Tiamat's Wrath

Chapter Five: Elvi

A few decades earlier and about two hundred thousand trillion kilometers from where she currently sat, a tiny node of active protomolecule in a biological matrix had entered the orbit of a planet called Ilus, hitchhiking on the gunship Rocinante.

As the uncanny semisentient intelligence of the protomolecule tried to make contact with other nodes in the gate builders’ long-dead empire, it woke up mechanisms that had been dormant for millions—or even billions—of years. The end result had been an ancient factory returning to life, a massive robot attack, the melting of one artificial moon, and the detonation of a power plant that nearly cracked the planet in two.

All in all, a really shitty experience.

So when Elvi’s team took the catalyst out of isolation in unexplored systems to do a similar if slightly better-controlled reaching out to the artifacts and remains, she made sure they were careful. They watched what happened, they were ready to put the catalyst back in its box, and they didn’t get too close to anything.

“Falcon in position,” the pilot said.

If anything went terribly wrong, the pilot or Sagale or Elvi could give a single spoken order—Emergency evacuation, their name, and the delta-eight authorization code—and the ship would take it from there. Given the Falcon’s oversized engine and massive acceleration, anyone not in one of the ship’s specially designed high-g couches would be injured or killed, but the data they’d already collected would be preserved. Laconia had a lot of fail-safe logic like that. It wasn’t her favorite part of the job.

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Admiral Sagale replied. He was strapped into a crash couch on the bridge too. Another sign of how seriously everyone took this part of the mission. “Major Okoye, you may proceed.”

“Take her out,” Elvi said into the comm. In this situation, there was only one her.

Elvi sat in her custom Laconian crash couch, surrounded by screens. The instruments could be yanked away in under a second, and the couch chamber filled with a breathable fluid for high-g burn shortly after. She was one of the few people important enough that efforts would be made to keep her alive. It felt like working inside a torpedo. She kind of hated it.

On one of her screens, a camera tracked the movement of the catalyst as she was wheeled out of her storage room on a high-tech gurney covered in sensors. Protomolecule communication went both ways. What happened to their sample was just as important to their study as what happened to the dead system that they might be about to activate.

The catalyst’s gurney moved on magnetic wheels down the corridor to a compartment in the skin of the ship, away from all the radiation shielding and whatever high-tech wizardry Cortázar’s team had come up with to lock their sample away from the rest back beyond the gate.

Nothing happened.

“No response yet,” Travon said.

“Gee, really?” Fayez replied, the sarcasm in his tone meant for everyone else. Travon wouldn’t hear it.

While the protomolecule might communicate in ways that looked like they were faster than light once it got going, it didn’t start it right away. Since locality wasn’t a big deal for the protomolecule, but the speed of light was, Elvi suspected it was some slower-than-light handshake as the two network nodes agreed on the protocol to be used. That was somewhere between a guess and a metaphor, but it helped her to think about it.

Her sample came out of Cortázar’s laboratory pens. It hadn’t existed until the recent past. Everything they were trying to interact with here had been waiting since humanity had been a kinky idea that two amoebas came up with. So somehow, when her node came into physical proximity—meaning somewhere in the same solar system—for the first time, they were creating some kind of relationship to each other on the fly. Which was awesome, but also weird. And not how quantum entanglement worked, unless somehow it was.

In her study of the protomolecule and the civilization that had created it, Elvi often found herself glad she wasn’t a physicist. What the protomolecule did biologically, while not entirely explicable yet, at least seemed like it might be fully understood some day. The mechanisms by which it hijacked life and repurposed it were incredibly advanced, but not totally dissimilar to things like viruses and parasitic fungi. She didn’t understand all the rules yet, but she felt like she could, given enough time and research.

What the protomolecule did to physics looked less like a variation and refinement of the standard models and more like kicking the game table over and scattering the pieces across the floor. Elvi wondered if Jen Lively’s constant lighthearted joking was so she didn’t go insane as her understanding of reality was ripped to shreds in front of her on a daily basis.

“Getting a reaction,” Travon said.

