Leviathan Falls

Chapter Seven: Jim

Why am I only hearing about this now?” Teresa asked.

Jim couldn’t tell if the tension was anger, fear, or something else, but it had settled around the girl’s shoulders like a shawl. Her eyes were focused someplace just over Jim’s right shoulder, fixed and glaring in a way that he knew from his time on Laconia was her way of listening intently.

It was strange to think that of all of them, Jim had spent the most time with Teresa. They’d lived in the State Building for years, her as the child of the high consul, and him as his prisoner. Or maybe both as his prisoner, just in different ways.

“That was me,” he said. “I didn’t want to float the possibility if it didn’t come through.”

Her gaze flicked to him with a question.

“I didn’t want to disappoint you,” he said.

“But it came through. It’s here. A possibility.”

“It’s a boarding school in New Egypt system. Sohag Presbyterian Academy—”

“I’m not interested in a religious education,” she said.

“It’s not really specifically religious. I mean, there are religious classes and services, but they aren’t mandatory.”

Teresa took a moment, processing that like she’d taken a bite of food and was deciding whether to spit it out.

“A cousin,” she said.

“Elizabeth Finley. She was your mother’s cousin, and apparently doesn’t think much of your father. It’s kind of perfect. She knows who you are, and can take steps to keep you safe, and she’s not interested in bowing before Laconia for personal reasons, so we don’t have to worry about her deciding to hand you over for a bounty.”

“And you’ve vetted her?”

“The underground did what it could. She seems to check out. There’s not a big presence in New Egypt, Laconian or underground. That’s another part of the appeal.”

Teresa’s gaze floated back over his shoulder as she thought.

Like all the cabins in the Roci, Teresa’s had been designed for Martian military back when that had still meant something. Jim was used to the spartan design for himself or the others. Putting an adolescent girl in the same setting made it seem more like a prison. At fifteen, Jim had been a sophomore at North Frenchtown High. The issues he’d struggled with were how to sleep an extra twenty minutes in the mornings, how to cover over his profound disinterest in Mr. Laurent’s chemistry lectures, and whether Deliverance Benavidez would go out with him. Back then, all of Montana had seemed too small. Teresa only had a few square meters.

“What about Muskrat?”

“Finley says it won’t be a problem. There are other students who have pets too. Mostly they’re service animals, but it won’t stand out enough to cause trouble.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I like it here. Amos is teaching me things. And there are fewer variables here. I wouldn’t know the people there. I don’t think I’d trust them.”

“I hear you,” Jim said. “But this is a warship. And we’re at war. And while you did pull us out of the fire, I’m not comfortable using you as a shield.”

“I’m a good shield.”

“Yeah, but I’m done with that play.”

“Why?” she asked. “I know you don’t want to, but it worked. And it’ll keep working, at least sometimes. Why don’t you want something that works to keep you safe?” The sincerity in her voice surprised him.

“Shields take the hit,” Jim said. “Shields get shot. That’s what they’re there for. And someday, someone is going to think that they can disable the Roci by putting a round through our drive cone. Or that it’s worth the risk to drop a few rail-gun rounds through us. There’s a calculus here, and yes, you make them less likely to shoot us down. But I don’t want to be the guy you died for. I’m not okay with it.”

She tilted her head like she was hearing a new sound. “You care about this.”

“Yeah. Kind of do.”

If he’d expected an outpouring of emotion from her—gratitude or admiration or just respect for the morality of his position—he’d picked the wrong girl. She considered him like he was an unexpected kind of butterfly. It wasn’t quite contempt, but it wasn’t not-contempt either. He saw something occur to her and waited until she was ready to say it.

“If I went, and I didn’t like it there, could I come back?”

“Probably not,” he said. And then, a moment later, “No.”

The sorrow in her expression was brief, but it was deep. He understood a little better the loss he was asking her to embrace.

“I need to think about this,” she said. “When do you need my answer?”

When Naomi had come to him with the news, she’d asked him to tell Teresa. Not ask permission, not negotiate with. The verb had been tell. And yet, here he was. Jim scratched his neck.

“It’s weeks until the term starts. I’d like to get you there early enough to have you situated, but if we make it a relatively hard burn…”

“I understand,” she said. “I won’t take too long.”

He pulled himself out of the room, skimming down the corridor. He heard the door close behind him. The ship was quiet. Naomi was waiting for him on the flight deck. He was going to have to tell her that a fifteen-year-old girl had maneuvered him into giving her the choice of going to boarding school or… staying on the ship, he guessed. Doing something that wasn’t Naomi’s plan. It was barely his responsibility, and he still felt like he’d screwed it up.

He passed Alex’s cabin and heard the familiar voice drifting through the door. But it will make it harder for you to come visit, and I know with Rohi pregnant, you’d want to see your grandson. Alex had been smiling a lot since the message came through, but he knew there was something else there too. Jim wanted to be happy for him, and he thought he was faking it pretty well. He’d slapped Alex on the back and made grandpa jokes that made his old friend grin.

