Caliban's War

by James S. A. Corey

  So who had brought the protomolecule to Ganymede?

  He’d given the sample to Fred Johnson as leverage to be used in the peace talks. The Outer Planets Alliance had gotten a lot of concessions in the chaos that followed the brief inner planets war. But not everything they’d wanted. The inner planets fleets in orbit around Ganymede were proof of that.

  Fred had the only sample of the protomolecule left in the solar system. Because Holden had given it to him.

  “It was Fred,” he said out loud without realizing it.

  “What was Fred?” Naomi asked.

  “This. What’s happening here. He did this.”

  “No,” Naomi said.

  “To drive the inner planets out, to test some kind of super-weapon, something. But he did this.”

  “No,” Naomi said again. “We don’t know that.”

  The air in the corridor grew smoky, the nauseating scent of burning hair and flesh choking off Holden’s reply. Amos held up a hand to halt the group, and the Pinkwater people stopped and took up defensive positions. Amos moved up the corridor to the junction and looked off to his left for several moments.

  “Something bad happened here,” he finally said. “I’ve got half a dozen dead, more than that celebrating.”

  “Are they armed?” Holden asked.

  “Oh yeah.”

  The Holden who would have tried to talk his way by them, the Holden who Naomi liked and wanted back, barely put up a struggle when he said, “Get us past them.”

  Amos leaned out around the corner and fired off a long burst from his auto-shotgun.

  “Go,” he said when the echoes of the gunshots had faded away.

  The Pinkwater people picked up their wounded and hurried up the corridor and beyond the battle; Prax jogged along close behind, head down and thin arms pumping. Holden followed, a glance showing him dead bodies on fire at the center of a wide hallway. Burning them had to be a message. It wasn’t quite bad enough yet for them to be eating each other. Was it?

  There were a few bodies lying outside the fire, bleeding out on the corrugated metal floors. Holden couldn’t tell if they were Amos’ handiwork. The old Holden would have asked. The new one didn’t.

  “Naomi,” he said, wanting to hear her voice.

  “I’m here.”

  “We’re seeing trouble out here.”

  “Is it …” He heard the dread in her voice.

  “No. Not the protomolecule. But the locals may be bad enough. Seal up the ’locks,” Holden told her, the words coming to him without thought. “Warm up the reactor. If something happens to us, leave and rendezvous with Alex. Don’t go to Tycho.”

  “Jim,” she said, “I—”

  “Don’t go to Tycho. Fred did this. Don’t go back to him.”

  “No,” she said. Her new mantra.

  “If we aren’t there in half an hour, go. That’s an order, XO.”

  At least she would get away, Holden told himself. No matter what happened on Ganymede, at least Naomi would make it out alive. A vision of the nightmare Julie, dead in her shower, but with Naomi’s face flashed in his mind. He didn’t expect the little yelp of grief that escaped him. Amos turned and looked back at him, but Holden waved him on without a word.

  Fred had done this.

  And if Fred had, then Holden had too.

  Holden had spent a year playing enforcer to Fred’s politician. He’d hunted ships and killed them for Fred’s grand OPA government experiment. He’d changed the man he’d been into the man he was now, because some part of him believed in Fred’s dream of the liberated and self-governed outer planets.

  And Fred had secretly been planning … this.

  Holden thought of all the things he’d put off so that he could help Fred build his new solar system order. He’d never taken Naomi to meet his family back on Earth. Not that Naomi herself could have ever gone to Earth. But he could have flown his family up to Luna to meet her. Father Tom would have resisted. He hated travel. But Holden had no doubt that in the end he would have gotten them all to come meet her once he explained how important she’d become to him.

  And meeting Prax, seeing his need to find his daughter, made Holden realize how badly he wanted to know what that was like. To experience that sort of hunger for the presence of another human being. To present another generation to his parents. To show them that all the effort and energy they had put into him had paid off. That he was passing it along. He wanted, almost more than he’d wanted anything before, to see the looks on their faces when he showed them a child. His child. Naomi’s child.

