Leviathan Falls

Chapter Forty-Three: Jim

The passageways varied. Some were large enough to fit a ship through, more like a dry dock than a corridor. Some were like the Roci or the Falcon, well fitted to a human form. Some were barely crawl spaces and some as thin as drinking straws. Probably there were others too small for the naked eye to see. The station functioned at all sizes, like a fractal of itself.

Jim’s fever was steady, but a numbness had started at his feet and fingers. Pins and needles at first, and then a growing absence. If he squeezed his hands together, he could feel the deep pressure like an ache, but lighter touch was gone. And there was a vibrant, unsteady, electric feeling in his belly that he didn’t like. Tanaka didn’t ask him for another health update, though, and he didn’t volunteer anything.

The passage they were trying bent sharply, but Jim had lost a sense of direction. It might have been turning in toward the center of the station or out toward its skin. The only things he was sure of were that Tanaka always seemed certain of the next path to try and they were running out of time. Jim and Teresa followed Tanaka around the bend and forward into a widening where the passage they were in crossed another like it traveling at an oblique angle. Tanaka stopped at the junction and tapped at the wrist controls on her suit. Her scowl was harsh enough to sharpen knives on.

“Is there something you’re looking for?” Jim asked on the open channel. “This is kind of a large structure to just hope we bump into Duarte.”

Tanaka’s voice buzzed with annoyance. “I have a complete physical map produced by the Falcon with best-guess locations based on structure and energy flow that appear to be more approximate and inaccurate than expected…”

“Or the place keeps changing around us,” Miller said with a shrug.

“… In addition I have chemical markers that would be more useful if I had a different suit, but which I’m certain will get us to our goal. There’s some noise, but I’m making progress.”

Miller scratched his nose, and Jim’s started itching. “I don’t think she’s making progress. But violent, frustrated, and heavily armed? Not a combination I’d push.”

Teresa floated at Jim’s side. Her face was pale and there was a darkness to the skin around her eyes like she’d gone too long without sleep.

Jim put a hand on her shoulder, and it took a few seconds before she looked over. “How’re you holding together?” he asked.

“I keep hearing a boy talking about how much he misses his sister. I think he’s speaking Korean. I don’t really have Korean, but I still understand him. It’s like the Tower of Babel in reverse.”

“Don’t let it distract you,” Tanaka said.

Jim expected Teresa to bite back, but she only shook her head. “I just want to find my father.”

“This way,” Tanaka said, gesturing at a branch of the intersecting passage. “The traces look stronger this way.”

She pushed off, and Teresa followed. Jim wondered what they’d do if he went his own way, then sighed and went after them. He wasn’t leaving the kid to Tanaka.

“You know,” Miller said, “you get a repeat offender, and after a while you kind of get to know them.”

Up ahead, the passageway brightened and split at a fork like an artery into two smaller versions of itself. Tanaka went through one, and Teresa followed, drifting until she bumped against the wall before she righted herself.

“I forgot how much I didn’t miss your gnomic cop stories,” he said.

“And yet, here I am. I’m making a point. You see the way someone works, you see the way they think. Joey cuts through a wall to get into warehouses a half a dozen times, the next time you see a warehouse with a hole cut in it, you maybe want to check where Joey was that night. People don’t change, not really. The strategies that work for them, they reach for.”

“I hear you.”

“So I look at your pal Duarte, right? And it looks to me like Eros all over again. Not the goal, maybe, but the method. Eros, the shit took over people’s bodies and made whatever it wanted out of them.”

“And Duarte’s doing the same thing. Using people like building blocks for something he wants.”

“Maybe.”

Jim looked over. Miller seemed to be at his side, even though he knew it wasn’t really true. The illusion was perfect.

Miller hoisted a weary eyebrow. “You need to ask yourself whether you think Duarte’s the perp, or first among victims. You know that this stuff can hook itself into your dopamine receptors. Train you up to like whatever it wants you to like. Maybe it grabbed on to how he feels about the kid over there and used that as a leash. The things that built all this shit could be using him from beyond their graves the same as they used Julie. And there are some things you can only access by being in the substrate. You remember that.”

“That’s uncomfortable,” Jim said. “But yes. I was thinking along the same lines.”

“Of course you were. I’m using your brain. It’s not like I brought any neurons of my own to this partnership.”

“So this is just me talking to myself? That’s disappointing.”

“No,” Miller said. “This is what’s left of me trying to point you toward the clues. This is your case, old fella. You know more than you think you do.”

Something shifted deep in Jim’s gut. It hurt for a second, and then the pain turned to a coolness that made Jim think about things like nerve damage. But his mind wasn’t on his body. It was back on Eros Station when the protomolecule was first set loose. For a moment, he saw the corpse of Julie Mao in the crap little hotel room, the black spirals threading up the wall from her body. The blue fireflies floating in the air. There was something about her that tickled at the back of his mind. About her but not about her. About Eros, but not just about Eros.

