Caliban;s war e-2

by James S. A. Corey

  So Holden hurried out of the hotel and onto the streets of Lovell City. A quick pedicab ride got him to the tube station, and a twenty-minute tube ride took him to the New Hague United Nations complex. A perky young page was waiting for him when he arrived, and he was escorted efficiently through the complex’s twisty maze of corridors to a door marked CONFERENCE ROOM 34.

  “You can wait inside, sir,” the perky page chirped at him.

  “No, you know?” Holden said, clapping the boy on the shoulder. “I think I’ll wait out here.”

  The page dipped his head slightly and bustled off down the corridor, already looking at his hand terminal for whatever his next task was. Holden leaned against the corridor wall and waited. In the low gravity, standing was hardly any more effort than sitting, and he really wanted to see Mao perp-walked down the hallway to his meeting.

  His terminal buzzed, and he got a short text message from Avasarala. It said ON OUR WAY.

  Less than five minutes later, Jules-Pierre Mao climbed off an elevator into the corridor, flanked by two of the largest military police officers Holden had ever seen. Mao had his hands cuffed in front of him. Even wearing a prisoner’s jumpsuit, hands in restraints, and with armed guards escorting him, he managed to look arrogant and in control. As they approached, Holden stood up straight and stepped in their way. One of the MPs yanked on Mao’s arm to stop him and gave Holden a subtle nod. It seemed to say, I’m down for whatever with this guy. Holden had a sense that if he yanked a pistol out of his pants and shot Mao right there in the corridor, the two MPs would discover they had both been struck with blindness at the same moment and failed to see anything.

  But he didn’t want to shoot Mao. He wanted what he always seemed to want in these situations. He wanted to know why.

  “Was it worth it?”

  Even though they were the same height, Mao managed to frown down at him. “You are?”

  “Awww, come on,” Holden said with a grin. “You know me. I’m James Holden. I helped bring down your pals at Protogen, and now I’m about to finish that job with you. I’m also the one that found your daughter after the protomolecule had killed her. So I’ll ask again: Was it worth it?”

  Mao didn’t answer.

  “A dead daughter, a company in ruins, millions of people slaughtered, a solar system that will probably never have peaceful stability again. Was it worth it?”

  “Why are you here?” Mao finally asked. He looked smaller when he said it. He wouldn’t make eye contact.

  “I was there, in the room, when Dresden got his and I’m the man who killed your pet admiral. I just feel like there’s this wonderful symmetry in being there when you get yours.”

  “Antony Dresden,” Mao said, “was shot in the head three times execution style. Is that what passes for justice with you?”

  Holden laughed. “Oh, I doubt Chrisjen Avasarala is going to shoot you in the face. Do you think what’s coming will be better?”

  Mao didn’t reply, and Holden looked at the MP and gestured toward the conference room door. They almost looked disappointed as they pushed Mao into the room and attached his restraints to a chair.

  “We’ll be waiting out here, sir, if you need us,” the larger of the two MPs said. They took up flanking positions next to the door.

  Holden went into the conference room and took a chair, but he didn’t say anything else to Mao. A few moments later, Avasarala shuffled into the room, talking on her hand terminal.

  “I don’t give a fuck whose birthday it is, you make this happen before my meeting is over or I’ll have your nuts as paperweights.” She paused as the person on the other end said something. She grinned at Mao and said, “Well, go fast, because I have a feeling my meeting will be short. Good talking to you.”

  She sank into a chair directly across the table from Mao. She didn’t look at Holden or acknowledge him at all. He suspected that the record would never reflect his presence in the room. Avasarala put her terminal on the tabletop and leaned back in her chair. She didn’t speak for several tense seconds. When she did, it was to Holden. She still didn’t look at him.

  “You’ve gotten paid for hauling me back here?”

  “Payment’s cleared,” Holden said.

  “That’s good. I wanted to ask you about a longer-term contract. It would be civilian, of course, but-”

  Mao cleared his throat. Avasarala smiled at him.

  “I know you’re there. I’ll be right with you.”

