At that point, she’d seen only the Laconia everyone was presented in the newsfeeds. Impossibly powerful, militarily unbeatable, but not interested in ethnic cleansing or genocide. Maybe even with humanity’s best interests at heart. Taking their money to do science hadn’t given her many qualms. Especially since there also hadn’t been many options. When the king says, Come work for me, there aren’t many paths to No.
The qualms came later when she was inducted into their military and learned the source of Laconia’s overwhelming technological advantage.
When she met the catalysts.
“We should get back,” Fayez said as he finished clearing away the last of their dishes from dinner. “The clock is ticking.”
“I will. In a minute,” she replied, stepping back into the tiny private bathroom they shared. One of the privileges of her rank. In the mirror over her sink, an old woman stared back at her. The woman’s eyes were haunted by what she was about to do.
“You ready in there?” Fayez shouted.
“You go ahead. I’ll catch up.”
“Jesus, Els, you’re not going to go see it again, are you?”
It. The catalyst.
“It isn’t your fault,” Fayez said. “You didn’t design this study.”
“I agreed to oversee it.”
“Sweetheart. Darling. Light of my life. Whatever we call Laconia in public, when you take its clothes off, it’s a dictatorship,” Fayez said. “We never had a choice.”
“I know.”
“So why do you do this to yourself?” Fayez said.
She didn’t answer, because she couldn’t have explained it even if she wanted to.
“I’ll catch up.”
The catalyst holding area was in the heart of the Falcon, surrounded on all sides by thick layers of depleted uranium shielding and the galaxy’s most complicated Faraday cage. It had become clear very quickly that the protomolecule communicated at faster than light speed. Some application of quantum entanglement was the leading theory, but whatever the mechanism, the protomolecule defied locality, much like the ring gate system it had created. It had taken Cortázar and his team years to figure out how to keep a sample of the protomolecule from talking to itself, but they’d had decades and they’d eventually come up with a combination of materials and fields that tricked a node of protomolecule into locking itself off from the rest.
A node. It. The catalyst.
Two of Sagale’s Marines guarded the door to its chamber. They wore heavy blue power armor that whined and clicked when they moved. Each was equipped with a flamethrower. Just in case.
“We’re going to use the catalyst soon. I want to check on it,” Elvi said to the space between the two guards. For all that she had a military title, she still often couldn’t figure out who was the ranking officer in any given room. She lacked the indoctrination of boot camp, and the lifetime of practice the Laconians took for granted.
“Of course, Major,” the one on the left said. She looked too young to be the senior officer, but that was so often true of the Laconians. Most of them looked too young for their titles. “Will you need an escort?”
“No,” Elvi said. No, I always do this alone.
The young Marine did something on the wrist of her armor, and the door behind her slid open. “Let us know when you’re ready to come out.”
The catalyst’s room was a cube, four meters on a side. It had no bed, no sink, no toilet. Just hard metal and mesh drains. Once a day, the room was flushed with solvent and the liquid was sucked away to be incinerated. The Laconians were obsessive about contamination protocols where the protomolecule was concerned.
The node, it, the catalyst, had once been a woman in her late fifties. What her name had been and why she’d been selected for protomolecule infection was not in the official record Elvi had access to. But Elvi hadn’t been in their military for long before she found out about the Pen. The place where convicted criminals were sent to be deliberately infected, so that the empire would have a limitless supply of protomolecule to work with.
The catalyst was special, though. Through some work of Cortázar’s or through some accident of the woman’s genetics, she was only a carrier. She showed early signs of infection—changes to her skin and skeletal structure—but in the months since she’d been brought on board the Falcon, those changes hadn’t progressed at all. And she never entered what everyone called the “vomit zombie” phase, puking up material to try to spread the infection.
Elvi knew that she was perfectly safe in the same room with the catalyst, but she shuddered every time she entered anyway.
The infected woman looked at her with blank eyes and moved her lips in a soundless whisper. She smelled mostly of the solvent bath she received every day, but under it was something else. A morgue stink of decaying flesh.
It was normal to sacrifice animals. Rats, pigeons, pigs. Dogs. Chimpanzees. Biology had always suffered the cognitive push-pull of proving that humans were just another kind of animal while at the same time claiming to be morally different in kind. It was okay to kill a chimp in the name of science. It wasn’t okay to kill a person.
Except, apparently, when it was.
Maybe the catalyst had agreed to this. Maybe it was this or some other, more gruesome death. Whatever that would be.
“I’m sorry,” Elvi said to her, as she did every time she came into the catalyst chamber. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t know that they did this. I would never have agreed to it.”
The woman’s head lolled on her neck, nodding forward as if in mock agreement.
“I won’t forget that they did this to you. If I can ever make this right, I will.”
The woman pushed at the floor with her hands as though she wanted to stand up, but her arms lacked the strength, and her hands flopped bonelessly. It was just reflexes. That’s what she told herself. Instinct. The woman’s brain was gone, or at least changed into something that wasn’t by any sane definition a brain. There wasn’t anyone really alive in that skin. Not anymore.
But there had been once.
Elvi wiped her eyes. The universe was always stranger than you expected. Sometimes it was full of wonders. Sometimes full of horrors.
“I won’t forget.”
Chapter Two: Naomi
Naomi missed the Rocinante, but then she missed a lot of things these days.
Her old ship and home was still parked on Freehold. Before they’d left, she and Alex had found a cavern system on the edge of Freehold’s southernmost continent with a mouth big enough to edge the ship into. They’d put it down in a dry tunnel and spent a week running seals and storage tarps that would keep the local flora and fauna out. Whenever they got back to the Roci, it would be there, ready and waiting. If they never did, it would be there for centuries. Still waiting.
Sometimes, on the edge of sleep, she’d take herself through it. She still knew every centimeter from the top of the cockpit to the curve of the drive cone. She could think her way through it on the float or under thrust. She’d heard about ancient scholars back on Earth making palaces of memory that way. Imagine Alex in the cockpit, holding an hourglass for time. Then down to the flight deck, where Amos and Clarissa were tossing a golgo ball with the numeral 2 painted on it back and forth for initial and final velocities divided by two. Then down to her cabin, and Jim. Jim by himself. Jim who meant displacement. A simple kinematic equation, three things that were all the same, easy to remember because they all stung her heart.