Tiamat's Wrath

by James S. A. Corey

  “Is there any way to make him sit still for a minute?” Trejo asked.

  “He does sometimes,” Kelly said. “Having people around agitates him. Give him a little time to settle.”

  Trejo muttered something but didn’t object. Elvi waited with the others, watching the man who had, however briefly, been the god-king of a galactic empire. All she saw now was a lost man. She remembered feeling the force of his personality the first time they’d met. The sense of being in the presence of something vital and irresistible. She saw something in the way his jaw fit against his neck that reminded her of Teresa. It was easy to forget that they were also people. Father and daughter. The same complicated, fraught relationship that human beings had been navigating since they’d developed language. Before that, probably.

  Without really knowing why, Elvi stepped forward and took Duarte’s hand. He considered it like it was a pleasant surprise. She knelt, smiling gently, and his gaze swam through whatever dark waters he lived in now until he found her.

  “We just need to scan you, sir,” she said. “It won’t hurt.”

  His smile was gentle and filled with an unspeakable love. He squeezed her fingers gently and let them go. She stood back, getting out of the light and the scanning radius. Duarte looked around the room like a beneficent king in his dying hours until his attention landed on Cortázar.

  “All right,” Trejo said. “Let’s get this done before—”

  Duarte stood, his head tilted at an angle like he was remembering something half-forgotten. He stepped away from his chair. Ilich made a small, frustrated hiss.

  “All right,” Trejo said. “It’s okay. Let’s just get him back in position and try this again.”

  Duarte stepped over to stand before Cortázar. His attention seemed as focused as Elvi had seen since his fall. Cortázar smiled and bowed his head like it was something he knew he was supposed to do. Duarte’s jaw worked, his mouth opening and closing, but the only sound he made was a small oh. He moved his hand in a soft gesture, like he was fanning away smoke, and Cortázar’s chest bloomed out at the back. It was so slow, so gentle, that Elvi couldn’t understand what she was seeing. Not at first.

  It was as if Cortázar were an image projected on mist, and the mist was being blown away. Nothingness swirled through his chest, his face. And behind him, floating on the air, spirals of red and pink, gray and white, as ornate and beautiful as ink dropped into water. The air filled with the smell of iron. Of blood. Cortázar sat on the floor, his legs folding under him, and then slumped to the side with a long, wet exhalation. The left half of his head was missing from the jaw to the crown. His heart was still trying to beat in the open theater of his ribs, but the man was gone.

  They were silent and perfectly still. Duarte looked up, his attention caught by something that made him smile like a child seeing a dragonfly, and his hands rose aimlessly. Trejo put the scanner down on the bed, turned, and walked quietly out of the room, pulling Elvi along with him. Ilich followed, and then Kelly, shutting the door behind them. They were all pale. The State Building was shaking under them, tremors that matched Elvi’s heartbeat. She fought to breathe.

  “All right,” Ilich said. “Okay. That happened. That just happened.”

  “Major Okoye?” Trejo said. His normally dark face was pale and gray.

  “I have never fucking seen anything like that. Ever,” she said. “Holy fucking shit.”

  “I agree,” Trejo said.

  “He knew,” Elvi said. “That’s what this was. He knew about Teresa. Did you tell him?”

  “What about Teresa?” Ilich asked. “What did he know about Teresa? What did she have to do with this?”

  “Let’s not lose focus here, people,” Trejo said, leaning against the wall. “Mr. Kelly, would you escort the high consul to fresh quarters until we can get these cleaned?”

  Kelly looked like Trejo had just asked him to put his hand in a meat grinder to see if it was running. For a moment, Elvi thought the man would refuse, but Laconians were a breed apart. Kelly nodded and walked stiffly away.

  “We can do an announcement without him,” Trejo said. “I can do it. As his… acting military commander. Pleased to accept the position. Thank him for his faith in me. Like that.”

  “We need to shoot him,” Ilich said. “Whatever that thing in there is? That’s not the high consul. I don’t know what the hell it is, but the only sane thing any of us can do right now is put a bullet in its brain.”

