Tiamat's Wrath (The Expanse, #8)

by James S.A. Corey

“The people who have power over you are weak too. They shit and bleed and worry that their children don’t love them anymore. They’re embarrassed by the stupid things they did when they were young that everyone else has forgotten. And so they’re vulnerable. We all define ourselves by the people around us, because that’s the kind of monkey we are. We can’t transcend it. So when they watch you, they hand you the power to change what they are too.”

IF LIFE TRANSCENDS DEATH, THEN I WILL SEEK FOR YOU THERE. IF NOT, THEN THERE TOO.

Even as the capital city became synonymous with humanity as a whole, the planet around it stayed alien.

Holden had seen the protomolecule in action as much as anyone who wasn’t in Cortázar’s lab. That was probably why the side effects of Duarte’s treatments were more obvious to him.

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 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.

“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.”

But in the Laconian Empire, the military always sat at the top of the authority chart.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The mechanisms by which it hijacked life and repurposed it were incredibly advanced, but not totally dissimilar to things like viruses and parasitic fungi.

Something about the hull materials just absorbed or bounced off at an angle almost any radar that hit it. She could also dump all her waste heat into internal heat sinks for several hours and run liquid hydrogen through capillaries in her skin, keeping the hull temperature pretty close to zero. Unless someone was really looking for her, she’d just show up as a slightly warmer spot in space with a radar profile not much bigger than a bunk bed. Alex could remember when a destroyer with similar technology had killed his old ship the Canterbury.

There are people I love. There are people who have loved me. I fought for what I believed, protected those I could, and stood my ground against the encroaching darkness. Good enough.

That’s the thing about autocracy. It looks pretty decent while it still looks pretty decent. Survivable, anyway. And it keeps looking like that right up until it doesn’t. That’s how you find out it’s too late.

Growing older was a falling away of everything that didn’t matter. And a deepening appreciation of all the parts that were important enough to stay.

Naomi stretched. She liked the freedom of free fall even though it meant doubling up her exercise routine. Or maybe because it meant that. More hours in the resistance band meant at least doing something physical. Feeling her body. And also there was a sense of being where she belonged.

Whether Duarte said it or not, the offer included trading all she knew of Saba and the underground. In return, she would be waking up next to Jim, living in a prison a thousand times larger than the one she’d imposed on herself. That was all obvious. The poison was the rest of it—access, influence, the emperor’s ear. It was exactly the path she’d argued for. Working within the system to make a revolution without starvation and hatred and dead kids.

The real horror was that once the bargain was struck, the devil didn’t cheat. He gave you exactly and explicitly all that had been promised. And the price was your soul.

Animals had made the path she and Muskrat followed through the forest. Bone-elk and ground pigs and pale, shovel-faced horses, none of which had any relationship to Sol system elk or pigs or horses.

“Yeah,” he said after a while, “well, for what it’s worth, you’re not the first person that felt like the captain was a splinter they couldn’t dig out. He has that effect on people. But if he says you ought to keep an eye on him, maybe you ought to keep an eye on him.”

“Your dad’s kind of an asshole,” Timothy said, his expression philosophical, his voice matter-of-fact. “And he’s killed a lot more people than Holden ever did.” “That’s different. That’s war. He had to do it or else no one would have been able to organize everyone. We’d just have stumbled into the next conflict unprepared.

“I don’t—” Teresa started, then stopped. Timothy’s comment made her think of a philosophy lesson, and Ilich talking about consequentialism. Intention is irrelevant. Only outcomes matter.

“Why did you call him captain?” “That’s who he is. Captain Holden.” “He’s not your captain.”

“I never knew mine either,” Timothy said. “But I put something together later that I could sort of pretend was family. It wasn’t bad for someone that grew up on my street. While it lasted. I’ll tell you what, though, as fucked up as my childhood was? It’s got nothing on yours.”

“Meaningless term,” Cortázar said. “Humans arose inside nature. We’re natural. Everything we do is natural. The whole idea that we are different in category is either sentimental or religious. Irrelevant from a scientific perspective.” “So if we get to a place that we can all live forever, that’s not unnatural?” Holden sounded genuinely curious.

