Caliban;s war e-2

by James S. A. Corey

  Caliban;s war

  ( Expance - 2 )

  James S.A. Corey

  James S.A. Corey

  Caliban's War

  Prologue: Mei

  Mei?” Miss Carrie said. “Please put your painting work away now. Your mother is here.”

  It took her a few seconds to understand what the teacher was saying, not because Mei didn’t know the words-she was four now, and not a toddler anymore-but because they didn’t fit with the world as she knew it. Her mother couldn’t come get her. Mommy had left Ganymede and gone to live on Ceres Station, because, as her daddy put it, she needed some mommy-alone-time. Then, her heart starting to race, Mei thought, She came back.

  “Mommy?”

  From where Mei sat at her scaled-down easel, Miss Carrie’s knee blocked her view of the coatroom door. Mei’s hands were sticky with finger paints, red and blue and green swirling on her palms. She shifted forward and grabbed for Miss Carrie’s leg as much to move it as to help her stand up.

  “Mei!” Miss Carrie shouted.

  Mei looked at the smear of paint on Miss Carrie’s pants and the controlled anger on the woman’s broad, dark face.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Carrie.”

  “It’s okay,” the teacher said in a tight voice that meant it wasn’t, really, but Mei wasn’t going to be punished. “Please go wash your hands and then come put away your painting work. I’ll get this down and you can give it to your mother. It is a doggie?”

  “It’s a space monster.”

  “It’s a very nice space monster. Now go wash your hands, please, sweetheart.”

  Mei nodded, turned, and ran for the bathroom, her smock flapping around her like a rag caught in an air duct.

  “And don’t touch the wall!”

  “I’m sorry, Miss Carrie.”

  “It’s okay. Just clean it off after you’ve washed your hands.”

  She turned the water on full blast, the colors and swirls rushing off her skin. She went through the motions of drying her hands without caring whether she was dripping water or not. It felt like gravity had shifted, pulling her toward the doorway and the anteroom instead of down toward the ground. The other children watched, excited because she was excited, as Mei scrubbed the finger marks mostly off the wall and slammed the paint pots back into their box and the box onto its shelf. She pulled the smock up over her head rather than wait for Miss Carrie to help her, and stuffed it into the recycling bin.

  In the anteroom, Miss Carrie was standing with two other grown-ups, neither of them Mommy. One was a woman Mei didn’t know, space monster painting held gently in her hand and a polite smile on her face. The other was Doctor Strickland.

  “No, she’s been very good about getting to the toilet,” Miss Carrie was saying. “There are accidents now and then, of course.”

  “Of course,” the woman said.

  “Mei!” Doctor Strickland said, bending down so that he was hardly taller than she was. “How is my favorite girl?”

  “Where’s-” she began, but before she could say Mommy, Doctor Strickland scooped her up into his arms. He was bigger than Daddy, and he smelled like salt. He tipped her backward, tickling her sides, and she laughed hard enough that she couldn’t talk anymore.

  “Thank you so much,” the woman said.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Miss Carrie said, shaking the woman’s hand. “We really love having Mei in the classroom.”

  Doctor Strickland kept tickling Mei until the door to the Montessori cycled closed behind them. Then Mei caught her breath.

  “Where’s Mommy?”

  “She’s waiting for us,” Doctor Strickland said. “We’re taking you to her right now.”

  The newer hallways of Ganymede were wide and lush and the air recyclers barely ran. The knife-thin blades of areca palm fronds spilled up and out from dozens of hydroponic planters. The broad yellow-green striated leaves of devil’s ivy spilled down the walls. The dark green primitive leaves of Mother-in-Law’s Tongue thrust up beneath them both. Full-spectrum LEDs glowed white-gold. Daddy said it was just what sunlight looked like on Earth, and Mei pictured that planet as a huge complicated network of plants and hallways with the sun running in lines above them in a bright blue ceiling-sky, and you could climb over the walls and end up anywhere.