“Oh,” he said. “Hey. We used heat.” Tanaka didn’t turn back or respond. He checked to see if his mic was on. “Tanaka! Back on Eros, we used heat.”

Tanaka tapped her suit’s thrusters, pausing in midair and turning back toward him. Teresa, nearer to the wall, caught an irregularity with her fingers and used it like a handhold. Jim slowed and stopped. Miller floated unseen at Tanaka’s side until Jim glanced back, and he was there too.

“When Eros moved, it heated up,” Jim said. “Miller went in looking for a way to stop it. He looked for hot spots. If Duarte’s at the center of this the same way Juliette Mao was running Eros, he’ll be using a lot of energy. Making a lot of waste heat. Even if the map’s wrong, maybe that can help?”

He couldn’t parse Tanaka’s silence, but she paused and thought at least. The itch on Jim’s nose got worse, like something tiny biting him just beside his right nostril. A swirl of blue dots wafted out of one wall, crossed to the other, and vanished again.

“All right,” Tanaka said, and turned to the control panel at her wrist. A moment later, she shook her head. “I don’t have connection to the Falcon.”

Jim checked his system. The only options on it were local—Tanaka and Teresa. As far as his vac suit was concerned, there wasn’t anyone else in the universe.

“We’re too far in,” he said. “Or maybe this place acts like a Faraday cage along with everything else.”

Tanaka lowered her head. In the absence of gravity, it was just an expression of emotion. For the first time, Jim thought of her not as a threat or an enemy, but a person who was caught in the same meat grinder of a situation that he was. The thinness of her face made odd by the injury, the tightness of her mouth, the exhaustion in her eyes.

“Hey, it’s all right,” he said. “We can do this.”

She lifted her eyes, and the woman looking out at him was the one who’d shot Amos’ spine out. Any vulnerability or compassion was lost in a short-leashed hatred and rage. He was pretty sure if she didn’t have a helmet on, she would have spat.

“Follow me,” she said. “Stay close.”

He did.

“It was a good try,” Miller said.

Jim turned off his mic. “You know, I’m starting to think this might not have been a great plan.”

Miller barked out a laugh, and Jim smiled. The coldness in his belly and the numbness in his limbs were the only reminders that the detective was eating him alive from the inside out. Tanaka reached another junction, this time with a shaft that looked like it was the same metallic compound as the station’s exterior. It was the first one like it Jim had seen since they’d come in. She paused, and he thought he saw a thermal scan running in the subtle reflection of her helmet display.

“What happens?” he asked.

“What happens when?”

“When it gets you. The protomolecule. When it finishes taking you over, what happens?”

The detective narrowed his unreal eyes, and for a moment, Jim imagined a glimmer of unearthly blue in them. “You mean what did you let yourself in for?”

“Yeah.”

“Too late to turn back now.”

“I know. I’m just not feeling great.”

“You want bullshit happy mouth noises, or the truth.”

“Bullshit happy mouth noises.”

“It’s great,” Miller said without missing a beat. “It’s having a long, restful sleep full of interesting, vivid dreams.”

A cramp ran through Jim’s gut, sharp as a screwdriver. “You’re right. That does sound great,” he said through clenched teeth. “I really think I’m going to like that.”

“This way,” Tanaka said, going into the metal shaft. “Try to keep up.”

They fell. Jim couldn’t interpret it as anything but falling now. When he tried to see the float as moving forward or rising up, the reframe worked for a heartbeat or two, and then they were falling again. Either the little stringlike lines of force were gone now, or he’d lost the trick of seeing them. The blue fireflies were thicker here, swirling and dancing in eddies that had nothing to do with the local air. Jim found himself thinking of flocks of birds at dawn and schools of silver-scaled fish. Thousands of individual animals coordinating into something larger, wider, capable of things that no one of them could have managed. It seemed important.

Something was happening with his left hand, and he noticed that Teresa had taken it. He could see her squeezing his fingers in hers, but he couldn’t feel it.

“Don’t fall asleep,” she said, and he was pretty sure sleep was a euphemism for something more permanent. He tried to turn on his mic, but it seemed harder to do than it should have been. With his right hand, he fumbled with the helmet’s seals until he managed to pop off the visor. The air was weirdly thick, like humidity but without the water. Teresa watched him, her eyes widening. Then she pulled her own helmet off and latched it to her suit at the hip.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Jim said. “I promise.”

“What the fuck are you two doing?” Tanaka’s voice was fuzzy compared to Teresa’s. Jim made a mental note to check the speakers in his helmet when he got back to the Roci. Probably a loose connection.

“I was having trouble with my mic. And my nose itched.”

“Teresa, put your helmet back on.”

Teresa still had his hand in hers. She looked at Tanaka with a breathtakingly false innocence and pointed to her ears. I can’t hear you. A flash of pure anger passed over Tanaka’s expression, and Jim felt a little hitch of fear. But then she popped her visor open too.

