Tiamat's Wrath (Expanse 8)

She finished the last bite of bagel and washed it down with the dregs of her tea. It was still hours before daylight. If she waited, her courage would fail her. She cleaned up her plate and teacup, stretched until her leg ached, and went to the attendant.

“Can I help you with something, ma’am?”

“I need to talk to Admiral Trejo.”

Trejo was dressed when she reached his office. His bright-green eyes were puffy with lack of sleep, and his shirt had the limp look of something worn for too many days in a row. His desk held a pile of exhausted single-use displays, the detritus of a flood of highly sensitive reports from inside the system and what he had managed to glean from all the systems beyond. His smile was warm, well practiced, and probably insincere.

Elvi had been laboring hard under the strain of juggling a mad emperor, a murderous scientist, and civilization-ending monsters that had killed her crew and eaten her flesh. It was uncomfortable to think that Trejo was under more pressure than she was.

“Doctor,” Trejo said. “You’re up early.”

“So are you.”

He gestured to a chair. “I’m up late. Coordination with the other systems has been… challenging. I delegate what I can, but the high consul didn’t sleep, and being both him and myself has been… strenuous.”

“When was the last time you slept?”

“A full night? Honestly, I’d have to do some math.”

Elvi sat, folding her hands together on her knees. The anxiety hissed and spun in her chest like a firework. Sleep seemed like something in a language she couldn’t speak. Neither of them knew what the term meant anymore.

“Is there something I can do for you, Dr. Okoye?” Trejo prompted. Elvi realized she’d faded out for a moment.

“I don’t have hard proof,” she said, “but I believe Dr. Cortázar intends to harm the high consul’s daughter. Maybe even kill her.”

Trejo sighed and looked down. Elvi steeled herself. She was aware how thin her argument was. Even if Holden had come right out and made the accusation, it wouldn’t have carried much weight. Her trust in him would do more to undermine her own status than to dignify his report. All she had was the bone-deep conviction that it was true. She was prepared to plant her flag there and defend her position until Trejo took her seriously.

She expected him to say What evidence do you have? or What makes you think that? or Why would he do that? Instead, the admiral stretched his neck to the side until it popped. “Has there been any change in the high consul’s condition?”

“Not that I’ve seen,” she said. “But—”

“What options do we have for bringing him back to himself?”

“I don’t know. I honestly don’t know if that’s even possible.”

“We did the thing in the first place,” Trejo said. His voice was getting a rasp to it. Frustration or fear or anger. “Why can’t we undo it?”

“The same reason we can’t stir milk back out of coffee or unscramble an egg. Physics is full of things that only work in one direction. This is one.”

“Can we regenerate his central nervous system the way we would after a head injury?”

Elvi felt confused. She’d imagined several versions of this conversation, but none of them had involved ignoring her fears and changing the subject. She wasn’t sure what to do.

“Well, um… it’s not exactly like that. The cells in his brain are all still intact. Cortázar changed the way they function. Regrowing tissue means finding areas that are compromised and encouraging new cells to build there.”

“If we intentionally damaged his brain and pumped in normal cell lines, would he grow back?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Burn out his hippocampus, regenerate it. Then his occipital lobe or whatever. Go through him part by part, kill what’s there and replace it with fresh tissue that works like normal human flesh, and build him back up that way. Would that work?”

“I… I don’t know,” Elvi said. “That’s the Ship of Theseus question. Whether, when you replace all the individual parts of something, you still have the same thing. That’s philosophy. But even then, regrowing central nervous systems is tricky work. We’d want to talk to medical doctors. Physicians. I’m a biologist.”

“Cortázar did it.”

“Cortázar is deeply, deeply ethically flawed,” Elvi said. “I’m pretty sure he was using Duarte as an animal model to work the kinks out for his own treatment in the future, and I think he’s planning to sacrifice Teresa too. That’s what I’m here telling you.”

“What about the things that attacked the ring space? Can we say definitively whether they do or don’t pose an ongoing threat? If I park another ship where Medina used to be, is it going to get eaten? Or are we safe as long as we don’t blow up any more neutron stars?”