Leviathan Falls

Chapter Thirty-Three: Naomi

Naomi floated in her cabin, her mind dancing over the work. The underground had been difficult and unwieldy even in the days when Saba ran it, and she’d only been one of his lieutenants. Since the fall of Laconia and her own flight before the storm, it had slipped further into chaos. The secret shipyards in Larson system had gone quiet so long she assumed they’d been discovered or else suffered some catastrophic accident. Then a report appeared in her queue that began with a brief, dismissive apology and went on as though nothing odd had happened. One of the cells in Sol system had been discovered and detained, but six others began their own counter-operation without waiting for approval from the rest of the organization. In Calypso, Théo Ammundsun, formerly director of the Louvre on Earth, was going about creating an institution to catalog and gather samples of alien artifacts. He delivered only sporadic and incomplete reports. Entries like San Ysidro sample appears active—Moving to isolate filled her with more dread than information.

It was her network, and every day that she took her eyes off it, every hour she didn’t pepper it with messages and pull the best local leaders into power, every moment that she didn’t prove the value of a centralized coordinator, the net frayed. Maybe that was inevitable. All she had was her name and reputation, Jim’s name and reputation. It was a thin lever arm to move people who wanted to see the kneecapping of Laconia as freedom instead of responsibility.

She prepared messages to the places she thought might be useful: Gregor Shapiro on Ganymede had done the most work with nonlocal signaling protocols; Emilia Bell-Cavat (who was either three weeks late reporting in or whose latest reports had gone astray) was both a secret coordinator of the underground in New Greece system and an expert on noninsect superorganisms; Kachela al-Din worked with direct brain-to-brain communication in a medical context before he’d become a ship designer. They were her straws, and she was reaching for them. The sense of moving too slowly, of being too far behind even as she began, made Duarte’s hive mind seem almost seductive. If across all the spread of the human race, she could just ask her questions, hear the answers, be with the people she needed and wasn’t with…

“Hey,” Jim said from the doorway. “Did something happen with Elvi?”

“You mean besides the miraculous appearance and vanishing of the god-emperor in her lab?”

Jim considered. “I mean besides that, but when you put it that way, I guess that would cover a lot of weird. She’s just seemed kind of nervous.”

“I’m going back to the god-emperor thing.”

“I meant around us in particular,” Jim said as he pulled himself into the cabin. “She was going to come have dinner here on the Roci, but she bailed. I feel like maybe something about Amos bothered her.”

“Have you asked her?”

“You see? There you go with your useful, straightforward suggestions. I never come up with those kinds of things myself.”

“Yes, you do.”

He braced himself at the wall behind her, looking over her shoulder at the arrayed underground. “What’ve you got?”

“Just what was in the toolbox before,” she said. “I feel like I came to cook a meal and it turns out it’s a poetry competition. Everything I built was to fight against Laconia back when Laconia was simple things, like invulnerable ships and neofascist authoritarians. Now that it’s become a really invasive bad dream, how do you build a resistance to fight that?”

“It was kind of always an invasive bad dream, but I get what you’re saying,” Jim said. “Plus San Esteban. Don’t forget the boiling dark gods looking to snuff out all life because we annoyed them. Do you have a sense what the plan is?”

“Track Duarte down and talk him out of it,” she said. “Find a way to access and use whatever tools the builders made without turning all humanity into an extended version of Winston Duarte’s hippocampus.”

Jim nodded and rubbed his chin and neck with the flat of his palm in a way that meant he wasn’t convinced. That was fair. She wasn’t either.

“We do have Teresa,” Naomi continued. “She’s the only individual he’s shown enough concern for to adjust his cognition. If she asks him, maybe he’ll change again.”

“Parent and child,” Jim agreed. “That’s powerful stuff. Not sure I’d want to rely on it for, like, the survival of the human race.”

“Failure position is force him out of his position, whatever that is, and find someone else who can step into his place. Cara, Xan. Amos.”

“Jesus, really?”

“Not my first option, but maybe.”

Jim’s sigh was soft, gentle. It would have been less devastating if she hadn’t heard the despair under it. “Detective Miller once told me, ‘We don’t have a right thing, just a plateful of a little less wrong.’”

“Yeah, but he was an asshole.”

Jim laughed, then reached out and put his hand on the back of her head. She pushed back into him, taking pleasure and comfort in the simple physical presence of the man she trusted.

“When you send out the information,” Jim said, almost apologetically. “I mean, when you explain the situation to the rest of the underground? That’s going to pull a trigger.”

“I know,” she murmured.

“You have a plan for that?”

“I do.”

“Am I going to like it?”

“Nope,” she said, and opened her eyes, looking up into his gentle, bright gaze looking back down at her.

“I didn’t figure,” he said.

