Caliban's War: Book Two of the Expanse series

by James S. A. Corey

  “None,” Bobbie said, attaching the fresh battery pack Avasarala’s techs had provided to the back of the armor and getting a lovely green “fully charged” light from the panel. “Once I get started, the obvious counterplay will be to grab the undersecretary and hold her hostage. Preventing that is your job.”

  Cotyar smiled again. There was no humor in it.

  “As you say.”

  It took Bobbie just under three hours to assemble and field prep her suit. It should have taken only two, but she forgave herself the extra hour by remembering that she was out of practice. The closer the suit got to completion, the tighter the knot in her stomach grew. Some of it was the natural tension that came before combat. And her time in the Marines had taught her to use it. To let the stress force her to recheck everything three times. Once she was in the thick of it, it would be too late.

  But deep down, Bobbie knew that the possibility of violence wasn’t the only thing twisting up her insides. It was impossible to forget what had happened the last time she’d worn this suit. The red enamel of her Martian camouflage was pitted and scraped from the exploding monster and her high-speed skid across Ganymede’s ice. A tiny bit of fluid leakage on the knee reminded her of Private Hillman. Hilly, her friend. Wiping off the helmet’s faceplate made her think of the last time she’d spoken to Lieutenant Givens, her CO, just before the monster had ripped him in two.

  When the suit was finished and lying on the floor, opened up and waiting for her to climb inside, she felt a shudder run up her spine. For the first time ever, the inside looked small. Sepulchral.

  “No,” she said to no one but herself.

  “No?” Cotyar asked, sitting on the floor next to her, holding the tools he thought she might need next. He’d been so quiet during the assembly procedure she’d sort of forgotten he was there.

  “I’m not afraid of putting this back on,” she said.

  “Ah,” Cotyar replied with a nod, then put the tools into the toolbox. “As you say.”

  Bobbie pushed herself to her feet and yanked the black unitard she wore under the armor out of the crate. Without thinking about it, she stripped down to her panties and pulled the skintight garment on. She was pulling the wire leads out of her armor and connecting them to the various sensors on the bodysuit when she noticed that Cotyar had turned his back to her, and that his usually light brown neck was turning beet red.

  “Oh,” she said. “Sorry. I’ve stripped down and put this on in front of my squaddies so many times I don’t even think about it anymore.”

  “No reason to apologize,” Cotyar said without turning around. “I was only taken by surprise.”

  He risked a peek over his left shoulder, and when he saw that she was fully covered by the bodysuit, he turned back to help her wire it up to the armor.

  “You are,” he said, then paused for a beat. “Lovely.”

  It was her turn to blush.

  “Aren’t you married?” Bobbie asked with a grin, happy for the distraction. The simple humanity in discomfort with mating signals made the monster in her head seem very far away.

  “Yes,” Cotyar replied, attaching the final lead to a sensor at the small of her back. “Very. But I’m not blind.”

  “Thank you,” Bobbie said, and gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder. After a few moments’ struggle with the tight spaces, she sat down into the suit’s open chest and slid down until her legs and arms were fully inside. “Button me up.”

  Cotyar sealed up the chest as she’d shown him, then put the helmet on her and locked it in place. Inside the suit, her HUD flashed through the boot routine. A gentle, almost subliminal hum surrounded her. She activated the array of micro-motors and pumps that powered the exo-musculature, and then sat up.

  Cotyar was looking at her, his face a question. Bobbie turned on the external speaker and said, “Yeah, it all looks good in here. Green across the board.”

  She pushed herself to her feet effortlessly and felt the old sensation of barely restrained power running through her limbs. She knew if she pushed off hard with her legs, she’d hit the ceiling with enough force to severely damage it. A sudden motion of her arm could hurl the heavy four-poster bed across the room or shatter Cotyar’s spine. It made her move with the deliberate gentleness of long training.

