Tiamat's Wrath (Expanse 8)

Naomi shook her head. “No. Nothing obvious. I want him briefed, but not at the risk of exposing the organization. Saba can get the message when he can get the message. He knows how to find us once he does.”

Chava made a frustrated sound at the back of her throat and slammed down the last of her tea. “Let me take you to the safe house, then. At least we can chew our nails someplace comfortable. Laconia takes the repeaters seriously. Whatever the issue is, getting the communications network back up will be high on their to-do list.”

“Thank God for the efficiency of the enemy,” Naomi said, making it a joke. Chava even laughed at it a little.

But a day later, the repeater was still down. And the day after that. It was almost a week before a high-speed probe made the long journey to the ring gate and through it, and sent back the images that even the censor’s office couldn’t keep a lid on.

Auberon system—Naomi and Chava and the crew of the Bhikaji Cama included—saw the swirling colors that had replaced the darkness between the ring gates. They found out why the repeater on the slow zone side of the gate wasn’t responding. It was gone, and so were all the other repeaters like it. And the Eye of the Typhoon. And Medina Station and all the ships that had been quarantined inside the ring space. Only the alien station at the center remained, glowing bright as a tiny sun.

Naomi looked at it all until she was on the edge of vertigo, then looked away and had to go back to check that it was real. Over and over again, locked in a cycle of disbelief.

All human existence in the small artificial universe between the gates had been wiped away as if it had never been there at all, leaving no sign of what had killed it.

Chapter Twenty-Four: Bobbie

The bar was worse than shitty. Shitty had character. The place was generic. Fake stone meant to echo a tunnel on Ceres or Pallas marked with graffiti to make it look edgy until you noticed that the pattern of it repeated every couple meters. The appearance of counterculture as churned out by a corporate designer. The food wasn’t bad. Vat-grown ribs in a hot marinade and vegetable kibble that hadn’t been cooked to a mush. The beer was decent, if a little hoppy for her taste. A screen at the back usually played highlights from football games around the system. Now it was playing a newsfeed. And while most of the time the screen was a background for the conversations and drinking, today everyone was watching it.

“The event mirrors the one experienced when the Tempest was forced to employ its magnetic field generator against separatist forces on Pallas Station,” the woman on the screen said. She was pale skinned, with long, dark hair and a serious expression. Bobbie thought the broadcast was out of Luna, but it could as easily have been Ceres or Mars. They all looked the same these days. “But while the previous effect had a clear trigger and was restricted to Sol system, the few ships that have made the transit into Sol since the event report that this was much more widespread, possibly affecting all known systems.

“The loss of Medina Station and the Typhoon along with all civilian ships in the ring space is assumed to be related, but no official report has been released at this time to confirm that.”

Caspar made a low sound, something between a cough and a chuckle. Jillian, across from him, lifted her chin as a question.

“More critical than their pet journalists usually are,” Caspar said.

“You can still see the censor’s arm up her ass working her lips,” Jillian said. “If we had a free press, they’

d be tearing these bastards eight new assholes an hour until we got an explanation.”

An old man in a collarless shirt appeared on the screen with the dark-haired newsfeed host. He was smiling as anxiously as if the camera were mugging him. There was a chyron identifying him and his credentials, but the screen was too far away and the print too small for Bobbie to make them out, except she thought his first name was Robert. She leaned forward, trying to hear better.

“What can you tell us about these events, Professor?” the host asked.

“Well, yes. Yes. The first thing, of course, is that it’s a mistake to use the plural, yes? Events plural. What we’re seeing is better understood as a single, nonlocal event. Which fits with everything we’ve learned about the… I don’t like to say alien life. Too many presumptions. Call it the previous tenants and their enemies.” The old man’s smile grew a little warmer, amused by his own joke. Bobbie thanked the good angels that she’d never taken a university course from him.

Jillian sneered. “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 pointed to the screen with a pale bone that had recently been wrapped in rib meat. “These people are idiots.”

Caspar shrugged. “We just lost the underground coordination from Medina and we’re having beer and barbecue.”

“We’re idiots too,” Jillian said.

“You are, anyway,” Caspar said, but he smiled when he said it.

The announcement that the Sol gate was closed for business until further notice had been bad. No one on her crew had said anything to her directly, but they hadn’t had to. No ships in or out of the system didn’t make the shell game impossible. They might still be able to escape. Sneak off Callisto and find a Transport Union ship to hide in. But even if they did, that ship wouldn’t be going anywhere until the quarantine was lifted. Any hope of slipping out to a different system, hiding on some undeveloped moon until the attack in Sol system blew over was lost. Instead, they’d be trying to hide from the tiger without leaving its cage.

Then things got worse.

Bobbie was asleep when it happened. It had been getting harder and harder to get any rest. She’d pull herself onto her cot in what had been a warehouse office, kill the lights, and her mind would launch into scenarios of escape or capture or violence, running through every combination of circumstances she could invent. She felt lucky to get five full hours in a cycle, so when she woke up groggy and confused, she’d thought it was just exhaustion finally catching up. It wasn’t until her hand terminal chirped to let her know that everyone from her crew to the Callistan emergency service to the top newsfeeds in the system had been trying to get her attention that she understood something deeper had happened.

“The important thing to understand,” the old man said, looking into the camera like he was everyone’s kind uncle, “is that while these incidents can be very upsetting and certainly they have caused some accidents when people were in the middle of sensitive or dangerous activities when they came, they pose no real threat in and of themselves.”

“Can you explain that?” the host asked.

“These spells have not been shown to have any long-term effects. There is no indication that they are more than an inconvenience, really. It’s important, of course, to keep in mind they may happen, at least until the Science Directorate understands the cause and… ah …control of them. Until then, we should all make sure fail-safes are engaged on our vehicles and equipment. But that’s good advice in any case, yes?”

Caspar roughened his voice, mimicking the old man. “And don’t concern yourself with the fact that it destroyed gates and battleships. Oh my, no. Don’t worry your pretty little heads about that.”

“Where’s Alex?” Bobbie asked.