Tiamat's Wrath

by James S. A. Corey

  She’d come across him months ago during one of her first excursions. She’d been trying to get high enough on the mountain to see the State Building, and there he’d been, eating his lunch and drinking from a scarred ceramic water purifier. He’d looked like nothing so much as an old cartoon of an enlightened guru meditating on a mountaintop. If there had been any threat in his smile, she might have been scared of him. But there wasn’t, and she wasn’t. And anyway Muskrat had liked him immediately.

  “Sorry,” she said, sitting on the edge of his cot. “I’ve been busy. I have a bunch of new things I’m studying. What are you working on?”

  Timothy considered the half-carved wood. “I was going for a marking gauge. I’ve got one already, but it’s a little big for the fine work.”

  “And you can’t have too many tools,” Teresa said. The phrase was something of a joke between them, and Timothy grinned.

  “Damned straight. So what’s up?”

  Teresa leaned forward. Timothy frowned and put down the wood and the knife. She didn’t know where to start, so she started with her father’s plan to train her up.

  He had a way of shifting his attention so that she felt like he was actually listening, not just preparing a reply in his head and waiting for her to stop talking. He focused on her the way he did on the wood he carved or the food he cooked. He didn’t judge her. He didn’t quiz her. She never worried that he would be disappointed with what she said.

  It was the way she imagined her father would listen to her if he weren’t her father.

  She wandered from topic to topic, telling Timothy about Connor and Muriel, the briefings and meetings her father was adding to her schedule, and all the day-to-day worries and thoughts that had built up without her even knowing, and ending with the unnerving conversation with Holden the dancing bear and the weird way he’d said You should keep an eye on me like it meant something more than it seemed…

  When she ran out of words, Timothy leaned back and scratched his beard. Muskrat had curled up on the floor between the two of them. The dog snored softly, and one leg twitched as she dreamed. Two repair drones queried each other, their voices clicking in descending musical tones. Just telling the story left her feeling better.

  “Yeah,” he said after a while, “well, for what it’s worth, you’re not the first person that felt like the captain was a splinter they couldn’t dig out. He has that effect on people. But if he says you ought to keep an eye on him, maybe you ought to keep an eye on him.”

  Teresa leaned back against the wall and pulled her knees up. “I just wish I knew why he bothers me so much.”

  “He don’t treat you like you’re special.”

  “You don’t treat me like I’m special. We’re friends.”

  He considered that. “Maybe it’s because he thinks your dad’s an asshole.”

  “My dad’s not an asshole. And Holden’s a killer. He doesn’t get to judge other people.”

  “Your dad’s kind of an asshole,” Timothy said, his expression philosophical, his voice matter-of-fact. “And he’s killed a lot more people than Holden ever did.”

  “That’s different. That’s war. He had to do it or else no one would have been able to organize everyone. We’d just have stumbled into the next conflict unprepared. My dad’s trying to save us.”

  Timothy held up a finger like she’d made his point for him. “Now you’re telling me why it’s okay he’s an asshole.”

  “I don’t—” Teresa started, then stopped. Timothy’s comment made her think of a philosophy lesson, and Ilich talking about consequentialism. Intention is irrelevant. Only outcomes matter.

  “I don’t tell anyone how to live,” Timothy was saying. “But if you’re looking for moral perfection in your family? Prepare for disappointment.”

  Teresa chuckled. If anyone else had said the same thing to her, she would have bristled, but it was Timothy. That made it okay. She was glad she’d made the time to come out to see him.

  “Why did you call him captain?”

  “That’s who he is. Captain Holden.”

  “He’s not your captain.”

  A flash of surprise passed over Timothy, like it was a thought he’d never had. “I guess he ain’t,” Timothy said, and then a moment later, and more slowly, “I guess he ain’t.”

  “Dad says he’s afraid,” Teresa said. “Holden is, I mean. Not Dad.”

  “They both are,” Timothy said, picking his knife back up. “Guys like them always are. It’s people like you and me that aren’t scared.”

