Leviathan Falls

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Elvi

The Rocinante had come through the Adro gate, the gate had lit up like a radio and X-ray bonfire, and Elvi knew that the game had changed. She hadn’t known what it had changed into or what the consequences of the change would be, but without doubt, the ways she’d been operating were the old ways now.

The immediate response on the Falcon had been barely restrained panic. An enemy gunship was in the system. The Falcon was far from defenseless, but were they going to be in a battle? Had the underground come to drop nukes on the BFE the way they had the construction platforms? What had they done to change the ring gate? Elvi led by example at first. She didn’t panic, and it gave everyone else permission not to panic either. Then the first tightbeam from the Roci arrived, Naomi brought her up to speed, and Elvi had some decisions to make.

The first job, and the one that would shape what came after, was talking to Harshaan Lee.

The younger man floated in her office with his ankles crossed and his arms held behind his back in a way that opened his chest. He listened with the calm focus of a researcher taking in a new body of information. Only this was information that reframed his own life and his prospects for survival.

“I’m not going to apologize,” Elvi said. “Admiral Trejo knows very well how I feel about all the political and military wrangling in the face of this existential alien threat. If he finds out… When he finds out about this, he won’t be surprised. But he won’t be happy either.”

Dr. Lee let a long, slow breath out from between his teeth, half sigh and half deflation. “No, I see that he won’t.”

“If you’d like, I can incarcerate you,” Elvi said. “When this all comes out, you’ll be able to honestly say you couldn’t do anything about it.”

Lee was silent for a long moment, his gaze shifting as he thought. Elvi admired the man’s intelligence and professionalism. She didn’t know what he’d say or do, but if she did need to start moving down her chain of command until she found someone who’d toe her line, it was going to be a long, difficult day.

When he spoke, his voice was a mixture of resignation and amusement. “I am an officer of Laconia and a patriot. You are my commander and the head of the directorate in which I serve. Your collaboration is unorthodox. After San Esteban, unorthodox may be necessary. I understand your rationale. You may rely upon me.”

“Thank you,” Elvi said. “And Harshaan? I have access to the comms. And I have monitors on them not even the comms officers know about. Don’t fuck with me. I’m here to win.”

“Very much understood,” he said.

With his support, the rest of the crew shifted from fear to confusion. She wouldn’t have thought it, but there were some real advantages to working in a system that treated chain of command with an almost religious zeal. At least when she was the one with the authority.

Communication through the gate had always been spotty. In Sol system or Laconia—and increasingly in more developed colonies like Auberon and Bara Gaon—repeaters were plentiful enough for robust routing solutions. If one failed, the others would notice and track their signals around it. In Adro, there was a single thread of repeaters that the Falcon itself had dropped on the way out and the one at the ring gate that the underground or pirates or vandals occasionally destroyed. The new flood of radio pouring off the ring gates acted like a signal jammer and made the system even less reliable. But slowly, during periods of low activity and on frequencies the ring’s new activity seemed to ignore, a deeper picture of what had happened began to reveal itself to her. By the time the Rocinante arrived, she had as clear an understanding of the new status quo as anyone except possibly Ochida and Trejo. More than that, she had a plan. And getting Dr. Lee on board had been more straightforward than the risks she needed the Rocinante to shoulder.

She waited in the airlock with Fayez and Cara. She would have invited Dr. Lee and Xan, but they wouldn’t be coming to the briefing. There wasn’t enough space in her lab for all of them. She felt the anxiety in her chest like a spring wound up a quarter turn too tightly. Floating beside her, Cara fidgeted, clasping and unclasping her hands. Wringing them. Elvi had always thought that was just a figure of speech.

“Still time to back out of this,” Fayez said.

“No there isn’t,” Elvi said.

“No. You’re right.”

The airlock’s outer door cycled closed. There was a soft click as the inner door’s bolts came free. The door slid open, and they were there.

