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.
The message from Trejo wasn’t unexpected, but she’d let herself hope it might not come. She decanted a bulb of red wine designed to her tastes—dry and oaky—and drank half of it before she played it.
The message was noisy—static and resolution loss and best-guess infills by the comm system fighting against the new noise from the ring gates. Even so, she could tell that Trejo looked like shit. His unnaturally green eyes had taken on an almost milky softness. His hair was whiter than she remembered it being, and thinner. The darkness under his eyes spoke of sleeplessness. Anton Trejo was Laconia now, and he was learning that it was too big for him. No wonder he wanted Duarte back. She recognized his office at the State Building. She’d only been away from Laconia for a few months, but it seemed like a memory from childhood.
“Colonel Tanaka,” he said, nodding at the camera as if he were looking at her. “I want to thank you for your report. I’m not going to bullshit you. The outcome in Freehold system isn’t what I was hoping for. But you were the one with boots on the ground. I’m not going to second-guess you. This other thing . . . Well, it’s concerning.”
“Well understated, sir,” she said to the recording, and squirted a little more of the wine toward the back of her throat. Nothing was as good on the float, and she had to breathe the fumes from her mouth up into her nose for the drink to taste like anything.
“I have ordered three ships from the Science Directorate to make all reasonable haste to the ring space, where they can make a complete survey. Your data has been provided to them and to Drs. Ochida and Okoye. If it is possible to get to the bottom of this, I have faith that they will.”