Leviathan Falls

Chapter Forty-Five: Naomi

The closer the Rocinante and the Falcon kept to the station, the more cover the alien structure provided and the less of the field of battle was in her scopes. The Roci was able to build real-time reports by syncing with other ships in her little fleet by tightbeam and making a patchwork map with data from half a dozen different ships. She didn’t like it, though. It left her feeling half blinded.

“Two more in,” Alex said.

“Got them,” Naomi shouted back. One from Argatha system, another from Quivira. She set the Roci to identifying their silhouettes and drive signatures. Neither one was running a transponder. There was no reason to. Everyone on the hive mind’s side already knew who they were, and they weren’t about to let her in on it.

On the far side of the ring space, three enemy ships were slowly dismantling her fighters. She’d lost the Amador and the Brian and Kathy Yates. The Senator had taken heavy damage and was venting air. More enemy ships were coming through the rings, wave after wave after wave. Some of them—many of them—were ships she’d called there. Laconian science and military ships, survey and support ships from the underground. The crews had answered to her or Elvi or Trejo, and now were something else entirely. A different organism.

When she had a moment to gather herself, she wondered how many people there were still left out there. Had Duarte invaded and co-opted the minds of everyone in all the systems, or was he targeting the ones on their way toward the rings? She imagined whole stations filled with silent bodies working in perfect coordination, the need for verbal communication replaced by the direct influence of brain on brain. A single hand with billions of fingers. If that was what humanity was now, there would never be another conversation, another misunderstanding or joke or shitty pop song. She tried to imagine what it would be like for a baby born into a world like that, not as an individual but an appendage that had never known itself as anything else.

“Naomi?” Alex said. “Three more, and one of ’em is a Storm-class.”

“I see it. Tightbeam to the… the Lin Siniang.”

“It’s yours,” Alex said.

“And watch the dropship coming in from Torfaen system.”

“Just waiting until she’s in range.”

Naomi pulled up their ammunition supply even though she didn’t really have time to. They still had a decent number of torpedoes and rail-gun slugs. PDCs were a little low. And they were the back of the fleet, to the degree that a spherical battlefield had a back.

The connection came up. The woman on the other side of it had long, black hair pulled back in a functional bun and the old-school split circle of the OPA tattooed on her collarbone, though she looked too young to have been born when the OPA was still a real force. The Roci put her name up in a chyron for Naomi.

“Captain Melero, I need you to intercept and delay the incoming ships. Take the Duffy, the Cane Rosso, and the Malak Alnuwr.”

The young woman’s eyes went flat and her face pale. She’d just been handed a death sentence, and they both knew it. Belay that, Naomi thought. Get your people and run like hell. Live to fight another day. Except there weren’t any other days. This was the last day anyone had, and it was only as long as the time they could win for Jim and Teresa.

She tried not to think about Jim.

“Compra todas, sa sa,” Melero said. “Count on us, ke?”

She dropped the connection. Naomi didn’t think she’d ever met Captain Melero before, and she was certain she would never see or speak to the woman again. She wished they could put together a more coordinated defense, but the best she could manage was to set small groups together and give them leave to do what they thought was best. That and hope.

Her timer went off, and she took another pill out of her pocket and swallowed it dry.

You don’t need to do that. There’s no shame in letting go. It’s going to happen eventually anyway. Naomi didn’t push back at the thought. She had the impression that engaging with the other thoughts and memories, even to fight against them, made them stronger. The best she could manage was to let them rise up in her and fall away, and keep chugging down pharmaceuticals until her kidneys cried uncle. She wasn’t worried about long-term damage. An outright overdose would be bad, but she didn’t see much option there either. If she was swamped by other people’s selves, lost in the chatter of minds that weren’t her own, it would be just as good as dead. From a tactical standpoint, worse.

“Everyone brace,” Alex said. “I’m taking the shot.”

“Braced,” Amos said over the comms as Naomi centered herself in her crash couch. The kick of the rail gun was almost subliminal, counteracted by a thrust from the drive, but if the timing went wrong, she didn’t want to be bouncing around the deck like a bad throw in golgo.

She pulled up the scopes in time to see the dropship scattering into bright dust. There had been people on that ship. She wondered if they were dead now, or if their memories and opinions and senses of their own selves were stuck flickering through a billion different brains that weren’t theirs to begin with. Or if they’d been dead before their bodies were destroyed. Maybe those were different ways of saying the same thing.

