Two of Sagale’s Marines guarded the door to its chamber. They wore heavy blue power armor that whined and clicked when they moved. Each was equipped with a flamethrower. Just in case.
“We’re going to use the catalyst soon. I want to check on it,” Elvi said to the space between the two guards. For all that she had a military title, she still often couldn’t figure out who was the ranking officer in any given room. She lacked the indoctrination of boot camp, and the lifetime of practice the Laconians took for granted.
“Of course, Major,” the one on the left said. She looked too young to be the senior officer, but that was so often true of the Laconians. Most of them looked too young for their titles. “Will you need an escort?”
“No,” Elvi said. No, I always do this alone.
The young Marine did something on the wrist of her armor, and the door behind her slid open. “Let us know when you’re ready to come out.”
The catalyst’s room was a cube, four meters on a side. It had no bed, no sink, no toilet. Just hard metal and mesh drains. Once a day, the room was flushed with solvent and the liquid was sucked away to be incinerated. The Laconians were obsessive about contamination protocols where the protomolecule was concerned.
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. But Elvi hadn’t been in their military for long before she found out about 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.
The catalyst was special, though. Through some work of Cortázar’s or through some accident of the woman’s genetics, she was only a carrier. She showed early signs of infection—changes to her skin and skeletal structure—but in the months since she’d been brought on board the Falcon, those changes hadn’t progressed at all. And she never entered what everyone called the “vomit zombie” phase, puking up material to try to spread the infection.
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. She smelled mostly of the solvent bath she received every day, but under it was something else. A morgue stink of decaying flesh.
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.
“I’m sorry,” Elvi said to her, as she did every time she came into the catalyst chamber. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t know that they did this. I would never have agreed to it.”
The woman’s head lolled on her neck, nodding forward as if in mock agreement.
“I won’t forget that they did this to you. If I can ever make this right, I will.”
The woman pushed at the floor with her hands as though she wanted to stand up, but her arms lacked the strength, and her hands flopped bonelessly. It was just reflexes. That’s what she told herself. Instinct. The woman’s brain was gone, or at least changed into something that wasn’t by any sane definition a brain. There wasn’t anyone really alive in that skin. Not anymore.
But there had been once.
Elvi wiped her eyes. The universe was always stranger than you expected. Sometimes it was full of wonders. Sometimes full of horrors.
“I won’t forget.”
Chapter Two: Naomi
Naomi missed the Rocinante, but then she missed a lot of things these days.
Her old ship and home was still parked on Freehold. Before they’d left, she and Alex had found a cavern system on the edge of Freehold’s southernmost continent with a mouth big enough to edge the ship into. They’d put it down in a dry tunnel and spent a week running seals and storage tarps that would keep the local flora and fauna out. Whenever they got back to the Roci, it would be there, ready and waiting. If they never did, it would be there for centuries. Still waiting.
Sometimes, on the edge of sleep, she’d take herself through it. She still knew every centimeter from the top of the cockpit to the curve of the drive cone. She could think her way through it on the float or under thrust. She’d heard about ancient scholars back on Earth making palaces of memory that way. Imagine Alex in the cockpit, holding an hourglass for time. Then down to the flight deck, where Amos and Clarissa were tossing a golgo ball with the numeral 2 painted on it back and forth for initial and final velocities divided by two. Then down to her cabin, and Jim. Jim by himself. Jim who meant displacement. A simple kinematic equation, three things that were all the same, easy to remember because they all stung her heart.
That was one reason she’d agreed to the shell-game plan when Saba and the underground had reached out to her. Memories were like ghosts, and as long as Jim and Amos were gone, the Roci would always be a little bit haunted.
And it wasn’t only Jim, though he had been the first. Naomi had also lost Clarissa, who would have died from the slow poisons in her implants if she hadn’t chosen to die by violence. Amos had taken a high-risk mission from the underground, deep in enemy territory, and then gone silent, missing pickup window after pickup window until they all stopped expecting to hear from him again. Even Bobbie, healthy and well, but in the captain’s seat of her own ship now. They were all lost to her, but Jim was the worst.
Freehold, on the other hand, she didn’t miss at all. The experience of being under a vast and empty sky had its charm for a while, but the unease lasted longer than the novelty. If she was going to live as a fugitive and outlaw, she could at least do it in something where the air was held in by something visible. Her new quarters—spare and terrible as they were—at least had that going for them.
From the outside, her bunk looked like a standard cargo container made to transport a low-yield planetary fusion reactor. It was the kind colonists in the thirteen hundred new systems would use to power a small city or a medium-sized mining station. With its actual cargo gone, there was enough room for a gimbaled crash couch, an emergency support recycler, a water supply, and half a dozen modified short-burn torpedoes. The crash couch was her bed and her workbench. The support recycler was her power and food and her waste disposal. The kind of thing that would keep the crew of a stranded ship alive for weeks, but not in anything like comfort. The water supply was for drinking, but also part of the stealth, connected to small evaporation panels on the exterior of the container to bleed off her waste heat.
And
the torpedoes were how she spoke to the larger world.