Tiamat's Wrath

by James S. A. Corey

  “True,” Emma said.

  Naomi laughed, and it was a hard, bitter sound. “Anyway, I spent too much time already with people telling me they’d shoot me if I didn’t do what they said. That tank’s empty for this lifetime.”

  “May it never refill,” Emma said.

  A flat-faced man in a command uniform pulled himself into the commissary, glanced at them, and did a fast double take. The environmental techs looked from him to Naomi, then pushed off, shoving their spent bulbs in the recycler as they left. The officer went to the dispenser, pulled a drink of some sort—coffee, tea, maté—and left again without looking back at them. His disapproval made the air feel cooler.

  “You’ve got what you need?” Emma asked, as if the man hadn’t been there at all.

  The question had more weight than the words deserved. “I’m good,” Naomi said. “When we get to port, though—”

  “We’ll get you out safe,” Emma said. “After that…”

  “I know,” Naomi said. After that, she was still a criminal. Still a fugitive. Still a mouse looking for a safe hole. That would come. “Saba may have something for me.”

  “I’ll light you a candle. Meantime, if you need something, better me than Chuck, maybe,” Emma said, then sucked the last of the paste out of the bulb, smacked her lips, and launched for the door. Naomi floated alone in the commissary for a few minutes more. She felt a little guilty taking a bulb of tea back to her cabin, but only a little.

  The Bhikaji Cama was a massive ship. Three quarters of a kilometer long and wide enough to look squat in the schematics. It had been built decades earlier to ferry enough people and supplies to one of the outlying worlds that a self-sustaining colony could arrive all at once. Buildings and recyclers and soil and reactors and fuel. Everything that humanity needed to make a toehold in an unfriendly alien ecosphere except a sense of fashion and guidelines on how to woo your mechanics. The halls were a drab green with hand- and footholds that hadn’t been scrubbed in a few too many weeks. The ship conserved water jealously, using passive radiators to shed heat instead of evaporative feeds, and it left the air hotter than she liked.

  Her cabin was tiny. Not just smaller than her storage container had been, but smaller than some supply closets she’d had on the Roci. The crash couch was cheap, with gel that stank a little, and there wasn’t enough room for her to stretch her arms in it. The design was called albuepartir back in the Belt, because if your arm drifted off the edge in your sleep, a sudden deceleration could break it. Some previous tenant had illustrated the anti-spalling cloth with a complex and violent firefight between two sets of stick figures, one with colored-in circles for heads, and the other pale and empty. Naomi strapped herself into the couch, pulled up the system and the false record Chuck had given her, and got back to work.

  The ironic thing was that, with the access she had now, she could actually reach more information than with the passive feeds she’d relied on before. She tried to be careful about it, not abuse her access in a way that would raise any more red flags than were already flying. But she had requests out to the union database mirror about political officers and changes to Laconian transfer point regulation. It was the sort of thing that anyone on a ship like the Cama might be—and probably was—looking into. It was only her perspective on the information coming back that made it different.

  Thinking that the political officer in Sol system had meant something specifically about Sol was the mistake she’d made. That they’d all made. There was also one on Auberon, and that changed the scope. Now that she knew to look for the pattern, it was there. Freighters diverted to Medina on their transits or held. Environmental audits on ships that were running close to their theoretical maximum load.

  It still wasn’t confirmation. Nothing so overt as that. But if there had been a massive wave of Laconian bureaucrats being quietly repositioned throughout the colony worlds—a new level of infrastructure being put in place without fanfare or warning—this was what it would look like. One political officer going to Earth was an opportunity. Two political officers being set in place in Sol and Auberon were a threat. A new Laconian mandarinate covertly set to keep eyes on the transfer points was an escalation. If Laconia continued the trend and put officers on the ships themselves, it was the end of the shell game.

  She flicked through the data, looking for places where she might have been wrong. Where her interpretations could have been mistaken or where another interpretation could have fit the same data. She was reaching for hope the way a patient might by holding a doctor’s hand and saying, But it might not be terminal, right?

  Emma accepted her connection almost as soon as she requested it.

