Caliban;s war e-2

by James S. A. Corey

  The cotton ticking disappeared, resolving into the image of a pale, new root springing from a seed. He felt himself smile. Well, that’s interesting.

  “What is, Doc?” Amos asked. Prax realized he must have spoken aloud.

  “Um,” Prax said, trying to gather the words that would explain what he’d seen. “It’s trying to move up a radiation gradient. I mean… the version of the protomolecule that was loose on Eros fed off radiation energy, and so I guess it makes sense that this one would too-”

  “This one?” Alex asked. “What one?”

  “This version. I mean, this one’s obviously been engineered to repress most of the changes. It’s hardly changed the host body at all. There have to be novel constraints on it, but it still seems to need a source of radiation.”

  “Why, Doc?” Amos asked. He was trying to be patient. “Why do we think it needs radiation?”

  “Oh,” Prax said. “Because we shut down the drive, and so the reactor is running at maintenance level, and now it’s trying to dig through to the core.”

  There was a pause, and then Alex said something obscene.

  “Okay,” Holden said. “There’s no choice. Alex, you need to get that thing out of here before it gets through the bulkhead. We don’t have time to build a new plan.”

  “Captain,” Alex said. “Jim-”

  “I’ll be in one second after it’s gone,” Amos said. “If you aren’t there, it’s been an honor serving with you, Cap.”

  Prax waved his hands, as if the gesture could get their attention. The movement sent him looping slowly through the operations deck.

  “Wait. No. That is the new plan,” he said. “It’s moving up a radiation gradient. It’s like a root heading toward water.”

  Naomi had turned to look at him as he spun. She seemed to spin, and Prax’s brain reset to feeling that she was below him, spiraling away. He closed his eyes.

  “You’re going to have to walk us through this,” Holden said. “Quickly. How can we control it?”

  “Change the gradient,” Prax said. “How long would it take to put together a container with some unshielded radioisotopes?”

  “Depends, Doc,” Amos said. “How much do we need?”

  “Just more than is leaking through from the reactor right now,” Prax said.

  “Bait,” Naomi said, catching hold of him and pulling him to a handhold. “You want to make something that looks like better food and lure that thing out the door with it.”

  “I just said that. Didn’t I just say that?” Prax asked.

  “Not exactly, no,” Naomi said.

  On the screen, the creature was slowly building a cloud of metal shavings. Prax wasn’t sure, because the resolution of the image wasn’t actually all that good, but it seemed like its hand might be changing shape as it dug. He wondered how much the constraints placed on the protomolecule’s expression took damage and healing into account. Regenerative processes were a great opportunity for constraining systems to fail. Cancer was just cell replication gone mad. If it was starting to change, it might not stop.

  “Regardless,” Prax said, “I think we should probably hurry.”

  The plan was simple enough. Amos would reenter the cargo bay and free the captain as soon as the bay doors had shut behind the intruder. Naomi, in ops, would trigger the doors to close the moment the creature had gone after the radioactive bait. Alex would fire the engines as soon as doing so wouldn’t kill the captain. And the bait-a half-kilo cylinder with a thin case of lead foil to keep it from attracting the beast too early-would be walked out through the main airlock and tossed into the vacuum by the only remaining crewman.

  Prax floated in the airlock, bait trap in the thick glove of the environment suit. Regrets and uncertainty flooded through his mind.

  “Maybe it would be better if Amos did this part,” Prax said. “I’ve never actually done any extravehicular anything before.”

  “Sorry, Doc. I’ve got a ninety-kilo captain to haul,” Amos said.

  “Couldn’t we automate this? A lab waldo could-”

  “Prax,” Naomi said, and the gentleness of the syllable carried the weight of a thousand get-your-ass-out-theres. Prax checked the seals on his suit one more time. Everything reported good. The suit was much better than the one he’d worn leaving Ganymede. It was twenty-five meters from the personnel airlock near the front of the ship to the cargo bay doors at the extreme aft. He wouldn’t even have to go all the way there. He tested the radio tether to make sure it was clipped tightly into the airlock’s plug.

