Leviathan Falls

Chapter Forty-Two: Alex

I’m still seeing lag on the aft PDCs,” Alex said. “It’s only fifteen milliseconds, though. It’s not bad.”

“I hear you,” Amos said. “But I don’t have anything else I’m doing, and lag’s still lag. Give me a minute to isolate the line.”

“You got it,” Alex said. The flight deck was dim, the way he liked to keep it, but the dark wasn’t calming. Even the sounds of the Rocinante, familiar as the face in his mirror, seemed ominous. His back and shoulders were tight enough that he’d had a low-level headache for what felt like days, and he couldn’t guess the last time he’d slept through the night. And that was before Jim and Teresa had headed into the alien station with a stone-cold killer. Before Jim had infected himself with the protomolecule. Before Duarte had started reforging humanity into a single, enormous organism that seemed like it wanted to kill him and Amos and Naomi personally.

Put that way, a little lost sleep was probably appropriate.

“Okay,” Amos said. “Try now.”

Alex tapped the test routine. “Still seeing it.”

“Good. Now the aft PDC junction.”

“Same lag.”

“Aft general?”

“That looks good.”

Amos’ sigh had a facial expression that went with it, even though the big man wasn’t on camera. Raised eyebrows, lips pulling to one side, like a father watching his kid fail at something important. Equal parts affection and disappointment. “Well, that means it’s the vacuum channel between ’em. I’ll try flushing it.”

Naomi’s voice came from the flight deck below him and the system comms at the same time. “You need a hand with that?”

“I wouldn’t say no,” Amos replied. “It ain’t exactly a one-person job.”

“On my way, then.” And then, only through the air, “Alex, keep an eye on the gates. If anything transits in—”

“I’ll sing out. Don’t worry about that.”

“Thank you.”

“Hey, Naomi? I just want you to know, whatever happens, it’s been a real honor shipping with you all this time.”

“I don’t think I can take another farewell speech, Alex.”

“No. But I wanted you to know.”

There was a pause, and then she said, “It’s been an honor for me too.” And then she was gone, heading down toward the space between the hulls with Amos to fine-tune their ship one last time.

It felt weird, not having Teresa there to help Amos out. The kid hadn’t been on the Roci for all that long, but he’d gotten so used to her presence that the change threw him a little. Jim not being there was worse. He kept wanting to check in with him, see if he was sleeping or on the scopes or down getting some coffee. There was a part of Alex’s head that just couldn’t wrap itself around the idea that Jim wasn’t on the Roci. And that Clarissa wasn’t. And that Bobbie wasn’t.

Now that it looked like their last go-round, he saw that he’d always kind of expected everyone to show up again somehow. It was silly when he thought about it, but it didn’t feel ridiculous at all. Years had passed since Clarissa died, but Alex’s heart was still patiently waiting to see her name on the duty roster. Bobbie was gone—he’d watched her go—and he still expected to hear her voice in the galley, laughing and giving Amos their peculiar kind of rough sibling grief.

The dead were still around him, because he couldn’t bring himself to believe that they weren’t. He could know it. He could understand. But like a kid who’d lost something precious, he’d never been able to shake that sense that maybe, just maybe, if he looked again, it would be there. Maybe the people he loved weren’t gone forever. Maybe the past—his past, his losses, his mistakes—were close enough for him to reach back and fix them if he stretched just right. Maybe, despite everything, it could still be okay.

“Check it now,” Amos said, and Alex ran the test.

“Well, holy shit,” he said. “That did it.”

“No lag?”

“One millisecond.”

“Yeah, well, we’re not getting better than that,” Amos agreed. “I’m packing up the toolkit and moving on to the rail gun.”

“I’ll be here,” Alex said, and it felt more like a prayer than it usually did.

He refreshed the tactical map just to see that it hadn’t changed, turned on some music and turned it off again. According to the last data they’d gotten before the repeaters shut off, the first of the incoming ships should already have been there. That they weren’t meant that the situation outside the ring space had changed, and he didn’t get to know what it had changed into. When he’d been a young man back on Mars, even before he’d joined up with the navy, one of his cousins had talked him into joining a martial arts school for a few weeks. One of the exercises the teacher had given them was to put a sack over their head and try to anticipate where the more advanced students were going to attack them from. The mixture of vulnerability, attention, and sickeningly acute anticipation wasn’t that different from what he was carrying now. He refreshed the tactical map again.

Naomi came back to the ops deck below him. The sweetness of chamomile and the soft, metallic sound of strapping into a crash couch announced her. A few seconds later, Elvi’s voice, pressed thin and tinny by the comms, floated up. She was too quiet for Alex to make out the words, but her tone was tense, her words staccato.

“Understood,” Naomi said. “I’m a little shorthanded right now, though. Send someone over, and I’ll set the permissions for them.”

Alex waited a few seconds to be sure he wasn’t interrupting, then shouted down, “Everything all right with the Falcon?”

“They’re a little short on some supplies for the stay-out-of-my-head drugs. Elvi wanted to raid our med bay.”

