Джеймс Кори - Leviathan Falls

Jim filtered the tactical map. The Perishable Harvest was about thirty degrees spinward of the Roci , and burning toward the wide, angry sun. If they’d gotten the message, they hadn’t complied with it yet.

“Is that one of ours?” Jim asked.

“Nope,” Naomi said. “It’s listed as property of a David Calrassi out of Bara Gaon. I don’t know anything about it.”

With light delay, they should have received the Black Kite ’s command ten minutes before the Rocinante did. Jim imagined some other crew in a panic because they’d received the message he’d been dreading. Whatever happened next, the Rocinante was out of the crosshairs for the moment at least. He wished he could feel the relief a little more deeply.

Jim unstrapped from the crash couch and swung around. The bearings hissed as it shifted under his weight.

“I’m heading down to the galley for a minute,” he said.

“Grab a coffee for me too,” Alex said.

“Oh no. Not coffee. I’m maybe up to some chamomile or warm milk. Something soothing and unaggressive.”

“Sounds good,” Alex said. “When you change your mind and get some coffee, grab one for me too.”

On the lift, Jim leaned against the wall and waited for his heart to stop racing. This was how heart attacks came, wasn’t it? A pulse that started fast and then never slowed until something critical popped. That was probably wrong, but it felt that way. He felt that way all the time.

It was getting better. Easier. The autodoc had been able to supervise the regrowth of his missing teeth. Apart from the indignity of needing to numb his gums like a toddler, that had gone well enough. The nightmares were old acquaintances by now. He’d started having them on Laconia while still a prisoner of High Consul Duarte. He’d expected them to fade once he was free, but they were getting worse. Being buried alive was the most recent version. More often it was someone he loved being murdered in the next room and not being able to key in the lock code fast enough to save them. Or having a parasite living under his skin and trying to find a way to cut it out. Or the guards on Laconia coming to beat him until his teeth broke again. The way that they had.

On the upside, the old dreams about forgetting to put on his clothes or not studying for a test seemed to be off the rotation. His weirdly vindictive dream life wasn’t all bad.

There were still days when he couldn’t shake the sense of threat. Sometimes a part of his mind would get trapped in the unfounded and irrational certainty that his Laconian torture team was about to find him again. Others, it was the less irrational dread of the things beyond the gates. The apocalypse that had destroyed the protomolecule’s makers and was on the path to destroying humanity.

Seen in that light, maybe he wasn’t the broken part of the equation. Maybe the larger situation was bad enough that feeling as whole and sane as the man he’d been before his Laconian imprisonment would have been a sign of madness. Still, he wished he could tell whether the waves of shuddering were a resonance effect of running the drive dirty or if it was just him.

The lift stopped, and he stepped out, turning toward the galley. The soft, rhythmic thump of dog tail against deck told him Teresa and Muskrat were already there. Amos—black-eyed, gray-skinned, and back from the dead—was there too, sitting at the table with the same placeholder smile he’d always had. Jim hadn’t seen him shot in the head back on Laconia, but he knew about the drones that had taken the pieces of human flesh and reconnected them. Naomi still struggled with whether the thing that called itself Amos really was the mechanic they’d shipped with for so many years, or if he’d become an alien mechanism that only thought it was Amos because it was made from his body and brain. Jim had decided that even if he looked different, even if he sometimes knew things that were scraps of the ancient alien world, Amos was Amos. He didn’t have the spare energy to think about it more deeply than that.

Besides which, the dog liked him. Not a perfect critical guide, but probably the least imperfect.

Muskrat, sitting at Teresa’s feet, looked up at Jim hopefully and wagged her tail against the deck again.

“I don’t have any sausage,” Jim said to the expressive brown eyes. “You’ll have to make do with kibble like the rest of us.”

“You spoiled her,” Teresa said. “She’s never letting you forget that.”

“If I go to heaven, let it be for spoiling dogs and children,” Jim said, and headed for the dispenser. Without thinking, he keyed in a bulb of coffee. Then, realizing what he’d done, he added one for Alex.

Teresa Duarte shrugged and turned her attention back to the tube of mushroom, flavorings, and digestive fiber that was her breakfast. Her hair was pulled back in a dark ponytail, and her mouth had a permanent slight frown that was either a quirk of her physiology or her character. Jim had seen her grow from a precocious child to a rebellious adolescent in the State Building in Laconia. She was fifteen now, and it was sobering to remember who he’d been at her age: a thin, dark-haired Montana boy with no particular ambitions beyond the knowledge that if nothing else worked out, he could join the navy. Teresa seemed older than adolescent Jim had been, both more knowledgeable about the universe and angrier with it. Maybe the two went hand in hand.

She’d been afraid of him when he’d been her father’s prisoner. Now that she was on Jim’s ship, the fear seemed to have evaporated. He’d been her enemy then, but he wasn’t sure that he was her friend now. The emotional complexity of an adolescent girl socialized in isolation was probably more than he could ever really understand.

The dispenser finished both his bulb and Alex’s, and Jim took them, appreciating the warmth against his palms. The shuddering was almost gone now, and the bitterness of the coffee was more calming than tea would have been.

“We’re going to need a resupply before much longer,” Amos said.

“Really?”

“We’re okay on water, but we could stand to re-up the fuel pellets. And the recyclers ain’t what they used to be.”

“How bad?”

“We’re solid for a few weeks yet,” Amos said.

Jim nodded. His first impulse was to dismiss it as a problem for another day. That was wrong, though. Fuck-it-if-it’s-not-happening-right-now was crisis thinking, and if he couldn’t break out of it, it would only lead to more crises later on.

“I’ll talk to Naomi,” he said. “We’ll figure something out.” Assuming the Laconians don’t find us. Assuming the gate entities don’t kill us. Assuming that any of the thousand other catastrophes I haven’t even thought of don’t kill us all before it matters. He took another sip of his coffee.

“How’re you doing, Cap’n?” Amos asked. “You seem a little twitchy.”

“Fine,” Jim said. “Just covering near-constant panic with light humor, same as anyone.”

Amos had a moment of eerie stillness—one of the hallmarks of his new self—and then smiled a little wider. “All right then.”

Alex broke in over the ship comms. “We got something.”

“Something good?”

“Something,” Alex said. “The Perishable Harvest just dumped some kind of liquid, and it’s burning like hell for the big trade station in the outer Belt.”

“Copy that,” Naomi said—also over the comms—in the new staccato calm that Jim thought of as her Commander Nagata voice. “Confirming.”

“The Black Kite ?” Jim asked the wall.

Alex and Naomi were silent for a moment, then Alex said, “Looks like they’re going after them.”