Текст книги "Caliban’s War"
Автор книги: James S.A. Corey
Соавторы: Daniel Abraham
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Научная фантастика
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“When you came in, all I could see was this big, lumpy red thing,” Larson explained. “I thought maybe you were another one of those monsters.”
The lack of visible damage was a good thing. It meant all the hatches and other systems they came across still worked. The lack of a monster rampaging through the ship was even better. The thing that had Holden worried was the lack of people. A ship this size had over a thousand crew persons. At least some of them should be in the areas of the ship they were passing through, but so far they hadn’t run across a single one.
The occasional puddle of brown goo on the floor was not an encouraging sign.
Larson stopped at a locked hatch to let Holden catch his breath. The heavy hazmat suit was not built for long treks, and it was starting to fill up with the stink of his own sweat. While he took a minute to rest and let the suit’s cooling systems try to bring his temperature down, Larson said, “We’ll be going past the forward galley to one of the elevator bays. The CIC is on the deck just above. Five, ten minutes tops.”
Holden checked his air supply and saw that he had burned nearly half of it. He was rapidly approaching the point of no return. But something in Larson’s voice caught his ear. It was the way he said galley.
“Is there something I should know about the galley?”
Larson said, “I’m not sure. But after the cameras went out, I kept hoping someone was going to come get me. So I started trying to call people on the comm. When that didn’t work, I started having the Kingdo location checks on people I knew. After a while, no matter who I asked about, the answer was always ‘the forward galley.’”
“So,” Holden said. “There might be upwards of a thousand infected Navy people crammed into that galley?”
Larson gave a shrug barely visible in his environment suit. “Maybe the monster killed them and put them there.”
“Oh, I think that’s exactly what happened,” Holden said, taking out his gun and working the slide to chamber a round. “But I seriously doubt they stayed dead.”
Before Larson could ask what he meant, Holden had his suit unlock the hatch. “When I open this door, you head to the elevator as fast as you can. I’ll be right behind you. Don’t stop no matter what. You haveto get me to that CIC. Are we clear?”
Larson nodded inside his helmet.
“Good. On three.”
Holden began counting, one hand on the hatch, the other holding his gun. When he hit three, he shoved the hatch open. Larson put his feet against a bulkhead and pushed off down the corridor on the other side.
Tiny blue flickers floated in the air around them like fireflies. Like the lights Miller had reported when he was on Eros the second time. The time he didn’t come back from. The fireflies were here now too.
At the end of the corridor, Holden could see the elevator door. He began clumping after Larson on his magnetic boots. When Larson was halfway down the corridor, he passed an open hatch.
The young sailor started screaming.
Holden ran as fast as the clumsy hazmat suit and his magnetic boots would let him go. Larson kept flying down the corridor, but he was screaming and flailing at the air like a drowning man trying to swim. Holden was almost to the open hatch when something crawled out of it and into his path. At first he thought it was the kind of vomit zombie he’d run into on Eros. It moved slowly, and the front of its Navy uniform was covered in brown vomit. But when it turned to look at Holden, its eyes glowed with a faint inner blue. And there was an intelligence in them the Eros zombies hadn’t had.
The protomolecule had learned some lessons on Eros. This was the new, improved version of the vomit zombie.
Holden didn’t wait to see what it was going to do. Without slowing his pace, he raised his pistol and shot it in the head. To his relief, the light went out of its eyes, and it spun away from the deck, spraying brown goo in an arc as it rotated. When he passed the open hatch, he risked a glance inside.
It was full of the new vomit zombies. Hundreds of them. All their disconcertingly blue eyes were aimed at him. Holden turned back to the corridor and ran. From behind, he heard a rising wave of sounds as the zombies moaned as one and began climbing along the bulkheads and deck after him.
“Go! Get in the elevator!” he screamed at Larson, cursing at how much the heavy hazmat suit slowed him down.
“God, what was that?” Naomi said. He’d forgotten she was watching. He didn’t waste breath answering. Larson had come out of his panic-induced fugue and was busily working the elevator doors open. Holden ran up to him and then turned around to look behind. Dozens of the blue-eyed vomit zombies filled the corridor behind him, crawling on the bulkheads, ceiling, and deck like spiders. The floating blue lights swirled on air currents Holden couldn’t feel.
“Go faster,” he said to Larson, sighting down his pistol at the lead zombie and putting a bullet in its head. It floated off the wall, spraying goo as it went. The zombie behind it shoved it out of the way, which sent it spinning down the corridor toward them. Holden moved in front of Larson to protect him, and a spray of brown slime hit his chest and visor. If they hadn’t both been wearing sealed suits, it would have been a death sentence. He repressed a shudder and shot two more zombies. The rest didn’t even slow down.
Behind him, Larson cursed as the partially opened doors snapped shut again, pinning his arm. The sailor worked them back open, pushing them with his back and one leg.
“We’re in!” Larson yelled. Holden began backing up toward the elevator shaft, emptying the rest of his magazine as he went. Half a dozen more zombies spun away, spraying goo; then he was in the shaft and Larson shoved the doors shut.
