“Only if she can understand the answer.”
“And if they knew. Which evidence suggests they didn’t. I mean that elaborate gamma-ray burst trap in Tecoma system was just them wiring a shotgun to a doorknob. Even if we know everything about the space jellyfish, is that going to be enough?”
They fell silent. Elvi knew the solid feeling at the center of her gut. It was always there these days. The only thing that changed was how aware of it she was. She anticipated what he would say next—What are we doing here?—and her own reply—The best we can. But he surprised her.
“It’s going to be okay.”
She laughed, not because she believed it but because it was obviously untrue. And because he wanted to comfort her, and she wanted to be comforted. He took her arm, drawing her across the open desk, and pulled her beside him. His arms enfolded her, and she let herself curl against him until they were floating together, his head at her shoulder, his thighs under hers, like twins in the same amniotic sac. It wasn’t an image she thought other people would find heartwarming, but she did. And when she was alone with Fayez, other people weren’t important. His breath smelled like smoky tea.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured. “Baby, I’m so sorry.”
“For what?”
“All of it.”
“It’s not your fault.”
She pressed her cheek to his head, felt the scratch of his hair against her cheek. Tears were sheeting across her eyes, making the office swim like she was underwater. “I know. But I don’t know how to fix it, and I’m supposed to.”
She felt the subtle expansion and collapse of his sigh. “We are hailing an awful lot of Marys, aren’t we?”
“We’re making progress. We already know so much more.”
“You’re right. I’m frustrated. I didn’t mean to piss on the project,” Fayez said. “If the answer’s anywhere, it’s here.”
She nodded, and hoped that was true, and that the growing sense she felt that there was something important—critical—in her notes that she’d missed was right. And that whatever it was, she could find it in time.
Later, when Fayez had gone to get some sleep, she went through a packet of reports from Ochida. The high-energy physics workgroup had their most recent data ready for review. The latest complex modeling outputs mapped possible connections between the attack on the Typhoon, the uptick in virtual particles in Tecoma system, and the initial loss of consciousness after the Tempest had destroyed Pallas Station. A surveying company that usually did mining operations around Jupiter was trying to find the weird magic bullet that had been frame-locked to the Tempest when it was destroyed. Her own computational biology group was setting up a distributed study that would put subjects in NIRS imaging around the clock in every populated system in hopes of catching good data the next time the enemy flicked consciousness off. And all the reports were being dumped through massive virtual pattern-matching arrays on Earth, Mars, Laconia, and Bara Gaon in hopes that machine intelligence might catch something the humans had overlooked.
It was the broadest, best-funded research effort in the history of the human race. A million people searching through a haystack the size of 1,300 planets and hoping there was a needle in there someplace.
She sometimes wondered if this had been Duarte’s plan all along. Push and push until solving the ring entity problem was forced into first position for all humanity. He’d always held that it was a problem they’d have to solve sooner or later, and humans did tend to do their best work when survival was on the line. But whether it had been the high consul’s intention or not, humanity had one problem it was trying to solve now. And James fucking Holden had somehow managed to put her in charge of it.
She didn’t know whether looking over the vast effort calmed her or keyed her up. Maybe both.
When she reached the end of the packet, she closed down her screen. There were a couple dozen things that she, as head of the Laconian Science Directorate, needed to authorize or comment on, and she would. But after she’d had some food and maybe a nap. If she could sleep.
She pulled herself through the ship, floating down the corridors. Cara and Xan were in the galley with Harshaan Lee and Quinn de Bodard, and Elvi watched them as she decanted herself a bulb of lentil soup.
“Major,” Harshaan Lee said, nodding to her as she floated over.
“Doctor,” Elvi said, and took a mouthful of soup. The Falcon made good food. The lentils tasted almost fresh—like nutrition and mud and comfort—even though they were probably made from textured fungal proteins.