Tiamat's Wrath

by James S. A. Corey

  He cast his eyes to the deck. Jim did the same. Amos put on the same somber face he always did at moments like this. A flood of complex feelings washed through her. Sorrow and joy, relief and the emptiness of a loss that would never be made whole.

  Alex cleared his throat and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “Bobbie Draper was one of my best friends. She was a Marine right down to her bones. Anything else she did was built on that. She was brave and honorable, and she was strong. She made a hell of a captain. I remember when Fred Johnson tried to make her into an ambassador back in the day, and she kept calling it the way she saw it instead of playing politician. She was always like that. She took on the impossible, and she made it work.”

  He took a deep breath, opened his mouth like he was going to go on, then closed it again and shook his head. Jim was weeping now too. And so was she. Amos’ newly black eyes shifted like he was reading something in the air, and he lifted his chin.

  “She was a badass,” he said, then paused and nodded, satisfied.

  “She will be missed,” Naomi said. “From now on. And forever.”

  They stood in silence for a moment, and then Jim stepped forward and cycled the exterior door. When it was open, the little chemical boosters on the coffin slid it to the edge of the lock. And then it was gone. Jim cycled the lock closed again, turned, and stepped in, putting his arms around her and Alex. A moment later, the solid mass of Amos’ arms looped around her too. The four of them held each other there with the hum and rumble of the Rocinante around them. They stayed there for a long time.

  The elements of her little ragtag fleet that had been closest to the ring gate were through long before the Roci was even halfway through the system. Alex kept them at a punishing burn, balancing the reaction mass they still had and the distance to a friendly resupply depot in Gossner system. If they took breaks a little more often than during the dive into the system and burned a little less heavily, it was to conserve mass and because the Whirlwind and her cohort of destroyers were parked close in to Laconia, still knocking down the torpedoes and long-arc rocks that Naomi’s people had flung at the planet. Three days into their burn toward the gate, someone somewhere had grown the balls to issue an order, and the Whirlwind flung half a dozen torpedoes at the retreating Roci. The PDCs took them all down, and no more followed.

  When they were burning, Naomi used the time to calculate a safe transit schedule and tightbeam it to the other ships. From the start of the campaign to its end, they’d lost thirty-two ships, and just shy of two hundred lives. They had retrieved Jim and Amos, taken in Teresa Duarte, and destroyed the mechanism of production that Laconia depended on for its high-powered fleet. The Whirlwind was still a massive killing machine capable of taking control of any system it chose. But it was only one ship. It couldn’t attack through any of the ring gates without leaving Laconia underprotected. It was pinned.

  The Storm reached the gate and sent back a formal salute to Naomi before it passed through. Jillian Houston taking her ship back to Draper Station and waiting for new orders. That was a strange thought. Naomi had spent so much of her mental energy and focus on winning the battle she’d almost forgotten about everything that came after. Freedom from Laconia didn’t—couldn’t—mean a return to de facto rule by the Transport Union. For one thing, Medina Station was gone and no one would be setting up a permanent base in the ring space again. For another, Laconia had replaced the structures of trade and control with its own.

  But still, there were ways. There wouldn’t be a choke hold on the ring space the way there had been, but there could be a network of cheap, easily replaced relays that announced incoming and outgoing traffic. Ships could know, at least, what the chances were of going dutchman before they made the transit. There weren’t many people who’d choose to go through a ring gate if they knew they wouldn’t come out the other side. Give the people enough information, and they’d be able to make the right decisions on their own. That was a problem for later, though. For the moment, she could watch the drive plumes of the ships that had broken Laconia touch the gate and escape, one after another, and think to herself, Safe. Safe. Safe.

  In the breaks between the hard burns, the crew celebrated and, unfortunately, fought. In the tension before the attack, Ian Kefilwe and another young man—an engineer named Safwan Cork—had fallen into bed together and were now negotiating the difficult romantic territory of having survived. She tried to keep out of it, but once she saw Jim sitting with Ian in one of the now-empty torpedo bays, listening while the young man wept. It seemed right.

