Caliban’s War

Chapter Ten: Prax

“Pas kirrup es I’m to this,” the boy sitting on the cot said. “Pinche salad, sa-sa? Ten thousand, once was.”

He couldn’t have been more than twenty. Young enough, technically, to be his son, just as Mei could have been the boy’s daughter. Colt-thin from adolescent growth and a life in low g, his thinness was improbable to begin with. And he’d been starving besides.

“I can write you a promissory note if you want,” Prax said.

The boy grinned and made a rude gesture.

From his professional work, Prax knew that the inner planets thought of Belter slang as a statement about location. He knew from living as a food botanist on Ganymede that it was also about class. He had grown up with tutors in accent-free Chinese and English. He’d spoken with men and women from everywhere in the system. From the way someone said allopolyploidy, he could tell if they came from the universities around Beijing or Brazil, if they’d grown up in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains or Olympus Mons or in the corridors of Ceres. He’d grown up in microgravity himself, but Belt patois was as foreign to him as to anyone fresh up the well. If the boy had wanted to speak past him, it would have been effortless. But Prax was a paying customer, and he knew the boy was making an effort to dial it back.

The programming keyboard was twice as large as a standard hand terminal, the plastic worn by use and time. A progress bar was slowly filling along the side, notations in simplified Chinese cycling with each movement.

The hole was a cheap one near the surface of the moon. No more than ten feet wide, four rough rooms inched into the ice from a public corridor hardly wider or better lit. The old plastic walls glittered and wept with condensation. They were in the room farthest from the corridor, the boy on his cot and Prax standing hunched in the doorway.

“No promise for the full record,” the boy said. “What is, is, sabé?”

“Anything you can get would be great.”

The boy nodded once. Prax didn’t know his name. It wasn’t the sort of thing to ask. The days it had taken to track down someone willing to break through the security system had been a long dance between his own ignorance of Ganymede Station’s gray economy and the increasing desperation and hunger in even the most corrupt quarters. A month before, the boy might have been skimming commercial data to resell or hold hostage for easily laundered private credit. Today he was looking for Mei in exchange for enough leafy greens to make a small meal. Agricultural barter, the oldest economy in humanity’s record, had come to Ganymede.

“Authcopy’s gone,” the boy said. “Sucked into servers, buried ass deep.”

“So if you can’t break the security servers—”

“Don’t have to. Camera got memory, memory got cache. Since the lockdown, it’s just filling and filling. No one watching.”

“You’re kidding,” Prax said. “The two biggest armies in the system are staring each other down, and they’re not watching the security cameras?”

“Watching each other. No one half-humps for us.”

The progress bar filled completely and chimed. The boy pulled open a list of identifying codes and started paging through them, muttering to himself. From the front room, a baby complained weakly. It sounded hungry. Of course it did.

“Your kid?”

The boy shook his head.

“Collateral,” he said, and tapped twice on a code. A new window opened. A wide hall. A door half melted and forced open. Scorch marks on the walls and, worse, a puddle of water. There shouldn’t be free water. The environmental controls were getting further and further away from their safe levels. The boy looked up at Prax. “C’est la?”

“Yes,” Prax said. “That’s it.”

The boy nodded and hunched back over his console.

“I need it before the attack. Before the mirror came down,” Prax said.

“Hokay, boss. Waybacking. Tod á frames con null delta. Only see when something happens, que si?”

“Fine. That’s fine.”

Prax moved forward, leaning to look over the boy’s shoulder. The image jittered without anything on the screen changing except the puddle, slowly getting smaller. They were going backward through time, through the days and weeks. Toward the moment when it had all fallen apart.

Medics appeared in the screen, appearing to walk backward in the inverted world as they brought a dead body to lay beside the door. Then another draped over it. The two corpses lay motionless; then one moved, pawing gently at the wall, then more strongly until, in an eyeblink, he staggered to his feet and was gone.

“There should be a girl. I’m looking for who brought out a four-year-old girl.”

“Sa day care, no? Should be a thousand of them.”

“I only care about the one.”

The second corpse sat up and then stood, clutching her belly. A man stepped into the frame, a gun in his hand, healing her by sucking the bullet from her guts. They argued, grew calm, parted peaceably. Prax knew he was seeing it all in reverse, but his sleep- and calorie-starved brain kept trying to make the images into a narrative. A group of soldiers crawled backward out of the ruined door, like a breech birth, then huddled, backed away in a rush. A flash of light, and the door had made itself whole, thermite charges clinging to it like fruit until a soldier in a Martian uniform rushed forward to collect them safely. Their technological harvest complete, the soldiers all backed rapidly away, leaving a scooter behind them, leaning against the wall.

And then the door slid open, and Prax saw himself back out. He looked younger. He beat on the door, hands popping off the surface in staccato bursts, then leapt awkwardly onto the scooter and vanished backward.

