Tiamat's Wrath

Chapter Twenty-One: Elvi

Elvi could see Sagale steeling himself for her reaction. It was in the way he tightened his jaw and the flatness of his eyes. She had one foot tucked into a hold on the wall, her hand on another. She waited for the outrage or the vertigo or some physical sign in herself to match his expectations. What she found was a bleak disappointment.

When he’d called her to his office, she’d suspected it was bad news. Now that the rest of the crew had been decanted and brought up to speed, anything said on the bridge, no matter how softly, was common knowledge in minutes. Fear did that to people. Made them fast to share and gossip.

“If I object to this plan?” she said. “Because we both know I object to this plan.”

“I will pass it directly to High Consul Duarte,” Sagale said. “It is as important to him as it is to me that you understand how seriously we take your concerns.”

“Will it change anything?”

“Candidly?” Sagale said.

“For fuck’s sake. Another bomb ship? After …” She gestured toward the deck with her free hand, meaning the ring space, the missing gates, all of it. She’d had almost three days to process the enormity of it, and she couldn’t. It was too big.

Three days was long enough for Sagale to report in and for Duarte to deliberate and respond. It probably wasn’t long enough for Sagale to have pushed back and been shut down. He hadn’t even tried. That was the disappointing part.

“We have protocol. It is that when a ship fails to transit, send a bomb ship through the same gate. It’s the only way to keep our message clear.”

“And then see if we can lose another gate or two?”

“The losses that we have suffered are … significant,” Sagale said. “But it is the considered opinion of the high consul that they do not represent an escalation on the part of the enemy.”

“How do you even get there?”

Sagale lifted a hand, palm out, but the softening in his eyes made it a request to hear him out more than an order that she be silent. Elvi crossed her arms and nodded him on.

“The attacks the enemy made on us have been ineffective in that—in that—they did insignificant primary damage. The loss of consciousness that we experienced in Sol system when Pallas died might have been deadly for the protomolecule’s designers, but it was largely ineffective against us. The response in Tecoma system would have been trivial in any other system. The effect was … unfortunate only because of features of the landscape, so to speak, that are not in play elsewhere in the empire.”

“So I just picked a bad Bikini Atoll?” Elvi said.

“No one holds you responsible for what happened, Doctor. You couldn’t have known any more than we could. If anything, the strategic error was mine. I saw the inhospitable nature of the system as an advantage and overlooked the possible consequences.”

He spread his hands.

“Or,” Elvi said, “it was a trap.”

“I don’t see how—”

“No. Be quiet. It’s my turn now. What we saw in Tecoma wasn’t even similar to the previous interactions. We were awake the whole time. It didn’t change our perceptions of anything. That was something different. And if you look at the logic of it? It’s not even hard to see.”

“Walk me through it.”

“That star wasn’t natural, it was created. And it was created from a system that looked like Sol. It was manufactured and it was pointed at the ring gate. They aimed it like tying a shotgun trigger to a doorknob. Our bomb ship did something to activate it. Maybe it got something to come look at us, and that’s what set it off. I don’t know. But it was built to be a booby trap.”

Sagale’s scowl looked like he’d bitten into a bad date. “That is an interesting interpretation,” he said.

“It fired off the largest gun that it’s possible to make given the physical laws of the universe. And what’s more? The station was built to withstand it. It took a gamma burst from a collapsing neutron star, and it’s not dead.”

“You find that significant.”

“I find that pretty clear evidence that we’re way out of our weight class here and we should stop throwing punches!”

“You don’t have to shout, Doctor.”

Elvi unballed her fists and tried to relax her jaw. Her blood felt hot in her face, and she didn’t know if it was from fear or anger or if any normal emotions actually fit into a situation like this. Sagale’s system chimed an alert, and he muted it.

“I don’t disagree with you,” he said. “But what does not throwing punches look like?”

“Not sending bomb ships through would be a start.”

