Caliban;s war e-2

by James S. A. Corey

  When his stored-air gauge read 100 percent, he turned on the radio and called Naomi. “I’m going in now.”

  He kicked off his boot mags, and a sharp push against the inner airlock door sent him across the short gap to the King.

  “I’m getting a good picture,” Naomi said. The video link light on his HUD was on. Naomi could see everything he could see. It was comforting and lonely at the same time, like making a call to a friend who lived very far away.

  Holden cycled the airlock. The two minutes while the King closed the outer door and then pumped air into the chamber seemed to last forever. There was no way to know what would be on the other side of the inner airlock door when it finally opened. Holden put his hand on the butt of his pistol with a nonchalance he didn’t feel.

  The inner door slid open.

  The sudden screech of his hazmat suit’s radiation alarm nearly gave him a heart attack. He chinned the control that killed the audible alarm, though he kept the outside radiation level meter running. It wasn’t data that actually did him any good, but the suit was reassuring him that it could handle the current levels, and that was nice.

  Holden stepped out of the airlock into a small compartment filled with storage lockers and EVA equipment. It looked empty, but a small noise from one of the lockers alerted him, and he turned just in time to see a man in a UN naval uniform burst out of the locker and swing a heavy wrench at his head. The bulky hazmat suit kept him from moving quickly, and the wrench struck a ringing blow off the side of his helmet.

  “Jim!” Naomi yelled over the radio.

  “Die, you bastard!” the Navy man yelled at the same time. He took a second swing, but he wasn’t wearing mag boots, and without the push off the bulkhead to give him momentum, the swing did little more than start spinning the man around in the air. Holden grabbed the wrench out of his hand and threw it away. He caught the man to stop his spinning with his left hand and drew his pistol with his right.

  “If you cracked my suit, I’m going to throw you out that airlock,” Holden said. He began flipping through suit status screens while keeping his pistol pointed at the wrench enthusiast.

  “It looks okay,” Naomi said, relief evident in her voice. “No reds or yellows. That helmet is tougher than it looks.”

  “What the hell were you doing in that locker?” Holden asked the man.

  “I was working here when the… it… came on board,” the man said. He was a compact-looking Earther, with pale skin and flaming red hair cut close to the scalp. A patch on his suit said LARSON. “All the doors sealed up during emergency lockdown. I was trapped in here, but I could watch what was happening on the internal security system. I was hoping to grab a suit and get out the airlock, but it was sealed too. Say, how’d you get in here?”

  “I have admiralty-level overrides,” Holden said to him. Quietly, to Naomi he said, “At current radiation levels, what’s survival odds for our friend here?”

  “Not bad,” Naomi said. “If we get him into sick bay in the next couple of hours.”

  To Larson he said, “Okay, you’re coming with me. We’re going to CIC. Get me there fast, and you’ve got a ride off this tub.”

  “Yes, sir!” Larson said with a salute.

  “He thinks you’re an admiral.” Naomi laughed.

  “Larson, put on an environment suit. Do it fast.”

  “Sir, yes sir!”

  The suits they had in the airlock storage lockers would at least have their own air supplies. That would cut down on damage from the radiation the young sailor was absorbing. And an airtight suit would reduce the risk of protomolecule infection as they made their way through the ship.

  Holden waited until Larson had shrugged into a suit, then transmitted the override code to the hatch and it slid open. “After you, Larson. Command information center, as fast as you can. If we run into anyone, especially if they’re throwing up, stay away and let me deal with them.”

  “Yes, sir,” Larson said, his voice fuzzy over the static-filled radio, then pushed off into the corridor. He took Holden at his word and led him on a fast trip through the crippled Agatha King. They stopped only when a sealed hatch blocked their way, and then only long enough for Holden’s suit to convince it to open.

