Caliban’s War

Chapter Fifty-Two: Avasarala

It was over, except that it wasn’t. It never was.

“We’re all friends now,” Souther said. Talking to him without lag was a luxury she was going to miss. “But if we all limp back to our corners, we’re more likely to stay that way. I’m thinking it’s going to be a question of years before either of our fleets are back up to what we were. There was a lot of damage.”

“The children?”

“Processing them. My medical officer’s in communication with a list of doctors who deal with pediatric immune problems. It’s just about finding their parents and getting them all home now.”

“Good,” she said. “That’s what I like to hear. And the other thing?”

Souther nodded. He looked younger in low gravity. They both did. Skin didn’t sag when there was nothing to tug it down, and she could see what he’d looked like as a boy.

“We’ve got transponder locks on a hundred and seventy-one packages. They’re all moving sunward pretty fast, but they’re not accelerating or evading. Pretty much we’re standing back and letting them get close enough to Mars that disposal is trivial.”

“You sure that’s a good idea?”

“By ‘close,’ I mean still weeks away at current speed. Space is big.”

There was a pause that meant something other than distance.

“I wish you’d ride back on one of ours,” Souther said.

“And be stuck out here for another few weeks with the paperwork? Not going to happen. And besides, heading back with James Holden and Sergeant Roberta Draper and Mei Meng? It has all the right symbolism. Press will eat it up. Earth, Mars, the Outer Planets, and whatever the hell Holden is now.”

“Celebrity,” Souther said. “A nation of its own.”

“He’s not that bad once you get past the self-righteousness. And anyway, this is the ship I’m on, and there’s nothing it’s waiting to repair before it starts its burn. And I’ve already hired him. No one’s giving me any shit about discretionary spending right now.”

“All right,” Souther said. “Then I’ll see you back down the well.”

“See you there,” she said, and cut the connection.

She pulled herself up and launched gently across the ops deck. It would have been easy to push down the crew ladder shaft, flying the way she’d dreamed of as a child. It tempted. In practice, she figured she’d either push too hard and slam into something or else too gently and have air resistance stop her with nothing solid close enough to reach. She used the handholds and pulled herself slowly down toward the galley. Pressure doors opened at her approach and closed behind her with soft hydraulic hisses and metallic bangs. When she reached the crew deck, she heard the voices before she could make out the words, and the words before she saw the people.

“…have to shut it down,” Prax was saying. “I mean, it’s false pretenses now. You don’t think I could be sued, do you?”

“You can always be sued,” Holden said. “Chances are they wouldn’t win.”

“But I don’t want to be sued in the first place. We have to shut it down.”

“I put a notice on the site so it gives a status update and asks for confirmation before any more money gets moved.”

She pulled herself into the galley. Prax and Holden were floating near the coffee machine. Prax wore a stunned expression, whereas Holden looked slightly smug. They both had bulbs of coffee, but Prax seemed to have forgotten his. The botanist’s eyes were wide and his mouth hung open, even in the microgravity.

“Who’s getting sued?” Avasarala asked.

“Now that we have Mei,” Holden said, “Prax wants people to stop giving him money.”

“It’s too much,” the botanist said, looking at her as if he expected her to do something about it. “I mean…”

“Surplus funds?” Avasarala asked.

“He can’t quite retire on what he’s got,” Holden said. “Not in luxury, anyway.”

“But it’s yours,” Prax said, turning to Holden with something like hope. “You set up the account.”

“I took the Rocinante’s fees already. Trust me, you paid us generously,” Holden said, hand out in a gesture of refusal. “What’s still in there’s all yours. Well, yours and Mei’s.”

Avasarala scowled. That changed her personal calculus a little. She’d thought this would be the right time to lock Prax into a contract, but Jim Holden had once again ridden in at the last moment and screwed everything up.

“Congratulations,” Avasarala said. “Has either of you seen Bobbie? I need to talk to her.”

“Last I saw, she was heading for the machine shop.”

“Thanks,” Avasarala said, and kept pulling herself along. If Praxidike Meng was independently wealthy, that made him less likely to take on the job of rebuilding Ganymede for purely financial reasons. She could probably work the civic pride angle. He and his daughter were the face of the tragedy there, and having him running the show would mean more to people than all the facts and figures of how screwed they’d all be without the food supplies back online. He might be the kind of man who’d be swayed by that. She needed to think about it.

Once again, she was moving slowly and carefully enough that she heard the voices before she reached the machine shop. Bobbie and Amos, both of them laughing. She couldn’t believe that she was walking in on an intimate moment, but it had that tickle-fight sound to it. Then Mei shrieked with delight, and Avasarala understood.

