Caliban's War (Expanse, #2)

by James S.A. Corey

Full-spectrum LEDs glowed white-gold. Daddy said it was just what sunlight looked like on Earth, and Mei pictured that planet as a huge complicated network of plants and hallways with the sun running in lines above them in a bright blue ceiling-sky, and you could climb over the walls and end up anywhere.

The closer to the surface they got, the narrower the corridors became. The older hallways seemed dirtier even though there really wasn’t any dirt on them. It was just that they were more used up.

She didn’t like the woman, but she liked being alone even less.

Eighteen months before, there hadn’t been sides. The inner planets had all been one big, happy, slightly dysfunctional family. Then Eros, and now the two superpowers were dividing up the solar system between them, and the one moon neither side was willing to give up was Ganymede, breadbasket of the Jovian system. As the only moon with any magnetosphere, it was the only place where dome-grown crops stood a chance in Jupiter’s harsh radiation belt, and even then the domes and habitats still had to be shielded to protect civilians from the eight rems a day burning off Jupiter and onto the moon’s surface. Bobbie’s armor had been designed to let a soldier walk through a nuclear bomb crater minutes after the blast. It also worked well at keeping Jupiter from frying Martian Marines. Behind the Earth soldiers on patrol, their dome glowed in a shaft of weak sunlight captured by enormous orbital mirrors. Even with the mirrors, most terrestrial plants would have died, starved of sunlight. Only the heavily modified versions the Ganymede scientists cranked out could hope to survive in the trickle of light the mirrors fed them.

Above, the sun—not even a disk from here as much as the brightest star—flashed as it passed behind Jupiter’s limb, and for a moment the planet’s faint ring system was visible.

If Earth decided it needed Ganymede all to itself, four grunts walking around the greenhouse dome wouldn’t stop them. With dozens of Earth and Mars warships in a tense standoff in orbit, if hostilities broke out the ground pounders would probably find out only when the surface bombardment began. To her left, the dome rose to almost half a kilometer: triangular glass panels separated by gleaming copper-colored struts that turned the entire structure into a massive Faraday cage. Bobbie had never been inside one of the greenhouse domes. She’d been sent out from Mars as part of a surge in troops to the outer planets and had been walking patrols on the surface almost since day one. Ganymede to her was a spaceport, a small Marine base, and the even smaller guard outpost she currently called home.

It changed when rocks fell on it from space, or when warm water from the liquid core forced itself onto the surface and created short-lived lakes. Neither thing happened all that often. At home on Mars, wind and dust changed the landscape hourly. Here, she was walking through the footsteps of the day before and the day before and the day before. And if she never came back, those footprints would outlive her.

“Undesignated light freighter, this is Captain James Holden of the Outer Planets Alliance missile frigate Rocinante.

It was Fred Johnson, the nominal leader of the OPA and their personal patron on the Tycho corporation’s manufacturing station, which was also now doubling as the de facto OPA headquarters.

With the plant to save, the dome suddenly felt horribly dangerous.

Even if things got bad and there was a shooting war, it wouldn’t be here. Ganymede was where the food came from. With its magnetosphere, it was the safest place for pregnant women to gestate, claiming the lowest incidence of birth defects and stillbirth in the outer planets. It was the center of everything that made human expansion into the solar system possible. Their work was as precious as it was fragile, and the people in charge would never let the war come here.

The critical failure diagnostics started to run: motors humming, lifts clicking, the tracking interface spooling through checksums like an athlete stretching before a run.

Part of his mind was skittering over the things that needed to be done to save the project—contact his project manager at RMD-Southern, refile the supplemental grant applications, get the data backups to rebuild the viral insertion samples—while another part had gone still and eerily calm. The sense of being two men—one bent on desperate measures, the other already in the numb of mourning—felt like the last weeks of his marriage.

Dr. Bourne,” he said. “It has been an honor.” They took a long, silent moment at the graveside of their previous lives. Doris sighed. “All right,” she said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Prax thought there was a dangerous buzz in her voice. She was as scared as anyone. Only she had a gun. So this wasn’t going to work. He had to find something else. His one remaining Glycine kenon still in his hand, Prax walked away from the tube station.

The four years he’d spent trying to find a forgotten closet or an abandoned tunnel that wasn’t already occupied by an illegal hydroponics experiment left him with a good sense of the tunnel architecture.

He gave her a frightening smile that didn’t extend past a slight upturn at the corners of his mouth.

A monitor started sounding a low, chiming alert, but no one else paid it any attention, so she didn’t either.

The heroine who sees the monster, but no one will believe her. She imagined the second act, in which she was court-martialed in disgrace, and only got her redemption in the third act, when the monster showed up again and killed everyone who didn’t believe— “Wait!” she said. “What decompression did you use? My suit is an older model. It uses the version 5.1 video compression. Tell the tech that, and have them try it again.”

Bobbie didn’t reply, but her reaction to Thorsson’s attitude had finally shifted from frightened through angry to annoyed.

Singh, to his credit, did not reply. He immediately plugged the suit into a monitor and began working.

She started to say something, but the tech was pumping his fist and high-fiving his assistant.

“Sergeant Draper’s assistance was crucial,” Thorsson said, not a hint of apology in his lovely voice. “Because of it, she may have just saved us from an all-out shooting war with Earth.

“Gunny,” Thorsson said. “I’m sorry about what happened to your team. But mostly I’m sorry for not believing you. Thank you for responding with professionalism. We avoided a serious mistake because of it.”

