Tiamat's Wrath

by James S. A. Corey

  Trejo put down the hand terminal. His coffee sloshed over the lip of its cup, staining the white linen. “We are in a war—”

  “Yes, you should fix that too.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You should stop being in a war. Send the underground a fruit basket or something. Start peace talks. I don’t know. However that works. I said it before, and I meant it. If you want peace, lose gracefully. We have bigger problems.”

  She took a last bite of the pastry and washed it down with the dregs of the coffee. It tasted better with the bitter following the sweet. Trejo was stone-faced. She stood.

  “Do what you need to do,” she said. “I’m going to get ready for work, and then I’ll be in the lab at the university. If you want to throw me in prison for insubordination or whatever the military term is, that’s where you’ll find me. If you want to fix this, let me know when the Falcon can be ready, and I’ll brief you on everything I find.”

  He didn’t respond. She nodded curtly and walked away. She’d hoped she would feel better, and she did. But only a little.

  The wide sky of Laconia had cleared. The snow clouds were gone, and the air was crisp and bright with just a hint of the spearmint smell of freshly turned Laconian earth. A flock—or swarm—of something flew high in the sky, vanishing against the sun and reappearing on its collective way to the south. Some organism following a temperature incline or a nutrient gradient or some other more exotic drive she didn’t know about. That no one knew about. Not yet.

  They would, though, someday. If she could fix all this.

  Fayez was awake when she got back to the rooms. He sat on the edge of their bed in the soft cotton pajamas that the Laconian Empire provided them gratis. He was massaging his new foot the way the physician had told him to. He looked up at her, worried. He hadn’t slept since the night before either. They’d gotten back to their rooms cold and weary, and also in another kind of shock. She had been a pawn in Holden’s chess game. And Holden had gotten her to the last rank and promoted her to a queen.

  “Well? How’s Trejo?” Fayez asked, mordant and hopeful. “Are we exiled?”

  “No such luck,” Elvi said. “Maybe later.”

  “We could still leave.” He was only partly joking. She imagined what it would be like. Getting the Falcon back. Or any ship, really. If they got off Laconia, they could go anywhere. Trejo wouldn’t have the resources to chase them. Not now. They could go back to Sol or Bara Gaon or one of the new, struggling colonies. They could leave all this bullshit behind.

  Except that something out there was looking for a way to snuff out their minds. And there wasn’t a better place to fight against that than right here. Her prison wasn’t Laconia. Her jailer wasn’t Trejo. The thing that had taken all her choices away was that this mystery so clearly needed to be solved, and she was so clearly the best one to do it.

  She kissed her husband softly, and on the lips. When she pulled back, the humor was gone from his eyes. They’d been together for so long. They’d been so many different people together. She felt the change coming again. She was entering a new part of her life now. It meant packing away all her stories about how she was only here from fear of the authorities. The authorities were broken. She was here because she chose to be, and that changed everything.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you were hoping for a gentlemanly retirement someplace that would give us both tenure.”

  “Or just one of us,” he said. “I’m not greedy.”

  “We don’t get to have that. And I’m sorry.”

  Fayez sighed, crossed his legs. “If we don’t, we don’t. I still have you?”

  “Always.”

  “Good enough,” he said, and patted the mattress at his side.

  “I have to go.”

  “Mixed signals,” he said.

  “I’ll be back after work.”

  “You say that now, but I know you. You’ll find something interesting and stay up until midnight chasing it, and by the time you come home, it’ll be time to leave again.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  “It’s why everyone needs you,” Fayez said. “It’s why I need you too. When you get back, I’ll be here.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “I’m sorry we couldn’t run away together.”

  “Maybe in our next lives.”

  The universe is always stranger than you think.

  It didn’t matter how broad her imagination was, how cynical, how joyous and open, how well researched or wild minded. The universe was always stranger. Every dream, every imagining, however lavish and improbable, inevitably fell short of the truth.

  Elvi had been born in a system with a single star and a handful of planets. She’d studied exobiology when it was still theoretical. When she’d been a newly minted PhD, her greatest dream was that she might get a research fellowship on Mars, and maybe—the pinnacle of all her wildest hopes—find some hard evidence that life had evolved there independently. It would have been the most astounding, important thing she could imagine. She’d be in the scientific histories as the woman who’d discovered living structures that came from someplace besides the Earth.

  Looking back, the dream seemed impossibly small.

  At the labs, she stopped to have a long talk with Dr. Ochida. She wanted a rundown of all the research being done—where it stood, who was heading up the projects, what his opinions were of the experimental designs. Even after Cortázar had died, she hadn’t done that. Hadn’t acted as though the labs were hers to run. Now she did, and Ochida didn’t object. That probably made it true.

  At any rate, he answered everything she asked, and Trejo hadn’t sent any guards to drag her away. So she was effectively in control of the most advanced research facility in the history of humankind. And if there was one thing that her decades in academic science had drilled into her consciousness, it was that power meant policy.

  “We’re going to need to make some changes,” she said. “We’re shutting down the Pen.”

  Ochida actually stopped walking. She could have said that all the science teams were now required to walk on their hands, and the man would have been less astounded.

