Caliban's War

by James S. A. Corey

  Holden watched as Dr. Strickland carried Mei down an older-looking corridor, the dark-haired woman in tow. They came to a door that looked like an ancient pressure hatch. Strickland did something at the panel next to it, and the three of them went inside.

  “No eyes past this,” the hacker said, almost flinching as if in expectation of being punished for the failings of the Ganymede security system.

  “Naomi, where does that go?” Holden said, patting the air to let the hacker know he wasn’t to blame.

  “Looks like an old part of the original dig,” she said, her words punctuated by pauses as she worked her console. “Zoned for utility storage. Shouldn’t be anything beyond that door but dust and ice.”

  “Can you get us there?” Holden asked.

  Naomi and Prax both said, “Yes,” at the same time.

  “Then that’s where we’re going.”

  He gestured for Prax and the hacker to lead the way back out to the front room, then followed them. Amos was sitting at the table, spinning one of the chicken cans on its edge like a thick coin. In the light gravity of the moon, it seemed like it would keep spinning forever. His expression was distant and unreadable.

  “You did the job,” Holden said to the hacker, who was staring at Amos, his face twitching from fear to rage and back again. “So you’ll get paid. We aren’t going to stiff you.”

  Before the kid could reply, Amos stood up and picked up the case of canned chicken. He turned it over and dumped all the remaining cans on the floor, where a few rolled away to various corners of the small room.

  “Keep the change, asshole,” he said, then threw the empty box into the tiny kitchen nook.

  “And with that,” Holden said, “we’ll take our leave.”

  After Amos and Prax had gone out the door, Holden backed out, keeping a watchful eye on the hacker to make sure there were no misguided attempts at revenge. He shouldn’t have worried. The minute Amos was out the door, the kid just started picking up the chicken cans and stacking them on the table.

  As he backed out and closed the door behind him, Naomi said, “You know what it means, don’t you?”

  “Which thing?” he replied, then said to Amos, “Back to the ship.”

  “Prax said all the kids with Mei’s particular disorder were missing,” Naomi continued. “And her doctor is the one who took her out of school.”

  “So we can probably assume he, or people working with him, took the others,” Holden agreed.

  Amos and Prax were walking together up the corridor, the big man still wearing his distant look. Prax put a hand on his arm, and Holden heard him whisper, “Thank you.” Amos just shrugged.

  “Why would he want those kids?” Naomi asked.

  “The better question to me is, how did he know to take them just hours before the shooting started?”

  “Yeah,” Naomi said, her voice quiet. “Yeah, how did he know that?”

  “Because he’s the reason why things went pear-shaped,” Holden replied, saying out loud what they were both thinking.

  “If he’s got all of those kids, and he or the people he’s with were able to start a shooting war between Mars and Earth to cover up the snatch …”

  “Starts to feel like a strategy we’ve seen before, doesn’t it? We need to know what’s on the other side of that door.”

  “One of two things,” Naomi said. “Nothing, because after the snatch they got the hell off this moon …”

  “Or,” Holden continued, “a whole lot of guys with guns.”

  “Yeah.”

  The galley of the Somnambulist was quiet as Prax and Holden’s crew watched the video again. Naomi had pieced together all the security footage of Mei’s abduction into a single long loop. They watched as her doctor carried her through various corridors, up a lift, and finally to the door of the abandoned parts of the station. After the third viewing, Holden gestured for Naomi to turn it off.

  “What do we know?” he said, his fingers drumming on the table.

  “The kid’s not scared. She’s not fighting to get away,” Amos said.

  “She’s known Dr. Strickland all her life,” Prax replied. “He would be almost like family to her.”

  “Which means they bought him,” Naomi said. “Or this plan has been going on for …”

  “Four years,” Prax said.

  “Four years,” Naomi repeated. “Which is a hell of a long con to run unless the stakes are huge.”

  “Is it kidnapping? If they want a ransom payment …”

  “Doesn’t wash. A couple hours after Mei disappears into that hatch,” Holden said, pointing at the image frozen on Naomi’s screen, “Earth and Mars are shooting each other. Somebody’s going to a lot of trouble to grab sixteen sick kids and hide the fact they did it.”

