Leviathan Falls

Chapter Thirty-Seven: Tanaka

If they’d met on Laconia, it would have been in the State Building. They would have sat around a carefully made, tasteful table in a room designed to radiate power, comfort, and seriousness. Instead, they were in the galley of a half-rebuilt science ship that stank of overstressed air recyclers and industrial solvent. It made a kind of sense. Portraits of great war leaders or critical battles that looked flattering, well composed, and balanced always felt like propaganda. Tanaka had spent a lot of time in the halls of power. She’d seen many paintings of great men in uniform staring eagle-eyed into the distance where their future glory lay. She’d seen very few paintings of soldiers with only a ragged tent and a dying fire to hold back the cold nights before some stranger tried to bayonet them in the morning.

She’d left Botton on the Derecho, coming to the Falcon alone. She wore her dress uniform and a sidearm. The drugs left her slightly nauseated, and she’d had a headache since before they’d transited out of Bara Gaon that might have been something nasty building up in her bloodstream or just the constant, unremitting feeling of other minds bumping against her own. In addition to everything else, she had the persistent hallucination that her left eye was weeping, cool tears running down her cheek even in the absence of gravity to pull them.

“You’re certain that this… effect is spreading?” Dr. Okoye asked. She’d gained frown lines at the center of her forehead and at the corners of her mouth since the last time Tanaka had seen her. She was also skinny and soft from too much time spent on the float. Between atrophy, stress, and malnutrition, she looked like a stick halfway through burning.

“I am,” Tanaka said. “The people who were present for the event got the worst of it. But it’s happening to other people too. I don’t know how many. And if you don’t want it happening to you, start taking these now.”

Along with the treasonous head of the Science Directorate, the others in the room were her equally treasonous husband, the head of the underground, and the man who had shot Tanaka’s teeth out. While they thought, the weird little not-gnats shimmied around their heads. The ones around Holden were odd, but she couldn’t put her finger on why. Tanaka fantasized about what order she’d shoot them in. She’d pretty much settled on starting with Holden. As compromised as she felt, she wasn’t certain she’d be able to get all of them, and she’d be disappointed to die in a universe that still had James Holden in it.

So petty, a voice muttered in her mind. An older man. His judgment stung, even though she didn’t know him. She stopped imagining Holden dead just to avoid any more unsolicited commentary.

Elvi Okoye paged through the list of medications Tanaka had given her, and her husband watched over her shoulder. The thin woman’s frown deepened, but Holden was the one who spoke.

“How bad is it?”

“It’s unpleasant,” Tanaka said, going for understatement. “The medication helps, but it doesn’t stop it.”

“We have to find a way into the ring station,” Nagata said.

“There isn’t one,” Fayez Sarkis said. “The sensor data shows a lot of activity. Constant restructuring. Vast magnetic and electrical charges building up and fading away. All kinds of things. But no doors.”

“I doubt we can force it open,” Holden said. “But—”

“It shrugged off the primary weapon of a Magnetar-class battleship, and then took a full broadside from a collapsing neutron star without getting a dent,” Tanaka said. “But sure, let’s get out the chisels and hacksaws and give it a try.”

“But,” Nagata said, talking over her, “it can open. It has opened. There’s a way.”

Of all of them, Nagata was the most surprising. She was nearly the same age as Tanaka, and while the Belter’s long, lanky frame was the result of too much time on the float when she was a child, they still looked like they might have been related. Distant cousins, maybe. There was a weariness about her too that spoke to Tanaka, and a sense that she kept herself to herself.

“We all agree that nothing will force it open,” Elvi said.

“Which is why we don’t force it,” Nagata said. “Last time it opened, there was a protomolecule sample hidden on the Rocinante. The Falcon has a sample now. Let’s use it.”

“Another dive,” Fayez said. “Only into the station this time instead of the library.”

Tanaka saw Elvi’s hesitation in the gnats before she spoke. “That might not be… easy. The Adro diamond was built to dispense information. We turned it on, and it did what it was created to do. When the station opened for Holden, the protomolecule sample was driving. It was using him to get inside, improvising in the way it was built to improvise. We don’t understand what the station was meant to do.”

