The Mercy of Gods, page 1
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2024 by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck
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Cover illustration by Daniel Dociu
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Corey, James S. A., author.
Title: The mercy of gods / James S.A. Corey.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Orbit, 2024. | Series: The captive’s war ; book 1
Identifiers: LCCN 2023052525 | ISBN 9780316525572 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780316525558 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Scientists—Fiction. | Alien abduction—Fiction. | Extraterrestrial beings—Fiction. | LCGFT: Science fiction. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3603.O73429 M47 2024 | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20240129
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023052525
ISBNs: 9780316525572 (hardcover), 9780316580649 (BarnesAndNoble.com signed edition), 9780316525558 (ebook)
E3-20240607-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PART ONE: BEFORE One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
PART TWO: CATASTROPHE Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
PART THREE: PUZZLES Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
PART FOUR: TURNABOUT Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
PART FIVE: FISSURE Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
PART SIX: SMALL BATTLES IN THE GREAT WAR Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Acknowledgments
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PART ONE
BEFORE
You ask how many ages had the Carryx been fighting the long war? That is a meaningless question. The Carryx ruled the stars for epochs. We conquered the Ejia and Kurkst and outdreamt the Eyeless Ones. We burned the Logothetes until their worlds were windswept glass. You wish to know of our first encounter with the enemy, but it seems more likely to me that there were many first encounters spread across the face of distance and time in ways that simultaneity cannot map. The ending, though. I saw the beginning of that catastrophe. It was the abasement of an insignificant world that called itself Anjiin.
You can’t imagine how powerless and weak it seemed. We brought fire, death, and chains to Anjiin. We took from it what we deemed useful to us and culled those who resisted. And in that is our regret. If we had left it alone, nothing that came after would have been as it was. If we had burned it to ash and moved on as we had done to so many other worlds, I would not now be telling you the chronicle of our failure.
We did not see the adversary for what he was, and we brought him into our home.
—From the final statement of Ekur-Tkalal, keeper-librarian of the human moiety of the Carryx
One
Later, at the end of things, Dafyd would be amazed at how many of the critical choices in his life seemed small at the time. How many overwhelming problems had, with the distance of time, proved trivial. Even when he sensed the gravity of a situation, he often attributed it to the wrong things. He dreaded going to the end-of-year celebration at the Scholar’s Common that last time. But not, as it turned out, for any of the reasons that actually mattered.
“You biologists are always looking for the starting point, asking the origin question, sure. But if you want to see origins,” the tall, lanky man at Dafyd’s side said, pointing a skewer of grilled pork and apple at his chest. Then, for a moment, the man drunkenly lost his place. “If you want to see origins, you have to look away from your microscopes. You have to look up.”
“That’s true,” Dafyd agreed. He had no idea what the man was talking about, but it felt like he was being reprimanded.
“Deep sensor arrays. We can make a telescope with a lens as wide as the planet. Effectively as wide as the planet. Wider, even. Not that I do that anymore. Near-field. That’s where I work now.”
Dafyd made a polite sound. The tall man pulled a cube of pork off the skewer, and for a moment it looked like he’d drop it down into the courtyard. Dafyd imagined it landing in someone’s drink in the Common below.
After a moment, the tall man regained control of his food and popped it into his mouth. His voice box bobbed as he swallowed.
“I’m studying a fascinating anomalous zone just at the edge of the heliosphere that’s barely a light-second wide. Do you have any idea how small that is for conventional telescopy?”
“I don’t,” Dafyd said. “Isn’t a light-second actually kind of big?”
The tall man deflated. “Compared with the heliosphere, it’s really, really small.” He ate the rest of the food, chewing disconsolately, and put the skewer down on the handrail. He wiped his hand with a napkin before he extended it. “Llaren Morse. Near-field astronomic visualization at Dyan Academy. Good to meet you.”
Taking it meant clutching the man’s greasy fingers in his own. But more than that, it meant committing to the conversation. Pretending to see someone and making his excuses meant finding another way to pass his time. It seemed like a small choice. It seemed trivial.
“Dafyd,” he said, accepting the handshake. When Llaren Morse kept nodding, he added, “Dafyd Alkhor.”
Llaren Morse’s expression shifted. A small bunching between his eyebrows, his smile uncertain. “I feel like I should know that name. What projects have you run?”
“None. You’re probably thinking of my aunt. She’s in the funding colloquy.”
