by John Appel
But some got through, and then the real surprise came.
“Sweet Mother of the Leap, they’re launching shuttles,” the tactical officer said. “They’re going to board us.”
An iron fist gripped Andini’s heart as the rebel’s plan became plain. “How many?” she asked, wondering if her voice sounded as hollow as she felt.
“Depends on how full they are, but I estimate two hundred to two hundred fifty boarders.”
“Target the shuttles,” she said, her lips suddenly dry. “Use the mass drivers, too. We’re lost anyway if we don’t take them out.”
But the short range worked in the attacker’s favor as well, minimizing the time the incoming assault craft were exposed. And now, at last, the rebels engaged Iwan Goleslaw directly, aiming to disable her point defenses with pinpoint fire.
Andini imagined she could feel the moment the first boarding craft clamped on in her very bones, even though it was two hundred meters down the hull. “How long until the reinforcing task force is in range?”
“Twenty minutes.”
Too long. Her despair gave way to grim determination. “Right. Major Nkruma’s people to repel boarders. All other crew, abandon ship.” She locked eyes with her tactical officer as the alarm triggered by her order sounded on the comm of every Saljuan aboard. “Fist. Once the crew is off, we’ll scuttle.” The tactical officer, face pale, acknowledged. Andini turned to Dinata. “Minister, my yeoman will see you to your shuttle.”
Dinata, thoroughly lost, looked back and forth between Andini and the display. “But our mission—”
“Is a failure. So be it.” Andini called up the ship control officer as her yeoman dragged the still-protesting minister away. Most of the combat-center crew followed, but a few, mainly those directing point defense against a new wave of boarding craft, stayed at their posts. Pride in her crew pushed back against a new wave of despair. “I need a course that keeps us between the shuttles and the rebel ships. Highest burn you can manage.”
The massive ship rotated and thrust returned. It was a paltry one-third gravity, but it would have to do. Andini and the tactical officer unlocked the red panels she’d never once imagined she’d need to open. Long minutes ticked by. Finally, the shuttle pilots reported they had launched.
“How long until they’re at minimum safe distance?” she asked. She could hear the fire between the boarders and Nugroho’s troops now.
“Three minutes. They’ve got to kill their initial velocity first.”
Shit. She should have held off on maneuvering until the shuttles launched. Too late now, though. She hoped it would be enough.
Barely a minute remained when the tactical officer cried out in surprise. “Captain! Several of the boarding craft are detaching. They’re burning hard to rejoin their ships.”
“What?” She checked the display, confirmed it with her own eyes. The shooting outside the combat center didn’t let up, though. “Why are they doing that?” She flipped the display to show the internal condition of the ship, grimacing at the red blotches denoting the boarders’ incursions. They were perilously close to the bridge, the combat center, and engineering. But one incongruous tentacle caught her eye, probing deeply but far from the critical stations that would grant the attackers control of her ship.
They had breached the special ordnance store. The antimatter bombs must be aboard the escaping shuttles.
She had one card left to play. She prayed the rebels were still close enough for it to work.
“Now,” she told the tactical officer, and turned the key.
The nuclear scuttling charges buried deep within Iwan Goleslaw detonated, and once again, a new star burned brightly in the Ileri sky. But only for a little while.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-SEVEN
Toiwa
Government House, Ileri Station, Trailing Ring
Pockets of rebels still held out in the hub and the north ring, but Government House was secure again, with assistance from Captain Gupta’s marines. Toiwa and Major Biya delivered their reports to Prime Minister Vega and her cabinet from the huge briefing suite in which they’d first talked with the Saljuans, just a few days before. The conversation was all facts and figures and was totally lacking in narrative, as if the speakers were reporting quarterly-arrest and case-clearance rates. The words felt sterile, banal, and it bothered Toiwa that they seemed to strip meaning from the sacrifices of Zheng and the other dead, from Okereke and Imoke and the other maimed and wounded, from the innumerable stories she’d heard of ordinary citizens who’d found ways to help each other, and to stand up against the rebels. What had these people paid for?
