Leviathan Falls

Chapter Twenty-Five: Tanaka

The captain of the Preiss was a flat-faced, pale-skinned man with a stubble-length beard that didn’t hide his double chin. He’d spent two decades ferrying colonists to new worlds, and now he floated in Tanaka’s cabin with a vague look on his face. He should have been frightened. He only seemed stunned.

By force of will, Tanaka kept from tapping her fingers against her thigh. She wasn’t going to show anxiety, even in front of someone who seemed primed to overlook it. After all, this interview and all the others were being recorded.

“I’ve taken,” he said, paused, licked his lips absently, “psychedelics. I’ve been places, you know? It wasn’t like that. Not at all.”

The Preiss was docked to the Derecho, the first of the ships waiting their turn for the Laconians to meet with their crews, copy the data from their sensor and comms systems, and generally go over everything with the finest-toothed of all possible combs. But the Priess was the most important. It was the only ship to ever shrug off going dutchman.

And if Tanaka had held any hope that its captain knew why, she would have been abandoning it right about now. “What is the ship carrying that’s in any way out of the ordinary?”

His focus swam, found her. His shrug and scowl were perfectly synchronized, the result of a lifetime’s practice saying Fucked if I know.

“We were just going through, same as always. The drive plume, it always hits first. But we couldn’t see that anything odd was going on. Drive plume was in the way, you know?”

“I do,” Tanaka said. Her jaw ached. “But there must be something. Something different this time? Had anything changed on this ship recently?”

“Got some new air scrubbers out of Ganymede. Charged graphene with crosshatching. Supposed to last twice as long as the old kind, and you can wash ’em with distilled water. Reuse ’em five or six times.”

“That’s the only new equipment?”

“Since the last trip, yeah.”

“What about the passengers. Are any of them shipping anything out of the ordinary?”

The shrug. The scowl. “It’s all construction and climate engineering stuff. I don’t know.”

“Is any of it protomolecule-based technology?”

A flash of impatience crossed the thick man’s face. “Everything’s protomolecule-based technology. The lace plating’s protomolecule tech. The biofilms around the reactor are. Half the food supply comes from things we built off that shit.”

Tanaka took a deep breath and let it out through her teeth. It didn’t placate her that he was right. But there had to be some reason that this man was here, floating at her workstation, and not vanished into the hungry void that was a failed transit.

She let it go.

“Did you have… any experiences associated with the event?” She managed to keep her voice steady, as if any answer would have been as good as another. As if just asking didn’t make her gut tighten.

“Oh yeah. Oh, hell yeah.”

Tanaka turned off the recorder. “Tell me what you remember. Don’t feel like you have to make sense of it. Just your memory of the experience.”

The man shook his head. Not a negation, but a gesture of wonder bordering on disbelief. “There was this thing where… I don’t know. It was like being in the ocean, but the water was other people? You know how you dream, and maybe you’re some other person? Like you dream you’re old when you’re a kid. Or a kid when you’re old. It was like having a thousand of those dreams all at the same time.”

Tanaka nodded. It was actually a pretty good description. She forced her jaw to relax.

“Do you still remember anything about those impressions? Or did the experience fade like normal dreams?”

He shrugged again, but almost gently. Like he was frightened or sad. When he spoke, his tone was almost wistful. “There’s… scraps? There was like a memory I had where I was a woman on L-4 maybe ten years ago? I’d just gotten a promotion or something, and I was drunk with some friends.”

“Have you ever been on L-4?”

“Nah, but that’s where I was. Where she was. Where she was when I was her. I don’t know, it was fucked up.”

“Do you remember anything else about her?”

“My skin was really dark. Like dark dark. And there was something wrong with my right leg.”

“Okay. All right.” Tanaka turned the recording back on. “We’re going to hold your passage until we can interview everyone on board the ship and make a complete forensic scan.”

She expected him to object, but he didn’t. The Preiss was going to be late arriving on Nieuwestad, and the captain would probably lose a bonus at the least. Possibly owe a late-arrival penalty. If the monetary loss bothered him, he didn’t show it. Tanaka’s guess was that he’d had an experience that made the mere economic reality of his position seem less significant. She was seeing a lot of that in her interviews.

