Leviathan Falls

Chapter Forty: Naomi

You can see him?” Naomi asked. “Right now, you can see him?”

Jim nodded. They were floating in the emptied lab where Amos had only recently been strapped down for his failed dive into the station. The Falcon’s security officers had taken Jim there directly from the catalyst’s chamber, and Elvi had called Naomi over. Now he was steadying himself on a handhold. His face had the sweaty, tight look it got when he was coming down with an illness or he’d drunk too much, but there was a calm with it. And something else. Amusement, maybe.

“For me, he seems to be right between you and Elvi,” Jim said. “A little bit closer to Elvi.”

“This can’t be the same Miller,” Elvi said. “This has to be something else.”

Jim chuckled.

“What?” Elvi snapped.

“Sorry. He said something funny. Look, in any traditional sense, the Miller I met died when Eros crashed into Venus. The protomolecule preserved and co-opted the patterns in his brain, and when it needed a tool to find missing things, there those patterns were, right in the toolbox. That version of Miller needed something that could take a ship places, and I was the guy who decided where the ship went, so it started using me. Physically manipulating my brain into seeing and interacting with the patterns it made from Miller. Those manipulations left channels. All I did was put the protomolecule and those channels back together.”

He looked at Naomi and tilted his head, a little smile on his lips. “I was just remembering something Alex said about tools that get used long enough developing souls. It’s off the subject. Forget about it.”

“Before, you weren’t able to see him when other people were around,” Elvi said.

“That’s true,” Jim said. “This is a different relationship.” A moment later, he laughed. Naomi didn’t know what at, except that it was Miller. If the jealousy stung, there was nothing she could do with it.

“Can this version of Miller open the station the way the last one did?”

Jim seemed to listen for a moment, then he shrugged. “I don’t know. He doesn’t either. The situation’s different that way too. We won’t know until we’ve tried.”

“I want to do some scans,” Elvi said, more to herself than to them. “Brain activity at a minimum. Full metabolic if we have time.”

“Not sure I have a lot of time for that,” Jim said.

“Is this something you can undo?” Naomi asked. “Is there a way to pull this back out of him?”

“It’s going to be hard to unscramble that egg,” Elvi said. “But there are probably some things we can do to keep him stable. Or more nearly stable.”

Jim shrugged. “Getting us more time is good, but only if we get more out than it takes to get it, if you see what I mean. We have a lot of clocks counting down on us right now.”

“I’m talking about saving your life,” Elvi said.

“I know, and I appreciate it. That’s a later-on problem. If we don’t get the rest of this right, it’s not going to matter. If you still exist as an individual who wants to fix me? That’ll mean a lot of things have gone right.”

They were quiet. Naomi glanced at the empty space between her and Elvi as if there might be something there for her to see. There wasn’t, but Elvi turned as if the look had been meant for her. Naomi realized they were waiting for her to make the decision. Jim was smiling at her, and it made Naomi want to punch him in the face. How in fuck did I wind up here? she thought.

“Collect any data you can now, and stabilize him,” she said. “We’ll need to get Teresa ready.”

“And Tanaka?” Elvi asked.

Naomi hesitated. She didn’t like Tanaka, and she didn’t trust her, but their interests were aligned for the moment, and inviting yet another front in her personal wars felt petty. “And Tanaka.”

“Okay,” Elvi said. “I’ll get the medical team.”

She pulled herself out of the lab and closed the door behind her. It wasn’t until the latch clicked that Naomi realized Elvi was giving them a moment alone. Jim looked away from her almost shyly. He was older, thinner, more worn around the edges than the man she’d met decades before on the Canterbury, but the openness she remembered was there too. The vulnerability. The almost genetic inability to believe that things wouldn’t work out for the best if he just followed his heart.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Really? I haven’t watched you try to kill yourself enough times? Now you make me watch you succeed in slow motion. But you’re sorry.”

“Yeah. That part is pretty shitty. But I couldn’t think of anything else, and this isn’t what—”

“Let’s take care of the problem,” she said. “The rest can come later.”

He hesitated, then nodded. “I’ll probably go to the station from here. Once they’re done with the scans.”

“I’ll be on the Roci.”

“All right then. I’ll let you know when I’m in position.”

Naomi nodded and pulled herself to the door and down the corridor as if they were only heading to their various mundane duties. As if it weren’t the last time. How strange to know in the moment that something precious was ending, and still have it change nothing. Either it was a sign of her devastation or a tribute to how good their life together was and had been.

She made the transfer back to the Rocinante. The air didn’t change scent this time. Either there had been enough traffic between the connected ships that the atmospheres had mingled, or she’d just gotten used to both of them. She hesitated for a moment, unsure whether to go back to her cabin or up to the ops deck. Her work could be done at either one, but the cabin had Jim’s things—his clothes, his scent, his absence—and so she made the turn to ops.

Alex was there, his eyes wide and his hands fluttering in powerless distress.

“You heard?” she said.