Later, when she crossed back over to the Falcon, Naomi would keep that look in mind. They had come a long way—both together and apart—since they’d been babies on the Canterbury. It was easy for her to think that life had beaten the idealism and joy out of them. She felt ground down to the nerve endings more often than she didn’t. And Jim seemed… not tired, exactly, but all used up. Like his fuel tank was empty and he was just trying to coast gracefully to the finish line. But even so, now and then she saw him still in there. Behind the dark-rimmed pale eyes, under the graying hair, the same reckless, holy fool she’d noticed when Captain McDowell brought him on board. Time and use had changed them, but it hadn’t changed what they were. There was joy in that. A promise.

She found Elvi alone in the lab. The apparatus of the dive—paired medical couches, scanners, and sensor arrays—were on the float with her. Here and there, a few cords had come loose from their fittings and floated in the subtle breeze. Elvi herself moved from one console to the next, bringing up logs and datafiles, checking connections and power levels. The atrophy of her muscles left her looking frailer than Naomi pictured her. There was a haunted look in her eyes.

“What are you working on?” Naomi asked instead of saying hello.

“Nothing in particular,” Elvi said. “It’s just… I had a roommate when I went to university who used to do needlepoint. He wasn’t great at it, but it gave his hands something to do while he thought. When he was stuck on a problem and couldn’t see any way out—” She gestured at the empty lab. There was something bleak in the gesture. “I’m doing needlepoint. Have you ever done something you knew was wrong, but you told yourself that this time it was justified? That just this once, the rules didn’t apply? Or if they did, there was a grander cause that made it okay?”

“You just described most of the last decade of my life,” Naomi said.

“I don’t know how I move forward with this protocol.”

Is something wrong? hovered in the back of Naomi’s mouth. It was only the ridiculous obviousness of the answer that changed it to “I’ve finished all my messages. They’re ready to send.”

“All right,” Elvi said. “I’ll clear your access to the comms.”

“It’s not going to be that easy,” Naomi said. “You say the relays are safe. I believe you. But…”

“You think Trejo will find out.”

“I know he will. When I send this, it’s going to twenty people in sixteen systems. They’re going to tell their networks. And it’s going to be the most important thing anyone has seen. This will leak. It will leak the minute I send it out, and I can’t stop that from happening.”

Elvi took one end of a floating cable in her hand, considered it, and plugged it into a slot in the medical couch where Amos had been for the dive. For a moment, Naomi felt like there were three of them in the room. Elvi and her, but also the empty space where Winston Duarte had appeared to be. It was only air now, but it had significance. The empire, the underground, and the man who would be God. Three sides of the coin.

“We have to get help,” Elvi said. “I’ve been trying to do this by myself. I can’t. I’m not even sure I trust my judgment anymore. Duarte’s plan will affect everyone. Everywhere. I don’t even know that I can make a moral case against sending messages out. Even if it means Trejo orders Dr. Lee to shoot me in the head.”

“That seems like an extreme call.”

“It’s Laconia. They do shit like that all the time.”

“Well, I have another thought,” Naomi said. “But I wanted to talk to you about it first.”

“Admiral Trejo,” Naomi said, dead-eyeing the camera, “I accept your proposal and the amnesty you offered to the underground. I am sending copies of your original broadcast in Freehold and this response for dissemination within my organization. Once my people see that local Laconian forces are abiding by your word, all action against Laconian personnel and assets will end, and we can start working on our more pressing issues.

“To that end, I am including files, debriefings, and interviews around a recent experiment which I think you’ll agree is both interesting and alarming.”

Naomi steadied herself. She felt like there should be more to say, that this was one of those moments that history books leaned on. The acceptance speech that ended the war between Laconia and the remnants of the Transport Union. She’d had thoughts and intentions, things she’d meant to say, but now that she was in the moment, they all seemed ponderous and artificial.

Screw it, she thought. Posterity can take care of itself.

“Please get back to me. The sooner we can establish some working protocols, the sooner we can address this situation.”

She stopped the recording.

“And the less likely we are to be sucked up into a vast, inhuman consciousness in which we are all lost like raindrops falling into an ocean,” she finished to the inactive lens.

Elvi, at her workstation, gave a thumbs-up. The recording was good. Naomi stretched her arms out to the side, easing the tension that had knotted itself between her shoulder blades. For a moment, she pictured all the people who had sworn to join the fight against Duarte and Laconia who would be seeing this. She wanted to believe that they’d all follow her lead, they’d all see the wisdom in her choices, they’d all put aside their grudges and their guns. Or a plurality of them, even. There was a future not far from here where she was going to be fighting against a bunch of the people who’d once been her allies. She would be announcing not only the situation with Duarte, but laying her cards on the table with the underground and Trejo alike. It was the most James Holden–esque thing she’d ever contemplated.

“Last chance,” she said. “Do we send it or not?”

Elvi looked stricken. “Oh. No. I…” She made the thumbs-up gesture again, more tentatively this time. “It’s sent. It’s gone. I sent it. Was that not what we agreed?”

“It’s fine,” Naomi said. “Now, let’s see if he sends us a bouquet or a battle group. I should go tell my crew what we’ve done.”

