Leviathan Falls

Chapter Forty-One: Jim

This is a bad idea,” Miller said. “I mean, you’ve always been a little dim, but even you have to know this is a bad idea.”

“Yeah. I know,” Jim said. “But it is literally the best bad idea I’ve got.”

“You look back, some of the life choices that got you here were ill-advised.”

Jim shifted to look at the space where the dead detective seemed to be. Miller had the decency to look sheepish and raise one hand, palm out in a gesture of surrender.

“I’m not saying there’s no pot-and-kettle aspect to this,” Miller said. “I’m just trying to set your expectations on how this ends.”

The sphere of the station wasn’t a sphere at this distance. He was close enough—they were close enough—that it felt more like a glowing blue plain. The ring gates around and behind him shone like tiny, perversely regular stars.

The Laconian heavy vac suit that Elvi had given him fit strangely in the armpits and knees, giving him an ease of motion that kept sending little the-suit-is-coming-apart jabs of panic to his amygdala. The HUD showed that he had fifteen hours of air, which was pretty damned good. He didn’t even need a second bottle. The Laconian suits stored backup air and water in pores in the suit’s plating, and while this wasn’t battle armor—the only weapon he had was a sidearm from the Roci’s supply—it was reinforced enough to give him some protection.

The on-suit sensors didn’t show anything dangerous in the station’s bluish glow, and only a few hundred millirems coming from all the gates together. He would have suffered more radiation on a short walk outside to check the Roci’s hull in normal space. It was the only thing about his situation that seemed even vaguely safe.

The Roci and the Falcon floated a few kilometers off to his right, the Derecho about the same distance to his left. All the ships were small enough to cover with the thumb of an outstretched hand. And the alien transport that had hauled Winston Duarte from Laconia was a pale dot below him on the station surface. His helmet assured him that Teresa and Tanaka were both en route to his position, but he couldn’t see them without magnification. Not yet. Which just left him, or else him and Miller, depending how he looked at it.

The detective wore the same gray suit and dark hat that he had in life. His sad, basset-hound expression seemed younger than Jim remembered it, but that was probably just that Jim had grown past him while Miller stayed the same. Having the protomolecule working directly on his body had given Miller the ability to remain in Jim’s consciousness even when other people were present, and Miller had also developed the unpleasant habit of being somewhere in Jim’s view at all times. If he seemed to be at Jim’s right side, and Jim turned left, Miller would be there too. And his sense of the direction Miller’s voice came from clicked to match wherever he seemed to be. It was disorienting and creepy, like Miller was the villain in a low-budget horror video.

Miller stuck his hands in his pockets and pointed toward the Derecho with his chin. “Looks like Colonel Friendly’s here.”

“You don’t want to call her that.”

“Why not? It’s not like she’ll hear me.”

Tanaka was a dark dot against the background light of the gates. Her maneuvering thrusters were compressed gas and hardly made any sign that they were firing except that she began to slow as she approached. Her suit was the same blue as Laconia’s flag, with the stylized wings on it. Apart from that, it reminded Jim of Bobbie Draper’s old Goliath: less a vac suit than a weapon shaped like one. Her face was surprisingly visible. One cheek looked smoother and younger because he’d blown the original into ribbons not that long before. Her gaze clicked around him like she was taking inventory. She paused, frowning, and seemed to focus on the emptiness around his helmet.

“Well, I guess it’s true then,” she said through the helmet radio. “You really do have someone else on board.”

“Yes, I do,” Jim said. “But how did you—”

“I’m here,” Teresa said. Jim turned back toward the Roci and found Teresa in a battered Rocinante-badged vac suit, Miller floating apologetically at her side. “I’m almost ready. I just need to take care of one more thing.”

“What?” Tanaka asked sharply.

“Muskrat. If there’s fighting, she should be in her crash couch.”

Tanaka’s silence seemed like a pointed reply.

“Oh, this is going to be fun,” Miller said.

“I’ll take care of that,” Jim said. “Other than Muskrat, are you both ready? Do we need anything else before we head in?”

“No,” Teresa said. “We can go.” Tanaka shook her head. Jim reoriented himself toward the vast and empty blueness, and found Miller already there below him.

He opened a connection to the Roci. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Naomi replied. She sounded soft and preoccupied. Jim took a quick reading to the station.

“So, we’re about a hundred meters from the surface of the station, and we’re heading in.”

“I’ve got you,” she said, and then something else that he didn’t quite catch.

“Teresa wants you to make sure Muskrat’s in her crash couch in case you have to do any tricky maneuvering.”

“I’ll see to it.”

The great blue wall grew closer. In the corner of his eye, Tanaka was activating and shutting down the gun in her suit’s forearm, extending and retracting the barrel in a combination of fidgeting and threat. Teresa was staring ahead at the station in something like hunger.

Miller, at his side, nodded. “I’ve got something. Look at this.” The blue wall suddenly wasn’t featureless. Lines ran through it, fine as string, making wide, complex spirals that came together and fell apart only to be replaced by new whorls that rose up. It was something between organic and mechanical, and it felt very familiar.