“Yeah,” Jen agreed. “Something’s happening in the object.”

“What was the delay on that?” Elvi asked.

“Eighteen minutes.”

They were nine light-minutes from the structure, so that made a handshake propagating at or near c plausible. She really needed to write that hypothesis up and run it past the nanoinformatics staff.

Elvi’s screens went wild with readings from the catalyst’s sensor package. It was too much data to be analyzed in real time, so Elvi let it wash over her like a wave of numbers and graphs. There would be plenty of opportunity later to figure out what it all meant.

“Looking stable so far,” Travon said.

“Always glad when things don’t immediately blow up,” Elvi said, but no one laughed.

“You know what makes a diamond green?” Jen asked everyone and no one. “I looked it up.”

“Radiation,” Fayez said. Of course he knew. He’d been on the Ilus team too, as its geologist. While the opening of the protomolecule gate network had given Elvi more than thirteen hundred new biospheres to study, it had given Fayez ten times that many new geologies to explore. Some of them as exotic as a great huge lump of carbon crystal that was a really pretty color. “Diamonds that form in the presence of radiation can get that green color. Some people mistake them for emeralds. But totally different mineral. Emeralds are beryl, not carbon.”

“Stealing my thunder there, sport,” Jen said. “But I’m betting it means that this star was a lot more active when the object was formed. My best guess, based on stellar decay, is that the object is almost five billion years old. That’s been hanging out for about a third of the time the universe has, you know, existed.”

“That would make it one of the oldest artifacts we’ve found,” Travon said, suddenly interested. “Maybe something from the very beginning of their civilization.”

“Fascinating,” Sagale said, his clipped tones the only sign of his impatience. “What’s it doing?”

What’s it doing that helps us fight ghoulies from beyond time and space? was the implied question. For all her bottomless budget, for all the cream-of-the-crop science teams she’d been given and her custom-built state-of-the-art ship, there was only one result the high consul and his Science Directorate cared about. How do we stop the things that eat ships passing through the gates?

“I don’t know,” she said. “Let me take a look.”

Eighteen hours into their data collection, Elvi retired to her cabin. She’d learned early on that the military discipline of the Laconians didn’t extend to forcing people to work on no rest. Duarte wanted everyone at peak efficiency. Baked into that was the idea that most people would spend a third of their day sleeping. When Elvi climbed out of her couch and said she needed to rest before she began her analysis, Sagale didn’t bat an eye.

It was a trick she’d started using to buy uninterrupted work time. She’d been able to go twenty-four hours straight since grad school. Some caffeine tablets and hot tea, and she could go forty-eight if she needed to. Not sleeping bought her eight or nine hours without Sagale’s questions about results and timetables.

But the gag only worked if everyone pretended that she actually was sleeping, so for Fayez to burst in meant he had something big.

“It made a copy.”

Before Elvi could ask what had made a copy and what it had made a copy of, he’d floated over to the dining table in the middle of her cabin and slapped his terminal down on it. The electromagnetics in the table kept the terminal from floating away, but the impact sent Fayez tumbling gently toward the wall. He was an Earther, born and raised, and no matter how much time he spent in space, he never seemed to lose that instinctive expectation of gravity. As he drifted away, he yelled at the table, “Show her! Show her … the thing! Display last file, volumetric display.”

A holographic map of what looked like a human brain appeared, floating above the table. The brain sparked with flashing synaptic paths, probably an fMRI or fNIRS scan. Elvi had seen this particular brain often enough to know it belonged to the catalyst. That it had been a woman, once upon a time. Fayez hit the bulkhead and pushed off with one foot, rejoining her at the table.

“A lot of activity,” Elvi said. “But taking her out of her pen might be causing her stress, or physical discomfort. Nothing here is all that unusual.”

“That’s just her being her,” Fayez said, shaking his head and tapping away at his terminal. “Look at this.”

A second image appeared. It took Elvi a moment to recognize that it was a copy of the catalyst’s brain activity, but without the physical structure of the brain.

