Leviathan Falls (The Expanse #9)

by James S.A. Corey

But the Derecho hadn’t followed them through the gate, and there was literally no place else for a ship to hide. At some point, Adro had been a solar system capable of sustaining life. Now it was a star, a green diamond the size of a gas giant, the Falcon, and the Rocinante.

“Weird the things that get to you when you’re a kid,” Jim said. “I knew it wasn’t for real. I was young, I wasn’t dumb. But it still scared me, and the thing my dad told me that actually got me past it? He showed me how it wouldn’t scale.” “Wouldn’t scale?” “Volume goes up by cubes. A cat big enough to crush a city wouldn’t be strong enough to stand up, even at Martian gravity. Its bones would break under its own weight. And that did it for me. I was all right, because I saw it couldn’t work. This is like that cat, it doesn’t scale.”

“The gates. The systems. It’s bigger than us. It’s bigger than we can be. I mean, have you ever thought about what it would be like to see every system there is now? To see just the places where we are? There’s thirteen hundred seventy-three gates—” “Seventy-one. Thanjavur and Tecoma are gone.”

“So ignoring every actual constraint that makes it impossible?” “Yeah. Five billion klicks a month, every month. No time on the float. No time at the planets. Just—” He threw his hand forward, a gesture of speed. “All right.” “Hundred and fifteen years. Start it the day you’re born, and finish it an old man, and never see anything but the inside of your ship. Take a week at each planet—not each city, not each station, each planet—to play tourist? Add another twenty-eight years. A hundred forty-some years old. That’s a solid lifetime, just to take a peek. Get the lay of the land. Never see the same place twice.” Jim thought about that. Between working for the Transport Union back in the day and fleeing with the underground, he’d been to more systems than most people ever would, and it was still probably under three dozen. He knew how many more there were, how many he’d never see, how many Naomi was trying to coordinate. Alex was right. It was daunting. Maybe more than daunting. “And that’s not the worst of it,” Alex said. “By the time you’re done, there’s been a century of change at the place you started from. It won’t be the same. All the places you visit start changing into new ones the second you leave.”

“This is all too big for people,” Alex said. “The things that built it? Maybe they could handle it, but we’re not designed for this scale. We’re trying to get big enough we can make it work, but we’re breaking our legs just standing up.”

With its drive off, the Falcon was no more than a small, oddly shaped asteroid at first. It was a little under three hundred thousand kilometers off the Adro diamond, orbiting it like a tiny artificial moon. The artifact itself was eerie: vast and green and flickering now and then with murky internal energies like storms that penetrated deep into the flesh of the object. The planet. The library. Jim knew enough about Elvi’s preliminary work that he could appreciate the supremely unnatural aspects of the thing: that it didn’t collapse under its own mass, that it was connected using the same locality-breaking principles as the ring gates, that it had the capacity to hold vastly more information than humanity had generated in its millennia of progress.

What is an empire but all humanity under the direction of a single mind? I was right, but I dreamed too small. I have seen how much more we have to be.

In order to fully access these tools, we have to become more like them. We have to be one thing instead of billions of different ones. I am learning how to do that as well.

Are you… saying we need to become a hive mind? Yes. Interconnected, with our thoughts and memories flowing freely between nodes. All our illusions of division washed away. Empire was the closest I could imagine to it. But—the third man gestures at himself almost in apology—I can imagine more now. It’s all right. We’ll be safe. Will we be people? We’ll be better.

The dreamers open their eyes, and nothing changes.

It’s all right,” Duarte said. “We’ll be safe.” Elvi looked at the man carefully. He didn’t seem like a phantom. He was just as solid and present as everyone else on the deck. Thinner than he’d been on Laconia.

that. “Will we be people?” Elvi said. Duarte’s smile was almost melancholy. “We’ll be better.” And he wasn’t there anymore. All around the deck, the technicians stared at the place where the high consul of Laconia had been with wide, frightened eyes. The

Weird cognitive effects were where the alien technology had started back on Ilus. Before that, with the protomolecule version of Jim’s friend getting remade in his sensory cortices. Human consciousness was simple enough that the repair drones on Laconia were able to make working approximations of what some people wanted to have fixed. Xan. Amos. A sampling drone Cara had accidentally shattered once.

Reports dreamlike hallucinations of being another person and/or being connected to a large number of other people. Claims memory of hallucinatory experiences remains clear over time.

“In theory? Could our species be modified into something that behaves in a fundamentally different way? Sure. Absolutely. Happens all the time.”

