Tiamat's Wrath

by James S. A. Corey

  The ship told her Alex was in the machine shop, and that four of her crew besides him were in various parts of the ship. All that mattered to her at the moment was that Alex was alone. This wasn’t a conversation she needed the others to hear. Not yet, anyway.

  The machine shop looked less like the manufacturing workshop that the Rocinante had and more like a showroom or a spa. The cabinets were set into gently curving walls, the seams too fine to see. The light came from the walls themselves, the skin of the ship glowing softly and uniformly to make the space gentle and shadowless. Alex stood at one of the benches with a manufacturing printer that looked like it had been grown from a seed more than built. He was thinner about the middle than he’d been when he was married. What was left of his hair had gone white, and a stubble of pale whiskers marked his dark cheeks. He reminded her of the man who’d run the ice cream shop by her school when she’d been a child. He looked up at her and nodded, and the memory faded. He was only Alex again.

  “Something broken?” she asked, and pointed to the printer with her chin.

  “The center brace on my crash couch was showing some wear. I broke down the old piece and I’m printing up a replacement,” he said. “What brings you back to the ship?”

  “I was looking for you,” she said. “We need to have a conversation.”

  “I thought we might.”

  “The things you said before? About why I was… reaching for something. You may have been right.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But you aren’t now,” she said. “The situation’s changed on us. The calculus shifted when they closed the gates.”

  “There are still Transport Union ships we could meet with. The gates will open at some point. I mean, they can’t keep them closed forever, I don’t care what happened out there.”

  “But until they do, we’re stuck in Sol system. But that’s not the big point. They lost the Typhoon. They only had three of these monsters. The Heart of the Tempest controlling Sol system because that’s the place with the power and the resources. The population.”

  “The history,” Alex said. “It has the story of a time when Laconia wasn’t in charge.”

  “That too,” Bobbie said. “The Eye of the Typhoon to control the gates. The Voice of the Whirlwind back in Laconia protecting their home system. Now they’re down one because of whatever this disaster was. And they’re scrambling. Trejo’s been called back to Laconia. No one’s in control of the ring space. Everything I said before about showing people that the fight is winnable is still true, and if it works we’ll be taking their fleet down to a single battleship. Maybe they’ll keep it in Laconia. Maybe they’ll take it to the ring space if they think whatever that was won’t happen again. They won’t bring it here. Sol system will get a lot easier for the underground to navigate. It’s still the most important system, and we can go a long way toward taking it back. It’s not just a symbolic win anymore. It’s tactical and strategic too. I can’t let the opportunity go.”

  “I hear what you’re saying,” Alex said.

  The printer ticked to itself for a few seconds.

  “I know you have reservations,” Bobbie said. “I respect them. Seriously.”

  “No, it’s not that,” Alex began. “I just—”

  “I don’t want you in on this if you aren’t certain. No, listen to me. It’s a long shot. The Tempest is the deadliest machine humans have ever built. We both know what it stood up to in the war. Even if we do manage to deliver the package, I don’t know for certain that the antimatter will be enough to kill it. You have a kid. And before long, he’s probably going to have a kid. Holden’s gone. Amos is gone. Naomi’s doing her hermit thing. The Roci’s mothballed. And… if this doesn’t work, the Storm’s gone too. If you want out, that’s not a wrong thing.”

  “If I want out?”

  “If you want to retire. We can get you a fresh name, or do more background for the one you’ve got. Set you up with a job on Ceres or Ganymede or here. Whatever. You could actually get to know Kit and his wife. No one will think less of you for wanting that.”

  “I might,” Alex said.

  “I need you a hundred percent or nothing.”

  Alex scratched his chin. The printer chimed that its run was finished, but Alex didn’t open it to take out the new brace.

  “You’re speaking as the captain of this ship,” he said. “You actually pronounce things a little differently when you’re being in charge. You know that? It’s subtle, but it’s there. Anyway, as the captain, I know what you’re saying. And I know why you’re saying it. But as my friend, I need a favor from you.”