  The ship was only about three hundred thousand kilometers out from the ring gates, and the remaining burns were all braking, making sure that when they did the transit, they had time on the far side to maneuver and not just slam into the other side of the sphere and vanish. The Laconian forces hadn’t come after them. Not even to throw more long-range torpedoes.

  Teresa Duarte was an astounding beast of a human being. Naomi tried to make a connection with her, but only once. They were in a pause, Alex making a gentle quarter g, and Naomi was getting dinner. It still felt strange to her, seeing the galley full. In her mind, there were still only six crew on the Roci.

  Teresa was by herself, leaning against one of the walls, a bowl of noodles in one hand and chopsticks in the other. Her hair was braided back, and it made her face look harsher than usual. No one was sitting with her. No one was speaking to her. Probably because no one knew what to say.

  Naomi served herself a bowl of white kibble and sat down across from the girl. Teresa looked up, and there was a flash of outrage before she reined herself in.

  “Is this okay?” Naomi asked.

  “It’s your ship. You get to sit where you want.”

  “Got to be a little strange, being someplace like this, yeah?”

  Teresa nodded. Naomi took a bite of her kibble and wondered if they were going to sit in silence. Teresa shook her head. “There are people everywhere. And there’s nowhere to go. Back home I could be alone. No one’s ever alone out here.”

  “There are ways,” Naomi said, thinking of her cargo container. “But there are usually fewer people here. It does get a little full.”

  “You should have a crew of twenty-two.”

  “We usually made do with six. Sometimes four.”

  “I don’t like it here,” Teresa said, standing up. “I’ll want to find someplace else once we leave.”

  She walked away without saying anything else. She didn’t put her uneaten bowl in the recycler, so when Naomi was finished with her own meal, she cleaned up after both of them, then walked down the corridor to her cabin.

  To theirs.

  Jim was in the crash couch. His jumpsuit was drenched in sweat at the armpits and down the back. He looked at her and shook his head.

  “I will never, ever get this out of shape again,” he said. “This is miserable.”

  “You’ll get better,” she said, and lay down beside him. The couch shifted to account for her added weight. Every time she saw him, she felt herself not quite trusting it. Not quite letting herself believe he was really back, in case it was all a dream or a false reprieve. As if the universe would take him away from her again. It was getting better, but she wasn’t sure it would ever completely go away.

  “I saw your friend in the galley,” she said. “She’s having some trouble adjusting, I think.”

  “Well, she was the only child of a galactic god-emperor, and now she’s eating oatmeal in a half-antique gunship. That’s got to be a hard transition.”

  “What are we going to do with her once we get to the supply depot? You know she’s too important to just let her go, right?”

  “I don’t know that we can make her stay. Not unless we’re talking about throwing her in a prison. But there are other options.”

  “Are there?”

  “There were plenty of Martians who didn’t take off with Duarte back in the day. Some of them will be cousins of hers. If we’re luc
ky, some of them may be counselors and therapists. Or… I don’t know. Run rehabilitation centers.”

  “If not?”

  “If there aren’t, some can be made. Everyone’s related to everyone, if you go back far enough. We’ll just go back until the right people are connected to her.”

  “You sound like Avasarala,” Naomi said.

  “I’ve been thinking about her a lot. I feel like I built a little version of her in my head. You ever have that feeling?”

  “I know the one,” Naomi said. And then, “Teresa doesn’t just need a place to land and some sort-of relatives. She needs love.”

  “She had love. Her father loved her. He really did. What she didn’t have was a sense of proportion.”

  “And then you brought her here.”

  “She brought herself,” he said. “Just like we all do. And it’s a pain in the ass for each and every one of us, every time it happens. Outgrowing your family? Hard work under the best of circumstances. Which these aren’t.”