  “I’ve already got a contract,” Holden said. “We’re escorting the first reconstruction flotilla to Ganymede. And after that, I’m thinking we’ll probably be able to get another escort gig from there. Still a lot of people relocating who’d rather not get stopped by pirates along the way.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Mao’s face was white with humiliation. Holden let himself enjoy it.

  “I’ve just gotten done working for a government,” Holden said. “I didn’t wear it well.”

  “Oh please. You worked for the OPA. That’s not a government, it’s a rugby scrum with a currency. Yes, Jules, what is it? You need to go to the potty?”

  “This is beneath you,” Mao said. “I didn’t come here to be insulted.”

  Avasarala’s smile was incandescent.

  “You’re sure about that? Let me ask, do you remember what I said the first time we met?”

  “You asked me to tell you about any involvement I might have had with the protomolecule project run by Protogen.”

  “No,” Avasarala replied. “I mean, yes, I did ask that. But that’s not the part that you should be caring about right now. You lied to me. Your involvement with weaponizing the Protogen project is fully exposed, and that question is like asking what color Tuesday was. It’s meaningless.”

  “Let’s get down to brass tacks,” Mao said. “I can-”

  “No,” Avasarala interrupted. “The part you should be caring about is what I said just before you left. Do you remember that?”

  He looked blankly up at her.

  “I didn’t think so. I told you that if I found out later you’d hidden something from me, I wouldn’t take it well.”

  “Your exact words,” Mao said with a mocking grin, “were ‘I am not someone you want to fuck with.’”

  “So you do remember,” she said, not a hint of humor in her tone. “Good. This is where you get to find out what that means.”

  “I have additional information that could be of benefit-”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Avasarala said, real anger creeping into her voice for the first time. “Next time I hear your voice, I have those two big MPs in the hallway hold you down and beat you with a fucking chair. Do you understand me?”

  Mao didn’t reply, which showed that he did.

  “You don’t have any idea what you’ve cost me,” she said. “I’m being promoted. The economic planning council? I run it now. The public health service? I never had to worry about it because that was Errinwright’s pain in the ass. It’s mine now. The committee on financial regulation? Mine. You’ve fucked up my calendar for the next two decades.

  “This is not a negotiation,” Avasarala continued. “This is me gloating. I’m going to drop you into a hole so deep even your wife will forget you ever existed. I’m going to use Errinwright’s old position to dismantle everything you ever built, piece by piece, and scatter it to the winds. I’ll make sure you get to watch it happening. The one thing your hole will have is twenty-four-hour news. And since you and I will never meet again, I want to make sure my name is on your mind every time I destroy something else you left behind. I am going to erase you.”

  Mao stared back defiantly, but Holden could see it was just a shell. Avasarala had known exactly where to hit him. Because men like him lived for their legacy. They saw themselves as the architects of the future. What Avasarala was promising was worse than death.

  Mao shot a quick look at Holden, and it seemed to say, I’ll take those three shots to the head now, please.


  Holden smiled at him.

  Chapter Fifty-Four: Prax

  Mei sat on Prax’s lap, but her attention was focused with a laser intensity to her left. She put her hand up to her mouth and gently, deliberately deposited a wad of half-chewed spaghetti into her palm, then held it out toward Amos.

  “It’s yucky,” she said.

  The big man chuckled.

  “Well, if it wasn’t before, it sure is now, pumpkin,” he said, unfolding his napkin. “Why don’t you put that right here?”

  “I’m sorry,” Prax said. “She’s just-”

  “She’s just a kid, Doc,” Amos said. “This is what she’s supposed to do.”

  They didn’t call the dinner a dinner. It was a reception sponsored by the United Nations at the New Hague facilities on Luna. Prax couldn’t tell if the wall was a window or an ultrahigh-definition screen. On it, Earth glowed blue and white on the horizon. The tables were spread around the room in a semi-organic array that Avasarala had explained was the current fashion. Makes it look like some asshole just put them up anywhere.

