Caliban’s War

Chapter Forty: Prax

Thrust pressed him into the crash couch. It was only four g, but even a single full g called for very nearly the full medical cocktail. He had lived in a place that kept him weak. He’d known that, of course, but mostly in terms of xylem and phloem. He had taken the normal low-g medical supplements to encourage bone growth. He had exercised as much as the guidelines asked. Usually. But always in the back of his mind, he’d thought it was idiocy. He was a botanist. He’d live and die in the familiar tunnels, with their comfortable low gravity—less than a fifth of Earth’s. An Earth he would never have reason to go to. There was even less reason he would ever need to suffer through a high-g burn. And yet here he lay in the gel like he was at the bottom of an ocean. His vision was blurred, and he fought for every inhalation. When his knee hyperextended, he tried to scream but couldn’t catch his breath.

The others would be better. They’d be used to things like this. They knew that they’d survive. His hindbrain wasn’t at all sure. Needles dug into the flesh of his thigh, injecting him with another cocktail of hormones and paralytics. Cold like the touch of ice spread from the injection points, and a paradoxical sense of ease and dread filled his mind. At this point, it was a balancing act between keeping his blood vessels elastic enough that they wouldn’t burst and robust enough that they wouldn’t collapse. His mind slid out from under him, leaving something calculating and detached in its place. It was like pure executive function without a sense of self. What had been his mind knew what he had known, remembered the things he remembered, but wasn’t him.

In this altered state of consciousness, he found himself taking inventory. Would it be okay to die now? Did he want to live, and if he did, on what terms? He considered the loss of his daughter as if it were a physical object. Loss was the soft pink of crushed seashell, where once it had been the red of old, scabby blood. The red of an umbilical cord waiting to drop free. He remembered Mei, what she had looked like. The delight in her laugh. She wasn’t like that anymore. If she was alive. But she was probably dead.

In his gravity-bent mind, he smiled. Of course, his lips couldn’t react. He’d been wrong. All along, he’d been wrong. The hours of sitting by himself, telling himself that Mei was dead. He’d thought he was toughening himself. Preparing himself for the worst. That wasn’t right at all. He’d said it, he’d tried to believe it, because the thought was comforting.

If she was dead, she wasn’t being tortured. If she was dead, she wasn’t scared. If she was dead, then the pain would be all his, entirely his, and she would be safe. He noticed without pleasure or pain that it was a pathological mental frame. But he’d had his life and his daughter taken from him, had survived in near starvation while the cascade effect ate what was left of Ganymede, had been shot at, had faced a half-alien killing machine, and was now known throughout the solar system as a wife beater and pedophile. He had no reason to be sane. It wouldn’t help him.

And on top of that, his knee really hurt.

Somewhere far, far away, in a place with light and air, something buzzed three times, and the mountain rolled off his sternum. Coming back to himself was like rising from the bottom of a pool.

“Okay, y’all,” Alex said across the ship’s system. “We’re callin’ this dinner. Take a couple minutes for your livers to crawl up off your spinal cords, and we’ll meet up in the galley. We’ve only got fifty minutes, so enjoy it while you can.”

Prax took a deep breath, blowing it out between his teeth, and then sat up. His whole body felt bruised. His hand terminal claimed the thrust was at one-third g, but it felt like more and less than that. He swung his legs over the edge, and his knee made a wet, grinding pop. He tapped at his terminal.

“Um, I’m not sure I can walk,” he said. “My knee.”

“Hang tight, Doc.” Amos’ voice came from the speaker. “I’ll come take a look at it. I’m pretty much the closest thing we’ve got to a medic unless you wanna hand it over to the med bay.”

“Just don’t try to weld him back together,” Holden said. “It doesn’t work.”

The link went silent. While he waited, Prax checked his incoming messages. The list was too long for the screen, but that had been true since the initial message had gone out. The message titles had changed.

He didn’t open them. He checked the newsfeeds under his own name and Mei’s and had seven thousand active feeds with those keywords. Nicola’s only had fifty.