  Cotyar reached under his jacket and pulled out a sleek black pistol of the slug-throwing variety. Bobbie knew the security team had loaded them with high-impact plastic rounds, guaranteed not to knock holes in the ship. It was the same kind of round Mao’s security team would be using. He started to hold it out to her, but then looked at the thickness of her armored fingers, and at the much smaller opening of the trigger guard, and shrugged apologetically.

  “I won’t need it,” she said. Her voice sounded harsh, metallic, inhuman.

  Cotyar smiled again.

  “As you say.”

  Bobbie punched the button to call the keel elevator, then walked back and forth in the lounge, letting her reflexes get used to her armor. There was a nanosecond delay between attempting to move a limb and having the armor react. It made walking around feel vaguely dreamlike, as if the act of wanting to move your limbs and the moving of the limbs themselves were separate events. Hours of training and use had mostly overcome the sensation when Bobbie wore her armor, but it always took a few minutes of moving around to get past the oddness of it.

  Avasarala walked into the lounge from the room they were using as the communications center and sat down at the bar. She poured herself a stiff shot of gin, then squeezed a piece of lime into it almost as an afterthought. The old lady had been drinking a lot more lately, but it wasn’t Bobbie’s place to point it out. Maybe it was helping her sleep.

  When the elevator didn’t arrive after several minutes, she thumped over to the panel and hit the button a few more times. A small display said OUT OF SERVICE.

  “Damn,” Bobbie said to herself. “They really are kidnapping us.”

  She’d left the external speakers on, and the harsh voice coming out of her suit echoed around the room. Avasarala didn’t look up from her drink but said, “Remember what I said.”

  “Huh?” Bobbie said, not paying attention. She climbed awkwardly up the crew ladder to the deck hatch above her head and hit the button. The hatch slid open. That meant that everyone was still pretending that this wasn’t a kidnapping. They could explain away the elevator. Explaining why the undersecretary was locked out of the rest of the ship would be harder. Maybe they figured a woman in her seventies would be reluctant to climb around the ship on ladders, so killing the lift was good enough. They might have been right. Avasarala certainly didn’t look like she was up to a two-hundred-foot climb, even in the low gravity.

  “None of these people were on Ganymede,” Avasarala said.

  “Okay,” Bobbie replied to the seeming non sequitur.

  “You won’t be able to kill enough of them to bring your platoon back,” Avasarala finished, tossing off the last of her gin, then pushing away from the bar and heading off to her room.

  Bobbie didn’t reply. She pulled herself up to the next deck and let the hatch slide shut behind her.

  Her armor had been designed for exactly this sort of mission. The original Goliath-class scout suits had been built for Marine boarding parties in ship-to-ship engagements. That meant they were designed for maximum maneuverability in tight spaces. No matter how good the armor was, it was useless if the soldier wearing it couldn’t climb ladders, slip through human-sized hatches, and maneuver gracefully in microgravity.

  Bobbie climbed the ladder to the next deck hatch and hit the button. The console responded with a red warning light. A few moments of looking at the menus revealed why: They’d parked the crew elevator just above the hatch and then disabled it, creating a barricade. And that meant they knew something was up.

  Bobbie looked around the room she was in, another relaxation lounge, nearly identical to the one she’d just left, until she found the likeliest place for
them to have hidden their cameras. She waved. This won’t stop me, guys.

  She climbed back down and went into the luxurious bathroom space. On a ship this nice, it couldn’t properly be called the head. A few moments’ probing found the fairly well-hidden bulkhead service hatch. It was locked. Bobbie tore it off the wall.

  On the other side were a tangle of piping and a narrow corridor barely large enough to stuff her armor into. She climbed in and pulled herself along the pipes for two decks, then kicked the service hatch into the room and climbed in.

  The compartment turned out to be a secondary galley, with a bank of stoves and ovens along one wall, several refrigeration units, and lots of counter space, all in gleaming stainless steel.

  Her suit warned her that she was being targeted, and changed the HUD so that the normally invisible infrared beams aimed at her became faint red lines. Half a dozen were painting her chest, all coming from compact black weapons held by Mao-Kwik security personnel at the other end of the room.

