Leviathan Falls

Chapter Thirty-Five: Alex

At first, Alex didn’t notice the sounds of violence. There were several reasons for that: He was on the flight deck at the top of the Rocinante, and the fighting was down by the crew airlock; he was at the end of a long, busy shift, and the fatigue left him a little slower on the uptake than usual; he was watching one of his favorite old neo-noir entertainment feeds, and the detective—played by Shin Jung Park—had just followed the mysterious woman—Anna Reál—into a nightclub on Titan. It was only a few minutes before he’d find the policeman’s body, and maybe an hour before he realized that the mysterious woman was his daughter. Alex had seen this one many times over the years. He knew it well. Rewatching old feeds was a comfort for him. There was a calm that came with knowing what was going to happen.

He couldn’t tell what caught his attention, only that something in the club sounded wrong. He paused the feed, Shin Jung Park with his eyes half closed and his mouth open awkwardly in the middle of ordering a drink. The Roci was just the hum of recyclers and his own heartbeat. When the next shout came, Alex started. It was a girl’s voice lifted in rage. He couldn’t make out individual words, but it was only trouble.

He unstrapped and hauled himself down through ops to the lift. The girl’s voice came again, louder and fast. The only thing he could make out was the word fucking in the middle of a sentence. Then a sound of impact loud enough that the hull rang with it for a few seconds.

“Hey there,” he said as he pulled himself toward the crew airlock. “Something wrong?”

No one answered back, but he heard Amos talking low and calm. Alex’s first thought was that something had happened to Muskrat, and Teresa was losing herself in grief, but that didn’t quite seem right either.

The girl’s voice came again, and it wasn’t Teresa. It was younger, higher. A serrated blade of a voice. You had no fucking right to get involved in it. You are shit to me. You are the same kind of vicious fuck that Cortázar was, and you can get back there and tell her you were wrong. Alex drifted down.

Cara floated at the airlock, her face a mask of rage and pain. Amos blocked her way into the Roci, his arms stretched out to either wall as if he were casually bracing himself there. Jim and Teresa were in the lift shaft, coming up from the crew decks, drawn by the same commotion. Teresa’s eyes were wide and anxious. Jim met Alex’s eyes and nodded.

“I get why you’re pissed, Sparkles,” Amos said. “This part’s rough.”

“Stop saying that!” the smaller girl shouted. “You don’t know shit about me!”

“But it’ll pass,” Amos went on. “Maybe it doesn’t go all the way back to what it was before you put your head in that thing, but it’ll get better than this.”

“I am supposed to be in there! They’re supposed to tell me things! I want it, and you fucked it up for me. Now you need to fix it.”

“This is what fixed looks like now.”

“We’re dead anyway!” She was fighting against sobs now. “It doesn’t matter if we’re all dead anyway.”

“We should get you back to Little Man. He’s worried about you.”

“Stay out of our heads!” Cara screamed, and launched herself at Amos. The impact of their bodies was deeper and more violent than Alex had expected, like they were both weighted with lead. Cara’s attack wasn’t balanced or braced, and Amos was. She flailed, losing her orientation. Her heel, swinging, hit the bulkhead with a sound like a hammer strike. Where she hit, the fabric and foam had a deep dent.

The screams and sobs grew more violent and then, like a candle guttering out, faded suddenly into nothing. Amos looked back over his shoulder, first at Jim and Teresa, then back up toward Alex. A black streak across his right cheek showed where Cara had struck him.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” Amos said.

“Take your time,” Alex replied, and then felt stupid for saying it. But Amos only nodded and passed from handhold to handhold until he reached Cara where she floated, curled tightly into herself, her whole body a fist. Amos said something to the girl that Alex couldn’t hear, and then tucked her in one broad, pale arm and pulled her with him out the airlock door and across the docking bridge.

Jim and Teresa rose up as Alex floated down, and the three of them watched Amos cross to the Falcon and pass into it.

“Well, shit,” Alex said. “Looks like Elvi told her about us dropping the whole library thing.”

“He knew it would be ugly,” Teresa said. “He’s been waiting for this to happen. He told Dr. Okoye to put responsibility for shutting the experiments down on him.”

“Because he can take the punch?” Alex asked.

“Have you seen Elvi?” Jim said. “She looks like she’d break if you breathed on her too hard.”

“Well, good on Amos, I guess,” Alex said. For a moment, he had the sense that someone else was in the airlock with them—some fourth person watching alongside them. He looked back toward the lift, expecting to see Naomi, but no one was there.

