Leviathan Falls

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Jim

Muskrat paddled her legs like she was swimming as she floated down the corridor outside the galley. Her bark was deep and conversational, and she had a wide canine grin. At the far end of the corridor, Xan went still for a split second before letting loose a peal of laughter and opening his arms to catch the floating dog.

“You can do it!” Teresa Duarte said, clapping her hands.

“She won’t bite me?” Xan called back.

“She’s a good dog. She doesn’t bite.”

The excitement on the black-eyed boy’s face was bright. He put out his hands, gray fingers splayed, and chortled with delight. Jim slipped past him, ducked under the floating dog, and pulled himself into the galley proper. Alex and Fayez were already there, Alex held to the floor by magnetic boots and Fayez on the float but steadied on a handhold.

“Looks like they’re having fun,” Jim said as the Rocinante decanted fresh coffee into a bulb. “What exactly are they doing?”

“They’re playing catch,” Alex said, “with the dog.”

Jim sipped the bitter, lovely coffee, feeling the familiar warmth against his palate and down his throat. “Of course they are. I don’t even know why I asked.”

Reconfiguring the Falcon’s lab for a dual dive wasn’t trivial, and it wasn’t fast. Elvi had packed enough supplies in the Falcon for anything and everything to break, so getting her hands on another set of sensors, a second medical couch, and enough backup monitoring units was simply a matter of figuring out which crate in which cargo hold. They couldn’t move the walls of the lab, though, and finding the space for all the equipment and the technical staff was taking time and an apparently endless number of meetings. Added to that were the baseline scans for Amos, integrating the data from the Roci’s medical bay, and a series of long, in-depth interviews with Elvi intended to map the previous explorations of the library to the shifts in consciousness and knowledge that the mechanic had suffered.

As the days moved on, more new faces started appearing on the Roci. First, it was Fayez and Elvi, but as her time became more and more in demand, Fayez started coming over alone. Then bringing Cara and Xan with him, or more often, just Xan. Outside the galley, Muskrat woofed happily as she drifted past the galley’s door heading back toward Teresa.

“Kids are getting along well,” Fayez said.

“You’re just setting Teresa up as a babysitter, aren’t you?” Alex asked. “I mean, she’s old enough.”

“Xan’s twice her age, easy,” Fayez said.

“He’s a kid, though,” Alex said. “It’s just he’s been a kid for a really long time.”

“What do you do when the models fail?” Fayez said, spreading his hands. “Xan and Cara don’t really exist on the kid/not-kid spectrum. They’re just Cara and Xan.”

Teresa’s laughter boiled in from the corridor. Even with the months she’d spent on the Roci, it was an unfamiliar sound, harsh and joyous. Jim didn’t think of Teresa Duarte as the laughing type.

But maybe it was just that she didn’t often have the opportunity for it. There weren’t very many people who could see past her circumstances to the girl she actually was. Jim wasn’t sure he could, even. She was the daughter of the god-emperor, their human shield, the heir to Laconia, and its highest-ranking apostate. All that was true, but it wasn’t complete. There was a kid there too. One who’d lost her mother and her dad, who’d run away from home, who needed things emotionally that Jim could guess at. But he didn’t know. He was probably just as much a cipher to her.

There was something weirdly universal about her laughter, though. And Xan’s. The sound of young humans at play. Jim realized they were being quiet, all three of them, and listening to the kids like it was a piece of music.

Muskrat whined once—a high, nervous sound—and Teresa called for Xan to stop. A moment later, her face appeared at the door, flushed and sweaty. “Hey. Muskrat needs to use the little dogs’ room. Can I take Xan down to the machine shop so he can see how it works?”

Jim’s reflexive Sure, go ahead stumbled over the idea of Xan and Teresa alone in the ship. It wasn’t that he thought they’d do anything malicious—it turned out he trusted Teresa more than that—but in their present moods, something could happen by mistake. The machine shop of an aging Martian gunship wasn’t a great place for oopsies.

“I’ll come too,” Alex said, and tossed the last of his meal into the recycler.

Jim turned to Teresa, pointed his thumb at Alex, and said, “Don’t let him start playing with the tools.”

The girl rolled her eyes, seeing through Jim’s weak joke to the concerns behind it and dismissing them out of hand. Alex clapped his shoulder on the way out, and Jim drank more of his coffee as girl and boy and dog and man muttered and chuckled their way to the lift shaft, and then down.