“Be ready to put that back in place on my order,” Tanaka said. Teresa nodded, but didn’t speak.

There was a warmth radiating from the metal walls. He hadn’t felt it before because his skin had been covered, but now it was like the pressure of sunlight on a hot day. Or an oven, just opened. And more than that, there was an eerie sense of pressure. He couldn’t explain it. The air was hardly over a single atmosphere, but some part of him felt an inhumanly powerful force kept in check. Like the station wasn’t floating in vacuum, but at the bottom of an ocean that was bigger than worlds.

“Well, that’s literally true,” Miller said. “That was the trick.”

“What was the trick?”

Miller gestured at the walls, the fireflies, the incomprehensible complexity and strangeness of the station. “It’s where the power comes from. They cracked the universe open, pushed their way in here, and it pushed back. A whole other universe trying to smash this place flat, and it powers the gates, the artifacts. That magnetic ray gun Duarte was playing with. They built stars with it. Broke rules that you can’t break without a different set of physics to strain it through. You can Eve-and-apple it all you want, but this shit right here? This is all made out of original sin.”

“When we find him, you make the approach,” Tanaka said, and Jim didn’t understand for a second what she meant.

“I understand,” Teresa said with a resentment that meant it wasn’t the first time she’d been told.

“I will take care of everything else.”

Teresa answered more slowly this time, but she said the same thing. “I understand.”

The heat was growing more intense, and Jim felt sweat starting to bead on his skin. The metal hall joined three others like it, each of them coming in at an acute angle, to form a single larger passage with a nearly symmetrical hexagonal shape that was disorienting somehow. Like the angles shouldn’t quite all work together. The glow was brighter, and the heat was ramping up toward unpleasant.

Tanaka checked her wristpad. “I think we’re getting close.”

“We better be,” Miller said, “or you three are all going to be lightly broiled before we find our perp.”

Something moved ahead of them. Something bright. Jim thought for a moment he was just imagining it—protomolecule hallucination or heat exhaustion—but Tanaka moved to put herself between them and whatever it was, her armored face shield slamming closed, protecting them out of instinct. The barrel at her forearm popped open.

“Oh,” Miller said. “She doesn’t want to do that.”

“Wait,” Jim said, but Tanaka was moving forward. He followed. Without his visor on, his HUD wasn’t working. His suit chimed to let him know his maneuvering thrusters were nearing half charge and he should turn back to avoid being caught on the float. In other circumstances, it would have seemed really important.

The thing was familiar, metallic blue and insectile. Half a meter taller than Tanaka, and she wasn’t short. It moved with a fast twitch like a clockwork ticking from one position to the next. Now that he thought to look, there were others like it embedded in the walls all around them, so tightly packed that there might not be structure to the walls apart from their bodies.

“Don’t do anything aggressive,” Jim said.

“This is the first thing we’ve seen that looks like a sentry,” Tanaka said, her voice booming out of the suit’s external speakers. “We’re not doubling back.”

She shifted, and it shifted to block her. A feral grin stretched the asymmetry of her cheeks. Miller leaned over beside her, staring into her visor with a look of astonishment. “She really is going to get you all killed, isn’t she?”

“Let me try,” Jim said. “I’m here. I opened the station. At least let me try just shutting it down.”

Tanaka’s gun barrel closed and opened and closed again. She gestured him forward with her chin.

“Miller?”

The detective shrugged. “Give me a minute. I’ll see what I can do.”

Jim felt that same oddness. Flexing his phantom limb, an awareness that he was doing something, but not of what exactly it was. The cramp in his gut came again, higher now. Closer to his chest. The pain rose and fell again quickly.

“Try now,” he said.

Tanaka moved to one side, and the sentinel ignored her. She moved past it, and it remained inert. Tanaka gestured Teresa forward, and the girl went as Tanaka watched the sentinel, waiting, it seemed, for an excuse to defend them. Jim went last. His breath was shallow and fast. He couldn’t feel his legs below the knee.

“We’re running out of time on a lot of fronts here,” Miller said. “Any play you want to make, you’d better make it soon.”

“Thank you,” Jim murmured, “for your support and advice.”

Ahead of them, the light went from blue to white. Jim fired his thrusters, moving into a chamber like a sphere a hundred meters across. Other passages like the one they’d come through were touches of darkness in the brightness. The light itself felt wrong—thick, tangible, jittering, alive. It made Jim’s skin crawl.

From opposite sides of the sphere, dark filaments wove a huge web like a stalactite and a stalagmite reaching from the roof and floor of a cave to touch at a single point. Or like the wings of a great dark angel.

At the center was something the size of a human being. A man with his arms outstretched, cruciform. Thick cables of the filament wove into his sides, his arms, his legs. He was still dressed in Laconian blue, except his feet, which were bare.

Jim knew the face almost before they were close enough to see it.

“Daddy?” Teresa said.