Leviathan Falls

Chapter Three: Naomi

They waited until the Black Kite was far enough from the ring gate that an intercept burn would have been difficult if not impossible. Then they waited a little more so that they wouldn’t seem suspicious for starting their transit burn at the first possible moment. And then Naomi couldn’t stand waiting anymore.

Three hours after that, the Laconian frigate hit them with a tightbeam demanding in official language and harsh tones of voice who they were and where they thought they were going.

“This is the Vincent Soo, independent freighter on contract with Atmosphäre Shared Liability Corporation out of Earth. We are carrying ore samples for quality control testing. Our public contracts and permissions are attached. Message repeats.”

The voice was built from samples of ten different men, slip-mixed by the Roci’s system so that even if the Laconians realized the message was false, they wouldn’t be able to track the voice patterns back to anyone. The Vincent Soo was a real ship with a similar drive signature and silhouette to their present modified version of the Roci, though it didn’t work outside Sol system. The contracts the message included would come back as real unless someone started digging into them. It was as plausible a mask as Naomi could fashion.

“They aren’t responding,” Alex said.

They were both on the ops deck. The lighting was low, though she noticed that Alex had started keeping even the low settings a little higher than he had when they’d both had younger eyes.

“Could be good, could be bad,” Naomi said.

“Sure wish I could tell which it was.”

“If they start chasing us with their guns blazing, then it was bad.”

Alex nodded. “Yeah. That makes sense. I just wish they’d say ‘Hey, we decided not to chase you down and kill you.’ Just out of courtesy.”

“At this range, we’ll have plenty of time to watch violent death barrel down on us. You won’t miss anything.”

“Well, thank God for that.”

With every minute the Black Kite didn’t answer and didn’t turn its drives in pursuit, Naomi felt the fear of capture or destruction fade, and the fear of transit grow. It was hard to believe that there had been a time when her life hadn’t been moving from one trauma to the next like walking on stepping-stones in an ornamental garden. There had been whole decades when passing through the ring gates hadn’t been more than a passing unease. Yes, if there was too much traffic, the ship could go dutchman—quietly vanish from existence for who-knew-where or no place. But it had been the same scale of threat as anything. They could hit a micrometeor that broke their drive. The magnetic bottle could fail and spill a free fusion reaction into the body of the ship. She could have a stroke.

Once, there had been rules about how the gates worked. Human rules about what traffic was allowed through. Inhuman rules about how much matter and energy could pass through in a certain period of time without angering the dark, ship-eating gods.

All of that was gone now.

“How many ships you think they have looking for us?” Alex asked.

“You mean how many ships do they own, or how many are in the specific hunt group tasked with trying to find us?”

Alex was silent, then made a soft clicking sound with his tongue. “Probably wouldn’t like either answer, would I?”

“How long until we reach the gate?”

“If we don’t brake before the transit, about eighteen hours.”

Naomi unstrapped from her crash couch and stood up. The deck rose up under her, thrust gravity at just over half a g. “I’m going to get some rest. Call me if someone decides to kill us.”

“Will do,” Alex said as she headed for the lift. And then, “How’s Jim?”

Naomi looked back. Alex’s face was tinted blue by the light of his screen. The thin white stubble of hair clinging to the side and back of his head reminded her of pictures of snow on rich soil, and the gentleness in his eyes told her the question hadn’t really been a question.

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

She made her way down to the crew decks, listening to the reassuring hum of the ship around her. After so many years in close company with the Roci, she could judge the health of the ship by its sounds. Even if she hadn’t known already that they were running the drive just a little out of balance, she’d have been able to pick up on it from the way the decks muttered and creaked.

When Jim had been taken prisoner by Laconia, Naomi had mourned him. Mourned the version of herself that had him at her side. When, against all odds, he’d come back, she hadn’t really been ready. It was something she hadn’t let herself hope for, and so she hadn’t thought deeply about how it would be.

The crash couch was rigged up for the two of them to share. For extended hard burns, one or the other of them might take one of the spare cabins or—more often—a couch on the ops deck. The doubled couch wasn’t built for optimum function so much as quality of life. The pleasure of waking up at someone’s side. The intimacy of watching them sleep, feeling them breathe. Knowing on a cellular level that she wasn’t alone.

Jim was sleeping when she came into the room. He still looked thinner than she remembered him being before his time in prison. Before her time in self-exile. It might only have been the graying of his hair, but the skin of his eyelids seemed darker than it had been before, as though he’d been bruised in a way that wouldn’t heal. Even in sleep, there was a rigidity to his body, like he was braced against an attack.

