Caliban's War

  “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.

  “In about thirty seconds, that mob is going to tear you and your men to pieces trying to get into that ship,” he said. “I think you should let them have it before this turns violent.”

  “Violent!” The man gave a humorless laugh. “It’s already violent. The only reason the ship isn’t long gone is because one of them set off a bomb and blew up the docking-clamp release mechanism. If they try to take the ship, we’ll—”

  “They will not take the ship,” said a gravelly voice, and a heavy hand came down on Holden’s shoulder. When he turned around, one of the corporate goons was standing behind him. “This ship is Mao-Kwikowski Mercantile property.”

  Holden pushed the man’s hand off his shoulder.

  “A dozen guys with Tasers and shotguns isn’t going to stop them,” he said, pointing out at the chanting mob.

  “Mr.”—the goon looked him up and down once—“Philips. I don’t give a drippy shit what you or the OPA thinks about anything, and especially not my chances of doing my job. So why don’t you fuck off before the shooting starts?”

  Well, he’d tried. Holden smiled at the man and began to reach for the holster at the small of his back. He wished that Amos were here, but he hadn’t seen him since they had gotten off the ship. Before he reached the pistol, his hand was enveloped by long slender fingers and squeezed tightly.

  “How about this,” Naomi said, suddenly at Holden’s side. “How about we skip past the posturing and I just tell you how this is actually going to work?”

  Both Holden and the goon turned to look at Naomi in surprise. She held up one finger in a wait a minute gesture and pulled out her hand terminal. She called someone and turned on the external speaker.

  “Amos,” she said, still holding her finger up.

  “Yep,” came the reply.

  “A ship is trying to leave from port 11, pad B9. It’s full of food we could really use here. If it makes it off the ground, do we have an OPA gunship close enough to intercept?”

  There was a long pause; then, with a chuckle, Amos said, “You know we do, boss. Who’m I actually saying this to?”

  “Call that ship and have them disable the freighter. Then have an OPA team secure it, strip it of everything, and scuttle it.”

  Amos just said, “You got it.”

  Naomi closed up the terminal and put it back into her pocket.

  “Don’t test us, boy,” she said to the goon, a hint of steel in her voice. “Not one word of that was empty threat. Either you give these people the cargo, or we’ll take the whole damned ship. Your choice.”

  The goon stared at her for a moment, then motioned to his team and walked away. Port security followed, and Holden and Naomi had to dodge out of the way of the crowd rushing up the dock and to the loading bay doors.

  When they were out of danger of being trampled, Holden said, “That was pretty cool.”

  “Getting shot standing up for justice probably seemed very heroic to you,” she said, the steel not quite gone from her voice. “But I want to keep you around, so stop being an idiot.”

  “Smart play, threatening the ship,” Holden said.

  “You were acting like that asshole Detective Miller, so I just acted like you used to. What I said was the kind of thing you say when you’re not in a hurry to wave your gun around.”

  “I wasn’t acting like Miller,” he said, the accusation stinging, because it was true.

  “You weren’t acting like you.”

  Holden shrugged, noticing only afterward that it was another imitation of Miller. Naomi looked down at the captain’s patches on the shoulder of her Somnambulist jumpsuit. “Maybe I should keep these …”

  A small, unkempt-looking man with salt-and-pepper hair, Chinese features, and a week’s growth of beard walked up to them and nodded nervously. He was literally wringing his hands, a gesture Holden had been pretty sure only little old ladies in ancient cinema made.

  He gave them another small nod and said, “You are James Holden? Captain James Holden? From the OPA?”

  Holden and Naomi glanced at each other. Holden tugged at his patchy beard. “Is this actually helping at all? Be honest.”

  “Captain Holden, my name is Prax, Praxidike Meng. I’m a botanist.”

  Holden shook the man’s hand.

  “Nice to meet you, Prax. I’m afraid we have to—”

  “You have to help me,” Prax said. Holden could see that the man had been through a rough couple of months. His clothes hung off him like a starving man’s, and his face was covered with yellowing bruises from a fairly recent beating.

  “Sure, if you’ll see the Supitayaporns at the aid stat
ion, tell them I said—”

  “No!” Prax shouted. “I don’t need that. I need you to help me!”

