“The kind of guy, he’d feed you into a wood chipper, but he wouldn’t stiff you for his half of the bar tab,” Amos said. “I’ve known folks like that.”
“This Colonel Tanaka? I think she’s pissed off that she didn’t get us at New Egypt. Also, that I shot her in the face.”
“Yeah,” Amos agreed. “That’ll do it.”
“Think she’ll cool it if I explain I was just trying to kill her?”
“Seems like the right tentacle ain’t keeping track of what the left tentacle’s up to,” Amos said. “High command wants more than one thing, and running a galactic empire’s hard work. Maybe you’re right about Trejo. Maybe Tanaka just let it get personal and fucked up.”
They were silent for a long moment, then Jim sighed again. “The thing with hunting dogs is that once you let them off the leash, you’ve let them off the leash. They don’t stop until they catch what they’re going after.”
Amos went quiet for a moment, and Jim couldn’t tell if he was thinking or in one of his uncanny pauses. When he moved, it was like he turned back on.
“When I was back on Earth, I didn’t run with a hunting-dog kind of crowd,” Amos finally said. “But there was this guy I knew growing up who used to train police dogs. That’s kind of the same thing, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” Jim said. “Maybe.”
“So this guy, he was pretty fucked up by the time I knew him. Addicted to a bunch of different stuff, and taking a long time dying from it, but he still liked the dogs. The thing he said was that the whole process was about trying to find which ones weren’t going to start fucking people up on their own recognizance. So he’d flunk out any of the puppies that didn’t train up right, and he’d spend a lot of time working with the ones that made the cut. Fucking well-trained, smart animals, but that was the problem too. You get a dog smart enough, they know when it’s a training exercise and when it’s not. He used to say that until you went in the field, you never really knew what kind of dog you had.”
“So you think Tanaka’s going to stay on us until she gets what she’s after.”
“Or we manage to kill her,” Amos said. “Not sure it makes much difference in the big picture.”
“I can’t see how this all plays out.”
“Sure you do. Everyone dies. That’s always been how it is. Only question now is whether we can find some way to not all go at once.”
“If we do, then civilization dies. Everything humanity has ever done goes away.”
“Well, at least there won’t be anyone who misses it,” Amos said, and sighed. “You’re overthinking this, Cap’n. You got now and you got the second your lights go out. Meantime is the only time there is. All that matters is what we do during it.”
“I just want to go out knowing that things will be okay without me. That it all keeps going.”
“That you’re not the one who dropped the ball.”
“Yeah.”
“Or maybe,” Amos said, “you’re not that important and it ain’t up to you to fix the universe?”
“You always know how to cheer me up.”
Chapter Twenty-Four:
The Lighthouse and the Keeper
Tanaka almost hadn’t gone into active service. There had been a point when she was sixteen years old and the star student of her cohort in the Imahara Institute’s upper university program when she’d seriously considered committing to a career as an art historian. She’d taken three tutorials and courses, and she’d been good at it. Knowing the history surrounding an image made both the art and the history more interesting.
One of her last essays had been about a painting by Fernanda Daté called The Education of the Third Miko. It had been of a thin woman looking directly out at the viewer. The oil paint that Daté used had given an eerie impression of direct eye contact. The figure had been seated on a throne of skulls, and a single pale tear streaked her left cheek. Tanaka had written about the context for the image in Daté’s life—the nonresponsive cancer that the artist was struggling with when the painting was made, the threat of war between Earth and Mars that she’d grown up with, and her admiration for the Shintofascist philosophies of Umoja Gui. The distress of the third Miko depicted the aftermath of her self-revelation and acceptance of her own compromised nature.
Tanaka hadn’t thought about that painting in decades, or about what a very different life she would have lived if she’d made a few different decisions at the start.