Tiamat's Wrath

Chapter One: Elvi

The universe is always stranger than you think.

That had been the favorite phrase of a professor of Elvi’s back in her graduate study days. Professor Ehrlich, a grumpy old German with a long white beard who’d always made Elvi think of garden gnomes, repeated it every time someone was surprised by the results their lab test delivered. At the time, Elvi had found the catchphrase true to the point of triteness. Of course the universe had unexpected surprises.

Professor Ehrlich was almost certainly dead. He’d been at the edge of what anti-aging technology could achieve when Elvi was in her early twenties. She had a daughter older than that now. But if he’d still been alive, Elvi would have sent him a lengthy and heartfelt apology.

The universe wasn’t just stranger than you knew, it was stranger than you could know. Every new wonder, no matter how astonishing, just laid the foundation for an even more astounding discovery later. The universe and its constantly shifting definition of what was considered strange. The discovery of what everyone thought was alien life when the protomolecule was found on Phoebe had shaken people to their foundations, and was somehow still less disturbing than the discovery that the protomolecule wasn’t an alien so much as it was an alien’s tool. Their version of a wrench, only a wrench that converted the entire asteroid station of Eros into a spaceship, hijacked Venus, created the ring gate, and gave sudden access to thirteen hundred worlds beyond.

The universe is always stranger than you think. God damn right, Professor.

“What,” her husband Fayez said, “is that?”

They were on the bridge of her ship, the Falcon. The ship that the Laconian Empire had given her. On the screen in front of them, a high-resolution image of what everyone was calling the object slowly filled in. It was a planetary body a little larger than Jupiter and nearly transparent, like an enormous crystal ball with a faintly greenish hue. The only structure in the Adro system.

“Passive spectrometry says almost entirely carbon,” Travon Barrish said, not even looking up from his work screen as the data scrolled by. He was the team’s materials scientist, and the most literal person Elvi had ever met. Of course he gave Fayez the factual answer to his question. She knew that wasn’t what her husband had been asking. He’d been asking, Why is that?

“It’s packed into a dense lattice,” Jen Lively, the team’s physicist, said. “It …”

She trailed off, so Elvi finished for her. “It’s a diamond.”

When she was seven years old, Elvi Okoye had returned to Nigeria with her mother when her great-aunt, a woman Elvi had never met, died. As her mother worked to take care of funeral arrangements, Elvi wandered through her house. It became a game of sorts, seeing how much of a picture of the dead woman she could create by looking at the objects she’d left behind. On a shelf next to the bed, a picture of a smiling young man with dark skin and pale eyes who could have been a husband, or a brother, or a son. In the tiny bathroom, among the scattered packages of cheap soaps and cleansers, one beautiful crystal bottle filled with mysterious green liquid. Perfume? Poison? Without having known the woman herself, all the objects she’d left behind were fantastic and compelling.

Many years later, while rinsing her mouth, the smell triggered a memory and she realized the green liquid in the bottle had almost certainly been mouthwash. One mystery solved, but new questions arose. Why had she put mouthwash in such a beautiful bottle instead of just leaving it in the recyclable container it came in? Where had the bottle come from originally? Had she used it as mouthwash, or was there some hidden function mouthwash could perform that Elvi had never thought of? Without the dead woman to explain, it would forever remain a mystery. Some things could only ever be understood in context.

On the view screen, a single faintly green diamond with a machine-perfect smooth surface floating in a solar system with no other planets, orbiting one fading white dwarf star. A bottle of mouthwash in cut crystal, surrounded by cheap soap on a dirty bathroom counter. Fayez was right. The only question that mattered was why, but everyone who knew was dead. The only answer she had left was Professor Ehrlich’s.

The Falcon had been specially designed at the request of High Consul Duarte specifically for her, and it had only one mission: to visit the gate network’s “dead systems” and see if they held any clues about the nameless enemy that had destroyed the protomolecule builders’ civilization or the weird nonphysical bullets that they—or it, or whatever pronoun you used for an extradimensional alocal antecedent—had left behind.

