Leviathan Falls

Chapter Sixteen: Tanaka

The school medic looked like his voice had broken about half an hour before. If Tanaka hadn’t known better, she’d have thought he was a student, not staff. He had dark skin, full lips, and hair cut close to the skull. In other circumstances, she’d have found him very pretty. As it was, she kind of hated him. For one thing, he was nervous with her. Every sentence he spoke rose at the end, so no matter how straightforward or obvious the statement, he bent it into a question. Also, some part of her limbic system had noticed that every time he was around, something happened that hurt or annoyed her. Changing dressings on her ruined cheek, needle sticks for the blood draws and support meds, scans in the school’s antiquated autodoc. Something.

Worst of all, she probably owed her life to him.

Her men—Mugabo’s strike team that she’d appropriated—were stripped of their equipment and buried already. Winston Duarte himself had ended the custom of bringing the dead back to Laconia for burial. All soil is Laconian soil had been the message then. Even with the profuse bleeding of head and face wounds, it would have been hard for her to hemorrhage to death on the dirt of Abbassia. But if someone had come and put a bullet in her, they’d have had a pretty good chance of blaming the murder on Holden and whatever the fuck his ship mechanic had become. She didn’t remember being found or brought into the medical station. She didn’t know if the medic had hesitated or if he’d been resolute to his Hippocratic oath. She did know without doubt that she had been vulnerable before him, that he had held her life in his young, unscarred hands. She hated him for that.

“I would very much recommend against any high-g maneuvers for at least three weeks?” he said as she packed her few remaining belongings into a sack. “Regrowth gel is very difficult on something that moves as much as a cheek?”

“I will have the very best care available,” she said, enunciating each word separately through the numbed ruins of her mouth. Holden’s bullet had cost her three upper teeth on the left side and most of her right cheek. There were microfractures from her palate up to her left orbital, and she was having headaches that left her swimming with pain. Those might have come from the fight with the black-eyed mechanic, though. Once enough things got fucked up in her skull, there wasn’t much point assigning an origin story to each of them.

“I think it would be wiser to wait? Another week to give the gel time to bond?”

Tanaka didn’t dignify that with a reply. Her armor was out in the courtyard, packed neatly for recovery along with what was salvageable from the dead fire team, and she walked out of the infirmary to join it, with the medic trailing behind her like a wisp of tissue stuck to her boot. The transport cart from the Sparrowhawk was a plume of dust, still half a klick from the campus. The faculty and staff of the academy watched her from their windows and doors with a mixture of fear and disapproval. She was the woman who’d swept down from the sky and locked them all away while their school turned into a free fire zone. An honorary degree would have been a little much to expect.

She smiled at the thought, then winced.

When the cart arrived, Mugabo was on it. His practiced formality was as crisp as a starched shirt. He braced and saluted her. It actually made her feel better. More herself. While his little crew loaded the arms and armor of their dead, Mugabo stood at her side, head tilted forward.

“You took your damn time,” she said.

“My apologies. The damage we sustained made atmospheric entry problematic, and your transport ship was… Unfortunately, we were forced to salvage certain equipment from it. I am very sorry for the delay.”

“Where do the repairs stand?”

Mugabo nodded, not meaning anything positive other than that he’d heard the question. “While the damage is significant, I am confident we can continue safely. My chief mechanic recommends a return to Laconia for resupply.”

“Are we short of something?”

“The composites that feed the hull are understandably diminished.”

“Meaning the self-repair functions aren’t working.”

“The hull’s integrity is within the error bars,” Mugabo said. She liked the way he deflected. He didn’t want to go to Laconia, his chief mechanic did. His ship wasn’t broken unless Tanaka was willing to permit it to be. There had always been that thread in the tapestry of Laconian culture: the willingness to assert whatever reality your commanding officer proposed. She wondered what Mugabo’s internal life was like. Did he have a reserve of freedom and perversity hidden inside, the way she did, or was he the same blankness all the way down?

She swung herself into the front seat beside the driver and looked out over the school. The battlefield. She’d lost here—lost her fire team, her target, her blood, and her flesh. Part of her reputation. And she’d lost it because she had been too slow to reach for violence. Teresa Duarte was precious—a resource of one. Irreplaceable. Holden had been willing to risk her where Tanaka had not. Lesson learned.

Part of her wanted to drop a missile on the school grounds from orbit and erase the site. She could do it. A few lives wiped out—including that fucking medic—and no one would prosecute her for it. The only consequence would be that people would know she’d done it. They’d guess at the embarrassment and shame that had driven the act.

So fuck it. Let them live.

Mugabo’s team finished the loading and clambered back into their places on the cart. Some peculiarity of the atmosphere refracted the sunlight into six bands like a child’s picture of a star. She remembered something she’d heard once: I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. She didn’t know where the line came from. It didn’t matter. She had a hunt to complete.

“We can go,” she said.