  “But the protomolecule… The supply…”

  “We have enough,” she said. “Our reason for collecting more died with the construction platforms.”

  “But… the prisoners. What do we do with them?”

  “We’re not executioners,” Elvi said. “We never should have been. When the guards come, tell them we don’t accept the transfer. If Trejo wants to line people up against the wall and shoot them, I’m not in a position to stop that. But I can say we won’t support it. And we won’t base our research on it. From here on in, informed consent or work with yeast.”

  “This is… This will…”

  “Speed isn’t the only measure of progress, Doctor,” Elvi said. But she could tell from his eyes he didn’t know what she meant. “Just get it done. All right?”

  “Yes, Dr. Okoye. As you see fit.” He almost bowed as he retreated.

  The universe is always stranger than you think. Elvi went to her private lab. There were so many things to do, so many possible pathways to follow in the research. She could keep the secret of Duarte’s condition, or she could make her own research group, pulling from the best minds in Laconia. Trejo’s conspiracy was down to just the two of them and Kelly anyway. And with Teresa on the run with James fucking Holden, treating it as a state secret was more and more ridiculous.

  The chair seemed more comfortable now that it was hers. She knew it hadn’t actually changed, but she had. She pulled up her waiting messages and ran through them. The most recent one was from the shipyards, giving her an unscheduled update on the status of the Falcon. She took it as an olive branch from Trejo.

  As she went through the list, she felt herself growing calmer. More focused. The complicated, obscure world of politics and intrigue fell away, and the complicated, obscure world of research
protocols and alien biology took its place. It was like coming home. Fayez had been right. She was going to be there until morning if she wasn’t careful. But whatever she did, whatever path she took, the first step was the same. Even if it was a bad idea, it was necessary.

  The black-eyed children watched her as she went to their cage. Cara stood up, coming to meet her the way she often did. When Elvi undid the lock and slid the cage door open, Cara stared at it, confused. Her little brother walked to her side, slipped his smaller hand in hers. Elvi stood back, nodding to them. For the first time in decades, the two children stepped out of their cage freely. Xan’s little chest was heaving in and out with the emotion of it. A tear slipped down Cara’s grayish cheek.

  “Really?” Cara whispered. She meant, Are we really free?

  “There are some things I have to figure out,” Elvi said, and her voice was trembling too. “I hoped, if you’re willing, that you would help me.”

  Epilogue: Holden

  Holden lay strapped in the autodoc, his eyes closed. The ship was on the float, conserving the last of their reaction mass. He didn’t mind. Weightlessness was a visceral reminder that he wasn’t on Laconia anymore. He loved it for that.

  The machine ticked and hummed in a vaguely disapproving way, like it was trying to tell him to exercise more and cut back on salt. There were voices in the background. There were always voices in the background these days. After so many years with a skeleton crew, having a full complement felt like having a party where too many people had showed up and no one was leaving.

  A needle slid into his left arm, and the autodoc chugged to itself, pumping in his own peculiar cocktail of oncocidals and antiagathics and blood pressure stabilizers. And probably something for psychological distress. Lord knew he had that coming. The coolness gave him a pins-and-needles feeling on his lips, and he tasted something that his brain tried to interpret as peanuts. When it was done, the needle withdrew and a thin scanning bar on an armature came out and waved a wand along his face. An image of his skull and lips appeared on the screen, with the new growth in green.

  “All the parts in the right place?” Naomi asked from the doorway.

  “Most of them,” Holden said, and the scanner beeped at him, chiding. He stayed still while it finished. When the armature retracted, he said, “It does feel pretty fucking undignified to be teething at my age.”

  “Well, they knocked your tooth out,” Naomi said. Her tone was mild, but he could hear the murder behind it. He played it all down, but she knew. All the time he’d been under Laconian control, he’d made light of things. He’d made rules for himself so that his powerlessness didn’t turn into despair. He’d plotted and planned and watched for opportunities. Now it was over, and everything he’d been careful not to feel was still waiting for him.

  “My dad used to say something when he’d been traveling,” Holden said as the autodoc finished its run.

  “Which one?”

  “Father Caesar. He used to say that when you went too far too fast, your soul took some time catching up to you.”

  Naomi frowned. “I thought that was how religious fanatics argued that Belters didn’t have souls.”

  “Might have been that too,” Holden said. “Father Caesar was talking about jet lag. Anyway, I was thinking about it with just… change. You know?”

  He didn’t talk about the day he’d been arrested much. Not with anyone besides Naomi. He’d been taken into custody on Medina Station, held for questioning. Not sure if he was going to live the rest of his life in a box or be slaughtered as a warning to others. And Governor Singh had shipped him back to Laconia for questioning about the aliens that had made the rings and the other aliens that had killed them. And through the first part of it, and then again on and off all the time he’d been gone, he’d had the sense that none of it was really happening. Or that it was, but not to him. He’d become someone else. Being a prisoner had driven him a little crazy for a while, and he still wasn’t right. Not really. But every day he woke up on the Roci with Naomi beside him and Alex in the pilot’s chair, he felt a little closer to sane. His soul a little bit nearer, in a wide and metaphorical sense.

