Leviathan Falls

Chapter Eleven: Teresa

At fifteen years since the first permanent settlements, New Egypt was a younger colony system. It had two planets with large habitable areas. The school where she was going to live, like most of the other established settlements, was on the smaller of them, the fourth planet out from the sun. The planet—called Abbassia—had a little under three-quarters g and a thirty-hour day. For reasons that hadn’t been investigated in depth yet, the magnetosphere was very strong, which was important given the very active and frequent solar flares. Even near the equator, the auroras were supposed to be magnificent.

The total population of the two planets together was less than the Laconian capital, and it was spread across half a dozen small cities and a score of mineral extraction sites. Only a third of Abbassia was covered by ocean, and most of the land surface was arid, though with extensive cloud forest analogs at upper elevations in both the northern and southern hemispheres.

Sohag Presbyterian Academy was nestled in a river valley in the south, a few hundred kilometers from Nouvelle École, with which it cooperated academically. Sohag Presbyterian’s grounds were a little under a thousand hectares of terraformed soil and agricultural cultivates. The buildings had been designed by Alvaro Pió shortly before his death, and they were listed in the top thousand most significant architectural sites in the new worlds.

Teresa had looked at pictures of the campus filled with smiling young people her age and a little older. She tried to imagine herself among them. Tried to imagine who she would be if she were in those images. This is going to be my home now. Unless something goes wrong.

And it seemed like something might be going wrong.

The whole crew was gathered at a screen on the ops deck that showed the tactical display of the New Egypt system. Their focus—and so Teresa’s focus too—was the ship that had just passed through the ring gate 6 AU behind them and was burning hard for Abbassia.

“I don’t have it on any of the transit schedules from the underground,” Naomi said. “But that’s exactly the problem. There isn’t a single coordinated set of flight plans, and even if there were, people are smuggling all the time now.”

“Nothing on the drive signature?” Jim asked.

“Doesn’t match anything in the records,” Alex said. “But that doesn’t mean much either. Could be something that was built or had the drive swapped out at a shipyard in Bara Gaon or Auberon. There’s more and more decent yards in other systems too. It’s not like it was back when everything was just Sol system.”

“I know,” Jim said.

Alex increased the size of the image, but the ship was still too small to make out—a black dot against the brightness of its drive plume. A few dozen meters of ceramic and carbon-silicate lace as seen from almost nine hundred million kilometers. It was a miracle they could make out as much as they could. “Chances are decent that its coming through now is just coincidence.”

“Yeah,” Jim said in a voice that meant he disagreed. Amos crossed his thick arms over his chest and smiled. He wasn’t smiling about anything. Teresa still thought of him as Timothy sometimes. Timothy always smiled, even when he’d been hiding in a cave. Jim hauled in a wide sigh and let it out again. “But if it is a Laconian ship—”

“It still probably wouldn’t be tracking us,” Naomi said. “We’ve kept radio silence. We’re not even passing data with the local repeater network. They’d have to know we were coming here.”

“Probably it’s what it looks like,” Amos said. “Freighter hauling freight. Or a pirate. Pirates are good too.”

“It’s not the chances that bother me,” Jim said. “It’s the stakes. I don’t want them tracking us down to the surface.”

“I can make landfall when the site’s on the far side of the planet,” Alex said. “Zip in, drop Teresa and the pup off, and get back up above atmosphere before they’d see us taking off. Even if they’re watching, they won’t know where we went. Might not even know we landed at all.”

Teresa listened with a sensation growing in her belly. It was like a tightness. Or a stone. It had a taste too. She unbuckled herself from the crash couch and pulled herself down the lift. She wasn’t sure where she was going, but the crew of the Rocinante talking through the details of how they were going to drop her off made staying in place unbearable.

She passed by the galley to the crew quarters, including her own. She heard Muskrat bark an inquiry as she passed, but she didn’t answer, just kept going down. The machine shop was as close to a safe and comfortable place as she had anymore. She had a list of tasks from Amos and she pulled it up. It was time to check the water supply’s chemical sensors. She’d never done it before, but the instructions were linked to the entry. She read them, gathered up the tools, and made her way to the tank feeds. Her jaw ached. She made herself stop clenching her teeth.