  Fred had taken that from him, first by wasting his time as the OPA’s leg breaker, and now by this betrayal. Holden swore to himself that if he made it off Ganymede, Fred would pay for all of it.

  Amos halted the group again, and Holden noticed that they were back at the port. He shook himself out of his reverie. He didn’t remember how they’d gotten there.

  “Looks clear,” Amos said.

  “Naomi,” Holden said, “what does it look like around the ship?”

  “Looks clear here,” she said. “But Alex is worried that—”

  Her voice was cut off by an electronic squeal.

  “Naomi? Naomi!” Holden yelled, but there was no response. To Amos he said, “Go, double-time it to the ship!”

  Amos and the Pinkwater people ran toward the docks as quickly as their injured bodies and the unconscious teammate would let them. Holden brought up the rear, shouldering his assault rifle and flicking off the safety as he ran.

  They ran through the twisting corridors of the port sector, Amos scattering pedestrians with loud shouts and the unspoken threat of his shotgun. An old woman in a hijab scurried away before them like a leaf driven before a storm. She was dead already. If the protomolecule was loose, everyone Holden passed was dead already. Santichai and Melissa Supitayaporn and all the people they’d come to Ganymede to save. The rioters and killers who’d been normal citizens of the station before their social ecosystem collapsed. If the protomolecule was loose, all of them were as good as dead.

  So why hadn’t it happened?

  Holden pushed the thought aside. Later—if there was a later—he could worry about it. Someone shouted at Amos, and Amos fired his shotgun into the ceiling once. If port security still existed outside of the vultures trying to take a cut of every incoming shipment, they didn’t try to stop them.

  The outer airlock door of the Somnambulist was closed when they reached it.

  “Naomi, you there?” Holden asked, fumbling in his pockets for the swipe card. She didn’t reply, and it took him a moment to remember he’d given the card to Wendell. “Wendell, open the door for us.”

  The Pinkwater leader didn’t reply.

  “Wendell—” Holden started, then stopped when he saw that Wendell was staring, wide-eyed, at something behind him. Holden turned to look and saw five men—Earthers, all of them—in plain gray armor without insignias. All were armed with large bore weapons.

  No, Holden thought, and brought his gun up and across them in a full auto sweep. Three of the five men dropped, their armor blooming red. The new Holden rejoiced; the old was quiet. It didn’t matter who these men were. Station security or inner planet military or just leftover mercenaries from the now destroyed shadow base, he’d kill them all before he let them stop him from getting his crew off this infected moon.

  He never saw who fired the shot that took his leg out from under him. One second he was standing, emptying the magazine of his assault rifle into the gray-armored fire-team, and the next a sledgehammer blow hit the armor on his right thigh, knocking him off his feet. As he fell, he saw the two remaining gray-armored soldiers go down as Amos’ auto-shotgun unloaded in a single long roar.

  Holden rolled to his side, looking to see if anyone else was hurt, and saw that the five on his side had been only half of the enemy team. The Pinkwater people were raising their hands and dropping their weapons as five more gray-armored soldiers came down the cor
ridor from behind.

  Amos never saw them. He dropped the expended magazine from his auto-shotgun and was pulling a new one off his harness when one of the mercenaries aimed a large weapon at the back of his head and pulled the trigger. Amos’ helmet flew off and he was slapped forward onto the corrugated-metal decking with a wet crunch. Blood splashed across the floor where he hit it.

  Holden tried to get a new magazine into his assault rifle, but his hands wouldn’t cooperate and before he could reload his gun, one of the soldiers had crossed the distance and kicked the rifle away from him.

  Holden had time to see the still standing members of his Pinkwater team disappear into black bags before one came down over his own head and plunged him into darkness.

  Chapter Twenty: Bobbie

  The Martian delegation had been given a suite of offices in the UN building for their own use. The furniture was all real wood; the paintings on the walls were originals and not prints. The carpet smelled new. Bobbie thought that either everyone in the UN campus lived like a king, or they were just going out of their way to impress the Martians.

