Tanaka’s hand gestures indicated the channel, and Nagata switched to it with a click.
“I thought we had an understanding,” Tanaka said.
“I’m not going in,” Nagata replied. “I didn’t want Teresa to come alone. I’ll wait out here.”
The girl was in a suit like Nagata’s, but where Nagata came across like the citizen of another time, Teresa Duarte looked like a kid in a costume. The eyes behind the visor were defiant, the chin a little raised, the jaw a little lifted. Tanaka didn’t need to have her consciousness bleeding out around her to see the girl for what she was. Scared. Out of her depth. It would have been pathetic if Tanaka didn’t feel the same way, but since she did, it was disgusting.
“I don’t know that bringing the high consul out to see his enemies is going to be better than bringing you in,” she said.
Nagata made an old Belter gesture that agreed. “If Teresa doesn’t need me, I won’t be here.”
“I told her this was all right,” Teresa said. She sounded like her father. Tanaka didn’t quite understand what she was looking at. The older woman’s quiet fierceness and the girl’s imperious entitlement believing they protected each other like the warriors of ancient Greece locking shields. Idiotic hubris or well-earned confidence, it could be hard to tell the difference until it was too late.
“Your choice,” Tanaka said. “Come with me now.”
Nagata took the girl’s helmet, pressed it against her own. It was rude, having a private conversation right in front of her, but Tanaka let it go. She’d killed a bunch of Nagata’s friends and followers. Nagata’s lover had shot her in the face. A little discourtesy seemed like a small thing to worry about now, and Tanaka suspected all the debts were about to be settled, one way or another.
A short burst from her suit thrusters, and she was falling toward the unblemished surface of the station and the little egg-ship. It was strange seeing it. She could still picture its compatriots in the grotto on Laconia. It was like being on a weeks-long hunt and finally coming across a confirming footprint. The joy that burst up in her was unexpected and it was also unmistakably her own. Trejo had called her in as a hunter. He’d been right.
Tanaka switched to the Falcon’s channel. “This is Colonel Tanaka. The girl and I are in place.”
Okoye’s voice was complicated by the static. The ring space had become a noisy place, what with the gods of chaos banging on the walls. “Understood. We are starting the dive now. Stand by.”
The connection went quiet. Tanaka checked her ammunition, her air supply, her medical status. Beside her, the girl drifted slowly to the right, her velocity just slightly off from Tanaka’s own.
“How well do you know him?” the girl asked.
“The high consul?” Tanaka asked. “We’ve met a few times. I was in the first wave. When we went to Laconia from Mars.”
“You’re a founder.”
“I am,” Tanaka said. “All this? I helped make this. He directed us, and we did the work. Humanity’s only galactic empire.”
“Do you think…” the girl began, but she let the question die unfinished. Do you think he’s all right? Do you think this is going to work? Do you think it was worth it? The girl could have been asking anything.
Beneath them, the station glowed. Tanaka knew better, but she had the sense that it was humming, sound somehow projecting itself across the vacuum. There might have been some kind of magnetic resonance making her suit ring along with it. It might only have been an illusion.
She checked her suit’s readout. The Falcon was monitoring the activity of the station—energy, magnetic fields, seismic activity. The data stream was a fire hose. She didn’t know enough to interpret it. She scanned the blue, featureless surface, looking for something. Anything. She remembered a painting inspired by Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The part where the sailing ship was trapped in a windless still near Earth’s equator. In the painting, the ship had been small, the sea vast and empty. Had it been Turner? Drew? Drummond? She couldn’t remember. She hadn’t thought much of it when she’d seen it. She understood it better now.
The girl corrected her course and started drifting back toward her. The approach irritated Tanaka. A better soldier would have matched the first time.
“Do we know how long this is supposed to take?” the girl asked.
“As long as it does.”
They were quiet. Tanaka counted breaths that piled up into minutes. The vast blue exhausted her eyes until the color seemed to vibrate and dance. The girl clicked onto the channel, then off, then on again. When she finally mustered up the courage to speak, she gave voice to Tanaka’s own thoughts.
“Something’s wrong.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Elvi
The laboratory was still in an organized kind of chaos. The old setup had been taken down before they left Adro with no reason to think it would be reconstructed anytime soon. Now all the pieces were coming back out, laid down in familiar lines for an unfamiliar purpose. It reminded her of an autopsy. Everything in place, but not functioning.
Or at least not functioning yet.
Rebuilding it was easier and faster than creating it the first time had been. The medical couch already knew the baseline for Cara and Amos. The long months they had spent calibrating the system made recalibrating it simpler. The sensors were already in place, and the territory they were sampling—the station—many orders of magnitude smaller than the Adro diamond.
It should have felt better, but with every cable that came out from storage, every monitor that was paired with some part of the sensors or the medical couch, Elvi felt a little more anxious, the knot in her stomach a little tighter. She couldn’t say exactly what she was frightened of, only that she was frightened.
The crew worked with the efficiency of a well-drilled military. Someone who didn’t know what they were looking at would have heard a cacophony of voices, everyone talking over everyone else. She could see the structure in it. She knew that Oran Alberts and Susan Yi were ringing the power lines to make sure there was a minimum of noise in the system. Weyrick and Cole were preparing the sync between the medical couch’s NIR scanners and the signal processing deck. Jenna and Harshaan were feeding the system backups into the secondary array. They were three distinct conversations like three melodies played simultaneously that sounded discordant until you understood how they all fit together.
With twelve hours still to go before the dive began, Fayez came to the lab. There was a tightness he got around the corners of his eyes sometimes when he was tense. She put the potentiometer back in its case to calibrate later and launched herself over to him, lifting an eyebrow when he met her gaze.
“New briefing came in from Ochida,” he said.
“Want to go see if he’s figured it all out for us?”
“Hope springs eternal.” Fayez turned and led the way back to her office.
Since Naomi had accepted Trejo’s offer of cooperation, Elvi hadn’t heard from the admiral. She wasn’t sure what her status was with him or with Laconia, but she was very aware of having humiliated the de facto military dictator of the empire. It wasn’t the sort of thing that ended well for people, historically speaking. It still wasn’t in her top five biggest worries.