“The important thing is that we get good data. One person. Lots of people. All the same. But bad experimental design? That’s what sin really is,” Cortázar slurred. “That’s not me either. Nature eats babies all the time.” Holden shifted, looking directly up into the surveillance camera as if he knew exactly where the hidden lens was. As if he knew she would be watching. You should keep an eye on me.

man with a salt-and-pepper beard longer than his close-cropped hair looked away from her long enough to recognize Naomi, then back at Emma in disgust. His uniform identified him as Captain Burnham. The comms tech was between them like a mouse at a catfight. “The answer was no before,” Burnham said, then pointed toward Naomi with his chin. “Now that this one is on my deck, the answer’s go fuck yourself.”

Or something bigger. Naomi thumbed the notification open. ALL UNION SHIPS: TOP PRIORITY. ALL TRAFFIC THROUGH ALL GATES IS SUSPENDED BY ORDER OF LACONIAN MILITARY COMMAND. NO SHIPS PERMITTED THROUGH ANY GATE UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. ALL TRANSITS ARE ON HOLD. ALL SHIPS ON APPROACH ARE TO EVACUATE THE LANE TO .8 AU IMMEDIATELY.

A moment later, a message came back. I KNOW. I CAN’T DECIDE IF I’M PANICKED OR BORED. V. CONFUSING. BEEN READING THE SAFETY GUIDELINES. TURNS OUT MALES ARE SPECIFICALLY DISCOURAGED FROM MASTURBATING IN THE GEL WHILE UNDER BURN. WONDER WHAT THAT TEST PROTOCOL LOOKED LIKE.

center of 1,373 gates evenly distributed around the surface of a sphere that had nothing outside it. Icons marked the repurposed generation ship that was the oldest station in the space between worlds and the Magnetar-class Laconian warship that was the newest. Along with them, a scattering of ships in a space barely smaller than the Earth’s sun. If the icons had been to

“Governor Song is trying to evacuate the ring space per my recommendation,” Sagale said. “She is also trying to move Medina Station further out of harm’s way in case a gamma burst does come through Tecoma gate.

“It’s going to hit the station, isn’t it?” Elvi said. “The star, the gate, and that alien station that runs the ring space. They’re all in a line.” “Yes,” Sagale said.

“Yes,” Elvi said, but she didn’t move. Not yet. “It was designed, right? Tecoma system was designed. To… to do this?”

The protomolecule engineers were some kind of quantum-entangled high-energy physics hive mind thing. I don’t know what they were thinking.”

“Gates moved,” Fayez said in the same tone he used for trivial information. Laundry’s dry. Dinner’s ready. Gates moved. “What?” Sagale said. “Yeah,” Fayez said. “Not much, but a little. And all of them. Look for yourself.” Sagale shifted the main screen. The slow zone bloomed. And with it corrections on each of the gates. The ships were all in place, all matching their expected vectors and positions. But a little yellow error code hung at the gates to show where they were expected to be, and where they were instead.

“Yeah, so,” Fayez said. “Pretty sure I see what’s going on. They just reordered. Because there’s not as many of them now. Equal distance between them got a little bigger. Tecoma gate’s gone. And… Oh yeah. Look at that. Thanjavur gate was pretty much straight across from it. And it’s gone too. We just lost two gates, Admiral. And one of them had an entire world filled with people behind it.”

“They just lost one of their battleships, the central traffic control for the ring gates, a shitload of ships, and two whole fucking gates, and they want to talk about the limits of locality?”

She had her people and her duty. It was Mars that had changed and darkened. It had metastasized into an empire and a grand project she wanted no part of.

They lost the Typhoon. They only had three of these monsters. The Heart of the Tempest controlling Sol system because that’s the place with the power and the resources. The population.”

He was alive and had all his fingers with the nails still attached because he’d also known about the dead space that had appeared on the Tempest when it used its magnetic field generator in normal space. And the dead spaces like it in all the systems besides Sol. He was the one person in the whole of humanity who had—escorted by the enslaved remnants of Detective Miller—been inside the alien station and seen the fate of the protomolecule’s builders firsthand. And from the first moment they’d allowed it, he’d been shoveling everything he knew about that at them.

Duarte was a thoughtful, educated, civilized man and a murderer.

Like a religious fanatic, the man really believed that everything he’d done was justified by his goal in doing it. Even