Caliban's War: Book Two of the Expanse series (57 page)

Eight more possible ambushes.

She tightened her hands into fists until the knuckles stretched painfully inside her gauntlets.
Bring it
.

Three decks up the elevator stopped, the panel informing her that all the pressure hatches between her and the bridge had been overridden and forced open. They were willing to risk a hole in the ship emptying out half the ship’s air rather than let her up to the bridge. It was sort of gratifying to be scarier than sudden decompression.

She climbed off the lift onto a deck that appeared to be mostly crew quarters, though it must have been evacuated. There wasn’t a soul in sight. A quick tour revealed twelve small crew cabins and two bathrooms that could reasonably be called heads. No gold plating on the fixtures for the crew. No open bar. No twenty-four-hour-a-day food service. Looking at the fairly Spartan living conditions of the average crew member on the
Guanshiyin
brought
home Avasarala’s last words to her. These were just sailors. None of them deserved to die for what had happened on Ganymede.

Bobbie found herself glad she didn’t have a gun.

She found another access hatch in the head and tore it open. But to her surprise, the service corridor ended just a few feet above her head. Something in the structure of the ship was cutting her off. Having never seen the
Guanshiyin
from the outside, she had no idea what it might be. But she needed to get another five decks up, and she wasn’t about to let this stop her.

A ten-minute search turned up a service hatch through the outer hull. She’d torn off two inner hull hatches on two different decks, so if she got it open, those two decks would lose their air. But the central ladder corridor was sealed at Avasarala’s deck, so her people would be fine. And the whole reason she was doing this was the sealed hatch to the upper decks, which seemed to be where most of the crew was.

She thought about the six men down in the galley and felt a pang. Sure, they’d shot first, but if any of them were still alive, she had no desire to asphyxiate them in their sleep.

It turned out not to be a problem. The hatch led into a small airlock chamber, about the size of a closet. A minute later it had cycled through and she climbed out onto the outer hull of the ship.

Triple-hulled. Of course. The lord of the Mao-Kwik empire wasn’t going to trust his expensive skin to anything that wasn’t the safest humans could build. And the ostentatious design of the ship extended to her outer hull as well. While most military ships were painted a flat black that made them hard to spot visually in space, most civilian ships either were left an unpainted gray or were painted in basic corporate colors.

The
Guanshiyin
had a mural painted on it in vivid colors. Bobbie was too close to see what it was, but under her feet were what appeared to be grass and the hoof of a giant horse. Mao had the hull of his ship painted with a mural that included horses and grass. When almost no one would ever see it.

Bobbie made sure her boot and glove mags were set strong enough to handle the quarter-g thrust the ship was still under, and started climbing up the side. She quickly reached the spot where the dead end between the hulls began, and saw that it was an empty shuttle bay. If only Avasarala had let her do this
before
Mao had run off with the shuttle.

Triple hulls
, Bobbie thought. Maximum redundancy.

On a hunch, she crawled across the ship to the other side. Sure enough, there was a second shuttle bay. But the ship in it wasn’t a standard short-flight shuttle. It was long and sleek, with an engine housing twice as large as that of a normal ship its size. Written in proud red letters across the bow of the ship was the name
Razorback
.

A racing pinnace.

Bobbie crawled back around to the empty cargo bay and used the airlock there to enter the ship. The military override codes her suit sent to the locked door worked, to her surprise. The airlock led to the deck just below the bridge, the one used for shuttle supply storage and maintenance. The center of the deck was taken up by a large machine shop. Standing in it were the captain of the
Guanshiyin
and his senior staff. There were no security personnel or weapons in sight.

The captain tapped his ear in an ancient
can you hear me?
gesture. Bobbie nodded one fist at him, then turned the external speakers back on and said, “Yes.”

“We are not military personnel,” the captain said. “We can’t defend ourselves from military hardware. But I’m not going to turn this vessel over to you without knowing your intentions. My XO is on the deck above us, prepared to scuttle the ship if we can’t come to terms.”

Bobbie smiled at him, though she didn’t know if he could see it through her helmet. “You’ve illegally detained a high-level member of the UN government. Acting in my role as a member of her security team, I have come to demand that you deliver her immediately to the port of her choosing, at best possible speed.”

She shrugged with her hands in the Belter way. “Or, you can blow yourselves up. Seems like a drastic overreaction to having to give the undersecretary her radio privileges back.”

The captain nodded and relaxed visibly. Whatever happened next, it wasn’t like he had any choice. And since he didn’t have any choice, he didn’t have any responsibility. “We were following orders. You’ll note that in the log when you take command.”

“I’ll see that she knows.”

The captain nodded again. “Then the ship is yours.”

Bobbie opened her radio link to Cotyar. “We win. Put Her Majesty on, will you?”

While she waited for Avasarala, Bobbie said to the captain, “There are six injured security people down below. Get a medical team down there.”

“Bobbie?” Avasarala said over the radio.

“The ship is yours, madam.”

“Great. Tell the captain we need to make best possible speed to intercept Holden. We’re getting to him before Nguyen does.”

“Uh, this is a pleasure yacht. It’s built to run at low g for comfort. I’d bet it can do a full g if it needs to, but I doubt it does much more than that.”

“Admiral Nguyen is about to kill everyone that actually might know what the fuck is going on.” Avasarala didn’t quite yell. “We don’t have time to cruise around like we’re trying to pick up fucking rent boys!”

“Huh,” Bobbie said. Then, a moment later: “If this is a race, I know where there’s a racing ship …”

H
olden pulled himself a cup of coffee from the galley coffeepot, and the strong smell filled the room. He could feel the eyes of the crew on his back with an almost physical force. He’d called them all there, and once they’d assembled and taken their seats, he’d turned his back on them and started making coffee.
I’m stalling for time, because I forgot how I wanted to say this
. He put some sugar in his coffee even though he always drank it black, just because stirring took a few more seconds.

