the deck. Prax frowned. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again.

  Holden said what Prax had been thinking.

  “Alex? Is that a handprint?”

  “Looks like one, Cap, but…”

  “Pull out. Look at the decking.”

  They were small. Subtle. Easy to overlook on the small image. But they were there. A handprint, smeared in something dark that Prax had the strong suspicion had once been red. The unmistakable print of five naked toes. A long smear of darkness.

  The pilot followed the trail.

  “That bay’s in hard vacuum, right?” Holden asked.

  “Has been for a day and a half, sir,” Alex said. The casual air was gone. They were all business now.

  “Track right,” Holden said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Okay, stop. What’s that?”

  The body was curled into a fetal ball, except where its palms were pressed against the bulkhead. It lay perfectly still, as if they were under high g and it was held against the deck, crushed by its own weight. The flesh was the black of anthracite and the red of blood. Prax couldn’t tell if it had been a man or a woman.

  “Alex, do we have a stowaway?”

  “Pretty sure that ain’t on the cargo manifest, sir.”

  “And did that fellow there bend his way through my ship with his bare hands?”

  “Looks like maybe, sir.”

  “Amos? Naomi?”

  “I’m looking at it too.” Naomi’s voice came from the terminal a moment befo
re Amos’ low whistle. Prax thought back to the mysterious sounds of violence in the lab, the bodies of guards they hadn’t fought, the shattered glass and its black filament. Here was the experiment that had slipped its leash back at that lab. It had fled to the cold, dead surface of Ganymede and waited there until a chance came to escape. Prax felt the gooseflesh crawling up his arms.

  “Okay,” Holden said. “But it’s dead, right?”

  “I don’t think so,” Naomi said.

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Bobbie

  Bobbie’s hand terminal began playing reveille at four thirty a.m. local time: what she and her mates might have grumbled and called “oh dark thirty” back when she’d been a marine and had mates to grumble with. She’d left her terminal in the living room, lying next to the pull-down cot she used as a bed, the volume set high enough to have left her ears ringing if she’d been in there with it. But Bobbie had already been up for an hour. In her cramped bathroom, the sound was only annoying, bouncing around her tiny apartment like radio in a deep well. The echoes were a sonic reminder that she still didn’t have much furniture or any wall hangings.

  It didn’t matter. She’d never had a guest.

  The reveille was a mean-spirited little joke Bobbie was playing on herself. The Martian military had formed hundreds of years after trumpets and drums had been a useful means of transmitting information to troops. Martians lacked the nostalgia the UN military had for such things. The first time Bobbie had heard a morning reveille, she’d been watching a video on military history. She’d been happy to realize that no matter how annoying the Martian equivalent-a series of atonal electronic blats-was, it would never be as annoying as what the Earth boys woke up to.

  But now Bobbie wasn’t a Martian Marine anymore.

  “I am not a traitor,” Bobbie said to her reflection in the mirror. Mirror Bobbie looked unconvinced.

  After the blaring trumpet call’s third repetition, her hand terminal beeped once and fell into a sullen silence. She’d been holding her toothbrush for the last half hour. The toothpaste had started to grow a hard skin. She ran it under warm water to soften it back up and started brushing her teeth.

  “I’m not a traitor,” she said to herself, the toothbrush making the words unintelligible. “Not.”

  Not even standing here in the bathroom of her UN-provided apartment, brushing her teeth with UN toothpaste and rinsing the sink with UN-provided water. Not while she clutched her good Martian toothbrush and scrubbed until her gums bled.

  “Not,” she said again, daring mirror Bobbie to disagree.

  She put the toothbrush back into her small toiletry case, carried it into the living room, and placed it in her duffel. Everything she owned stayed in the duffel. She’d need to move fast when her people called her home. And they would. She’d get a priority dispatch on her terminal, the red-and-gray border of the MCRN CINC–COM flashing around it. They’d tell her that she needed to return to her unit immediately. That she was still one of them.

  That she wasn’t a traitor for staying.

  She straightened her uniform, slid her now quiet terminal into her pocket, and checked her hair in the mirror next to the door. It was pulled into a bun so tight it almost gave her a face-lift, not one single hair out of place.

  “I’m not a traitor,” she said to the mirror. Front hallway mirror Bobbie seemed more open to this idea than bathroom mirror Bobbie had. “Damn straight,” she said, then slammed the door behind her when she left.

  She hopped on one of the little electric bikes the UN campus made available everywhere, and was in the office three minutes before five a.m. Soren was already there. No matter what time she came in, Soren always beat her. Either he slept at his desk or he was spying on her to see what time she set her alarm for each morning.

  “Bobbie,” he said, his smile not even pretending to be genuine.

  Bobbie couldn’t bring herself to respond, so she just nodded and collapsed into her chair. One glance at the darkened windows in Avasarala’s office told her the old lady wasn’t in yet. Bobbie pulled up her to-do list on the desktop screen.

