Caliban's War (Expanse, #2)

by James S.A. Corey

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.

“Wendell,” Holden said, rummaging in the box of their belongings and then tossing a card-key to the Pinkwater leader.

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.

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.

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.

It was his last walk. Whatever happened, Prax was never coming back here, because here wouldn’t exist.

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

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 eject a 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.

“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.

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.

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.

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

“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.

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.

“There’s nothing below us that matters,” Holden said, thinking of the remnants of black filament they’d seen in the hidden base. “Melt it.” “Okay,” Alex said. Then, once the ship had finished orienting straight up, he said, “Givin’ her the spurs.”

“Jim,” Naomi said, a warning in her voice now. “This is what I’m talking about. The intensity of your feelings isn’t evidence. You are about to accuse a man who’s been your friend and patron for the last year of maybe killing an entire moon full of people. That isn’t the Fred we know. And you owe him better than that.”

She knew that some of the photons striking her eyes right now had come from explosions light-minutes away. Ganymede Station, once the safest place without an atmosphere, then a war zone, and now a wasteland. She could no more pick out the light of its death than pluck a particular molecule of salt from the ocean, but she knew it was there, and the fact was like a stone in her belly.

Now he’d reassembled his command without her knowing it. And he’d had her pulled from the Martian negotiations. Which meant that he hadn’t done any of it. Nguyen had either a patron or a cabal. She hadn’t seen that he was a bit player, so whoever called his tune had surprised her. She was playing against shadows, and she hated it. “More light,” she said.

When Bobbie came into the room, a film of cheap paper in her fist, it struck Avasarala again how poorly the Martian fit in. It wasn’t only her accent or the difference in build that spoke of a childhood in the lower Martian gravity. In the halls of politics, the woman’s air of physical competence stood out. She looked like she’d been rousted out of bed in the middle of the night, just like all of them; it was only that it looked good on her. Might be useful, might not, but certainly it was worth remembering.

“I don’t know. Does it matter?” Of course it mattered. The difference between The UN has been negotiating in bad faith and The UN was negotiating in bad faith could be measured in hundreds of lives. Thousands. Avasarala tried to swallow her impatience. It didn’t come naturally.

“They haven’t recalled you,” Avasarala said. “And they’re not going to. The wartime diplomatic code of contact is almost exactly the same for you as it is for us, and it’s ten thousand pages of nine-point type. If you get orders right now, I can put up enough queries and requests for clarifications that you’ll die of old age in that chair.

Bobbie was silent for a long moment. “You mean that as a rhetorical device,” she said at last, “but it would make a certain amount of sense to kill you. And I can do it.” A tiny chill hit Avasarala’s spine, but she didn’t let it reach her face.

Avasarala took a deep breath, then another, then another, until the sound lost its ragged edge and the awe and fear grew small enough that she could push it to the back of her mind. “What does this?” she said at last. She’d meant it as a rhetorical question. Of course there was no answer. No force known to humanity could do what had just been done.

“Can you send this version to Admiral Souther?” “Oh, no. It’s not cleared for release.” Avasarala looked at him, her expression empty. “Are you clearing it for release?” “I am clearing it for release to Admiral Souther. Please send it immediately.”

She wasn’t used to fear or awe. Her life had been about control, talking and bullying and teasing whoever needed it until the world turned the direction she wanted it to. The few times the implacable universe had overwhelmed her haunted her: an earthquake in Bengal when she’d been a girl, a storm in Egypt that had trapped her and Arjun in their hotel room for four days as the food supplies failed, the death of her son. Each one had turned her constant pretense of certainty and pride against her, left her curled in her bed at night for weeks afterward, her fingers bent in claws, her dreams nightmares. This was worse. Before, she could comfort herself with the idea that the universe was empty of intent. That all the terrible things were just the accidental convergences of chance and mindless forces. The death of the Arboghast was something else. It was intentional and inhuman.

“I love you very much,” Avasarala said. “Knowing you has let me bear the unbearable.” Arjun grinned. He looked good with wrinkles. He was a more handsome man now that he was older. As if the round-faced, comically earnest boy who’d snuck to her window to read poems in the night had only been waiting to become this. “I love you, I have always loved you, if we are born into new lives, I will love you there.” Avasarala sobbed once, wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and nodded.

“And if both sides—Earth and Mars—are making that same calculation, we’re going to spend all our energy getting ready for the war after next.” “Yep,” Bobbie said. “And yes, that’s how we all lose together.”

Intellectually, he knew that he was falling sunward, heading in from the Jovian system toward the Belt. In a week, the sun would be close to twice the size it was now, and it would still be insignificant. In a context of such immensity, of distances and speeds so far above any meaningful human experience, it seemed like nothing should matter.

He was in a tiny metal-and-ceramic box that was exchanging matter for energy to throw a half dozen primates across a vacuum larger than millions of oceans. Compared to that, how could anything matter?

was, he thought, something about the sense of being suddenly safe. On Ganymede, he’d had fear to numb him. Fear and malnutrition and routine and the ability at any moment to move, to do something even if it was utterly useless. Go check the boards again, go wait in line at security, trot along the hallways and see how many new bullet holes pocked them. On the Rocinante, he had to slow down. He had to stop. There was nothing for him to do here but wait out the long sunward fall to Tycho Station. He couldn’t distract himself. There was no station—not even a wounded and dying one—to hunt through. There were only the cabin he’d been given, his hand terminal, a few jumpsuits a half size too big for him. A small box of generic toiletries. That was everything he had left. And there was enough food and clean water that his brain could start working again. Each passing hour felt like waking up a little more. He knew how badly his body and mind had been abused only when he got better. Every time, he felt like this had to be back to normal, and then not long after, he’d find that, no, there had been more.

