Caliban;s war e-2

by James S. A. Corey

  She wondered. It was a stretch to believe there was anything human down on Venus. The protomolecule, as well as anyone understood it, had been designed to hijack primitive life and remake it into something else. But if… If the complexity of a human mind had been too much for it to totally control, and the girl had in some sense survived the descent, if she’d reached out to her daddy…

  Avasarala reached for her hand terminal and opened a connection to Soren.

  “Ma’am?”

  “When I said don’t hurry, I didn’t mean you should take the whole fucking day off. My tea?”

  “Coming, ma’am. I got sidetracked. I have a report for you that might be interesting.”

  “Less interesting if the tea’s cold,” she said, and dropped the channel.

  Putting any kind of real surveillance on Mao would probably be impossible. Mao-Kwikowski Mercantile would have its own communications arrays, its own encryption schemes, and several rival companies at least as well funded as the United Nations already bent on ferreting out corporate secrets. But there might be other ways to track communications coming off Venus and going to Mao-Kwik installations. Or messages going down that well.

  Soren came in carrying a tray with a cast-iron teapot and an earthenware cup with no handle. He didn’t comment on the darkness, but walked carefully to her desk, set down the tray, poured out a smoky, dark cupful of still-steaming tea, and put his hand terminal on the desk beside it.

  “You could just send me a fucking copy,” Avasarala said.

  “More dramatic this way, ma’am,” Soren said. “Presentation is everything.”

  She snorted and pointedly picked up the cup, blowing across the dark surface before she looked at the terminal. The date stamp at the lower right showed it as coming from outside Ganymede seven hours earlier and the identification code of the associated report. The man in the picture had the stocky bones of an Earther, unkempt dark hair, and a peculiar brand of boyish good looks. Avasarala frowned at the image as she sipped her tea.

  “What happened to his face?” she asked.

  “The reporting officer suggested the beard was intended as a disguise.”

  She snorted.

  “Well, thank God he didn’t put on a pair of glasses, we might never have figured it out. What the fuck is James Holden doing on Ganymede?”

  “It’s a relief ship. Not the Rocinante.”

  “We have confirmation on that? You know those OPA bastards can fake registration codes.”

  “The reporting officer did a visual inspection of the interior layout and checked the record when he got back. Also, the crew didn’t include Holden’s usual pilot, so we assume they’ve got it parked-and-dark somewhere in tightbeam range,” Soren said. He paused. “There is a standing detain-on-sight for Holden.”

  Avasarala turned the lights back on. The windows became dark mirrors again; the storm was pressed back outside.

  “Tell me we didn’t enforce it,” Avasarala said.

  “We didn’t enforce it,” Soren said. “We have a surveillance detail on him and his team, but the situation on the station isn’t conducive to a close watch. Plus which, it doesn’t look like Mars knows he’s there yet, so we’re trying to keep that to ourselves.”

  “Good that someone out there knows how to run an intelligence operation. Any idea what he’s doing?”

  “So far, it looks a lot like a relief effort,” Soren said with a shrug. “We haven’t seen him meeting with anybody of special interest. He’s asking questions. Almost got into a fight with some opportunists who’ve been shaking down relief ships, but the other guys backed down. It’s early, though.”

  Avasarala took another sip of tea. She had to give it to the boy; he could brew a fine pot of tea. Or he knew someone who could, which was just as good. If Holden was there, that meant the OPA was interested in the situation on Ganymede. And that they didn’t have someone already on the ground to report to them.

  Wanting the intelligence didn’t in itself mean much. Even if it had been just a bunch of idiot ground-pounders getting trigger-happy, Ganymede was a critical station for the Jovian system and the Belt. The OPA would want their own eyes on the scene. But to send Holden, the only survivor of Eros Station, seemed more than coincidental.

  “They don’t know what it is,” she said aloud.

  “Ma’am?”

