Tiamat's Wrath

by James S. A. Corey

  “All right,” Naomi said loud enough for the flight-deck crew to hear. “It’s time. Alex?”

  “Aye, aye, Cap,” Alex said. He triggered the acceleration alarm through the whole ship, waited twenty seconds for any stragglers to get into a couch, and the Roci jumped up, eager as he was. The gel of the crash couch pressed back, cool against him, and he felt himself grinning. His HUD marked the pathway to the gate, and he started wondering how bad it might be on the other side. As the fear of staying in the slow zone faded, the fear of leaving it for Laconia ramped up.

  Behind him, another ship’s drive bloomed. The Storm. And then the Quinn. The Cassius. They’d timed it all out to the second. He felt the needle and then the surge of the juice. It was a hard burn for him, it was going to be hellish for the Belters. For Naomi.

  He kept his eyes on the drive status, on the maneuvering thrusters. They were making the transit much faster than usual, and a misfiring maneuvering thruster at the wrong moment could throw them off course and into the swirling nothingness at the edge of the slow zone. He didn’t know whether that would be a good death or not, and he wasn’t interested in finding out.

  Without visual telescopy, the thousand-kilometer circle of the gate wouldn’t have been more than a speck on the monitor before they were already through it. Almost before he could register the passage, the Roci’s thrusters fired. The crash couches didn’t hiss so much as click as they snapped to his right and then sharply back again. Alex’s vision clouded a little at the edges, the blood in his brain stirred by the shifts of inertia.

  The first thing was enemies. The Roci’s radar was already sweeping the system, her telescopes looking for the drive plumes and her radio array listening for the transponders of Laconian ships. Already five had lit up, but they were identified as Transport Union ships with legitimate business in the system. There weren’t very many points of interest in Laconia system. It was still too new for the spread of human stations that Sol system had. There were some, though. An ice moon around the system’s single gas giant had a scientific outpost on it. One of the inner, rocky planets had been mining titanium for half a decade. Rumor was that Duarte had set aside one of the Ceres-sized dwarf planets as the site of a massive art project that was underway. The first real enemy the Roci found was almost halfway to the empire’s home. A pair of Storm-class destroyers already burning out toward the gate. And then, behind them, close to the planet, the unmistakable heat and energy signature of a Magnetar-class battleship.

  Alex pushed his fingers to the control pad at his side and typed out a message.

  NO GUARDS AT THE GATE. THEY DIDN’T SEE US COMING.

  A few minutes later, Naomi managed a reply. OR THEY COULDN’T IMAGINE ANYONE BEING THIS DUMB.

  He would have laughed if he could catch his breath. They’d been at eight gs since they came through. He’d done worse, but he’d been younger when he did it. The Storm, Quinn, Cassius, and Prince of the Face were all behind them, their trajectories making a thin fan pattern. At the gate, the first of the Donnager-class battleships emerged into normal space and angled off on a vector different from their own. The threshold level on Naomi’s model dropped slowly on his screen, measuring mass and energy and safety. The moment it was low enough, the second battleship arrived. The light delay from the ring to Laconia was almost three hours. So everything they were seeing in system was from the past. But it also meant that the closest Laconian ship wouldn’t know the enemy had arrived for a little over an hour and a half, and Laconia proper twice that. Alex didn’t let off the burn. By the time the response came, their fleet needed to be scattered as far through the system as it could be.

  If it had been football, Laconia would have had a world-class goalie and a couple of professional strikers against Naomi’s team of four hundred grade school children and three Donnager-class football hooligans. Any head-to-head battle was a win for Duarte. So it was better that there not be any. Not until Naomi could pick them.

  Alex switched over to visual telescopes and looked back at the receding gate. It was already tiny, but he could make out the drive plumes of the emerging ships when they came through like new stars being born. And behind them, the real stars and the wide, beautiful smear of the galactic plane. The same, more or less, as it always was.

