Caliban's War: Book Two of the Expanse series

by James S. A. Corey

  “Ooh, right in the back,” Alex said. “That was cold.”

  Souther’s ID showed up again on Avasarala’s console, and she hit accept just as the Roci shifted again.

  “—the immediate surrender of the flagship King and Admiral Augusto Nguyen,” Souther was saying. His shock of white hair was standing up off his head as if the low thrust gravity was letting it expand like a peacock’s tail. His smile was sharp as a knife. “Any vessel that still refuses to acknowledge my orders as legal and legitimate will forfeit this amnesty. You have thirty seconds from this mark.”

  On the tactical display, the threads of silver and gold had, for the most part, vanished. The ships shifted positions, each moving along its own complex vectors. As she watched, all the remaining green dots turned to white. All except one.

  “Don’t be an asshole, Nguyen,” Avasarala said. “It’s over.”

  The ops deck was silent for a long moment, the tension almost unbearable. Naomi’s voice was the one to break it.

  “I’ve got more fast movers. Oh, I’ve got a lot of them.”

  “Where?” Holden snapped.

  “From the surface.”

  Avasarala didn’t do anything, but her tactical display resized, pulling back until the cluster of ships, red and white and the single defiant green, were less than a quarter of their original size and the massive curve of the moon’s surface impinged on the lower edge of the display. Rising like a solid mass, hundreds of fine yellow lines.

  “Get me a count,” Holden said. “I need a count here.”

  “Two hundred nineteen. No. Wait. Two hundred thirty.”

  “What the hell are they? Are those torpedoes?” Alex asked.

  “No,” Bobbie said. “They’re monsters. They launched the monsters.”

  Avasarala opened a broadcast channel. Her hair probably looked worse than Souther’s but she was well past vanity. That she could speak without fear of vomiting was blessing enough.

  “This is Avasarala,” she said. “The launch you are all seeing right now is a new protomolecule-based weapon that is being used as an unauthorized first strike against Mars. We need to shoot those fuckers out of the sky and do it now. Everyone.”

  “We’ve got a coordination override request coming through from Souther’s flagship,” Naomi said. “Surrender control?”

  “The hell I will,” Alex said.

  “No, but track requests,” Holden said. “I’m not handing control of my ship to a military fire-control computer, but we still need to be part of the solution here.”

  “The King’s starting a hard burn,” Alex said. “I think he’s trying to hightail it.”

  On the display, the attack from the surface of Io was beginning to bloom, individual threads coming apart in unexpected angles, some corkscrewing, some reaching out in bent paths like an insect’s articulated legs. Any one of them was the death of a planet, and the acceleration data put them at ten, fifteen, twenty g’s. Nothing human survived at a sustained twenty g. Nothing human had to.

  Golden flickers of light appeared from the ships, drifting down to meet the threads of Io. The slow, stately pace of the display was undercut by the data. Plasma torpedoes burning full out, and yet it took long seconds for them to reach the main stem. Avasarala watched the first of them detonate, saw the column of protomolecule monsters split into a dozen different streams. Evasive action.

  “Some of those are coming toward us, Cap,” Alex said. “I don’t think they’re designed to hole a ship’s hull, but I’m pretty damn sure they’d do it anyway.”

  “Let’s get in there and do what we can. We can’t let any of these … Okay, where’d they go?”

  On the tactical display, the attacking monsters were blinking out of existence, the threads vanishing.

  “They’re cutting thrust,” Naomi said. “And the RF transponders are going dark. Must have radar-absorbing hull materials.”

  “Do we have tracking data? Can we anticipate where they’re going to be?”

  The tactical display began to flicker. Fireflies. The monsters shifting in and out, thrusting in what looked like semi-random directions, but the bloom of them always expanding.

  “This is going to be a bitch,” Alex said. “Bobbie?”

  “I’ve got some target locks. Get us in PDC range.”

  “Hang on, kids,” Alex said. “We’re going for a ride.”

