Leviathan Falls

Chapter Forty-Seven: Jim

Don’t look,” Jim said. “Don’t look, kid. I’ve got you. Don’t look.”

Teresa kept her head against him, her eyes down. Even with his numbed arms, he could feel her hyperventilating. Her father’s body, not just mutilated but also transformed, floated slowly away, a sheet of dark liquid clinging to it from surface tension. Tanaka, covered by more traditional blood, was on the drift too. The two bodies separated slowly.

He tried to imagine what it would have been like for him, seeing Mother Elise or Father Caesar or any of his parents die that way. He tried to picture Naomi or Alex where Duarte was. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t imagine being sixteen years old and watching his father, the center of his life and reality, who had been taken from him and then teasingly almost returned, die that badly.

“It’s going to be okay,” he whispered to her as she sobbed and wailed. “It’s all right.”

Miller swept off his hat and wiped metaphorical sweat off his unreal brow. He looked exhausted.

“Is he gone?” Jim asked.

Miller nodded. “Yeah, we’re the only ones here now. Which is good. I was switching those goons off a hundred times a second, and he kept setting them back on ‘murder everything.’”

Teresa raised her balled fists to her eyes. Miller shook his head. “I always hate this part. The bodies and the blood are gross sometimes, but the ones who are left holding the bag? Especially kids. I hate that part.”

“What do I do?”

“Normally, I handed them a stuffed bear and called in the social worker. I don’t know. How do you tell someone that it’s just the way the game plays, and this time their number came up?”

Jim rested his chin on the top of her head. “It’s going to be all right.”

“Or lie to them,” Miller said. “That works too. But there is a question we need to answer. I’m not sure how we get her out of here safe.”

“We can clear a path, can’t we? If Duarte’s not reconfiguring the station, can’t we do it?”

“Sure, probably. I seem to be an all-purpose remote as far as local things are concerned. But what are you going to put her on when she gets there?”

Despite the heat, Jim felt a chill. “Why not the Roci?”

Miller tilted his head like he was hearing an unfamiliar noise. “You’re forgetting what got us here. All this is a complication on the real problem. When Colonel Friendly aced Duarte, she took his finger out of the dike. We’re safe in here. This place has already taken the worst the bad guys could dish out and stayed solid. But everyone else out there?” He shook his head.

The coolness in Jim’s chest bloomed into pain for a second, and then switched back off. He tried to catch his breath. “What do I do? How do I stop it?”

“Stop what?” Teresa asked.

“Hey,” Miller said. “We’ve only got one brain here. If I know, you do too. It’s like I told you last time. Walking around with a body on means you’ve got a certain level of status.”

“Of access,” Jim said.

“You’re not making a remote connection. It’s why he had to come here. Had to be here.”

Jim felt a tension he didn’t know he was carrying release. His arms were numb to the shoulder now, his legs up to the waist. His breath was shallow and his jaw ached. Miller shrugged. “You knew coming in here you weren’t coming back out.”

“I did. But I’d hoped. You know, maybe.”

“Optimism is for assholes,” Miller said with a laugh.

“Maybe what?” Teresa asked. “I don’t know what you mean. Maybe what?”

He took her by the shoulders. The tears sheeting her eyes had turned her sclera pink and raw. Her lips trembled and shook. He’d known her since he’d first been sent to Laconia in chains. She’d been a child then, but she’d never looked as young as she did now.

“There’s something I have to do. I don’t know how it’s going to work out exactly, but listen. I will not leave you here alone, okay?”

She shook her head, and he could tell she wasn’t hearing him. Not really. Of course she was in shock. Who wouldn’t be? He wished there was something more he could do. He fumbled, taking her hands in his. He had to watch his fingers to know where they were.

“I will take care of you,” he said. “But I have to do this now. Right now.”

“Do what?”

He drew back his hands, and turned toward the network of black filaments. The space where Duarte’s body had been was empty apart from floating black fibers. They stirred in a breeze Jim couldn’t feel. Something about the motion reminded him of sea creatures putting out feelers to catch their prey. A wave of nausea washed over him.

He held out his arms, fingers splayed, and let the threads touch him. Glimmers of blue ran along them and swirled through the air. He felt a gentle tug across his shoulders as the web pulled taut. The ranks of inert sentinels floated randomly through the wide, bright, empty air. The Laconian corpses, still drifting, drew farther away. The black threads snaked toward him like they were following a scent and laced themselves into his sides when they found him.

Teresa was watching him, stunned. Her eyes were wide with horror and disbelief. He tried to think of something to say—a joke that would break the tension and let her laugh at the nightmare. He couldn’t come up with anything.

“Whatever he did, he did before,” Miller said, beside him now. “If there was any setup or arrangements that needed to be made, Duarte already put them in place before the Preiss did its not-vanishing trick. We’ll have to navigate it a little.”

“How am I supposed to find it?” Jim said. “I don’t know how any of this works. I don’t know how to do anything but put myself in the circuit and hope.”

