Caliban's War: Book Two of the Expanse series

by James S. A. Corey

  He turned off the recording, sent it, and crawled onto the small bed. He’d expected it to be hard and uncomfortable, but the mattress was as cradling as crash couch gel, and he fell asleep easily and woke four hours later like someone had flipped a switch on the back of his head. Amos was still gone, even though it was station midnight. There was still no message from Persis-Strokes, so Prax recorded a polite inquiry—just to be sure the information hadn’t gotten lost in transit—then watched it and erased it. He took a long shower, washing his hair twice, shaved, and recorded a new inquiry, looking less like a raving lunatic.

  Ten minutes after he sent it, a new-message alert chimed. Intellectually, he knew it couldn’t be a response. With lag, his message wouldn’t even be at Luna yet. When he pulled it up, it was Nicola. The heart-shaped face looked older than he remembered it. There was the first dusting of gray at her temples. But when she made that soft, sad smile, he was twenty again, sitting across from her in the grand park while bhangra throbbed and lasers traced living art on the domed ice above them. He remembered what it had been like to love her.

  “I have your message,” she said. “I’m … I’m so sorry, Praxidike. I wish there was more I could do. Things aren’t so good here on Ceres. I will talk with Taban. He makes more than I do, and if he understands what’s happened, he might want to help too. For my sake.

  “Take care of yourself, old man. You look tired.”

  On the screen, Mei’s mother leaned forward and stopped the recording. An icon showed an authorized transfer code for eighty FusionTek Reál. Prax checked the exchange rates, converting the company scrip to UN dollars. It was almost a week’s salary. Not enough. Not near enough. But still, it had been a sacrifice for her.

  He pulled the message back up, pausing it in the gap between two words. Nicola looked out at him from the terminal, her lips parted barely enough for him to see her pale teeth. Her eyes were sad and playful. He’d thought for so long that it was her soul and not just an accident of physiology that gave her that look of fettered joy. He’d been wrong.

  As he sat, lost in history and imagination, a new message appeared. It was from Luna. Persis-Strokes. With a feeling somewhere between anxiety and hope, he went to the attached spreadsheet. At the first set of numbers, his heart sank.

  Mei might be out there. She might be alive. Certainly Strickland and his people were there. They could be found. They could be caught. There was justice to be had.

  He just couldn’t afford it.

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Holden

  Holden sat in a pull-down chair in the Rocinante’s engineering bay reviewing the damage and making notes for Tycho’s repair crew. Everyone else was gone. Some more than others, he thought.

  REPLACE STARBOARD ENGINEERING BULKHEAD.

  SIGNIFICANT DAMAGE TO PORT-SIDE POWER CABLE JUNCTION, POSSIBLY REPLACE ENTIRE JUNCTION BOX.

  Two lines of text representing hundreds of work hours, hundreds of thousands of dollars in parts. It also represented the aftermath of coming within a hand’s breadth of fiery annihilation for the ship and crew. Describing it in two quick sentences felt almost sacrilegious. He made a footnote of the types of civilian parts that Tycho was likely to have available that would work with his Martian warship.

  Behind him, a wall monitor streamed a Ceres-based news show. Holden had turned it on to keep his mind occupied while he tinkered with the ship and made notes.

  Which was all bullshit, of course. Sam, the Tycho engineer who usually took the lead on their repair jobs, didn’t need his help. She didn’t need him making lists of parts for her. She was, in every sense, better qualified to be doing what he was doing right now. But as soon as he turned the job over to her, he wouldn’t have any reason to stay on the ship. He would have to confront Fred about the protomolecule on Ganymede.

  And maybe lose Naomi in the process.

  If his early suspicion was correct and Fred actually had bartered using the protomolecule as currency or, worse, as a weapon, Holden would kill him. He knew that like he knew his own name, and he feared it. That it would be a capital offense and would almost certainly get him burned down on the spot was actually less important than the fact that it would be the final proof that Naomi was right to leave. That he’d turned into the man she feared he was becoming. Just another Detective Miller, dispensing frontier justice from the barrel of his gun. But whenever he pictured the scene, Fred’s admission of guilt and heartfelt appeal for mercy, Holden couldn’t picture not killing him for what he’d done. He remembered being the sort of man who would make a different choice, but he couldn’t actually remember what being that man was like.

