He straightened his uniform and checked himself in the mirror before stepping smartly into the outer offices. He heard the change when he walked into the room. The men and women under his command making certain that he saw them busy. Eight Marines in armor were waiting outside, along with a driver, who wasn’t in power armor but did carry an assault rifle beside her in the cart.
“The docks, sir?” the driver asked.
“Berth K-eighteen,” Singh said, then sat back as the cart started off.
The Marine escort loped along as fast as the cart could drive and with the sense that they weren’t anywhere near an uncomfortable pace. The hallway had been cleared, and guards stood at the intersections with weapons drawn. It was like traveling through the dream of a tube station that had grown out in all directions until there wasn’t even the promise of finding a way up to the surface. A woman with a heart-shaped face peered past the guard’s shoulder, straining to catch a glimpse of him, and Singh waved at her. Let the civilians see that their governor was here, not hiding away in his office. If he wasn’t scared of the terrorists, the loyal faction of the population wouldn’t be either. Or less so, anyway.
And still, he did wonder how many of those people he passed would have been as happy to see him dead. He wondered if the girl with the heart-shaped face would have shot him if she’d had the chance. There was no way to be certain. Would never be a way to be totally certain. Or at least no way other than …
At the end of the drum, they left the spin gravity behind. The Marines shifted gracefully into a protective star formation with him at its center. He had seen images of the terrorists’ attack—twisted metal and shattered ceramic. Flakes of carbon lace floating in the air like black snow. Passing through the space now, what struck him was the stink of it. Welding torches and burning lubricant oil, overheated wiring and the back-of-the-throat bitterness of exhausted fire suppressants.
They did this to their own station, just to spite me, he thought. And then No, not their own. Mine. This more than anything else proves they can’t be trusted with the future. This station is mine.
They passed by the crowd of people waiting for permission to visit their ships, the Marines alert for any sign of violence, and passed by without so much as a scowl. At the berth, the guards held Holden at the airlock, assuming that Singh had come because he wanted to inspect the prisoner before he left. On the float, Holden looked younger. The lines in his face softened, and his hair stood wildly out from his head. He could see what the man had looked like as a boy.
Singh nodded.
“Governor,” Holden said. He made it just polite enough to make it clear he was impatient without actually demanding offense be taken.
“Captain Holden. I wish you a safe journey.”
“Thanks.”
“Laconia is a beautiful place.”
“Not sure I’m going to be seeing the nice parts of it, but I’m open for a pleasant surprise.”
“If you cooperate with the high consul, you will be treated well,” Singh said. “We are an honorable people. No matter what you think, we were never your enemy.”
Holden’s smile was weary. “Okay.” That’s bullshit, but I’m too tired to fight about it.
Singh nodded, and the guards guided the prisoner away. The airlock closed behind him.
Fifteen minutes later, the Lightbreaker left dock and burned hard for the Laconia gate with Holden aboard.
Singh heard Overstreet’s report in the security office rather than his own. The walls were a pleasantly neutral gray-green that matched everything. The only decorations were a small potted fern and a framed piece of calligraphy in red, black, and gold that listed the high consul’s Nine Moral Tenets.
Overstreet himself sat behind his desk with a physical solidity that made it seem like he’d grown there. Singh stood looking down at the man rather than take the seat and posture of a visitor. It might be Overstreet’s office, but it was all Singh’s station.
“I’m expecting some unrest after the news comes back from Sol,” Overstreet said. “People don’t like seeing their team lose. I’m trying to get ahead of that. Channel it into something we can control. Not let it turn into something that can gain momentum.”
“That’s wise. Are you seeing a reaction to the news about the underground losing their hiding place?”
“Not among the general population, no. But it meant a lot to the security force. We knew it was here someplace, but actually finding the hub and shutting it down? It’s a major step forward. Without a physically isolated space, it’s harder for the terrorists to coordinate. And it lets us move into the next phase. Identification.”
“How many have you found?” Singh asked.
Overstreet spread his massive hands. “Fifteen for certain. Maybe twenty. The level of internal corruption within the local population can’t be understated. My best estimate is that a third of our operating personnel are at least open to working against us.”
Singh let the assessment sit for a moment, watching his outrage at the ingratitude and arrogance of the locals flare like it was happening outside himself. When he was sure he wouldn’t curse, he spoke.
“That’s unacceptable,” Singh said. “Changing that has to be a top priority.”
“Didn’t mean to suggest I was accepting it. Just reporting in on where it stood. I’ve put in double and triple checks, random audits, all the internal security procedures I can, but this is going to be something we struggle with until we start getting regular commerce open again. Once we can start breaking up the old guard here, I expect to see these problems fall away. Wash out the bad, bring in the new. Like that.”
Singh made a small sound of acknowledgment, neither approval nor condemnation.
“The dock attack was what led us to their nest,” Overstreet said. “But even there, I’m fairly sure some information isn’t getting passed up the chain to us.”
“And where do we stand on that investigation?”
Overstreet’s ice-blue eyes looked away.
“Permission to speak freely, Governor?”
“Granted.”
