Tiamat’s Wrath by James S. A. Corey (2019) (read in 2022)

“She hugged him. It was like hugging a tree. He pulled back, and when he looked at her, she thought there was something like regret in his expression. It couldn’t have been pity.”

“That’s the thing about autocracy. It looks pretty decent while it still looks pretty decent. Survivable, anyway. And it keeps looking like that right up until it doesn’t. That’s how you find out it’s too late.”

“Elvi’s voice sounded outraged, even to her. “The last time we made them angry, they turned off every consciousness in the Sol system and there was a massive surge in virtual particle activity. They fired a bullet that broke spooky interactions in ways we’re still trying to make sense of. Every one of those things defies our understanding of how reality works. So we’re going to throw a bomb at them?””

““I think we have a resistance right now because we have a lot of old guys who grew up resisting an enemy too strong to ever beat. They’ve been inoculated against fear of failure. But when they’re gone, I think we’re done. As a movement. As a force in history. Because we’re not going to convince anyone born after the Transport Union was formed to fight an unwinnable fight.”

“Duarte and his people were smart. They kept things from getting bad too quickly. They made the right speeches about respect and autonomy. They let people believe that government by a king would never go wrong. And by the time it did, and things got bad enough to inspire a younger resistance, she and Alex and the old-school OPA would be off the board. Then who would be left to fight? Why would they think there was any hope in it?”

“If they started pushing a dozen other ships through, the enemy might not understand the high consul’s point.”

“Candidly, I don’t like it. We’re going up against something we don’t understand with unfamiliar tools on a battlefield whose constraints we’re working out as we go along. It’s a stupid war, but it’s ours. If it can be won, I intend to win it. You’re going to help me.””

“Probably it had sounded persuasive to Laconian ears. The bone-deep assumption that all things Laconian were good and all opposition evil made for a hell of a blind spot when it came to writing propaganda.”

“As long as Laconia had the capacity to make ships like the Tempest and the Typhoon, it could never grow past being an oppressor. The dream of empire could only die if the ancient Martian dream of independence through better technology was put to rest.”

““The problem is it’s hard to reconcile when you’ve lost,” Naomi said. “Someone takes all the power, and you try to bring them into the fold again? That’s capitulation. I don’t think violence solves anything, not even this. Not even now. But maybe winning puts us in a place that we can be gracious.””

“Trejo put down the hand terminal. His coffee sloshed over the lip of its cup, staining the white linen. “We are in a war—”

““Yes, you should fix that too.”

““Excuse me?”

““You should stop being in a war. Send the underground a fruit basket or something. Start peace talks. I don’t know. However that works. I said it before, and I meant it. If you want peace, lose gracefully. We have bigger problems.””

“The part where Duarte was complicit in the vast slaughter on Earth that defined Avasarala’s career got skipped over. History was in the process of being rewritten by the winners. Holden was pretty sure that even though it didn’t make it into the press releases and state newsfeeds, everyone remembered that she and Duarte had been on opposite sides, back in the day. And if they didn’t, he certainly did.”

“She taught us to use everything shameful in our lives as a weapon to humiliate people who would diminish us.”

“Kajri smiled. “The people who have power over you are weak too. They shit and bleed and worry that their children don’t love them anymore. They’re embarrassed by the stupid things they did when they were young that everyone else has forgotten. And so they’re vulnerable. We all define ourselves by the people around us, because that’s the kind of monkey we are. We can’t transcend it. So when they watch you, they hand you the power to change what they are too.””

“On the view screen, a single faintly green diamond with a machine-perfect smooth surface floating in a solar system with no other planets, orbiting one fading white dwarf star.”

““One thousand three hundred and seventy three times that we know of,” Ilich said. “That’s a lot.”

“The colony worlds—Sol system included—were only on the gate network because there had been life for the Romans to hijack. A few hundred systems in a galaxy of billions. Ilich was old enough that anything more than one was miraculous to him. Teresa hadn’t grown up in a lonely universe the way the colonel had. She’d grown up in a lonely universe the way she had, and the two didn’t compare.”

“There are people I love. There are people who have loved me. I fought for what I believed, protected those I could, and stood my ground against the encroaching darkness. Good enough.”

