Tiamat's Wrath

by James S. A. Corey

  With a gesture, he opened a comm channel.

  “Admiral Sagale,” Governor Song’s voice came. “How can I help you?” It had a hint of Mariner Valley drawl. Elvi wondered if it was the mark of a Martian working for Laconia or a Laconian who’d carried her accent out into the alien worlds and back again. Whether this obedience was peculiar to Duarte’s people or if it had been part of the Martian character all along.

  “My eggheads came up with an analysis I’d like your eggheads to take a peek at, Governor. It may be nothing, but I’d recommend we hold action on the bomb ship until we know what we’re looking at.”

  There was a long pause. “You have my curiosity, Admiral. Send over what you have.”

  “Thank you,” Sagale said, and the governor cut the connection. “Share that with the Typhoon and Medina, Dr. Lively. Let’s see if they share your concerns.”

  “Yes, sir,” Jen said, and started packaging her information like she’d been given an extra five minutes on her final exams.

  Fayez touched Elvi’s shoulder and said, almost too softly to hear, “Do you think we just got away with—”

  The universe exploded.

  If it had been a sound, it would have been deafening. Elvi put her hands over her ears just the same. A reflex. An approximation. Jen was screaming. Elvi tried to sink to the deck, but only managed to pull her legs up so that she was floating in a fetal position. The curve of the handhold before her was ornate and beautiful. The smudge of darkness where the oil from the crew’s skin hadn’t been cleaned away was like a map of a vast coastline, fractal and complex. She was aware of Fayez beside her, of the waves of pressure passing between them, touching, and reflecting away as they both screamed. The air was a fog of atoms. Sagale was a cloud of atoms. She was a cloud.

  You’ve been here, she thought. You’ve been here before. Don’t get distracted by it. Don’t lose yourself.

  The cloud that was her hand, vibrations in emptiness, slipped through the void and clatter to the cloud that was the handhold. Fields of energy between her atoms and the bulkhead’s atoms turned into a dance of pressure, and the surge sent lightning up her arm, so complicated it was hard to keep track of. She was aware that she felt it, but there was so much happening it was hard to keep the sensation in mind.

  Elvi found that she could see right through the suddenly vaporous ship, and right through the other ship clouds around it. Medina was a vast but wispy thunderhead at the center of them all.

  Something was moving through the clouds, dark and sinuous as a dancer slipping between raindrops. And then another. And then more. They were everywhere, sliding through the gas and liquid and solid, scattering the clouds with their passage. They were solid. Real in a way the clouds of matter were not. They were more real than anything she’d ever seen. Tendrils of darkness that had never known light. That could never know light. You’ve seen this absence of light before. A darkness like the eye of an angry god… You said that to someone.

  One darted and swirled, off to her left if left meant anything now. It furled like a question mark, and the pattern of atoms and vibrations swirled around it and into it. The beauty of it, the grace, were hard to look away from. Clouds mixed and swirled together in its wake, colors so pure they were only colors. It took effort to recognize they were blood.

  She’d been here before. It had been overwhelming the first time. It was overwhelming again now, but at least she knew what it was. That made holding her mind together possible. At least for a moment.

  You’re doing great, kid. You’re doing great. You can do this. Just a little more. But do it now …

  She tried to remember what her throat was. Tried to imagine that the dots of matter and emptiness had said words before. That they still could. They were her body, the air she breathed. She tried to make it all work together long enough to scream.

  Emergency evacuation. Major Okoye authorization delta-eight. A tendril of darkness darted toward her…

  … and dropped away. All of them slid away, falling like black snowflakes through the cloud of vibrations that was the deck. Everything swirled, one form folding into another. If she unfocused her eyes, she could just recognize them. Jen’s body, rolling as maneuvering thrusters made the deck into a hillside. Someone’s arm from fingers to elbow, and even a few centimeters of flesh beyond. The glow of the main display, too much itself to hold any meaning beyond the simple elegance of photons caught in air. She was aware of her own pain like it was the sound of a distant waterfall. She fell through it and into something like sleep.

