Текст книги "Caliban’s War"

Santichai and Melissa Supitayaporn were a pair of eighty-year-old earthborn missionaries from the Church of Humanity Ascendant, a religion that eschewed supernaturalism in all forms, and whose theology boiled down to Humans can be better than they are, so let’s do that. They also ran the relief depot headquarters with the ruthless efficiency of natural-born dictators. Minutes after arriving, Holden had been thoroughly dressed down by Santichai, a frail wisp of a man with thinning white hair, about his altercation with customs officials at the port. After several minutes of trying to explain himself, only to be shouted down by the tiny missionary, he finally just gave up and apologized.

“Don’t make our situation here any more precarious,” Santichai repeated, apparently mollified by the apology but needing to drive this point home. He shook a sticklike brown finger in Holden’s face.

“Got it,” Holden said, holding up his hands in surrender. The rest of his crew had vanished at Santichai’s first angry outburst, leaving Holden to deal with the man alone. He spotted Naomi across the large open warehouse space of the relief depot, talking calmly to Melissa, Santichai’s hopefully less volatile wife. Holden couldn’t hear any shouting, though with the voices of several dozen people and the grinding gears and engine whine and reverse alerts of three lift trucks, Melissa could have been flinging grenades at Naomi and he probably wouldn’t have heard it.

Looking for an opportunity to escape, Holden pointed at Naomi across the room and said, “Excuse me, I—”

Santichai cut him off with a curt wave of one hand that sent his loose orange robes swirling. Holden found himself unable to disobey the tiny man.

“This,” Santichai said, pointing in the direction of the crates being brought in from the Somnambulist, “is not enough.”

“I—”

“The OPA promised us twenty-two thousand kilos of protein and supplements by last week. This is less than twelve thousand kilos,” Santichai said, punctuating his statement with a sharp poke at Holden’s bicep.

“I’m not in charge of—”

“Why would they promise us things they have no intention of delivering? Promise twelve thousand if that is what you have. Do notpromise twenty-two thousand and then deliver twelve,” he said, accompanied by more poking.

“I agree,” Holden said, backing out of poke range with his hands up. “I totally agree. I’ll call my contact on Tycho Station immediately to find out where the rest of the promised supplies are. I’m sure they’re on the way.”

Santichai shrugged in another swirl of orange.

“See that you do,” he said, then steamed off toward one of the lift trucks. “You! You!Do you see the sign that says ‘medicine’? Why are you putting things that are not medicine in that place?”

Holden used this distraction to make good his escape, and jogged over to Naomi and Melissa. Naomi had a form open on her terminal and was completing some paperwork while Melissa watched.

Holden glanced around the warehouse space while Naomi worked. The Somnambulistwas just one of almost twenty relief ships that had landed in the last twenty-four hours, and the massive room was quickly filling up with crates of supplies. The chill air smelled of dust and ozone and hot oil from the lift trucks, but under it there was a vaguely unpleasant smell of decay, like rotting vegetation. As he watched, Santichai darted across the warehouse floor, shouting instructions to a pair of workers carrying a heavy crate.

“Your husband is something else, ma’am,” Holden said to Melissa.

Melissa was both taller and heavier than her tiny husband, but she had the same shapeless cloud of thinning white hair he had. She also had bright blue eyes that nearly disappeared in her face when she smiled. As she was doing now.

“I’ve never met anyone else in my life who cared more about other people’s welfare, and less about their feelings,” she said. “But at least he’ll make sure everyone is well fed before he tells them all the many things they did wrong.”

“I think that does it,” Naomi said, hitting the key to send the filled-out form to Melissa’s terminal, a charmingly outdated model she pulled out of a pocket in her robe when it chimed receipt.

“Mrs. Supitayaporn,” Holden said.

“Melissa.”

“Melissa, how long have you and your husband been on Ganymede?”