  The areas of the ship they moved through didn’t look damaged at all. The bioweapon pod had hit farther aft, and the monster had headed straight to the reactor room. According to Larson, it had killed a number of people on the way, including the ship’s entire contingent of Marines when they tried to stop it. But once it had entered engineering, it mostly ignored the rest of the crew. Larson said that shortly after it got into engineering, the shipwide security camera system had gone off-line. With no way to know where the monster was, and no way out of the airlock storage room, Larson had hidden in a locker to wait it out.

  “When you came in, all I could see was this big, lumpy red thing,” Larson explained. “I thought maybe you were another one of those monsters.”

  The lack of visible damage was a good thing. It meant all the hatches and other systems they came across still worked. The lack of a monster rampaging through the ship was even better. The thing that had Holden worried was the lack of people. A ship this size had over a thousand crew persons. At least some of them should be in the areas of the ship they were passing through, but so far they hadn’t run across a single one.

  The occasional puddle of brown goo on the floor was not an encouraging sign.

  Larson stopped at a locked hatch to let Holden catch his breath. The heavy hazmat suit was not built for long treks, and it was starting to fill up with the stink of his own sweat. While he took a minute to rest and let the suit’s cooling systems try to bring his temperature down, Larson said, “We’ll be going past the forward galley to one of the elevator bays. The CIC is on the deck just above. Five, ten minutes tops.”

  Holden checked his air supply and saw that he had burned nearly half of it. He was rapidly approaching the point of no return. But something in Larson’s voice caught his ear. It was the way he said galley.

  “Is there something I should know about the galley?”

  Larson said, “I’m not sure. But after the cameras went out, I kept hoping someone was going to come get me. So I started trying to call people on the comm. When that didn’t work, I started having the King do location checks on people I knew. After a while, no matter who I asked about, the answer was always ‘the forward galley.’”

  “So,” Holden said. “There might be upwards of a thousand infected Navy people crammed into that galley?”

  Larson gave a shrug barely visible in his environment suit. “Maybe the monster killed them and put them there.”

  “Oh, I think that’s exactly what happened,” Holden said, taking out his gun and working the slide to chamber a round. “But I seriously doubt they stayed dead.”

  Before Larson could ask what he meant, Holden had his suit unlock the hatch. “When I open this door, you head to the elevator as fast as you can. I’ll be right behind you. Don’t stop no matter what. You have to get me to that CIC. Are we clear?”

  Larson nodded inside his helmet.

  “Good. On three.”

  Holden began counting, one hand on the hatch, the other holding his gun. When he hit three, he shoved the hatch open. Larson put his feet against a bulkhead and pushed off down the corridor on the other side.

  Tiny blue flickers floated in the air around them like fireflies. Like the lights Miller had reported when he was on Eros the second time. The time he didn’t come back from. The fireflies were here now too.

  At the end of the corridor, Holden could see the elevator door. He began clumping after Larson on his magnetic boots. When Larson was halfway down the corridor, he passed an open hatch.

  The young sailor started screaming.

  Holden ran as fast as the clumsy hazmat suit and his magnetic boots would let him go. Larson kept flying down the corridor, but he was screaming and flailing at the air like a drowning ma
n trying to swim. Holden was almost to the open hatch when something crawled out of it and into his path. At first he thought it was the kind of vomit zombie he’d run into on Eros. It moved slowly, and the front of its Navy uniform was covered in brown vomit. But when it turned to look at Holden, its eyes glowed with a faint inner blue. And there was an intelligence in them the Eros zombies hadn’t had.

  The protomolecule had learned some lessons on Eros. This was the new, improved version of the vomit zombie.

  Holden didn’t wait to see what it was going to do. Without slowing his pace, he raised his pistol and shot it in the head. To his relief, the light went out of its eyes, and it spun away from the deck, spraying brown goo in an arc as it rotated. When he passed the open hatch, he risked a glance inside.

  It was full of the new vomit zombies. Hundreds of them. All their disconcertingly blue eyes were aimed at him. Holden turned back to the corridor and ran. From behind, he heard a rising wave of sounds as the zombies moaned as one and began climbing along the bulkheads and deck after him.

  “Go! Get in the elevator!” he screamed at Larson, cursing at how much the heavy hazmat suit slowed him down.

