Caliban's War

by James S. A. Corey

  “I just want you to know how much I appreciate the way you looked after my people,” Wendell told the pair who made up the medical team.

  The woman suggested something obscene and unpleasant, but she smiled while she did it.

  “Wendell,” Holden said, rummaging in the box of their belongings and then tossing a card-key to the Pinkwater leader. “The Somnambulist is still yours, but you need to get to her now and get the hell out of here.”

  “Preaching to the choir,” Wendell said. “Get that gurney. We’re not leaving him behind now, and we’ve got to get out of here before reinforcements come.”

  “Yessir,” Paula said.

  Wendell turned to Holden.

  “It was interesting meeting you, Captain. Let’s not do this again.”

  Holden nodded but didn’t stop putting his armor back on to shake hands. Amos did the same, then distributed their confiscated weapons and items back to them. Holden checked the magazine on his gun and then left through the same door the dark-skinned man had used, Amos and Naomi on his heels. Prax had to trot to catch up. Another detonation came, this one not so distant. Prax thought he felt the ice shake under him, but it might have been his imagination.

  “What’s … what’s going on?”

  “The protomolecule’s breaking out,” Holden said, tossing a hand terminal to Naomi. “The infection’s taking hold.”

  “I don’d dink dat’ whas habn’ing, Cab’n,” Amos said. With a grimace he grabbed his nose with his right hand and yanked it away from his face. When he let go, it looked mostly straight. He blew a bloody-colored plug of snot out of each nostril, then took a deep breath. “That’s better.”

  “Alex?” Naomi said into her handset. “Alex, tell me this link is still up. Talk to me.”

  Her voice was shaking.

  Another boom, this one louder than anything Prax had ever heard. The shaking wasn’t imagined now; it threw Prax to the ground. The air had a strange smell, like overheated iron. The station lights flickered and went dark; the pale blue emergency evacuation LEDs came on. A low-pressure Klaxon was sounding, its tritone blat designed to carry through thin and thinning air. When Holden spoke, he sounded almost contemplative.

  “Or they might be bombarding the station.”

  Ganymede Station was one of the first permanent human toeholds in the outer planets. It had been built with the long term in mind, not only in its own architecture, but also in how it would fit with the grand human expansion out into the darkness at the edge of the solar system. The possibility of catastrophe was in its DNA and had been from the beginning. It had been the safest station in the Jovian system. Just the name had once brought to mind images of newborn babies and domes filled with food crops. But the months since the mirrors fell had corroded it.

  Pressure doors meant to isolate atmosphere loss had been wedged open when local hydraulics had failed. Emergency supplies had been used up and not replaced. Anything of value that could be turned into food or passage on the black market had been stolen and sold. The social infrastructure of Ganymede was already in its slow, inevitable collapse. The worst of the worst-case plans hadn’t envisioned this.

  Prax stood in the arching common space where Nicola and he had gone on their first date. They’d eaten together at a little dulcería, drinking coffee and flirting. He could still remember the shape of her face and the heart-stopping thrill he’d felt when she took his hand. The ice where the dulcería had been was a fractured chaos. A dozen passages intersected here, and people were streaming through them, trying to get to the port or else deep enough into the moon that the ice would shield them, or someplace they could tell themselves was safe.

  The only home he’d really known was falling apart around him. Thousands of people were going to die in the next few hours. Prax knew that, and part of him was horrified by it. But Mei had been on that ship, so she wasn’t one of them. He still had to rescue her, just not from this. It made it bearable.

  “Alex says it’s hot out there,” Naomi said as the four of them trotted through the ruins. “Really hot. He’s not going to be able to make it to the port.”

  “There’s the other landing pad,” Prax said. “We could go there.”

  “That’s the plan,” Holden said. “Give Alex the coordinates for the science base.”

  “Yes, sir,” Naomi said at the same moment Amos, raising a hand like a kid in a schoolroom, said, “The one with the protomolecule?”

