Leviathan Falls

Chapter Thirty-Six: Jim

The ring space was full. Fifty-six ships floated in the eerie brightness of the gates, and instead of burning from one place to the other, they were still. Jim watched them all on a volumetric display. There were more science ships than anything else, but freighters and colony ships were among them. Their drives were pointed in every direction, depending on where they’d come in from and how they’d burned off their velocity. It took him a while to figure out what was unnerving about them.

For decades, the ring space—the slow zone—had been the hub between systems. Especially since the death of Medina Station and the Typhoon, ships came in and out as quickly as they could, minimizing the time spent in the starless non-sky. Now they’d come here. It was only the closest ships, the ones most easily deployed, but for the first time in his living memory, they had arrived. A few maneuvering thrusters fired now and then to correct some tiny drift, but their Epsteins were dark. The fleet had come to Naomi’s call. To Trejo’s. To Elvi’s. They weren’t locked in battle. They weren’t traveling to some more human, more comprehensible space. They were a few slivers of ceramic and silicon lace in a bubble the size of a million Earths.

They looked drowned.

“Okay, we have the ship on visual,” Elvi said from the Falcon. Even as close as they were, the tightbeam had the flatness and distortion of signal loss. Not enough to make the connection unclear, but enough to make it feel claustrophobic.

“The alleged ship,” Jim said, reaching for a joke.

“The egg-shaped thing. We have the egg-shaped thing on scopes. So the good news is that it’s still there.”

“Have there been any signs of movement or activity?” Naomi asked from the Roci’s ops.

“No,” Elvi said. “Not on the station anyway.”

“Other places?” Naomi asked.

“Everything’s more active than it was before. The amount of radiant heat in this place is orders of magnitude greater than it was before. More light, more radiation. Some of the ships that got here first, we may need to get them out into normal space soon to give them a chance to lose some of the excess. The heat exchangers are collecting more energy than they’re shedding. I’ve got every spare sensor taking in data and looking for useful patterns.”

“First order of business,” Jim said.

“Direct inspection of the station?” Elvi replied.

“I was going to say make sure that all the people who spent the last few years trying to kill each other are okay putting that aside,” Jim said. “We’ve got a couple dozen ships from each side, and you have to figure all of them have crews with some hard feelings about the whole war thing.”

“Already on that,” Naomi said. “I’ve been trading messages since we passed the gate.”

“How bad is it?” Jim asked.

“Grumbling, but nothing to raise an alarm. Not yet.”

Jim looked at the little drowned flecks again. They weren’t trying to kill each other. That was worth celebrating. “All right. We should go see if anyone’s at home on the egg-shaped thing.”

Elvi’s voice managed to be tired and resolute at the same time. “The Falcon’s set course, but I don’t want to use the Epstein for braking anywhere near the surface. It’s going to take a while.”

“You know that thing sucked down a gamma ray burst and still exists, right?” Jim said.

“I’m not worried about the station,” Elvi said. “I’m worried about not breaking things before I understand what they are. If Duarte’s still in that egg and I burn him to a crisp before we can talk, I’ll feel silly.”

“Fair point,” Jim said. “We’ll set to rendezvous.”

He dropped the connection. Moments later, the Roci shifted under him as Alex changed their course. Jim closed the display and sat in his crash couch, feeling the walls around him, the vibration of the ship, the sense that occasionally struck him of being a tiny organism in a vast universe. His jaws ached, but they did that a lot these days, and if he paid attention, there was a tightness at the base of his skull that never went away, even when he was sleeping. He was used to it. It was how he lived.

Once, there had been a focus to the tension, even if the focus changed sometimes. Fear of the Laconian Empire rolling through and crushing anyone that didn’t agree with it under its heel. Or fear of the apocalypse he’d seen in the ring station, back before the gates had even opened. Or the constant, nagging threat of Duarte withdrawing his protection and having Jim thrown in the Pen. The near certainty that by trying to find out whether the things on the other side of the ring gates were conscious and capable of change, Duarte would start a war he couldn’t win. And now, that his individual life—the self that was James Holden—would be lost in a sea of consciousness, a vast single mind built from human beings but not human. He could take his pick, and his body was just as ready to ache for the cause.

Or maybe it was just a habit now. Maybe the weight of history had ground him down because he didn’t know how to shrug it off. Didn’t know that he would choose to, even if he had been able. Two ways of saying the same thing.

“Is this going to be a one-shot,” Alex asked from the flight deck, “or are we expecting we’ll want to chew the fat some once you’re done?”

“I don’t understand the question,” Jim said.

“If we’re just popping you out to work with Elvi’s crew, I’ll park us close. If you think we’re going to want to be in the same room, you can pop out the cargo lock, and I’ll put the bridge back up.”