“It’d be going a lot better if you hadn’t shipped my best resource back home. Holden was central to the conspiracy. The man’s a murderer. And I’m still not a hundred percent certain what the aim of the attack was.”
“To damage the Storm while it was still in dock,” Singh said.
“Maybe,” Overstreet said. “But why? In preparation for something? Or was it to degrade the oxygen supply and force us to open shipping before we’re ready? Or was it to destroy the air gap server, or the secondary power storage, or one of the eight warehouses that got scraped out by the blast? Or was it just a propaganda move to make Laconian rule look weak? Or provoke a crackdown as a way to recruit new insurgents?”
“It did all of those things,” Singh said.
“But which ones it intended matters, sir. Understanding the mind of the enemy is what lets me do my job.”
Singh heard the frustration in Overstreet’s tone. That was fair. Part of his error in removing Tanaka had been putting Overstreet into position without the training and preparation time he should have had. And with the underground running circles around them, the man couldn’t feel he was doing a good job. Nothing degraded morale like the sense that the potential for excellence was being denied.
Happily, Singh was in a position to address that point right away. He took out his hand terminal, opened the message that had occasioned this particular visit, took off his personal security encryption and passed it to Overstreet. The young man appeared on Overstreet’s monitor. Wide, slightly feverish eyes, unruly hair. The lens and the perspective made the bent nose seem larger than it actually was.
“Hoy, bossmang. Something big going down,” Jordao said, “I only got my part, but it’s about the sensor arrays. Parley, tu y mé, aber keep it quiet. Voltaire finds out I know you, and you’ll see my water in your faucets, yeah?”
Overstreet’s eyes narrowed to
slivers of ice. His lips had thinned to a single dark line.
“Well, that’s interesting,” he said.
“The Belters aren’t the only ones with a network,” Singh said. “Not anymore. See that your debriefing isn’t observed. This time, we’ll be ahead of the bastards.”
“May mean pulling personnel off the engineering investigation,” Overstreet said.
“This is the most important thing now,” Singh said.
Overstreet nodded slowly, lost in thoughts and calculations of his own. When he sighed, it was like a dying man’s breath. “We’re holding this station with just the crew we carried out here on the Gathering Storm and a few extras that Admiral Trejo could spare us. And this station is a damn lot bigger than our ship was.”
“Is that a problem for you, Overstreet?”
“It’s just that we do have a great selection of number-one priorities. Don’t we, sir?”
Chapter Forty-Two: Drummer
“… and if you fail to turn back,” Secretary-General Li said, “we will be forced to respond with force. There will be no further warnings.”
“He looks good,” Lafflin said. “Statesman-like.”
Drummer thought he looked sad, which actually came off pretty well, all things considered. It made it seem as if it was the impending loss of life that had dragged his spirits down. She was fairly certain that if she’d done the announcement, it would have come off as anger. Or fear. Or a near-psychosis-inducing lack of sleep.
She went back in the spooled message and watched it again. The line had been drawn where everyone had known it would. Point Leuctra, 2.1 AU from the sun. By conventions of mining law and centuries of precedent, that placed the Heart of the Tempest inside the asteroid belt. An invisible line in space, unmarked by anything more than what people believed about it. And that was enough.
The combined fleet of the EMC and her union hadn’t played coy. They had burned and braked to reach this position. Two hundred and thirty-seven ships, ranging from the void cities to traffic-control skiffs. Anything with a gun was spread across the surface of a modified parabola with one focus on the Tempest’s flight path. The ships on her side might shift and evade, but everything the secretary-general had said was for the newsfeeds and posterity. Anyone with a map and half a semester of military history could have drawn accurate conclusions without him.
She wondered if Saba would see it, back on Medina. She wondered if he was still alive. There hadn’t been a reply to her desperate question about the time slip, and the Tempest showed every sign of ignoring the EMC’s warning. Drummer went from optimism that Cameron Tur was right—that the Laconians wouldn’t dare use their magnetic matter-ripping beam for fear of its mysterious side effects—to expecting time to stutter, stop, and come back with the fleet already in ruins.
If she died here, would Saba see it? Would the official Laconian newsfeeds be how they said goodbye?
Lafflin changed the display to the tactical map—the hundreds of green dots that were their fleet including the one that was People’s Home. The single orange blip that was their doom. As a piece of abstract art, it looked like something a student would have come up with at lower university. If she’d ever thought to put together a visual display that said destined to fail, it would have been that small, glowing bit of orange.
But still …
Somewhere, when she’d still been working security contracts, she’d seen an interview with an old, smiling imam, whose name she didn’t remember. The one thing he’d said that stuck with her was, I am a human being. Anything that happens to human beings could happen to me. One time and another in the years since, she’d taken comfort from that. Or warning. People fall in love, so maybe I will too. People get jobs, so maybe I will too. And people get sick. People have accidents. And now, she supposed, people are divided from their families by war and history. And so that could happen to me too. Even when they won, would it mean she would wake up beside Saba again? There were so many variations of victory and loss.
“They’re confident, aren’t they?” Lafflin said, leaning back in his chair. “It’s astounding.”
