Caliban’s War

The event she was watching had been captured by two lunar telescopic stations with broad-spectrum intelligence feeds that happened to be at the correct angles, and about a dozen shipborne optical observers. The dataset they collected agreed perfectly.

“Play it again,” Avasarala said.

Michael-Jon de Uturbé had been a field technician when she’d first met him, thirty years before. Now he was the de facto head of the special sciences committee and married to Avasarala’s roommate from university. In that time, his hair had fallen out or grown white, his dark brown skin had taken to draping a bit off of his bones, and he hadn’t changed the brand of cheap floral cologne he wore.

He had always been an intensely shy, almost antisocial, man. In order to maintain the co

He tapped his hand terminal twice, and the images on the display reset. The Arboghastwas whole once more, floating in false color detail above the haze of Venusian cloud. The time stamp started moving forward, one second per second.

“Walk me through,” she said.

“Um. Well. We start from the spike. It’s just like the one we saw that last time Ganymede started going to hell.”

“Splendid. That’s two datapoints.”

“This came before the fighting,” he said. “Maybe an hour. A little less.”

It had come during Holden’s firefight. Before she could bring him in. But how could Venus be responding to Holden’s raid on Ganymede? Had Bobbie’s monsters been part of that fight?

“Then the radio ping. Right”—he froze the display—“here. Massive sweep in three-second-by-seven-second grid. It was looking, but it knew where to look. All those active scans, I’d assume. Called attention.”

“All right.”

He started the playback again. The resolution went a few degrees grainier, and he made a pleased sound.

“This was interesting,” he said, as if the rest were not. “Radiative pulse of some kind. Interfered with all the telescopy except a strictly visible spectrum kit on Luna. Only lasted a tenth of a second, though. The microwave burst after it was pretty normal active sensor sca

You sound disappointedperched at the back of Avasarala’s tongue, but the dread and anticipation of what would come next stopped it. The Arboghast, with 572 souls aboard her, came apart like a cloud. Hull plates peeled away in neat, orderly rows. Super-structural girders and decks shifted apart. The engineering bays detached, slipping away. In the image before her, the full crew had been exposed to hard vacuum. In the moment she was looking at now, they were all dying and not yet dead. That it was like watching a construction plan animation—crew quarters here, the engineering section here, the plates cupping the drive thus and so—only made it more monstrous.

“Now this is especially interesting,” Michael-Jon said, stopping the playback. “Watch what happens when we increase magnification.”

Don’t show them to me, Avasarala wanted to say. I don’t want to watch them die.

But the image he moved in on wasn’t a human being, but a knot of complicated ducting. He advanced it slowly, frame by frame, and the image grew misty.

“It’s ablating?” she asked.

“What? No, no. Here, I’ll bring you closer.”

The image jumped in again. The cloudiness was an illusion created by a host of small bits of metal: bolts, nuts, Edison clamps, O-rings. She squinted. It wasn’t a loose cloud either. Like iron filings under the influence of a magnet, each tiny piece was held in line with the ones before and behind it.

“The Arboghastwasn’t torn apart,” he said. “It was disassembled. It looks as though there were about fifteen separate waves, each one undoing another level of the mechanism. Stripped the whole thing down to the screws.”

Avasarala took a deep breath, then another, then another, until the sound lost its ragged edge and the awe and fear grew small enough that she could push it to the back of her mind.

“What does this?” she said at last. She’d meant it as a rhetorical question. Of course there was no answer. No force known to humanity could do what had just been done. That wasn’t the meaning he took.

“Graduate students,” he said brightly. “My Industrial Design final was just the same. They gave us all machines and we had to take them apart and figure out what they did. Extra credit was to deliver an improved design.” And a moment later, his voice melancholy: “Of course we also had to put them back together, yes?”

On the display, the rigidity and order of the floating bits of metal stopped, and the bolts and girders, vast ceramic plates and minute clamps began to drift, set in chaotic motion by the departure of whatever had been holding them. Seventy seconds from first burst to the end. A little over a minute, and not a shot fired in response. Not even something clearly to be shot.

“The crew?”

“Took their suits apart. Didn’t bother disassembling the bodies. Might have interpreted them as a logical unit or might already know all it needs to about human anatomy.”

“Who’s seen this?”

Michael-Jon blinked, then shrugged, then blinked again.

“Thisthis, or a version of this? We’re the only one with both high-def feeds, but it’s Venus. Everyone who was looking saw it. Not like it’s in a sealed lab.”

She closed her eyes, pressing her fingers against the bridge of her nose as if she were fighting a headache while she struggled to keep the mask in place. Better to seem in pain. Better to seem impatient. The fear shook her like a seizure, like something happening to somebody else. Tears welled up in her eyes, and she bit her lip until they went away. She pulled up the perso

“Can you send this version to Admiral Souther?”

“Oh, no. It’s not cleared for release.”

Avasarala looked at him, her expression empty.

“Are you clearing it for release?”

“I am clearing it for release to Admiral Souther. Please send it immediately.”

Michael-Jon bobbed a quick nod, tapping with the tips of both pinkies. Avasarala took out her own hand terminal and sent a simple message to Souther. WATCH AND CALL ME. When she stood, her legs ached.

“It was good seeing you again,” Michael-Jon said, not looking at her. “We should all have di

“Let’s,” Avasarala said, and left.

The women’s restroom was cold. Avasarala stood at the sink, her palms flat against the granite. She wasn’t used to fear or awe. Her life had been about control, talking and bullying and teasing whoever needed it until the world turned the direction she wanted it to. The few times the implacable universe had overwhelmed her haunted her: an earthquake in Bengal when she’d been a girl, a storm in Egypt that had trapped her and Arjun in their hotel room for four days as the food supplies failed, the death of her son. Each one had turned her constant pretense of certainty and pride against her, left her curled in her bed at night for weeks afterward, her fingers bent in claws, her dreams nightmares.

This was worse. Before, she could comfort herself with the idea that the universe was empty of intent. That all the terrible things were just the accidental convergences of chance and mindless forces. The death of the Arboghastwas something else. It was intentional and inhuman. It was like seeing the face of God and finding no compassion there.

Shaking, she pulled up her hand terminal. Arjun answered almost immediately. From the set of his jaw and the softness of his eyes, she knew he had seen some version of the event. And his thought hadn’t been for the fate of mankind, but for her. She tried to smile, but it was too much. Tears ran down her cheeks. Arjun sighed gently and looked down.