Caliban’s War

Chapter Twenty-Six: Holden

Holden watched the monster quiver as it huddled against the cargo bay bulkhead. On the video monitor, it looked small and washed out and grainy. He concentrated on his breathing. Long slow breath in, fill up the lungs all the way to the bottom. Long slow breath out. Pause. Repeat. Do not lose your shit in front of the crew.

“Well,” Alex said after a minute. “There’s your problem.”

He was trying to make a joke. Had made a joke. Normally, Holden would have laughed at his exaggerated drawl and comic obviousness. Alex could be very funny, in a dry, understated sort of way.

Right now, Holden had to clench his hands to stop from strangling the man.

Amos said, “I’m coming up,” at the same moment Naomi said, “I’m coming down.”

“Alex,” Holden said, pretending a calm he didn’t feel. “What’s the status of the cargo bay airlock?”

Alex tapped twice on the terminal and said, “Airtight, Cap. Zero loss.”

Which was good, because as frightened of the protomolecule as he was, Holden also knew that it wasn’t magic. It had mass and it occupied space. If not even a molecule of oxygen could sneak out through the airlock seal, then he was pretty sure none of the virus could get in. But…

“Alex, crank up the O2,” Holden said. “As rich as we can get it without blowing the ship up.”

The protomolecule was anaerobic. If any of it did somehow get in, he wanted the environment as hostile as possible.

“And get up to the cockpit,” he continued. “Seal yourself in. If the goo somehow gets loose on the ship, I need your finger on the reactor overrides.”

Alex frowned and scratched his thin hair. “That seems a little extreme—”

Holden grabbed him by the upper arms, hard. Alex’s eyes went wide and his hands came up in an automatic gesture of surrender. Beside him, the botanist blinked in confusion and alarm. This was not the best way to instill confidence. In other circumstances, Holden might have cared.

“Alex,” Holden said, not able to stop himself from shaking even while clutching the pilot’s arms. “Can I count on you to blow this ship into gas if that shit gets in here? Because if I can’t, consider yourself relieved of duty and confined to quarters immediately.”

Alex surprised him, not by reacting in anger, but by reaching up and putting his hands on Holden’s forearms. Alex’s face was serious, but his eyes were kind.

“Seal myself into the cockpit and prepare to scuttle the ship. Aye, aye, sir,” he said. “What’s the stand-down order?”

“Direct order from myself or Naomi,” Holden replied with a hidden sigh of relief. He didn’t have to say, If that thing gets in here and kills us, you’re better off going up with the ship. He let go of Alex’s arms and the pilot took one step back, his broad dark face wrinkled with concern. The panic that threatened to overwhelm Holden might get out of his control if he allowed anyone to feel sympathy for him, so he said, “Now, Alex. Do it now.”

Alex nodded once, looked like he wanted to say something else, then spun on his heel and went to the crew ladder and up toward the cockpit. Naomi descended the same ladder a few moments later, and Amos came up from below a short time after that.

Naomi spoke first. “What’s the plan?” They’d been intimate long enough for Holden to recognize the barely concealed fear in her voice.

Holden paused to take two more long breaths. “Amos and I will go see if we can’t drive it out the cargo bay doors. Get them open for us.”

“Done,” she said, and headed up the ladder to ops.

Amos was watching him, a speculative look in his eyes.

“So, Cap, how do we ‘drive it’ out those doors?”

“Well,” Holden replied. “I was thinking we shoot the shit out of it and then take a flamethrower to any pieces that fall off. So we better gear up.”

Amos nodded. “Damn. I feel like I just took that shit off.”

Holden was not claustrophobic.

No one who chose long-flight space travel as a career was. Even if a person could somehow con their way past the psychological profiles and simulation runs, one trip was usually enough to separate those who could handle long periods in confined spaces from those who went bugfuck and had to be sedated for the trip home.

As a junior lieutenant Holden had spent days in scout ships so small that you literally could not bend over to scratch your feet. He’d climbed around between the inner and outer hulls of warships. He’d once been confined to his crash couch for twenty-one days during a fast-burn trip from Luna to Saturn. He never had nightmares of being crushed or being buried alive.

