Tiamat's Wrath (Expanse 8)

“If he was being oblique because Duarte’s got an eye on him, he won’t be straight with you any more than he was me.”

Unless I let him know that Duarte isn’t watching anything right now, Elvi thought. The idea left a cold mark that could have been fear or excitement or something of both. She wondered what Trejo would think, and if Holden was even on the new, secret emperor’s radar.

“Maybe I can come up with something,” Elvi said.

And maybe she could have if they hadn’t discovered Amos Burton and his pocket nuke that night and Holden hadn’t been thrown in a cell before morning.

Cortázar smiled when he saw her like it was something he’d told himself to remember to do. Elvi felt like her answering nod was equally fake, but she didn’t know if he’d notice or care.

“Anything else I can help with, Paolo?” Ochida asked.

“Thank you, no,” Cortázar said. “We’ll be fine.”

Ochida stepped away. Everything about it was perfectly normal and polite. It all felt like a threat. Cortázar turned and started walking toward a set of metal doors. She had to trot to catch up with him.

“I’m sorry we had to push this until after lunch,” he said. “I’ve been at the security office all morning going over the things they took from the spy.”

r /> “Amos Burton,” Elvi said. “Kelly briefed me. It’s a little weird. I knew him. We were both on Ilus at the same time. He saved my husband’s life.”

“Well, he had a pocket nuke with him in that cave, so…” Cortázar wagged his hand in a so-so gesture. “I was with the analysis team. Trejo’s looking at the communication deck pretty carefully. It looks like the bastard’s been out there for quite a long time.”

“Do we know what he wanted?”

“Not yet, but we may still get to ask him.”

“I thought he was dead.”

“Oh my, yes. Very much so.”

“Then how?”

He presented his lanyard to a locking mechanism, and the doors cycled open. She followed him into a darker corridor. The walls were thicker. Reinforced. It was a little sobering to think that the raw protomolecule of the Pen wasn’t the most dangerous thing in the lab.

“Ilich fucked that whole thing up badly,” Cortázar said. “Not his fault. He didn’t know not to leave the body behind.”

The doors closed behind them with a deep sound. Like a prison. The corridor acted as an airlock.

“After they shot the poor fucker in the head, Ilich pulled everyone back to protect the little princess,” Cortázar said. She heard the sneer in his voice, and thought of Richard III. “He should have left someone guarding the body. Or burned it before he left. Not his fault, really. He knows the rules about the repair drones, but he doesn’t know the reason behind them.”

A second set of doors opened, light spilling into the hallway. “I don’t understand,” Elvi said.

“You will,” Cortázar said lightly as he walked into the private lab. He’d been teasing her.

This lab was smaller than the Pen. She recognized some of the equipment from her own exobiology labs—array sequencers, proteome sample analyzer, NIR and low-resonance scanners. Other things were as strange as any of the alien artifacts she’d come across. Cortázar ignored them all, stepping across to a transparent polymer cage the size she’d seen used for simian and large-animal studies.

“Trejo thinks having a new set of eyes on all of this will help, but the truth is you’re going to be playing catch-up for months just to get to the point you can ask intelligent questions,” he said. “But to get you started? These were the original cases. The seed grit in our oyster.”

Two children were in the cage, a boy maybe seven or eight years old and a girl on the edge of adolescence. Their eyes were perfectly black, like the pupils had eaten iris and sclera alike. The girl stood up and walked toward the front face of the cage. Her skin was grayish. She moved almost normally, but when she stopped, there was a terrible stillness about her.

“What …,” Elvi said, and then didn’t know how to finish the question. She’d heard the phrase It made my flesh crawl, but she’d thought it was a figure of speech until then.

“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.

“I don’t know you,” the girl said.

“My name’s Elvi.”

“I’m Cara. Are you going to hurt us too?”