Tiamat's Wrath

Chapter Twenty-Six: Elvi

Elvi woke herself trying to scream. She didn’t remember the dream, just the sense of overwhelming fear and paralysis. The effort to make herself heard that seemed to go on for hours, even though all it managed was a little groan, loud enough to bring her back to consciousness. It left her in the darkness, drenched in sweat and grateful for another few sleepless hours.

The suite was courtesy of the Laconian state. Two beds, both with autodocs built into them. One for her, the other for Fayez, who, fortunately, was still breathing deeply and heavily. She knew without looking that she hadn’t woken him up. She was grateful for that too. She didn’t turn the light on. Her cane was at her bedside, and she found it easily enough. She levered herself to the edge of the mattress, steeled herself, and swung her legs over. It hurt like hell, but only for a few seconds. Standing up was actually better, and she was leaning on the cane less than she had been.

The night terrors were looking pretty robust, though.

Trying hard not to make enough noise to wake her husband, she went through the darkness to the closet. The servants had left robes for them both, thick, textured cotton with a lining of something that might have been silk. She pulled it on one sleeve at a time, cinched it closed, and made her way out to the courtyard and a stone bench carved with complex mathematical patterns like something out of a mosque.

Her memory of the rescue was spotty at best. She remembered giving the emergency evacuation order to the Falcon. She remembered coming back to consciousness in normal space and calling for help. Crawling through blood and crash couch gel to Fayez. That part was pretty clear. After that, a few lucid moments of trying to cinch a belt around Fayez’s calf as a tourniquet. At some point, she’d decided that she was losing too much blood, slipped her hand into the hole in her leg, and made a fist in there to apply pressure all around. That probably should have been the worst part—her wrist vanishing into the skin of her own leg like a graphics processing failure. What she actually felt at the time was pride at having come up with a graceful solution. The tourniquet had been hard.

They told her she had been conscious when the rescue ship came, but she didn’t remember it. She knew because she’d read the reports that Jen had lived and was being treated somewhere else in the city. That Admiral Sagale had died, half his head ripped away. That Travon was technically listed as missing, since it was possible he could have survived someplace without the arm he left behind.

The casualties among the rest of the crew were similar. About half had survived. No one had come through uninjured. The Falcon had been stabilized too and brought home to be healed. And studied.

Some local animal was making its call. Four distinct notes, repeated again and again, at different speeds. Mating call. Warning. Alerting the hive to a food source. She had no way to know, but it was pretty. The night air was cool almost to the point of discomfort, but she didn’t want to go back inside for a coat. She’d just wait until she got tired and head back to bed or else find some other lobby in the palatial buildings to sit in until dawn broke. If anyone wondered why there was a lady with a bathrobe and a cane wandering around, she’d just tell them it was classified.

Exobiology wasn’t medicine. She knew more about predictive parallel evolution models than she did about wound care. If she hadn’t had a rank in the Science Directorate, she wouldn’t have been able to see her medical records, and mostly for good reasons. It was dangerous for someone with one expertise to try to interpret something in a different but similar field. Laypeople didn’t understand how much scientific literature was about nuance and shared understanding. Even with expert systems to help, she was more likely to avoid errors with one of Jen Lively’s physics analyses than her own medical records, if only because she knew that she didn’t know physics.

But she’d looked anyway.

The medical team had fought hard to keep her and Fayez alive. The cuts where their flesh had gone missing were strange. Something about the wounds had made clotting weird too, which of course immediately left her thinking of vampire bats and leeches. Organisms that fed on blood and produced anticoagulants. Which there was no reason to think these attackers had. The incisions in the decking had the same too-perfect margins.

A more comprehensive report was still in draft form, but she was able to access that too. Sagale appeared to have died instantly. Others in the crew had lived long enough for the wounded Falcon to haul them through the gate and out of danger, only to bleed out or succumb to shock. The missing matter was just that. Missing. The scoop of her leg, Fayez’s foot. Most of one lobe of Sagale’s brain. All of Travon but his arm. It wasn’t that they had been torn away. They’d been excised and taken … elsewhere. All told, the Falcon had lost 12 percent of its mass, apparently at random. The dark things that moved between the spaces hadn’t been targeting the crew. They’d meant to take everything. The human parts they’d removed were just points along a path. It almost made them worse. At least murderers had motives.

She pulled aside the robe and looked at the wound. The medical gel that filled in the missing flesh was pale, but getting pinker. She could already trace the lines where blood vessels were starting to form. Muscle and skin would follow over the next few weeks and months. In the end, she’d probably have a slightly discolored patch on her leg where the skin was younger than she was. Sagale, on the other hand … She shuddered. It was still hard to accept that he was gone.

She didn’t notice the dawn starting. The courtyard didn’t open to the east, so it was just a slow, subtle graying of the Laconian sky. The retreat of the stars and glowing construction platforms. Even then, what she noticed was the local organisms getting louder and the gentle vinegary smell that one of the local bird analogs made when it was waking up during mating season. She was cold and stiff and uncomfortable, but she didn’t move until Kelly, Duarte’s personal attendant, appeared.

