Leviathan Falls

Chapter One: Jim

It pinged us,” Alex said. His voice was a light almost singsong that meant he thought they were screwed.

Jim, sitting on the ops deck with a tactical map of Kronos system on the screen and his heart going double time, tried to disagree. “Just because he’s knocking doesn’t mean he knows who’s home. Let’s keep acting like what we’re acting like.”

The Rocinante was acting like a small-haul freighter, a class of ship thick on the ground in Kronos system. Naomi had tuned the Epstein to run just dirty enough to change their drive signature without generating too much extra waste heat. A set of extra plating welded to their hull at an underground shipyard in Harris system had altered their silhouette. A slow dribble of liquid hydrogen was pumping out across the top of the ship and changing their thermal profile. When Naomi had gone over the plan to layer on camouflage, it had seemed comprehensive. It was only the threat of violence that made Jim feel exposed.

The enemy frigate was called the Black Kite. Smaller than the Storm-class destroyers, it was still well armed and had the self-healing outer hull that made Laconian ships hard to kill. It was part of a hunting group scouring all the inhabited systems for Teresa Duarte, runaway daughter of High Consul Winston Duarte, heir apparent to his empire, and, for the time being, apprentice mechanic on the Rocinante.

This wasn’t the first time they’d seen it.

“Any follow-up?” Jim asked.

“Just the ladar ping,” Alex said. “Think I should warm up the peashooter, just in case?”

Yeah, let’s do that was on the edge of Jim’s mind when Naomi’s voice answered instead. “No. There’s some evidence that their next-generation sensor arrays can recognize rail-gun capacitors.”

“That feels unfair,” Jim said. “What a crew does with its rail-gun capacitor in the privacy of its own ship shouldn’t be anyone else’s business.”

He could hear the smile in Naomi’s voice. “While I agree in principle, let’s keep the guns offline until we need them.”

“Copy that,” Alex said.

“Still no follow-up?” Jim asked, even though he had access to all the same logs Alex did. Alex checked anyway.

“Comms are dark.”

Kronos wasn’t quite a dead system, but it was close. The star there was large and fast-burning. There had been a habitable planet in the goldilocks zone there at one point—at least enough that the protomolecule had been able to hijack the biomass needed to build a ring gate. But in the strange eons since the gate’s formation and humanity’s stumbling into the alien ruins, the goldilocks zone had moved. The original life-bearing planet hadn’t quite been engulfed by the star yet, but its oceans had been boiled to nothing and its atmosphere stripped away. The only native life in Kronos was on the wet moon of an outlying gas giant, and that wasn’t much more than viciously competing continent-sized sheets of slime mold.

The human inhabitants of Kronos were around ten thousand miners on seven hundred thirty-two active sites. Corporations, government-sponsored interest groups, independent rock hoppers, and unholy legal hybrids of all three were stripping palladium out of a nicely rich scattering of asteroids and sending it out to anyone still building air recyclers or working on adjustment-terraforming projects.

Which was everyone.

Kronos had been the edge of the Transport Union’s reach back in the day, then the ass end of the Laconian Empire, and now no one really knew what it was. There were hundreds of systems like it, all through the gate network: places that either weren’t self-sufficient yet or didn’t plan to be, more focused on digging out their own little economic niche than any broader coalition. The kinds of places where the underground could usually hide and repair their ships and plan for what came next. On the tactical map, asteroids marked by orbit, survey status, composition, and legal ownership swirled around the angry star as thick as pollen in springtime. The ships were clumped around the excavation and survey sites by the dozen, and as many more were on lonely transits from one little outpost to another or on errands to gather water for reaction mass and radiation shielding.

The Black Kite had come through the ring gate three days before, torpedoed the underground’s radio repeater at the surface of the gate, and then burned gently to remain in place like a bouncer at a pretentious nightclub. The ring gates didn’t orbit the stars so much as remain in fixed position as though they’d been hung on hooks in the vacuum. It wasn’t the strangest thing about them. Jim had let himself hope that blowing up the underground’s pirate transmitter would be all the Kite did. That the enemy would finish its little vandalism and fuck off to cut the metaphorical telegraph wires on some other system.

It had stayed, scanning the system. Looking for them. For Teresa. For Naomi, functional leader of the underground. And for him.

The comm display lit up the green of an incoming transmission, and Jim’s gut knotted. At their present range, the battle wouldn’t come for hours, but the rush of adrenaline was like someone had fired a gun. The fear was so present and overwhelming that he didn’t notice anything odd.

“Broadcast,” Alex said over the ship comms and from the deck above Jim. “Weird it’s not a tightbeam… I don’t think he’s talking to us.”

Jim opened the channel.

The woman’s voice had a clipped, emotionless formality that was like the accent of the Laconian military. “… as offensive action and treated as such. Message repeats. This is the Black Kite to registered freighter Perishable Harvest. By order of Laconian security forces, you will cut your drive and prepare for boarding and inspection. Refusal to comply will be viewed as an offensive action and treated as such. Message repeats…”

Jim filtered the tactical map. The Perishable Harvest was about thirty degrees spinward of the Roci, and burning toward the wide, angry sun. If they’d gotten the message, they hadn’t complied with it yet.