  She lay down, snuggling into his arm. He was sweat-damp, but she didn’t care. She stroked her fingertips across his forehead and down his cheek. He turned his head, pressing into her hand like a cat that wanted petting.

  “Do you think she’ll be okay?” Naomi asked.

  “No idea. She will or she won’t. Either way, it’s going to be up to her. I’m pretty sure she’ll be herself while she does it, though. That’s a victory for her. We’ll help if we can. If she’ll let us.”

  The alert went on. Ring passage in five minutes. Jim sighed, stood, and started changing into fresh clothes.

  “What about you?” Naomi said.

  “What about me?”

  “Will you be okay?”

  Jim smiled, and there was only a little weariness in his eyes. Only a little sorrow. “I played a long, terrible, shitty game, and I won. Then after I won, I made it back home. I’m waking up in the morning next to you. I’m perfect.”

  Chapter Fifty: Elvi

  The day after Teresa escaped, Elvi spent the hours before dawn watching the feeds. As soon as the violence ended, even before the wounded and the dead were sorted, the stories began taking shape. The differences between the state newsfeeds and the security reports Elvi saw in the aftermath made it sound like there had been two different battles. The separatist terrorist forces, each of them tracked as they fled for the ring gate, had been driven back by the overwhelming power of the Laconian Navy. Or else the enemy had achieved all its apparent objectives and withdrawn of its own accord. The orbital weapons platform network and land-based rail guns had successfully protected Laconia from the enemy’s last-ditch suicide attack. Or else the underlying assumption that the platforms and the base would be support for a naval defense had, in the heat of the moment, been ignored. And the enemy losses, while real, hadn’t been catastrophic. The enemy was in flight, and the threats to Laconia required little more than a mopping up. Or else the Whirlwind was going to be stuck close to the planet for the foreseeable future while a handful of destroyers hunted down the stray torpedoes and rocks that had been launched at the planet, any one of which could cause massive damage.

  The most breathtaking lie—the one that put all the others to shame—was that the construction platforms had been taken down before the attack could reach them, and were being brought back to full operation in a secret location to protect them from further attack. The other stories about the battle might be extreme readings of the actual text, but the construction platforms were no more. There was no version of reality that supported the state’s claims that they had survived. The former shipyards of Laconia were a collection of junk scattered in orbit around the planet, and no number of horses and men were going to put them together again.

  Added to that were all the things that the newsfeeds simply didn’t mention: That a fast attack frigate had landed within spitting distance of the State Building. That the high consul’s daughter had run away with the enemy in what might perhaps be humanity’s newest record-setting act of teenage rebellion. That the prisoner held in the State Building had also escaped.

  Or that one prisoner had, anyway.

  “Major?” the young man said. “Admiral Trejo is ready to see you.”

  The lobby was a wide space with sandstone-colored columns and enough sofas and chairs to seat a hundred people. She was the only one there.

  “Doctor,” Elvi said.

  The young man looked confused. “I’m sorry?”

  “I’d prefer you call me doctor. Major is an honorary rank. I earned my doctorate.”

  “Yes, Dr. Okoye. Of course. The admiral…”

  “Is ready to see me,” she said, standing up and pulling her tunic straight. “Lead the way.”

  The meeting wasn’t in one of the usual rooms. No formal desk, no volumetric display, no small crowd of men bowing to the power of the state and jockeying for their status in it. It was just her and Trejo in a private dining room. He had a simple breakfast of coffee and fruit with a sugar-iced pastry, and another like it set aside for her. A window almost as wide as the whole wall looked out over the snow-covered grounds and the land beyond all the way to the horizon. It felt a little obscene to think about the violence that had shaken it all. That they weren’t both underground in a high-security shelter felt like another kind of lie.

  “Admiral,” she said, sitting. The young man left immediately. Trejo poured her coffee himself.

