The idea was like a whispered threat. She woke herself up trying to scream.
When her eyes opened, her surroundings were no more familiar. The lightin-darkness of pale linens in a dim room. A frame on the wall filled with hand-brushed letters. Something on the floor that was and wasn’t tatami. She told herself that she would know. She didn’t now, didn’t yet, but she would. This was her room. This was her bed. There was a reason it didn’t seem familiar . . .
Because these were her rooms on Gewitter Station. Not hers. Not owned. Assigned to her for a moment, like a hotel. Nothing felt like her, because it was only a brief relationship, architecturally speaking. That made sense. That sounded right. She pulled herself out from under the blanket and stumbled to the tiny bathroom. Above the sink, a whole wall of mirror. She looked at the woman looking back out at her, and she seemed familiar.
Tanaka shifted her head and watched her reflection do the same. She opened her mouth, watched the places where the surgical scars on her cheeks pulled down at her eyelids differently. If you’d stuck with the field surgery, it would be healed by now, she thought. What the hell did she need with cosmesis anyway?
What’s a third Miko? someone asked in her mind, and she pushed the thought away.
“Aliana Tanaka,” she said, and the reflection mimicked. “You are Aliana Tanaka. Colonel Aliana Tanaka, Laconian Marine Corps. Special Operations Group, Second Battalion, First Marine Expeditionary Regiment. Aliana Tanaka, that’s who you are.”
The syllables of her own name became a mantra, and slowly, slowly, the mantra became something more. She remembered the medicine, went back to the bedroom to find the packet, and dry-swallowed two more of the pills. They made a thick lump halfway down her esophagus. Good enough.
She found her hand terminal and scanned the packet. She was already down to the last two doses. When she put in for a resupply, the system threw up an error. She keyed in a security override, insisted, and while she was at it, doubled the size of the prescription. Whatever damage it did her wasn’t even in her top ten problems right now.
She looked at the time—halfway through the second watch— and didn’t know when she’d gone to sleep. Maybe she was up early. Maybe she’d slept in. Time and behavior were doing strange things right now. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t going back to sleep now. She could start from there.
She pulled up the lights, showered under uncomfortably cool water, and dressed in her uniform. The woman over the sink now looked less hagridden. Her scars were almost dignified. Aliana Tanaka. Aliana Tanaka.
She put in a connection request for Captain Botton on the Derecho. It took him long enough to accept that she thought he might have been sleeping, but he was dressed and on the bridge of the ship. Maybe he just didn’t like taking her calls.
“Colonel,” he said instead of hello.
“What’s the situation?” she asked smartly.
He nodded and seemed to gather himself. She had the impression— a last wisp of dream—of tiny gnats swarming around his head, almost too small and translucent to be picked up by the camera. She ignored them. “We should be fully resupplied in seventy-two hours, sir.”
Tanaka scowled. “I made the requests personally. We should have been at the front of the line.”
“We are,” Botton said. “The common supplies are already on board. Water. Food. Filters. Basic medical supplies. We’re only waiting for catalytic plates for the recycler and a shipment of fuel pellets that was outbound. They’re burning hard to get back.”
That a ship had to turn back around for her was weirdly reassuring. It was evidence that there was an objective reality, that the world of base matter still counted for something, that not everything was a slip of consciousness that other minds could invade and change.
“Fine. But keep the crew ready for immediate departure. If I decide not to wait for the full resupply, I don’t want to be hauling people out of dockside bars because they thought they were still on shore leave.”
The gnats around Botton’s head came more sharply into focus and his mouth went just a degree tighter. Botton didn’t like that she was running his ship. Why would he? She’d have hated him if their positions were reversed. He was usually better at hiding his irritation. She had the uncanny sense that she was seeing his thoughts as he had them.
“If I may, does this have anything to do with the armistice?” Botton asked.
The what? Tanaka almost said. Reflexes from decades in the military kicked in before she could. “I can’t confirm or deny anything at this point.”