She told herself that he was recovering, and that was probably true. She could feel the passing days and weeks changing her too. Letting her expand a little bit more into a place she hadn’t had access to when they had all been apart. It was different than it had been. Bobbie was gone. Clarissa was gone. Amos was transformed in ways that made her skin crawl if she let herself think about it too much. And Teresa and her dog were there, half permanent passengers and half threat. Even so, this was closer to the life she’d had than she had any right to expect. A version of her family, back together. Sometimes that was a comfort. Sometimes it was just a way to be nostalgic for what hadn’t returned.

If they could stop, recover, decompress, who knows what else they might have been able to salvage, but they couldn’t.

She lay down beside him, her head pillowed on one folded arm. Jim shifted, yawned, cracked open one eye. His smile was the same—boyish, bright, delighted to see her. This time is a gift, she thought. And she smiled back.

“Hey, sexy lady,” Jim said. “What did I miss?”

Years, she thought. We missed years. Instead of the truth, she smiled.

“Nothing critical,” she said.

“I really want to slow us down,” Alex said.

Naomi, in the galley, was putting the remains of her meal into the recycler. They had cut thrust, and the whir of the vacuum sucking the stray bits of food into the system was almost as loud as Alex’s voice over the comms. On the wall screen, the Kronos ring gate hung against a wide field of stars, the weird dark, twisting mass at its perimeter visible only because of the Roci’s enhancements. With each passing second, the magnification dropped. The ring was a thousand klicks across, their transit was counting down from twelve minutes, and it still would have been invisible to the naked eye.

“You can tap the brakes if you want to,” Naomi said. “But if there’s unfriendly company in the ring space, it’ll just make us easier to hit.”

“I want to charge up the rail gun,” Alex said. “But you won’t let me, so I’m sublimating.”

“You could recheck the torpedoes and PDCs.”

“Amos and Teresa are doing that already. I don’t want to seem like I don’t trust them.”

“You could arm the hull charges and be ready to blow the disguise plates off.”

Alex was silent for a long, slow breath. Across the little room, Jim gave her an approving thumbs-up.

“Yeah, I’ll do that,” Alex said. “Really want my rail gun up, though.”

“When we’re on the other side, you can charge it to your heart’s content,” Naomi said.

“Promises, promises.” A click said that Alex had dropped the connection. The magnification on the ring gate continued its slow fall. Naomi called up a little inset window pointing back. The noise from their drive cone made the image blurry, grainy, and approximate, but even so, she could see that the Black Kite wasn’t moving toward them.

“I’m not seeing a repeater,” Jim said. “They blew ours up, but it doesn’t look like they dropped one.”

“I noticed that. They aren’t worried about coordinating with anyone on the other side. So there’s at least a chance we aren’t burning straight into a trap.”

“Yay!”

Ten minutes remained.

“Ready?” Naomi asked. In answer, Jim pulled himself to a wall handhold and pushed off toward the central lift. Naomi opened a connection to Amos. “We’re taking stations on the ops deck. Not that we’re expecting any trouble, but if there is some…”

“I hear you, Boss. I’ve already got the pup in her kennel. In case we bang around a little.”

Bang around a little meaning evade incoming fire. “And Teresa?”

There was one of his odd pauses before he answered. “We’re strapping down in engineering. You have a need, just say the word.”

Naomi dropped the connection and followed Jim. The lift was at the bottom of the shaft, locked down until someone called it, and they swam through the empty air of its shaft until they reached ops. They went to their usual stations, pulled the straps across their bodies, shifted the screens to the controls they would each take if the transit landed them in danger. The combination of fear and familiarity turned it into a ritual, like brushing her teeth before sleep. The ring persisted, but the lensing of the telescopy put fewer stars around it now.

“Ready in ops,” Naomi said.

“Flight deck,” Alex said.

“Yeah,” Amos said. “We’re good. Do your thing.”

The counter reached zero. Jim took a sharp breath. The gate blinked to the grainy trailing image—the same structure, but behind them now and receding. The stars all went out at once.

“And we are through,” Alex said. “No threats on the board so far as I can see, but shit howdy, are there too many people in here. I’m flipping us around and putting the brakes on until we know where we’re headed.”

The thrust gravity warning went on even though he’d just said it, and after a moment of vertiginous rotation, up and down returned. The gel of the couch pressed into Naomi’s back. She had already brought up the tactical map.

The ring space—what she still thought of as the slow zone even though there hadn’t been the hard limit on velocity here since Jim and a protomolecular echo of Detective Miller had turned it off decades ago—was a little smaller than the sun in Sol system. A million Earths could have fit in it, but the only things it contained now were 1,371 ring gates, the single enigmatic station at its center, and fifty-two ships including the Roci, all of them on transits of their own. Alex was right. It was too many. It was dangerous.

“How many do you think we’ve lost?” Jim asked. When she looked over, he had the same screen open before him.

“Just underground ships?”

