Tiamat's Wrath

by James S. A. Corey

  It was a week and a half after her arrival, and Naomi was out, sitting on the desert sand as the sun set. The truth was that as much as she enjoyed complaining about being planetside, there was a kind of surreal thrill to being under a vast dome of air. After an hour or so, she had to go back inside or she started getting anxious. But for that first thirty minutes, it was beautiful. The sunlight seemed to sink into the sand, lighting it from within. And the star field that bloomed above her head was familiar, even if the high air made the steady stars seem to flicker and shimmer.

  It felt very strange to be in such a quiet, peaceful, empty place and also the middle of a war.

  She heard his footsteps on the sand, soft and regular as an air intake gently cycling. She sat up and dusted the sand from the backs of her arms. Alex was wearing his flight suit, and it hung a little loose on him. Even with his usual beaming smile, he seemed a little deflated. He grunted as he sat on the dune beside her.

  “You holding together okay?” Alex asked.

  “I’m all right,” Naomi said.

  “Just asking because you’ve been spending a lot of time working the Roci with me, and then going straight to the reports and newsfeeds when you’re done. You haven’t taken much downtime.”

  Naomi felt an old, familiar touch of annoyance, and it was strangely delightful. If Alex had started his mother hen habits back up, it had to mean he was feeling better. Not recovered, maybe never that, but improved.

  “Doing the briefings is my downtime.”

  “Coordinating a massive resistance to an authoritarian and galaxy-spanning empire is your hobby?”

  “I didn’t have an option. We don’t have a golgo table, and… No offense? Even if we did, you play like a Martian.”

  He chuckled to show he knew it was affection. “Have you got a note back for them? Another bottle to pop out into the systems?”

  It was a hard question. Even when she’d had her mind on the panels and wiring of the Rocinante, a part of her had been thinking about the grand strategy of the underground. About limiting Laconian reach and power, about taking advantage of the openings left by the enemy’s mistakes.

  And about the goal at the end. That was the trick of grand strategy. Knowing where the journey was ending even when you were making up all the individual steps to get there.

  Working on the Roci had given the insight she’d had on the passage out from Auberon time to season. What had been a vision of a possible future had, while she worked with her hands and taken her mind elsewhere, become a bone-deep certainty. As long as Laconia had the capacity to make ships like the Tempest and the Typhoon, it could never grow past being an oppressor. The dream of empire could only die if the ancient Martian dream of independence through better technology was put to rest.

  An attack on Laconia posed half a dozen unsolvable problems, and Naomi thought she had solutions to at least four of them…

  “I’ve got some things I should send out. I can bounce a broadcast off the repeaters at Freehold and up to the Storm. Even if there aren’t any ships closer to the gate than that, they can get one of their torpedoes going. And if they’ve been doing what they’re supposed to, they’ll have some bottles already on the float near the gates.”

  “Lightspeed is way better than the best drive,” Alex said, nodding sagely. “Trying to send a bottle from here would take a pretty long time. You know, though, there is a way to shave a few seconds off the time it takes to get your messages out.”

  She shifted to look at him. The sun was gone, and the rose-and-gray twilight made him look younger. She lifted an eyebrow, inviting him to go on. He looked at her with feigned innocence.

  “All we’ve got to do is be a few light-seconds closer, right?”

  It hit her with a relief she hadn’t expected. She looked up into the Freehold sky, past it to the stars.

  “Right,” she said. “Let’s do that. I’m sick of walking on walls.”

  An hour later, they were strapped into their couches on the flight deck. Working the Rocinante’s displays was like singing with an old friend as she checked the maneuvering thrusters’ output profiles. The reactor was stable. The thrust was good. Even after its long rest, the Roci’s power grid was solid.

  “We’re good,” Naomi said. “Take her out.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  The ship lurched, and the crash couches shifted. Naomi had the familiar sense of motion as they accelerated and then slid out of the cave on maneuvering thrusters only. The deck swung around and down until it was under her, and she sank into the gel as Alex took them higher from the ground.

