Caliban;s war e-2

by James S. A. Corey

  Once Bobbie was outside the UN compound, her agoraphobia lessened. Buildings rose around her like walls of steel and glass, moving the dizzying skyline far enough up that she no longer saw it. Small electric cars whizzed down the streets, trailing a high-pitched whine and the scent of ozone.

  And people were everywhere.

  Bobbie had gone to a couple of games at Armstrong Stadium on Mars, to watch the Red Devils play. The stadium had seats for twenty thousand fans. Because the Devils were usually at the bottom of the standings, it generally held less than half that. That relatively modest number was the greatest number of humans Bobbie had ever seen in one place at one time. There were billions of people on Mars, but there weren’t a lot of open spaces for them to gather. Standing at an intersection, looking down two streets that seemed to stretch into infinity, Bobbie was sure she saw more than the average attendance of a Red Devils game just walking on the sidewalks. She tried to imagine how many people were in the buildings that rose to vertigo-inducing heights in every direction around her, and couldn’t. Millions of people, probably in just the buildings and streets she could see.

  And if Martian propaganda was right, most of the people she could see right now didn’t have jobs. She tried to imagine that, not having any particular place you had to be on any given day.

  What the Earthers had discovered is that when people have nothing else to do, they have babies. For a brief period in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the population had looked like it might shrink rather than continue to grow. As more and more women went into higher education, and from there to jobs, the average family size grew smaller.

  A few decades of massive employment shrinkage ended that.

  Or, again, that was what she’d been taught in school. Only here on Earth, where food grew on its own, where air was just a by-product of random untended plants, where resources lay thick on the ground, could a person actually choose not to do anything at all. There was enough extra created by those who felt the need to work that the surplus could feed the rest. A world no longer of the haves and the have-nots, but of the engaged and the apathetic.

  Bobbie found herself standing next to a street-level coffee shop and took a seat.

  “Can I get you anything?” a smiling young woman with brightly dyed blue hair asked.

  “What’s good?”

  “We make the best soy-milk tea, if you like that.”

  “Sure,” Bobbie said, not sure what soy-milk tea was, but liking those two things separately enough to take a chance.

  The blue-haired girl bustled away and chatted with an equally young man behind the bar while he made the tea. Bobbie looked around her, noticing that everyone she saw working was about the same age.

  When the tea arrived, she said, “Hey, do you mind if I ask you something?”

  The girl shrugged, her smile an invitation.

  “Is everyone who works here the same age?”

  “Well,” she said. “Pretty close. Gotta collect your pre-university credits, right?”

  “I’m not from here,” Bobbie said. “Explain that.”

  Blue seemed actually to see her for the first time, looking over her uniform and its various insignias.

  “Oh, wow, Mars, right? I want to go there.”

  “Yeah, it’s great. So tell me about the credits thing.”

  “They don’t have that on Mars?” she asked, puzzled. “Okay, so, if you apply to a university, you have to have at least a year of work credits. To make sure you like working. You know, so they don’t waste classroom space on people who will just go on basic afterward.”

  “Basic?”

  “You know, basic support.”

  “I think I understand,” Bobbie said. “Basic support is the money you live on if you don’t work?”

  “Not money, you know, just basic. Gotta work to have money.”

  “Thanks,” Bobbie said, then sipped her milk tea as Blue trotted to another table. The tea was delicious. She had to admit, it made a sad kind of sense to do some early winnowing before spending the resources to educate people. Bobbie told her terminal to pay the bill, and it flashed a total at her after calculating the exchange rate. She added a nice tip for the blue-haired girl who wanted more from life than basic support.

  Bobbie wondered if Mars would become like this after the terraforming. If Martians didn’t have to fight every day to make enough resources to survive, would they turn into this? A culture where you could actually choose if you wanted to contribute? The work hours and collective intelligence of fifteen billion humans just tossed away as acceptable losses for the system. It made Bobbie sad to think of. All that effort to get to a point where they could live like this. Sending their kids to work at a coffee shop to see if they were up to contributing. Letting them live the rest of their lives on basic if they weren’t.

