Caliban;s war e-2

by James S. A. Corey

  Avasarala cut the link.

  “Oh, this ain’t good,” Alex said.

  “Well,” Avasarala said, then opened the faceplate on her helmet and let out a long sigh. She opened her purse and pulled a pistachio out of it. She cracked it and thoughtfully ate the meat, then put the shell in the nearby recycling chute. A tiny bit of the skin floated away in the microgravity. “No, actually, it should be fine. This is all posturing. As long as they keep comparing dicks, no one will shoot.”

  “But we can’t just wait here,” Prax said, shaking his head. Amos was floating in front of him, checking his helmet. Prax shoved him away and tried to get to his feet. He drifted away from his crash couch but didn’t think to turn on his boot mags. “If Mei is down there, we have to go. They’re talking about glassing the moon. We have to get there before they do it.”

  There was a high violin-string whine at the back of Prax’s voice. The tension was getting to him. It was getting to all of them, but Prax was the one who was going to show it worst and first. Holden shot a look at Amos, but the big man just looked surprised at having been pushed away by the much smaller scientist.

  “They’re talking about destroying the base. We have to go down there!” Prax continued, the panic in his voice starting to shine through.

  “We’re not doing anything,” Holden said. “Not until we have a better idea how this is going to shake out.”

  “We came all this way so that we can not do anything?” Prax demanded.

  “Doc, we don’t want to be the ones to move first,” Amos said, and put a hand on Prax’s shoulder, pulling him back down to the deck. The little botanist violently shrugged it off without turning around, then shoved off his couch toward Avasarala.

  “Give me the channel. Let me talk to them,” Prax said, reaching for her comm panel. “I can-”

  Holden launched himself out of his crash couch, catching the scientist mid-flight and hurling them both across the deck and into the bulkhead. The thick layer of anti-spalling padding absorbed their impact, but Holden felt the air go out of Prax when his hip slammed into the smaller man’s belly.

  “Gah,” Prax said, and curled up into a floating fetal ball.

  Holden kicked on his boot mags and pushed himself down to the deck. He grabbed Prax and pushed him across the compartment to Amos. “Take him below, stuff him in his bunk, and sedate the shit out of him. Then get to engineering and get us ready for a fight.”

  Amos nodded and grabbed the floating Prax. “Okay.” A moment later the two of them disappeared down the deck hatch.

  Holden looked around the room, seeing the shocked looks from Avasarala and Naomi but ignoring them. Prax’s need for his daughter to take precedence over everything else had almost put them all in danger again. And while Holden intellectually understood the man’s drive, having to stop him from killing them all every time Mei’s name came up was stress he didn’t need right then. It left him angry and needing to snap at someone.

  “Where the hell is Bobbie?” he said to no one in particular. He hadn’t seen her since they had put in to orbit around Io.

  “Just saw her in the machine shop,” Amos replied over the radio. “She was fieldstripping my shotgun. I think she’s doing all the guns and armor.”

  “That’s-” Holden started, ready to yell about something. “That’s actually really helpful. Tell her to button up her suit and turn her radio on. Things might be going south in a hurry here.”

  He took a few seconds to breathe and calm himself down, then returned to the combat operations station.

  “You okay?” Naomi asked over their private channel.

  “No,” he said, chinning the button to make sure only she heard his reply. “No, I’m actually scared to death.”

  “I thought we were past that.”

  “Past being scared?”

  “No,” she said, the smile audible in her voice. “Past blaming yourself for it. I’m scared too.”

  “I love you,” Holden said, feeling that same electric thrill he always got when he told her, part fear, part boast.

  “You should probably keep your eye on your station,” she said, her tone teasing. She never told him she loved him when he said it first. She’d said that when people did it too often, it made the word lose all its power. He understood the argument, but he’d kind of hoped she’d break her rule this once. He needed to hear it.

  Avasarala was hunched over the comm station like an ancient mystic peering into a murky crystal ball. The space suit hung on her like a scarecrow’s oversized coveralls. Holden considered ordering her to button up her helmet, then shrugged. She was old enough to decide for herself the relative risks and rewards of eating during a battle.

