Tiamat's Wrath

Chapter Thirty-Four: Elvi

Elvi woke up gasping.

“Hey hey hey,” Fayez said, shifting in the bed beside her. His hand on her back grounded her. It made the dream scatter back a little. She leaned into it. “Nightmare?” he asked.

“Worse,” she said. “You know that dream where you’ve got the big presentation that you forgot about, and now you have to pretend you did eight months of work on something you’ve got no clue on?”

“That is your go-to for bad dreams.”

“That, except that usually when I have it, I just have to wake up and things are better,” she said, smoothing back her hair. “I’d give three fingers and an eye to only have a blown lecture to worry about.”

He shifted, the familiar warmth of his body moving alongside her. “How’s your gut?” he asked. And then, when she didn’t answer, “You need to eat, darling.”

“I do. I will. It’s just …”

“I know.”

She reached for her cane, but when she stood, she put more weight on her hurt leg. The pain felt right. She went to the bathroom first, then started pulling on clothes. It was still dark out, apart from the lights of the State Building, the glow of the city, and the construction platforms glittering against the stars.

“Come back to bed,” Fayez said. “It’s too early.”

“I’m not going to sleep anyway. I’ll go out to the university. Get a jump on the day.”

“You have to get some rest.”

“Rest for me,” she said, and kissed him on the cheek, and then again on the neck. They were still for a moment.

When Fayez spoke, his voice didn’t have its usual lightness. “I will find a way to get us out of this if I can.”

“Out of this?”

“The part where you’re surrounded by psychopaths and politicians. We’ll steal a little ship, head out to some backwater colony world and spend the rest of our lives trying to get cucumbers to grow in poison soil. It’ll be great.”

“It would be heaven,” she said. “Go back to bed. I’ll come back when I can.”

The State Building was almost pleasant at night. Something about the quietness made it seem like she had freedom. There were just as many guards, just as many surveillance drones. Maybe it was just millennia of evolution priming her brain to believe that what happened in the darkness was hidden, private, and peculiar. She stuffed her hands in her pockets and went to the commissary. There would be something there—coffee and sweet rice, if nothing else. She couldn’t keep much more than that down anyway.

The work in Cortázar’s lab was punishing. There were a couple of decent virtual context translators in the lab. They helped enough that when his notes were couched in terms of nanoinformatics—complex imaginary information loss, Deriner functions, implicit multipliers—she could understand it in exo-biological terms like functional regulation site persistence across generations. How either or both of them would ever be able to make the issues clear to Admiral Trejo, she couldn’t imagine. But she’d been able to explain convergent evolution to undergraduates, once upon a time. So maybe she’d come up with something.

The commissary was bright and quiet. An attendant nodded to her as she entered. Or maybe he was a guard. Same thing. Elvi got herself a cup of tea—the coffee smelled too acidic and aggressive when she got close to it—and a bagel with butter and jelly. She didn’t want to go to the pens or Cortázar’s private labs. She didn’t want to spend another day with Cara and Xan. She also didn’t want to stay here. But most of all, she didn’t want to do what she knew she had to do. Tell Trejo about Cortázar.

She’d wanted to find proof. A smoking gun somewhere in his notes. She’d gone over everything she could find about Duarte’s transubstantiation—her term for it, not theirs—hoping to find something that showed Cortázar didn’t intend to let Teresa follow in her father’s footsteps, and that he never had. There was nothing. Either he’d never put it in his written musings or he’d erased it carefully enough that she couldn’t find it.

Her hand terminal had a reminder function. It was meant to alert her when meetings were about to start, and one of the options was to let her know when the other people were already together. She’d made a fake appointment with Cortázar and Teresa with an unfixed time. It meant that anytime the two of them were in close proximity, she was notified, and would be until one of them noticed it on their schedule and wiped it out. She was almost certain that her unexpected appearance at the medical wing was the only thing that had kept Cortázar’s work with Teresa from moving forward already.

And by work, she was pretty sure she meant vivisection.

She finished the last bite of bagel and washed it down with the dregs of her tea. It was still hours before daylight. If she waited, her courage would fail her. She cleaned up her plate and teacup, stretched until her leg ached, and went to the attendant.

“Can I help you with something, ma’am?”

“I need to talk to Admiral Trejo.”

Trejo was dressed when she reached his office. His bright-green eyes were puffy with lack of sleep, and his shirt had the limp look of something worn for too many days in a row. His desk held a pile of exhausted single-use displays, the detritus of a flood of highly sensitive reports from inside the system and what he had managed to glean from all the systems beyond. His smile was warm, well practiced, and probably insincere.

Elvi had been laboring hard under the strain of juggling a mad emperor, a murderous scientist, and civilization-ending monsters that had killed her crew and eaten her flesh. It was uncomfortable to think that Trejo was under more pressure than she was.

“Doctor,” Trejo said. “You’re up early.”

“So are you.”

He gestured to a chair. “I’m up late. Coordination with the other systems has been … challenging. I delegate what I can, but the high consul didn’t sleep, and being both him and myself has been … strenuous.”