The future? Or just a simple continuation of the present?
“When did I become so dissatisfied with the status quo? Me, the policewoman?” she asked Eduardo,
when they finally managed to snatch a few hours of privacy, after Iwan Goleslaw burned brightly one last time, as Vega’s full plan became clear and her reserve warships hammered the rebel strong points on the ground.
He smiled gently and stroked her forehead. “Love, you’ve been that way since the moment we met. You’ve always fought against injustice, and against those who wield power unjustly. You are my bright cavaleira, straight as a sword, bringing judgment to the wicked.”
She flushed with embarrassment and not a little shame, thinking about what she’d done these past few days. “I’m not so bright anymore. Rusty and tarnished, more like.”
“Only in your own eyes,” he told her.
She felt tarnished indeed, as she found herself reciting antiseptic numbers that could never truly represent her dead, her living, her compromised souls caught by some combination of coercive nanoware, loss of opportunity, and demagoguery. Less than ten percent of the rebels tested positive for this strange slow-burning variant of the Unity Plague that Councilor Walla, Ogawa’s assailants and a few others carried. How could these bloodless figures ever reflect why so many became caught up in Miguna’s movement?
At least, with the nanoware destroyed, she didn’t have to worry about a full-blown outbreak of the Unity Plague. At least not yet.
Vega asked to speak with her privately as the conference wrapped up. She withdrew to her new office. Ruhindi’s was still ruined and bore the scars of her assassination; Toiwa didn’t think she’d ever use it. Instead, she’d installed herself in the former deputy governor’s suite. Leaving Sergeant Chijindu at the door, she flipped on the projector, and she and Vega regarded each other’s telepresent forms.
“You’re doing well,” Vega began, her normally gruff voice like dripping honey. “The kind of transition you’ve made can be difficult under normal circumstances, much less this kind of chaos. You’re a credit to the office.”
“Thank you, Prime Minister,” Toiwa said, feeling uneasy in the face of Vega’s praise. It wasn’t that she didn’t think she was doing well, it was just something about Vega’s manner that masked what Toiwa now knew lay inside the other woman. I know now what you’ll do, what—and who—you’ll sacrifice to get your way. She fixed on her politician’s face. “Many outstanding people have stepped up into larger responsibilities. I’m pleased you think I’m setting a good example for them.”
Vega folded her hands together on the table, leaning forward. “There are some crucial decisions to make, very soon,” she said. “We have a chance to put Ileri back together in a way our descendants can cherish, not curse. And our chance to keep the rest of the Cluster from invoking Interdiction, or worse. All that hinges on what we do in the very short term. You see that, I hope?”
She felt the anger, cold and deep, that had lurked beneath her surface ever since Ogawa had told her of the hidden lab and its work. It wasn’t clear to her yet just what Vega’s involvement was in the government’s own dabbling with the Unity Plague, but there was no way she hadn’t known about it. Even if those efforts didn’t rise to the level of whatever Miguna and his ilk had been up to, they were definitely playing with technology pro
scribed under the Accords. An Interdiction or worse, you and yours have almost brought down on us as much as Miguna.
She kept that latent fury buried, and instead nodded slowly. It wasn’t that the bit about putting their world back together wasn’t critical. It would be so easy to give in to the desire for revenge, to demand retribution for their losses. History, from that of Lost Earth on through the days of Exile, told her that path never led to a good end.
“I believe so,” she said. “We have to chart a response that walks the line between justice and reconciliation. Find ways to reform society and reintegrate those who followed the guidance of the infected, and to expunge the agent from those who did succumb.” The agent was the euphemism Kala Valverdes had coined to avoid invoking the legendary horror of the Unity Plague. It made Toiwa uncomfortable to dance around the truth, but she’d let herself be persuaded that they needed this fig leaf of deception. “And we have to shore up the weak points in our society that Miguna and his pack were able to exploit.”
