He nodded and walked to his desk, the mag boots clicking with each step. The peach-colored pills he took from the safety drawer were familiar as air to her now. He put them in his mouth and drank them down. “I’ll set an automatic reminder.”
“The Falcon is ready.”
Botton sobered. “Good hunting.”
“It’s not why I came here.”
His look of surprise was deeply comforting. Every bit of evidence that her mind wasn’t open to everyone was a reassurance. Or, no, that wasn’t right. It was a chance to pretend she could set limits, that she had control she knew she didn’t really have. A chance to grab the comforting lie.
“When I find the high consul,” she said, “we don’t know what the result will be. This armistice with the underground? It’s Trejo’s agreement. Once we have the high consul, it may or may not be ours.”
Botton blinked. “I . . . think I understand.”
“I won’t be on the ship. If I give the order?”
“I am an officer of the Laconian Empire.”
Tanaka smiled. Her cheek barely ached at all when she did it. How odd to just finish healing now. “Tell no one until the time comes. Our minds can’t be trusted. And keep on the medication schedule.”
“I understand.”
“And Botton? If . . . if this doesn’t work? If we can’t stop what’s happening with—” She motioned toward her head. “I’d like to ask you a favor.”
His smile was gentle. “I’ll keep two bullets back, Colonel. One for each of us.” In that moment, she almost liked him.
Her suit was in the armory, polished, loaded, and ready. The same suit she’d used to kill Draper Station. She tried to think of it as a good luck charm. I had a copper penny with a string through it. I got it the night Emily Nam kissed me. I wore it every day for fourteen years. Tanaka pictured the little coin with its verdigris and the woven plastic string. She remembered Emily, and the softness of her lips, her fingertips stroking gently through his beard. His name was Alan and he grew up on Titan. She let him drift away, trying not to remember anything of her own life where it could find its way into him.
Incendiary rounds. Grenades. The last time someone had fired a grenade in the alien station, thousands of people had died. Well, fuck them. They knew the job was dangerous when they took it. She fastened the helmet in place, checked her bottles, checked her seals. Made sure that the medical system had enough drugs to keep her herself for a few more hours at least. This was her last chance.
She went out the airlock alone, launching down toward the blue, metallic sphere. All around her, the gates glowed, tracking her like thirteen hundred eyes. The girl was too small to see, but Tanaka’s suit picked her up—a tiny black dot against the glow. Another figure was beside her—Nagata. Tanaka did a single long acceleration burn and then several short, harder braking burns, falling toward the heir to the empire and her rebel protector. Nagata’s suit was an old Martian design, like something out of a museum.
Tanaka’s hand gestures indicated the channel, and Nagata switched to it with a click.
“I thought we had an understanding,” Tanaka said.
“I’m not going in,” Nagata replied. “I didn’t want Teresa to come alone. I’ll wait out here.”
The girl was in a suit like Nagata’s, but where Nagata came across like the citizen of another time, Teresa Duarte looked like a kid in a costume. The eyes behind the visor were defiant, the chin a little raised, the jaw a little lifted. Tanaka didn’t need to have her consciousness bleeding out around her to see the girl for what she was. Scared. Out of her depth. It would have been pathetic if Tanaka didn’t feel the same way, but since she did, it was disgusting.
“I don’t know that bringing the high consul out to see his enemies is going to be better than bringing you in,” she said.
Nagata made an old Belter gesture that agreed. “If Teresa doesn’t need me, I won’t be here.”
“I told her this was all right,” Teresa said. She sounded like her father. Tanaka didn’t quite understand what she was looking at. The older woman’s quiet fierceness and the girl’s imperious entitlement believing they protected each other like the warriors of ancient Greece locking shields. Idiotic hubris or well-earned confidence, it could be hard to tell the difference until it was too late.
“Your choice,” Tanaka said. “Come with me now.”
Nagata took the girl’s helmet, pressed it against her own. It was rude, having a private conversation right in front of her, but Tanaka let it go. She’d killed a bunch of Nagata’s friends and followers. Nagata’s lover had shot her in the face. A little discourtesy seemed like a small thing to worry about now, and Tanaka suspected all the debts were about to be settled, one way or another.