Leviathan Falls

Chapter Five: Tanaka

The Laconian Mechanized Infantry Suit: Special Reconnaissance, or more affectionately the Stalker, was a marvel of design. Built for extended recon, it was lighter and faster than the standard suit, and instead of bristling with weaponry, it was covered with sensors and tracking systems. It wasn’t meant for front-line fighting. Its job was to slip in, spot the enemy and mark the targets, then slip away before the heavily armed shock troops arrived to take care of business. The small-caliber rapid-fire Gatling gun on the suit’s right arm meant a Stalker could still handle a little business of its own, should the need arise.

In her many decades of service, first in the Martian Marine Corps as a member of the elite Force Recon Battalion at Hecate Base, and later as a combat officer in the newly created Laconian Marines, Tanaka had worn just about every model of power armor made. The Stalker suit was her favorite. Long and lean, fast as a greyhound and tough as nails, she’d always fancied that the suit looked like a robotic version of herself.

The one she wore now was currently a gentle mottled green, the color-shifting surface changing to match the rolling forest and Laconian brush that the suit’s three-sixty optics were picking up. It didn’t make her invisible, but it meant the suit’s camouflage was always appropriate for the environment. Two large battery packs rode on the back, giving her a ninety-hour range. The gun was loaded with a belt of mixed armor-piercing and high explosive. She loped through the forest at an easily sustainable twenty kilometers an hour, scattering the small animals before her. There was no reason to move cautiously. Unless she actually found the high consul out there, nothing in the wilds was a threat to her.

She’d started her work by reviewing some of the files and background previously closed to her.

Actual information about the high consul’s personal life and data was thin, even with Omega status to unlock files for her. His medical records were sketchy and vague. Much of his privacy had been preserved over the years by never recording data in the first place. Everyone else on Laconia, on the other hand, was well documented. She’d taken the high consul’s laundry and locked it in a room with her suit’s sensor package while she prepped for the trip. When she put the suit on, it had identified the chemical markers of every human who’d come in contact with the fabric. All but one of them were identifiable. Process of elimination made the remaining signal the high consul. Negative space for hunting animals.

Now she had a scent.

From the security records, she could track Duarte to the edge of the State Building’s grounds, and then a little beyond it. The track after that was thin. Wind had scattered the scents, rain had washed them away.

Laconia wasn’t a huge planet, but it was still an entire planet. Duarte had left days before on foot. Best-case scenario he was still walking, and she’d be able to find him in a long afternoon. But the colony worlds had a habit of sprouting ancient transportation networks—methods the aliens who’d engineered the place had used to move shit around. If he’d tapped into one of them, he could be anywhere on Laconia or miles under it. If she could find where he’d accessed it, she’d have the next step. That was all it took: one step after another until the mission was done.

She was moving fast enough to surprise a family of bone-elk digging for food in the soil with their impressive racks of horns. They startled at her sudden appearance, then all bolted in different directions trying to get away. Her suit tracked them all, marking their threat level as low. If she overrode that and changed the threat to high, the gun on her arm would turn the entire herd into paste in seconds.

She chose not to.

At first, she followed the vague signs. A 15 percent match, hardly better than an educated guess, led down a particular animal trail lined by silver-leaved bushes. A 20 percent match went directly up a sheer rock wall, and she discarded it as a false positive. As she crisscrossed the landscape, her mind relaxed into the experience of the search, and time became less concrete. She’d heard about a similar kind of flow with artists when they fell deeply into their work. It was a lovely way to be—alone in her head with the pure focus of the task.

She made steady speed through the narrow band of forest and into the rocky foothills of a mountain. When she reached it, she had a pretty good hunch where she was going. Topographical maps led her through a twisty box canyon and up to the entrance of a cave. It was well hidden from casual view. No wonder no one had found it without a concerted effort. Teresa must have thought she’d found the best hiding spot in the world.

A pair of large rodent-like creatures—black fur and eyes, callused mouths, and ears like seashells—were in the entrance, fighting or mating or some combination of the two. They stopped and hissed at her as she approached, baring brownish hook-needle teeth. She kicked them out of the way. They hit the cave wall with a wet thud, and stopped moving. She considered the little bodies for a moment and ducked into the darkness below the stone.

