Caliban's War

by James S. A. Corey

  Bobbie nodded, but the feeling of being in over her head had started to outcompete her excitement at a new opportunity.

  “Ma’am, is Sergeant Draper cleared to access—” Soren said.

  “Yes. I just cleared her. Bobbie? You’re cleared,” Avasarala said right over the top of him. “Stop busting my balls, Soren. I’m out of tea.”

  Bobbie made a conscious effort not to turn around and look at Soren. The situation was uncomfortable enough without driving home the fact that he’d just been humiliated in front of a foreigner with exactly seventeen minutes on the job.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Soren said. “But I was wondering whether you should alert the security service about your decision to clear the sergeant. They do like to be in the loop on that kind of thing.”

  “Meow meow cry meow meow,” Avasarala said. “That’s all I heard you say.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Soren said.

  Bobbie finally looked back and forth between them. Soren was being dressed down in front of a new team member who was also technically the enemy. His expression hadn’t changed. He looked like he was humoring a demented grandmother. Avasarala made an impatient clicking sound with her teeth.

  “Was I not clear? Have I lost the ability to speak?”

  “No, ma’am,” Soren said.

  “Bobbie? Can you understand me?”

  “Y-yes, sir.”

  “Good. Then get out of my office and do your jobs. Bobbie, read. Soren, tea.”

  Bobbie turned to leave and found Soren staring at her, his face expressionless. Which was, in its way, more disconcerting than a little well-justified anger would have been.

  As she walked past him, Avasarala said, “Soren, wait. Take this to Foster in data services.” She handed Soren what looked like a memory stick. “Make sure you get it to him before he leaves for the day.”

  Soren nodded, smiled, and took the small black wafer from her. “Of course.”

  When he and Bobbie had left Avasarala’s office, and Soren had closed the door behind them, Bobbie let out a long whistling exhale and smiled at him.

  “Wow, that was awkward. Sorry about—” she started, but stopped when Soren held up his hand, casually dismissing her concern.

  “It’s nothing,” he said. “She’s actually having a pretty good day.”

  While she stood gaping and looking at him, Soren turned away from her and tossed the memory stick onto his desk, where it slid under the wrapper of a half-eaten package of cookies. He sat down and put on a headset, then began scrolling through a list of phone numbers on his desktop terminal. If he noticed her continued presence, he gave no sign.

  “You know,” Bobbie said finally, “I just have some stuff to read, so if you’re busy, I could take that thing to the data services guy. I mean, if you’re busy with other stuff.”

  Soren finally looked at her quizzically.

  “Why would I need you to do that?”

  “Well,” Bobbie said, glancing at the time on her terminal, “it’s pretty close to eighteen hundred local, and I don’t know what time you guys usually close up shop, so I just thought—”

  “Don’t worry about it. The thing is, my whole job is making her”—he jerked his head toward the closed door—“calm and happy. With her, everything’s top priority. And so nothing is, you know? I’ll do it when it needs doing. Until then, the bitch can bark a little if it makes her feel happy.”

  Bobbie felt a cool rush of surprise. No, not surprise. Shock.

  “You just called her a bitch?”

  “What would you call her, right?” Soren said with a disarming grin. Or was it mocking? Was this all a joke to him, Avasarala and Bobbie and the monster on Ganymede too? An image popped into her head of snatching the smug little assistant out of his chair and snapping him into a zigzag shape. Her hands flexed involuntarily.

  Instead, she said, “Madam Secretary seemed to think it was pretty important.”

  Soren turned to look at her again. “Don’t worry about it, Bobbie. Seriously. I know how to do my job.”

  She stood for a long moment.

  “Solid copy on that,” she said.

  Bobbie was yanked from a dead sleep by sudden blaring music. She lurched upright in an unfamiliar bed in a nearly pitch-black room. The only light she could see was a faint pulsing pearly glow from her hand terminal, all the way across the room. The music suddenly stopped sounding like an atonal cacophony and became the song she’d selected as the audio alarm for incoming phone calls when she went to bed. Someone was calling. She cursed them in three languages and tried to crawl across the bed toward the terminal.