Once the order came, getting the Rocinante ready to evacuate Adro system didn’t take long at all. Alex had been over the flight checks with the experience of a lifetime lifting him through the process. The maneuvering thrusters were all reporting back solid. The water supply was still pretty healthy, especially compared with the Falcon, which rode drier than Alex would have been comfortable with. The air recyclers were working at better-than-spec. The Epstein drive would need a refit sometime in the next year, if things went well enough that they were all still alive and recognizably human by then.

Alex had heard the idea that a tool, used long enough and cared for well enough, developed a soul. He’d never been a religious man, but even without going to the supernatural, he felt like there was some truth in that. The Rocinante and Alex had spent a lot of years in each other’s company, and he understood the ship the way he would a friend. It was probably just normal primate subliminal pattern matching, but he experienced it as the ship having moods and needs. He could tell when a thruster wanted to have its feed lines replaced by the way the ship turned, knew when they were low on reaction mass by the sound of the drive echoing in the halls. Getting ready for another burn out toward the gates was like pulling on his socks. He didn’t even think about it anymore. The ship and her crew were intimate enough that it all just happened.

The Falcon was a newer ship with a younger crew, and breaking it down for a trip—especially after months on the float—took longer. Elvi’s people had been running a lab without any particular need to worry about arcane ideas like up and down. Now, everything had to be unmade, stowed, and packed away. Alex had the sense that some of the crew over there hadn’t expected to ever leave Adro.

The last decision was whether to leave the docking bridge in place and coordinate their drives. It wasn’t that hard a maneuver. It just meant letting the Falcon and the Rocinante talk to each other as they burned so that their drives stayed in sync. The bridge from one ship to the other could remain in place, and they could go back and forth easily. Alex liked the idea. He didn’t want the Falcon’s crew coming over, and he didn’t have any particular interest in making the crossing himself, but there was an equality that driving in tandem like that carried. The Rocinante was an old gunship from before the gates had opened. The Falcon was Laconia’s state-of-the-art science vessel with even more advanced technology than the Gathering Storm had boasted. Putting the two of them into a single unit made Alex feel like the Roci was getting the correct level of respect.

But even though Naomi had accepted the Laconian armistice, she wasn’t keen on having the Falcon’s system too intimately connected to the Roci’s. When the time came, Naomi and Jim, Amos and Teresa and Muskrat all folded themselves back into their places. The Roci pulled its docking bridge back in, and the two ships turned their backs to the great green diamond and burned toward the gate, together but separate. It felt like an omen of something, but Alex was damned if he could tell what. He kept thinking about Amos and Cara in the airlock, of her anger and his calm. He wasn’t sure whether he was glad the black-eyed girl wasn’t able to cross over at will or worried that Amos would be stuck on the Roci if things went bad on the Falcon.

The burn was hard but not punishing. A little over a full gravity most of the time, backing down to half that at meals. There were more newsfeeds and reports from other ships in the underground now that they weren’t hiding from Laconian forces, and Alex followed some of them. Every time a new packet arrived, he hoped for a message from Kit. Naomi was deep in the coordination, listening to messages, answering them, passing them across to the Falcon for Elvi to see and comment on.

Amos had died and been hauled back from the abyss without it changing much about his demeanor, but Jim and Teresa were both wearing the stress of the moment heavily. Jim kept his usual facade of good humor, but now and then, the deep fatigue showed. Teresa, on the other end of the spectrum, had tapped into a nervous energy that couldn’t find an outlet. From the moment she woke, she ran diagnostics that weren’t due for weeks or cleaned filters that had only recently been cleaned or went to the ship gym and pushed herself through the resistance gel. Alex would have put it down to the bottomless reserves of youth if it hadn’t felt so much like fear.

A day before they reached the halfway point and were slated to start their braking burn, he found Teresa in the galley eating a protein bar and watching video of the ring gate they were hurtling toward. Swirls of highly charged particles and light poured off of it like mist.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” Alex said.

“We always knew the gates were energy sources,” Teresa said with a shrug.

Alex changed his meal plan. He’d been going to head up to the flight deck and watch his feeds. Instead he had the galley serve him a plate of rice and black sauce, then sat across from Teresa with a fork. She glanced at him, and then away.

“Seems like something’s bugging you,” Alex said. “Or am I making that up?”

She shrugged a sharp, percussive shrug. He wondered if she’d been having dreams about the bright gates too, or if that was just him.

“I keep thinking about the fight,” she said.

“Yeah,” Alex said, thinking she meant the battle against the things that had killed San Esteban.

“He’s different. I knew the repair drones changed him, but so much is the same that I just thought he was him still. But they killed him on New Egypt, and he didn’t die. The girl who was yelling at him? Cara? If she’d hit you or me, she’d have broken our bones. He just took it. Like it was nothing.”