The truth was, Jim was astounded by Kit’s optimism. And by astounded, he really meant horrified. When Alex talked about his grandson, working out whether he’d been born yet, how big he was likely to be, speculating on the names that Kit and his wife might choose, all Jim could see was one more body on the pile when the end came. Another baby who’d stop breathing when the deep enemy solved its puzzle. Another death.

Maybe that was unfair. There had been any number of end-times before this: black plague, nuclear war, food web collapse, Eros moving. Every generation had its apocalypse. If they made humans stop falling in love and having babies, celebrating and dreaming and living out the time they had, they’d have stopped a long time before.

It was just that this time, it was different. This time, they weren’t going to make it. The only other one who knew, who understood, was Amos. And so Amos was the only one he could talk to.

He made his way down toward the reactor and the drive. The smell of silicone lubricant sweetened the air, and Muskrat’s soft bark drew him toward the engineering deck. The dog was floating in the air, her tail a circular whirl that left her head shifting in a circle a few centimeters across. Her lips were pulled back in a wide canine smile.

“Still no sausage,” Jim said, and the dog barked softly.

“She doesn’t actually care about that,” Amos said. “She just likes having you around.”

Jim steadied the dog with one hand and petted her with the other. “You know, I would have said dog on spaceship was a very bad plan, but I do kind of like having her here. I mean, more when we’re under thrust.”

Amos rose from a workstation, a small welding torch in one hand and dark goggles to protect his eyes pushed up onto his forehead. A hydraulic valve was clamped at the station with a line of scorch marks along the ceramic where the metal sealant was still cooling. “She does get embarrassed when I have to take her to the vacuum fire hydrant.”

“The what?”

“It’s the idiom for where dogs piss,” Amos said. “I don’t make this up. I just follow the network groups.”

“Because there’s a lot of floating puppies,” Jim said to Muskrat. “You’re not the only one.”

“They cope with atrophy better than us too,” Amos said as he stripped off the goggles and fit them into his tool case. “Something about having more legs on the ground, I think.”

“Probably. I will miss her when she’s gone,” Jim said, then nodded at the valve. “Is there a problem with the water feed?”

“Nope. And there isn’t going to be. Mineralization was messing with the seal, and you wait until that’s bad enough for a little erosion, you might as well print up a new one, y’know?”

“I at least have it on good authority. That’s close enough for me.”

Amos snapped the welding torch into its place and pulled a polishing cloth out of his pocket. “We need to get the fuck out of the slow zone. Hanging out here like this is making my scalp crawl.”

“Yeah. As soon as Naomi gets through her data, decides for sure where we’re going,” Jim said. “I’m worried about the kid.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

“It’s easy for me to forget how much she’s lost, you know? Her entire experience was curated to the millimeter before she came with us. A few months here—just enough to get comfortable and find her feet—and now another total change. It’s a lot. She’s fifteen. Can you imagine facing all that at fifteen?”

Amos looked over at him like he’d said something funny. “You stressed over Tiny? She’s going to be fine.”

“Is she? I mean… What do we even know about this school we’re taking her to?”

“We know it gets shot at less than we do.”

“Besides that.”

Amos put the cloth over his thumb, took a firm grip on the valve, and started rubbing away the scorch marks as he talked. “Tiny’s working out who she is. Shit, what she is. It’s what she was doing on Laconia. It’s what she’s doing here. When she goes to that school, it’s not like the job changes. The question is, does she have more to learn from a boarding school at the ass end of nowhere or getting missiles thrown at her with a bunch of old-fart revolutionaries?”

“I don’t think we’re really revolutionaries.”

“And,” Amos went on, raising his voice to keep Jim from changing the subject, “it’s not what’s really eating you. We both know that.”

Before Jim could reply, Alex’s voice came over ship-wide. “Hey, everybody. I was hoping… I kind of need to call a little group meeting? In the galley. If you can. Um. Thanks.”

Amos squinted at the valve, turning it one way and then the other before giving it a last, satisfied swipe with the cloth. He set it back in its clamp.

“Do you need to put that back in place?”

“Nah,” Amos said. “I got a spare holding the line for now.”

“Then I guess we should go see what’s up with Alex.”

“He wants something, but he needs to apologize for a few minutes before he asks.”

“Well, sure,” Jim said. “I mean, I wonder what he’s going to ask for.”

If there had been gravity, Alex would have been pacing when they came through the galley door. Teresa was already there, floating beside the wall without touching it. Her arms were crossed, her mouth was tight and small, and every now and then she moved her jaw and made some brief expression. If he had to guess, Jim would have said she was deep in conversation with herself and barely paying attention to them. Amos took a place at the table, rooting himself by his mag boots to keep his hands free to steady Muskrat. The dog seemed perfectly at ease, reassured by having so much of its pack together.