“Look at it like that, it’s kind of a good sign,” Alex said.

“Not following you.”

“Well, if Duarte wasn’t worried that there was something we could do, he’d just wait for us to run out of our meds, wouldn’t he? This whole moving ships around and shutting down repeaters and all? He’s only doing that because he thinks it’s worth doing. So we must be a threat, somehow.”

“I wonder if he’d tell us how. I mean if we asked really nicely,” Naomi said. Her voice was a harmony of despair and grim humor.

“We’ll figure it out,” Alex said. “Hey, once Elvi’s got what she needs from the med bay, should I pull the bridge? We’re going to be more maneuverable in a fight if we don’t have to match to the Falcon.”

“No,” Naomi said. “The Roci’s the flagship of the underground, the Falcon’s the flagship for Laconia, and all those other ships out there are watching us. I don’t want anything that will make it seem like maybe we’re two independent fleets. Besides which, we’re the back line. If the fighting gets to us, it’ll be because a lot of other shit has gone wrong.”

“Or because the Whirlwind gets here,” Alex said.

“In which case, it doesn’t matter.”

“Yeah,” Alex said, and then more quietly and to himself, “Yeah. But at least we got the fuckers spooked.”

As if in answer, a wave of presence washed over him, and there were people with him. A wave of impressions—an older woman in an apartment on Luna, a younger man who had something wrong with his right foot, a child in an unpaved street kicking a worn ball. A vast sense of humanity—masculine and feminine and both and neither, exhausted and exultant and enraged, young and old—washed through him like someone had turned on a fire hose. He felt the idea of Alex Kamal eroding and bit his lip to bring him back to his own body, his own self.

It’s all right to let go, a voice said with the complexity and depth of a choir. If angels had voices, they’d have sounded like this. It’s all right to let go. Holding on is only pain and weariness. Let us carry you, and you can rest. You can let go now. It was almost persuasive. It was almost enough.

The wave passed, but it didn’t go entirely away. It persisted, a little pressure like a hand resting on the back of his head. A small touch that was invitation and threat. He trembled a little as he took the peach-colored tab out of his pocket. He chewed it, breaking it into powder in his mouth to get the drugs into his bloodstream faster. It was as bitter as sin.

“Did y’all feel that too?” he asked on the ship comm.

“I did,” Amos said. “Can’t say I liked it.”

Naomi said, “It felt more focused than before. I think it’s trying to soften us up. Get anyone that’s a borderliner over to its side.”

“I don’t think so, Boss,” Amos said. “I got more the sense of surrender-or-die.”

Alex’s tactical map threw an alert up, bright red dots at a tight cluster of gates. The Roci pulled up a flash analysis from the old data and the silhouettes and drive signatures. Based on what ships had been on approach before and what they saw now, there were six ships—one Laconian gunship, three pirate hunters, and two private freighters with aftermarket torpedo racks—coming in fast through a tight cluster of gates all within about a twenty-degree sweep of the ring space.

“I think the rail gun’s looking fine,” Amos said. “I’m going to head for engineering, get the patch kits ready in case someone starts poking holes in us.”

Over the comms, another voice came, broadcast to all ships. “This is Captain Botton of the Derecho. We have the enemy in sight. We are moving to engage.”

“Belay that,” Naomi shouted from the ops deck. “All ships, evade and defend, but stay in position.”

On the tactical map, the Derecho shifted toward the incoming ships, but the rest of Naomi’s fleet held steady. Fifty-odd flecks of blue diffused through the ring space and half a dozen red clustered like a knife driving toward the station at its center. Diving toward the Roci and the Falcon and Jim. If the dots seemed to move slowly, it was only because the distances were so huge.

“What are you looking at?” Alex called.

“Not sure yet,” Naomi shouted back, and six more dots appeared on the tactical map, falling in from gates on the opposite side of the ring space. “That. I was waiting for that.”

The comms chirped out an error, and Naomi cursed. Alex pulled up a mirror of her screen, just to see what the issue was. Broad-spectrum jamming coming from all the enemy ships. The whole broadcast spectrum shimmered with noise and false requests stacked one on another until the Roci gave up and rebooted the antennas. Alex had been in a lot of fights, and he’d never seen anything this comprehensive outside a pirate attack.

“Alex, can you get me tightbeam locks?”

“Tell me who you want to talk to, and I’ll get them up.”

A list appeared on his screen, and he started queuing. Getting the lock, sending the orders, and moving to the next ship didn’t take that much longer than broadcast would have, but the invisible hand on the back of his head weighed a little heavier. Coordinating Naomi’s forces without broadcast meant building an ad hoc network that kept track of where all the other ships were and bounced between them, trading data back and forth as quickly as the lasers could carry them. In theory, it was entirely possible. In practice, it was more complicated. Any ship that had a buffer fail would mean slowing down the whole system. Any laser that lost alignment meant lost orders, the doubling up of retransmission requests, the opportunity for confusion and corruption and mistakes.