Before he could answer, Naomi did. “Put the bridge up. It will be good for the other ships to see it, even if we don’t use it.”

“Copy that,” Alex said. “I’m taking us in.”

Jim unstrapped and headed for the cargo airlock.

Teresa was already there. She was wearing a vac suit, testing the seals at the boot and glove and the charge on the mag boots. Jim paused and steadied himself as the ship drifted under him. Her hair was back and tucked into a tight cap that emphasized the shape of her eyes and the roughness of her skin. She lifted her chin in a gesture that might have been a greeting or defiance or both.

“Going somewhere?”

“If my father’s there, you’ll want me there.”

Jim shook his head. “If we find something, I will let you know. And if we need you, I’ll get you. I promise.”

The girl shook her head, left then right, no more than a few millimeters. Her expression was hard. “It’s my dad,” she said.

Jim felt a wave of emotions that rose and fell in him in seconds. Frustration, sorrow, guilt, fear. And, almost randomly, a deep nostalgia. He remembered being in school and coming home to find Father Anton in the back of the house building a firepit. It had been a moment of no significance. He hadn’t thought about it in years, and then there it was, as present and powerful and filled with love as if it had happened a moment before. It’s my dad.

“You understand the risks?” Jim asked.

“No, I don’t,” Teresa said. “Do you?”

Jim shrugged. “Make sure you check your helmet seals.”

When they were ready to go, he cycled the cargo airlock. The air pumped out, and as it grew thinner, the sound in his suit changed, growing softer the way it always did. Leaving him feeling more isolated, or more aware of his isolation. His breath, the gentle whir of the fans, the creaking of the suit, it all came to fill more of his senses. It felt almost like falling asleep. Then the vibrations came through the deck as the outer doors unlatched, and the cargo bay opened. Light spilled through the cracks like it never had before, and it took him a few seconds to understand why it was strange. Normally, the light that a ship like theirs opened to was worklights or a star—strong, harsh, and directional. The milk-light that diffused into the hold now came from every direction. It was soft and shadowless as a hazy afternoon on Earth. Like a child’s simplistic imagination of heaven.

The station rolled under them, a metallic sphere five klicks in diameter. Too big for a ship, too small for a planet, too smooth and regular for an asteroid. And on its glowing blue surface, a dot like a grain of rice with Elvi’s team barely more than dust motes beside it.

Jim and Teresa guided the suit thrusters in toward the group, and the scale of the ship became clearer by having human figures beside it. It was tiny. The whole thing would almost have fit in the cargo hold they’d just left. Smooth as skin and seamlessly curved, it seemed more organic than constructed. One side was open, the flesh of the egg-shape peeled back layer after layer after layer until the hole was big enough for someone to step through.

One of the forms moving around it broke off and came toward him and Teresa. Elvi’s face swam up from the other side of the visor like he was looking at her under the surface of a still lake. Her voice over the radio was staticky and distant, given how close she was physically.

“It’s a match to the artifacts on Laconia,” she said. “It must use the same inertialess movement that Eros did back in the day, because nothing on it looks like a thruster. We can’t tell how long it’s been here from the temperature because—” She gestured at the thousand bright gates around them.

“Are you sure it was him?” Teresa asked.

“Provable? No. Silly to assume anything different? Yes. At this point I’d need evidence that it wasn’t Duarte before I’d entertain it seriously. I hear hoofbeats, I’m still thinking horses at this point.”

Half a dozen other figures in Laconian vac suits moved around the egg, swirling out in what Jim realized slowly was a search pattern. “Any sign of him?”

“You’re thinking of something convenient like an airlock or a door?” Elvi said. “No. Nothing. The artifact’s here, but the surface of the station is totally unmarked.”

“Have we tried knocking?” Jim said, more than half joking.

“If I can help,” Teresa said. “I could broadcast that we’re here. If he can hear my voice, he might come out. Or let us come in.”

“Worth trying,” Elvi said, motioning them on.

Beside the egg-shape, a collection of boxes were badged as equipment: sensor lines, power supplies, biological sampling kits. The figure floating beside them like a mother hen over its brood turned out to be Harshaan Lee. Jim watched the man’s mouth move as he spoke on some other channel that Jim wasn’t listening to. Then a click of static and he was on with them. “Give me a moment, and I will connect the young lady’s suit output to our system. We can broadcast on a wideband directly on the station with contact vibration as well.”

“Humanity’s largest subwoofer,” Jim said. Elvi chuckled, but no one else seemed to think it was funny.

“How did you get in before?” Elvi asked.

Jim shook his head. He wasn’t sure she saw it, so he shook his fist like a Belter. “I just came down toward it, and it opened up. I didn’t do anything.”