  That was another interesting question. Was the radio-jamming effect a natural output of the monster? Prax tried to imagine how such a thing could be generated biologically. Would the effect end when the monster left the ship? When it was burned up by the exhaust?

  “Prax,” Naomi said. “Now is good.”

  “All right,” he said. “I’m going out.”

  The outer airlock door cycled open. His first impulse was to push out into the darkness the way he would into a large room. His second was to crawl on his hands and knees, keeping as much of his body against the skin of the ship as humanly possible. Prax took the bait in one hand and used the toe rings to lift himself up and out.

  The darkness around him was overwhelming. The Rocinante was a raft of metal and paint on an ocean. More than an ocean. The stars wrapped around him in all directions, the nearest ones hundreds of lifetimes away, and then more past those and more past those. The sense of being on a tiny little asteroid or moon looking up at a too-wide sky flipped and he was at the top of the universe, looking down into an abyss without end. It was like a visual illusion flipping between a vase and then two faces, then back again at the speed of perception. Prax grinned up, spreading his arms into the nothingness even as the first taste of nausea crawled up the back of his tongue. He’d read accounts of extravehicular euphoria, but the experience was unlike anything he’d imagined. He was the eye of God, drinking in the light of infinite stars, and he was a speck of dust on a speck of dust, clipped by his mag boots to the body of a ship unthinkably more powerful than himself, and unimportant before the face of the abyss. His suit’s speakers crackled with background radiation from the birth of the universe, and eerie voices whispered in the static.

  “Uh, Doc?” Amos said. “There a problem out there?”

  Prax looked around, expecting to see the mechanic beside him. The milk-white universe of stars was all that met him. With so many, it seemed like they should sum to brightness. Instead, the Rocinante was dark except for the EVA lights and, toward the rear of the ship, a barely visible white nebula where atmosphere had blown out from the cargo bay.

  “No,” Prax said. “No problems.”

  He tried to take a step forward, but his suit didn’t budge. He pulled, straining to lift his foot from the plating. His toe moved forward a centimeter and stopped. Panic flared in his chest. Something was wrong with the mag boots. At this rate, he’d never make it to the cargo bay door before the creature dug through and into engineering and the reactor itself.

  “Um. I have a problem,” he said. “I can’t move my feet.”

  “What are the slide controls set to?” Naomi asked.

  “Oh, right,” Prax said, moving the boot settings down to match his strength. “I’m fine. Never mind.”

  He’d never actually walked with mag boots before, and it was a strange sensation. For most of the stride, his leg felt free and almost uncontrolled, and then, as he brought his foot toward the hull, there would be a moment, a critical point, when the force took hold and slammed him to the metal. He made his way floating and being snatched down, step by step. He couldn’t see the cargo bay doors, but he knew where they were. From his position looking aft, they were to the left of the drive cone. But on the right side of the ship. No, starboard side. They call it starboard on ships.

  He knew that just past the dark metal lip that marked the edge of the ship, the creature was digging at the walls, clawing through the fl
esh of the ship toward its heart. If it figured out what was going on-if it had the cognitive capacity for even basic reasoning-it could come boiling up out of the bay at him. Vacuum didn’t kill it. Prax imagined himself trying to clomp away on his awkward magnetic boots while the creature cut him apart; then he took a long, shuddering breath and lifted the bait.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m in position.”

  “No time like the present,” Holden said, his voice strained with pain but attempting to be light.

  “Right,” Prax said.

  He pressed the small timer, hunched close to the hull of the ship, and then, with every muscle in his body, uncurled and flung the little cylinder into nothing. It flew out, catching the light from the cargo bay interior and then vanishing. Prax had the nauseating certainty that he’d forgotten a step, and that the lead foil wouldn’t come off the way it was supposed to.

  “It’s moving,” Holden said. “It smelled it. It’s going out.”