  No favors, no compromises, either you’re in or you’re out popped to her lips.

  “What do you need?” she asked.

  “Run it by Naomi. If she says it’s the wrong thing, listen to her. Hear her out.”

  Bobbie felt herself pushing back against the idea. The old fight was like a knot in her gut, hard as stone. But…

  “If she agrees?”

  Alex squared his shoulders, lowered his center of gravity, and smiled amiably. No one else on the ship would have recognized the imitation of Amos, but she did.

  “Then we go fuck some motherfuckers permanently up,” he said.

  Interlude: The Dancing Bear

  Holden woke up with the light of dawn streaming through the high window and casting shadows across the ceiling. The last trails of a dream—something about crocodiles getting into a water recycler and him and Naomi trying to lure them out with a salt shaker—slipped away. He stretched, yawned, and pulled himself up out of the wide bed with its soft pillows and plush blanket. He took a moment at the foot of the bed to take everything in. The flowers in the vase by the window. The subtle pattern woven into the sheets. He worked his toes against the soft, warm rug. And he recited silently what he always did, every morning since the beginning.

  This is your cell. You are in prison. Don’t forget.

  He smiled contentedly because someone was watching.

  His shower was tiled with river stones, smooth and beautiful. The water was always warm, and the soap was scented with sandalwood and lilac. The towels were soft and thick and white as fresh-fallen snow. He shaved in a mirror that was heated to keep condensation from forming on it. His Laconian uniform—real cloth, not recycled paper—was pressed and clean in his footlocker. He dressed himself, humming a light melody he remembered from his childhood because someone was listening.

  He had come to Laconia in a much less pleasant cell. He had been questioned in a box. He’d been beaten. And in the early days, threatened with worse things than that. In the later days, tempted with the promise of freedom. Even power. It could have been much, much worse. He had, after all, been part of an attack that had crippled Medina Station and ended with the agents of the underground scattering to systems all around the empire. Someone had even managed to steal one of Laconia’s early destroyers out from under them. Holden had known a lot about how the underground on Medina functioned, who was involved with it, and where they could be found. He was alive and had all his fingers with the nails still attached because he’d also known about the dead space that had appeared on the Tempest when it used its magnetic field generator in normal space. And the dead spaces like it in all the systems besides Sol. He was the one person in the whole of humanity who had—escorted by the enslaved remnants of Detective Miller—been inside the alien station and seen the fate of the protomolecule’s builders firsthand. And from the first moment they’d allowed it, he’d been shoveling everything he knew about that at them. Calling him cooperative on the subject would have been a vast understatement, and with every passing week, his knowledge of the underground was more out of date. Less useful. They didn’t even bother asking him about that stuff anymore.

  Duarte was a thoughtful, educated, civilized man and a murderer. He was charming and funny and a little melancholy and, as far as Holden could tell, completely unaware of his own monstrous ambition. Like a relig
ious fanatic, the man really believed that everything he’d done was justified by his goal in doing it. Even when it was the push for his own personal immortality—and then his daughter’s—before slamming the door behind them, Duarte managed to cast it as a necessary burden for the good of the species. He was above all else a charming little ratfuck. As Holden grew to respect the man, even to like him, he was careful never to lose sight of the fact that Duarte was a monster.

  There was a lock on his door, but he didn’t control it. He put the handheld he’d been issued in a pocket, walked out into the courtyard, and closed the door behind him. Anyone who wanted in could go in. If they wanted for some reason to lock him out—or in—they could. He put his hands in his pockets and strolled down a colonnaded walkway. The ferns in the planter came from Earth. Maybe the soil did too. Some minor functionary of the state came out of a doorway before him, turned and breezed by him as if he hadn’t been there. He was like a fern that way. Decorative.