  When the drive kicked in, the whole ship rocked and shuddered, and Naomi felt the prick of the needle and then the coolness of the juice in her veins, keeping her from suffering the worst of the g forces. Alex was grinning like a kid on his birthday as the old gunship rose again for the great emptiness. Naomi watched the external temperature as they rose, the atmosphere growing colder and colder, but also thinner and thinner until there wasn’t enough there to conduct away heat at all. The shuddering stopped, and the only sounds were the ticking of the air recyclers and the occasional harmonic chiming of the drive passing through a resonance frequency. On her tactical display, the planet fell away behind them and they passed escape velocity. They weren’t even in a long orbit of Freehold now. They were on their own. Free.

  Naomi shouted, a wide, celebratory yawp. And Alex answered back. She lay back in the couch and let herself just be home. Just for a moment.

  The Roci was an old ship now. She’d never be state of the art again. But like old tools, well used and well cared for, she’d become something more than plating and wires, conduits and storage and sensor arrays. Old Rokku had said that after fifty years flying, a ship had a soul. It had seemed like a cute superstition when she was young. It seemed obvious now.

  “God, I missed this,” Alex said.

  “I know, right?”

  An hour later, Alex put them on the float, and Naomi unstrapped. Freehold system was so empty, there was no traffic control authority. No flight plans or patrols watching for drive plumes without transponders. She started her diagnostics running, but she already knew from the sound of the drive and the taste of the air that they’d come back clean. She moved from station to station, checking the displays and controls as if there were other crew members who might be using them.

  She didn’t notice the change in Alex’s mood until he spoke.

  “I tried to keep her alive. I really did. Right at the end, she was out there throwing rounds at that great big bastard, and I was going to take us in. Burn the Storm right in there and try to get her back on board. But there wasn’t time.” His sigh had a shudder in it. “And it would just have fucked things up if I’d done it.”

  Naomi wrapped her hand around a foothold and braced. She turned to look at him, and this time he met her eyes.

  “She was a hell of a woman,” Naomi said. “We were lucky to know her.”

  “The thing I kept thinking all the way out was, How am I going to tell Kit his Aunt Bobbie’s gone?”

  “How did you?”

  “I haven’t yet. I couldn’t stand to when we were in Sol system. And now… I still don’t know if I can. I miss her. I miss all of them, but… but I watched her go, and… Shit.”

  “I know,” Naomi said. “I was thinking about her a lot. I sent the okay for the mission.”

  “Oh, Naomi. No. This isn’t your fault.”

  “I know that. I don’t always feel it, but I know it. And it’s strange, but the way I comfort myself? I think of all the other ways she could have died. Like oncocidal-resistant cancer. A reactor bottle failure. Just getting old and frail until the antiaging drugs weren’t enough anymore.”

  “That’s a little macabre,” Alex said. Then, a moment later, “But yeah. I know exactly what you mean.”

  “It was Bobbie,” Naomi said. “She knew we don’t live forever. And if she’d gotten to choose a way to go, I bet this would have been
in her top five.”

  Alex was quiet for a few seconds, then sniffed. “I miss her every minute of every day, but god damn, it was just so fuckin’ right.”

  “Going hand to hand with a ship the combined strength of Earth, Mars, and the Transport Union couldn’t beat and winning?”

  “Yeah. If we’ve got to die, I guess that’s a pretty good way to go. Still. I’m sorry we’ve got to die.”

  “Mortality does suck that way,” Naomi said.

  “What would be your way?”

  “I don’t know. That’s not what I think about,” she said, surprised that she knew her opinion about what aspect of her own death was important to her. “I don’t care how I go. There are just things I want done first.”

  “Like what?”

  “I want to see Jim again. And Amos. I want this war over with, and a real peace established. The kind where people can be angry with each other and hate each other and no one has to die over it. That’d be enough.”

