In the time it had taken to put herself and the ship back together, the Rocinante had built up an impossible lead, burning past the one incoming merchant ship, the gas giants, and out toward the gate fast enough that there was no point laying on the speed to catch them. Whatever system they were going to, they’d be in by the time she reached the ring space. They couldn’t outrun light, though. She sent the drive signature and silhouette of the ship’s disguise out ahead, spreading the information to every system where the Laconian repeaters hadn’t been spiked recently. Wherever Holden took the girl, Tanaka’s forces would know to look for him. Maybe she’d get lucky.
Or maybe she wouldn’t.
She spent long days going through reports on the other efforts she’d put into motion. The Science Directorate’s analysis of the egg-thing from Laconia was consistent with the idea of an inertialess transport, and they were looking at strategies for tracing it. One theory was that the egg-ship’s passage might leave a trail of free neutrons. She’d taken the Survey and Exploration Directorate off all its other work and tasked it with a report of all known alien structures in all systems. If Duarte had gone someplace, it was almost certain to be one of these. Activity in any of them would give her somewhere to start. But so far, no joy. Her orders to the Intelligence Directorate—checking on any close associates or former lovers of the high consul in case they’d suffered a visitation like Trejo’s—resulted in a report that was equal parts bureaucratic obfuscation and dead ends.
The whole thing left her angry. That was fine. Anger was comfortable. It was useful. She understood it.
She could remember to the moment the last time she’d felt self-pity. She’d been eleven years old and living in Innis Deep. Her parents had both died that year. Her mother had discovered something about her husband she couldn’t live with, and one night she sabotaged the air system in their quarters and suffocated both of them as they slept. Tanaka had been sent to stay with her aunt Akari for the night. She wound up living there for the rest of her childhood. If her aunt knew what it was that had sent her mother into a murder-suicide rage, she never told.
Moving meant changing schools, and the transition combined with the unexplained loss of her parents had been difficult. One day after school, her aunt had found her sitting on her bed and crying. She demanded to know why. Tanaka admitted that a girl at her school had slapped her face and humiliated her.
Aunt Akari knelt down in front of her. She was an MCRN captain, and tall like all the Tanaka women. In her spotless uniform, Aliana thought her aunt looked like a warrior goddess. She’d waited for her to hug her close, then tell her she would take care of everything, the way her mother would have.
Instead, Aunt Akari had asked which cheek had been slapped. When Aliana pointed at it, her aunt had slapped her on the same cheek so hard it made her burst into tears again.
“Are you sad, or are you angry?” Aunt Akari had said, her voice gentle but insistent.
“I don’t understand—” she had started to reply, when her aunt slapped her again.
“Are you sad, or are you angry?” she’d repeated.
“Why—” Akari slapped her before she could say more.
“Are you sad, or are you angry?”
She had wiped at the water in her eyes, afraid to say anything for fear of another slap. She looked at her beautiful but stern aunt’s face, staring back at her without pity or compassion.
“Angry,” Aliana finally said, and was surprised to discover it was true.
“Good,” her aunt said, then stood up and held out her hand to pull Aliana up off the bed. “Anger I can do something with. Sadness, fear, self-pity, self-doubt? They are inwardly focused. They keep you locked inside yourself. They’re useless. Anger is outwardly focused. Anger wants to take action. Anger is useful. Are you ready to use it?”
Aliana had nodded. It seemed safer than speaking.
“Then I’ll show you how.”
And she had.
Mugabo stood, arms behind him, with the same banal and pleasant almost-smile as always. “We have come near enough to the ring gate that it would be best if navigation knew where they should chart for.”
Tanaka leaned back in her seat. Her head hurt, but a little less than usual and she hadn’t taken the pain medication. Wouldn’t unless she needed it to function. The regrowth of her damaged bone ached, and the flesh of her cheek was slowly reknitting. The teeth would take a while. They needed something a little more solid to anchor to. That was fine.
Returning to Laconia was almost certainly the right thing, but it felt like admitting defeat. She had put it off until now, and she still chafed at the idea. She pressed at her broken orbit with the tips of her fingers, checking to see how hard she could push before the pain came.
“For the time being,” she began, “we should assume that the ship resupply will—”
Her comms chimed. A high-priority message had just arrived from the Laconia system. From Admiral Trejo. She let whatever she’d meant to say trail off and die, then looked up at Mugabo. He raised his eyebrows a millimeter like the waiter at an expensive restaurant waiting to see whether she approved of the wine.
“Let me get back to you on that, Captain,” she said.
“Of course,” he said with a sharp, professional nod. If he was annoyed at being put off yet again, he didn’t show it. She had the sense that she could prevaricate and delay forever and never get more than polite acceptance and a repeat of the question an hour later. Mugabo was a man without passions as far as she could tell. He’d wear her down like water eroding a stone.
He closed the door behind him, and Tanaka put her system on a do-not-disturb setting that would keep anyone from intruding. Trejo’s message wasn’t large, but it had a datafile linked to it. A message within the message.
Trejo, looking out from her screen, seemed older than a few weeks could justify. It was all in the tone of his skin and the paleness of his lips, though. His eyes were still as sharp and bright as ever, and his voice belonged to a man thirty years younger than he was. She wondered if he was taking stimulants.
“Colonel,” he said, looking into his camera. “I have reviewed your report, and… I think we can agree that could have gone better. We lost some good people on this, and you didn’t secure your target. But I’m not sure we came away exactly empty-handed.
“For what it’s worth, I would also have expected Nagata to put the girl someplace besides the gunship that the head of the underground was flying. But since she’s chosen to keep so many of her eggs in a single basket, certain opportunities may be open to us that wouldn’t have been otherwise.”
Tanaka scratched her bandages. All she felt was a little pressure. The itch didn’t subside at all. Trejo shifted in his chair and vanished. The image before her changed to a grainy visual telescopic view of a ship. It was hardly more than a dark shape against its own drive plume.
“I wanted to pass this along.” Trejo’s voice was calmer than she was. “It’s from the Derecho. Botton’s commanding it on a mission in Freehold system. Traffic analysis thinks they’ve still got the Storm hidden there, and he’s trying to flush it out. A ship made an unscheduled transit into the system in the time period your alert specified. It’s the right tonnage for the Rocinante, and the drive signature… Well, it doesn’t match, but it’s close enough that they could be running it dirty to throw us off. Thermally, it’s the same story. Close enough to be faked. And the silhouette is very close. It reports—”