Caliban's War

by James S. A. Corey

  Martens waited until she had the gun on the cleaning mat, then sat down on the floor next to her. She attached a wire brush to the end of one of the cleaning rods, dipped it in the cleaner, and began running the brush through the gun, one barrel at a time. Martens watched.

  After a few minutes, she replaced the brush with a small cloth and swabbed the remaining cleanser out of the barrels. Then a fresh cloth soaked in gun lubricant to oil them. When she was applying lube to the complex mesh of gears that composed the Gatling mechanism and ammo feed system, Martens finally spoke.

  “You know,” he said, “Thorsson is naval intelligence right from the start. Straight into officer training, top of his class at the academy, and first posting at fleet command. He’s never done anything but be an intelligence wonk. The last time he fired a gun was his six weeks as a boot, twenty years ago. He’s never led a fire team. Or served in a combat platoon.”

  “That,” Bobbie said, putting down her lubricant then standing up to put the gun back together, “is a fascinating story. I really appreciate you sharing it.”

  “So,” Martens continued, not missing a beat. “How fucked up do you have to be before Thorsson starts asking me if maybe you aren’t a little shell-shocked?”

  Bobbie dropped the wrench she was holding, but caught it with her other hand before it could hit the deck.

  “Is this an official visit? Because if not, you can f—”

  “Me now? I’m not a wonk,” Martens said. “I’m a marine. Ten years as an enlisted man before I was offered OCS. Got dual degrees in psychology and theology.”

  The end of Bobbie’s nose itched, and she scratched it without thinking. The sudden smell of gun oil let her know that she’d just rubbed lubricant all over her face. Martens glanced at it but didn’t stop talking. She tried to drown him out by putting the gun together as noisily as possible.

  “I’ve done combat drills, CQB training, war games,” he said, speaking a little louder. “Did you know I was a boot at the same camp where your father was first sergeant? Sergeant Major Draper is a great man. He was like a god to us boots.”

  Bobbie’s head snapped up and her eyes narrowed. Something about this headshrinker acting like he knew her father felt dirty.

  “It’s true. And if he were here right now, he’d be telling you to listen to me.”

  “Fuck you,” Bobbie said. She imagined her father wincing at the use of obscenity to hide her fear. “You don’t know shit.”

  “I know that when a gunnery sergeant with your level of training and combat readiness almost gets taken out by a yeoman still at the tail end of puberty, something is goddamned wrong.”

  Bobbie threw the wrench at the ground, knocking over the gun oil, which began to spread across her mat like a bloodstain.

  “I fucking fell down! We were at a full g, and I just … I fell down.”

  “And in the meeting today? Yelling at two civilian intelligence analysts about how Marines would rather die than fail?”

  “I didn’t yell,” Bobbie said, not sure if that was the truth. Her memories of the meeting had become confused once she was out of the room.

  “How many times have you fired that gun since you cleaned it yesterday?”

  “What?” Bobbie said, feeling nauseated and not sure why.

  “For that matter, how many times had you fired it since you cleaned it the day before that? Or the one before that?”

  “Stop it,” Bobbie said, waving one hand limply at Martens and looking for a place to sit back down.

  “Have you fired that gun even once since you’ve come on board the Dae-Jung? Because I can tell you that you’ve cleaned it every single day you’ve been on board, and several times you’ve cleaned it twice in one day.”

  “No, I—” Bobbie said, finally sitting down with a thump on an ammo canister. She had no memory of having cleaned the gun before that day. “I didn’t know that.”

  “This is post-traumatic stress disorder, Bobbie. It’s not a weakness or some kind of moral failure. It’s what happens when you live through something terrible. Right now you’re not able to process what happened to you and your men on Ganymede, and you’re acting irrationally because of it,” Martens said, then moved over to crouch in front of her. She was afraid for a moment that he’d try to take her hand, because if he did, she’d hit him.

  He didn’t.

  “You’re ashamed,” he said, “but there’s nothing to be ashamed of. You’re trained to be tough, competent, ready for anything. They taught you that if you just do your job and remember your training, you can deal with any threat. Most of all, they taught you that the most important people in the world are the ones standing next to you on the firing line.”

  Something twitched in her cheek just under her eye, and Bobbie rubbed at the spot hard enough to make stars explode in her vision.

  “Then you ran into something that your training couldn’t prepare you for, and against which you had no defense. And you lost your teammates and friends.”

  Bobbie started to reply and realized she’d been holding her breath, so instead of speaking, she exhaled explosively. Martens didn’t stop talking.

  “We need you, Roberta. We need you back. I haven’t been where you are, but I know a lot of people who have, and I know how to help you. If you let me. If you talk to me. I can’t take it away. I can’t cure you. But I can make it better.”

  “Don’t call me Roberta,” Bobbie said so quietly that she could barely hear herself.

  She took a few short breaths, trying to clear her head, trying not to hyperventilate. The scents of the cargo bay washed over her. The smell of rubber and metal from her suit. The acrid, competing scents of gun oil and hydraulic fluid, old and aged right into the metal no matter how many times the Navy boys swabbed the decks. The thought of thousands of sailors and marines passing through this same space, working on their equipment and cleaning these same bulkheads, brought her back to herself.