  “They smuggled in someone with experience in the protomolecule for a reason. They’re trying to figure out what the hell’s going on. Which means they don’t know. Which means…” She sighed. “Which means it wasn’t them. Which is a fucking pity, since they’ve got the only live sample we know about.”

  “What would you like the surveillance team to do?”

  “Surveillance,” she snapped. “Watch him, see who he talks to and what he does. Daily reports back if it’s boring, real-time updates if it runs hot.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Do you want him brought in?”

  “Pull him and his people in when they try to leave Ganymede. Otherwise stay out of their way and try not to get noticed. Holden’s an idiot, but he’s not stupid. If he realizes he’s being watched, he’ll start broadcasting pictures of all our Ganymede sources or something. Do not underestimate his capacity to fuck things up.”

  “Anything else?”

  Another flash of lightning. Another roll of thunder. Another storm among trillions of storms that had assaulted the Earth since back in the beginning, when something had first tried to end all life on the planet. Something that was on Venus right now. And spreading.

  “Find a way for me to get a message to Fred Johnson without Nguyen or the Martians finding out,” she said. “We may need to do some back-channel negotiation.”

  Chapter Ten: Prax

  Pas kirrup es I’m to this,” the boy sitting on the cot said. “Pinche salad, sa-sa? Ten thousand, once was.”

  He couldn’t have been more than twenty. Young enough, technically, to be his son, just as Mei could have been the boy’s daughter. Colt-thin from adolescent growth and a life in low g, his thinness was improbable to begin with. And he’d been starving besides.

  “I can write you a promissory note if you want,” Prax said.

  The boy grinned and made a rude gesture.

  From his professional work, Prax knew that the inner planets thought of Belter slang as a statement about location. He knew from living as a food botanist on Ganymede that it was also about class. He had grown up with tutors in accent-free Chinese and English. He’d spoken with men and women from everywhere in the system. From the way someone said allopolyploidy, he could tell if they came from the universities around Beijing or Brazil, if they’d grown up in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains or Olympus Mons or in the corridors of Ceres. He’d grown up in microgravity himself, but Belt patois was as foreign to him as to anyone fresh up the well. If the boy had wanted to speak past him, it would have been effortless. But Prax was a paying customer, and he knew the boy was making an effort to dial it back.

  The programming keyboard was twice as large as a standard hand terminal, the plastic worn by use and time. A progress bar was slowly filling along the side, notations in simplified Chinese cycling with each movement.

  The hole was a cheap one near the surface of the moon. No more than ten feet wide, four rough rooms inched into the ice from a public corridor hardly wider or better lit. The old plastic walls glittered and wept with condensation. They were in the room farthest from the corridor, the boy on his cot and Prax standing hunched in the doorway.

  “No promise for the full record,” the boy said. “What is, is, sabe?”

  “Anything you can get would be great.”

  The boy nodded once. Prax didn’t know his name. It wasn’t the sort of thing to ask. The days it had taken to track down someone willing to break through the security system had been a long dance between his own ignorance of Ganymede Station’s gray economy and the increasing desperation and hunger in even the most corrupt quarters. A month before, the boy might
have been skimming commercial data to resell or hold hostage for easily laundered private credit. Today he was looking for Mei in exchange for enough leafy greens to make a small meal. Agricultural barter, the oldest economy in humanity’s record, had come to Ganymede.

  “Authcopy’s gone,” the boy said. “Sucked into servers, buried ass deep.”

  “So if you can’t break the security servers — ”

  “Don’t have to. Camera got memory, memory got cache. Since the lockdown, it’s just filling and filling. No one watching.”

  “You’re kidding,” Prax said. “The two biggest armies in the system are staring each other down, and they’re not watching the security cameras?”

  “Watching each other. No one half-humps for us.”

  The progress bar filled completely and chimed. The boy pulled open a list of identifying codes and started paging through them, muttering to himself. From the front room, a baby complained weakly. It sounded hungry. Of course it did.

