Caliban;s war e-2

by James S. A. Corey

  “I’ve read your file,” Avasarala said. “You faced down a UN corvette during the Eros incident.”

  “Yeah, one corvette. We were a match for her. And I got her to back down by threatening the unarmed science ship she was escorting. This isn’t even remotely the same thing.”

  “So what does the infamous James Holden do at his last stand?”

  He was silent for a while.

  “He rats,” Holden said. “We know what’s going on. We have all the pieces now. Mao-Kwik, the protomolecule monsters, where they’re taking the kids… everything. We put all the data in a file and broadcast it to the universe. They can still kill us if they want to, but we can make it a pointless act of revenge. Keep it from actually helping them.”

  “No,” Avasarala said.

  “Uh, no? You might be forgetting whose ship you’re on.”

  “I’m sorry, did I seem to give a fuck that this is your ship? If I did, really, I was just being polite,” Avasarala said, giving him a withering glare. “You aren’t going to fuck up the whole solar system just because you’re a one-trick pony. We have bigger fish to fry.”

  Holden counted to ten in his head and said, “Your idea is?”

  “Send it to these two UN admirals,” she said, then tapped something on her terminal. His buzzed with the received file. “Souther and Leniki. Mostly Souther. I don’t like Leniki, and he hasn’t been in the loop on this, but he’s a decent backup.”

  “You want my last act before being killed by a UN admiral to be sending all of the vital information I have to a UN admiral.”

  Avasarala leaned back into her chair and rubbed her temples with her fingertips. Holden waited. “I’m tired,” she said after a few moments. “And I miss my husband. It’s like an ache in my arms that I can’t hold him right now. Do you know what that’s like?”

  “I know exactly what that ache feels like.”

  “So I want you to understand that I’m sitting here, right now, coming to terms with the idea that I won’t see him again. Or my grandchildren. Or my daughter. My doctors said I probably had a good thirty years left in me. Time to watch my grandkids grow up, maybe even see a great-grandchild or two. But instead, I’m going to be killed by a limp-dick, whiny sonofabitch like Admiral Nguyen.”

  Holden could feel the massive weight of those six destroyers bearing down on them, murder in their hearts. It felt like having a pistol pushed into his ribs from behind. He wanted to shake the old woman and tell her to hurry up.

  She smiled at him.

  “My last act in this universe isn’t going to be fucking up everything I did right up to now.”

  Holden made a conscious effort to ignore his frustration. He got up and opened the refrigerator. “Hey, there’s leftover pudding. Want some?”

  “I’ve read your psych profile. I know all about your ‘everyone should know everything’ naive bullshit. But how much of the last war was your fault, with your goddamned endless pirate broadcasts? Well?”

  “None of it,” Holden said. “Desperate psychotic people do desperate psychotic things when they’re exposed. I refuse to grant them immunity from exposure out of fear of their reaction. When you do, the desperate psychos wind up in charge.”

  She laughed. It was a surprisingly warm sound.

  “Anyone who understands what’s going on is at least desperate and probably psychotic to boot. Dissociative at the least. Let me explain it this way,” Avasarala said. “You tell everyone, and yeah, you’ll get a reaction. And maybe, weeks, or months, or years from now, it will all get sorted out. But you tell the right people, and we can sort it out right now.”

  Amos and Prax walked into the galley together. Amos had his big thermos in his hand and headed straight toward the coffeepot. Prax followed him and picked up a mug. Avasarala’s eyes narrowed and she said, “Maybe even save that little girl.”

  “Mei?” Prax said immediately, putting the mug down and turning around.

  Oh, that was low, Holden thought. Even for a politician.

  “Yes, Mei,” Avasarala replied. “That’s what this is about, right, Jim? Not some personal crusade, but trying to save a little girl from very bad people?”

  “Explain how-” Holden started, but Avasarala kept talking right over the top of him.