  “If Protogen wasn’t toast,” Amos said, “I’d say this is exactly the kind of shit they’d pull.”

  “And whoever it is has significant tech resources too,” Naomi said. “They were able to hack the school’s system even before the Ganymede netsec was collapsing from the battle, and insert that woman’s records into Mei’s file without any trace of tampering.”

  “Some of the kids in her school had very rich or powerful parents,” Prax said. “Their security would have to be top notch.”

  Holden drummed out a last rhythm on the tabletop with both hands, then said, “Which all leads us back to the big question. What’s waiting for us on the other side of that door?”

  “Corporate goons,” Amos said.

  “Nothing,” Naomi said.

  “Mei,” Prax said quietly. “It might be Mei.”

  “We need to be prepared for all three possibilities: violence, gathering clues, or rescuing a kid. So let’s put together a plan. Naomi, I want a terminal with a radio link that I can plug into whatever network we find on the other side, and give you a doorway in.”

  “Yep,” Naomi said, already getting up from the table and heading toward the keel ladder.

  “Prax, you need to come up with a way for Mei to trust us if we find her, and give us details on any complications her illness might cause during a rescue. How quickly do we need to get her back here for her meds? Things like that.”

  “Okay,” Prax said, pulling out his terminal and making notes.

  “Amos?”

  “Yeah, Cap?”

  “That leaves violence to us. Let’s tool up.”

  The smile began and ended at the corners of Amos’ eyes.

  “Fuck yeah.”

  Chapter Fourteen: Prax

  Prax didn’t understand how near he was to collapse until he ate. Canned chicken with some kind of spicy chutney, soft no-crumb crackers of the type usually used in zero-g environments, a tall glass of beer. He wolfed it down, his body suddenly ravenous and unstoppable.

  After he finished vomiting, the woman who seemed to take care of all the small practical matters on the ship—he knew her name was Naomi, but he kept wanting to call her Cassandra, because she looked like an intern by that name he’d worked with three years earlier—switched him to a thin protein broth that his atrophied gut could actually handle. Over the course of hours, his mind started coming back. It felt like waking up over and over without falling asleep in between; sitting in the hold of Holden’s ship, he’d find himself noticing the shift in his cognition, how much more clearly he could think and how good it felt to come back to himself. And then a few minutes later, some set of sugar-deprived ganglia would struggle back to function, and it would all happen again.

  And with every step back toward real consciousness, he felt the drive growing, pushing him toward the door that Strickland and Mei had gone through.

  “Doctor, huh?” the big one—Amos —said.

  “I got my degree here. The university’s really good. Lots of grant money. Or … now I suppose there used to be.”

  “I was never much for formal education myself.”

  The relief ship’s mess hall was tiny and scarred by age. The woven carbon fil
ament walls had cracks in the enameling, and the tabletop was pitted from years, maybe decades, of use. The lighting was a thin spectrum shifted toward pink that would have killed any plants living under it in about three days. Amos had a canvas sack filled with formed plastic boxes of different sizes, each of which seemed to have a firearm of some kind inside. He had unrolled a square of red felt and disassembled a huge matte-black pistol on it. The delicate metal parts looked like sculpture. Amos dipped a cotton swab into a bright blue cleaning solution and rubbed it gently on a silver mechanism attached to a black metal tube, polishing metal plates that were already bright as a mirror.

  Prax found his hands moving toward the disassembled pieces, willing them to come together. To be already cleaned and polished and remade. Amos pretended not to notice in a way that meant he was very much aware.

  “I don’t know why they would have taken her,” Prax said. “Dr. Strickland has always been great with her. He never … I mean, he’d never hurt her. I don’t think he’d hurt her.”

  “Yeah, probably not,” Amos said. He dipped the swab into the cleaning fluid again and started on a metal rod with a spring wrapped around it.