“It would. But so would abandoning the gates entirely. Would you recommend doing that? There are colonies that will collapse if we choose that, and maybe those are acceptable losses. But once the trouble began last time, shutting down the gate network didn’t save the beings that used it. They were dead when we turned the system back on.”

“Not starting trouble was my argument.”

“Trouble started long before Laconia existed. Ships have been disappearing for decades. Whatever this is, it began before we recognized it. The fastest way to undermine a strategic plan is to abandon it before there’s sufficient reason to do so. The high consul has been briefed. He believes that the tit-for-tat plan still has merit.”

“And so you’re going to do it.”

“I do as I’m told, Doctor. I am an officer of the Laconian military,” Sagale said. “As are you.”

The mood on the Falcon showed in small ways. Instead of wandering to and from the commissary while she thought, Jen remained rooted at her station. Travon moved through the ship tapping his thumb and middle finger together in a fluttering beat every time a new status update came from the Typhoon or Medina. Sagale stayed in his office for the most part, avoiding Elvi and Fayez and the rest of the science team as if their disapproval bothered him.

Out near Medina, a captain drew a short straw, and the Myron’s Folly was chosen as the bomb vessel. On the main screen, a swarm of loading mechs and drones hauled the cargo out of its hold. The little flares of their thrusters reminded Elvi of termite swarms.

The antimatter had been stored on Medina for a moment just like this. Governor Song’s engineers would set the ship’s reactor as close to critical as they could and disable the fail-safes, so that when the bombs went off, the reactor failure would add its own destructive punch to the mix. But there was the problem of making the ship go dutchman in the absence of other traffic.

The safety curve was based on the amount of matter and energy making transits though the gate network. Usually that meant keeping the flow down to safe levels. Now it meant driving it up past the threshold without sending another ship through. Protocol demanded, Sagale kept pointing out, that the bomb ship be the next thing to go. If they started pushing a dozen other ships through, the enemy might not understand the high consul’s point.

To do that, they had to pour a massive amount of energy through the gate. The Typhoon’s ultrahigh magnetic field projector could do it, but they were making sure there was nothing that would be damaged on the far side of the gate. The combination of caution and recklessness took her breath away.

“I should go talk to him again,” Elvi said.

“Tell him that he’s wrong more forcefully?” Fayez said. “See if he changes his mind because you disagree at him harder?”

“He’s not that bad,” she said. And then, because she knew that he was, “There has to be something.”

“There doesn’t, sweetheart.”

Jen looked up from her station monitor. Her lips were thin, her gaze restless. “Eighty thousand people in Thanjavur system,” she said. “One habitable planet with three cities, and a moon base on its major satellite. And they’re … I just can’t get my head around it. They’re just gone.”

“They might be fine,” Elvi said. “Just … out of contact. They may be better off than all of us at this rate.”

“Unless their sun exploded. There are stories about that, aren’t there? The protomolecule engineers burning whole systems?”

Travon fluttered his finger and thumb together again as he worked his station’s monitor. “Thanjavur’s only eight and a half light-years from Gedara. If there’s a big flash in eight and a half years, we’ll know what happened.”

“I don’t like this,” Jen said.

“None of us do,” Fayez said. “Honestly, I think old Sagale would skip this part if he could.”

“What?” Jen said. “No, not that. I mean yes, I don’t like that. But this too.”

She threw a dataset Elvi didn’t recognize onto the main monitor. The Myron’s Folly blinked away and a series of energy graphs took its place. Jen turned to look at them as if the significance were obvious.

“I’m a biologist,” Elvi said.

“We’re seeing radiation coming from in between the rings. We’ve never seen that before. There hasn’t been anything there to radiate. This little pocket universe just ends at the rings. Anything that went out was gone like it passed an event horizon. Now, since … well, since us? Something’s coming through.”

“Something’s knocking around in the attic,” Fayez said. “That’s not reassuring. I’m not reassured.”

“What do you make of it?” Elvi asked.

“I don’t know. I just have data, and it says something’s happening that didn’t happen before. And it’s not calming down.”