  The commissary was larger than a whole deck of the Rocinante. Pale, vaulted ceilings and an open kitchen with three cooks on duty any time of the day or night. A few tables by the windows, a dozen scattered in another courtyard at the back. Fresh fruit. Fresh eggs. Fresh meats and cheeses and rice. Not too much of any one thing. The elegance came from the labor and deference of the people, not from conspicuous waste. Loyalty valued over wealth. It was amazing what you could learn about someone by sitting quietly for a few months with what they’d built.

  He got a carved wooden tray and a plate of rice and fish, the way he usually did. A smaller plate of melon and berries. A light-roast coffee in a white ceramic cup the size of a small soup bowl. Cortázar was sitting alone in an alcove at the back, looking at something on a hand terminal. Out of discipline, Holden grinned and went to sit across from the sociopathic professional vivisectionist.

  “Good morning, Doc,” he said. “Haven’t seen you in a while. Universe treating you gently?”

  Cortázar closed whatever file he’d been reading over, but not before Holden caught the phrase indefinite homeostasis. He didn’t know what it meant exactly, and he couldn’t look it up without someone knowing he had.

  “Things are fine,” Cortázar said, and the glimmer in his eyes meant that was true. Which probably meant they were terrible for someone who wasn’t Paolo Cortázar. “Very good.”

  “Yeah?” Holden said. “What’s the good word?”

  For a second, Cortázar teetered on the edge of saying something, but he pulled back. It was a confirmation of his good mood. The doctor liked knowing more than the people around him. It gave him a sense of power. The times he was most likely to let his guard down were when he was angry or annoyed. Or drunk. Drunk and complaining Cortázar was the best version of the man.

  “Nothing I can talk about,” he said, and rose from his place even though his food was only half-eaten. “I’m sorry I can’t stay. Schedule.”

  “If you get time later, track me down and we can play some more chess,” Holden said. He lost a lot of chess to Cortázar. He didn’t even have to throw the games. The guy was good. “You will always find me at home.”

  Left alone, Holden ate his breakfast in silence and let the atmosphere of the room wash over him. Another of the things he’d learned during his time as a dancing bear was not to search for clues to anything. The effort of the search actually made him overlook things. It was better to be passive and notice what was there. Like the way the cooks spoke to each other, scowling. Like the speed of the dignitaries walking into and out of the commissary, the way their shoulders were tight.

  Ever since the most recent event—the weird shift in his perception, the lost time and consciousness—the atmosphere in the State Building had been like this. Something was going on, but Holden didn’t know what. No one had even mentioned it to him. And he didn’t ask. Because someone was always listening.

  When he was done, he left his plate to be cleared away, got his usual two cups of fresh coffee in takeaway mugs, and tucked a half link of sausage into his pocket. He walked out toward the gardens. It was a little cool. Seasons were longer on Laconia, but the autumn was definitely starting to get its roots into things. High above, one of the weird jellyfish-looking cloud things sailed through the air, the blue of the sky showing through its transparent flesh. The guard post was little more than a bench with a square-jawed young man who looked like he might have been one of Alex’s cousins.

  “Good morning, Fernand,” Holden said. “Brought you a little something.”

  The guard smiled and shook his head. “I still can’t accept that from you, sir.”

  “I understand,” Holden said. “It’s a shame, you know, because the coffee they serve at the VIP commissary is really good. Fresh beans that they didn’t roast like they were hiding evidence. Water with a little bit of minerals, but not so much that it tastes like you’re drinking a quarry. It’s excellent stuff, but…”

  “It sounds wonderful, sir.”

  Holden put one of the takeaway mugs on the bench. “I’ll just put this here so you can dispose of it safely. And this one that Lieutenant Yao can dispose of too. It has a little sugar in it.”

  “I’ll let her know to get rid of it,” the guard said with a smile. It had taken weeks to get that far with the kid. It wasn’t much, but it wasn’t nothing. Every person in the State Building who saw humanity in Holden, who shared a joke with him, or who had a pattern in their day that he could be a part of, made him that tiny bit harder to kill. No one thing he did made a difference. All of it together might decide between mercy or a bullet in the back of his skull somewhere not too far down the line. So Holden chuckled like the guard was a friend and ambled out into the gardens.