“Amos was always tough as old leather,” Alex said. “That’s not new.”

“He’s just so different.” She stuffed the last of the protein bar into her mouth, chewed for a minute, swallowed. “I think about my father.”

“Because he changed too?”

Teresa leaned forward, her elbows on the table. Her jaw was tight and the brightness in her eyes looked a little feverish. “I thought he was gone. I thought the whole experiment went bad and he was just… People lose their parents all the time. I thought I was one of those.”

“Orphaned.”

“But if he’s only changed, I don’t know what I am. Orphan. Not orphan. Something else.”

“And now we’re going to see him. It worries you.”

“How much can you change and still be you?” she asked, and it took Alex a few seconds to realize it wasn’t a rhetorical. He took another forkful of rice to give himself time to think.

“Well,” he said, “people change all the time. Not changing would be weirder. I mean, look at you. You’re not the same person you were before you came here. Shit, you’re different from when you first came on the ship. Older, more sure of yourself, better mechanic. I’m not the same guy I used to be. Amos… Yeah, it’s more extreme. It’s weirder. Same with your dad. But I think Amos is still Amos, even if it’s a different version of him. I think when we find your dad, he’ll at least be like what he used to be. You know? I mean, I expect he’s still going to care about you.”

“I don’t know that,” she said, and the bleakness in her voice told him he’d cut close to the bone.

“I have a kid,” he said. “I’m a dad, just like your father. And I promise you, the connection between a parent and a child? That’s basic. It’s deep. You look at Amos and see all the ways he’s different. I can see all the ways he’s still the same. Your dad’s going to be different. But if anything about him is what it used to be? That part’ll be how he feels about you.”

“That’s sweet,” Teresa said. “And complete bullshit.”

“You don’t know. Until you have a kid, you won’t. I will plant my flag on that one. The love of a parent for their kid is the last thing to go.”

“Even correcting for socioeconomic status, the rate of parental maltreatment of children is robustly at eight per thousand. Most of those victims are between newborn and three years old. Someplace with a million children—Warsaw, Benin City, Auberon—would expect eight thousand abused, neglected, or maltreated children. That’s a good-sized lower university just of kids whose parents were mistreating them. Sure, humans love their children. They kill them too. Regular as clockwork.”

Alex nodded. They were quiet for a few moments. “I sometimes forget the kind of education you had.”

“When they groom you to rule all humanity, they don’t leave a lot of sentimentality in the curriculum,” Teresa said.

“That’s too bad.”

“I’m scared to see him again,” she said. “I’m just scared.”

With every passing hour, the gate grew closer and brighter, and Alex grew more aware of the uncertainty they were flying into. The reports from the underground and Laconia were coming almost constantly now, and the conversations between the Falcon and the Roci were a permanent background hum—Amos talking with Cara and Xan, Jim and Fayez, Naomi with Elvi and Harshaan Lee. The sense of coming closer to a critical point, of being nearly out of time, permeated everything. His mind kept turning back to Teresa and her father, Amos and the children that weren’t his though they shared his eyes, Giselle and Kit and Rohi and the grandson that he had never seen. He thought about sending out a message, but he didn’t know what he’d say. That was always the problem. Too many feelings and not the right words to wrap around them.

When the time came for the final approach to the gate and Naomi came up to the ops deck, he didn’t think it was anything significant. He kept his attention on their drive and the Falcon’s while Naomi, below him, took the comms. They were close enough to the ring now that a strong broadcast would have gotten through the ring gate interference, even as loud as it had become.

When Naomi announced the tonnage and drive types of the Roci and the Falcon, their expected times of transit and vectors into the ring space, Alex noticed that it was an extra step they didn’t usually take. He just assumed it was something Naomi had worked out with the others. It wasn’t until the reply came back that he understood what he was looking at.

The data that came back was badged from the Spider Webb, a survey ship out of the New Wales system. Alex didn’t know if it had been Laconian or underground before this, but the reply they sent was regimented and clear. It listed the ships in the ring space, their tonnages and drives, their vectors and flight plans. It showed the anticipated incoming and outgoing traffic in a simple, standard format, and indicated that the Roci and the Falcon could transit safely. It was the first and only time they’d used Naomi’s protocol in practice, and it had functioned just the way she’d designed it to.

Alex unstrapped and let himself down onto the ops deck. Naomi was in her crash couch. The light of the screen shone in her eyes and her pale hair. She looked over at Alex, her expression someplace between sour and amused.

“Yeah,” Alex said.

“It would have worked,” she said. “If we’d cooperated, it would have worked.”

“It would have been better.”

“I think about all the things we could have done, all the miracles we could have achieved, if we were all just a little bit better than it turns out we are.”