Free The Vital Abyss: An Expanse Novella (The Expanse) by James S.A. Corey

Cortázar,” she said. Unlike the others, her accent was as soft as a broadcast feed’s talking head. “I’m sorry we haven’t spoken before. My name is Michio Pa.”
    “Pa,” I said, assuming from her military bearing that she was not a first-name sort. Her slight smile suggested I’d guessed correctly. The gray man said something in Belter polyglot too fast for me to follow and Pa nodded.
    “Am I correct that you’ve had an opportunity to review the same data as Dr. Brown?”
    I folded my hands in my lap, squeezing my knuckles until they hurt. “He let me look at it, yes.”
    “Were you able to draw any conclusions?”
    “I was,” I said.
    Pa poured out glasses of tea for the both of us and then pulled up a virtual display. I recognized the data structures as I would have a lover’s face. “What do you make of it?”
    I felt the trembling as if it rose up from the station itself, and not my own body. I drew in a shuddering breath. “Based on the profusion rate data and the internal structures, I believe the latent information within the protomolecule is expressing something similar in function to an egg.”
    Her smile pitied me. “Walk me through that.”
    I did, recounting for her all that I’d already said to Brown, back when I’d meant to make him out the fool. I wore my invisible jester’s cap well; I capered and grew excited. By the end, I managed to half-convince myself that everything I said was possible. That the gate—I never called it that—might also be an egg. The most effective lies, after all, convince the liar.
    When I finished, she nodded. “Thank you.”
    “You can’t give them Brown,” I said. “He did liaison duty. The real work belonged to us. Send me instead.”
    “We’re considering how to go forward.” She rose, and I moved to her, taking her hand.
    “If you put me in the room again, he’ll kill me.”
    She paused. “Why do you say that?”
    “He’s from the research group.”
    “So are you.”
    It took me long seconds to put words to something so obvious. “It’s what I would do.”
    *  *  *
    After the squalor and close quarters of Phoebe, the spacious, well-lit corridors of Thoth Station felt like distilled luxury. Wide, white halls that curved with a near-organic grace. Team workspaces and individual carrels both. I slept in a private room no larger than a medieval monk’s cell, but I shared it with no one. I ate cultured steak as tender and rich as the best that Earth had to offer and drank wine indistinguishable from the real thing. The local climate, free from the temperature inertia carried by Phoebe’s eight quadrillion tons of ice, remained balmy and pleasant.
    Thoth boasted a research staff larger and better qualified than the universities on Earth or Luna, and the equal of even the best on Mars. The nanoinformatics team grew larger than before, even counting the loss of our Martian naval colleagues. Instead of only Trinh and Le and Quintana, I could now talk through my ideas about the protomolecule with a professional musician turned information engineer named Bouthers and an ancient-looking woman named Althea Ecco, who I didn’t realize for almost a week authored half of my textbooks from Tel Aviv. And Lodge, and Kenzi, and Yacobsen, and Al-Farmi, and Brown. We sat up nights in the common rooms, mixing now and then with the other groups: biochemistry, signaling theory, morphology, physical engineering, chemical engineering, logical engineering, and on and on until it seemed like Thoth represented every specialty that cutting-edge research could invent. Like the coffeehouses of Muslim Spain, we created civilization among ourselves. Or at least it felt that way. It might only have been the romance of the times.
    Everyone in research had undergone the treatment, which admittedly posed some problems. Singh in computational biology held forth on her theory of the protomolecule as a Guzman-style quantum computer one night over dinner, and when Kibushi