  “I need to send a message,” Naomi said.

  “Where to?” Emma asked over the gabble of other voices.

  “Upstairs,” Naomi said. “Do you want me to say the name?”

  Emma was silent for a moment. Then, “Can you find your way to ops?”

  “I’ll meet you there,” Naomi said, and dropped the call.

  She moved through the ship faster when her mind was on something else. As if her body, freed from thinking about her place in the rhythms of the ship, found them automatically. She composed the message as the decks passed by her, what she could say to make the situation clear to Saba but obscure to anyone intercepting the tightbeam either here or at the repeaters that bridged the interference through the gates.

  She heard Emma’s voice before she reached the ops deck. Her tone was high and rough as a decking saw. Naomi pulled herself onto the deck and grabbed a handhold to stop. Emma was on the float by the comms station, her arms folded and her jaw jutting out. A man with a salt-and-pepper beard longer than his close-cropped hair looked away from her long enough to recognize Naomi, then back at Emma in disgust. His uniform identified him as Captain Burnham. The comms tech was between them like a mouse at a catfight.

  “The answer was no before,” Burnham said, then pointed toward Naomi with his chin. “Now that this one is on my deck, the answer’s go fuck yourself.”

  “It’s nothing,” Emma said. “Five-minute tightbeam to Medina? No one would even blink at it. It’s trivial.”

  “It’s already too much.” He turned to look at Naomi. “Don’t say anything, you. I know who you are, and I know what you are, and I have extended my unrequested hospitality to you out of grandmotherly fucking kindness.”

  “You have as much to hide as she does,” Emma said. “Everyone knows about the sealed cabins.”

  The comms tech pulled himself down into the gel of his crash couch like he could disappear into it. Naomi considered the captain of the Bhikaji Cama with all the calm and dignity she could manage. “I appreciate that my presence puts you and yours at greater risk. I wouldn’t have chosen this if there were a better way, but there isn’t. If things had gone the way I hoped, you’d never have known I was here. That’s not the way it happened, though. And now I need five minutes with your tightbeam.”

  Burnham lifted his hands to her, palms out. Stop. “Ma’am, I am not a partisan, but I know a lot of my crew are. I’m the kind of man that kens when to shut up and mind my own business. I’m not turning you over to the political officer, but don’t mistake that for loyalty. I’m trying to get my ass out of a crack, and I’m getting more and more convinced that locking you in a cabin and welding the door shut might be an easier path than the one I’ve chosen.”

  “It’s important,” Naomi said.

  “It’s my ship. The answer is no.” His eyes were hard, but it was as much fear as anger. Naomi waited a moment, seeing what her gut said. Push or back down. Emma sighed, and the captain’s beard shifted as his jaw went tighter.

  “I understand,” Naomi said. She met Emma’s eyes for a fraction of a second, and then they moved to the bulkhead together. Emma fumed silently until they made the turn into the lift shaft.

  “Sorry about that,” Emma said. “He’s an asshole.”

  “I did stow away on his ship and
put him at risk of a Laconian interrogation room,” Naomi said. “Expecting him to take orders from me along with it might be too much to ask. I’ll find another way.”

  “I can help unbox some of those communication torpedoes,” Emma said. Her tone made it an apology.

  “I’d rather find another way to use the tightbeam. Time may be important. But Emma, you have to be more careful.”

  “He’s not going to fold,” Emma said. “I’ve shipped with that man long enough to tell when he’s at his edge. There’s a thing he does with his lips. I can clean him out playing poker too.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” Naomi said. “You said five minutes talking to Medina.”

  “They were going to know where the message was going anyway,” Emma said. “They had to.”

  “I didn’t know Saba was on Medina Station, and I do now,” Naomi said. “Now if they catch me, it compromises him.”

  Emma pressed her lips tight. “Sorry. I assumed that… Sorry.”

  “We’ll tell him. I’m sure he has plans to shift locations if he needs to.”

  Emma nodded, then muttered fuck under her breath. Even as she thought about other ways to get comm access, Naomi spared a moment to feel sympathy for her.

