Leviathan Falls

Chapter Two: Tanaka

Aliana pressed the button on her vaporizer and inhaled deeply. The mist tasted like vanilla and hit her lungs like a soft warm cloud. Nicotine and tetrahydrocannabinol mixed with just a touch of something more exotic. Something that tempered the THC sleepiness with a vivid hyperawareness. The shades in her room were drawn, but the hint of light at the edges shifted the dust into a rainbow of sparks. She moved one leg, and the silk sheet caressed it like a thousand tiny lovers.

Tristan was asleep next to her, his small muscular butt pressed up against her thigh. He snored gently as he slept, punctuated by the occasional twitch and sigh. Aliana knew that she found the noise charming and sweet because she was high and postcoital. The minute his snoring became annoying, Tristan would have overstayed his welcome.

There were, in her experience, two ways to thrive in a rigid, authoritarian regime. The first—the one most people reached for—was to be what power wanted you to be. Mars had wanted loyal soldiers, and they had produced them like they were printing machine parts. She knew, because she was old enough that she’d been one of them. She’d seen her cohort try to strangle or excise from their collective souls anything that wasn’t sufficiently Martian, and sometimes they’d managed.

The other mode of survival was to enjoy having secrets. Enjoy the power of seeming to be one thing while being another. And then be good at it. Even when it didn’t involve fucking her junior officers, it was a kind of sexual perversion. The thrill of knowing that a wrong word or an unexpected slip could put a bullet in the back of her head was more important to her than the actual sex.

A permissive, open society where she could have done all the same things without fear of consequences would have driven her crazy. She’d loved being part of the Laconian experiment from the beginning because Duarte’s vision—first as a capital offense against Mars and then as a permanent engine of danger—fed her kinks. She felt no shame about that. She knew what she was.

“Wake up,” she said, pushing her fingers into the young man’s back.

“Sleeping,” Tristan slurred at her.

“I know. Now wake up.” She jabbed him again. She spent ten hours a week boxing and wrestling. When she stiffened her fingers, they were like iron bars.

“God dammit,” Tristan said, then rolled over. He gave her a sleepy grin. His tousled blond hair and clean-shaven face with its deep dimples made him look like a cherub in a classical painting. One of Raphael’s putti.

Aliana took another hit off the vaporizer and offered it to him. He shook his head. “Why’d you wake me?”

Aliana stretched luxuriously under the soft sheets, her long frame barely contained by the oversized bed. “I’m high. I want to fuck.”

Tristan flopped onto his back with an exaggerated sigh. “Allie, I barely have any fluid left in my body.”

“Then go get a glass of water, take a salt pill, and get your ass back into my bed.”

“Aye, aye, Colonel,” Tristan said, laughing.

The laugh ended in a sharp oof when she rolled over on top of him and slammed down onto his belly, locking his thighs to the bed with her ankles and feet, and gripping his wrists in her hands. He looked up at her with surprise, then thinking it was sex play, started to struggle. His arms and chest were well formed but soft, more like a healthy teenager’s than a man in his twenties. Her arms were thin and ropy, the muscles of a long-distance runner, burned down to their essence through constant hard use, and strong as steel springs. When he tried to move, she easily shoved him back down, squeezing her hands until his wrists popped and he squealed.

“Allie, you’re—” he started, but she squeezed again and he shut up. She was angry, and he saw it. She liked that she was angry. She liked that he saw it.

“In this room, I am Aliana. You are Tristan,” she said, speaking slowly, making sure the drugs weren’t slurring her words. “Outside that door, you are Corporal Reeves, and I am Colonel Tanaka. Those things can never be confused for us.”

“I know,” Tristan said. “I was just kidding.”

“No kidding. No jokes. No slipups. If you make a mistake, if you forget the strict discipline that allows this to exist, I will at minimum be dishonorably discharged.”

“I’d never—”

“And you,” Aliana continued as if he hadn’t spoken, “will not like the version of me that comes calling on you then.”