  Bobbie stood up. To their credit, the security goons didn’t back up. Her HUD ran through the weapons database and informed her that the men were armed with 5mm submachine guns with a standard ammo capacity of three hundred rounds and a cyclic rate of ten rounds per second. Unless they were using high-explosive armor-piercing rounds, unlikely with the ship’s hull right behind her, the suit rated their danger level as low.

  Bobbie made sure her external speakers were still on and said, “Okay, fellas, let’s—”

  They opened fire.

  For one long second, the entire galley was in chaos. High-impact plastic rounds bounced off her armor, deflected off the bulkheads, and skipped around the room. They blew apart containers of dried goods, hurled pots and pans off their magnetic hooks, and flung smaller utensils into the air in a cloud of stainless steel and plastic shards. One round took a particularly unlucky bounce and hit one of the security guards in the center of his nose, punching a hole into his head and dropping him to the floor with an almost comic look of surprise on his face.

  Before two seconds could tick by, Bobbie was in motion, launching herself across the steel island in the center of the room and plowing into all five remaining guards with her arms outstretched, like a football player going in for a tackle. They were hurled against the far bulkhead with a meaty thud, then slumped to the ground motionless. Her suit started to put up life-sign indicators on her HUD for them, but she shut it off without looking. She didn’t want to know. One of the men stirred, then started to raise his gun. Bobbie gently shoved him, and he flew across the room to crumple against the far bulkhead. He didn’t move again.

  She glanced around the room, looking for cameras. She couldn’t find one but hoped it was there anyway. If they’d seen this, maybe they wouldn’t throw any more of their people at her.

  At the keel ladder, she discovered that they’d blocked the elevator by jamming the floor hatch open with a crowbar. Basic ship safety protocols wouldn’t allow the elevator to move to another deck unless the deck above was sealed. Bobbie yanked out the crowbar and threw it across the room, then hit the call button. The lift climbed up the ladder shaft to her level and stopped. She jumped on and hit the button that would take her to the bridge, eight decks up. Eight more pressure hatches.

  Eight more possible ambushes.

  She tightened her hands into fists until the knuckles stretched painfully inside her gauntlets. Bring it.

  Three decks up the elevator stopped, the panel informing her that all the pressure hatches between her and the bridge had been overridden and forced open. They were willing to risk a hole in the ship emptying out half the ship’s air rather than let her up to the bridge. It was sort of gratifying to be scarier than sudden decompression.

  She climbed off the lift onto a deck that appeared to be mostly crew quarters, though it must have been evacuated. There wasn’t a soul in sight. A quick tour revealed twelve small crew cabins and two bathrooms that could reasonably be called heads. No gold plating on the fixtures for the crew. No open bar. No twenty-four-hour-a-day food service. Looking at the fairly Spartan living conditions of the average crew member on the Guanshiyin brought home Avasarala’s last words to her. These were just sailors. None of them deserved to die for what had happened on Ganymede.

  Bobbie found herself glad she didn’t have a gun.

  She found another access hatch in the head and tore it open. But to her surprise, the service corridor ended just a few feet above her head. Something in the structure of the ship was cutting her off. Having never seen the Guanshiyin from the outside, she had no idea what it might be. But she needed to get another five decks up, and she wasn’t about to let this stop her.

  A ten-minute search turned up a service hatch through the outer hull. She’d torn off two inner hull hatches on two different decks, so if she got it open, those two decks would lose their air. But the central ladder corridor was sealed at Avasarala’s deck, so her people would be fine. And the whole reason she was doing this was the sealed hatch to the upper decks, which seemed to be where most of the crew was.

  She thought about the six men down in the galley and felt a pang. Sure, they’d shot first, but if any of them were still alive, she had no desire to asphyxiate them in their sleep.

  It turned out not to be a problem. The hatch led into a small airlock chamber, about the size of a closet. A minute later it had cycled through and she climbed out onto the outer hull of the ship.