  And a blink later, she was back. Thrust that could have been a third of a g or five gs pulled her down. When she forced herself to sit up, blood glued her cheek to the deck. The air stank, but with too many different volatiles to make sense of. Alarms were sounding, echoing off each other in a meaningless cacophony. Everything had gone wrong at once. She hauled herself up to standing.

  The bridge was a thing from a nightmare. Swaths of the bulkheads, decks, equipment were gone. Like an artist had come in with an eraser and taken away bits of it at random. And the others too.

  Sagale was still at his post, a long loop of his head and right shoulder simply vanished. Jen lay in a still pile where the deck met the wall, covered in blood that might have been her own. Travon’s arm lay beside his station, but where his crash couch had been, there was a soft-edged hole down to the next deck and the one below that. It was like seeing a coral reef made from her ship and her friends and—

  “Fayez!” she screamed. “Fayez!”

  “Here,” his voice said behind her. “I’m here. I’m okay.”

  He was in two-thirds of a crash couch. The fluid in the reservoir had all poured out and down and away.

  “I’m okay,” he said again.

  “Your foot’s gone,” she said.

  “I know. But I’m okay,” he said, and closed his eyes. Elvi stumbled to the console that looked most nearly intact. It was hard to walk, and she didn’t know why until she looked down and saw that a scoop of her thigh the size of a softball was missing. As soon as she saw it, she felt the pain.

  A lesser ship would have been dead a hundred times over, but the Falcon was hardy. Its skin had been cut a hundred times, and it had regrown fast enough to keep in air. The reactor was throwing errors and emergency corrections, the log spooling so fast she couldn’t keep track. She pulled up the sensor arrays, and stars appeared on her screen. The ship was out of the slow zone. Free of the rings. The system identified Laconia’s sky. She turned the ship’s attention back to the ring gate falling away behind them. It looked calm. As if nothing at all odd had just happened. She felt laughter burbling up in her throat and tried to keep it down, uncertain whether it would stop once it got started.

  She opened a broadcast channel and prayed that enough of the Falcon still existed to get the signal out. For a moment, the system didn’t respond and her heart sank. Then the transmitter hauled itself to life.

  “Thank you,” she told the ship. “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  She gathered her strength, wondering how much blood she’d lost. How much she had left.

  “To any ship in range. This is Major Elvi Okoye of the Laconian Science Directorate. I am in need of immediate aid. We have mass casualties—”

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Teresa

  I’ve never seen anyone that angry before,” she said. She was telling the story of little Monster Singh and her mother. “I mean, I’ve probably been mad, but this was different. This girl was…”

  “Seriously? You’re one of the angriest people I know, Tiny,” Timothy said.

  His food recycler was in pieces laid out on a blanket, everything carefully in place like an exploded drawing of itself. Only the built-in power supply was still inside the frame. Timothy was going through the components now, cleaning and polishing each one. Looking for the signs of wear. Teresa sat on his cot with her back against the cave wall, her legs pulled up in front of her and Muskrat snoring contentedly at
her side. A repair drone lurked at the edge of the light, its bulbous black eyes looking vaguely hurt that Timothy wasn’t letting it take care of the equipment.

  “I’m not an angry person,” she said. Then, a moment later, “I don’t think I’m angry.”

  Timothy tossed her a pair of dark goggles and motioned for her to put them on. She did, and put a hand over Muskrat’s eyes so that she wouldn’t be blinded. After a few seconds, the light of a welding torch burst in her vision like a tiny green star. The smoke was acrid and metallic and she liked it.

  “Thing is,” Timothy said, loud over the roar of the torch, “there’s only a couple kinds of anger. You get angry because you’re afraid of something or you get angry because you’re frustrated.” The torch turned off with a pop.

  “Safe?” Teresa asked.