“No, I mean the big we. Everyone. Laconian. Underground. Civilians just trying to get supplies where they’re needed. How many do you think we’ve lost?”

“No way to know,” she said. “No one’s keeping track anymore. There’s a war on.”

She set the Roci to identify the ships by transponder, drive signature, thermal profile, and silhouette, to note any discrepancies and flag any ships that were known to be associated with the underground or the Laconian Empire. It took the ship system three seconds to produce a compiled list with cross notations and a navigable interface. Naomi started the human work of paging through. The ships most closely allied with Laconia were a freighter called Eight Tenets of Bushido that operated out of Bara Gaon and a long-range explorer called the Flying Buffalo that was based in Sol but owned by a corporate network that had embraced Duarte’s rule the moment Earth and Mars had surrendered. Neither were warships, and both struck Naomi as being allies of convenience more than true believers in the Laconian cause. They weren’t part of the official Laconian hierarchy, anyway.

The only ship on her known underground contacts was an independent rock hopper out of Sol that was flying as the Caustic Bitch but was listed in the registry as PinkWink. There was probably a story there, but Naomi wasn’t sure she wanted to know what it was.

There was also a bottle on the float.

“One of yours?” Jim asked.

“Hope so,” Naomi said. “We’ll see.”

Once, humanity’s comm network had been a fairly robust thing. In-system radio signals hit repeaters at the ring gates that were either strong enough to shout over the interference in the gates or actually physically penetrated them with transceivers on both sides. Medina Station, at the heart of the ring space, had maintained them and monitored the comm traffic. For decades, a message from Earth could reach Bara Gaon and receive an answer back within a day even if the signal queuing was swamped. But with the death of Medina and the rise of the underground, that was gone.

Now the thirteen hundred worlds communicated in a shifting patchwork of relays, ships carrying messages, and the modified torpedoes she called bottles. This one in particular was an advanced design, set to wait and gather incoming messages from the underground that were meant for her and keep them until it was triggered. It was an imperfect system, and she was certain she’d lost more than a few along the way, but it was easy to verify, difficult to fake, and difficult if not impossible to trace.

She pulled up the Epstein drive controls and dropped in a slightly altered feed pattern. To anyone besides the bottle, it would be unremarkable—well within the range of normal drive fluctuations. To the sensor array on the surface of the bottle, it would match a pattern.

It did.

The bottle shouted a dense blip of tightly packed data, putting it out broadcast for any ship in the slow zone to hear. A tightbeam would have pointed a finger if anyone had caught backscatter from it. This could be meant for any of the dozens of ships that could hear it. And every now and then, the underground set false bottles to sneak into the slow zone or a gate to spit out faked data and confuse the patterns.

The Roci’s system sucked in the radio burst and set quietly to work decrypting it, while at the edge of the ring space the bottle lit its own drive and zipped out through one of the gates. Naomi’s underground knew to watch for its detonation as the sign to place another one when they could. If the Laconians saw it—even if they knew what it meant—there still wasn’t anything for them to do about it.

It was all run like an OPA cell writ large, and Naomi was the one who’d designed it. The sins of her past, finding a use.

“Well, that could have gone a lot worse,” Jim said. “I guess the question now is where we go next.”

“That will depend on what’s in the data,” Naomi said. “I don’t like spending more time in the ring space than we have to.”

“I would also hate to be eaten by forces from beyond space and time before it was my turn.” The lightness and humor she’d always known were still there, but there was an emptiness behind it. Not nihilism, she thought. Exhaustion.

“If we need to,” she began, “there’s always—”

Teresa’s voice cut in on the ship-wide comms. “I need help. In the machine shop. I need help now.”

Jim was unstrapped before the girl had finished speaking. All the weariness was gone from him. He didn’t wait for the lift to engage, dropping down the handholds in the shaft like climbing down a ladder. Naomi was barely behind him. Some part of her was almost relieved to see him moving with certainty again. Like catching a glimpse of the Jim from before. Even if a lot of him was in hiding, he was still in there.

“What’s going on?” Alex asked from the flight deck.

“Something’s happening to Amos,” Teresa said. She had the tense calm of an emergency responder.

“We’re on our way,” Naomi said. Jim didn’t respond at all. When they reached the engineering deck, Naomi heard something. A voice, Amos’ voice, but not with words in it. It was a low wet sound, half growl, half gargle. Something about it reminded her of drowning. She and Jim strode down to the machine shop together.

Teresa was sitting on the deck, her legs crossed and cradling Amos’ wide, bald head in her lap as he jerked and shuddered. A pale foam dripped from his mouth, and the pure black eyes were wide and empty. A sickening smell—as much metallic as organic—filled the air.

“He’s having a seizure,” Jim said.

Teresa’s voice trembled when she spoke. “Why? Why is this happening?”