  The Roci bucked hard, and Avasarala pressed back into her seat. The shuddering rhythm seemed to be her own trembling muscles and then the firing PDCs and then her body again. On the display, the combined forces of Earth and Mars spread out, running after the near-invisible foes. Thrust gravity shifted, spinning her couch one way and then another without warning. She tried closing her eyes, but that was worse.

  “Hmm.”

  “What, Naomi?” Holden said. “ ‘Hmm’ what?”

  “The King was doing something strange there. Huge activity from the maneuvering thrusters and … Oh.”

  “‘Oh’ what? Nouns. I need nouns.”

  “She’s holed,” Naomi said. “One of the monsters holed her.”

  “Told you they could do that,” Alex said. “Hate to be on the ship right now. Still. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer fella.”

  “His men aren’t responsible for his actions,” Bobbie said. “They may not even know Souther’s in command. We’ve got to help them.”

  “We can’t,” Holden said. “They’ll shoot at us.”

  “Would you all please shut the fuck up?” Avasarala said. “And stop moving the goddamned ship around. Just pick a direction and calm down for two minutes.”

  Her comm request went ignored for five minutes. Then ten. When the King’s distress beacon kicked in, she still hadn’t answered. A broadcast signal came in just after.

  “This is Admiral Nguyen of the United Nations battleship Agatha King. I am offering to surrender to UN ships with the condition of immediate evacuation. Repeat: I am offering surrender to any United Nations military vessel on the condition of immediate evacuation.”

  Souther answered on the same frequency.

  “This is the Okimbo. What’s your situation?”

  “We have a possible biohazard,” Nguyen said. His voice was so tight and high it sounded like someone was strangling him. On the tactical display, several white dots were already moving toward the green.

  “Hold tight, King,” Souther said. “We’re on our way.”

  “Like hell you are,” Avasarala said, then cursed quietly as she opened a broadcast channel. “Like hell you are. This is Avasarala. I am declaring a quarantine and containment order on the Agatha King. No vessel should dock with her or accept transfer of materiel or personnel. Any ship that does will be placed under a quarantine and containment order as well.”

  Two of the white dots turned aside. Three others continued on. She opened the channel again.

  “Am I the only one here who remembers Eros? What the fuck do you people think is loose on the King? Do not approach.”

  The last of the white dots turned aside. When Nguyen answered her comm request, she’d forgotten she still had it open. He looked like shit. She didn’t imagine she looked much better. How many wars had ended this way? she wondered. Two exhausted, nauseated people staring at each other while the world burned around them.

  “What more do you want from me?” Nguyen said. “I’ve surrendered. I lost. My men shouldn’t have to die for your spite.”

  “It’s not spite,” Avasarala said. “We can’t do it. The protomolecule gets loose. Your fancy control programs don’t work. It’s infectious.”

  “That’s not proven,” he said, but the way he said it told her everything.

  “It’s happening, isn’t it?” she said. “Turn on your internal cameras. Let us see.”

  “I’m not going to do that.”

  She felt the air go out of her. It had happened.

  “I am so sorry,” Avasarala said. “Oh. I am so sorry.”

  Nguyen’s eyeb
rows rose a millimeter. His lips pressed, bloodless and thin. She thought there were tears in his eyes, but it might have been only a transmission artifact.

  “You have to turn on the transponders,” Avasarala said. And then, when he didn’t reply: “We can’t weaponize the protomolecule. We don’t understand what it is. We can’t control it. You just sent a death sentence to Mars. I can’t save you, I cannot. But turn those transponders back on and help me save them.”

  The moment hung in the air. Avasarala could feel Holden’s and Naomi’s attention on her like warmth radiating from the heating grate. Nguyen shook his head, his lips twitching, lost in conversation with himself.

  “Nguyen,” she said. “What’s happening? On your ship. How bad is it?”

  “Get me out of here, and I’ll turn the transponders on,” he said. “Throw me in the brig for the rest of my life, I don’t care. But get me off of this ship.”

