Caliban's War

by James S. A. Corey

  But it wasn’t an excuse. Not anymore.

  He started to pull out his terminal to call Naomi when it hit him like a light turning on. I’m fired.

  He’d been on an exclusive contract with Fred for over a year. Tycho Station was their home base. Sam had spent almost as much time tuning and patching the Roci as Amos had. That was all gone. They’d have to find their own jobs, find their own ports, buy their own repairs. No more patron to hold his hand. For the first time in a very long time, Holden was a real independent captain. He’d need to earn his way by keeping the ship in the air and the crew fed. He paused for a moment, letting that sink in.

  It felt great.

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Prax

  Amos sat forward in his chair. The sheer physical mass of the man made the room seem smaller, and the smell of alcohol and old smoke came off him like heat from a fire. His expression couldn’t have been more gentle.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Prax said. “I just don’t know what to do. This is all my fault. Nicola was just … she was so lost and so angry. Every day, I woke up and I looked over at her, and all I saw was how trapped she was. And I knew Mei was going to grow up with that. With trying to get her mommy to love her when all Nici wanted to do was be somewhere else. And I thought it would be better. When she started talking about going, I was ready for her to do it, you know? And when Mei … when I had to tell Mei that …”

  Prax dropped his head into his hands, rocking slowly back and forth.

  “You gonna sick up again, Doc?”

  “No. I’m fine. If I’d been a better father to her, she’d still be here.”

  “We talking about the ex-wife or the kid?”

  “I don’t care about Nicola. If I’d been there for Mei. If I’d gone to her as soon as we got the warning. If I hadn’t waited there in the dome. And for what? Plants? They’re dead now anyway. I had one, but I lost it, too. I couldn’t even save one. But I could have gotten there. Found her. If I’d—”

  “You know she was gone before the shit hit the fan, right?”

  Prax shook his head. He wasn’t about to let reality forgive him.

  “And this. I had a chance. I got out. I got some money. And I was stupid. It was her last chance, and I was stupid about it.”

  “Yeah, well. You’re new at this, Doc.”

  “She should have had a better dad. She deserved a better dad. Was such a good … she was such a good girl.”

  For the first time, Amos touched him. The wide hand took his shoulder, gripping him from collarbone to scapula and bending Prax’s spine until it was straight. Amos’ eyes were more than bloodshot, white sclera marbled with red. His breath was hot and astringent, the platonic ideal of a sailor on a shore leave bender. But his voice was sober and steady.

  “She’s got a fine daddy, Doc. You give a shit, and that’s more than a lot of people ever do.”

  Prax swallowed. He was tired. He was tired of being strong, of being hopeful and determined and preparing for the worst. He didn’t want to be himself anymore. He didn’t want to be anyone at all. Amos’ hand felt like a ship clamp, keeping Prax from spinning away into darkness. All he wanted was to be let go.

  “She’s gone,” Prax said. It felt like a good excuse. An explanation. “They took her away from me, and I don’t know who they are, and I can’t get her back, and I don’t understand.”

  “It ain’t over yet.”

  Prax nodded, not because he was actually comforted, but because this was the moment when he knew he should act like he was.

  “I’m never going to find her.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  The door chimed and slid open. Holden stepped in. Prax couldn’t see at first what was different about him, but that something had happened … had changed … was unmistakable. The face was the same; the clothes hadn’t changed. Prax had the uncanny memory of sitting through a lecture on metamorphosis.

  “Hey,” Holden said. “Everything all right?”

  “Little bumpy,” Amos said. Prax saw his own confusion mirrored in Amos’ face. They were both aware of the transformation, and neither of them knew what it was. “You get laid or something, Cap?”

  “No,” Holden said.

  “I mean, good on you if you did,” Amos said. “It just wasn’t how I pictured—”

  “I didn’t get laid,” Holden said hesitantly. The smile that came after was almost radiant. “I got fired.”

