Leviathan Falls

Chapter Six: Naomi

Amos—or the thing that had been Amos—smiled and waited for the autodoc to finish its run. Naomi, braced at a handhold, watched the values and scans as they spooled out. Red and amber and occasionally green, they were the medical equivalent of a shrug. The machine thought he was a basket full of different kinds of strange. Some was the strange he’d been ever since returning from Laconia. Some was new strange that deviated from previous measures. Whether any of it was significant was anybody’s guess. There was no comparison data for an animal like him, no others of his kind apart from the pair that Elvi Okoye had. There was no context.

Naomi felt that way a lot these days.

“I’m feeling fine,” he said.

“That’s good. You should stay here for a while anyway. In case it happens again.”

The pure black eyes shifted. It was hard to tell if he was focusing on her or something else in the room. Without iris or pupil, he could appear all-seeing and blind at the same moment.

“I don’t think I’ll be getting the wigglies again anytime soon,” he said.

“You’ve been pretty shaken up. Not just this. All of it. Better that we get an idea what’s going on with you now so you don’t have another seizure while you’re doing something dangerous.”

“I get that. But it’s not going to happen again.”

“You can’t know that unless we know why it happened.”

“Yeah.”

They were quiet for a moment. Only the hum of the air recyclers and the muttering of the autodoc. “Do you?”

“Do I what, Boss?”

“Do you know why the seizure happened?”

Amos lifted a wide, grayish hand in a gesture that said maybe, maybe not. The little widening of his smile was exactly the one he’d have used before, but half a second later than he would have used it. “I got a feeling. There’s stuff running in the background with the new head. There was a hiccup. Don’t think it’ll happen again.”

She tried to smile back, but it felt forced. “That’s not as reassuring as you think.”

“You don’t think I’m him, do you?”

She noted the pronoun. Him. Not You don’t think I’m me. “I don’t even know what that question means.”

“It’s all right. I get it. I went away like I used to be. I come back with these eyes and this blood. And my brain doing things it didn’t use to do. If you weren’t at least wondering, that would be weird.”

“Are you?”

“Am I?”

“Are you still human?”

His smile could have meant anything. “Not sure I ever was, really. But I know I’m still me.”

“That’ll do then,” she said, and made herself lean over and kiss his wide smooth scalp the way she might have if she hadn’t had doubts. If it was true, and he was Amos, then it was the right thing. If it wasn’t, and he wasn’t, better that whoever he was believe she accepted him. “Still, wait an hour before you get back to work?”

He sighed. “If you say so.”

She squeezed his shoulder, and it was solid. Had it felt like that before? Amos had always been strong. He’d spent as much time in the ship gym as Bobbie, and Bobbie had damn near lived there. Naomi couldn’t tell if this was a change or just her mind looking for discrepancies. Building them whether they were there or not.

“I’ll check on you,” she said, because it wasn’t a lie, no matter what she meant by it.

The ring space wasn’t somewhere to relax. There had been a time when it had been the hub of humanity’s great spread to the stars. It had seemed safe then, or relatively so. Anything that found its way to the edge of the sphere defined by the ring gates vanished and was lost, but nothing reached back.

Until it did. And then it had been annihilating. Now most ships moved through it fast and hot, setting the angle of their transit before they came in and getting out the farther gate as quickly as they could. It was exactly the wrong thing to keep from going dutchman, but it minimized the time spent in the uncanny space.

Other ships passed in and out of the rings, the traffic of more than a thousand systems, all of them relying on trade to one degree or another. All of the ships on their own errands with no particular interest in or awareness of Naomi and her burdens. The Roci stayed there, on the float. Every hour courted the danger that reality itself would start boiling again and everything in the ring space would be killed. But before they could go anywhere, they needed a place to go and a plan that was more fleshed out than Don’t die.

She worked on the ops deck, floating just over her crash couch with her legs folded in the lotus position. The straps shifted around her like kelp in a vast water recycling tank, and the web of the underground spread out on the screen before her. It had been easier when she’d been focused on attacking Laconia. Breaking things was always easier than building them up.

In the aftermath of Laconia’s defeat in its home system—on its home planet—the empire had moved to consolidate the power it still had. Trejo was locking down shipyards and supply lines as best he could with the forces that remained to him. Naomi was trying to leverage the influence and organization she’d gathered for the battle into some kind of sustainable self-governing network. The newsfeeds from Sol, Bara Gaon, Auberon, and Svarga Minor chattered about increased Laconian presence. Though why anyone was worried about a backwater like Svarga wasn’t entirely clear. The message queue was as long as her arm, it felt like.