  “Sure, you can take ’em off.” When she did, the cave seemed brighter than when she’d put them on before. Even with the intensity of the light, her eyes had adapted to darkness. She scratched Muskrat’s ears as Timothy went on. “If you’re… I don’t know. If you’re scared maybe your dad isn’t the kind of guy you thought he was, you might get angry. Or you’re afraid no one’s got your back. Like Nutless.”

  “His name’s Connor,” Teresa said, but she smiled when she said it.

  “Yeah, him,” Timothy agreed. “Or maybe you’re afraid he made you look stupid in front of your crew. So you get angry. If you didn’t give a shit whether your old man lived or died? If Nutless and your crew didn’t matter to you? Then you’re not angry. Or the other way? You’re trying to get something to work. A conduit to fit. Been working at it for hours, and just when it’s looking about right, the metal bends on you and you gotta start over. That’s angry too, but it ain’t scared-angry. It’s the other one.”

  “So you look at me,” Teresa said, derision in her voice, “and you think I’m scared and frustrated?”

  “Yep.”

  Teresa’s mockery died, and she hugged her knees. It didn’t fit at all with who and what she thought she was, but something in her leaped toward his word. It felt like recognizing someone. Like catching a glimpse of herself from an angle she’d never seen before. It was fascinating.

  “How do you deal with it?”

  “Fucked if I know, Tiny. I don’t do those.”

  “You don’t get angry?”

  “Not out of fear, anyway. I don’t remember the last time I was afraid of something. Frustration was more my thing. But I had this friend, and I watched her die slow. I couldn’t do anything about it. That was frustrating, and I got angry. Started looking for a fight. But I had another friend who straightened me out.”

  “How?”

  “She beat the living shit out of me,” Timothy said. “That helped. And ever since then, nothing has seemed like it was worth getting too bent out of shape over.”

  He rolled a bright silver cone about the size of a thumb in his palm and scowled.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Injector’s getting a little ragged at the mouth is all,” Timothy said. “I can touch it up. Just means I’ll be drinking my yeast patties more than eating them.”

  “You spend a lot of time with that thing.”

  “You take care of your tools, your tools take care of you.”

  Teresa leaned against the wall. The stone was cool against her back. Deep cave temperatures were the measure of the underlying climate average. Mass and depth smoothed out the daily highs and lows—even the annual fluctuations of summer and winter. She knew it intellectually, but she hadn’t understood it until Timothy’s cave. The way it always felt cool in the heat and warm in the chill.

  “You know, the wise man living alone on the mountain is really cliché,” she said, smiling when she said it so he wouldn’t think she was being mean. “Anyway, I don’t have anything to be scared of.”

  “Assassins with pocket nukes for one,” Timothy said, slotting the injector back into its housing.

  Teresa laughed, and after a second, Timothy smiled too.

  “If anyone’s going to kill me, it’ll probably be Dr. Cortázar,” she said.

  “Yeah? Why’s that?”

  “It’s just a joke. I was watching Holden, like we talked about? And I heard this conversation he and Dr. Cortázar were having.”

  “What about?” Timothy asked, idly.

  Teresa thought back. What had they been talking about exactly? Mostly she remembered Cortázar talking about how nature ate babies and Holden looking into the camera. But it had been about her father too.

  She took in a breath, ready to speak, and the air rattled against the back of her throat and down into her lungs like a billion little molecule-sized marbles banging against the soft tissue. Her respiration system was a cave inside Timothy’s cave, and she was acutely aware of the complexity of her own body and the answering complexity of the caverns around her. Veins and chips in the wall before her fragmented and smoothed together. Gravity trying to tug her down into the floor, and the astonishingly complex dance of the electrons in the stone and her flesh pushing back. She managed to wonder if she’d been drugged before her awareness was overwhelmed by the immediacy and complexity of the air and her body and the increasingly invisible boundary that failed to really divide her from the world…

  Muskrat barked anxiously. She’d slumped down on the cot at some point without knowing she was doing it. Timothy stood up, his expression perfectly focused and his recycler forgotten. The repair drone made a weird yipping sound as it tried to stand up, staggering drunkenly.