For the first time in his decade and a half of nearly constant space travel, the ship he was on felt too small. Not just cramped, but terrifyingly constricted. He felt trapped, like an animal in a snare.

Less than twelve meters away from where he stood, someone infected with the protomolecule was sitting in his cargo bay. And there was nowhere he could go to get away from it.

Putting on his body armor didn’t help this feeling of confinement.

The first thing that went on was what the grunts called the full-body condom. It was a thick black bodysuit, made of multiple layers of Kevlar, rubber, impact-reactive gel, and the sensor network that kept track of his injury and vitals status. Over that went the slightly looser environment suit, with its own layers of self-sealing gel to instantly repair tears or bullet holes. And finally, the various pieces of strap-on armor plating that could deflect a high-velocity rifle shot or ablate the outer layers to shed the energy of a laser.

To Holden, it felt like wrapping himself in his own death shroud.

But even with all its layers and weight, it still wasn’t as frightening as the powered armor that recon Marines wore would have been. What the Navy boys called walking coffins. The idea behind the name being that anything powerful enough to break the armor would liquefy the marine inside, so you didn’t bother to open it. You just tossed the whole thing into the grave. This was hyperbole, of course, but the idea of going into that cargo bay wearing something that he wouldn’t even be able to move without the power-enhanced strength would have scared the shit out of him. What if the batteries died?

Of course, a nice suit of strength-augmenting armor might be handy when trying to throw monsters off the ship.

“That’s on backward,” Amos said, pointing at Holden’s thigh.

“Shit,” Holden said. Amos was right. He’d been so far up his own ass that he’d screwed up the buckles on his thigh armor. “Sorry, I’m having a hard time staying focused here.”

“Scared shitless,” Amos said with a nod.

“Well, I wouldn’t say—”

“Wasn’t talking about you,” Amos said. “Me. I’m scared shitless of walking into the cargo bay with that thing in there. And I didn’t watch Eros turn into goo at close range. So I get it. Right there with you, Jim.”

It was the first time in Holden’s memory that Amos had called him by his first name. Holden nodded back at him, then went about straightening out his thigh armor.

“Yeah,” he said. “I just yelled at Alex for not being scared enough.”

Amos had finished with his armor and was pulling his favorite auto-shotgun out of his locker.

“No shit?”

“Yeah. He made a joke and I’m scared out of my skull, so I yelled at him and threatened to relieve him.”

“Can you do that?” Amos asked. “He’s kind of our only pilot.”

“No, Amos. No, I can’t kick Alex off the ship any more than I can kick you or Naomi off the ship. We’re not even a skeleton crew. We’re whatever you have when you don’t have a skeleton.”

“Worried about Naomi leaving?” Amos said. He kept his voice light, but his words hit like hammer blows. Holden felt the air go out of him, and had to focus on breathing again for a minute.

“No,” he said. “I mean, yes, of course I am. But that’s not what has me freaked out right now.”

Holden picked up his assault rifle and looked at it, then put it back in his locker and took out a heavy recoilless pistol instead. The self-contained rockets that were its ammunition wouldn’t impart thrust and send him flying all over the place if he fired it in zero g.

“I watched you die,” he said, not looking at Amos.

“Huh?”

“I watched you die. When that kidnap team, whoever the hell they were, took us. I saw one of them shoot you in the back of the head, and I saw you drop face-first on the floor. There was blood everywhere.”

“Yeah, but I—”

“I know it was a nonlethal round. I know they wanted us alive. I know the blood was your broken nose when your head slammed into the floor. I know all of that now. At the time, what I knew was that you’d just been shot in the head and killed.”

Amos slid a magazine into his shotgun and racked a round but, other than that, didn’t make a sound.

“All of this is really fragile,” Holden said, waving around at Amos and the ship. “This little family we have. One fuckup, and something irreplaceable gets lost.”

Amos was frowning at him now. “This is still about Naomi, right?”

“No! I mean, yes. But no. When I thought you were dead, it knocked all the wind out of me. And right now, I need to focus on getting that thing off the ship, and all I can think about is losing one of the crew.”