  Three hours later, the enemy destroyers killed their drives. Light delay meant that they’d seen the intrusion into their space and reacted, and the evidence of response was only just arriving. Alex wondered if they’d cut drives when they saw the Roci come through or if it had taken a few unexpected drive plumes lighting up their gate to make them nervous. If he’d cared enough, he could have done the math and figured it. He did enough to know that the news of their appearance hadn’t reached Duarte and the Laconian capital and that it would very, very soon.

  In his couch, Ian grunted. For a moment, Alex was afraid it was a medical problem. Some people reacted pretty badly to their first extended high-g burn. But then the message came from Naomi.

  DROP THE BURN. WE HAVE A MESSAGE.

  Alex thumbed the Roci back down to half a g. All around him, he heard the others gasp and sigh. He did a little of the same himself.

  “Kefilwe,” Naomi said. “Let’s have that message.”

  “Yes, Captain,” Ian said. “To your station?”

  “I think we’ll all be interested.”

  A woman not much older than Ian appeared on their monitors. She had sharp features, pale lips, and the blue uniform of Laconia, and her forehead was furrowed. Confused. Not alarmed.

  “This is Captain Kennedy Wu of the Laconian destroyer Rising Shamal to the unidentified destroyer and its escort. You have made an unauthorized and unscheduled transit into Laconian space. Please cut your drives at once. If you are in need of assistance—”

  Someone behind Kennedy cried out in alarm. Alex thought they said It’s the Storm or That’s the Storm. Something along those lines. The Laconian captain’s concern changed to fear and anger in a heartbeat. Alex tried to put himself in her place. The stolen ship that had murdered the pride of her navy, killed the unkillable, and was now showing up where it had no business being. He and Naomi knew all their antimatter supply had gone up with the Tempest, but he watched Captain Kennedy wonder.

  “Attention, Gathering Storm. You are to cut engines immediately and surrender control to me. Any attempt to approach Laconia will be treated as hostile and met with immediate and—”

  A different voice called out. This time Alex was sure of the words. More contacts. This one’s big. That had probably been one of the Donnager-class ships coming through. Captain Kennedy looked away from the message, checking something on another monitor, and the message ended.

  “Well,” Alex said. “I think they noticed us.”

  “Got to think High Consul Duarte’s going to be having a distressing day, don’t you?” Ian said.

  Naomi pulled up the tactical display. The vastness of Laconia system simplified so much that all their ships pouring through the gate were a single, minuscule yellow dot.

  “Orders?” he asked.

  “They’re coming for the Storm first,” she said. “Bring us on a slower burn toward the gas giant. And get me a tightbeam to Captain Sellers on the Garcia y Vasquez. We’ll make it look like we’re open for a fight there, and the Neve Avivim can burn like hell to get around like they’re going to make it a pincer. As soon as the destroyers commit to that, we’ll change it.”

  “Copy that,” Ian said.

  Behind them, another ship came through the gate. Hundreds of drive plumes arced in shallow curves or wide, spreading like dust in a high wind.

  The siege of Laconia had begun.

  Chapter Forty-Three: Elvi

  If she could have, Elvi would have moved her work someplace else. A lab of her own would have been best, her rooms with Fayez a damned close second. But the data was at the university and the Pen, so that was where she went. And at first, she resented it. The breakthrough came when she could final
ly put aside Cortázar’s work on changing Duarte and get back to her own data.

  Her reports from the dead systems felt like letters from a past life. The breathlessness she’d felt upon realizing that there were literally rains of glass on the one semihabitable planet in Charon seemed almost childish now. She looked back at it and saw her own wide-eyed wonder, and even felt an echo of it. The massive crystal flower with filaments running though the petals like vacuum channels, gathering the energy of Charon system’s wildly fluctuating radiation and magnetic fields like daisies collected sunlight, if daisies had been thousands of kilometers wide. She still thought the crystal flowers could be a kind of naturally occurring interstellar life. And the massive green diamond…

  She looked at that one for a long time before she understood what she was really thinking. Then she took a tablet with the readouts and data to Cortázar’s private lab. She hated being in the room with him, hated having him at her back, but she didn’t have an alternative.