“Almost,” she said, tapping her finger against her chin and staring off into the distance, “ten years? Can it be that long? It must be, because Dru had just had her baby, and he—”

“I’m wondering because the one thing no one outside of Ganymede seems to know is how this”—Holden gestured around him—“all got started.”

“The station?”

“The crisis.”

“Well, the UN and Martian soldiers started shooting at each other; then we started seeing system failures —”

“Yes,” Holden said, cutting in again. “I understand that. But why?Not one shot during the entire year that Earth and Mars have jointly held this moon. We had a war before the whole Eros thing, and they didn’t bring it here. Then all at once everyone everywhere is shooting? What kicked that off?”

Melissa looked puzzled, another expression that made her eyes almost disappear in a mass of wrinkles.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’d assumed they were shooting each other everywhere in the system. We don’t get much news right now.”

“No,” Holden said. “It’s just here, and it was just for a couple of days. And then it stopped, with no explanation.”

“That is odd,” Melissa said, “but I don’t know that it matters. Whatever happened, it doesn’t change what we need to do now.”

“I suppose not,” Holden agreed.

Melissa smiled, embraced him warmly, then went off to check someone else’s paperwork.

Naomi hooked her arm through Holden’s, and they started toward the warehouse exit into the rest of the station, dodging crates of supplies and aid workers as they went.

“How can they have had a whole battle here,” she said, “and no one knows why?”

“They know,” Holden said. “Someoneknows.”

  The station looked worse on the ground than from space. The vital, oxygen-producing plants that lined the corridor walls were turning an unhealthy shade of yellow. Many corridors didn’t have lights, and the automatic pressure doors had been hand cranked and then wedged open; if one area of the station suddenly lost pressure, many adjoining sections would as well. The few people they ran into either avoided their eyes or stared at them with open hostility. Holden found himself wishing he were wearing his gun openly, rather than in a concealed holster at the small of his back.

“Who’s our contact?” Naomi asked quietly.

“Hmmmm?”

“I assume Fred has people here,” she replied under her breath as she smiled and nodded at a passing group of men. All of them openly carried weapons, though most were of the stabbing and clubbing variety. They stared back at her with speculative looks on their faces. Holden moved his hand under his coat and toward his gun, but the men moved on, only giving them a few backward glances before they turned a corner and disappeared from view.

“He didn’t arrange for us to meet someone?” Naomi finished in a normal voice.

“He gave me some names. But communication with this moon has been so spotty he wasn’t able to—”

Holden was cut off by a loud bang from another part of the port. The explosion was followed by a roar that gradually resolved into people shouting. The few people in the corridor with them began to run, some toward the noise, but most away from it.

“Should we c” Naomi said, looking at the people running toward the commotion.

“We’re here to see what’s going on,” Holden replied. “So let’s go see.”

  They quickly became lost in the twisting corridors of Ganymede’s port, but it didn’t matter as long as they kept moving toward the noise and along with the growing wave of people running in the same direction. A tall, stocky man with spiked red hair ran alongside them for a while. He was carrying a length of black metal pipe in each hand. He grinned at Naomi and tried to hand her one. She waved it off.

“’Bout fookin’ time,” he yelled in an accent Holden couldn’t place. He held his extra club out to Holden when Naomi didn’t take it.

“What is?” Holden asked, taking the club.

“Fookin’ bastahds flingin’ the victuals up, and the prols jus gotta shove, wut? Well, fook that, ya mudder-humpin’ spunk guzzlas!”

Spiky Redhead howled and waved his club in the air, then took off at a faster run and disappeared into the crowd. Naomi laughed and howled at his back as he ran. When Holden shot her a look, she just smiled and said, “It’s infectious.”

A final bend in the corridor brought them to another large warehouse space, looking almost identical to the one ruled over by the Supitayaporns, except that this room was filled with a mob of angry people pushing toward the loading dock. The doors to the dock were closed, and a small group of port security officers were trying to hold the mob back. When Holden arrived, the crowd was still cowed by the security officers’ Tasers and shock prods, but from the rising tension and anger in the air, he could tell that wouldn’t last long.