Miller blinked forward, teleporting from one spot to another the way only a hallucination could, waited until the pattern of lines had come to a moment of calm, and reached into the surface. Jim felt it as an effort in his own body, but not anyplace he could identify, like flexing a muscle in a phantom limb. As the spirals re-formed, the place where Miller was stayed empty, then widened. The blue glow darkened in a circle three meters wide as a depression formed, then deepened, then became a tunnel. Tanaka said something, but with her radio off. Jim only knew because he saw her lips move.

“Okay. We’ve got an entrance. We have a way in.”

When Naomi spoke again, her voice was despairing. “We’ll give you as much time as we can.”

“She thinks you’re all dead,” Miller said. “Her and you, and everybody in those ships. Or, I don’t know. If not dead, something worse. I’ve been a mind caught inside these fuckers and not permitted to die. It wasn’t fun. Speaking of which, have I said fuck you very much for dragging me back yet?”

Jim shook his head. He didn’t know what he could say to Naomi that would bring her any comfort. You made it without me before or If we die, we’ll die giving it our best shot or I’ll use whatever time you can give. Nothing fit what he wanted to say. “It’s going to be okay,” he said.

“Good hunting, love.”

“It won’t,” Miller added. “Be okay, I mean.”

Holden killed his mic. “Yeah, I know, fuck me for bringing you back. Now be helpful or shut up.”

And the curve of the tunnel into the station seemed to rise up around him, blotting out the Roci and the Derecho and the star-bright gates. It led deeper into the station, but the direction kept flipping in Jim’s perception between forward and down—moving through a passage or falling down a hole.

“Eyes up,” Tanaka said, back on the open channel. “Holden, what’s your condition?”

“Sorry, what?”

“Your condition. You’re my passkey in this little hellscape. If you go full protomonster on me, I need to know, and I need to know before it happens. So what’s your fucking condition?”

“So,” Miller said. “I feel like there was a conversation about who was lead on this case that you two should have had earlier.”

“I feel fine,” Jim said, then paused, considered. “A little feverish, maybe? But not bad.”

“I want an update every five minutes. Set a timer.”

“If I start feeling worse, I’ll let you know.”

“Yes, you will. Because you’ll be on a timer.”

Miller, floating between them and a half pace back, tried to conceal a grin. Jim weighed the pros and cons of pushing back against Tanaka and set a timer. He set it for seven minutes, though.

The tunnel widened. A surface like some transparent membrane marked its edge, but Jim didn’t feel anything more than the slightest resistance when he moved through it. The tunnel or hole went another ten meters and then into a cathedral-vast chamber. The lines he’d seen on the station’s skin were here too, weaving and reweaving the walls and pillars. A gentle light pulsed from the walls, too diffuse for shadows. There was movement everywhere, and Jim had the sense that if he hadn’t pumped raw protomolecule into his body, he wouldn’t have been aware of most of it. Every surface was alive, trading fluids and tiny objects smaller than sand grains. It was like watching a huge body with all its tissues busy about their individual tasks and the whole of it orchestrated into one massive, unknowable purpose.

One of the pillars was also a figure—a mech, an insect, or something else entirely. He had the flashbulb memory of a Martian Marine destroying something like it with a grenade, and then being destroyed himself, broken down to complex molecules and used to repair the damage he’d done. He turned his mic back on.

“Um,” he said. “Try not to break anything in here if you can help it.”

He expected Tanaka to snap at him, but Teresa was the one who spoke. “I thought there wasn’t a breathable atmosphere. That’s what the reports said. Noble gas with some volatiles. That’s not what this is.”

Jim checked his suit. She was right. Neon, and more of it than had been here before, and the same trace benzene, but also oxygen. In the suit’s opinion, he could take off his helmet right now and be fine. He didn’t.

“It’s him,” Tanaka said. “The high consul didn’t pack a vac suit, and if there wasn’t something like it in that… ship he brought”—she nodded at the air, the walls, the station in general—“he’d make this support him.”

“He didn’t have food and water either,” Teresa said.

Tanaka scowled behind her faceplate. “I think he did. The same way. He’s in here. Holden? Which way to him?”

Jim blinked and turned to Miller.

“No idea,” Miller said. “If Duarte’s a new, well-tuned racing ship, you and me are a couple shipping containers strapped to the top of a reactor. You can say we do the same thing and not be technically wrong, but it’s not like we’re in the same weight class.”

“I don’t know,” Jim said. “I thought you were the tracker.”

Tanaka didn’t answer. Instead she gestured for them to stay back, and used her thrusters to move toward the center of the chamber. Taking point.

Once she was well away, Tanaka went still, as if she was listening to something. Maybe she was. There was enough atmosphere for sound waves to carry, and Jim didn’t know what her suit was capable of. The cathedral shifted with lines of energy and complex electromagnetic fields that he wasn’t sure Tanaka could see, and passageways led out of it in a hundred different directions. For a moment, Jim saw it all as a gargantuan heart that was just about to squeeze down on them. His head spun like he was falling, and a wave of awe swept over him like he was hearing the voice of God, but whispering.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Miller said. “Hold it together. It’s early in the game for you to start getting euphoric attacks on me.”