  The room was almost equally people he knew and people he didn’t, and watching them segregate was fascinating in its way. To his right, several small tables were filled with short, stocky men and women in professional suits and military uniforms orbiting around Avasarala and her amused-looking husband, Arjun. They gossiped about funding-system analysis and media-relations control. Every outer planets hand they shook was an inclusion that their subjects of conversation denied. To his left, the scientific group was dressed in the best clothes they had, dress jackets that had fit ten years before, and suits representing at least half a dozen different design seasons. Earthers and Martians and Belters all mixed in that group, but the talk was just as exclusionary: nutrient grades, adjustable permeability membrane technologies, phenotypic force expressions. Those were both his people from the past and his future. The shattered and reassembled society of Ganymede. If it hadn’t been for the middle table with Bobbie and the crew of the Rocinante, he would have been there, talking about cascade arrays and non-visible-feeding chloroplasts.

  But in the center, isolated and alone, Holden and his crew were as happy and at peace as if they’d been in their own galley, burning through the vacuum. And Mei, who had taken a fancy to Amos, still wouldn’t be physically parted from Prax without starting to yell and cry. Prax understood exactly how the girl felt, and didn’t see it as a problem.

  “So living on Ganymede, you know a lot about low-gravity childbearing, right?” Holden said. “It’s not really that much riskier for Belters, is it?”

  Prax swallowed a mouthful of salad and shook his head.

  “Oh, no. It’s tremendously difficult. Especially if it’s just a shipboard situation without extensive medical controls. If you look at naturally occurring pregnancies, there’s a developmental or morphological abnormality five times out of six.”

  “Five…” Holden said.

  “Most of them are germ line issues, though,” Prax said. “Nearly all of the children born on Ganymede were implanted after a full genetic analysis. If there’s a lethal equivalent, they just drop the zygote and start over. Non-germ line abnormalities are only twice as common as on Earth, though, so that’s not so bad.”

  “Ah,” Holden said, looking crestfallen.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “No reason,” Naomi said. “He’s just making conversation.”

  “Daddy, I want tofu,” Mei said, grabbing his earlobe and yanking it. “Where’s tofu?”

  “Let’s see if we can’t find you some tofu,” Prax said, pushing his chair back from the table. “Come on.”

  As he walked across the room, scanning the crowd for a dark, formal suit belonging to a waiter as opposed to a dark, formal suit belonging to a diplomat, a young woman came up to him with a drink in one hand and a flush on her cheeks.

  “You’re Praxidike Meng,” she said. “You probably don’t remember me.”

  “Um. No,” he said.

  “I’m Carol Kiesowski,” she said, touching her collarbone as if to clarify what she meant by I. “We wrote to each other a couple of times right after you put out the video about Mei.”

  “Oh, right,” Prax said, trying desperately to remember anything about the woman or the comments she might have left.

  “I just want to say I think both of you are just so, so brave,” the woman said, nodding. It occurred to Prax that she might be drunk.

  “Son of a fucking whore,” Avasarala said, loud enough to cut through the background buzz of conversations.

  The crowd turned to her. She was looking at her hand terminal.

  “What’s a whore, Daddy?”

  “It’s a kind of frost, honey,” Prax said. “What’s going on?”

  “Holden’s old boss beat us to the punch,” Avasarala said. “I guess we know what happened to all those fucking missiles he stole.”

  Arjun touched his wife’s shoulder and pointed at Prax. She actually looked abashed.

  “Sorry for the language,” she said. “I forgot about her.”

  Holden appeared at Prax’s shoulder.

  “My boss?”

  “Fred Johnson just put on a display,” Avasarala said. “Nguyen’s monsters? We’ve been waiting for them to come closer to Mars before we took them down. Transponders are all chirping away, and we’ve got them all tracked tighter than a fly’s… Well, they crossed into the Belt, and he nuked them. All of them.”

  “That’s good, though,” Prax said. “I mean, isn’t that good?”

  “Not if he’s doing it,” Avasarala said. “He’s flexing muscles. Showing that the Belt’s got an offensive arsenal now.”