  “The UN isn’t one person. It isn’t even one corporation. It’s a thousand little, petty factions fighting against each other. Their side’s got the floor, but that’s temporary. That’s always temporary. I know people who can move against Nguyen and his group. They can cut off his support, strip him of ships, even recall and court-martial him given enough time. But they can’t do any of that if we’re in a shooting war with Mars. And if you toss everything you know into the wind, Mars won’t have time to wait and figure out the subtleties; they’ll have no choice but to preemptively strike against Nguyen’s fleet, Io, what’s left of Ganymede. Everything.”

  “Io?” Prax said. “But Mei-”

  “So you want me to give all the info to your little political cabal back on Earth, when the entire reason for this problem is that there are little political cabals back on Earth.”

  “Yes,” Avasarala said. “And I’m the only hope she’s got. You have to trust me.”

  “I don’t. Not even a little bit. I think you’re part of the problem. I think you see all of this as political maneuvering and power games. I think you want to win. So no, I don’t trust you at all.”

  “Hey, uh, Cap?” Amos said, slowly screwing the top onto his thermos. “Ain’t you forgetting something?”

  “What, Amos? What am I forgetting?”

  “Don’t we vote on shit like this now?”

  “Don’t pout,” Naomi said. She was stretched out on a crash couch next to the main operations panel on the ops deck. Holden was seated across the room from her at the comm panel. He’d just sent out Avasarala’s data file to her two UN admirals. His fingers itched with the desire to dump it into a general broadcast. But they’d debated the issue for the crew, and she’d won the vote. The whole voting thing had seemed like such a good idea when he’d first brought it up. After losing his first vote, not so much. They’d all be dead in two days, so at least it probably wouldn’t happen again.

  “If we get killed, and Avasarala’s pet admirals don’t actually do anything with the data we just sent, this was all for nothing.”

  “You think they’ll bury it?” Naomi said.

  “I don’t know, and that’s the problem. I don’t know what they’ll do. We met this UN politician two days ago and she’s already running the ship.”

  “So send it to someone else too,” Naomi said. “Someone who you can trust to keep it quiet, but can get the word out if the UN guys turn out to be working for the wrong team.”

  “That’s not a bad idea.”

  “Fred, maybe?”

  “No.” Holden laughed. “Fred would see it as political capital. He’d use it to bargain with. It needs to be someone that has nothing to gain or lose by using it. I’ll have to think about it.”

  Naomi got up, then came over to straddle his legs and sit on his lap facing him. “And we’re all about to die. That’s not making any of this any easier.”

  Not all of us.

  “Naomi, gather the crew up, the marine and Avasarala too. The galley, I guess. I have some last business to announce. I’ll meet you guys there in ten minutes.”

  She kissed him lightly on the nose. “Okay. We’ll be there.”

  When she disappeared from sight down the crew ladder, Holden opened up the chief of the watch’s locker. Inside were a set of very out-of-date codebooks, a manual of Martian naval law, and a sidearm and two magazines of ballistic gel rounds. He took out the gun, loaded it, and strapped the belt and holster around his waist.

  Next he went back to the comm station and put Avasarala’s data package into a tightbeam transmission that would bounce from Ceres to Mars to Luna to Earth, using public routers all the way. It would be unlikely to send up any red flags. He hit
the video record button and said, “Hi, Mom. Take a look at this. Show it to the family. I have no idea how you’ll know when the right time to use it is, but when that time comes, do with it whatever seems best. I trust you guys, and I love you.”

  Before he could say anything else or think better of the whole thing, he hit the transmit key and turned the panel off.

  He called up the ladder-lift, because riding it would take longer than climbing the ladder and he needed time to think out exactly how to play the next ten minutes. When he reached the crew deck, he still didn’t have it all figured out, but he squared his shoulders and walked into the galley anyway.

  Amos, Alex, and Naomi were sitting on one side of the table, facing him. Prax was in his usual perch on the counter. Bobbie and Avasarala sat sideways on the other side of the table so that they could see him. That put the marine less than two meters away, with nothing between her and him. Depending on how this went, that might be a problem.