  She moved over to her reassembled gun and picked it up off the mat before the spreading pool of gun oil could touch it.

  “No, Captain, talking to you is not what’s going to get me better.”

  “Then what, Sergeant?”

  “That thing that killed my friends, and started this war? Somebody put that thing on Ganymede,” she said, and seated the gun in its housing with a sharp metallic click. She gave the triple barrels a spin with her hand, and they turned with the fast oily hiss of high-quality bearings. “I’m going to find out who. And I’m going to kill them.”

  Chapter Nine: Avasarala

  The report was more than three pages long, but Soren had managed to find someone with the balls to admit it when he didn’t know everything. Strange things were happening on Venus, stranger than Avasarala had known or guessed. A network of filaments had nearly encased the planet in a pattern of fifty-kilometer-wide hexagons, and apart from the fact that they seemed to carry superheated water and electrical currents, no one knew what they were. The gravity of the planet had increased by 3 percent. Paired whirlwinds of benzene and complex hydrocarbons were sweeping the impact craters like synchronized swimmers where the remains of Eros Station had smashed into the planetary surface. The best scientific minds of the system were staring at the data with their jaws slack, and the reason no one was panicking yet was that no one could agree on what they should panic about.

  On one hand, the Venusian metamorphosis was the most powerful scientific tool ever. Whatever happened did so in plain sight of everyone. There were no nondisclosure agreements or anti-competition treaties to be concerned with. Anyone with a scanner sensitive enough could look down through the clouds of sulfuric acid and see what was going on today. Analyses were confidential, follow-up studies were proprietary, but the raw data was orbiting the sun for anyone to see.

  Only, so far, it was like a bunch of lizards watching the World Cup. Politely put, they weren’t sure what they were looking at.

  But the data was clear. The attack on Ganymede and the s
pike in the energy expended on Venus had come at exactly the same time. And no one knew why.

  “Well, that’s worth shit,” she said.

  Avasarala closed down her hand terminal and looked out the window. Around them the commissary murmured softly, like the best kind of restaurant, only without the ugly necessity of paying for anything. The tables were real wood and arranged carefully so that everyone had a view and no one could be overheard unless they wanted to be. It was raining that day. Even if the raindrops hadn’t been pelting the windows, blurring city and sky, she’d have known by the smell. Her lunch—cold sag aloo and something that was supposed to be tandoori chicken—sat on the table, untouched. Soren was still sitting across from her, his expression polite and alert as a Labrador retriever’s.

  “There’s no data showing a launch,” Soren said. “Whatever’s on Venus would have to have gotten out to Ganymede, and there’s no sign of that at all.”

  “Whatever’s on Venus thinks inertia’s optional and gravity isn’t a constant. We don’t know what a launch would look like. As far as we know, they could walk to Jupiter.”

  The boy’s nod conceded the point.

  “Where do we stand on Mars?”

  “They’ve agreed to meet here. They’ve got ships on the way with the diplomatic delegation, including their witness.”

  “The marine? Draper?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Admiral Nguyen is in charge of the escort.”

  “He’s playing nice?”

  “So far.”

  “All right, where do we go from here?” Avasarala asked.

  “Jules-Pierre Mao’s waiting in your office, ma’am.”

  “Run him down for me. Anything you think’s important.”

  Soren blinked. Lightning lit the clouds from within.

  “I sent the briefing …”

  She felt a stab of annoyance that was half embarrassment. She’d forgotten that the background on the man was in her queue. There were thirty other documents there too, and she’d slept poorly the night before, troubled by dreams in which Arjun had died unexpectedly. She’d had widowhood nightmares since her son had died in a skiing accident, her mind conflating the only two men she’d ever loved.

  She’d meant to review the information before breakfast. She’d forgotten. But she wasn’t going to admit it to some European brat just because he was smart, competent, and did everything she said.

  “I know what’s in the briefing. I know everything,” she said, standing up. “This is a fucking test. I’m asking what you think is important about him.”

  She walked away, moving toward the carved oak doors with a deliberate speed that made Soren scramble a little to keep up.

  “He’s the corporate controlling interest of Mao-Kwikowski Mercantile,” Soren said, his voice low enough to carry to her and then die. “Before the incident, they were one of Protogen’s major suppliers. The medical equipment, the radiation rooms, the surveillance and encryption infrastructure. Almost everything Protogen put on Eros or used to construct their shadow station came from a Mao-Kwik warehouse and on a Mao-Kwik freighter.”

  “And he’s still breathing free air because …?” she said, pushing through the doors and into the hallway beyond.

  “No evidence that Mao-Kwik knew what the equipment was for,” Soren said. “After Protogen was exposed, Mao-Kwik was one of the first to turn over information to the investigation committee. If they—and by ‘they,’ I mean ‘he’—hadn’t turned over a terabyte of confidential correspondence, Gutmansdottir and Kolp might never have been implicated.”

  A silver-haired man with a broad Andean nose walking the other way in the hall looked up from his hand terminal and nodded to her as they drew near.

  “Victor,” she said. “I’m sorry about Annette.”