Change out a few species of bacteria in your gut, and you’ll be a fundamentally different person.

The builders, as far as we can tell, were free-floating individual organisms that networked themselves into a functional consciousness, kind of the way an octopus can be viciously intelligent without a centralized brain. With the nonlocal effects we’ve seen? Sure, why not rebuild that architecture with advanced primates?”

“Whether,” Elvi said, “he’s talking about making us into ants or neurons. If you’re an ant, you’re still an individual, just one who’s part of a larger organization. If you’re a neuron… Neurons don’t have a sense of self.” “I’m not a hundred percent sure that ants do either,” Fayez said. “So you’re saying,” Naomi broke in, “that Duarte, or whatever he’s turned himself into, is at least plausibly preparing to make everyone, everywhere part of a collective consciousness with him at the center so that he can go to war against the things beyond the gates.” Elvi gathered herself, fighting to organize her thoughts. “Yes,” she said.

“All what?” “This. The things you’re doing with Sparkles and Little Man. They’re over now. We’re gonna need to pack this up and move on,” he said, and shrugged. When she didn’t reply, he looked away. “When you started before, I was sort of in on it. Impressions. Nothing you’d take in front of the judge, right? It’s why we had to come out. Needed to be here. Do it myself. That way I’d understand. So here we are, and I did the thing, and I get it now. So now I can tell you it’s over. It stops now.” “You object to the experiment.”

“That’ll suck,” Amos agreed. “I’m not a philosophy guy. I’m not trying to bust your balls or figure out, you know, everything. But this is pretty simple. I came to see what you and Sparkles were doing. I’ve seen it. It needs to stop, so we’re gonna stop. That’s it. We’re good.”

“I am,” she said. As she closed her eyes, the feeling in her chest and belly grew, swelling out and washing through her. She finally recognized it. She had wanted it to be relief, but it wasn’t that. It was her body telling her that she’d just stared death in the eye. It was fear.

“We can start anywhere you like. It’s all connected.” “You sound like you already have me pegged.” “I wouldn’t go that far, but…” She shrugged. “I’m good at what I do. Most of your file is classified, but what’s available to me tells a compelling story. No long-term relationships. You’ve never lived anywhere longer than a year. You refused an advanced scholarship in order to enlist. You’ve repeatedly refused promotion so that you could stay a field officer. You’ve been on the run for a long time.”

“I’ve heard your debriefings,” Elvi said. “The terms you used? Or it used, I guess. Pleroma, fallen world, substrate. They’re human terms.”

“When people don’t know anything,” Amos said, “they love having meetings to talk about it.”

She was also skinny and soft from too much time spent on the float. Between atrophy, stress, and malnutrition, she looked like a stick halfway through burning.

“You’re right,” Holden said. “Let’s solve the extinction-level threat first. Then we can all go back to killing each other at a more civilized pace.”

There was a part of her that wanted to take a lover—find someone on the crew that she could grind against for a few hours. Just another way to bring her attention entirely to her own body and its sensations. It wasn’t fear of getting caught that stopped her. It was the unsettling certainty that anything she did would be known, shared, experienced, by other people. That it was no longer possible to have secrets of her own.

Everywhere she looked, there were signs and reports of consciousness bleeding from one mind into others. Every minute she had to live with it hurt in a way she couldn’t articulate. She didn’t have to. The crew of the Derecho knew. They were all trapped in the same place she was.

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.

The war would go on. The builders of the ring gates moving from form to form—primitive bioluminescent sea slugs, to angels of light, then to a hive of mostly hairless primates with billions of bodies and only one mind. The dark things inside the gates and outside the universe scratching and ripping and unmaking the sickness that had intruded on its reality. Maybe someday that battle would be won. Maybe it would go on forever. Either way, nothing that Jim knew as human would persist. No more first kisses. No more prayers. No more moments of jealousy or insight or selfishness or love. They would be taken apart and fit back together like the bodies on Eros. Something would be there, but it wouldn’t be them.

barest hint of the hunger of their youth. “Whatever you think you have to do? Whatever it is,” she whispered, “wait until I’m asleep.”

“Well,” the familiar voice said where only Jim could hear it. “This can’t be good.” “Hey, Miller. We need to talk.”

He looked at Naomi and tilted his head, a little smile on his lips. “I was just remembering something Alex said about tools that get used long enough developing souls. It’s off the subject. Forget about it.”