“So. Who are we?” he said as he stirred.

His question was met with silence, so he turned around and leaned back against the countertop, holding his unwanted cup of coffee and continuing to stir.

“Seriously,” he said. “Who are we? It’s the question I keep coming back to.”

“Uh,” Amos said, and shifted in his seat. “My name’s Amos, Cap. You feeling okay?”

No one else spoke. Alex was staring at the table in front of him, his dark scalp shining through his thinning hair under the harsh white of the galley lights. Prax was sitting on the counter next to the sink and looking at his hands. He flexed them periodically as though trying to figure out what they were for.

Only Naomi was looking at him. Her hair was pulled up into a thick tail, and her dark, almond-shaped eyes were staring right into his. It was fairly disconcerting.

“I’ve recently figured out something about myself,” Holden continued, not letting Naomi’s unblinking stare throw him off. “I’ve been treating you all like you owe me something. And none of you do. And that means I’ve been treating you like shit.”

“No,” Alex started without looking up.

“Yes,” Holden said, and stopped until Alex looked up at him. “Yes. You maybe more than anyone else. Because I’ve been scared to death and cowards always look for an easy target. And you’re about the nicest person I know, Alex. So I treated you badly because I could get away with it. And I hope you forgive me for that, because I really hate that I did it.”

“Sure, I forgive you, Cap,” Alex said with a smile and his heavy drawl.

“I’ll try to earn it,” Holden answered, bothered by the easy reply. “But Alex said something else to me recently that I’ve been thinking about a lot. He reminded me that none of you are employees. We’re not on the
Canterbury
. We don’t work for Pur’n’Kleen anymore. And I don’t own this ship any more than any of you do. We took contracts from the OPA in exchange for pocket money and ship expenses, but we never talked about how to handle the excess.”

“You opened that account,” Alex said.

“Yeah, there’s a bank account with all of the extra money in it. Last I checked, there was just under eighty grand in there. I said we’d keep it for ship expenses, but who am I to make that decision
for the rest of you? That’s not
my
money. It’s
our
money.
We
earned it.”

“But you’re the captain,” Amos said, then pointed at the coffeepot.

While Holden fixed him a cup, he said, “Am I? I was the XO on the
Canterbury
. It made sense for me to be the captain after the
Cant
got nuked.”

He handed the cup to Amos and sat down at the table with the rest of the crew. “But we haven’t been those guys for a long time now. Who we are now is four people who don’t actually work for anyone—”

Prax cleared his throat at this, and Holden nodded an apology at him. “Anyone long term, let’s say. There is no corporation or government granting me authority over this crew. We’re just four people who sort of own a ship that Mars will probably try to take back the first chance they get.”

“This is legitimate salvage,” Alex said.

“And I hope the Martians find that compelling when you explain it to them,” Holden replied. “But it doesn’t change my point: Who are we?”

Naomi nodded a fist at him. “I see where you’re going. We’ve left a lot of this kind of stuff just up in the air because we’ve been running full tilt since the
Canterbury.”

“And this,” Holden said, “is the perfect time to figure that stuff out. We’ve got a contract to help Prax find his little girl, and he’s paying us so we can afford to run the ship. Once we find Mei, how do we find the next job? Do we go looking for a
next
job? Do we sell the
Roci
to the OPA and retire on Titan? I think we need to know those things.”

No one spoke. Prax pushed himself off the counter and started rummaging through the cabinets. After a minute or two, he pulled out a package that read
CHOCOLATE PUDDING
on the side and said, “Can I make this?”

Naomi laughed. Alex said, “Knock yourself out, Doc.”

Prax pulled a bowl out and began mixing ingredients into it.
Oddly enough, because the botanist was paying attention to something else, it created a sense of intimacy for the crew. The outsider was doing outside things, leaving them to talk among themselves. Holden wondered if Prax knew that and was doing it on purpose.

Amos slurped down the last of his coffee and said, “So, you called this meeting, Cap. You have something in mind?”

“Yeah,” Holden said, taking a moment to think. “Yeah, kind of.”

Naomi put a hand on his arm and smiled at him. “We’re listening.”

“I think we get married,” he said with a wink at Naomi. “Make it all nice and legal.”

“Wait,” she said. The look on her face was more horrified than Holden would have hoped.

“No, no, that’s sort of a joke,” Holden said. “But only sort of. See, I was thinking about my parents. They formed their initial collective partnership because of the farm. They were all friends, they wanted to buy the property in Montana, and so they made a group large enough to afford it. It wasn’t sexual. Father Tom and Father Caesar were already sexual partners and monogamous. Mother Tamara was single. Fathers Joseph and Anton and Mothers Elise and Sophie were already a polyamorous civil unit. Father Dimitri joined a month later when he started dating Tamara. They formed a civil union to own the property jointly. They wouldn’t have been able to afford it if they were all paying taxes for separate kids, so they had me as a group.”

“Earth,” Alex said, “is a weird freakin’ place.”

“Eight parents to a baby ain’t exactly common,” Amos said.

“But it makes a lot of economic sense with the baby tax,” Holden said. “So it’s not unheard of, either.”

“What about people making babies without paying the tax?” Alex asked.

“It’s tougher to get away with than you think,” Holden said. “Unless you never go to a doctor or only use black markets.”

Amos and Naomi shared a quick look that Holden pretended not to see.

“Okay,” Holden continued. “Forget babies for a minute. What I’m talking about is incorporating. If we plan to stick together, let’s make it legal. We can draft up incorporation papers with one of the independent outer planets stations, like Ceres or Europa, and become joint owners of this enterprise.”