  If he was wrong, and Fred had nothing to do with the tragedy on Ganymede, then she’d have been right all along, and he had just been too stubborn to see it. He might be able to apologize for that with sufficient humility to win her back. Stupidity was usually a lesser crime than vigilantism.

  But if Fred wasn’t the one playing God with the alien supervirus, that was much, much worse for humanity in general. It was an unpleasant thought that the truth that would be worst for humanity was the one that would be best for him. Intellectually, he knew he wouldn’t hesitate to sacrifice himself or his happiness to save everyone else. But that didn’t stop the tiny voice at the back of his head that said, Fuck everyone else, I want my girlfriend back.

  Something half remembered pushed up from his subconscious and he wrote MORE COFFEE FILTERS on his list of needed supplies.

  The wall panel behind him chimed an alert half a second before his hand terminal buzzed to let him know someone was at the airlock, requesting permission to board. He tapped the screen to switch to the airlock’s outer door camera and saw Alex and Sam waiting in the corridor. Sam was still the adorable red-haired pixie in the oversized gray coveralls he remembered. She was carrying a large toolbox and laughing. Alex said something else and she laughed harder, almost dropping her tools. With the intercom off, it was a silent movie.

  Holden tapped the intercom button and said, “Come on in, guys.” Another tap cycled the outer airlock doors open. Sam waved at the camera and stepped inside.

  A few minutes later, the pressure hatch to engineering banged open, and the ladder-lift whined its way down. Sam and Alex stepped off, Sam dropping her tools onto the metal deck with a loud crash.

  “What’s up?” she said, giving Holden a quick hug. “You getting my girl all shot up again?”

  “Your girl?” Alex said.

  “Not this time,” Holden replied, pointing out the damaged bulkheads in the engineering bay to her. “Bomb went off in the cargo bay, burned a hole there and threw some shrapnel into the power junction there.”

  Sam whistled. “Either that shrapnel took the long way around, or your reactor knows how to duck.”

  “How long, you think?”

  “Bulkhead’s simple,” she said, punching something into her terminal, then tapping her front teeth with its corner. “We can bring a patch in through the cargo bay in a single piece. Makes the job a lot easier. Power junction takes longer, but not a lot. Say four days if I get my crew on it right now.”

  “Well,” Holden said, wincing like a man who had to keep admitting to new wrongdoings. “We also have a damaged cargo bay door that will either have to be fixed or replaced. And our cargo bay airlock is kind of messed up.”

  “Couple more days, then,” Sam said, then knelt down and began pulling things out of her toolbox. “Mind if I start taking some measurements?”

  Holden waved at the wall. “Be my guest.”

  “Been watching the news a lot?” Sam said, pointing at the talking heads on the wall monitor. “Ganymede is fucked, right?”

  “Yeah,” Alex said. “Pretty much.”

  “But it’s only Ganymede so far,” Holden said. “So that means something I haven’t quite figured out yet.”

  “Naomi’s staying with me right now,” Sam said as if they’d been talking about that all along. Holden felt his face go still and tried to fight
against it, forcing himself to smile.

  “Oh. Cool.”

  “She won’t talk about it, but if I find out you did something shitty to her, I’m using this on your dick,” she said, holding up a torque wrench. Alex laughed nervously for a second, then trailed off and just looked uncomfortable.

  “I consider myself fairly warned,” Holden said. “How is she?”

  “Quiet,” Sam said. “Okay, got what I need. Gonna scoot now and get fabrication to work on cutting this bulkhead patch. See you boys around.”

  “Bye, Sam,” Alex said, watching her ride the ladder-lift until the pressure door closed behind her. “I’m twenty years too old, and I’m pretty sure I’ve got the wrong plumbin’, but I like that gal.”

