Drummer let her head sink into her hands. Her neck ached and a deep, vague craving bothered her—something like thirst, but without a clear sense of what could slake it. If anything could.
She heard the door open behind her, but she didn’t bother looking up. Whoever it was, she didn’t care. And anyway, it would only be Vaughn.
“Madam President,” Vaughn said.
“Yeah.”
“Something’s come through you should probably see.”
“Something wonderful that’s going to fill my life with joy?”
“No.”
She sat up, waving one hand in a circle. Get on with it.
“There’s been a new transmission from Medina,” Vaughn said. “On the official feeds.”
“More threats and posturing from Laconia? Or have they made the war official?”
“Neither one,” Vaughn said, and took the monitor focus. A simple video feed of a podium in front of a few tiers of chairs. Drummer was a little surprised by the simple blue curtains at the back. She’d expected more imperial pomp. A Signa Romanum with a double-headed eagle. The chairs were filled with people meant to look like journalists, whether they were or not.
Carrie Fisk walked into the frame and took her place at the podium. Drummer felt her mouth go hard.
“Thank you all for coming today,” Fisk said, nodding to her audience. She gathered herself. Looked out, then down again. “Since its creation, the Association of Worlds has been a staunch advocate of independence and planetary sovereignty. As such, we have tracked issues of self-rule in the newly colonized systems and fought for the rights of people living on them. The hegemonic power of Sol system and the Transport Union have proven time and again that those in power have valued the systems unequally. Sol and the union have claimed a de facto sovereignty over what they have, through their actions, made clear they consider second-class planets and governments.”
“Oh, fuck you,” Drummer murmured. “Fuck you and your quisling bullshit.”
“I have had the opportunity to meet several times with the representatives of the Laconian system about the future of the ring gates and the nature of commerce and governance between the worlds. And I am very happy to be able to say that the Association of Worlds has voted unanimously to accept Laconia’s offers of protection and the coordination of trade. In exchange, High Consul Duarte has accepted the association’s requirements for self-rule and political autonomy. With this—”
Drummer killed the feed. Duarte had planned this too. Not only the military campaign but the story that made it something other than a blatant conquest. He came back because he thinks he can win, and if he thinks that, you should prepare yourself for the idea that it’s true. Carrie Fisk would be on the newsfeeds of thirteen hundred worlds—worlds that Drummer was cut off from—and the story she told would find rich enough soil to take root.
“Self-rule and political autonomy?” she said. “At the end of a gun? How does that work?”
“Tribute,” Vaughn said. “A pledge of financial and resource support if called on, but with very little suggestion that there will be occasion for it.”
“Plus the promise that he won’t kill the shit out of them, I’m guessing?”
Vaughn’s smile was flinty. “Fisk didn’t make that explicit, but I think the implication’s there, yes.”
Drummer pressed her hand to her chin, stood up. Part of her wanted to send Vaughn to the med bay to come back with something to keep her awake. Amphetamines, cocaine, anything stronger than another bulb of tea.
“It’s been a long day,” she said. “When the EMC’s messages start coming through, tell them to calm their shit down, and that we’re going to address this.”
“And for the board members?” Vaughn asked.
“Tell ’em the same,” Drummer said as she walked out. “Tell ’em it’s all under control.”
Back in her quarters, she stripped, leaving her clothes in a pathway from the door to the shower. She stood under the near-scalding water, letting it run down her back and over her face. It felt wonderful. Heat conduction as raw, physical comfort. Eventually, she killed the water, took a towel to sluice off most of the moisture, and then dropped to her crash couch, one arm flung over her eyes. Exhaustion pulled down into the gel more powerfully than the spin of the drum. She waited for the despair to come.
It didn’t. The union was facing an existential threat. The fragile fabric of human civilization in the colonies was ripping before her eyes, and she was relieved. From her first memories to the death of the Free Navy, she’d been a Belter and a member of one faction or another of the OPA. Her brain and soul and identity had all matured with the inners’ boot at her throat. At the throat of everyone she loved.
The respectability of Tycho Station and then of the union and now of the presidency had been her dream from the start. The prospect of a Belter reaching power equal to the inners had guided her on, if not for her, then at least a Belter like her. And like all dreams, the closer she’d come to it, the better she understood what it really was. For years, she’d worn power and authority like it was someone else’s jumpsuit. Now, with Duarte and Laconia, everything she’d built was falling away. And part of her was happy about it. She’d been raised to fight against great powers. To wage wars she couldn’t win, but also couldn’t lose. Returning to that now was a staggering loss, but it also felt like coming home.
Her mind began to slip away, her consciousness falling into dream. History was a cycle. Everything that had happened before, all the way back through the generations, would happen again. Sometimes the wheel turned quickly, sometimes it was slow. She could see it like a feed gear, all teeth and bearings with her on the rim along with everybody else. Her last thought before forgetfulness took her and she fell deeply into slumber was that even with the gates, nothing really ever changed so much as repeated itself, over and over, with all new people, forever.
Which, in light of the next morning’s first meeting, was more than a little ironic.
