Caliban’s War

Chapter Twenty-One: Prax

Prax knelt, his arms zip-tied securely behind him. His shoulders ached. It hurt to hold his head up and it hurt to let it sink down. Amos lay facedown on the floor. Prax thought he was dead until he saw the zip-ties holding his arms behind his back. The nonlethal round their kidnappers had fired into the back of the mechanic’s head had left an enormous blue-and-black lump there. Most of the others—Holden, some of the Pinkwater mercenaries, even Naomi—were in positions much like his own, but not all.

Four years before, they’d had a moth infestation. A containment study had failed, and inch-long gray-brown miller moths had run riot in his dome. They’d built a heat trap: a few dabs of generated pheromones on a heat-resistant fiber swatch under the big long-wave full-spectrum lighting units. The moths came too close, and the heat killed them. The smell of small bodies burning had fouled the air for days, and the scent was exactly like that of the cauterizing drill their abductors were using on the injured Pinkwater man. A swirl of white smoke rose from the formed-plastic office table on which he was laid out.

“I’m just…” the Pinkwater man said through his sedation haze. “You just go ahead, finish that without me. I’ll be over…”

“Another bleeder,” one of their abductors said. She was a thick-featured woman with a mole under her left eye and blood-slicked rubber gloves. “Right there.”

“Check. Got it,” said the man with the drill, pressing the metal tip back down into the patient’s open belly wound. The sharp tapping sound of electrical discharge, and another small plume of white smoke rising from the wound.

Amos rolled over suddenly, his nose a bloody ruin, his face covered in gore. “I bight be wrong about dis, Cab’n,” he said, the words fighting out past the bulbous mess of his nose, “ ’ut I don’d dink dese fellas are station security.”

The room Prax had found himself in when the hood had been lifted had nothing to do with the usual atmosphere of law enforcement. It looked like an old office. The kind a safety inspector or a shipping clerk might have used in the ancient days before the cascade had started: a long desk with a built-in surface terminal, a few recessed lights shining up on the ceiling, a dead plant—Sanseviera trifasciata—with long green-brown leaves turning to dark slime. The gray-armored guards or soldiers or whatever they were had been very methodical and efficient. Prisoners were all along one wall, bound at the ankles and wrists; their hand terminals, weapons, and personal effects were stowed along the opposite wall with two guards set to do nothing but make sure no one touched them. The armor they’d stripped off Holden and Amos was in a pile on the floor next to their guns. Then the pair that Prax thought of as the medical team had started working, caring for the most desperately wounded first. They hadn’t had time yet to go on to anybody else.

“Any idea who we’re dealing with here?” Wendell asked under his breath.

“Not OPA,” Holden said.

“That leaves a pretty large number of suspects,” the Pinkwater captain said. “Is there somebody you’ve pissed off I should know about?”

Holden’s eyes took on a pained expression and he made a motion as close to a shrug as he could manage, given the circumstances.

“There’s kind of a list,” he said.

“Another bleeder here,” the woman said.

“Check,” the drill man said. Tap, smoke, the smell of burning flesh.

“No offense meant, Captain Holden,” Wendell said, “but I’m starting to wish I’d just shot you when I had the chance.”

“None taken,” Holden replied with a nod.

Four of the soldiers came back into the room. They were all squat Earther types. One—a dark-skinned man with a fringe of gray hair and an air of command—was subvocalizing madly. His gaze passed over the prisoners, seeing them without seeing them. Like they were boxes. When his eyes were on Prax, the man nodded but not to him.

“Are they stable?” the dark-skinned man asked the medical team.

“If I had the choice,” the woman said, “I wouldn’t move this one.”

“If you didn’t?”

“He’ll probably make it. Keep the high g to a minimum until I can get him to a real medical bay.”

“Excuse me,” Holden said. “Can someone please tell me what the hell’s going on?”

He might as well have been asking the walls.

