Tiamat's Wrath (Expanse 8)

“I need to make this my ship now. In her tradition and her honor, but my command. I wish it wasn’t like that, but it’s where we are. You understand.”

“I do.”

“Good. Because I need you as my XO.”

Alex looked at her. He

knew the answer and what he was going to do as clearly as if he’d actually been thinking about it. All his next steps laid out before him.

“Thank you,” he said. “But no. This is your ship, and that’s the way it should be. I’ve got one of my own.”

Chapter Thirty-Four: Elvi

Elvi woke up gasping.

“Hey hey hey,” Fayez said, shifting in the bed beside her. His hand on her back grounded her. It made the dream scatter back a little. She leaned into it. “Nightmare?” he asked.

“Worse,” she said. “You know that dream where you’ve got the big presentation that you forgot about, and now you have to pretend you did eight months of work on something you’ve got no clue on?”

“That is your go-to for bad dreams.”

“That, except that usually when I have it, I just have to wake up and things are better,” she said, smoothing back her hair. “I’d give three fingers and an eye to only have a blown lecture to worry about.”

He shifted, the familiar warmth of his body moving alongside her. “How’s your gut?” he asked. And then, when she didn’t answer, “You need to eat, darling.”

“I do. I will. It’s just…”

“I know.”

She reached for her cane, but when she stood, she put more weight on her hurt leg. The pain felt right. She went to the bathroom first, then started pulling on clothes. It was still dark out, apart from the lights of the State Building, the glow of the city, and the construction platforms glittering against the stars.

“Come back to bed,” Fayez said. “It’s too early.”

“I’m not going to sleep anyway. I’ll go out to the university. Get a jump on the day.”

“You have to get some rest.”

“Rest for me,” she said, and kissed him on the cheek, and then again on the neck. They were still for a moment.

When Fayez spoke, his voice didn’t have its usual lightness. “I will find a way to get us out of this if I can.”

“Out of this?”

“The part where you’re surrounded by psychopaths and politicians. We’ll steal a little ship, head out to some backwater colony world and spend the rest of our lives trying to get cucumbers to grow in poison soil. It’ll be great.”

“It would be heaven,” she said. “Go back to bed. I’ll come back when I can.”

The State Building was almost pleasant at night. Something about the quietness made it seem like she had freedom. There were just as many guards, just as many surveillance drones. Maybe it was just millennia of evolution priming her brain to believe that what happened in the darkness was hidden, private, and peculiar. She stuffed her hands in her pockets and went to the commissary. There would be something there—coffee and sweet rice, if nothing else. She couldn’t keep much more than that down anyway.

The work in Cortázar’s lab was punishing. There were a couple of decent virtual context translators in the lab. They helped enough that when his notes were couched in terms of nanoinformatics—complex imaginary information loss, Deriner functions, implicit multipliers—she could understand it in exobiological terms like functional regulation site persistence across generations. How either or both of them would ever be able to make the issues clear to Admiral Trejo, she couldn’t imagine. But she’d been able to explain convergent evolution to undergraduates, once upon a time. So maybe she’d come up with something.

The commissary was bright and quiet. An attendant nodded to her as she entered. Or maybe he was a guard. Same thing. Elvi got herself a cup of tea—the coffee smelled too acidic and aggressive when she got close to it—and a bagel with butter and jelly. She didn’t want to go to the pens or Cortázar’s private labs. She didn’t want to spend another day with Cara and Xan. She also didn’t want to stay here. But most of all, she didn’t want to do what she knew she had to do. Tell Trejo about Cortázar.

She’d wanted to find proof. A smoking gun somewhere in his notes. She’d gone over everything she could find about Duarte’s transubstantiation—her term for it, not theirs—hoping to find something that showed Cortázar didn’t intend to let Teresa follow in her father’s footsteps, and that he never had. There was nothing. Either he’d never put it in his written musings or he’d erased it carefully enough that she couldn’t find it.

Her hand terminal had a reminder function. It was meant to alert her when meetings were about to start, and one of the options was to let her know when the other people were already together. She’d made a fake appointment with Cortázar and Teresa with an unfixed time. It meant that anytime the two of them were in close proximity, she was notified, and would be until one of them noticed it on their schedule and wiped it out. She was almost certain that her unexpected appearance at the medical wing was the only thing that had kept Cortázar’s work with Teresa from moving forward already.

And by work, she was pretty sure she meant vivisection.