Caliban’s War

Chapter Thirty-Seven: Avasarala

“I don’t blame anyone but myself,” the teary-eyed woman said, and Avasarala stopped the feed, sitting back in her chair. Her heart was beating faster than usual and she could feel thoughts swimming just under the ice of her conscious mind. She felt like someone could press an ear to her skull and listen to her brain humming.

Bobbie was sitting on the four-poster. She made the thing look small, which was impressive in itself. She had one leg tucked up under her and a pack of real playing cards laid out in formation on the crisp gold-and-green bedspread. The game of solitaire was forgotten, though. The Martian’s gaze was on her, and Avasarala felt a slow grin pulling at her lips.

“Well, I’ll be fucked,” she said. “They’re scared of him.”

“Who’s scared of who?”

“Errinwright is moving against Holden and this Meng bastard, whoever he is. They actually forced him to take action. I couldn’t get that out of him.”

“You don’t think the botanist was diddling his kid?”

“Might have been, but that”—she tapped on the still, tearful face of the botanist’s ex-wife—“is a smear campaign. I’ll bet you a week’s pay that I’ve had lunch with the woman coordinating it.”

Bobbie’s skeptical look only made Avasarala smile more broadly.

“This,” Avasarala said, “is the first genuinely good thing that’s happened since we got on this floating whorehouse. I’ve got to get to work. Goddamn, but I wish I was back at the office.”

“You want some tea?”

“Gin,” she said, engaging the camera on her terminal. “We’re celebrating.”

In the focus window, she looked smaller than she felt. The rooms had been designed to command attention whatever angle she put herself in, like being trapped in a postcard. Anyone who rode in the yacht would be able to brag without saying a word, but in the weak gravity her hair stood out from her head like she’d just gotten out of bed. More than that, she looked emotionally exhausted and physically diminished.

Put it away, she told herself. Find the mask.

She took a deep breath, made a rude gesture into the camera, and then started recording.

“Admiral Souther,” she said. “Thank you so much for your last message. Something’s come to my attention that I thought you might find interesting. It looks like someone’s taken a fresh dislike to James Holden. If I were with the fleet instead of floating around the fucking solar system, I’d take you out for a cup of coffee and talk this over, but since that’s not happening, I’m going to open some of my private files for you. I’ve been following Holden. Take a look at what I’ve got and tell me if you’re seeing the same things I am.”

She sent the message. The next thing that would have made sense would be contacting Errinwright. If the situation had been what they were both pretending it was, she’d have kept him involved and engaged. For a long moment, she considered following the form, pretending. Bobbie loomed up on her right, putting the glass of gin on the desk with a soft click. Avasarala picked it up and sipped a small taste of it. Mao’s private-label gin was excellent, even without the lime twist.

Nah. Fuck Errinwright. She pulled up her address book and started leafing through entries until she found what she wanted and pressed record.

“Ms. Corlinowski, I’ve just seen the leaked video accusing Praxidike Meng of screwing his cute little five-year-old daughter. When exactly did UN media relations turn into a fucking divorce court? If it gets out that we were behind that, I would like to know whose resignation I’m going to hand to the newsfeeds, and right now I’m thinking it’s yours. Give my love to Richard, and get back to me before I fire your incompetent ass out of spite.”

She ended the recording and sent it.

“She was the one that arranged it?” Bobbie asked.

“Might have been,” Avasarala said, taking another bite of gin. It was too good. If she wasn’t careful, she’d drink a lot of it. “If it wasn’t, she’ll find who it was and serve them up on a plate. Emma Corlinowski’s a coward. It’s why I love her.”

Over the next hour, she sent a dozen more messages out, performance after performance after performance. She started a liability investigation into Meng’s ex-wife and whether the UN could be held responsible for slander. She put the Ganymede relief coordinator on high alert, demanding everything she could get about Mei Meng and the search for her. She put in high-priority requests to have the doctor and the woman from Holden’s broadcast identified, and then sent a twenty-minute rambling message to an old colleague in data storage, with a small, tacit request for the same information made in the middle of it all.

Errinwright had changed the game. If she’d had freedom, she’d have been unstoppable. As it was, she had to assume that every move she made would be cataloged and acted against almost as soon as she made it. But Errinwright and his allies were only human, and if she kept a solid flow of demands and requests, screeds and wheedling, they might overlook something. Or someone on a newsfeed might notice the uptick in activity and look into it. Or, if nothing else, her efforts might give Errinwright a bad night’s sleep.

It was what she had. It wasn’t enough. Long years of practice with the fine dance of politics and power had left her with expectations and reflexes that couldn’t find their right form there. The lag was killing her with frustration, and she took it out on whomever she was recording for at the moment. She felt like a world-class musician standing before a full auditorium and handed a kazoo.

She didn’t notice when she finished her gin. She only put the glass to her mouth, found it empty, and realized it wasn’t the first time she’d done it. Five hours had passed. She’d had only three responses so far out of almost fifty messages she’d sent out. That was more than lag. That was someone else’s damage control.