“That’s the thing about autocracy. It looks pretty decent while it still looks pretty decent. Survivable, anyway. And it keeps looking like that right up until it doesn’t. That’s how you find out it’s too late.”

“whenever they spoke, he was polite and unthreatening. Even a little amused by everything in a vague, philosophical kind of way that made it easy to be polite back.”

““I’ve been around wet soil before,” she said, almost defensive. “That smell’s called petrichor. It’s actinomycete spores.”

““I didn’t know that,” Holden said. “It’s a good smell. I miss it.””

“That’s the point of a dancing bear. It’s the least dangerous thing at the court, because everyone’s aware of it. The ones you trust are always the most dangerous. A lot more kings and princesses got poisoned by their friends than eaten by bears.””

“Fayez pulled a jar of scalp cream out of a cabinet and began rubbing it into her short, tight curls with his fingertips. It felt wonderful to have him massaging her head. When you find a man who takes pleasure in helping you avoid dry scalp, Elvi thought, you keep him. “You can do that all day if you want,” she said. “If we had all day, my attentions would begin moving south,” he replied with a grin.”

““Because one of two things is true,” Sagale said. “Either there is an intelligence that lies beyond those gates that is making the choice to destroy our ships, or there is some natural effect of the gate system itself that does it. This is how we will determine that.””

“Elvi’s voice sounded outraged, even to her. “The last time we made them angry, they turned off every consciousness in the Sol system and there was a massive surge in virtual particle activity. They fired a bullet that broke spooky interactions in ways we’re still trying to make sense of. Every one of those things defies our understanding of how reality works. So we’re going to throw a bomb at them?””

“Maybe it was something that happened with every generation, this sense of displacement. It might be an artifact of the way human minds seemed to peg “normal” to whatever they’d experienced first and then bristled at everything afterward that failed to match it closely enough.”

““Well, for me, it looks like dying with the knowledge that humanity’s a little bit better off than it would have been if I’d never been born. A little freer. A little kinder. A little smarter. That the bullies and bastards and sadists got their teeth into a few less people because of me. That’s got to be enough.””

““She is right,” Bobbie said, turning back to her inventory. “It’s just I’m right too. Naomi wants there to be one way to fix this, and she wants it to be the one where there’s no blood.“

““But there’s two ways,” Alex said, thinking that he was agreeing.

““There’s no way,” Bobbie said. “There’s just pushing back with everything we’ve got and hoping we can outlast the bastards.””

““I think we have a resistance right now because we have a lot of old guys who grew up resisting an enemy too strong to ever beat. They’ve been inoculated against fear of failure. But when they’re gone, I think we’re done. As a movement. As a force in history. Because we’re not going to convince anyone born after the Transport Union was formed to fight an unwinnable fight.”

“Or maybe it was the idea of his kid getting married. Or maybe it was that he was a little smarter than she was, or a little less angry, or a little more realistic. Maybe it was that he’d seen a little sooner than she had why the fight was unwinnable.”

“Duarte and his people were smart. They kept things from getting bad too quickly. They made the right speeches about respect and autonomy. They let people believe that government by a king would never go wrong. And by the time it did, and things got bad enough to inspire a younger resistance, she and Alex and the old-school OPA would be off the board. Then who would be left to fight? Why would they think there was any hope in it?”

“He had a way of shifting his attention so that she felt like he was actually listening, not just preparing a reply in his head and waiting for her to stop talking. He focused on her the way he did on the wood he carved or the food he cooked. He didn’t judge her. He didn’t quiz her. She never worried that he would be disappointed with what she said.”

“He considered that. “Maybe it’s because he thinks your dad’s an asshole.”

““My dad’s not an asshole. And Holden’s a killer. He doesn’t get to judge other people.”

““Your dad’s kind of an asshole,” Timothy said, his expression philosophical, his voice matter-of-fact. “And he’s killed a lot more people than Holden ever did.”

““That’s different. That’s war. He had to do it or else no one would have been able to organize everyone. We’d just have stumbled into the next conflict unprepared. My dad’s trying to save us.”

“Timothy held up a finger like she’d made his point for him. “Now you’re telling me why it’s okay he’s an asshole.””

“The chief engineer coughed out a laugh. “Of course I do. Anyone in the Belt’s going to know Naomi fucking Nagata. It’s just these Laconian fucks who can’t see what they’re looking at. And again, it’s a real honor.””

