“You have,” he replied. He’d gotten older too. His once-black hair was almost totally gray now, and laugh lines spread out from the corners of his eyes. She didn’t mind. She liked that he smiled more than he frowned. He was smiling now. “Things have been thrown.”
“I never—” she started, wondering if he was actually afraid she’d throw a plate at him out of frustration or just teasing her to lighten the mood. Even after decades together, she sometimes couldn’t tell what went on in his head.
“Bermuda, just after Ricki left home for university, we took our first real vacation in years and you—”
“There was a roach. A roach crawled on my plate!”
“It nearly took my head off when you hurled it.”
“Well,” she said, “I was startled.”
She laughed. Fayez was grinning like he’d won a prize. So, of course, making her laugh had been the goal all along. She put the plate down.
“Look, I know saluting and following orders isn’t exactly what we had in mind when we got our degrees,” Fayez said. “But this is the new reality as long as Laconia’s in control. So—”
It was her own fault, really, being swept up into the Science Directorate. Laconia by and large left people alone. Planets elected their own governors and representatives to the Association of Worlds. They could establish their own laws, as long as they didn’t directly contravene imperial law. And unlike most dictatorships in history, Laconia seemed uninterested in restricting higher education. The universities of the galaxy functioned pretty much like they had before the takeover. Sometimes even a little better.
But Elvi had made the mistake of becoming humanity’s leading expert on the protomolecule, the vanished civilization that had created it, and the doom that had wiped it out. As a much younger woman, she’d been sent to Ilus as part of the first scientific mission to explore the biology of an alien world. Until then, her specialization in exobiology had been theoretical, mostly focusing on bathypelagic and deep-ice life that had seemed like good analogs for bacteria one might find under the surface of Europa.
They’d never found any bacteria on Europa, but the gate network opened, and suddenly exobiology was a real thing with more than thirteen hundred new biomes to explore. She’d gone to Ilus expecting to study lizard analogs, and instead run f
ace-first into the artifacts of a galaxy-wide war older than her species. She’d become obsessed with understanding. Of course she had. A house the size of a galaxy, filled with rooms full of fascinating things, and the owners dead for millennia. She’d devoted the rest of her professional life to figuring them out. So when Winston Duarte invited her to lead a team to explore exactly that mystery, and gave her a bottomless grant to do it, she hadn’t been able to say no.
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.