  “She had me add a lot of people,” Soren said, referring to the list of people Bobbie was supposed to call in her role as Martian military liaison. “She really wants to get a hold of an early draft of the Martian statement on Ganymede. That’s your top priority for the day. Okay?”

  “Why?” Bobbie said. “The actual statement came out yesterday. We both read it.”

  “Bobbie,” Soren said with a sigh that said he was tired of explaining simple things to her, but a grin that said he really wasn’t. “This is how the game is played. Mars releases a statement condemning our actions. We go back channel and find an early draft. If it was harsher than the actual statement that was released, then someone in the dip corps argued to tone it down. That means they’re trying to avoid escalating. If it was milder in the early draft, then they’re deliberately escalating to provoke a response.”

  “But since they know you’ll get those early drafts, then that’s meaningless. They’ll just make sure you get leaks that give you the impression they want you to have.”

  “See? Now you’re getting it,” Soren said. “What your opponent wants you to think is useful data in figuring out what they think. So get the early draft, okay? Do it before the end of the day.”

  But no one talks to me anymore because now I’m the UN’s pet Martian, and even though I’m not a traitor, it is entirely possible that everyone else thinks I am.

  “Okay.”

  Bobbie pulled up the newly revised list and made the first connection request of the day.

  “Bobbie!” Avasarala yelled from her desk. There was any number of electronic means for getting Bobbie’s attention, but she almost never saw Avasarala use them. She yanked her earbud free and stood up. Soren’s smirk was of the psychic variety; his face didn’t change at all.

  “Ma’am?” Bobbie said, taking a short step into Avasarala’s office. “You bellowed?”

  “No one likes a smart-ass,” Avasarala said, not looking up from her desk terminal. “Where’s my first draft of that report? It’s almost lunchtime.”

  Bobbie stood a little straighter and clasped her arms behind her back.

  “Sir, I regret to inform you that I have been unable to find anyone willing to release the early draft of the report to me.”

  “Are you standing at attention?” Avasarala said, looking up at her for the first time. “Jesus. I’m not about to march you out to the firing squad. Did you try everyone on the list?”

  “Yes, I-” Bobbie stopped for a moment and took a deep breath, then took a few more steps into the office. Quietly she said, “No one talks to me.”

  The old woman lifted a snow-white eyebrow.

  “That’s interesting.”

  “It is?” Bobbie said.

  Avasarala smiled at her, a warm, genuine smile, then poured tea out of a black iron pot into two small teacups.

  “Sit down,” she said, waving at a chair next to her desk. When Bobbie remained standing, Avasarala said, “Seriously, sit the fuck down. Five minutes talking to you and I can’t tilt my head forward again for an hour.”

  Bobbie sat, hesitated, and took one of the small teacups. It wasn’t much larger than a shot glass, and the tea inside it was very dark and smelled unpleasant. She took a small sip and burned her tongue.

  “It’s a Lapsang souchong,” Avasarala said. “My husband buys it for me. What do you think?”

  “I think it smells like hobo feet,” Bobbie replied.

  “No shit, but Arjun loves it and it’s not bad once you get used to drinking it.”

  Bobbie nodded and took another sip but didn’t reply.

  “Okay, so,” Avasarala said, “you’re the Martian who was unhappy and got tempted over to the other side by a powerful old lady with lots of shiny prizes to offer. You’re the worst kind of traitor, because ultimately everything that’s happened to you since you came to Earth was because you were pouting.�
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  “I-”

  “Shut the fuck up now, dear, the grown-up is talking.”

  Bobbie shut up and drank her awful tea.

  “But,” Avasarala continued, the same sweet smile on her wrinkled face, “if I were on the other team, you know who I’d send misinformation leaks to?”

  “Me,” Bobbie said.

  “You. Because you’re desperate to prove your value to your new boss, and they can send you blatantly false information and not really care if they fuck your shit up in the long run. If I were the Martian counterespionage wonks, I’d have already recruited one of your closest friends back home and be using them to funnel a mountain’s worth of false data your direction.”

  My closest friends are all dead, Bobbie thought.

  “But no one-”

  “Is talking to you from back home. Which means two things. They are still trying to figure out my game in keeping you here, and they don’t have a misinformation campaign in place because they’re as confused as we are. You’ll be contacted by someone in the next week or so. They’ll ask you to leak information from my office, but they’ll ask it in such a way that winds up giving you a whole lot of false information. If you’re loyal and spy for them, great. If not and you tell me what they asked for, also great. Maybe they’ll get lucky and you’ll do both.”

  Bobbie put the teacup back on the desk. Her hands were in fists.

  “This,” Bobbie said, “is why everyone hates politicians.”

  “No. They hate us because we have power. Bobbie, this isn’t how your mind likes to work, and I respect that. I don’t have time to explain things to you,” Avasarala said, the smile disappearing like it had never been. “So just assume I know what I’m doing, and that when I ask you to do the impossible, it’s because even your failure helps our cause somehow.”

  “Our cause?”

  “We’re on the same team here. Team Let’s-Not-Lose-Together. That is us, isn’t it?”