Caliban's War: Book Two of the Expanse series (67 page)

“All right,” Bobbie said. “What do we do?”

“We break out the fucking champagne,” Avasarala said. “What did he just tell us? There is nothing in that message. Nothing. He is walking around his words like they’ve got poisoned spikes on them. And what’s he got? Threats. No one makes threats.”

“Wait,” Alex said. “That was a good sign?”

“That was excellent,” Avasarala said, and then something else, something small, fell into place in the back of her mind and she started laughing and cursing at the same time.

“What? What is it?”

“‘If life transcends death, then I will seek for you there. If not, then there too,’” she said. “It’s a fucking haiku. That man has a one-track mind and one train on it. Poetry. Save me from poetry.”

They didn’t understand, but they didn’t need to. The real message came five hours later. It came on a public newsfeed, and it was delivered by Secretary-General Esteban Sorrento-Gillis. The old man was brilliant at looking somber and energetic at the same time. If he hadn’t been the executive of the largest governing body in the history of the human race, he’d have made a killing promoting health drinks.

The whole crew had gathered by now—Amos, Naomi, Holden, Alex. Even Prax. They were sandwiched into the ops deck, their
combined breaths just slightly overloading the recyclers and giving the deck a feeling of barn heat. All eyes were on the screen as the secretary-general took the podium.

“I have come here tonight to announce the immediate formation of an investigative committee. Accusations have been made that some individuals within the governing body of the United Nations and its military forces have taken unauthorized and possibly illegal steps in dealing with certain private contractors. If these accusations are true, they must be addressed in the most expedient possible manner. And if unfounded, they must be dispelled and those responsible for spreading these lies called to account.

“I need not remind you all of the years I spent as a political prisoner.”

“Oh fuck me,” Avasarala said, clapping her hands in glee. “He’s using the outsider speech. That man’s asshole must be tight enough right now to bend space.”

“I have dedicated my terms as secretary-general to rooting out corruption, and as long as I have this gavel, I shall continue to do so. Our world and the solar system we all share must be assured that the United Nations honors the ethical, moral, and spiritual values that hold us all together as a species.”

On the feed, Esteban Sorrento-Gillis nodded, turned, and strode away in a clamor of unacknowledged questions, and the commentators flowed into the space, talking over each other in all the political opinions of the spectrum.

“Okay,” Holden said. “So did he actually say anything?”

“He said Errinwright is finished,” Avasarala said. “If he had any influence left at all, that announcement would never have been made.
Goddamn
, I wish I was there.”

Errinwright was off the board. All that left was Nguyen, Mao, Strickland or whoever he was, their half-controlled protomolecule warriors, and the building threat of Venus. She let a long breath rattle through her throat and the spaces behind her nose.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, “I have just solved our smallest problem.”

O
ne of Bobbie’s most vivid memories was of the day she got her orders to report to the 2nd Expeditionary Force Spec War training facility. Force Recon. The top of the heap for a Martian ground pounder. In boot camp, they’d trained with a Force Recon sergeant. He’d been wearing a suit of gleaming red power armor, and they’d watched him demonstrate its use in a variety of tactical situations. At the end, he’d told them that the top four boots from her class would be transferred to the Spec War facility on the slopes of Hecates Tholus and trained to wear the armor and join the baddest fighting unit in the solar system.

She decided that meant her.

Determined to win one of those four coveted slots, she’d thrown herself into her boot camp training with everything she had. It turned out that was quite a lot. Not only did she make it into the top four, she was number one by an embarrassing margin. And
then the letter came, ordering her to report to Hecate Base for recon training, and it was all worth it. She called her father and just screamed for two minutes. When he finally got her to calm down and tell him what she was calling about, he screamed back for even longer.
You’re one of the best now, baby
, he’d said at the end, and the warmth those words put in her heart had never really faded.

Even now, sitting on the gray metal deck in the dirty machine shop on a stolen Martian warship. Even with all her mates torn into pieces and scattered across the frozen surface of Ganymede. Even with her military status in limbo and her loyalty to her nation justifiably in question. Even with all that,
You’re one of the best now, baby
made her smile. She felt an ache to call her father and tell him what had happened. They’d always been close, and when neither of her brothers had followed in his footsteps by choosing a military career, she had. It had just strengthened the connection. She knew he’d understand what it was costing her to turn her back on everything she held sacred to avenge her team.

And she had a powerful premonition she’d never see him again.

Even if they made it through to Jupiter with half the UN fleet hunting them, and even if when they got there, Admiral Nguyen and the dozen or more ships he controlled didn’t immediately blow them out of the sky, and even if they managed to stop whatever was happening in orbit around Io with the
Rocinante
intact, Holden was still planning to land and save Prax’s daughter.

The monsters would be there.

She knew it as surely as she’d ever known anything in her life. Each night she dreamed of facing it again. The thing flexing its long fingers and staring at her with its too-large glowing blue eyes, ready to finish what it had started all those months earlier on Ganymede. In her dream, she raised a gun that grew out of her hand, and started shooting it as it ran toward her, black spiderwebs spilling from holes that closed like water. She always woke before it reached her, but she knew how the dream would end: with her shattered body left cooling on the ice. She also knew that when Holden led his team down to the laboratories on Io where
the monsters were made, she’d go along with him. The scene from her dream would play out in real life. She knew it like she knew her father’s love. She welcomed it.

On the floor around her lay the pieces of her armor. With weeks of travel on the way to Io, she had time to completely strip and refit it. The
Rocinante’s
machine shop was well stocked, and the tools were of Martian make. It was the perfect location. The suit had seen a lot of use without much maintenance, but if she was being honest with herself, the distraction was the payoff. A suit of Martian reconnaissance armor was an incredibly complex machine, finely tuned to its wearer. Stripping and reassembling it wasn’t a trivial task. It required full concentration. Every moment she spent working on it was another moment when she didn’t think about the monster waiting to kill her on Io.

Sadly, that distraction was over now. She’d finished with the maintenance, even finding the micro-fracture in a tiny valve that was causing the slow but persistent leak of fluid in the suit’s knee actuator. It was time to just put it all back together. It had the feeling of ritual. A final cleansing before going out to meet death on the battlefield.

I’ve watched too many Kurosawa movies
, she thought, but couldn’t quite abandon the idea. The imagery was a lovely way of turning angst and suicidal ideation into honor and noble sacrifice.

She picked up the torso assembly and carefully wiped it off with a damp cloth, removing the last bits of dust and machine oil that clung to the outside. The smell of metal and lubricant filled the air. And while she bolted armor plating back onto the frame, the red enameled surface covered with a thousand dings and scratches, she stopped fighting the urge to ritualize the task and just let it happen. She was very likely assembling her death shroud. Depending on how the final battle went, this ceramic and rubber and alloy might house her corpse for the rest of eternity.

She flipped the torso assembly over and began working on the back. A long gouge in the enamel showed the violence of her passage across Ganymede’s ice when the monster had self-destructed
right in front of her. She picked up a wrench, then put it back down, tapping on the deck with her knuckle.

Why then?

Why had the monster blown itself up at that moment? She remembered the way it had started to shift, new limbs bursting from its body as it watched her. If Prax was right, that was the moment the constraint systems that Mao’s scientists had installed failed. And they’d set the bomb up to detonate if the creature was getting out of their control. But that just pushed the question one level back. Why had their control over the creature’s physiology failed at that precise moment? Prax said that regenerative processes were a good place for constraint systems to fail. And her platoon had riddled the creature with gunfire as it had charged their lines. It hadn’t seemed to hurt it at the time, but each wound represented a sudden burst of activity inside the creature’s cells, or whatever it had in place of cells, as the monster healed. Each was a chance for the new growth to slip the leash.

Maybe that was the answer.
Don’t try to kill the monster. Just damage it enough that the program starts to break down and the self-destruct kicks in
. She wouldn’t even have to survive, just last long enough to harm the monster beyond its ability to safely repair itself. All she needed was enough time to really hurt it.

She put down the armor plate she was working on and picked up the helmet. The suit’s memory still had the gun camera footage of the fight on it. She hadn’t watched it again after Avasarala’s presentation to the crew of the
Roci
. She hadn’t been able to.

She pushed herself to her feet and hit the comm panel on the wall. “Hey, Naomi? You in ops?”

“Yep,” Naomi said after a few seconds. “You need something, Sergeant?”

“Do you think you can tell the
Roci
to talk to my helmet? I’ve got the radio on, but it won’t talk to civilian stuff. This is one of our boats, so I figure the
Roci
has the keys and codes.”

There was a long pause, so Bobbie put the helmet on a worktable next to the closest wall monitor and waited.

“I’m seeing a radio node that the
Roci
is calling ‘MCR MR Goliath III 24397A15.’”

“That’s me,” Bobbie said. “Can you send control of that node down to the panel in the machine shop?”

“Done,” Naomi said after a second.

“Thanks,” Bobbie said, and killed the comm. It took her a moment to re-familiarize herself with the Martian military video software, and to convince the system to use out-of-date data-unpacking algorithms. After a few false starts, the raw gun camera footage from her fight on Ganymede was playing on the screen. She set it to endless loop and sat back down on the deck with her suit.

She finished bolting the back armor on and began attaching the torso’s power supply and main hydraulic system during the first play-through. She tried not to feel anything about the images on screen, nor to attach any significance to them or think of them as a puzzle to be solved. She just concentrated on her work on the suit with her mind and let her subconscious chew on the data from the screen.

The distraction caused her to redo things occasionally as she worked, but that was fine. She wasn’t on a deadline. She finished attaching the power supply and main motors. Green lights lit up on the hand terminal she had plugged into the suit’s brain. On the wall screen by her helmet, a UN soldier was hurled across the surface of Ganymede at her. A confusion of images as she dodged away. When the image steadied, both the UN Marine and her friend Tev Hillman were gone.

Bobbie picked up an arm assembly and began reattaching it to the torso. The monster had picked up a soldier in a suit of armor comparable to her own and then thrown him with enough force to kill instantly. There was no defense against that kind of strength except not to get hit. She concentrated on putting the arm back together.

When she looked up at the screen again, the feed had restarted. The monster was running across the ice, chasing the UN soldiers. It killed one of them. The Bobbie on the video began firing, followed by her entire platoon opening up.

The creature was fast. But when the UN soldiers suddenly turned to open a firing lane for the Martians, the creature didn’t react quickly. So maybe fast in a straight line, but not a lot of lateral speed. That might be useful. The video caught up again to the UN soldier being thrown into Private Hillman. The creature reacted to gunfire, to injuries, even though they didn’t slow it down. She thought back to the video she’d seen of Holden and Amos engaging the creature in the
Rocinante’s
cargo hold. It had largely ignored them until Amos started shooting it, and then it had erupted into violence.

But the first creature had attacked the UN troop station. So at least to some degree, they could be directed. Given orders. Once they no longer had orders, they seemed to lapse into a default state of trying to get increased energy and break the constraints. While in that state, they ignored pretty much everything but food and violence. The next time she ran into one, unless it had specifically been ordered to attack her, she could probably pick her own battleground, draw it to her where she wanted to be. That was useful too.