  “God, what was that?” Naomi said. He’d forgotten she was watching. He didn’t waste breath answering. Larson had come out of his panic-induced fugue and was busily working the elevator doors open. Holden ran up to him and then turned around to look behind. Dozens of the blue-eyed vomit zombies filled the corridor behind him, crawling on the bulkheads, ceiling, and deck like spiders. The floating blue lights swirled on air currents Holden couldn’t feel.

  “Go faster,” he said to Larson, sighting down his pistol at the lead zombie and putting a bullet in its head. It floated off the wall, spraying goo as it went. The zombie behind it shoved it out of the way, which sent it spinning down the corridor toward them. Holden moved in front of Larson to protect him, and a spray of brown slime hit his chest and visor. If they hadn’t both been wearing sealed suits, it would have been a death sentence. He repressed a shudder and shot two more zombies. The rest didn’t even slow down.

  Behind him, Larson cursed as the partially opened doors snapped shut again, pinning his arm. The sailor worked them back open, pushing them with his back and one leg.

  “We’re in!” Larson yelled. Holden began backing up toward the elevator shaft, emptying the rest of his magazine as he went. Half a dozen more zombies spun away, spraying goo; then he was in the shaft and Larson shoved the doors shut.

  “Up one level,” Larson said, panting with fear and exertion. He pushed off the bulkhead and floated up to the next set of doors, then levered them open. Holden followed, replacing the magazine in his gun. Directly across from the elevator was a heavily armored hatch with cic stenciled in white on the metal. Holden moved toward it, having his suit transmit the override code. Behind him, Larson let the elevator doors slam shut. The howling of the zombies echoed up the elevator shaft.

  “We should hurry,” Holden said, hitting the button to open the CIC and bulling his way in before the hatch had finished cycling open. Larson floated through after him.

  There was a single man still in the CIC: a squat, powerfully built Asian man with an admiral’s uniform and a large-caliber pistol in one shaky hand.

  “Stay where you are,” the man said.

  “Admiral Nguyen!” Larson blurted out. “You’re alive!”

  Nguyen ignored him. “You’re here for the bioweapon launch vehicle remote codes. I have them here.” He held up a hand terminal. “They’re yours in exchange for a ride off of this ship.”

  “He’s taking us,” Larson said, pointing at Holden. “He said he’d take me too.”

  “No fucking way,” Holden said to Nguyen. “Not a chance. Either give me those codes because there’s a scrap of humanity left in you, or give them to me because you’re dead. I don’t give a shit either way. You decide.”

  Nguyen looked back and forth from Larson to Holden, clutching the hand terminal and the pistol so tightly that his knuckles were white. “No! You have to-”

  Holden shot him in the throat. Somewhere in his brain stem, Detective Miller nodded in approval.

  “Start working on an alternate route back to my ship,” Holden said to Larson as he walked across the room to grab the hand terminal floating by Nguyen’s corpse. It took him a moment to find the King’s self-destruct switch hidden behind a locked panel. Souther’s override code gave him access to that too.

  “Sorry,” Holden said quietly to Naomi as he opened it. “I know I sort of agreed not to do that anymore. But I didn’t have time to-”

  “No,” Naomi said, her voice sad. “That bastard deserved to die. And I know you’ll feel like shit about it later. That’s good enough for me.”

  The panel opened, and a simple button lay on the other side. It wasn’t even red, just a plain industrial white. “This is what blows the ship?”

  “No timer,” Naomi said.

  “Well, this is an anti-boarding fail-safe. If someone opens this panel and presses this button, it’s because the ship is lost. They don’t want it on a timer someone can just disarm.”

  “This is an engineering problem,” Naomi said. She already knew what he was thinking, and she was trying to get an answer out before he could say it. “We can solve this.”

  “We can’t,” Holden said, waiting to feel the sorrow but instead feeling a sort of quiet peace. “There are a couple hundred very angry zombies trying to get up the elevator shaft right now. We won’t come up with a solution that doesn’t leave me stranded in here anyway.”