  But one thing was for sure: All that running and exercising the Martian Marines did at one full gravity was bullshit. There was no way Mars could ever beat Earth on the ground. You could drop every Martian soldier, fully armed, into just one Earth city and the citizens would overwhelm them using rocks and sticks.

  Deep in the grip of pathos, she suddenly felt a massive weight lift that she hadn’t even realized she’d been carrying. Thorsson and his bullshit didn’t matter. The pissing contest with Earth didn’t matter. Making Mars into another Earth didn’t matter, not if this was where it was headed.

  All that mattered was finding out who’d put that thing on Ganymede.

  She tossed off the last of her tea and thought, I’ll need a ride.

  Chapter Sixteen: Holden

  Beyond the door lay a long hallway that looked, to Holden, exactly the same as every other hallway on Ganymede: ice walls with moisture-resistant and insulated structural plates and inset conduit, rubberized walking surface, full-spectrum LEDs to mimic sunlight slanting down from the blue skies of Earth. They could have been anywhere.

  “We’re sure this is right, Naomi?”

  “That’s the one we saw Mei go through in the hacker’s footage,” she replied.

  “Okay,” he said, then dropped to one knee and motioned for his ad hoc army to do the same. When everyone was in a rough circle around him, he said, “Our overwatch, Naomi, has intel on the layout of these tunnels, but not much else. We have no idea where the bad guys are, or even if they’re still here.”

  Prax started to object, but Amos quieted him with a heavy hand on his back.

  “So we could conceivably leave a lot of intersections at our back. I don’t like that.”

  “Yeah,” said Wendell, the Pinkwater leader. “I don’t like that much either.”

  “So we’re going to leave a lookout at each intersection until we know where we’re going,” Holden replied, then said, “Naomi, put all their hand terminals on our channel. Guys, put in your ear-buds. Comm discipline is don’t speak unless I ask a direct question, or someone is about to die.”

  “Roger,” said Wendell, echoed by the rest of his team.

  “Once we know what we’re looking at, I’ll call all the lookouts up to our position if needed. If not, they’re our way out of here if we’re in over our heads.”

  Nods all around.

  “Outstanding. Amos is point. Wendell, you cover our asses. Everyone else, string out at one-meter intervals,” Holden said, then tapped on Wendell’s breastplate. “We do this thing clean, and I’ll talk to my OPA people about putting a few credits in your accounts in addition to getting you offworld.”

  “Righteous,” the thin woman with the cheap armor said, and then racked a round in her machine pistol.

  “Okay, let’s go. Amos, Naomi’s map says fifty meters to another pressure door, then some warehouse space.”

  Amos nodded, then shouldered his weapon, a heavy automatic shotgun with a thick magazine. He had several more magazines and a number of grenades dangling from his Martian armor’s harness. The metal clicked a little as he walked. Amos headed off down the hallway at a fast walk. H
olden gave a quick glance behind, gratified to see the Pinkwater people keeping up the pace and the spacing. They might look half starved, but they knew what they were doing.

  “Cap, there’s a tunnel coming off to the right just before the pressure door,” Amos said, stopping and dropping to one knee to cover the unexpected corridor.

  It didn’t appear on the map. That meant that new tunnels had been dug after the station specs had last been updated. Modifications like that meant he had even less information than he’d thought. It wasn’t a good thing.

  “Okay,” Holden said, pointing at the thin woman with the machine pistol. “You are?”

  “Paula,” she said.

  “Paula, this is your intersection. Try not to shoot anyone that doesn’t shoot at you first, but do not let anyone past you for any reason.”

  “Solid copy on that,” Paula said, and took up a position looking down the side corridor with her weapon at the ready.

  Amos pulled a grenade off his harness and handed it to her.

  “Just in case shit goes down,” he said. Paula nodded, settled her back against the wall. Amos, taking point, moved toward the pressure door.