  Naomi pushed off, floating to him, and catching herself with the unconscious grace of someone born to it. She took his hand. She did that a lot these days. He liked it too. Especially when he woke up in the middle of the night, too groggy from sleep to know where he was, and started to panic that the guards were coming to beat him again. Her voice calmed him down, but her hand in his worked faster.

  “We’re going to start the braking burn in about forty minutes,” she said.

  “Hard?”

  “Alex says about three-quarter g. We’ll be fine. But I thought I’d let you know anyway.”

  “We won’t be trapped in the same couch for hours.”

  “Well, not by that, anyway,” she said. He didn’t know if the sly sexual banter was sincere or just another way of telling him he was home. It soothed him either way.

  “Just between us?” he said. “I’m going to be glad when it’s just us again. These are nice folks, but they’re not family, you know?”

  “I do,” she said. “We might… we might need to talk about hiring someone on, though. With Clarissa and Bobbie both gone.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “We’ll look at it.” He meant, But not now. Later. When I can. She heard it all.

  “I’m going to go check the coolant feed lines,” she said. “These kids all grew up on newer ships. They’re not used to our heat tolerances.”

  “All right,” Holden said. “I’m going to finish this and head for the flight deck.”

  “Sounds good,” she said, and pushed backward, keeping her eyes on him as she moved away to the door and caught herself without even looking.

  After she was gone, the autodoc chimed, giving him permission to unstrap himself. He moved slowly not because he hurt, but because he liked the sensation of freeing himself. The report was on the screen when he got there. All in all, it was pretty solid. He pulled up a record going back to his return to the Roci, and all the trend lines were going the right way. So there it was in clean, glowing lines. His soul on its way back.

  It would be good to feel like himself again. Naomi was stuck as the central planner for the underground as it transitioned to whatever came next. But she’d made it very clear that one run as captain of a gunship on campaign was more than a lifetime’s worth for her. The captain’s chair of the Rocinante was his. Though, since she was still nominally the admiral of the resistance fleet, his captaincy felt a bit like an emeritus title. Even so, there were responsibilities that came with it. If not now, then soon.

  He hesitated, then pulled up Amos’ record. There was no data. He thought about it for a moment. He didn’t want to have the talk, but he was going to have to. If he was going to be the captain again, he was going to have to be the captain again.

  He stopped by the galley first for a bulb of coffee and a printed length of something that the system called mushroom bacon. Three of the new crew were floating near a table, and he felt them watching him in the same way people sometimes did in bars or the corridors of stations. Is that James Holden? He’d been able to be oblivious to it before. Now he felt their attention like they were pointing a heat gun at him. He pretended not to notice their interest and headed for the machine shop.

  Muskrat floated in the middle of the room, a complex diaper on her haunches with a hole for her tail. She started wagging as soon as Holden came in. It made her gyrate around a center of mass defined by her larger and mostly still body and her lighter and fast-moving tail. Holden tossed a thumb-sized bit of the bacon at her mouth, and she caught it.

  “You’re getting better at that,” he said to the dog as it chewed noisily.

  The machine shop was perfectly familiar. The smell of high-grade lubricants and the residual heat of the machine printers, the old sign still in place where it had been. SHE TAKES CARE OF YOU. YOU TAKE CARE OF HER.

 
; A clanging came from inside the deck, two sharp, percussive strikes, and then a grunt. The slide of a body moving through a crawl space.

  “Hey, Cap’n,” the thing that had been Amos said, pulling himself out from under the decking. He had a wrench in one hand and an air filter in the other. His skin was still a sickly gray, and it left him looking cold. Like someone who had just drowned.

  “Everything going all right?” Holden said, gesturing at the dog with a forced cheerfulness.

  “So far. Turns out there’s a lot of people been thinking about how to have dogs on a ship. I’m just looking at what kinds of solves they’ve come up with.” He let the tools float and scratched the dog’s ears, stabilizing her jaw with his other hand so she didn’t drift.

  “Seems difficult,” Holden said.

  “It ain’t all dignified. I’m putting together a traveling kit for Tiny. Figure anyplace she heads for, she’s taking this one. Hard part’s the filters. Turns out these dogs throw off a lot of fur. Gums the standard recyclers up pretty quick if you don’t catch it first.”

  Holden braced himself with a handhold. Muskrat tried to turn toward him, but didn’t have anything to push against.

  “Have you heard about Teresa having any plans?” Holden asked, avoiding the conversation he’d come here to have.

  The mechanic took the filter and started running his thumb along the edge, inspecting it by touch. The blackness of his eyes made it hard to know what exactly he was looking at.

  “Nope. Last I saw, she and Alex and one of the new kids were all talking about Martian entertainment feeds. Apparently one of the ones she was into, Kit watched when he was her age. I think Tiny likes having something in common with people, even if it’s just the films they’ve watched.”

  “So I was at the med bay just now,” Holden said. “I noticed you hadn’t been by.”

  “Yeah, well. Autodoc isn’t so clear on what to make of me these days.”

  “Yeah,” Holden said. “About that.” He hesitated. He didn’t know how to ask if the thing in front of him was really Amos anymore.