Caliban’s War

Chapter Nine: Avasarala

The report was more than three pages long, but Soren had managed to find someone with the balls to admit it when he didn’t know everything. Strange things were happening on Venus, stranger than Avasarala had known or guessed. A network of filaments had nearly encased the planet in a pattern of fifty-kilometer-wide hexagons, and apart from the fact that they seemed to carry superheated water and electrical currents, no one knew what they were. The gravity of the planet had increased by 3 percent. Paired whirlwinds of benzene and complex hydrocarbons were sweeping the impact craters like synchronized swimmers where the remains of Eros Station had smashed into the planetary surface. The best scientific minds of the system were staring at the data with their jaws slack, and the reason no one was panicking yet was that no one could agree on what they should panic about.

On one hand, the Venusian metamorphosis was the most powerful scientific tool ever. Whatever happened did so in plain sight of everyone. There were no nondisclosure agreements or anti-competition treaties to be concerned with. Anyone with a scanner sensitive enough could look down through the clouds of sulfuric acid and see what was going on today. Analyses were confidential, follow-up studies were proprietary, but the raw data was orbiting the sun for anyone to see.

Only, so far, it was like a bunch of lizards watching the World Cup. Politely put, they weren’t sure what they were looking at.

But the data was clear. The attack on Ganymede and the spike in the energy expended on Venus had come at exactly the same time. And no one knew why.

“Well, that’s worth shit,” she said.

Avasarala closed down her hand terminal and looked out the window. Around them the commissary murmured softly, like the best kind of restaurant, only without the ugly necessity of paying for anything. The tables were real wood and arranged carefully so that everyone had a view and no one could be overheard unless they wanted to be. It was raining that day. Even if the raindrops hadn’t been pelting the windows, blurring city and sky, she’d have known by the smell. Her lunch—cold sag aloo and something that was supposed to be tandoori chicken—sat on the table, untouched. Soren was still sitting across from her, his expression polite and alert as a Labrador retriever’s.

“There’s no data showing a launch,” Soren said. “Whatever’s on Venus would have to have gotten out to Ganymede, and there’s no sign of that at all.”

“Whatever’s on Venus thinks inertia’s optional and gravity isn’t a constant. We don’t know what a launch would look like. As far as we know, they could walk to Jupiter.”

The boy’s nod conceded the point.

“Where do we stand on Mars?”

“They’ve agreed to meet here. They’ve got ships on the way with the diplomatic delegation, including their witness.”

“The marine? Draper?”

“Yes, ma’am. Admiral Nguyen is in charge of the escort.”

“He’s playing nice?”

“So far.”

“All right, where do we go from here?” Avasarala asked.

“Jules-Pierre Mao’s waiting in your office, ma’am.”

“Run him down for me. Anything you think’s important.”

Soren blinked. Lightning lit the clouds from within.

“I sent the briefing…”

She felt a stab of annoyance that was half embarrassment. She’d forgotten that the background on the man was in her queue. There were thirty other documents there too, and she’d slept poorly the night before, troubled by dreams in which Arjun had died unexpectedly. She’d had widowhood nightmares since her son had died in a skiing accident, her mind conflating the only two men she’d ever loved.

She’d meant to review the information before breakfast. She’d forgotten. But she wasn’t going to admit it to some European brat just because he was smart, competent, and did everything she said.

“I know what’s in the briefing. I know everything,” she said, standing up. “This is a fucking test. I’m asking what you think is important about him.”

She walked away, moving toward the carved oak doors with a deliberate speed that made Soren scramble a little to keep up.

“He’s the corporate controlling interest of Mao-Kwikowski Mercantile,” Soren said, his voice low enough to carry to her and then die. “Before the incident, they were one of Protogen’s major suppliers. The medical equipment, the radiation rooms, the surveillance and encryption infrastructure. Almost everything Protogen put on Eros or used to construct their shadow station came from a Mao-Kwik warehouse and on a Mao-Kwik freighter.”

“And he’s still breathing free air because…?” she said, pushing through the doors and into the hallway beyond.

“No evidence that Mao-Kwik knew what the equipment was for,” Soren said. “After Protogen was exposed, Mao-Kwik was one of the first to turn over information to the investigation committee. If they—and by ‘they,’ I mean ‘he’—hadn’t turned over a terabyte of confidential correspondence, Gutmansdottir and Kolp might never have been implicated.”

