“I… don’t…” she stammered.
“I don’t know either,” he said. “Back at Mars, you’d have been released to civilian life. But where we’re going, there is no civilian life. No human life at all. Do I turn you out to fend for yourself in the local food chain? Do I spend the time and resources it would take to send you back, and then back where? The forces that have taken control on Mars would see you as a traitor just the same as they would me. They’d throw you in the brig for life unless you cooperated with them. And if you were going to cooperate with them, then it wouldn’t make sense for me to send you back in the first place. Would it?”
“No, sir.” He could see understanding beginning to dawn in her eyes. Only beginning to, though. Humanity was so flawed. Not just her, but everyone. Half the population was below average intelligence. Half below average dedication. Average adherence to duty. The cruel law of statistics. It was astounding that as a race they’d managed as much as they had.
“Now that we are taking initiative,” he said, “it is more important than ever that we maintain strict discipline. We’re like the first long-haul missions back before anyone had an Epstein drive. Months, maybe years, as a community of warriors and explorers. There’s not room for outsiders when there is no outside. I know you’re upset that —”
“No, sir, I’m not —”
“I know you’re upset that I’m coming down on you for something as minor as a bracelet. It seems trivial, and it is. But if I wait until it’s not trivial, we come to matters of life and death very, very quickly. I don’t have the latitude to take a cavalier position.”
“I understand, sir.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that.”
He held out his hand, palm up. Babbage wiped away a tear with the back of her hand, and then dug in her pocket for a moment. When she put the bracelet in his hand, she paused, holding it for just a second longer. Whatever it meant to her, giving it over was a sacrifice. He closed his hand on the thin silver chain with its tiny sparrow-shaped pendant. He tried to make his smile gentle as he spoke.
“Dismissed.”
When she had closed the door behind her, he turned back to his system. A new message had come in from Cortázar. His flesh crawled a little. Duarte’s pet scientist had been sending more and more messages since the Belters had pulled the trigger. The man’s enthusiasm unnerved Sauveterre. The man’s personality was firmly in the uncanny valley, and his pleasure in the project they were undertaking at the new Laconia Station had a feeling of anticipation that was almost sexual.
Duty, however, was duty. He put Babbage’s jewelry in the recycler and opened the message. Cortázar was too close to the camera or else had chosen for reasons of his own to be slightly out of focus. His wide chin and thin, black hair should have been unremarkable. Sauveterre rubbed his hands like he was trying half-consciously to wash them.
“Captain Sauveterre,” the strange little man said. “I’m pleased to report that the sample arrived intact. Thank you very much for taking custody of it after its liberation. I am, however, distressed to hear that the fleet is running behind schedule.”
“It’s a few days over the course of months,” Sauveterre said to himself and the screen. “We’ll make it up.”
“I know you are aware that both supplies and time are in short supply until the artifact has been brought to heel. In order to help make up for this shortfall, the research group has put together some plans and specifications for some of the modifications the Barkeith will need in order to dock with the artifact. Several of them can be started by your engineering teams en route. And of course, if you have any questions, I am at your disposal. Cortázar out.”
The screen flipped to a series of technical drawings. There was more than enough about those to disturb him as well. They called all the alien technology by the name protomolecule, but of course, that far-traveled set of life-hijacking microparticles was only one object in a much grander toolbox. And if Cortázar had interpreted the top-clearance data from the MCRN probes correctly, what they had found would be much easier for humanity to tame and make use of.
Still, the changes Cortázar wanted for the Barkeith were unpleasantly organic. Less like they were fitting a new model of airlock on the ship, and more like they were carving it into some kind of colossal prosthesis.
It’s the beginning of something very new and very powerful, and if good people don’t step in to accept the power, bad ones will. It was what Admiral Duarte had told him the night he’d brought Sauveterre into the fold. It had been true then, and it was true now. He switched on the camera, adjusted his hair, and began recording.
“Message received. I will take the plans to my engineers at once. If they have any concerns, we will be in touch.” Short, to the point, minimalist without being rude. Efficient. He hoped it would come across as efficient. He rewatched it to be sure and considered rerecording it and changing concerns to questions, but decided he was overanalyzing it. As he sent it off, his system chimed.
“Captain, we have clearance from Medina.”
“Do we now, Mister Kogoma? Kind of them. What was the resolution of their tracking number situation?”
“The freighter is moving in to dock with the station, sir.”
Well, there was another ship for the skinnies to commandeer. If the Toreador had known which way the wind was blowing, they’d have hightailed it back to whatever hardscrabble planet they’d come from and tried to make do without whatever they had lost anyway. As it was, the Free Navy would just keep gobbling up the ships that came through, starving out the colonies. Weakening them. By the time the Belters figured out they were fighting a rearguard action against history, Duarte would be in position.