  Trejo drew his sidearm, took it by its barrel, and held it out toward Ilich. “If you’re sure that’ll kill him, be my guest.”

  Ilich hesitated, then looked away. Trejo holstered his pistol. “Major Okoye.”

  “I know,” she said. “Another top priority. I’ll get right on it. But…”

  “But?”

  “I know you told Cortázar to give me full access. I’ve never been entirely certain he did.”

  Trejo considered it. From the far side of the door, something rattled. A thump, like a piece of equipment had been bumped into, knocked over. If it had been a sound of violence, it would almost have been better. Trejo pulled out his hand terminal, thumbed in a code, and adjusted something she couldn’t see.

  “Major Okoye, you are Paolo Cortázar. You want to go through his room and check his underwear, you go right ahead. See what he’s been eating. Check his medical records for sexual diseases. Read his letters to his God damn mother, I don’t care. That man’s life is an open book to you starting now. Find something useful in it.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” Elvi said.

  “And Major? I know you were a civilian before you were appointed. You didn’t come up like the rest of us, so I’m going to make this clear for you. If you say one more word about surrendering the empire? I will have you before a court-martial, and then I will have you shot. This is a war now. The rules have changed.”

  “Understood,” Elvi said. “They’ve been doing that a lot lately.”

  “Ain’t that the God damn truth,” Trejo said. Then, “Colonel Ilich, you’re with me. Let’s draft this announcement.”

  Elvi walked out of the State Building like she was in a bad dream. Even the bite of the wind felt less real to her. Shock, she thought. I’m in emotional shock. That happens when people die in front of you.

  At the lab, Dr. Ochida waved to her as she passed, and then looked concerned when she didn’t wave back. She knew that she should have stopped and talked to him, but she didn’t have any idea what she’d have said. In the private lab—her private lab—Xan and Cara were sitting in their cage playing a word game they used to pass the time. They paused when she came in, but didn’t ask her what had happened. What was wrong.

  The uneaten half of Cortázar’s sandwich was still on his desk, wrapped in brown paper. Elvi threw it in the recycler and opened her work environment. All the reports and data feeds she’d been poring over for weeks. She split the screen and, with her new permissions, pulled up Cortázar’s. She backed both up to the functional index.

  His was a hundred and eighteen entries longer. Elvi felt something like anger, something like dread, something like the mordant pleasure that comes from being proven right about something shitty.

  “What an asshole,” she said.

  Chapter Forty-Four: Naomi

  The burn was long and it was punishing. Even with the crash couch distributing the pressure along every possible square centimeter of her body, Naomi ached her way through the hours. The only solace was the breaks for food and the head, and she kept those brief.

  Laconia was a slightly smaller heliosphere than Sol, with nine planets, only one of them habitable. A single gas giant with somewhere between eighty and a hundred moons, depending on where the line was drawn. Two large planets out past that in the deep, and a rocky captured planet hardly larger than Luna with a retrograde orbit that swung high above and far below the plane of the ecliptic. Five planets in closer to the sun, the second of them being her target and the heart of the
empire. A transfer station at the gas giant, and the alien construction platforms that orbited the inhabited world. That was her battleground, and she meant to have her forces diffused through it. On the enemy’s side, the Voice of the Whirlwind at Laconia proper, the Rising Shamal and her sister ship, plus four more Storm-class destroyers.

  Her couch on the burn was almost as isolated as her old shipping container. Her time, even if it was painful, was her own. She studied the maps until she could see them with her eyes closed.

  And in the back of her mind, Bobbie waited. The memories and habits of decades spent breathing the same air, drinking the same water, being part of the same organism had made the woman a part of her. And the Bobbie in her head had a lot to say.

  A campaign like this is an argument. You’re trying to persuade the enemy of something. Talk them into it. And this time, here? You need to teach them that the danger of staying in place is greater than the danger of coming after you. For it to work, every lesson needs to support that one single thought.