  Emma’s hand terminal sounded at the same moment that hers did. Another chime sounded from down a corridor. A ship-wide alert. Or something bigger. Naomi thumbed the notification open.

  ALL UNION SHIPS: TOP PRIORITY. ALL TRAFFIC THROUGH ALL GATES IS SUSPENDED BY ORDER OF LACONIAN MILITARY COMMAND. NO SHIPS PERMITTED THROUGH ANY GATE UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. ALL TRANSITS ARE ON HOLD. ALL SHIPS ON APPROACH ARE TO EVACUATE THE LANE TO .8 AU IMMEDIATELY.

  Emma was moving through data fast, flipping from one interface to another, and so intent on her hand terminal that she didn’t notice she was drifting. Naomi caught her elbow and pulled her to the wall.

  “What happened?” Naomi asked.

  “Don’t know,” Emma said, shaking her head. “Something big.”

  Chapter Nineteen: Elvi

  The hard burn out of Tecoma system without sedation was a slice of hell. The crash couch felt close as a coffin around her. The breathable support fluid was thick in her throat. She tried to tell herself that it was like being in a dream where she could never drown, but every few minutes, she felt an animal panic in the back of her head. Throughout most of human evolutionary history, the watery inside-a-pipe-with-no-way-out view she had would have been the last thing someone saw before they died in pain. It was hard to convince her hindbrain that this time was different.

  The monitor, weirdly, was crisper and easier to see than normal. Something about how the fluid did or didn’t scatter light. Or evidence that she needed to look into vision correction, she didn’t know which. But she could track the ship’s progress on its mad dash for the ring and the data still streaming in from the probes. The fizz of miraculous protons kept coming into the system, and the spin of the Tecoma star and the magnetic fields it generated were pulling some of the new matter into a glowing accretion disk. It was almost beautiful except for the part where it could collapse into a black hole and generate the gamma ray burst that killed them as fast as a neuron could fire.

  With the adjustable buoyancy in the tank, she felt the burn less as being pressed down and more as being squeezed in a massive and invisible fist. Red flight information data kept her aware of how tenuous her position was. Surviving a sustained thirty-g burn in a conventional crash couch would have been about as likely as living through a free fall drop from orbit onto a pile of knives.

  When they hit the midpoint of the flight, the Falcon kicked off its drive, flipped the ship, and started its deceleration in less than a minute. All Elvi experienced was a moment’s vertigo and a bloom of black spots in her vision that cleared away again quickly. The animal panic rose in her again, and she fought to keep it back.

  I AM NOT LOVING THIS EXPERIENCE, she sent to Fayez. She hated that she couldn’t say it or hear his voice.

  A moment later, a message came back. I KNOW. I CAN’T DECIDE IF I’M PANICKED OR BORED. V. CONFUSING. BEEN READING THE SAFETY GUIDELINES. TURNS OUT MALES ARE SPECIFICALLY DISCOURAGED FROM MASTURBATING IN THE GEL WHILE UNDER BURN. WONDER WHAT THAT TEST PROTOCOL LOOKED LIKE.

  The fluid made it hard to laugh. Her husband might not have been a good match for anyone but her. But for her, he was perfect.

  Hours later, they passed through the ring gate into what everyone still called the slow zone. The Falcon jounced as maneuvering thrusters took them off the mathematical line defined by the gate and the star. Under perfect circumstances, the couch would have cycled through three sets of progressively thinner fluid before it finally drained, but Elvi was done. She selected IMMEDIATE RELEASE from the system menu, approved the override, and heard the deep chunk-chunk-chunk of the pump as it drew the fluid away and injected oxygen-rich air in its place. She might choke and cough and feel like she was getting over bronchitis for a few hours, but she genuinely didn’t care.

  Admiral Sagale hadn’t either, because the first thing she heard when her crash couch popped its seals and slid open was his phlegmy voice.

  “—for immediate evacuation. We have data that the high consul specifically mandated.”