Amos nodded, slung the shotgun over his shoulder, and sat down on the bench next to his locker.

“I get it. So what do you want to do?”

“I want,” Holden said, sliding a magazine into his pistol, “to get that fucking monster off my ship. But please promise me you won’t die doing it. That would help a lot.”

“Cap,” Amos said with a grin. “Anything that kills me has already killed everyone else. I was born to be the last man standing. You can count on it.”

The panic and fear didn’t leave Holden. They squatted on his chest now just the way they had before. But at least he didn’t feel so alone with them.

“Then let’s go get rid of this stowaway.”

The wait inside the cargo bay airlock was endless as the inner door sealed, the pumps sucked all the air out of the room, and then the outer door cycled open. Holden fidgeted and rechecked his gun half a dozen times while he waited. Amos stood in a relaxed slump, his huge shotgun cradled loosely in his arms. The upside, if there was an upside to the wait, was that with the cargo bay in vacuum, the airlock could make as much noise as it wanted without alerting the creature to their presence.

The last of the external noise disappeared, and Holden could hear only himself breathing. A yellow light came on near the outer airlock door, warning them of the null atmosphere on the other side.

“Alex,” Holden said, plugging a hardline into the airlock terminal. Radio was still dead all over the ship. “We’re about to go in. Kill the engines.”

“Roger that,” Alex replied, and the gravity dropped away. Holden kicked the slide controls on his heels to turn up his magnetic boots.

The cargo bay on the Rocinante was cramped. Tall and narrow, it occupied the starboard side of the ship, crammed into the unused space between the outer hull and the engineering bay. On the port side, the same space was filled with the ship’s water tank. The Roci was a warship. Any cargo it carried would be an afterthought.

The downside to this was that while under thrust, the cargo bay turned into a well with the cargo doors at the bottom. The various crates that occupied the space latched on to mounts on the bulkheads or in some cases were attached with electromagnetic feet. With thrust gravity threatening to send a person tumbling seven meters straight down to the cargo doors, it would be an impossible place to fight effectively.

In microgravity, it became a long hallway with lots of cover.

Holden entered the room first, walking along the bulkhead on magnetic boots, and took cover behind a large metal crate filled with extra rounds for the ship’s point defense cannons. Alex followed, taking up a position behind another crate two meters away.

Below them, the monster seemed to be asleep.

It huddled motionless against the bulkhead that separated the cargo bay from engineering.

“Okay, Naomi, go ahead and open it up,” Holden said. He jiggled the trailing line of cable to get it unhooked from a corner of the crate and gave it a little slack.

“Doors opening now,” she replied, her voice thin and fuzzy in his helmet. The cargo doors at the bottom of the room silently swung open, exposing several square meters of star-filled blackness. The monster either didn’t notice the doors opening or didn’t care.

“They hibernate sometimes, right?” Amos said, the cable running from his suit to the airlock looking like a high-tech umbilical cord. “Like Julie did when she got the bug. Hibernated in that hotel room on Eros for a couple weeks.”

“Maybe,” Holden replied. “How do you want to approach this? I’m almost thinking we should just go down there, grab the thing, and toss it out the door. But I have strong reservations about touching it.”

“Yeah, wouldn’t want to take our suits back inside with us,” Amos agreed.

Holden had a sudden memory of coming in after playing outside, and taking all his clothes off in the mudroom before Mother Tamara would let him into the rest of the house. This would be pretty much the same, only a lot colder.

“I find myself wishing we had a really long stick,” Holden said, looking around at the various objects stored in the cargo bay, hoping to find one that suited his need.

“Uh, Cap’n?” Amos said. “It’s looking at us.”

Holden turned back around and saw Amos was right. The creature hadn’t moved anything but its head, but it was definitely staring up at them now, its eyes a creepy illuminated-from-within blue.

“Well, okay,” Holden said. “It’s not hibernating.”

“You know, if I can knock it off that bulkhead with a shot or two, and Alex kicks on the engine, it might just tumble right out the back door and into the exhaust plume. That oughta take care of it.”

“Let’s think about—” Holden said, but before he could finish his thought, the room strobed several times with the muzzle flash of Amos’ shotgun. The monster was hit multiple times and knocked into a spinning lump floating toward the door.