  Holden shot a glance at Naomi. She shrugged. Your call.

  “Okay,” Holden said. “What’s the problem?”

  Chapter Twelve: Avasarala

  A small house is a deeper kind of luxury,” her husband said. “To live in a space entirely our own, to remember the simple pleasures of baking bread and washing our own dishes. This is what your friends in high places forget. It makes them less human.”

  He was sitting at the kitchen table, leaning back in a chair of bamboo laminate that had been distressed until it looked like stained walnut. The scars from his cancer surgery were two pale lines in the darkness of his throat, barely visible under the powdering of white stubble. His forehead was broader than when she’d married him, his hair thinner. The Sunday morning sun spilled across the table, glowing.

  “That’s crap,” she said. “Just because you pretend to live like a dirt farmer doesn’t make Errinwright or Lus or any of the others less human. There’s smaller houses than this with six families living in them, and the people in those are a hundred times closer to animals than anyone I work with.”

  “You really think that?”

  “Of course I do. Otherwise why would I go to work in the morning? If someone doesn’t get those half-feral bastards out of the slums, who are you university types going to teach?”

  “An excellent point,” Arjun said.

  “What makes them less human is they don’t fucking meditate. A small house isn’t a luxury,” she said, then paused. “A small house and a lot of money, maybe.”

  Arjun grinned at her. He had always had the most beautiful smile. She found herself smiling back at him, even though part of her wanted to be cross. Outside, Kiki and Suri shrieked, their small half-naked bodies bolting across the grass. Their nurse trotted along a half second behind them, her hand to her side like she was easing a stitch.

  “A big yard is a luxury,” Avasarala said.

  “It is.”

  Suri burst in the back door, her hand covered in loose black soil and a wide grin on her face. Her footsteps left crumbling dark marks on the carpet.

  “Nani! Nani! Look what I found!”

  Avasarala shifted in her chair. In her granddaughter’s palm, an earthworm was shifting the pink and brown rings of its body, wet as the soil that dripped from Suri’s fingers. Avasarala made her face into a mask of wonder and delight.

  “That’s wonderful, Suri. Come back outside and show your nani where you found that.”

  The yard smelled like cut grass and fresh soil. The gardener—a thin man hardly older than her own son would have been—knelt in the back, pulling weeds by hand. Suri pelted out toward him, and Avasarala moved along after her at a stroll. When she came near, the gardener nodded, but there was no space for conversation. Suri was pointing and gesturing and retelling the grand adventure of finding a common worm in the mud as if it were a thing of epics. Kiki appeared at Avasarala’s side, quietly taking her hand. She loved her little Suri, but privately—or if not that, then only to Arjun—she thought Kiki was the smarter of her grandchildren. Quiet, but the girl’s black eyes were bright, and she could mimic anyone she heard. Kiki didn’t miss much.

  “Darling wife,” Arjun called from the back door. “There’s someone to talk with you.”

  “Where?”

  “The house system,” Arjun said. “She says your terminal’s not answering.”

  “There’s a reason for that,” Avasarala said.

  “It’s Gloria Tannenbaum.”

  Avasarala reluctantly handed Kiki’s hand over to the nurse, kissed Suri’s head, and went back toward the house. Arjun held the door open for her. His expression was apologetic.

  “These cunts are digging into my grandma time,” she said.

  “The price of power,” Arjun replied with a solemnity that was amused and serious at the same time.

  Avasarala opened the connection on the system in her private office. There was a click and a moment’s dislocation while the privacy screens came up, and then Gloria Tannenbaum’s thin, eye-browless face appeared on her screen.

  “Gloria! I’m sorry. I had my terminal down with the children over.”

  “Not a problem,” the woman said with a clean, brittle smile that was as close as she came to a genuine emotion. “Probably for the best anyway. Always assume those are being monitored more closely than civilian lines.”

  Avasarala lowered herself into her chair. The leather breathed out gently under her weight.

  “I hope things are all right with you and Etsepan?”

  “Fine,” Gloria said.

  “Good, good. Now why the fuck are you calling me?”

  “I was talking to a friend of mine whose wife is stationed on the Mikhaylov. From what he says, it’s being pulled off patrol. Going deep.”

  Avasarala frowned. The Mikhaylov was part of a small convoy monitoring the traffic between the deep stations orbiting at the far edge of the Belt.