The comms chimed with a connection request from the Falcon. From Elvi. Naomi checked her timers. The window for the Whirlwind’s entry into the system was already open. Depending on how hard the Magnetar had burned and braked, it could pass through the Laconia gate at any time now. The end was about as nigh as they got. She accepted the connection.

Elvi looked even more exhausted than usual. Naomi had a flashbulb memory of a dark-skinned man with pale hair and soft, hooded eyes reciting My candle burns at both ends. It will not last the night. She didn’t know if the recollection was hers or someone else’s.

“Give me good news.”

“Well,” Elvi said. “It looks like the isolation chamber is effective in stopping the shared consciousness effect. Being in the catalyst chamber stops the hive mind, even after Tanaka’s psychoactives have dropped to subclinical levels.”

“How quickly can we expand that to something, say, the size of a gunship?”

“With enough labor and materials, we could probably pull it off in a couple years. Until then, you can pick the three, maybe four people you want to stuff in there until someone opens it and hauls them out again.”

Naomi couldn’t help laughing, but there wasn’t any mirth in it.

“Yeah,” Elvi said. “I know.”

“Get me a report. How the isolation chamber works. Directions for building one. We’ll put it on a torpedo, get it through some gates. It won’t do us any good, but maybe someone out there can benefit from it.”

“Can I start it ‘Be sure, stranger, to let the Laconians know we rest here, obedient to their command’?”

“I won’t stop you,” Naomi said. “Sol, Auberon, and Bara Gaon. Where else do we send it?”

“We should send it everywhere. The big tech centers are where Duarte’s most likely to concentrate. The smaller colonies might not have the supplies and manufacturing ready to go, but the knowledge will keep as long as there’s anyone who’s not part of the hive mind.”

“If there is anyone. I’ve got thirty-one ships left, including us. I’m about to have fewer. I don’t have thirteen hundred torpedoes, and every one of these messages we send is one less round we can use defending ourselves and Jim.”

Elvi nodded. “I’ll get you the data.”

“Do it quickly,” Naomi said. “We don’t have long.”

Elvi dropped the connection. On the tactical display, the Lin Siniang and the little battle group with it were engaging with the two new enemy ships. Four more enemy arrived simultaneously in different quadrants of the ring space. They’re pulling us apart, she thought. They’re drawing us away from the station. And it was working. Naomi’s little fleet was falling apart before her eyes, and there was nothing she could do about it. As she watched, the Cane Rosso blinked from green to orange and vanished like an ember going cool. Thirty ships to defend one station with the full weight of thirteen hundred systems pouring down on her.

“Alex,” she said. “We have four more friends who’ve come to the dance. Get me tightbeams to… the Lastialus and the Kaivalya.”

“Coming up,” Alex said, as calmly as if she’d asked him for a flight schedule.

He had been her pilot longer than anyone else in her life. They knew each other’s moods and rhythms, and stress only made them work more smoothly together. Maybe group minds weren’t that strange after all. In their way, the crew of Roci had developed something between them that, over the decades, had felt like more than the sum of its parts. It was cracked and fractured now—Bobbie gone, Clarissa gone, Jim gone, Amos changed—but with her and Alex, there was still the spark of it. The last smooth surface in a universe that had gone rough and biting.

“Well shit,” Alex said. “Looks like last-dance time.”

The alert came up on her tactical map as he spoke. A new ship had arrived through the Laconia gate. Its transponder was off, but that didn’t matter. The silhouette was enough. Larger than anything besides the void cities and uncannily organic in its design, the Voice of the Whirlwind came into the ring space. It was almost a relief to see it. The dread of knowing it was coming had been terrible. Now the worst had happened, and all that was left was playing out the last few moves, and then packing up the board and seeing whether death was the end or something more interesting.

She started a recording. “This is Naomi Nagata. Concentrate all fire on the Whirlwind. When you’re dry, evacuate the area on your own judgment. We will hold our post.”

She grabbed the comms and set the Roci to deliver it to each of the remaining ships in turn. By the time she’d finished, the Whirlwind was visibly farther into the ring space. Its velocity was terrifying and its braking burn murderous. The Roci ran the numbers in an instant. The Magnetar was on course for the ring station, covering half a million klicks in a little more than twenty minutes. They were coming to protect Duarte.

“Hey,” Amos said through the comms. “About how many rail-gun rounds do you think we could put in that thing before it gets here?”