  Elvi pulled herself up. Her muscles ached like someone had beaten her with a hammer. She floated to the bridge. Stopping herself on a handhold felt like it was going to bend the joints in her hand the wrong way. Sagale’s couch was in its open configuration, but a film of fluid still clung to his hair and arm. The smell of it was too complex for her mind. Her brain kept reaching for comparisons and then abandoning them—grape jelly, cinnamon, acetate, nutmeg—over and over. Behind her, Fayez groaned. Sagale looked over at them, scowling.

  “You shouldn’t be out of your couch, Major Okoye,” he said, and before she could respond, the comm channel did.

  “Your request is noted,” a familiar voice said. Elvi knew she should recognize it. The sustained high gs might have compromised her more than she’d thought. “I’ll do what I can.”

  “Governor Song,” Sagale said. “The Falcon is on a scientific mission critical to the empire. If we busted our asses to get here so we can die waiting in line—”

  The penny dropped for Elvi. Jae-Eun Song. Governor of Medina Station. She’d heard of the woman often, though they had never met.

  “Admiral Sagale,” the woman said. It was strange to be close enough to another ship that the light delay made interrupting him possible. “I had no warning about this. I had sixty-four ships in the zone, including Medina Station and the Typhoon. I’ve gotten it down to twenty-eight, even with you screaming through my gate and screwing up my queue. You can give my team a minute to run the numbers.”

  Sagale’s expression landed somewhere between annoyance and rage, but his voice was professional. “Understood, Governor. Didn’t mean to step on your toes.” He turned off his microphone with a gesture like a punch.

  “What’s—” Elvi said, then braced herself and coughed up a thick wad of breathable fluid. Fayez appeared at her side with a towel. She spat into it. “What’s going on?”

  Sagale put a volumetric display on the main monitor. The alien station hung exactly in the center of 1,373 gates evenly distributed around the surface of a sphere that had nothing outside it. Icons marked the repurposed generation ship that was the oldest station in the space between worlds and the Magnetar-class Laconian warship that was the newest. Along with them, a scattering of ships in a space barely smaller than the Earth’s sun. If the icons had been to scale, they’d have been less than motes of dust. Fewer than a hundred bubbles of air in a space the volume of a million Earths.

  “Governor Song is trying to evacuate the ring space per my recommendation,” Sagale said. “She is also trying to move Medina Station further out of harm’s way in case a gamma burst does come through Tecoma gate. But preparing the station is proving difficult, as it means stopping the spin drum and turning on drives that haven’t been used in seve
ral decades. In that context, I have asked for a priority transit to Laconia.”

  “And?” Fayez asked.

  “And her team is crunching the numbers,” Sagale said, biting each word off individually. He was scared. He was right to be. She was too.

  “Where’s Jen?” she asked. There was a sharp pain in her chest. More fluid coming loose.

  “The others are sedated,” Sagale said. “There was no reason to keep them awake.”

  “She could have monitored the data coming in from Tecoma,” Fayez said. “I mean, I can look at it, but Jen’s the one that understands.”

  “I’d rather focus on keeping her alive so she can make sense of it later,” Sagale said.

  “It’s going to hit the station, isn’t it?” Elvi said. “The star, the gate, and that alien station that runs the ring space. They’re all in a line.”

  “Yes,” Sagale said.

  Fayez raised a hand over his head like a kid in a classroom. “Um. Point of clarification? Do we really want to make a transit right before that happens? Because if I recall correctly, the whole reason that we have a Magnetar-class ship here at all is because hitting that little ball there with a massive energy burst makes an exponentially larger plume of gamma radiation pop out of all the gates.”

  “We have been able to use that effect to guard all the gates simultaneously, yes,” Sagale said. “The cannons-on-the-cliffs strategy.”

  “And don’t we want to be on this side of those cannons when they go off?” Fayez was talking too fast. Elvi took his hand, squeezing his fingers, hoping it would calm him. “I’m just asking, because the thing where we rush through to safety just in time to get cooked by the aftermath seems unpleasant.”

  “It’s a calculated risk,” Sagale said. “We aren’t certain that the station will survive the blast. Or what will happen if it doesn’t.”

  She watched new vistas of catastrophe unfold in her husband’s eyes. The station might break. The slow zone might collapse. It had been unthinkable right up to the moment he thought it.