Leviathan Falls

Chapter Thirty-Four: Tanaka

Tanaka knew she was dreaming, but she wasn’t certain that the dream was hers. In it, she was in a tunnel carved from bare stone and sealed against seepage like one of the old transit corridors in Innis Shallows back on the Mars of her youth, but there was a confusion in her as if she had never been anyplace like it before. Somewhere nearby, a man was screaming, and the name that she associated with the shrieks was Nobuyuki, but she didn’t know who that was.

That might have just been the nature of dreams, though, and the strangeness of it was only because she was on the ragged edge of lucidity. The thing that made it feel like she was watching someone else’s dream was more subtle. The texture of the emotions was wrong. The way they slid across her mind. She knew them as they came: betrayal, panic, the profound sorrow of a mistake that couldn’t be unmade. It was like seeing a Picasso composition in the style of Van Gogh, familiar and alien at the same time.

With the logic of dreams, she felt someone beside her thinking about the different kinds of unconsciousness: sleeping, dreaming, and dying. A younger mind, and a masculine one, but gentle in a way she didn’t usually associate with masculinity. A gentle soul beside her, caught in the same riptide she was.

And then she felt others around them, like they were all in the same theater watching a wall screen or a living performance. Other minds, other selves, all bleeding into each other, bleeding into her. Thoughts and impulses, impressions and emotions, rising up and drifting away without any clear owner, and her own selfhood just one flake in the snowstorm.

If the thing that calls itself Aliana Tanaka came apart here and never swirled back together, she thought, I wouldn’t even notice that I was missing.

The idea was like a whispered threat. She woke herself up trying to scream.

When her eyes opened, her surroundings were no more familiar. The light-in-darkness of pale linens in a dim room. A frame on the wall filled with hand-brushed letters. Something on the floor that was and wasn’t tatami. She told herself that she would know. She didn’t now, didn’t yet, but she would. This was her room. This was her bed. There was a reason it didn’t seem familiar…

Because these were her rooms on Gewitter Station. Not hers. Not owned. Assigned to her for a moment, like a hotel. Nothing felt like her, because it was only a brief relationship, architecturally speaking. That made sense. That sounded right. She pulled herself out from under the blanket and stumbled to the tiny bathroom. Above the sink, a whole wall of mirror. She looked at the woman looking back out at her, and she seemed familiar.

Tanaka shifted her head and watched her reflection do the same. She opened her mouth, watched the places where the surgical scars on her cheeks pulled down at her eyelids differently. If you’d stuck with the field surgery, it would be healed by now, she thought. What the hell did she need with cosmesis anyway?

What’s a third Miko? someone asked in her mind, and she pushed the thought away.

“Aliana Tanaka,” she said, and the reflection mimicked. “You are Aliana Tanaka. Colonel Aliana Tanaka, Laconian Marine Corps. Special Operations Group, Second Battalion, First Marine Expeditionary Regiment. Aliana Tanaka, that’s who you are.”

The syllables of her own name became a mantra, and slowly, slowly, the mantra became something more. She remembered the medicine, went back to the bedroom to find the packet, and dry-swallowed two more of the pills. They made a thick lump halfway down her esophagus. Good enough.

She found her hand terminal and scanned the packet. She was already down to the last two doses. When she put in for a resupply, the system threw up an error. She keyed in a security override, insisted, and while she was at it, doubled the size of the prescription. Whatever damage it did her wasn’t even in her top ten problems right now.

She looked at the time—halfway through the second watch—and didn’t know when she’d gone to sleep. Maybe she was up early. Maybe she’d slept in. Time and behavior were doing strange things right now. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t going back to sleep now. She could start from there.

She pulled up the lights, showered under uncomfortably cool water, and dressed in her uniform. The woman over the sink now looked less hagridden. Her scars were almost dignified. Aliana Tanaka. Aliana Tanaka.

She put in a connection request for Captain Botton on the Derecho. It took him long enough to accept that she thought he might have been sleeping, but he was dressed and on the bridge of the ship. Maybe he just didn’t like taking her calls.

“Colonel,” he said instead of hello.

“What’s the situation?” she asked smartly.

He nodded and seemed to gather himself. She had the impression—a last wisp of dream—of tiny gnats swarming around his head, almost too small and translucent to be picked up by the camera. She ignored them. “We should be fully resupplied in seventy-two hours, sir.”

Tanaka scowled. “I made the requests personally. We should have been at the front of the line.”

“We are,” Botton said. “The common supplies are already on board. Water. Food. Filters. Basic medical supplies. We’re only waiting for catalytic plates for the recycler and a shipment of fuel pellets that was outbound. They’re burning hard to get back.”

That a ship had to turn back around for her was weirdly reassuring. It was evidence that there was an objective reality, that the world of base matter still counted for something, that not everything was a slip of consciousness that other minds could invade and change.

“Fine. But keep the crew ready for immediate departure. If I decide not to wait for the full resupply, I don’t want to be hauling people out of dockside bars because they thought they were still on shore leave.”