  Thorsson had called her a few hours after she’d left her run-in with Avasarala at the bar, and had demanded that she meet with him the next day. Now she waited in the lobby of their temporary office suite, sitting in a bergère-style chair with green velvet cushions and a cherry wood frame that would have cost her two years’ salary on Mars. A screen set into the wall across from her played a news channel with the sound muted. It turned the program into a confusing and occasionally macabre slide show of images: two talking heads sitting at a desk in a blue room, a large building on fire, a woman walking down a long white hallway while gesturing animatedly to both sides, a UN battleship parked at an orbital station with severe damage scarring its flank, a red-faced man talking directly into the camera against the backdrop of a flag Bobbie didn’t recognize.

  It all meant something and nothing at the same time. A few hours before, this would have frustrated Bobbie. She would have felt compelled to go find the remote and turn the sound up, to add context to the information being thrown at her.

  Now she just let the images flow around her like canal water past a rock.

  A young man she’d seen a few times on the Dae-Jung but had never actually met hurried through the lobby, tapping furiously on his terminal. When he was halfway across the room, he said, “He’s ready for you.”

  It took Bobbie a moment to realize the young man had been talking to her. Apparently her stock had fallen far enough that she no longer warranted face-to-face delivery of information. More meaningless data. More water flowing past her. She pushed herself to her feet with a grunt. Her hours-long walk at one g the previous day had taken more out of her than she’d realized.

  She was vaguely surprised to find that Thorsson’s office was one of the smallest in the suite. That meant that either he didn’t care about the unspoken status conferred through office size, or he was actually the least important member of the delegation to still rate a private workspace. She felt no compulsion to figure out which. Thorsson did not react to her arrival, his head bent over his desk terminal. Bobbie didn’t care about being ignored, or about the lesson he was trying to teach her with it. The size of the office meant that Thorsson had no chair for guests, and the ache in her legs was sufficiently distracting.

  “I may have overreacted earlier,” he finally said.

  “Oh?” Bobbie replied, thinking about where she might find more of that soy-milk tea.

  Thorsson looked up at her. His face was trying its mummified-remains version of a warm smile. “Let me be clear. There’s no doubt that you damaged our credibility with your outburst. But, as Martens points out, that is largely my fault for not fully understanding the extent of your trauma.”

  “Ah,” Bobbie said. There was a framed photograph on the wall behind Thorsson of a city with a tall metal structure in the foreground. It looked like an archaic rocket gantry. The caption read PARIS.

  “So instead of sending you home, I will be keeping you on staff here. You’ll be given an opportunity to repair the damage you’ve done.”

  “Why,” Bobbie said, looking Thorsson in the eye for the first time since coming in, “am I here?”

  Thorsson’s hint of a smile disappeared and was replaced by an equally understated frown. “Excuse me?”

  “Why am I here?” she repeated, thinking past the disciplinary board. Thinking of how hard it would be to get reassigned to Ganymede if Thorsson didn’t send her back to Mars. If he didn’t, would she be allowed to resign? Just leave the corps and buy her own ticket? The thought of no longer being a marine made her sad. The first really strong feeling she’d had in a while.

  “Why are you—” Thorsson started, but Bobbie cut him off.

  “Not to talk about the monster, apparently. Honestly, if I’m just here as a showpiece, I think I’d rather be sent home. I have some things I could be doing …”

  “You,” Thorsson said, his voice getting tighter, “are here to do exactly what I say for you to do, and exactly when I say it. Is that understood, soldier?”

  “Yeah,” Bobbie said, feeling the water slide past her. She was a stone. It moved her not at all. “I have to go now.”

  She turned and walked away, Thorsson not managing to get a last word out before she left. As she moved through the suite toward the exit, she saw Martens pouring powdered creamer into a cup of coffee in the small kitchen area. He spotted her at the same time.

