And by work, she was pretty sure she meant vivisection.
She finished the last bite of bagel and washed it down with the dregs of her tea. It was still hours before daylight. If she waited, her courage would fail her. She cleaned up her plate and teacup, stretched until her leg ached, and went to the attendant.
“Can I help you with something, ma’am?”
“I need to talk to Admiral Trejo.”
Trejo was dressed when she reached his office. His bright-green eyes were puffy with lack of sleep, and his shirt had the limp look of something worn for too many days in a row. His desk held a pile of exhausted single-use displays, the detritus of a flood of highly sensitive reports from inside the system and what he had managed to glean from all the systems beyond. His smile was warm, well practiced, and probably insincere.
Elvi had been laboring hard under the strain of juggling a mad emperor, a murderous scientist, and civilization-ending monsters that had killed her crew and eaten her flesh. It was uncomfortable to think that Trejo was under more pressure than she was.
“Doctor,” Trejo said. “You’re up early.”
“So are you.”
He gestured to a chair. “I’m up late. Coordination with the other systems has been … challenging. I delegate what I can, but the high consul didn’t sleep, and being both him and myself has been … strenuous.”
“When was the last time you slept?”
“A full night? Honestly, I’d have to do some math.”
Elvi sat, folding her hands together on her knees. The anxiety hissed and spun in her chest like a firework. Sleep seemed like something in a language she couldn’t speak. Neither of them knew what the term meant anymore.
“Is there something I can do for you, Dr. Okoye?” Trejo prompted. Elvi realized she’d faded out for a moment.
“I don’t have hard proof,” she said, “but I believe Dr. Cortázar intends to harm the high consul’s daughter. Maybe even kill her.”
Trejo sighed and looked down. Elvi steeled herself. She was aware how thin her argument was. Even if Holden had come right out and made the accusation, it wouldn’t have carried much weight. Her trust in him would do more to undermine her own status than to dignify his report. All she had was the bone-deep conviction that it was true. She was prepared to plant her flag there and defend her position until Trejo took her seriously.
She expected him to say What evidence do you have? or What makes you think that? or Why would he do that? Instead, the admiral stretched his neck to the side until it popped. “Has there been any change in the high consul’s condition?”
“Not that I’ve seen,” she said. “But—”
“What options do we have for bringing him back to himself?”
“I don’t know. I honestly don’t know if that’s even possible.”
“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.”
“Can we regenerate his central nervous system the way we would after a head injury?”
Elvi felt confused. She’d imagined several versions of this conversation, but none of them had involved ignoring her fears and changing the subject. She wasn’t sure what to do.
“Well, um … it’s not exactly like that. The cells in his brain are all still intact. Cortázar changed the way they function. Regrowing tissue means finding areas that are compromised and encouraging new cells to build there.”
“If we intentionally damaged his brain and pumped in normal cell lines, would he grow back?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Burn out his hippocampus, regenerate it. Then his occipital lobe or whatever. Go through him part by part, kill what’s there and replace it with fresh tissue that works like normal human flesh, and build him back up that way. Would that work?”
“I … I don’t know,” Elvi said. “That’s the Ship of Theseus question. Whether, when you replace all the individual parts of something, you still have the same thing. That’s philosophy. But even then, regrowing central nervous systems is tricky work. We’d want to talk to medical doctors. Physicians. I’m a biologist.”
“Cortázar did it.”
“Cortázar is deeply, deeply ethically flawed,” Elvi said. “I’m pretty sure he was using Duarte as an animal model to work the kinks out for his own treatment in the future, and I think he’s planning to sacrifice Teresa too. That’s what I’m here telling you.”
“What about the things that attacked the ring space? Can we say definitively whether they do or don’t pose an ongoing threat? If I park another ship where Medina used to be, is it going to get eaten? Or are we safe as long as we don’t blow up any more neutron stars?”
Elvi didn’t mean to laugh. It just happened. Trejo’s professional demeanor slipped for a moment, and she saw the rage and despair underneath it.
“How would I possibly know that?” she said. Her voice was louder than she’d meant it to be, but she didn’t rein herself in. “I don’t know what they are or how they ate the ships they did. Have we had reports? Do we have data? I can’t do anything but speculate without that. And what does any of that have to do with Teresa Duarte?”
Trejo went to his desk, called up a fresh window, and shifted it to her hand terminal. She looked at the images there. She recognized the Heart of the Tempest. It was the most iconic Laconian ship there was. The images had the hyperreal quality of optical telescopy that had been stabilized and enhanced. A few glittering sparks appeared around it.
“Was there a battle?” she asked, and the image went so white that even coming from the small screen it hurt her eyes.
“It’s already known through the Sol system. It will be known through the whole empire. The Tempest is dead. A separatist terror cell stole secret Laconian technology and used it against us. And now I have one Magnetar-class ship, thirteen-hundred-odd ring gates to keep control over, and the one place where it could actually do that is haunted by …” He gestured at her leg. Whatever the fuck did that.
“I see,” she said.
“We haven’t been able to keep signal repeaters up. Every time I send them out, some rock thrower knocks them back down. The terrorists are sending messages to each other through the gates using the technological equivalent of tin cans and chewing gum, and I can’t stop them. If I can put a fleet of ships into the ring space, I control everything because it’s a choke point. It’s the choke point. If I can’t do that safely, I can’t control the empire.”
“Except if—” she began, but Trejo couldn’t be stopped. His words were like an avalanche. Once they’d started, they kept going.
“Everyone—everyone—on every ship and station and planet is going to be waiting to see what the high consul does. And right now he’s two hallways over, waving his hands like a fucking undergraduate on his first hallucinogenic trip. Governments exist on confidence. Not on liberty. Not on righteousness. Not on force. They exist because people believe that they do. Because they don’t ask questions. And Laconia is looking down the throat of a lot of questions we can’t answer.”