Caliban's War: Book Two of the Expanse series (74 page)

“I like the backup plan better,” Amos said.

“Backup plan?” Prax asked.

“The backup plan is I grab the first guy we see, and beat him until he tells us where the kids are.”

Prax nodded. “Okay. I like that one too.”

Bobbie ignored the macho posturing. Everyone dealt with pre-combat jitters in their own way. Bobbie preferred obsessive list making. But flexing and threats were good too. “Once we have a location, you guys move with all haste to the kids, while I ensure a clear path of egress.”

“Sounds good,” Amos said.

“Make no mistake,” Bobbie said. “Io is one of the worst places in the solar system. Tectonically unstable and radioactive as hell. Easy to see why they hid here, but do not underestimate the peril that just being on this shit moon carries.”

“Two minutes,” Alex said over the comm.

Bobbie took a deep breath. “And that isn’t the worst. These assholes launched a couple hundred human-protomolecule hybrids at Mars. We can hope that they shot their entire wad, but I have a feeling they didn’t. We might very well run into one of those monsters once we get inside.”

She didn’t say,
I’ve seen it in my dreams
. It seemed counterproductive.

“If we see one,
I deal with it
. Amos, you almost got your captain killed blasting away at the one you found in the cargo bay. You try that shit with me, I’ll snap your arm off. Don’t test me.”

“Okay, chief,” Amos replied. “Don’t get your panties in a twist. I heard you.”

“One minute,” Alex said.

“There are Martian Marines controlling the perimeter, but they’ve been given the okay to let us in. If someone escapes past us, no need to apprehend them. The Marines will pick them up before they get far.”

“Thirty seconds.”

“Get ready,” Bobbie said, then pulled up her HUD’s suit status display. Everything was green, including the ammo indicator, which showed two thousand incendiary rounds.

The air sucked out of the airlock in a long, fading hiss, leaving only a thin wisp of atmosphere that would be the same density as Io’s own faint haze of sulfur. Before the ship hit the deck, Amos jumped up out of his chair and stood on his toes to put his helmet against hers. He yelled, “Give ’em hell, marine.”

The outer airlock door slid open, and Bobbie’s suit blatted a radiation alarm at her. It also helpfully informed her that the outside atmosphere was not capable of supporting life. She shoved Amos toward the open lock and then pushed Prax after him. “Go, go, go!”

Amos took off across the ground in a weird, hopping run, his breath panting in her ears over the radio link. Prax stayed close behind him and seemed more comfortable in the low gravity. He had no trouble keeping up. Bobbie climbed out of the
Roci
and then jumped in a long arc that took her about seven meters above the surface at its apex. She visually scanned the area while her suit reached out with radar and EM sensors, trying to pinpoint targets. Neither she nor it found any.

She hit the ground next to the lumbering Amos and hopped again, beating them both to the airlock door. She tapped the button and the outer door cycled open. Of course. Who locks their door on Io? No one is going to hike across a wasteland of molten silicon and sulfur to steal the family silver.

Amos plowed past her into the airlock, stopping for breath only once he was inside. Bobbie followed Prax in a second later, and she was about to tell Amos to cycle the airlock when her radio died.

She spun around, looking out across the surface of the moon for movement. Amos came up behind her and put his helmet against her back armor. When he yelled, it was barely audible. “What is it?”

Instead of yelling back, she stepped outside the airlock and pointed to Amos, then pointed at the inner door. She mimed a person walking with her fingers. Amos nodded at her with one hand, then moved back into the airlock and shut the outer door.

Whatever happened inside, it was up to Amos and Prax now. She wished them well.

She spotted the movement before her suit did. Something shifting against the sulfurous yellow background. Something not quite the same color. She tracked it with her eyes and had the suit hit it with a targeting laser. She wouldn’t lose track of it now. It might gobble radio waves, but the fact that she could see it meant that light bounced off it just fine.