  “You’re never scared?”

  “I haven’t been scared since I was younger than you, Tiny. I had a rough start.”

  “Me too. My mom died when I was a baby. I think my father doesn’t like having women around me because it feels like replacing her. All my teachers have been men.”

  “I never knew mine either,” Timothy said. “But I put something together later that I could sort of pretend was family. It wasn’t bad for someone that grew up on my street. While it lasted. I’ll tell you what, though, as fucked up as my childhood was? It’s got nothing on yours.”

  “My life’s perfect,” Teresa said. “I can have anything I want. Anytime I want it. Everyone treats me well. My father’s making sure I have the training and education to govern billions of people on thousands of planets. No one has ever had the advantages and opportunities I have.” She paused, surprised by the hint of bitterness that had crept into her voice.

  “Uh-huh,” Timothy said. “That’s why you’re always looking over your shoulder when you sneak out to see me, I guess.”

  That night, back in her room, she couldn’t sleep. The small nighttime noises of the State Building took on a weird power to distract and startle her. Even the gentle ticking of the walls as they radiated away the day’s heat felt like someone knocking for her attention. She tried turning her pillow to press her cheek against the cool side and playing gentle, soothing music. It didn’t help. Every time she closed her eyes and willed herself down toward dream, she found herself five minutes later with her eyes open, halfway through an imaginary debate with Timothy or Holden or Ilich or Connor. It was past midnight when she gave up.

  Muskrat rose with her, following her from bedroom to office, and then, when Teresa sat on one of her workbench stools, curled up at her feet and fell immediately to snoring. Nothing bothered her dog, or at least not for long. Teresa pulled up an old movie about a family living in a haunted apartment on Luna, but her mind slid off the entertainment as quickly as it had off the pillow. She thought about going out and walking around the gardens, but that annoyed her too. When she realized what she actually wanted to do, she’d already known it for a while. Admitting it to herself felt like a surrender.

  “Security log access,” she said, and her room’s system shifted from the haunted corridors of Luna to a businesslike user interface. Even as honored and important as she was, there were logs that she didn’t have access to. No one except maybe her father and Dr. Cortázar could have access to the recordings from the pens, for instance. That was normal. And it didn’t matter for what she needed. No one was worried about preserving Holden’s privacy. She could have watched him sleep if she’d wanted to.

  She set the system to generate a full track for Holden over the past week, then scrubbed through it. She knew that the State Building had ubiquitous surveillance built into it, but it was interesting to see where exactly the microlenses were and how much they could capture while staying invisible themselves. As she scrubbed through Holden’s passage in the buildings and the gardens, she thought about all the other things she could watch on the feeds. Connor and Muriel, for instance.

  On one of her screens, Holden sat on the grass, looking out at the same mountain where Timothy lived. The accelerated scrubbing made his casual gestures and adjustments seem spasmodic. Like he was vibrating. Then Muskrat was there with him. Then she was. She didn’t like looking at herself on camera. She didn’t look the way she felt like she d
id. In her mind, her hair was smoother and her posture was better. Without meaning to, she shifted on her stool to sit up straighter. Holden flopped to the grass and sat up with his back wet, and then she and Muskrat zipped out of the frame. She forgot her posture again and leaned forward.

  Holden fidgeted on the screen, then rose and sped off. Her scrub was at twenty times faster than base. In under an hour, she could take in the shape of his whole day. Holden at his dinner reading something on a handheld. Holden walking through the same common area her class had been in, pausing to talk to a guard. Holden in the gymnasium, exercising on the old-style machines that they used to use on ships. Holden sitting at a table on a veranda overlooking the city with Dr. Cortázar and a bottle of wine—

  She tapped the feed, dropping back to normal speed, and found an audio track.

  “—also jellyfish,” Cortázar said. “Turritopsis dohrnii is the classic example, but there are half a dozen more. An adult reverts to a polyp colony form under stress. Like an elderly man turning into a fetus. That’s not the model we’re using, but it means the organism has no set maximum life span.” He took a long sip from his wineglass.