“I don’t understand. What’s that second image from?”

“That,” Fayez said with a grin, “is coming from the object.”

“What, the whole thing is mirroring her brain activity?”

“No, it’s very localized,” Fayez said, and tinkered with the controls. The second image zoomed out for a long time until the entire object was in view. A tiny white dot appeared. “That dot is not to scale, of course. It’d be the size of Greenland at this distance. But that’s the approximate location of the image.”

He tapped some more, and the image was replaced with long strings of sensor data. “Jen started picking up some EM fluctuation in the surface of the object. I mean, in context it’s tiny, but the object is totally inert, and the sensors on this boat are as sensitive as a galactic tyrant’s money can buy.”

“Okay,” Elvi said. “What does she think we’re looking at?”

“At first it just looked like some photons bouncing around, until Jen put together this map. No one knew what we were looking at until Travon said, ‘Hey, that looks like an fMRI.’ I pulled up the catalyst’s monitor, and boom, there we were.”

Elvi didn’t mind space, but the one thing it lacked that she needed right then was the ability to collapse into a chair. She felt a rush of adrenaline that made her hands tingle and her legs go numb.

“So they’re echoing each other?”

“Like looking in a mirror.”

“Oh,” she said. Then, “Okay. That’s huge.”

“Oh, it gets huger,” Fayez said. “All across the object we’re now seeing radiation hotspots”—he zoomed in on one, and a new rush of numerical data splashed across the image—“like this.”

He was looking at her expectantly. Waiting for her to make the connection. She didn’t think she was all that tired, but whatever flash of insight he was looking for just wasn’t there.

“I give up.”

“It took us a minute too,” Fayez said. He pulled up a third image. Elvi recognized a ring gate. “This is the same kind of radiation that sprays out of the gate during a transit.”

Almost before the numbers hit her screen Elvi had it. “That correlated to the catalyst.”

“Yes. Catalyst brain, green diamond-thing copy, and weird distributed gate-like radiation. Three things, all with the same pattern,” Fayez said.

Elvi pulled the image of the huge green diamond back until she could see the whole thing at once. It seemed to flicker with tiny stars of light appearing and disappearing where the computer marked the radiation spikes for her.

“This thing is filled with … gates? Like, in the physical structure of the object itself?”

“We have a theory,” Fayez said. He was grinning like he had the first time she agreed to sleep with him. He was a goofball, but she liked what made him happy: knowing things, and her.

“It’s too early for theories,” she said.

“I know, but we have one anyway. And by we, I mean Travon first, but we’re all on board. This thing comes in contact with a protomolecule-infected mind, it makes a copy of that mind, then these gate signatures start showing up all over the object. Travon starts talking about how secure data storage works. You take the physical imprint that’s the encoded data and you scatter it. You put it in a bunch of discrete storage locations with tags and code built in so that if any portion of the storage system is lost, the rest of it knows how to rebuild the lost portion from the scattered fragments.”

Elvi, who was a lot more computer literate than Fayez, started, “That’s not exactly—”

“So then Jen says, ‘A diamond is a super-dense and incredibly regularly structured mass of carbon atoms. If you had a way to shift things around without damaging the overall structure, it’d make a great data storage material.’ ”

Elvi paused, her mind ticking through the implications.

“A way like tiny, tiny wormholes,” Elvi said.

“Right? We know that the protomolecule builders seem to have had a hive mind. Or one brain. However you want to parse that. Instantaneous nonlocalized communication across all the various nodes and entities, all across their corner of galaxy. But shit happens, even to them. Asteroids hit planets or earthquakes or volcanoes or whatever. Anything that’s stored in a single node is lost forever when that node is destroyed. So what if what we’re looking at is the backup drive for their entire civilization? Everything they ever knew, packed into a carbon lattice the size of Jupiter?”

“That,” Elvi said, “is one gigantic fucking logical leap.”

“Yeah.” He nodded, but his grin remained undiminished. “Totally unfounded. Complete guesswork. We’ll need generations of scientific studies to verify what this thing is, and then generations more to crack the code on how to dig out the data, if any such data exists.