The gnats around Botton’s head came more sharply into focus and his mouth went just a degree tighter. Botton didn’t like that she was running his ship. Why would he? She’d have hated him if their positions were reversed. He was usually better at hiding his irritation. She had the uncanny sense that she was seeing his thoughts as he had them.

“If I may, does this have anything to do with the armistice?” Botton asked.

The what? Tanaka almost said. Reflexes from decades in the military kicked in before she could. “I can’t confirm or deny anything at this point.”

“Understood, sir. Permission to speak candidly?”

“Go ahead.”

“It would help the crew to hear something from you directly. They’re getting everything through newsfeeds now, and it’s an invitation to chaos.”

“I hear you,” she said. “I’ll do what I can.”

“Aye, aye,” Botton said, and braced. She cut the connection. The armistice? There was something… something she knew? Some awareness that had slipped into her from the back while she slept? Until she turned to the newsfeeds and the leaked recordings of Nagata and Trejo that the underground had put out, she was reaching for supernatural answers when memory and mundanity were enough. Tanaka knew about the peace between Laconia and the underground because she’d been the one to deliver the offer. Nagata had just gotten around to saying yes.

Tanaka stood in the center of her room, shifting through feeds until she found an apparently unedited copy of the message. The sooner we can establish some working protocols, the sooner we can address this situation. Nagata never mentioned the Duarte girl. She didn’t need to. The daughter was beside the point now—bait for a trap that Tanaka didn’t have to set. It didn’t mean she’d be useless, and it chafed her to think Trejo had given in to Nagata with nothing in return.

She was just starting to think about eating something and whether to send a query of her own to Trejo when a message appeared. It popped up in her secure queue flagged as flash traffic from the admiral himself. She opened it with a flick of her fingers. On the wall screen, Trejo looked angry. His eyes flickered like he was reading something in the air. The sense of gnats wasn’t there, though. The message was just an object, not a mind.

“Okoye sold us out,” Trejo said. “I don’t know how much she and her husband gave away, but we have to assume it’s the farm. The good news is that it’s out in the open now. Bad news is we have to deal with this other shit first. I’ve given them the same report that Ochida sent you. They’ll be sending their best and brightest to the ring gates. I’d like you to be there too.

“Your mission’s the same. Get Duarte and bring him back. Some of the circumstances are a little different. Whatever he’s done, it’s working. Ochida’s not seeing any more San Estebans. The glitches have stopped. Reality’s getting back to normal.”

Tanaka felt a wave of something—rage, fear, nausea—and pushed it away.

“Which means Duarte is still the priority,” Trejo went on. “When you find him we need to understand what he’s doing and take control of it, whatever that entails. Nagata is nominally in charge of ring gate traffic so that we won’t need to keep trying to whistle while we’re pissing, but I want it clear between us: Your Omega status is still very much in place. If you have to choose between fulfilling your mission or preserving this agreement, I trust your judgment.”

The message ended. That was stark enough. Tanaka took a long breath, shifted her shoulders, and put a connection back through to Botton on the Derecho. He answered more quickly this time. She wondered how long it would take to grab a sandwich.

“I’ve communicated with Admiral Trejo,” she said. “I have a message for you to pass on to the crew. Tell them to get ready for launch. We’re burning to the ring space to rendezvous with Nagata and the high consul as soon as I’m back to the ship.”

“Yes, sir,” Botton said.

“Who’s on security detail right now?”

Botton blinked. His gaze cut to the right. For a moment, she had the irrational fear he would say Nobuyuki, though she didn’t think there was anyone with that name on the Derecho.

“Lieutenant De Caamp.”

“Have her send two armed escorts to my rooms on the station immediately.”

“Copy that,” Botton said. “Is there a problem?”

“No. I have a stop to make before I leave the station, and they might not want to let me in,” she said. And then, with a chuckle, “Or back out.”

Just under an hour later, she walked into the psychiatric wing of Gewitter medical complex with two Marines behind her. A young man with unfashionably long hair was at the reception desk. His face went ashy as she stepped up to his desk.

“I’m here to see Dr. Ahmadi,” she said.

“Of course. You can have a seat in the waiting area, and I’ll—”

“I’m here to see Dr. Ahmadi right now.”

“I’m not sure where she is.”

Tanaka leaned forward, put her hands on the reception desk, and smiled gently. “Just for pretend, if it was really important, how would you find her?”

The doctors’ lounge was otherwise empty when she reached it. It was a warm room with indirect lighting and real plants—ferns and ivies—hanging from planters along the walls. Two sofas long enough to sleep on and an automated galley as sophisticated as some she’d seen serve a whole ship.

She didn’t know if the other physicians had been warned away or if Ahmadi had been alone there all along, but when she sat down across from her, Ahmadi’s tea had a little skin of oil across its top where it had cooled, undrunk. The doctor’s gaze swam a little bit as it found its way to Tanaka.