“It’s true?”

“It is,” she said, and picked a couch to strap into. “How did you find out?”

“Casey.”

“Casey?”

“The power supply technician on the Falcon? Dark hair, wide face? Little mole on his neck? He was over drinking beer with me and Amos back in Adro before we left.”

Naomi shook her head. She had probably seen him, but she didn’t make connections with the ease that Alex did.

“Are you all right?” Alex asked in a voice that meant he knew that she wasn’t.

Naomi pulled up her tactical display and split it. The ring space on the left, and on the right a more schematic view with the rings, the systems beyond them, and the ships falling in from all directions. The sheer scale of it was overwhelming. She had to figure out which of the ships were coming to her aid, which were the new enemy. She had to inventory the drugs and precursors that would keep the ships she did have from falling into Duarte’s nightmare hive mind. She had to keep control of the ring space long enough for Jim to have a chance at stopping the catastrophe that was rolling in toward them from all directions.

“I’m really, really angry,” she said. “When Jim came back from Laconia—when we got him back—I knew he was hurt. I knew there was less of him somehow. I thought we’d take care of him. That he was injured, not just in his body. In his soul, if that’s the word. With time and care and love, I thought maybe I would see him again the way he had been. The way I remembered him.”

“I get that,” Alex said.

“And then the thing that actually did bring him back wasn’t any of that. I saw him again. Just now. I saw him the way he used to be. At his best. And love isn’t what got him there. And it wasn’t care. And it wasn’t time. He saw something incredibly, stupidly dangerous that needed to be done and only he could do. And he just…”

She opened a closed fist like she was scattering dust.

Alex hung his head. “He just did it.”

“He rose to the occasion.” Tears were sheeting across her eyes now, making the deck a swirl of color and refraction. She wiped them away on the back of her sleeve.

“He is who he is,” Alex said. “He is who he’s always been. I understand that. I’ve got two marriages behind me because I thought I’d changed and grown into someone else. And I wasn’t wrong, but I wasn’t right either. Jim changed, but he also stayed the same.”

“I wish we’d been the ones to bring him back, and not this.”

“So what can we do?”

Naomi looked at her screens. The tears were already drying, even if the darkness and emptiness and regret were all just as deep. “We give him as much time as we can. We try to make this latest idiotic, brave, stupid gesture count for as much as it can. And then we see what happens next. Someone needs to let Teresa know and get her ready. And tell Amos. There may be some fighting.”

“I can take care of them. Don’t you worry about it.”

He turned and headed for the lift shaft.

“Alex?”

When he looked back, they only locked their gazes for a moment. She didn’t know what she’d meant to say, and whatever it was, he already knew it.

“I got this part,” he said. “You take care of yours.”

She started the work, and at first it felt impossibly large. She was overwhelmed by the scope and complexity, but she told herself that it didn’t matter whether it was possible, only that she do it. She started small and specific. The Tullus Aufidius—a mercenary gunship with roots in Freehold—was slated to pass through the St. Anthony gate in sixteen hours. It had been coming to her call as part of the underground, but hadn’t responded to connection requests from the repeater at the gate since Amos’ psychic dive into the ring station went so wrong. So that was the first problem. She found a solution. The Kerr, the Vukodlak, and the Dhupa—two Laconian fighters and one underground supply ship with some torpedo racks welded on the outside—would intercept it. Any of the three that survived the encounter could join the Armando Guelf at the Hakuseki gate and intercept the Brother Dog.

She thought about sending a message out to Trejo, calling for more Laconian reinforcements. The message would take hours to reach him, hours to get back, and by the time any ships he sent made it there, it was just as likely they wouldn’t be answering to Trejo or Naomi anymore. Better to play the cards she had. She wasn’t going to win, but she could take a long time losing.

She ran solutions through the Roci’s system, shifting from scenario to scenario like a football coach preparing for a complicated game. Here are my players. Here are their players. Here’s the field of play. The hurt and the horror and the grief were still there when she thought to turn to them, but they lived at a distance. She felt herself slipping into the version of herself that she’d made during Jim’s captivity: the Naomi who lived in secret and met the world with her intellect because her heart was still too raw.

She wondered whether this was how Camina Drummer had survived as the last president of the Transport Union, or Michio Pa as the first. Or Avasarala, back on Earth when Earth had been the center of the human race and not just the oldest planet among thousands. The Indefatigable and the Yunus Emre would intercept the Blackberry when it transited the Xicheng gate. She queried the Yunus Emre about the models of torpedo and PDCs it had and set the Roci to checking for ships with compatible loadouts.

When Jacob died, it had been just the same. It had been just weeks until their fortieth anniversary, and the children were all coming back from university for the party. She’d found him in the bathroom. Dead of a stroke, the doctors said. She’d spent twenty-eight hours straight cleaning the apartment, and she wouldn’t have stopped then except Hannah came early and—

Naomi stopped, her hands raised and her heart beating triple-time. She looked around the ops deck as if examining it would make it more solid, more real, more concrete. She checked the time. It was still half an hour before her next dose of the drugs was due. She took them anyway. The peach-colored tabs were bitter, and the taste lingered at the back of her throat. She waited a few minutes, watching her own cognition, waiting for memories of lives she hadn’t lived to sneak back into her.