The enemy were outnumbered five to one, and the enemy ships burned in weird, spiraling paths, drawing Naomi’s fleet toward them and then spinning away before they got in range. Tempting Naomi’s forces to overreach, but never engaging. Alex wasn’t sure this was even a real attack so much as a feint to see how Naomi would react until the Derecho came inside firing range of the first group of ships.

The timing of the attack was astounding. The farthest of the ships bloomed, emptying its torpedoes like a dandelion shedding seeds. Then the next nearest, then the next, then the one closest. Wave after wave, with the first torpedoes going just slightly slower to give the missiles behind them time to catch up. Alex set the Roci’s scopes to track what it could.

The Derecho was a Storm-class destroyer. The backbone of the Laconian Navy. The other ships were weaker, smaller, with fewer weapons. If anyone had asked him, Alex would have put his money on the Derecho against all of them without a second thought. The full loads of all the ships poured out and fell onto the Derecho with impact times coordinated to the millisecond. The Derecho’s PDCs were in constant fire, its counter missiles taking out a dozen enemy torpedoes at a time, and it was still overwhelmed.

The impact was like seeing a sudden, brief sun. When it faded, the destroyer was on the drift, spinning slowly toward the annihilating edge of the ring space with nothing that could rescue it. He hoped that everyone aboard was already dead.

“Holy shit,” Naomi said.

“I get the feeling this isn’t going to be like other fights,” Alex said over the comms. He was pretty sure his voice wasn’t shaking.

“Easier to take something out when you don’t give a shit about what comes after,” Amos agreed. “Those ships are finished, but I don’t think anyone on ’em cares.”

It’s all right to let go. Put down your weapons now, and you will be saving humanity, not destroying it. Don’t be afraid of the changes that are coming, they are the only thing that can save us all. Alex gritted his teeth until his jaw ached.

“Alex!” Naomi shouted, and he realized it wasn’t the first time she’d done it.

“Sorry, sorry,” Alex said. “I’m here. What’s going on?”

“I need a tightbeam to the Godalming. I need it now.”

Alex scrambled, finding the ship. It was a pirate that worked with the underground. He found it at the edge of Naomi’s forces, almost on the other side of the ring space from the corpse of the Derecho. The light delay to it was small enough that they could talk in real time.

“Godalming,” Naomi said, “this is the Rocinante. You’re off your assigned pattern.”

The voice that answered was older and rough. “We have a shot at this pinché motherfucker, Rocinante. We’re taking it.”

“You don’t, though,” Naomi said.

Alex pulled up the tactical, and even then, he didn’t see it at first. The other ships with their odd spiraling paths had teased their own ships farther and farther apart until one strayed too far. Now, like different limbs of the same beast, the enemy ships had turned, burning hard on paths that would keep the pirate from support and help while they surrounded it.

“We’re fine,” the voice from Godalming said, stubbornly. “We’ve taken worse than this.”

It’s all right to let go. There’s no honor in death.

The tactical threw another alert up. Five more red dots transiting through different ring gates in the same moment. Alex saw them now for what they were. A hunt group.

He was already setting up the queue of tightbeam connections, new orders to address the new enemy, when another transit came. Small and blisteringly fast, already braking hard to shed its velocity so that it wouldn’t slam into the ring station and die. The Roci estimated the burn at something near twenty gs. Even if the people in the ship were in submersion tanks, they were in as much danger from their own deceleration as from the fight they were diving into.

“Naomi?”

“Get us there,” she said.

There wasn’t time to detach from the Falcon, so Alex took control of both ships, whipping them around and laying in a coordinated burn to keep them together. The tiny, fast ship would be half blinded by its own drive cone, but the other enemy ships would see everything the Roci did. All the eyes were connected. All the minds were one. Alex laid in a firing solution, synced with the Falcon, and put a rail-gun slug out along the enemy’s path. It was already dodging even as he fired the shot. Alex switched to torpedoes and fired a tight spread, set to detonate between the ship and the station.

The missiles launched as an emergency mayday came from the Godalming and then cut off. They seemed to crawl across the display. Alex willed them to go faster, to defy the laws of physics just a little bit. Just for him.

“They’re not going to hit,” Naomi said.

“They’re not meant to,” Alex said. “I’m just trying to put some debris in their way.”

The torpedoes blinked out as they detonated, and the Roci tracked the spheres of energy and scrap metal that radiated out along the paths they’d been going. The fast ship came into the spheres like a stone falling through a cloud. Alex held his breath. There was still vastly more empty space in those fields than matter, but at the speed the dropship was going, even a sliver of metal the size of a fingernail clipping would be enough…

The enemy ship’s drive flickered. Alex exhaled.

“Good job,” Amos said over the comms.

“Sometimes you’re lucky,” Alex said, but he felt a little bloom of pride all the same.

“Pull us back,” Naomi said. “I want us parked right outside Jim’s entrance. They’re trying to get to the station, and we’re going to be the last thing they have to go through to get there.”