  The Storm-class destroyer Mammatus ended its assignment in Arcadia system and rotated back to Laconia for resupply. The transit from Arcadia to the ring space was uneventful, apart from the now-familiar annoyance that the most recent set of repeaters had been sabotaged.

  The Mammatus’ transit into Laconia was very different. The moment the destroyer emerged into normal space, its sensor arrays were swamped by massive jamming from multiple sources. Half a dozen ships positioned just outside the ring gate flooded the Mammatus with radio and light. It took fewer than three seconds for the ship to reset, but by then five torpedoes—already launched and waiting for a target—were slamming into the ship. Informed by months of analysis of the captured Storm, the torpedo strikes were devastating. The Mammatus lost maneuvering thrusters along her port side and six PDC emplacements. Worse, it began venting atmosphere.

  Its counterstrike was late and weakened. The enemy PDCs took out the torpedoes as soon as they were launched, and with its mobility limited and its port vulnerable, the destroyer fled. Its burn toward Laconia and the prospect of safety was the obvious strategy, and easy to foresee. Compromised as it was, it failed to register the field of stealth composite–coated debris in its path until a swarm of uranium micrometeorites peppered its already-stressed hull, peeling back a section of the plating. A maneuvering thruster misfired as the power grid tried to compensate, sending the destroyer into a spin. Despite all that, it took five more torpedoes and a constant stream of PDC fire to kill it. The Mammatus fought well and died ugly, but it died. Everyone in the system saw its last hour, even if the light delay meant they saw it far too late to act.

  Lesson one: You can’t rely on reinforcements.

  Days under burn stretched. Naomi slept when she could, studied the movements of the enemy and the reports of her fleet when she couldn’t. Her knees ached from being bent just slightly backward by the acceleration. It hadn’t all been in the same direction. Twice now, Alex had shifted them. Not a full flip-and-burn, but a change of vector that brought them closer to the gas giant. The Laconian destroyers in the system started a burn to match, and Naomi’s three Donnager-class battleships—the Carcassonne, the Armstrong, and the Bellerophon—had redeployed as if to make a full engagement just outside the transfer station there. And then they had all broken off, scattering, while a dozen smaller ships dove sunward to the inner planets. The Whirlwind, capable of slaughtering any of them, stayed in place, leaving the chase to the destroyers.

  She’d expected the battleships to draw off the Laconian forces, but they didn’t. The destroyers followed her hunt group, pushing them to a long, arcing retreat up above the ecliptic. The destroyers turned back quickly, never venturing past the gas giant’s orbit. It wasn’t the repositioning she’d wanted, but it worked. It would do.

  When the burn paused, she took a long moment before she unstrapped, just to enjoy the physical relief of a gentle half g. Walking down the hall to the galley, her legs felt shaky and her neck ached.

  The others—her crew—were already there, wolfing down bowls of noodles and mushrooms, talking and laughing. They sobered when she came in. She was the adult. The commander. Who she was mattered less than what.

  She didn’t mind that.

  She found Alex in the cargo bay, opening an access panel. He looked like he hadn’t showered in days. Probably he hadn’t.

  “Issue?” she asked.

  “No. We’re good. I was just getting a little less pressure on the water feed to this thruster than I’d wanted. Thought I’d tweak it while I had the chance.”

  “Good thought.”

  “I was hoping we’d be getting down to the inner planets by now.”

  “Early days,” she said. “There’s time.”

  The Bhikaji Cama lumbered through the void, well behind the other ships. Its hold was open to the vacuum.

  Two groups of ships, eight in one and fourteen in the other, fired long-range torpedoes at the transfer station. The missiles burned hard, then went ballistic. Slightly fewer than three hundred warheads screamed through the black, all aimed at the transfer station, and all timed to arrive within seconds of each other.

  And all of them, of course, were intercepted. Most were killed by the transfer station’s PDCs, but a handful also fell to long-range countermissiles launched from the Whirlwind. It didn’t use its field projector, and wouldn’t. Despite its power, the range was short, and the last time one had been fired in normal space, Sol system had lost consciousness for three minutes. The Laconians didn’t want to risk their defense with a blackout.