“We’ve never seen anything like this before.” She’d known Cameron Tur professionally since she’d first taken a job with the union, and he’d never registered as more than vaguely interested in anything.
Now he sat across the table from her, gesturing with a tortilla like he was conducting an orchestra with it. His eyes were wide and bright, his voice higher and faster than usual, and she couldn’t make out what the hell he was saying.
“Hot places in space,” she repeated, looking at the schematic. “So, like stealth ships? Are you saying there are stealth ships waiting outside the ring gate?”
“No, no, no,” Tur said. “Not that kind of hot. Not temperature hot.”
Drummer gave a short, frustrated laugh and put the hand terminal down. “Okay, maybe we should try this again like you were talking to a civilian. There are these areas we’ve seen that are … what exactly?”
“Well,” Tur said, nodding more to himself than to her. “Of course you know that a vacuum isn’t really empty. There are always electromagnetic waves and particles that pop in and out of existence. Quantum fluctuation.”
“My background is in security and politics,” she said.
“Oh. Right,” Tur said. He seemed to notice his tortilla, took a bite from it. “Well, vacuum state isn’t at all just emptiness. There are always spontaneous quantum creations and annihilations. Hawking-Zel’dovich radiation that allows for—”
“Security, Tur. Politics and security.”
“Sorry. Really small things just show up and then they just go away,” Tur said. “Much smaller than atoms. It happens all the time. It’s perfectly normal.”
“All right,” Drummer said, and took a sip of her morning coffee. Either it was a little more bitter than usual or she was overly sensitive today.
“So when we turned all the sensor arrays on the gate? To try to get more information about the war and all that? There was interference we couldn’t make sense of. It was like the kind we see when si
gnals pass through the gates, but it wasn’t localized there. It was out in normal space.” He pulled the schematic back up. “Here and here and here. That we know of. There may be others, but we haven’t done a full sweep looking for them. But we never saw anything like this, and the logs make it seem like they may have appeared about the same time that the Laconian ship went through the gate. Or when it fired at the ring station. We don’t have great data on timing.”
“All right,” Drummer said again. She was growing impatient.
“It’s the rate, you see. The rates of quantum creation and annihilation are … they’re through the roof. The uptick is massive.”
She was still struggling to get her mind around the idea that emptiness wasn’t empty, but something about the awe in Tur’s voice sent a chill down her back all the same.
“So you’re telling me … what exactly?”
“That the space near the ring started boiling,” Tur said. “And we don’t know why.”
Chapter Twenty: Singh
Santiago Singh spent a very unpleasant few days dealing with the fallout from his newly announced security protocols for Medina Station. One by one, every bureaucrat and functionary called him to express their concerns over how the crackdown might negatively impact morale and efficiency on the station. However the conversations were phrased, what he heard in them was always the same. The new rules will make people unhappy. They won’t work as hard. Sabotage will increase. Are you sure we want to do this?
His responses, however he put them, were also of a piece: I don’t care if people are unhappy about the new rules, if they fail to do their jobs, they will be fired, sabotage is punishable by imprisonment or death, yes, I’m sure.
In High Consul Duarte’s seminal book on logistics, he’d pointed out that of all the methods by which one can exert political and economic control over another state, occupation by military force was the least effective and the most unstable. The justification for occupation of Medina Station was that, as the checkpoint of all thirteen hundred colony worlds, it minimized the need for any further military action and let the imperial government move on quickly to economic trade and cultural pressure, which were much more stable long-term strategies for exerting control. And in fact, demonstrating to the people of Medina that the Laconian takeover would lead to better lives for all of them was the test case. If Singh could convince a station full of people bred for anarchy that imperial rule was desirable, the still-nascent colonies beyond the gates should be a piece of cake.
He understood all of this well enough. But it didn’t change the fact that he’d had to spend his afternoon explaining to stupid, angry people why attempting to assassinate the governor of the station carried consequences.
When he cut the connection on what he hoped was the last of those complaints, he yelled out for someone to bring him coffee or tea or whatever else passed for a potable on that festering armpit of a station. No one replied. Because Kasik was dead and he hadn’t yet brought himself to assign anyone new to his duties. As if by keeping the dead man on the roster, some part of him still remained that history hadn’t erased.
For a moment, the buzz of activity and conversation, irritation and confrontation that he’d cultivated since the incident slipped away, and he saw Kasik spitting raspberry jam that was really his brain and his blood and part of his tongue—
Singh lost a few seconds. When he became aware again, he was on his knees next to his desk, vomiting into his trash can. From the state of the bin, he’d been at it for a while. The smell and look of the mess set off a new round of vomiting that only ended when his stomach clenched up painfully on nothing and a thin trickle of bile bit at the back of his throat. Delayed shock. Trauma reaction. It was normal, he told himself. Anyone would go through it.
“I’m so sorry, Kasik,” he said, face suddenly covered in tears for a man whose first name he couldn’t even remember.
The comm unit on his desk politely beeped. “Leave me the fuck alone,” Singh yelled at it.
“Admiral Trejo is here for you, sir,” a carefully neutral voice replied.