  A hand squeezed his shoulder. He looked up, and Larson said, “I’ll press it.”

  “No, you don’t have to-”

  Larson held out his arm. The sleeve of his environment suit had a tiny tear where the elevator doors had closed on it. Around the tear was a palm-sized brown stain.

  “Just rotten fucking luck, I guess. But I watched the Eros feeds like everyone else,” Larson said. “You can’t risk taking me. Pretty soon I might be…” He paused and pointed back toward the elevator with his head. “Might be one of those.”

  Holden took Larson’s hand in his. The thick gloves made it impossible to feel anything. “I’m very sorry.”

  “Hey, you tried,” Larson said with a sad smile. “At least now I won’t die of thirst in a suit locker.”

  “Admiral Souther will know about this,” Holden said. “I’ll make sure everyone knows.”

  “Seriously,” Larson said, floating next to the button that would turn the Agatha King into a small star for a few seconds. He pulled off his helmet and took a long breath. “There’s another airlock three decks up. If they aren’t in the elevator shaft yet, you can make it.”

  “Larson, I-”

  “You should go away now.”

  Holden had to strip off his suit in the King’s airlock. It was covered in the goo, and he couldn’t risk taking it onto the Razorback. He absorbed a few rads while he stole another UN vac suit from one of the lockers and put it on instead. It looked exactly like the one Larson was wearing. As soon as he was back on the Razorback, he sent the remote command codes to Souther’s ship. He was nearly back to the Rocinante when the King vanished in a ball of white fire.

  Chapter Fifty: Bobbie

  The captain just left,” Amos said to Bobbie when he came back into the machine shop. She floated half a meter above the deck inside a small circle of deadly technology. Behind her sat her cleaned and refitted recon suit, a single barrel of the newly installed gun gleaming inside the port on its right arm. To her left floated the recently reassembled auto-shotgun Amos favored. The rest of the circle was formed by pistols, grenades, a combat knife, and a variety of weapon magazines. Bobbie took one last mental inventory and decided she’d done all she could do.

  “He thinks maybe he’s not coming back from this one,” Amos continued, then bent down to grab the auto-shotgun. He looked it over with a critical eye, then gave her an appreciative nod.

  “Going in
to a fight where you know you aren’t coming back gives you a sort of clarity,” Bobbie said. She reached out and grabbed her armor, pulling herself into it. Not an easy thing to do in microgravity. She had to twist and shimmy to get her legs down into the suit before she could start sealing up the chest. She noticed Amos watching her. He had a dopey grin on his face.

  “Seriously. Now?” she said. “We’re talking about your captain going off to his death, and all that’s going through your head right now is ‘Ooh, boobies!’”

  Amos continued to grin, not chastened at all. “That bodysuit don’t leave a lot to the imagination. That’s all.”

  Bobbie rolled her eyes. “Believe me, if I could wear a bulky sweater inside my fully articulated, power-assisted combat suit, I still wouldn’t. Because that would be stupid.” She hit the controls to seal the suit, and her armor folded around her like a second skin. She closed the helmet, using the suit’s external speakers to talk to Amos, knowing it would make her voice robotic and inhuman.

  “Better put your big-boy pants on,” she said, the sound echoing around the room. Amos took an unconscious step back. “The captain isn’t the only one that might not be coming back.”

  Bobbie climbed onto the ladder-lift and let it take her all the way up to the ops deck. Avasarala was belted into her couch at the comm station. Naomi was in Holden’s usual spot at the tactical panel. Alex would be up in the cockpit already. Bobbie opened her visor to speak using her normal voice.

  “We cleared?” she asked Avasarala.

  The old lady nodded and held up one hand in a wait gesture while she spoke to someone on her headset mic. “The Martians have already dropped a full platoon,” she said, pushing the mic away from her face. “But their orders are to set up a perimeter and seal the base while someone further up the food chain decides what to do.”

  “They’re not going to-” Bobbie started, but Avasarala cut her off with a dismissive wave of her hand.