  Triple-hulled. Of course. The lord of the Mao-Kwik empire wasn’t going to trust his expensive skin to anything that wasn’t the safest humans could build. And the ostentatious design of the ship extended to her outer hull as well. While most military ships were painted a flat black that made them hard to spot visually in space, most civilian ships either were left an unpainted gray or were painted in basic corporate colors.

  The Guanshiyin had a mural painted on it in vivid colors. Bobbie was too close to see what it was, but under her feet were what appeared to be grass and the hoof of a giant horse. Mao had the hull of his ship painted with a mural that included horses and grass. When almost no one would ever see it.

  Bobbie made sure her boot and glove mags were set strong enough to handle the quarter-g thrust the ship was still under, and started climbing up the side. She quickly reached the spot where the dead end between the hulls began, and saw that it was an empty shuttle bay. If only Avasarala had let her do this before Mao had run off with the shuttle.

  Triple hulls, Bobbie thought. Maximum redundancy.

  On a hunch, she crawled across the ship to the other side. Sure enough, there was a second shuttle bay. But the ship in it wasn’t a standard short-flight shuttle. It was long and sleek, with an engine housing twice as large as that of a normal ship its size. Written in proud red letters across the bow of the ship was the name Razorback.

  A racing pinnace.

  Bobbie crawled back around to the empty cargo bay and used the airlock there to enter the ship. The military override codes her suit sent to the locked door worked, to her surprise. The airlock led to the deck just below the bridge, the one used for shuttle supply storage and maintenance. The center of the deck was taken up by a large machine shop. Standing in it were the captain of the Guanshiyin and his senior staff. There were no security personnel or weapons in sight.

  The captain tapped his ear in an ancient can you hear me? gesture. Bobbie nodded one fist at him, then turned the external speakers back on and said, “Yes.”

  “We are not military personnel,” the captain said. “We can’t defend ourselves from military hardware. But I’m not going to turn this vessel over to you without knowing your intentions. My XO is on the deck above us, prepared to scuttle the ship if we can’t come to terms.”

  Bobbie smiled at him, though she didn’t know if he could see it through her helmet. “You’ve illegally detained a high-level member of the UN government. Acting in my role as a member of her security team, I have come to demand that you deliver her immediatel
y to the port of her choosing, at best possible speed.”

  She shrugged with her hands in the Belter way. “Or, you can blow yourselves up. Seems like a drastic overreaction to having to give the undersecretary her radio privileges back.”

  The captain nodded and relaxed visibly. Whatever happened next, it wasn’t like he had any choice. And since he didn’t have any choice, he didn’t have any responsibility. “We were following orders. You’ll note that in the log when you take command.”

  “I’ll see that she knows.”

  The captain nodded again. “Then the ship is yours.”

  Bobbie opened her radio link to Cotyar. “We win. Put Her Majesty on, will you?”

  While she waited for Avasarala, Bobbie said to the captain, “There are six injured security people down below. Get a medical team down there.”

  “Bobbie?” Avasarala said over the radio.

  “The ship is yours, madam.”

  “Great. Tell the captain we need to make best possible speed to intercept Holden. We’re getting to him before Nguyen does.”

  “Uh, this is a pleasure yacht. It’s built to run at low g for comfort. I’d bet it can do a full g if it needs to, but I doubt it does much more than that.”

  “Admiral Nguyen is about to kill everyone that actually might know what the fuck is going on.” Avasarala didn’t quite yell. “We don’t have time to cruise around like we’re trying to pick up fucking rent boys!”

  “Huh,” Bobbie said. Then, a moment later: “If this is a race, I know where there’s a racing ship …”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: Holden

  Holden pulled himself a cup of coffee from the galley coffeepot, and the strong smell filled the room. He could feel the eyes of the crew on his back with an almost physical force. He’d called them all there, and once they’d assembled and taken their seats, he’d turned his back on them and started making coffee. I’m stalling for time, because I forgot how I wanted to say this. He put some sugar in his coffee even though he always drank it black, just because stirring took a few more seconds.