“Here?”
“In the security lobby, sir.”
Singh cursed under his breath, soft but vicious. He grabbed the liner out of his trash can and stuffed it into the recycler. The air probably still smelled of sick. He turned the air recyclers as high as they would run to cut it.
“Put him through in one minute, please,” Singh answered, then used the sixty seconds to wash his face and rinse out his mouth. Trejo had returned to Medina. It could have meant a number of things, but all of them meant he wanted to have a face-to-face conversation instead of trading messages through the comparatively glacial security apparatus that surrounded official communications. And that meant talking about sensitive issues.
“Sonny,” Admiral Trejo said as he walked into the room. “You look a fright.”
“Yes, sir,” Singh agreed. “I’m afraid that recent events have shaken me a bit more than I expected. But I’m getting it secured. Shipshape and ready to sail, sir.”
“Have you slept at all?” Trejo asked. He sounded genuinely concerned.
“Yes, sir,” he said. And then, because it felt like lying, “Some, sir.”
“It’s hard losing someone. Especially someone you worked with closely.”
“I’ll be fine, sir,” Singh said. “Please, take my desk.”
Trejo’s smile was sympathetic as he sat. He took the offered desk. “I have good news for you, at least. I passed along your findings on the gamma-ray bursts through the rings, along with your recommendation about using a ship with an ultrahigh magnetic field projector stationed in the slow zone to control access and passage. Naval high command was very intrigued. They took it all the way to the top.”
The top meant only one person on Laconia. “I’m very flattered it got so much attention, Admiral.”
“He agrees with you,” Trejo said. His voice had a flatness that Singh didn’t entirely understand. His green eyes flicked up to meet Singh’s gaze and they stayed there. “They’re sending out the Eye of the Typhoon. It’ll take a bit for her to outfit. She wasn’t scheduled to come through for another four months, but you’ll have her with all deliberate speed. She’ll have Medina Station defense as her official mission, but holding the ring system using your new data will be part of her parameters.”
“Rear Admiral Song has that command, as I recall.”
“Yeah, that’s Song’s boat,” Trejo agreed. “But you’re still governor of Medina. You’ll have operational command over the defense of the station, and that includes determining when and if our new ring strategy is appropriate.”
“Yes, sir,” Singh replied.
“It’ll be heady stuff, knowing an admiral has to dance to your tune, Sonny. Just remember that this posting won’t last forever. Don’t make any enemies you can’t unmake.” There was a weight to Trejo’s words, like they carried more than just what they said. They landed on Singh’s chest like a gentle rebuke.
“Understood and appreciated, Admiral,” Singh said. “Will the Tempest remain here until the Typhoon arrives to take over?”
“No. We are moving up the timetable, per your analysis. The Tempest is leaving through the Sol gate in four hours. Unless you’ve reconsidered your position?”
Singh felt an offer in the question. This was the chance for him to say that he was out of his depth. That he needed backup and help. The temptation to claim perfect fitness was strong, but he couldn’t dismiss the fact that he was, in fact, compromised. The question was whether his own frailty was enough to risk giving Sol system more time to prepare. The most dangerous part of the Tempest’s mission in Sol system was the transit through the gate and the hours immediately after it. The longer the enemy had to exploit that period of vulnerability, the less the time he’d won with his discovery of the gamma burst would gain them. He didn’t want to undercut the advantage he’d just provided.
And still …
He st
arted to reply, but stopped when the bitter-lemon taste of bile crept up the back of his throat again. Not now. He swallowed furiously, hoping this would be enough to hold off yet another round of vomiting into his trash bin. Trejo’s eyes widened with what looked like genuine concern.
“Sonny,” Trejo said, “have you seen a doctor?”
“Immediately following the attack. I sustained no injuries beyond a bruise on my knee and a bit of pride.”
“That’s not what I mean,” Trejo said.
“I’ll be fine,” Singh lied, but Trejo didn’t call him on it. “I know that the ring emissions were never part of the defensive strategy before, but I find myself worried about leaving such a powerful tool behind.”
“Understood. I’ll be honest, I’m not totally happy moving the timetable up. Slow and steady, that’s the strategy I like best. But there’s nothing so far to indicate the locals have made any breakthroughs we don’t know about. The high consul thinks we can afford to pull the Tempest out past the gate early. It does feel a bit like I’m leaving you here with your ass hanging out. But there is exactly one fleet in known space that poses a threat to our plans here. And it’s bottled up in the Sol system. You won’t need to worry about defending Medina from it at all, because I’m going to force them to fight me on their home ground. I don’t expect the colonies are going to cause you any trouble a destroyer can’t handle.”
“I agree, sir,” Singh said. “We’ll hold and wait for the Typhoon’s arrival, or word of your success in Sol, whichever comes first.”
Singh expected this to end the conversation, and waited for Admiral Trejo to stand. Instead, the old man stared at him with thoughtful eyes until the silence had become uncomfortable. Etiquette dictated that he not close the interview until his superior dismissed him, so he stared back and tried for a vague smile.