  “You and Amos just trade this crush back and forth?” Holden said. “Or should I be worried about you two doing pistols at dawn over her?”

  “My love is a pure love,” Alex said with a grin. “I wouldn’t sully it by actually, you know, doin’ anything about it.”

  “The kind poets write about, then.”

  “So,” Alex said, leaning against a wall and looking at his nails. “Let’s talk about the XO situation.”

  “Let’s not.”

  “Oh, let’s do,” Alex said, then took a step forward and crossed his arms like a man who was not going to give any ground. “I’ve been flyin’ this boat solo for over a year now. That only works because Naomi is a brilliant ops officer and takes up a whole lotta slack. If we lose her, we don’t fly. And that’s a fact.”

  Holden dropped the hand terminal he’d been using into his pocket and slumped back against the reactor shielding.

  “I know. I know. I never thought she’d actually do this.”

  “Leave,” Alex said.

  “Yeah.”

  “We’ve never talked about pay,” Alex said. “We don’t get salaries.”

  “Pay?” Holden frowned at Alex and banged out a quick drumbeat on the reactor behind him. It echoed like a metal tomb. “Every dime that Fred’s given us that hasn’t gone to pay for operating the ship is in the account I set up. If you need some of it, twenty-five percent of that money belongs to you.”

  Alex shook his head and waved his hands. “No, don’t get me wrong. I don’t need money, and I don’t think you’re stealin’ from us. Just pointing out that we never talked about pay.”

  “So?”

  “So that means we aren’t a normal crew. We aren’t workin’ the ship for money, or because a government drafted us. We’re here because we want to be. That’s all you’ve got over us. We believe in the cause, and we want to be part of what you’re doing. The minute we lose that, we might as well take a real payin’ job.”

  “But Naomi—” Holden started.

  “Was your girlfriend,” Alex said with a laugh. “Damn, Jim, have you seen her? She can get another boyfriend. In fact, you mind if I—”

  “I take your point. I hear you. I fucked it up, it’s my fault. I know that. All of it. I need to go see Fred and start thinking about how to put it all back together again.”

  “Unless Fred actually did do it.”

  “Yeah. Unless that.”

  “I’ve been wondering when you’d finally drop by,” Fred Johnson said as Holden walked through his office door. Fred was looking both better and worse than when Holden had first met him a year earlier. Better because the Outer Planets Alliance, the quasi government that Fred was the titular head of, was no longer a terrorist organization, but a de facto government that could sit at the diplomatic table with the inner planets. And Fred had taken to the role of administrator with a relish he must not have felt for being a freedom fighter. It was visible in the relaxed set of his shoulders, and the half smile that had become his default expression.

  And worse because the last year and all the pressures of governance had aged him. His hair was both thinner and whiter, his neck a confusion of loose flesh and old, ropy muscle. His eyes had permanent bags under them now. His coffee-colored skin didn’t show many wrinkles, but it had a tinge of gray to it.

  But the smile he gave Holden was genuine, and he came around the desk to shake his hand and guide him to a chair.

  “I read your report on Ganymede,” Fred said. “Talk to me about it. Impressions on the ground.”

  “Fred,” Holden said. “There’s something else.”

  Fred nodded to him as he moved back around his desk and sat down. “Go on.”

  Holden started to speak, then stopped. Fred was staring at him. His expression hadn’t changed, but his eyes were sharper, more focused. Holden felt a sudden and irrational fear that Fred already knew everything he was about to say.

  The truth was Holden had always been afraid of Fred. There was a duality to the man that left him on edge. Fred had reached out to the crew of the Rocinante at the exact moment they’d needed help the most. He’d become their patron, their safe harbor against the myriad enemies they’d gathered over the last year. And yet Holden couldn’t forget that this was still Colonel Frederick Lucius Johnson, the Butcher of Anderson Station. A man who had spent the last decade helping to organize and run the Outer Planets Alliance, an organization that was capable of murder and terrorism to further its goals. Fred had almost certainly ordered some of those murders personally. It was entirely possible that the OPA leader version of Fred had killed more people than even the United Nations Marine colonel version of Fred had.