Naomi looked very different from the last time Elvi had seen her in person. They’d both been much younger then, and she remembered Naomi as a soft, almost retiring presence who had the habit of hiding behind the spill of her own dark, curling hair. The woman in her airlock had a harder face, hair the white of snowfall, and nothing reticent about her. The cameras did a great deal to disguise the gravity with which she held herself. Somehow, across the reach of decades, Naomi Nagata had become the kind of person Elvi could imagine sitting across a table from Anton Trejo. She wondered if Trejo knew that.

James Holden, on the other hand, looked exactly like himself, but older. Of course, she’d seen him much more recently on Laconia. She’d had time to adjust to the years in his face and the vague, bemused look in his eyes.

“Naomi, Jim. It’s good to see you again,” she said. The man beside them gave her a friendly smile. She might only have imagined Cara’s near-silent gasp. “And Amos. I’d heard you changed like Cara and Xan. I would really love to do a few medical scans while you’re here. If that’s all right with you?”

“If it helps, Doc. Hey, Sparkles.”

They were all silent for a moment. Criminals and conspirators tasked with saving humanity from itself and the enemies bent on its destruction.

“Well,” Fayez said. “This is just awkward as hell, isn’t it?”

“Please come in. I’ve had a little welcoming party set up, and we have a lot we need to talk about.”

As they passed through the ship, the crew was careful not to notice them. Elvi tried to imagine what she’d have felt in their place. The enemy welcomed into their home. She wondered how many of them guessed that Teresa Duarte was in the ship they were linked to. If she’d tried to design a pressure test to see whether her people would rat her out to Trejo, she couldn’t have done better than this. She hoped that none of them had a back channel out that she didn’t know about. If they did… Well, that would be an interesting problem.

They reached the lab, and she ushered them all in like she was back in college and hosting a party in her dorm room. She went in last, closing the door behind her.

“Welcome to my little world,” Elvi said, gesturing at the lab.

Naomi grabbed a handhold, stopped herself, and looked over the space, approving. Elvi had become so used to the half dozen multifunction workstations, the heavy air scrubber built to capture dangerous chemicals and put out any fires, that having new people looking at it felt like a reminder it was there. It had all become as familiar as her own body and as easy to take for granted. Most of what the Falcon was doing in Adro was medical scans of Cara and geological scans of the diamond, but the ship was built for everything from electron microscopy to vivisection.

“It’s lovely,” Jim said, and he almost seemed genuine, but not quite.

“It’s a fucking prison,” Elvi said with a smile. “But it’s mine.”

She grimaced when she realized she’d just claimed to be locked in a prison to a man who had spent the previous few years being tortured in an actual prison, but the look on his face didn’t change. If he noticed her gaffe he had the grace to ignore it.

“I’m sorry we put you in a hard position,” Naomi said. “I know you’re taking a risk letting us come here.”

Elvi made a shooing motion with her left hand as she pulled a display onto the wall screen with her right. “It was the right thing. You do what you have to when the universe is on fire.”

“Is it?” Naomi asked.

“On fire?” Elvi said. “That’s actually a really interesting question. You know about the new event?”

“We’ve been running dark,” Naomi said. “The only things we know, we heard from you.”

“Well, you were part of it, whatever it was.” She pulled up the ring gate on the wall in its new, bright form. A cascade of analytic data spilled out in columns beside it. “You were part of the trigger anyway. Most of the direct data I have is from Colonel Tanaka.”

“The one who keeps trying to kill us?”

“The same,” Fayez said. “She’s been doing field reports and sending us the raw data while you were on your way here. She had scanners doing live sweeps of the slow zone looking for traces of your passage when the shit hit the fan. And she was even watching the turd in question.”

Elvi gestured and the screen shifted to the familiar bubble of the ring space with its hundreds of gates equally spaced along the surface. She zoomed in on one that was at an oblique angle to the telescope capturing the image, the circle of the gate bent by perspective into an oval. A glimmer of light shone in the center of the ring gate like a firefly. The drive plume of a ship braking before it passed through.