The Falcon had visited three of those systems so far. Every time it had been a wonder. Elvi didn’t like the phrase dead system. People had started calling them that because they contained no planets capable of sustaining life. She found the classification annoying and simplistic. Yes, it wasn’t possible for any life they understood to live on a Jupiter-sized diamond floating around a white dwarf. But there was also no conceivable natural process that could account for such an artifact. Someone had made it. Engineering on a scale that was awesome in the classical sense of the word. Inspiring both wonder and dread in equal proportion. To write it off as dead because plants didn’t grow on it felt like the dread winning out over the wonder.

“They swept up everything,” Fayez said. He was flipping through telescope and radar images of the solar system. “There isn’t even a cometary belt clear out to a light-year from the star. They grabbed every bit of material in this entire solar system, turned it into carbon, and mashed it into a fucking diamond.”

“People used to give diamonds as gifts before proposing marriage,” Jen said. “Maybe someone wanted to be sure the answer wasn’t no.”

Travon’s head snapped up from his console, and he blinked at Jen for several seconds. His rigid literalism meant he was also chemically free of anything resembling a sense of humor, and Elvi had watched Jen’s flippant irony put him into vapor lock more than once.

“I don’t think—” Travon started, but Elvi cut him off.

“Stay focused on the job, people. We need to know everything about this system before we bring the catalyst online and start breaking things.”

“Copy that, boss,” Fayez said, and gave her a wink no one else could see.

The rest of her team, the very best scientists and technicians from across the empire, handpicked and placed under her command by the high consul himself, turned back to their displays. In scientific matters related to their current mission, her orders had the full force of imperial law. No one on the team ever argued.

The caveat being, of course, that not everyone was on her team, and not everything was considered a scientific matter.

“You want to tell him that we’re pushing the rollout,” Fayez said, “or should I?”

She looked at the screen again with a kind of longing. There were probably structures in the diamond. Traces like pale ink in a dead script that could point them a little further toward the next mystery, the next revelation, the next unutterable strangeness. She didn’t want to tell anyone about anything. She wanted to look.

“I’ll take care of it,” Elvi said, and headed for the lift.

Admiral Mehmet Sagale was a mountain of a man with coal-black eyes in a dinner plate–flat face. As the military commander of their mission, he mostly left the scientists alone. But when something fell into an area where his orders specified he was in charge, he was as implacable and immovable as his size suggested. And something about sitting in his spartan office always felt disciplinary. Like being sent to the headmaster for cheating on a test. Elvi hated playing the role of supplicant to a military figurehead. But in the Laconian Empire, the military always sat at the top of the authority chart.

“Dr. Okoye,” Admiral Sagale said. He rubbed the bridge of his nose with the tips of sausage-sized fingers and gazed at her with the same mix of affection and patronizing annoyance she had once given her children when they were doing something stupid. “We are woefully behind schedule, as you know. My orders are to—”

“This system is incredible, Met,” she said. Using the nickname was a little aggression, but one he tolerated. “It’s too incredible to just throw away out of impatience. We need to spend time really studying this artifact before you trot out the catalyst and wait to see if something blows up!”

“Major Okoye,” Sagale replied, using her military title to not so subtly remind her of their relative positions in the chain of command. “As soon as your team finishes their preliminary data collection, we will bring out the catalyst and see if this system has any military value, as per our orders.”

“Admiral,” Elvi said, knowing aggression would fail on him when he was in this mood and trying for a placating respect instead. “I just want a little more time. We can make up the schedule on our trip out. Duarte gave me the fastest science ship in human history so I could spend more time on the science and less on the travel. Exactly like I’m asking you to do now.”

Reminding Sagale that she had a direct line to the high consul, and that he valued her work enough to build her a ship for it. How was that for not so subtle.

Sagale was unmoved.

“You have twenty hours to finish gathering your data,” he said, folding his hands across his wide belly like a Buddha. “And not one minute more. Inform your team.”

“This sort of rigid thinking is precisely why it’s impossible to do good science under Laconian rule,” Elvi said. “I should be running a university biology department somewhere. I’m too old to be good at taking orders.”