The tunnels near the entrance were where the enemy spy had lived for years. His stink was still everywhere. The suit also found traces of Teresa and a dozen other Laconians. The extraction team that had killed Timothy or Amos Burton or whoever he’d been, and then the search team that came looking for his corpse and his equipment. The report said he’d been sitting on a backpack nuke the whole time. The prevailing theory was that he was waiting to see if he could extract James Holden before using it. She had a certain respect for that. There was a purity about someone who could casually hold death in his hands, just waiting for the right moment.

The suit thought it had Duarte’s scent, but if the high consul had come through here, his trail was either too faint or too muddled up with everyone else’s for the suit to track it with certainty. She moved through the cave, trying to recapture the pure state she’d felt in the forest, but something about killing the little not-rats and finding the evidence of the spy’s nest had gotten her thinking. The pure and beautiful moment was gone, even if the hunt was still on.

The stone here was pale, flaking, and weak. She could have dug a passage through it with the powered gloves of her suit. It made her more than a little worried about cave-ins, especially after she got past the entry area where the camp had been and the tunnel system turned into a maze. Her suit’s inertial tracking meant it could create a 3-D map of everywhere she went in real time, but the mountain was large. If the tunnels carved their way through the whole thing, she could be there for days. If she was right and Duarte had come here, it was going to be hard getting him out.

The efficient thing would have been to call for a swarm of micro drones and flood the tunnels with them. But Trejo had impressed on her the need for strict operational security, and including a tech team to run the drones felt like an unnecessary risk. Still, if she couldn’t put her hands on the man, that could be her plan B.

She wasn’t ready to give up, though. Not yet.

The farther into the caves she got, the less natural they seemed. Near the entrance, they had felt like accidents of geology, but here and there strange textures and protrusions began dotting the walls and grew up from the floors in the larger caverns. Black and silver spirals that seemed to carry their own light. Tanaka had spent enough time on Laconian warships built by the strange orbital shipyards to know protomolecule builder tech when she saw it.

This place had definitely been one of their installations, but its purpose was lost to time. The report from the investigation team had marked the location as needing further study, but with the attack on Laconia, everyone seemed to have just forgotten about it. No one’s first priority. Unless maybe Duarte’s.

She passed through a complex junction—an east-west tunnel above intersecting with a curving north-to-southeastern one below, and the suit alerted. She checked the display. Seventy-five percent match in the upper passage.

“Got you,” she said.

Only maybe she didn’t. She followed the suit’s prompting through the twists and turns of a section of the tunnels, the chemical signal staying between 75 and 60 percent match, and came out into a large room filled with elaborate crystalline growths. They rose from the floor like delicate five-meter-high towers of glass lattice, glowing in soft pastel colors when her suit’s lights hit them. In another context, they’d have been breathtakingly lovely. A kind of post-revivification abstract sculpture. She wondered if they were made by alien intelligences or the blind, idiot forces of nature. That she couldn’t tell was either beautiful or damning, but either way, beside the point.

The suit was sure the high consul had been in the room. Her first 100 percent hit. Whether he was still in there or not, Duarte had definitely stood where she was or very close to it. Had seen the crystals with his weirdly altered eyes. Her heart rate increased a little as the realization struck that she might actually be able to find him. The relief at a real prospect of success showed her how carefully she’d been ignoring the possibility of failure.

The trail led her around the base of one of the towers. A pair of doglike constructs were worrying at a shard of crystal lying on the ground next to it. Tanaka could see the gap at the top of the tower where it must have broken off and fallen. In the files, Laconian intelligence called these things repair drones and indicated that they were nonthreatening. Occasionally they’d wander into the fringes of the city and steal broken things, only to later return them repaired, but altered. Researching what they chose to fix and how they went about intuiting original function was one of the projects that the Science Directorate was going to get around to one of these days.

The suit indicated that the high consul’s scent was on one of the drones. Tanaka scowled to herself. If Duarte had left his scent on the thing by touching it—if that was the trail she was following—she was screwed. They could have interacted anywhere before the dog came here, and she’d have no idea where Duarte and this thing had met up.

