When Tanaka spoke, it was deliberately using the other woman’s cadence and intonation. Not quite mocking her, not quite not. “You believe I am suffering an ongoing, unstoppable intimate assault.”
“I do.”
“And you think that’s something I can heal from?”
“I would like to help you.”
“I would like to be helped,” Tanaka said. “Send me the pills. We’ll go from there.”
The station was unfamiliar enough to hold her attention. The puzzle of reading the signs, finding her way to the transport tubes, picking the right lift to get her to her quarters, all kept her from thinking too much about anything else. When she got there, things were worse.
Her rooms were simple, spare, and elegant. The color scheme was mostly a dusty red designed to highlight the splashes of Laconian blue. The decoration was minimalist and tasteful: a calligraphic print of a passage of the high consul’s writings, a crystal vase with a single flower in it that was replaced each day by the staff, a floor covering designed to evoke tatami mats. There was nothing in it to distract her from her impulses and thoughts.
She ordered food to the room: curried fish and a dry white wine. Someone in her head remembered an apartment with blue-green walls of chipping paint and a couch made from foam and cloth. It was a happy memory, but Tanaka didn’t know why. Someone else had eaten a bad fish curry, and the echo of a night recovering from food poisoning wafted through her awareness and vanished again, thin as cigarette smoke.
The medication arrived at almost the same time as the food. A glassine packet with ten peach-colored pills in it and the printed directions to take one each morning and to avoid alcohol. She dry-swallowed two of them, then chased them with a long swig from the wine bottle. The curry was punishingly hot, just as she’d hoped. It gave her an excuse to polish off the wine. By the time she was finished, a deep ache was growing at the base of her skull, but she had the sense that the memories and thoughts were a little less, the voices a little quieter.
The room’s system chimed. A connection request from the Derecho. She checked her hand terminal. There were half a dozen messages from Botton queued there, but she’d forgotten to take off her privacy settings after Ahmadi. She turned them off now and accepted the connection through the room. A wall screen came to life, and Botton’s head filled it.
“Colonel,” he said. “I am very sorry to interrupt. I wouldn’t if you hadn’t specifically asked for immediate updates.”
Had she asked for immediate updates? She didn’t remember doing it, but it sounded like something she would have done. The ache at the base of her skull grew a little more intense.
“It’s fine,” she said. “What seems to be the problem?”
“We had a high-priority report from the Science Directorate on Laconia. Dr. Ochida’s office flagged it as critical.”
“What did it say?”
Botton blinked. “I don’t know, Colonel. I’m not cleared.”
She knew that. She should have known. “Of course. Send it to me. I’ll take it here.”
“Colonel,” the captain said, and then vanished. He was replaced with an encrypted datafile. As she ran the decryption, she wondered what the effect of alcohol was on her new medication. If it beat the hell out of her liver and kidneys, it might still be worth the damage. If it made the meds less effective, though . . .
She ordered another bottle of wine anyway.
Ochida appeared on the screen. He looked as clean and crisp as ever. She recognized the room he was in. Not the Science Directorate, but the State Building. That meant whatever he was telling her, he’d likely already told Trejo.
“Colonel,” he said. “I hope you’re well.”
“Fuck you,” Tanaka said to the recording with a polite nod.
“We were feeding the data you sent us through the virtual intelligence and pattern-matching systems here, and we came up with something interesting. Take a look at this.”
The screen jumped. Where Ochida had been, there was the ring space. Telescopic images, tactical map, scatter data. She didn’t need to look at the time stamp. She recognized the sequence like it was a well-studied painting. It was the gap between when the Derecho had entered the ring space and the transit of the Preiss. It was the last few moments that her mind had been her own.
The images ticked forward frame by frame, slowed down by the analytic software. She watched the ships inch forward in their arcs, the tactical display tracking each of them. The dissipating drive plume into Bara Gaon that had misled her. The flicker of the Preiss’s drive as it began to go dutchman. And then whiteness. The annihilating brightness of a thousand rings bursting into light.