He hauled himself hand by hand out of the office to where her guards were waiting in the corridor. She thumbed the control, and the door closed behind him. The database of all crew and passengers from the detained ships was on the Derecho’s system. The data wasn’t perfect. Some of the ships claimed to have suffered data loss during the incident, their systems corrupted and spotty. It just meant they were hiding evidence: maybe of smuggling, maybe of contacts in the underground, maybe of some glimpse of the Rocinante’s passage through the slow zone. She wasn’t naive enough to believe these people were good citizens of the empire.

She’d care about that later.

Her own experience had been like a whiteout. One moment, she’d been watching the Preiss die in a failed transit. The next, she’d been in a hurricane of unfamiliar consciousness, battered by it. When she’d come back to herself, the Derecho had been on automatic lockdown. The crew had been stunned, confused. She remembered passing one woman in the corridor who was floating in a fetal position, tears in a bubble over her eyes like goggles made of salt water.

The glitches and lost consciousness were often associated with visual and aural hallucinations. This was a new variation, but that was all. She wanted to believe that, and like anything she found herself wanting to be true, she forced herself to double-check it.

The initial search criteria was easy enough. Anyone female-identifying who’d been on L-4 between eight and thirteen years previously. Cross-reference that with medical records mentioning the right leg.

There was only one hit. Anet Dimitriadis, senior mechanic on the Pleasant Life, a freighter working between Corazon Sagrado, Magpie, and Pankaja systems. Tanaka resented the tightness in her throat as she pulled up the woman’s file.

Anet Dimitriadis had skin so dark the system adjusted the image contrast to make her features clear. Like a rush of cold water in her gut, fear flooded Tanaka.

“Fuck,” she said.

In the ring space, a soft and shadowless light spilled from the gates. Along with it, electromagnetic radiation on a range of frequencies filled the void like a jamming device. The Derecho took all of it in, filling the available memory with raw data from every sensor array it had. The ships that been in the ring space when the Preiss had done whatever trick it had done drifted, waiting for their turns to be questioned and released. A handful of other ships came through the gates, burning slowly, tentatively, like mice that thought they’d heard something meow.

What Tanaka wanted and what she could do were far enough apart to be independent variables. It would have been the work of years to put each and every person in the ships there in her office where she could grill them, scare them, threaten them. Find out what they remembered or thought they remembered. She didn’t have years.

And, more to the point, this wasn’t her mission. She was hunting Winston Duarte, or whatever he’d become, and hauling him—or it—back to Laconia. Whatever was going on here might be fascinating. It might be the most important thing in the universe. That didn’t matter because it wasn’t her job.

Except that she’d found something more important than her job.

Twice a day, she ate in the Derecho’s galley, but only because there was some deep, primate part of her brain that thought being around other primates would make her safer. The isolation of her office felt too much like vulnerability. But being around the crew was intensely uncomfortable in its own way. She ate her rice and egg slurry, drank her tea, and went back to her office, relieved to be alone again, but anxious too. She hated herself when she was like this.

She had Botton send representatives to each ship to conduct interviews, routing only the captains, scientists, and information officers directly to her. When she wasn’t doing her own interviews, she had a dozen more to listen to, compare among each other, gnaw at like a dog to crack a bone down to the marrow. She switched between the feeds, catching a question or two, a phrase or two, and then moving on. Kenst how you can pay attention to how, sa, just your foot feels? Like that, aber con a jéjé different bodies. Tanaka shifted. I had this intense sense of panic, but it wasn’t my panic. It was someone else’s, and I was feeling it. She shifted. There was someone with me, only he wasn’t in the room. He was more with me than if he’d just been beside me. She told herself she was bored, but that was a lie. She was restless, and that wasn’t the same. She needed to get drunk, to get in a fight, to fuck. Something. Be doing anything that centered her fully in her own body, where she could forget being anything other than herself.

The message from Trejo wasn’t unexpected, but she’d let herself hope it might not come. She decanted a bulb of red wine designed to her tastes—dry and oaky—and drank half of it before she played it.