Travel between systems was slow. The Rocinante didn’t have any of the breathable-fluid crash couches that would let bodies sustain long, very high-g burns. The duties that Amos assigned her to keep her engaged filled the gap that Ilich and other tutors had left, and she clung to them now not because she particularly enjoyed them, but because they were familiar. And because it felt like laying claim to something.

She was about halfway done with a bubble of escaped water the size of her fist adhering to her arm when Amos pulled himself in beside her. He didn’t say anything, just took a little hand vacuum and cleaned the spilled water off her wrist. He handed her tools when she needed them and stowed them for her when she didn’t. It went faster with him there. In the end, she found that two sensors out of sixty were showing periodic faults. Low-voltage shorts. Harmless. And they could be down half the sensors and not really have to worry about water quality. She tagged both of them for replacement anyway. Amos’ philosophy was to replace things before you needed to, not after. She found it a sensible rule.

“So,” he said, “this was back on Earth when I was younger than you are now. There was this guy I knew. His parents both OD’d the same night. Upside, he was a registered birth, so someone gave a shit. Downside, he got put into the foster system. It fucked him up pretty good.”

“Abusive foster caregivers are a common issue in aggressively individualist social orders. I had a unit about civil service reform two years ago. We studied it.”

“True, but that wasn’t the only thing got him. He was one of those people that tried to put down roots, you know? Wherever he was, he’d find things and hold on to them. Put him in a new city for a week, and he’d already have a favorite park. That kind of shit. Only it was fostering, so every few months he’d lose it all again.”

“Is this an uplifting story about how he found his real home inside himself?”

Amos went still for a moment the way he did, then looked chagrined. “Actually, he got addicted to a bunch of home-brewed narcotics and slow-melted his nervous system. So, nah, not really. I was trying to say that you’re not the only one who has a hard time letting go. Moving on to the next thing. I don’t know. Thought it might help to hear that.”

“What about you?”

“I’m good wherever I am,” he said. “But getting to that point was unpleasant. You don’t want to be like me.”

They were quiet for a moment. Her sleeve was still wet. It clung to her arm.

“I’m angry,” she said.

“I know.”

“I feel like he’s throwing me away. Putting me aside because I’m inconvenient.”

“I hear you.”

“It’s like who I am and what I want don’t even matter to him. I know that’s crazy. Or at least I know it’s overblown, but it’s like I have a splinter I can’t dig out. It’s just right there on my nerve ending, and every time I even brush up against it, it hurts.”

“Yeah.”

She sat still, feeling her blood pulse in her temple, her mind agitated. “I’m not really mad at the captain, am I? This is about my father.”

“This school thing could be good for you, Tiny. A lot healthier than hanging around an old warship with nobody your own age.”

“But I like it here. You like me being here, right?”

“No,” Amos said. “I don’t want you to stay.”

It felt like a punch in the gut. “But—”

“Look, Tiny, I’ve watched a lot of people die. Some of them were my friends. I’m mostly okay with that now. But I ain’t ready to watch you die. And if you stay here on this ship, you will. That’s the kind of ship this is.”

“That’s what Jim said too,” Teresa said.

“Yeah? Well, the two of us see a lot of things the same way.”

“You seem very different to me.”

“We are.”

“You’re going to be fighting for the fate of humanity. I’m going to be worrying about algebra assignments.”

“Well, maybe you’ll get lucky and we’ll win and the algebra will matter. Then twenty, thirty years down the road, something else will show up to slaughter everyone, and you can take care of that one.”

She didn’t want to be crying. She didn’t want to be sad. Amos leaned over and put a thick, ropy arm around her. He was strangely hot to the touch, like he was always running a fever. She leaned into him and wept anyway.