“Yes, sir,” Mugabo replied, and the cart lurched, turned, and sped away toward the landing point. The wind of their passage tasted like dirt. She took comfort in the knowledge that she could live a full, rich life and never once come back to this shithole of a planet. The thought helped, if only a little.

When they were back on the Sparrowhawk and burning for the ring gate, she submitted herself to the medical team. Walking into the infirmary of her own free will and not flinching as they made their examination pulled some of the sting of her first experience of the wounds. By the time they’d checked the wound on her scalp, scraped the local regrowth gel out of her cheek, sewn a matrix in place, and put their own gel on, she felt better. It hurt badly, but showing them and herself that the pain was incidental was almost soothing. Mortification of the flesh had a long and glorious history among performance artists and religious zealots. She didn’t think of herself as either, but maybe there was some overlap.

The new nerve endings itched, and her head throbbed if she stood up too quickly when they were under thrust. Otherwise, she was ready to get back to work, starting with her after-action report. She sat at the little desk in her office, and while the air recycler hummed and the vibrations of the drive fluted gently through the ship, she recounted the failed mission in careful, exacting detail. It was the moral equivalent of the gel scrape. Proof that she could take this pain too. She sent it to Trejo like an atheist confessing her sins. The ritual of cleansing with only a little vestigial sense of actually being clean. After that was done, the work.

In the time it had taken to put herself and the ship back together, the Rocinante had built up an impossible lead, burning past the one incoming merchant ship, the gas giants, and out toward the gate fast enough that there was no point laying on the speed to catch them. Whatever system they were going to, they’d be in by the time she reached the ring space. They couldn’t outrun light, though. She sent the drive signature and silhouette of the ship’s disguise out ahead, spreading the information to every system where the Laconian repeaters hadn’t been spiked recently. Wherever Holden took the girl, Tanaka’s forces would know to look for him. Maybe she’d get lucky.

Or maybe she wouldn’t.

She spent long days going through reports on the other efforts she’d put into motion. The Science Directorate’s analysis of the egg-thing from Laconia was consistent with the idea of an inertialess transport, and they were looking at strategies for tracing it. One theory was that the egg-ship’s passage might leave a trail of free neutrons. She’d taken the Survey and Exploration Directorate off all its other work and tasked it with a report of all known alien structures in all systems. If Duarte had gone someplace, it was almost certain to be one of these. Activity in any of them would give her somewhere to start. But so far, no joy. Her orders to the Intelligence Directorate—checking on any close associates or former lovers of the high consul in case they’d suffered a visitation like Trejo’s—resulted in a report that was equal parts bureaucratic obfuscation and dead ends.

The whole thing left her angry. That was fine. Anger was comfortable. It was useful. She understood it.

She could remember to the moment the last time she’d felt self-pity. She’d been eleven years old and living in Innis Deep. Her parents had both died that year. Her mother had discovered something about her husband she couldn’t live with, and one night she sabotaged the air system in their quarters and suffocated both of them as they slept. Tanaka had been sent to stay with her aunt Akari for the night. She wound up living there for the rest of her childhood. If her aunt knew what it was that had sent her mother into a murder-suicide rage, she never told.

Moving meant changing schools, and the transition combined with the unexplained loss of her parents had been difficult. One day after school, her aunt had found her sitting on her bed and crying. She demanded to know why. Tanaka admitted that a girl at her school had slapped her face and humiliated her.

Aunt Akari knelt down in front of her. She was an MCRN captain, and tall like all the Tanaka women. In her spotless uniform, Aliana thought her aunt looked like a warrior goddess. She’d waited for her to hug her close, then tell her she would take care of everything, the way her mother would have.

Instead, Aunt Akari had asked which cheek had been slapped. When Aliana pointed at it, her aunt had slapped her on the same cheek so hard it made her burst into tears again.

“Are you sad, or are you angry?” Aunt Akari had said, her voice gentle but insistent.

“I don’t understand—” she had started to reply, when her aunt slapped her again.

“Are you sad, or are you angry?” she’d repeated.

“Why—” Akari slapped her before she could say more.

“Are you sad, or are you angry?”

She had wiped at the water in her eyes, afraid to say anything for fear of another slap. She looked at her beautiful but stern aunt’s face, staring back at her without pity or compassion.

“Angry,” Aliana finally said, and was surprised to discover it was true.

“Good,” her aunt said, then stood up and held out her hand to pull Aliana up off the bed. “Anger I can do something with. Sadness, fear, self-pity, self-doubt? They are inwardly focused. They keep you locked inside yourself. They’re useless. Anger is outwardly focused. Anger wants to take action. Anger is useful. Are you ready to use it?”

Aliana had nodded. It seemed safer than speaking.

“Then I’ll show you how.”

And she had.

Mugabo stood, arms behind him, with the same banal and pleasant almost-smile as always. “We have come near enough to the ring gate that it would be best if navigation knew where they should chart for.”

