Caliban’s War

Chapter Fifteen: Bobbie

Three hours into the first big meeting between the Martian and UN diplomats and they’d only just got past introducing everyone and on to reading the agenda. A squat Earther in a charcoal-gray suit that probably cost more than Bobbie’s recon armor droned on about Section 14, Subsection D, Items 1-11, in which they would discuss the effect of past hostilities on commodity pricing pursuant to existing trade agreements. Bobbie looked around, noticed that everyone else at the long oak table was staring with rapt attention at the agenda reader, and stifled the truly epic yawn that was struggling to get out.

She distracted herself by trying to figure out who people were. They’d all been introduced by name and title at some point, but that didn’t mean much. Everyone here was an assistant secretary, or undersecretary, or director of something. There were even a few generals, but Bobbie knew enough about how politics worked to know that the military people in the room would be the least important. The people with real power would be the quiet ones with unassuming titles. There were several of those, including a moonfaced man with a skinny tie who’d been introduced as the secretary of something or other. Sitting next to him was someone’s grandmother in a bright sari, a splash of yellow in the middle of all the dark brown and dark blue and charcoal gray. She sat and munched pistachios and wore an enigmatic half smile. Bobbie entertained herself for a few minutes by trying to guess if Moonface or Grandma was the boss.

She considered pouring a glass of water from one of the crystal decanters evenly distributed across the table. She wasn’t thirsty, but turning her glass over, pouring water into it, and drinking it would burn a minute, maybe two. She glanced down the table and noticed that no one else was drinking the water. Maybe everyone was waiting for someone else to be first.

“Let’s take a short break,” charcoal-suit man said. “Ten minutes, then we can move on to Section fifteen of the agenda.”

People got up and began dispersing toward restrooms and smoking areas. Grandma carried her handbag to a recycling chute and dumped pistachio shells into it. Moonface pulled out his terminal and called someone.

“Jesus,” Bobbie said, rubbing her eyes with her palms until she saw stars.

“Problem, Sergeant?” Thorsson said, leaning back in his chair and grinning. “The gravity wearing on you?”

“No,” Bobbie said. Then, “Well, yes, but mostly I’m ready to jab a stylus into my eye, just for a change of pace.”

Thorsson nodded and patted her hand, a move he was using more often now. It hadn’t gotten any less irritating and paternalistic, but now Bobbie was worried that it might mean Thorsson was working up to hitting on her. That would be an uncomfortable moment.

She pulled her hand away and leaned toward Thorsson until he turned and looked her in the eye.

“Why,” she whispered, “is no one talking about the goddamned monster? Isn’t that why I’m—why we’re here?”

“You have to understand how these things work,” Thorsson said, turning away from her and fiddling with his terminal. “Politics moves slow because the stakes are very high, and no one wants to be the person that screwed it up.”

He put his terminal down and gave her a wink. “Careers are at stake here.”

“Careers…”

Thorsson just nodded and tapped on his terminal some more.

Careers?

For a moment, she was on her back, staring up into the star-filled void above Ganymede. Her men were dead or dying. Her suit radio dead, her armor a frozen coffin. She saw the thing’s face. Without a suit in the radiation and hard vacuum, the red snowfall of flash-frozen blood around its claws. And no one at this table wanted to talk about it because it might affect their careers?

To hell with that.

When the meeting’s attendees had shuffled back into the room and taken their places around the table, Bobbie raised her hand. She felt faintly ridiculous, like a fifth-grade student in a room full of adults, but she had no idea what the actual protocol for asking a question was. The agenda reader shot her one annoyed glance, then ignored her. Thorsson reached under the table and sharply squeezed her leg.

She kept her hand up.

“Excuse me?” she said.

People around the table took turns giving her increasingly unfriendly looks and then pointedly turning away. Thorsson upped the pressure on her leg until she’d had enough of him and grabbed his wrist with her other hand. She squeezed until the bones creaked and he snatched his hand away with a surprised gasp. He turned his chair to look at her, his eyes wide and his mouth a flat, lipless line.

Yellow-sari placed a hand on the agenda reader’s arm, and he instantly stopped talking. Okay, that one is the boss, Bobbie decided.

“I, for one,” Grandma said, smiling a mild apology at the room, “would like to hear what Sergeant Draper has to say.”

She remembers my name, Bobbie thought. That’s interesting.

“Sergeant?” Grandma said.

Bobbie, unsure of what to do, stood up.

“I’m just wondering why no one is talking about the monster.”

Grandma’s enigmatic smile returned. No one spoke. The silence slid adrenaline into Bobbie’s blood. She felt her legs starting to tremble. More than anything in the world, she wanted to sit down, to make them all forget her and look away.

She scowled and locked her knees.

“You know,” Bobbie said, her voice rising, but she was unable to stop it. “The monster that killed fifty soldiers on Ganymede? The reason we’re all here?”

The room was silent. Thorsson stared at her like she had lost her mind. Maybe she had. Grandma tugged once at her yellow sari and smiled encouragement.

“I mean,” Bobbie said, holding up the agenda, “I’m sure trade agreements and water rights and who gets to screw who on the second Thursday after the winter solstice is all very important!”

She stopped to suck in a long breath, the gravity and her tirade seeming to have robbed her of air. She could see it in their eyes. She could see that if she just stopped now, she’d be an odd thing that happened and everyone could go back to work and quickly forget her. She could see her career not crashing off a cliff in flames.

She discovered that she didn’t care.

“But,” she said, throwing the agenda across the table, where a surprised man in a brown suit dodged it as though its touch might infect him with whatever Bobbie had, “what about the fucking monster?”

Before she could continue, Thorsson popped up from his seat.

“Excuse me for a moment, ladies and gentlemen. Sergeant Draper is suffering from some post-combat-related stress and needs attention.”

He grabbed her elbow and drove her from the room, a rising wave of murmurs pushing at their backs. Thorsson stopped in the conference room’s lobby and waited for the door to shut behind him.

“You,” Thorsson said, shoving her toward a chair. Normally the skinny intelligence officer couldn’t have pushed her anywhere, but all the strength seemed to have run out of her legs, and she collapsed into the seat.

“You,” he repeated. Then, to someone on his terminal, he said, “Get down here, now.”

“You,” he said a third time, pointing at Bobbie, then paced back and forth in front of her chair.

A few minutes later, Captain Martens came trotting into the conference room lobby. He pulled up short when he saw Bobbie slouched in her chair and Thorsson’s angry face.

“What—” he started, but Thorsson cut him off.

“This is your fault,” he said to Martens, then spun to face Bobbie. “And you, Sergeant, have just proven that it was a monumental mistake to bring you along. Any benefit that might have been gained from having the only eyewitness has now been squandered by your… your idiotic tirade.”

“She—” Martens tried again, but Thorsson poked a finger into his chest and said, “You said you could control her.”

Martens gave Thorsson a sad smile.

“No, I never said that. I said I could help her given enough time.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Thorsson said, waving a hand at them. “You’re both on the next ship to Mars, where you can explain yourselves to a disciplinary board. Now get out of my sight.”

He spun on his heel and slipped back into the conference room, opening the door only wide enough for his narrow body to squeeze through.

Martens sat down in the chair next to Bobbie and let out a long breath.

“So,” he said. “What’s up?”

“Did I just destroy my career?” she asked.

“Maybe. How do you feel?”

“I feel…” she said, realizing how badly she did want to talk with Martens, and becoming angered by the impulse. “I feel like I need some air.”

Before Martens could protest, Bobbie stood up and headed for the elevators.

The UN complex was a city in its own right. Just finding a way out took her the better part of an hour. Along the way, she moved through the chaos and energy of government like a ghost. People hurried past her in the long corridors, talking energetically in clumps or on their hand terminals. Bobbie had never been to Olympia, where the Martian congressional building was located. She’d caught a few minutes of congressional sessions on the government broadcast when an issue she cared about was being discussed, but compared to the activity here at the UN, it was pretty low-key. The people in this building complex governed thirty billion citizens and hundreds of millions of colonists. By comparison, Mars’ four billion suddenly seemed like a backwater.

On Mars, it was a generally accepted fact that Earth was a civilization in decay. Lazy, coddled citizens who lived on the government dole. Fat, corrupt politicians who enriched themselves at the expense of the colonies. A degrading infrastructure that spent close to 30 percent of its total output on recycling systems to keep the population from drowning in its own filth. On Mars, there was virtually no unemployment. The entire population was engaged either directly or indirectly in the greatest engineering feat in human history: the terraforming of a planet. It gave everyone a sense of purpose, a shared vision of the future. Nothing like the Earthers, who lived only for their next government payout and their next visit to the drugstore or entertainment malls.

Or at least, that was the story. Suddenly Bobbie wasn’t so sure.

Repeated visits to the various information kiosks scattered through the complex eventually got her to an exit door. A bored guard nodded to her as she passed by, and then she was outside.

Outside. Without a suit.

Five seconds later she was clawing at the door, which she now realized was an exit only, trying to get back in. The guard took pity on her and pushed the door open. She ran back inside and collapsed on a nearby settee, gasping and hyperventilating.

“First time?” the guard asked with a smile.

Bobbie found herself unable to speak, but nodded.

“Mars or Luna?”

“Mars,” she said once her breathing had slowed.

“Yeah, I knew it. Domes, you know. People who’ve been in domes just panic a bit. Belters lose their shit. And I mean completely. We wind up shipping them home drugged up to keep them from screaming.”

“Yeah,” Bobbie said, happy to let the guard ramble while she collected herself. “No kidding.”

“They bring you in when it was dark outside?”

“Yeah.”

“They do that for offworlders. Helps with the agoraphobia.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll hold the door open a bit for you. In case you need to come back in again.”

The assumption that she’d give it a second try instantly won Bobbie over, and she actually looked at the guard for the first time. Earther short, but with beautiful skin so dark it was almost blue. He had a compact, athletic frame and lovely gray eyes. He was smiling at her without a trace of mockery.

“Thank you,” she said. “Bobbie. Bobbie Draper.”

“Chuck,” he replied. “Look at the ground, then slowly look to the horizon. Whatever you do, don’t look straight up.”

“I think I got it this time, Chuck, but thanks.”

Chuck gave her uniform a quick glance and said, “Semper fi, Gunny.”

“Oohrah,” Bobbie replied with a grin.

On her second trip outside, she did as Chuck had recommended and looked down at the ground for a few moments. This helped reduce the feeling of massive sensory overload. But only a little. A thousand scents hit her nose, competing for dominance. The rich aroma of plants and soil she would expect in a garden dome. The oil and hot metal from a fabrication lab. The ozone of electric motors. All of them hit her at once, layered on top of each other and mixed with scents too exotic to name. And the sounds were a constant cacophony. People talking, construction machinery, electric cars, a transorbital shuttle lifting off, all at once and all the time. It was no wonder it had caused a panic. Just two senses’ worth of data threatened to overwhelm her. Add that impossibly blue sky that stretched on forever…

Bobbie stood outside, eyes closed, breathing until she heard Chuck let the door close behind her. Now she was committed. Turning around and asking Chuck to let her back in would be admitting defeat. He’d clearly done some time in the UNMC, and she wasn’t going to look weak in front of the competition. Hell no.

When her ears and nose had gotten more accustomed to the barrage of inputs, she opened her eyes again, looking down at the concrete of the walkway. Slowly, she lifted them till the horizon was in view. Ahead of her lay long sidewalks passing through meticulously tended green space. Beyond it in the distance was a gray wall that must have stood ten meters high, with guard towers regularly spaced on it. The UN complex had a surprising amount of security. She wondered if she’d be able to get out.

She needn’t have worried. As she approached the guarded gate to the outside world, the security system queried her terminal, which assured it of her VIP status. A camera above the guard post scanned her face, compared it to the picture on file, and verified her identity while she was still twenty meters from the gate. When she reached the exit, the guard snapped her a sharp salute and asked if she’d need a ride.

“No, just going for a walk,” she said.

The guard smiled and wished her a good day. She began walking down the street leading away from the UN complex, then turned around to see two armed security personnel following her at a discreet distance. She shrugged and walked on. Somebody would probably lose their job if a VIP like her got lost or hurt.

Once Bobbie was outside the UN compound, her agoraphobia lessened. Buildings rose around her like walls of steel and glass, moving the dizzying skyline far enough up that she no longer saw it. Small electric cars whizzed down the streets, trailing a high-pitched whine and the scent of ozone.

And people were everywhere.

Bobbie had gone to a couple of games at Armstrong Stadium on Mars, to watch the Red Devils play. The stadium had seats for twenty thousand fans. Because the Devils were usually at the bottom of the standings, it generally held less than half that. That relatively modest number was the greatest number of humans Bobbie had ever seen in one place at one time. There were billions of people on Mars, but there weren’t a lot of open spaces for them to gather. Standing at an intersection, looking down two streets that seemed to stretch into infinity, Bobbie was sure she saw more than the average attendance of a Red Devils game just walking on the sidewalks. She tried to imagine how many people were in the buildings that rose to vertigo-inducing heights in every direction around her, and couldn’t. Millions of people, probably in just the buildings and streets she could see.

And if Martian propaganda was right, most of the people she could see right now didn’t have jobs. She tried to imagine that, not having any particular place you had to be on any given day.

What the Earthers had discovered is that when people have nothing else to do, they have babies. For a brief period in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the population had looked like it might shrink rather than continue to grow. As more and more women went into higher education, and from there to jobs, the average family size grew smaller.

A few decades of massive employment shrinkage ended that.

Or, again, that was what she’d been taught in school. Only here on Earth, where food grew on its own, where air was just a by-product of random untended plants, where resources lay thick on the ground, could a person actually choose not to do anything at all. There was enough extra created by those who felt the need to work that the surplus could feed the rest. A world no longer of the haves and the have-nots, but of the engaged and the apathetic.

Bobbie found herself standing next to a street-level coffee shop and took a seat.

“Can I get you anything?” a smiling young woman with brightly dyed blue hair asked.

“What’s good?”

“We make the best soy-milk tea, if you like that.”

“Sure,” Bobbie said, not sure what soy-milk tea was, but liking those two things separately enough to take a chance.

The blue-haired girl bustled away and chatted with an equally young man behind the bar while he made the tea. Bobbie looked around her, noticing that everyone she saw working was about the same age.

When the tea arrived, she said, “Hey, do you mind if I ask you something?”

The girl shrugged, her smile an invitation.

“Is everyone who works here the same age?”

“Well,” she said. “Pretty close. Gotta collect your pre-university credits, right?”

“I’m not from here,” Bobbie said. “Explain that.”

Blue seemed actually to see her for the first time, looking over her uniform and its various insignias.

“Oh, wow, Mars, right? I want to go there.”

“Yeah, it’s great. So tell me about the credits thing.”

“They don’t have that on Mars?” she asked, puzzled. “Okay, so, if you apply to a university, you have to have at least a year of work credits. To make sure you like working. You know, so they don’t waste classroom space on people who will just go on basic afterward.”

“Basic?”

“You know, basic support.”

“I think I understand,” Bobbie said. “Basic support is the money you live on if you don’t work?”

“Not money, you know, just basic. Gotta work to have money.”

“Thanks,” Bobbie said, then sipped her milk tea as Blue trotted to another table. The tea was delicious. She had to admit, it made a sad kind of sense to do some early winnowing before spending the resources to educate people. Bobbie told her terminal to pay the bill, and it flashed a total at her after calculating the exchange rate. She added a nice tip for the blue-haired girl who wanted more from life than basic support.

Bobbie wondered if Mars would become like this after the terraforming. If Martians didn’t have to fight every day to make enough resources to survive, would they turn into this? A culture where you could actually choose if you wanted to contribute? The work hours and collective intelligence of fifteen billion humans just tossed away as acceptable losses for the system. It made Bobbie sad to think of. All that effort to get to a point where they could live like this. Sending their kids to work at a coffee shop to see if they were up to contributing. Letting them live the rest of their lives on basic if they weren’t.

But one thing was for sure: All that running and exercising the Martian Marines did at one full gravity was bullshit. There was no way Mars could ever beat Earth on the ground. You could drop every Martian soldier, fully armed, into just one Earth city and the citizens would overwhelm them using rocks and sticks.

Deep in the grip of pathos, she suddenly felt a massive weight lift that she hadn’t even realized she’d been carrying. Thorsson and his bullshit didn’t matter. The pissing contest with Earth didn’t matter. Making Mars into another Earth didn’t matter, not if this was where it was headed.

All that mattered was finding out who’d put that thing on Ganymede.

She tossed off the last of her tea and thought, I’ll need a ride.