“We don’t need more ships,” Tanaka said. “At least let’s take it to the girl. If she won’t go with me, we can find someone else. But there isn’t anyone better.”
“She’s right,” Holden said bitterly. “Teresa needs to be okay with it, but any of us would be a distraction. Maybe a threat. The next best fit would be Elvi, and she’s—”
“Double agent,” Fayez said. “Traitor to the empire.”
“Busy overseeing the dive,” Holden said. He turned his attention to Tanaka. “What happens when you get to him?”
“I bring him out,” Tanaka said. “If I can’t bring him out, I establish a more reliable means of communication with him. We learn what he knows, and we find the way to protect the empire. Circumstances may have changed. My job hasn’t.”
And if you’d gotten out of my way and let me do it, a lot of people would still be alive. She didn’t say it, and Holden wasn’t in her mind the way the others were, but she was fairly sure he’d understood the point anyway.
“Not to protect the empire,” Nagata said. “To protect the human race.”
Tanaka shrugged. “From my perspective, that’s a distinction without a difference.”
“You’re right,” Holden said. “Let’s solve the extinction-level threat first. Then we can all go back to killing each other at a more civilized pace.”
He was staring at her, the bugs around his head motionless, as if each of them was staring too. He’s thinking about how he’s going to have to kill me again when this is all over with, Tanaka realized.
“Of course,” she replied with a smile. “First things first.”
“I’ll talk to Teresa,” Nagata said.
“Excellent,” Tanaka replied. “How long is this going to take?”
Thirty-six hours later, Tanaka got the confirmation that the experiment was ready. By then, seven more ships had come to the ring space. Thirty more would be there in the next day. Before long, they’d have a whole fleet of people to float around with their thumbs up their asses, unsure what to do. None of them mattered. Not if she could get her job done. Finish the mission, whatever the mission had become.
Tanaka’s head felt like a cocktail party full of people she didn’t know, but she hadn’t lost herself again. The voices were quiet, muffled, possible to ignore. So she ignored them. She spent her time in the gym, pushing herself until the ache of her muscles was an environment in and of itself. She took high-velocity steam showers, standing in the flow between jet and vacuum drain with the water almost hot enough to scald. Like the workouts, the pain centered her inside her physical self. It brought clarity.
There was a part of her that wanted to take a lover—find someone on the crew that she could grind against for a few hours. Just another way to bring her attention entirely to her own body and its sensations. It wasn’t fear of getting caught that stopped her. It was the unsettling certainty that anything she did would be known, shared, experienced, by other people. That it was no longer possible to have secrets of her own. The constant presence of other minds touching hers, trying to pull her into their memories and emotions, was like being eaten.
She kept checking for a message from Trejo, but nothing came. Instead, there was the slow but growing trickle of follow-up reports from the debriefings and interviews she’d taken before her transit into Bara Gaon. The captain of the Preiss had gone catatonic. The old medical technician from Konjin had started a regimen of psychoactives to keep his mind his own, but the others on the ship had started fading. He posted images to the feed of the ship’s crew going weirdly silent, working together with perfect synchrony like a dozen tentacles of the same beast. After leaving the ring space for Parker system, the Ilrys Eves had stopped answering its comms and diverted away from its flight plan for the major city on the second planet, and was now on course to a distant exoplanet in a non-elliptical orbit that had been flagged for exploration as a possible artifact.
Everywhere she looked, there were signs and reports of consciousness bleeding from one mind into others. Every minute she had to live with it hurt in a way she couldn’t articulate. She didn’t have to. The crew of the Derecho knew. They were all trapped in the same place she was.
Botton stood in his office, fastened to the deck by his mag boots with a bulb in his hand and a distant expression in his eyes. Slowly, he found her and saluted. His face had become even more gaunt since they’d left Gewitter and Bara Gaon, and stubble ghosted his chin and neck.
“Captain,” she said.
“How can I help?” His voice was soft at the edges.
“What are you drinking?”
He took a moment, then looked at the bulb in his hand as if he’d forgotten it was there. “Water. It’s water.”
“The medication?”
He nodded and walked to his desk, the mag boots clicking with each step. The peach-colored pills he took from the safety drawer were familiar as air to her now. He put them in his mouth and drank them down. “I’ll set an automatic reminder.”
“The Falcon is ready.”
Botton sobered. “Good hunting.”
“It’s not why I came here.”
His look of surprise was deeply comforting. Every bit of evidence that her mind wasn’t open to everyone was a reassurance. Or, no, that wasn’t right. It was a chance to pretend she could set limits, that she had control she knew she didn’t really have. A chance to grab the comforting lie.
“When I find the high consul,” she said, “we don’t know what the result will be. This armistice with the underground? It’s Trejo’s agreement. Once we have the high consul, it may or may not be ours.”
Botton blinked. “I… think I understand.”
“I won’t be on the ship. If I give the order?”
“I am an officer of the Laconian Empire.”
Tanaka smiled. Her cheek barely ached at all when she did it. How odd to just finish healing now. “Tell no one until the time comes. Our minds can’t be trusted. And keep on the medication schedule.”
“I understand.”
“And Botton? If… if this doesn’t work? If we can’t stop what’s happening with—” She motioned toward her head. “I’d like to ask you a favor.”
His smile was gentle. “I’ll keep two bullets back, Colonel. One for each of us.” In that moment, she almost liked him.
Her suit was in the armory, polished, loaded, and ready. The same suit she’d used to kill Draper Station. She tried to think of it as a good luck charm. I had a copper penny with a string through it. I got it the night Emily Nam kissed me. I wore it every day for fourteen years. Tanaka pictured the little coin with its verdigris and the woven plastic string. She remembered Emily, and the softness of her lips, her fingertips stroking gently through his beard. His name was Alan and he grew up on Titan. She let him drift away, trying not to remember anything of her own life where it could find its way into him.
Incendiary rounds. Grenades. The last time someone had fired a grenade in the alien station, thousands of people had died. Well, fuck them. They knew the job was dangerous when they took it. She fastened the helmet in place, checked her bottles, checked her seals. Made sure that the medical system had enough drugs to keep her herself for a few more hours at least. This was her last chance.
She went out the airlock alone, launching down toward the blue, metallic sphere. All around her, the gates glowed, tracking her like thirteen hundred eyes. The girl was too small to see, but Tanaka’s suit picked her up—a tiny black dot against the glow. Another figure was beside her—Nagata. Tanaka did a single long acceleration burn and then several short, harder braking burns, falling toward the heir to the empire and her rebel protector. Nagata’s suit was an old Martian design, like something out of a museum.