Leviathan Falls

Chapter Fifteen: Teresa

Time was a problem. Time was always a problem.

It started, she had learned, with the fact that simultaneity was an illusion, and “the same time” on different planets in different systems was mostly an accounting convenience that only functioned because most people were moving relatively slowly compared to lightspeed. But beyond that, the measurements of time were embedded in history. An hour had sixty minutes because mathematicians in ancient Babylon had worked in a sexagesimal system. A year was the time it took Earth to make a full transit around Sol, and that mattered even though Teresa had never been to Earth and almost certainly never would. Like the number of minutes in an hour, the width of a centimeter, the volume of a liter, the length of a year was the marker by which humanity told the story of itself.

And so, because an old planet in another system was in more or less the same position relative to its star now as it had been during the siege of Laconia, Teresa Duarte was going to wake up sixteen years old instead of fifteen. And because of how quickly that same planet spun on its axis, it was still early morning, and she was in her quarters on the Roci, drifting between wakefulness and dream.

One of the things she’d grown to like about living on the Rocinante was the way it made the cycles of daylight and darkness arbitrary. If the crew had decided that every day lasted thirty hours, then it did. If night and day cycled through six hours at a time, then that was true. That they didn’t was a choice, and the fact that it was a choice was strangely wonderful. It would have been easy to become unmoored, and it turned out she liked being unmoored. The ability to drift was delicious. Now, lying on a couch in thrust gravity a fraction of what she’d felt growing up, she was aware of the cool gray walls, the almost-dark lit only by her handheld’s standby light. At the same time, she was also on Laconia, in a secondary machine shop that opened off her old bedroom and didn’t really exist, building something that changed every time she roused a little and slid back down. Dreams of other spaces—secret rooms, hidden passages, forgotten access shafts—had become common for her in the last months. They were probably symbolic of something. She was just fitting a wire lead into a vacuum channel adapter when the dream changed, shifting under her like she’d switched to a different feed.

She was still in her real quarters, could see the real walls and light, but they were augmented by black spirals whose fine detail she was more aware of than the dim light could justify. They seemed to weave and reweave themselves as she watched them. Filaments of black thread that reached out, found each other, built together into a new shape that was also part of the old one. Tiny blue lights wove in and out of the constantly remade spirals too, glimmering like fireflies. As hypnagogic hallucinations went, it was probably the most beautiful her brain had ever come up with. She felt like she could watch the black spirals forever and never get bored.

Her father stood beside them, looking down at her. His eyes were a perfect blue that they hadn’t been in reality. He was smiling. Teresa closed her eyes, willing herself to wake up. This wasn’t a dream she wanted to have. When she opened them again, the spirals were gone, but her father was still there. He looked strange. His hair was longer than he’d worn it, and though he was in the tunic and trousers Kelly had dressed him in back on Laconia, he wasn’t wearing shoes.

She sat up slowly, careful of the low gravity. The dream didn’t fade.

“Teresa,” he said, and his voice was like water to someone dying of thirst. Tears began to sheet her eyes.

“Father,” she said, and even though she could feel the vibrations in her throat—even though she was almost certainly really speaking out loud—he didn’t vanish. The sense of being awake grew in her. The sluggishness of dreams loosened its grip, but his image didn’t fade. Not yet.

“Happy birthday,” he said. “Everything is going to be all right.”

She wiped the tears away with the back of her hand. “It’s not, though,” she whispered.

“It will. I only need a little more time, and we will all be together. I dreamed too small before. I can see better now. You’ll see better too.”

Teresa shook her head, and a sharp knock came at the door.

“You decent?” Alex’s muffled voice said.

“Yes,” she said, and the door opened a crack. For a moment, it seemed like her dream and her reality would come together face-to-face, but as the light spilled in, her father blinked back into nothingness. She wiped her eyes again, trying to hide that she’d been crying.

“Hey there,” Alex said. “We’ve got some grub. You hungry?”

“Sure,” Teresa said. “Give me a minute.”

Alex nodded and retreated, but Muskrat nosed the door open and hopped in, barely constrained by her own weight. Her brown eyes shifted around the room like she was looking for something, and she whined softly.

“It’s okay, old lady,” Teresa said. “Everything’s fine.”

It was almost true. Well, it was less untrue than it might have been, anyway. The Rocinante was almost at the New Egypt ring gate, and while the Sparrowhawk—far back down the local sun’s gravity well—apparently hadn’t died, it also was far enough that even a killing burn wouldn’t have been able to catch up with them. About to make a transit without a clear idea of the traffic through the ring space, and with the Laconian military chasing them but out of firing range, was as close to okay as Teresa could expect these days. But Timothy—Amos—had defied death again, Muskrat was still with her, and she wasn’t at a religious boarding school at the ass end of nowhere.