The machine shop was the last place in the ship, with the possible exception of engineering, that Avasarala would have thought about playing with a little girl, but there she was, arms and legs flailing through the air. Her shoulder-length black hair flowed around her in a whirl, following the gentle end-over-end spin of her body. Her face was bright with pleasure. Bobbie and Amos stood at opposite ends of the shop. As Avasarala watched, Bobbie caught the little girl out of the air and launched her back toward Amos. Soon, Avasarala thought, the girl would start losing her milk teeth. She wondered how much of all this Mei would remember when she was an adult.

“Are you people crazy?” Avasarala said as Amos caught the girl. “This isn’t a playground.”

“Hey there,” Amos said, “we weren’t planning on staying long. The captain and the doc needed a minute, so I figured I’d haul the kiddo down here. Give her the tour.”

“When they send you to play catch with a child, they don’t mean that she’s the f—that she’s the ball,” Avasarala said, moving across to him. “Give that child to me. None of you people has any idea how to take care of a little girl. It’s amazing you all lived to adulthood.”

“Ain’t wrong about that,” Amos said amiably, holding out the kid.

“Come to your nana,” Avasarala said.

“What’s a nana?” Mei asked.

“I’m a nana,” Avasarala said, gathering the child to her. Her body wanted to put the girl against her hip, to feel the weight bearing down on her. In microgravity holding a child felt odd. Good, but odd. Mei smelled of wax and vanilla. “How much longer before we can get some thrust? I feel like a f—like a balloon floating around in here.”

“Soon as Alex and Naomi finish maintenance on the drive computers, we’re out of here,” Amos said.

“Where’s my daddy?” Mei asked.

“Good,” Avasarala said. “We’ve got a schedule to keep, and I’m not paying you people for floating lessons. Your daddy’s talking to the captain, Mei-Mei.”

“Where?” the girl demanded. “Where is he? I want my da!”

“I’ll get you back to him, kiddo,” Amos said, holding out a massive hand. He shifted his attention to Avasarala. “She’s good for about five minutes, then it’s ‘Where’s Daddy?’”

“Good,” Avasarala said. “They deserve each other.”

“Yeah,” the big mechanic said. He pulled the child close to his center of gravity and launched up toward the galley. No handhold for him. Avasarala watched him go, then turned to Bobbie.

Bobbie floated, her hair sprayed softly out around her. Her face and body were more relaxed than Avasarala remembered ever having seen them. It should have made her seem at peace, but all she could think was that the girl looked drowned.

“Hey,” Bobbie said. “Did you hear back from your tech guys on Earth?”

“I did,” Avasarala said. “There was another energy spike. Bigger than the last ones. Prax was right. They are networked, and worse than that, they don’t suffer lag. Venus reacted before the information about the battle could have reached it.”

“Okay,” Bobbie said. “That’s bad, right?”

“It’s weird as tits on a bishop, but who knows if it means anything? They’re talking about spin-entanglement webs, whatever the hell those are. The best theory we’ve got is that it’s like a little adrenaline rush for the protomolecule. Some part of it is involved with violence, and the rest goes on alert until it’s clear the danger’s passed.”

“Well, then it’s scared of something. Nice to know it might have a vulnerability somewhere.”

They were silent for a moment. Somewhere far off in the ship, something clanged and Mei shrieked. Bobbie tensed, but Avasarala didn’t. It was interesting to see people who hadn’t been around a child react to Mei. They couldn’t tell the difference between pleasure and alarm. Avasarala found that on this ship, she and Prax were the only experts in children’s screaming.

“I was looking for you,” Avasarala said.

“I’m here,” Bobbie said, shrugging.

“Is that a problem?”

“I don’t follow. Is what a problem?”

“That you’re here?”

She looked away, her expression closing down. It was what Avasarala had expected.

“You were going down there to die, only the universe fucked you over again. You won. You’re alive. None of the problems go away.”

“Some of them do,” Bobbie said. “Just not all. And at least we won your game.”

Avasarala’s cough of a laugh was enough to set her spinning slightly. She reached out to the wall and steadied her drift.

“That’s the game I play. You never win. You just don’t lose yet. Errinwright? He lost. Soren. Nguyen. I took them out of the game and I stayed in, but now? Errinwright’s going to retire with extreme prejudice, and I’m going to be given his job.”

“Do you want it?”