She was about to go searching for another trace of the scent when one of the dogs said ki-ka-ko, then picked up the broken crystal shard in its weird puppetlike mouth and wandered off. She followed it.

After a confusing series of twists and turns, they emerged into another chamber, ten times the size of anything she’d seen before in the tunnels. It was like stepping into a cathedral. A fluting sound like wind over the top of empty bottles muttered through the space with no clear origin. Strange, almost organic-looking mechanisms grew up from the floor and towered over her, ten or fifteen stories high. For a moment, she felt something like awe.

In among them were half a dozen pits filled with viscous brown fluid, like sewer water mixed with petroleum oil. The dog walked over and dropped its broken bit of crystal into one of the pools, then waited motionless. The suit warned her that there were eleven other mobiles in the cavern. Each of them another one of the weird dog things. None seemed hostile. As she watched, they brought things into the room and dropped them in the pools. One time, a dog took something resembling a half meter of water pipe out of the pool and then left with it.

“This your machine shop, puppy?” she asked. “What are you doing here?”

Tanaka raised her arm and fired half a dozen shots into one of the motionless dogs, blowing it apart. She waited. After a few moments, three of the other dogs came over and began gently picking up the pieces of their dead comrade and dumping them into the pools.

“Ah-ha,” Tanaka said to them. “Fixing your friend up, aren’t you? All right. I’ll wait.”

They just looked back at her with their big eyes as though they were embarrassed at her outburst.

One said ki-ka-ko but didn’t move.

There were a lot of strange chemicals in the air in the chamber, and the suit took a while sorting through them all, but after a few moments it popped up an alert. Duarte’s scent. It was a significant trace. She had a hard time believing that it was just contact with a repair drone. If he’d passed through that room, had he been hurt or killed and the dogs brought him there? Had he figured out the same thing she just did, and used the sewage pools to fix something? Her hands itched a little bit, and she grinned. She felt the impatience of the chase, like she was a dog straining at its leash at the smell of rabbits. The joy of the hunt.

Slowly, methodically, she moved around the perimeter looking for the strongest match. Tracing Duarte’s movement inside the room was probably pointless, but knowing where he’d come from and what direction he’d left would be enough. The best hit was a tunnel leading off the large cavern and gently sloping up.

She followed it, the chemical scent growing stronger as she moved. Half an hour later she emerged into a large room with an open window to the outside.

The chamber was shaped like a half circle, with a flat wall nearly sixty meters across. The middle twenty meters of the wall were missing, creating a large opening to the outside. Sunlight streamed in. Sky glowed oxygen-blue between the draping strands of vine and branch.

He’d been here. More than that, he’d spent time here. Duarte’s scent marker was everywhere.

“High consul?” she said, the suit amplifying her. “This is Colonel Tanaka. If you’re here, I just want to talk with you, sir.”

No one answered.

On either side of the outside opening were spindly cradles growing up from the floor, with fifteen-meter-long egg-shaped objects held in them. The eggs had the same mother-of-pearl gleam she’d seen in the interior of a Gravitar-class battleship. Like something made at the alien construction platform. And the high consul’s most recent scent track moved up to the empty cradle in the center. She walked slowly around the cradle, but no track led away.

“All right, little buddy,” she said to the egg that had been there and was gone, “what the fuck are you?”

“A ship,” Dr. Ochida said.

Tanaka leaned back in her chair. She’d taken over an office in the State Building as her base of operations with a staff of ten and high-priority access to everyone of any importance to the empire. The décor was generic politician, but she’d put a print of Ammon Fitzwallace’s Artemis the Hunter on the wall where she could see it, all vibrant green with shocks of bright and bloody red.

“You’re sure?”

“Well, no,” Ochida said. “We have a team going to the site now, as you requested. We’ll know more once that’s complete, but we have seen similar structures elsewhere. Persephone system. Bara Gaon. Swarga Loka. Seven Kings. It’s not the most common, but it’s certainly not unprecedented. A fair proportion of the artifact tree seems focused on material transport, and especially in the Seven Kings data, we see—”

“Probably a ship.”

