Текст книги "Caliban;s war"

Автор книги: James S.A. Corey

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 26 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

She glanced around the room, looking for cameras. She couldn’t find one but hoped it was there anyway. If they’d seen this, maybe they wouldn’t throw any more of their people at her.

At the keel ladder, she discovered that they’d blocked the elevator by jamming the floor hatch open with a crowbar. Basic ship safety protocols wouldn’t allow the elevator to move to another deck unless the deck above was sealed. Bobbie yanked out the crowbar and threw it across the room, then hit the call button. The lift climbed up the ladder shaft to her level and stopped. She jumped on and hit the button that would take her to the bridge, eight decks up. Eight more pressure hatches.

Eight more possible ambushes.

She tightened her hands into fists until the knuckles stretched painfully inside her gauntlets. Bring it.

Three decks up the elevator stopped, the panel informing her that all the pressure hatches between her and the bridge had been overridden and forced open. They were willing to risk a hole in the ship emptying out half the ship’s air rather than let her up to the bridge. It was sort of gratifying to be scarier than sudden decompression.

She climbed off the lift onto a deck that appeared to be mostly crew quarters, though it must have been evacuated. There wasn’t a soul in sight. A quick tour revealed twelve small crew cabins and two bathrooms that could reasonably be called heads. No gold plating on the fixtures for the crew. No open bar. No twenty-four-hour-a-day food service. Looking at the fairly Spartan living conditions of the average crew member on the Guanshiyin brought home Avasarala’s last words to her. These were just sailors. None of them deserved to die for what had happened on Ganymede.

Bobbie found herself glad she didn’t have a gun.

She found another access hatch in the head and tore it open. But to her surprise, the service corridor ended just a few feet above her head. Something in the structure of the ship was cutting her off. Having never seen the Guanshiyin from the outside, she had no idea what it might be. But she needed to get another five decks up, and she wasn’t about to let this stop her.

A ten-minute search turned up a service hatch through the outer hull. She’d torn off two inner hull hatches on two different decks, so if she got it open, those two decks would lose their air. But the central ladder corridor was sealed at Avasarala’s deck, so her people would be fine. And the whole reason she was doing this was the sealed hatch to the upper decks, which seemed to be where most of the crew was.

She thought about the six men down in the galley and felt a pang. Sure, they’d shot first, but if any of them were still alive, she had no desire to asphyxiate them in their sleep.

It turned out not to be a problem. The hatch led into a small airlock chamber, about the size of a closet. A minute later it had cycled through and she climbed out onto the outer hull of the ship.

Triple-hulled. Of course. The lord of the Mao-Kwik empire wasn’t going to trust his expensive skin to anything that wasn’t the safest humans could build. And the ostentatious design of the ship extended to her outer hull as well. While most military ships were painted a flat black that made them hard to spot visually in space, most civilian ships either were left an unpainted gray or were painted in basic corporate colors.

The Guanshiyin had a mural painted on it in vivid colors. Bobbie was too close to see what it was, but under her feet were what appeared to be grass and the hoof of a giant horse. Mao had the hull of his ship painted with a mural that included horses and grass. When almost no one would ever see it.

Bobbie made sure her boot and glove mags were set strong enough to handle the quarter-g thrust the ship was still under, and started climbing up the side. She quickly reached the spot where the dead end between the hulls began, and saw that it was an empty shuttle bay. If only Avasarala had let her do this before Mao had run off with the shuttle.

Triple hulls, Bobbie thought. Maximum redundancy.

On a hunch, she crawled across the ship to the other side. Sure enough, there was a second shuttle bay. But the ship in it wasn’t a standard short-flight shuttle. It was long and sleek, with an engine housing twice as large as that of a normal ship its size. Written in proud red letters across the bow of the ship was the name Razorback.

A racing pinnace.

Bobbie crawled back around to the empty cargo bay and used the airlock there to enter the ship. The military override codes her suit sent to the locked door worked, to her surprise. The airlock led to the deck just below the bridge, the one used for shuttle supply storage and maintenance. The center of the deck was taken up by a large machine shop. Standing in it were the captain of the Guanshiyin and his senior staff. There were no security personnel or weapons in sight.