  He dropped his hand to the butt of the gun at his hip to make sure everyone saw it, then said, “We have about two days before elements of the UN Navy get close enough to overwhelm our defenses with a torpedo salvo and destroy this ship.”

  Alex nodded, but no one spoke.

  “But we have the Mao racing pinnace that brought Avasarala to us attached to the hull. It holds two. We’re going to stick two people on it and get them away. Then we’re going to turn around and head straight for those UN ships to buy the pinnace time. Who knows, we may even take one with us. Get ourselves a few servants in the afterlife.”

  “Fucking A,” Amos said.

  “I can support that,” Avasarala said. “Who’re the lucky bastards? And how do we stop the UN ships from just killing it after they kill this ship?”

  “Prax and Naomi,” Holden said immediately, before anyone else could speak. “Prax and Naomi go on the ship.”

  “Okay,” Amos said, nodding.

  “Why?” Naomi and Avasarala said at the same moment.

  “Prax because he’s the face of this whole thing. He’s the guy who figured it all out. And because when someone finally rescues his little girl, it’d be nice if her daddy was there,” Holden said. Then, tapping the butt of the gun with his fingers: “And Naomi because I fucking said so. Questions?”

  “Nope,” Alex said. “Works for me.”

  Holden was watching the marine closely. If someone tried to take the gun from him, it would be her. And she worked for Avasarala. If the old lady decided she wanted to be on the Razorback when it left, the marine would be the one who tried to make that happen. But to his surprise, she didn’t move except to raise her hand.

  “Sergeant?” Holden said.

  “Two of those six Martian ships that are tailing the UN boys are new Raptor-class fast cruisers. They can probably catch the Razorback if they really want to.”

  “Would they?” Holden asked. “It was my impression that they were there to keep an eye on the UN ships and nothing else.”

  “Well, probably not, but…” She drifted off mid-sentence with a distant look in her eyes.

  “So that’s the plan,” Holden said. “Prax, Naomi, get whatever supplies you need packed up and get on the Razorback. Everyone else, I’d appreciate it if you waited here while they did that.”

  “Hold on a minute-” Naomi protested, her voice angry.

  Before Holden could respond, Bobbie spoke again.

  “Hey, you know? I just had an idea.”

  Chapter Forty-Three: Bobbie

  They were all missing something. It was like someone knocking at the back of her mind, demanding to be let in. Bobbie went over it in her head. Sure, that prick Nguyen showed every sign he was willing to kill the Rocinante, ranking UN politician on board or not. Avasarala had made a gamble that her presence would back the UN ships off. It seemed she was about to lose that bet. There were still six UN destroyers bearing down on them.

  But there were six more ships tailing them.

  Including, as she’d just pointed out to Holden, two Raptor-class fast-attack cruisers. Top-of-the-line Martian military hardware, and more than a match for any UN destroyer. Along with the two cruisers were four Martian destroyers. They might or might not be better than their UN counterparts, but with the two cruisers in their wing, they had a significant tonnage and firepower advantage. And they were following the UN ships to see that they weren’t about to do something to escalate the shooting war.

  Like killing the one UN politician who wasn’t straining at the leash for a war with Mars.

  “Hey, you know?” Bobbie said before she realized she was going to say anything. “I just had an idea…”

  The galley fell silent.

  Bobbie had a sudden and uncomfortable memory of speaking up in the UN conference room and wrecking her military career in the process. Captain Holden, the cute one who was a little too full of himself, was staring at her, a not particularly flattering gape on his face. He looked like a very angry person who’d lost his train of thought mid-rant. And Avasarala was staring at her too. Though, having learned to read the old lady’s expression better, she didn’t see anger there. Just curiosity.

  “Well,” Bobbie said, clearing her throat. “There are six Martian ships following those UN ships. And the Martian ships outclass them. Both navies are at high alert.”

  No one moved or spoke. Avasarala’s curiosity had turned to a frown. “So,” Bobbie continued, “they might be willing to back us up.”

  Avasarala’s frown had only gotten deeper. “Why,” she said, “would the Martians give a fuck about protecting me from being killed by my own damn Navy?”

