Tiamat's Wrath

by James S. A. Corey

  An alarm sounded, screaming out across the State Building and its compound. She didn’t know if it was about the war or the escaped prisoner.

  At Teresa’s rooms, she pounded the door with her fist and shouted the girl’s name, but the only answer was frantic barking. The thunder of the planetary defenses grew louder, almost deafening. Something terribly bright happened somewhere above the clouds and turned the white snow-struck landscape to noon for three long seconds.

  “We need to take shelter,” Fayez said, and Elvi kicked Teresa’s door. Fayez did too. It seemed like it wouldn’t be enough. They’d beat themselves against it forever and never get through. And then the frame gave way, the door slammed inward, and Teresa’s dog ran out into the night, barking madly.

  “Get inside,” Fayez shouted, but Elvi was already following the dog. It bounded through the fallen snow, throwing up ice like dust. Its bark was urgent, and it led Elvi on. She couldn’t feel her feet well, and her wounded leg burned and ached, but one foot went in front of the other.

  Snowfall and the battle light had changed the gardens into a vision of hell. She didn’t know where she was, didn’t know where the State Building was, couldn’t tell where she was going, except that she was following the trail of paw prints and broken snow.

  She should have gotten a gun. She was a major. Someone would have given her one if she’d asked. Better, she should have called Ilich and the security team. It was too late, though. She couldn’t turn back, and she had to believe that the James Holden she knew would listen to her. Would hear her. Would stop whatever his plan was before the girl got hurt.

  The dog vanished into the gloom ahead, barking and howling. She’d been stupid. She’d been overworked. Duarte and Cortázar and the war and the things from beyond time and space. They’d overwhelmed her and she’d lost sight of the girl who was right in front of her and the man who’d planned to kill her.

  All the panic and the fear and the driving need to flee distilled into this moment, this doomed rush, the snow, and the howls of the dog.

  And voices.

  “Stop!” Elvi shouted, and her voice was hoarse. “Holden, stop!”

  The trail led almost to the fence. High in the darkness, the mountain beyond the State Building reared up, transformed by snow and darkness into a vast gray wave. And there, in a snow-filled gully, James Holden stood in a black guard’s uniform. His hair was wild and his skin was pale except for two bright-red patches at the cheeks where the cold had bitten him.

  The dog capered and yapped at his side, and Holden raised a hand like he was seeing an unexpected friend at a cocktail party. But there was another voice. Teresa’s voice, scolding the dog and telling it to be quiet.

  “Holden,” Elvi gasped. Now that she was slowing down, her side hurt like someone was stabbing her. “Holden, stop. Don’t do this. You don’t have to do this.”

  “Do what?” he said. And then, “Are you okay?”

  “Let her go. It won’t fix anything to hurt her.”

  Holden’s forehead furrowed, and for a moment, she could see the young man he’d been the first time she’d met him, decades ago on a different planet. She held tight to the chance he might still be the same man, somewhere deep inside.

  “Hurt who?” he said, and pointed at Teresa. “Her?”

  “I know what you did,” she said, trying to catch her breath. “I know you put Cortázar up to it.”

  “We have to go,” Teresa said. Elvi noticed for the first time that the girl was doing something in the gully. Digging away a drift of fallen snow. Holden’s sleeves were crusted with ice where he’d been doing the same.

  “She’s just a kid, Holden. Whatever your plan is, she doesn’t have to be part of it.”

  “I’m more part of her plan at this point,” he said.

  “We have to go!” Teresa said. “We don’t have time for this. Muskrat! Shut up!”

  The dog wagged, happily ignoring the order. Footsteps came from behind Elvi. Fayez, stumbling through the snow. A deep, rolling sound came from the north. The earth trembled, and the rail-gun flashes stopped. Without their voices, the night seemed weirdly silent.

  “What’s going on?” Fayez said.

  “I’m leaving,” Teresa said. “I’m trading their prisoner for a way out, and I’m leaving. His ship is coming for us right now, and we have to get to the rendezvous.”