  Mei leaned her head on Doctor Strickland’s shoulder, looking over his back and naming each plant as they passed. Sansevieria trifasciata. Epipremnum aureum. Getting the names right always made Daddy grin. When she did it by herself, it made her body feel calmer.

  “More?” the woman asked. She was pretty, but Mei didn’t like her voice.

  “No,” Doctor Strickland said. “Mei here is the last one.”

  “Chysalidocarpus lutenscens,” Mei said.

  “All right,” the woman said, and then again, more softly: “All right.”

  The closer to the surface they got, the narrower the corridors became. The older hallways seemed dirtier even though there really wasn’t any dirt on them. It was just that they were more used up. The quarters and labs near the surface were where Mei’s grandparents had lived when they’d come to Ganymede. Back then, there hadn’t been anything deeper. The air up there smelled funny, and the recyclers always had to run, humming and thumping.

  The grown-ups didn’t talk to each other, but every now and then Doctor Strickland would remember Mei was there and ask her questions: What was her favorite cartoon on the station feed? Who was her best friend in school? What kinds of food did she eat for lunch that day? Mei expected him to start asking the other questions, the ones he always asked next, and she had her answers ready.

  Does your throat feel scratchy? No.

  Did you wake up sweaty? No.

  Was there any blood in your poop this week? No.

  Did you get your medicine both times every day? Yes.

  But this time, Doctor Strickland didn’t ask any of that. The corridors they went down got older and thinner until the woman had to walk behind them so that the men coming the other direction could pass. The woman still had Mei’s painting in her hand, rolled up in a tube so the paper wouldn’t get wrinkles.

  Doctor Strickland stopped at an unmarked door, shifted Mei to his other hip, and took his hand terminal out of his pants pocket. He keyed something into a program Mei had never seen before, and the door cycled open, seals making a rough popping sound like something out of an old movie. The hallway they walked into was full of junk and old metal boxes.

  “This isn’t the hospital,” Mei said.

  “This is a special hospital,” Doctor Strickland said. “I don’t think you’ve ever been here, have you?”

  It didn’t look like a hospital to Mei. It looked like one of the abandoned tubes that Daddy talked about sometimes. Leftover spaces from when Ganymede had first been built that no one used anymore except as storage. This one had a kind of airlock at the end, though, and when they passed through it, things looked a little more like a hospital. They were cleaner, anyway, and there was the smell of ozone, like in the decontamination cells.

  “Mei! Hi, Mei!”

  It was one of the big boys. Sandro. He was almost five. Mei waved at him as Doctor Strickland walked past. Mei felt better knowing the big boys were here too. If they were, then it was probably okay, even if the woman walking with Doctor Strickland wasn’t her mommy. Which reminded her…

  “Where’s Mommy?”

  “We’re going to go see Mommy in just a few minutes,” Doctor Strickland said. “We just have a couple more little things we need to do first.”

  “No,” Mei said. “I don’t want that.”

  He carried her into a room that looked a little like an examination room, only there weren’t any cartoon lions on the walls, and the
tables weren’t shaped like grinning hippos. Doctor Strickland put her onto a steel examination table and rubbed her head. Mei crossed her arms and scowled.

  “I want Mommy,” Mei said, and made the same impatient grunt that Daddy would.

  “Well, you just wait right here, and I’ll see what I can do about that,” Doctor Strickland said with a smile. “Umea?”

  “I think we’re good to go. Check with ops, load up, and let’s release it.”

  “I’ll go let them know. You stay here.”

  The woman nodded, and Doctor Strickland walked back out the door. The woman looked down at her, the pretty face not smiling at all. Mei didn’t like her.

  “I want my painting,” Mei said. “That’s not for you. That’s for Mommy.”

  The woman looked at the painting in her hand as if she’d forgotten it was there. She unrolled it.

  “It’s Mommy’s space monster,” Mei said. This time, the woman smiled. She held out the painting, and Mei snatched it away. She made some wrinkles in the paper when she did, but she didn’t care. She crossed her arms again and scowled and grunted.

  “You like space monsters, kid?” the woman asked.