“Major Okoye,” Kelly said. “You’re up early.”

“Or late,” Elvi said, trying on a smile. It didn’t really fit.

“Admiral Trejo arrived from Sol system last night.”

“That was fast.”

“I understand the burn was punishing. Still, he asked if you could join us after breakfast.”

“I can,” Elvi said. “But the one I need to talk to is the high consul.”

Kelly’s smile revealed nothing. “That’s worth discussing with the admiral.”

Elvi had had only ever seen Anton Trejo on screens. In person, he was a little underwhelming at first, and then, after a few minutes, she understood how he’d become the most decorated man in the Laconian military. He was stocky. His hair was dark and thin enough she could see pretty much all of his scalp through it. His eyes were a vivid green. A few years back, he’d conquered all of human civilization in less than a month. His manner was gentle, like everyone but him was a little fragile and he didn’t want to break them unintentionally.

He didn’t come across as having much to prove.

The meeting room was casual. Tapestry-upholstered couches and a low, long table of polished stone. The others were all men. Colonel Ilich, who Elvi had met a few times when she’d first been pressed into the Laconian military, Kelly who had brought her, and her immediate superior, Paolo Cortázar, who headed the Science Directorate and coordinated pretty much all the research Laconia did. Winston Duarte wasn’t there.

“Thank you for joining us, Doctor,” Trejo said as she took a seat across from him. “I read the reports on the incident in the ring space. That’s some hairy shit there.”

She took the casual profanity as a sign of his respect. He was treating her as a peer.

“It was,” she said. “I’m hoping not to do that again.”

“We’ll try to keep it that way. I was a little anxious making the transit myself. I mean, I wasn’t awake for it. I heard you were awake in one of these new full immersion couches? I don’t think I’d enjoy that. I don’t like going over twenty g asleep, much less watching it happen.”

“I’m glad you made it,” Elvi said. Cortázar shrugged and looked at his fingernails. Performative boredom. He wasn’t happy she was there. With a little taste of spite, she found a way to draw the pleasantries out a little more. “I hope there wasn’t any trouble for you?”

“No, no,” Trejo said. “I was fine. There are problems, though. People are starting to make their own transits. One poor bastard out of Bellerophon tried to speed through. Transit into ring space and transit back out in the same burn. He hadn’t heard about how the gates all shifted position a little. His ship hit the edge of the gate hub about three hundred klicks to the left of the gate he was aiming for.”

“Ouch,” Elvi said.

“People are getting desperate. For every system that can sustain itself, there’s dozens that aren’t there yet. Trade isn’t optional for them. It’s life and death. And without a traffic authority, death comes a lot more often.”

“I’m sorry about Medina and the Typhoon,” Elvi said.

“Admiral Song was a good sailor,” Trejo said. “Died with her boots on. That’s as much as any of us can ask. But there’ll be time enough to toast the dead later. I have a problem, Doctor. And I have chosen to make part of my problem your problem too.”

Cortázar sighed and looked away. Trejo explained what had happened to the high consul, then asked Kelly to bring them some tea while Elvi got over the shock. It was green tea, poured from a cast-iron kettle into black ceramic mugs. She’d had two servings before she felt like she’d found her feet again.

“So there’s no one running the empire,” she said.

“We are running the empire on the high consul’s behalf until such time as he is sufficiently recovered to take over the duties himself,” Trejo said, then paused and added, “or his daughter has reached an age sufficient to take over in his place.”

“She’s very bright,” Colonel Ilich said. “And she’s controllable. The high consul believed, and I agree, that the narrative of succession had to be familiar and reassuring. Primogeniture is a common model across a wide band of cultures and backgrounds. Of course, she won’t be expected to actually wield power until she has shown an aptitude and willingness.”

“How old is she?” Elvi asked.

“Duarte hoped he’d have a couple centuries to train her up,” Trejo said. “Hell, he hoped she could stay on the bench forever. But these are the cards we have, and so we’re going to play them. I’m not going to sugarcoat this. We’ve got a lot to carry, and most of that is going to fall on the Science Directorate.”

“How can I help?” Elvi asked. It sounded better than What the fuck do you want me to do about this?

“Your top mission is to get the high consul back,” Trejo said. “Dr. Cortázar will walk you through everything he’s done so far. We’re hoping a pair of fresh eyes will find something he hasn’t.”

Elvi looked over at Cortázar. He wasn’t looking at her. So this was why he was pouting. Trejo had called his competence into question. That was going to be unpleasant.

“While you do that, I’m going be getting things back under control,” Trejo said. “The Voice of the Whirlwind’s still a few weeks shy of her shakedown, but we’re not stationing any crewed vessel in the ring space, and we’re keeping the transits short. Whirlwind’s going to be protecting Laconia. Tempest is staying in Sol. There’s a situation there that needs an eye on it, and Sol’s the most unruly system we have to worry about.”