“It doesn’t matter if I want it. I’ll be offered it because if the bobble-head doesn’t offer it, people will think he’s slighting me. And I’ll take it because if I don’t, people will think I’m not hungry enough to be afraid of any longer. I’ll be answering directly to the secretary-general. I’ll have more power, more responsibility. More friends and more enemies. It’s the price of playing.”

“Seems like there should be an alternative.”

“There is. I could retire.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Oh, I will,” Avasarala said. “The day my son comes home. What about you? Are you looking to quit?”

“You mean am I still planning to get myself killed?”

“Yes, that.”

There was a pause. That was good. It meant Bobbie was actually thinking about her answer.

“No,” she said. “I don’t think so. Going down in a fight’s one thing. I can be proud of that. But just getting out to get out. I can’t do that.”

“You’re in an interesting position,” Avasarala said. “You think about what to do with it.”

“And what position is that? Ronin?”

“A traitor to your government and a patriotic hero. A martyr who didn’t die. A Martian whose best and only friend is about to run the government of Earth.”

“You’re not my only friend,” Bobbie said.

“Bullshit. Alex and Amos don’t count. They only want to get into your pants.”

“And you don’t?”

Avasarala laughed again. Bobbie was at least smiling. It was more than she’d done since she’d come back. Her sigh was deep and melancholy.

“I still feel haunted,” she said. “I thought it would go away. I thought if I faced it, it would all go away.”

“It doesn’t go away. Ever. But you get better at it.”

“At what?”

“At being haunted,” Avasarala said. “Think about what you want to do. Think about who you want to become. And then see me, and I will make it happen for you if I can.”

“Why?” Bobbie asked. “Seriously, why? I’m a soldier. I did the mission. And yes, it was harder and stranger than anything I’ve ever done, but I got it done. I did it because it needed doing. You don’t owe me anything.”

Avasarala hoisted an eyebrow.

“Political favors are how I express affection,” she said.

“Okay, people,” Alex’s voice said across the ship’s PA. “We’re back up and commencing burn in thirty seconds unless someone says otherwise. Everybody get ready to weigh something.”

“I appreciate the offer,” Bobbie said. “But it may be a while before I know if I want to take it.”

“What will you do, then? Next, I mean.”

“I’m going home,” she said. “I want to see my family. My dad. I think I’ll stay there for a while. Figure out who I am. How to start over. Like that.”

“The door’s open, Bobbie. Whenever you want it, the door is open.”

The flight back to Luna was a pain in the ass. Avasarala spent seven hours a day in her crash couch, sending messages back and forth against different levels of lag. On Earth, Sadavir Errinwright was quietly celebrated, his career with the UN honored with a small and private ceremony, and then he went off to spend more time with his family or farm chickens or whatever he was going to do with the remaining decades until death. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t involve wielding political power.

The investigation into the Io base was ongoing, and heads were quietly rolling on Earth. But not on Mars. Whoever in the Martian government had been bidding against Errinwright, they were going to get away with it. By losing the most powerful biological weapon in human history, they’d saved their own careers. Politics was full of little ironies like that.

Avasarala put together her own new office in absentia. By the time she stepped into it, it would already have been running for a month. It felt like driving a car while sitting in the backseat. She hated it.

In addition, Mei Meng had decided she was funny, and spent part of each day monopolizing her attention. She didn’t have time to play with a little girl, except that of course she did. So she did. And she had to exercise so that they wouldn’t have to put her in a nursing home when she got back to a full g. The steroid cocktail gave her hot flashes and made it hard to sleep. Both her granddaughters had birthdays she could attend only on a screen. One had twenty minutes’ lag; one had four.

When they passed the cloud of protomolecule monsters speeding in toward the sun, she had nightmares for two nights running, but they gradually stopped. Every one of them was being tracked by two governments, and Errinwright’s little packets of death were all quiescent and speeding quietly and happily toward their own destruction.

She couldn’t wait to be home.

When they docked on Luna, it was like a starving woman with a slice of apple touched to her lips, but not allowed to bite. The soft blue and white of the daylight planet, the black and gold of night. It was a beautiful world. Unmatched in the solar system. Her garden was down there. Her office. Her own bed.

But Arjun was not.

He was waiting for her on the landing pad in his best suit with a spray of fresh lilacs in his hand. The low gravity made him look younger too, if a little bloodshot about the eyes. She could feel the curiosity of Holden and his crew as she walked toward him. Who was this man that he could stand to be married to someone as abrasive and hard as Chrisjen Avasarala? Was this her master or her victim? How would that even work?

“Welcome home,” Arjun said softly as she leaned into his arms.

He smelled like himself. She put her head against his shoulder, and she didn’t need Earth so badly any longer.

This was home enough.