Aliana Tanaka is a former MCRN officer who joined Winston Duarte's breakaway fleet and traversed the Ring gate into Laconia system.
History[]
Tanaka had an extremely troubled childhood in Innis Deep, which somewhat explains her later actions. Tanaka's mother committed a murder-suicide upon discovering an irreconcilable truth about Tanaka's father, and the aunt she was left in custody of physically punished her to supress sadness and pity, touting turning anger to action.
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.[1] She turned down an advanced scholarship, pursuing a military career instead at the insistence of her aunt.[2]
She held the rank of a Marine Corps colonel, and was posted as the security officer for governor Santiago Jilie Singh, who held the Navy rank of captain. She served in this capacity until she resisted an order from Singh to crackdown on the inhabitants of Medina Station and advised the governor to reconsider. She was then relieved of her command post.
She then directly served High Admiral Anton Trejo aboard the Heart of the Tempest.
Later, when assigned by Trejo to track down the missing Winston Duarte, Tanaka took over an office in the State Building as her base of operations with a staff of ten and high-priority access to everyone of any importance to the empire. She’d put a print of Ammon Fitzwallace’s Artemis the Hunter on the wall where she could see it.[3]
Tanaka's search led her to the cave Amos Burton once inhabited, where she deduced that Duarte left Laconia in a small alien ship. She decided to use Teresa Duarte, who had fled Laconia with the crew of the Rocinante in Tiamat's Wrath, as bait to lure Winston. She began her search for Teresa by investigating Duarte's known relatives in various ring systems.
She confronted the Rocinante crew on Abbassia in the New Egypt system, where they intended to take Teresa to a boarding school near her relatives. A firefight ensued, and Tanaka was shot in the face by James Holden, which left one of her cheeks severely scarred. The Rocinante escaped to the Freehold system with Teresa, where Tanaka subsequently pursued them. Tanaka arrived in the system with a message from Trejo to Naomi Nagata, offering an armistice and alliance between the Laconian Empire and the underground, implementing Naomi's gate travel protocols, and the withdrawal of Laconian forces from Freehold, in exchange for the return of Teresa. Tanaka, however, had no intention of honoring the deal and, armed with a Laconian assault suit of power armor, systematically annihilated Draper Station and its inhabitants in an attempt to locate and retrieve Teresa, who once more eluded capture aboard The Rocinante.
Tanaka, after losing the Rocinante's trail, mistakenly followed another ship to the Bara Gaon system aboard the Rising Derecho. She observes the Preiss incident from inside the ring space, and subsequently began to experience the thoughts and memories of others who were present. Tanaka found the experience extremely violating and destabilizing and sought psychiatric help from Dr. Ahmadi, who prescribed medication to mitigate the issue.
After Laconian scientists located Duarte's alien ship on the surface of the Ring Station, Tanaka decided to head there, where she once more encountered the Rocinante crew. She entered the station with Teresa and Holden, where they found Duarte connected to the station, creating his hive mind and stalling the Ring Entities' attacks. After Teresa's attempts to reach Duarte failed, Tanaka brutally killed him, abandoning her trapped power armor and harnessing her rage to disembowel him with her bare hands, simultaneously ending the hive mind and unleashing the dark gods on humanity. In the process, she was mortally injured by the station's defenses.
Notes[]
- A ship named UNN Tanaka was involved in the Io Campaign.
See also[]
References
- ↑ The Expanse Novel Leviathan Falls - Chapter 24: The Lighthouse and the Keeper
- ↑ The Expanse Novel Leviathan Falls - Chapter 31: Tanaka
- ↑ The Expanse Novel Leviathan Falls - Chapter 5: Tanaka