  There were patterns in the life of the State Building. Everyone had routines, whether they knew it or not. Here at the heart of the empire, with thousands of people making their way into and out of and through the buildings at the source of authority and power, he could have spent lifetimes tracking them all. It was like sitting and watching a termite hive until each insect stopped being itself and turned into an organ in a much larger, older consciousness. If he lived as long as Duarte intended to, he still wouldn’t understand all the subtleties of it. For his present purposes, the smaller patterns were enough. Things like Cortázar enjoyed winning at chess and the guard lieutenant liked sugar in her coffee and Duarte’s daughter went out into the gardens in the late morning, especially when she was upset.

  Not that she always did. Some days, Holden put himself in what he hoped would be her path and wound up spending hours reading old adventure novels or watching censor-approved entertainment feeds. Not news. He had access to the state propaganda feeds, but he couldn’t bring himself to watch them. Either they’d make him angry, and he couldn’t afford to be angry, or through simple repetition they’d start to seem true. He couldn’t afford that either.

  Today, he picked a little pagoda set by an artificial stream. The plants there were local varieties. The leaflike structures were darker than the plants he’d known growing up. Blue black with whatever chlorophyll analog Laconia’s evolutionary history had come up with. Still wide, to catch the energy of the sun. Still tall to get above everything they were competing with. Similar pressures yielded similar solutions, just the way flight had evolved five different times on Earth. Good moves in design space. That’s what Elvi Okoye had called it.

  He took out his handheld, and for almost two hours let himself sink into an old murder mystery set on an ice hauler in the Belt before the gates opened, and written by someone who had clearly never been on an ice hauler in their life. The first sign that he wasn’t alone was the barking. He put down his reading just as the old Labrador came galloping around the hedge, grinning the way only dogs could. Holden took the sausage out of his pocket and let the dog eat it from his palm while he scratched the old girl’s ears. There was no better way to seem trustworthy than to be liked by a dog, and there was no better way to convince a dog to like you than br
ibery.

  “Who’s a good dog?” he said. The dog huffed once just as the girl came around. Teresa, the heir apparent. Princess of the empire. She was fourteen, and in the phase of adolescence where every emotion spilled down her face. He barely had to glance at her to know that something had wrecked her.

  “Hey,” he said, the way he always did. Every time the same, so that the pattern of it became familiar. So that he became familiar. Because things that are familiar aren’t a threat.

  Normally she answered with Hello, but today she broke the pattern. She didn’t say anything at all, just looked at her dog and avoided Holden’s gaze. Her eyes were bloodshot, with dark smudges under them. Her skin was paler than usual. Whatever was going on, it was personal to her. That narrowed the options down.

  “You know what’s weird,” he said. “I saw Dr. Cortázar at breakfast, and he was in a big rush. Normally he’ll stop, chew the fat for a little while. Today, he skinned right out of there. Didn’t even bother to whip my ass on the chessboard.”

  “He’s busy right now,” Teresa said. Her voice was as ruined as she was. “He has a patient. Dr. Okoye. The one from the Science Directorate. Her husband too. She got hurt, and she’s here at the State Building so she and Father can talk. She isn’t hurt badly. She’ll be fine, but Dr. Cortázar is helping to take care of her.”

  At the end of the speech, she nodded, like she was reviewing what she’d said and approved of it. It was a small gesture. The kind that would lose her a lot of money if she ever started playing cards.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Holden said. “I hope she gets better.”

  He didn’t ask what had happened. He didn’t dig for information. He should have left it at that. From a tactical point of view, anything more was a mistake.

  “Hey,” he said. “I may not be the guy you want to hear this from, but whatever it is? It’s going to be okay.”

  The girl’s eyes went wide, and then they went hard. It didn’t take a second.