  “It’s the only secret landing pad I’ve got,” Holden said.

  “Yeah, all right.”

  When Holden turned to Prax, his face was gray with strain and fear.

  “Okay, Prax. You’re the local. Our armor is vacuum rated, but we’ll need environment suits for you and Naomi. We’re about to run through hell, and not all of it’s going to be pressurized. I don’t have time to take a wrong turn or look for something twice. You’re point. Can you handle it?”

  “Yes,” Prax said.

  Finding the emergency environment suits was easy. They were common enough to have essentially no resale value and stowed at brightly colored emergency stations. All the supplies in the main halls and corridors were already stripped, but ducking down a narrow side corridor that linked to the less popular complex where Prax used to take Mei to the skating rink was easy. The suits there were safety orange and green, made to be visible to rescuers. Camouflage would have been more appropriate. The masks smelled of volatile plastic, and the joints were just rings sewn into the material. The suit heaters looked ill cared for and likely to catch on fire if used too long. Another blast came, followed by two others, each sounding closer than the one before.

  “Nukes,” Naomi said.

  “Maybe gauss rounds,” Holden replied. They might have been talking about the weather.

  Prax shrugged.

  “Either way, a hit that gets into a corridor means superheated steam,” he said, pressing the last seal along his side closed and checking the cheap green LED that promised the oxygen was flowing. The heating system flickered to yellow, then back to green. “You and Amos might make it if your armor’s good. I don’t think Naomi and I stand a chance.”

  “Great,” Holden said.

  “I’ve lost the Roci,” Naomi said. “No. I’ve lost the whole link. I was routing through the Somnambulist. She must have taken off.”

  Or been slagged. The thought was on all their faces. No one said it.

  “Over this way,” Prax said. “There’s a service tunnel we used to use when I was in college. We can get around the Marble Arch complex and head up from there.”

  “Whatever you say, buddy,” Amos said. His nose was bleeding again. The blood looked black in the faint blue light inside his helmet.

  It was his last walk. Whatever happened, Prax was never coming back here, because here wouldn’t exist. The fast lope along the service corridor where Jaimie Loomis and Tanna Ibtrahmin-Sook had taken him to get high was the last time he’d see that place. The broad, low-ceilinged amphitheater under the old water treatment center where he’d had his first internship was cracked, the reservoir compromised. It wouldn’t flood the corridors quickly, but in a couple of days, the passageways would be filled in. In a couple of days, it wouldn’t matter.

  Everything glowed in the emergency LEDs or else fell into shadow. There was slush on the ground as the heating system struggled to compensate for the madness and failed. Twice, the way was blocked, once by a pressure door that was actually still functional, once by an icefall. They met almost no one. The others were all running for the port. Prax was leading them almost directly away from it now.

  Another long, curved hall, then up a construction ramp, through an empty tunnel, and …

  The blue steel door that blocked their way wasn’t locked, but it was in safety mode. The indicator said there was vacuum on the other side. One of the God-like fists pummeling Ganymede had broken through here. Prax stopped, his mind clicking through the three-dimensional architecture of his home station.
If the secret base was there, and he was here, then …

  “We can’t get there,” he said.

  The others were silent for a moment.

  “That’s not a good answer,” Holden said. “Find a different one.”

  Prax took a long breath. If they doubled back, they could go down a level, head to the west, and try getting to the corridor from below, except that a blast strong enough to break through here would almost certainly have compromised the level below too. If they kept going to the old tube station, they might be able to find a service corridor—not that he knew there was one, but maybe—and it might lead in the right direction. Three more detonations came, shaking the ice. With a sound like a baseball bat hitting a home run, the wall beside him cracked.

  “Prax, buddy,” Amos said, “sooner’d be better.”

  They had environment suits, so if they opened the door, the vacuum wouldn’t kill them. But there would be debris choking it. Any strike hard enough to break through to the surface would …

  Would …

  “We can’t get there … through the station tunnels,” he said. “But we can go up. Get to the surface and go that way.”

