Chapter Forty-Eight: Avasarala

 

I’ve got fast movers,” Naomi said over the blaring alarms. “The UN flagship is firing.”

Avasarala closed her helmet, watching the in-suit display confirm the seal, then tapped at the communications console, her mind moving faster than her hands. Errinwright had cut a deal, and now Nguyen knew it. The admiral had just been hung out to dry, and he was taking it poorly. A flag popped up on the console: incoming high-priority broadcast. She thumbed it, and Souther appeared on her terminal and every other one in the ops deck.

“This is Admiral Souther. I am hereby taking command of—”

“Okay,” Naomi said. “I need my real screen back now. Got some work to do.”

“Sorry, sorry,” Avasarala said, tapping at the console. “Wrong button.”

“—this task force. Admiral Nguyen is relieved of duty. Any hostilities will be —”

Avasarala switched the feed to her own screen and in the process switched to a different broadcast. Nguyen was flushed almost purple. He was wearing his uniform like a boast.

“—illegal and unprecedented seizure. Admiral Souther is to be escorted to the brig until—”

Five incoming comm requests lit up, each listing a name and short-form transponder ID. She ignored them all for the broadcast controls. As soon as the live button went active, she looked into the camera.

“This is Assistant Undersecretary Chrisjen Avasarala, representing the civilian government of Earth,” she said. “Legal and appropriate command of this force is given to Admiral Souther. Anyone rejecting or ignoring his orders will be subject to legal action. I repeat, Admiral Souther is in legally authorized command of—”

Naomi made a low grunting sound. Avasarala stopped the broadcast and turned.

“Okay,” Holden said. “That was bad.”

“What?” Avasarala said. “What was bad?”

“One of the Earth ships just took three torpedo hits.”

“It that a lot?”

“The PDCs aren’t stopping them,” Naomi said. “Those UN torpedoes all have transponder codes that mark them as friends, so they’re sailing right through. They typically don’t expect to be getting shot at by other UN ships.”

“Three is a lot,” Holden said, strapping into the crash couch. She didn’t see him touch any of the controls, but he must have, because when he spoke, it echoed through the ship as well as the speakers in her helmet. “We have just gone live. Everyone has to the count of twenty to get strapped in someplace safe.”

“Solid copy on that,” Bobbie replied from wherever she was on the ship.

“Just got the doc strapped in and happy,” Amos said. “I’m on my way to engineering.”

“Are we heading into this?” Alex asked.

“We’ve got something like thirty-five capital ships out there, all of them much, much bigger than us. How about we just try to keep anyone from shooting us full of holes.”

“Yes, sir,” Alex said from the pilot’s deck. Any vestige of democracy and vote taking was gone. That was a good thing. At least Holden had control when there had to be a single voice in command.

“I have two fast movers coming in,” Naomi said. “Someone still thinks we’re the bad guys.”

“I blame Avasarala,” Bobbie said.

Before Avasarala could laugh, gravity ticked up and slewed to the side, the Rocinante taking action beneath her. Her couch shifted and creaked. The protective gel squeezed her and let her go.

“Alex?”

“On ’em,” Alex said. “I wouldn’t mind getting a real gunner, sir.”

“Are we going to have enough time to get her up here safely?”

“Nope,” Alex said. “I’ve got three more incoming.”

“I can take PDC control from here, sir,” Bobbie said. “It’s not the real thing, but it’s something the rest of you won’t have to do.”

“Naomi, give the PDCs to the sergeant.”

“PDC control transferred. It’s all yours, Bobbie.”

“Taking control,” Bobbie said.

Avasarala’s screen was a tangle of incoming messages in a flickering array. She started going through them. The Kennedy was announcing that Souther’s command was illegal. The Triton’s first officer was reporting that the captain had been relieved of duty, and requested orders from Souther. The Martian destroyer Iani Chaos was trying to reach Avasarala for clarification of which Earth ships it was permitted to shoot at.

She pulled up the tactical display. Circles in red and green marked the swarm of ships; tiny silver threads showed what might have been streams of PDC fire or the paths of torpedoes.

“Are we red or green?” Avasarala asked. “Who’s who on this fucking thing?”