  Avasarala tried to lean forward, but it only made her crash couch shift. She looked for the words that would bring him back, the ones that would tell him that he had been wrong and evil and now he was going to die badly at the hands of his own weapon and somehow make it all right. She looked at this angry, small, shortsighted, frightened little man and tried to find the way to pull him back to simple human decency.

  She failed.

  “I can’t do that,” she said.

  “Then stop wasting my time,” he said, and cut the connection.

  She lay back, her palm over her eyes.

  “I’m gettin’ some mighty strange readings off that battleship,” Alex said. “Naomi? You seeing this?”

  “Sorry. Give me a second.”

  “What have you got, Alex?” Holden asked.

  “Reactor activity’s down. Internal radiation through the ship’s spiking huge. It’s like they’re venting the reactor into the air recycling.”

  “That don’t sound healthy,” Amos said.

  The ops deck went silent again. Avasarala reached to open a channel to Souther but stopped. She didn’t know what she’d say. The voice that came over the ship channel was slushy and drugged. She didn’t recognize Prax at first, and then he had to repeat himself twice before she could make out the words.

  “Incubation chamber,” Prax said. “It’s making the ship an incubation chamber. Like on Eros.”

  “It knows how to do that?” Bobbie said.

  “Apparently so,” Naomi said.

  “We’re going to have to slag that thing,” Bobbie said. “Do we have enough firepower for that?”

  Avasarala opened her eyes again. She tried to feel something besides great, oceanic sorrow. There had to be hope in there somewhere. Even Pandora got that much.

  Holden was the one who said what she was thinking.

  “Even if we can, it won’t save Mars.”

  “Maybe we got them all?” Alex said. “I mean, there were a shit-load of those things, but maybe … maybe we got ’em?”

  “Hard to tell when they were running ballistic,” Bobbie said. “If we missed just one, and it gets to Mars …”

  It was all slipping away from her. She had been so close to stopping it, and now here she was, watching it all slip past. Her gut was a solid knot. But they hadn’t failed. Not yet. Somewhere in all this there had to be a way. Something that could still be done.

  She forwarded her last conversation with Nguyen to Souther. Maybe he’d have an idea. A secret weapon that could come out of nowhere and force the codes out. Maybe the great brotherhood of military men would draw some vestige of humanity out of Nguyen.

  Ten minutes later, a survival pod came loose from the King. Souther didn’t bother contacting her before they shot it down. The ops deck was like a mourning chamber.

  “Okay,” Holden said. “First things first. We’ve got to get down to the base. If Mei’s there, we need to get her out.”

  “I’m on that,” Amos said. “And we got to take the doc. He ain’t gonna outsource that one.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Holden said. “So you guys take the Roci down to the surface.”

  “Us guys?” Naomi asked.

  “I’ll take the pinnace over to the battleship,” Holden said. “The transponder activation codes are going to be in the CIC.”

  “You?” Avasarala asked.

  “Only two people got off Eros,” Holden said with a shrug. “And I’m the one that’s left.”

  Chapter Forty-Nine: Holden

  Don’t do this,” Naomi said. She didn’t beg, or cry, or make demands. All the power of her request lay in its quiet simplicity. “Don’t do it.”

  Holden opened the suit locker just outside the main airlock and reached for his Martian-made armor. A sudden and visceral memory of radiation sickness on Eros stopped him. “They’ve been pumping radiation into the King for hours now, right?”

  “Don’t go over there,” Naomi said again.

  “Bobbie,” Holden said over the comm.

  “Here,” she replied with a grunt. She was helping Amos prep their gear for the assault on the Mao science station. After his one encounter with the Mao protomolecule hybrid, he could only imagine they were going loaded for bear.

  “What are these standard Martian armor suits rated for radiation-wise?”

  “Like mine?” Bobbie asked.

  “No, not a powered suit. I know they harden you guys for close-proximity blasts. I’m talking about this stuff we pulled out of the MAP crate.”

  “About as much as a standard vacuum suit. Good enough for short walks outside the ship. Not so much for constant exposure to high radiation levels.”