The message was noisy—static and resolution loss and best-guess infills by the comm system fighting against the new noise from the ring gates. Even so, she could tell that Trejo looked like shit. His unnaturally green eyes had taken on an almost milky softness. His hair was whiter than she remembered it being, and thinner. The darkness under his eyes spoke of sleeplessness. Anton Trejo was Laconia now, and he was learning that it was too big for him. No wonder he wanted Duarte back. She recognized his office at the State Building. She’d only been away from Laconia for a few months, but it seemed like a memory from childhood.

“Colonel Tanaka,” he said, nodding at the camera as if he were looking at her. “I want to thank you for your report. I’m not going to bullshit you. The outcome in Freehold system isn’t what I was hoping for. But you were the one with boots on the ground. I’m not going to second-guess you. This other thing… Well, it’s concerning.”

“Well understated, sir,” she said to the recording, and squirted a little more of the wine toward the back of her throat. Nothing was as good on the float, and she had to breathe the fumes from her mouth up into her nose for the drink to taste like anything.

“I have ordered three ships from the Science Directorate to make all reasonable haste to the ring space, where they can make a complete survey. Your data has been provided to them and to Drs. Ochida and Okoye. If it is possible to get to the bottom of this, I have faith that they will.”

A buzz was slipping into his voice. His annoyance might be with her. It might be with the universe or the unjust nature of chance. Or maybe he hadn’t gotten laid in too long. She didn’t know how he lived his life. She steeled herself to take the brunt of it, whatever it was.

“I also understand that this is alarming and of interest, but I do think it’s a distraction from your primary objective.”

Primary objective. He wasn’t saying Duarte’s name. Not even here. It was a misplaced discretion. Teresa Duarte had been breaking bread with the enemy for almost a year. Naomi Nagata and the whole underground knew by now that Duarte was shattered. They might not know that he’d taken the trouble to resurrect himself, but they probably did.

He was trying to keep his secrets secret, even when there was every reason to think his beans were well and truly spilled. Her stomach hurt. She realized Trejo had been speaking while her mind wandered, and she rolled the message back.

“… from your primary objective. I need your focus here, Colonel. I am spinning a lot of different plates right now, and while I appreciate your enthusiasm, I need you to keep in mind that you are one part of something much, much larger. Trust me to take care of this whatever the fuck this was. You do your job. We will get through this clusterfuck together, just the same way we always have. The more you get off-mission, the less useful your mission becomes to Laconia.”

The message ended. It wasn’t quite a threat, which was nice. It wasn’t quite not one either. Do the job I asked or I’ll pull your Omega status. He hadn’t said it. He hadn’t needed to.

Tanaka carefully enunciated the word fuck into the still air of her office, squeezed the last wine from the bulb, and hauled her way out into the corridor and toward the bridge. She was already composing her reply. I have returned to the pursuit of the asset we discussed. I remain convinced she is the most likely path to completing the mission. Before she sent it, though, she had to make it true.

It wasn’t until she pulled herself to a stop on the bridge that she realized she hadn’t been there since the event. At the stations, half a dozen crew in sharp Laconian blue were unnaturally focused on their screens. She had a terrible memory of being at lower university and walking into a study group room that suddenly went quiet. She didn’t know if they were laughing at her or frightened of her. Her scarred cheek began to itch, and she took some pride in letting the irritation swell to pain without scratching it.

She cast her gaze around the bridge like she was aiming a weapon. She picked out all the little flaws—the places where the couches were beginning to wear, where the fabric had been replaced and didn’t quite match. Something about these imperfections soothed her.

Botton was at the captain’s station, strapped into his crash couch though there was no thrust gravity. When he saw her, he undid his restraints, pushed himself up to a mag-booted approximation of standing, and braced. She nodded, and he relaxed.

“I have had word from Admiral Trejo,” she said.

Botton nodded. Was there a smile hidden there? Without wanting it, she remembered the taste of whiskey on his tongue, richer and peatier than when she drank it herself. The feel of it warming his throat. She had been in a cacophony of different minds, but that one, she recognized. She had been inside Botton in a way more intimate than even the most authentic sex. Had he experienced something like that with her? Was he, right now, recalling one of her trysts with inappropriate men? She suddenly felt violated and exposed, but he hadn’t said a word.