The captain tapped his ear in an ancient can you hear me? gesture. Bobbie nodded one fist at him, then turned the external speakers back on and said, “Yes.”

“We are not military personnel,” the captain said. “We can’t defend ourselves from military hardware. But I’m not going to turn this vessel over to you without knowing your intentions. My XO is on the deck above us, prepared to scuttle the ship if we can’t come to terms.”

Bobbie smiled at him, though she didn’t know if he could see it through her helmet. “You’ve illegally detained a high-level member of the UN government. Acting in my role as a member of her security team, I have come to demand that you deliver her immediately to the port of her choosing, at best possible speed.”

She shrugged with her hands in the Belter way. “Or, you can blow yourselves up. Seems like a drastic overreaction to having to give the undersecretary her radio privileges back.”

The captain nodded and relaxed visibly. Whatever happened next, it wasn’t like he had any choice. And since he didn’t have any choice, he didn’t have any responsibility. “We were following orders. You’ll note that in the log when you take command.”

“I’ll see that she knows.”

The captain nodded again. “Then the ship is yours.”

Bobbie opened her radio link to Cotyar. “We win. Put Her Majesty on, will you?”

While she waited for Avasarala, Bobbie said to the captain, “There are six injured security people down below. Get a medical team down there.”

“Bobbie?” Avasarala said over the radio.

“The ship is yours, madam.”

“Great. Tell the captain we need to make best possible speed to intercept Holden. We’re getting to him before Nguyen does.”

“Uh, this is a pleasure yacht. It’s built to run at low g for comfort. I’d bet it can do a full g if it needs to, but I doubt it does much more than that.”

“Admiral Nguyen is about to kill everyone that actually might know what the fuck is going on.” Avasarala didn’t quite yell. “We don’t have time to cruise around like we’re trying to pick up fucking rent boys!”

“Huh,” Bobbie said. Then, a moment later: “If this is a race, I know where there’s a racing ship…”

Chapter Thirty-Nine: Holden

Holden pulled himself a cup of coffee from the galley coffeepot, and the strong smell filled the room. He could feel the eyes of the crew on his back with an almost physical force. He’d called them all there, and once they’d assembled and taken their seats, he’d turned his back on them and started making coffee. I’m stalling for time, because I forgot how I wanted to say this. He put some sugar in his coffee even though he always drank it black, just because stirring took a few more seconds.

“So. Who are we?” he said as he stirred.

His question was met with silence, so he turned around and leaned back against the countertop, holding his unwanted cup of coffee and continuing to stir.

“Seriously,” he said. “Who are we? It’s the question I keep coming back to.”

“Uh,” Amos said, and shifted in his seat. “My name’s Amos, Cap. You feeling okay?”

No one else spoke. Alex was staring at the table in front of him, his dark scalp shining through his thinning hair under the harsh white of the galley lights. Prax was sitting on the counter next to the sink and looking at his hands. He flexed them periodically as though trying to figure out what they were for.

Only Naomi was looking at him. Her hair was pulled up into a thick tail, and her dark, almond-shaped eyes were staring right into his. It was fairly disconcerting.

“I’ve recently figured out something about myself,” Holden continued, not letting Naomi’s unblinking stare throw him off. “I’ve been treating you all like you owe me something. And none of you do. And that means I’ve been treating you like shit.”

“No,” Alex started without looking up.

“Yes,” Holden said, and stopped until Alex looked up at him. “Yes. You maybe more than anyone else. Because I’ve been scared to death and cowards always look for an easy target. And you’re about the nicest person I know, Alex. So I treated you badly because I could get away with it. And I hope you forgive me for that, because I really hate that I did it.”

“Sure, I forgive you, Cap,” Alex said with a smile and his heavy drawl.

“I’ll try to earn it,” Holden answered, bothered by the easy reply. “But Alex said something else to me recently that I’ve been thinking about a lot. He reminded me that none of you are employees. We’re not on the Canterbury. We don’t work for Pur’n’Kleen anymore. And I don’t own this ship any more than any of you do. We took contracts from the OPA in exchange for pocket money and ship expenses, but we never talked about how to handle the excess.”

