Tiamat's Wrath

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 Or else the enemy had achieved all its apparent objectives and withdrawn of its own accord.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 stole 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.”

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.”