Caliban's War: Book Two of the Expanse series (43 page)

When the door was closed, Bobbie cleared her throat.

“What’s going to happen to him?” she asked.

Avasarala sipped her tea. It was good, fresh green tea, brewed perfectly—rich and sweet and not even slightly bitter.

“Who gives a shit?” she said. “The Mao-Kwik yacht leaves in four days. That’s not much time. And neither of us is going to be able to take a dump without the bad guys knowing. I’m going to
get you a list of people I need to have drinks or lunch or coffee with before we leave. Your job is to arrange it so I do.”

“I’m your social secretary now?” Bobbie said, bristling.

“You and my husband are the only two people alive who I know aren’t trying to stop me,” Avasarala said. “That’s how far down I am right now. This has to happen, and there is no one else I can rely on. So yes. You’re my social secretary. You’re my bodyguard. You’re my psychiatrist. All of it. You.”

Bobbie lowered her head, breathing out through flared nostrils. Her lips pursed and she shook her massive head once quickly—left, then right, then back to center.

“You’re fucked,” she said.

Avasarala took another sip of her tea. She should have been ruined. She should have been in tears. She’d been cut off from her own power, tricked. Jules-Pierre Mao had sat there, not a meter from where she was now, and laughed down his sleeve at her. Errinwright and Nguyen and whoever else was in his little cabal. They’d tricked her. She’d sat there, pulling strings and trading favors and thinking that she was doing something real. For months—maybe years —she hadn’t noticed that she was being closed out.

They’d made a fool of her. She should have been humiliated. Instead, she felt alive. This was her game, and if she was behind at halftime, it only meant they expected her to lose. There was nothing better than being underestimated.

“Do you have a gun?”

Bobbie almost laughed.

“They don’t like having Martian soldiers walking around the United Nations with guns. I have to eat lunch with a dull spork. We’re at war.”

“All right, fine. When we get on the yacht, you’re in charge of security. You’re going to need a gun. I’ll arrange that for you.”

“You can? Honestly, though, I’d rather have my suit.”

“Your suit? What suit?”

“I had custom-fit powered armor with me when I came here.
The video feed of the monster was copied from it. They said they were turning it over to your guys to confirm the original footage hadn’t been faked.”

Avasarala looked at Bobbie and sipped her tea. Michael-Jon would know where it was. She’d call him the next morning, arrange to have it brought on board the Mao-Kwik yacht with an innocuous label like
WARDROBE
stamped on the side.

Probably thinking she needed to be convinced, Bobbie kept talking. “Seriously. Get me a gun, I’m a soldier. Get that suit for me, I’m a superhero.”

“If we’ve still got it, you’ll have it.”

“All right, then,” Bobbie said. She smiled. For the first time since they’d met, Avasarala was afraid of her.

God help whoever makes you put it on
.

G
ravity returned as Alex brought the engine up, and Holden floated down to the deck of the cargo bay airlock at a gentle half g. They didn’t need to go fast now that the monster was outside the ship. They just needed to put some distance between the ship and it, and get it into the drive’s star-hot exhaust plume, where it would be broken down into its various subatomic particles. Even the protomolecule couldn’t survive being reduced to ions.

He hoped, anyway.

When he touched down on the deck, he intended to turn on the wall monitor and check the aft cameras. He wanted to watch the thing be torched, but the moment his weight came down, a white-hot spike of pain took his knee. He yelped and collapsed.

Amos drifted down next to him, then kicked off his boot mags and started to kneel. “You okay, Cap?” he said.

“Fine. I mean, for I-think-I-blew-out-my-knee levels of fine.”

“Yeah. Joint injury’s a lot less painful in microgravity, ain’t it?”

Holden was about to reply when a massive hammer hit the side of the ship. The hull rang like a gong. The
Roci’s
engine cut off almost instantly, and the ship snapped into a flat spin. Amos was lifted away from Holden and thrown across the airlock to slam against the outer door. Holden slid along the deck to land standing upright against the bulkhead next to him, his knee collapsing under him so painfully he nearly blacked out.

