Tiamat's Wrath (The Expanse, #8)

by James S.A. Corey

Out of discipline, Holden grinned and went to sit across from the sociopathic professional vivisectionist.

There was no better way to seem trustworthy than to be liked by a dog, and there was no better way to convince a dog to like you than bribery.

The dog looked from her to Holden, regret in the dark-brown eyes. The hope of more sausage weighed against the distress of her person.

He was seeing Teresa, devastated. The State Building vibrating with banked anxiety. Cortázar—entitled, narcissistic, protomolecule-obsessed Cortázar—quietly gleeful. Another bout of strange consciousness and lost time, this one at least in Laconia system, and maybe beyond. Elvi Okoye’s return being used as a cover story for Cortázar’s presence at the State Building. Because he needed to be there, was happy to be there, and someone wanted to hide the real reasons why. Put like that, something had happened to Duarte. If it was true, Cortázar’s hands were freer. Which meant his plans to vivisect and kill Duarte’s daughter would probably kick into high gear.

This was the problem with thousand-year Reichs. They came and they went like fireflies.

“They were Alexander and Cara Bisset when they were alive,” Cortázar said. “Children of the initial scientific expedition that was on Laconia before the high consul relocated his loyalists here. The boy died in an accident. The girl was poisoned trying to eat local flora in the wilderness not long after. This is what happens when you have a dead body around the repair drones. Or, well. Sometimes. They don’t always take it upon themselves to fix things, but when they do…” He nodded toward the dead children. This is what happens.

Two men, each convinced of their exceptionalism, were capable of leapfrogging over vast chasms of maybe-this-isn’t-a-great-idea and this-is-totally-illegal.

Development into a mature form wasn’t the same as aging and death. Maybe the drones hadn’t understood that. So that meant something about how the protomolecule designers had functioned, didn’t it?

Sol system joined the Association of Worlds was a hell of a way to say, Laconia trucked in a half-alien warship and killed the shit out of everyone until we showed them our bellies.

“The activity of the decryption package coincided with a data drop from known separatist elements earlier today,” she said, and Bobbie killed the feed. She made a connection to Jillian. Her second in command accepted like she’d been expecting her. Before Jillian could speak, Bobbie asked, “Did a bottle come through?”

That’s why your father brought this painting here. The unity of the human project is a Laconian ideal.” It was a strange thought. They were torturing Holden right now over political differences. They’d killed Timothy, and maybe Timothy had come to Laconia to kill them. And now here they were, all pretending that a long-dead man’s barely concealed penis was a symbol of how much they were all in it together.

He’d wondered more than once why Naomi had chosen to live in a hidden shipping container, but now, here, he thought he understood. The pleasure of being utterly alone made his mourning into something different and strange and humane.

“Doing the briefings is my downtime.” “Coordinating a massive resistance to an authoritarian and galaxy-spanning empire is your hobby?”

The dream of empire could only die if the ancient Martian dream of independence through better technology was put to rest.

Old Rokku had said that after fifty years flying, a ship had a soul. It had seemed like a cute superstition when she was young. It seemed obvious now.

“I want to see Jim again. And Amos. I want this war over with, and a real peace established. The kind where people can be angry with each other and hate each other and no one has to die over it. That’d be enough.”

Sometimes it was inscrutable, like the fact that substrate-level entities were difficult to refract through rich-light. That was the most interesting example, because Cara understood what the substrate was, and what refraction meant in that context, and the nature of rich-light, but the whole body of knowledge didn’t connect to anything. There was no shared context with anything like food or trees or water. Any human knowledge. It was, Elvi thought, like finding a sea turtle who thoroughly understood Godel’s incompleteness theorem, but didn’t have any sea-turtley application for it. That kind of cognitive artifact was a large part of why Cortázar had drawn the conclusion that Cara and Xan weren’t actually the children they’d been before they were “repaired,” but alien technology created using human corpses.

But it was interesting that none of Cortázar’s work on Duarte seemed to have resulted in the high consul’s getting access to the library, and the weird turning-off of consciousness hadn’t broken Cara and Xan the way it had Duarte.

her report and analysis of the most recent mass blackout event. There was literally no room in her awareness for the present.