A voice in her memory said the words as clearly and distinctly as if they had been spoken: Distributed responsibility is the problem. One person gives the order, another carries it out. One can say they didn’t pull the trigger, the other that they were just doing what they were told, and everyone lets themselves off the hook. She let her breath out slowly from between her teeth.

Elvi opened a connection request to Sagale’s office. To his credit, he accepted it immediately. “Dr. Okoye.”

“Admiral, could you join us on the bridge? There’s some incoming data I’d like you to look at.”

She heard the hesitation while he decided whether it was a ploy to stop the bomb ship plan. Just because the data was real didn’t mean it wasn’t a ploy.

“I’m on my way,” Sagale said, and cut the connection.

“We could always mutiny,” Fayez said brightly.

“We wouldn’t stand a chance,” Travon said. “I did the nav analysis. Even if we took control of the ship, the Typhoon could blow us to dust before we got out a gate.”

“Jesus, Travon,” Fayez said. “I was joking.”

“Oh,” Travon said. “Sorry.”

“I remember when I was just a scientist,” Elvi said. “I liked that. It was nice.”

Five minutes later Sagale came on the bridge, floating toward his station like none of them were there. Elvi remembered seeing him in the same place, still damp from the crash couch and weeping. He was a different man now. For a moment, against her will, she admired him. Sagale considered the display in silence. The loudest sounds were the hush of the air recyclers and the flutter of Travon’s right thumb and middle finger.

He considered the energy graphs as Jen explained them again. Sagale took it in impassively. When Jen had finished, he floated quietly in his crash couch restraints. His gaze flickered to Elvi’s, and she thought there was something in them. Gratitude, maybe.

With a gesture, he opened a comm channel.

“Admiral Sagale,” Governor Song’s voice came. “How can I help you?” It had a hint of Mariner Valley drawl. Elvi wondered if it was the mark of a Martian working for Laconia or a Laconian who’d carried her accent out into the alien worlds and back again. Whether this obedience was peculiar to Duarte’s people or if it had been part of the Martian character all along.

“My eggheads came up with an analysis I’d like your eggheads to take a peek at, Governor. It may be nothing, but I’d recommend we hold action on the bomb ship until we know what we’re looking at.”

There was a long pause. “You have my curiosity, Admiral. Send over what you have.”

“Thank you,” Sagale said, and the governor cut the connection. “Share that with the Typhoon and Medina, Dr. Lively. Let’s see if they share your concerns.”

“Yes, sir,” Jen said, and started packaging her information like she’d been given an extra five minutes on her final exams.

Fayez touched Elvi’s shoulder and said, almost too softly to hear, “Do you think we just got away with—”

The universe exploded.

If it had been a sound, it would have been deafening. Elvi put her hands over her ears just the same. A reflex. An approximation. Jen was screaming. Elvi tried to sink to the deck, but only managed to pull her legs up so that she was floating in a fetal position. The curve of the handhold before her was ornate and beautiful. The smudge of darkness where the oil from the crew’s skin hadn’t been cleaned away was like a map of a vast coastline, fractal and complex. She was aware of Fayez beside her, of the waves of pressure passing between them, touching, and reflecting away as they both screamed. The air was a fog of atoms. Sagale was a cloud of atoms. She was a cloud.

You’ve been here, she thought. You’ve been here before. Don’t get distracted by it. Don’t lose yourself.

The cloud that was her hand, vibrations in emptiness, slipped through the void and clatter to the cloud that was the handhold. Fields of energy between her atoms and the bulkhead’s atoms turned into a dance of pressure, and the surge sent lightning up her arm, so complicated it was hard to keep track of. She was aware that she felt it, but there was so much happening it was hard to keep the sensation in mind.

Elvi found that she could see right through the suddenly vaporous ship, and right through the other ship clouds around it. Medina was a vast but wispy thunderhead at the center of them all.