“It’s like the doc said. This whole thing wants to do what it’s going to do. You’re just here to let it. You’re not building a gun, just pulling a trigger.”

“That’s a lot less helpful than you think,” Jim said.

The thing in his gut shifted. His heart did something violent and not at all heart-like, and he was someplace else. Someplace cool. He could feel his arms and legs again, and there was no pain anymore. If he concentrated, he could still see the bright room, the floating sentinels. He could still feel his body, wracked by the threads and the changes the protomolecule was making to him. It was like being on the edge of sleep, aware of his sleeping self and his dream self at the same time.

Miller cleared his throat. “It’s happening. You should hurry.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

Miller’s face was an apology. “You’re the station now. This is your Eros, and you’re what Julie was. Relax, and let it show you what you want to know.”

Naomi, Jim thought, aching. I want to see Naomi again.

And awkward as a child taking its first steps, his awareness broadened. It wasn’t quite like seeing, and it wasn’t quite like knowing something intellectually, but a mix of both. He felt Naomi at her place on the flight deck, recognized her distress. And as it bore down on her, scattering the molecules and atoms of his ship like a wind scattering dust, Jim saw the enemy clearly for the first time.

Instinctively, he reached out and pushed it back. The black thing from a different reality screamed and fought, pressing against him. Jim wanted to feel the struggle pushing against his hands, but that wasn’t quite right. His sense of his body was very strange now. But he could feel the black thing making its way forward like it was swimming toward Naomi against a heavy current.

“You’re going to need to think a little bigger,” Miller said, and the scope of Jim’s awareness expanded. The ring gates and the space between them exploded into his mind. Not just the physical space and the ships scattered through it, not just the crews of the ships and their candle-flame-bright minds, but the invisible structures of it: lines of subtle force that laced between the gates and the station, looping and reinforcing, coming together and apart in a complex sacred geometry. From this perspective, the intrusion of the enemy on the Rocinante and on all the other vessels was a single thing. A deformation in the lines of force that kept the ring space from collapsing back into nothingness.

He pushed back, trying to bring the nature of the ring space back to true, but the pressure working against him was implacable. It was omnipresent, and anyplace he resisted it, it flowed around him.

“Miller?”

“I’m right here.”

“I can’t do this. I can’t stop it.”

“That’s a problem, then.”

“Miller! They’re going to die!”

Jim pressed back like he was trying to lift a blanket with a toothpick. He was too small, and the pressure, the deformation, was coming from everywhere at once. He felt the candlelight minds on a dozen ships starting to go out. Jim started to panic, flailing. Another few flickering lights went out. One of the ships changed from a single thing with a bright core of energy at its heart to a thousand tiny things, to nothing, as the enemy shattered it and the flow of the attack carried it outside the bubble of space.

“How do I stop this?”

“You know,” Miller said. “I told you. You stop it the same way he did.”

Jim reached out to the candle-flame minds, pushing into them, and with each one he touched, he felt himself growing wider. A man from Earth, born after the devastation, who joined the underground because he was angry with his father who had capitulated to Laconia became part of Jim. A woman whose mother was sick and might be dying at a medical center on Auberon. Someone who was secretly in love with their pilot. Someone who had been thinking of killing themselves. Jim washed through the minds of everyone in the ring space—Naomi, Alex, Amos—and what had been impossible became possible.

This, Miller said, but not aloud, all of this was built by one kind of animal. An animal made from light that shared a single mind across more than a thousand systems. If you want to use their guns, you have to have hands the same shape as them.

Hands? Jim tried to say, but there was so much to him now, he was so wide and bright and full it was hard to know whether he’d managed.

It’s a metaphor, Miller said. Don’t get too stuck on it.

Jim pressed out, and this time he was able to push everywhere at once. The pressure was terrible. The enemy was stronger than he was—than they were—but the structure of the rings and the space and the lines of subtle force were like a construction mech, amplifying his strength, protecting him. Slowly, achingly, he moved back. The crushing pressure outside the ring space was a furnace, an engine, a source of unimaginable energy. Like a judo master, the ring station took the near-infinite power of an entire universe trying to crush it and pivoted, turning its strength against it. The other, older universe just outside the sphere of rings moved past him, and he could feel the pain he caused it. He could feel its hatred. The wound in its flesh that he was.

It pushed, but he could hold it. The lines were in their places now, stable in a way that took less effort to hold in place until the ancient enemy rallied again. He felt it slithering against the slow zone, a black snake larger than suns.

All the energy we can use is from one thing that wants to be something else, Miller said. Water behind a dam that wants to get to an ocean. Coal that wants to be ash and smoke. Air that wants to equalize pressure. This structure is stealing energy from another place like a turbine slows down the wind just a little. And the things from the other place will never stop hating us for it.

Jim pulled back, extracting himself from mind after mind after mind. Making himself smaller, lesser, and weaker with each one. Making himself only himself.