  A man in uniform to Avasarala’s left started talking at the same time as a woman just behind her, and in a moment, the need to declaim had spread through the whole group. Prax pulled away. The drunk woman was pointing at a man and talking rapidly, Prax and Mei forgotten. He found a waiter at the edge of the room, extracted a promise of tofu, and went back to his seat. Amos and Mei immediately started playing at who could blow their nose the hardest, and Prax turned to Bobbie.

  “Are you going to go back to Mars, then?” he asked. It seemed like a polite, innocuous question until Bobbie pressed her lips tight and nodded.

  “I am,” she said. “Turns out my brother’s getting married. I’m going to try to get there in time to screw up his bachelor party. What about you? Taking the old lady’s position?”

  “Well, I think so,” Prax said, a little surprised that Bobbie had heard about Avasarala’s offer. It hadn’t been made public yet. “I mean, all of the basic advantages of Ganymede are still there. The magnetosphere, the ice. If even some of the mirror arrays can be salvaged, it would still be better than starting again from nothing. I mean, the thing you have to understand about Ganymede…”

  Once he started on the subject, it was hard for him to stop. In many ways, Ganymede had been the center of civilization in the outer planets. All the cutting-edge plant work had been there. All the life sciences issues. But it was more than that. There was something exciting about the prospect of rebuilding that was, in its fashion, even more interesting than the initial growth. To do something the first time was an exploration. To do it again was to take all the things they had learned, and refine, improve, perfect. It left Prax a little bit giddy. Bobbie listened with a melancholy smile on her face.

  And it wasn’t only Ganymede. All of human civilization had been built out of the ruins of what had come before. Life itself was a grand chemical improvisation that began with the simplest replicators and grew and collapsed and grew again. Catastrophe was just one part of what always happened. It was a prelude to what came next.

  “You make it sound romantic,” Bobbie said, and the way she said it was almost an accusation.

  “I don’t mean to — ” Prax began, and something cold and wet wriggled its way into his ear. He pulled back with a yelp, turning to face Mei’s bright eyes and brilliant smil
e. Her index finger dripped with saliva, and beyond her Amos was laughing himself crimson, one hand grasping at his belly and the other slapping the table hard enough to make the plates rattle.

  “What was that?”

  “Hi, Daddy. I love you.”

  “Here,” Alex said, passing Prax a clean napkin. “You’re gonna want that.”

  The startling thing was the silence. He didn’t know how long it had been going on, but the awareness of it washed over him like a wave. The political half of the room was still and quiet. Through the forest of their bodies, he saw Avasarala bending forward, her elbows on her knees, her hand terminal inches in front of her face. When she stood up, they parted before her. She was such a small woman, but she commanded the room just by walking out of it.

  “That’s not good,” Holden said, rising to his feet. Without another word, Prax and Naomi, Amos and Alex and Bobbie all followed after her. The politicians and the scientists came too, all of them mixing at last.

  The meeting room was across a wide hall and set up in the model of an ancient Greek amphitheater. The podium at the front stood before a massive high-definition screen. Avasarala marched down to a seat, talking fast and low into her hand terminal. The others trailed in after her. The sense of dread was physical. The screen went black and someone dimmed the lights.

  In the darkness of the screen, Venus stood in near silhouette against the sun. It was an image Prax had seen hundreds of times before. The feed could have come from any of a dozen monitoring stations. The time stamp on the lower left said they were looking back in time forty-seven minutes. A ship name, the Celestine, floated beneath the numbers.

  Every time the protomolecule soldiers had been involved in violence, Venus had reacted. The OPA had just destroyed a hundred of its half-human soldiers. Prax felt himself caught between excitement and dread.

  The image scattered and re-formed, some kind of interference confusing the sensors. Avasarala said something sharp that could have been show me. A few seconds later, the image stopped and reframed. A detail screen showing a gray-green ship. A heads-up display marked it the Merman. The image scattered again, and when it re-formed, the Merman had moved half an inch to the left and was spinning end over end, tumbling. Avasarala spoke again. A few seconds’ lag, and the screen went back to its original image. Now that Prax knew to look, he could see the tiny dot of the Merman moving near the penumbra. There were other tiny specks like it.