“Fuck that very, very much,” she said to the empty air, then opened a connection to Elvi. “How long before we can get this going?”

“Tanaka’s on her way now,” Elvi said. “We’re putting Jim in a Laconian suit. She thought it might make Duarte feel better than his Roci gear. And… it’s just more likely to keep him alive. You know, until…”

“I’m starting to get intrusive thoughts.”

“I know,” Elvi said. “A lot of people are. The data from before says it shouldn’t get too bad as long as you keep on the medication schedule. But we’re only muffling them. We’re not shutting them all the way up.”

“Are they getting information from me?”

The Roci chirped an alert. Naomi pulled it up as Elvi replied. “Maybe, but it’s all still pretty haphazard. My guess is that any intelligence that slips through is going to be lost in the clutter. That’s just a guess, though.”

“Not sure the data’s going to support that.”

“Why not?”

“The repeaters at the gates? All the ones that were still working? They just went offline. Kill codes from the system sides of the gates.”

Elvi hesitated. “All at the same time?”

“Within a few seconds of each other.”

“That’s… more coordinated than I like.”

Naomi stretched her shoulders. She could feel her strategies shifting. Reconceptualize everything she’d just designed. Still coaching the game, but now it was a game she wasn’t allowed to watch being played…

“Let me know as things progress,” she said. “I’ll be here.”

She pulled up the tactical map. The four most critical gates were Earth, Laconia, Auberon, and Bara Gaon. She found the ships closest to each. It took five minutes to calculate the flight solutions she wanted for each of them: hard burns that started braking well inside the ring space. Just enough velocity to make the transit, gather telescopic data, and duck back in. And the point of transit randomized, so that even if the enemy had a back door into their heads, they couldn’t line up a torpedo or a rail-gun strike on the ship.

She was gratified that none of the captains questioned the orders or pushed back at the mission. She set tracking indicators on each of them—tiny red cones that showed the distance the ships had traveled without giving her a precise lock on their actual position. While they moved, she ran simulations on the transit times for the first dozen ships due to pass into the ring space, and what changes to their paths were physically possible. The intercepts that had been certain became clouds of time and place…

She was almost annoyed when the connection request came and broke her concentration.

“Hey,” Jim said, and all the control and distance she’d bent herself to building blew away on his breath. Grief slammed into her like a rogue wave, blowing her off her feet and trying to drown her.

“Hey,” she murmured.

“So, we’re about a hundred meters from the surface of the station, and we’re heading in.”

She took down the tactical display and pulled up the Roci’s external camera. It didn’t take a second for the ship to find them. Three dashes silhouetted against the glowing blue of the station. Tags appeared as the Roci marked their positions and velocities. Naomi cleared them. It was enough to see them. Watching was more important than knowing the details. The details didn’t matter.

“I’ve got you,” she said, and the ways that both was and wasn’t true stung. “I’ve got you, Jim.”

“Teresa wants you to make sure Muskrat’s in her crash couch in case you have to do any tricky maneuvering.”

“I’ll see to it.”

One of the little dashes nodded, so that one was Jim. An alert came up from the ship that had peeked into Auberon, and then the one in Laconia. She closed them. It didn’t look like the three of them were moving at all. They were just there, against the blueness. The little egg of Duarte’s ship appeared and grew larger. They were almost there.

“Okay,” Jim said. “We’ve got an entrance. We have a way in.”

“We’ll give you as much time as we can.”

“It’s going to be okay.” The oceanic optimism would have been a lie in anyone else. Or maybe a prayer.

“Good hunting, love,” she said, and the three dots passed into the blue and vanished. She waited for a moment, but nothing changed. The station remained its enigmatic self. A third alert came, this one from Sol gate. She turned off the external cameras and pulled her tactical map back up.

There were many, many more ships coming now. Hundreds of them, and while most were on fast burns, it would still take them days to reach the gates.

And by then, none of it would matter, because in the Laconia gate data was the game-ender. The Voice of the Whirlwind, last of the three Magnetar-class battleships, was on a killing burn toward the Laconia gate. At its pace, even people in the breathable-fluid crash couches would be risking their lives. Only they weren’t risking their lives at all. Their lives were no more important now than the individual skin cells on a boxer’s knuckles. They would be shattered by the hundreds and not be missed.

The moment the Whirlwind came through that gate, the fight was over, and any forces that Duarte’s hive mind had would be able to flood the ring station and pull Jim and Teresa and Tanaka back out like they were plucking a splinter.

She opened a connection to her little, doomed fleet.

“This is Naomi Nagata,” she said. “Prepare to receive your orders.”