  “Yeah,” Alex said. “That would. I think about Amos a lot. Do you think—”

  There was something like a great, soundless pop—a detonation without quite being a detonation—and Naomi fell. Would have fallen if direction still existed. Everything had gone the electric noncolor of eyes pressed too hard in the darkness. Nothingness buzzed around her like an assault. Somewhere nearby, someone was screaming. It might have been Alex. It might have been her own voice.

  The bright void she fell into—falling in all directions at once—had shapes inside the light, jagged and shifting as a migraine halo. She felt something missing in herself, but couldn’t tell what it was. That frightened her worse than the suddenness and strangeness of the transition. The sense of absence without an object, of loss without knowing what had been lost. She tried to close her eyes, but nothing changed. She tried to reach out, but there was nothing to reach for. Or with. She couldn’t tell whether she’d just fallen into the light or if she’d been falling for hours.

  She felt herself slipping into something else. Something like sleep but not sleep, and she resisted by instinct. A deep fear wrapped itself around her, and she held on to it as if it could save her.

  And then, without any more warning than had come before, it was over. She was on the Rocinante’s flight deck. She’d drifted away from her crash couch. Behind her, Alex gagged. She grabbed a handhold and braced. Her body felt wrung out, exhausted. Like she’d been awake for too many days, and the fatigue had seeped into her muscles.

  “Did we,” she said, and her voice sounded weird in her ears. She swallowed and tried again. “Did we lose time?”

  The soft tap of Alex’s fingers against a control panel. She closed her eyes, grateful beyond words that the darkness came when her lids fell. A wave of nausea came over her and left again.

  “We did,” Alex said. “Lost… almost twenty minutes.”

  She pushed off, navigating her way to her couch by long instinct more than thought. She strapped in with a sense of deep gratitude. Alex’s face was grayish, like he’d just seen something horrifying.

  “That wasn’t… that wasn’t like the other ones,” he said. “That was different.”

  “It was,” Naomi said.

  Alex checked over the Rocinante’s status and seemed to take some comfort in it. Naomi was tingling, the pins-and-needles feel of a pinched nerve, but without a physical location on her body. Like her mind was slowly coming back. It was a deeply unsettling feeling.

  “Fucking Duarte,” she said. “Fucking Laconia and their fucking tests.”

  “What do you think they did this time?”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: Elvi

  Elvi’s hand terminal chimed again. It was past time for her to go, but she couldn’t pull herself away. Also, the girl in the glass cage didn’t have a chair, and so Elvi had chosen to sit on the floor beside her. The prospect of getting back up with her aching leg wasn’t pleasant.

  “So,” she said, “it wasn’t a change in cognition?”

  There was a moment of eerie stillness, the off-putting pause that they always seemed to have, and then Cara shook her head. “I mean, it’s hard to be sure what it was like really, but I didn’t have the feeling of being any different. Except for the library, you know.”

  The library was what Cara and Alexander—whose nickname in the family had been Xan—called the information that they carried with them after their re-creation by the repair drones. It was, according to them, like knowing things without having to learn them first. Sometimes the information was straightforward, like details about the local environment. Sometimes it was inscrutable, like the fact that substrate-level entities were difficult to refract through rich-light. That was the most interesting example, because Cara understood what the substrate was, and what refraction meant in that context, and the nature of rich-light, but the whole body of knowledge didn’t connect to anything. There was no shared context with anything like food or trees or water. Any human knowledge. It was, Elvi thought, like finding a sea turtle who thoroughly understood Godel’s incompleteness theorem, but didn’t have any sea-turtley application for it.

  That kind of cognitive artifact was a large part of why Cortázar had drawn the conclusion that Cara and Xan weren’t actually the children they’d been before they were “repaired,” but alien technology created using human corpses. It was a deep question, and one that Elvi struggled with. The children had clearly been transformed. The fact that they weren’t aging or developing was evidence enough of that. The blackness of their eyes and the grayness of their skin dropped them straight into an uncanny valley that still made something in Elvi’s hindbrain recoil.