  “What model are you using?” Holden asked.

  “The original inspirations for the work were corpses that the repair drones got hold of. Not really immortality at all, but the new organisms had some improvements. That’s where the breakthrough comes. That’s what we should really be focusing on, sacrifice or no. Healthy subject with a well-recorded baseline instead of this…”—his voice rang with contempt—“this fieldwork. How to achieve a more robust homeostasis. Just because it’s difficult to do doesn’t make the principal science unsolvable.”

  “So not unnatural at all,” Holden said, tipping a little more wine from the bottle into the doctor’s glass.

  “Meaningless term,” Cortázar said. “Humans arose inside nature. We’re natural. Everything we do is natural. The whole idea that we are different in category is either sentimental or religious. Irrelevant from a scientific perspective.”

  “So if we get to a place that we can all live forever, that’s not unnatural?” Holden sounded genuinely curious.

  Cortázar leaned in toward the prisoner, gesturing with his left hand while he swirled his glass in his right. “The only limits on us are what we can do. It’s perfectly natural to seek personal benefit. It’s perfectly natural to give advantages to your own offspring and withhold them from others. It’s perfectly natural to kill your enemies. That’s not even outlier behavior. That’s all in the middle of the bell curve all the time.”

  Teresa rested her head in her hands. She was pretty sure Cortázar was drunk. She’d never been herself, but she’d seen some adults at state functions get the same vague focus and sense of being a little off their own points.

  “You’re right, though,” Cortázar said, “You’re exactly right. The foundation needs to be broad. That’s true.”

  “Immortality is a high-stakes game,” Holden said, like he was agreeing.

  “Yes. Plumbing the depths of the protomolecule and all the artifacts it opens up is the work of a hundred lifetimes. Making the researchers die and be replaced by other people with a less advanced understanding is clearly—clearly—a bad idea. But that’s policy. This is the way forward. So this is the way forward.”

  “Because Duarte made it policy,” Holden said.

  “Because we’re primates who hold valuable things for our own bloodlines at the expense of everyone else,” Cortázar said. “Only one person can ever be immortal. That was what he said. But then he changed the rules. She can be too because he’s found a justification for her. That she’s really just an extension of him. I’m not mad about that. That’s just the organism we are. I’m not mad. But it doesn’t matter.”

  “That’s good,” Holden said.

  “The important thing is that we get good data. One person. Lots of people. All the same. But bad experimental design? That’s what sin really is,” Cortázar slurred. “That’s not me either. Nature eats babies all the time.”

  Holden shifted, looking directly up into the surveillance camera as if he knew exactly where the hidden lens was. As if he knew she would be watching. You should keep an eye on me. Teresa felt a crawling sensation coming up her neck and the feeling, even after he looked away, that he saw her as clearly as she saw him.

  She shut down the feed, closed the logs, and went back to bed, but she still didn’t sleep.

  Chapter Fifteen: Naomi

  Getting what you want fucks you up. Naomi pushed the thought aside as she had a dozen times before.

  The first part of breaking down her shelter was the easiest. She’d spent years on the float, sometimes running cargo herself, sometimes fighting smugglers for the OPA and the Transport Union. She knew all the tricks. Disassembling her crash couch and system into parts was the work of two hours. Everything she had was modular. Easy to take apart, easy to put into rotation as spare. Everything she’d had could dissolve back into the larger ship and not appear as anything more than a handful of off-by-one inventory miscounts.

  The empty container was a little harder, but only a little. According to the manifest, her container was supposed to be filled with the same payload of Earth-farmed bacteria and microbes and starter soil as seventy other containers in the ship. Shifting the contents of just a dozen or so to a slightly less dense configuration left plenty of overage to fill the space that had been hers. By the time the supplies reached their destination, she’d be elsewhere. And even if Laconia backtracked the discrepancies, there wouldn’t be much to suggest anything more than run-of-the-mill theft.

  The real problem was time. Well, the first real problem.