  Would he really balk at using the protomolecule to further his agenda?

  Maybe. Maybe that would be going too far. And he’d been a friend, and he deserved the chance to defend himself.

  “Fred, I—” Holden started, then stopped.

  Fred nodded again, the smile slipping off his face and being replaced by a slight frown. “I’m not going to like this.” It was a statement of fact.

  Holden grabbed the arms of the office chair and pushed himself to his feet. He shoved more violently than he wanted to and, in the low .3 g of station spin, flew off his feet for a second. Fred chuckled and the frown shifted back into a grin.

  And that was it. The grin and the laugh broke the fear and turned it into anger. When Holden settled back to his feet, he leaned forward and slammed both palms onto Fred’s desk.

  “You,” he said, “don’t get to laugh. Not until I know for sure it wasn’t all your fault. If you can do what I think you might have done and still laugh, I will shoot you right here and now.”

  Fred’s smile didn’t change, but something in his eyes did. He wasn’t used to being threatened, but it wasn’t new territory either.

  “What I might have done,” Fred said, not turning it into a question, just repeating it back.

  “It’s the protomolecule, Fred. That’s what’s happening on Ganymede. A lab with kids as experiments and that black webbing shit and a monster that almost killed my ship. That’s my fucking impression on the ground. Someone has been playing with the bug, and it might be loose, and the inner planets are shooting each other to shit in orbit around it.”

  “You think I did this,” Fred said. Again, just a flat statement of fact.

  “We threw this shit into Venus,” Holden yelled. “I gave you the only sample. And suddenly Ganymede, breadbasket of your future empire, the one place the inner navies won’t cede control of, gets a fucking outbreak?”

  Fred let the silence answer for a beat.

  “Are you asking me if I’m using the protomolecule to drive the inner planets troops off Ganymede, and strengthen my control of the outer planets?”

  Fred’s quiet tone made Holden realize how loud he’d gotten, and he took a moment to take several deep breaths. When his pulse had slowed a bit, he said, “Yes. Pretty much exactly that.”

  “You,” Fred said with a broad smile that did not extend to his eyes, “do not get to ask me that.”

  “What?”

  “In case you’ve forgotten, you are an employee of this organization.” Fred stood up, stretching to his full height, a dozen centimeters taller than
Holden. His smile didn’t change, but his body shifted and sort of spread out. Suddenly he looked very large. Holden took a step back before he could stop himself.

  “I,” Fred continued, “owe you nothing but the terms of our latest contract. Have you completely lost your mind, boy? Charging in here? Shouting at me? Demanding answers?”

  “No one else could have—” Holden started, but Fred ignored him.

  “You gave me the only sample we knew of. But you assume that if you don’t know about it, it doesn’t exist. I’ve been putting up with your bullshit for over a year now,” Fred said. “This idea you have that the universe owes you answers. This righteous indignation you wield like a club at everyone around you. But I don’t have to put up with your shit.

  “Do you know why that is?”

  Holden shook his head, afraid if he spoke, it might come out as a squeak.

  “It’s because,” Fred said, “I’m the fucking boss. I run this outfit. You’ve been pretty useful, and you might be again in the future. But I have enough shit to deal with right now without you starting another one of your crusades at my expense.”

  “So,” Holden said, letting the word drag to two syllables.

  “So you’re fired. This was your last contract with me. I’ll finish fixing the Roci and I’ll pay you, because I don’t break a deal. But I think we’ve finally built enough ships to start policing our own sky without your help, and even if we haven’t, I’m just about done with you.”

  “Fired,” Holden said.

  “Now get the hell out of my office before I decide to take the Roci too. She’s got more Tycho parts on her now than originals. I think I might be able to make a good argument I own that ship.”

  Holden backed up toward the door, wondering how serious that threat might actually be. Fred watched him go but didn’t move. When he reached the door, Fred said, “It wasn’t me.”

  Their gazes met for a long, breathless moment.

  “It wasn’t me,” Fred repeated.

  Holden said, “Okay,” and backed out the door.