From New York Times bestselling and Hugo-award winning author of The Expanse comes the next volume in the critically-acclaimed Captive’s War trilogy.
★ “Masterful . . . . This is space opera at its best.” – Publishers Weekly (starred review) on The Mercy of Gods
The monstrous Carryx empire was built by subjugation and war. Thousands of species are bound to their Sovran’s command in an endless, blood-soaked test: be useful in the eternal conflict or be slaughtered.
Dafyd Alkhor, highest among their human captives, is feared and despised by the very people he champions. Ruthless in carving out his niche in the eternal war machine of the empire, he will reshape human nature itself as a tool for their alien masters’ use. But Dafyd’s loyalty is not what it seems.
The Swarm, an agent of the Carryx’s deathless enemy, has been smuggled into the Carryx world-palace along with the human slaves. It’s mission: discover a way to bring down the empire’s eternal reign. But the longer it lives among and within humanity, the more it forgets that it is a weapon.
As the human captives spread through the battlefronts of empire, the awesome power of the Carryx becomes clear. And with it, a desperate plan for their destruction.
But empires hide secrets, and even the deathless enemy may not be what it appears…
"The start of something truly epic." ― Fonda Lee on The Mercy of Gods
"Corey is always one of the most engaging voices in the genre." ― Adrian Tchaikovsky, author of Children of Time
For More from James S. A. Corey, check out:
The Captive's War The Mercy of Gods The Faith of Beasts
The Expanse Leviathan Wakes Caliban's War Abaddon's Gate Cibola Burn Nemesis Games Babylon's Ashes Persepolis Rising Tiamat's Wrath Leviathan Falls
Memory's Legion
The Expanse Short Fiction Drive The Butcher of Anderson Station Gods of Risk The Churn The Vital Abyss Strange Dogs Auberon The Sins of Our Fathers
Publisher:
Orbit
Print pages:
560
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From the archive entry of the regulator-librarian, first among servants of the Sovran:
… It is the Sovran’s will that those places in which the war against the deathless has opened new territory be investigated using tools and perspectives likely to yield new insight. In particular, the unexplored systems spinward of the fifth body…
From the archive entry of the monitor-librarian of the bodies of knowledge and memory:
… eighty thousand more. Locations where the war against the deathless opened previously unexplored territory will be identified and additional exploratory and information-gathering assets routed there. Deep-resonance information from the nova at…
From the archive entry of the endeavor-librarian of exploratory projects:
… eighth dactyl of the limb. Information-gathering assets will be identified and mobilized with priority given to equipment, animals, and combinations with potential to yield novel information from tactical and physical analyses. These will be delivered to…
From the archive entry of the supervisor-librarian of animal assets:
… with respect to their continued population levels. Animals with sensory and cognitive potential likely to yield novel information will be grouped: [Group 1: aqueous, high acidity, silicate/carbon] [Group 2: terrestrial, oxygen-tolerant, carbon] [Group 3: terrestrial, anaerobic, silicate/carbon] [Group 4:…
From the archive entry of the keeper-librarian of provisional moieties:
… have been underperforming and will be culled. Their assets will be reallocated to the Manacat of Paol, Red Sybillie of Soun, and Human of Anjiin moieties. Additionally, Manacat, Red Sybillie, and Human moieties are to identify individual and small-sample groups for field use and ensure sufficient supply of…
Anjiin had been home to four and a half billion people. The Carryx had taken a little under four thousand of them back to serve in the world-palace.
One in seven died in the crossing or from illnesses and accidents after arrival. Once humanity had proven its worth in the eyes of the empire, the groups—and sometimes even isolated individuals—scattered in the first days of their captivity were brought back together like a lost family finding itself in the wilderness, except for the almost five hundred people who were set apart and sent away on tasks that the Carryx alone understood.
The new space they now inhabited was like a vast single building dedicated to the human hive, simultaneously more authentic and deeply changed. The gaps in Carryx understanding of humans had narrowed. Bathrooms now had dispensers for the red cleansing gel instead of every shower beginning with it. The mysteries of hair cutting and shaving, trimming nails and dealing with menstruation were accommodated. The unspoken indignities of human life were a degree more dignified.
In exchange, the proportions of the passageways had become wider, the walls canted slightly in, the air had taken on a pungent smell like resin and salt. The odd scent was everywhere, permeated everything, and so became unremarkable. People only noticed it when they returned from travel out in the common areas of the world-palace or after spending time in the little garden at the top of the habitat where the breeze was cool and thin, like the air on a mountaintop. And the view was breathtaking.