“Is that one of ours?” Jim asked.

“Nope,” Naomi said. “It’s listed as property of a David Calrassi out of Bara Gaon. I don’t know anything about it.”

With light delay, they should have received the Black Kite’s command ten minutes before the Rocinante did. Jim imagined some other crew in a panic because they’d received the message he’d been dreading. Whatever happened next, the Rocinante was out of the crosshairs for the moment at least. He wished he could feel the relief a little more deeply.

Jim unstrapped from the crash couch and swung around. The bearings hissed as it shifted under his weight.

“I’m heading down to the galley for a minute,” he said.

“Grab a coffee for me too,” Alex said.

“Oh no. Not coffee. I’m maybe up to some chamomile or warm milk. Something soothing and unaggressive.”

“Sounds good,” Alex said. “When you change your mind and get some coffee, grab one for me too.”

On the lift, Jim leaned against the wall and waited for his heart to stop racing. This was how heart attacks came, wasn’t it? A pulse that started fast and then never slowed until something critical popped. That was probably wrong, but it felt that way. He felt that way all the time.

It was getting better. Easier. The autodoc had been able to supervise the regrowth of his missing teeth. Apart from the indignity of needing to numb his gums like a toddler, that had gone well enough. The nightmares were old acquaintances by now. He’d started having them on Laconia while still a prisoner of High Consul Duarte. He’d expected them to fade once he was free, but they were getting worse. Being buried alive was the most recent version. More often it was someone he loved being murdered in the next room and not being able to key in the lock code fast enough to save them. Or having a parasite living under his skin and trying to find a way to cut it out. Or the guards on Laconia coming to beat him until his teeth broke again. The way that they had.

On the upside, the old dreams about forgetting to put on his clothes or not studying for a test seemed to be off the rotation. His weirdly vindictive dream life wasn’t all bad.

There were still days when he couldn’t shake the sense of threat. Sometimes a part of his mind would get trapped in the unfounded and irrational certainty that his Laconian torture team was about to find him again. Others, it was the less irrational dread of the things beyond the gates. The apocalypse that had destroyed the protomolecule’s makers and was on the path to destroying humanity.

Seen in that light, maybe he wasn’t the broken part of the equation. Maybe the larger situation was bad enough that feeling as whole and sane as the man he’d been before his Laconian imprisonment would have been a sign of madness. Still, he wished he could tell whether the waves of shuddering were a resonance effect of running the drive dirty or if it was just him.

The lift stopped, and he stepped out, turning toward the galley. The soft, rhythmic thump of dog tail against deck told him Teresa and Muskrat were already there. Amos—black-eyed, gray-skinned, and back from the dead—was there too, sitting at the table with the same placeholder smile he’d always had. Jim hadn’t seen him shot in the head back on Laconia, but he knew about the drones that had taken the pieces of human flesh and reconnected them. Naomi still struggled with whether the thing that called itself Amos really was the mechanic they’d shipped with for so many years, or if he’d become an alien mechanism that only thought it was Amos because it was made from his body and brain. Jim had decided that even if he looked different, even if he sometimes knew things that were scraps of the ancient alien world, Amos was Amos. He didn’t have the spare energy to think about it more deeply than that.

Besides which, the dog liked him. Not a perfect critical guide, but probably the least imperfect.

Muskrat, sitting at Teresa’s feet, looked up at Jim hopefully and wagged her tail against the deck again.

“I don’t have any sausage,” Jim said to the expressive brown eyes. “You’ll have to make do with kibble like the rest of us.”

“You spoiled her,” Teresa said. “She’s never letting you forget that.”

“If I go to heaven, let it be for spoiling dogs and children,” Jim said, and headed for the dispenser. Without thinking, he keyed in a bulb of coffee. Then, realizing what he’d done, he added one for Alex.

Teresa Duarte shrugged and turned her attention back to the tube of mushroom, flavorings, and digestive fiber that was her breakfast. Her hair was pulled back in a dark ponytail, and her mouth had a permanent slight frown that was either a quirk of her physiology or her character. Jim had seen her grow from a precocious child to a rebellious adolescent in the State Building in Laconia. She was fifteen now, and it was sobering to remember who he’d been at her age: a thin, dark-haired Montana boy with no particular ambitions beyond the knowledge that if nothing else worked out, he could join the navy. Teresa seemed older than adolescent Jim had been, both more knowledgeable about the universe and angrier with it. Maybe the two went hand in hand.

She’d been afraid of him when he’d been her father’s prisoner. Now that she was on Jim’s ship, the fear seemed to have evaporated. He’d been her enemy then, but he wasn’t sure that he was her friend now. The emotional complexity of an adolescent girl socialized in isolation was probably more than he could ever really understand.

The dispenser finished both his bulb and Alex’s, and Jim took them, appreciating the warmth against his palms. The shuddering was almost gone now, and the bitterness of the coffee was more calming than tea would have been.

“We’re going to need a resupply before much longer,” Amos said.

“Really?”