“Only one way to be sure,” Alex answered, and Naomi felt an overwhelming rush of affection for them both.

All across the ring space, the last vestiges of humanity, the few whose minds were still their own, threw the missiles and PDC rounds and rail-gun slugs that they had toward the incoming behemoth, clear in the knowledge that it wouldn’t matter. Naomi watched as the torpedoes were shot down, the streams of fast-moving slugs dodged or ignored. They were gnats, and the Whirlwind could disregard them.

A message from Elvi came with the report on the isolation chamber, and Naomi put it in the Roci’s torpedoes—a last message in her final bottles—and fired them out. The Roci’s loadout dropped to zero. Well, you tried, an old man said. You did try. She could picture his house—a little row house on a thin street in Bogotá—and the orange tabby who slept on his windowsill. Like she was falling into a daydream, she felt the other lives around her, felt herself forgetting Naomi Nagata and the pain and loss and anger of being her. And also the joy.

She checked her timer. It was still an hour before her next dose of the drugs was due. But by that time, it wouldn’t matter. She opened the ship-wide comm. She tried to find her last words. Something that would fit the love she had for these men, this ship, the life she’d led. The Whirlwind was more than halfway to the station already, though the second stretch would be slower. Even at a quarter million kilometers away, the Roci was picking up the excess radiation from its drive plume.

The shout, when it came, literally defied description. It was an overpowering taste of mint or a vibrant purple or the shuddering sense of an orgasm without the pleasure. Her mind skipped and jumped, trying to make sense of something it had no capacity to understand, matching the signal to one sensation and then another and then another until she found herself on the float above her crash couch with no idea how much time had passed.

“Ah,” Alex said. “Did you guys feel that?”

“Yup,” Amos said.

“Any idea what it was?”

“Nope.”

Naomi’s tactical map was still up, and it had changed. The Whirlwind had cut its braking burn and was on its way to overshooting the station entirely. The other ships—both the enemy and her own—were in disarray. The comms lit up with a broadcast message, and she realized that the jamming had stopped. She accepted the message.

The woman on the screen was young, dark-skinned, with close-cropped hair, and Naomi had seen her once before.

“This is Admiral Sandrine Gujarat of the Laconian battleship Voice of the Whirlwind. I would very much appreciate someone telling me how the fuck I got here.”

Naomi’s finger hovered over Reply, while she tried to think of what to say. She was still there when another broadcast message came through, this one from the Falcon. Elvi’s eyes were wide and bright, and her smile was so fierce it was almost a threat.

“This is Dr. Elvi Okoye, head of the Laconian Science Directorate, in cooperation with Naomi Nagata of the Rocinante. You have all experienced a cognitive manipulation. You may be disoriented or have inappropriately strong emotional reactions. No ships in this space pose any threat. Please stand down and remain safely in place. We will reach out to each of you shortly. Message repeats…”

Naomi turned off the comms. In the quiet of the Rocinante, she let her mind drift, and nothing drifted back. No outside memories. No voices. No sense of looming invisible presence.

“Naomi?” Alex called down. “I’m feeling weird up here.”

“It’s gone. The hive mind. It’s gone.”

“So it’s not just me?”

Amos’ voice was calm and affable. “Nobody’s bumping into the back of my head either.”

“He did it,” she said. “I think Jim did it.”

She closed her eyes and relaxed and something hit her, hard as a kick, from every direction at once. Her eyes shot open, and she couldn’t quite understand what she was seeing. The ops deck hadn’t changed at all—the comm display, the crash couches, the passage up to the flight deck and down to the rest of the ship. And also everything had been transformed. The comm display was a field of bright pixels, glowing and flickering too fast for the human eye to follow. The detail of each one made the shapes of words and buttons that they created too abstract to comprehend, like trying to see the curve of a planet from its surface. She raised her hand, and the skin on her knuckles was a range of crags and valleys as complex as anything that stone and erosion had ever managed. When she cried out, the air fluttered with her breath, compression waves bouncing and curving, enhancing and annihilating.

She tried to find the clasp on the crash couch straps, but she couldn’t make out the surface where one thing began and another ended. And streaking through the emptiness of things, the vacuum that still lived in the heart of matter, threads of living blackness, more solid and real than anything she’d ever seen. They writhed and swam, and behind them, everything swirled and came apart. With no one manning the lighthouse now, the elder gods returned.

Oh, she managed to think, right.