A silver-haired man with a broad Andean nose walking the other way in the hall looked up from his hand terminal and nodded to her as they drew near.

“Victor,” she said. “I’m sorry about Annette.”

“The doctors say she’ll be fine,” the Andean said. “I’ll tell her you asked.”

“Tell her I said to get the hell out of bed before her husband starts getting dirty ideas,” she said, and the Andean laughed as they passed. Then, to Soren: “Was he cutting a deal? Cooperation for clemency?”

“That was one interpretation, but most people assumed it was personal vengeance for what happened to his daughter.”

“She was on Eros,” Avasarala said.

“She was Eros,” Soren said as they stepped into the elevator. “She was the initial infection. The scientists think the protomolecule was building itself using her brain and body as a template.”

The elevator doors closed, the car already aware of who she was and where she was going. It dropped smoothly as her eyebrows rose.

“So when they started negotiating with that thing—”

“They were talking to what was left of Jules-Pierre Mao’s daughter,” Soren said. “I mean, they think they were.”

Avasarala whistled low.

“Did I pass the test, ma’am?” Soren asked, keeping his face empty and impassive except for a small twinkle in the corners of his eyes that said he knew she’d been bullshitting him. Despite herself, she grinned.

“No one likes a smart-ass,” she said. The elevator stopped; the doors slid open.

Jules-Pierre Mao sat at her desk, radiating a sense of calm with the faintest hint of amusement. Avasarala’s eyes flickered over him, taking in the details: well-tailored silk suit that straddled the line between beige and gray, receding hairline unmodified by medical therapies, startling blue eyes that he had probably been born with. He wore his age like a statement that fighting the ravages of time and mortality was beneath his notice. Twenty years earlier, he’d just have been devastatingly handsome. Now he was that and dignified too, and her first, animal impulse was that she wanted to like him.

“Mr. Mao,” she said, nodding to him. “Sorry to make you wait.”

“I’ve worked with government before,” he said. He had a European accent that would have melted butter. “I understand the constraints. What can I do for you, Assistant Undersecretary?”

Avasarala lowered herself into her chair. The Buddha smiled beatifically from his place by the wall. The rain sheeted down the window, shadows giving the near-subliminal impression that Mao was weeping. She steepled her fingers.

“You want some tea?”

“No, thank you,” Mao said.

“Soren! Go get me some tea.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the boy said.

“Soren.”

“Ma’am?”

“Don’t hurry.”

“Of course not, ma’am.”

The door closed behind him. Mao’s smile looked weary.

“Should I have brought my attorneys?”

“Those rat fuckers? No,” she said, “the trials are all done with. I’m not here to reopen any of the legal wrangling. I’ve got real work to do.”

“I can respect that,” Mao said.

“I have a problem,” Avasarala said. “And I don’t know what it is.”

“And you think I do?”

“It’s possible. I’ve been through a lot of hearings about one damn thing and another. Most of the time they’re exercises in ass covering. If the unvarnished truth ever came out at one, it would be because someone screwed up.”

The bright blue eyes narrowed. The smile grew less warm.

“You think my executives and I were less than forthcoming? I put powerful men in prison for you, Assistant Undersecretary. I burned bridges.”

Distant thunder mumbled and complained. The rain redoubled its angry tapping at the pane. Avasarala crossed her arms.

“You did. But that doesn’t make you an idiot. There are still things you say under oath and things you dance around. This room isn’t monitored. This is off the record. I need to know anything you can tell me about the protomolecule that didn’t come out in the hearings.”

The silence between them stretched. She watched his face, his body, looking for signs, but the man was unreadable. He’d been doing this too long, and he was too good at it. A professional.

“Things get lost,” Avasarala said. “There was one time during the finance crisis that we found a whole auditing division that no one remembered. Because that’s how you do it. You take part of a problem and you put it somewhere, get some people working on it, and then you get another part of the problem and get other people working on that. And pretty soon you have seven, eight, a hundred different little boxes with work going on, and no one talking to anyone because it would break security protocol.”

“And you think…?”

“We killed Protogen, and you helped. I’m asking whether you know of any little boxes lying around somewhere. And I’m very much hoping you say yes.”