  “And how do we do that?” Holden asked.

  Finding an access way that wasn’t locked down took twenty minutes, but Prax found one. No wider than three men walking abreast, it was an automated service unit for the dome exteriors. The service unit itself had long since been cannibalized for parts, but that didn’t matter. The airlock was still working under battery power. Naomi and Prax fed it the instructions, closed the inner door, and cycled the outer open. The escaping pressure was like a wind for a moment, and then nothing. Prax walked out onto the surface of Ganymede.

  He’d seen images of the aurora from Earth. He’d never imagined he’d see anything like it in the blackness of his own sky. But there, not just above him but in lines from horizon to horizon, were streaks of green and blue and gold—chaff and debris and the radiating gas of cooling plasma. Incandescent blooms marked torch drives. Several kilometers away, a gauss round slammed into the moon’s surface, the seismic shock knocking them from their feet. Prax lay there for a moment, watching the water ejecta geyser up into the darkness and then begin to fall back down as snow. It was beautiful. The rational, scientific part of his mind tried to calculate how much energy transfer there was to the moon when a rail-gun-hurled chunk of tungsten hit it. It would be like a miniature nuke without all the messy radiation. He wondered if the round would stop before it hit Ganymede’s nickel-iron core.

  “Okay,” Holden said over the cheap radio in Prax’s emergency suit. The low end of the sound spectrum was lousy, and Holden sounded like a cartoon character. “Which way now?”

  “I don’t know,” Prax said, rising to his knees. He pointed toward the horizon. “Over there somewhere.”

  “I need more than that,” Holden said.

  “I’ve never been on the surface before,” Prax said. “In a dome, sure. But just out? I mean, I know we’re close to it, but I don’t know how to get there.”

  “All right,” Holden said. In the high vacuum over his head, something huge and very far away detonated. It was like the old cartoon lightbulb of someone getting an idea. “We can do this. We can solve this. Amos, you head toward that hill over there, see what you can see. Prax and Naomi, start going that direction.”

  “I don’t think we need to do that, sir,” Naomi said.

  “Why not?”

  Naomi raised her hand, pointing back behind Holden and Prax both.

  “Because I’m pretty sure that’s the Roci setting down over there,” she said.

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Holden

  The secret landing pad lay in the hollow of a small crater. When Holden crested the lip and saw the Rocinante below him, the sudden and dizzying release of tension told him how frightened he’d been for the last several hours. But the Roci was home, and no matter how hard his rational mind argued that they were still in terrible danger, home was safe. As he paused a moment to catch his breath, the scene was lit with bright white light, like someone had taken a picture. Holden looked up in time to see a fading cloud of glowing gas in high orbit.

  People were still dying in space just over their heads.

  “Wow,” Prax said. “It’s bigger than I expected.”

  “Corvette,” Amos replied, obvious pride in his voice. “Frigate-class fleet escort ship.”

  “I don’t know what any of that means,” Prax said. “It looks like a big chisel with an upside-down coffee cup on the back.”

  Amos said, “That’s the drive—”

  “Enough,” Holden cut in. “Get to the airlock.”

  Amos led the way, sliding down the crater’s icy wall hunched down on his heels and using his hands for balance. Prax went next, for once not needing any help. Naomi went third, her reflexes and balance honed by a lifetime spent in shifting gravities. She actually managed to look graceful.

  Holden went last, fully prepared to slip and go down the hill in a humiliating tumble, then pleasantly surprised when he didn’t.

  As they bounded across the flat floor of the crater toward the ship, the outer airlock door slid open, revealing Alex in a suit of Martian body armor and carrying an assault rifle. As soon as they were close enough to the ship that they could cut through the orbital radio clutter, Holden said, “Alex! Man, is it good to see you.”

  “Hey, Cap,” Alex replied, even his exaggerated drawl not able to hide the relief in his voice. “Wasn’t sure how hot this LZ would be. Anyone chasin’ you?”