“She pointed one thumb toward the monitor. “That’s not science. ‘Light shit on fire and see what happens’ isn’t science. This is throwing dynamite into a pond to see if any fish float to the top.”

““So . . . natural philosophy?”

““Military bullshit. Solving every problem by trying to blow it up.””

“[…] don’t like things that can only happen once. You can’t make sense of something when there’s no pattern. One data point is the same as none.””

““You know what would be funny?” Fayez said. “If this whole blowing-things-up plan broke the gate and we were all trapped here on this ship for the rest of our lives with no way home.”

“Sagale glowered and cleared his throat.

““You’re right,” Fayez said. “Too soon.””

“[…] maybe I used to think it was enough to spit in my enemy’s eye while he strangles me. But I’ve been thinking about Jillian’s assessment of the objective value of moral victories, and she wasn’t wrong either.””

““Easy to make rules,” Emma said. “Easy to make systems with a perfect logic and rigor. All you need to do is leave out the mercy, yeah? Then when you put people into it and they get chewed to nothing, it’s the person’s fault. Not the rules. Everything we do that’s worth shit, we’ve done with people. Flawed, stupid, lying, rules-breaking people. Laconians making the same mistake as ever. Our rules are good, and they’d work perfectly if it were only a different species.””

“[…] it was showing a schematic of the slow zone—the gates, the alien station at their center, Medina Station, and a few dozen ships scattered through 750 trillion cubic kilometers. A space smaller than the interior of a star.”

“It was like hearing that sometimes you woke up in the morning and didn’t have a color anymore. That red could die. Or that three could be shot off the number line. Learning that a gate could be destroyed was like learning that a rule of her universe so basic that she’d never even thought of it as a rule had been violated. If he’d said You actually have two bodies or Sometimes you can walk through walls or You can also breathe rock, it wouldn’t have felt stranger. More displacing.”

“[…] we can show the enemy that we are disciplined. Or we can show it that we aren’t.””

““That star wasn’t natural, it was created. And it was created from a system that looked like Sol. It was manufactured and it was pointed at the ring gate. They aimed it like tying a shotgun trigger to a doorknob. Our bomb ship did something to activate it. Maybe it got something to come look at us, and that’s what set it off. I don’t know. But it was built to be a booby trap.”

“Sagale’s scowl looked like he’d bitten into a bad date. “That is an interesting interpretation,” he said.”

“Trouble started long before Laconia existed. Ships have been disappearing for decades. Whatever this is, it began before we recognized it.”

“If they started pushing a dozen other ships through, the enemy might not understand the high consul’s point.”

“Distributed responsibility is the problem. One person gives the order, another carries it out. One can say they didn’t pull the trigger, the other that they were just doing what they were told, and everyone lets themselves off the hook.”

“She hugged him. It was like hugging a tree. He pulled back, and when he looked at her, she thought there was something like regret in his expression. It couldn’t have been pity.”

“She still had decades in her, if she kept her treatments and exercise regimen up. The universe she died in might still be better than the one she lived in now, but she had a hard time believing it would be better than the one she’d been born into. Too much had been lost, and what wasn’t lost was changed beyond her ability to understand it.”

“Duarte was a thoughtful, educated, civilized man and a murderer. He was charming and funny and a little melancholy and, as far as Holden could tell, completely unaware of his own monstrous ambition. Like a religious fanatic, the man really believed that everything he’d done was justified by his goal in doing it. Even when it was the push for his own personal immortality—and then his daughter’s—before slamming the door behind them, Duarte managed to cast it as a necessary burden for the good of the species. He was above all else a charming little ratfuck. As Holden grew to respect the man, even to like him, he was careful never to lose sight of the fact that Duarte was a monster.”

“It was dangerous for someone with one expertise to try to interpret something in a different but similar field. Laypeople didn’t understand how much scientific literature was about nuance and shared understanding. Even with expert systems to help, she was more likely to avoid errors with one of Jen Lively’s physics analyses than her own medical records, if only because she knew that she didn’t know physics.”

“Candidly, I don’t like it. We’re going up against something we don’t understand with unfamiliar tools on a battlefield whose constraints we’re working out as we go along. It’s a stupid war, but it’s ours. If it can be won, I intend to win it. You’re going to help me.””