  “Your kid?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “Collateral,” he said, and tapped twice on a code. A new window opened. A wide hall. A door half melted and forced open. Scorch marks on the walls and, worse, a puddle of water. There shouldn’t be free water. The environmental controls were getting further and further away from their safe levels. The boy looked up at Prax. “C’est la?”

  “Yes,” Prax said. “That’s it.”

  The boy nodded and hunched back over his console.

  “I need it before the attack. Before the mirror came down,” Prax said.

  “Hokay, boss. Waybacking. Tod a frames con null delta. Only see when something happens, que si?”

  “Fine. That’s fine.”

  Prax moved forward, leaning to look over the boy’s shoulder. The image jittered without anything on the screen changing except the puddle, slowly getting smaller. They were going backward through time, through the days and weeks. Toward the moment when it had all fallen apart.

  Medics appeared in the screen, appearing to walk backward in the inverted world as they brought a dead body to lay beside the door. Then another draped over it. The two corpses lay motionless; then one moved, pawing gently at the wall, then more strongly until, in an eyeblink, he staggered to his feet and was gone.

  “There should be a girl. I’m looking for who brought out a four-year-old girl.”

  “Sa day care, no? Should be a thousand of them.”

  “I only care about the one.”

  The second corpse sat up and then stood, clutching her belly. A man stepped into the frame, a gun in his hand, healing her by sucking the bullet from her guts. They argued, grew calm, parted peaceably. Prax knew he was seeing it all in reverse, but his sleep-and calorie-starved brain kept trying to make the images into a narrative. A group of soldiers crawled backward out of the ruined door, like a breech birth, then huddled, backed away in a rush. A flash of light, and the door had made itself whole, thermite charges clinging to it like fruit until a soldier in a Martian uniform rushed forward to collect them safely. Their technological harvest complete, the soldiers all backed rapidly away, leaving a scooter behind them, leaning against the wall.

  And then the door slid open, and Prax saw himself back out. He looked younger. He beat on the door, hands popping off the surface in staccato bursts, then leapt awkwardly onto the scooter and vanished backward.

  The door went quiet. Motionless. He held his breath. Walking backward, a woman carrying a five-year-old boy on her hip went to the door, vanished within, and then reappeared. Prax had to remind himself that the woman hadn’t been dropping her son off, but retrieving him. Two figures backed down the corridor.

  No. Three.

  “Stop. That’s it,” Prax said, his heart banging against his ribs. “That’s her.”

  The boy waited until all three figures were caught in the camera’s eye, stepping out into the corridor. Mei’s face was petulant; even in the low resolution of the security camera, he knew the expression. And the man holding her…

  Relief warred with outrage in his chest, and relief won. It was Dr. Strickland. She’d gone with Dr. Strickland, who knew about her condition, about the medicine, about all the things that needed to be done to keep Mei alive. He sank to his knees, his eyes closed and weeping. If he’d taken her, she wasn’t dead. His daughter wasn’t dead.

  Unless, a thin demonic thought whispered in his brain, Strickland was too.

  The woman was a stranger. Dark-haired with features that reminded Prax of the Russian botanists he’d worked with. She was holding a roll of paper in her hand. Her smile might have been one of amusement or impatience. He didn’t know.

  “Can you follow them?” he asked. “See where they went?”

  The boy looked at him, lips curled.

  “For salad? No. Box of chicken and atche sauce.”

  “I don’t have any chicken.”

  “Then you got what you got,” the boy said with a shrug. His eyes had gone dead as marbles. Prax wanted to hit him, wanted to choke him until he dug the images out of the dying computers. But it was a fair bet the boy had a gun or something worse, and unlike Prax, he likely knew how to use it.

  “Please,” Prax said.

  “Got your favor, you. No epressa me, si?”

  Humiliation rose in the back of his throat, and he swallowed it down.

  “Chicken,” he said.

  “Si.”

  Prax opened his satchel and put a double handful of leaves, orange peppers, and snow onions on the cot. The boy snatched up a half of it and stuffed it into his mouth, eyes narrowing in animal pleasure.