  Amos ran up the ramp and grabbed Alex in a bear hug that yanked him off his feet.

  “Man, it’s fucking good to be home!” he said.

  Prax and Naomi followed, Naomi patting Alex on the shoulder as she went by. “You did good. Thank you.”

  Holden stopped on the ramp to look up one last time. The sky was still filled with the flashes and light trails of ongoing battle. He had the sudden visceral memory of being a boy back in Montana, watching massive thunderheads flash with hidden lightning.

  Alex watched with him, then said, “It was a bit hectic, comin’ in.”

  Holden threw an arm around his shoulder. “Thanks for the ride.”

  Once the airlock had finished cycling and the crew had removed their environment suits and armor, Holden said, “Alex, this is Prax Meng. Prax, this is the solar system’s best pilot, Alex Kamal.”

  Prax shook Alex’s hand. “Thank you for helping me find Mei.”

  Alex frowned a question at Holden, but a quick shake of the head kept him from asking it. “Nice to meet you, Prax.”

  “Alex,” Holden said, “get us warmed up for liftoff, but don’t take off until I’m up in the copilot’s chair.”

  “Roger,” Alex said, and headed toward the bow of the ship.

  “Everything’s sideways,” Prax said, looking around at the storage room just past the inner airlock door.

  “The Roci doesn’t spend much time on her belly like this,” Naomi said, taking his hand and leading him to the crew ladder, which now appeared to run across the floor. “We’re standing on a bulkhead, and that wall to our right is normally the deck.”

  “Grew up in low grav and don’t spend much time on ships, apparently,” Amos said. “Man, this next part is really gonna suck for you.”

  “Naomi,” Holden said. “Get to ops and get belted in. Amos, take Prax to the crew deck and then head down to engineering and get the Roci ready for a rough ride.”

  Before they could leave, Holden put a hand on Prax’s shoulder.

  “This takeoff and flight is going to be fast and bumpy. If you haven’t trained for high-g flight, it will probably be very uncomfortable.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Prax said, making what he probably thought was a brave face.

  “I know you’re tough. You couldn’t have survived the last couple weeks otherwise. You don’t have anything to prove at this point. Amos will take you to the crew deck. Find a room wi
thout a name on the door. That will be your room now. Get in the crash couch and buckle in, then hit the bright green button on the panel to your left. The couch will pump you full of drugs that will sedate you and keep you from blowing a blood vessel if we have to burn hard.”

  “My room?” Prax said, an odd note in his voice.

  “We’ll get you some clothes and sundries once we’re out of this shit. You can keep them there.”

  “My room,” Prax repeated.

  “Yeah,” Holden said. “Your room.” He could see Prax fighting down a lump in his throat, and he realized what the simple offer of comfort and safety probably meant to someone who’d been through what the small botanist had over the last month.

  There were tears in the man’s eyes.

  “Come on, let’s get you settled in,” Amos said, leading Prax aft toward the crew deck.

  Holden headed the other way, past the ops deck, where Naomi was already strapped down into a chair at one of the workstations, then forward into the cockpit. He climbed into the copilot’s seat and belted in.

  “Five minutes,” he said over the shipwide channel.

  “So,” Alex said, dragging the word out to two syllables while he flicked switches to finish the preflight check, “we’re lookin’ for someone named Mei?”

  “Prax’s daughter.”

  “We do that now? Seems like the scope of our mission is creepin’ a bit.”

  Holden nodded. Finding lost daughters was not part of their mandate. That had been Miller’s job. And he’d never be able to adequately explain the certainty he felt that this lost little girl was at the center of everything that had happened on Ganymede.

  “I think this lost little girl is at the center of everything that’s happened on Ganymede,” he said with a shrug.

  “Okay,” Alex replied, then hit something on a panel twice and frowned. “Huh, we have a red on the board. Gettin’ a ‘no seal’ on the cargo airlock. Might’ve caught some flak on the way down, I guess. It was pretty hot up there.”