If she had glimpsed inside Botton’s actual and genuine mind, that was fine with her. But if he or other people had been able to access her private memories, know her—even for a moment—the way she knew herself? That was like waking up to find herself in mid-fuck with a stranger. She’d navigated her whole life on the unbroken membrane between her public self and her private one. The idea that the separation might have been ripped open put her on the edge of almost animal panic.

She realized she’d been silent a beat too long. “The Science Directorate is sending survey ships to investigate the event and the hallucinations that accompanied it.” She hit the word hallucinations just a degree harder than she needed to. She meant You felt something, you recalled something, you experienced something. Don’t assume it was truth.

“Copy that, Colonel,” Botton said. “I will recall our people from the other ships at once.”

She glanced at the screen he’d been working at. It was the scan of the ring space that the Derecho had been making in the moment when whatever had happened had happened. She gestured toward it with her chin, and asked the question with her eyebrows.

Botton blushed. That was unexpected.

“I have been… reviewing the event,” he said. “It was an exceptional moment.”

“You have an opinion about it? Something you feel you should share with your commanding officer?” She said it coolly. It wasn’t a threat, unless he thought it was. And then it was.

Botton didn’t hear the warning. His stance softened, his gaze turned inward. She wondered, if the event happened again just then, what she might find in the place behind his eyes.

“The… hallucinations. I found them very unpleasant.”

“As did I,” Tanaka said.

“Yes, Colonel. I feel as though understanding what happened might better help to put the experience behind me. And I would very much like to put it behind me.”

Tanaka tilted her head. There was an echo of her own fear in his voice. It occurred to her for the first time that she wouldn’t be the only one who had felt the gestalt as a violation. For all she knew, Botton had secrets of his own to nurture and protect. It left her liking Botton a degree better.

“I’m sure the Science Directorate will be better equipped to make sense of this than we are,” she said. “How long before we can be underway?”

“Transferring our crew back from the ships could take several hours.” It sounded like an apology. She liked that too.

“As soon as they arrive, inform the remaining ships that they are to stay here until the survey ships arrive and debrief them.”

“They aren’t going to like that. Several of the captains have expressed a strong preference to leave the ring space as soon as possible.”

“Any ship that leaves before being given permission will be labeled a criminal vessel and destroyed on sight by Laconian forces,” Tanaka said.

“I will make sure they understand.”

She took a deep breath. At the workstations, the other crew could have been living in different dimensions for all the reaction they showed to her conversation. On Botton’s screen, the ring gates flared white. And the alien station at the ring space’s heart matched them. The Derecho’s sensor arrays lowered their sensitivity to keep from whiting out. When the image returned a second later, the rings were glowing points all around the surface of the slow zone.

I’m missing something. The words were like a whisper in her ear. Something the captain of the Preiss had said. Or something about the newly glowing gates. Or had Botton accidentally said something that would unlock the mystery, or better, give her control over it?

“We have evidence that something made a transit to Bara Gaon system in approximately the right time frame,” Botton said. “Shall we proceed there?”

“Yes,” Tanaka said. “Alert me when the full crew has returned.”

She clicked on her mag boots, used her ankle to turn her body and to stop it, then launched herself back toward the lift. Behind her, someone let out a long, stuttering breath as if they’d been holding it the whole time she’d been there.

Bara Gaon was an active system. If the Rocinante had fled there, it was because they hoped to use contacts in the underground to cover their passage. Any data she got from the official sources, she’d have to double-check herself in case it had been corrupted. Her mind ran forward along the path of the chase, and it was a relief.

She needed to go to the ship’s gymnasium and punch a heavy bag. I used to be a boxer when I was young. The thought wafted through her mind like she’d heard someone say it. It wasn’t her voice. She ignored it. She needed to eat. She needed to report back to Trejo. She needed to track down the Rocinante. She needed to find Winston Duarte or whatever he had become. She felt duty sliding in around her mind like blinders, cutting away the distractions.

She had a mission and a score to settle. Unthinking, she scratched her wounded cheek.

She was missing something.