“Sol gate,” Elvi said. “Still almost half the traffic in and out of the ring space goes through there.”

“But there was a lot of other traffic,” Naomi said, grimly. “Including us.”

Elvi shifted her hand, and the glimmer in the gate slowed. A readout said they were watching it several thousand times slower than it had actually happened, but the feed wasn’t choppy. Jim crossed his arms, scowling. Amos and Cara watched with a matching interest and stillness. The glimmer grew brighter, until it was pure white on the screen.

“It was a colony ship,” Elvi said, her words fast, staccato, and anxious. “It attempted transit a few seconds after Tanaka’s ship came in. We don’t know how many other transits had happened before, but that doesn’t matter. Enough to put the threshold up over safety.”

The glow brightened… and it died. Elvi felt a sting of excitement, but only because she already knew that the lives she was watching end, hadn’t. Somehow they’d been saved. The drive plume returned, coalescing inside the ring space like the ship had made its passage after all, even though it had clearly vanished just moments before.

“What the fuck was that?” Naomi murmured.

“The ship went dutchman, and then came back. But that’s just the pregame show,” Elvi said. “Watch how much the ring entities liked it.”

The edge of the slow zone bubbled, brightened, roiled. Elvi had seen that before. The Falcon had been the only ship to survive the last time this had happened. When she spoke, her voice was tighter and higher. “This is what we saw when we lost Medina Station. It’s a direct intrusion across the ring space’s barriers. It killed Medina. It killed the Typhoon.”

“Too bad it didn’t kill Tanaka,” Amos said.

Patterns played across the ring space like malefic auroras, and a darkness moved in the light. Elvi found herself hunching over like she was protecting her belly from a punch. She forced her spine straight.

“And then this,” Elvi said.

As one, the ring gates and station flared white, a brightness that overloaded the telescopes for three long, terrible seconds. When the light faded, like letting out a long, slow exhalation, the ring space returned to itself, with all the drive cones and transponders and traffic that had been there before. Including the colony ship that they’d watched vanish and reform.

“It’s not just the Adro gate that lit up,” Naomi said.

“No, it’s all of them. And when that happened, there was a cognitive effect. Most of the data Colonel Tanaka has been providing has been about that.”

“A cognitive effect like the lost memory?” Naomi asked.

“Nope,” Fayez said. “Very, very different.”

“It looks like it may have been a kind of networked connection between the minds of the people in the ring space,” Elvi said. “All the crews of all the ships. It was apparently fairly overwhelming. But there’s an indication that they all participated in each other’s memories and experiences.”

Amos scratched his chin. “That sounds like what’s been going on with me and Sparkles.”

“It does seem very similar to what you, Cara, reported during the dives into the BFE.”

“BFE?” Amos asked.

“The diamond. The library.”

“Why BFE?” Jim said.

Elvi scowled and shook her head. “The point is, when we saw it with you two”—she gestured to Cara and Amos—“we had assumed it was because you’d been modified by the repair drones. What happened in the ring space, that happened to unmodified human beings. The effect didn’t last very long. Almost instantaneous, really. But the memories have been vivid and persistent. The radiation from the gates is also interesting. Take a look at this.”

The display shifted into something that looked like an impossibly complicated spiderweb. With a gesture, Elvi rotated it, then looked over at Jim.

He nodded and said, “I have no idea what that is.”

“Communication between the gates,” Elvi said. “We think the patterns in the radiation set up handshakes between the gates similar to the one we saw here between Cara and the… diamond.”

“The gates are talking to each other?” Naomi said.

“We’ve been using them as a matter transport system, which they are. It makes sense that they’re also a communication network.”

A tickling sensation crawled up Jim’s neck and he shuddered. “Amos said something about there being a kind of light that can think.”