  “I really need to get there,” Prax said. He didn’t say, Every minute here is a minute that they could be hurting Mei. That she could be dying or getting shipped offworld. He tried to keep his words from sounding like a whine or a demand, but they seemed to come out as both.

  “Getting ready’s the shitty part,” Amos said, as if agreeing to something. “You want to get right out into it right the fuck now. Get it over with.”

  “Well, yes,” Prax said.

  “I get that,” Amos said. “It’s no fun, but you’ve got to get through it. Going in without your gear ready, you might as well not go. Plus which the girl’s been gone for how long now?”

  “Since the fighting. Since the mirror came down.”

  “Chances of another hour making much difference are pretty small, right?”

  “But—”

  “Yeah,” Amos said with a sigh. “I know. This is the tough part. Not as bad as waiting for us to get back, though. That’s gonna suck even worse.”

  Amos put down the swab and started fitting the long black spring back over the spindle of bright metal. The alcohol fumes of the cleaning solution stung Prax’s eyes.

  “I’m waiting for you,” Prax said.

  “Yeah, I know,” Amos said. “And I’ll make sure we’re real quick about it. The captain’s a real good guy, but he can get kind of distracted sometimes. I’ll keep him on point. No trouble.”

  “No,” Prax said, “I don’t mean I’m waiting for you when you go to that door. I mean I’m waiting for you right now. I’m waiting to go there with you.”

  Amos slid the spring and spindle into the shell of the gun, twisting it gently with his fingertips. Prax didn’t know when he’d risen to his feet.

  “How many gunfights have you been in?” Amos asked. His voice was low and wide and gentle. “Because I’ve been in … shit. This’ll be eleven for me. Maybe twelve, if you count the one time when the guy got up again as a different fight. Point is, if you want your little girl safe, you don’t want her in a tunnel with a guy firing a gun who doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

  As if in punctuation, Amos slid the gun together. The metal clacked.

  “I’ll be fine,” Prax said, but his legs were trembling, just standing up. Amos held up the gun.

  “This ready to fire?” Amos asked.

  “Sorry?”

  “If you pick this gun up right now, point it at a bad guy, pull the trigger, does it go bang? You just watched me put it together. Dangerous or safe?”

  Prax opened his mouth, then closed it. An ache just behind his sternum grew a notch worse. Amos started to put the gun down.

  “Safe,” Prax said.

  “You sure about that, Doc?”

  “You didn’t put any bullets in it. It’s safe.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  Amos frowned at the gun.

  “Well, yeah, that’s right,” he said. “But you’re still not going.”

  Voices came from the narrow hallway from the airlock. Jim Holden’s voice wasn’t what Prax had thought it would be. He’d expected him to be serious, grave. Instead, even during the times like now, when the distress clipped his vowels short and tightened his voice, there was a lightness to him. The woman’s voice — Naomi, not Cassandra—wasn’t deeper, but it was darker.

  “Those are the numbers,” she said.

  “They’re wrong,” Holden said, ducking into the mess. “They’ve got to be wrong. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “What’s the word, Cap’n?” Amos asked.

  “Security’s not going to be any use,” Holden said. “The locals are stretched too thin trying to keep the place from straight-out catastrophe.”

  “Which is why maybe we shouldn’t be going in with guns drawn,” Naomi said.

  “Please, can we not have that conversation again right now?”

  Her mouth hardened and Amos pointedly looked at the gun, polishing the parts that already shone. Prax had the sense of walking in on a much longer conversation.

  “This guy who grabs a gun first and talks later …” Naomi said. “You didn’t used to be him. You aren’t him.”

  “Well, I need to be him today,” Holden said in a voice that closed the subject. The silence was uncomfortable.

  “What’s wrong with the numbers?” Prax asked. Holden looked at him, confused. “You said there was something wrong with the numbers.”

  “They’re saying that the death rate’s going up. But that’s got to be wrong. The fighting was … what? One day? Day and a half? Why would things be getting worse now?”

  “No,” Prax said. “That’s right. It’s the cascade. It’ll get worse.”