“We’ve got ten minutes,” the dark-skinned man said.

“Transport ship?”

“Not yet. The secure facility.”

“Splendid,” the woman said sourly.

“Because if you want to ask us any questions,” Holden said, “we should start by getting everybody off Ganymede. If you want your people to still be people, we have to go. That lab we were in had the protomolecule.”

“I want them moved two at a time,” the dark-skinned man said.

“Yes, sir,” the woman replied.

“Are you listening to me?” Holden shouted. “The protomolecule is loose on this station.”

“They’re not listening to us, Jim,” Naomi said.

“Ferguson. Mott,” the dark-skinned man said. “Report.”

The room was silent as someone somewhere reported in.

“My daughter’s missing,” Prax said. “That ship took my daughter.”

They weren’t listening to him either. He hadn’t expected them to. With the exception of Holden and his crew, no one had. The dark-skinned man hunched forward, his expression profoundly focused. Prax felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. A premonition.

“Repeat that,” the dark-skinned man said. And then a moment later: “We’re firing? Who’s we?”

Someone answered. The medical team and the weapons guards had their eyes on the commander too. Their faces were poker-blank.

“Understood. Alpha team, new orders. Get to the port and secure a transport ship. Use of force is authorized. Repeat that: Use of force is authorized. Sergeant Chernev, I need you to cut the prisoners’ leg restraints.”

One of the gun guards did a double take.

“All of them, sir?”

“All of them. And we’re going to need a gurney for this gentleman.”

“What’s going on, sir?” the sergeant asked, his voice strained by confusion and fear.

“What’s going on is I’m giving you an order,” the dark-skinned man said, striding fast out the door. “Now go.”

Prax felt the knife slash as a rough vibration against his ankles. He hadn’t realized his feet were numb until the burning pins-and-needles sensation brought tears to his eyes. Standing hurt. In the distance, something boomed like an empty freight container dropped from a great height. The sergeant cut Amos’ legs free from their bonds and moved on to Naomi. One guard still stood by the supplies. The medical team was sealing the gut-shot man’s belly closed with a sweet-smelling gel. The sergeant bent over.

The glance between Holden and Amos was the only warning Prax had. As casually as a man heading for the restroom, Holden started walking toward the door.

“Hey!” the weapons guard said, lifting a rifle the size of his arm. Holden looked up innocently, all eyes upon him, while behind him Amos brought his knee up into the sergeant’s head. Prax yelped with surprise and the gun swung toward him. He tried to raise his hands, but they were still tied behind him. Wendell stepped forward, put a foot against the medical woman’s hip, and pushed her into the guard’s line of fire.

Naomi was kneeling on the sergeant’s neck; his face was purple. Holden kicked the drill-wielding man in the back of the knee at the same moment that Amos tackled the man with the rifle. The cauterizing drill sparked against the floor with a sound like a finger tapping against glass. Paula had the sergeant’s knife in her hands, backing up against one of her compatriots, sawing at the zip line around his wrists. The rifleman swung his elbow, and Amos’ breath went out in a whoosh. Holden dropped onto the male half of the medical team, pinning the man’s arms with his knees. Amos did something Prax couldn’t see, and the rifleman grunted and folded over.

Paula got through the Pinkwater man’s zip-tie just as the medical woman scooped up the rifle. The freed man pulled the pistol from the fallen sergeant’s holster and leaned forward, pressing the barrel to the medical woman’s temple as she swung the rifle up a quarter second too late.

Everyone froze. The medical woman smiled.

“Checkmate,” she said, and lowered the rifle to the floor.

It had all taken no more than ten seconds.

Naomi took the knife, quickly, methodically slicing through the wrist bindings while Holden followed along behind, disabling the communication webs in the gray unmarked armor and zip-tying their hands and feet. A perfect inversion of the previous situation. Prax, rubbing the feeling back into his fingers, had the absurd image of the dark-skinned man coming back in and barking orders to him. Another boom came, another huge, resonating container being dropped and sounding out like a drum.