“The scale of it all was too big. There were too many billion people in too many hundred solar systems for anyone to really understand. For any human to really understand.”

““The original bodies died twenty years ago, more or less,” Cortázar said. “These artifacts that were built from them have been static since their recovery.”

““So they’ll always be young?”

““Well. They’ll always look like immature human beings,” Cortázar said. “That’s not exactly the same thing. They have, for the most part, similar structures and chemistry to the original bodies, only very stable. Telomeres don’t shorten. Mitosis can run indefinitely. There’s no buildup of senescent cells or plaques. The immune response has a couple additional pathways and structures that are interesting. Really very nice work.””

“Evolution was a paste-and-baling-wire process that came up with half-assed solutions like pushing teeth through babies’ gums and menstruation. Survival of the fittest was a technical term that covered a lot more close-enough-is-close-enough than actual design.”

“In his last days, her grandfather talked sometimes about how weirdly clear his early memories had become. He might not quite remember the name of his nurse or when the man had last been to check on him, but the details of his childhood were vivid and immediate. Like the past was growing stronger as his present and future wore thin. He told the story about seeing a living cat for the first time, and how strange it had felt to hold it, with the same awe in his voice every time.”

“It was a strange thought. They were torturing Holden right now over political differences. They’d killed Timothy, and maybe Timothy had come to Laconia to kill them. And now here they were, all pretending that a long-dead man’s barely concealed penis was a symbol of how much they were all in it together. This was stupid. It was worse than stupid. It was dishonest.”

“The stars of the galactic disk spread against the horizonless sky. Some of that light had been traveling for centuries. Millennia. Longer. Many of those stars would have died long before she was born. What a weird fate for a photon to be spat out of a nuclear fireball, speed through the vast emptiness between stars, and land on a Martian Marine’s retina while she decided whether she still feared death, or if she was ready. She’d done this a dozen times before.”

“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 exo-biological 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.”

““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.””

“Probably it had sounded persuasive to Laconian ears. The bone-deep assumption that all things Laconian were good and all opposition evil made for a hell of a blind spot when it came to writing propaganda.”

“Wars never ended because one side was defeated. They ended because the enemies were reconciled. Anything else was just a postponement of the next round of violence.”

“As long as Laconia had the capacity to make ships like the Tempest and the Typhoon, it could never grow past being an oppressor. The dream of empire could only die if the ancient Martian dream of independence through better technology was put to rest.”

“But it was interesting that none of Cortázar’s work on Duarte seemed to have resulted in the high consul’s getting access to the library, and the weird turning-off of consciousness hadn’t broken Cara and Xan the way it had Duarte. There was a clue in there somewhere. She had the dataset. She just needed the right grid to put over it, and the pattern would make sense. She could feel it.”

““Like we don’t have a steel chamber in fusion reactors. We have magnetic bottles. Magnetic fields that perform the same basic function as matter. The older civilization appears to have developed its consciousness in a form that relied more on energetic fields and maybe structures in unobservable matter than the stuff we made a brain from. There’s also some implication that quantum effects have something to do with our being aware. If that’s true for us, it was probably true for them.

““My thesis—the one I was working on before I came here—explored the idea that our brains are kind of a field combat version of consciousness. Not too complex. Not a lot of bells and whistles, but takes a lot of punishment and keeps functioning. Our brain may actually have a kick-starting effect, so when the quantum interactions that underlie having experiences break down, they’re easier to start up again. Does that make sense?””

“What I suspect—and I don’t have any data for this—is that the enemy figured out how to snuff out all the systems at once, whether the gates were active or not. I believe that our travel through the gates is irritating to these beings. Maybe even damaging in some way. When that damage gets high enough, they react.”

““So when I killed Pallas Station in Sol . . . ,” Trejo said. “You also hit some weird, aphysical dark god in whatever passes for its nose,” Elvi said. “And they did what you’d expect them to do. If you get sick and a penicillin shot makes you better, then the next time you get sick, you try another shot. Only it turns out we aren’t the same kind of conscious system as the gate makers. We don’t break as easy, and we recover better. What slaughtered their civilization just lost us a few minutes of time.””