To the east, two huge arcs rose up from the planet’s surface below, curving up beyond the atmosphere. Lights dotted their sides—decorative, purposeful, or just the gleam of a million windows. Below them, the dark forms of other ziggurats rose out of the clouds and stretched off to the distant horizon.
The garden itself was smaller than the quad outside Dafyd’s apartment on Anjiin had been. A single tree with deep purple-brown bark and thick, leathery leaves, a bed of wild mint, and a fountain of black metal and pale stone that rose to Dafyd’s waist if he was standing, its flowing water a constant mutter. It astounded him that something so modest could feel like luxury.
The little Sinen, looking like the cross of goat and cuttlefish, finished its announcement and left him pressing his thumbs against his eyelids. His headache didn’t diminish. He heard Jellit’s footsteps coming up the stairway and didn’t look up.
“Something wrong?” the other man asked.
“Another summons from my lord and master,” Dafyd said. “Ekur wants to talk about something.”
“More alterations in our duties and responsibilities?”
“I’ll know when I get there,” Dafyd said, and hauled himself up. “Anything I should know from the visualization lab?”
“Nothing that’s not in the report,” Jellit said. He seemed on the edge of saying more, but didn’t, and Dafyd went down the wide stairway into the body of the moiety without him. The Sinen clerk followed.
Campar was gone on some mysterious mission for the Carryx. So was Rickar. And Jessyn. But so far as Dafyd knew they were still alive, wherever they’d been sent. Nöl, Synnia, Else, and Irinna were all dead. Of the group Dafyd had known on Anjiin, the only ones around him now were Tonner, who hated him, and Jellit, who had gone from an almost-enemy to Dafyd’s accomplice in exposing the human rebellion against the Carryx. They were now joined by the blood on their hands.
To everyone who hadn’t known him before, Dafyd was the voice of the Carryx. The man to speak to when something was needed, and the conduit for demands from the empire. The high priest interceding between his people and their godlike masters.
He stopped at his room. Papers and notes were in piles all through the place with the lists of every name in the human population, who they had been before the Carryx invasion, and what they were doing now. What they wanted. What they needed. He took half a dozen pages with the notes he’d prepared.
The report he needed most was still missing. Of course it was.
“I have to stop by the labs,” Dafyd said to the Sinen overseer. “Tonner was supposed to give me an update. It’s not here.”
The little box he wore at his chest made a series of wet coughs, and the Sinen replied with a small trill and sigh. The voice that came from the box at its chest was impassive. “If you do, you do.”
It wasn’t permission, and so it was half a threat. The tension at his temples felt like he was wearing an invisible crown as he went back out to the common corridor and headed down.
The promotion of the human moiety had carried in a wave of equipment and material even as it left any of the familiar human designs behind. The tanks and refrigerators, incubators and protein assays, spectrometers and pseudo-lens microscopy in the new labs were the best designs of the Carryx empire, the genius and insights of a thousand other species. The machines reminded Dafyd of the contents of some exotic tide pool, taken out and laid in order by a curious child. Some of the objects were grotesque, some were beautiful, and a few defied comprehension.
Tonner’s new second was a tall, thin man named Brun with dark hair and an almost comically prominent larynx. In a previous life, he’d been the leader of one of the most successful chemical manufacturing cooperatives on Anjiin. Now he was standing with half a dozen of Tonner’s new team, considering what looked like the segmented back of a crayfish the size of a table. Brun’s eyes lit up when he saw Dafyd.
“It’s a static centrifuge,” the tall man said with a grin. “Can you beat that?”
Where’s Tonner? was in the front of Dafyd’s mind, but A static what? came out of his mouth.
“I know,” Brun said. “You tell the little half-mind thing what acceleration you want and for how long, and it generates the g-force without spinning. I don’t know how it even does that, but this thing can do specific gravity control like nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s a kicker.”
“Where’s Tonner?”
“The legacy labs,” Brun said. “He said he’d be back after midday, but you know how he gets.”
Dafyd turned toward the common areas, the Sinen at his heels. He walked a little faster.