Something was moving through the clouds, dark and sinuous as a dancer slipping between raindrops. And then another. And then more. They were everywhere, sliding through the gas and liquid and solid, scattering the clouds with their passage. They were solid. Real in a way the clouds of matter were not. They were more real than anything she’d ever seen. Tendrils of darkness that had never known light. That could never know light. You’ve seen this absence of light before. A darkness like the eye of an angry god … You said that to someone.

One darted and swirled, off to her left if left meant anything now. It furled like a question mark, and the pattern of atoms and vibrations swirled around it and into it. The beauty of it, the grace, were hard to look away from. Clouds mixed and swirled together in its wake, colors so pure they were only colors. It took effort to recognize they were blood.

She’d been here before. It had been overwhelming the first time. It was overwhelming again now, but at least she knew what it was. That made holding her mind together possible. At least for a moment.

You’re doing great, kid. You’re doing great. You can do this. Just a little more. But do it now …

She tried to remember what her throat was. Tried to imagine that the dots of matter and emptiness had said words before. That they still could. They were her body, the air she breathed. She tried to make it all work together long enough to scream.

Emergency evacuation. Major Okoye authorization delta-eight. A tendril of darkness darted toward her …

… and dropped away. All of them slid away, falling like black snowflakes through the cloud of vibrations that was the deck. Everything swirled, one form folding into another. If she unfocused her eyes, she could just recognize them. Jen’s body, rolling as maneuvering thrusters made the deck into a hillside. Someone’s arm from fingers to elbow, and even a few centimeters of flesh beyond. The glow of the main display, too much itself to hold any meaning beyond the simple elegance of photons caught in air. She was aware of her own pain like it was the sound of a distant waterfall. She fell through it and into something like sleep.

And a blink later, she was back. Thrust that could have been a third of a g or five gs pulled her down. When she forced herself to sit up, blood glued her cheek to the deck. The air stank, but with too many different volatiles to make sense of. Alarms were sounding, echoing off each other in a meaningless cacophony. Everything had gone wrong at once. She hauled herself up to standing.

The bridge was a thing from a nightmare. Swaths of the bulkheads, decks, equipment were gone. Like an artist had come in with an eraser and taken away bits of it at random. And the others too.

Sagale was still at his post, a long loop of his head and right shoulder simply vanished. Jen lay in a still pile where the deck met the wall, covered in blood that might have been her own. Travon’s arm lay beside his station, but where his crash couch had been, there was a soft-edged hole down to the next deck and the one below that. It was like seeing a coral reef made from her ship and her friends and—

“Fayez!” she screamed. “Fayez!”

“Here,” his voice said behind her. “I’m here. I’m okay.”

He was in two-thirds of a crash couch. The fluid in the reservoir had all poured out and down and away.

“I’m okay,” he said again.

“Your foot’s gone,” she said.

“I know. But I’m okay,” he said, and closed his eyes. Elvi stumbled to the console that looked most nearly intact. It was hard to walk, and she didn’t know why until she looked down and saw that a scoop of her thigh the size of a softball was missing. As soon as she saw it, she felt the pain.

A lesser ship would have been dead a hundred times over, but the Falcon was hardy. Its skin had been cut a hundred times, and it had regrown fast enough to keep in air. The reactor was throwing errors and emergency corrections, the log spooling so fast she couldn’t keep track. She pulled up the sensor arrays, and stars appeared on her screen. The ship was out of the slow zone. Free of the rings. The system identified Laconia’s sky. She turned the ship’s attention back to the ring gate falling away behind them. It looked calm. As if nothing at all odd had just happened. She felt laughter burbling up in her throat and tried to keep it down, uncertain whether it would stop once it got started.

She opened a broadcast channel and prayed that enough of the Falcon still existed to get the signal out. For a moment, the system didn’t respond and her heart sank. Then the transmitter hauled itself to life.

“Thank you,” she told the ship. “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you.”

She gathered her strength, wondering how much blood she’d lost. How much she had left.

“To any ship in range. This is Major Elvi Okoye of the Laconian Science Directorate. I am in need of immediate aid. We have mass casualties—”