“Power the gates and sterilize entire solar systems when needed, if memory serves,” Holden said. The gnats around his head swirled and darted for a moment.

“Either Duarte parked his ship here and took a stroll through space, or he got in,” Fayez said.

“Do we have anything more promising to try?” Tanaka asked.

Elvi’s silence was answer enough.

Tanaka didn’t roll her eyes. “We have a plausible approach to opening the station. So let’s try it. We have the high consul’s daughter, who is the only person with a strong enough emotional connection to bring him out of whatever fugue state he’s in. You open the way, I will escort her in.”

“That’s not going to happen,” Nagata said.

“Not going to happen?”

Holden answered. “We weren’t going to hand her over to you in New Egypt or Freehold. We aren’t going to do it now.”

Tanaka opened her hands, palms up. Floating as she was with legs crossed at the ankle, she felt like a painting of a saint being assumed into heaven. The patron saint of putting up with idiots, whoever that was.

“Admiral Trejo made it clear that we’re on the same side now,” Tanaka said. “He gave me the highest clearance in the empire to fulfill one mission. Finding the high consul is that mission, and has been since before New Egypt. And all of you are rebels who were still fighting a war with him when he disappeared. I’m open to counterarguments, but if the plan is to engage him in conversation, I’m not sure how you’re better ambassadors than I am.”

“There are hundreds of ships en route to us right now,” Elvi said. “The Science Directorate is sending everything we can spare. The underground is also…” She looked at Nagata, who nodded.

“We don’t need more ships,” Tanaka said. “At least let’s take it to the girl. If she won’t go with me, we can find someone else. But there isn’t anyone better.”

“She’s right,” Holden said bitterly. “Teresa needs to be okay with it, but any of us would be a distraction. Maybe a threat. The next best fit would be Elvi, and she’s—”

“Double agent,” Fayez said. “Traitor to the empire.”

“Busy overseeing the dive,” Holden said. He turned his attention to Tanaka. “What happens when you get to him?”

“I bring him out,” Tanaka said. “If I can’t bring him out, I establish a more reliable means of communication with him. We learn what he knows, and we find the way to protect the empire. Circumstances may have changed. My job hasn’t.”

And if you’d gotten out of my way and let me do it, a lot of people would still be alive. She didn’t say it, and Holden wasn’t in her mind the way the others were, but she was fairly sure he’d understood the point anyway.

“Not to protect the empire,” Nagata said. “To protect the human race.”

Tanaka shrugged. “From my perspective, that’s a distinction without a difference.”

“You’re right,” Holden said. “Let’s solve the extinction-level threat first. Then we can all go back to killing each other at a more civilized pace.”

He was staring at her, the bugs around his head motionless, as if each of them was staring too. He’s thinking about how he’s going to have to kill me again when this is all over with, Tanaka realized.

“Of course,” she replied with a smile. “First things first.”

“I’ll talk to Teresa,” Nagata said.

“Excellent,” Tanaka replied. “How long is this going to take?”

Thirty-six hours later, Tanaka got the confirmation that the experiment was ready. By then, seven more ships had come to the ring space. Thirty more would be there in the next day. Before long, they’d have a whole fleet of people to float around with their thumbs up their asses, unsure what to do. None of them mattered. Not if she could get her job done. Finish the mission, whatever the mission had become.

Tanaka’s head felt like a cocktail party full of people she didn’t know, but she hadn’t lost herself again. The voices were quiet, muffled, possible to ignore. So she ignored them. She spent her time in the gym, pushing herself until the ache of her muscles was an environment in and of itself. She took high-velocity steam showers, standing in the flow between jet and vacuum drain with the water almost hot enough to scald. Like the workouts, the pain centered her inside her physical self. It brought clarity.

There was a part of her that wanted to take a lover—find someone on the crew that she could grind against for a few hours. Just another way to bring her attention entirely to her own body and its sensations. It wasn’t fear of getting caught that stopped her. It was the unsettling certainty that anything she did would be known, shared, experienced, by other people. That it was no longer possible to have secrets of her own. The constant presence of other minds touching hers, trying to pull her into their memories and emotions, was like being eaten.