  The edge of the bed came unexpectedly and plunged her face-first toward the floor, her half-asleep body not compensating for Earth’s heavier gravity. She managed to avoid breaking her head open at the cost of a pair of jammed fingers on her right hand.

  Cursing even louder, she continued her trek across the floor to the still glowing terminal. When she finally reached it, she opened the connection and said, “If someone isn’t dead, someone will be.”

  “Bobbie,” the person on the other end said. It took Bobbie’s fuzzy head a moment to place the voice. Soren. She glanced at the time on her terminal and saw that it was 0411. She wondered if he was calling to drunkenly upbraid her or apologize. It certainly wouldn’t be the strangest thing that’d happened over the last twenty-four hours.

  Bobbie realized he was still talking, and put the speaker back up to her ear. “—is expecting you soonest, so get down here,” Soren said.

  “Can you repeat that?”

  He started speaking slowly, as though to a dim child. “The boss wants you to come to the office, okay?”

  Bobbie looked at the time again. “Right now?”

  “No,” Soren said. “Tomorrow at the normal time. She just wanted me to call at four a.m. to make sure you were coming.”

  The flash of anger helped wake her up. Bobbie stopped gritting her teeth long enough to say, “Tell her I’ll be right there.”

  She fumbled her way to a wall, and then along it to a panel, which lit up at her touch. A second touch brought up the room’s lights. Avasarala had gotten her a small furnished apartment within walking distance of the office. It wasn’t much bigger than a cheap rent hole on Ceres. One large room that doubled as living space and bedroom, a smaller room with a shower and toilet, and an even smaller room that pretended to be a kitchen. Bobbie’s duffel lay slumped in the corner, a few items pulled out of it, but mostly still packed. She’d stayed up till one in the morning reading and hadn’t bothered to do anything after that but brush her teeth and then collapse into the bed that pulled down from the ceiling.

  As she stood surveying the room and trying to wake up, Bobbie had a sudden moment of total clarity. It was as though a pair of dark glasses she hadn’t even known she was wearing were snatched away, leaving her blinking in the light. Here she was, climbing out of bed after three hours of sleep to meet with one of the most powerful women in the solar system, and all she cared about was that she hadn’t gotten her quarters shipshape and that she really wanted to beat one of her coworkers to death with his brass pen set. Oh, and she was a career marine who’d taken a job working with her government’s current worst enemy because someone in naval intelligence had been mean to her. And not least of all, she wanted to get back to Ganymede and kill someone without having the foggiest idea who that someone might be.

  The abrupt and crystal-clear vision of how far off the tracks her life seemed to have fallen lasted for a few seconds, and then the fog and sleep deprivation returned, leaving her with only the disquieting feeling that she’d forgotten to do something important.

  She dressed in the prior day’s uniform and rinsed her mouth out, then headed out the door.

  Avasarala’s modest office was packed with people. Bobbie recognized at least three civilians from her first meeting there on Earth. One of them was the moonfaced man who she’d later learned was Sadavir Errinwright, Avasarala’s boss and
possibly the second most powerful man on Earth. The pair were in an intense conversation when she came in, and Avasarala didn’t see her.

  Bobbie spotted a small clump of people in military uniforms and drifted in their direction until she saw that they were generals and admirals, and changed course. She wound up next to Soren, the only other person in the room standing alone. He didn’t even give her a glance, but something about the way he held himself seemed to radiate that disquieting charm, powerful and insincere. It struck Bobbie that Soren was the kind of man she might take to bed if she was drunk enough, but she’d never trust him to watch her back in a fight. On second thought, no, she’d never be drunk enough.

  “Draper!” Avasarala called out in a loud voice, having finally noticed her arrival.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Bobbie said, taking a step forward as everyone in the room stopped talking to look at her.

  “You’re my liaison,” Avasarala said, the bags under her eyes so pronounced they looked less like fatigue and more like an undiagnosed medical condition. “So fucking liaise. Call your people.”

  “What happened?”