  “Would it hurt to ask?”

  “No,” Holden said. “I’m thinking no. Is everyone else here thinking it wouldn’t hurt?”

  “Who’d make the call?” Avasarala asked. “You? The traitor?”

  The words were like a gut punch. But Bobbie realized what the old lady was doing. She was hitting Bobbie with the worst possible Martian response. Gauging her reaction to it.

  “Yeah, I’d open the door,” Bobbie said. “But you’re the one that will have to convince them.”

  Avasarala stared at her for one very long minute, then said, “Okay.”

  “Repeat that, Rocinante,” the Martian commander said. The connection was as clear as if they were standing in the room with the man. It wasn’t the sound quality that was throwing him. Avasarala spoke slowly, enunciating carefully, all the same.

  “This is Assistant Undersecretary Chrisjen Avasarala of the United Nations of Earth,” Avasarala said again. “I am about to be attacked by a rogue element of the UN Navy while on my way to a peacekeeping mission in the Jupiter system. Fucking save me! I will reward you by talking my government out of glassing your planet.”

  “I’m going to have to send this up the chain,” the commander said. They weren’t using a video link, but the grin was audible in his voice.

  “Call whoever you need to call,” Avasarala said. “Just make a decision before these cunts start raining missiles down on me. All right?”

  “I’ll do my best, ma’am.”

  The skinny one-her name was Naomi-killed the connection and swiveled to look at Bobbie. “Why would they help us, again?”

  “Mars doesn’t want a war,” Bobbie replied, hoping she wasn’t talking completely out her ass. “If they find out that the UN’s voice of reason is on a ship that’s about to be killed by rogue UN war hawks, it only makes sense for them to step in.”

  “Kind of sounds like you’re talking out your ass there,” Naomi said.

  “Also,” Avasarala said, “I just gave them permission to shoot at the UN Navy without political repercussions.”

  “Even if they help,” Holden said, “there’s no way they can completely stop the UN ships from taking some shots at us. We’ll need an engagement plan.”

  “We just got this damn thing put back together,” Amos said.

  “I still say we stick Prax and Naomi on the Razorback,” Holde
n said.

  “I’m starting to think that’s a bad idea,” Avasarala said. She took a sip of coffee and grimaced. The old lady was definitely missing her five cups of tea a day.

  “Explain,” Holden said.

  “Well, if the Martians decide they’re on our side, that changes the whole landscape for those UN ships. They can’t beat all seven of us, if I understand the math right.”

  “Okay,” Holden said.

  “That makes it in their interest not to be called a rogue element in the history books. If Nguyen’s cabal fails, everyone on his team gets at minimum a court-martial. The best way to make sure that doesn’t happen is to make sure I don’t survive this fight, no matter who wins.”

  “Which means they’ll be shooting at the Roci,” Naomi said. “Not the pinnace.”

  “Of course not,” Avasarala said with a laugh. “Because of course I’ll be on the pinnace. You think for a second they’ll believe that you’re desperately trying to protect an escape craft that I’m not on? And I bet the Razorback doesn’t have those PDCs you were talking about. Does it?”

  To Bobbie’s surprise, Holden was nodding as Avasarala spoke. She’d sort of pegged him as a know-it-all who fell in love only with his own ideas.

  “Yeah,” Holden said. “You’re absolutely right. They’ll fling everything they’ve got at the Razorback as she tries to get away, and she’ll have no defense.”

  “Which means we all live or we all die, right here on this ship,” Naomi said with a sigh. “As usual.”

  “So, again,” Holden said. “We need an engagement plan.”

  “This is a pretty thin crew,” Bobbie said now that the conversation had moved back to her area of expertise. “Where’s everyone usually sit?”

  “Operations officer,” Holden said, pointing at Naomi. “She also does electronic warfare and countermeasures. And she’s a savant, considering she’d never worked it before we got this ship.”

  “Mechanic-” Holden started, pointing at Amos.

  “Grease monkey,” Amos said, cutting him off. “I do my best to keep the ship from falling apart when there’s holes in it.”