She stared down at him for a moment, waiting until his sudden fear turned into understanding. Then she let go of his wrists and climbed off of him, lying back down on her side of the bed.

“Get me some water too, would you?” she said.

Tristan didn’t answer, just got up and left the room. Aliana watched him go, enjoying the clenching of his thighs and ass as he walked, the gentle V of his back and shoulders. He was very, very pretty. When the thing they had inevitably ended, she was going to miss him. But that didn’t change the fact that it would end. They always had before. That was part of the joy.

A few moments later, Tristan returned carrying two glasses of water. He paused at the foot of the bed, looking unsure. Aliana patted the sheets next to her.

“I’m sorry if I hurt you,” she said.

“It’s okay,” he replied, then handed her a glass and sat down next to her. “I’m sorry I slipped up. Still want to fuck?”

“In a minute,” she said. They both gulped water for a while.

“Will I see you again?” he eventually asked. Aliana found herself gratified by the hopefulness in his voice.

“I should be on Laconia for a while this time,” she replied. “And I do want to see you again. We just have to be careful.”

“I understand,” he said. And she knew he did. She liked her toys to be much younger and much lower rank. It kept things simpler that way. But she didn’t waste her time with stupid men.

Her thirst gone, the warmth in her lungs was spreading down to her belly in a very pleasant way. She reached over and put her hand on Tristan’s thigh. “I think we should—”

The handheld on her nightstand chimed. She’d set it to do-not-disturb, which meant the device thought the incoming call was important enough to ignore that. She’d had it a long time and trained it well, so it was probably right. She lifted it to check the connection request. It was coming from the State Building. She accepted the connection without visual. “Colonel Tanaka here.” Tristan slid out of bed and reached for his pants.

“Good afternoon, Colonel. This is Lieutenant Sanchez with scheduling and logistics. You have a debriefing at the State Building in two hours.”

“First I’ve heard of it,” she said, reaching for the side table and her sobriety meds. “Can you tell me the agenda?”

“I’m sorry, Colonel. I don’t have access to that. You were added to the attendees by Admiral Milan.”

The party was over.

When she reached the State Building, a light rain was falling. Tiny droplets turned the paving dark and shiny at the same time. The low mountain at the edge of the grounds looked like something from an ancient ukiyo-e print. Yoshitoshi or Hiroshige. An attaché from the Science Directorate was waiting to meet her with a cup of coffee and an umbrella. She waved both away.

Tanaka knew her way around the State Building. Most of her assignments were in the field, but she’d made enough friends and professional connections in the highest ranks of power that when she was on Laconia, she was often here. She hadn’t been back since the siege of Laconia, the destruction of the construction platform, and the maybe-kidnapping, maybe-autoemancipation of Teresa Duarte. There weren’t any physical changes to the building. The poured concrete was as solid as ever, the cut flowers in the vases as fresh. The guards in their razor-pressed uniforms were as stolid and calm. And everything felt fragile.

The attaché guided her to an office she’d been in before. Yellow walls of domestic wood with the blue seal of Laconia worked into them, and two austere sofas. Admiral Milan—acting commander in chief while the high consul was in seclusion and Admiral Trejo was in Sol system—sat at a wide desk. He was a broad man, with a heavy face and salt-and-pepper hair shaved tight. And a crusty old sailor from the Mars days, impatient with bullshit and quick-tempered as a badger. Tanaka liked him immensely.

At one sofa, a lieutenant with a signal intelligence insignia on the standard Laconian blue naval uniform stood. Beside him, Dr. Ochida of the Science Directorate sat with his hands on his knee, fingers laced together. The silence had the awkwardness of an interruption.

Admiral Milan was the first to speak. “We’re running a little long here, Colonel. Have a seat. We’ll be done soon.”

“Yes, sir,” Tanaka said, and took the other sofa for herself. Admiral Milan looked to the standing lieutenant—Rossif, to judge by his nametag—and drew a circle in the air with his fingertip. Get on with it.

