Tiamat's Wrath

by James S. A. Corey

  “Okay, yeah,” Fayez said. “That’s a fair point.”

  Governor Song’s voice came over the comm channel. “Admiral Sagale?”

  “Yes?” Sagale said, then remembered he’d turned off the mic. He enabled it again. “Yes, Governor. I’m here.”

  “We have slotted the Falcon for priority transit through Laconia gate. I am sending you the traffic control data now. Do not rush your transit. We’re cutting it as close to the limit as we can here. I don’t want anyone going dutchman.”

  Sagale’s head came back a degree, as if the thought had surprised him. His voice when he spoke was clear. “Understood. Thank you for this, Jae-Eun.”

  “If we live through this, you owe me a drink,” the governor of Medina Station said. “The ship ahead of you is the Plain of Jordan through Castila gate. Please monitor that and match to your plan. Godspeed, Mehmet.”

  Sagale turned his attention to the controls, and a moment later the gravity warning sounded. Not that anyone else on the ship would hear it. Elvi had to fight the urge to shout the emergency evacuation command and let all the other ships figure out how to be safe about it.

  “How long do we have?” Elvi asked, and then laughed. It sounded like she was asking how long they had to live, and since she kind of was, it seemed funny. Sagale didn’t join in.

  “We’re going to be at a quarter g for a while if you want to stretch your legs,” he said. “Then you have to be back in the couch. Once we make the transit, I’m making a hard turn and burning perpendicular to the ring to get us away from it.”

  “In case of overspill,” Fayez said.

  “From an abundance of caution,” Sagale said. He passed the back of his hand over his eyes, and Elvi realized that for all his stoic reserve, he was weeping. The drive kicked on, and she drifted to the deck. Fayez put a hand on her shoulder and drew her away.

  “This is bad,” he said softly.

  “I know.”

  He nodded. “I just felt like I needed to say it out loud.”

  She took his hand and kissed it. It still smelled like breathable fluid. “If this is all we get… Well, then shit.”

  “With you on that one, sweetheart,” he said, and folded his arms around her. “This whole thing really was a terrible idea, wasn’t it?”

  “Couldn’t have seen it coming,” she said. “I mean, unless…”

  Something moved in the back of her head. Something about the Magnetar-class ships and the way the Heart of the Tempest had annihilated the rail guns on the alien station during Laconia’s first incursion. The way it had killed Pallas Station. The way the enemy had reacted differently.

  “You’re thinking something,” Fayez said. “I can hear the gears turning.”

  “I don’t know what yet,” she said. “But yeah. I am.”

  A new voice came from the bridge. The comm channel still open on Sagale’s controls. This is Plain of Jordan confirming transit in two minutes. We are go, no-go in ten seconds.

  Another voice answered. Medina control here. You are go for transit. Sagale was muttering something under his breath. It might have been profanity. It might have been prayer. The volumetric display showed a single red dot in the vastness moving toward the pinpoint white of a gate.

  “We better get back in our cans,” Fayez said.

  “Yes,” Elvi said, but she didn’t move. Not yet. “It was designed, right? Tecoma system was designed. To… to do this?”

  Fayez smoothed a hand across her head. The fluid was dry enough now to be tacky, but the touch felt good anyway. “Elvi, you are the light of my heart. The woman I love and know better than I know anyone, and I can’t get through the day without being dead wrong about what you’re going to say or want. The protomolecule engineers were some kind of quantum-entangled high-energy physics hive mind thing. I don’t know what they were thinking.”

  “No,” Elvi said, shuffling back toward her couch in the gentle quarter g. “It was designed. There was an intention.”

  “Does that help us?” he asked. “Because that would be great, but I don’t know that I see how that helps us.”

  This is the Plain of Jordan transferring our status now. We are on approach to—

  The display stuttered and threw up an error readout. The lights went out and the gravity dropped away.

  “Brace!” Sagale called out from the blackness.

  Elvi reached out in the blackness, trying to find a wall and a handhold. “What happened?”