She was surprised how relieved the plan’s failure left her. The immediate aftermath had been fear and shock. The horror of seeing Amos’ shattered body, the violence of the firefight, the anxiety of wondering whether the Sparrowhawk would risk firing on them to get her back. But as soon as that had passed, she’d found herself smiling more. She was still here, and it wasn’t even her fault.

When she went out to the galley, the crew of the Rocinante were standing around a little table with a sad, yellow-white cake. It had two candles printed from medical resin in the shapes of a one and a six. The flames were almost spheres. It was pathetic.

“It’s pretty much the same yeast and fungus as everything else,” Naomi said. “But it’s got sugar and it looks nice.”

“It’s… You’re all very kind,” Teresa said. There was a knot in her throat that she didn’t understand. Maybe gratitude, maybe sorrow, maybe the chaotic wake of the powerful dream of her father. Amos and Jim started a little song, and Naomi and Alex joined in, clapping along. It felt cheap and small and unimaginative, but it was also an effort they had put out for her that they didn’t have to. When Alex told her to make a wish and blow out the candles, she just blew them out. She couldn’t think of anything to wish for.

Amos plucked the resin candles out and dropped them into the recycler while Naomi cut the cake and Jim handed out bulbs of tea and coffee.

“Not a traditional breakfast,” Naomi said, handing a corner piece to Teresa. “But we wanted to take a moment before the Freehold transit. Once we get in the shipyard, we’ll be busy.”

“Anything the ship needs, we better get now,” Jim agreed.

Her last birthday had been in a ballroom of the State Building. The most important people in the vast spread of humanity had been there, and Teresa had been one of them. Her father had already been wrecked by the catastrophe that had destroyed the Typhoon and Medina Station, and she had felt the weight of the empire on her shoulders. She’d known what to wish for then. A way out. And now here she was, her wish granted. It wasn’t at all what she’d imagined it would be.

She took a bite of the cake and it was… fine. Inoffensive. A little too dense, a little too dry, but fine. It wasn’t made by the best bakers in a thousand worlds vying to impress their god-emperor. It wasn’t preceded by a formal speech crafted to give the right political signals or followed by a presentation of ostentatious gifts that she didn’t care about and wouldn’t remember a week later. She couldn’t imagine an experience less like the ones she’d had before. Even if they’d ignored her birthday, it would have been more familiar. There had been any number of times she’d felt ignored while standing in the spotlight.

Muskrat put a wet nose against her arm and barked a soft, conversational bark. Teresa broke off a corner of her cake and passed it over. The dog chewed loudly and with enthusiasm.

“What’s up?” Jim said, and it took her a moment to realize he was talking to her.

“Nothing,” she said. “Why?”

“You sighed.”

“I did?”

Alex nodded. “You did.”

“It’s nothing,” she said. “I was thinking about how different this is from last year. That’s all.”

“Not exactly the best Sweet Sixteen ever,” Alex said with a grimace. “This should have been the big one.”

“What are you talking about?” Jim said. “Last year was the big one. Quinceañera. Sweet Sixteen isn’t a thing.”

“Maybe not where you come from,” Alex said. “Mars, it was sixteen.”

Naomi scowled in affable confusion at Jim. “You mean quinsé? How do you know about that?”

Amos smiled an empty, friendly smile that meant he didn’t know or care what the others were talking about but he was willing to let them go on about it for a while. Sometimes he reminded her of a huge, patient dog in a crowd of puppies.

“Fifteenth birthday. Quinceañera,” Jim said. “It’s the big rite-of-passage birthday for a lot of Earth. Father Caesar was all about mine. We had a tent and a live band, and I had to wear a tailored suit and learn a dance. A bunch of people I barely knew put money in my educational account. It was fun in a mildly humiliating way.”

“Huh,” Naomi said. “I thought quinsé began in the Belt.”

“Did you have a dance?”

“There was dancing. And drinking.”

“Drinking at fifteen?” Alex said.

“Fifteen was the age when your parents lost their customs credit exemption and went back to paying full taxes and fees. So that was the age we usually took our first jobs. At least before the Transport Union. Pa changed the credit age to seventeen. But the party stayed the same.”

“So you left your parents when you were fifteen?” Teresa said.

“Before that,” Naomi said. “I didn’t know my father, and my mother had a long-term contract on a freighter that didn’t accept children. I was mostly with my tías. Some of them I was related to, but most I wasn’t.”

“I didn’t really know my mother,” Teresa said. “She died when I was young.”

“That’s hard,” Naomi said as if she was agreeing with something. Teresa waited for the next question. How did she die? She was sorry now that she’d brought it up. But no one pushed.

“I don’t know about any of that,” Alex said. “In Mariner Valley, it was Sweet Sixteen. Unless it was thirteen. There was some of that too.”

“That why you were so pissed that we missed Kit’s?” Amos asked.

Alex looked down, a flash of pain covered over almost instantly by a good-humored ruefulness. “Me and Giselle were pretty much at our worst about then. Staying scarce was the right thing to do, but yeah. I was awfully sorry to miss it.”