“I agree,” Fayez said. “But here we are.”

She and Fayez were in her quarters to shower and catch a quick bite of food before Sagale and his storm troopers trotted out their live sample of protomolecule and risked destroying a billions-of-years-old artifact just to see if it went boom in a useful manner. “If it won’t build them a better bomb, who cares if they break it!”

She whirled toward Fayez as she said it, and he took a half step away from her. She realized she was still holding her dinner plate in one hand. “I’m not going to throw it,” she said. “I don’t throw things.”

“You have,” he replied. He’d gotten older too. His once-black hair was almost totally gray now, and laugh lines spread out from the corners of his eyes. She didn’t mind. She liked that he smiled more than he frowned. He was smiling now. “Things have been thrown.”

“I never—” she started, wondering if he was actually afraid she’d throw a plate at him out of frustration or just teasing her to lighten the mood. Even after decades together, she sometimes couldn’t tell what went on in his head.

“Bermuda, just after Ricki left home for university, we took our first real vacation in years and you—”

“There was a roach. A roach crawled on my plate!”

“It nearly took my head off when you hurled it.”

“Well,” she said, “I was startled.”

She laughed. Fayez was grinning like he’d won a prize. So, of course, making her laugh had been the goal all along. She put the plate down.

“Look, I know saluting and following orders isn’t exactly what we had in mind when we got our degrees,” Fayez said. “But this is the new reality as long as Laconia’s in control. So—”

It was her own fault, really, being swept up into the Science Directorate. Laconia by and large left people alone. Planets elected their own governors and representatives to the Association of Worlds. They could establish their own laws, as long as they didn’t directly contravene imperial law. And unlike most dictatorships in history, Laconia seemed uninterested in restricting higher education. The universities of the galaxy functioned pretty much like they had before the takeover. Sometimes even a little better.

But Elvi had made the mistake of becoming humanity’s leading expert on the protomolecule, the vanished civilization that had created it, and the doom that had wiped it out. As a much younger woman, she’d been sent to Ilus as part of the first scientific mission to explore the biology of an alien world. Until then, her specialization in exobiology had been theoretical, mostly focusing on bathypelagic and deep-ice life that had seemed like good analogs for bacteria one might find under the surface of Europa.

They’d never found any bacteria on Europa, but the gate network opened, and suddenly exobiology was a real thing with more than thirteen hundred new biomes to explore. She’d gone to Ilus expecting to study lizard analogs, and instead run face-first into the artifacts of a galaxy-wide war older than her species. She’d become obsessed with understanding. Of course she had. A house the size of a galaxy, filled with rooms full of fascinating things, and the owners dead for millennia. She’d devoted the rest of her professional life to figuring them out. So when Winston Duarte invited her to lead a team to explore exactly that mystery, and gave her a bottomless grant to do it, she hadn’t been able to say no.

At that point, she’d seen only the Laconia everyone was presented in the newsfeeds. Impossibly powerful, militarily unbeatable, but not interested in ethnic cleansing or genocide. Maybe even with humanity’s best interests at heart. Taking their money to do science hadn’t given her many qualms. Especially since there also hadn’t been many options. When the king says, Come work for me, there aren’t many paths to No.

The qualms came later when she was inducted into their military and learned the source of Laconia’s overwhelming technological advantage.

When she met the catalysts.

“We should get back,” Fayez said as he finished clearing away the last of their dishes from dinner. “The clock is ticking.”

“I will. In a minute,” she replied, stepping back into the tiny private bathroom they shared. One of the privileges of her rank. In the mirror over her sink, an old woman stared back at her. The woman’s eyes were haunted by what she was about to do.

“You ready in there?” Fayez shouted.

“You go ahead. I’ll catch up.”

“Jesus, Els, you’re not going to go see it again, are you?”

It. The catalyst.

“It isn’t your fault,” Fayez said. “You didn’t design this study.”

“I agreed to oversee it.”

“Sweetheart. Darling. Light of my life. Whatever we call Laconia in public, when you take its clothes off, it’s a dictatorship,” Fayez said. “We never had a choice.”