“When was the last time you slept?”

“A full night? Honestly, I’d have to do some math.”

Elvi sat, folding her hands together on her knees. The anxiety hissed and spun in her chest like a firework. Sleep seemed like something in a language she couldn’t speak. Neither of them knew what the term meant anymore.

“Is there something I can do for you, Dr. Okoye?” Trejo prompted. Elvi realized she’d faded out for a moment.

“I don’t have hard proof,” she said, “but I believe Dr. Cortázar intends to harm the high consul’s daughter. Maybe even kill her.”

Trejo sighed and looked down. Elvi steeled herself. She was aware how thin her argument was. Even if Holden had come right out and made the accusation, it wouldn’t have carried much weight. Her trust in him would do more to undermine her own status than to dignify his report. All she had was the bone-deep conviction that it was true. She was prepared to plant her flag there and defend her position until Trejo took her seriously.

She expected him to say What evidence do you have? or What makes you think that? or Why would he do that? Instead, the admiral stretched his neck to the side until it popped. “Has there been any change in the high consul’s condition?”

“Not that I’ve seen,” she said. “But—”

“What options do we have for bringing him back to himself?”

“I don’t know. I honestly don’t know if that’s even possible.”

“We did the thing in the first place,” Trejo said. His voice was getting a rasp to it. Frustration or fear or anger. “Why can’t we undo it?”

“The same reason we can’t stir milk back out of coffee or unscramble an egg. Physics is full of things that only work in one direction. This is one.”

“Can we regenerate his central nervous system the way we would after a head injury?”

Elvi felt confused. She’d imagined several versions of this conversation, but none of them had involved ignoring her fears and changing the subject. She wasn’t sure what to do.

“Well, um … it’s not exactly like that. The cells in his brain are all still intact. Cortázar changed the way they function. Regrowing tissue means finding areas that are compromised and encouraging new cells to build there.”

“If we intentionally damaged his brain and pumped in normal cell lines, would he grow back?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Burn out his hippocampus, regenerate it. Then his occipital lobe or whatever. Go through him part by part, kill what’s there and replace it with fresh tissue that works like normal human flesh, and build him back up that way. Would that work?”

“I … I don’t know,” Elvi said. “That’s the Ship of Theseus question. Whether, when you replace all the individual parts of something, you still have the same thing. That’s philosophy. But even then, regrowing central nervous systems is tricky work. We’d want to talk to medical doctors. Physicians. I’m a biologist.”

“Cortázar did it.”

“Cortázar is deeply, deeply ethically flawed,” Elvi said. “I’m pretty sure he was using Duarte as an animal model to work the kinks out for his own treatment in the future, and I think he’s planning to sacrifice Teresa too. That’s what I’m here telling you.”

“What about the things that attacked the ring space? Can we say definitively whether they do or don’t pose an ongoing threat? If I park another ship where Medina used to be, is it going to get eaten? Or are we safe as long as we don’t blow up any more neutron stars?”

Elvi didn’t mean to laugh. It just happened. Trejo’s professional demeanor slipped for a moment, and she saw the rage and despair underneath it.

“How would I possibly know that?” she said. Her voice was louder than she’d meant it to be, but she didn’t rein herself in. “I don’t know what they are or how they ate the ships they did. Have we had reports? Do we have data? I can’t do anything but speculate without that. And what does any of that have to do with Teresa Duarte?”

Trejo went to his desk, called up a fresh window, and shifted it to her hand terminal. She looked at the images there. She recognized the Heart of the Tempest. It was the most iconic Laconian ship there was. The images had the hyperreal quality of optical telescopy that had been stabilized and enhanced. A few glittering sparks appeared around it.

“Was there a battle?” she asked, and the image went so white that even coming from the small screen it hurt her eyes.

“It’s already known through the Sol system. It will be known through the whole empire. The Tempest is dead. A separatist terror cell stole secret Laconian technology and used it against us. And now I have one Magnetar-class ship, thirteen-hundred-odd ring gates to keep control over, and the one place where it could actually do that is haunted by …” He gestured at her leg. Whatever the fuck did that.

“I see,” she said.

“We haven’t been able to keep signal repeaters up. Every time I send them out, some rock thrower knocks them back down. The terrorists are sending messages to each other through the gates using the technological equivalent of tin cans and chewing gum, and I can’t stop them. If I can put a fleet of ships into the ring space, I control everything because it’s a choke point. It’s the choke point. If I can’t do that safely, I can’t control the empire.”

“Except if—” she began, but Trejo couldn’t be stopped. His words were like an avalanche. Once they’d started, they kept going.

“Everyone—everyone—on every ship and station and planet is going to be waiting to see what the high consul does. And right now he’s two hallways over, waving his hands like a fucking undergraduate on his first hallucinogenic trip. Governments exist on confidence. Not on liberty. Not on righteousness. Not on force. They exist because people believe that they do. Because they don’t ask questions. And Laconia is looking down the throat of a lot of questions we can’t answer.”