  “Shit,” Holden said. Then: “Thanks.” He killed the comm panel and closed the locker. “I’ll need a full-on hazard suit. Which means I’ll be better in the radiation, and not bullet resistant at all.”

  “How many times can you get yourself massively irradiated before it catches up with you?” Naomi said.

  “Same as last time. At least one more,” Holden replied with a grin. Naomi didn’t smile back. He hit the comm again and said, “Amos, bring me up a hazard suit from engineering. Whatever’s the hardest thing we’ve got on board.”

  “Okay,” Amos replied.

  Holden opened his equipment locker and took out the assault rifle he kept there. It was large, black, and designed to be intimidating. It would immediately mark anyone who carried it as a threat. He put it back and decided on a pistol instead. The hazmat suit would make him fairly anonymous. It was the sort of thing any member of the damage-control team might wear during an emergency. If he was wearing only a service pistol in a hip holster, it might keep anyone from singling him out as part of the problem.

  And with the protomolecule loose on the King, and the ship flooded with radiation, there would be a big problem.

  Because if Prax and Avasarala were right, and the protomolecule was linked even without a physical connection, then the goo on the King knew what the goo on Venus knew. Part of that was how human spaceships were put together, ever since it had disassembled the Arboghast. But it also meant it knew a lot about how to turn humans into vomit zombies. It had performed that trick a million times or so on Eros. It had practice.

  It was entirely possible that every single human on the King was now a vomit zombie. And sadly, that was the best-case scenario. Vomit zombies were walking death to anyone with exposed skin, but to Holden, in his fully sealed and vacuum-rated hazmat suit, they would be at worst a mild annoyance.

  The worst-case scenario was that the protomolecule was so good at changing humans now, the ship would be full of lethal hybrids like the one he’d fought in the cargo bay. That would be an impossible situation, so he chose to believe it wasn’t true. Besides, the protomolecule hadn’t made any soldiers on Eros. Miller hadn’t really taken the time to describe what he’d run into there, but he’d spent a lot of time on the station looking for Julie and he’d never reported being attacked by anything. The protomolecule was incredibly aggressive and invasive. It would kill a mill
ion humans in hours and turn them into spare parts for whatever it was working on. But it invaded at the cellular level. It acted like a virus, not an army.

  Just keep telling yourself that, Holden thought. It made what he was about to do seem possible.

  He took a compact semiautomatic pistol and holster out of the locker. Naomi watched while he loaded the weapon’s magazine and three spares, but she didn’t speak. He had just pushed the last round into the final magazine when Amos floated into the compartment, dragging a large red suit behind him.

  “This is our best, Cap,” he said. “For when shit has gone truly wrong. Should be plenty for the levels they’ve got in that ship. Max exposure time is six hours, but the air supply only lasts two, so that’s not an issue.”

  Holden examined the bulky suit. The surface was a thick, flexible rubbery substance. It might deter someone attacking with their fingernails or teeth, but it wouldn’t stop a knife or a bullet. The air supply was contained under the suit’s radiation-resistant skin, so it made for a big, awkward lump on the wearer’s back. The difficulty he had pulling the suit to himself and then stopping it told him its mass was considerable.

  “Won’t be moving fast in this, will I?”

  “No,” Amos said with a grimace. “They’re not made for a firefight. If the bullets start flying, you’re fucked.”

  Naomi nodded but said nothing.

  “Amos,” Holden said, grabbing the mechanic’s arm as he turned to leave. “The gunny’s in charge once you hit the surface. She’s a pro, and this is her show. But I need you to keep Prax safe, because he’s kind of an idiot. The only thing I ask you to do is get that man and his little girl safely off the moon and back to this ship.”

  Amos looked hurt for a moment. “Of course I will, Captain. Anything that gets to him or that baby will already have killed me. And that ain’t easy to do.”

  Holden pulled Amos to him and gave the big man a quick hug. “I feel sorry for anything that tries. No one could ask for a better crewman, Amos. Just want you to know that.”