  “I want my mommy.”

  The woman stepped close. She smelled like fake flowers and her fingers were skinny. She lifted Mei down to the floor.

  “C’mon, kid,” she said. “I’ll show you something.”

  The woman walked away and for a moment Mei hesitated. She didn’t like the woman, but she liked being alone even less. She followed. The woman walked down a short hallway, punched a key-code into a big metal door, like an old-fashioned airlock, and walked through when the door swung open. Mei followed her. The new room was cold. Mei didn’t like it. There wasn’t an examination table here, just a big glass box like they kept fish in at the aquarium, only it was dry inside, and the thing sitting there wasn’t a fish. The woman motioned Mei closer and, when Mei came near, knocked sharply on the glass.

  The thing inside looked up at the sound. It was a man, but he was naked and his skin didn’t look like skin. His eyes glowed blue like there was a fire in his head. And something was wrong with his hands.

  He reached toward the glass, and Mei started screaming.

  Chapter One: Bobbie

  Snoopy’s out again,” Private Hillman said. “I think his CO must be pissed at him.”

  Gunnery Sergeant Roberta Draper of the Martian Marine Corps upped the magnification on her armor’s heads-up display and looked in the direction Hillman was pointing. Twenty-five hundred meters away, a squad of four United Nations Marines were tromping around their outpost, backlit by the giant greenhouse dome they were guarding. A greenhouse dome identical in nearly all respects to the dome her own squad was currently guarding.

  One of the four UN Marines had black smudges on the sides of his helmet that looked like beagle ears.

  “Yep, that’s Snoopy,” Bobbie said. “Been on every patrol detail so far today. Wonder what he did.”

  Guard duty around the greenhouses on Ganymede meant doing what you could to keep your mind occupied. Including speculating on the lives of the Marines on the other side.

  The other side. Eighteen months before, there hadn’t been sides. The inner planets had all been one big, happy, slightly dysfunctional family. Then Eros, and now the two superpowers were dividing up the solar system between them, and the one moon neither side was willing to give up was Ganymede, breadbasket of the Jovian system.

  As the only moon with any magnetosphere, it was the only place where dome-grown crops stood a chance in Jupiter’s harsh radiation belt, and even then the domes and habitats still had to be shielded to protect civilians from the eight rems a day burning off Jupiter and onto the moon’s surface.

  Bobbie’s armor had been designed to let a soldier walk through a nuclear bomb crater minutes after the blast. It also worked well at keeping Jupiter from frying Martian Marines.

  Behind the Earth soldiers on patrol, their dome glowed in a shaft of weak sunlight captured by enormous orbital mirrors. Even with the mirrors, most terrestrial plants would have died, starved of sunlight. Only the heavily modified versions the Ganymede scientists cranked out could hope to survive in the trickle of light the mirrors fed them.

  “Be sunset soon,” Bobbie said, still watching the Earth Marines outside their little guard hut, knowing they were watching her too. In addition to Snoopy, she spotted the one they called Stumpy because he or she couldn’t be much over a meter and a quarter tall. She wondered what their nickname for her was. Maybe Big Red. Her armor still had the Martian surface camouflage on it. She hadn’t been on Ganymede long enough to get it resurfaced with mottled gray and white.

  One by one over the course of five minutes, the orbital mirrors winked out as Ganymede passed behind Jupiter for a few hours. The glow from the greenhouse behind her changed to actinic blue as the artificial lights came on. While the overall light level didn’t go down much, the shadows shifted in strange and subtle ways. Above, the sun-not even a disk from here as much as the brightest star-flashed as it passed behind Jupiter’s limb, and for a moment the planet’s faint ring system was visible.

  “They’re going back in,” Corporal Travis said. “Snoop’s bringing up the rear. Poor guy. Can we bail too?”

  Bobbie looked around at the featureless dirty ice of Ganymede. Even in her high-tech armor she could feel the moon’s chill.

  “Nope.”