“Up one level,” Larson said, panting with fear and exertion. He pushed off the bulkhead and floated up to the next set of doors, then levered them open. Holden followed, replacing the magazine in his gun. Directly across from the elevator was a heavily armored hatch with cic stenciled in white on the metal. Holden moved toward it, having his suit transmit the override code. Behind him, Larson let the elevator doors slam shut. The howling of the zombies echoed up the elevator shaft.
“We should hurry,” Holden said, hitting the button to open the CIC and bulling his way in before the hatch had finished cycling open. Larson floated through after him.
There was a single man still in the CIC: a squat, powerfully built Asian man with an admiral’s uniform and a large-caliber pistol in one shaky hand.
“Stay where you are,” the man said.
“Admiral Nguyen!” Larson blurted out. “You’re alive!”
Nguyen ignored him. “You’re here for the bioweapon launch vehicle remote codes. I have them here.” He held up a hand terminal. “They’re yours in exchange for a ride off of this ship.”
“He’s taking us,” Larson said, pointing at Holden. “He said he’d take me too.”
“No fucking way,” Holden said to Nguyen. “Not a chance. Either give me those codes because there’s a scrap of humanity left in you, or give them to me because you’re dead. I don’t give a shit either way. You decide.”
Nguyen looked back and forth from Larson to Holden, clutching the hand terminal and the pistol so tightly that his knuckles were white. “No! Youhave to—”
Holden shot him in the throat. Somewhere in his brain stem, Detective Miller nodded in approval.
“Start working on an alternate route back to my ship,” Holden said to Larson as he walked across the room to grab the hand terminal floating by Nguyen’s corpse. It took him a moment to find the King’sself-destruct switch hidden behind a locked panel. Souther’s override code gave him access to that too.
“Sorry,” Holden said quietly to Naomi as he opened it. “I know I sort of agreed not to do that anymore. But I didn’t have time to—”
“No,” Naomi said, her voice sad. “That bastard deserved to die. And I know you’ll feel like shit about it later. That’s good enough for me.”
The panel opened, and a simple button lay on the other side. It wasn’t even red, just a plain industrial white. “This is what blows the ship?”
“No timer,” Naomi said.
“Well, this is an anti-boarding fail-safe. If someone opens this panel and presses this button, it’s because the ship is lost. They don’t want it on a timer someone can just disarm.”
“This is an engineering problem,” Naomi said. She already knew what he was thinking, and she was trying to get an answer out before he could say it. “We can solve this.”
“We can’t,” Holden said, waiting to feel the sorrow but instead feeling a sort of quiet peace. “There are a couple hundred very angry zombies trying to get up the elevator shaft right now. We won’t come up with a solution that doesn’t leave me stranded in here anyway.”
A hand squeezed his shoulder. He looked up, and Larson said, “I’ll press it.”
“No, you don’t have to—”
Larson held out his arm. The sleeve of his environment suit had a tiny tear where the elevator doors had closed on it. Around the tear was a palm-sized brown stain.
“Just rotten fucking luck, I guess. But I watched the Eros feeds like everyone else,” Larson said. “You can’t risk taking me. Pretty soon I might be c” He paused and pointed back toward the elevator with his head. “Might be one of those.”
Holden took Larson’s hand in his. The thick gloves made it impossible to feel anything. “I’m very sorry.”
“Hey, you tried,” Larson said with a sad smile. “At least now I won’t die of thirst in a suit locker.”
“Admiral Souther will know about this,” Holden said. “I’ll make sure everyone knows.”
“Seriously,” Larson said, floating next to the button that would turn the Agatha Kinginto a small star for a few seconds. He pulled off his helmet and took a long breath. “There’s another airlock three decks up. If they aren’t in the elevator shaft yet, you can make it.”
“Larson, I—”
“You should go away now.”
Holden had to strip off his suit in the King’sairlock. It was covered in the goo, and he couldn’t risk taking it onto the Razorback. He absorbed a few rads while he stole another UN vac suit from one of the lockers and put it on instead. It looked exactly like the one Larson was wearing. As soon as he was back on the Razorback, he sent the remote command codes to Souther’s ship. He was nearly back to the Rocinantewhen the Kingvanished in a ball of white fire.
Chapter Fifty: Bobbie
The captain just left,” Amos said to Bobbie when he came back into the machine shop. She floated half a meter above the deck inside a small circle of deadly technology. Behind her sat her cleaned and refitted recon suit, a single barrel of the newly installed gun gleaming inside the port on its right arm. To her left floated the recently reassembled auto-shotgun Amos favored. The rest of the circle was formed by pistols, grenades, a combat knife, and a variety of weapon magazines. Bobbie took one last mental inventory and decided she’d done all she could do.
“He thinks maybe he’s not coming back from this one,” Amos continued, then bent down to grab the auto-shotgun. He looked it over with a critical eye, then gave her an appreciative nod.