By the end of the speech, his voice had risen. Grown strident. Elvi had the sudden and vivid memory of being a girl in Karhula. The manager of the grocery she and her father went to every week had found out the rent on the property was going up, that he was going to have to move or shut down. He’d had the same tone of voice, the same sense of having been overwhelmed by events, the same anger in the face of implacable reality. There was something weirdly comforting about the idea that a humble grocer and the most powerful man in a galaxy-wide empire could have something so fundamental in common. Without thinking, she reached out and took Trejo’s hand. He yanked it back like she’d burned him.

It took a couple long, shuddering breaths for him to regain his composure. When he spoke again, it was the Trejo she recognized. “Your problem, Dr. Okoye, is that you think the immediate problem before you is the most pressing one. It is not. Whatever else Paolo Cortázar may be—and I have no illusions about that man—he is also indispensable.”

The silence between them stretched out longer than was comfortable. Elvi felt like she was looking over the lip of a cliff she hadn’t understood she was standing on. “You’re telling me it’s okay with you.”

“I will try to keep guards on the girl,” Trejo said. “I will do what I can to make sure the two of them aren’t alone together.”

“But if he comes in here with her head under his arm, you’ll shrug and let it slide?”

Trejo spread his hands. “If he says he can fix this clusterfuck by sacrificing her, I’ll find him a knife. That is my duty. I am an officer of the Laconian Empire,” he said. Then, a moment later, “As are you.”

The air in the room seemed thin. Elvi was having a hard time catching her breath. Either Trejo didn’t see her distress or he chose not to.

“Your focus, Dr. Okoye, is to provide a second set of eyes and experience as a help to Dr. Cortázar. You and he are partners in this. There is no daylight between you. If you find that difficult or distasteful, I don’t really care. We are at a critical moment in history, and you must rise to this occasion.”

“She’s a kid,” Elvi said.

“I agree it would be better if she lived. I’ll do what I can,” Trejo said. “But there can’t be any misunderstanding between us about what our priorities are. The sooner you and he find a way to stir the cream back out of this coffee, the sooner she’ll be safe. Anything that impedes the efforts to heal Winston Duarte is your enemy. Anything that helps is your friend. Are we clear?”

I resign floated at the back of her throat. She could feel the words like they were something physical. She knew the shape of them. And she knew Trejo wouldn’t let her quit. Where she was now, there was no coming back from.

“As clear as an unmuddied lake,” she said. “As clear as air.”

“Thank you for your time, Doctor. My door is always open to you.”

It was, she thought, an ironic way to tell her to leave.

She rose and walked out into the hall, and then the wide lobby, and then the darkness of the gardens. In the east, the first hint of dawn was turning off the dimmest stars. The air smelled like burnt cinnamon. It was the mating display of a species of ground-dwelling grub-like animal native to Laconia. On Earth, it would have been birdsong. She stood for a long moment and breathed it deeply.

She had done fieldwork for decades, traveling to new worlds with her sample bags and testing kits. She was probably the only person living who had seen as many different trees of life as she had. All the numberless different solutions that evolution had come up with under all the different stars, and all responding—more or less—to the same pressures. Eyes on every world, because things that sensed light were more likely to survive. Mouths near the sense organs, because things with feeding coordination did better than things without. She’d probably killed and dissected representatives of more individual species than anyone in history in the name of science. And still, she didn’t think of herself as a killer. As complicit in murder. As monstrous.

On the horizon, a plume that looked almost like smoke but was really millions of tiny, green-bodied, screw-shaped worms rose up into the sky and then flattened. They shimmered in the rising brightness, a bioluminescent display. Nature was beautiful, wherever she found it. And it was cruel. She didn’t know why she kept expecting humanity to be different. Why she pretended the same rules that applied to mountain lions and parasitic wasps didn’t also constrain her. Red in tooth and claw, and at every level. In the Bible, even angels murdered humanity’s babies when God asked them to.

The swarm on the horizon finished advertising its quality as a mating cluster, the light going out, their bodies going gray. The clouds took on the pink and red of any planet with enough oxygen to selectively scatter the shorter wavelengths. The cinnamon smell grew stronger.

“Good luck, little grubs,” she said. “Hope it works out for you.”

She headed back into the State Building and then through to the other side of the compound, where a car was waiting for her. She got in without exchanging pleasantries with the driver, and they headed out into the great city where lights were just turning off as the sun rose. High-rises and streets and warehouses and theaters, all of it reminding her of nothing so much as a huge hive.

At the university, she walked herself from the parking structure to the Pen. Cortázar was sitting on a bench outside the windowless cube, a cup of coffee in one hand and a corn muffin balanced on his knee.

He smiled to her as she came close. “Beautiful morning, isn’t it?” he said.

He had dark eyes. His cheek was brown, stippled by white stubble where he hadn’t shaved. He looked like someone’s chemistry professor, not a monster.

“We should get to work,” she said.