Just behind the front line of rent-a-cops, with their nonlethal deterrents, stood a small clump of men in dark suits and sensible shoes. They carried shotguns with the air of men who were just waiting for someone to give them permission.

That would be the corporate security, then.

Looking over the room, Holden felt the scene snap into place. Beyond that closed loading bay door was one of the few remaining corporate freighters loaded down with the last food being stripped from Ganymede.

And this crowd was hungry.

Holden remembered trying to escape a casino on Eros when it went into security lockdown. Remembered angry crowds facing down men with guns. Remembered the screams and the smells of blood and cordite. Before he knew he’d made a decision, he found himself pushing his way to the front of the crowd. Naomi followed, murmuring apologies in his wake. She grabbed his arm and stopped him for a moment.

“Are you about to do something really stupid?” she asked.

“I’m about to keep these people from being shot for the crime of being hungry,” he said, wincing at the self-righteous tone even as he said it.

“Don’t,” Naomi said, letting him go, “pull your gun on anyone.”

“They have guns.”

“Guns plural. You have gun singular, which is why you will keep yours in your holster, or you’ll do this by yourself.”

That’s the only way you ever do anything. By yourself. It was the kind of thing Detective Miller would have said. For him, it had been true. That was a strong enough argument against doing it that way.

“Okay.” Holden nodded, then resumed pushing his way to the front. By the time he reached it, two people had become the focus of the conflict. A gray-haired port security man wearing a white patch with the word supervisorprinted on it and a tall, thin dark-skinned woman who could pass for Naomi’s mother were yelling at each other while their respective groups looked on, shouting agreements and insults.

“Just open the damn door and let us look!” yelled the woman in a tone that let Holden know this was something she was repeating again and again.

“You won’t get anything by yelling at me,” the gray-haired supervisor yelled back. Beside him, his fellow security guards held their shock sticks in white-knuckled grips and the corporate boys held their shotguns in a loose cradle that Holden found far more threatening.

The woman stopped shouting when Holden pushed his way up to the supervisor, and stared at him instead.

“Who c?” she said.

Holden climbed up onto the loading dock next to the supervisor. The other guards waved their shock prods around a little, but no one jabbed him. The corporate thugs just narrowed their eyes and shifted their stances a bit. Holden knew that their confusion about who he was would only last so long, and when they finally got past it, he was probably going to get uncomfortably intimate with one of those cattle prods, if not just blasted in the face with a shotgun. Before that could happen, he thrust his hand out to the supervisor and said in a loud voice that would carry to the crowd, “Hi there, I’m Walter Philips, an OPA rep out of Tycho Station, and here as personal representative of Colonel Frederick Johnson.”

The supervisor shook his hand like a man in a daze. The corporate gorillas shifted again and held their guns more firmly.

“Mr. Philips,” the supervisor said. “The OPA has no authority c”

Holden ignored him and turned to the woman he’d been shouting at.

“Ma’am, what’s all the fuss?”

“That ship,” she said, pointing at the door, “has almost ten thousand kilos of beans and rice on it, enough to feed the whole station for a week!”

The crowd murmured agreement at her back and shuffled forward a step or two.

“Is that true?” Holden asked the supervisor.

“As I said,” the man replied, holding up his hands and making pushing motions at the crowd as though he could drive them back through sheer force of will, “we are not allowed to discuss the cargo manifests of privately owned—”

“Then open the doors and let us look!” the woman shouted again. While she yelled and the crowd picked up her chant– let us look, let us look– Holden took the security supervisor by the elbow and pulled his head close.

“In about thirty seconds, that mob is going to tear you and your men to pieces trying to get into that ship,” he said. “I think you should let them have it before this turns violent.”