“I can’t overstate how devastating it’s been to lose Medina Station, sir. Controlling that choke point was the leash we had on the empire. Without it…”

“Bear with me,” Elvi said. “Unless we’re reaching for religious explanations, which I’m not the person to comment on, consciousness is a property of matter. That’s trivial. We’re made out of matter, we’re conscious. Minds are a thing that brains do. And there’s an energetic component. We know that neurons firing is a sign that a particular kind of conscious experience is happening. So, for instance, if I’m looking at your brain while you imagine something, I can guess reliably whether you’re imagining a song or a picture by seeing if your visual or auditory cortex is lighting up.” “All right,” Trejo said. “There’s no reason to believe that a brain is the only structure capable of having that combination of structure and energy. And in fact, there’s a fair amount of evidence that the gate builders had a conscious structure—a brain-like thing—where the material component wasn’t at all the same kind of thing we use. Anecdotally, we’ve found at least one brain-like structure that was a diamond the size of Jupiter.”

“My thesis—the one I was working on before I came here—explored the idea that our brains are kind of a field combat version of consciousness. Not too complex. Not a lot of bells and whistles, but takes a lot of punishment and keeps functioning. Our brain may actually have a kick-starting effect, so when the quantum interactions that underlie having experiences break down, they’re easier to start up again. Does that make sense?”

“So, the scenario that James Holden brought back from the alien station in the ring space was of something systematically destroying the consciousness of the older civilization. Killing it. The previous civilization tried getting rid of systems. Inducing supernovas. That didn’t help. They eventually closed all the gates, and that didn’t fix the problem either, because whatever it was killed them all anyway.

“And that’s where we came in. We found—and I have directly observed—things that we call bullets or scars or persistent nonlocal field effects. Basically a place where whatever hates the ring gates has done something to collapse consciousness on a planet or in a system. Or in all the systems at once. What I suspect—and I don’t have any data for this—is that the enemy figured out how to snuff out all the systems at once, whether the gates were active or not. I believe that our travel through the gates is irritating to these beings. Maybe even damaging in some way. When that damage gets high enough, they react.”

“Right? But then they’re not done. Especially, and no offense here, when we start dropping bomb ships into wherever they are. Playing tit for tat. And the way this one felt different? Light and shapes instead of that kind of hyperawareness?” “I did notice that, yes,” Trejo said dryly. “I believe that the enemy, whatever it is, is experimenting with new ways to break conscious systems. Brains. I think we’re the equivalent of a penicillin-resistant infection, and the last event we experienced was an attempt at tetracycline.”

Trejo nodded to her and shifted to Cortázar. “Do you disagree?” Cortázar squirmed. “His previous state? Probably not. But moving him forward into a new state is much more plausible. Easy, even. And more than that, instructive.” Trejo went terribly still.

But no, the Whirlwind couldn’t stop them. It had already gone too far, and even with the braking burn, its vector was still away from the planet. It was fighting its own mass and momentum like a swimmer struggling against the outgoing tide. The destroyers were in the same position. They’d been tricked. Lured away with only the planetary defense grid to protect them.

The timing was bad, but it could have been worse. She left out the window as if she were sneaking out to see Timothy again.

“You stay,” she said. Then to the woman, “You have something to subdue him? An electrical prod?” “Yes,” the woman said.

Teresa flipped the safety clear. Holden flinched, prepared for the pain and shock, and Teresa drove the weapon into the guard’s belly and pulled the trigger. He went down hard, not even trying to catch himself. “Okay,” Holden said after a long, stunned moment. “That was weird.” “We don’t have much time. Come with me.”

“Your people are coming. Your old ship. The whole invasion was a ruse to get them close.” “There’s an invasion?” Holden said. And then, “They don’t tell me much. But you’re saving me?” “I’m using you. I need to leave. You’re my ticket onto those ships. Now hurry. We don’t have time.”

The experiment to change Duarte’s body using the tamed protomolecule had been the worst kind of science—uncontrolled, unethical, speculative, and risky. He had overstated his certainty to Duarte, underplayed the risks, moved ahead on therapies based on best-guess understandings of Cara and Xan, and collected data obsessively. His notes and records read like a horror story.

His decision to instead kill her and give her to the repair drones hadn’t come until fairly recently.

It was a long time before she figured out who had convinced him to change from his usual strategy. When she did, she only told Fayez.

“Holden?” her husband said, incredulous. “James Holden put Cortázar up to killing Teresa?” “I don’t know,” Elvi said. “I think so. Maybe.”

Holden’s argument correct? Consider restarting protocol with additional subject. And every note after that, wherever it had been added, assumed that Teresa Duarte began the process already dead. Another note seemed to be a list of talking points for breaking the news to the high consul. With your life span, she was going to die before you did anyway. The important thing is that we learn as much as we can from her death sacrifice. Children die in nature all the time. This is just like that. But the one she kept returning to was Holden’s argument correct?

Fuck you for putting me in this position, she thought. Fuck you for making this the right thing for me to do. It wasn’t what she said aloud. “Go.”