  “Just you got fired, or all of us?”

  “All of us.”

  “Huh,” Amos said. He went still for a moment, then shrugged. “All right.”

  “I need to talk to Naomi, but she’s not accepting connections from me. Do you think you could track her down?”

  Discomfort pursed Amos’ lips like he’d sucked on an old lemon.

  “I’m not going to pick a fight,” Holden said. “We just didn’t leave it in the right place. And it’s my fault, so I need to fix it.”

  “I know she was hanging out down in that one bar Sam told us about last time. The Blauwe Blome. But you make a dick of yourself and I’m not the one that told you.”

  “Not a problem,” Holden said. “Thanks.”

  The captain turned to leave and then stopped in the doorway. He looked like someone still half in a dream.

  “What’s bumpy?” he asked. “You said it was bumpy.”

  “The doc was looking to hire on some Luna private security squad to track the kid down. Didn’t work out and he kind of took it bad.”

  Holden frowned. Prax felt the heat of a blush pushing up his neck.

  “I thought we were finding the kid,” Holden said. He sounded genuinely confused.

  “Doc wasn’t clear on that.”

  “Oh,” Holden said. He turned to Prax. “We’re finding your kid. You don’t need to get someone else.”

  “I can’t pay you,” Prax said. “All my accounts were on the Ganymede system, and even if they’re still there, I can’t access them. I just have what people are giving me. I can probably get something like a thousand dollars UN. Is that enough?”

  “No,” Holden said. “That won’t buy a week’s air, much less water. We’ll have to take care of that.”

  Holden tilted his head like he was listening to something only he could hear.

  “I’ve already talked to my ex-wife,” Prax said. “And my parents. I can’t think of anyone else.”

  “How about everyone?” Holden said.

  “I’m James Holden,” the captain said from the huge screen of the Rocinante’s pilot capsule, “and I’m here to ask for your help. Four months ago, hours before the first attack on Ganymede, a little girl with a life-threatening genetic illness was abducted from her day care. In the chaos that—”

  Alex stopped the playback. Prax tried to sit up, but the gimbaled copilot’s chair only shifted under him, and he lay back.

  “I don’t know,” Alex said from the pilot’s couch. “The green background kinda makes him look pasty, don’t you think?”

  Prax narrowed his eyes a degree, considered, then nodded.

  “It’s not really his color,” Prax said. “Maybe if it was darker.”

  “I’ll try that,” the pilot said, tapping at his screen. “Normally it’s Naomi who does this stuff. Communications packages ain’t exactly my first love. But we’ll get it done. How about this?”

  “Better,” Prax said.

  “I’m James Holden, and I’m here to ask for your help. Four months ago …”

  Holden’s part of the little presentation was less than a minute, speaking into the camera from Amos’ hand terminal. After that, Amos and Prax had spent an hour trying to create the rest. Alex had been the one to suggest using the better equipment on the Rocinante. Once they’d done that, putting together the information had been easy. He’d taken the start he’d made for Nicola and his parents as the template. Alex helped him record the rest—an explanation of Mei’s condition; the security footage of Strickland and the mysterious woman tak
ing her from the day care; the data from the secret lab, complete with images of the protomolecule filament; pictures of Mei playing in the parks; and a short video from her second birthday party, when she smeared cake frosting on her forehead.

  Prax felt odd watching himself speak. He had seen plenty of recordings of himself, but the man on the screen was thinner than he’d expected. Older. His voice was higher than the one he heard in his own ears, and less hesitant. The Praxidike Meng who was about to be broadcast out to the whole of humanity was a different man than he was, but it was close enough. And if it helped to find Mei, it would do. If it brought her back, he’d be anyone.

  Alex slid his fingers across his controls, rearranging the presentation, connecting the images of Mei to the timeline to Holden. They had set up an account with a Belt-based credit union that had a suite of options for short-term unincorporated nonprofit concerns so that any contributions could be accepted automatically. Prax watched, wanting badly to offer comment or take control. But there was nothing more to do.