Jim’s sense of the utter majesty of the station dialed back, and he turned off his mic. “You make it sound like there’s a later in the game.”

Miller’s smile was enigmatic, and it looked a little like sorrow by the time it reached his eyes. “Until death all is life.”

“I feel like I should know who said that.”

“Take a couple deep breaths and rein your head back in. I think we’re leaking a little.”

His gaze cut toward Teresa, and Jim looked over to see her looking back at him with a worried expression.

“Everything’s fine. I’m fine,” he said, then turned his mic back on and repeated it. Teresa nodded, but she didn’t say anything.

“Not sure you sold her,” Miller said.

Tanaka’s voice came back over the open channel. “Heading out. You two come with me. Stay. Close.”

She was already maneuvering across the chamber. Teresa oriented herself more quickly, and jetted off after her, leaving Jim to bring up the rear.

To Jim’s right, something huge shifted. A buzz filled his ears like a swarm of hornets that didn’t register on the suit’s instruments, and something that was like light but also wasn’t flowed through the walls. Adrenaline hit his system, and his heart started tapping anxiously against his ribs. Whatever it was shifted, faded, and moved on without quite entering the chamber. Jim had never seen a whale breaching, but he thought he understood something of how it would feel to be next to one when it did. Neither Tanaka nor Teresa seemed to have noticed anything. He checked his medical stats. According to the suit, he was running a little over thirty-eight degrees. A fever, but not high enough to generate hallucinations.

“No, that was real,” Miller said. “Just a little reminder that we’re out of our depth here.”

“Didn’t need it. Was clear,” Jim said.

“What?” Tanaka answered.

“Nothing,” Jim said. “Just talking to myself.”

Tanaka paused at the oblong opening to a passageway that curved down deeper into the station. A trickle of lights like pale blue fireflies trickled out of it and into the wider chamber behind them.

“I thought I told you to stay close,” Tanaka said. “Next time, do it.”

“Colonel,” Teresa said. “Please proceed.”

Miller, now at Teresa’s side, swept his hat off and rubbed at his temple with the palm of his hand. “Jesus Christ. Is anyone not in charge here?”

Tanaka turned and led the way down the passage. The glow from the walls here took on a deep, buttery yellow. The lines in them went from spirals to frenetic dashing lines that reminded Jim of being very young and his parents driving him through a snowstorm. After about a hundred meters, the passage began to change, widening along the oval’s longer axis and narrowing along the lesser until Jim could put his hands on either side.

“It’s getting too thin,” Teresa said. “We’re not going to fit.”

“Stay close.”

The passage kept widening and flattening until Jim felt like they were making their way through a crack in a cave system. The sense of mass on either side started to become claustrophobic, but Tanaka kept pressing ahead.

His timer went off.

“I’m running a fever, but otherwise fine,” he said.

“What?”

“You wanted me to check in. I’m checking in. Little fever. Feeling fine. Maybe we should all be keeping each other up to date. I show you mine, you show me yours. Reciprocity.”

Tanaka turned back, pushing herself past Teresa and toward him like an eel in a coral reef. Her jaw shifted as she moved to a private channel. He matched her.

“Captain Holden,” she said. “I appreciate what you’ve done to get me into this station, but I’m here now. It’s seeming like your present utility to me is considerably less. So I would very much recommend you stop giving me your fucking attitude before I start thinking about how much I owe you a bullet in the face. Reciprocity, and all.”

She nodded once, sharply, like she was agreeing with herself on his behalf, and moved back to the open channel.

“This is a dead end. We’re heading back and trying again.”

She pushed past Jim, moving toward the chamber they’d left behind. Teresa followed her. Jim floated for a moment, his hand on one wall, his back on the other. A breath of fireflies swirled up from the depths where the passage was too thin for human beings and rose up past Teresa and Tanaka.

“You shot her in the face, huh?” Miller asked.

“She was trying to kill us at the time,” Jim replied. “But honestly, I think it was more because she reminded me of every Laconian interrogator who’d ever beat the shit out of me.”

“As revenge for a beating goes, a face shot is pretty good.”

“It didn’t make me feel better.”

“You know,” Miller said, “there was this guy when I was just starting with Star Helix. Jason. Pissed off the boss, I don’t remember how. Got stuck working data forensics. That doesn’t sound bad, but what it meant was going through people’s logs. The security footage. The creepy shit perps kept hidden from the main partitions. Day after day after day of watching horrific things play out and not being able to do a goddamn thing about it. It started getting into his head. The union shrink called it ‘continuous ongoing trauma.’ We all kind of knew what was coming. That one reminds me of him.”

Jim killed his mic and launched himself up after them, following the bottoms of their feet. “How long did he last?”

“Year and a half. Almost nineteen months. We all thought that was pretty damn good. Most people on that job find a way to get out after six months.”

“I don’t think we have six months.”

“I’m just saying Colonel Friendly had an edge to her before all this started. She’s not doing well now. You should be ready for the possibility that you’ll have to shoot her again before this is over.”

“Last time I shot her she wasn’t in Laconian power armor, and I still didn’t successfully kill her.”

“Well, old fella,” Miller said, “that’s gonna be a problem.”