Thorsson gave her his creepy smile, but Bobbie had learned that it was just the way the man’s face worked. He seemed to lack the muscles necessary for normal smiling.

Hawkish. Impressed with himself in the way that successful young men tended to be.

The hallways of the United Nations complex in the Hague were clean and wide, the décor a soft style that made everything look like a museum diorama of Portuguese colonies in the 1940s.

It was springtime, and the snow that had touched the city since December was finally gone.

The place smelled like fresh blooms and old pipe smoke, though Avasarala had never smoked there and didn’t know anyone who had. She walked to the window. Beneath her, the city spread out in vast concrete and ancient stone. In the darkening sky, Venus burned. In the twelve years she had been at this desk, in this room, everything had changed. The alliance between Earth and its upstart brother had been an eternal, unshakable thing once. The Belt had been an annoyance and a haven for tiny cells of renegades and troublemakers as likely to die of a ship malfunction as to be called to justice. Humanity had been alone in the universe. And then the secret discovery that Phoebe, idiosyncratic moon of Saturn, had been an alien weapon, launched at Earth when life here was hardly more than an interesting idea wrapped in a lipid bilayer.

But the spring still came. The election cycle still rose and fell. The evening star still lit the indigo heavens, outshining even the greatest cities of Earth.

If the back-channel chatter was to be trusted—and it wasn’t—Mars had a lone marine’s suit camera. Avasarala had seven minutes of high-definition video from forty different cameras of the thing slaughtering the best people Earth had standing for it. Even if the Martians could be convinced to keep it quiet, this was going to be hard to bury.

I have a binder with nine hundred pages of analysis and contingency plans for conflict with Mars, including fourteen different scenarios about what we do if they develop an unexpected new technology. The binder for what we do if something comes up from Venus? It’s three pages long, and it begins Step One: Find God.”

She used her hand terminal rather than the office system to call Arjun. It was a superstitious urge that made her want to keep them separate, even in ways as small as this.

The mask, he called it. As if the person she was when she faced the world was the false one, and the one who spoke to him or played painting games with her granddaughters was authentic. She thought he was wrong, but the fiction was so comforting she had always played along.

Chapter Six: Holden

He washed up in his tiny sink—no actual free-flowing water, but a system of moist towels and soaped pads—scratching unhappily at the scraggly beard he’d been growing as part of his disguise. He’d never tried to grow one before, and was disappointed to discover that his facial hair grew in patches of varying length and curl.

This lieutenant might be bored with his job, but he was smart and perceptive, and he was letting them know it up front.

“You’re a good captain, and you can have my back in a fight anytime. But you’re a crap criminal. You just don’t know how to act like anyone but yourself.”

“But we don’t own this food. Most of the food production on Ganymede is owned by corporations that aren’t headquartered here. Lot of money tied up in these shipments. Every day it sat on the ground here, people were losing a fortune.”

Even at its best, the Jovian moon was a wasteland of gray silicate rock and slightly less gray water ice, the entire thing pocked with craters and flash-frozen lakes. It had looked like a battlefield long before humanity’s ancestors crawled up onto dry land for the first time.

To see one crushed beneath the twisted metal of what looked like a fallen mirror array was shocking and demoralizing. The domes fed the outer planets with their specially bred crops. The most advanced agricultural science in history happened inside them. And the orbiting mirrors were marvels of engineering that helped make it possible.

“You ask to look at our manifest; then you tell us which items we have mistakenly included on it. And while we are retransmitting to your office with our newly amended manifest, you and your goons take the plum items and sell them on what I’m guessing is a thriving black market for food and medicine.”

Her expression was odd and evaluating, her voice in the no-man’s-land between accusing and not.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and her eyes looked past him to the next desperate, frightened, unbathed person that she wouldn’t be able to help.

The few passenger ships that were permitted out were packed with people trying to get anywhere else. The fares for passage were bankrupting people who’d worked for years in some of the highest-paying material science positions outside Earth. The poorer people were left sneaking out in freight drones or tiny yachts or even space suits strapped onto modified frames and fired off toward Europa in hopes of rescue. Panic drove them from risk to risk until they wound up somewhere else or in the grave. Near the security stations, near the ports, even near the abandoned military cordons set up by Mars and the UN, the corridors were thick with people scrambling for anything they could tell themselves was safety.

The milk tasted wonderful, smooth and rich and soft. Prax could almost feel the calories and nutrients being sucked in through the membranes in his mouth. It occurred to him that he might technically be starving.

Prax nodded, his body responding without him. He felt like a flywheel had come loose somewhere in the back of his head.

The daughter stood in front of him, interposed between her enraged father and Prax. All he could really see of her was her ass and her ponytail and her hands, flat out at her father in the universal gesture for stop. She was saving his life.

The secret of closed-system botanical collapse was this: It’s not the thing that breaks you need to watch out for. It’s the cascade.

The wide spade-shaped leaves looked wrong. They were still green, but thicker, and with a golden undertone. Someone had put distilled water in the hydroponic supply instead of the mineral-rich solution long-stability hydroponics needed. They could get away with it for another week. Maybe two. Then the air-recycling plants would start to die, and by the time that happened, the cascade would be too far gone to stop. And if they couldn’t get the right water to the plants, he couldn’t imagine they’d be able to set all the mechanical air recyclers going. Someone was going to have to do something about that. Someone else.