  “Naomi,” Holden said, looking over the door and locking mechanism. “Pressure door, uh, 223-B6. Pop it.”

  “Got it,” she said. A few seconds later, Holden heard the bolts retract.

  “Ten meters to the next mapped intersection,” he said, then looked at the Pinkwater people and picked one gruff-looking older man at random. “That’s your intersection when we get there.”

  The man nodded, and Holden gestured at Amos. The mechanic took hold of the hatch with his right hand and began counting down from five with his left. Holden took up a position facing the door, his assault rifle at the ready.

  When Amos hit one, Holden took a deep breath, and he burst through the door as Amos yanked it open a split second later.

  Nothing.

  Just another ten meters of corridor, dimly lit by the few LEDs that hadn’t failed in the decades since its last use. Years of micro-frost melt had built a texture over the surface of the walls like dripping spiderwebs. It looked delicate, but it was mineralized as hard as stone. It reminded Holden of a graveyard.

  Amos began advancing to the intersection and the next hatch, his gun aimed down the hallway. Holden followed him, his rifle tracking right as he kept it aimed at the side passage, the reflex to cover every possible ingress point to their position having become automatic over the last year.

  His year as a cop.

  Naomi had said this wasn’t him. He’d left the Navy without seeing live combat outside pirate hunting from the comfort of a warship’s operations deck. He’d worked for years on the Canterbury, hauling ice from Saturn to the Belt without ever having to worry about something more violent than drunken ice buckers fighting out their boredom. He’d been the peacemaker, the one who always found the way to keep things cool. When tempers flared, he’d keep it calm or keep it funny or just sit for a shift and listen to someone rave and rant whatever it was out of their system.

  This new person he’d become reached for his gun first and talked second. Maybe she was right. How many ships had he slagged in the year since Eros? A dozen? More? He comforted himself with the thought that they were all very bad people. The worst kind of carrion eaters, using the chaos of war and the retreat of the Coalition Navy as an opportunity to pillage. The kind of people who’d strip all the expensive parts off your engine, steal your spare air, and leave you adrift to suffocate. Every one of their ships he’d shot down had probably saved dozens of innocent ships, hundreds of lives. But doing it had taken something from him that he occasionally felt the lack of.

  Occasions like when Naomi had said, This isn’t you.

  If they tracked down the secret base where Mei had been taken, there was a good chance they’d have to fight to get her back. Holden found himself hoping it would bother him, if for no other reason than to prove that it still could.

  “Cap? You okay?”

  Amos was staring at him.

  “Yeah,” Holden said, “I just need a different job.”

  “Might not be the best moment for a career change, Cap.”

  “Fair point,” Holden said, and pointed to the older Pinkwater man he’d singled out before. “This is your intersection. Same instructions. Hold it unless I call you.”

  The older guy shrugged and nodded, then turned to Amos. “Don’t I get a grenade too?”

  “Nah,” Amos said, “Paula’s cuter than you.” He counted down from five, and Holden went through the door, same as last time.

  He’d been ready for another featureless gray corridor, but on the other side there was a wide-open space, with a few tables and dusty equipment scattered haphazardly around the room. A massive 3-D copier emptied of resin and partially disassembled, a few light industrial waldoes, the kind of complex automated supply cabinet that usually lurked under desks in scientific labs or medical bays. The mineralized webwork was on the walls but not the boxes or equipment. A glass-walled cube two meters to a side sat off in one corner. One of the tables had a small bundle of sheets or tarps piled on it. Across the room another hatch stood closed.

  Holden pointed to the abandoned equipment and said to Wendell, “See if you can find a network access point. If you can, plug this into it.” He handed Naomi’s hastily rigged network bridge to him.

  Amos sent two of the remaining Pinkwater people up to the next hatch to cover it, then came back to Holden and gestured with his gun toward the glass box.

  “Big enough for a couple kids,” he said. “Think that’s where they kept ’em?”