“Mars is red, Earth is green,” Naomi said.

“And which Earth ones are on our side?”

“Find out,” Holden said as one of the green dots suddenly vanished. “Alex?”

“The Darius took the safeties off its PDCs, and now it’s spraying down everything in range whether it’s friend or foe. And … shit.”

Avasarala’s chair shifted again, seeming to rise from under her, pressing her back into the gel until it was hard to lift her arms. On the tactical screen, the cloud of ships, enemy and friendly and ambiguous, shifted slightly, and two golden dots grew larger, proximity notations beside them counting quickly down.

“Madam Assistant whatever you are,” Holden said, “you could respond to some of those comm requests now.”

Avasarala’s gut felt like someone was squeezing it from below. The taste of salt and stomach acid haunted the back of her tongue. She was beginning to sweat in a way that had less to do with temperature than nausea. She forced her hands out to the control panel just as the two golden dots vanished.

“Thank you, Bobbie,” Alex said. “I’m heading up. Gonna try to get the Martians between us and the fighting.”

She started making calls. In the heat of a battle, all she had to offer was this: making calls. Talking. The same things she always did. Something about it was actually reassuring. The Greenville was accepting Souther’s command. The Tanaka wasn’t responding. The Dyson opened the channel, but the only sound was men shouting at each other. It was bedlam.

A message came in from Souther, and she accepted it. It included a new IFF code, and she manually accepted the update. On the tactical, most of the green dots shifted to white.

“Thank you,” Holden said. Avasarala swallowed her You’re welcome. The antinausea drugs seemed to be working for everyone else. She really, really didn’t want to throw up inside her helmet. One of the six remaining green dots blinked out of existence and another turned suddenly to white.

“Ooh, right in the back,” Alex said. “That was cold.”

Souther’s ID showed up again on Avasarala’s console, and she hit accept just as the Roci shifted again.

“—the immediate surrender of the flagship King and Admiral Augusto Nguyen,” Souther was saying. His shock of white hair was standing up off his head as if the low thrust gravity was letting it expand like a peacock’s tail. His smile was sharp as a knife. “Any vessel that still refuses to acknowledge my orders as legal and legitimate will forfeit this amnesty. You have thirty seconds from this mark.”

On the tactical display, the threads of silver and gold had, for the most part, vanished. The ships shifted positions, each moving along its own complex vectors. As she watched, all the remaining green dots turned to white. All except one.

“Don’t be an asshole, Nguyen,” Avasarala said. “It’s over.”

The ops deck was silent for a long moment, the tension almost unbearable. Naomi’s voice was the one to break it.

“I’ve got more fast movers. Oh, I’ve got a lot of them.”

“Where?” Holden snapped.

“From the surface.”

Avasarala didn’t do anything, but her tactical display resized, pulling back until the cluster of ships, red and white and the single defiant green, were less than a quarter of their original size and the massive curve of the moon’s surface impinged on the lower edge of the display. Rising like a solid mass, hundreds of fine yellow lines.

“Get me a count,” Holden said. “I need a count here.”

“Two hundred nineteen. No. Wait. Two hundred thirty.”

“What the hell are they? Are those torpedoes?” Alex asked.

“No,” Bobbie said. “They’re monsters. They launched the monsters.”

Avasarala opened a broadcast channel. Her hair probably looked worse than Souther’s but she was well past vanity. That she could speak without fear of vomiting was blessing enough.

“This is Avasarala,” she said. “The launch you are all seeing right now is a new protomolecule-based weapon that is being used as an unauthorized first strike against Mars. We need to shoot those fuckers out of the sky and do it now. Everyone.”

“We’ve got a coordination override request coming through from Souther’s flagship,” Naomi said. “Surrender control?”

“The hell I will,” Alex said.

“No, but track requests,” Holden said. “I’m not handing control of my ship to a military fire-control computer, but we still need to be part of the solution here.”

“The King’s starting a hard burn,” Alex said. “I think he’s trying to hightail it.”