The door went quiet. Motionless. He held his breath. Walking backward, a woman carrying a five-year-old boy on her hip went to the door, vanished within, and then reappeared. Prax had to remind himself that the woman hadn’t been dropping her son off, but retrieving him. Two figures backed down the corridor.

No. Three.

“Stop. That’s it,” Prax said, his heart banging against his ribs. “That’s her.”

The boy waited until all three figures were caught in the camera’s eye, stepping out into the corridor. Mei’s face was petulant; even in the low resolution of the security camera, he knew the expression. And the man holding her…

Relief warred with outrage in his chest, and relief won. It was Dr. Strickland. She’d gone with Dr. Strickland, who knew about her condition, about the medicine, about all the things that needed to be done to keep Mei alive. He sank to his knees, his eyes closed and weeping. If he’d taken her, she wasn’t dead. His daughter wasn’t dead.

Unless, a thin demonic thought whispered in his brain, Strickland was too.

The woman was a stranger. Dark-haired with features that reminded Prax of the Russian botanists he’d worked with. She was holding a roll of paper in her hand. Her smile might have been one of amusement or impatience. He didn’t know.

“Can you follow them?” he asked. “See where they went?”

The boy looked at him, lips curled.

“For salad? No. Box of chicken and atche sauce.”

“I don’t have any chicken.”

“Then you got what you got,” the boy said with a shrug. His eyes had gone dead as marbles. Prax wanted to hit him, wanted to choke him until he dug the images out of the dying computers. But it was a fair bet the boy had a gun or something worse, and unlike Prax, he likely knew how to use it.

“Please,” Prax said.

“Got your favor, you. No epressa mé, si?”

Humiliation rose in the back of his throat, and he swallowed it down.

“Chicken,” he said.

“Si.”

Prax opened his satchel and put a double handful of leaves, orange peppers, and snow onions on the cot. The boy snatched up a half of it and stuffed it into his mouth, eyes narrowing in animal pleasure.

“I’ll do what I can,” Prax said.

He couldn’t do anything.

The only edible protein still on the station was either coming in a slow trickle from the relief supplies or walking around on two feet. People had started trying Prax’s strategy, grazing off the plants in the parks and hydroponics. They hadn’t bothered with the homework, though. Inedibles were eaten all the same, degrading the air-scrubbing functions and throwing the balance of the station’s ecosystem further off. One thing was leading to another, and chicken couldn’t be had, or anything that might substitute for it. And even if there was, he didn’t have time to solve that problem.

In his own home, the lights were dim and wouldn’t go bright. The soybean plant had stopped growing but didn’t fade, which was an interesting datapoint, or would have been.

Sometime during the day, an automated system had clicked into a conservation routine, limiting energy use. In the big picture, it might be a good sign. Or it might be the fever break just before the catastrophe. It didn’t change what he had to do.

As a boy, he’d entered the schools young, shipping up with his family to the sunless reaches of space, chasing a dream of work and prosperity. He hadn’t taken the change well. Headaches and anxiety attacks and constant, bone-deep fatigue had haunted those first years when he needed to impress his tutors, be tracked as bright and promising. His father hadn’t let him rest. The window is open until the window is closed, he’d say, and then push Prax to do a little more, to find a way to think when he was too tired or sick or in pain to think. He’d learned to make lists, notes, outlines.

By capturing his fleeting thoughts, he could drag himself to clarity like a mountain climber inching toward a summit. Now, in the artificial twilight, he made lists. The names of all the children he could remember from Mei’s therapy group. He knew there were twenty, but he could only remember sixteen. His mind wandered. He put the image of Strickland and the mystery woman on his hand terminal, staring at it. The confusion of hope and anger swirled in him until it faded. He felt like he was falling asleep, but his pulse was racing. He tried to remember if tachycardia was a symptom of starvation.

For a moment, he came to himself, clear and lucid in a way he only then realized he hadn’t been in days. He was starting to crash. His own personal cascade was getting ahead of him, and he wouldn’t be able to keep up his investigation much longer without rest. Without protein. He was already half zombie.

He had to get help. His gaze drifted to the list of children’s names. He had to get help, but first he’d check, just check. He’d go to… go to…

He closed his eyes, frowned. He knew the answer. He knew that he knew. The security station. He’d go there and ask about each of them. He opened his eyes, writing security station down under the list, capturing the thought. Then UN outreach station. Mars outreach. All the places he’d been before, day after day, only now with new questions. It would be easy. And then, when he knew, there was something else he was supposed to do. It took a minute to figure out what it was, and then he wrote it at the bottom of the page.

Get help.

“They’re all gone,” Prax said, his breath ghosting white in the cold. “They’re all his patients, and they’re all gone. Sixteen out of sixteen. Do you know the probability of that? It’s not random.”

The security man hadn’t shaved in days. A long, angry ice burn reddened his cheek and neck, the wound fresh and untreated. His face must have touched an uninsulated piece of Ganymede. He was lucky to still have skin. He wore a thick coat and gloves. There was frost on the desk.