  “Maybe,” Holden said, moving over to examine it. “Prax, can you-” Holden stopped when he realized the botanist had gone over to the tables and was standing next to the bundle of rags. With Prax standing next to the bundle, Holden’s perspective shifted and suddenly it didn’t look like a pile of rags at all. It looked very much like a small body under a sheet.

  Prax was staring at it, his hand darting toward it and then pulling back. He was shaking all over.

  “This… this is…” he said to no one in particular, his hand moving out and back again.

  Holden looked at Amos, then gestured at Prax with his eyes. The big mechanic moved over to him and put a hand on his arm.

  “How’s about you let us take a look at that, okay?”

  Holden let Amos guide Prax a few steps away from the table before he moved over to it. When he lifted the sheet to look under, Prax made a sharp noise like the intake of breath before a scream. Holden shifted his body to block Prax’s view.

  A small boy lay on the table. He was skinny, with a mop of unruly black hair and dark skin. His clothes were bright: yellow pants and a green shirt with a cartoon crocodile and daisies. It wasn’t immediately clear what had killed him.

  Holden heard a commotion and turned around to see Prax, red-faced and struggling to get past Amos to the table. The mechanic was restraining him with one arm in a grip that was halfway between a wrestling hold and an embrace.

  “It’s not her,” Holden said. “It’s a kid, but it’s not her. A boy. Four, maybe five years old.”

  When Amos heard that, he let the struggling Prax go. The botanist rushed to the table, flipping the sheet over and giving one quick cry.

  “That’s Katoa,” Prax said. “I know him. His father…”

  “It’s not Mei,” Holden repeated, putting a hand on Prax’s shoulder. “We need to keep looking.”

  Prax shrugged his hand off.

  “It’s not Mei,” Holden said again.

  “But Strickland was here,” Prax said. “He was their doctor. I thought if he was with them, they’d be…”

  Holden said nothing. He was thinking the same thing. If one of the kids was dead, they could all be.

  “I thought that meant they’d keep them alive,” Prax said. “But they let Katoa die. They just let him die and they put him under this sheet. Basia, I’m so sorry…”


  Holden grabbed Prax and spun him around. The way he imagined a cop would.

  “That,” he said, pointing at the small body on the table, “is not Mei. Do you want to find her? Then we need to keep moving.”

  Prax’s eyes were filled with tears and his shoulders shook in silent sobs, but he nodded and walked away from the table. Amos watched him carefully. The mechanic’s expression was unreadable. The thought came unbidden: I hope bringing Prax was a good idea.

  Across the room, Wendell whistled and waved a hand. He pointed at Naomi’s network access rig plugged into a port in the wall and gave the thumbs-up.

  “Naomi, you in?” Holden said while he pulled the sheet back up to cover the dead boy.

  “Yep, I’m in,” she said, her tone distracted as she worked with the incoming data. “Traffic in this node is encrypted. Got the Somnambulist started on it, but she’s not nearly as smart as the Roci. This could take a while.”

  “Keep trying,” Holden replied, and signaled to Amos. “But if there’s traffic on the network, someone’s still here.”

  “If you wait a minute,” Naomi said, “I might be able to give you the security cameras and a more up-to-date floor plan.”

  “Feed us what you can, when you can, but we’re not waiting.”

  Amos ambled over to Holden and tapped the visor of his helmet. Prax was standing alone by the glass cube, staring into it like there was something to see. Holden expected Amos to say something about the man, but Amos surprised him.

  “Been paying attention to the temperature, Cap?”

  “Yeah,” Holden replied. “Every time I check it says ‘cold as hell.’”

  “I was just over by the door,” Amos continued. “It went up about half a degree.”

  Holden thought about that for a moment, double-checking it on his own HUD and tapping his fingers on his thigh.

  “There’s climate in the next room. They’re heating it.”

  “Seems likely,” Amos said, shifting the big auto-shotgun into both hands and thumbing off the safety.

  Holden motioned the remaining Pinkwater people over to them.