On the display, the attack from the surface of Io was beginning to bloom, individual threads coming apart in unexpected angles, some corkscrewing, some reaching out in bent paths like an insect’s articulated legs. Any one of them was the death of a planet, and the acceleration data put them at ten, fifteen, twenty g’s. Nothing human survived at a sustained twenty g. Nothing human had to.

Golden flickers of light appeared from the ships, drifting down to meet the threads of Io. The slow, stately pace of the display was undercut by the data. Plasma torpedoes burning full out, and yet it took long seconds for them to reach the main stem. Avasarala watched the first of them detonate, saw the column of protomolecule monsters split into a dozen different streams. Evasive action.

“Some of those are coming toward us, Cap,” Alex said. “I don’t think they’re designed to hole a ship’s hull, but I’m pretty damn sure they’d do it anyway.”

“Let’s get in there and do what we can. We can’t let any of these … Okay, where’d they go?”

On the tactical display, the attacking monsters were blinking out of existence, the threads vanishing.

“They’re cutting thrust,” Naomi said. “And the RF transponders are going dark. Must have radar-absorbing hull materials.”

“Do we have tracking data? Can we anticipate where they’re going to be?”

The tactical display began to flicker. Fireflies. The monsters shifting in and out, thrusting in what looked like semi-random directions, but the bloom of them always expanding.

“This is going to be a bitch,” Alex said. “Bobbie?”

“I’ve got some target locks. Get us in PDC range.”

“Hang on, kids,” Alex said. “We’re going for a ride.”

The Roci bucked hard, and Avasarala pressed back into her seat. The shuddering rhythm seemed to be her own trembling muscles and then the firing PDCs and then her body again. On the display, the combined forces of Earth and Mars spread out, running after the near-invisible foes. Thrust gravity shifted, spinning her couch one way and then another without warning. She tried closing her eyes, but that was worse.

“Hmm.”

“What, Naomi?” Holden said. “ ‘Hmm’ what?”

“The King was doing something strange there. Huge activity from the maneuvering thrusters and … Oh.”

“‘Oh’ what? Nouns. I need nouns.”

“She’s holed,” Naomi said. “One of the monsters holed her.”

“Told you they could do that,” Alex said. “Hate to be on the ship right now. Still. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer fella.”

“His men aren’t responsible for his actions,” Bobbie said. “They may not even know Souther’s in command. We’ve got to help them.”

“We can’t,” Holden said. “They’ll shoot at us.”

“Would you all please shut the fuck up?” Avasarala said. “And stop moving the goddamned ship around. Just pick a direction and calm down for two minutes.”

Her comm request went ignored for five minutes. Then ten. When the King’s distress beacon kicked in, she still hadn’t answered. A broadcast signal came in just after.

“This is Admiral Nguyen of the United Nations battleship Agatha King. I am offering to surrender to UN ships with the condition of immediate evacuation. Repeat: I am offering surrender to any United Nations military vessel on the condition of immediate evacuation.”

Souther answered on the same frequency.

“This is the Okimbo. What’s your situation?”

“We have a possible biohazard,” Nguyen said. His voice was so tight and high it sounded like someone was strangling him. On the tactical display, several white dots were already moving toward the green.

“Hold tight, King,” Souther said. “We’re on our way.”

“Like hell you are,” Avasarala said, then cursed quietly as she opened a broadcast channel. “Like hell you are. This is Avasarala. I am declaring a quarantine and containment order on the Agatha King. No vessel should dock with her or accept transfer of materiel or personnel. Any ship that does will be placed under a quarantine and containment order as well.”

Two of the white dots turned aside. Three others continued on. She opened the channel again.

“Am I the only one here who remembers Eros? What the fuck do you people think is loose on the King? Do not approach.”

The last of the white dots turned aside. When Nguyen answered her comm request, she’d forgotten she still had it open. He looked like shit. She didn’t imagine she looked much better. How many wars had ended this way? she wondered. Two exhausted, nauseated people staring at each other while the world burned around them.

“What more do you want from me?” Nguyen said. “I’ve surrendered. I lost. My men shouldn’t have to die for your spite.”

“It’s not spite,” Avasarala said. “We can’t do it. The protomolecule gets loose. Your fancy control programs don’t work. It’s infectious.”