“You’re here,” Ahmadi said.

“I am,” Tanaka agreed, and pushed the little packet with its two pills across the table. “How does this work? Why does it take the edge off the effect?”

Ahmadi nodded. “It reduces activity in the temporoparietal lobes with some antipsychotic effects. It diminishes spontaneous neural firings globally. Whatever is reaching into your mind, I thought it might help you to not respond to it.”

“What else does that? What other drugs? I need a list.”

Ahmadi put out her hand. For a moment, Tanaka didn’t know what she meant by it, then she gave the doctor her terminal. As Ahmadi wrote in it, she spoke. Her voice was soft and hazy.

“When I was an intern, I had a patient with left neglect.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“He had a lesion on his brain that meant he didn’t experience the concept of left. If I asked him to draw a circle, he’d draw the right half. If you had him draw an analog clock face, all the numbers would be crowded onto the right. Left was a thought he just couldn’t have. Like he was colorblind, but for half his perceptual field.”

Tanaka leaned back in her chair. “Are you all right?”

“I always thought about how strange it would be to have that loss. I never thought about how odd we must have been to him. These weird people with twice as much world that he couldn’t conceive of. And he couldn’t. The thoughts you have depend on the brain you have. Change the brain and you change the kinds of thoughts that are possible to think.”

She put the terminal onto the table beside her abandoned tea. It made a scraping sound like a fingernail over skin as she pushed it across. Tanaka didn’t pick it up.

“It happened to you.”

“It did,” Ahmadi said. “I was remembering a tunnel. You were there. Something bad was happening.”

“To Nobuyuki,” Tanaka said. “Whoever the fuck that is.”

“It’s connecting us,” Ahmadi said. “It’s making cross connections between our neurons. Making it so that the electrical impulse of a neuron in one brain can trigger the neuron in another brain to fire. We used to do that with rats, you know? Put an electrode in one rat brain that’s hooked to a radio transmitter. A receiver hooked to another rat in another room. We’d show one the color red, and shock the other. After a while, when the one saw red, the other would flinch even without a shock. ‘Poor man’s telepathy’ we called it.”

“Nothing personal, but your work sounds kind of fucked up.”

“I thought it would be like… being with people. Like a dream, but it’s not. It’s being part of an idea that is too big to think. Being one part of a brain that’s so vast and interconnected, it’s not human. It’s made of humans, but that’s not what it is. Not any more than we’re neurons and cells.”

“You still think this is intimate assault?”

“Oh yes,” Ahmadi said. Her voice was low and rich with her conviction. “Yes.”

Tanaka picked up the handheld from the table. A dozen different pharmaceuticals were listed there, with dosage formulas and warnings. Do Not Take on an Empty Stomach. Discontinue if Rash Presents. Avoid if Pregnant. She slapped the handheld onto her wrist and put the two remaining pills into her pocket.

“It’s spreading,” Ahmadi said. “It’s not just the people who were in the ring space with you. It’s spreading out everywhere. Like a contagion.”

“I know.”

“How can it do that?”

Tanaka stood. Ahmadi seemed smaller than she had in their session. Her face was softer than it had been. The voice that had admired her, that had been reminded of his wife, was silent. Or elsewhere. Or blocked by the drugs.

“I don’t know how it’s being done,” Tanaka said. “But I intend to find out.”

“How do you stop it?”

“I’ll find that out too,” she said, and walked away. In the corridor, she copied the list to the two Marines as she led the way toward the pharmacy. “Any of these that are already compounded, we take. Anything we’d need to synthesize more on the Derecho, we take that too.”

“How do we know what those are?”

“Shake a pharmacist,” Tanaka said.

It took longer than Tanaka had wanted to spend, but the supply was also larger. By the end, they had to take wide, blue plastic bags that were meant for the personal effects of patients. By the time they were ready to go, it looked like they’d been shopping at a high-fashion market district. One of the doctors—a small, round-faced man with an unfortunate beard—followed them out toward the hub to the main station flapping his hands in distress. Tanaka did him the favor of ignoring him.

It took the lift a few seconds to arrive. As Tanaka stood there, waiting, one of her guards cleared his throat. “Straight to the dock, sir?”

“Yes,” Tanaka said. And then, “No. Wait.” As the lift chimed, she pulled open one of the bags and grabbed out a familiar glassine packet, filled with pills. “Go ahead. I’ll meet you at the ship.”

“Are you sure, sir?”

“Go.”

She didn’t wait to watch. Anyone on the Derecho stupid enough to disobey her at this point was beyond saving. She stalked to the doctor’s lounge again. This time, more people were there. They turned to look at her like she was a threat. Fair enough.

Ahmadi was exactly where Tanaka had left her, though somehow she’d gotten a fresh cup of tea to ignore. Tanaka touched her shoulder, and she was slow to turn. Tanaka put the packet on the table beside the teacup. Ahmadi’s hand covered it.

“I’ll do what I can,” Tanaka said.