  “We found Ilich,” Trejo said instead of hello. “Well, his body anyway. He and two of the state guard were assassinated by the separatists.”

  Elvi waited to feel something about that. The familiar, professionally thoughtful man she’d worked with was dead. She would never see him again. It wasn’t the first time she’d lost a colleague. Back before anyone called her major, she’d taught at an upper university that had three of her fellow faculty members die in the same semester. She’d lost most of the science staff of the Falcon, and it had been devastating. This wasn’t. Where the shock and sadness should have been, there was just an oceanic depth of resentment. She wasn’t even perfectly clear whose name belonged on it. Duarte. Trejo. Holden. All of them together.

  “Too bad,” she said, because she felt like she ought to say something.

  “He was loyal to the empire,” Trejo said. “Whatever his failings were, he was that.”

  She didn’t know what she could say to that, so she didn’t say anything.

  “Our situation has once again changed,” Trejo said, and paused to blow across the surface of his coffee. He didn’t just look exhausted. He looked ten years older than when he’d arrived, and things had been broken beyond repair back then. Another few years like this, and Trejo would be the oldest man alive, no matter his age. She remembered a myth about someone wishing for eternal life, but forgetting to ask for youth to go with it. In the story they’d gradually shrunk and withered until they turned into a cicada. She wondered if Fayez knew who the story was about.

  She realized again that Trejo was waiting for her to respond. She didn’t know what he wanted her to say and didn’t care much either.

  “Are you feeling all right, Major?”

  “Doctor,” she said. “I think it would be best if you called me doctor. And I’m fine. I’ve had a lot on my plate recently. I’m sure you understand.”

  “I do. I most certainly do,” he said. “The construction platforms. The stick moons, they called them. They were what drew the high consul’s attention to Laconia in the first place. Did you know that? He saw them in the first wave of scans that came through when the gates opened. There was a vessel—something like a vessel—halfway built in one of them.”

  “I’d heard that,” Elvi said. The coffee was good. The pastry was a little too sweet for her liking.

  “They are the foundation of Laconian power.”

  Jesus Christ, Elvi thought. Had Trejo always been this sanctimonious and she just hadn’t noticed? Or was she just really irritable right now?

  “They s
tole a goal on us,” he said. “I will give them that. They found a dirty trick, and we fell for it. Once. It won’t happen again. I need you to put aside the other issues you’re looking into. For the time being. I know what you’re going to say. ‘Another first priority.’”

  “That’s where I would have started, yes,” Elvi said.

  “The loss of those platforms is the loss of the most powerful ships humanity has ever made. It’s the loss of antimatter production. It’s the loss of the regenerative tanks. Without them, we lose the ability to project our power out beyond the system. Whether we’re fighting against the terrorists or the things beyond the ring gates, we need that ability.”

  “So whatever the high consul has become gets shelved,” she said. “Figuring out the nature of the enemy and the weird system-wide attacks gets shelved. The secret of immortality? Shelved.”

  “I can hear your frustration, and I share it,” Trejo said, “but the fact remains—”

  “No, I’m good with that. But making more weapons isn’t the first priority,” she said. She took out her handheld, pulled up her notes, and passed it over. “That right there? That is my first priority.”

  Trejo scowled at the display like she’d handed him some particularly unpleasant insect. “Adro system?”

  “The big green diamond that looks like it might have a record of the entire protomolecule civilization. Rise and fall. I would probably get the best results if the Falcon were repaired and crewed with a team specifically chosen for this project. I have some names drawn up. I’ll send them to you.”

  “Dr. Okoye—”

  “I understand I’m not in a position to force you to do anything. But I’m comfortable in the belief that all of the issues we’re trying to deal with are connected, and that”—she pointed at the schematic of the massive diamond—“looks more like the Rosetta stone than anything else. So that’s where I’m putting my efforts. In my professional judgment, it makes more sense than building bigger explosions or chasing after the fountain of youth.”