The door slid open again, and Vaughn ghosted into the room, a drinking bulb in either hand. The smell of tea wafted to her seconds later. He didn’t speak as he reached out to her. The bulb warmed her palm and the tea was rich and sweet.
“Hard day,” Vaughn said. It was strange. She didn’t like Vaughn or dislike him, but she’d come to rely on him. And now, in this traumatic hour, it was this crag-faced political operative at her side instead of Saba. The universe was tricky, and its sense of humor came with teeth.
“Hard day,” Drummer agreed.
On the display, the Tempest fell slowly toward the sun. Pallas Station would pass on the ship’s starboard, and too far away to see with the naked eye. Admiral Trejo would be watching the show on a screen of his own. The death of Pallas would be one of the most observed events in history. Five minutes and fifteen seconds. Which meant, in Pallas’ frame of reference, now.
She took another sip of tea, feeling the hot water against her tongue and the roof of her mouth, Brownian motion making it seem to fizz against the soft flesh of her palate, beat against the individual taste buds. Molecules of sugar latched to contact sites, and the nerves ran through the meat of her tongue, back into her body like she was drinking twice, once with the liquid and once with electrical fire. A sense of vertigo washed through her.
She tried to put the bulb down, but the surface of the table was distant, visible, but through a distracting cloud that was the air—atoms and molecules bouncing against each other, striking and spinning away and striking again. Thicker than bodies at a tube station.
She tried to call out to Vaughn. She could see him, right there before her, the jagged territory of his skin fractally similar at every scale. She tried to make out his expression, but she couldn’t bring her focus back that far. It was like trying to see the face of God. Something hummed and throbbed, ticking faster than she could quite be aware of. The pulse of her own brain, the tempo of her consciousness. It sang like a chorus, and she heard herself hearing it.
She dropped the bulb. It clattered against the table, rolled, and dropped to the ground, falling closed so that it kept even a drop of tea from escaping. Vaughn took a step, then sank down to his knees. His eyes were wide, and his face pale as death and covered by sweat. Drummer sat slowly. Her knees felt weak.
“God,” Vaughn said. “Besse God.”
Drummer couldn’t tell if it was profanity or prayer.
The timer on the display read two minutes and twenty seconds. Whatever had happened, it had taken almost three minutes out of her life. It hadn’t seemed that long. Maybe she’d passed out?
“I need,” she began, and her voice felt strange. Like she could still hear overtones fluting up from her vocal cords. “I need to know what that was.”
“I don’t,” Vaughn said. He was weeping. Wide, thick tears dripping down his cheeks.
“Vaughn,” she snapped, and it sounded more like her own voice again. “Come to! I need to know what that was.”
“I saw everything,” he said.
“How widespread. What happened. Everything. Get me reports.”
“Yes,” he said, and then a moment later, “Yes, ma’am.” But he rested his head on his knees and didn’t move.
On the display, the timer came to twelve seconds, and the Tempest fired. Not missiles, but the magnetic beam that Saba had reported. The thing that had stripped the defenses from the slow zone and burst gamma radiation out all the gates. Pallas Station vanished like a blown-out candle with eleven seconds to spare. They were roughly five light-minutes away, so it had happened … the two things had happened together in the Tempest’s frame of reference.
“Tur,” she said. “Get me Cameron Tur.”
“The thing you have to understand is that the technology of the ring stations doesn’t break the speed of light,” Tur said, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a ball on a string. “The one thing we can absolutely say is that the protomolecule is bound by the speed of light. Everything they designed got around it with a different understanding of locality. That’s not the same thing at all.”
He was talking fast and, Drummer thought, more than half to himself. That she was in the room let him think out loud, but he didn’t have his science-advisor voice tuned up. This was one step short of a chimpanzee shrieking and pointing at the charred spot where lightning had struck.
“If you look at it, the gates themselves are clearly bounded by lightspeed. The strategy the protomolecule employs is to send out bridge builders at subluminal speeds to environments where there are stable replicators to hijack and employ to … to poke holes into a different space. Going from Sol gate to Laconia or Ilus or wherever, we don’t accelerate ships past lightspeed, we just take a shortcut because the slow zone is a place outside locality where very different places in our reference can be very nearby in that frame.”
“That’s great,” Drummer said. “Was it a weapon?”
Tur goggled at her. “Was what a weapon?”
“That—” She waved her fingers in front of his eyes. “That whatever the hell that was. With the hallucinations and the missing time. Was it a weapon? Can the Laconians turn us off like that anytime they want?”
“It was … it was associated with their weapon,” Tur said. “I mean it happened at the same time, but that’s the thing. Time doesn’t actually work like that. ‘The same time’ is a weird linguistic fantasy. It doesn’t exist. Simultaneity doesn’t act like this.”
He waved his arms, flapping them out toward the sides of the room. This.
The whatever-the-hell-it-had-been hadn’t just happened in Drummer’s meeting room, or on People’s Home. It had been spread throughout the system—Earth and Mars, Saturn’s moons and Jupiter’s. Even the science stations on moons around Neptune and Uranus, and the deep labs in the Kuiper Belt. The reports were startlingly similar—hallucinations and lost time that began uniformly at the moment the Tempest had fired its magnetic weapon at Pallas Station. Or, more accurately, the moment in the Tempest’s frame of reference. Tur seemed very specific about that. Like it was important.