  “Bobbie,” he said. He’d gotten a lot more familiar with her over the last few days. Normally, she’d have assumed it was a buildup to romantic or sexual overtures. With Martens, she was pretty sure it was just another tool in his “how to fix broken marines” tool kit.

  “Captain,” she said. She stopped. She felt the front door tugging at her with a sort of psychic gravity, but Martens had never been anything but good to her. And she had a strange premonition that she was never going to see any of these people again. She held out her hand to him, and when he took it, she said, “I’m leaving. You won’t have to waste your time with me anymore.”

  He smiled his sad smile at her. “In spite of the fact that I don’t actually feel like I’ve accomplished anything, I don’t feel like I wasted my time. Do we part friends?”

  “I—” she started, then had to stop and swallow a lump in her throat. “I hope this didn’t wreck your career or anything.”

  “I’m not worried about it,” he said to her back. She was already walking out the door. She didn’t turn around.

  In the hallway Bobbie pulled out her terminal and called the number Avasarala had given her. It immediately went to voice mail.

  “Okay,” she said, “I’ll take that job.”

  There was something liberating and terrifying about the first day on a new job. In any new assignment, Bobbie had always had the unsettling feeling that she was in over her head, that she wouldn’t know how to do any of the things they would ask her to do, that she would dress wrong or say the wrong thing, or that everyone would hate her. But no matter how strong that feeling was, it was overshadowed by the sense that with a new job came the chance to totally recreate herself in whatever image she chose, that—at least for a little while—her options were infinite.

  Even waiting for Avasarala finally to notice her couldn’t fully dampen that feeling.

  Standing in Avasarala’s office reinforced Bobbie’s impression that the Martian suite was intended to impress. The deputy secretary was important enough to get Bobbie transferred out of Thorsson’s command and into a liaison role for the UN with a single phone call. And yet her office had cheap carpet that smelled unpleasantly of stale tobacco smoke. Her desk was old and scuffed. No cherrywood chairs here. The only things that looked lovingly tended in the room were the fresh flowers and the Buddha shrine.

  Avasarala radiated weariness. There were dark circles under her eyes that hadn’t been there during their official meetings and hadn’t been visible in the dim l
ights of the bar where she’d made her offer. Sitting behind her giant desk in a bright blue sari, she looked very small, like a child pretending to be a grown-up. Only the gray hair and crow’s-feet ruined the illusion. Bobbie suddenly pictured her instead as a cranky doll, complaining as children moved her arms and legs and forced her to go to tea parties with stuffed animals. The thought made her cheeks ache from restraining the grin.

  Avasarala tapped at a terminal on her desk and grunted with irritation. No more tea for you, gramma dolly, you’ve had enough, Bobbie thought, then stifled a laugh. “Soren, you’ve moved my fucking files again. I can’t find a goddamned thing anymore.”

  The stiff young man who’d brought Bobbie into the office and then sort of melted into the background cleared his throat. It made Bobbie jump. He was closer behind her than she’d realized.

  “Ma’am, you asked me to move a few of the—”

  “Yes, yes,” Avasarala interrupted, tapping harder on the terminal’s screen, as if that would make the device understand what she wanted. Something about that made Bobbie think of people who started talking louder when trying to communicate with someone who spoke a different language.

  “Okay, there they are,” Avasarala said with irritation. “Why you’d put them …”

  She tapped a few more times and Bobbie’s terminal chimed.

  “That,” she said, “is the report and all of my notes on the Ganymede situation. Read them. Today. I may have an update later, once I’ve had a little polite questioning done.”

  Bobbie pulled out her terminal and scrolled quickly through the documents she’d just been sent. It went on and on for hundreds of pages. Her first thought was Did she really mean read all of this today? This was quickly followed by Did she really just hand me everything she knows? It made her own government’s recent treatment of her look even worse.

  “It won’t take you long,” her new boss continued. “There’s almost nothing there. Lots of bullshit by overpaid consultants who think they can hide the fact that they don’t actually know anything by talking twice as long.”