“And the traffic control?” Elvi asked.

“We can’t hold the inside of gates,” Trejo said. “So we’re going to have to take the outsides. We have two hundred and eighty Pulsar-class destroyers to police thirteen hundred and seventy-one gates.”

For a moment, Elvi saw the enormity of what Trejo was facing press down on him. The bright-green eyes focused on nothing, and the cheerful, confident face only looked tired. But a moment later, he was back.

“I’ll be deploying those to systems most likely to have high traffic. We’ll get the comms network back. And after the Whirlwind’s ready, we’re turning all the construction platforms over to generating more antimatter charges. That brings us to your number two priority. I think we can all agree this tit-for-tat see-if-we-can-be-reasonable plan hasn’t gone so well. We’re going to gear up to fight this war for real. Anything you can find that will give us an—”

Adrenaline flooded Elvi’s bloodstream. Her heart hit her ribs like a hammer. “Are you fucking crazy?”

Ilich and Kelly shared a look as if she’d confirmed something. Cortázar sneered.

“I’m sorry,” Elvi said. “Wait. No. I’m actually not. Are you fucking crazy? Did you not see what just happened?”

Trejo bowed his head. His scalp glimmered at her through his sparse hair.

“I understand that this is a hard conversation for you right now, Doctor. You’ve been through a lot. But I’m a military man, and the fact is that we are at war. We have been at war since the first time a ship failed a transit.”

“Those things killed—”

“I know what they did.” Trejo’s voice was harsh. It pushed her back into her seat. “And I know why they did it. Because they got hurt. That means they can be hurt, and unless they find some way to sue for peace, I intend to prepare our forces to hurt them again. Candidly, I don’t like it. We’re going up against something we don’t understand with unfamiliar tools on a battlefield whose constraints we’re working out as we go along. It’s a stupid war, but it’s ours. If it can be won, I intend to win it. You’re going to help me.”

A hundred objections rose in her mind, but fell back at the sight of the bright-green eyes.

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“Good. Please begin your review with Dr. Cortázar and keep me apprised of any insights or progress.”

I will Elvi said at the same moment that Cortázar said We will. Trejo accepted the answers as if they’d been the same. When he spoke, he spoke to Elvi. “If you disapprove of my plan of action, it’s easy to stop me. Just get me my boss back.”

“I’m going to try,” Elvi said.

Elvi walked back to her rooms before she left the State Building for the Science Directorate. She wanted to clear her head, but it wasn’t clearing. Every thought she had seemed to fight its way to consciousness like it was swimming through gel. Her leg ached worse now, and the sleepless hours were starting to weigh on her, pulling her toward bed now that she had obligations. Or maybe she was just realizing that her time of healing after the trauma was over, and she wasn’t remotely okay.

The grounds were beautiful. Better than the best luxury resort. The weird leathery fliers they called sunbirds were out, flapping high above the buildings and looking more like bats than birds. Something like a dragonfly zoomed past her, wings buzzing here both the same as and entirely differently than they would have on earth.

The scale of it all was too big. There were too many billion people in too many hundred solar systems for anyone to really understand. For any human to really understand. Maybe that was why Winston Duarte had decided not to be human anymore. Him or his daughter either. It made her wish she’d majored in mathematics instead. They hadn’t sent any mathematicians to Ilus. And without Ilus, she wouldn’t have been the nearest thing to an expert on the wounds in reality that those dark things left. And she wouldn’t have been recruited by Laconia. And she wouldn’t be here. One little change early on could have meant a whole different life.

She turned the last corner before her courtyard, and there, out in the gardens, Fayez sat. One leg ended in a bright blue pod the size of a boot where his missing foot was already starting to grow back. The other was stretched out on a bench. And leaning against the back of the bench, James Holden.

As if he had felt the pressure of her gaze, Holden looked up and waved. He seemed both older and as though he hadn’t changed at all. She started toward the bench, leaning more on her cane than she’d had to before. The gel in her leg felt like it was burning. Hours more standing and walking through Cortázar’s labs sounded awful.

As she approached, Holden and Fayez exchanged a few words, and Holden walked off briskly. By the time she got to her husband’s side, Holden had disappeared behind a hedge.

Fayez moved his good leg and gave her room to sit. There were dark pouches under his eyes, but his smile was as amused and sardonic as the day she’d met him. Or the day she’d married him. Or that one time when they’d almost died because a terrorist had booby-trapped a landing pad.

“I think I must have lived my life wrong somehow,” she said.

“I know the feeling,” he said. “But then I see you, and I think something must have gone right. Even if everything else treats me like my previous incarnation killed a priest.”

She took his hand, wove her fingers with his. The future looked a little less bleak.

“I just had the most interesting conversation,” Fayez said.

“I could say the same,” she said. “But mine’s classified, so why don’t you go first.”

“Well, he was being awfully cagey. But I think our old friend Holden just told me Cortázar’s plotting murder.”