There had been a time that he’d loved Nicola, or thought that he had. He’d wanted to have sex with her as badly as he’d wanted anything before in his life. He told himself there had been good times. Nights they’d spent together. Mei had come from Nicola’s body. It was hard to believe that something so precious and central to his life had also been part of a woman who, by the evidence, he’d never really known. Even as the father of her child, he hadn’t known the woman who could have made that recording.

He opened the hand terminal’s recording fields, centered the camera on himself, and licked his lips.

“Nicola…”

Twenty seconds later, he closed the field and erased the recording. He had nothing to say. Who are you, and who do you think I am? came closest, and he didn’t care about the answer to either one.

He went back to the messages, filtering on the names of the people who’d been helping him investigate. There was nothing new since the last time.

“Hey, Doc,” Amos said, lumbering into the small room.

“I’m sorry,” Prax said, putting his terminal back into its holder beside the crash couch. “It was just that during that last burn…”

He gestured to his knee. It was swollen, but not as badly as he’d expected. He’d thought it would be twice its normal size, but the anti-inflammatories that had been injected into his veins were doing their job. Amos nodded, put a hand on Prax’s sternum, and pushed him back into the gel.

“I got a toe that pops out sometimes,” Amos said. “Little tiny joint, but get it at the wrong angle on a fast burn, hurts like a bitch. Try not to tense up, Doc.”

Amos bent the knee twice, feeling the joint grind. “This ain’t that bad. Here, straighten it out. Okay.”

Amos wrapped one hand around Prax’s ankle, braced the other on the frame of the couch, and pulled slowly and irresistibly. Prax’s knee bloomed with pain, and then a deep, wet pop and a nauseating sensation of tendons shifting against bone.

“There you go,” Amos said. “We go back into burn, make sure you got that leg in the right place. Hyperextend that again right now, we’ll pop your kneecap off, okay?”

“Right,” Prax said, starting to sit up.

“I’m sorry as hell to do this, Doc,” Amos said, putting a hand on his chest, pushing him back down. “I mean, you’re having a lousy day and all. But you know how it is.”

Prax frowned. Every muscle in his face felt bruised.

“What is it?”

“All this bullshit they’re saying about you and the kid? That’s all just bullshit, right?”

“Of course,” Prax said.

“Because you know, sometimes things happen, you didn’t even mean them to. Have a hard day, lose your temper, maybe? Or shit, you get drunk. Some of the things I’ve done when I really tied one on? I don’t even know about until later.” Amos smiled. “I’m just saying if there’s a grain of truth, something that’s getting all exaggerated, it’d be better if we knew it now, right?”

“I never did anything that she said.”

“It’s okay to tell me the truth, Doc. I understand. Sometimes guys do stuff. Doesn’t make ’em bad.”

Prax pushed Amos’ hand aside and brought himself up to sitting. His knee felt much better.

“Actually,” he said, “it does. That makes them bad.”

Amos’ expression relaxed, his smile changed in a way Prax couldn’t quite understand.

“All right, Doc. Like I said, I’m sorry as hell. But I did have to ask.”

“It’s okay,” Prax said, standing up. For a moment, the knee seemed like it might give, but it didn’t. Prax took a tentative step, then another. It would work. He turned toward the galley, but the conversation wasn’t finished. “If I had. If I had done those things, that would have been okay with you?”

“Oh, fuck no. I’d have broken your neck and thrown you out the airlock,” Amos said, clapping him on the shoulder.

“Ah,” Prax said, a gentle relief loosening in his chest. “Thank you.”

“Anytime.”

The other three were in the galley when Prax and Amos got there, but it still felt half full. Less. Naomi and Alex were sitting across the table from each other. Neither of them looked as ruined as Prax felt. Holden turned from the wall with a formed-foam bowl in either hand. The brown slurry in them smelled of heat and earth and cooked leaves. As soon as it caught his nose, Prax was ravenous.

“Lentil soup?” Holden asked as Prax and Amos sat on either side of Alex.

“That would be wonderful,” Prax said.

“I’ll just take a tube of goo,” Amos said. “Lentils give me gas, and I can’t see popping an intestine next time we accelerate being fun for anyone.”

Holden put a fresh bowl in front of Prax and handed a white tube with a black plastic nipple to Amos, then sat beside Naomi. They didn’t touch, but the connection between them was unmistakable. He wondered whether Mei had ever wanted him to reconcile with Nicola. Impossible now.