  “The doctors say she’ll be fine,” the Andean said. “I’ll tell her you asked.”

  “Tell her I said to get the hell out of bed before her husband starts getting dirty ideas,” she said, and the Andean laughed as they passed. Then, to Soren: “Was he cutting a deal? Cooperation for clemency?”

  “That was one interpretation, but most people assumed it was personal vengeance for what happened to his daughter.”

  “She was on Eros,” Avasarala said.

  “She was Eros,” Soren said as they stepped into the elevator. “She was the initial infection. The scientists think the protomolecule was building itself using her brain and body as a template.”

  The elevator doors closed, the car already aware of who she was and where she was going. It dropped smoothly as her eyebrows rose.

  “So when they started negotiating with that thing—”

  “They were talking to what was left of Jules-Pierre Mao’s daughter,” Soren said. “I mean, they think they were.”

  Avasarala whistled low.

  “Did I pass the test, ma’am?” Soren asked, keeping his face empty and impassive except for a small twinkle in the corners of his eyes that said he knew she’d been bullshitting him. Despite herself, she grinned.

  “No one likes a smart-ass,” she said. The elevator stopped; the doors slid open.

  Jules-Pierre Mao sat at her desk, radiating a sense of calm with the faintest hint of amusement. Avasarala’s eyes flickered over him, taking in the details: well-tailored silk suit that straddled the line between beige and gray, receding hairline unmodified by medical therapies, startling blue eyes that he had probably been born with. He wore his age like a statement that fighting the ravages of time and mortality was beneath his notice. Twenty years earlier, he’d just have been devastatingly handsome. Now he was that and dignified too, and her first, animal impulse was that she wanted to like him.

  “Mr. Mao,” she said, nodding to him. “Sorry to make you wait.”

  “I’ve worked with government before,” he said. He had a European accent that would have melted butter. “I understand the constraints. What can I do for you, Assistant Undersecretary?”

  Avasarala lowered herself into her chair. The Buddha smiled beatifically from his place by the wall. The rain sheeted down the window, shadows giving the near-subliminal impression that Mao was weeping. She steepled her fingers.

  “You want some tea?”

  “No, thank you,” Mao said.

  “Soren! Go get me some tea.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the boy said.

  “Soren.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Don’t hurry.”

  “Of course not, ma’am.”

  The door closed behind him. Mao’s smile looked weary.

  “Should I have brought my attorneys?”

  “Those rat fuckers? No,” she said, “the trials are all done with. I’m not here to reopen any of the legal wrangling. I’ve got real work to do.”

  “I can respect that,” Mao said.

  “I have a problem,” Avasarala said. “And I don’t know what it is.”

  “And you think I do?”

  “It’s possible. I’ve been through a lot of hearings about one damn thing and another. Most of the time they’re exercises in ass covering. If the unvarnished truth ever came out at one, it would be because someone screwed up.”

  The bright blue eyes narrowed. The smile grew less warm.

  “You think my executives and I were less than forthcoming? I put powerful men in prison for you, Assistant Undersecretary. I burned bridges.”

  Distant thunder mumbled and complained. The rain redoubled its angry tapping at the pane. Avasarala crossed her arms.

  “You did. But that doesn’t make you an idiot. There are still things you say under oath and things you dance around. This room isn’t monitored. This is off the record. I need to know anything you can tell me about the protomolecule that didn’t come out in the hearings.”

  The silence between them stretched. She watched his face, his body, looking for signs, but the man was unreadable. He’d been doing this too long, and he was too good at it. A professional.

  “Things get lost,�
� Avasarala said. “There was one time during the finance crisis that we found a whole auditing division that no one remembered. Because that’s how you do it. You take part of a problem and you put it somewhere, get some people working on it, and then you get another part of the problem and get other people working on that. And pretty soon you have seven, eight, a hundred different little boxes with work going on, and no one talking to anyone because it would break security protocol.”

  “And you think …?”

  “We killed Protogen, and you helped. I’m asking whether you know of any little boxes lying around somewhere. And I’m very much hoping you say yes.”

  “Is this from the secretary-general or Errinwright?”

  “No. Just me.”

  “I’ve already said everything I know,” he said.

  “I don’t believe that.”

  The mask of his persona slipped. It lasted less than a second, nothing more than a shift in the angle of his spine and a hardness in his jaw, here and gone again. It was anger. That was interesting.

  “They killed my daughter,” he said softly. “Even if I’d had something to hide, I wouldn’t have.”

  “How did it come to be your girl?” Avasarala asked. “Did they target her? Was somebody using her against you?”

  “It was bad luck. She was out in the deep orbits, trying to prove something. She was young and rebellious and stupid. We were trying to get her to come home but … she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Something tickled at the back of Avasarala’s mind. A hunch. An impulse. She went with it.

  “Have you heard from her since it happened?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Since Eros Station crashed into Venus, have you heard from her?”

  It was interesting watching him pretend to be angry now. It was almost like the real thing. She couldn’t have said what about it was inauthentic. The intelligence in his eyes, maybe. The sense that he was more present than he had been before. Real rage swept people away. This was rage as a gambit.