Caliban's War, Page 25
James S. A. Corey
“I’m seein’ eight percent and falling.”
The wall unit said something cheerful and obscene. Amos.
“I’m tellin’ you, the seal’s cracked,” Alex said.
“I been over it twice,” Amos said from the comm. The pilot took a mug with the word Tachi printed on it from the coffee machine.
“Third time’s the charm.”
“Arright. Stand by.”
The pilot took one long, lip-smacking sip from the mug, then, noticing Prax, nodded. Prax smiled uncomfortably.
“Feelin’ better?” Alex asked.
“Yes. I think so,” Prax said. “I don’t know.”
Alex sat at one of the tables. The design of the room was military—all soft edges and curves to minimize damage if someone was caught out of place by an impact or a sudden maneuver. The food inventory control had a biometric interface that had been disabled. Built for high security, but not used that way. The name ROCINANTE was on the wall in letters as broad as his hand, and someone had added a stencil of a spray of yellow narcissus. It looked desperately out of place and very appropriate at the same time. When he thought about it that way, it seemed to fit most things about the ship. Her crew, for instance.
“You settlin’ in all right? You need anything?”
“I’m fine,” Prax said with a nod. “Thank you.”
“They beat us up pretty good gettin’ out of there. I’ve been through some ugly patches of sky, but that was right up there.”
Prax nodded and took a food packet from the dispenser. It was textured paste, sweet and rich with wheat and honey and the subterranean tang of baked raisins. Prax sat down before he thought about it, and the pilot seemed to take it as an invitation to continue the conversation.
“How long have you been on Ganymede?”
“Most of my life,” Prax said. “My family went out when my mother was pregnant. They’d been working on Earth and Luna, saving up to get to the outer planets. They had a short posting on Callisto first.”
“Belters?”
“Not exactly. They heard that the contracts were better out past the Belt. It was the whole ‘make a better future for the family’ idea. My father’s dream, really.”
Alex sipped at his coffee.
“And so, Praxidike. They named you after the moon?”
“They did,” Prax said. “They were a little embarrassed to find out it was a woman’s name. I never minded it, though. My wife—my ex-wife—thought it was endearing. It’s probably why she noticed me in the first place, really. It takes something to stand out a little, and you can’t swing a dead cat on Ganymede without hitting five botany PhDs. Or, well, you couldn’t.”
The pause was just long enough that Prax knew what was coming and could steel himself for it.
“I heard your daughter went missing,” Alex said. “I’m sorry about that.”
“She’s probably dead,” Prax said, just the way he’d practiced.
“It had to do with that lab y’all found down there, did it?”
“I think so. It must have. They took her just before the first incident. Her and several of the others in her group.”
“Her group?”
“She has an immune disorder. Myers-Skelton Premature Immunosenescence. Always has had.”
“My sister had a brittle bone disorder. Hard,” Alex said. “Is that why they took her?”
“I assume so,” Prax said. “Why else would you steal a child like that?”
“Slave labor or sex trade,” Alex said softly. “But can’t see why you’d pick out kids with a medical condition. It true you saw protomolecule down there?”
“Apparently,” Prax said. The food bulb was cooling in his hand. He knew he should eat more—he wanted to, as good as it tasted—but something was turning at the back of his mind. He’d thought this all through before, when he’d been distracted and starving. Now, in this civilized coffin hurtling through the void, all the old familiar thoughts started to touch up against each other. They’d specifically targeted the children from Mei’s group. Immunocompromised children. And they’d been working with the protomolecule.
“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.
&nbs
p; “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 before 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.
“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?”