“Gedara system. Population just shy of two hundred thousand. High concentration of fissionables in the upper crust, so they’ve been trying to get deep-crust mining operations going for the last several years. Agriculture exists but it’s a decade away from self-sustaining.”

“And the incursion?” Admiral Milan said.

“Twenty-three minutes, eleven seconds,” Rossif answered. “Total loss of consciousness. Some accidental fatalities, some damage to infrastructure. Mostly people crashing vehicles or falling off of things. And logs show that just seconds before the incursion, two unscheduled heavy freighters passed through the ring and went dutchman.”

Dr. Ochida cleared his throat. “There was something strange this time.”

“Something stranger than everyone’s brain shutting off for twenty minutes?” Admiral Milan said.

“Yes, Admiral,” Ochida answered. “A review of instrumentation during the event shows a different kind of time loss as well.”

“Explain.”

“Short version,” Ochida said, “light went faster.”

Admiral Milan scratched his neck. “Did the word explain change meanings and no one told me?” Tanaka suppressed a smile.

“Simply put, the speed of light is a function of basic properties of the universe. Call it… the fastest causality can propagate in vacuum,” Ochida said. “For twenty-some minutes in the Gedara system, the nature of space-time shifted in a way that altered the speed of light. Made it faster. The light delay from the ships at the Gedara ring to the planet at the time was slightly less than forty minutes. Logs of the event show that during the incursion, it decreased by nearly four thousand nanoseconds.”

“Four thousand nanoseconds,” Milan said.

“The nature of space-time changed in that system for twenty minutes,” Ochida intoned, then waited for a reaction he wasn’t getting. He looked crestfallen.

“Well,” Milan said. “I will certainly have to think about this. Thank you for the briefing, Lieutenant. Doctor. You’re both dismissed. You stay, Colonel.”

“Yes, sir,” Tanaka replied.

Once the room was empty, Milan leaned back. “Drink? I’ve got water, coffee, bourbon, and some herbal tea shit my husbands both drink, tastes like grass clippings.”

“Am I on active duty?”

“I don’t think you need to concern yourself with breaking protocol, if that’s what you mean.”

“Then bourbon sounds great, sir,” Tanaka replied. Admiral Milan spent a minute fussing at his desk, then came back with a cut crystal glass and two fingers of smoky brown liquid swirling in it.

“To your health,” Tanaka said, then took a sip.

“So,” Milan said, and sat with the unconscious grunt of an old man with a lot of bad joints. “What do you think that lightspeed shit means?”

“Not a clue, sir. I’m a shooter, not an egghead.”

“This is why I’ve always liked you,” he said, then sat back in his chair, steepling his fingers. The silence was different this time, and she wasn’t certain what it meant. “So just between the two of us—one old sailor to another—is there anything you want to tell me?”

She felt the adrenaline hit her bloodstream. She didn’t let it show. She was too practiced at deception for that. “I don’t know what you mean.”

He tilted his head and sighed. “I don’t either. I find this whole thing pretty fucking mysterious. And I’m not as good at swallowing my curiosity as I was when we were young.”

“Still genuinely unclear what we’re talking about. Was someone supposed to tell me why you wanted me here?”

“It wasn’t me that wanted you. Trejo made the request, and he had me do a little paperwork on your behalf.” He pulled out a physical folder of red paper with a silver string to close it, and handed it to her. It seemed so out of place, it was like being handed a stone tablet. She drank the rest of her bourbon off in one shot before she took it. It was lighter than she expected, and the string came undone easily. Inside was a single sheet of three-layer security parchment, the document verification circuits crisp as lace. Her picture was on it and her biometric profile, her name and rank and identification record numbers. And a short passage granting her Omega status from the Laconian Intelligence Directorate at the personal request of the High Consul’s Office.

If it had been a severed head, she wouldn’t have been more surprised.

“Is this…” she began.