  “All right,” Alex said. “That’s about as pretty as I can make it.”

  “Okay, then,” Prax said. “What do we do with it now?”

  Alex looked over. He seemed tired, but there was also an excitement.

  “Hit send.”

  “But the review process …”

  “There is no review process, Doc. This isn’t a government thing. Hell, it’s not even a business. It’s just us monkeys flying fast and tryin’ to keep our butts out of the engine plume.”

  “Oh,” Prax said. “Really?”

  “You hang around the captain long enough, you get used to it. You might want to take a day, though. Think it through.”

  Prax lifted himself on one elbow.

  “Think what through?”

  “Sending this out. If it works the way we’re thinking, you’re about to get a lot of attention. Maybe it’ll be what we’re hoping for; maybe it’ll be something else. All I’m saying is you can’t unscramble that egg.”

  Prax considered for a few seconds. The screens glowed.

  “It’s Mei,” Prax said.

  “All right, then,” Alex said, and shifted communication control to the copilot’s station. “You want to do the honors?”

  “Where is it going? I mean, where are we sending it?”

  “Simple broadcast,” Alex said. “Probably get picked up by some local feeds in the Belt. But it’s the captain, so folks will watch it, pass it around on the net. And …”

  “And?”

  “We didn’t put our hitchhiker in, but the filament out of that glass case?We’re kind of announcing that the protomolecule’s still out there. That’s gonna boost the signal.”

  “And we think that’s going to help?”

  “First time we did something like this, it started a war,” Alex said. “ ‘Help’ might be a strong word for it. Stir things up, though.”

  Prax shrugged and hit send.

  “Torpedoes away,” Alex said, chuckling.

  Prax slept on the station, serenaded by the hum of the air recyclers. Amos was gone again, leaving only a note that Prax shouldn’t wait up. It was probably his imagination that made the spin gravity seem to feel different. With a diameter as wide as Tycho’s, the Coriolis effect shouldn’t have been uncomfortably noticeable, and certainly not when he lay there, motionless, in the darkness of his room. And still, he couldn’t get comfortable. He couldn’t forget that he was being turned, inertia pressing him against the thin mattress as his body tried to fly out into the void. Most of the time he’d been on the Rocinante, he’d been able to trick his mind into thinking that he had the reassuring mass of a moon under him. It wasn’t, he decided, an artifact of how the acceleration was generated so much as what it meant.

  As his mind slowly spiraled down, bits of his self breaking apart like a meteor hitting atmosphere, he felt a massive welling-up of gratitude. Part of it was to Holden and part to Amos. The whole crew of the Rocinante. Half-dreaming, he was on Ganymede again. He was starving, walking down ice corridors with the certainty that somewhere nearby, one of his soybeans had been infected with the protomolecule and was tracking him, bent on revenge. With the broken logic of dreams, he was also on Tycho, looking for work, but all the people he gave his CV to shook their heads and told him he was missing some sort of degree or credential he didn’t recognize or understand. The only thing that made it bearable was a deeper knowledge—certain as bone—that none of it was true. That he was sleeping, and that when he woke, he would be somewhere safe.

  What did wake him at last was the rich smell of beef. His eyes were crusted like he’d been crying in his sleep, the tears leaving salt residues where they’d evaporated. The shower was hissing and splashing. Prax pulled on his jumpsuit, wondering again why it had TACHI printed across the back.

  Breakfast waited on the table: steak and eggs, flour tortillas, and black coffee. Real food that had cost someone a small fortune. There were two plates, so Prax chose one and started eating. It had probably cost a tenth of the money he had from Nicola, but it tasted wonderful. Amos ducked out of the shower, a towel wrapped around his hips. A massive white scar puckered the right side of his abdomen, pulling his navel off center, and a nearly photographic tattoo of a young woman with wavy hair and almond-shaped eyes covered his heart. Prax thought there was a word under the tattooed face, but he didn’t want to stare.