“But it didn’t happen when they fired it in the slow zone,” Drummer said. “Why didn’t Medina have this happen?”
“What? Oh, no, we don’t know. The ring space and the station there and the gates, we don’t know what their relationship is with normal space. The rules of physics may be different. I mean, it’s clearly an active system, and the energy output from the magnetic weapon there was smaller than the gamma bursts that came from it, so it was tapping into an energy supply that didn’t have anything to do with the Tempest per se. But the thing is I’m not sure that was a propagating event. If it wasn’t a propagating event, then maybe it didn’t violate lightspeed.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Drummer said between clenched teeth.
“Well, I mean when you drop a pebble in a pond, there are ripples. They propagate, and all propagation is limited by lightspeed. But instead of a pebble, imagine you dropped a sheet of plating. So that the surface of the plating hit the surface of the pond everywhere at once. It doesn’t matter that the trigger that dropped the plate was in one place, because it happened everywhere. Not a point location, but a nonlocalized location.”
“Nonlocalized. Location,” Drummer said, pressing her palms into her eye sockets. Annoyance and fear curled in her throat. So you’re telling me you don’t know shit floated at the back of her mouth.
“Everyone would experience it as if the effect began exactly with them and then propagated away in every direction at the speed of light, but in reality—”
“I don’t care,” she said. It was still harsh, but less than what she wanted to do. Tur reared back from her anyway. “What it is, what it means about the way you understand the universe or physics? I don’t care. None of that matters to me.”
“But—”
“They just demonstrated a weapon that at its minimum ripped Pallas Station down to hyperaccelerated dust. I am preparing to lead th
ousands of soldiers on hundreds of ships into battle against this thing. You need to tell me was that a glitch in consciousness because of their attack, or can they make that happen again anytime they want? Did they know it was going to happen? Did they suffer all the same high weirdness that we did? Because if they can turn our brains off for a few minutes at will, I’m going to need some very different strategies.”
By the end, she was shouting. She hadn’t meant to shout. Tur had his hands up, palms toward her, like he was afraid she might attack. Fine, let him wonder. Maybe it would focus him up.
“I … that is …” Tur took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “I feel comfortable saying that the glitch, if that’s what we’re calling it, was associated with Tempest’s attack on Pallas. Given that it didn’t happen in the slow zone, I can’t say whether it was a controlled effect or an artifact of the weapon with some quality of local space around Sol.”
“All right,” Drummer said.
“Whether the enemy anticipated it or not, I can’t say.”
“That’s fair,” Drummer said. The first pricks of regret were forming at the back of her mind. She shouldn’t have yelled at him.
“And I can’t say whether they suffered the same effect … but I would guess they did. If I’m right about the mechanism, there isn’t any sort of shielding against it. You can’t block something that’s already there. That’s what nonpropagating means. It doesn’t come from anyplace. Everywhere it is, that’s where it came from.”
Drummer leaned back. That, at least, was interesting. If the Laconians had to go through the same things she had every time they fired their big gun, it would make a gap when automated systems might be able to penetrate their defenses.
“We’re also seeing the increased quantum creations and annihilations much more broadly,” Tur was saying somewhere nearby. “Like system-wide broadly. And there’s early suggestion that some experiments on Neptune and Luna that were working with controlled entanglement structures collapsed. So maybe—”
Drummer leaned back in her chair, folding her hands together. Her eyelids fell to half-mast. She knew—they all knew—that this was the first time one of the Laconian ships had left its home system. This wasn’t only an invasion, it was also a shakedown cruise. And nothing ever went completely as expected on a shakedown. The question was whether the Laconians knew what had happened. Whether they’d been anticipating it. If they’d been taken by surprise as well, they might not risk using the magnetic beam again.
Tur wouldn’t be able to tell her that. Or Vaughn or Lafflin. Admiral Trejo could say it, but not to her. Which meant there was only one plausible way for her to find out.
Her heart leaped at the idea, and she waited for the joy to fade before she risked thinking about it again. It was always dangerous when the universe fell down in a pattern where the thing you wanted and the wise path were the same.
Somewhere, Tur was still talking. He might as well have been on another ship. Drummer’s mind pressed through the possibilities, the dangers, the possible profits, and the certain loss. Each time, she found herself at the same conclusion.
She thanked Tur, using the social conventions of conversation to signal him it was time for him to go. She even shook his hand to make up a little for losing her temper before. As she walked him to the door, he was still talking about locality and signal loss. She closed the door behind him and went back to her desk.
Vaughn answered the connection request like his finger had been hovering over the button.
“Ma’am?”
“The Tempest is going to make a report. It may go back to Medina, or route through Medina back to Laconia,” she said. “We’re going to find out what it says.”
“Yes, ma’am. And how are we going to do that?”
“Saba,” she said. “The risk is worth it now. We’re reopening communications with Medina.”