“We’re okay on water, but we could stand to re-up the fuel pellets. And the recyclers ain’t what they used to be.”

“How bad?”

“We’re solid for a few weeks yet,” Amos said.

Jim nodded. His first impulse was to dismiss it as a problem for another day. That was wrong, though. Fuck-it-if-it’s-not-happening-right-now was crisis thinking, and if he couldn’t break out of it, it would only lead to more crises later on.

“I’ll talk to Naomi,” he said. “We’ll figure something out.” Assuming the Laconians don’t find us. Assuming the gate entities don’t kill us. Assuming that any of the thousand other catastrophes I haven’t even thought of don’t kill us all before it matters. He took another sip of his coffee.

“How’re you doing, Cap’n?” Amos asked. “You seem a little twitchy.”

“Fine,” Jim said. “Just covering near-constant panic with light humor, same as anyone.”

Amos had a moment of eerie stillness—one of the hallmarks of his new self—and then smiled a little wider. “All right then.”

Alex broke in over the ship comms. “We got something.”

“Something good?”

“Something,” Alex said. “The Perishable Harvest just dumped some kind of liquid, and it’s burning like hell for the big trade station in the outer Belt.”

“Copy that,” Naomi said—also over the comms—in the new staccato calm that Jim thought of as her Commander Nagata voice. “Confirming.”

“The Black Kite?” Jim asked the wall.

Alex and Naomi were silent for a moment, then Alex said, “Looks like they’re going after them.”

“Moving away from the ring gate?”

“Yes indeed,” Alex said, and the pleasure in his voice was unmistakable.

Jim felt a surge of relief, but it didn’t last more than a moment. He was already thinking about the ways it might be a trap. If the Roci turned toward the ring too soon, it would draw attention to them. Even if the Roci evaded the Black Kite, there might be another Laconian ship risking itself by waiting inside the ring space, ready to intercept any ship fleeing the system.

“Why are they running?” Teresa asked. “They don’t think they’re going to get away, do they? Because that would be stupid.”

“They aren’t trying to save the ship,” Amos said. He had the same patient, almost philosophical tone as when he was walking her through how to do a good weld in microgravity or checking the seal on a pipe. It was the voice of a teacher walking his student through a lesson in how the world worked. “Whatever they had on that ship that Laconia was going to get pissed about, they can’t hide it. Not in a system as thin as this one. And there’s no way they’re slipping off and swapping transponders, so their ship’s fucked. The trade station’s big enough they can maybe get the crew off and sneak onto other ships or pretend they were on the station all along.”

“Running to where the hiding places are,” Teresa said.

“And the more lead time they have, the better the chances they can find a good spot,” Amos said.

That could be us, Jim thought. If the Black Kite had decided that we looked a little sketchier than the Perishable Harvest, we would be sacrificing the Roci and hoping we could get small enough to overlook. Only it wasn’t true. There was no hiding place in Kronos or anywhere small enough that Laconia wouldn’t look there. Plain sight was their best hope, because their plan B was violence.

He didn’t think he’d said anything aloud or made any kind of noise that would show his distress, but maybe he had, because Teresa looked at him with something between annoyance and sympathy. “You know I won’t let them hurt you.”

“I know that you’ll try,” Jim said.

“I’m still the daughter of the high consul,” she said. “I’ve gotten you out of trouble before.”

“I’m not leaning on that trick,” Jim said, more harshly than he’d intended. Muskrat shifted, hauled herself up to standing, and looked from Jim to Teresa and back in distress. Teresa’s eyes hardened.

“I think what the captain’s saying,” Amos said, “is that using you as a meat shield isn’t something he’s a hundred percent comfortable with. It’s not that you wouldn’t do it, since you already did. But the people on the other end of that gun? We don’t know them, they may not be the most reliable, and the less we have to count on them, the better.”

Teresa scowled, but less.

“Yes,” Jim said. “That was much more eloquent.”

“Sometimes I’m good that way,” Amos said, and it might have been a joke or it might not. “You want us to get the ship ready to rabbit? We’ve got enough reaction mass for a decent burn.”

“I thought we needed fuel pellets.”

“We do, but we can spend ’em getting out of Kronos, put water on the grocery list, and call it good. Recyclers are really going to be our limiting factor.”

The pull of the thought was stronger than gravity. Light the drive, put nose toward the ring gate, and get the hell out before the enemy could get hold of them. Jim intentionally loosened his grip on the bulbs. “Naomi. What do you think?”

A moment of silence, then, “Sorry. I wasn’t listening. What was the question?”

“Should we prep the Roci for a mad dash out of here? As soon as the Black Kite’s fully committed to its burn, we could make a break.”

“No,” she said, the way he had known she would. “They haven’t identified us. If we go too soon, it’ll only make them suspicious. Better if we look like bystanders. Alex? Plot an intercept with the Whiteoak. It’s the big ice hauler at the second gas giant.”

“Got her,” Alex said.

Amos shifted on his bench. “Captain?”

“I’m fine.”

“If we need to run,” Naomi said, “we’ll run.”

We’ll always need to run. We’ll never get to rest, Jim thought. There didn’t seem like any point in saying it.