He chinned a button in his helmet, and his body armor shot him full of amphetamines and painkillers. Within seconds, his knee still hurt, but the pain was very far away and easy to ignore. The threatening tunnel vision vanished and the airlock became very bright. His heart started to race.

“Alex,” he said, knowing the answer before he asked, “what was that?”

“When we torched our passenger there, the bomb in the cargo bay went off,” the pilot replied. “We’ve got serious damage to that bay, to the outer hull, and to engineering. Reactor went into emergency shutdown. The cargo bay turned into a second drive during the blast and put us into a spin. I have no control over the ship.”

Amos groaned and began moving his limbs. “That sucks.”

“We need to kill this spin,” Holden said. “What do you need to get the attitude thrusters back up?”

“Holden,” Naomi cut in, “I think Prax may be injured in the airlock. He’s not moving in there.”

“Is he dying?”

The hesitation lasted for one very long second.

“His suit doesn’t think so.”

“Then ship first,” Holden said. “First aid after. Alex, we’ve got radios again. And the lights are on. So the jamming is gone, and the batteries must still be working. Why can’t you fire the thrusters?”

“Looks like … primary and secondary pumps are out. No water pressure.”

“Confirmed,” Naomi said a second later. “Primary wasn’t in the blast area. If it’s toast, engineering must be a mess. Secondary’s on the deck above. It shouldn’t have been physically damaged, but there was a big power spike just before the reactor went off-line. Might have fried it or blown a breaker.”

“Okay, we’re on it. Amos,” Holden said, pulling himself over to where the mechanic lay on the cargo airlock’s outer door. “You with me?”

Amos gave a one-handed Belter nod, then groaned. “Just knocked the wind out of me, is all.”

“Gotta get up, big man,” Holden said, pushing himself to his feet. In the partial gravity of their spin, his leg felt heavy, hot, and stiff as a board. Without the drugs pouring through him, standing on it would have probably made him scream. Instead, he pulled Amos up, putting even more pressure on it.

I will pay for this later
, he thought. But the amphetamines made later seem very far away.

“What?” Amos said, slurring the word. He probably had a concussion, but Holden would get him some medical attention later when the ship was back under their control.

“We need to get to the secondary water pump,” Holden said, forcing himself to speak slowly in spite of the drugs. “What’s the fastest access point?”

“Machine shop,” Amos replied, then closed his eyes and seemed to fall asleep on his feet.

“Naomi,” Holden said. “Can you control Amos’ suit from there?”

“Yes.”

“Shoot him full of speed. I can’t drag his ass around with me, and I need him.”

“Okay,” she said. A couple of seconds later, Amos’ eyes popped open.

“Shit,” he said. “Was I asleep?” His words were still slurred but now had a sort of manic energy to them.

“We need to get to the bulkhead access point in the machine
shop. Grab whatever you think we’ll need to get the pump running. It might have blown a breaker or fried some wiring. I’ll meet you there.”

“Okay,” Amos said, then pulled himself along the toe rings set into the floor to get to the inner airlock door. A moment later it was open and he crawled out of view.

With the ship spinning, gravity was pulling Holden to a point halfway between the deck and the starboard bulkhead. None of the ladders and rings set into the ship for use in low g or under thrust would be oriented in the right direction. Not really a problem with four working limbs, but it would make maneuvering with one useless leg difficult.

And of course, once he moved past wherever the ship’s center of spin was, everything would reverse.

For a moment, his perspective shifted. The vicious Coriolis rattled the fine bones inside his ears, and he was riding a spinning hunk of metal lost in permanent free fall. Then he was under it, about to be crushed. He flushed with the sweat that came a moment before nausea as his brain ran through scenarios to explain the sensations of the spin. He chinned the suit controls, pumping a massive dose of emergency antinausea drugs into his bloodstream.

Without giving himself more time to think about it, Holden grabbed the toe rings and pulled himself up to the inner airlock door. He could see Amos filling a plastic bucket with tools and supplies he was yanking out of drawers and lockers.