“Okay, Alex,” Holden said. “What’ve we got?”

“Same thing we had before,” Alex said. “Six destroyers burning like hell toward us. A matching force burning after them, and a racing pinnace heading away from us on the other side.”

“Wait,” Prax said. “Away from us?”

“They’re matching our course. Already did the turnaround, and they’re getting up to speed to join us.”

Prax closed his eyes, picturing the vectors.

“We’re almost there, then?” he said.

“Very nearly,” Alex said. “Eighteen, twenty hours.”

“How’s it going to play out? Are the Earth ships going to catch us?”

“They’re gonna catch the hell out of us,” Alex said, “but not before we get that pinnace. Call it four days after, maybe.”

Prax took a spoonful of the soup. It tasted just as good as it smelled. Green, dark leaves were mixed in with the lentils, and he spread one open with his spoon, trying to identify it. Spinach, maybe. The stem margin didn’t look quite right, but it had been cooked, after all…

“How sure are we this isn’t a trap?” Amos asked.

“We aren’t,” Holden said. “But I don’t see how it would work.”

“If they want us in custody instead of dead,” Naomi suggested. “We are talking about opening our airlock for someone way high up in the Earth government.”

“So she is who she says she is?” Prax asked.

“Looks like it,” Holden said.

Alex raised a hand.

“Well, if it’s talk to some little gramma from the UN or get my ass shot off by six destroyers, I’m thinkin’ we can break out the cookies and tea, right?”

“It would be late in the game to go for another plan,” Naomi said. “It makes me damn uncomfortable having Earth saving me from Earth, though.”

“Structures are never monolithic,” Prax said. “There’s more genetic variation within Belters or Martians or Earthers than there is between them. Evolution would predict some divisions within the group structures and alliances with out-members. You see the same thing in ferns.”

“Ferns?” Naomi asked.

“Ferns can be very aggressive,” Prax said.

A soft chime interrupted them: three rising notes, like bells gently struck.

“Okay, suck it down,” Alex said. “That’s the fifteen-minute warning.”

Amos made a prodigious sucking sound, the white tube withering at his lips. Prax put down his spoon and lifted the soup bowl to his lips, not wanting to leave a drop of it. Holden did the same, then started gathering up the used bowls.

“Anyone needs to hit the head, this is the time,” he said. “We’ll talk again in…”

“Eight hours,” Alex said.

“Eight hours,” Holden repeated.

Prax felt his chest go tight. Another round of crushing acceleration. Hours of the couch’s needles propping up his failing metabolism. It sounded like hell. He rose from the table, nodded to everyone, and went back to his bunk. His knee was much better. He hoped it would still be when he next got up. The ten-minute chime sounded. He lay down on the couch, trying to align his body perfectly, then waited. Waited.

He rolled over and grabbed his hand terminal. Seven new incoming messages. Two of them supportive, three hateful, one addressed to the wrong person, and one a financial statement from the charity fund. He didn’t bother reading them.

He turned on the camera.

“Nicola,” he said. “I don’t know what they told you. I don’t know if you really think all those things that you said. But I know I never touched you in anger, even at the end. And if you really felt afraid of me, I don’t know why it was. Mei is the one thing that I love more than anything in life. I’d die before I let anyone hurt her. And now half the solar system thinks I hurt her…”

He stopped the recording and began again.

“Nicola. Honestly, I didn’t think we had anything left between us to betray.”

He stopped. The five-minute warning chimed as he ran his fingers through his hair. Each individual follicle ached. He wondered if this was why Amos kept his head shaved. There were so many things about being on a ship that didn’t occur to you until you were actually there.

“Nicola…”

He erased all the recordings and logged into the charity bank account interface. There was a secure request format that could encrypt and send an authorized transfer as soon as light-speed delivered it to the bank’s computers. He filled it all out quickly. The two-minute warning sounded, louder and more insistent. With thirty seconds left, he sent her money back. There was nothing else for them to say.

He put the hand terminal in place and lay back. The computer counted backward from twenty, and the mountain rolled back over him.

“How’s the knee?” Amos asked.

“Pretty good,” Prax said. “I was surprised. I thought there’d be more damage.”