“Really? I haven’t watched you try to kill yourself enough times? Now you make me watch you succeed in slow motion. But you’re sorry.” “Yeah. That part is pretty shitty. But I couldn’t think of anything else, and this isn’t what—”

“I get that,” Alex said. “And then the thing that actually did bring him back wasn’t any of that. I saw him again. Just now. I saw him the way he used to be. At his best. And love isn’t what got him there. And it wasn’t care. And it wasn’t time. He saw something incredibly, stupidly dangerous that needed to be done and only he could do. And he just…”

hear you.” “So I look at your pal Duarte, right? And it looks to me like Eros all over again. Not the goal, maybe, but the method. Eros, the shit took over people’s bodies and made whatever it wanted out of them.” “And Duarte’s doing the same thing. Using people like building blocks for something he wants.”

“Well, that’s literally true,” Miller said. “That was the trick.” “What was the trick?” Miller gestured at the walls, the fireflies, the incomprehensible complexity and strangeness of the station. “It’s where the power comes from. They cracked the universe open, pushed their way in here, and it pushed back. A whole other universe trying to smash this place flat, and it powers the gates, the artifacts. That magnetic ray gun Duarte was playing with. They built stars with it. Broke rules that you can’t break without a different set of physics to strain it through. You can Eve-and-apple it all you want, but this shit right here? This is all made out of original sin.”

At the center was something the size of a human being. A man with his arms outstretched, cruciform. Thick cables of the filament wove into his sides, his arms, his legs. He was still dressed in Laconian blue, except his feet, which were bare. Jim knew the face almost before they were close enough to see it. “Daddy?” Teresa said.

From the moment they entered the station, Teresa had been watching James Holden die.

“We were doomed as soon as the gates appeared,” he said, but to her, not Tanaka. “If no one had taken responsibility, we would have bumbled along until the other ones came and killed us all. I saw that, and I did what I had to do. It was never for me. The empire was only a tool. It was a way to coordinate. To prepare for the war that was coming. The war in heaven.”

“Is and isn’t,” Jim said, and his voice was strange, like the cadence belonged to someone else. “I’ve seen this before. The station’s inside him. What it wants and what he wants? No way to tell one from the other. Not now.” “You’ve seen this before?” Tanaka said. “Where?” “On Eros,” Jim said. “Julie was like this. She wasn’t so far gone, but she was just like this.” And then, to Teresa, “I’m sorry, kid. I’m so sorry.”

“Colonel, I am right here, and I can hear you,” her father said. He turned his head toward Tanaka, his eyes steady and blank. “And I remember you. You were one of the first with me. You saw Mars die, and you were part of the remaking of it in the empire. This is the continuation of that. This is what we were fighting for all along. We will make all of humanity safe and whole and unified.” “Sir,” Tanaka said, “we can do this without mindfucking everyone. We can fight this war and still be human beings.” “You don’t understand, Colonel. But you will.”

The woman on the screen was young, dark-skinned, with close-cropped hair, and Naomi had seen her once before. “This is Admiral Sandrine Gujarat of the Laconian battleship Voice of the Whirlwind. I would very much appreciate someone telling me how the fuck I got here.”

the Rocinante, she let her mind drift, and nothing drifted back. No outside memories. No voices. No sense of looming invisible presence. “Naomi?” Alex called down. “I’m feeling weird up here.” “It’s gone. The hive mind. It’s gone.” “So it’s not just me?” Amos’ voice was calm and affable. “Nobody’s bumping into the back of my head either.” “He did it,” she said. “I think Jim did it.”

They writhed and swam, and behind them, everything swirled and came apart. With no one manning the lighthouse now, the elder gods returned. Oh, she managed to think, right.

The administrator was explaining that her parents were dead. The overwhelming sense, unspoken but clear, was pity. This was why she’s so broken. This is why she hurts people. This is why she only fucks men she can dominate, because she’s always so frightened. Look at all the things that were wrong with her.

The man she’d betrayed Mars for was flapping like a wet rag in a breeze. His bright, sightless eyes reminded her of nothing so much as Okoye’s pet catalyst. Blue fireflies ran along the black threads, sewing him back in place. She didn’t feel pity for him. It was now nothing but contempt.

An ant that defied the anthill was torn apart. No wasp betrayed the hive and lived.

Tanaka pulled, twisted. Duarte’s neck snapped like a gunshot. She felt it as much as heard it. In gravity, his head would have lolled to the side, the weight of his skull drawing it down. Here, it might almost not have happened.

Something happened, and everything went white. She lost herself, if just for a few seconds. When she came to, her mind was clear. It was her own for the first time since the Preiss came back from going dutchman. She coughed, and tasted blood.