She kept checking for a message from Trejo, but nothing came. Instead, there was the slow but growing trickle of follow-up reports from the debriefings and interviews she’d taken before her transit into Bara Gaon. The captain of the Preiss had gone catatonic. The old medical technician from Konjin had started a regimen of psychoactives to keep his mind his own, but the others on the ship had started fading. He posted images to the feed of the ship’s crew going weirdly silent, working together with perfect synchrony like a dozen tentacles of the same beast. After leaving the ring space for Parker system, the Ilrys Eves had stopped answering its comms and diverted away from its flight plan for the major city on the second planet, and was now on course to a distant exoplanet in a non-elliptical orbit that had been flagged for exploration as a possible artifact.

Everywhere she looked, there were signs and reports of consciousness bleeding from one mind into others. Every minute she had to live with it hurt in a way she couldn’t articulate. She didn’t have to. The crew of the Derecho knew. They were all trapped in the same place she was.

Botton stood in his office, fastened to the deck by his mag boots with a bulb in his hand and a distant expression in his eyes. Slowly, he found her and saluted. His face had become even more gaunt since they’d left Gewitter and Bara Gaon, and stubble ghosted his chin and neck.

“Captain,” she said.

“How can I help?” His voice was soft at the edges.

“What are you drinking?”

He took a moment, then looked at the bulb in his hand as if he’d forgotten it was there. “Water. It’s water.”

“The medication?”

He nodded and walked to his desk, the mag boots clicking with each step. The peach-colored pills he took from the safety drawer were familiar as air to her now. He put them in his mouth and drank them down. “I’ll set an automatic reminder.”

“The Falcon is ready.”

Botton sobered. “Good hunting.”

“It’s not why I came here.”

His look of surprise was deeply comforting. Every bit of evidence that her mind wasn’t open to everyone was a reassurance. Or, no, that wasn’t right. It was a chance to pretend she could set limits, that she had control she knew she didn’t really have. A chance to grab the comforting lie.

“When I find the high consul,” she said, “we don’t know what the result will be. This armistice with the underground? It’s Trejo’s agreement. Once we have the high consul, it may or may not be ours.”

Botton blinked. “I… think I understand.”

“I won’t be on the ship. If I give the order?”

“I am an officer of the Laconian Empire.”

Tanaka smiled. Her cheek barely ached at all when she did it. How odd to just finish healing now. “Tell no one until the time comes. Our minds can’t be trusted. And keep on the medication schedule.”

“I understand.”

“And Botton? If… if this doesn’t work? If we can’t stop what’s happening with—” She motioned toward her head. “I’d like to ask you a favor.”

His smile was gentle. “I’ll keep two bullets back, Colonel. One for each of us.” In that moment, she almost liked him.

Her suit was in the armory, polished, loaded, and ready. The same suit she’d used to kill Draper Station. She tried to think of it as a good luck charm. I had a copper penny with a string through it. I got it the night Emily Nam kissed me. I wore it every day for fourteen years. Tanaka pictured the little coin with its verdigris and the woven plastic string. She remembered Emily, and the softness of her lips, her fingertips stroking gently through his beard. His name was Alan and he grew up on Titan. She let him drift away, trying not to remember anything of her own life where it could find its way into him.

Incendiary rounds. Grenades. The last time someone had fired a grenade in the alien station, thousands of people had died. Well, fuck them. They knew the job was dangerous when they took it. She fastened the helmet in place, checked her bottles, checked her seals. Made sure that the medical system had enough drugs to keep her herself for a few more hours at least. This was her last chance.

She went out the airlock alone, launching down toward the blue, metallic sphere. All around her, the gates glowed, tracking her like thirteen hundred eyes. The girl was too small to see, but Tanaka’s suit picked her up—a tiny black dot against the glow. Another figure was beside her—Nagata. Tanaka did a single long acceleration burn and then several short, harder braking burns, falling toward the heir to the empire and her rebel protector. Nagata’s suit was an old Martian design, like something out of a museum.