  “Hey, Doc,” Amos said. “You’re looking better.”

  “I got some rest,” Prax said as Amos walked into his own room and closed the door behind him. When Prax spoke again, he raised his voice. “I want to thank you. I was feeling low last night. And whether you and the others can actually help find Mei or not—”

  “Why wouldn’t we be able to find her?” Amos asked, his voice muffled by the door. “You ain’t losing respect for me, are you, Doc?”

  “No,” Prax said. “No, not at all. I only meant that what you and the captain are offering is … it’s a huge …”

  Amos came back out grinning. His jumpsuit covered scars and tattoos as if they’d never been.

  “I knew what you meant. I was just joshing you. You like that steak? Keep wondering where they put the cows on this thing, don’t you?”

  “Oh no, this is vat-grown. You can tell from the way the muscle fibers grow. You see how these parts right here are layered? Actually makes it easier to get a good marbled cut than when you carve it out of a steer.”

  “No shit?” Amos said, sitting across from him. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Microgravity also makes fish more nutritious,” Prax said around a mouthful of egg. “Increases the oil production. No one knows why, but there are a couple very interesting studies about it. They think it may not be the low g itself so much as the constant flow you have to have so that the animals don’t stop swimming, make a bubble of oxygen-depleted water, and suffocate.”

  Amos ripped a bit of tortilla and dipped it into the yolk.

  “This is what dinner conversation’s like in your family, ain’t it?”

  Prax blinked.

  “Mostly, yes. Why? What do you talk about?”

  Amos chuckled. He seemed to be in a very good mood. There was a relaxed look about his shoulders, and something in the set of his jaw had changed. Prax remembered the previous night’s conversation with the captain.

  “You got laid, didn’t you?”

  “Oh hell yes,” Amos said. “But that’s not the best part.”

  “It’s not?”

  “Oh, it’s a fucking good part, but there’s nothing better in the world than getting a job the day after your ass gets canned.”

  A pang of confusion touched Prax. Amos pulled his hand terminal out of his pocket, tapped it twice, and slid it across the table. The screen showed a red security border and the name of the credit union Alex had been working with the night before. When he saw the balance, his eyes went wide.

  “Is … is that …?”

  “That’s enough to kee
p the Roci flying for a month, and we got it in seven hours,” Amos said. “You just hired yourself a team, Doc.”

  “I don’t know … really?”

  “Not just that. Take a look at the messages you’ve got coming in. Captain made a pretty big splash back in the day, but your kiddo? All that shit that came down on Ganymede just got itself a face, and it’s her.”

  Prax pulled up his own terminal. The mailbox associated with the presentation had over five hundred video messages and thousands of texts. He began going through them. Men and women he didn’t know—some of them in tears —offered up their prayers and anger and support. A Belter with a wild mane of gray-black hair gibbered in patois so thick Prax could barely make it out. As near as he could tell, the man was offering to kill someone for him.

  Half an hour later, Prax’s eggs had congealed. A woman from Ceres told him that she’d lost her daughter in a divorce, and that she was sending him her month’s chewing tobacco money. A group of food engineers on Luna had passed the hat and sent along what would have been a month’s salary if Prax had still been a botanist. An old Martian man with skin the color of chocolate and powdered-sugar hair gazed seriously into a camera halfway across the solar system and said he was with Prax.

  When the next message began, it looked just like the others before it. The man in the image was older—eighty, maybe ninety—with a fringe of white hair clinging to the back of his skull and a craggy face. There was something about his expression that caught Prax’s attention. A hesitance.

  “Dr. Meng,” the man said. He had a slushy accent that reminded Prax of recordings of his own grandfather. “I’m very sorry to hear of all you and your family have suffered. Are suffering.” The man licked his lips. “The security video on your presentation. I believe I know the man in it. But his name isn’t Strickland …”