Once the airlock had cycled back closed behind them and Jim had gotten the vac suit off and serviced and stowed, he went back to his cabin. He stank of sweat and neoprene, and his muscles ached and twitched. There had been a time a few decades before when the labor wouldn’t have taken as much out of him, but even with the discomfort and the sense that he couldn’t have gone on as long as he had as a younger man, there was still a pleasure in the work. By the time he’d washed up and changed into a clean flight suit, he was pleased with himself in a way that he hadn’t felt in a long time.
When he got to the ops deck, Amos was alone on it, strapped into a crash couch despite there being no thrust gravity or any real prospect for it. Jim pulled himself to a halt on one of the handholds and looked up toward the flight deck.
“Where is everyone?” he asked.
“Alex is sleeping, Tiny’s taking care of the dog and getting some grub. Naomi went over to the Falcon to talk about the sensor data.”
“There’s sensor data already? I mean, I figured there’d be a few hours at least before they gathered enough to have a meeting about.”
“When people don’t know anything,” Amos said, “they love having meetings to talk about it.”
“I suppose.”
Amos stretched and scratched idly at his chest where his gunshot wound was still a ragged dull-black circle set in pale flesh. “Apparently, there’s a lot of activity going on in the station. Stuff happening, even if they don’t know what it is. It’s hotter too, and the temperature’s going up.”
“Weird seeing the gears moving. Especially since I didn’t know there were gears before.”
“Did you find him?”
“We didn’t.”
“Is he there?”
Jim stretched. His spine cracked. “Yeah. He’s there. But I don’t think he’s looking to talk.”
Whatever Amos was going to say in reply was lost when the comms spat out an alert. Jim pulled himself to a couch and called it up. IFF had pinged a ship on the Roci’s alert list. The Derecho— the ship that had killed the Gathering Storm and chased them out of Freehold—had just made transit through Bara Gaon gate. Jim turned off the security alert, and a few seconds later, a message came into the queue from Colonel Aliana Tanaka.
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Tanaka
If they’d met on Laconia, it would have been in the State Building. They would have sat around a carefully made, tasteful table in a room designed to radiate power, comfort, and seriousness. Instead, they were in the galley of a half-rebuilt science ship that stank of overstressed air recyclers and industrial solvent. It made a kind of sense. Portraits of great war leaders or critical battles that looked flattering, well composed, and balanced always felt like propaganda. Tanaka had spent a lot of time in the halls of power. She’d seen many paintings of great men in uniform staring eagle-eyed into the distance where their future glory lay. She’d seen very few paintings of soldiers with only a ragged tent and a dying fire to hold back the cold nights before some stranger tried to bayonet them in the morning.
She’d left Botton on the Derecho, coming to the Falcon alone. She wore her dress uniform and a sidearm. The drugs left her slightly nauseated, and she’d had a headache since before they’d transited out of Bara Gaon that might have been something nasty building up in her bloodstream or just the constant, unremitting feeling of other minds bumping against her own. In addition to everything else, she had the persistent hallucination that her left eye was weeping, cool tears running down her cheek even in the absence of gravity to pull them.
“You’re certain that this . . . effect is spreading?” Dr. Okoye asked. She’d gained frown lines at the center of her forehead and at the corners of her mouth since the last time Tanaka had seen her. She was also skinny and soft from too much time spent on the float. Between atrophy, stress, and malnutrition, she looked like a stick halfway through burning.
“I am,” Tanaka said. “The people who were present for the event got the worst of it. But it’s happening to other people too. I don’t know how many. And if you don’t want it happening to you, start taking these now.”
Along with the treasonous head of the Science Directorate, the others in the room were her equally treasonous husband, the head of the underground, and the man who had shot Tanaka’s teeth out. While they thought, the weird little not-gnats shimmied around their heads. The ones around Holden were odd, but she couldn’t put her finger on why. Tanaka fantasized about what order she’d shoot them in. She’d pretty much settled on starting with Holden. As compromised as she felt, she wasn’t certain she’d be able to get all of them, and she’d be disappointed to die in a universe that still had James Holden in it.