  “What’s the cascade?” Naomi asked. Amos slid the pistol into its box and hauled out a longer case. A shotgun maybe. His gaze was on Prax, waiting.

  “It’s the basic obstacle of artificial ecosystems. In a normal evolutionary environment, there’s enough diversity to cushion the system when something catastrophic happens. That’s nature. Catastrophic things happen all the time. But nothing we can build has the depth. One thing goes wrong, and there’s only a few compensatory pathways that can step in. They get overstressed. Fall out of balance. When the next one fails, there are even fewer paths, and then they’re more stressed. It’s a simple complex system. That’s the technical name for it. Because it’s simple, it’s prone to cascades, and because it’s complex, you can’t predict what’s going to fail. Or how. It’s computationally impossible.”

  Holden leaned against the wall, his arms folded. It was still odd, seeing him in person. He looked the same as he had on the screens, and he also didn’t.

  “Ganymede Station,” Holden said, “is the most important food supply and agricultural center outside Earth and Mars. It can’t just collapse. They wouldn’t let it. People come here to have their babies, for God’s sake.”

  Prax tilted his head. A day before, he wouldn’t have been able to explain this. For one thing, he wouldn’t have had the blood sugar to fuel thought. For another, he wouldn’t have had anyone to say it to. It was good to be able to think again, even if it was only so he could explain how bad things had become.

  “Ganymede’s dead,” Prax said. “The tunnels will probably survive, but the environmental and social structures are already broken. Even if we could somehow get the environmental systems back in place—and really, we can’t without a lot of work—how many people are going to stay here now? How many would be going to jail? Something’s going to fill the niche, but it won’t be what was here before.”

  “Because of the cascade,” Holden said.

  “Yes,” Prax said. “That’s what I was trying to say before. To Amos. It’s all going to fall apart. The relief effort’s going to make the fall a little more graceful, maybe. But it’s too late. It’s too late, an
d since Mei’s out there, and we don’t know what’s going to break, I have to go with you.”

  “Prax,” Cassandra said. No. Naomi. Maybe his brain wasn’t really up to full power even now.

  “Strickland and that woman, even if they think they can keep her safe, they can’t. You see? Even if they’re not hurting her, even if they’re not, everything around them is going to fall apart. What if they run out of air? What if they don’t understand what’s happening?”

  “I know this is hard,” Holden said. “But shouting about it won’t help.”

  “I’m not shouting. I’m not shouting. I’m just telling you that they took my little girl away, and I need to go and get her. I need to be there when you open that door. Even if she’s not there. Even if she’s dead, I need to be the one who finds her.”

  The sound was crisp and professional and oddly beautiful: a magazine slipping into a pistol. Prax hadn’t seen Amos take it back out of its box, but the dark metal was in the man’s huge hand. Dwarfed by his fingers. While he watched, Amos chambered a round. Then he took the gun by its barrel, careful to keep it pointing at the wall, and held it out.

  “But I thought …” Prax said. “You said I wasn’t …”

  Amos stretched his arms out another half inch. The gesture was unmistakable. Take it. Prax took it. It was heavier than it looked.

  “Um. Amos?” Holden said. “Did you just give him a loaded gun?”

  “Doc needs to go, Cap’n,” Amos said with a shrug. “So I’m thinking he should probably go.”

  Prax saw the look that passed between Holden and Naomi.

  “We might want to talk about that decision-making process, Amos,” Naomi said, shaping the words carefully.

  “You betcha,” Amos said. “Soon as we get back.”

  Prax had been walking through the station for weeks as a native, a local. A refugee with nowhere to flee. He’d gotten used to how the hallways looked, how people’s eyes slid over him in case he’d try to lay his burdens on them. Now that Prax was fed and armed and part of a group, the station had become a different place. People’s eyes still slid across them, but the fear was different, and hunger fought against it. Holden and Amos didn’t have the gray of malnutrition or the haunted look around their eyes of seeing everything they thought was immutable collapse. Naomi was back at the ship, hacked into the local security network and ready to coordinate the three of them in case they got split up.