When they’d first come, the cathedral had been a circle of wonders and terrors—a crossroads of alien bodies with the power to overwhelm. The deep tectonic strangeness had been enough to feel like annihilation. Now Dafyd walked around weird almost-crabs the size of dogs without thinking. The luminescent blue gnats so small they seemed like a living light meant that he shouldn’t breathe in as he passed through them to keep from sucking one into his throat. The Phylarchs of Astrdeim with their glowing eyes and flickering joints lumbered by, as familiar as buses and bicycles had once been. The Eddentic of Lof swirled in the high air, the Oumenti and Soun clicked to one another in the low. Each of them had a place in the Carryx world, some function they fulfilled for their masters. The fact that Dafyd had no idea what barely registered with him anymore. His mind building walls between things he needed to know and things he could safely ignore.
He threaded his way across the wide public square of their shared moieties and cut across to the wall with the lab annex they had taken from the Night Drinkers, the little hallway with its high slate bench and recognizable equipment. The glass cubes that had housed the berries and the not-turtles were empty. That project was over, and the next ones had begun.
The time since Anjiin had diminished Tonner Freis. It was more than physical. Before their subjugation, Tonner had been—at least in the moment—the most celebrated researcher on the planet. His prematurely gray hair had been a contrast with his youth and vigor then. Now there was a harshness to his face. It wasn’t age, but it mimicked it. He leaned against the old protein assay. The fingers of his nearly-healed broken arm poked out of their splint and rubbed together like they were trying to find something. When he saw Dafyd, he shook his head.
“The new lab machines are a mistake,” Tonner said instead of hello. “We need to get to work. Work. Not spend half a year figuring out the controls on a bunch of new equipment. Institutional knowledge is a valuable thing. You can’t just throw it all out because the cockroach kings decided to give you some pretty toys.”
The translator on the Sinen’s chest burbled Tonner’s words at it. Dafyd flinched, then patted the air in warning. This thing is listening. Calm down. “That wasn’t my decision.”
“I thought it was all your decision,” Tonner spat back at him. “Aren’t you the boss around here?”
“You know I’m not,” Dafyd said.
Tonner glanced over to the Sinen loitering in the space behind them and smirked. “Whatever you say.”
“I’ve been called in to the librarian. I need your report.”
“I don’t have it,” Tonner said, and then, seeing Dafyd’s expression, “My team is gone. I am training up a new one, and it’s not like you’ve given me a bunch of impressionable new research assistants. Brun ran his own union, Addira has two decades of her own research, Abfoss was due for retirement in a few years. Everyone thinks they know a better way to do everything. None of them will just do as they’re fucking told. I had a group. I had people.” Tonner’s voice cracked on the last word, and he took a few seconds to gather himself. “So yes. Please let the cockroach kings know that I am doing what I can to get up to speed, and sometimes writing down a note saying so is less important to me than doing the actual job.”
“Can you just tell me about where things stand? Just verbally.”
Tonner shrugged and the protein assay chimed the way that meant it was shifting to a polymerization phase. Tonner looked out past his shoulder. He looked exhausted.
“Making our own food supply is going to take about twice the hydroponic capacity we have right now. That’s tanks, lights, filtration, micronutrients, everything. It looks like we will be able to adapt the silicate microfarm from the berries to general use, so low-volume production’s mostly covered. Training more people to do the analysis for protein translation—which should be the most useful thing we do for them—is going to take me months.”
His shrug meant What the hell do you want from me?
“So. Double the hydroponics,” Dafyd said.
“Sure. Start there,” Tonner said. He almost turned away, then paused. “Have you heard from any of them?”
Them. Jessyn, Rickar, Campar. The only ones left.
“No,” Dafyd said. “Not yet.”
Ekur-Tkalal shifted its abdomen on four thin legs while Dafyd finished his report. Its thorax and head stayed steady, the two massive black-and-red fighting arms planted against the floor. Which was good. As long as those arms stayed on the floor, it wasn’t ready to kill him. Its four eyes moved independently as if each was distracted by a separate thought, and the mantis-like feeding arms in its chest unfolded and manipulated small shapes of floating light whose projectors Dafyd couldn’t identify. Every now and then, the Carryx chirped or burbled to itself, but the half-mind at its throat didn’t say anything. If there were words in its vocalizations, they weren’t meant for him. The Sinen who’d brought the summons stayed in the room with them, which was new. And, Dafyd thought, a little ominous.
While the Carryx finished whatever work occupied it, Dafyd waited. The room Dafyd thought of as the keeper-librarian’s office was small, and the sounds of other Carryx singing to each other carried from the passageways behind him. Ekur shifted the objects of light for another few moments, then began to speak.