  “He tried to get you killed,” Elvi said. “You can’t trust him.”

  “I can’t trust anyone,” Teresa said, and the weariness and bitterness in her voice belonged to a much older woman.

  “No,” Holden said. “That wasn’t about Teresa. That was about you. Hey, Fayez.”

  “Hey, Holden,” Fayez said, and dropped to his knees at Elvi’s side. Snowflakes landed on his hair and stayed there, unmelting.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “This has all been about you,” Holden said. “Literally from the minute I found out about the alien rip-in-space thing that showed up on the Tempest, I’ve been trying to get Cortázar out and you in his place. All this?” He gestured at the now-quiet sky. “I don’t know anything about it. I haven’t been in touch with anybody. None of it’s been me.”

  Elvi shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

  “I got you the job,” Holden said. “I’m the one who told Duarte you’d been studying what killed the protomolecule engineers. And yes, I talked Cortázar into getting himself in trouble. And then I tried to rat him out. It was the only thing I could think of that Duarte would care about enough to get rid of his pet mad scientist. And since you were the expert, you’d get the promotion.”

  The punch in her chest was betrayal. She felt betrayed. She’d seen Sagale and Travon die because of Holden. She’d almost lost her leg, almost lost her husband, suffered through everything because of him. “Why would you do this to me?”

  “I wanted to get someone sane and rational in charge before Duarte did something stupid that we couldn’t take back.” He lifted his hands and then let them fall, a gesture of powerlessness. “I’m not sure it worked, but it was all I could do.”

  Teresa stood up. Her black sweater was white with ice. “We can get through. The space is big enough. But the second I’m off the grounds, security’s going to know it. We can’t stop running once we start.”

  Holden nodded, but his eyes were on Elvi. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Make up for it. We’re here. Take us with you. And in the other half of her mind, the labs. The pens. The Falcon and all the data she’d acquired with it, still waiting to be sifted through. Was Ochida going to take it up if she left? Would he be better than Cortázar?

  Was there anyone, anywhere she’d trust with this more than she trusted herself? And the enemy—the deep enemy—had tried to hurt them already. Was looking for a way. Her leg throbbed like it was reminding her of the black things between the spaces. Was someone else going to stop them?

  She looked at Holden’s face. He was one of those men who was going to look boyish until the day he died. Fuck you for putting me in this position, she thought. Fuck you for making this the right thing for me to do.

  It wasn’t what she said aloud.

  “Go.”

  Chapter Forty-Seven: Naomi

  Alex?”

  “I see it,” he shouted. “What do we do?”

  A wave of disorientation washed through her, like she had started floating again without having stopped the first time. The ship jumped and shuddered around her as she pulled up the record of Amos’ mission and cross-checked. It looked real. If it was false, it was convincing.

  The plan was to hit the platforms and then burn hard to get away before the enemy forces could get back. She’d given them a wide window for it. Adding in a surface landing and extraction…

  But if she didn’t, and Amos really was waiting. Or Jim.

  “Naomi?” Alex asked again. “What do we do?”

  “Take out the platforms,” she said. And then, “First. We take out
the platforms first.”

  “If we’re going to land, we have to slow down,” Alex said.

  She needed time. She didn’t have it. The Roci shifted hard, then fell away, slamming her against her straps as their rail gun fired.

  “Get me options,” she said.

  “Coming up,” Alex said, and the thrust alert came on. They were flying into the enemy barrage, and she was slowing them down. “Ian! Tell the others to match my course. We’re putting on the brakes.”

  She pulled up the tactical, and the drive came on, pushing her back into her couch and the coolness of the gel. She couldn’t tell if it was the evasive dodging or the changes in acceleration or her own sense of doom that left her feeling nauseated, but it didn’t matter. She pulled up the tactical display, ran it through the Roci’s system, and prayed to nothing in particular that a solution existed.