She said her goodbyes to Alex and Naomi on the ship just after they touched down. They’d landed far enough away from the school that they wouldn’t damage the grounds, so there was still a little walk from her old life to her new one. She tried not to think about that. It was easier if she could pretend that this wasn’t the last time she would be on the ship. That she didn’t have to start her life over again. She just put one foot in front of the other as if this particular walk didn’t signify anything in particular.

Jim and Amos went with her to make sure everything was all right, but she could tell their minds were more than half on the incoming ship. Like guards from the State Building, they wore light body armor and sidearms. She just had a duffel bag with a couple of folded flight suits and a few days’ supply of dog food. Muskrat trotted along with them, her brown, worried eyes shifting between Teresa and Amos.

The sky was wide and blue with cumulus clouds on the horizon. The valley opened before them, gentle curves of land that looked like erosion and wind and the growth of plants. The local plants were tall and thin, rising up into the air like three-meter-high blades of blue-tinged grass. The breeze passing among them sounded like radio static. The school’s grounds stood out from the world around it—straight lines and right angles. The air smelled like overheated metal.

There weren’t any people.

“Term doesn’t start for another two weeks,” Jim said. “You’re probably the first to arrive.”

“Isn’t it a boarding school?” Teresa asked.

“They still have breaks between terms. I mean, don’t they?”

Amos shrugged. “Not a lot of private school types in my social circles. They know we’re coming?”

“Finley knows to expect us, but Naomi was keeping the radio-silence thing pretty strict. You know, in case.”

“Sure,” Amos said.

The main path was crushed stone gravel, light gray with flashes of pink and blue and gold where the sunlight glittered off it. An earthmover stood idle at the side of the path. Its wide industrial treads had left tracks behind it half a meter across. The disturbed ground was dark and damp. The sun hadn’t dried it yet. Amos smiled at nothing in particular, looking around like a tourist taking in the sights. Jim seemed tenser.

They walked up the path to a central courtyard three glass-windowed stories tall with a canopy stretched between the buildings. A stone fountain had lines of mineral deposits that showed where the water would have flowed if it had been flowing.

Teresa recognized it all from her reading about the school—the pale wood juxtaposed with the glass was apparently very interesting from an architectural perspective, but she just thought it looked awkward. The smiling kids and serious instructors that had filled the campus weren’t there, though. Muskrat whined and pressed in against Teresa’s leg.

“Yeah, dog,” Amos said. “Putting my little hairs up too.”

The wide double doors of the main building ten meters ahead of them swung open and a woman stepped out. Her arms were out at her sides, her hands open and empty. She was tall, long limbed, and thin, with high cheekbones and dark eyes. Her skin looked as taut and tough as if she’d been carved out of wood. Teresa couldn’t guess the woman’s age, but she wore a Laconian Marine uniform.

Jim muttered fuck to himself.

“I’m unarmed,” the woman said. Teresa recognized her tone. An officer’s voice. Brusque, and carrying an expectation of obedience. Her father’s palace had been filled with voices like it. “I’m no threat to you. You don’t need to escalate.”

“What are you doing here?” Teresa said, loud enough to carry through the courtyard. “Do you know who I am?”

Amos put a hand on her shoulder and gently pulled her half a step back. Jim’s eyes were wide, and his face was bloodless. If his expression hadn’t been so calm, she would have thought he was having a panic attack.

“Yes, I know who you are,” the woman said. “You’re Teresa Duarte. I am Colonel Aliana Tanaka of the Laconian Marine Corps. And Captain Holden, if I’m not mistaken. I have to say that’s a bit of a surprise. I’d have thought you’d have put her on a different ship. Eggs. Baskets. You know.”

Jim stood silent. Frozen. Oh, Teresa thought. He’s about to have a panic attack.

“I’m not here to hurt anyone,” Tanaka said. “I need the girl’s help.”

“I am here of my own free will,” Teresa said. “If my father—”

“At this point, I am considerably better briefed about your father’s condition than you are,” Tanaka said.

Amos reached down into his pocket, appearing to scratch idly at his leg while he looked up toward the canopy. Teresa heard a tiny, distant voice. Alex, saying What’s up, big guy?

