“That’s where I would have started, yes,” Elvi said.
“The loss of those platforms is the loss of the most powerful ships humanity has ever made. It’s the loss of antimatter production. It’s the loss of the regenerative tanks. Without them, we lose the ability to project our power out beyond the system. Whether we’re fighting against the terrorists or the things beyond the ring gates, we need that ability.”
“So whatever the high consul has become gets shelved,” she said. “Figuring out the nature of the enemy and the weird system-wide attacks gets shelved. The secret of immortality? Shelved.”
“I can hear your frustration, and I share it,” Trejo said, “but the fact remains—”
“No, I’m good with that. But making more weapons isn’t the first priority,” she said. She took out her handheld, pulled up her notes, and passed it over. “That right there? That is my first priority.”
Trejo scowled at the display like she’d handed him some particularly unpleasant insect. “Adro system?”
“The big green diamond that looks like it might have a record of the entire protomolecule civilization. Rise and fall. I would probably get the best results if the Falcon were repaired and crewed with a team specifically chosen for this project. I have some names drawn up. I’ll send them to you.”
“Dr. Okoye—”
“I understand I’m not in a position to force you to do anything. But I’m comfortable in the belief that all of the issues we’re trying to deal with are connected, and that”—she pointed at the schematic of the massive diamond—“looks more like the Rosetta stone than anything else. So that’s where I’m putting my efforts. In my professional judgment, it makes more sense than building bigger explosions or chasing after the fountain of youth.”
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.”
She took a last bite of the pastry and washed it down with the dregs of the coffee. It tasted better with the bitter following the sweet. Trejo was stone-faced. She stood.
“Do what you need to do,” she said. “I’m going to get ready for work, and then I’ll be in the lab at the university. If you want to throw me in prison for insubordination or whatever the military term is, that’s where you’ll find me. If you want to fix this, let me know when the Falcon can be ready, and I’ll brief you on everything I find.”
He didn’t respond. She nodded curtly and walked away. She’d hoped she would feel better, and she did. But only a little.
The wide sky of Laconia had cleared. The snow clouds were gone, and the air was crisp and bright with just a hint of the spearmint smell of freshly turned Laconian earth. A flock—or swarm—of something flew high in the sky, vanishing against the sun and reappearing on its collective way to the south. Some organism following a temperature incline or a nutrient gradient or some other more exotic drive she didn’t know about. That no one knew about. Not yet.
They would, though, someday. If she could fix all this.
Fayez was awake when she got back to the rooms. He sat on the edge of their bed in the soft cotton pajamas that the Laconian Empire provided them gratis. He was massaging his new foot the way the physician had told him to. He looked up at her, worried. He hadn’t slept since the night before either. They’d gotten back to their rooms cold and weary, and also in another kind of shock. She had been a pawn in Holden’s chess game. And Holden had gotten her to the last rank and promoted her to a queen.
“Well? How’s Trejo?” Fayez asked, mordant and hopeful. “Are we exiled?”
“No such luck,” Elvi said. “Maybe later.”
“We could still leave.” He was only partly joking. She imagined what it would be like. Getting the Falcon back. Or any ship, really. If they got off Laconia, they could go anywhere. Trejo wouldn’t have the resources to chase them. Not now. They could go back to Sol or Bara Gaon or one of the new, struggling colonies. They could leave all this bullshit behind.
Except that something out there was looking for a way to snuff out their minds. And there wasn’t a better place to fight against that than right here. Her prison wasn’t Laconia. Her jailer wasn’t Trejo. The thing that had taken all her choices away was that this mystery so clearly needed to be solved, and she was so clearly the best one to do it.
She kissed her husband softly, and on the lips. When she pulled back, the humor was gone from his eyes. They’d been together for so long. They’d been so many different people together. She felt the change coming again. She was entering a new part of her life now. It meant packing away all her stories about how she was only here from fear of the authorities. The authorities were broken. She was here because she chose to be, and that changed everything.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you were hoping for a gentlemanly retirement someplace that would give us both tenure.”
“Or just one of us,” he said. “I’m not greedy.”
“We don’t get to have that. And I’m sorry.”
Fayez sighed, crossed his legs. “If we don’t, we don’t. I still have you?”
“Always.”
“Good enough,” he said, and patted the mattress at his side.
“I have to go.”
“Mixed signals,” he said.
“I’ll be back after work.”
“You say that now, but I know you. You’ll find something interesting and stay up until midnight chasing it, and by the time you come home, it’ll be time to leave again.”
“You’re probably right.”
“It’s why everyone needs you,” Fayez said. “It’s why I need you too. When you get back, I’ll be here.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“I’m sorry we couldn’t run away together.”
“Maybe in our next lives.”
The universe is always stranger than you think.
It didn’t matter how broad her imagination was, how cynical, how joyous and open, how well researched or wild minded. The universe was always stranger. Every dream, every imagining, however lavish and improbable, inevitably fell short of the truth.
Elvi had been born in a system with a single star and a handful of planets. She’d studied exobiology when it was still theoretical. When she’d been a newly minted PhD, her greatest dream was that she might get a research fellowship on Mars, and maybe—the pinnacle of all her wildest hopes—find some hard evidence that life had evolved there independently. It would have been the most astounding, important thing she could imagine. She’d be in the scientific histories as the woman who’d discovered living structures that came from someplace besides the Earth.
Looking back, the dream seemed impossibly small.
At the labs, she stopped to have a long talk with Dr. Ochida. She wanted a rundown of all the research being done—where it stood, who was heading up the projects, what his opinions were of the experimental designs. Even after Cortázar had died, she hadn’t done that. Hadn’t acted as though the labs were hers to run. Now she did, and Ochida didn’t object. That probably made it true.
At any rate, he answered everything she asked, and Trejo hadn’t sent any guards to drag her away. So she was effectively in control of the most advanced research facility in the history of humankind. And if there was one thing that her decades in academic science had drilled into her consciousness, it was that power meant policy.
“We’re going to need to make some changes,” she said. “We’re shutting down the Pen.”
Ochida actually stopped walking. She could have said that all the science teams were now required to walk on their hands, and the man would have been less astounded.
“But the protomolecule . . . The supply . . .”
“We have enough,” she said. “Our reason for collecting more died with the construction platforms.”
“But . . . the prisoners. What do we do with them?”
“We’re not executioners,” Elvi said. “We never should have been. When the guards come, tell them we don’t accept the transfer. If Trejo wants to line people up against the wall and shoot them, I’m not in a position to stop that. But I can say we won’t support it. And we won’t base our research on it. From here on in, informed consent or work with yeast.”
“This is . . . This will . . .”
“Speed isn’t the only measure of progress, Doctor,” Elvi said. But she could tell from his eyes he didn’t know what she meant. “Just get it done. All right?”