Naomi came last and pulled herself a bulb of tea while motioning to Alex that he could start.

“So, yeah,” Alex said. “You all heard about Kit and Rohi, right?”

“You may have mentioned it,” Jim said, teasing him, but gently. Alex grinned.

“So I did the math, and I’m pretty sure that the baby’s already born. Now, I know that we’ve a lot on our plates here. The work we’re doing is really important. And risky. I didn’t sign on to any of this thinking it was like a normal contract. This has never been a normal contract.”

Amos’ sigh was almost inaudible. Alex heard it anyway, and Jim could see the old pilot dropping minutes of talking around the subject.

“Communication is dangerous, for him and for us, but I would really like to… to send my boy a message, you know? Maybe get a picture of my grandson. I don’t know what we have or what the underground needs from us. If we can’t… I just had to ask. You know, if it was something we could, and I just didn’t…”

Jim turned to Naomi and lifted his chin, asking. She took a sip from the bulb.

“It would mean poking our nose through the Sol gate,” she said. “We could get a tightbeam through trusted repeaters from there.”

“Any gate’s just about as far as any other one right now,” Jim said. “I mean, we’d just have to keep pretending we were on the same fake contract as before. Even if Laconia has forces in the system, there’s no better system to get lost in the traffic. Sol’s got a few centuries’ worth of ships and infrastructure to blend in with. It’s not like we’d be trying to go unnoticed in Arcadia or Farhome.”

“It would be more risk,” Alex said, but he was just trying to tell them that he wouldn’t be angry if they said no. Jim, Naomi, and Amos had all shipped with him long enough to know that was true. He wouldn’t be angry, but he would be sad. And if they were all going to die anyway, there was no reason to miss the chance.

“I think we should go,” he said.

“I was hoping we could drop Teresa off at school and then head for Firdaws,” Naomi said.

“The Sol gate’s right here,” Jim said. “A quick burn. If there aren’t any guard ships right at the ring gate, we can flip as soon as we’ve passed through the gate.”

Amos scratched his neck. “We got enough water out of Kronos. We’re not hurting for reaction mass. We could probably make up the time by burning a little longer to and from New Egypt. We are still hurting on fuel pellets and recyclers, but a little detour like that won’t matter for those.”

“Fine,” Naomi said. “Sol gate for long enough to contact Kit, then New Egypt. We resupply in Firdaws.”

“That work for you, Tiny?” Amos asked.

Teresa snapped back to the room from wherever she’d been. There was a bright sheen of tears over her eyes. Not thick, but present. “Yes. Fine. Yes.”

Alex’s relief melted him. When he spoke, his voice was reedy and thick. “Thank you. Really. If we hadn’t, I’d have lived with it, but… just thank you.”

“Family’s important,” Naomi said, and Jim couldn’t tell which of the thousand things she could have meant by it were in her mind.

It took less than an hour to get the Roci ready to go, even with Amos swapping and testing the repaired valve. Alex, on the flight deck above them, was singing to himself like a finch at dawn. There wasn’t a melody to speak of, just the musical lilting of pleasure and anticipation. Amos, Teresa, and Muskrat were in engineering, and Jim was thinking about all the things the girl might be feeling. Abandonment. Anger. Rejection. He hoped it wasn’t like that. Or that at least there were other things—anticipation, curiosity, hope—to leaven them. He hoped without any reason to hope that it would matter and that Teresa would by some miracle live long enough to work through the complications of her own heart.

As they started the burn for Sol ring at half a g instead of the usual third, Naomi sighed. At first, he thought her mind was on the same things as his.

“Too many fucking ships going through the rings,” she said. “And here we are, not exactly leading by example.”

He looked at the tactical. She was right, of course. Just in the time they’d been at a relative stop so that she could read through the data, ten more ships had passed through gates, burning on one errand or another that someone decided was worth the risk. Or didn’t understand that there was a risk. Or didn’t care.

“You saw there was another event?” Naomi asked. “There was a message from Okoye. It happened in Gedara system.”

“How many does that make?”

“Twenty? Something like that.”

Alex, above them, burst into a little run of melody. Something bright and jazzy, and as full as springtime. It was like listening to a message from a different universe.

“She’ll figure it out,” Naomi said, answering Jim’s silence. “If anyone can, she will.”

As they dove down toward the fluttering interference surface that was the gateway to Sol, a fast transit ship burst through the Laconia gate behind them, flipped, and started a punishing maneuvering burn. Jim watched them, waiting for the tightbeam demanding their surrender. It didn’t come.

“Looks like we skipped out at just the right time,” Naomi said.

“Another near miss,” Jim said. “Don’t know how many more of those we’re going to get.”

They passed through the Sol gate before they could see where the fast transport was headed.