  “Going deep where?”

  “I asked around,” Gloria said. “Ganymede.”

  “Nguyen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your friend has loose lips,” Avasarala said.

  “I never tell him anything true,” Gloria said. “I thought you should know.”

  “I owe you,” Avasarala said. Gloria nodded once, the movement sharp as a crow’s, and dropped the connection. Avasarala sat in silence for a long moment, fingers pressed to her lips, mind following the chains of implication like a brook flowing over stones. Nguyen was sending more ships to Ganymede, and he was doing it quietly.

  The why quietly part was simple. If he’d done it openly, she would have stopped him. Nguyen was young and he was ambitious, but he wasn’t stupid. He was drawing conclusions of his own, and somehow he’d gotten to the idea that sending more forces into the open sore that was Ganymede Station would make things better.

  “Oh, Nani!” Kiki called. From the lilt of her voice, Avasarala knew there was mischief afoot. She hefted herself up from the desk and headed for the door.

  “In here, Kiki,” she said, stepping out into the kitchen.

  The water balloon hit her in the shoulder without bursting, bobbled down to the floor, and popped at her feet, turning the stone tiles around her dark. Avasarala looked up, rage-faced. Kiki stood in the doorway leading to the yard, caught between fear and delight.

  “Did you just make a mess in my house?” Avasarala asked.

  Pale-faced, the girl nodded.

  “Do you know what happens to bad children who make a mess in their nani’s house?”

  “Do they get tickled?”

  “They get tickled!” Avasarala said, and bolted for her. Of course Kiki got away. She was a child of eight. The only time the girl’s joints ached, it was from growing too fast. And of course, eventually she let her nani catch her and tickle her until she screamed. By the time Ashanti and her husband came to gather up their children for the flight back to Novgorod, Avasarala had grass stains on her sari and her hair was standing off her scalp in all directions, like the cartoon image of her lightning-struck self.

  She hugged the children twice before they left, sneaking bits of chocolate to them each time, then kissed her daughter, nodded to her son-in-law, and waved to them all from her doorway. The security team followed their car. No one so closely related to her was safe from kidnapping. It was just another fact of life.

  Her shower was long, using a lavish volume of water almost too hot for comfort. She’d always liked her baths to approach scalding, ever since she was a girl. If her skin didn’t tingle and throb a little when she toweled off, she’d done it wrong.

  Arjun was on the bed, reading seriously from his hand terminal. She walked to her closet, threw the wet towel into the hamper, and shrugged into a cotton-weave robe.

  “He thinks they did it,” she said.

  “Who did what?” Arjun asked.


  “Nguyen. He’s thinking that the Martians are behind the thing. That there’s going to be a second attack on Ganymede. He knows the Martians aren’t moving their fleet there, and he’s still reinforcing. He doesn’t care if it fucks the peace talks, because he thinks they’re crap anyway. Nothing to lose. Are you listening to me?”

  “Yes, I am. Nguyen thinks it was Mars. He’s building a fleet to respond. You see?”

  “Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  “As a rule? No. But Maxwell Asinnian-Koh just posted a paper about post-lyricism that’s going to get him no end of hate mail.”

  Avasarala chuckled.

  “You live in your own world, dear one.”

  “I do,” Arjun agreed, running his thumb across the hand terminal’s screen. He looked up. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “I love you for it. Stay here. Read about post-lyricism.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “The same thing as always. Try to keep civilization from blowing up while the children are in it.”

  When she’d been young, her mother had tried to teach her knitting. The skill hadn’t taken, but there were other lessons that had. Once, the skein of yarn had gotten knotted badly, and Avasarala’s frustrated yanking had only made things progressively worse. Her mother had taken the tight-bound clump from her, but instead of fixing it herself and handing it back, her mother sat cross-legged on the floor beside her and spoke aloud about how to solve the knot. She’d been gentle, deliberate, and patient, looking for places where she could work more slack into the system until, seemingly all at once, the yarn spilled free.

  There were ten ships in the list, ranging from an ancient transport past due for the scrap heap to a pair of frigates captained by people whose names she’d heard. It wasn’t a huge force, but it was enough to be provocative. Gently, deliberately, patiently, Avasarala started plucking it apart.