““I believe that the enemy, whatever it is, is experimenting with new ways to break conscious systems. Brains. I think we’re the equivalent of a penicillin-resistant infection, and the last event we experienced was an attempt at tetracycline.””

““I do,” Elvi said, and she was surprised by the steel in her own voice. Trejo heard it too. “I’m hearing you say you can’t handle this. You want the fight with the underground over with? Easy to do. Surrender.”

““Your jokes aren’t funny,” he said.

““They aren’t when they’re not jokes.””

““The problem is it’s hard to reconcile when you’ve lost,” Naomi said. “Someone takes all the power, and you try to bring them into the fold again? That’s capitulation. I don’t think violence solves anything, not even this. Not even now. But maybe winning puts us in a place that we can be gracious.””

““It does . . . record?” Cara said. “That’s not the right word. It’s not like memory, exactly. It’s more like everything all at once? Like the way a film is all the pictures that tell the story, and they’re all there even when you only see one at a time? I’m not explaining this right.””

“Cara and Alexander died, and the drones made something out of the dead flesh. When you talk to that girl, she isn’t there. Something is, maybe. And it’s made from parts of a human, the way I could stitch together a model catapult from chicken bones. You’re anthropomorphizing them.”

““Is it a problem?”

““It’s inaccurate,” Cortázar said.”

“Cortázar sat on the floor, his legs folding under him, and then slumped to the side with a long, wet exhalation. The left half of his head was missing from the jaw to the crown. His heart was still trying to beat in the open theater of his ribs, but the man was gone.”

““And Major? I know you were a civilian before you were appointed. You didn’t come up like the rest of us, so I’m going to make this clear for you. If you say one more word about surrendering the empire? I will have you before a court-martial, and then I will have you shot. This is a war now. The rules have changed.””

““With them gone, the bad guys are going to have more guns for us,” Alex said. “We’re about to get real bumpy.”

““What the hell has it been up to now?” Ian asked.

““Walk in the park, kid,” Alex said.”

“She’d had enough conversations with him now to know he was telling a joke without his voice signaling that it was a joke. No one else in her social life did that, and she found it irrationally annoying. It made every exchange into a puzzle that had to be decoded to see if it was sincere or not. She pushed the irritation away. There were a lot of things people did that she’d never had to be patient about. It was time to start learning that skill.”

““Well, you know how it is.” Amos turned his dark eyes to her and nodded down at the snow where Ilich lay, still wheezing. “Hey there, Tiny. This guy a friend of yours?”

“Teresa started to say yes, and then no, and then she understood what he was asking. “No,” she said. “He’s not on my side.”

““All right,” Amos said, and fired the pistol twice. The muzzle flash was the brightest thing in the world.”

““If I am in distress, being held against my will. Threatened. Whatever. Is there a phrase I use to indicate that? Something innocuous I can slip into any conversation without my captors knowing it?”

““I . . . That is—”

““It’s a yes-or-no question, Admiral. This isn’t hard.” At this rate, the Whirlwind was going to nuke them to be rid of the girl.

““There is, miss,” Admiral Gujarat said.

““And have I said it?”

““You haven’t.”

““Then we can take it as given that I am not here under duress. That something is going on between the high consul and the leadership of the underground—something with which I have been entrusted and you haven’t. With that in mind? Go. Back. To. Your. Post.””

“But still, there were ways. There wouldn’t be a choke hold on the ring space the way there had been, but there could be a network of cheap, easily replaced relays that announced incoming and outgoing traffic. Ships could know, at least, what the chances were of going dutchman before they made the transit. There weren’t many people who’d choose to go through a ring gate if they knew they wouldn’t come out the other side. Give the people enough information, and they’d be able to make the right decisions on their own.”

“She realized again that Trejo was waiting for her to respond. She didn’t know what he wanted her to say and didn’t care much either.”

“Jesus Christ, Elvi thought. Had Trejo always been this sanctimonious and she just hadn’t noticed? Or was she just really irritable right now?”

“Trejo put down the hand terminal. His coffee sloshed over the lip of its cup, staining the white linen. “We are in a war—”

““Yes, you should fix that too.”

““Excuse me?”

““You should stop being in a war. Send the underground a fruit basket or something. Start peace talks. I don’t know. However that works. I said it before, and I meant it. If you want peace, lose gracefully. We have bigger problems.””