“So,” Miller continued, “they announced their let’s-call-it-displeasure by finding ways to slaughter us. When by ‘us’ I mean the other things that grew up in our universe. Our galactic photo-jellyfish cousins or whatever. The bad guys took out a system here, a system there. We shut down the gates to try to keep them from killing us, but it didn’t work. We tried to build tools that would stop them.”

“But nothing could,” Jim said.

“Nothing until now. See, now we’ve got a few billion murder-primates we can slot in where the airy-fairy angels of light used to be. I’m going to give us a better chance at that point.”

“That was Duarte’s plan.”

“It was.”

“I didn’t go through all of this just to be him.”

“Maybe you came through all this to understand why he did what he did. To get your head around it,” Miller said, taking his hat off and scratching the back of one ear. “You do what you have to do to fight back, or you get slaughtered. Either way, you lose what being human used to be.”

All through the ring space, people rushed. Fear and relief and the focused concentration of repair work being done while emergency klaxons sounded.

And beyond the rings, the systems. Billions of lives. Billions of nodes waiting to be strung together into a single, vast, beautiful mind. From here, Jim could see the great unity that humanity could become, and more than that, he could do it. He could finish the work Duarte had started, and bring something new and grand and strong into the universe.

It would be beautiful.

Miller nodded like he was agreeing with something. Which maybe he was. “Nerving yourself up to kiss your big crush for the first time? Or getting pissed off because the apartment one over has a nicer view than yours? Playing with your grandbabies, or drinking beer with the assholes from work because going back to an empty house is too depressing? All the grimy, grubby bullshit that comes with being locked in your own head for a lifetime. That’s the sacrifice. That’s what you give up to get a place among the stars.”

For a moment, Jim let himself look forward through epochs to see the brightness that humanity could become spread through the universe, discovering and creating and growing in its chorus. Reaching beyond anything a single human mind could conceive. A blanket of light that rivaled the stars themselves. Back in the bright chamber, his physical body wept with awe.

And he sighed.

“It’s not worth it.”

“Yeah,” Miller said. “I know. But what can you do?”

“They shut the rings down,” Jim said, “but they kept the station. The slow zone. They left it all here so that they could come back to it. The Sol ring couldn’t have worked if the station hadn’t been here for it to connect with. They put a bandage over it without getting the splinter out first.”

Miller frowned thoughtfully, but there was a glimmer in his eyes. Somewhere, Teresa was screaming Jim’s name. He’d need to take care of that. There was another thing first.

“Amos,” he said, and the big mechanic turned to look at him. The machine shop was in emergency lighting, and a swath of the deck was simply missing. Amos had a patch kit in one hand and a welding rig in the other. Muskrat, still in her crash couch, barked her greeting bark and wagged.

“Hey, Cap.”

“How bad’s the damage?”

Amos shrugged. “We’ve had worse. What happened to you?”

“A lot. Really a lot. I need you to do a favor for me.”

“Sure.”

“Tell Naomi to evacuate the ring space. Get everybody out. And wherever you go, be ready to stay there.”

“How long are we talking?”

“Stay there,” Jim said, and Amos lifted his eyebrows.

“Well. All right then.”

At the edge of the ring space, the enemy shifted and pressed, sensing, maybe, that Jim’s strength wasn’t what it had been. “And tell her to hurry. I’m not a hundred percent sure how long I can hold this.”

Amos looked around the machine shop, lips pressed together, then sighed and started stowing the patch kit. “You sure you don’t want to tell her yourself?”

“I think we’ve already said what we needed to say,” Jim said. “Another goodbye won’t help.”

“I can see that. Well, it’s been good shipping with you.”

“You too.”

“Hey, Cap, about the rest of ’em?”

“Tanaka’s dead. Duarte is too.”

“Tiny?”

“Don’t leave until she gets there.”

“That’s what I was waiting to hear.”

Jim moved his attention back to the station, complex and active as his cells. It all made sense to him now—the passages, the sentinels, the vast machines that broke rich light and opened the holes in the spectrum. That generated the subtle lines. There was so much that they’d never seen or understood. They’d all just bumbled through, using the gates as shortcuts and hoping for the best. A species of beautiful idiots.

He shifted what he could, remade the passages. There was some risk in it. The subtle lines shuddered, and the enemy circled, sniffing at the gates. Jim opened his eyes.

The pain was astounding. Now that he was aware of his body again, he didn’t understand how he’d ignored it. The numbness in his limbs had given way to a burning. The threads in his side tugged and ripped. It was hard to see. His eyes were changing, and the skin all down his front itched badly, but his arms were restrained and he couldn’t scratch.

Teresa was floating in a ball. He was aware that she’d been screaming for him the way he knew the relative densities of different elements or the names of Greek gods. Intellectually, and without remembering where he’d learned it.

“Teresa,” he said. His voice sounded wet and phlegmy. She didn’t respond. “Teresa!”

She started. Her face was blotchy. Her eyes were red and miserable. She looked terrible. She looked achingly beautiful. She looked so very human.

“I’ve cleared a path back to the ships for you,” Jim said. “You need to run…”