Llaren Morse’s expression went professional and formal so quickly, Dafyd almost heard the click. “Oh. Yes, that’s probably it.”
“We’re not actually involved in any of the same projects,” Dafyd said, half a beat too quickly. “I’m just putting in my time as a research assistant. Doing what I’m told. Keeping my head down.”
Llaren Morse nodded and made a soft, noncommittal grunt, then stood there, caught between wanting to get out of the conversation and also to keep whatever advantage the nephew of a woman who controlled the funding purse strings might give him. Dafyd hoped that the next question wouldn’t be which project he was working for.
“Where are you in from, then?” Llaren Morse asked.
“Right here. Irvian,” Dafyd said. “I actually walked from my apartments. I’m not really even here for the—” He gestured at the crowd below them and in the galleries and halls.
“No?”
“There’s a local girl I’m hoping to run into.”
“And she’ll be here?”
“I’m hoping so,” Dafyd said. “Her boyfriend will.” He smiled like it was a joke. Llaren Morse froze and then laughed. It was a trick Dafyd had, disarming the truth by telling it slant. “What about you? You have someone back at home?”
“Fiancée,” the tall man said.
“Fiancée?” Dafyd echoed, keeping his voice playful and curious. They were almost past the part where Dafyd would need to say anything more about himself.
“Three years,” Llaren Morse said. “We’re looking to make it formal once I get a long-term placement.”
“The position at Dyan Academy is just a two-year placement. There’s no promise it’ll fund after that. I’m hoping for at least a five-year before we start putting real roots down.”
Dafyd sank his hands in his jacket pockets and leaned against the railing. “Sounds like stability’s really important for you.”
“Yeah, sure. I don’t want to throw myself into a placement and then have it assigned out to someone else, you know? We put a lot of effort into things, and then as soon as you start getting results, some bigger fish comes in and swallows you.”
And they were off. Dafyd spent the next half hour echoing back everything Llaren Morse said, either with exact words or near synonyms, or else pulling out what Dafyd thought the man meant and offering it back. The subject moved from the academic intrigue of Dyan Academy to Llaren Morse’s parents and how they’d encouraged him into research, to their divorce and how it had affected him and his sisters.
The other man never noticed that Dafyd wasn’t offering back any information about himself.
Dafyd listened because he was good at listening. He had a lot of practice. It kept the spotlight off him, people broadly seemed more hungry to be heard than they knew, and usually by the end of it, they found themselves liking him. Which was convenient, even on those occasions when he didn’t find himself liking them back.
As Morse finished telling him about how his elder sister had avoided romantic entanglements with partners she actually liked, there was a little commotion in the courtyard below. Applause and laughter, and then there, in the center of the disturbance, Tonner Freis.
A year ago, Tonner had been one of the more promising research leads. Young, brilliant, demanding, with a strong intuition for the patterns that living systems fell into and growing institutional support. When Dafyd’s aunt had casually nudged Dafyd toward Tonner Freis by mentioning that he had potential, she’d meant that ten years down the line when he’d paid his dues and worked his way to the top, Freis would be the kind of man who could help the junior researchers from his team start their careers. A person Dafyd could attach himself to.
She hadn’t known that Tonner’s proteome reconciliation project would be the top of the medrey council report, or that it would be singled out by the research colloquy, high parliament review, and the Bastian Group. It was the first single-term project ever to top all three lists in the same year. Tonner Freis—with his tight smile and his prematurely gray hair that rose like smoke from an overheated brain—was, for the moment, the most celebrated mind in the world.
From where Dafyd stood, the distance and the angle made it impossible to see Tonner’s face clearly. Or the woman in the emerald-green dress at his side. Else Annalise Yannin, who had given up her own research team to join Tonner’s project. Who had one dimple in her left cheek when she smiled and two on her right. Who tapped out complex rhythms with her feet when she was thinking, like she occupied her body by dancing in place while her mind wandered.
Else Yannin, the research group’s second leader and acknowledged lover of Tonner Freis. Else, who Dafyd had come hoping to see even though he knew it was a mistake.
“Enjoy it now,” Llaren Morse said, staring down at Tonner and his applause. The small hairs at the back of Dafyd’s neck rose. Morse hadn’t meant that for him. The comment had been for Tonner, and there had been a sneer in it.
“Enjoy it now?” But he saw in the tall man’s expression that the trick wouldn’t work again. Llaren Morse’s eyes were guarded again, more than they had been when they’d started talking.