  “Yes,” Cara said, when she looked at it with her flat, black eyes. “I know about that.”

  Xan was sleeping. Or resting with his eyes closed, which was probably the same thing from where Elvi sat. Cortázar, at his desk, scowled at the two of them—Cara and Elvi, leaning against different sides of the clear plastic cage like girls comparing lunches at university. He went back to eating a sandwich with an air of disapproval.

  “Is there anything you can tell me about it?”

  Cara frowned. Even that had a moment of extra processing that went into it. Like the girl, or the thing that had been a girl, needed to remember how to make movement first. Or maybe it was more like a kind of gross motor stutter. Elvi really needed to get back to that line of research at some point…

  “It does… record?” Cara said. “That’s not the right word. It’s not like memory, exactly. It’s more like everything all at once? Like the way a film is all the pictures that tell the story, and they’re all there even when you only see one at a time? I’m not explaining this right.”

  “A gestalt,” Elvi said.

  “I don’t know that word,” the girl said.

  Her hand terminal chimed at the same moment that Cortázar’s system threw an alert on his monitor. Trejo informing them of an emergency meeting in his offices in half an hour.

  “Problem?” Cara asked.

  “Too many masters, not enough time,” Elvi said. “I’ll be back when I can.”

  Cortázar was already heading for the door. She had to trot to catch up. A driver waited for them outside, managing to look obsequious and impatient at the same time. A cold wind was blowing in from the east, stinging Elvi’s earlobes. It was her first winter on Laconia, and she understood it was likely to get a lot colder for a very long time before the warmth came back.

  In the back of the car, Cortázar folded his arms and scowled out the window. The city was glittering, and there were banners up for some kind of cultural celebration. Elvi didn’t know what it was. The streets they passed had people rushing down them in thick coats. A pair of young men ran alongside their car for a moment, hand in hand and laughing, before a security guard in Laconian blue waved them off.

  It was hard for her to remember that a whole population—millions of people—was spread across the planet, living lives in a new environment while she tired her head in reams of data. In that, it felt a lot like pretty much every other city she’d spent time near.

  “I heard you talking to the older subject,” Cortázar said.

  “Right?” Elvi said. “This is awesome.” She lowered her voice, roughened it, and put on a fake Martian accent. “We thought it was two cases, but it’s been the same case all along.” Then, when Cortázar didn’t respond. “Like Inspector Bilguun? How he and Dorothy were always on different investigations, and it turned out they were related?”

  “I never watched those,” Cortázar said. “I’m concerned about how you’re treating the subjects.”

  “Cara and Xan?”

  “You treat them like they’re people,” Cortázar said. “They aren’t.”

  “They aren’t rats. I’ve worked with rats. They’re very different.” Again, he didn’t get the joke. Or didn’t think it was funny.

  “They are mechanisms created from the corpses of children. They do some things that the children did because those are the parts that the repair drones had to work with. Eros was only different in scale. The nature of the protomolecule and all the technology related to it has the same logic. On Eros, when it wanted a pump, it co-opted a heart. When it needed tools to manipulate something, it repurposed a hand. This isn’t different. Cara and Alexander died, and the drones made something out of the dead flesh. When you talk to that girl, she isn’t there. Something is, maybe. And it’s made from parts of a human, the way I could stitch together a model catapult from chicken bones. You’re anthropomorphizing them.”

  “Is it a problem?”

  “It’s inaccurate,” Cortázar said. “That’s all.”

  At the State Building, an escort led them to a conference room where Trejo and Ilich were already sitting. Ilich looked worse than usual, and the way things were, that was saying something. Trejo, on the other hand, seemed almost at ease. He gestured at the chairs, and Elvi and Cortázar sat. A display on the wall showed a map of the system—sun, planets, moons, and ships—like a virtual orrery. It seemed to her like it had a lot of ships in it.

  “The research?” Trejo asked curtly. “Where do we stand?”

  “Making progress. Steady progress,” Cortázar said.

  “Do you concur, Major Okoye?”

