“I didn’t know you were doing another dive today,” Fayez said.
“She felt up to it. That’s not what you came for either, is it?”
He shut down the screens, rotated back to face Elvi, and braced on a foothold. “The Tanaka thing is a problem.”
She had looked tired before he said it. She looked worse now. “What are we seeing?”
“She’s reallocated and retasked four workgroups. Instead of doing deep background scanning, they’re searching for an artifact that may or may not have left from Laconia and doing deep brain scans of Trejo looking for… I don’t know what.”
“Traces of manipulation,” Elvi said. “Something that would show evidence that he’d had a direct neural link like the one James Holden and the remnants of Miller did on Ilus.”
“So you know about this?”
Elvi made a vague, helpless gesture. “She outranks me.”
“But you’re the administrator of the Science Directorate.”
“And that used to matter,” Elvi said. “Not anymore. Right now, her orders might as well say, ‘from the desk of God.’”
“These scientists want you to protect them from the bureaucracy.”
“What they want is for me to talk Duarte into overriding Trejo and getting her clearance pulled,” Elvi said. “There’s a problem with that plan.”
“That Duarte doesn’t exist?”
“That Tanaka will need to find him before I can ask him any favors, yes.”
Fayez was quiet for a moment. He didn’t want to go to the next place, but he had to. “Do you think that’s really what’s going on?”
Elvi’s sigh meant she’d had the same thoughts and suspicions. “You mean do I think Tanaka’s really searching for a version of Duarte that came out of his coma and disappeared?”
“Or is Trejo feeding us a story and seeing if it leaks out to the underground? This could all be a test. Duarte could be back at the State Building right now contemplating his oatmeal. We wouldn’t know until Dr. Lee gets a quiet order to put a bullet in the backs of our heads. We’re high in the food chain, but Trejo’s still an authoritarian despot, and there’s a lot of precedent for shit like that.”
“I can’t care about it,” Elvi said. “I can’t play the game. I don’t have the focus or the energy.”
“You can stop feeding our results to Jim and Nagata.”
Elvi nodded, but not in the way that meant she agreed.
Fayez pressed his fingertips into his closed eyelids. “Babe,” he said, but she stopped him.
“It’s happening more than we thought.”
“What? What’s happening?”
“The incidents. Like Gedara. We’ve only been seeing the near misses. We always catch the ones that turn off consciousness, but I had Ochida run through pattern matching for other anomalies like Gedara’s lightspeed thing? They’re happening all the time.”
“What do you mean, all the time?” Fayez said, but his gut had gone suddenly cold.
“Changes in virtual particle annihilations in Pátria, Felicité, and Kunlun systems. Lightspeed variations in Sumner and Farhome. Electron mass changed in Haza system for almost two minutes. Electron mass. Sanctuary system had gravity increase by a tenth of a percent throughout the system for six seconds.”
“Okay, every single thing you just said fucks me up.”
“This was one twenty-four-hour period. The things that are doing this are rattling all the windows looking for the way to make us die, and I don’t know how we guard our physical fucking constants against attack. It’s just a matter of time before they figure out how to trigger vacuum decay or something. So I’m going to keep doing exactly everything I can, and yes, that means sharing data. Because if that’s how we catch a break on this, it will be worth it. And if poor Dr. Lee needs to assassinate me because of it, at least it won’t be my problem anymore.”
“Okay. I get it.”
“Trejo’s fighting to hold on to an empire. I’m fighting to have something that’s recognizable as the universe with living things in it.”
“I get it,” he said again, but now that she’d started, she couldn’t stop. Not until the pressure was vented.
“If there’s a chance—one chance in a billion—for me to figure this out, I’m taking it. If there’s a price that I have to pay, that’s fine. Not even going to think about that. Just opening my wallet, and whatever the universe needs to take from me, it’s welcome to. That’s what we’re playing for. So yes, I really, really hope that Duarte snapped out of his fugue state and ran off to do whatever the fuck half-protomolecule former emperors do in their retirement, because that would mean Trejo wasn’t playing court intrigue games with me while I’m at work. But who knows? I don’t.”
She went quiet, still shaking her head in a tight, angry motion. Fayez steadied himself on the handhold.
“How do I help?”
“Just keep doing what you’re doing. Help me keep doing what I’m doing. Hope that we catch a break in time.”
“All right,” he said. “Can do.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“I do not accept your apology. You’re right. I get it.”
She took his hand. She felt cold. Her skin was dry. She’d grown thin enough that he could feel the individual tendons shifting over her bones. “I’m so sorry I pulled you into this.”
“It’s hellish, that’s true. But the company’s good.”
“No one I’d rather face the end of everything with than you.”
“It’s because I have a cute ass, isn’t it? That’s my secret power.”
She managed a smile. “You got me.”
“I can crack a walnut with these cheeks,” Fayez said. “I mean, you wouldn’t want to eat it afterward, but—”
“I love you,” she said. “Stop cheering me up. Send Cara back. I need to get some work done.”
He found Cara in her quarters with Xan. They were floating together in the space between their bunks, with Xan chattering excitedly about something from his entertainment feeds. Cara’s face was the polite boredom of older siblings throughout history. It was weirdly reassuring to see something normal, given their context. When Fayez cleared his throat, the pleasure on the girl’s face was as clear as the disappointment on her brother’s.
“Is Dr. Okoye ready?” Cara asked, and there was a hunger in the question that left Fayez a little uncomfortable. He swallowed it.
“She is. Sorry I interrupted. Just had some stuff I needed to talk with her about.”
“It’s okay,” Cara said. “But I should go.”
Fayez pulled himself aside and let the girl haul herself out. As she floated down the corridor, he had one of those moments he had sometimes where his sense of balance tried to wake up. For just a moment, Cara wasn’t floating away to the side, but falling headfirst down the hallway. He grabbed the handhold to steady himself, and after a few breaths, the feeling passed.
“Is something wrong?” Xan asked.
“No. I just… I’m never going to get used to living on the float. Spent my formative years down a gravity well, and some things are baked in.”
“I’ve heard that,” Xan said, then turned and touched the ceiling to press himself down toward the floor. It was hard to read his expression. The kid had been a little boy for several decades now, and between his child-stuck brain and the depth of his experience, he wasn’t really one thing or the other. His sister was like that too. It was impossible to see them as children, and it was impossible not to. Xan’s mag boots locked onto the deck, and he turned almost like he was walking in gravity.
“What about you?” Fayez said. “All well in your world?”
“I’m worried about Cara,” he said without hesitating. “She keeps coming back different.”