“That’s oversimplifying. We believe they were material transport pods,” Ochida said. “But—”

“Did it fly?”

“The location and design seem to indicate yes,” Dr. Ochida agreed with a nod.

“Then how do we track it?”

Ochida leaned forward. His chair creaked under him, and he blinked like an owl. “Track it?”

Tanaka clenched her fist where the scientist couldn’t see it and kept her voice even. “If I wanted to find where the ship went. Is there a drive signature I can search for? Some kind of energy profile?”

Ochida shook his head like she was a little girl who’d asked him for a unicorn. “The native propulsion systems aren’t something we’ve cracked yet. Not for want of trying. But we’ve known since Eros moved that it involves decoupling local inertia from frame inertia. That’s not something that has a drive. It seems more like a controlled gravity where a nonlocal area falls through normal space—”

“Okay,” Tanaka said, not punching the grinning scientist in the face only through great effort of will. “No drive plume. Then what can I use to find it?”

“Eros was also invisible to radar, you’ll recall.”

“You’re telling me a lot of things I can’t do. Start telling me what’s on the ‘can’ list.”

Ochida shrugged. “Eros was at least always visually available. If the ship passed through any light telescopy, you might find it that way. Of course, after the attack the planetary defenses are compromised, so…” He pressed his lips together in a universal gesture of impotence.

“All right,” Tanaka said. “Thank you.”

“You’re quite welcome.”

“No,” she said. “I mean you’re dismissed.”

Ochida blinked in surprise, but then he left. So that was good.

Tanaka ached. She’d barely begun, and her search area had just expanded from Laconia at or near a transport network to literally anyplace in 1,300 systems and no obvious path to narrow it down. The raw frustration of it was a knot between her shoulder blades. She pulled up a notepad and started thinking her options through. Signal intelligence was obvious. Images of the remaining egg-ships had to be put out to anything with visual telescopes. Stations. Ships. Anything near a ring gate.

The Voice of the Whirlwind—the only surviving Magnetar—was acting as ersatz planetary defense. It would be the priority. If it had seen the egg-ship, that would at least give her an idea what direction it was going. It was possible, after all, that Duarte had been going someplace in-system. She didn’t know for sure he’d been headed for a gate.

And then… what? Hunting a ship that couldn’t be tracked on radar, that didn’t leave a drive plume. That ran dark. If she knew what he’d been going after, maybe it would give her a smaller list of possible destinations. She’d need to talk to the valet and Admiral Trejo to see if Duarte had given any hint where he might be heading.

Or… maybe hunting wasn’t the right model. Maybe trapping was. Maybe it wasn’t a place Duarte was heading for. If the high consul was looking for something, that thing could be used as bait.

The records of ongoing operations were highly restricted. Trejo was probably the only one who could access everything, but he’d given her the keys. There were five active groups trying to recover Teresa Duarte. She read over their operating reports, but half of her mind was probing the strategy. Before his resurrection, the only sign Duarte had given that he was still conscious was his slaughter of Paolo Cortázar. That, according to Dr. Okoye, who had been there at the time, had been out of concern for his daughter. Was it such a stretch to think that the girl would be the first person he reached out to now? Wasn’t she the best available bait?

It sure as hell seemed like better odds than tracking the missing ship.

The most promising lead was an intelligence counter-op. A distant cousin of Duarte’s dead wife ran a boarding school on New Egypt, and there had been some chatter between her and known underground contacts. If Tanaka had the girl, it was the sort of place she’d have found to park her. And the school’s new term was starting soon. Hiding a teenage girl in a place with a lot of other teenage girls made sense.

Tanaka pulled up the command structure. The operation was being run through a hunting frigate called the Sparrowhawk. Captain Noel Mugabo was in charge.

Or had been, anyway. Until now.

She opened a connection to her aide and didn’t wait for him to speak. “Contact the Sparrowhawk and let them know I’ll be taking over direct operational command of their New Egypt mission. And find me a fast transport. Something with the breathable-fluid crash couches.

“Put me on New Egypt now.”