  But then sometimes when no one was observing them, Xan would put his head in Cara’s lap so she could ruffle his hair. It was a moment that primates had been sharing back to the Pleistocene, deeper and more recognizable than mere humanity. Or Cara would crack a joke about something Elvi asked, and then smile almost shyly when Elvi actually laughed. Elvi’s opinion shifted on them. Sometimes she was sure they were puppets of inscrutable alien technologies. Sometimes it seemed obvious that Cortázar had built his case that they weren’t human just so he could keep them in a cage for a few decades and run tests on them. Elvi wasn’t sure if she liked them or if they scared the shit out of her. If they were passing their Turing test, or if she was failing it.

  But it was interesting that none of Cortázar’s work on Duarte seemed to have resulted in the high consul’s getting access to the library, and the weird turning-off of consciousness hadn’t broken Cara and Xan the way it had Duarte. There was a clue in there somewhere. She had the dataset. She just needed the right grid to put over it, and the pattern would make sense. She could feel it.

  Her hand terminal went off again. This time with a message. Her transport had arrived. She was late for the briefing. She muttered something obscene and started levering herself up to standing. “I have to go.”

  “We’ll be here when you get back,” Cara said, and after a pause, Xan laughed. Elvi smiled too. It was silly to treat them like she’d been having lunch with friends and had to go too soon, but there she was. Sometimes she was silly.

  She leaned on her cane as she made her way out through the labs to the fresh and open air. Her leg hurt. The regrowth, as simple as it was, was going slowly. Poorly. Fayez’s new foot was already in place, the skin a little paler and softer, the new muscles still prone to cramp if he walked too much. But he’d regrown bones and tendons and nerves, and she was still leaning on a cane.

  The difference, she knew, was the stress. Fayez was almost ornamental in her present life. He slept in, ate at the State Building, visited with whoever came through the gardens or read books or watched old entertainment feeds. He recuperated. Elvi was diving through Cortázar’s data when she wasn’t examining Duarte’s condition or trying to keep Teresa from being murdered in the name of curiosity or going over her own data from the Falcon. She was barely sleeping, and when she did, it was just rolling the dice to se
e what flavor of nightmare was taking its turn.

  There would be a point when it was all too much. When the intrusive image of Sagale with a part of his head missing wouldn’t let itself be kicked down the road for her to think about later even one more time. When she’d break. It hadn’t come yet, though, so she didn’t have to deal with it. She was very aware that she was working on what Fayez called fuck-it-if-it’s-not-happening-right-now protocol.

  Worse than that, she was coming to a place where she enjoyed the intensity. She had never been under more stress in her life, except maybe once, back on Ilus. Everyone had been going blind, and there were neurotoxin-covered slugs crawling up out of the ground, and alien artifacts coming to life, and people murdering each other over political issues and personal pride. Everything had depended on her talent and the sharpness of her mind. And now it did again. And part of her loved it like it was sugar. Probably not a healthy part.

  The driver waiting for her had an umbrella up to shield her from a light, misty rain. He didn’t speak. When she got to the car, she leaned toward him. “Let Trejo know I’m on my way.”

  “I already have, Doctor,” the driver said.

  Drivers, Elvi thought as they pulled away, were a strange kind of affectation. It would have been easier to have a transport just pick her up and take her without another human involved. Having someone there whose job was to be deferential to her actually slowed things down. An extra layer of processing. Like that pause the children had. She wondered if it was like a stutter. She had to read up on that. Maybe there was something useful in it.

  The State Building was wreathed in mist. The car’s heater wasn’t quite enough to push back the cold that radiated from the window. Early winter on Laconia—on this part of Laconia anyway—seemed to involve a lot of chilly days and bitter nights. As soon as the sun went down, all the mist would turn into an all-encompassing layer of ice. The local trees had all retracted their leaves. The imported ones had seen all their chloroplasts die out and were in the process of dropping red and yellow and brown remnants.