She didn’t realize that she was hungry until Cotyar came with a plate, the smell of curried lamb and watermelon wafting in with him. Avasarala’s belly woke with a roar, and she turned off her terminal.

“You’ve just saved my life,” she told him, gesturing at the desk.

“It was Sergeant Draper’s idea,” he said. “After the third time you ignored her asking.”

“I don’t remember that,” she said as he put the dish in front of her. “Don’t they have servants on this thing? Why are you bringing the food?”

“They do, ma’am. I’m not letting them in here.”

“That seems extreme. Feeling jumpy, are you?”

“As you say.”

She ate too quickly. Her back was aching, and her left leg was tingling with the pins and needles she got now from sitting too long in one position. As a young woman, she’d never suffered that. On the other hand, she hadn’t had the ability to pepper every major player in the United Nations and be taken seriously. Time took her strength but it gave her power in exchange. It was a fair trade.

She couldn’t wait to finish her meal, turning on the terminal while she gulped the last of it down. Four waiting messages. Souther, God bless his shriveled little heart. One from someone at the legal council whose name she didn’t recognize, and another from someone she did. One from Michael-Jon, which was probably about Venus. She opened the one from Souther.

The admiral appeared on her screen and she had to stop herself from saying hello. It was only a video recording, not a real conversation. She hated it.

“Chrisjen,” the admiral said. “You’re going to have to be careful with all this information you’re sending me. Arjun’s going to get jealous. I wasn’t aware of our friend Jimmy’s part in instigating this latest brouhaha.”

Our friend Jimmy. He wasn’t saying the name Holden out loud. That was interesting. He was expecting some kind of filtering to be sniffing out Holden’s name. She tried to guess whether he thought the filter would be on his outgoing messages or her incoming. If Errinwright had half a brain—which he did—he’d be watching the traffic both ways for both of them. Was he worried about someone else? How many players were there at the table? She didn’t have enough information to work with, but it was interesting, at least.

“I can see where your concerns might lead you,” Souther said. “I’m making some inquiries, but you know how these things are. Might find something in a minute, might find something in a year. You don’t be a stranger, though. There’s more than enough going on out here that I can wish I could take you up on that lunch. We’re all looking forward to seeing you again.”

There was a barefaced lie, Avasarala thought. Still, nice of him to say it. She scraped her fork along the bottom of the plate, a thin residue of curry clinging to the silver.

The first message was some young man with a Brazilian accent explaining to her that the UN had nothing to do with the video footage released of Nicola Mulko, and therefore could not be held responsible for it. The second was the boy’s supervisor, apologizing for him and promising a fully formed brief by the end of the day, which was considerably more like it. The smart people were still afraid of her. That thought was more nourishing than the lamb.

As she reached for the screen, the ship shifted under her, gravity pulling her slightly to the side. She put her hand on the desk; the curry and the remnants of gin churned her gut.

“Were we expecting that?” she shouted.

“Yes, ma’am,” Cotyar called from the next room. “Scheduled course correction.”

“Never happens at the fucking office,” she said, and Michael-Jon appeared on her screen. He looked mildly confused, but that could have been just the angle of his face. She felt a sick dread.

For a moment, the Arboghast floated before her again, coming apart. Without intending it, she paused the feed. Something in the back of her mind wanted to turn away. Not to know.

It wasn’t hard to understand how Errinwright and Nguyen and their cabal would turn their backs on Venus, on the alien chaos that was becoming order and more than order. She felt it too, the atavistic fear lurking at the back of her mind. How much easier to turn to the old games, the old patterns, the history of warfare and conflict, deception and death. For all its horror, it was familiar. It was known.

As a girl, she’d seen a film about a man who saw the face of God. For the first hour of the film, he had gone through the drab life of someone living on basic on the coast of southern Africa. When he saw God, the film switched to ten minutes of the man wailing and then another hour of slowly building himself back up to do the same idiot life he’d had at the beginning. Avasarala had hated it. Now, though, she almost understood. Turning away was natural. Even if it was moronic and self-destructive and empty, it was natural.

War. Slaughter. Death. All the violence that Errinwright and his men—and she felt certain they were almost all of them men—were embracing, they were drawn to because it was comforting. And they were scared.

Well, so was she.

“Pussies,” she said, and restarted the playback.

“Venus can think,” Michael-Jon said instead of hello or any other social pleasantry. “I’ve had the signal analysis team running the data we saw from the network of water and electrical currents, and we’ve found a model. It’s only about a sixty percent correlation, but I’m comfortable putting that above chance. It’s got different anatomy, of course, but its functional structure is most like a cetacean doing spatial reasoning problems. I mean, there’s still the problem of the explanatory gap, and I can’t help with that part, but with what we’ve seen, I’m fairly sure that the patterns we saw were it thinking. They were the actual thoughts, like neurons firing off.”

