It was almost a full day before the message came back from Laconia. By then, Naomi had spent a long, sleepless night second-guessing herself, Alex and Jim were up to speed, and the Rocinante was ready to burn for the ring gate whether in tandem with the Falcon or on her own.
She was about to throw on a vac suit and run a visual inspection of the Roci’s plating when Jim called to her from the ops deck. “Naomi. We have something. It’s from Trejo.”
She put the helmet back in its cradle and pulled herself up to ops. Alex had already come down. His eyes were wide with concern. Jim could have been carved from plaster. She didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say. Either her gambit had worked or it hadn’t. They’d all know soon enough.
She pulled up her message queue. The entry at the top was marked ANTON TREJO. She opened it and pulled back far enough that the others could see. Trejo appeared at the same desk he’d been sitting at in the Freehold message, but with a less pleasant expression. Still technically a smile, but there was an anger in it that Naomi couldn’t miss if she wanted to. Fair enough. She’d just humiliated him by showing the underground and through them everyone in every system that Naomi Nagata had infiltrated the highest ranks of Laconia.
“Naomi Nagata,” Trejo said, and then chuckled like he’d practiced it. “You are a pistol, aren’t you? I am glad that we’re finally on the same side. I want you to know I’ve always respected your grit and your competence. I wish you’d gotten to know our cause under different circumstances. All this might have come out differently. Better now than never, though.”
“That man is going to put a bullet in the back of your head,” Jim said.
“Oh yeah,” Alex agreed. “No question.”
“If we get that far, I’ll deal with it,” Naomi said.
She rolled the message back to keep from missing anything. “As an initial gesture of our cooperation, I’m including a security briefing to you and Dr. Okoye both. Take a look at it, and let me know what you think. I’d appreciate it if we could use the secure channels moving forward. I’m sure the good doctor can tell you anything you need to get that set up if it’s not already.”
“This man spent weeks having me slowly beaten to death,” Jim said. “And he was never as angry at me as he is at you now.”
Naomi was already pulling up the security download. The featured report was of the inside of the ring space at the moment it went white. She’d seen it enough in Elvi’s scientific reports to recognize it. When the ring gates lit, blasting the ships there with light, the image froze, shifted. It seemed to be moving in toward the station at the center of the ring space. A small darkness stood out against the light, and a text window opened with the words: MATCH CERTAINTY 98.7%.
“Get Elvi,” Naomi said.
Chapter Thirty-Four: Tanaka
Tanaka knew she was dreaming, but she wasn’t certain that the dream was hers. In it, she was in a tunnel carved from bare stone and sealed against seepage like one of the old transit corridors in Innis Shallows back on the Mars of her youth, but there was a confusion in her as if she had never been anyplace like it before. Somewhere nearby, a man was screaming, and the name that she associated with the shrieks was Nobuyuki, but she didn’t know who that was.
That might have just been the nature of dreams, though, and the strangeness of it was only because she was on the ragged edge of lucidity. The thing that made it feel like she was watching someone else’s dream was more subtle. The texture of the emotions was wrong. The way they slid across her mind. She knew them as they came: betrayal, panic, the profound sorrow of a mistake that couldn’t be unmade. It was like seeing a Picasso composition in the style of Van Gogh, familiar and alien at the same time.
With the logic of dreams, she felt someone beside her thinking about the different kinds of unconsciousness: sleeping, dreaming, and dying. A younger mind, and a masculine one, but gentle in a way she didn’t usually associate with masculinity. A gentle soul beside her, caught in the same riptide she was.
And then she felt others around them, like they were all in the same theater watching a wall screen or a living performance. Other minds, other selves, all bleeding into each other, bleeding into her. Thoughts and impulses, impressions and emotions, rising up and drifting away without any clear owner, and her own selfhood just one flake in the snowstorm.
If the thing that calls itself Aliana Tanaka came apart here and never swirled back together, she thought, I wouldn’t even notice that I was missing.