  Periodically she reached into her purse and pulled out another nut. The air around her was a growing cloud of tiny pieces of pistachio skin. It was annoying to watch her cluttering up his ship, but no warship was built so fragile that a little airborne waste would break anything. Either the tiny pieces of shell would be sucked into the air recycling system and trapped by the filters, or they’d go under thrust and all the garbage would fall to the floor, where they could sweep it up. Holden wondered if Avasarala had ever had to clean anything in her life.

  While he watched her, the old lady cocked her head to one side, listening with sudden interest to something only she could hear. Her hand darted forward, bird quick, to tap at the screen. A new voice came over the ship’s radios, this one with the faint hiss transmissions picked up when traveling for millions of kilometers through space.

  “-eneral Esteban Sorrento-Gillis. Some time ago, I announced the formation of an exploratory committee to look into possible misuse of UN resources for illegal biological weapon research. While that investigation is ongoing, and the committee is not prepared to bring charges at this time, in the interests of public safety and to better facilitate a thorough and comprehensive investigation, certain UN personnel in key positions are to be recalled to Earth for questioning. First, Admiral Augusto Nguyen, of the United Nations Navy. Second-”

  Avasarala hit the panel to shut off the feed and stared at the console with her mouth open for several seconds. “Oh, fuck me.”

  All over the ship, alarms started blaring.

  Chapter Forty-Eight: Avasarala

  I’ve got fast movers,” Naomi said over the blaring alarms. “The UN flagship is firing.”

  Avasarala closed her helmet, watching the in-suit display confirm the seal, then tapped at the communications console, her mind moving faster than her hands. Errinwright had cut a deal, and now Nguyen knew it. The admiral had just been hung out to dry, and he was taking it poorly. A flag popped up on the console: incoming high-priority broadcast. She thumbed it, and Souther appeared on her terminal and every other one in the ops deck.

  “This is Admiral Souther. I am hereby taking command of-”

  “Okay,” Naomi said. “I need my real screen back now. Got some work to do.”

  “Sorry, sorry,” Avasarala said, tapping at the console. “Wrong button.”

  “-this task force. Admiral Nguyen is relieved of duty. Any hostilities will be — ”

  Avasarala switched the feed to her own screen and in the process switched to a different broadcast. Nguyen was flushed almost purple. He was wearing his uniform like a boast.

  “-illegal and unprecedented seizure. Admiral Souther is to be escorted to the brig until-”

  Five incoming comm requests lit up, each listing a name and short-form transponder ID. She ignored them all for the broadcast controls. As soon as the live button went active, she looked into the camera.

  “This is Assistant Undersecretary Chrisjen Avasarala, representing the civilian government of Earth,” she said. “Legal and appropriate command of this force is given to Admiral Souther. Anyone rejecting or ignoring his orders will be subject to legal action. I repeat, Admiral Souther is in legally authorized command of-”

  Naomi made a low grunting sound. Avasarala stopped the broadcast and tu
rned.

  “Okay,” Holden said. “That was bad.”

  “What?” Avasarala said. “What was bad?”

  “One of the Earth ships just took three torpedo hits.”

  “It that a lot?”

  “The PDCs aren’t stopping them,” Naomi said. “Those UN torpedoes all have transponder codes that mark them as friends, so they’re sailing right through. They typically don’t expect to be getting shot at by other UN ships.”

  “Three is a lot,” Holden said, strapping into the crash couch. She didn’t see him touch any of the controls, but he must have, because when he spoke, it echoed through the ship as well as the speakers in her helmet. “We have just gone live. Everyone has to the count of twenty to get strapped in someplace safe.”

  “Solid copy on that,” Bobbie replied from wherever she was on the ship.

  “Just got the doc strapped in and happy,” Amos said. “I’m on my way to engineering.”

  “Are we heading into this?” Alex asked.

  “We’ve got something like thirty-five capital ships out there, all of them much, much bigger than us. How about we just try to keep anyone from shooting us full of holes.”