Nothing except follow a ghost who could open all the doors inside the haunted house, he thought. Memories of the horrors and wonders he’d witnessed inside threatened to overwhelm him, and he needed to pay attention, so he forced them away.

“The protomolecule was directing it,” Elvi said. “It was trying to figure out what had happened to the systems it was supposed to report in to. You were a way to do that.”

“Because I had a body,” Jim said. The only things inside are ghosts now. Having a body in there means something. “It told me that. Being able to access matter wasn’t standard, I guess.”

“I’ve heard your debriefings,” Elvi said. “The terms you used? Or it used, I guess. Pleroma, fallen world, substrate. They’re human terms.”

“Everything I was doing got strained through human minds,” Jim said. Lee connected a bright red retractable wire from a dark, circular shape that was resting against the surface of the station and connected it to a slot in Teresa’s suit arm. “I wasn’t really driving, you know. I just got carried along by what it was doing.”

“Well,” Elvi said. “I think someone’s driving now.”

Lee gave a thumbs-up. Teresa looked from Jim to Elvi to Lee and back, suddenly anxious. “What should I say?”

“Just let him know we’re here,” Elvi said.

Teresa nodded, gathered herself. “It’s me, Dad. It’s Teresa. I’m here on the outside of the station. We want to come in and talk.” She paused for a moment, and when she spoke again, there was a note of longing in her voice that broke Jim’s heart a little. “I want to see you. I want to come in.”

They waited. Jim turned in a slow circle, watching for anything on the surface of the station—a ripple, a hole, a sign of something emerging. Nothing came.

“Try again,” he said.

“Father? If you’re in there, this is Teresa. I’m on the outside of the station. I want to come in.”

The seconds stretched as the hope in the girl’s expression slowly died. Lee gestured to her, pulled her close, and unhooked the line. “We have other avenues to explore,” he said. “We have several kilometers of contact sensors. We were using them on the Adro diamond, but they could be quite informative here as well.”

“We’ll help you string them,” Jim said.

“If you see anything different from the last time…” Elvi said.

Other than me? he thought, but didn’t say.

For the next four hours, the science team laid the sensor filament out along the station until Jim had the vivid memory of rolling endless skeins of yarn into balls during Father Dimitri’s knitting phase. Elvi stopped an hour into the process, heading back to the Falcon. Lee said it was so that she could oversee the data collection end of the process, but Jim was pretty sure she just needed to rest.

At first, the work was wearying, but as the time passed, Jim found himself falling into the rhythm of it. Running a line, then holding it in place while the others checked the connection between the sensors and the surface of the station. Teresa helped too, her many months of apprenticeship on the Roci showing in the way she asked for clarifications and announced her actions to the team before she took them. By the time their bottles were edging toward empty and Jim turned them back toward the ship, Teresa seemed to have shrugged off the first bitterness of her disappointment.

Once the airlock had cycled back closed behind them and Jim had gotten the vac suit off and serviced and stowed, he went back to his cabin. He stank of sweat and neoprene, and his muscles ached and twitched. There had been a time a few decades before when the labor wouldn’t have taken as much out of him, but even with the discomfort and the sense that he couldn’t have gone on as long as he had as a younger man, there was still a pleasure in the work. By the time he’d washed up and changed into a clean flight suit, he was pleased with himself in a way that he hadn’t felt in a long time.

When he got to the ops deck, Amos was alone on it, strapped into a crash couch despite there being no thrust gravity or any real prospect for it. Jim pulled himself to a halt on one of the handholds and looked up toward the flight deck.

“Where is everyone?” he asked.

“Alex is sleeping, Tiny’s taking care of the dog and getting some grub. Naomi went over to the Falcon to talk about the sensor data.”

“There’s sensor data already? I mean, I figured there’d be a few hours at least before they gathered enough to have a meeting about.”

“When people don’t know anything,” Amos said, “they love having meetings to talk about it.”

“I suppose.”

Amos stretched and scratched idly at his chest where his gunshot wound was still a ragged dull-black circle set in pale flesh. “Apparently, there’s a lot of activity going on in the station. Stuff happening, even if they don’t know what it is. It’s hotter too, and the temperature’s going up.”

“Weird seeing the gears moving. Especially since I didn’t know there were gears before.”

“Did you find him?”

“We didn’t.”

“Is he there?”

Jim stretched. His spine cracked. “Yeah. He’s there. But I don’t think he’s looking to talk.”

Whatever Amos was going to say in reply was lost when the comms spat out an alert. Jim pulled himself to a couch and called it up. IFF had pinged a ship on the Roci’s alert list. The Derecho—the ship that had killed the Gathering Storm and chased them out of Freehold—had just made transit through Bara Gaon gate. Jim turned off the security alert, and a few seconds later, a message came into the queue from Colonel Aliana Tanaka.