  “I’ll do what I can,” Prax said.

  He couldn’t do anything.

  The only edible protein still on the station was either coming in a slow trickle from the relief supplies or walking around on two feet. People had started trying Prax’s strategy, grazing off the plants in the parks and hydroponics. They hadn’t bothered with the homework, though. Inedibles were eaten all the same, degrading the air-scrubbing functions and throwing the balance of the station’s ecosystem further off. One thing was leading to another, and chicken couldn’t be had, or anything that might substitute for it. And even if there was, he didn’t have time to solve that problem.

  In his own home, the lights were dim and wouldn’t go bright. The soybean plant had stopped growing but didn’t fade, which was an interesting datapoint, or would have been.

  Sometime during the day, an automated system had clicked into a conservation routine, limiting energy use. In the big picture, it might be a good sign. Or it might be the fever break just before the catastrophe. It didn’t change what he had to do.

  As a boy, he’d entered the schools young, shipping up with his family to the sunless reaches of space, chasing a dream of work and prosperity. He hadn’t taken the change well. Headaches and anxiety attacks and constant, bone-deep fatigue had haunted those first years when he needed to impress his tutors, be tracked as bright and promising. His father hadn’t let him rest. The window is open until the window is closed, he’d say, and then push Prax to do a little more, to find a way to think when he was too tired or sick or in pain to think. He’d learned to make lists, notes, outlines.

  By capturing his fleeting thoughts, he could drag himself to clarity like a mountain climber inching toward a summit. Now, in the artificial twilight, he made lists. The names of all the children he could remember from Mei’s therapy group. He knew there were twenty, but he could only remember sixteen. His mind wandered. He put the image of Strickland and the mystery woman on his hand terminal, staring at it. The confusion of hope and anger swirled in him until it faded. He felt like he was falling asleep, but his pulse was racing. He tried to remember if tachycardia was a symptom of starvation.

  For a moment, he came to himself, clear and lucid in a way he only then realized he hadn’t been in days. He was starting to crash. His own personal cascade was getting ahead of him, and he wouldn’t be able to keep up his investigati
on much longer without rest. Without protein. He was already half zombie.

  He had to get help. His gaze drifted to the list of children’s names. He had to get help, but first he’d check, just check. He’d go to… go to…

  He closed his eyes, frowned. He knew the answer. He knew that he knew. The security station. He’d go there and ask about each of them. He opened his eyes, writing security station down under the list, capturing the thought. Then UN outreach station. Mars outreach. All the places he’d been before, day after day, only now with new questions. It would be easy. And then, when he knew, there was something else he was supposed to do. It took a minute to figure out what it was, and then he wrote it at the bottom of the page.

  Get help.

  “They’re all gone,” Prax said, his breath ghosting white in the cold. “They’re all his patients, and they’re all gone. Sixteen out of sixteen. Do you know the probability of that? It’s not random.”

  The security man hadn’t shaved in days. A long, angry ice burn reddened his cheek and neck, the wound fresh and untreated. His face must have touched an uninsulated piece of Ganymede. He was lucky to still have skin. He wore a thick coat and gloves. There was frost on the desk.

  “I appreciate the information, sir, and I’ll see it gets out to the relief stations — ”

  “No, you don’t understand, he took them. They’re sick, and he took them.”

  “Maybe he was trying to keep them safe,” the security man said. His voice was a gray rag, limp and weary. There was a problem with that. Prax knew there was a problem with that, but he couldn’t remember what it was. The security man reached out, gently moving him aside, and nodded to the woman behind him. Prax found himself staring at her like he was drunk.

  “I want to report a murder,” she said, her voice shaking.

  The security man nodded, neither surprise nor disbelief in his eyes. Prax remembered.

  “He took them first,” he said. “He took them before the attack happened.”

  “Three men broke into my apartment,” the woman said. “They… My brother was with me and he tried to stop them.”