“I appreciate the information, sir, and I’ll see it gets out to the relief stations—”

“No, you don’t understand, he took them. They’re sick, and he took them.”

“Maybe he was trying to keep them safe,” the security man said. His voice was a gray rag, limp and weary. There was a problem with that. Prax knew there was a problem with that, but he couldn’t remember what it was. The security man reached out, gently moving him aside, and nodded to the woman behind him. Prax found himself staring at her like he was drunk.

“I want to report a murder,” she said, her voice shaking.

The security man nodded, neither surprise nor disbelief in his eyes. Prax remembered.

“He took them first,” he said. “He took them before the attack happened.”

“Three men broke into my apartment,” the woman said. “They… My brother was with me and he tried to stop them.”

“When did this happen, ma’am?”

“Before the attack,” Prax said.

“A couple hours ago,” the woman said. “Fourth level. Blue sector. Apartment 1453.”

“Okay, ma’am. I’m going to take you over to a desk here. I need you to fill out a report.”

“My brother’s dead. They shot him.”

“And I’m very sorry about that, ma’am. I need you to fill out a report so we can catch the men who did this.”

Prax watched them walk away. He turned back to the line of the traumatized and desperate waiting their turns to beg for help, for justice, for law. A flash of anger lit him, then flickered. He needed help, but there wasn’t any to be had here. He and Mei were a pebble in space. They didn’t signify.

The security man was back, talking to a tall pretty woman about something horrible. Prax hadn’t noticed the man returning, hadn’t heard the beginning of the woman’s tale. He was starting to lose time. That wasn’t good.

The small sane part of his brain whispered that if he died, no one would look for Mei. She’d be lost. It whispered that he needed food, that he’d needed it for days. That he didn’t have very much time left.

“I have to go to the relief center,” he said aloud. The woman and the security man didn’t seem to hear. “Thanks anyway.”

Now that he had started to notice his own condition, Prax was astonished and alarmed. His gait was a shuffle; his arms were weak and ached badly, though he couldn’t remember having done anything to earn the pain. He hadn’t lifted anything heavy or gone climbing. He hadn’t done his daily exercise routine any time that he could remember. He didn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. He remembered the shudder of the falling mirror, the death of his dome, like it was something that had happened in a previous lifetime. No wonder he was falling apart.

The corridors by the relief center were packed like a slaughterhouse. Men and women, many of them who looked stronger and healthier than he was, pushed against each other, making even the widest spaces feel narrow. The closer he got to the port, the more light-headed he felt. The air was almost warm here, the barn-hot of bodies. It stank of keytone-acrid breath. Saint’s breath, his mother called it. The smell of protein breakdown, of bodies eating their own muscles to survive. He wondered how many people in the crowd knew what that scent was.

People were yelling. Shoving. The crowd around him surged back and forth the way he imagined waves might press against a beach.

“Then open the doors and let us look!” a woman shouted, far ahead of him.

Oh, Prax thought. This is a food riot.

He pushed for the edges, trying to get out. Trying to get away. Ahead of him, people were shouting. Behind him, they pushed. Banks of LEDs in the ceiling glowed white and gold. The walls were industrial gray. He put a hand out. He’d gotten to a wall. Somewhere, the dam burst, and the crowd flowed suddenly forward, the collective movement threatening to pull him swirling away into the flow. He kept a hand on the wall. The crowd thinned, and Prax staggered forward. The loading bay doors stood open. Beside them Prax saw a familiar face but couldn’t place it. Someone from the lab, maybe? The man was thick-boned and muscular. An Earther. Maybe someone he’d seen in his travels through the failing station. Had he seen the man grubbing for food? But no, he looked too well fed. There was no gauntness to his cheeks. He was like a friend and also a stranger. Someone Prax knew and also didn’t. Like the secretary-general or a famous actor.

Prax knew he was staring, but he couldn’t stop. He knew that face. He knew it. It had to do with the war.

Prax had a sudden flashbulb memory. He was in his apartment, holding Mei in his arms, trying to calm her. She was barely a year old, not walking, the doctors still tinkering to find the right pharmaceutical cocktail to keep her alive. Over her colic wail, the news streams were a constant alarmed chatter. A man’s face played over and over.

My name is James Holden and my ship, the Canterbury, was just destroyed by a warship with stealth technology and what appear to be parts stamped with Martian Navy serial numbers.

That was him. That was why he recognized the face and felt that he’d never seen it before. Prax felt a tug from somewhere near the center of his chest and found himself stepping forward. He paused. Beyond the loading doors, someone whooped. Prax took out his hand terminal, looked at his list. Sixteen names, sixteen children gone. And at the bottom of the page, in simple block characters: Get help.

Prax turned toward the man who’d started wars and saved planets, suddenly shy and uncertain.

“Get help,” he said, and walked forward.