“Their objection is the same one we’re seeing over and over again,” Jillian Houston, the captain of the underground’s stolen flagship, said from Naomi’s screen. She looked like a child. She was older than Naomi had been when she’d signed on to the Canterbury a lifetime ago. “Báifàn system is on the edge of being self-sustaining, but which side of the edge is debatable. They don’t like anyone saying when they can and can’t trade, and they’re absolutely not going to accept constraints that other systems aren’t abiding by. And I have to say, I’m sympathetic. We’re here to protect people’s freedom. I’m not sure what liberty is if you’re not permitted to decide what chances you’re willing to take.”

Naomi turned her head, trying to ease the knot at the base of her skull. She’d watched the report three times now, each time hoping she’d find a graceful and diplomatic response that had eluded her before. It hadn’t happened.

Instead, she felt herself growing taut and angry. The tension in her neck, the tightness across her chest pulling her shoulders forward into a hunch, the ache at the corners of her scowl. They were the physical manifestations of an impatience that reached far beyond Jillian’s message or her own still-uncomposed response.

She kept coming back to the uncharitable thought that if the underground were just made up of Belters, the problem would have been tractable. Or if not that, at least she’d have been sure a solution existed. Belters were viciously independent, but they also understood what it meant to rely on the community around them. Skipping a seal replacement didn’t only risk the life of the slack bastards who’d cheaped out on their work. Failure meant the death of everyone on the crew.

The colony worlds were acting like their safety could exist separate from the well-being of all the other systems and ships. It couldn’t be so hard to see how accepting a little restriction and regulation benefited everyone. But inner-worlds culture didn’t measure it that way. For them, being better meant being better than the person next to you, not both of you sharing the same increase.

She knew it wasn’t fair or even really accurate. Her frustration was leaking out as tribalism and spite. Which was why she hadn’t responded yet, even though as the de facto leader of the underground, she had to. What she really wanted to do was put a camera on Jim and have him give one of his heartfelt little sermons about how they were all one people, and that by pulling together, they’d get to the other side of their struggles. It was his genius that he could still believe that, even after everything they’d seen and been through.

But she’d just gotten him back. If she let herself get into the habit of seeing him as a useful tool for her work, it would betray the chance they’d been given. She needed to have the connection between them as something separate, something sacred, that the rest of the universe didn’t have claim on.

So maybe there was a thread of selfishness in Belters too.

She started the recording.

“Jillian. Thank you for the report. Please let our friends in Báifàn system know that I hear and understand their concerns, and I absolutely understand their need for safety and equity in how trade is carried out through the rings. The goal has to be minimizing the need for ring transit by building up to sustainability for all the colonies as quickly as possible, and their goal for that is absolutely the same as ours. I’ll include the presentation for why the protocols are the best, safest way forward for all of us, and you can pass that along too. Hopefully, they’ve already seen it.”

But maybe this time they’ll actually pay attention.

Or maybe the builders’ ancient enemy would figure out how to end all human life and none of this would matter. Fatalism had its dark attractions, after all. Hopelessness and despair could almost look restful.

She played back her message, decided that it sounded too pat and rehearsed, and redid it another four times before she gave up and sent it out. The message queue still waiting looked like forever.

She massaged her hands, digging into the aching muscles at the base of her thumbs, while the next message played on her screen. Governor Tuan had thin, terrier-sharp cheeks, frog-wet eyes, gray-black hair, and a tight, officious smile. She wondered whether she would still have thought he was ugly if he’d had a different personality. She’d probably have been more forgiving.

“On behalf of the governing council of Firdaws, I would like to thank you for submitting your proposal. I am very interested in returning to a schedule of reliable and mutually profitable trade.”

“But,” Naomi said to herself as Tuan scowled theatrically on the screen.

“There are, however, some very real concerns about the document as it stands that will require some thoughtful conversation. In that spirit, I would like to propose a summit meeting. While Firdaws is not yet entirely self-sustaining, we do have certain amenities that we will be happy to offer. Our state-of-the-art luxury villas can be set aside for you and your associates for as long as the negotiations take.”

