“We were just going through, same as always. The drive plume, it always hits first. But we couldn’t see that anything odd was going on. Drive plume was in the way, you know?”
“I do,” Tanaka said. Her jaw ached. “But there must be something. Something different this time? Had anything changed on this ship recently?”
“Got some new air scrubbers out of Ganymede. Charged graphene with crosshatching. Supposed to last twice as long as the old kind, and you can wash ’em with distilled water. Reuse ’em five or six times.”
“That’s the only new equipment?”
“Since the last trip, yeah.”
“What about the passengers. Are any of them shipping anything out of the ordinary?”
The shrug. The scowl. “It’s all construction and climate engineering stuff. I don’t know.”
“Is any of it protomolecule-based technology?”
A flash of impatience crossed the thick man’s face. “Everything’s protomolecule-based technology. The lace plating’s protomolecule tech. The biofilms around the reactor are. Half the food supply comes from things we built off that shit.”
Tanaka took a deep breath and let it out through her teeth. It didn’t placate her that he was right. But there had to be some reason that this man was here, floating at her workstation, and not vanished into the hungry void that was a failed transit.
She let it go.
“Did you have… any experiences associated with the event?” She managed to keep her voice steady, as if any answer would have been as good as another. As if just asking didn’t make her gut tighten.
“Oh yeah. Oh, hell yeah.”
Tanaka turned off the recorder. “Tell me what you remember. Don’t feel like you have to make sense of it. Just your memory of the experience.”
The man shook his head. Not a negation, but a gesture of wonder bordering on disbelief. “There was this thing where… I don’t know. It was like being in the ocean, but the water was other people? You know how you dream, and maybe you’re some other person? Like you dream you’re old when you’re a kid. Or a kid when you’re old. It was like having a thousand of those dreams all at the same time.”
Tanaka nodded. It was actually a pretty good description. She forced her jaw to relax.
“Do you still remember anything about those impressions? Or did the experience fade like normal dreams?”
He shrugged again, but almost gently. Like he was frightened or sad. When he spoke, his tone was almost wistful. “There’s… scraps? There was like a memory I had where I was a woman on L-4 maybe ten years ago? I’d just gotten a promotion or something, and I was drunk with some friends.”
“Have you ever been on L-4?”
“Nah, but that’s where I was. Where she was. Where she was when I was her. I don’t know, it was fucked up.”
“Do you remember anything else about her?”
“My skin was really dark. Like dark dark. And there was something wrong with my right leg.”
“Okay. All right.” Tanaka turned the recording back on. “We’re going to hold your passage until we can interview everyone on board the ship and make a complete forensic scan.”
She expected him to object, but he didn’t. The Preiss was going to be late arriving on Nieuwestad, and the captain would probably lose a bonus at the least. Possibly owe a late-arrival penalty. If the monetary loss bothered him, he didn’t show it. Tanaka’s guess was that he’d had an experience that made the mere economic reality of his position seem less significant. She was seeing a lot of that in her interviews.
He hauled himself hand by hand out of the office to where her guards were waiting in the corridor. She thumbed the control, and the door closed behind him. The database of all crew and passengers from the detained ships was on the Derecho’s system. The data wasn’t perfect. Some of the ships claimed to have suffered data loss during the incident, their systems corrupted and spotty. It just meant they were hiding evidence: maybe of smuggling, maybe of contacts in the underground, maybe of some glimpse of the Rocinante’s passage through the slow zone. She wasn’t naive enough to believe these people were good citizens of the empire.
She’d care about that later.
Her own experience had been like a whiteout. One moment, she’d been watching the Preiss die in a failed transit. The next, she’d been in a hurricane of unfamiliar consciousness, battered by it. When she’d come back to herself, the Derecho had been on automatic lockdown. The crew had been stunned, confused. She remembered passing one woman in the corridor who was floating in a fetal position, tears in a bubble over her eyes like goggles made of salt water.
The glitches and lost consciousness were often associated with visual and aural hallucinations. This was a new variation, but that was all. She wanted to believe that, and like anything she found herself wanting to be true, she forced herself to double-check it.
The initial search criteria was easy enough. Anyone female-identifying who’d been on L-4 between eight and thirteen years previously. Cross-reference that with medical records mentioning the right leg.
There was only one hit. Anet Dimitriadis, senior mechanic on the Pleasant Life, a freighter working between Corazon Sagrado, Magpie, and Pankaja systems. Tanaka resented the tightness in her throat as she pulled up the woman’s file.
Anet Dimitriadis had skin so dark the system adjusted the image contrast to make her features clear. Like a rush of cold water in her gut, fear flooded Tanaka.
“Fuck,” she said.
In the ring space, a soft and shadowless light spilled from the gates. Along with it, electromagnetic radiation on a range of frequencies filled the void like a jamming device. The Derecho took all of it in, filling the available memory with raw data from every sensor array it had. The ships that been in the ring space when the Preiss had done whatever trick it had done drifted, waiting for their turns to be questioned and released. A handful of other ships came through the gates, burning slowly, tentatively, like mice that thought they’d heard something meow.
What Tanaka wanted and what she could do were far enough apart to be independent variables. It would have been the work of years to put each and every person in the ships there in her office where she could grill them, scare them, threaten them. Find out what they remembered or thought they remembered. She didn’t have years.
And, more to the point, this wasn’t her mission. She was hunting Winston Duarte, or whatever he’d become, and hauling him—or it—back to Laconia. Whatever was going on here might be fascinating. It might be the most important thing in the universe. That didn’t matter because it wasn’t her job.
Except that she’d found something more important than her job.
Twice a day, she ate in the Derecho’s galley, but only because there was some deep, primate part of her brain that thought being around other primates would make her safer. The isolation of her office felt too much like vulnerability. But being around the crew was intensely uncomfortable in its own way. She ate her rice and egg slurry, drank her tea, and went back to her office, relieved to be alone again, but anxious too. She hated herself when she was like this.
She had Botton send representatives to each ship to conduct interviews, routing only the captains, scientists, and information officers directly to her. When she wasn’t doing her own interviews, she had a dozen more to listen to, compare among each other, gnaw at like a dog to crack a bone down to the marrow. She switched between the feeds, catching a question or two, a phrase or two, and then moving on. Kenst how you can pay attention to how, sa, just your foot feels? Like that, aber con a jéjé different bodies. Tanaka shifted. I had this intense sense of panic, but it wasn’t my panic. It was someone else’s, and I was feeling it. She shifted. There was someone with me, only he wasn’t in the room. He was more with me than if he’d just been beside me. She told herself she was bored, but that was a lie. She was restless, and that wasn’t the same. She needed to get drunk, to get in a fight, to fuck. Something. Be doing anything that centered her fully in her own body, where she could forget being anything other than herself.