Chapter Thirty-Five: Singh
An improvised explosive device punctured a liquid-oxygen storage tank on deck four of the engineering section,” Overstreet said. He was reading from a report that scrolled by on the monitor wrapped around his thick forearm. “We’ve recovered very little of the device itself, but what few pieces we have indicate it was made with material common to this facility. It’ll be difficult if not impossible to track the exact source.”
Singh sat and listened to the report and tried to look present and thoughtful. But the truth was, his mind was bouncing around like a tiny animal trying to escape a predator. He found he only processed about half of what Overstreet was saying. His hands were shaking so badly that he didn’t trust himself to pick up the glass of water on the desk in front of him. He kept them under the desk, where Overstreet wouldn’t see them. The sense that he was in immediate danger was inescapable because it was true.
“The damage to that deck was significant. Total loss of the primary liox storage. The thrust from the breach caused the station’s maneuvering thrusters to fire, and the shaking knocked down several structures in the habitat cylinder. The network-traffic station for the Storm was completely destroyed. A backup environmental-systems plant was significantly damaged, and will probably not be repairable.”
“The Storm,” Singh said. My first command. The symbol of Laconian power at Medina.
“This is preliminary, of course,” Overstreet replied, flicking one finger to skip down the report on his arm. “It does seem like that might have been the target of this attack, so minor hull damage and the loss of one sensor array feels like we got off light.”
Singh’s hands felt like they were shaking hard enough to be visible, even under the desk, so he gripped his thighs with both hands and held on tight.
“Preliminary casualty reports?”
“Again, light,” Overstreet said. “At this time, we have five confirmed Laconian fatalities, three from the engineering detail, two from security. Seven injuries ranging from life threatening to minor. Only two locals confirmed dead at this time. But we also have another dozen missing, so that number will probably go up.”
“To be willing to do so much damage to their own station, to their own people, just to try to hurt us …” Singh said, then trailed off.
“We have several persons of interest in custody,” Overstreet said. “One of them was setting off alarms immediately before the blast. It’s possible he wasn’t involved, but the coincidence seems unlikely. I will be debriefing him once we’re done here.”
“Is he a local?”
“Former captain of a Transport Union ship. James Holden.”
Singh frowned. “Why do I know that name?”
“Apparently he’s something of a celebrity, sir. He was involved in the Io Campaign and the defeat of the Free Navy back in the day.”
Both things that had happened when Singh was a child. The old guard still playing old-guard games.
“We will need to make the strongest possible response to this,” Singh said.
Overstreet nodded, his face grim. The hesitation meant something that Singh didn’t understand. “Sir, the radical factions of the Outer Planets Alliance fought a guerrilla war with Earth and Mars for nearly two centuries. The veterans of that war are almost certainly in leadership positions in this insurgency. That means we have some difficult decisions to make. About the scope of response.”
“I’m sorry,” Singh said. “I’m not following …”
“Insurgencies are historically nearly impossible to eradicate, for a few very simple reasons. The insurgents don’t wear uniforms. They look just like the innocent populace. And, they’re the friends and family of that populace. This means that every insurgent killed tends to increase recruiting for the insurgency. So unless you are willing to rack up a sizable civilian casualty count, we can’t just shoot everyone we suspect. If we take the strongest possible response, we stop calling it counterinsurgency and start calling it genocide.”
“I see,” Singh said. He’d studied counterinsurgency and urban pacification at the academy, of course.
Afghanistan had been impossible to conquer going all the way back to Alexander the Great. Ireland in the twentieth century. The Belter troubles for the last two centuries. It was different reading about it, but now he saw how this cycle of violence could go on and on for him too. “I’m not prepared to execute every Belter on the station.”
Overstreet seemed to relax without visibly moving at all.
“I agree, sir. All we can do is make it harder for them to operate,” Overstreet said. “We’re going to have Marines enter every compartment on the station. Anything we don’t control or have immediate use of will be sealed and the atmosphere removed. It won’t end this, but it’ll make it harder for them to plan and execute with no spaces under their control.”
“Agreed,” Singh said. “You have authorization to conduct this operation, and shut down any sections of the station you see fit. Let’s see if these people can work in daylight, not hiding in the sewers.”
Overstreet stood and saluted, then headed for the door. But just before he left, he turned back as if suddenly remembering something. “Sir, you might consider putting more pressure on your civilian informants. This is exactly the sort of thing they should be doing for us.”
“Yes,” Singh agreed. “That’s next on my list.”
The Belter with the badly broken nose—Jordao, Singh thought he called himself—was ushered into the office by two Marines. They held him by the arms, his feet barely touching the ground. His expression was somewhere between angry and sniveling.
“Put him down,” Singh told the Marines. When Jordao moved toward a chair, he said, “Don’t sit.”
“Sabe, bossmang.”
“You know about the attack?” Singh’s hands had mostly stopped shaking after Overstreet left, so he took a sip of his water. It was all playacting. Look calm, casual, in control. Make Jordao feel like Singh already knew the answer to every question he was asked. Make him afraid to lie. It seemed to be working. Jordao rubbed his hands together and bobbed his head like a supplicant.