Tanaka leaned back in her seat. Her head hurt, but a little less than usual and she hadn’t taken the pain medication. Wouldn’t unless she needed it to function. The regrowth of her damaged bone ached, and the flesh of her cheek was slowly reknitting. The teeth would take a while. They needed something a little more solid to anchor to. That was fine.

Returning to Laconia was almost certainly the right thing, but it felt like admitting defeat. She had put it off until now, and she still chafed at the idea. She pressed at her broken orbit with the tips of her fingers, checking to see how hard she could push before the pain came.

“For the time being,” she began, “we should assume that the ship resupply will—”

Her comms chimed. A high-priority message had just arrived from the Laconia system. From Admiral Trejo. She let whatever she’d meant to say trail off and die, then looked up at Mugabo. He raised his eyebrows a millimeter like the waiter at an expensive restaurant waiting to see whether she approved of the wine.

“Let me get back to you on that, Captain,” she said.

“Of course,” he said with a sharp, professional nod. If he was annoyed at being put off yet again, he didn’t show it. She had the sense that she could prevaricate and delay forever and never get more than polite acceptance and a repeat of the question an hour later. Mugabo was a man without passions as far as she could tell. He’d wear her down like water eroding a stone.

He closed the door behind him, and Tanaka put her system on a do-not-disturb setting that would keep anyone from intruding. Trejo’s message wasn’t large, but it had a datafile linked to it. A message within the message.

Trejo, looking out from her screen, seemed older than a few weeks could justify. It was all in the tone of his skin and the paleness of his lips, though. His eyes were still as sharp and bright as ever, and his voice belonged to a man thirty years younger than he was. She wondered if he was taking stimulants.

“Colonel,” he said, looking into his camera. “I have reviewed your report, and… I think we can agree that could have gone better. We lost some good people on this, and you didn’t secure your target. But I’m not sure we came away exactly empty-handed.

“For what it’s worth, I would also have expected Nagata to put the girl someplace besides the gunship that the head of the underground was flying. But since she’s chosen to keep so many of her eggs in a single basket, certain opportunities may be open to us that wouldn’t have been otherwise.”

Tanaka scratched her bandages. All she felt was a little pressure. The itch didn’t subside at all. Trejo shifted in his chair and vanished. The image before her changed to a grainy visual telescopic view of a ship. It was hardly more than a dark shape against its own drive plume.

“I wanted to pass this along.” Trejo’s voice was calmer than she was. “It’s from the Derecho. Botton’s commanding it on a mission in Freehold system. Traffic analysis thinks they’ve still got the Storm hidden there, and he’s trying to flush it out. A ship made an unscheduled transit into the system in the time period your alert specified. It’s the right tonnage for the Rocinante, and the drive signature… Well, it doesn’t match, but it’s close enough that they could be running it dirty to throw us off. Thermally, it’s the same story. Close enough to be faked. And the silhouette is very close. It reports—”

Tanaka stopped the playback. Her heart was going fast, and she was trying hard not to grin. It would hurt like hell if she did, and maybe even dislodge some of the regrowth matrix. But oh, she wanted to.

Mugabo accepted her comm request as soon as she’d made it. “Colonel?”

“Resupply is going to have to wait,” she said. “We’re going to rendezvous with the Derecho in Freehold system. All deliberate speed.”

“Yes, Colonel,” Mugabo said. “I shall inform the navigator.”

She dropped the connection and let herself smile until it hurt just a little, savoring the moment. She tabbed Trejo’s message back and started it playing again.

“… silhouette is very close. It reports itself to be a survey ship on contract out of Auberon, and there’s a paper trail to support that. But Auberon system is so deeply infiltrated by the underground, I have to take that fact very, very lightly. I don’t know if this is a lead you’ll choose to follow, but it looks promising to me. And if it is Teresa Duarte’s ship, and if Teresa’s ship is James Holden and Naomi Nagata’s… Well, then I might have a strategy we can try.”

Tanaka leaned forward. There was something in Trejo’s voice that caught her. She didn’t know if it was regret or anticipation or something of both.

“Everything we’ve done with these people up to now has been less effective than I’d hoped. They’re smart, and worse than that, they’re fortunate. I know it sounds like superstition, but some people are just born lucky. I believe that. Regardless, I think there’s some value in changing our tactics. I’ve included a datafile for you to review.”

She opened the datafile in an inset screen. Another image of Trejo sitting at the same desk, speaking in the same cadence. The voices overlapped, each obscuring the other until she killed the inset and rolled back the main message.

“… datafile for you to review. This is your mission, and I’m not looking to steer from the rear on it, but I think this is the right way to go. If you agree, you should use it. We’re at the high-stakes table here. If we don’t finish what Duarte started… Well, I don’t want to go out thinking about all the things I didn’t have the balls to try.”