It moved again. Not quickly, and staying close to the ground. If she hadn’t been looking right at it, she’d have missed the motion entirely. Being sneaky. Which probably meant it didn’t know she’d spotted it. Her suit’s laser range finder marked it as just over three hundred meters away. According to her theory, once it realized it had been spotted, it would charge her, moving in a straight line to try to grab and rip. If it couldn’t reach her quickly, it would try to throw things at her. And all she needed to do was hurt it until its program failed and it self-destructed. Lots of theories.

Time to test them out.

She aimed her gun at it. The suit helped her correct for deflection based on the range, but she was using ultrahigh velocity rounds on a moon with fractional gravity. Bullet drop at three hundred meters would be trivial. Even though there was no way the creature could see it through her helmet’s darkened visor, she blew it a kiss. “I’m back, sweetie. Come say hi to momma.”

She tapped the trigger on her gun. Fifty rounds streaked downrange, crossing the distance from her gun to the creature in less than a third of a second. All fifty slammed into it, shedding very little of their kinetic energy as they passed through. Just enough to burst the tip of each round open and ignite the self-oxidizing flammable gel they carried. Fifty trails of short-lived but very intense flame burned through the monster.

Some of the black filament bursting from the exit wounds actually caught fire, disappearing with a flash.

The monster launched itself toward Bobbie at a dead run that
should have been impossible in low gravity. Each push of its limbs should have launched it high into the air. It stuck to the silicate surface of Io as though it were wearing magnetic boots on a metal deck. Its speed was breathtaking. Its blue eyes blazed like lightning. The long, improbable hands reached out for her, clenching and grasping at nothing as it ran. It was all just like in her dreams. And for a split second, Bobbie just wanted to stand perfectly still and let the scene play out to the conclusion she’d never gotten to see. Another part of her mind expected her to wake up, soaking with sweat, as she had so many times before.

Bobbie watched as it ran toward her, and noted with pleasure the burnt black injuries the incendiary bullets had cut through its body. No sprays of black filament and then the wounds closing like water. Not this time. She’d hurt it, and she wanted to go on hurting it.

She turned away and took off in a bounding run at a ninety-degree angle to its path. Her suit kept the targeting laser locked on to the monster, so she could track its location even without turning around to look. As she’d suspected, it turned to follow her, but it lost ground. “Fast on the straightaways,” Bobbie said to it. “But you corner like shit.”

When the creature realized she wasn’t going to just stand still and let it get close to her, it stopped. Bobbie stumbled to a stop, turning to watch it. It reached down and tore up a big chunk of ancient lava bed, then reached down to grip the ground with its other hand.

“Here it comes,” Bobbie said to herself.

She threw herself to the side as the creature’s arm whipped forward. The rock missed her by centimeters as she hurtled sideways. She hit the moon’s surface and skidded, already returning fire. This time she fired for several seconds, sending hundreds of rounds into and through the creature.

“Anything you can do I can do better,” she sang under her breath. “I can do anything better than you.” The bullets tore great
flaming chunks out of the monster and nearly severed its left arm. The creature spun around and collapsed. Bobbie bounced back to her feet, ready to run again if the monster got back up. It didn’t. Instead, it rolled over onto its back and shook. Its head began to swell, and the blue eyes flashed even brighter. Bobbie could see things moving beneath the surface of its chitinous black skin.

“Boom, motherfucker!” she yelled at it, waiting for the bomb to go off.

Instead, it bounced suddenly to its feet, tore a portion of its own abdomen off, and threw it at her. By the time Bobbie realized what had just happened, the bomb was only a few meters from her. It detonated and blew her off her feet. She went skidding across Io’s surface, her armor blaring warnings at her. When she finally came to a stop, her HUD was flashing a Christmas display of red and green lights. She tried to move her limbs, but they were as heavy as stone. The suit’s motion control processor, the computer that interpreted her body’s movements and turned them into commands for the suit’s actuators, had failed. The suit was trying to reboot it while simultaneously trying to reroute and run the program in a different location. A flashing amber message on the HUD said
PLEASE STAND BY
.

Bobbie couldn’t turn her head yet, so when the monster leaned down over her, it took her completely by surprise. She stifled a scream. It wouldn’t have mattered. The sulfur atmosphere on Io was far too thin for sound waves to travel in. The monster couldn’t have heard her. But while the new Bobbie was at peace with the idea of dying in battle, enough of the old Bobbie remained that she was not going to go out screaming like a baby.

It leaned down to look at her; its overlarge and curiously childlike eyes glowed bright blue. The damage her gun had done seemed extensive, but the creature appeared not to notice. It poked at her chest armor with one long finger, then convulsed and vomited a thick spray of brown goo all over her.

“Oh, that’s
disgusting,”
she yelled at it. If her suit had been
opened up to the outside, getting that protomolecule shit on her would have been the least of her problems. But still, how the hell was she going to wash this crap off?

It cocked its head and regarded her curiously. It poked again at her armor, one finger wriggling into gaps, trying to find a way in to her skin. She’d seen one of these things rip a nine-ton combat mech apart. If it wanted into her suit, it was coming in. But it seemed reluctant to damage her for some reason. As she watched, a long, flexible tube burst out of its midsection and began probing at her armor instead of the finger. Brown goo dribbled out of this new appendage in a constant stream.

Her gun status light flickered from red to green. She spun up the barrels to test it and it worked. Of course, her suit was still telling her to “please stand by” when it came to actually moving. Maybe if the monster got bored and wandered in front of her gun, she could get some shots off.

The tube was probing at her armor more insistently now. It pushed its way into gaps, periodically shooting brown liquid into them. It was as repulsive as it was frightening. It was like being threatened by a serial killer that was also fumbling at her clothing with a teenager’s horny insistence.

“Oh, to hell with
this,”
she said to it. She was about through with letting this thing grope her while she lay helpless on her back. The suit’s right arm was heavy, and the actuators that made her strong when it was working also resisted movement when it was not. Pushing her arm up was like doing a one-arm bench press while wearing a lead glove. She pressed up anyway until she felt something pop. It might have been in the suit. It might have been in her arm. She couldn’t tell yet, because she was too wired for pain to set in.

But when it popped, her arm came up, and she pushed her fist up against the monster’s head.

“Buh-bye,” she said. The monster turned to look curiously at her hand. She held down the trigger until the ammo counter read
zero and the gun stopped spinning. The creature had ceased to exist from the shoulders up. She dropped her arm back to the ground, exhausted.

REROUTE SUCCESSFUL,
her suit told her.
REBOOTING,
it said. When the subliminal hum came back, she started laughing and found she couldn’t stop. She shoved the monster’s corpse off her and sat up.

“Good thing. It’s a really long walk back to the ship.”

P
rax ran.

Around him, the station walls formed angles at the center to make an elongated hexagon. The gravity was barely higher than Ganymede standard, and after weeks at a full-g burn, Prax had to pay attention to keep himself from rising to the ceiling with each step. Amos loped beside him, every stride low, long, and fast. The shotgun in the man’s hands remained perfectly level.

At a T intersection ahead, a woman appeared. Dark hair and skin. Not the one who’d taken Mei. Her eyes went wide and she darted off.

“They know we’re coming,” Prax said. He was panting a little.

“That probably wasn’t their first clue, Doc,” Amos said. His voice was perfectly conversational, but there was an intensity in it. Something like anger.

At the intersection, they paused, Prax leaning over and resting
elbows on knees to catch his breath. It was an old, primitive reflex. In less than .2 g, the blood return wasn’t significantly increased by putting his head even with his heart. Strictly speaking, he would have been better off standing and keeping his posture from narrowing any of his blood vessels. He forced himself to stand.