“Yes,” Elvi said. “One model that goes pretty well with this architecture is a neural network. A really small one, but the signal processing between them has some real similarities. If it’s a fully meshed network with each connection acting like a synapse, that’s a little shy of a million. So about a tenth as smart as a fruit fly. If they’re making connections between gates with different frequencies acting as distinct connections, they’d need something on the order of ten million different frequencies just to get as smart as a house cat—”

“Are you saying that the gates are alive and thinking on their own?” Naomi asked. The tremor in her voice was almost like fear.

“No. I’m also not saying they aren’t, but as biological systems go, this is really pretty simple.” She paused. “I was trying to be reassuring.”

“Not sure it worked,” Jim said.

“Didn’t,” Naomi agreed. “Really didn’t.”

Elvi shut off the wall screen and used a handhold to turn toward them. “I’m sorry. I’ve been deep in this for so long, I get happy when I find anything that isn’t overwhelmingly complicated. I have a friend from my postdoc who spent five years modeling protein cascades in trout livers. I’m supposed to do that depth of analytic work in half an hour five times a day. It’s been inhumane.”

“I’ve been running a guerrilla government with shitty communications, thirteen hundred different isolated systems, and literally billions of people who think whatever they’re looking at is the most important thing there is,” Naomi said. “I know how you feel.”

“Let me try again,” Elvi said. “There’s good news. Ever since the rings began radiating like this, there hasn’t been an event in any system. No loss of consciousness. No change in any basic physical constants or the laws of physics. No more San Estebans with massive numbers of people dying with no warning or defense.”

“Not sure that makes sense, Doc,” Amos said. “They weren’t able to stop it.”

“They?” Naomi asked.

Amos gestured at the dead wall screen as if it would show what he’d meant to say. “The ones that made all this. They got killed. They didn’t have a way to stop it once it started. They shut down the gates to try and quarantine themselves. Nothing stopped the attacks.”

“Not for them, no,” Elvi agreed. “Which makes this very interesting. And there is another factor. The shared consciousness thing? One effect was that people came away with impressions from lives that weren’t their own. Some episodic memories. Some procedural. I’m sure the data Colonel Tanaka’s collecting will fuel a billion doctoral theses on holographic memory-encoding paradigms, but one of the things that keeps coming up was an awareness of a man who was present but wasn’t there. More than two percent of the people who experienced the event talked about him. And he’s in my dataset too. Cara’s seen him. The other one.”

They all turned to the girl. For a moment, she seemed smaller, more vulnerable. Like the girl she’d once been. Elvi expected her to speak, but Amos was the one to answer.

“Duarte. You think it’s Duarte.”

Fayez shrugged. “He was massively altered with protomolecule-based technologies. He popped himself out of a coma and went missing. And now this? Yeah, it’s our best guess.”

“So when he went missing, he vaporized? He’s a protomolecule ghost now?” Amos said. “Haunting the network?”

Jim looked ill, and Naomi put her hand on his elbow, squeezing lightly. Cara looked over to Amos, and Elvi couldn’t tell if the girl was uncomfortable that he was there or if she was looking to him for protection.

“I have no idea what happened to him, physically. But it is possible,” Elvi said, “that he’s been using the work we’re doing here to… piggyback. That he’s aware of the things Cara and Amos are aware of. That he’s finding some separate application for it.”

“That he hauled himself up out of a coma more powerful than before,” Jim said.

“It’s a theory,” Elvi said.

“What do we do if you’re right?” Jim asked.

Elvi steeled herself. “I think we should try a dual dive. Put Amos and Cara in separate sensor arrays, bring out the catalyst, send them both into the library together. Up to now, Amos’ experience has been mediated by their connection. If Cara and Amos are together, it could very plausibly give them more control than Cara’s had going by herself.”

“Control’s good,” Amos said. “What do we do once we have control?”

“We try to talk to him.”