  “The situation around Ganymede has just turned into the shit-storm to end all shit-storms,” she said. “We’re in a shooting war.”

  Chapter Twenty-One: Prax

  Prax knelt, his arms zip-tied securely behind him. His shoulders ached. It hurt to hold his head up and it hurt to let it sink down. Amos lay facedown on the floor. Prax thought he was dead until he saw the zip-ties holding his arms behind his back. The nonlethal round their kidnappers had fired into the back of the mechanic’s head had left an enormous blue-and-black lump there. Most of the others—Holden, some of the Pinkwater mercenaries, even Naomi—were in positions much like his own, but not all.

  Four years before, they’d had a moth infestation. A containment study had failed, and inch-long gray-brown miller moths had run riot in his dome. They’d built a heat trap: a few dabs of generated pheromones on a heat-resistant fiber swatch under the big long-wave full-spectrum lighting units. The moths came too close, and the heat killed them. The smell of small bodies burning had fouled the air for days, and the scent was exactly like that of the cauterizing drill their abductors were using on the injured Pinkwater man. A swirl of white smoke rose from the formed-plastic office table on which he was laid out.

  “I’m just …” the Pinkwater man said through his sedation haze. “You just go ahead, finish that without me. I’ll be over …”

  “Another bleeder,” one of their abductors said. She was a thick-featured woman with a mole under her left eye and blood-slicked rubber gloves. “Right there.”

  “Check. Got it,” said the man with the drill, pressing the metal tip back down into the patient’s open belly wound. The sharp tapping sound of electrical discharge, and another small plume of white smoke rising from the wound.

  Amos rolled over suddenly, his nose a bloody ruin, his face covered in gore. “I bight be wrong about dis, Cab’n,” he said, the words fighting out past the bulbous mess of his nose, “’ut I don’d dink dese fellas are station security.”

  The room Prax had found himself in when the hood had been lifted had nothing to do with the usual atmosphere of law enforcement. It looked like an old office. The kind a safety inspector or a shipping clerk might have used in the ancient days before the cascade had started: a long desk with a built-in surface terminal, a few recessed lights shining up on the ceiling, a dead plant— Sanseviera trifasciata—with long green-brown leaves turning to dark slime. The gray-armored guards or soldiers or whatever they were had been very methodical and efficient. Prisoners were all along one wall, bound at the ankles and wrists; their hand terminals, weapons, and personal effects were stowed along the opposite wall with two guards set to do nothing but make sure no one touched them. The armor they’d stripped off Holden and Amos was in a pile on the floor next to their guns. Then the pair that Prax thought of as the medical team had started working, caring for the most desperately wounded first. They hadn’t had time yet to go on to anybody else.

  “Any idea who we’re dealing with here?” Wendell asked under his breath.

  “Not OPA,” Holden said.

  “That leaves a pretty large number of suspects,” the Pinkwater captain said. “Is there somebody you’ve pissed off I should know about?”

  Holden’s eyes took on a pained expression and he made a motion as close to a shrug as he could manage, given the circumstances.

  “There’s kind of a list,” he said.

  “Another bleeder here,” the woman said.

  “Check,” the drill man said. Tap, smoke, the smell of burning flesh.

  “No offense meant, Captain Holden,” Wendell said, “but I’m starting to wish I’d just shot you when I had the chance.”

  “None taken,” Holden replied with a nod.

  Four of the soldiers came back into the room. They were all squat Earther types. One—a dark-skinned man with a fringe of gray hair and an air of command—was subvocalizing madly. His gaze passed over the prisoners, seeing them without seeing them. Like they were boxes. When his eyes were on Prax, the man nodded but not to him.

  “Are they stable?” the dark-skinned man asked the medical team.

  “If I had the choice,” the woman said, “I wouldn’t move this one.”

  “If you didn’t?”

  “He’ll probably make it. Keep the high g to a minimum until I can get him to a real medical bay.”

  “Excuse me,” Holden said. “Can someone please tell me what the hell’s going on?”

  He might as well have been asking the walls.

  “We’ve got ten minutes,” the dark-skinned man said.