“Alex, just—” Amos said.

The monster blurred into action. It flung one arm toward the bulkhead, the limb actually seeming to get longer to reach it, and yanked down hard enough to bend the steel plates. The creature hurtled up to the top of the cargo bay so fast that when it hit the crate Holden was hiding behind, the magnetic feet lost their seal. The cargo bay seemed to spin as the impact threw Holden back. The crate, just behind him, matched his velocity. Holden slammed against the bulkhead a split second before the crate did, and the magnetic pallet snapped onto the new wall, trapping Holden’s leg beneath it.

Something in his knee bent badly, and the pain turned the world red for a moment.

Amos began firing his gun into the monster at close range, but it casually backhanded him and threw him into the cargo airlock hard enough to bend the inner door. The outer door slammed shut the second the inner door was compromised. Holden tried to move but his leg was pinned by the crate, and with electromagnets rated to hold a quarter ton of weight under a ten-g burn, he wouldn’t be moving it anytime soon. The crate controls that would shut the magnets off showed the orange glow of a full seal ten centimeters beyond his reach.

The monster turned back to look at him. Its blue eyes were far too large for its head, giving the creature a curious, childlike look. It reached out one oversized hand.

Holden fired into it until his gun was empty.

The miniature, self-contained rockets the recoilless gun used as ammunition exploded in tiny puffs of light and smoke as they hit the creature, each one pushing it farther back and tearing large chunks of its torso away. Black filaments sprayed out and across the room like a line drawing representation of blood splatter. When the last rocket hit, the monster was blown off the bulkhead and thrown down the cargo bay toward the open doors.

The black-and-red body tumbled toward the vast swatch of stars and darkness, and Holden let himself hope. Less than a meter from the doors, it reached out one long arm and caught the edge of a crate. Holden had seen what kind of strength was in those hands, and knew it wouldn’t lose its grip.

“Captain,” Amos was yelling in his ear. “Holden, are you still with us?”

“Here, Amos. In a little trouble.”

As he spoke, the monster pulled itself up onto the crate it had caught and sat motionless. A hideous gargoyle turned suddenly to stone.

“Gonna hit the override and get you,” Amos said. “The inner door is fucked, so we’ll lose some atmo, but not too much—”

“Okay, but do it soon,” Holden said. “I’m pinned. I need you to cut the mags on this crate.”

A moment later, the airlock door opened in a puff of atmosphere. Amos started to step out into the bay when the monster jumped off the crate it was sitting on, grabbed the heavy plastic container with one hand and the bulkhead with the other, and threw the container at him. It slammed into the bulkhead hard enough that Holden felt the vibration through his suit. It missed taking Amos’ head off by centimeters. The big mechanic fell back with a curse and the airlock doors shot closed again.

“Sorry,” Amos said. “Panicked. Let me get this open—”

“No!” Holden yelled. “Stop opening the damn door. I’m trapped behind two goddamn crates now. And one of these times, the door is going to cut my cable. I really don’t want to be stuck in here without a radio.”

With the airlock closed, the monster moved back over to the bulkhead next to the engine room and curled up into a ball again. The tissue in the gaping wounds caused by Holden’s gun pulsed wetly.

“I can see it, Cap,” Alex said. “If I stomp on the gas, I think I can knock it right out those doors.”

“No,” Naomi and Amos said at almost the same time.

“No,” Naomi repeated. “Look where Holden is under those crates. If we go high g, it’ll break every bone in his body, even if he somehow isn’t thrown out the door too.”

“Yeah, she’s right,” Amos said. “That plan’ll kill the captain. It’s off the table.”

Holden listened for a few moments to his crew argue about how to keep him alive, and watched the creature snuggle itself up the bulkhead and seem to go back to sleep.

“Well,” Holden said, breaking into their discussion. “A high-g burn would almost certainly break me into tiny pieces right now. But that doesn’t necessarily take it off the table.”

The new words that came over the channel seemed like a thing from another world. Holden didn’t even recognize the botanist’s voice at first.

“Well,” Prax said. “That’s interesting.”