  “We’re finding new connections,” she said. “You don’t really know what’s critical and what’s just nifty until after the fact, but sure. Progress.”

  “We’ve had a development,” Trejo said.

  “What’s up?” Elvi asked.

  That was how she learned that the underground had launched a full-scale invasion. Trejo brought them up to speed as quickly as he could, then opened the floor to comment.

  “The thing I care about,” Ilich said, “is what they know that we don’t. That’s why this is a problem.”

  “I understand your concern,” Trejo said, one palm up as if to say, Please stop whining.

  “First, they all saw the Tempest stand up to their fleet. They knew what it was capable of. And we saw them destroy the same unkillable ship. We don’t know what else they’re capable of.”

  “The readings from Sol are consistent with the full complement of antimatter resupply we sent having been used,” Cortázar said.

  “And there isn’t any more missing,” Trejo said. “All that still exists is either being isolated on the construction platforms or was shipped to bomb ships in other systems. It’s possible that they’ve been appropriated by the enemy since the loss of the Typhoon, but we haven’t heard of any that have gone missing.”

  “So if it’s not that,” Ilich said, “then what is up their sleeve that they’re willing to throw three hundred—”

  “Four hundred,” Trejo said. “More came through.”

  “Four hundred ships at us? Because unless they’ve all suddenly become suicidal, we have to assume they know something.”

  Elvi tended to agree with Ilich’s point, if not with his tone. She also understood why Trejo seemed more at ease. After all the alien strangeness and political intrigue, a nice simple shooting war was a move back into his comfort zone. Not into hers, though.

  “You let me worry about that,” Trejo said. “I’ve already been in touch with Admiral Gujarat. The Whirlwind’s still not at a hundred percent readiness, but she’s comfortable taking it out so long as it stays in-system. I have no interest in putting our last Magnetar through the gates anyway. We’re ready for this. What we aren’t ready for is the high consul’s silence.”

  “Would seem strange,” Cortázar said.

  “Leading a secret task force focused on the things that killed Medina is plausible,” Trejo said. “Reassuring, e
ven. Staying silent in the face of an invasion is not. We need his face on this. No options.”

  “I’m not sure how we do that,” Elvi said. “He hasn’t had a really lucid moment since—”

  “We make it,” Trejo said. “I understand that this is a little below your collective pay grade, but I’m not interested in bringing a media team into the fold. We’ll scan the high consul, get recordings of his voice, and generate a message to enemy and empire. You have some experience with imaging, yes?”

  “I’ve run a bunch of animals through sampling pouches,” Elvi said. “It’s not really the same thing.”

  “We can make it work,” Ilich said.

  “Good,” Trejo said, and stood. For a moment, Elvi thought the meeting was adjourned and started to head for the door herself. “Dr. Okoye. We’re not waiting on this. We’re doing it now.”

  The scanning device wasn’t particularly bulky, but Duarte’s room wasn’t built for it. Kelly had dressed the high consul in his formal uniform and was helping him to his chair. The thought, as Elvi understood it, was that if they scanned the uniform into the same profile as the man, creating the false version would be simpler.

  “There are going to be forensic traces,” Cortázar said. “There always are.”

  “We have very good imaging programs,” Trejo said as he tried to fit the lighting stick into its base.

  “Other people do too,” Cortázar said. “I’m not objecting to the plan. Just be prepared to discredit the people who say it’s faked.”

  “Already on that,” Trejo said, and stood. The lighting stick cycled through its spectrum, getting ready to catch the subtleties of Winston Duarte’s skin and hair. He’d grown thinner since the break. His eyes still had an intelligence to them if not a focus, but his cheekbones had become more prominent. Elvi felt like she could see the skull beneath the skin, and she didn’t remember thinking that before. Kelly brushed his hair, trying to put it into place the way he probably had before other addresses and announcements. Only Duarte wouldn’t keep still. His hands were thinner, gray and dusty-looking, and he moved them constantly. His eyes rolled in his head like he was following butterflies no one else could see.