  “Yes, sir,” Alex said from the pilot’s deck. Any vestige of democracy and vote taking was gone. That was a good thing. At least Holden had control when there had to be a single voice in command.

  “I have two fast movers coming in,” Naomi said. “Someone still thinks we’re the bad guys.”

  “I blame Avasarala,” Bobbie said.

  Before Avasarala could laugh, gravity ticked up and slewed to the side, the Rocinante taking action beneath her. Her couch shifted and creaked. The protective gel squeezed her and let her go.

  “Alex?”

  “On ’em,” Alex said. “I wouldn’t mind getting a real gunner, sir.”

  “Are we going to have enough time to get her up here safely?”

  “Nope,” Alex said. “I’ve got three more incoming.”

  “I can take PDC control from here, sir,” Bobbie said. “It’s not the real thing, but it’s something the rest of you won’t have to do.”

  “Naomi, give the PDCs to the sergeant.”

  “PDC control transferred. It’s all yours, Bobbie.”

  “Taking control,” Bobbie said.

  Avasarala’s screen was a tangle of incoming messages in a flickering array. She started going through them. The Kennedy was announcing that Souther’s command was illegal. The Triton’s first officer was reporting that the captain had been relieved of duty, and requested orders from Souther. The Martian destroyer Iani Chaos was trying to reach Avasarala for clarification of which Earth ships it was permitted to shoot at.

  She pulled up the tactical display. Circles in red and green marked the swarm of ships; tiny silver threads showed what might have been streams of PDC fire or the paths of torpedoes.

  “Are we red or green?” Avasarala asked. “Who’s who on this fucking thing?”

  “Mars is red, Earth is green,” Naomi said.

  “And which Earth ones are on our side?”

  “Find out,” Holden said as one of the green dots suddenly vanished. “Alex?”

  “The Darius took the safeties off its PDCs, and now it’s spraying down everything in range whether it’s friend or foe. And… shit.”

  Avasarala’s chair shifted again, seeming to rise from under her, pressing her back into the gel until it was hard to lift her arms. On the tactical screen, the cloud of ships, enemy and friendly and ambiguous, shifted slightly, and two golden dots grew larger, proximity notations beside them counting quickly down.

  “Madam Assistant whatever you are,” Holden said, “you could respond to some of those comm requests now.”

  Avasarala’s gut felt like someone was squeezing it from below. The taste of salt and stomach acid haunted the back of her tongue. She was beginning to sweat in a way that had less to do with temperature than nausea. She forced her hands out to the control panel just as the two golden dots vanished.

  “Thank you, Bobbie,” Alex said. “I’m heading up. Gonna try to get the Martians between us and the fighting.”

  She started making calls. In the heat of a battle, all she had to offer was this: making calls. Talking. The same things she always did. Something about it was actually reassuring. The Greenville was accepting Souther’s command. The Tanaka wasn’t responding. The Dyson opened the channel, but the only sound was men shouting at each other. It was bedlam.

  A message came in from Souther, and she accepted it. It included a new IFF code, and she manually accepted the update. On the tactical, most of the green dots shifted to white.

  “Thank you,” Holden said. Avasarala swallowed her You’re welcome. The antinausea drugs seemed to be working for everyone else. She really, really didn’t want to throw up inside her helmet. One of the six remaining green dots blinked out of existence and another turned suddenly to white.

  “Ooh, right in the back,” Alex said. “That was cold.”

  Souther’s ID showed up again on Avasarala’s console, and she hit accept just as the Roci shifted again.

  “-the immediate surrender of the flagship King and Admiral Augusto Nguyen,” Souther was saying. His shock of white hair was standing up off his head as if the low thrust gravity was letting it expand like a peacock’s tail. His smile was sharp as a knife. “Any vessel that still refuses to acknowledge my orders as legal and legitimate will forfeit this amnesty. You have thirty seconds from this mark.”