  An emergency light stuttered on. “Sensor arrays overloaded,” Sagale said. His voice was shaking. “They’re resetting now. I have to get us stopped until we can…”

  He didn’t finish the thought. The handhold buzzed gently with the vibration of maneuvering thrusters, and the Falcon swung up around her, lifting her feet off the deck. Fayez helped her reorient as the gravity alert sounded again and up and down returned. The volumetric display came back up with a warning at the edge that said NO INPUT—ESTIMATED POSITIONS ONLY. Sagale gunned the drive for a few seconds, and the Falcon felt like an elevator lurching toward some upper floor. Then he killed it and Elvi drifted up again.

  The three of them were silent for a long moment while the backup sensor arrays lurched to life. The comms clicked once, rattled with strange, fluting static, and filled with the gabble of panicked human voices. Sagale killed the channel and opened a private one.

  “Medina Station, this is Admiral Sagale of the Falcon. Please report status.”

  Elvi pulled herself to Travon’s station. She didn’t know if it took the ship a fraction of a second longer than usual to recognize her and put her data on the monitor, or if it was just the adrenaline throwing her perceptions off. The main sensor arrays were dead. Burned out in a fraction of a second. Backup systems slowly hauled themselves to life. Cameras and telescopes all around the Falcon unpacked themselves from hardened compartments and deployed. More of them were damaged than she’d expected. But not all. She opened a window and fed the data from the Falcon’s skin to her screen, and in the darkness, there was light.

  “This is Governor Song, Falcon,” the woman’s voice came, trembling like a violin. “We have sustained some damage to the ship and crew. We are still assessing.”

  The space between the rings was filled with whiteness. The station at the center—the alien control station that seemed to carry the rings with it like the center of a dandelion surrounded by seeds—was brighter than a sun. And some nebula-thin gas or dust cloud caught that light and shimmered. It was everywhere. It was beautiful. It was terrifying.

  “It’s going to be all right, Governor,” Sagale said in a tone that almost made it plausible. “I need to know the status of the Plain of Jordan. Did it make transit?”

  “Mehmet, I don’t—”

  “It’s important. Did the ship make it through?”

  Since the first time she’d seen it—the first time anyone had seen it—the boundary of the ring space had been a dark and featureless sphere, like a black bubble seen from inside. Now there was a twisting rainbow of energy or matter on it, like an oil slick on water. The darkness of it had always let Elvi imagine it to be infinite before. A vast and starless sky. Now it felt close and finite. It made everything seem more fragile. A wave of nausea passed across the edge of her awareness like it belonged to some other body.

  “No,” Governor Song said. “They were too close to the gate to shift back when the blast came. The energy through Tecoma gate would have… They didn’t make the transit.”

  “Please confirm, Medina. You’re saying the Plain of Jordan went dutchman.”

  “Yes. We lost them.”

  “Thank you, Medina. Please advise traffic control that all transits are suspended until further orders. No one comes into this space, and no one goes out. Not until I say so.”

  To her left, Fayez was at Jen’s station, seeing—she assumed—all the same things. Feeling some version of the awe and terror and wonder that she felt.

  “Understood,” Governor So
ng said. “I’ll see to it.”

  “Thank you, Jae-Eun,” Sagale said. “We have some work to do. We’ll need reports from the other systems. I’m guessing that there’s been some damage from the far sides of the gates too. It may take some time to—”

  “Gates moved,” Fayez said in the same tone he used for trivial information. Laundry’s dry. Dinner’s ready. Gates moved.

  “What?” Sagale said.

  “Yeah,” Fayez said. “Not much, but a little. And all of them. Look for yourself.”

  Sagale shifted the main screen. The slow zone bloomed. And with it corrections on each of the gates. The ships were all in place, all matching their expected vectors and positions. But a little yellow error code hung at the gates to show where they were expected to be, and where they were instead. Sagale’s face was ashen. Elvi felt herself wondering how many more shocks the man could take. Or, for that matter, many how many she could.