The grief welled up from a place just above his stomach, and he watched it like it was something outside himself.

Of all the varieties of pine to rise off Earth, lodgepole pine had been the most robust in low-g environments. His job had been to collect the fallen cones and burn them for the seeds. In the wild, lodgepole pine wouldn’t germinate without fire; the resin in the cones encouraged a hotter fire, even when it meant the death of the parental tree. To get better, it had to get worse. To survive, the plant had to embrace the unsurvivable. He understood that.

Built for high security, but not used that way. The name ROCINANTE was on the wall in letters as broad as his hand, and someone had added a stencil of a spray of yellow narcissus. It looked desperately out of place and very appropriate at the same time. When he thought about it that way, it seemed to fit most things about the ship. Her crew, for instance.

The Martian military had formed hundreds of years after trumpets and drums had been a useful means of transmitting information to troops. Martians lacked the nostalgia the UN military had for such things. The first time Bobbie had heard a morning reveille, she’d been watching a video on military history. She’d been happy to realize that no matter how annoying the Martian equivalent—a series of atonal electronic blats—was, it would never be as annoying as what the Earth boys woke up to.

“This is how the game is played. Mars releases a statement condemning our actions. We go back channel and find an early draft. If it was harsher than the actual statement that was released, then someone in the dip corps argued to tone it down. That means they’re trying to avoid escalating. If it was milder in the early draft, then they’re deliberately escalating to provoke a response.” “But since they know you’ll get those early drafts, then that’s meaningless. They’ll just make sure you get leaks that give you the impression they want you to have.” “See? Now you’re getting it,” Soren said. “What your opponent wants you to think is useful data in figuring out what they think. So get the early draft, okay? Do it before the end of the day.”

If I were the Martian counterespionage wonks, I’d have already recruited one of your closest friends back home and be using them to funnel a mountain’s worth of false data your direction.” My closest friends are all dead, Bobbie thought. “But no one—” “Is talking to you from back home. Which means two things. They are still trying to figure out my game in keeping you here, and they don’t have a misinformation campaign in place because they’re as confused as we are. You’ll be contacted by someone in the next week or so. They’ll ask you to leak information from my office, but they’ll ask it in such a way that winds up giving you a whole lot of false information. If you’re loyal and spy for them, great. If not and you tell me what they asked for, also great. Maybe they’ll get lucky and you’ll do both.” Bobbie put the teacup back on the desk. Her hands were in fists. “This,” Bobbie said, “is why everyone hates politicians.” “No. They hate us because we have power. Bobbie, this isn’t how your mind likes to work, and I respect that. I don’t have time to explain things to you,” Avasarala said, the smile disappearing like it had never been. “So just assume I know what I’m doing, and that when I ask you to do the impossible, it’s because even your failure helps our cause somehow.” “Our cause?” “We’re on the same team here. Team Let’s-Not-Lose-Together. That is us, isn’t it?”

“Cookies?” Soren said, a baffled expression on his face. Bobbie thought that it might be the first honest emotion she’d ever seen there.

and she wasn’t even all that sure what she felt guilty about. She disliked the man anyway. The hunch that popped into her head was almost certainly a result of her own paranoia and addled image of the world.

She was over two meters tall on a planet of short people. She wasn’t going to blend.

Once Bobbie was outside, her height was both an advantage and a disadvantage. Being a head and a half taller than most everyone around her meant that she could afford to stay pretty far behind Soren as he hurried along the sidewalk. She could spot the top of his head from half a city block away. At the same time, if he looked behind him, he couldn’t miss her face sticking up a good third of a meter out of the crowd.

“Slate, I guess,” he replied. His smile became a bit more genuine and a lot colder. He blew the chalk dust off the pool cue’s tip and moved a step to the side, shifting toward her left. “Too heavy for the early colony ships.”

Which was good, because as frightened of the protomolecule as he was, Holden also knew that it wasn’t magic. It had mass and it occupied space. If not even a molecule of oxygen could sneak out through the airlock seal, then he was pretty sure none of the virus could get in. But…

Beside him, the botanist blinked in confusion and alarm. This was not the best way to instill confidence. In other circumstances, Holden might have cared.

Holden was not claustrophobic. No one who chose long-flight space travel as a career was.

As a junior lieutenant Holden had spent days in scout ships so small that you literally could not bend over to scratch your feet. He’d climbed around between the inner and outer hulls of warships. He’d once been confined to his crash couch for twenty-one days during a fast-burn trip from Luna to Saturn. He never had nightmares of being crushed or being buried alive. For the first time in his decade and a half of nearly constant space travel, the ship he was on felt too small. Not just cramped, but terrifyingly constricted. He felt trapped, like an animal in a snare.

But even with all its layers and weight, it still wasn’t as frightening as the powered armor that recon Marines wore would have been. What the Navy boys called walking coffins. The idea behind the name being that anything powerful enough to break the armor would liquefy the marine inside, so you didn’t bother to open it. You just tossed the whole thing into the grave.

Right there with you, Jim.” It was the first time in Holden’s memory that Amos had called him by his first name. Holden nodded back at him, then went about straightening out his thigh armor.

“No, Amos. No, I can’t kick Alex off the ship any more than I can kick you or Naomi off the ship. We’re not even a skeleton crew. We’re whatever you have when you don’t have a skeleton.”

“All of this is really fragile,” Holden said, waving around at Amos and the ship. “This little family we have.

“Cap,” Amos said with a grin. “Anything that kills me has already killed everyone else. I was born to be the last man standing. You can count on it.” The panic and fear didn’t leave Holden. They squatted on his chest now just the way they had before. But at least he didn’t feel so alone with them.