  And there it was, long black fingers folding up from the ship, the dark body pulling itself up to the ship’s exterior like it had been born to the abyss. Its eyes glowed blue. Prax heard nothing but his own panicked breathing. Like an animal in the ancient grasslands of Earth, he had the primal urge to be still and silent, though through the vacuum, the creature wouldn’t have heard him if he’d shrieked.

  The creature shifted; the eerie eyes closed, opened again, closed; and then it leapt. The un-twinkling stars were eclipsed by its passage.

  “Clear,” Prax said, shocked by the firmness of his voice. “It’s clear of the ship. Close the cargo doors now.”

  “Check,” Naomi said. “Closing doors.”

  “I’m coming in, Cap’n,” Amos said.

  “I’m passing out, Amos,” Holden said, but there was enough laughter in the words that Prax was pretty sure he was joking.

  In the darkness, a star blinked out and then came back. Then another. Prax mentally traced the path. Another star eclipsed.

  “I’m heating her back up,” Alex said. “Let me know when you’re all secure, right?”

  Prax watched, waited. The star stayed solid. Shouldn’t it have gone dark like the others? Had he misjudged? Or was the creature looping around? If it could maneuver in raw vacuum, could it have noticed Alex bringing the reactor back online?

  Prax turned back toward the main airlock.

  The Rocinante had seemed like nothing-a toothpick floating on an ocean of stars. Now the distance back to the airlock was immense. Prax moved one foot, then the other, trying to run without ever having both feet off the deck. The mag boots wouldn’t let him release them both at the same time, the trailing foot trapped until the lead one signaled it was solid. His back itched, and he fought the urge to look behind. Nothing was there, and if something was, looking wouldn’t help. The cable of his radio link turned from a line into a loop that trailed behind him as he moved. He pulled on it to take up the slack.

  The tiny green-and-yellow glow of the open airlock called to him like something from a dream. He heard himself whimpering a little, but the sound was lost in a string of profanity from Holden.

  “What’s going on down there?” Naomi snapped.

  “Captain’s feeling a little under the weather,” Amos said. “Think he maybe wrenched something.”

  “My knee feels like someone gave birth in it,” Holden said. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Are we clear for burn?” Alex asked.

  “We are not,” Naomi said. “Cargo doors are as closed as they’re going to get until we hit the docks, but the forward airlock isn’t sealed.”

  “I’m almost in,” Prax said, thinking, Don’t leave me here. Don’t leave me in the pit with that thing.

  “Right, then,” Alex said. “Let me know when I can get us the hell out of here.”

  In the depth of the ship, Amos made a small sound. Prax reached the airlock, pulling himself in with a violence that made the joints of his suit creak. He yanked on his umbilical to pull it the rest of the way in after him. He flung himself against the far wall, slapping at the controls until the cycle started and the outer door slid closed. In the dim light of the airlock proper, Prax spun slowly on all three axes. The outer door remained closed. Nothing ripped it open; no glowing blue eyes appeared to crawl in after him. He bumped gently against the wall as the distant sound of an air pump announced the presence of atmosphere.

  “I’m in,” he said. “I’m in the airlock.”

  “Is the captain stable?” Naomi asked.

  “Was he ever?” Amos replied.

  “I’m fine. My knee hurts. Get us out of here.”

  “Amos?” Naomi said. “I’m seeing you’re still in the cargo bay. Is there a problem?”

  “Might be,” Amos said. “Our guy left something behind.”

  “Don’t touch it!” Holden’s voice was harsh as a bark. “We’ll get a torch and burn it down to its component atoms.”

  “Don’t think that’d be a good idea,” Amos said. “I’ve seen these before, and they don’t take well to cutting torches.”

  Prax levered himself up to standing, adjusting the slides on his boots to keep him lightly attached to the airlock floor. The inner airlock door chimed that it was safe to remove his suit and reenter the ship. He ignored it and activated one of the wall panels. He switched to a view of the cargo bay. Holden was floating near the cargo airlock. Amos was hanging on to a wall-mounted ladder and examining something small and shiny stuck to the bulkhead.