Tanaka’s hand gestures indicated the channel, and Nagata switched to it with a click.

“I thought we had an understanding,” Tanaka said.

“I’m not going in,” Nagata replied. “I didn’t want Teresa to come alone. I’ll wait out here.”

The girl was in a suit like Nagata’s, but where Nagata came across like the citizen of another time, Teresa Duarte looked like a kid in a costume. The eyes behind the visor were defiant, the chin a little raised, the jaw a little lifted. Tanaka didn’t need to have her consciousness bleeding out around her to see the girl for what she was. Scared. Out of her depth. It would have been pathetic if Tanaka didn’t feel the same way, but since she did, it was disgusting.

“I don’t know that bringing the high consul out to see his enemies is going to be better than bringing you in,” she said.

Nagata made an old Belter gesture that agreed. “If Teresa doesn’t need me, I won’t be here.”

“I told her this was all right,” Teresa said. She sounded like her father. Tanaka didn’t quite understand what she was looking at. The older woman’s quiet fierceness and the girl’s imperious entitlement believing they protected each other like the warriors of ancient Greece locking shields. Idiotic hubris or well-earned confidence, it could be hard to tell the difference until it was too late.

“Your choice,” Tanaka said. “Come with me now.”

Nagata took the girl’s helmet, pressed it against her own. It was rude, having a private conversation right in front of her, but Tanaka let it go. She’d killed a bunch of Nagata’s friends and followers. Nagata’s lover had shot her in the face. A little discourtesy seemed like a small thing to worry about now, and Tanaka suspected all the debts were about to be settled, one way or another.

A short burst from her suit thrusters, and she was falling toward the unblemished surface of the station and the little egg-ship. It was strange seeing it. She could still picture its compatriots in the grotto on Laconia. It was like being on a weeks-long hunt and finally coming across a confirming footprint. The joy that burst up in her was unexpected and it was also unmistakably her own. Trejo had called her in as a hunter. He’d been right.

Tanaka switched to the Falcon’s channel. “This is Colonel Tanaka. The girl and I are in place.”

Okoye’s voice was complicated by the static. The ring space had become a noisy place, what with the gods of chaos banging on the walls. “Understood. We are starting the dive now. Stand by.”

The connection went quiet. Tanaka checked her ammunition, her air supply, her medical status. Beside her, the girl drifted slowly to the right, her velocity just slightly off from Tanaka’s own.

“How well do you know him?” the girl asked.

“The high consul?” Tanaka asked. “We’ve met a few times. I was in the first wave. When we went to Laconia from Mars.”

“You’re a founder.”

“I am,” Tanaka said. “All this? I helped make this. He directed us, and we did the work. Humanity’s only galactic empire.”

“Do you think…” the girl began, but she let the question die unfinished. Do you think he’s all right? Do you think this is going to work? Do you think it was worth it? The girl could have been asking anything.

Beneath them, the station glowed. Tanaka knew better, but she had the sense that it was humming, sound somehow projecting itself across the vacuum. There might have been some kind of magnetic resonance making her suit ring along with it. It might only have been an illusion.

She checked her suit’s readout. The Falcon was monitoring the activity of the station—energy, magnetic fields, seismic activity. The data stream was a fire hose. She didn’t know enough to interpret it. She scanned the blue, featureless surface, looking for something. Anything. She remembered a painting inspired by Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The part where the sailing ship was trapped in a windless still near Earth’s equator. In the painting, the ship had been small, the sea vast and empty. Had it been Turner? Drew? Drummond? She couldn’t remember. She hadn’t thought much of it when she’d seen it. She understood it better now.

The girl corrected her course and started drifting back toward her. The approach irritated Tanaka. A better soldier would have matched the first time.

“Do we know how long this is supposed to take?” the girl asked.

“As long as it does.”

They were quiet. Tanaka counted breaths that piled up into minutes. The vast blue exhausted her eyes until the color seemed to vibrate and dance. The girl clicked onto the channel, then off, then on again. When she finally mustered up the courage to speak, she gave voice to Tanaka’s own thoughts.

“Something’s wrong.”