“Going into a fight where you know you aren’t coming back gives you a sort of clarity,” Bobbie said. She reached out and grabbed her armor, pulling herself into it. Not an easy thing to do in microgravity. She had to twist and shimmy to get her legs down into the suit before she could start sealing up the chest. She noticed Amos watching her. He had a dopey grin on his face.
“Seriously. Now?” she said. “We’re talking about your captain going off to his death, and all that’s going through your head right now is ‘Ooh, boobies!’”
Amos continued to grin, not chastened at all. “That bodysuit don’t leave a lot to the imagination. That’s all.”
Bobbie rolled her eyes. “Believe me, if I could wear a bulky sweater inside my fully articulated, power-assisted combat suit, I still wouldn’t. Because that would be stupid.” She hit the controls to seal the suit, and her armor folded around her like a second skin. She closed the helmet, using the suit’s external speakers to talk to Amos, knowing it would make her voice robotic and inhuman.
“Better put your big-boy pants on,” she said, the sound echoing around the room. Amos took an unconscious step back. “The captain isn’t the only one that might not be coming back.”
Bobbie climbed onto the ladder-lift and let it take her all the way up to the ops deck. Avasarala was belted into her couch at the comm station. Naomi was in Holden’s usual spot at the tactical panel. Alex would be up in the cockpit already. Bobbie opened her visor to speak using her normal voice.
“We cleared?” she asked Avasarala.
The old lady nodded and held up one hand in a waitgesture while she spoke to someone on her headset mic. “The Martians have already dropped a full platoon,” she said, pushing the mic away from her face. “But their orders are to set up a perimeter and seal the base while someone further up the food chain decides what to do.”
“They’re not going to—” Bobbie started, but Avasarala cut her off with a dismissive wave of her hand.
“Fuck no,” she said. “I’mfurther up the food chain, and I’ve already decided we’re going to glass this abattoir as soon as you’re off the surface. I’m letting them think we’re still discussing it so you have time to go get the kids.”
Bobbie nodded her fist at Avasarala. Recon Marines were trained to use the Belters’ physical idiom when in their combat armor. Avasarala just looked baffled at the gesture and said, “So stop playing with your hand and go get the fucking kids.”
Bobbie headed back to the ladder-lift, connecting to the ship’s 1MC as she went. “Amos, Prax, meet me in the airlock in five minutes, geared up and ready to go. Alex, put us on the deck in ten.”
“Roger that,” Alex replied. “Good hunting, soldier.” She wondered if they might have become friends, given enough time. It was a pleasant thought.
Amos was waiting for her outside the airlock when she arrived. He wore his Martian-made light armor and carried his oversized gun. Prax rushed into the compartment a few minutes later, still struggling to get into his borrowed gear. He looked like a boy wearing his father’s shoes. While Amos helped him get buttoned up, Alex called down to the airlock and said, “Heading down. Hang on to something.”
Bobbie turned her boot mags to full, locking herself to the deck while the ship shifted under her. Amos and Prax both sat down on chairs that pulled out from the wall, and belted in.
“Let’s go over the plan one more time,” she said, calling up the aerial photos they’d shot of the facility. She patched into the Rociand threw the pictures onto a wall monitor. “This airlock is our entrance. If it’s locked, Amos will blast it with explosives to open the outer door. We need to get inside fast. Your armor isn’t going to protect you from the vicious radiation belt Io orbits in for long. Prax, you have the radio link Naomi rigged, so once we’re inside, you start looking for a network node to plug it into. We have no information about the layout of the base, so the faster we can get Naomi hacking their system, the faster we can find those kids.”
“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 Rociand 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.”
Chapter Fifty-One: Prax
Prax 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.
“Where should I plug in this radio link for Naomi?” he asked Amos.
Amos shrugged and pointed at the wall. “Maybe we can just follow the signs instead.”
There was a legend on the wall with colored arrows pointing in different directions, ENV CONTROL and CAFETERIA and PRIMARY LAB. Amos tapped PRIMARY LAB with the barrel of his shotgun.
“Sounds good to me,” Prax said.
“You good to go?”
“I am,” Prax said, though he probably wasn’t.
The floor seemed to shift under him, followed immediately by a long, ominous rumbling that he could feel in the soles of his feet.
“Naomi? You there?”
“I am. I have to keep track of the captain on the other line. I might pop in and out. Everything all right?”
“Might be stretching the point,” Amos said. “We got something sounded like someone shooting at us. They ain’t shooting at the base, are they?”
“They aren’t,” Naomi said from the ship, her voice pressed thin and tinny by the attenuated signal. “It looks like some of the locals are mounting a defense, but so far our Marines aren’t returning fire.”
“Tell ’em to calm that shit down,” Amos said, but he was already moving down the corridor toward the primary lab. Prax jumped after him, misjudged, and cracked his arm against the ceiling.
“Soon as they ask me,” Naomi said.
The corridors were a maze, but it was the kind of maze Prax had been running through his whole life. The institutional logic of a research facility was the same everywhere. The floor plans were different; budget concerns could change how richly appointed the details were; the fields being supported determined what equipment was present. But the soul of the place was the same, and it was Prax’s home.