“Thank you,” Fayez said.

“You’re welcome. For what?”

“Letting Xan come get a little time away from the pressure cooker. He puts a good face on everything we’re doing, but it’s hard for him. Every time Cara goes in, I think he worries about how much of her is coming back.”

“Is that a problem?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. We’re not in territory with much precedent. We’ll pretty much know there’s a massive change coming when it’s already happened.”

“I know the feeling,” Jim said. He finished his coffee and tossed the bulb away.

“Thanks for letting me come over here too. The Falcon’s a fine ship, and the company’s generally not the worst, but after a few months on the float, I do start fantasizing about long walks by rivers and university coffee shops.”

Jim laughed politely, but there was a tightness in his chest. He keyed in a simple breakfast of eggs and beans. “I am sorry about that.”

“About what?” Fayez asked.

“Sticking you here. You and Elvi. I mean, I did kind of fuck you two over by getting you the job.”

Fayez tilted his head. Jim had known him since Ilus, and the years lay gently on the man. His hair was still thick and darker than it probably had a right to be. The lines in his face mostly gave evidence of laughter. Now he only looked thoughtful.

“I know why we’re here. If anything, we should thank you for the opportunity.”

“Okay, now you’re bullshitting me.”

Fayez was quiet for a long moment. Then, “You have a minute? I want to show you something.”

Jim shrugged, paused the meal, and followed as the other man led the way to the lift shaft, then to the airlock, and into the Falcon. The weird astringent smell was still there, but it wasn’t as assaulting now as the first time he’d smelled it. Familiarity had numbed him.

Fayez turned down a long hallway, heading down toward the ship’s reactor and drive decks. It was eerie seeing the same Martian design language that had built the Rocinante grown and complicated into the Laconian flesh of the Falcon. It reminded Jim of a documentary he’d seen about parasitic fungi that took over ants. Here was a ship that had been Martian, that became infected by the protomolecule and the ambitions of Winston Duarte, and now it looked similar and acted similar and you could almost mistake it for the kind of ship that the Roci still was. But this was something else.

“You know we keep Xan isolated when Cara goes on her dives, right?”

“I do,” Jim said.

“The idea is that he’d just be an extra variable. Another influence we’d have to correct for. But he’s also the control group. We see how Cara changes and how he doesn’t, and maybe that tells us something we need to know.”

A dark-haired woman with her attention on a hand terminal drifted into the corridor in front of them. When she glanced up and saw Jim, a glimmer of panic came into her eye. He nodded as they passed.

“That makes sense to me,” Jim said.

“And when we’re not doing that, we use the same rig to isolate the catalyst. It’s a lot like Ilus. You had a sample of the protomolecule on your ship, and it was accessing all the artifacts on Ilus. Flipping switches. Seeing what came on.”

“Looking to report that the ring gate was built.”

“Which it never did, because there was no one to report to. Well, we have a sample here, and Cortázar figured out how to loop it back onto itself so that our artifact only comes on when we want it to. Clean and easy, right?”

“Sounds like it.”

Fayez glanced back at him, and the laughter and humor were gone. “This is where we keep the sample. The catalyst. Come take a look.”

The cabin was small and spartan. A satchel was fixed to the wall with a tablet just visible at the edge. The only other thing reminded Jim of the kind of pressurization chamber used on Earth when someone had come up from scuba diving too quickly, or else a crematory furnace. It was a little over two meters long with a hatch at the end. A screen set into the box was dark. Fayez tapped it, and it came to life.

There was a woman on the screen. Her eyes were open. They glowed with a subtle blue light, and they focused on nothing. Jim understood, and it felt like a punch to the chest.

“This is the catalyst?”

“I looked her up,” Fayez said. “I didn’t tell Elvi. Back in the day, this was Francisca Torrez. She worked in the Science Directorate as a technician. I assume Cortázar knew her, at least in passing. She was going through something. Maybe her love life sucked. Maybe she always wanted to be a dancer and realized it wasn’t happening for her. Anyway, she started drinking and showed up to work intoxicated and belligerent. She didn’t even go home that day. Ochida had a streamlined disciplinary hearing with Cortázar and the head of security, and they put her in the Pen before she even sobered up.”

Jim looked at the face. It was smooth, but not like she was young. Like she was swollen. The woman… the catalyst… Francisca opened her mouth as if she were about to speak, then closed her lips again.