“Same.”

“This was the right thing,” Naomi said.

Elvi tilted her head and looked away. When she spoke, her voice was smaller, but also strangely more relaxed. “I think it was. I wish that meant we’d be rewarded for it.”

Naomi left, skimming down the Laconian corridors for the airlock. The enemy crew that maybe, sort of, technically wasn’t the enemy for the moment made way for her. Slipping across the bridge and back into the Rocinante felt like pulling on a favorite jacket. She had known that she was doing something momentous, but somehow she hadn’t really felt it until it was behind her. Whatever happened from here, Trejo would know she’d been working with Elvi and everything Duarte had said about his plan.

As she headed down toward engineering and the machine shop, she found herself wondering what it would be like to feel her connection to the vast swelling mass of humanity more immediately than she felt her own sense of self. She’d read some of the early analyses that Elvi’s team had done with a theoretical model based on Cara and Amos. The ways that the folds of their brains began to act as if they were physically cross-connected, and a thought that began in one could cascade over into the other and then back again like a song traveling through a window. It seemed oddly poetic when it didn’t seem like annihilation.

When she reached engineering, Teresa and Amos were hard at work. The preflight checklists were on the wall screens, and almost half were already in the green.

“Boss,” the thing that had been Amos said. “What’s up?”

“I was going to say we might want to look at prepping for a burn, but—” She gestured at the screens.

“Figured we were better ready than not ready.”

“Good call,” she said. “I took Trejo’s offer. I’m waiting to see if he’s still offering. If he’s not…”

“Amos said you saw him,” Teresa said. She was wearing a flight suit with one of the old Tachi designs. Naomi was surprised that after all this time the Roci still had the instructions to make those. “My father. You saw him?”

“We saw something,” Naomi said. “But we know it was an illusion. We can’t know what it was really based on. It seemed like him.”

“Pretty sure it was the guy,” Amos said. “My vantage point was a little different.”

“Are we going to kill him?” Teresa asked. There was no fear or pleading in her voice. If there was anger—and there was anger—it wasn’t aimed at her.

“We don’t know what we’re going to do,” Naomi said. “I’m not looking to kill anybody. But there may be a way to use what he’s found without using it the way he wants to use it.”

“If you were going to kill him, would you tell me?”

“Yes,” Naomi said, and meant it.

For a moment, all three of them were still. Teresa was the first to move, just a terse nod and then she turned back to the inventory screens. Amos’ smile widened a millimeter. Naomi had the impression that the girl had just done something he was proud of her for.

It was almost a full day before the message came back from Laconia. By then, Naomi had spent a long, sleepless night second-guessing herself, Alex and Jim were up to speed, and the Rocinante was ready to burn for the ring gate whether in tandem with the Falcon or on her own.

She was about to throw on a vac suit and run a visual inspection of the Roci’s plating when Jim called to her from the ops deck. “Naomi. We have something. It’s from Trejo.”

She put the helmet back in its cradle and pulled herself up to ops. Alex had already come down. His eyes were wide with concern. Jim could have been carved from plaster. She didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say. Either her gambit had worked or it hadn’t. They’d all know soon enough.

She pulled up her message queue. The entry at the top was marked ANTON TREJO. She opened it and pulled back far enough that the others could see. Trejo appeared at the same desk he’d been sitting at in the Freehold message, but with a less pleasant expression. Still technically a smile, but there was an anger in it that Naomi couldn’t miss if she wanted to. Fair enough. She’d just humiliated him by showing the underground and through them everyone in every system that Naomi Nagata had infiltrated the highest ranks of Laconia.

“Naomi Nagata,” Trejo said, and then chuckled like he’d practiced it. “You are a pistol, aren’t you? I am glad that we’re finally on the same side. I want you to know I’ve always respected your grit and your competence. I wish you’d gotten to know our cause under different circumstances. All this might have come out differently. Better now than never, though.”

“That man is going to put a bullet in the back of your head,” Jim said.

“Oh yeah,” Alex agreed. “No question.”

“If we get that far, I’ll deal with it,” Naomi said.

She rolled the message back to keep from missing anything. “As an initial gesture of our cooperation, I’m including a security briefing to you and Dr. Okoye both. Take a look at it, and let me know what you think. I’d appreciate it if we could use the secure channels moving forward. I’m sure the good doctor can tell you anything you need to get that set up if it’s not already.”

“This man spent weeks having me slowly beaten to death,” Jim said. “And he was never as angry at me as he is at you now.”

Naomi was already pulling up the security download. The featured report was of the inside of the ring space at the moment it went white. She’d seen it enough in Elvi’s scientific reports to recognize it. When the ring gates lit, blasting the ships there with light, the image froze, shifted. It seemed to be moving in toward the station at the center of the ring space. A small darkness stood out against the light, and a text window opened with the words: MATCH CERTAINTY 98.7%.

“Get Elvi,” Naomi said.