War, Sauveterre thought as he pulled himself to the command deck, had long since ceased to be about controlling territory. The job of a military was to disrupt its enemies. Generations of low-scale war in the Belt hadn’t been an attempt to hold Vesta Station or Ceres or any of the dozens of little floating supply hubs in the vast emptiness. It had always and only been about keeping the OPA or any other Belt force from coalescing into an organized force. Until the rules changed, and that organized force became useful. The Free Navy would have made itself decades before if men like Duarte had let it. Now that the Belt finally had it, they would find just how useless it was.
As long as it kept Earth and what was left of Mars busy for a few years. After that… The reward of audacity was the chance to steer history.
The command deck was in trim. Everyone in their couches, the displays freshly cleaned, the controls polished. The Barkeith would arrive at Laconia Station as smart and sharp as she had left Mars. And they wouldn’t be wearing bracelets. He drew himself down to his command station and strapped himself in.
“Mister Taylor, sound the acceleration alert. Mister Kogoma, inform the fleet and Medina Station that we are proceeding.”
“Sir,” the tactical officer said, “permission to open weapon ports.”
“Are we expecting action, Mister Kuhn?”
“Not expecting, sir. An abundance of caution.”
Kuhn didn’t trust the skinnies either. That was fair. They were a bunch of thugs and cowboys who thought that because they had guns, they had power. Sauveterre thought it was early for the Free Navy to start double-crossing Duarte, but they were stupid and impulsive. It didn’t do to assume an amateur force would make the same decisions as a professional. “Permission granted. And warm up the PDCs while you’re at it. Mister Kogoma, please advise the fleet to do likewise.”
“Yes, sir,” Kogoma said.
The Klaxon sounded and Sauveterre settled into his couch, the sensation of weight returning over the course of seconds. The transit to the Laconia ring was short. The space between the rings was almost claustrophobic compared with the vastness of real, open vacuum. And dark. Starless. The physics wonks said that there wasn’t any space on the other side of the rings. That whatever bubble they all existed in ended not in a barrier, but in some more
profound manner that he couldn’t picture. He didn’t need to.
The Laconia gate drew closer, a handful of stars burning solid and clear on the other side of it, and growing as they came near. The exhaust plumes of the fleet vanguard glowed brighter as they passed through. There would be new constellations there. A different angle on the galaxy, like a whole new sky.
“Approaching the ring, sir,” Keller said from the navigation controls. “Passing through in three. Two…”
Keller fell apart. No, that wasn’t right. Keller was where she had been, sitting as she had been sitting. But she was a cloud now. All of them were clouds. Sauveterre held up his hands. He could see them so perfectly: the ridges of his fingertips, the spaces between the molecules, the swirl and flow of his blood beneath them. He could see the molecules in the air – nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide all bouncing madly against each other, obscuring some more profound space between them. A vacuum that penetrated them all.
I’m having a stroke, he thought. And then, No. Something else is wrong.
“Kill the drive!” he shouted. “Turn about!” And the waves of his words passed through the visible but invisible air in an expanding sphere, bouncing against the walls, shuddering where they intersected with the cries of fear and a blaring Klaxon. It was beautiful. The cloud that was Mister Keller moved her hands and miraculously didn’t slip through the vast emptiness of her control deck.
He saw the sound coming in the rush of molecules before it reached him and he heard the words. “What’s going on? What’s happening?”
He couldn’t see the image on the screens to know if the stars were there. All he could sense were atoms and photons of the thing itself, not the pattern they made. Someone was screaming. Then someone else.
He turned and saw something move. Something else, not another cloud like himself, like the others, like matter. Something solid but obscured by the emptiness of material like a shape in the fog. Many shapes, neither light nor dark, but some other thing, some third side of that coin, passing through the spaces between the spaces. Rushing toward them. Toward him.
Sauveterre did not notice his death.
Acknowledgments
While the creation of any book is less a solitary act than it seems, the past couple of years have seen a huge increase in the people involved with The Expanse in all its incarnations, including this one. This book would not exist without the hard work and dedication of Danny and Heather Baror, Will Hinton, Tim Holman, Anne Clarke, Ellen Wright, Alex Lencicki, and the whole brilliant crew at Orbit. Special thanks are also due to DongWon Song and Carrie Vaughn for their services as beta readers, Ben Jones and Jordin Kare for their help figuring out what happens when a thruster misfires, and also to the gang from Sakeriver: Tom, Sake Mike, Non-Sake Mike, Porter, Scott, Raja, Jeff, Mark, Dan, Joe, and Erik Slaine, who got the ball rolling.
The support team for The Expanse has also grown to include Sharon Hall and Ben Roberts, Bill McGoldrick, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, and Naren Shankar among many, many others at Alcon Television, the Sean Daniel Company, and Syfy. Especially Alan for the Boom Coffee and Kenneth for essentially everything else.
And, as always, none of this would have happened without the support and company of Jayné, Kat, and Scarlet.
James S. A. Corey, Expanse 05 - Nemesis Games
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