“For about five years before Duarte tracked Elvi down and brought her to Laconia—at your suggestion, granted—this woman was being eaten by the protomolecule. And she still is. We keep it in check so that it’s not growing free the way it did, but we don’t feed her. We don’t cut her hair. She doesn’t take bathroom breaks. She doesn’t sleep. Every now and then we hit the chamber with a couple hours of hard radiation. That’s it. She isn’t human in any meaningful way. Not anymore. She’s a skin balloon filled with protomolecule.”

Jim tried to catch his breath.

“I’m not going to bullshit you,” Fayez continued. “If we took what we do here to a normal ethics board, they’d just call the police. We’ve moved past scientific ethics, past moral questions, and I’m pretty sure we’re shooting past crimes against humanity now. But I still know it could be even worse.”

Jim nodded. “I understand.”

“No offense, but you fucking don’t,” Fayez said. “I don’t want to be the one doing this. I really don’t want Elvi to be the one doing it. But more than anything else, I don’t want Cortázar or Ochida to be here. The men who looked at Francisca Torrez and thought this was a good thing to do with her? I don’t want them in charge. If this was their lab, Xan wouldn’t be over with his new friend Teresa, laughing at a dog pooping into partial vacuum. He’d be in a box, like he was when we found him. They’d haul him out when they wanted to do something to him, and they’d put him back when they were done, just like they were fitting a screwdriver back in a toolbox. So yeah, you fucked me and mine over. And we’ve done shit here that the gods will never forgive us for. But when you’re feeling bad about it, remember that the alternative was somehow even worse.”

Jim was still thinking about it three days later when the lab was ready. It looked like a mess. Cables snaked along the walls and floor, tied in place with bits of wire and binding tape. The second medical couch—the one for Amos—was canted at thirty degrees to make space for the sensor arrays that were hooked into it. What had been a perfectly organized, clean, clear, overly designed space looked like Jim’s bedroom before he’d gone into the navy, only with less laundry on the floor. The voices of the Laconian team were tight and high. No one looked at him, and for the first time since the Roci had docked to the Falcon, he felt like being ignored came easy. When they did take note of him, the sense was more annoyance that he was in the way than anything else.

“If you feel uncomfortable…” Elvi was saying.

“I’m fine,” Cara answered. She was in a tight-fitting medical slip that kept her warm, held the contact sensors in place, and made a fine-mesh matrix for the scans that would be going through her as soon as the dive began. She looked like someone in a swimming competition. The same hard, athletic focus. “I want this. I’m ready for it.”

He thought there was a shift in Elvi’s expression, but he didn’t know what it signified.

Harshaan Lee, Elvi’s second-in-command, was strapping Amos into the other medical bed. The big man was in a suit that matched Cara’s, but where the girl was focus and determination, he was smiling at the absurdity of it all. The black eyes caught Jim’s, and Amos lifted his chin.

“Hey, Cap’n. You come to see the show?”

“I’m not sure how much there’s going to be for me to look at.”

“I do like the outfit,” Amos said. “Very flattering.”

“If you don’t want to do this, you just have to say the word. You know that, right?” Jim said.

“Please don’t move,” Dr. Lee said. “I’m trying to get the sensor baselined.”

“Sorry,” Amos said, then turned back to Jim. “You don’t have to worry about me. This is what I came here for.”

“Wait. Really?”

“Please lie flat against the medical couch,” Dr. Lee said.

Amos gave a cheerful thumbs-up, and shifted as he’d been told. Jim pushed back, letting himself float away against the wall. At the door to the hallway, Naomi floated in. Her hair was pulled back and she was scowling, but she softened when she saw him.

Dr. Lee’s voice was sharp and loud. “Final checks, all. Final checks.”

The activity in the room didn’t speed up or slow down, but it changed. Jim found a handhold and steadied himself with it. Elvi floated beside him.

“You ready for this?” Jim asked.

“I just hope it works. If we did all this for basically nothing… Well, that’ll suck.”

“Final checks are in and green,” Dr. Lee announced. “We are good to proceed on the lead researcher’s instruction.”

He looked over at Elvi. She nodded.

“We are good to proceed,” Lee said, and Jim thought there was a satisfaction in his voice. “Please transfer the catalyst now.”

On the medical couches, Cara relaxed and Amos closed his eyes.