Its living voice was like birdsong, only deep, slow, and threatening. The voice that came from its half-mind was human and featureless. If it seemed to have a dismissive quality to it, that might only have been Dafyd’s prejudices.
“Your efforts in making one animal species nourishing to other species are of interest to the empire. Your work with imaging and gravimetric lensing is also of interest. You will put your efforts into these two things. No other human activities are of interest. Your other efforts are wasteful and will end. Reorganize your moiety around those things which are useful.”
“I understand,” Dafyd said. “We will.”
“Also, I have no use for animal scratchings. You will submit your reports in proper archival form.”
Dafyd lowered himself to his knees and spread his arms wider, palms against the floor. “I don’t know how to do that.”
“This one will instruct you,” Ekur-Tkalal said, gesturing at the Sinen with one of its feeding hands. “Your moiety has been found of interest by the Sovran. You will prepare for greater use in the empire. Anticipate assignment on thousands of worlds.”
“Ah. There are only about three thousand of us here,” Dafyd said.
The Carryx shifted its weight. Three of its eyes came to rest on Dafyd. “Yes. Your population is insufficient to meet future need.”
“Will you bring more from Anjiin? Are there other people coming—”
“You are to breed locally for the empire’s use. A moiety that cannot sustain its own population is not useful and will be culled.”
The air had gone thin. Dafyd tried to catch his breath. “I don’t know… I mean…”
“If you have requirements to support a generation of young, express them. If they are not overly arduous, they will be provided.”
“Our children… Our young take a long time growing up,” Dafyd said. “They grow slowly. They have to be educated.”
“I am aware,” Ekur-Tkalal said. “The will of the Sovran compasses eons. Begin now. Have them ready when we have use for them.”
And if they don’t want to? he thought. But he knew the answer. It was the same as always: Find a way or get them all killed.
“I understand,” he said. And the hell of it was, he did.
The swarm walks the length of the physics lab, its hands clasped behind its back. Around it, the others work to perfect the lensing techniques that gave Anjiin warning of their doom’s arrival. It had not helped them, but if the enemy—the deathless enemy that the Carryx didn’t know had smuggled the swarm into its lair—discovers the same techniques, the Carryx will already have a guard against them. The brilliance of the empire will again have been made brighter by the animals that it controls.
In the dark prison of the swarm’s consciousness, the dead man fights.
Jellit is the only male it has taken, the only one who had already dedicated himself to violence, and the only one who carried the weight of that trauma on his soul. The swarm can’t say if any of these differences explain why this body is more dedicated to asserting itself. To fighting the possession. To denying the death that has already come for him.
You all right? one of the other physicists in the lab asks. A woman named Kadey.
The swarm nods. Some things on my mind, it says.
This is the day it has resolved to reveal itself to Dafyd.
Oh for fuck’s sake, the dead man sneers in the chaos of the swarm’s mind. Again? You’ve got more days-I’m-going-to-tell-him than Else had last cigarettes.
An echo of amusement comes, but not from the swarm. It might belong to Ameer Kindred or Else Yannin. Or the two might be seeping into each other now. Ameer, the first human that the swarm took when it bloomed into being on the surface of Anjiin, is now so attenuated that her thoughts are hard to distinguish from the swarm’s own. And with her flesh abandoned, Else Yannin has begun to lose some clarity and definition as well, bleeding at the edges like a watercolor left where the damp could reach it. The body reinforces the mind in ways the swarm is only starting to catalog. If it had known before, it might not have shifted to Jellit. But so many things are firsts for the swarm. So many things only learned in retrospect.
Yes, you still would have killed me, the dead man says. God, how self-pitying can you be? Poor you, the people you murder aren’t emotionally supportive enough.
It is a lot to ask of us, the echo that is still Ameer Kindred agrees.
The swarm stops at one of the sensor connections. The device looks like a wire suspended in a glass tube three times Jellit’s height and about as thick as his thumb. The experiment is supposed to detect interference in very-long-wave electromagnetic resonances. Done correctly, it will create a computational lens. Done poorly, it will lose coherence and turn to noise. Around them, invisible to everyone else, a magnetic pulse rises from the planet below, vibrating with information that the swarm records, though it hasn’t yet learned to decode. The swarm is a weapon of war. A spy sent to collect everything and transmit what it learns back to worlds it has never known. It is designed to survive for as long as it can, but it is not designed to survive.
I can finish this run if you want, Kadey says, then gives a little frown. Having some time away from home would be a kindness.