  On the tactical display, the threads of silver and gold had, for the most part, vanished. The ships shifted positions, each moving along its own complex vectors. As she watched, all the remaining green dots turned to white. All except one.

  “Don’t be an asshole, Nguyen,” Avasarala said. “It’s over.”

  The ops deck was silent for a long moment, the tension almost unbearable. Naomi’s voice was the one to break it.

  “I’ve got more fast movers. Oh, I’ve got a lot of them.”

  “Where?” Holden snapped.

  “From the surface.”

  Avasarala didn’t do anything, but her tactical display resized, pulling back until the cluster of ships, red and white and the single defiant green, were less than a quarter of their original size and the massive curve of the moon’s surface impinged on the lower edge of the display. Rising like a solid mass, hundreds of fine yellow lines.

  “Get me a count,” Holden said. “I need a count here.”

  “Two hundred nineteen. No. Wait. Two hundred thirty.”

  “What the hell are they? Are those torpedoes?” Alex asked.

  “No,” Bobbie said. “They’re monsters. They launched the monsters.”

  Avasarala opened a broadcast channel. Her hair probably looked worse than Souther’s but she was well past vanity. That she could speak without fear of vomiting was blessing enough.

  “This is Avasarala,” she said. “The launch you are all seeing right now is a new protomolecule-based weapon that is being used as an unauthorized first strike against Mars. We need to shoot those fuckers out of the sky and do it now. Everyone.”

  “We’ve got a coordination override request coming through from Souther’s flagship,” Naomi said. “Surrender control?”

  “The hell I will,” Alex said.

  “No, but track requests,” Holden said. “I’m not handing control of my ship to a military fire-control computer, but we still need to be part of the solution here.”

  “The King’s starting a hard burn,” Alex said. “I think he’s trying to hightail it.”

  On the display, the attack from the surface of Io was beginning to bloom, individual threads coming apart in unexpected angles, some corkscrewing, some reaching out in bent paths like an insect’s articulated legs. Any one of them was the death of a planet, and the acceleration data put them at ten, fifteen, twenty g’s. Nothing human survived at a sustained twenty g. Nothing human had to.

  Golden flickers of light appeared from
the ships, drifting down to meet the threads of Io. The slow, stately pace of the display was undercut by the data. Plasma torpedoes burning full out, and yet it took long seconds for them to reach the main stem. Avasarala watched the first of them detonate, saw the column of protomolecule monsters split into a dozen different streams. Evasive action.

  “Some of those are coming toward us, Cap,” Alex said. “I don’t think they’re designed to hole a ship’s hull, but I’m pretty damn sure they’d do it anyway.”

  “Let’s get in there and do what we can. We can’t let any of these

  … Okay, where’d they go?”

  On the tactical display, the attacking monsters were blinking out of existence, the threads vanishing.

  “They’re cutting thrust,” Naomi said. “And the RF transponders are going dark. Must have radar-absorbing hull materials.”

  “Do we have tracking data? Can we anticipate where they’re going to be?”

  The tactical display began to flicker. Fireflies. The monsters shifting in and out, thrusting in what looked like semi-random directions, but the bloom of them always expanding.

  “This is going to be a bitch,” Alex said. “Bobbie?”

  “I’ve got some target locks. Get us in PDC range.”

  “Hang on, kids,” Alex said. “We’re going for a ride.”

  The Roci bucked hard, and Avasarala pressed back into her seat. The shuddering rhythm seemed to be her own trembling muscles and then the firing PDCs and then her body again. On the display, the combined forces of Earth and Mars spread out, running after the near-invisible foes. Thrust gravity shifted, spinning her couch one way and then another without warning. She tried closing her eyes, but that was worse.

  “Hmm.”

  “What, Naomi?” Holden said. “ ‘Hmm’ what?”

  “The King was doing something strange there. Huge activity from the maneuvering thrusters and… Oh.”

  “‘Oh’ what? Nouns. I need nouns.”

  “She’s holed,” Naomi said. “One of the monsters holed her.”

  “Told you they could do that,” Alex said. “Hate to be on the ship right now. Still. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer fella.”