“Not a joke. Admiral Trejo has instructed that you be given the keys to the kingdom. Override authority on any mission. Access to any information, regardless of security classification. Immunity from censure or prosecution for the duration of your deployment. Pretty sweet. You really telling me you don’t know what it’s about?”

“I assume there’s a mission?”

“Probably, but I’m not cleared to know what it is. You just keep your seat. I can show myself out.”

When Admiral Milan closed the door behind him, the office system threw a comm message on the wall screen. After a moment, Admiral Trejo appeared. She’d known him for as long as she’d known anyone living. His eyes were still the same uncanny green, but now there were dark bags under them. His hair was thinning and his skin had an unhealthy waxy shine. He looked haunted.

“Colonel Tanaka,” he said. “I’m reaching out to you with a critical mission for the empire. At present, I am taking a break from a hard burn from Sol system, and if this could wait until I arrived on Laconia, I’d brief you in person. It can’t, so this will have to do.”

She stared into her bourbon glass. It was empty, and the bottle sat just a meter away, but suddenly she didn’t want it anymore. She felt her attention sharpening.

“I’m sure that you, like everyone else in the empire, are wondering what exactly the high consul has been doing in seclusion. How he has been spearheading the fight against the forces that are threatening us from within the gates. I know there’s been some speculation that he was somehow injured or incapacitated. So, candidly, I need you to know that when I left for Sol system, the high consul was a drooling, brain-damaged moron who couldn’t feed himself or wipe his own ass. He has been that way since the attack that destroyed the Typhoon and Medina Station.”

Tanaka took a deep breath and let it out through her teeth.

“Dr. Cortázar had altered the high consul’s biology considerably by using modified protomolecule technologies. It left the high consul in possession of certain… abilities that were not fully documented or explored before Dr. Cortázar’s death. And in fact, Duarte killed him. Waved his hand and splattered that crazy fucker across half a room. I’ve never seen anything like it. Right now, the only people who know this are you, me, Dr. Okoye of the Science Directorate, and Teresa Duarte, who ran away with the underground’s assault forces after they cleaned our clock. So, pretty much the whole fucking enemy.

“Given that for background, you’ll understand how confused I was when the high consul appeared to me eighty… eighty-five hours ago in my office in Sol system. He didn’t register on the sensors. He didn’t interact with any physical object or leave any evidence of his presence that could be verified by an outside observer. But he was here. And before you get too happy with the Anton-Trejo’s-having-a-psychotic-break theory, there is some external evidence. Just not here in Sol.

“Shortly after I experienced what I experienced, Duarte disappeared from the State Building. Not popped-out-of-reality disappeared. He put on his pants and a fresh shirt, had a cup of tea and a polite conversation with his valet, then walked off the grounds. Every planetary sensor we have has been sweeping the landscape since then. No one has seen him.

“We’ve got over a thousand colony systems that are wondering if there’s anything left of the government. We have extradimensional enemies experimenting to find ways to snuff us out wholesale. And I am convinced that the answer to both of those issues is Winston Duarte, or whatever the fuck he’s turned into. I’ve known you for a long time, and I trust you. Your mission is to find him and bring him back. You’ve heard of carte blanche, but I promise you have never seen a check this blank. I don’t care what you spend—not in money, equipment, or lives—as long as you bring Winston Duarte back from wherever he’s gone. If he doesn’t want to come, convince him nicely if you can, but this only ends with him in our custody.

“Good hunting, Colonel.”

The message ended. Tanaka leaned back on the sofa, stretching her arms to her sides like a bird unfurling its wings. Her mind was already ticking away. The strangeness of it, the shocking revelations, the threat it posed. All of those were in her. She could feel them. But there was also the calm of a job that needed doing and the pleasure, deeper than she would have guessed, at the power she had just been given.

The door opened quietly, and Admiral Milan came back in.

“Everything all right?” he asked.

Tanaka laughed. “Not even close.”