“You opened that account,” Alex said.

“Yeah, there’s a bank account with all of the extra money in it. Last I checked, there was just under eighty grand in there. I said we’d keep it for ship expenses, but who am I to make that decision for the rest of you? That’s not my money. It’s our money. We earned it.”

“But you’re the captain,” Amos said, then pointed at the coffeepot.

While Holden fixed him a cup, he said, “Am I? I was the XO on the Canterbury. It made sense for me to be the captain after the Cant got nuked.”

He handed the cup to Amos and sat down at the table with the rest of the crew. “But we haven’t been those guys for a long time now. Who we are now is four people who don’t actually work for anyone-”

Prax cleared his throat at this, and Holden nodded an apology at him. “Anyone long term, let’s say. There is no corporation or government granting me authority over this crew. We’re just four people who sort of own a ship that Mars will probably try to take back the first chance they get.”

“This is legitimate salvage,” Alex said.

“And I hope the Martians find that compelling when you explain it to them,” Holden replied. “But it doesn’t change my point: Who are we?”

Naomi nodded a fist at him. “I see where you’re going. We’ve left a lot of this kind of stuff just up in the air because we’ve been running full tilt since the Canterbury.”

“And this,” Holden said, “is the perfect time to figure that stuff out. We’ve got a contract to help Prax find his little girl, and he’s paying us so we can afford to run the ship. Once we find Mei, how do we find the next job? Do we go looking for a next job? Do we sell the Roci to the OPA and retire on Titan? I think we need to know those things.”

No one spoke. Prax pushed himself off the counter and started rummaging through the cabinets. After a minute or two, he pulled out a package that read CHOCOLATE PUDDING on the side and said, “Can I make this?”

Naomi laughed. Alex said, “Knock yourself out, Doc.”

Prax pulled a bowl out and began mixing ingredients into it. Oddly enough, because the botanist was paying attention to something else, it created a sense of intimacy for the crew. The outsider was doing outside things, leaving them to talk among themselves. Holden wondered if Prax knew that and was doing it on purpose.

Amos slurped down the last of his coffee and said, “So, you called this meeting, Cap. You have something in mind?”

“Yeah,” Holden said, taking a moment to think. “Yeah, kind of.”

Naomi put a hand on his arm and smiled at him. “We’re listening.”

“I think we get married,” he said with a wink at Naomi. “Make it all nice and legal.”

“Wait,” she said. The look on her face was more horrified than Holden would have hoped.

“No, no, that’s sort of a joke,” Holden said. “But only sort of. See, I was thinking about my parents. They formed their initial collective partnership because of the farm. They were all friends, they wanted to buy the property in Montana, and so they made a group large enough to afford it. It wasn’t sexual. Father Tom and Father Caesar were already sexual partners and monogamous. Mother Tamara was single. Fathers Joseph and Anton and Mothers Elise and Sophie were already a polyamorous civil unit. Father Dimitri joined a month later when he started dating Tamara. They formed a civil union to own the property jointly. They wouldn’t have been able to afford it if they were all paying taxes for separate kids, so they had me as a group.”

“Earth,” Alex said, “is a weird freakin’ place.”

“Eight parents to a baby ain’t exactly common,” Amos said.

“But it makes a lot of economic sense with the baby tax,” Holden said. “So it’s not unheard of, either.”

“What about people making babies without paying the tax?” Alex asked.

“It’s tougher to get away with than you think,” Holden said. “Unless you never go to a doctor or only use black markets.”

Amos and Naomi shared a quick look that Holden pretended not to see.

“Okay,” Holden continued. “Forget babies for a minute. What I’m talking about is incorporating. If we plan to stick together, let’s make it legal. We can draft up incorporation papers with one of the independent outer planets stations, like Ceres or Europa, and become joint owners of this enterprise.”

“What,” Naomi said, “does our little company do?”

“Exactly,” Holden said in triumph.

“Uh,” Amos said again.

“No, I mean, that’s exactly what I’ve been asking,” Holden continued. “Who are we? What do we want to do? Because when this contract with Prax is over, the bank account will be well padded, we’ll own a high-tech warship, and we’ll be free to do whatever we damn well want to do.”

“Jesus, Cap,” Amos said. “I just got half a hard-on.”

“I know, right?” Holden replied with a grin.

Prax stopped mixing things in his bowl and stuck it in the refrigerator. He turned and looked at them with the careful movements of someone who feared he’d be asked to leave if anyone noticed him. Holden moved over to him and put an arm around his shoulder. “Our friend Prax here can’t be the only guy who needs to hire a ship like this, right?”

“We’re faster and meaner than just about anything a civvy can dig up,” Alex said with a nod.

“And when we find Mei, it will be as high profile as you could hope for,” Holden said. “What better advertising could we get than that?”

“Admit it, Cap,” Amos said. “You just kind of like being famous.”

“If it gets us jobs, sure.”

“We’re much more likely to wind up broke, out of air, and drifting through space dead,” Naomi said.

“That’s always a possibility,” Holden admitted. “But, man, aren’t you ready to be your own boss for a change? If we find we can’t make it on our own, we can always sell the ship for a giant sack of money and go our separate ways. We have an escape plan.”

“Yeah,” Amos said. “Fuck yeah. Let’s do this. How do we start?”

“Well,” Holden said. “That’s another new thing. I think we have to vote. No one of us owns the ship, so I think we vote on important stuff like this from now on.”

Amos said, “All in favor of making ourselves into a company to own the ship, raise your hand.”

To Holden’s delight, they all raised their hands. Even Prax started to, realized he was doing it, and then put it back down.

“I’ll get us an attorney on Ceres and start the paperwork,” Holden said. “But that leads to something else. A company can own a ship, but a company can’t be the registered captain. We’ll need to vote for whoever holds that title.”

Amos started laughing. “Gimme a fucking break. Raise your hand if Holden isn’t the captain.”

No hands went up.

“See?” Amos said.

Holden started to speak but stopped when something uncomfortable happened in his throat and behind his sternum.

“Look,” Amos said, his face kind. “You’re just that guy.”

Naomi nodded and smiled at Holden, which only made the ache in his chest pleasantly worse. “I’m an engineer,” she said. “There isn’t a program on this ship I haven’t tweaked or rewritten, and I could probably take her apart and put her back together by myself at this point. But I can’t bluff at cards. And I’m never going to be the one that stares down the joint navies of the inner planets and says, ‘Back the hell off.’”

“Roger that,” Alex said. “And I just want to fly my baby. That’s all and that’s it. If I get to do that, I’m happy.”

Holden started to speak, but to his surprise and embarrassment, the minute his mouth opened, his eyes teared up. Amos saved him.

“I’m just a grease monkey,” he said. “I push tools. And I mostly wait for Naomi to tell me when and where to push ’em. I got no desire to run anything bigger than that machine shop. You’re the talker. I’ve seen you face down Fred Johnson, UN naval captains, OPA cowboys, and drugged-up space pirates. You talk out your ass better than most people do using their mouth and sober.”

“Thank you,” Holden finally said. “I love you guys. You know that, right?”

“Plus which,” Amos continued, “no one on this ship will try harder to jump in front of a bullet for me than you will. I find that appealing in a captain.”

“Thanks,” Holden said again.

“Sounds settled to me,” Alex said, getting up and heading toward the ladder. “Gonna go make sure we’re not aimed at a rock or somethin’.”

Holden watched him go and was gratified to see him wiping his eyes as soon as he got out of the room. It was okay to be a weepy little kid as long as everyone else was being a weepy little kid.

Prax gave him an awkward pat on the shoulder and said, “Come back to the galley in an hour. Pudding will be ready.” Then he wandered out and into his cabin. He was already reading messages on his hand terminal as he closed the door.

“Okay,” Amos said. “What now?”

“Amos,” Naomi said, getting up and walking over to stand in front of Holden. “Please take ops for me for a while.”

“Roger that,” Amos said, the grin existing only in his voice. He climbed the ladder up and out of sight, the pressure hatch opening for him, then slamming behind him when he went.

“Hi,” Holden said. “Was that right?”

She nodded. “I feel like I got you back. I was worried I’d never see you again.”

“If you hadn’t yanked me out of that hole I was digging for myself, neither of us would have.”

Naomi leaned forward to kiss him, and he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her tight. When they stopped to breathe, he said, “Is this too soon?”

She said, “Shut up,” and kissed him again. Without breaking the kiss, she pulled her body away from his and began fumbling with the zipper of his jumpsuit. Those ridiculous Martian military jumpsuits that had come with the ship, TACHI stenciled across the back. Now that they were going to have their own company, they’d need to get something better. Jumpsuits made a lot of sense for shipboard life, with changing gravities and oily mechanical parts. But something actually tailored to fit them all, and in their own colors. ROCINANTE on the back.

Naomi’s hand got inside the jumpsuit and under his T-shirt, and he lost all thought of fashion choices.

“My bunk or yours?” he said.

“You have your own bunk?”

Not anymore.

Making love to Naomi had always been different than with anyone else. Some of it was physical. She was the only Belter he’d ever been with, and that meant she was physiologically different in some ways. But that wasn’t the most notable part for him. What made Naomi different was that they’d been friends for five years before they’d slept together.

It wasn’t a flattering testament to his character, and it made him cringe when he thought about it now, but he’d always been pretty shallow when it came to sex. He’d picked out potential sexual partners within minutes of meeting a new woman, and because he was pretty and charming, he usually got the ones he was interested in. He’d always been quick to allow himself to mistake infatuation for genuine affection. One of his most painful memories was the day Naomi had called him on it. Exposed for him the little game he played in which he convinced himself he genuinely cared for the women he was sleeping with so that he wouldn’t feel like a user.

But he had been. The fact that the women were using him in turn didn’t make him feel better about it.

Because Naomi was so physically different from the ideal that growing up on Earth had created, he had just not seen her as a potential sexual partner when they’d first met. And that meant he’d grown to know her as a person without any of the sexual baggage he usually carried. When his feelings for her grew beyond friendship, he was surprised.

And somehow, that changed everything about sex. The movements might all be the same, but the desire to communicate affection rather than demonstrate prowess changed what everything meant. After their first time together, he’d lain in bed for hours feeling like he’d been doing it wrong for years and only just realized it.

He was doing that again now.

Naomi slept on her side next to him, her arm thrown across his chest and her thigh across his, her belly against his hip and her breast against his ribs. It had never been like this with anyone before her, and this was what it was supposed to be like. This sense of complete ease and contentment. He could imagine a future in which he hadn’t been able to prove he’d changed, and in which she never came back to him. He could see years and decades of sexual partners, always trying to recapture this feeling and never being able to because, of course, it wasn’t really about the sex.

Thinking about it made his stomach hurt.

Naomi talked in her sleep. Her mouth whispered something mysterious into his neck, and the sudden tickle woke him up enough to realize he’d been drifting off to sleep. He hugged her head to his chest and kissed the top of it, then rolled over onto his side and let himself fade.

The wall monitor over the bed buzzed.

“Who is it?” he said, suddenly as tired as he could remember ever having been. He’d just closed his eyes a second earlier, and he knew he’d never be able to open them now.

“Me, Cap,” Alex said. Holden wanted to shout at him but couldn’t find the energy.

“Okay.”

“You need to see this,” was all Alex said, but something in his voice woke Holden up. He sat up, moving Naomi’s arm out of the way. She said something in sleep-talk but didn’t wake.

“Okay,” he said again, turning on the monitor.

A white-haired older woman with very strange facial features looked out at him. It took his addled mind a second to recognize that she wasn’t deformed, just being crushed by a heavy burn. With a voice distorted by g-forces mashing down on her throat, she said, “My name is Chrisjen Avasarala. I’m the UN assistant undersecretary of executive administration. A UN admiral has dispatched six Munroe-class destroyers from the Jupiter system to destroy your ship. Track this transponder code and come meet me or you and everyone on your ship will die. This is not a fucking joke.”