“Didn’t hyperextend this time,” Amos said. “Did okay with my toe too.”

A deep tone rang through the ship, and the deck shifted under Prax. Holden, standing just to Prax’s right, moved the rifle to his left hand and touched a control panel.

“Alex?”

“Yeah, it was little rough. Sorry about that, but… Hold on. Yeah, Cap. We’ve got seal. And they’re knocking.”

Holden shifted the rifle back to his other hand. Amos also had a weapon at the ready. Naomi stood beside him, nothing in her hands but a terminal linked to ship operations. If something went wrong, being able to control ship functions might be more useful than a gun. They all wore the articulated armor of the Martian military that had come with the ship. The paired ships were accelerating at a third of a g. The Earth destroyers still barreled down toward them.

“So I’m guessing the firearms mean you’re thinking trap, Cap’n?” Amos asked.

“Nothing wrong with an honor guard,” Holden said.

Prax held up his hand.

“You don’t ever get one again,” Holden said. “No offense.”

“No, I was just… I thought honor guards were usually on the same side as the people they’re guarding?”

“We may be stretching the definitions a little here,” Naomi said. Her voice had just a trace of tension in it.

“She’s just a little old politician,” Holden said. “And that pinnace can’t hold more than two people. We’ve got her outnumbered. And if things get ugly, Alex is watching from the pilot’s seat. You are watching, right?”

“Oh yeah,” Alex said.

“So if there are any surprises, Naomi can pop us loose and Alex can get us out of here.”

“That won’t help with the destroyers, though,” Prax said.

Naomi put a hand on his arm, squeezing him gently.

“I’m not sure you’re helping, Prax.”

The outer airlock cycled open with a distant hum. The lights clicked from red to green.

“Whoa,” Alex said.

“Problem?” Holden snapped.

“No, it’s just—”

The inner door opened, and the biggest person Prax had seen in his entire life stepped into the room wearing a suit of some sort of strength-augmenting armor. If it weren’t for the transparent faceplate, he would have thought it was a two-meter-tall bipedal robot. Through the faceplate, Prax saw a woman’s features: large dark eyes and coffee-with-cream skin. Her gaze raked them with the palpable threat of violence. Beside him, Amos took an unconscious step back.

“You’re the captain,” the woman said, the suit’s speakers making her voice sound artificial and amplified. It didn’t sound like a question.

“I am,” Holden said. “I’ve got to say, you looked a little different on-screen.”

The joke fell flat and the giant stepped into the room.

“Planning to shoot me with that?” she asked, pointing toward Holden’s gun with a massive gauntleted fist.

“Would it work?”

“Probably not,” the giant said. She took another small step forward, her armor whining when she moved. Holden and Amos took a matching step back.

“Call it an honor guard, then,” Holden said.

“I’m honored. Will you put them away now?”

“Sure.”

Two minutes later, the guns were stowed, and the huge woman, who still hadn’t given her name, tapped something inside the helmet with her chin and said, “Okay. You’re clear.”

The airlock cycled again, red to green, with the hum of the opening doors. The woman who came in this time was smaller than any of them. Her gray hair was spiking out in all directions, and the orange sari she wore hung strangely in the low thrust gravity.

“Undersecretary Avasarala,” Holden said. “Welcome aboard. If there’s anything I can—”

“You’re Naomi Nagata,” the wizened little woman said.

Holden and Naomi exchanged glances, and Naomi shrugged.

“I am.”

“How the fuck do you keep your hair like that? I look like a hedgehog’s been humping my skull.”

“Um—”

“Looking the part is half of what’s going to keep you all alive. We don’t have time to screw around. Nagata, you get me looking pretty and girlish. Holden—”

“I’m an engineer, not a damned hairstylist,” Naomi said, anger creeping into her voice.

“Ma’am,” Holden said, “this is my ship and my crew. Half of us aren’t even Earth citizens, and we don’t just take your commands.”

“All right. Ms. Nagata, if we’re going to keep this ship from turning into an expanding ball of hot gas, we need to make a press statement, and I’m not prepared to do that. Would you please assist me?”

“Okay,” Naomi said.

“Thank you. And, Captain? You need a fucking shave.”