Trouble? the swarm asks because Jellit would have.
Roommate problems.
The swarm’s laugh is short and harsh, and it doesn’t seem to come from any of the three it has taken, or maybe from all of them.
Thanks, it says. I’m actually going to take you up on that.
Pay me back later, Kadey says, and the swarm walks away.
The rooms it has now are the first private space it has had since Anjiin. Ameer Kindred had lived in a little rental loft by the Scholar’s Common with a yellow door and a cat that wasn’t hers but still came in through her window at night. The swarm remembers hunching in that loft, its senses straining at the sky while Ameer screamed in its still-unfolding consciousness, confused and horrified. The swarm had been almost a pure mechanism then, a thing of technique and programming so sophisticated it approached instinct.
Now it has the room Jellit had been assigned, but the assignment came after Jellit’s death, so in a real sense the little table with its two broad metal benches belongs to the swarm. The little kitchen where it prepares its rations is not shared with others. The little bed with polymer foam for a mattress is its alone.
But, depending on how the coming conversation plays out, perhaps that could change.
It remembers the dry-mouthed fear Ameer felt asking a girl to come back to her room for sex the first time, the almost clinical way Else accepted an erotic invitation when she had first come to the medrey. It remembers sneaking a girl into Jellit’s room when Jessyn was asleep next door, and then coupling quietly to keep from waking his sister up. And it remembers its own times with Dafyd, and the comfort Else’s body took in him. Is it so strange to think that it may return to that time, rekindle what it once had? Once Dafyd knows that the woman he loves didn’t die, but only changed…
I was dead before you kissed him using my mouth, Else says. Everything that happened between you was a lie.
There is a way that this is true, but there is also a way in which it isn’t. There were aspects of itself that the swarm could not reveal to Dafyd, but it knows from the memories of three people that this is always true. No romantic coupling ever included absolute honesty, if such a thing were even possible.
Rationalizing, Jellit says. You are undercover behind enemy lines, so every awful thing you do is justified. Poor, burdened hero that you are.
But the swarm had no capacity for love when it first gained awareness. Everything it knows of love, of sex, of the complications of the heart, it took from Else Yannin. From her body, from her mind. It was attracted to men in the ways that she was. It was complicated the way that she was. When it made love, it lifted its arms because she liked lifting hers, pressed Dafyd down because it satisfied her appetites, took him into her flesh with a joy and selfishness that didn’t originate in the swarm, though it resided there now.
Could we please not do this? Else says, and the swarm feels her shame and humiliation at being so exposed before it and Ameer and Jellit. The swarm rises on the balls of its feet the way Jellit once did when he was anxious or excited. The movement is natural. Unconsidered. The swarm is tired, and the sweat of the day makes the tunic that the Carryx machines produce for their human subjects cling to its back.
Today is the day it will reveal its presence to Dafyd, will tell him everything that it has withheld, but not like this. It will clean itself physically, before the emotional and metaphorical cleansing comes. It tells itself it isn’t stalling.
After its shower, the swarm stands naked before the strip of mirror, considering the body it inhabits. The cells and structures are, in most senses, Jellit. The scar on its rib from an accident Jellit had when he was a boy. The one on its leg from an act of violence that happened after they were all prisoners of the Carryx. The DNA in its nuclei has the code, for the most part, that Jellit was born with. The superstructure of the swarm directs and permeates Jellit, allows the body to become what it needs to be: a listening device, a transmitter, a chemical sampling machine. None of these aspects of its existence seem as important now.
It takes down a fresh set of clothes, cracks the wax coating around the cloth, and pulls on trousers and a tunic the match of every one it has had before, every one that it expects it will ever wear again. In the mirror, it looks… handsome? Pretty? It smiles the way Jellit smiled. And then the way Else smiled, only with Jellit’s lips. The expressions are different.
All right, it says aloud. It’s time.
The other parts of it are silent for once.
The swarm senses Dafyd’s distress as soon as it enters his room. It’s in the smell of his skin and the angle he stands at, the lines of his face and the barely audible sigh he makes when his mind is elsewhere.
Rough day with the boss? it asks in Jellit’s voice.
Dafyd’s smile is brief but sincere. Yeah, I have new problems. I don’t know what to do with them.
You want to talk about it?
Dafyd shrugs and sits at the table. His little kitchen area has black laminate counters and chairs that are a little too wide, a little too tall. They make the people sitting in them seem like children. This was all easier when there was… I don’t know. Hope? There was that moment when it seemed like there was hope.