  When the last of the torpedo barrage died, the expended hunt groups looped back, burning for the Cama. There the crew put on mech suits and loaders, made their way into the cargo ship’s vast belly, and came out with fresh torpedoes and water and PDC rounds.

  A week and a half into the campaign, at the time Naomi had specified, the Verity Close—sister ship to the Bhikaji Cama—made the transit into the system and bent its path to the opposite edge of the system and opened its hold.

  Lesson two: We have thirteen hundred systems to resupply us. You have one.

  “They’re following the Storm,” Naomi said. “I need to split you off.”

  On the screen, Jillian Houston scowled. “When the time comes, and you lure that murderous bastard of a ship away from Laconia, you’re still going to have a planetary defense system trying to shoot you down. That’s at minimum. You need me to eat that flak for you.”

  “If you’re with the attack group, the Whirlwind won’t budge. Not ever. I don’t like it any more than you do, but your ship used to be theirs. They know it’s the best tech in our fleet. They’re not going to take their eyes off it. They think you’re the number one threat because you are.”

  Despite herself, the younger woman smiled. “They’re right about that.”

  “I’m redeploying you. Move to accompany the Armstrong. When the time comes—”

  “I’ll be part of the bait,” Jillian said. “I don’t love it.”

  “It’s a risk. But it’s worth it.”

  “Understood,” Jillian said, and dropped the connection. Naomi stretched and checked her system. Eight more minutes before the next burn. She tried to decide if she wanted to wash off or get a bulb of tea. If she didn’t pick soon, she wouldn’t have time for either.

  Or maybe she could do both.

  “Alex. Postpone the burn for half an hour. There’s something I want to do.”

  “You bet,” Alex said.

  Naomi went down to her cabin and her private shower, the map of the system in her mind. With the Storm on its own, she could reroute the Carcassonne and fifty or so of the other, smaller ships toward the transfer station. The Roci, Quinn, Cassius, and Prince of the Face would be a minor threat and could loop down sunward, using the innermost planet as a gravity assist.

  There was a way that the whole process was like playing golgo. Judging her shot, how the ball would bounce and spin off the other bal
ls, how the next person would react to that. How each decision changed the state of the table. The Bobbie that lived in the back of her head said: A challenge of intellect, technique, and skill.

  Naomi saw how easy it would be to forget that the stakes were people’s lives.

  When the Laconian capital was surrounded—ships answering to the underground and the Transport Union at every angle throughout the system—the barrage began. The transfer station was forgotten. Not just long-range missiles, but rocks. Cheap, deadly. Every ship in the group sending nukes and accelerated titanium rods and holds full of gravel into intersecting orbits. Some moved fast, some would take months to arrive at Laconia—which was a message in itself about how long the underground was prepared to draw out the fight. Nothing targeted major population centers, but there was no way for Laconia to know that for sure. To be safe, they had to defend everything.

  The barrage kept going, day after day. Rock after rock to intercept. Torpedo after torpedo to shoot down. An endless rain of threats, wearing them down hour by hour by endless hour. That was the third lesson: Playing defense means being endlessly ground down. Someday something will get through.

  The Whirlwind stayed in its place, guarding the gravity well over Laconia, but the destroyers ranged farther and farther. When the enemy came too near, Naomi’s fleet scattered like children running from the police. Not everyone escaped. The Tucumcari, a rock hopper retrofitted to fight pirates in Arcadia, caught a torpedo on its drive cone and died in a ball of fire. The Nang Kwak, a private security company stealth ship two generations out of date, didn’t dodge a line of PDC fire. Disabled, it tried to surrender. The Laconian ships destroyed it instead. There were others. A handful. Each of them one too many. And every chance Naomi had to strike back at the enemy, to lure them out and end one or two of them, she let pass. It was the cardinal rule that she sent to every ship, all through the system. Laconian military that came out after them went home intact.