“I just want you to know how much I appreciate the way you looked after my people,” Wendell told the pair who made up the medical team.

The woman suggested something obscene and unpleasant, but she smiled while she did it.

“Wendell,” Holden said, rummaging in the box of their belongings and then tossing a card-key to the Pinkwater leader. “The Somnambulist is still yours, but you need to get to her now and get the hell out of here.”

“Preaching to the choir,” Wendell said. “Get that gurney. We’re not leaving him behind now, and we’ve got to get out of here before reinforcements come.”

“Yessir,” Paula said.

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. Amos did the same, then distributed their confiscated weapons and items back to them. Holden checked the magazine on his gun and then left through the same door the dark-skinned man had used, Amos and Naomi on his heels. Prax had to trot to catch up. Another detonation came, this one not so distant. Prax thought he felt the ice shake under him, but it might have been his imagination.

“What’s… what’s going on?”

“The protomolecule’s breaking out,” Holden said, tossing a hand terminal to Naomi. “The infection’s taking hold.”

“I don’d dink dat’ whas habn’ing, Cab’n,” Amos said. With a grimace he grabbed his nose with his right hand and yanked it away from his face. When he let go, it looked mostly straight. He blew a bloody-colored plug of snot out of each nostril, then took a deep breath. “That’s better.”

“Alex?” Naomi said into her handset. “Alex, tell me this link is still up. Talk to me.”

Her voice was shaking.

Another boom, this one louder than anything Prax had ever heard. The shaking wasn’t imagined now; it threw Prax to the ground. The air had a strange smell, like overheated iron. The station lights flickered and went dark; the pale blue emergency evacuation LEDs came on. A low-pressure Klaxon was sounding, its tritone blat designed to carry through thin and thinning air. When Holden spoke, he sounded almost contemplative.

“Or they might be bombarding the station.”

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.

Prax stood in the arching common space where Nicola and he had gone on their first date. They’d eaten together at a little dulcería, drinking coffee and flirting. He could still remember the shape of her face and the heart-stopping thrill he’d felt when she took his hand. The ice where the dulcería had been was a fractured chaos. A dozen passages intersected here, and people were streaming through them, trying to get to the port or else deep enough into the moon that the ice would shield them, or someplace they could tell themselves was safe.

The only home he’d really known was falling apart around him. Thousands of people were going to die in the next few hours. Prax knew that, and part of him was horrified by it. But Mei had been on that ship, so she wasn’t one of them. He still had to rescue her, just not from this. It made it bearable.

“Alex says it’s hot out there,” Naomi said as the four of them trotted through the ruins. “Really hot. He’s not going to be able to make it to the port.”

“There’s the other landing pad,” Prax said. “We could go there.”

“That’s the plan,” Holden said. “Give Alex the coordinates for the science base.”

“Yes, sir,” Naomi said at the same moment Amos, raising a hand like a kid in a schoolroom, said, “The one with the protomolecule?”

“It’s the only secret landing pad I’ve got,” Holden said.

“Yeah, all right.”

When Holden turned to Prax, his face was gray with strain and fear.

“Okay, Prax. You’re the local. Our armor is vacuum rated, but we’ll need environment suits for you and Naomi. We’re about to run through hell, and not all of it’s going to be pressurized. I don’t have time to take a wrong turn or look for something twice. You’re point. Can you handle it?”

“Yes,” Prax said.

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. The suits there were safety orange and green, made to be visible to rescuers. Camouflage would have been more appropriate. The masks smelled of volatile plastic, and the joints were just rings sewn into the material. The suit heaters looked ill cared for and likely to catch on fire if used too long. Another blast came, followed by two others, each sounding closer than the one before.

“Nukes,” Naomi said.

“Maybe gauss rounds,” Holden replied. They might have been talking about the weather.