  “Transport ship?”

  “Not yet. The secure facility.”

  “Splendid,” the woman said sourly.

  “Because if you want to ask us any questions,” Holden said, “we should start by getting everybody off Ganymede. If you want your people to still be people, we have to go. That lab we were in had the protomolecule.”

  “I want them moved two at a time,” the dark-skinned man said.

  “Yes, sir,” the woman replied.

  “Are you listening to me?” Holden shouted. “The protomolecule is loose on this station.”

  “They’re not listening to us, Jim,” Naomi said.

  “Ferguson. Mott,” the dark-skinned man said. “Report.”

  The room was silent as someone somewhere reported in.

  “My daughter’s missing,” Prax said. “That ship took my daughter.”

  They weren’t listening to him either. He hadn’t expected them to. With the exception of Holden and his crew, no one had. The dark-skinned man hunched forward, his expression profoundly focused. Prax felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. A premonition.

  “Repeat that,” the dark-skinned man said. And then a moment later: “We’re firing? Who’s we?”

  Someone answered. The medical team and the weapons guards had their eyes on the commander too. Their faces were poker-blank.

  “Understood. Alpha team, new orders. Get to the port and secure a transport ship. Use of force is authorized. Repeat that: Use of force is authorized. Sergeant Chernev, I need you to cut the prisoners’ leg restraints.”

  One of the gun guards did a double take.

  “All of them, sir?”

  “All of them. And we’re going to need a gurney for this gentleman.”

  “What’s going on, sir?” the sergeant asked, his voice strained by confusion and fear.

  “What’s going on is I’m giving you an order,” the dark-skinned man said, striding fast out the door. “Now go.”

  Prax felt the knife slash as a rough vibration against his ankles. He hadn’t realized his feet were numb until the burning pins-and-needles sensation brought tears to his eyes. Standing hurt. In the distance, something boomed like an empty freight container dropped from a great height. The sergeant cut Amos’ legs free from their bonds and moved on to Naomi. One g
uard still stood by the supplies. The medical team was sealing the gut-shot man’s belly closed with a sweet-smelling gel. The sergeant bent over.

  The glance between Holden and Amos was the only warning Prax had. As casually as a man heading for the restroom, Holden started walking toward the door.

  “Hey!” the weapons guard said, lifting a rifle the size of his arm. Holden looked up innocently, all eyes upon him, while behind him Amos brought his knee up into the sergeant’s head. Prax yelped with surprise and the gun swung toward him. He tried to raise his hands, but they were still tied behind him. Wendell stepped forward, put a foot against the medical woman’s hip, and pushed her into the guard’s line of fire.

  Naomi was kneeling on the sergeant’s neck; his face was purple. Holden kicked the drill-wielding man in the back of the knee at the same moment that Amos tackled the man with the rifle. The cauterizing drill sparked against the floor with a sound like a finger tapping against glass. Paula had the sergeant’s knife in her hands, backing up against one of her compatriots, sawing at the zip line around his wrists. The rifleman swung his elbow, and Amos’ breath went out in a whoosh. Holden dropped onto the male half of the medical team, pinning the man’s arms with his knees. Amos did something Prax couldn’t see, and the rifleman grunted and folded over.

  Paula got through the Pinkwater man’s zip-tie just as the medical woman scooped up the rifle. The freed man pulled the pistol from the fallen sergeant’s holster and leaned forward, pressing the barrel to the medical woman’s temple as she swung the rifle up a quarter second too late.

  Everyone froze. The medical woman smiled.

  “Checkmate,” she said, and lowered the rifle to the floor.

  It had all taken no more than ten seconds.

  Naomi took the knife, quickly, methodically slicing through the wrist bindings while Holden followed along behind, disabling the communication webs in the gray unmarked armor and zip-tying their hands and feet. A perfect inversion of the previous situation. Prax, rubbing the feeling back into his fingers, had the absurd image of the dark-skinned man coming back in and barking orders to him. Another boom came, another huge, resonating container being dropped and sounding out like a drum.