“Violent!” The man gave a humorless laugh. “It’s already violent. The only reason the ship isn’t long gone is because one of them set off a bomb and blew up the docking-clamp release mechanism. If they try to take the ship, we’ll—”

“They will not take the ship,” said a gravelly voice, and a heavy hand came down on Holden’s shoulder. When he turned around, one of the corporate goons was standing behind him. “This ship is Mao-Kwikowski Mercantile property.”

Holden pushed the man’s hand off his shoulder.

“A dozen guys with Tasers and shotguns isn’t going to stop them,” he said, pointing out at the chanting mob.

“Mr.”—the goon looked him up and down once—“ Philips. I don’t give a drippy shit what you or the OPA thinks about anything, and especially not my chances of doing my job. So why don’t you fuck off before the shooting starts?”

Well, he’d tried. Holden smiled at the man and began to reach for the holster at the small of his back. He wished that Amos were here, but he hadn’t seen him since they had gotten off the ship. Before he reached the pistol, his hand was enveloped by long slender fingers and squeezed tightly.

“How about this,” Naomi said, suddenly at Holden’s side. “How about we skip past the posturing and I just tell you how this is actually going to work?”

Both Holden and the goon turned to look at Naomi in surprise. She held up one finger in a wait a minutegesture and pulled out her hand terminal. She called someone and turned on the external speaker.

“Amos,” she said, still holding her finger up.

“Yep,” came the reply.

“A ship is trying to leave from port 11, pad B9. It’s full of food we could really use here. If it makes it off the ground, do we have an OPA gunship close enough to intercept?”

There was a long pause; then, with a chuckle, Amos said, “You know we do, boss. Who’m I actually saying this to?”

“Call that ship and have them disable the freighter. Then have an OPA team secure it, strip it of everything, and scuttle it.”

Amos just said, “You got it.”

Naomi closed up the terminal and put it back into her pocket.

“Don’t test us, boy,” she said to the goon, a hint of steel in her voice. “Not one word of that was empty threat. Either you give these people the cargo, or we’ll take the whole damned ship. Your choice.”

The goon stared at her for a moment, then motioned to his team and walked away. Port security followed, and Holden and Naomi had to dodge out of the way of the crowd rushing up the dock and to the loading bay doors.

When they were out of danger of being trampled, Holden said, “That was pretty cool.”

“Getting shot standing up for justice probably seemed very heroic to you,” she said, the steel not quite gone from her voice. “But I want to keep you around, so stop being an idiot.”

“Smart play, threatening the ship,” Holden said.

“You were acting like that asshole Detective Miller, so I just acted like you used to. What I said was the kind of thing you say when you’re not in a hurry to wave your gun around.”

“I wasn’t acting like Miller,” he said, the accusation stinging, because it was true.

“You weren’t acting like you.”

Holden shrugged, noticing only afterward that it was another imitation of Miller. Naomi looked down at the captain’s patches on the shoulder of her Somnambulistjumpsuit. “Maybe I should keep these c”

A small, unkempt-looking man with salt-and-pepper hair, Chinese features, and a week’s growth of beard walked up to them and nodded nervously. He was literally wringing his hands, a gesture Holden had been pretty sure only little old ladies in ancient cinema made.

He gave them another small nod and said, “You are James Holden? Captain James Holden? From the OPA?”

Holden and Naomi glanced at each other. Holden tugged at his patchy beard. “Is this actually helping at all? Be honest.”

“Captain Holden, my name is Prax, Praxidike Meng. I’m a botanist.”

Holden shook the man’s hand.

“Nice to meet you, Prax. I’m afraid we have to—”

“You have to help me,” Prax said. Holden could see that the man had been through a rough couple of months. His clothes hung off him like a starving man’s, and his face was covered with yellowing bruises from a fairly recent beating.

“Sure, if you’ll see the Supitayaporns at the aid station, tell them I said—”

“No!” Prax shouted. “I don’t need that. I need you to helpme!”

Holden shot a glance at Naomi. She shrugged. Your call.

“Okay,” Holden said. “What’s the problem?”

Chapter Twelve: Avasarala