“I know.”

“So why do you do this to yourself?” Fayez said.

She didn’t answer, because she couldn’t have explained it even if she wanted to.

“I’ll catch up.”

The catalyst holding area was in the heart of the Falcon, surrounded on all sides by thick layers of depleted uranium shielding and the galaxy’s most complicated Faraday cage. It had become clear very quickly that the protomolecule communicated at faster than light speed. Some application of quantum entanglement was the leading theory, but whatever the mechanism, the protomolecule defied locality, much like the ring gate system it had created. It had taken Cortázar and his team years to figure out how to keep a sample of the protomolecule from talking to itself, but they’d had decades and they’d eventually come up with a combination of materials and fields that tricked a node of protomolecule into locking itself off from the rest.

A node. It. The catalyst.

Two of Sagale’s Marines guarded the door to its chamber. They wore heavy blue power armor that whined and clicked when they moved. Each was equipped with a flamethrower. Just in case.

“We’re going to use the catalyst soon. I want to check on it,” Elvi said to the space between the two guards. For all that she had a military title, she still often couldn’t figure out who was the ranking officer in any given room. She lacked the indoctrination of boot camp, and the lifetime of practice the Laconians took for granted.

“Of course, Major,” the one on the left said. She looked too young to be the senior officer, but that was so often true of the Laconians. Most of them looked too young for their titles. “Will you need an escort?”

“No,” Elvi said. No, I always do this alone.

The young Marine did something on the wrist of her armor, and the door behind her slid open. “Let us know when you’re ready to come out.”

The catalyst’s room was a cube, four meters on a side. It had no bed, no sink, no toilet. Just hard metal and mesh drains. Once a day, the room was flushed with solvent and the liquid was sucked away to be incinerated. The Laconians were obsessive about contamination protocols where the protomolecule was concerned.

The node, it, the catalyst, had once been a woman in her late fifties. What her name had been and why she’d been selected for protomolecule infection was not in the official record Elvi had access to. But Elvi hadn’t been in their military for long before she found out about the Pen. The place where convicted criminals were sent to be deliberately infected, so that the empire would have a limitless supply of protomolecule to work with.

The catalyst was special, though. Through some work of Cortázar’s or through some accident of the woman’s genetics, she was only a carrier. She showed early signs of infection—changes to her skin and skeletal structure—but in the months since she’d been brought on board the Falcon, those changes hadn’t progressed at all. And she never entered what everyone called the “vomit zombie” phase, puking up material to try to spread the infection.

Elvi knew that she was perfectly safe in the same room with the catalyst, but she shuddered every time she entered anyway.

The infected woman looked at her with blank eyes and moved her lips in a soundless whisper. She smelled mostly of the solvent bath she received every day, but under it was something else. A morgue stink of decaying flesh.

It was normal to sacrifice animals. Rats, pigeons, pigs. Dogs. Chimpanzees. Biology had always suffered the cognitive push-pull of proving that humans were just another kind of animal while at the same time claiming to be morally different in kind. It was okay to kill a chimp in the name of science. It wasn’t okay to kill a person.

Except, apparently, when it was.

Maybe the catalyst had agreed to this. Maybe it was this or some other, more gruesome death. Whatever that would be.

“I’m sorry,” Elvi said to her, as she did every time she came into the catalyst chamber. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t know that they did this. I would never have agreed to it.”

The woman’s head lolled on her neck, nodding forward as if in mock agreement.

“I won’t forget that they did this to you. If I can ever make this right, I will.”

The woman pushed at the floor with her hands as though she wanted to stand up, but her arms lacked the strength, and her hands flopped bonelessly. It was just reflexes. That’s what she told herself. Instinct. The woman’s brain was gone, or at least changed into something that wasn’t by any sane definition a brain. There wasn’t anyone really alive in that skin. Not anymore.

But there had been once.

Elvi wiped her eyes. The universe was always stranger than you expected. Sometimes it was full of wonders. Sometimes full of horrors.

“I won’t forget.”