“That’s not proven,” he said, but the way he said it told her everything.

“It’s happening, isn’t it?” she said. “Turn on your internal cameras. Let us see.”

“I’m not going to do that.”

She felt the air go out of her. It had happened.

“I am so sorry,” Avasarala said. “Oh. I am so sorry.”

Nguyen’s eyebrows rose a millimeter. His lips pressed, bloodless and thin. She thought there were tears in his eyes, but it might have been only a transmission artifact.

“You have to turn on the transponders,” Avasarala said. And then, when he didn’t reply: “We can’t weaponize the protomolecule. We don’t understand what it is. We can’t control it. You just sent a death sentence to Mars. I can’t save you, I cannot. But turn those transponders back on and help me save them.”

The moment hung in the air. Avasarala could feel Holden’s and Naomi’s attention on her like warmth radiating from the heating grate. Nguyen shook his head, his lips twitching, lost in conversation with himself.

“Nguyen,” she said. “What’s happening? On your ship. How bad is it?”

“Get me out of here, and I’ll turn the transponders on,” he said. “Throw me in the brig for the rest of my life, I don’t care. But get me off of this ship.”

Avasarala tried to lean forward, but it only made her crash couch shift. She looked for the words that would bring him back, the ones that would tell him that he had been wrong and evil and now he was going to die badly at the hands of his own weapon and somehow make it all right. She looked at this angry, small, shortsighted, frightened little man and tried to find the way to pull him back to simple human decency.

She failed.

“I can’t do that,” she said.

“Then stop wasting my time,” he said, and cut the connection.

She lay back, her palm over her eyes.

“I’m gettin’ some mighty strange readings off that battleship,” Alex said. “Naomi? You seeing this?”

“Sorry. Give me a second.”

“What have you got, Alex?” Holden asked.

“Reactor activity’s down. Internal radiation through the ship’s spiking huge. It’s like they’re venting the reactor into the air recycling.”

“That don’t sound healthy,” Amos said.

The ops deck went silent again. Avasarala reached to open a channel to Souther but stopped. She didn’t know what she’d say. The voice that came over the ship channel was slushy and drugged. She didn’t recognize Prax at first, and then he had to repeat himself twice before she could make out the words.

“Incubation chamber,” Prax said. “It’s making the ship an incubation chamber. Like on Eros.”

“It knows how to do that?” Bobbie said.

“Apparently so,” Naomi said.

“We’re going to have to slag that thing,” Bobbie said. “Do we have enough firepower for that?”

Avasarala opened her eyes again. She tried to feel something besides great, oceanic sorrow. There had to be hope in there somewhere. Even Pandora got that much.

Holden was the one who said what she was thinking.

“Even if we can, it won’t save Mars.”

“Maybe we got them all?” Alex said. “I mean, there were a shit-load of those things, but maybe … maybe we got ’em?”

“Hard to tell when they were running ballistic,” Bobbie said. “If we missed just one, and it gets to Mars …”

It was all slipping away from her. She had been so close to stopping it, and now here she was, watching it all slip past. Her gut was a solid knot. But they hadn’t failed. Not yet. Somewhere in all this there had to be a way. Something that could still be done.

She forwarded her last conversation with Nguyen to Souther. Maybe he’d have an idea. A secret weapon that could come out of nowhere and force the codes out. Maybe the great brotherhood of military men would draw some vestige of humanity out of Nguyen.

Ten minutes later, a survival pod came loose from the King. Souther didn’t bother contacting her before they shot it down. The ops deck was like a mourning chamber.

“Okay,” Holden said. “First things first. We’ve got to get down to the base. If Mei’s there, we need to get her out.”

“I’m on that,” Amos said. “And we got to take the doc. He ain’t gonna outsource that one.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Holden said. “So you guys take the Roci down to the surface.”

“Us guys?” Naomi asked.

“I’ll take the pinnace over to the battleship,” Holden said. “The transponder activation codes are going to be in the CIC.”

“You?” Avasarala asked.

“Only two people got off Eros,” Holden said with a shrug. “And I’m the one that’s left.”

 

 

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