“Is this from the secretary-general or Errinwright?”

“No. Just me.”

“I’ve already said everything I know,” he said.

“I don’t believe that.”

The mask of his persona slipped. It lasted less than a second, nothing more than a shift in the angle of his spine and a hardness in his jaw, here and gone again. It was anger. That was interesting.

“They killed my daughter,” he said softly. “Even if I’d had something to hide, I wouldn’t have.”

“How did it come to be your girl?” Avasarala asked. “Did they target her? Was somebody using her against you?”

“It was bad luck. She was out in the deep orbits, trying to prove something. She was young and rebellious and stupid. We were trying to get her to come home but… she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Something tickled at the back of Avasarala’s mind. A hunch. An impulse. She went with it.

“Have you heard from her since it happened?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Since Eros Station crashed into Venus, have you heard from her?”

It was interesting watching him pretend to be angry now. It was almost like the real thing. She couldn’t have said what about it was inauthentic. The intelligence in his eyes, maybe. The sense that he was more present than he had been before. Real rage swept people away. This was rage as a gambit.

“My Julie is dead,” he said, his voice shaking theatrically. “She died when that bastard alien thing went down to Venus. She died saving the Earth.”

Avasarala countered soft. She lowered her voice, let her face take on a concerned, grandmotherly expression. If he was going to play the injured man, she could play the mother.

“Something lived,” she said. “Something survived that impact, and everybody knows that it did. I have reason to think that it didn’t stay there. If some part of your daughter made it through that change, she might have reached out to you. Tried to contact you. Or her mother.”

“There is nothing I want more than to have my little girl back,” Mao said. “But she’s gone.”

Avasarala nodded.

“All right,” she said.

“Is there anything else?”

Again, the false anger. She ran her tongue against the back of her teeth, thinking. There was something here, something beneath the surface. She didn’t know what she was looking at with Mao.

“You know about Ganymede?” she said.

“Fighting broke out,” he said.

“Maybe more than that,” she said. “The thing that killed your daughter is still out there. It was on Ganymede. I’m going to find out how and why.”

He rocked back. Was the shock real?

“I’ll help if I can,” he said, his voice small.

“Start with this. Is there anything you didn’t say during the hearings? A business partner you chose not to mention. A backup program or auxiliary staff you outfitted. If it wasn’t legal, I don’t care. I can get you amnesty for just about anything, but I need to hear it now. Right now.”

“Amnesty?” he said as if she’d been joking.

“If you tell me now, yes.”

“If I had it, I would give it to you,” he said. “I’ve said everything I know.”

“All right, then. I’m sorry to have taken your time. And… I’m sorry to open old wounds. I lost a son. Charanpal was fifteen. Skiing accident.”

“I’m sorry,” Mao said.

“If you find out something more, bring it to me,” she said.

“I will,” he said, rising from his seat. She let him get almost to the doorway before she spoke again.

“Jules?”

Turning to glance over his shoulder, he looked like a still frame from a film.

“If I find out that you knew something and you didn’t tell me, I won’t take it well,” she said. “I’m not someone you want to fuck with.”

“If I didn’t know that when I came in, I do now,” Mao said. It was as good a parting line as any. The door closed behind him. Avasarala sighed, leaning back in her chair. She shifted to look at the Buddha.

“Fat lot of help you were, you smug bastard,” she said. The statue, being only a statue, didn’t reply. She thumbed down the lights and let the gray of the storm fill the room. Something about Mao didn’t sit well with her.

It might only have been the practiced control of a high-level corporate negotiator, but she had the sense of being cut out of the loop. Excluded. That was interesting too. She wondered if he would try to counter her, maybe go over her head. It would be worth telling Errinwright to expect an angry call.

She wondered. It was a stretch to believe there was anything human down on Venus. The protomolecule, as well as anyone understood it, had been designed to hijack primitive life and remake it into something else. But if… If the complexity of a human mind had been too much for it to totally control, and the girl had in some sense survived the descent, if she’d reached out to her daddy…

Avasarala reached for her hand terminal and opened a connection to Soren.

“Ma’am?”

“When I said don’t hurry, I didn’t mean you should take the whole fucking day off. My tea?”

“Coming, ma’am. I got sidetracked. I have a report for you that might be interesting.”

“Less interesting if the tea’s cold,” she said, and dropped the channel.