“But Els,” he said, almost breathless with excitement. “I mean, what if?”

Admiral Sagale floated beside his desk, looking over navigational charts on a large wall display. Elvi could see a course plotted from their current position, through the Kalma gate and into the hub, then out again through the Tecoma gate and into the next dead system on their galactic tour.

“Tell me that this system is the most important scientific discovery of all time,” Sagale said, not even looking up when she floated into his office.

“It might very well—” Elvi started.

“But the big crystal flower in Naraka system was the most important discovery.”

“It was an astonishing artifact,” Elvi agreed. “But compared to—”

“Before that, it was the trinary star system in Charon, and the planet where it rained glass shards.”

“That was more just really cool. You have to admit, it was pretty spectacular.”

He turned to give her his full attention.

“I’m hearing you say—once again—that there are artifacts in this system that are critical to future investigation,” Sagale said. He seemed weary, and vaguely disappointed. “Just like the big crystal flower.”

Elvi went through it for him, and as she said it, Fayez’s theory seemed more and more plausible. Sagale stared at her through half-closed eyes as she spoke. When she told him that the diamond outside might actually house every piece of information the gate network builders had ever had, a muscle in his cheek twitched, but that was his only sign of surprise.

“That is interesting. Please write up that theory and include it with the data dump when we send everything back to Laconia during the transit. I apologize for lumping this in with the flowers and glass rain. This actually does seem impressive.”

His grudging admission stung a little, but she let it go.

“Sir,” Elvi said. “Met, this might be everything the high consul sent us on this mission to find. This might be it.”

“It is not,” Sagale said, but she pushed on.

“I strongly encourage you to send word back to the admiralty asking for more time. There are a thousand more tests we can be running while we wait for additional personnel and ships to join us. Leaving now gains us nothing.”

“And you believe you will be able to access this data if I give you that time?” Sagale said.

Elvi almost lied, hungry for the chance to stay a little while longer and learn a little bit more, but …

“No. I can’t say that. In fact, it will almost certainly be the work of decades, maybe centuries, to solve this problem. If it even is solvable. But this is our best shot. Nothing we find in Tecoma will be as important as this. I feel pretty safe guaranteeing that.”

“Then we’ll keep to our schedule, and see whether you’re right,” Sagale said, already turning away. “Get secured. We burn for Tecoma in eighty minutes.”

Seventy-eight minutes later, Elvi lay in her crash couch, waiting to drown.

The problem with space travel had always—from the very beginning—been the fragility of human bodies. In spite of these limitations, humanity had done itself pretty proud even before Laconia. Now they were improving by leaps and bounds. The Falcon could make the travel time from one system to another almost trivial by comparison to the standard science vessels and freighters of the civilian fleet. A journey of weeks could be accomplished in days. The Falcon would even give most of Duarte’s military ships a run for their money. But the price of all that acceleration was the full-submersion crash couch. A diabolical device that completely surrounded the human body in shock-absorbing gel, and filled the lungs with highly oxygenated fluid to make the chest cavity as incompressible as possible. For days.

“I don’t understand what he wants,” she said.

“He is a complicated man,” Fayez said from the couch next to hers.

“It’s like he doesn’t want us to find anything interesting. Every time we do, he gets grumpy.”

“You took your preflight meds?”

“Yes,” she said, even though she wasn’t sure she’d actually remembered to. They weren’t critical. “I feel like he’s got some other agenda he’s not telling us.”

“Almost certainly because he’s got some other agenda he isn’t telling us,” Fayez said. “That can’t be surprising, Els.”

“It can’t be something more important than this,” she said. “What would be more important than this?”

“To him? I don’t know. Maybe he just hates learning. Traumatized by a science fair when he was young. Ten seconds. I love you, Els.”

“I love you too,” she said. “I remember when juice was something they injected you with, not something you breathed. I remember I didn’t like it at the time.”

“Price of progress.”

She was looking for something clever to say back, but then the fluid poured in the way it always did and silenced her.