  “Yeah, so,” Fayez said. “Pretty sure I see what’s going on. They just reordered. Because there’s not as many of them now. Equal distance between them got a little bigger. Tecoma gate’s gone. And… Oh yeah. Look at that. Thanjavur gate was pretty much straight across from it. And it’s gone too. We just lost two gates, Admiral. And one of them had an entire world filled with people behind it.”

  Chapter Twenty: Teresa

  The science exposition was held in one of the public halls and on the grounds outside it. The vaulted ceiling gave the hall a sense of something that had been grown more than built, and the acoustic controls kept what could have been an overwhelming din of voices and noise calm and reassuring. A thousand children from five years old to sixteen ran and talked and made groups, associating for the most part with people they already knew and who attended the same schools they’d come from.

  The open schools all had their own stations in the hall, each one showing what the students had been studying in the last year and how it would add to the overall work of the empire. Some, like the water cycle demonstration, were basic, meant for the youngest children. Others, like the forest of life that compared the different ecosystems of the new worlds, and the programmable matter station that showcased the most recent materials science from Bara Gaon, were sophisticated enough to be interesting for her.

  And Connor was there.

  As the days passed, she found the sting of remembering Connor and Muriel being involved with each other grew a little less raw for her. Not painless. The image of them kissing—which she had very clearly in her mind for something she’d never actually seen—still bothered her. So when Connor nodded to her when she walked by and tried a little smile, she didn’t know what to make of it. Did he still like her? Was he trying to tell her that his connection with Muriel had been a mistake, or that he was glad that he and Teresa were still friends? She wasn’t sure which option she was hoping for. Or if she was hoping for any of them. Connor was confusing. Muriel and the others from her school had a booth about soil science and how to design microbes that could pass nutrients between organisms from different biomes, and Teresa was technically supposed to be with them. She didn’t want to be there. And really, she could go wherever she wanted. It wasn’t like someone was going to tell her she couldn’t.

  Instead, she went to the puzzle station where younger children worked with blocks trying to re-create shapes or argued over how to fit circles into a square or build a complex structure with only gravity and friction to hold it together. She’d done all the puzzles a thousand times over when she was younger. She moved through, giving encouragement and hints to the frustrated, and wondered if Connor would follow her there.

  A young girl—maybe six years old—sat at one of the tables by herself, scowling. Teresa sat across from her because she could see the place where Connor would be from there.

  The girl looked up at Teresa and seemed to gather herself. When she spoke, it was with the stilted formality of someone who had been coached in what to say and how to say it.

  “Hello. My name is Elsa Singh. I’m pleased to meet you.”

  “I’m Teresa Duarte,” Teresa said.

  “Are you a teacher?” Elsa asked.

  “No, I live here.”

  “No one will play with me,” Elsa said, scowling at her.

  “I could teach you something, if you want.”

  “All right,” Elsa said, and seemed to settle deeper into her little wooden chair. Teresa glanced over toward the school display. Muriel and Connor were talking, but Muriel was doing most of it, her lips moving fast like she was fighting to keep his attention. To her surprise, she felt a little pang of sympathy for the girl. If Connor had convinced Muriel to alienate Teresa Duarte, daughter of the high consul and maybe someday ruler of the Laconian Empire, and then gone cold on her? That would be a shitty thing to do. Effective too, because the pang passed as quickly as it had come. Muriel could deal with her mistakes on her own.

  “All right, Elsa,” she said, refocusing. She pulled up her handheld. “This is called the prisoner’s dilemma. Look at this…”

  Teresa built a table like the one Ilich had built with her, explained the rules—each player would decide to cooperate or defect, and they’d each be better off if they defected, but it would be better in the long term to cooperate. Elsa seemed only mildly interested, but willing to follow along.

  Connor started moving away from his group just as a new bunch of presenters arrived, washing through the hall with delight and gabbling. He seemed to disappear behind the flood, but she caught a glimpse of his brown hair. She thought he was coming toward her. Her heart started beating a little faster. She wasn’t sure she was more worried that he would find her or that he wouldn’t.