“I suppose it is,” she said. She didn’t know where his mind had been, but it had clearly been somewhere different from her own. “You should probably get to the transport.”
Lafflin’s smile was rueful. “Is there anything you’d like me to pass on?”
“No,” Drummer said. “Anything that needs saying, I’ll say after.”
Or, she didn’t say, not at all. That part was understood.
As with Pallas Station and Independence, the plan was to evacuate the civilian population before the violence began. Ships had been docking with People’s Home for days now, hauling off families that had lived there for years and taking them to Mars and Earth, Luna and the Lagrange stations, or any of the thousand little holes in the Belt that could still hold air. Going to the docks with Lafflin now was like walking through a graveyard. The wide, curving halls should have been filled with people. Music and voices should have echoed down through the common parks, the transfer tubes, the docks. Even the air smelled different—closer and musty as the recyclers shifted down to match their reduced loads.
She gave Lafflin points for waiting until near the end. Most of the EMC political types in his staff had been among the first out, just after families with children. The lines of refugees waiting to leave were all older people now. The staff and citizenry that didn’t have the skills to help in a battle, all with small bags floating beside them. Overnight bags, many of them. As if they might be coming right back. There was a lot of laughter in the line, and a sense of anticipation that bordered on feverish.
Part of her wanted to stop, to shake hands, to take a little of that bright, jittering energy for herself, but Drummer and Lafflin didn’t pause. There was still some decorum that came with rank. The executive waiting area was well appointed with bulbs of coffee or liquor, living plants in wall gardens, soft music and LEDs that matched the spectrum of the morning light in early spring. Or so they told her. It wasn’t as if spring were a concept with any practical existence in her life. It was nice, anyway.
Avasarala floated in a white sari with a golden sash. Drummer admired the old woman’s ability to wear it and remain decent. It wasn’t something a lot of Earthers could manage.
She touched Lafflin’s shoulder. “You’ll excuse me?”
“Of course, Madam President,” he said. “I look forward to seeing you at the post-action debrief.”
“You too,” Drummer said.
Avasarala nodded as Drummer slid close, braced on a handhold to kill her momentum.
“You’re leaving too?” Avasarala asked, her voice carefully neutral.
“No,” Drummer said. “I live here.”
“You’re a fucking idiot,” the old woman sighed, “but you’d be one if you left too. It’d be a better world if there was always at least one right answer instead of a basket of fucked.”
“Are you all right?” Drummer asked.
Avasarala waved the comment away, then reached out to the handhold to steady herself. “I’m trying to decide if we’re absolutely certain to lose or absolutely certain to win,” she said. “I change my mind every ten minutes or so.”
“It’s one ship that hasn’t been able to resupply in weeks,” Drummer said. “It’s already been through a battle. And that turning-off-people’s-minds-for-a-while thing it did, we’re ready for it this time. The automated systems have their governors off. We may have to get clever before the next one shows up, but no matter what happens, we’ll keep firing until that thing is a cloud of complex molecules and regret.”
“And because it’s this ten minutes,” Avasarala said, “I find that argument persuasive. Next one, I’m going to remember that Duarte sent it, and then I’ll get scared.” She shook her head. “Who knows? The son of a bitch has been off in his own private system since before the Free Navy got their nuts handed to them. And it’s pretty clear he’s been rubbing
up against whatever artifacts he found there. Maybe it made him stupid.”
“Doesn’t change what we have to do,” Drummer said.
“It doesn’t,” Avasarala agreed. “I hate this part. You have a clear succession? Santos-Baca went down with her ship too, and even if you turn that ugly motherfucker of a ship to slag, one of the EMC bastards is as likely to throw something the wrong direction. If this goes badly, the last thing we’re going to need is a long, angry committee meeting with everyone saying they’ve got the conch.”
Drummer felt a blaze of annoyance, but pushed it down. The old woman wasn’t trying to be insulting. She was just flailing around trying to find something she still had control over.
“We have bylaws,” Drummer said. “And it won’t matter. If I eat a stray torpedo, Albin Nazari takes over.”
“That whiner? He’s just gotten used to Santos-Baca’s chair, and then to get yours too? He’d be like a five-year-old driving a mech loader.”
“I’ll be dead,” Drummer said. “So I won’t give a fuck.”
Avasarala’s laugh was short, surprised, and joyful. “I don’t hate you, Camina. I hate almost everyone these days, but I don’t hate you.”
“I’m not planning to put Nazari in charge,” Drummer said. “I’m planning to win.”
In the scheme of the battle, People’s Home was many things: battleship, medical facility, port, and resupply. It was all the things a city could be. In the display, it was slightly paler than the other green dots that were its fellows. Guard of Passage had a position that mirrored it. The two great cities of the union with their drums spun down, burning into the fight as anchors for the fleet. Cities that had become battleships.
“Coffee?” Vaughn asked, and Drummer waved him away.
The control room was lit like a theater—dim and warm with the tactical display in a multinetworked holographic output. Drummer had been in other battles. She had studied more than that. She had never seen more firepower leveled at a single target. She was fairly certain it had never happened before.