  “What is it, Amos?” Naomi asked.

  “Well, I’d have to clean some of this yuck off it,” Amos said. “But it looks like a pretty standard incendiary charge. Not a big one, but enough to vaporize about two square meters.”

  There was a moment of silence. Prax released the seal on his helmet, lifted it off, and took a deep breath of the ship’s air. He switched to an outside camera. The monster was drifting behind the ship, suddenly visible again in the faint light coming out of the cargo bay, and slowly receding from view. It was wrapped around his radioactive bait.

  “A bomb,” Holden said. “You’re telling me that thing left a bomb?”

  “And pretty damn peculiar too. If you ask me,” Amos replied.

  “Amos, come with me into the cargo airlock,” Holden said. “Alex, what’s left to do before we burn that monster up? Is Prax back inside?”

  “You guys in the ’lock?” Alex said.

  “We are now. Do it.”

  “Don’t need to say it twice,” Alex said. “Brace for acceleration.”

  The biochemical cascade that came from euphoria and panic and the reassurance of safety slowed Prax’s response time so that when the burn began, he didn’t quite have his legs under him. He stumbled against the wall, knocking his head against the inner door of the airlock. He didn’t care. He felt wonderful. He’d gotten the monster off the ship. It was burning up in the Rocinante’s fiery tail even as he watched.

  Then an angry god kicked the side of the ship and sent it spinning across the void. Prax was ripped from his feet, the gentle magnetic tug of his boots not enough to stop it. The outer airlock door rushed at him, and the world went black.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Avasarala

  There was another spike. A third one. Only this time, there didn’t seem to be any chance of Bobbie’s monsters being involved. So maybe… maybe it was coincidence. Which opened the question. If the thing hadn’t come from Venus, then where?

  The world, however, had conspired to distract her.

  “She’s not what we thought she was, ma’am,” Soren said. “I fell for the little lost Martian thing too. She’s good.”

  Avasarala leaned back in her chair. The intelligence report on her screen showed the woman she’d called Roberta Draper in civilian clothes. If anything, they made her look bigger. The name listed was Amanda Telele. Free operative of the Martian Intelligence Service.

  “I’m still looking into it,” Soren said. “It looks like there really was a Roberta Draper, b
ut she died on Ganymede with the other marines.”

  Avasarala waved the words away and scrolled through the report. Records of back-channel steganographic messages between the alleged Bobbie and a known Martian operative on Luna beginning the day that Avasarala had recruited her. Avasarala waited for the fear to squeeze her chest, the sense of betrayal. They didn’t come. She kept turning to new parts of the report, taking in new information and waiting for her body to react. It kept not happening.

  “We looked into this why?” she asked.

  “It was a hunch,” Soren said. “It was just the way she carried herself when she wasn’t around you. She was a little too… slick, I guess. She just didn’t seem right. So I took the initiative. I said it was from you.”

  “So that I wouldn’t look like such a fucking idiot for inviting a mole into my office?”

  “Seemed like the polite thing to do,” Soren said. “If you’re looking for ways to reward my good service, I do accept bonuses and promotion.”

  “I fucking bet you do,” Avasarala said.

  He waited, leaning a little forward on his toes. Waiting for her to give the order to have Bobbie arrested and submitted for a full intelligence debriefing. As euphemisms went, “full intelligence debriefing” was among the most obscene, but they were at war with Mars, and a high-value intelligence agent planted in the heart of the UN would know things that were invaluable.

  So, Avasarala thought, why am I not reacting to this?

  She reached out to the screen, paused, pulled back her hand, frowning.

  “Ma’am?” Soren said.

  It was the smallest thing, and the least expected. Soren bit at the inside of his bottom lip. It was a tiny movement, almost invisible. Like a tell at a poker table. And as she saw it, Avasarala knew.

  There was no thinking it out, no reasoning, no struggle or second-guessing. It was all simply there, clear in her mind as if she had always known it, complete and perfect. Soren was nervous because the report she was looking at wouldn’t hold up to rigorous scrutiny.