  “That wasn’t just me, right?” Timothy said.

  “I don’t think so,” Teresa said.

  “Yeah, all right. It’s been fun, Tiny, but you need to head home now.”

  “What was that? Is there something wrong with the air in here? Are there fumes?”

  “Nope,” Timothy said, taking her by the arm and lifting her to her feet. “Air’s fine. That was something else. And it probably happened to a lot of people, so they’re gonna be scared, and they’re going to want to find where everyone important to them is, and that’s you. So you need to be not here.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said, but Timothy was pulling her forward, toward the mouth of the cave. His grip on her arm was like a vise. His expression was blank. It made him frightening. Muskrat followed behind, barking like she was trying to warn them of something.

  In the open air, the world was normal. The strange sensations she’d had before already seemed like a bad dream or an accident. Timothy’s reaction was the only thing that made it frightening. He looked up, scanning the sky, then nodded to himself.

  “Okay, Tiny. You and the furball head back home.”

  “I’ll come back as soon as I can,” she said. She didn’t know why she wanted to reassure him.

  “Okay.”

  It was the way he said it. Like his mind was already someplace else. She’d had adults treat her like that before—polite and agreeable, but elsewhere. Never Timothy, though. He was different. He was supposed to be different.

  “Will you be here when I do?”

  “I’ll have to, I guess. I’m not done yet, so—”

  She hugged him. It was like hugging a tree. He pulled back, and when he looked at her, she thought there was something like regret in his expression. It couldn’t have been pity.

  “Good luck, Tiny,” he said, then turned back toward his cave and was gone. Muskrat barked once and looked after him, as worried as Teresa was.

  “Come on,” she said, and started for her secret passage back into the State Building and home. The afternoon was cool. The leaves were starting to retreat back into their winter sheaths, leaving the trees looking stubbly. A sunbird hanging on a low branch opened its leathery wings at her and hissed, but she ignored it. At the horizon, wide clouds bunched and trailed gray veils of storm. If they came this way, the drainage tunnel would be impassable and she’d be stuck outside the walls. She picked up her pace…

  The sound
of the flier started as a high and distant whine, but it grew louder quickly. Less than a minute after she first noticed it, the sound was a roar. The black laminate body and three cold thrusters appeared over the treetops and fell into a thin meadow, hardly more than a break between trees. When the door popped open, she expected to see the light-blue uniforms of security. She prepared to identify herself and explain that she’d decided to go for a hike. It was only partly a lie.

  But while there were two armed guards, the first person out of the flier was Colonel Ilich. He trotted toward her, and his face was dark. The thrusters didn’t cycle all the way down, so when he reached her, he had to shout.

  “Get in the flier.”

  “What?”

  “You need to get in the flier now. You have to get back to the State Building.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Ilich’s jaw clenched and he pointed at the open door. “You. There. Now. This isn’t difficult.”

  Teresa stepped back like she’d been slapped. In all the years Ilich had been her tutor, he had never been mean to her. Never been anything but patient and supportive and amused. Even when she didn’t do her work or did something inappropriate, the punishment was just a long talk about why she’d made the choices she did and what the goals of her education were. It was like seeing a different man in an Ilich suit. She felt tears welling up in her eyes. She saw Oh, for fuck’s sake on his lips, but she couldn’t hear it.

  He made a little bow and gestured her forward like a servant making way for his master, but she felt the impatience in it. The contempt. The anger.

  Oh, she thought as she walked to the flier. He’s frightened.

  At the flier, Muskrat balked, and before Teresa could coax her in, Ilich assigned one of the guards to go back on foot with the dog. The flier’s door closed with a deep clank, and they lurched up over the trees. Even though the body of the flier had looked opaque from the outside, it was no darker than tinted glass from her seat. She could see the State Building clearly as soon as they cleared the top branches.