“When people don’t know anything,” Amos said, “they love having meetings to talk about it.”
“I suppose.”
Amos stretched and scratched idly at his chest where his gunshot wound was still a ragged dull-black circle set in pale flesh. “Apparently, there’s a lot of activity going on in the station. Stuff happening, even if they don’t know what it is. It’s hotter too, and the temperature’s going up.”
“Weird seeing the gears moving. Especially since I didn’t know there were gears before.”
“Did you find him?”
“We didn’t.”
“Is he there?”
Jim stretched. His spine cracked. “Yeah. He’s there. But I don’t think he’s looking to talk.”
Whatever Amos was going to say in reply was lost when the comms spat out an alert. Jim pulled himself to a couch and called it up. IFF had pinged a ship on the Roci’s alert list. The Derecho—the ship that had killed the Gathering Storm and chased them out of Freehold—had just made transit through Bara Gaon gate. Jim turned off the security alert, and a few seconds later, a message came into the queue from Colonel Aliana Tanaka.
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Tanaka
If they’d met on Laconia, it would have been in the State Building. They would have sat around a carefully made, tasteful table in a room designed to radiate power, comfort, and seriousness. Instead, they were in the galley of a half-rebuilt science ship that stank of overstressed air recyclers and industrial solvent. It made a kind of sense. Portraits of great war leaders or critical battles that looked flattering, well composed, and balanced always felt like propaganda. Tanaka had spent a lot of time in the halls of power. She’d seen many paintings of great men in uniform staring eagle-eyed into the distance where their future glory lay. She’d seen very few paintings of soldiers with only a ragged tent and a dying fire to hold back the cold nights before some stranger tried to bayonet them in the morning.
She’d left Botton on the Derecho, coming to the Falcon alone. She wore her dress uniform and a sidearm. The drugs left her slightly nauseated, and she’d had a headache since before they’d transited out of Bara Gaon that might have been something nasty building up in her bloodstream or just the constant, unremitting feeling of other minds bumping against her own. In addition to everything else, she had the persistent hallucination that her left eye was weeping, cool tears running down her cheek even in the absence of gravity to pull them.
“You’re certain that this… effect is spreading?” Dr. Okoye asked. She’d gained frown lines at the center of her forehead and at the corners of her mouth since the last time Tanaka had seen her. She was also skinny and soft from too much time spent on the float. Between atrophy, stress, and malnutrition, she looked like a stick halfway through burning.
“I am,” Tanaka said. “The people who were present for the event got the worst of it. But it’s happening to other people too. I don’t know how many. And if you don’t want it happening to you, start taking these now.”
Along with the treasonous head of the Science Directorate, the others in the room were her equally treasonous husband, the head of the underground, and the man who had shot Tanaka’s teeth out. While they thought, the weird little not-gnats shimmied around their heads. The ones around Holden were odd, but she couldn’t put her finger on why. Tanaka fantasized about what order she’d shoot them in. She’d pretty much settled on starting with Holden. As compromised as she felt, she wasn’t certain she’d be able to get all of them, and she’d be disappointed to die in a universe that still had James Holden in it.
So petty, a voice muttered in her mind. An older man. His judgment stung, even though she didn’t know him. She stopped imagining Holden dead just to avoid any more unsolicited commentary.
Elvi Okoye paged through the list of medications Tanaka had given her, and her husband watched over her shoulder. The thin woman’s frown deepened, but Holden was the one who spoke.
“How bad is it?”
“It’s unpleasant,” Tanaka said, going for understatement. “The medication helps, but it doesn’t stop it.”
“We have to find a way into the ring station,” Nagata said.
“There isn’t one,” Fayez Sarkis said. “The sensor data shows a lot of activity. Constant restructuring. Vast magnetic and electrical charges building up and fading away. All kinds of things. But no doors.”
“I doubt we can force it open,” Holden said. “But—”
“It shrugged off the primary weapon of a Magnetar-class battleship, and then took a full broadside from a collapsing neutron star without getting a dent,” Tanaka said. “But sure, let’s get out the chisels and hacksaws and give it a try.”
“But,” Nagata said, talking over her, “it can open. It has opened. There’s a way.”
Of all of them, Nagata was the most surprising. She was nearly the same age as Tanaka, and while the Belter’s long, lanky frame was the result of too much time on the float when she was a child, they still looked like they might have been related. Distant cousins, maybe. There was a weariness about her too that spoke to Tanaka, and a sense that she kept herself to herself.
“We all agree that nothing will force it open,” Elvi said.
“Which is why we don’t force it,” Nagata said. “Last time it opened, there was a protomolecule sample hidden on the Rocinante. The Falcon has a sample now. Let’s use it.”
“Another dive,” Fayez said. “Only into the station this time instead of the library.”
Tanaka saw Elvi’s hesitation in the gnats before she spoke. “That might not be… easy. The Adro diamond was built to dispense information. We turned it on, and it did what it was created to do. When the station opened for Holden, the protomolecule sample was driving. It was using him to get inside, improvising in the way it was built to improvise. We don’t understand what the station was meant to do.”
“Power the gates and sterilize entire solar systems when needed, if memory serves,” Holden said. The gnats around his head swirled and darted for a moment.
“Either Duarte parked his ship here and took a stroll through space, or he got in,” Fayez said.
“Do we have anything more promising to try?” Tanaka asked.
Elvi’s silence was answer enough.
Tanaka didn’t roll her eyes. “We have a plausible approach to opening the station. So let’s try it. We have the high consul’s daughter, who is the only person with a strong enough emotional connection to bring him out of whatever fugue state he’s in. You open the way, I will escort her in.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Nagata said.
“Not going to happen?”
Holden answered. “We weren’t going to hand her over to you in New Egypt or Freehold. We aren’t going to do it now.”
Tanaka opened her hands, palms up. Floating as she was with legs crossed at the ankle, she felt like a painting of a saint being assumed into heaven. The patron saint of putting up with idiots, whoever that was.
“Admiral Trejo made it clear that we’re on the same side now,” Tanaka said. “He gave me the highest clearance in the empire to fulfill one mission. Finding the high consul is that mission, and has been since before New Egypt. And all of you are rebels who were still fighting a war with him when he disappeared. I’m open to counterarguments, but if the plan is to engage him in conversation, I’m not sure how you’re better ambassadors than I am.”
“There are hundreds of ships en route to us right now,” Elvi said. “The Science Directorate is sending everything we can spare. The underground is also…” She looked at Nagata, who nodded.