“Naomi,” Holden said. “Going to take a peek in engineering. Do we have any cameras left in there?”

She made a sort of disgusted grunt he interpreted as a negative, then said, “I’ve got systems shorted out all over the ship. Either they’re destroyed, or the power is out on that circuit.”

Holden pulled himself over to the deck-mounted pressure hatch that separated the machine shop from engineering. A status light on the hatch blinked an angry red.

“Shit, I was afraid of that.”

“What?” Naomi asked.

“You don’t have environmental readings either, do you?”

“Not from engineering. That’s all down.”

“Well,” Holden said with a long sigh. “The hatch thinks there’s no atmosphere on the other side. That incendiary charge actually blew a hole through the bulkhead, and engineering is in vacuum.”

“Uh-oh,” Alex said. “Cargo bay’s in vacuum too.”

“And the cargo bay door is broken,” Naomi added. “And the cargo airlock.”

“And a partridge in a fucking pear tree,” Amos said with a disgusted snort. “Let’s get the damn ship to stop spinning and I’ll go outside and take a look at it.”

“Amos is right,” Holden said, giving up on the hatch and pushing himself to his feet. He staggered down a steeply angled bulkhead to the access panel where Amos was now waiting, bucket in hand. “First things first.”

While Amos used a torque wrench to unbolt the access panel, Holden said, “Actually, Naomi, pump all the air out of the machine shop too. No atmo below deck four. Override the safeties so we can open the engineering hatch if we need to.”

Amos ran out the last bolt and pulled the panel off the bulkhead. Beyond it lay a dark, cramped space filled with a confusing tangle of pipes and cabling.

“Oh,” Holden added. “Might want to prep an SOS if we can’t get this fixed.”

“Yeah, because we got a lot of people out there who we really want coming to help us right now,” Amos said.

Amos pulled himself into the narrow passage between the two hulls and then out of sight. Holden followed him in. Two meters beyond the hatch loomed the blocky and complex-looking pump mechanism that kept water pressure to the maneuvering thrusters. Amos stopped next to it and began pulling parts off. Holden waited behind him, the narrow space not allowing him to see what the big mechanic was doing.

“How’s it look?” Holden asked after a few minutes of listening to Amos curse under his breath while he worked.

“It looks fine here,” Amos said. “Gonna swap this breaker anyway, just to be sure. But I don’t think the pump’s our problem.”

Shit
.

Holden backed out of the maintenance hatch and half crawled up the steep slope of bulkhead back to the engineering hatch. The angry red light had been replaced with a morose yellow one now that there was no atmosphere on either side of the hatch.

“Naomi,” Holden said. “I’ve got to get into engineering. I need to see what happened in there. Have you killed the safeties?”

“Yes. But I’ve got no sensors in there. The room could be flooded with radiation—”

“But you have sensors here in the machine shop, right? If I open the hatch and you get radiation warnings, just let me know. I’ll shut it immediately.”

“Jim,” Naomi said, the stiffness that had been in her voice every time she’d spoken to him for the last day slipping a bit. “How many times can you get yourself massively irradiated before it catches up with you?”

“At least once more?”

“I’ll tell the
Roci
to prep a bed in sick bay,” she said, not quite laughing.

“Get one of the ones that’s not throwing errors.”

Without giving himself time to rethink it, Holden slapped the release on the deck hatch. He held his breath while it opened, expecting to see chaos and destruction on the other side, followed by his suit’s radiation alarm.

Instead, other than one small hole in the bulkhead closest to the explosion, it looked fine.

Holden pulled himself through the opening and hung by his arms for a few moments, examining the space. The massive fusion reactor that dominated the center of the compartment looked untouched. The bulkhead on the starboard side bowed in precariously, with a charred hole in its center, like a miniature volcano had formed there. Holden shuddered at the thought of how much energy had to have been released to bend the heavily armored and
radiation-shielded bulkhead in like that, and how close it had come to punching a hole in their reactor. How many more joules to go from a badly dented wall to full containment breach?