“If we’re all friends and just talking,” Amos said, his voice loud enough to carry, “how come you got a fire team on the roof up there?”

Teresa looked up. She wasn’t certain, but there might have been shadows on the canopy. Her heart was tapping at her ribs like it wanted to get out. Muskrat whined, and she put a hand on the old dog’s back.

“He’s right,” Jim said, his voice steadier than Teresa expected. “That doesn’t seem friendly.”

The woman didn’t miss a beat. “You’re correct. If I wanted to resolve this through violence, it would already be resolved. But I think we’ve all been through enough firefights to understand that when the bullets start flying, it gets very hard to be certain where they all end up. And I don’t want anything to happen to the girl either.”

“Where’s the head of school?” Jim said. “The one who was meeting us?”

“She’s safe. Honestly, I was hoping I’d find Teresa already here.”

“We didn’t know we were inconveniencing you, or we’d have scheduled things differently,” Jim said. Despite the casualness of his words, his voice was like a wire under so much tension it was about to snap.

“In your position, I would have made getting her to safety a much higher priority. You can’t imagine what a relief it is to discover I didn’t waste my time coming out.”

“You sure about that?” Jim said.

“Wouldn’t play with this one, Cap,” Amos said softly. There was a dangerous buzz in his voice Teresa had only heard once before. Close your eyes, Tiny. You don’t want to watch this. The last thing he’d said to her before he’d been killed.

“This isn’t a fight either of us need to have,” Tanaka said, taking a few slow steps forward. Her arms were still out to her sides, fingers splayed to emphasize the emptiness of her hands. “I’m not looking to arrest you, Captain Holden. Or your crew. Or your ship. You’re free to go. My mandate at present is very narrow.”

Teresa glanced over at Jim, and he looked back. While their gazes were still locked, he shouted, “How do I know you won’t open fire as soon as we don’t have her?”

There was no reason for her to believe that Jim was bluffing. In the moment, Teresa was certain he would leave her with Tanaka, and relief complicated her fear. They didn’t want to see her die. She understood that better now. She didn’t want to see them die either.

“You have my word,” Tanaka said.

“I was looking for something a little more solid.”

“I don’t have a habit of breaking faith. That’s going to have to be enough.”

Jim looked away from Teresa, back to the woman. Amos had started humming softly and tunelessly. The shadows on the canopy were larger now, and more clearly shaped like Laconian power armor.

“Not sure that it is going to be enough,” Jim said, “but I’m willing to discuss other ways to make a handoff. You let us go back to our ship. Once we’re in the airlock, we’ll let the girl walk back by herself.”

Tanaka’s smile was hard. “Let me make a counteroffer. How about you do what I said, and no one dies?”

Jim tensed. He was on the edge of doing something stupid out of fear, and Tanaka was starting to escalate. Teresa had been trained in negotiation strategies, up to and including hostage situations. Jim was going to fuck this up. She had to take control. “I’m a little tired of being talked about like I was luggage. This isn’t a conversation between him and you. This is a conversation with me. I decide what ship I leave this place on. Not him.”

Muskrat, sensing the tension, started barking and hopping on her front legs. Tanaka smiled, and it was cold.

“All right,” Tanaka said. “Please come with me. Do it now, and in return I won’t kill your friends.”

“You don’t have to do this,” Jim said, quietly enough that it was just for her to hear it.

Whatever happened, she would know that even now, having landed on this planet to get rid of her, he was still willing to die to protect her. The knot in her stomach was replaced by something warm and comforting. It had to be enough.

“I’ll go,” Teresa said, but no one heard her. Her voice was suddenly drowned out as the static hiss of the tree-sized grasses took on a deafening rumble. For a second, she thought of earthquakes or stampedes of cattle. Tanaka’s neck worked. She was subvocalizing to someone.

“You have to the count of three,” Tanaka shouted. “One—”

Amos said Fuck it, stepped in front of Teresa, and drew his gun.