  Their information on the defense grid was pieced together from Transport Union ships that had moved through the system. Five weapon platforms, flat black and resistant to radar. They were in higher orbits than the alien construction platforms, and spaced around the planet in a web that put any approaching ship in the sights of at least two and usually three. They were already firing at Naomi’s little strike force, and whatever technology they were using to compensate for the rounds they fired, it didn’t make a heat or light plume that she could use for targeting.

  The construction platforms were closer to the planet, long and articulated, with filaments coming off of them like something in a microscope slide of contaminated water. They shimmered with light. There were five of those too, all of them in near-equatorial orbit.

  The plan had been to approach with the ships close together so that they would all be covered by the same defenses and dilute the incoming fire between them. Then, when they were close, the Cassius and the Prince of the Face would split off, wrapping around the spinward side of the planet while the Roci and the Quinn cleaned up anti-spinward. Then they would all burn hard for the ring gate and the hundreds of systems beyond to hide in.

  That had been the plan. Now it was the same, but slower. More time in the enemy crosshairs. Less chance of escaping unharmed.

  Ian shouted over the din of PDC fire, drive resonance, and thruster burn. “Cassius is requesting permission to break off. They’re ready to make their run.”

  “Confirmed,” Naomi shouted. “Let’s do this.”

  “With them gone, the bad guys are going to have more guns for us,” Alex said. “We’re about to get real bumpy.”

  “What the hell has it been up to now?” Ian asked.

  “Walk in the park, kid,” Alex said.

  On her tactical display, the Cassius turned, its drive plume leaning in toward the other three as it slid toward the far side of the onrushing planet. A few seconds later, the Prince of the Face did likewise. As they slid away, a new bloom of fast movers jumped up from the Laconian defenses.

  “How many of these missiles can we take?” Naomi shouted, and a voice she didn’t know yelled back, PDCs at sixty percent as if that answered her question.

  “We can start doing damage of our own in eighty seconds,” Alex said. “Seventy-nine.”

  “Lock on the construction platforms,” Naomi said. Her legs felt like they were on the verge of cramping. Her monitor was throwing three low-priority medical alerts. She ignored them. The ship moved hard to port, fighting to get out of a rail gun’s firing arc. They were getting close enough that dodging after the rail gun fired was getting hard.

  “Permission to hit their weapons, Captain?”

  “No,” Naomi said. “The construction platform goes down first.” She might die. They all might die. Even if they did, they didn’t have to lose.

  She fought the temptation to grab weapons control herself. The fear and the tension left her muscles trembling, and the evasive shifting was coming faster and harder. She wanted a sense of control. Of being able to bend the next minutes to her will. Trusting a crew she’d barely met with everything was like flying blind.

  “Prince of the Face reporting that the Cassius took a rail-gun hit,” Ian shouted.

  “How bad?” Naomi asked, already pulling up the sensor array data to see for herself. By the time Ian spoke, she knew.

  “The Cassius is gone.”

  The odds shifted in her mind again. If the Prince of the Face was lost too, it would mean looping around Laconia to catch the surviving platforms. She’d only just taken on the risk by slowing down, and she was already paying the price.

  She took comms control and opened a connection to the Prince of the Face. As soon as it went through, she started talking.

  “This is Naomi Nagata of the Rocinante. Kill your braking burn. Go back to the initial strategy. In fast, kill the construction platforms, and burn for the gate. Do not decelerate further. Do not wait for us.”

  “Reconegut, Rocinante,” a voice came back. The accent was pure Ceres Station. “Geh cahn Allah, sa sa?”

  On her tactical display, the Prince of the Face’s drive plume died, and the ship seemed to leap ahead, rushing toward its target by burning less.

  “We’re almost in range,” Alex said.

  “I don’t care how much you have to dance,” Naomi said. “Just get us there.”

  “Ten more fast movers coming from the defense platform,” Ian said. “PDCs are at fifty.”

  “Alex?”

  “Doing what I can,” he said. “Give me thirty more seconds.”

  Naomi opened a channel to the Quinn. “Report.”