“I should let you go. I’ve kept you here all night,” the tall man said. “It was good meeting you, Alkhor.”
“Same,” Dafyd said, and watched him drift into the galleries and rooms. The abandoned skewer was still on the guardrail. The sky had darkened to starlight. A woman just slightly older than Dafyd ghosted past, cleaning the skewer away and disappearing into the crowd.
Dafyd tried to talk himself out of his little feeling of paranoia.
He was tired because it was the end of the year and everyone on the team had been working extra hours to finish the datasets. He was out of place at a gathering of intellectual grandees and political leaders. He was carrying the emotional weight of an inappropriate infatuation with an unavailable woman. He was embarrassed by the not-entirely-unfounded impression he’d given Llaren Morse that he was only there because someone in his family had influence over money.
Any one was a good argument for treating his emotions with a little skepticism tonight. Taken all together, they were a compelling case.
And on the other side of the balance, the shadow of contempt in Morse’s voice: Enjoy it now.
Dafyd muttered a little obscenity, scowled, and headed toward the ramp to the higher levels and private salons of the Common where the administrators and politicians held court.
The Common was grown from forest coral and rose five levels above the open sward to the east and the plaza to the west. Curvilinear by nature, nothing in it was square. Subtle lines of support and tension—foundation into bracing into wall into window into finial—gave the whole building a sense of motion and life like some climbing and twisting fusion of ivy and bone.
The interior had sweeping corridors that channeled the breeze, courtyards that opened to the sky, private rooms that could be adapted for small meetings or living quarters, wide chambers used for presentations or dances or banquets. The air smelled of cedar and akkeh trees. Harp swallows nested in the highest reaches and chimed their songs at the people below.
For most of the year, the Common was a building of all uses for the Irvian Research Medrey, and it served all the branches of scholarship that the citywide institution embodied. Apart from one humiliating failure on an assessment in his first year, Dafyd had fond memories of the Common and the times he’d spent there. The end-of-year celebration was different. It was a nested series of lies. A minefield scattered with gold nuggets, opportunity and disaster invisibly mingled.
First, it was presented as a chance for the most exalted scholars and researchers of Anjiin’s great medrey and research conservatories to come together to socialize casually. In practice, “casual” included intricate and opaque rules of behavior and a rigidly enforced though ill-defined hierarchy of status. And one of many ironclad rules of etiquette was that people were to pretend there were no rules of etiquette. Who spoke to whom, who could make a joke and who was required to laugh, who could flirt and who must remain unreachably distant, all were unspoken and any mistake was noted by the community.
Second, it was a time to avoid politics and openly jockeying for the funding that came with the beginning of a new term. And so every conversation and comment was instead soaked in implication and nuance about which studies had ranked, which threads of the intellectual tapestry would be supported into the next year and which would be cut, who would lead the research teams and who would yoke their efforts to some more brilliant mind.
And finally, the celebration was open to the whole community. In theory, even the greenest scholar-prentice was welcome. In practice, Dafyd was not only one of the youngest people there, but also the only scholar-associate attending as a guest. The others of his rank on display that night were scraping up extra allowance by serving drinks and tapas to their betters.
Some people wore jackets with formal collars and vests in the colors of their home medrey and research conservatories. Others, the undyed summer linens that the newly appointed high magistrate had made fashionable. Dafyd was in his formal: a long charcoal jacket over an embroidered shirt and slim-fitting pants. A good outfit, but carefully not too good.
Security personnel lurked in the higher-status areas, but Dafyd walked with the lazy confidence of someone accustomed to access and deference. It would have been trivial to query the local system for the location of Dorinda Alkhor, but his aunt might see the request and know he was looking for her. If she had warning… Well, better that she didn’t.
The crowd around him grew almost imperceptibly older as the mix of humanity shifted from scholar-researchers to scholar-coordinators, from support faculty to lead administrators, from recorders and popular writers to politicians and military liaisons. The formal jackets became just slightly better tailored, the embroidered shirts more brightly colored. All the plumage of status on display. He moved up the concentration of power like a microbe heading toward sugar, his hands in his pockets and his smile polite and blank. If he’d been nervous it would have shown, so he chose to be preoccupied instead. He went slowly, admiring art and icons in the swooping niches of forest coral, taking drinks from the servers and abandoning them to the servers that followed, being sure he knew what the next room was before he stepped into it.