  She played the game with the little girl, pretending to care about it more deeply than the stream of humanity over Elsa’s shoulder. They both cooperated for a few rounds, and then, when Teresa felt like it was time for the rest of the tit-for-tat lesson, she defected. Elsa looked at the handheld with the results as if it didn’t make sense.

  “Now,” Teresa said. “The thing is, once someone defects like that, you have to decide what—”

  “You cheated!” The little girl’s voice was more than just loud. It was a shriek of rage. Her face was twisted in a vicious scowl and dark with blood just under the skin. “You said we should be nice!”

  “No,” Teresa said. “It’s part of the lesson…”

  “Fuck your fucking lesson,” Elsa said. Out of a child that young, the profanity was like a slap. Elsa grabbed the handheld and threw it into the crowd, standing up so fast her chair toppled, clattering on the ground. Before Teresa could do anything, Elsa collapsed and started weeping on the floor.

  Security personnel were already moving through the crowd toward them, but Teresa waved them off. She felt trapped between wanting to comfort Elsa or get her handheld back or leave in humiliation and shame. Elsa’s mouth was square and gaping as her sobs turned into screams again. Someone nearby shouted, Monster! and Teresa thought for a second they meant her. Then the woman was there. Older, with eyes the same shape as Elsa’s, the same skin tone. Elsa’s mother scooped the girl up in her arms, rocking her.

  “It’s okay, Monster,” the mother said, and hushed her gently. “It’s all right. Mama’s here. I’m right here. It’s okay.”

  Elsa clamped her hands over her ears, closed her eyes, and buried her head in her mother’s embrace. The mother rocked her, gently making cooing sounds to soothe her. Teresa took a step forward.

  “I’m so sorry,” the mother said. “Elsa gets overstimulated. It won’t happen again.”

  “No,” Teresa said. “It was my fault. She’s fine. It was me. I didn’t explain the game well enough.”

  The mother smiled and turned her attention back to Elsa. Teresa waited for the mother to start asking questions of the little girl. What just happened? and What mistake did you make? and What would you do differently next time? All the things her father would have asked her to make the moment meaningful. But Elsa�
��s mother did none of that. She only calmed her daughter and told her that everything would be all right. That she was loved. Teresa watched with a sensation she couldn’t quite recognize.

  She didn’t notice Colonel Ilich coming up to her until he touched her shoulder.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said. “Your father is asking to see you. Now, if you can.”

  “Of course,” she said, and followed, only pausing to retrieve her handheld.

  Her father’s private office was small. A small desk with a monitor built into the surface that could display flat on the surface or volumetrically over it. As she came in, it was showing a schematic of the slow zone—the gates, the alien station at their center, Medina Station, and a few dozen ships scattered through 750 trillion cubic kilometers. A space smaller than the interior of a star. Her father was still as stone, looking at it. It was like he didn’t need to breathe anymore. “Is everything okay?” she asked.

  “What do you remember about the experiment in Tecoma system?”

  Teresa sat on the little couch, folding her legs up under her. She tried to recall everything she could of the science briefings she’d been in, but all she could think of was the crying little girl and her mother.

  “It’s where we were doing the first tit-for-tat experiment,” she finally said. “To see if the enemy can be negotiated with.” It seemed ominous that she’d just been reviewing the prisoner’s dilemma, and that it had gone badly.

  “To see if we can make it change its behavior, yes,” her father said, then gave a small, rueful chuckle. “There’s good news and bad there.” He gestured at his monitor, throwing a report to her handheld. “Look this over. Tell me what you make of it.”

  Teresa opened the report like it was a test from Colonel Ilich. Her father watched her while she read through it, looked at the datasets, tried to make it all make sense. She tried not to read Admiral Sagale’s summary at the end, because that felt like cheating. She should be able to draw the conclusions herself.