  Her squad grumbled but fell in line as she led them on a slow low-gravity shuffle around the dome. In addition to Hillman and Travis, she had a green private named Gourab on this particular patrol. And even though he’d been in the Marines all of about a minute and a half, he grumbled just as loud as the other two in his Mariner Valley drawl.

  She couldn’t blame them. It was make-work. Something for the Martian soldiers on Ganymede to do to keep them busy. If Earth decided it needed Ganymede all to itself, four grunts walking around the greenhouse dome wouldn’t stop them. With dozens of Earth and Mars warships in a tense standoff in orbit, if hostilities broke out the ground pounders would probably find out only when the surface bombardment began.

  To her left, the dome rose to almost half a kilometer: triangular glass panels separated by gleaming copper-colored struts that turned the entire structure into a massive Faraday cage. Bobbie had never been inside one of the greenhouse domes. She’d been sent out from Mars as part of a surge in troops to the outer planets and had been walking patrols on the surface almost since day one. Ganymede to her was a spaceport, a small Marine base, and the even smaller guard outpost she currently called home.

  As they shuffled around the dome, Bobbie watched the unremarkable landscape. Ganymede didn’t change much without a catastrophic event. The surface was mostly silicate rock and water ice a few degrees warmer than space. The atmosphere was oxygen so thin it could pass as an industrial vacuum. Ganymede didn’t erode or weather. It changed when rocks fell on it from space, or when warm water from the liquid core forced itself onto the surface and created short-lived lakes. Neither thing happened all that often. At home on Mars, wind and dust changed the landscape hourly. Here, she was walking through the footsteps of the day before and the day before and the day before. And if she never came back, those footprints would outlive her. Privately, she thought it was sort of creepy.

  A rhythmic squeaking started to cut through the normally smooth hiss and thump sounds her powered armor made. She usually kept the suit’s HUD minimized. It got so crowded with information that a marine knew everything except what was actually in front of her. Now she pulled it up, using blinks and eye movements to page over to the suit diagnostic screen. A yellow telltale warned her that the suit’s left knee actuator was low on hydraulic fluid. Must be a leak somewhere, but a slow one, because the suit couldn’t find it.

  “Hey, guys, hold up a minute,” Bobbie said. “Hilly, you have any extra hydraulic fluid in your pack?”

  “Yep,” said Hillman, already pulling it out.
<
br />   “Give my left knee a squirt, would you?”

  While Hillman crouched in front of her, working on her suit, Gourab and Travis began an argument that seemed to be about sports. Bobbie tuned it out.

  “This suit is ancient,” Hillman said. “You really oughta upgrade. This sort of thing is just going to happen more and more often, you know.”

  “Yeah, I should,” Bobbie said. But the truth was that was easier said than done. Bobbie was not the right shape to fit into one of the standard suits, and the Marines made her jump through a series of flaming hoops every time she requisitioned a new custom one. At a bit over two meters tall, she was only slightly above average height for a Martian male, but thanks in part to her Polynesian ancestry, she weighed in at over a hundred kilos at one g. None of it was fat, but her muscles seemed to get bigger every time she even walked through a weight room. As a marine, she trained all the time.

  The suit she had now was the first one in twelve years of active duty that actually fit well. And even though it was beginning to show its age, it was just easier to try to keep it running than beg and plead for a new one.

  Hillman was starting to put his tools away when Bobbie’s radio crackled to life.

  “Outpost four to stickman. Come in, stickman.”

  “Roger four,” Bobbie replied. “This is stickman one. Go ahead.”

  “Stickman one, where are you guys? You’re half an hour late and some shit is going down over here.”

  “Sorry, four, equipment trouble,” Bobbie said, wondering what sort of shit might be going down, but not enough to ask about it over an open frequency.

  “Return to the outpost immediately. We have shots fired at the UN outpost. We’re going into lockdown.”

  It took Bobbie a moment to parse that. She could see her men staring at her, their faces a mix of puzzlement and fear.

  “Uh, the Earth guys are shooting at you?” she finally asked.

  “Not yet, but they’re shooting. Get your asses back here.”