The swarm’s heart leaps. He means it. He means the moment it revealed itself and the great war to him. The moment an ally against the Carryx appeared. It had to have been like a miracle for him, and it will be again. The swarm takes in a deep breath.
He thinks you died when Else did, Jellit says. He thought you were riding along with her, like an add-on. Not that you’d eaten her. He didn’t know you ate people.
The swarm pushes the thought away. It isn’t what it told him.
It’s what you let him think, Else says. You knew. Even back then, you knew to hide how it actually works. If he understood what you’d really done to me…
It goes to Dafyd’s cabinets. There is very little food there, and what there is has the thin, desperate feel of emergency rations. The swarm’s cupboard is as bare. But there are cups for water and a kettle to boil it in and a small box with an amber gel and a scoop already taken out of it. The gel is an imitation of Tonner Freis’s favorite tea. The swarm starts the water boiling and holds up the box like it is displaying it. We’re going to have a whole menu based on the food Tonner likes.
I could tell him to make things he doesn’t want, but I don’t think he’d do it, Dafyd says. There’s a little laughter at the corner of his eyes, and the swarm feels a rush of pleasure at making him feel pleasure. The kettle ticks as it starts to heat.
I haven’t heard from her, Dafyd says. I haven’t heard from any of them. I think I will. I’m technically in charge of them, but I don’t know what that means, exactly.
He thinks you’re here because of Jessyn, Jellit says. He doesn’t think you like him, he thinks you need him to keep tabs on my sister. He’s not your friend. We weren’t buddies back on Anjiin. We didn’t have romantic feelings for each other. You are hauling all of this around by yourself. This thing you want to have happen, won’t.
The swarm spoons bits of gel into the cups where they will melt when the water comes. Its eyes feel uncomfortable. A little sting of tears. Dafyd pretends not to notice, thinking that the emotion is about a brother missing a sister. So many levels of misunderstanding.
It’s all right, the swarm says to Dafyd. The words mean half a dozen things.
It will finish making the tea, hand the cup to Dafyd, and then it will tell him. The war against the Carryx is still being fought. The spy that was here before in the flesh of his lover is still here. It is still gathering intelligence that might turn the tide of violence against the empire. They may still find the way that they can burn the Carryx worlds to ash.
The water will boil. The gel will melt. It will tell him.
And the rest? Jellit says. Are you going to tell him about smuggling out the data you’ve gathered? Tell him how you broke off a piece of yourself and hid it in someone who was shipping out? Tell him that as soon as it’s in range of your buddies on the other side, it’s going to pop like a hand grenade? Go ahead, tell him that your mission is about to kill another one of his friends. See how much he loves you for it. We’ll watch.
The water boils.
This is not the day it will reveal itself.
Jessyn kept the device beside her bunk: glass panes each a little larger than her two splayed hands together and held about a thumb’s width apart. It sat upright on one edge, looking a lot like the transparent cases children kept insects in so they could watch them tunnel and nest. Except that the gap between the panes wasn’t filled with insects and sand, it was filled with the white slurry that she’d harvested from thirty-five of the complex symbiotes they called berries, which weren’t berries at all. The slurry was a mostly inert silicate base that supported billions of microscopic organisms, a complete ecosystem as complicated as a coral reef in a gentle sea. It was balanced so that Jessyn could pour a half cup of glucose solution in the top of the device once a day, clean a handful of the rat-turd-looking precipitate out once a week, and decant a daily dose of clear, bitter, astringent soup that would keep her mind from fishtailing out from under her.
If the slurry started discoloring red or yellow, her little ecosystem was getting out of balance, and she’d add a little acid to the sugar until it cleared up. Black or green meant a contaminating organism had gotten in, and she had to sterilize the whole thing. Before she’d left the Carryx palace world, Tonner had made her enough dry starter to reset the device three times. She’d already used one dose, but she was pretty sure she’d figured out where that contaminant had come from and fixed the problem.
So that was her margin of error. Screw up the mix more than twice or let the device break once, and she was fucked. Keep it safe and working, and she’d be fine until something else killed her. She didn’t remember when she’d stopped considering old age a likely cause of death.
The ship bounced and shuddered again and then seemed to swing under her. The motion jostled a wave of little bubbles up through the slurry. Jessyn took a deep breath and let it out through her teeth. She’d gotten used to the low, pulsing hum of the Carryx ship during the time they’d spent
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