Putting any kind of real surveillance on Mao would probably be impossible. Mao-Kwikowski Mercantile would have its own communications arrays, its own encryption schemes, and several rival companies at least as well funded as the United Nations already bent on ferreting out corporate secrets. But there might be other ways to track communications coming off Venus and going to Mao-Kwik installations. Or messages going down that well.

Soren came in carrying a tray with a cast-iron teapot and an earthenware cup with no handle. He didn’t comment on the darkness, but walked carefully to her desk, set down the tray, poured out a smoky, dark cupful of still-steaming tea, and put his hand terminal on the desk beside it.

“You could just send me a fucking copy,” Avasarala said.

“More dramatic this way, ma’am,” Soren said. “Presentation is everything.”

She snorted and pointedly picked up the cup, blowing across the dark surface before she looked at the terminal. The date stamp at the lower right showed it as coming from outside Ganymede seven hours earlier and the identification code of the associated report. The man in the picture had the stocky bones of an Earther, unkempt dark hair, and a peculiar brand of boyish good looks. Avasarala frowned at the image as she sipped her tea.

“What happened to his face?” she asked.

“The reporting officer suggested the beard was intended as a disguise.”

She snorted.

“Well, thank God he didn’t put on a pair of glasses, we might never have figured it out. What the fuck is James Holden doing on Ganymede?”

“It’s a relief ship. Not the Rocinante.”

“We have confirmation on that? You know those OPA bastards can fake registration codes.”

“The reporting officer did a visual inspection of the interior layout and checked the record when he got back. Also, the crew didn’t include Holden’s usual pilot, so we assume they’ve got it parked-and-dark somewhere in tightbeam range,” Soren said. He paused. “There is a standing detain-on-sight for Holden.”

Avasarala turned the lights back on. The windows became dark mirrors again; the storm was pressed back outside.

“Tell me we didn’t enforce it,” Avasarala said.

“We didn’t enforce it,” Soren said. “We have a surveillance detail on him and his team, but the situation on the station isn’t conducive to a close watch. Plus which, it doesn’t look like Mars knows he’s there yet, so we’re trying to keep that to ourselves.”

“Good that someone out there knows how to run an intelligence operation. Any idea what he’s doing?”

“So far, it looks a lot like a relief effort,” Soren said with a shrug. “We haven’t seen him meeting with anybody of special interest. He’s asking questions. Almost got into a fight with some opportunists who’ve been shaking down relief ships, but the other guys backed down. It’s early, though.”

Avasarala took another sip of tea. She had to give it to the boy; he could brew a fine pot of tea. Or he knew someone who could, which was just as good. If Holden was there, that meant the OPA was interested in the situation on Ganymede. And that they didn’t have someone already on the ground to report to them.

Wanting the intelligence didn’t in itself mean much. Even if it had been just a bunch of idiot ground-pounders getting trigger-happy, Ganymede was a critical station for the Jovian system and the Belt. The OPA would want their own eyes on the scene. But to send Holden, the only survivor of Eros Station, seemed more than coincidental.

“They don’t know what it is,” she said aloud.

“Ma’am?”

“They smuggled in someone with experience in the protomolecule for a reason. They’re trying to figure out what the hell’s going on. Which means they don’t know. Which means…” She sighed. “Which means it wasn’t them. Which is a fucking pity, since they’ve got the only live sample we know about.”

“What would you like the surveillance team to do?”

“Surveillance,” she snapped. “Watch him, see who he talks to and what he does. Daily reports back if it’s boring, real-time updates if it runs hot.”

“Yes, ma’am. Do you want him brought in?”

“Pull him and his people in when they try to leave Ganymede. Otherwise stay out of their way and try not to get noticed. Holden’s an idiot, but he’s not stupid. If he realizes he’s being watched, he’ll start broadcasting pictures of all our Ganymede sources or something. Do not underestimate his capacity to fuck things up.”

“Anything else?”

Another flash of lightning. Another roll of thunder. Another storm among trillions of storms that had assaulted the Earth since back in the beginning, when something had first tried to end all life on the planet. Something that was on Venus right now. And spreading.

“Find a way for me to get a message to Fred Johnson without Nguyen or the Martians finding out,” she said. “We may need to do some back-channel negotiation.”