He looked into the camera as if expecting her to answer and then looked mildly disappointed when she didn’t.

“I thought you’d want to know,” he said, and ended the recording.

Before she could formulate a response, a new message from Souther appeared. She opened it with a sense of gratitude and relief that she was slightly ashamed of.

“Chrisjen,” he said. “We have a problem. You should check the force assignments on Ganymede and let me know if we’re seeing the same things.”

Avasarala frowned. The lag now was over twenty-eight minutes. She put in a standard request, expedited it, and stood up. Her back was a solid knot. She walked to the common area of the suite. Bobbie, Cotyar, and three other men were sitting in a circle, the deck of cards distributed among them. Poker. Avasarala walked toward them, rolling through the hips where movement hurt. Something about lower gravity made her joints ache. She lowered herself to Bobbie’s side.

“Next hand, you can deal me in,” she said.

The order had come from Nguyen, and at first glance it made no sense at all. Six UN destroyers had been ordered off the Ganymede patrol, sent out at high burn on a course that seemed to lead essentially to nowhere. Initial reports showed that after a decent period of wondering what the fuck, a similar detachment of Martian ships matched course.

Nguyen was up to something, and she didn’t have the first clue what it could be. But Souther had sent it and thought she would see something.

It took another hour to find it. Holden’s Rocinante had departed Tycho Station on a gentle burn for the Jovian system. He might have filed a flight plan with the OPA, but he hadn’t informed Earth or Mars of anything, which meant Nguyen was watching him too.

They weren’t just scared. They were going to kill him.

Avasarala sat quietly for a long moment before she stood up and went back toward the game. Cotyar and Bobbie were at the end of a high-stakes round, which meant the pile of little bits of chocolate candy they were using for chips was almost five centimeters deep.

“Mr. Cotyar,” Avasarala said. “Sergeant Draper. With me, please.”

The cards all vanished. The men looked at each other nervously as she walked back into her bedroom. She closed the door behind them carefully. It didn’t even click.

“I am about to do something that may pull a trigger,” she said. “If I do this, the complexion of our situation may change.”

Cotyar and Bobbie exchanged looks.

“I have some things I’d like to get out of storage,” Bobbie said.

“I’ll brief the men,” Cotyar said.

“Ten minutes.”

The lag between the Guanshiyin and the Rocinante was still too long for conversation, but it was less than it took to get a message back to Earth. The sense of being so far from home left her a little light-headed. Cotyar stepped into the room and nodded once. Avasarala opened her terminal and requested a tightbeam connection. She gave the transponder code for the Rocinante. Less than a minute later, the connection came back refused. She smiled to herself and opened a channel to ops.

“This is Assistant Undersecretary Avasarala,” she said, as if there were anyone else on board who it might be. “What the fuck is wrong with your tightbeam?”

“I apologize, Madam Secretary,” a young man with bright blue eyes and close-cut blond hair said. “That communication channel isn’t available right now.”

“Why the fuck isn’t it available?”

“It’s not available, ma’am.”

“Fine. I didn’t want to do this on the radio, but I can broadcast if I have to.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” the boy said. Avasarala took a long breath and let it out through her teeth.

“Put the captain on,” she said.

A moment later, the image jumped. The captain was a thin-faced man with the brown eyes of an Irish setter. The set of his mouth and his bloodless lips told her that he knew what was coming, at least in outline. For a moment, she just looked into the camera. It was a trick she’d learned when she’d just started off. Looking at the screen image let the other person feel they were being seen. Looking into the tiny black pinpoint of the lens itself left them feeling stared down.

“Captain. I have a high-priority message I need to send.”

“I am very sorry. We’re having technical difficulties with the communication array.”

“Do you have a backup system? A shuttle we can power up? Anything?”

“Not at this time.”

“You’re lying to me,” she said. Then, when he didn’t answer: “I am making an official request that this yacht engage its emergency beacon and change course to the nearest aid.”

“I’m not going to be able to do that, ma’am. If you will just be patient, we’ll get you to Ganymede safe and in one piece. I’m sure any repairs we need can be done there.”

Avasarala leaned close to the terminal.

“I can come up there and we can have this conversation personally,” she said. “Captain. You know the laws as well as I do. Turn on the beacon or give me communications access.”

“Ma’am, you are the guest of Jules-Pierre Mao, and I respect that. But Mr. Mao is the owner of this vessel, and I answer to him.”

“No, then.”

“I’m very sorry.”

“You’re making a mistake, shithead,” Avasarala said, and dropped the connection.

Bobbie came into the room. Her face was bright, and there was a hunger about her, like a running dog straining at the leash. Gravity shifted a degree. A course correction, but not a change.

“How’d it go?” Bobbie asked.

“I am declaring this vessel in violation of laws and standards,” Avasarala said. “Cotyar, you’re witness to that.”

“As you say, ma’am.”

“All right, then. Bobbie. Get me control of this fucking ship.”