  “We took a few rounds in engineering and our machine shop,” a young man’s voice answered. “We’re okay for now.”

  “Rocinante is lining up a shot. Cover us.”

  “Copy that,” the Quinn said.

  The Roci slammed to port, and then again. Naomi’s crash couch whirled, keeping the impacts against her back no matter what direction they came from.

  “I really. Wish. They had fewer rail guns,” Alex said from between clenched teeth.

  “At least we can dodge,” Naomi said.

  “We can until we can’t,” Alex said, and the Roci stuttered under her as their own rail gun fired. She pulled up the image of the alien platform, still much too far away to see with the naked eye. Even with the Roci’s system stabilizing the image, it jumped and vibrated. Naomi leaned in, willing the shot to hit. At this distance, even a mistiming in the shot, a small unanticipated vibration, could mean they’d failed.

  The image whited out for a second as an enemy missile died close enough to their line-of-sight to confuse the sensors. It came back in time for her to see the platform shudder and shift. The complex structure seemed to pull in like it was wrapping itself around an injury. It thrashed once, a widespread spasm. The shimmer of lights danced along its spine and out through the structures of its arms, and then it began to unspool. Like a tight-wound thread dropped into water, it relaxed and spread. The rigid shape softened and collapsed on itself, scattering through the emptiness over a vast Laconian ocean. Bright lines of energy like lightning or dying nerve impulses shot along it as it grew dark and drifted apart. The Roci shook and shuddered as the alien structure gently, gracefully died.

  Alex let out a sigh that was part relief and part awe. Naomi knew exactly what he meant. She tried to open a connection to the Prince of the Face, to report the kill and check in, but the body of the planet blocked it, and there weren’t any repeaters she could use. From here on in, she had to go on faith.

  Alex turned off the drive. They’d braked. If they’d kept it going, the Roci would have started moving away from the planet again. They were in orbit now. Being on the float should have been a relief. It felt like a threat.

  “Where’s the next one?” Naomi asked.

  “Coming up,” Alex said. “It’s behind the horizon line now. We’ll have it in eight and half minutes.”

  “Let’s start knocking down some of these weapons platforms. See if we can get a little peace.”

  The Roci
kicked again, and the PDC chatter was joined by the deeper, subtle thrum of the torpedoes launching. Naomi found herself grinning despite the pain.

  “What’s that?” Naomi said. On the surface of the planet, near the center of one of the continents, a brightness was lighting the thick clouds from beneath. City lights. The capital. Laconia. And just north of it, a bright and burning light, rising up through the atmosphere in a perfectly straight line of fire and smoke.

  “Huh,” Alex said. “That’s surface-based rail guns.”

  “Were we expecting those?”

  “First I’ve heard of them.”

  “That’s going to make landing a lot harder.”

  “Yes, it is,” Alex said, and dragged the Roci out of the path of the incoming fire. “Kind of makes you wish the pickup was a little farther from the most guarded part of the planet, really.”

  “We’d meant to do this a long time ago,” Naomi said. “It looks like they built up in the meantime.”

  She checked her maps. The city was almost beneath them now. This was as close to Jim as she had been in years. If the Prince of the Face was on time and target, there was only one platform left. On her monitor, one of the Laconian weapons platforms blew, taken out by a combination of a rail-gun round from the Quinn and two of the Roci’s remaining torpedoes.

  It would be so easy to order the drop. Fall through the rough Laconian air, make the pickup, and kill the last platform on her way out.

  If she was sure she’d make it. If she was so convinced that she’d live through it that she could risk wasting everything they’d done until now. And she wasn’t.

  “Steady as she goes, Alex,” Naomi said.

  A sudden bang like a detonation shook the ship, deafening her. She waited for the hiss of lost air, the silence of the vacuum, and it didn’t come.

  “What was that?” she shouted.

  “Debris hit,” Ian said. “We’ve got a hole in the outer hull.”

  “Watch our pressure. If we start leaking, tell me.”

  “You got it.”

  “I’ve got the last one,” Alex said.