She slid it into a secondary queue. There was only so much explaining to people how cooperation would keep them all from dying she could manage in a single sitting.

The next entry stopped her. It was from Sol. It was from Kit.

The only child of Alex’s second marriage was a grown man now, but she’d seen him as a newborn and known his mother, Giselle, as well as any of the Roci crew had really gotten to know her. Now here he was, looking into a camera. He looked more like his mother—Giselle’s high, sharp cheekbones and regal forehead and brows. When he moved, she could see Alex in him.

“Hey,” he said. “So I know it’s been a while. And things… I know it’s not like we could be in touch more. But I wanted to let you know something.”

Naomi’s gut tightened, and she braced for a hit. That Kit had come to her had to mean it was something about Alex, or something that would hurt Alex badly enough that Kit wanted to be sure there would be people there to comfort him, even if he decided to keep it to himself.

“Well,” Kit said, “there aren’t a lot of planetary engineering gigs in Sol system, and the ones there are they have fifteen people applying for every spot. I know that we talked about me keeping a low profile—”

Naomi frowned, trying to remember when she’d said something like that.

“—but we got offered a contract with a geological survey on Nieuwestad. It’s a good company. Jacobin-Black Combined Capital. They’re doing a lot of industrial construction and microclimate engineering, and I think it could be a really good move for us. But it will make it harder for you to come visit, and I know with Rohi pregnant, you’d want to see your grandson.”

Kit grinned like he’d just delivered the punch line to a joke, and Naomi stopped the playback. Relief was like a drug in her veins. She leaned back in her crash couch, the gimbals hissing under her, and called up toward the flight deck.

“Alex! I think I got some of your mail. I’ll send it up.”

But he was already coming down the lift ladder. “What’s up?” he said.

“I got some of your mail. It’s in the intelligence packet, but it’s yours. From Kit.”

His smile was quick and automatic. “Well, play it.”

Naomi scrubbed the message back to the start and let it play. Knowing what was coming, she watched his face, and saw the shock and the joy and the tears in Alex’s eyes when the news landed. Kit went on for a time, telling Alex about the dates they were shipping out for Nieuwestad and the due date for the coming child. And some news of no real importance about Giselle and life on Mars. And then the message ended with Kit saying I love you, Dad and Alex lowering himself into the crash couch at Naomi’s side.

“Well ain’t that a kick in the nuts,” Alex said through a wide grin. “I’m going to be a granddaddy.”

“Yes, you are.”

He considered it for a moment, then shook his head. “I was going to say I’m too young to be anyone’s grandfather, but I’m not, am I?”

“No,” Naomi said. “You aren’t. If anything, you ran kind of late.”

“Took a while getting it right. God. Kit’s a good kid. I hope he’s better at keeping a marriage together than I was.”

“He isn’t you. I’m not saying he won’t fuck it all up, but even if he does, it’ll be however he fucks it up. Not how you did.” For a moment she thought of her own son, dead along with his father and the rest of the Free Navy. The memory almost didn’t hurt. That wasn’t true. It would always hurt, but now it was a low-level ache instead of a knife to the belly. Time had done its healing, or at least let the scars go numb.

The piloting subsystem chimed, and Alex hauled himself up out of the couch. “I guess Giselle’s going to be a grandmother.” He grinned. “And she’s going to hate the shit out of it, isn’t she?”

“The title may not fit her self-image,” Naomi said.

“You make a good diplomat,” Alex said, and headed back for the lift. When she was alone again, she separated Kit’s message from the rest of the packet and copied it over to Alex’s message queue. She thought about keeping a copy for herself, but it hadn’t been meant for her, and she didn’t want to presume.

A soft clicking alert, and a new message popped up on her queue. She’d built a system of flags to help her keep track of her cascading responsibilities. This flag was the deep gold color that she’d chosen to mean Home. Issues specific and peculiar to the Rocinante and her little family. What remained of her little family.

The message was the one Naomi had been waiting for. Its tracking headers showed the subtle signs and countersigns the underground used to confirm authenticity. The repeaters echoed back to New Egypt, as she’d hoped. Nothing looked amiss. Anything that touched on the daughter of High Consul Winston Duarte, Naomi treated like it was made from snakes and plutonium.

Once she was certain of the message protocols and origins, she isolated her comm system, offered a silent prayer to the universe, and decrypted the message. It was a single line of text: