Leviathan Falls

Chapter Forty-Six: Tanaka

Teresa!” Holden shouted at the girl. “Get away from there! Don’t damage the station!”

Well, Tanaka thought, aren’t we just fucked?

The girl ignored him, ripping at the black threads that were wired into the high consul’s body. None of this was in her brief. None of it was going even remotely the way she or Trejo had intended or hoped. There was some independent judgment she was going to have to exercise very, very soon now.

The girl shuddered and jumped, but not in a way that made sense. Something had her, lifting her away from what had been Duarte. The raw panic on Holden’s face told her that he knew what this was, and it wasn’t good. The girl screamed without seeming to be aware that she was screaming, and Holden grabbed at her, pulled himself to her. For a moment, the girl looked like she was widening. Tanaka could almost imagine invisible angels pulling at her arms and legs. There had been an execution method like that once, she thought. Tie a horse to each limb of the prisoner and see which one kept the biggest chunk. But then Holden shouted and the angels all vanished, leaving the girl behind.

Jesus, you’re disappointed? You’re disappointed you didn’t just see that girl killed? a man’s voice said. What is wrong with you? How do you live with yourself? Then, something else—a man, a woman, something—was with her and she was in the administrator’s office at Innis Deep and she was eleven. The administrator was explaining that her parents were dead. The overwhelming sense, unspoken but clear, was pity. This was why she’s so broken. This is why she hurts people. This is why she only fucks men she can dominate, because she’s always so frightened. Look at all the things that were wrong with her.

“I swear to God,” she said, softly enough that Holden and the girl couldn’t hear it, but not talking to herself. “I will put a bullet through my brain if you don’t get out of me.”

Holden was saying something to the girl. Tanaka didn’t care. Winston Duarte’s writhing, pale-fleshed body—still wrapped with black threads like someone had sewn them into him—was argument enough that the appeal-to-paternal-instinct plan wasn’t going to work. The girl was useless. And her mission—bring the high consul back to Trejo—was impossible now too. Even if Duarte was capable of leaving this place, Trejo and Laconia didn’t exist in any meaningful way.

Which meant her Omega status was meaningless. She had better than it. She had freedom. She had nothing to stop her from doing whatever she saw fit except whoever had the balls to try and stop her.

A sound plucked at her. A skittering, buzzing noise that was also like hearing soldiers on parade. At one of the openings in the bright, hot furnace of a chamber, one of the great insectile sentinels came out, and then another. And then a flood. Tanaka felt her eyes go wide.

“Holden, we have a problem.”

He muttered an obscenity. The girl was crying. Blue fireflies swirled like sparks at a bonfire.

“If you hurt them, they’ll take you apart. They literally use your body to fix the damage you do.”

“You were able to protect the girl?”

Holden looked confused for a moment. His skin looked wrong. Like there was some mother-of-pearl version growing up from under his skin. “I… Yes? I guess I was?”

Tanaka switched the gun on her forearm to armor-piercing rounds. “Good. Now do that for me.”

Her first shot was intended for Duarte, but her aim was fouled by the vanguard of the enemy slamming into her. The impact pushed her to the side and sent her spinning, but she kept a grip on the attacker. It was faceless, eyeless, more machine than organism. She put her fist to what passed for its thorax, resting her knuckles against the weird plates of its armor or exoskeleton, and opened fire. Even dampened by the strength of her power armor, the recoil felt wonderful. The sentinel twitched and went still, and then there were two more. She felt something tugging at her like a magnetic force that didn’t register on her suit’s sensor array, and a wave of pain washed over her like needles being driven into her body. One of the sentinels swung a scythe-like arm at her, the cutting edge skittering across her chest plate, and she caught a glimpse of Holden, shielding the girl with his body, his teeth bared in a rictus grin of effort.

The needles sensation faded, and she grabbed the scythe arm, braced her foot against the thing’s body, and ripped the arm free. There were more around her now, slamming into her until her ears rang with the impacts. She lost herself for a moment in the glory of the violence, breaking what she could get hold of, shooting what she couldn’t.

There were too many of them for her to have any hope of winning. One managed a lucky swing and left a sliver of its carapace stuck in her suit’s left shoulder joint. Another wrapped itself around her right leg and didn’t let go, even when she pumped a dozen rounds through its body. They swarmed her, threw themselves at her, died, and made way for a dozen more behind them. She switched back to incendiary rounds, and everything around her turned to fire, but they kept coming through the expanding balls of flame. Two of them grabbed her right arm, and between them, they bent the power armor back. Then two more had her left. She didn’t know how many she’d killed, but it had to be more than a dozen. That’s how long it had taken them to find a strategy against her that worked.

She kept firing, but they were in control of her aim now. The best she could hope was that a few of them would bumble into the line of fire and die there. Holden was wrapped around the girl, his eyes closed, sweat sheeting his skin. And beyond him, through the crowd of sentinels, Duarte.

The man she’d betrayed Mars for was flapping like a wet rag in a breeze. His bright, sightless eyes reminded her of nothing so much as Okoye’s pet catalyst. Blue fireflies ran along the black threads, sewing him back in place. She didn’t feel pity for him. It was now nothing but contempt.

The glowing eyes swung toward her, seemed to fix on her. See her for the first time. Something opened at the back of her consciousness, something was wrenched open, and Duarte flowed into her. The idea of Aliana Tanaka felt distant and small compared to the maelstrom of his—of its—awareness. An ant that defied the anthill was torn apart. No wasp betrayed the hive and lived.

The sentinels hauled her toward him and his black webbing, and she was abased. She felt an oceanic shame, and that shame was a punishment poured into her against her will—a manipulation, a proof that her own heart could be commanded against her—it didn’t matter. Nearby, the girl was screaming for her father, and somewhere deep in the prison of her mind, a young Aliana Tanaka wept for the loss of her own parents and for the evil she had done in turning against her spiritual father, her true father, and the ideal of Laconia. Voices flooded her, wailing and angry and scouring as a sandblaster. She felt herself falling apart under their attention, until all that was left of her was sorrow. Ongoing, intimate assault, another voice said in the mind that was no longer truly her own. An invasion in her secret space. The thing that she kept apart, only for herself.

Then another voice came through. This one, not from Duarte or his hive, but from her. From her past. If it hadn’t still hurt, she might not have heard it. Aunt Akari. Are you sad, or are you angry? And she felt the slap as a sting on her still-healing cheek. Are you sad, or are you angry?

I’m angry, Tanaka thought, and because she did, it was true.

She looked up. She wasn’t more than eight meters from Duarte in his torn, dark cradle. She couldn’t move. The sentinels had her well and truly restrained as they worked to tear her apart. But they were holding her power armor. No one was holding her.

The advantage of training in different forms of combat for as many years and as consistently as she had was simple: You moved past thought. There was no consideration, no weighing of what she should or shouldn’t do, no planning. There was no need for them. The emergency blow of the power armor was like a flower bud blossoming; the plates and joints that the alien insect things were holding popped and fell away like petals. The insect things kept their grip on them, but Tanaka had already pushed off. The air against her skin, the lightness of her underarmor, the oppressive heat of the chamber. They were all flashes of experience. Flickers that she was aware of without the need to attend to. She knew that one good blow from any of the sentinels would open her to the bone if it connected, but she knew it without fear. It was one fact among many, and the calculations were all as reflexive as catching a tossed ball.

She crossed the gap to Duarte in an instant, sliding past him and over the webbing on the left side, where the girl had damaged it enough to leave a hole. One arm around his throat, bracing her legs around his waist. The heat of his body was almost painful, but she fit herself into place. From here, she could use the strength of her whole body, pulling through her back and twisting at the core, against the little vertebral joints in Duarte’s neck. The girl screaming somewhere. Holden shouted something. Tanaka pulled, twisted. Duarte’s neck snapped like a gunshot. She felt it as much as heard it. In gravity, his head would have lolled to the side, the weight of his skull drawing it down. Here, it might almost not have happened.

The sentinels shuddered, and Holden shouted again. Something stung her arm like a wasp. A strand of the black filament dug into her skin. A half sphere of deep-red blood was spreading out where it had bitten; she swatted it away, and Holden shouted again. This time, she understood the words.

He’s not dead.

Between her still-braced legs, Duarte shifted. The noise in her brain ramped up to a scream. Instincts warred in her: push away and evade, or commit to the attack. She leaned into the attack.

Holden was on the float, turning slowly on all three axes, with the girl in his arms, her head curled into his neck to hide her eyes. His skin was mottled and bright and twisted with effort. The sentinels twitched, jumping toward her and then falling back. Tools with two masters, bouncing between conflicting commands. Her last battle, and she was locking shields with James fucking Holden.

Tanaka punched Duarte twice in the ribs. The second time, she felt the bones go. Another sting. Another thread, biting at her leg this time. She flicked it away. The girl had been trying to pull her daddy free from the web, and even her amateur thrashing had done some damage. Tanaka didn’t know what the relationship was between Duarte and the threads, but she could recognize a weak point. It wasn’t proper shuto-uchi, but she could improvise. She stayed braced with her legs and the arm around Duarte’s broken neck, and brought the knife-edge of her hand in where the threads met his body. With every hit, a few more ripped free. Drops of black fluid stippled the free air, and she didn’t know if they were coming from Duarte or the filament.

Duarte writhed against her, and his pain made her lock down harder. The inside of her thighs was burning like he’d poured acid on her, but the pain was only a message. She didn’t have to care. She kept chopping away at the threads. By the time his side was free, his arms had started flapping back at her, punching her face and the side of her head. The shriek in her mind was constant now.

When she went to shift her position so she could attack the connection on Duarte’s other side, the skin on her arm tore. Tiny extrusions were coming out of Duarte’s throat, thick and wet as slugs. They’d burrowed through her sleeve and penetrated the flesh of her arm. When she tried to pull her legs free, she couldn’t.

“Oh, fuck you,” she said. Strategy vanished, and she beat her fist into Duarte’s side, crushing bones with every strike. The thing that had been the leader of all humanity squealed in pain, and she took joy in the sound. Something pressed into her belly, squirming its way into her like a snake. She stiffened her fingers and pressed hard into the softness where Duarte’s rib cage ended. His flesh ripped under the pressure. “Not as much fun when it’s happening to you, is it, you fuck,” Tanaka said. “Don’t like it as much when it’s happening to you.”

Ink-black blood slickened her hand and stung the quick under her fingernails. Her fingertips pushed through a tough, resistant layer of muscle, and her hand was inside him. The snake thing in her gut whipped and writhed. The pain of it was transcendent. She pushed into him, fitting up to her wrist, pulling him in close against her. Something in his chest fluttered against her like a sparrow. She grabbed it, crushed it, and forced her way deeper.

Something happened, and everything went white. She lost herself, if just for a few seconds. When she came to, her mind was clear. It was her own for the first time since the Preiss came back from going dutchman. She coughed, and tasted blood.

The threads that were still sewn into the mess that was her body and his released, floating in the sweltering, furnace-hot air like smoke from hell. Tanaka’s breath was shallow, and when she tried to force herself to breathe deeply, she couldn’t. She pried her legs free of Duarte’s corpse, and scoops of missing flesh the size of golf balls filled with her blood. When she tried to push him away, the snake thing snapped off, still stuck in her gut.

Duarte floated, rotating slowly. His empty eyes swept past her. For almost four decades, she had been an officer of the Laconian Empire, and she’d been good at it. For longer than that, she’d been herself.

Off to her left, Holden and the girl were still. A cloud of sentinels around them had turned to statues. Holden’s eyes found hers. There was still enough humanity in him that she could see horror and disgust in his face. She wished she had a sidearm, so she could have put a round through both of them and watched them bleed out with her. She reached out her arm, index finger pointing forward, thumb raised, and sighted in on Holden’s face.

“Bang, motherfucker,” she said.

The last thing she felt was rage that he didn’t die.