  The Laconian ship was already on a braking burn. Eighteen hours to rendezvous didn’t leave her much time for everything she had to do. Emma was a help. The woman had more years working transport than Naomi did, and she could drive a loading mech like it was part of her body. Even so, they were cutting it close. And every hour of the mechs hissing and clacking, the smell of industrial lubricant, and the bone-deep ache of effort was another chance for the regular crew to notice that something strange was happening. Toward the end, Naomi sent Emma away to see whether there was any information about the larger picture. If other ships were being stopped. If this was a coincidence, or if the destroyer knew that Naomi was there.

  Until she knew, she had to assume there was hope. Another motto for her life these days.

  Naomi moved the last pallets into the steel and ceramic that had been her home for months, closed the doors, sealed them, and slapped a customs inspection sticker over the seam. She still had to stow the loader mech and replace the stickers on all the containers she’d cracked, but that wouldn’t take more than another few minutes. She had almost half a shift before the inspection. A little over four hours to reinvent herself and blend in with the ship’s crew. That was the second real problem…

  Getting what you want fucks you up.

  They’d been in a bar on Pallas-Tycho not long after the two stations had become a single object. Clarissa had been in relatively good health then. Strong enough she could go drinking, anyway. Naomi didn’t remember which bar they’d been in, except that it had gravity, so it had to have been in Tycho’s old habitation ring. She did remember that Jim had been there. They’d been talking about how to address Alex’s upcoming change in marital status. Whether he’d be bringing his new wife on the ship or taking a leave of absence to be with her or what. Every option had advantages, every one had drawbacks. Looking back, Naomi thought that on some level all of them knew that the relationship was doomed. Clarissa had leaned back in her chair, a glass of whiskey in her hand. Her voice was thoughtful. “Getting what you want fucks you up,” she’d said. “When I was in jail, there was nothing I wanted more than to be anywhere else. Then I got out.”

  “Into an apocalyptic hellscape,” Naomi said.

  “But even after that. When we got up to Luna and when we got on the Roci.
It was hard. I knew what I was when I was in prison. It took me years to figure out who I was outside.”

  “We’re talking about marriage, aren’t we?”

  “Getting what you want fucks you up,” Clarissa had said.

  Naomi put her hand on the transport container. She’d put herself in prison in order to be safe, and her safety had turned her captive. All she wanted was to wake up next to Jim again. To have something like a pleasant, day-to-day life with him. And now that she couldn’t have it, all she wanted was her hermitage back.

  Her hand terminal chimed. There was only one person it could be.

  “Where do we stand?” she asked.

  “I’ve got a plan,” Emma said. “Meet me in med bay three.”

  “I don’t know where that is. Does the ship have a directory function? Because I don’t really think asking for directions is our best plan.”

  “Shit. All right. Wait there. I’ll be down in ten. I can take you there.”

  “Copy that,” Naomi said, and dropped the connection. It gave her time to reseal the containers.

  Emma, on the float beside her, held the hypodermic needle between her finger and thumb like she was playing darts. Her technique aside, though, the plan was about as solid as Naomi could hope for at short notice. She stretched her chin up and Emma stabbed again, a quick pinch at her jawline at the right to match her already-swelling left.

  “How’s that feel?” Emma asked.

  “Itches,” Naomi said.

  “Still up for the eyes?”

  “Yeah.”

  Inserting her into the ship’s roster wasn’t possible. Even if they could backdate all the paperwork to the Bhikaji Cama’s last port, Emma didn’t have the authorizations she’d need. And messing with the system immediately before an inspection was an invitation to disaster. Fail to shut down one logging system, and the last-minute change was a flashing pointer to whatever you most wanted hidden. So making Naomi into a regular crewman wasn’t possible, but making her not immediately match the biometrics for Naomi Nagata was in reach. All it took was a few well-placed needle sticks and some fluid that caused mild swelling. The only trick was changing the shape of her face in ways that made her look like someone else and not just herself, only puffy.