Prax shrugged.

“Either way, a hit that gets into a corridor means superheated steam,” he said, pressing the last seal along his side closed and checking the cheap green LED that promised the oxygen was flowing. The heating system flickered to yellow, then back to green. “You and Amos might make it if your armor’s good. I don’t think Naomi and I stand a chance.”

“Great,” Holden said.

“I’ve lost the Roci,” Naomi said. “No. I’ve lost the whole link. I was routing through the Somnambulist. She must have taken off.”

Or been slagged. The thought was on all their faces. No one said it.

“Over this way,” Prax said. “There’s a service tunnel we used to use when I was in college. We can get around the Marble Arch complex and head up from there.”

“Whatever you say, buddy,” Amos said. His nose was bleeding again. The blood looked black in the faint blue light inside his helmet.

It was his last walk. Whatever happened, Prax was never coming back here, because here wouldn’t exist. The fast lope along the service corridor where Jaimie Loomis and Tanna Ibtrahmin-Sook had taken him to get high was the last time he’d see that place. The broad, low-ceilinged amphitheater under the old water treatment center where he’d had his first internship was cracked, the reservoir compromised. It wouldn’t flood the corridors quickly, but in a couple of days, the passageways would be filled in. In a couple of days, it wouldn’t matter.

Everything glowed in the emergency LEDs or else fell into shadow. There was slush on the ground as the heating system struggled to compensate for the madness and failed. Twice, the way was blocked, once by a pressure door that was actually still functional, once by an icefall. They met almost no one. The others were all running for the port. Prax was leading them almost directly away from it now.

Another long, curved hall, then up a construction ramp, through an empty tunnel, and…

The blue steel door that blocked their way wasn’t locked, but it was in safety mode. The indicator said there was vacuum on the other side. One of the God-like fists pummeling Ganymede had broken through here. Prax stopped, his mind clicking through the three-dimensional architecture of his home station. If the secret base was there, and he was here, then…

“We can’t get there,” he said.

The others were silent for a moment.

“That’s not a good answer,” Holden said. “Find a different one.”

Prax took a long breath. If they doubled back, they could go down a level, head to the west, and try getting to the corridor from below, except that a blast strong enough to break through here would almost certainly have compromised the level below too. If they kept going to the old tube station, they might be able to find a service corridor—not that he knew there was one, but maybe—and it might lead in the right direction. Three more detonations came, shaking the ice. With a sound like a baseball bat hitting a home run, the wall beside him cracked.

“Prax, buddy,” Amos said, “sooner’d be better.”

They had environment suits, so if they opened the door, the vacuum wouldn’t kill them. But there would be debris choking it. Any strike hard enough to break through to the surface would…

Would…

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

“And how do we do that?” Holden asked.

Finding an access way that wasn’t locked down took twenty minutes, but Prax found one. No wider than three men walking abreast, it was an automated service unit for the dome exteriors. The service unit itself had long since been cannibalized for parts, but that didn’t matter. The airlock was still working under battery power. Naomi and Prax fed it the instructions, closed the inner door, and cycled the outer open. The escaping pressure was like a wind for a moment, and then nothing. 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.

“Okay,” Holden said over the cheap radio in Prax’s emergency suit. The low end of the sound spectrum was lousy, and Holden sounded like a cartoon character. “Which way now?”

“I don’t know,” Prax said, rising to his knees. He pointed toward the horizon. “Over there somewhere.”

“I need more than that,” Holden said.

“I’ve never been on the surface before,” Prax said. “In a dome, sure. But just out? I mean, I know we’re close to it, but I don’t know how to get there.”

“All right,” Holden said. In the high vacuum over his head, something huge and very far away detonated. It was like the old cartoon lightbulb of someone getting an idea. “We can do this. We can solve this. Amos, you head toward that hill over there, see what you can see. Prax and Naomi, start going that direction.”

“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.