Teresa took the last mouthful of her cake, to Muskrat’s visible disappointment. She’d spent most of a year with these four people. And after the epic failure that leaving her with her cousin on New Egypt had turned out to be, probably the next year too. Others had come and gone, but this central crew had remained the constant. Listening to them talk now was listening in on the idle chatter of a family. But it was a family she didn’t belong to. Part of that was that none of them was anything close to her age. When they talked about the time before the ring gates, it was like watching an old entertainment feed. The idea of all humanity trapped in a single system made her feel almost claustrophobic. It meant something different to them, and she could make out aspects of what that was. Her understanding would never mesh with theirs.

She watched Amos. He didn’t talk about birthdays or parents. Of the four, he was the one most like her—on the edge of the conversation. But he was comfortable there. He was comfortable anywhere.

She would never have what they did. Her experiences were only her own. No one else anywhere had lived the way she had, and people who had been closest to her were all back on Laconia or else dead. Other people could tie their stories together with analogies and patterns, how one person’s childhood birthday was like someone else’s, but her life had been too different. Nowhere in the universe would she find a table full of people whose fathers had groomed them to take control of humanity’s fate, who had been offered immortality and turned it down, whose private life had been synonymous with the function of a galaxy-spanning state.

The only hope she had was to find a place and start building, not a normal life but a comprehensible one. Then wait until it was all in the past and she could tell warm, shareable stories about it.

Even the idea was exhausting.

The alert was a polite chime. The ship letting them know that the moment had passed and the next thing was coming. They cleaned up the detritus of the cake breakfast, and Alex gave her a brief, awkward side hug before he led Jim and Naomi toward the lift. She and Muskrat followed Amos down toward engineering.

“They mean well,” Teresa said.

“Yup.”

In engineering, Amos gave Muskrat a treat and took her to the canine couch while Teresa strapped herself in. The air smelled of silicone lubricant and the thin, harsh ozone that the ceramic printers gave off. It reminded her of the smell of rain, but without the minty tones, and it comforted her. How strange to have been in a place long enough that the smell of it felt like home. Or maybe she wouldn’t have felt that way except that she’d nearly lost it to a bunch of Presbyterians.

The transit out of New Egypt and into Freehold would go quickly. In theory, any two gates could be connected by a straight line, so that the angle at which a ship entered one could be set such that it didn’t need a braking burn. In practice, most ships came in slow, and often made their course corrections when they were fully in the ring space and could see their targets. Something about shooting blind through a gateway they couldn’t see, when missing it meant instant and utter annihilation, made the limbic systems of most pilots light up in a very bad way. This particular transit was in the sweet spot—not too far, but also not too steep an angle. If something did go wrong, the Roci would have time to shift its trajectory and exit some other ring.

At their present speed, the gap between gates would be brief, and the transits themselves wouldn’t be noticeable—one moment they would be in the eerie non-space of the ring gates, the next falling toward a distant star with the familiar universe around them. Amos strapped himself in across from her, scratching idly at his chest where the gunshot had opened him.

“Does it bother you?” she asked.

He looked over, his dark eyes wide and strangely innocent. Like a stuffed animal’s. She pointed at his chest as the countdown to transit began. Alex’s voice, professional with just the barest hint of anxiety.

“I don’t know,” Amos said. “Not really. I don’t like being dead, so…” He shrugged. “It is different, though.”

Alex reached zero, and Teresa imagined she felt a moment’s vertigo, but it was almost certainly psychosomatic. When Amos spoke again, his voice was calm and amiable. One of the things she liked about him was that he never had the faint condescension of generic concern. “You’re thinking about your dad?”

“You didn’t choose what happened to you. How you changed. He did. And I don’t know which of you I’m more like, you know? I chose to leave. To be here. But there are so many things that I can’t—”

“We have a problem,” Naomi said over the ship-wide. “Stand by, and stay strapped.”

“Got you,” Amos said, but he was already pulling a mirror of the tactical controls onto the wall screen. Freehold system appeared, simplified by the shorthand of graphic design into something comprehensible. The sun. Freehold itself and the single other inner planet. The three gas giants. A dozen prospecting ships, mostly in the asteroid belt or the gas giant’s moons. Teresa looked for what had made Naomi’s voice so hard, and it took her a moment to find it.

The Gathering Storm was a Laconian destroyer, stolen by Roberta Draper. It was the flagship of the underground’s clandestine fleet, the tip of the spear during the siege of Laconia that had been Teresa’s own escape. To Admiral Trejo and the rest of the Laconian Navy, it was a humiliation and a thorn. A reminder of a string of losses. To the underground, it was a symbol of the empire’s vulnerability. It was the ship that might slip through any gate at any time, bringing the underground’s power to bear on any lesser ship, almost more powerful as a story than as a fighting vessel.

But the Laconian destroyer on the tactical display in low orbit around Freehold wasn’t the Gathering Storm.