Miguna, for his part, was not among the infected. He’d been abandoned by much of his inner circle, who almost certainly had been, judging from the forensic evidence after the fact, and examinations of the few who’d been captured or killed during the first part of the rebellion. The rest had fled aboard the shuttles that launched just before the assault on Iwan Goleslaw that rendezvoused with the surviving rebel warships before those jumped out of the system. After the space battle’s conclusion, Vega’s forces had cornered Miguna in his command center, alone but for a handful of long-time sycophants, ranting about how incompetence and betrayal had brought him to these straits. He now languished in secure detention somewhere in the bowels of Fort Ali. Was he the puppet master? Or the figurehead diverting attention from whomever truly gave orders to the infected?
Toiwa doubted Vega or her people shared Toiwa’s qualms about medically assisted interrogation.
Here and now, Vega favored Toiwa with a smile, the kind one gave a student who’d just given their teacher the proper answer to a pop quiz. “Just so. It’s going to be tricky, but I’ve got some smart people working on it. I’d like you to be part of this effort, but you’ll need to decide just what role you want to play.”
Toiwa wasn’t sure where this was going. “What role, ma’am?” She spread her hands as if to encompass all her new charges. “I thought my role as governor was quite clear.”
“That’s one option of course,” Vega said. “Under the law, you remain governor of the station until we can arrange for elections, which will likely be several months. I suspect you’d probably win the election if you chose to run. But there’s another option I feel compelled to offer you.”
Toiwa shifted in her seat, uneasy. “I’m not sure what you mean,” she said. “Though I admit I haven’t given much thought to things beyond crisis control just yet.”
“Quite properly so,” Vega said, soothingly. “If you were the kind of person who was already planning their next move instead of working their ass off to put out wildfires, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“Thank you,” Toiwa said, confused about just where Vega was going with this. “You mentioned another option?”
“Indeed,” Vega said. “The position of High Commissioner of the Ileri Constabulary is open, you might recall.” Vega’s image leaned back in her chair, watching Toiwa with care.
Oh. Oh, shit.
“I... I hadn’t really thought that through, ma’am,” she said after a moment. “That... isn’t an option I’d considered pursuing.” She paused. It wasn’t that High Commissioner wasn’t, or at least hadn’t, been her ultimate ambition, and she wagered Vega knew that. “It’s certainly something I aspired to in my career,” she admitted. “Just... not now.”
“I thought so,” Vega said. “It certainly wouldn’t be a cakewalk. My social-science advisers are already pushing for a number of reforms. Some of those involve the Constabulary, along with other necessary social rebuilding.”
“What do you mean, ma’am?” Toiwa asked.
Vega sighed. “Nearly a third of our citizens are under the age of thirty, the largest single demographic group on the planet. Until recently, we’d managed to mostly avoid the economic bottlenecks that led to the Great Looting back on Lost Earth. But opportunity for our young people has been stagnating, and our leaders have lacked a vision for what our future as a world, as a people, should be. That vacuum is a large part of what Miguna and the One Worlders exploited. They provided a vision, however flawed and toxic it was. That was my predecessor’s biggest mistake. She failed to share the message about how joining the Commonwealth would help that.”
Toiwa found herself nodding. She understood Vega’s arguments intellectually, if not in her own life. Her own drive for truth, for justice, gave her life purpose. But she’d seen that grasping search for meaning in some of her friends. “A better way to help people discover and follow their vocations, for one,” she said, and Vega smiled and nodded in approval.
“Indeed,” Vega said. “Something the Commonwealth does well. I thought you’d grasp the nature of the work before us. I think that makes you a perfect candidate to help rebuild the Constabulary for the future.”
It was a dazzling vision, the offer of the very thing she’d worked for nearly twenty years for, though she had expected to work nearly another twenty before getting her shot at it. She knew already some of the changes she’d make, how she’d go about making them, the personnel changes she’d push through... well, that last would depend on who’d survived the rebellion, and their roles in it.
But was Vega telling her what she wanted to hear? Toiwa, as a constable, had learned to look at people’s actions to discern their true motives; and the PM had proved utterly ruthless. Biya had privately explained the gambit of using the Saljuans and their paltry escort as bait, and the way Vega seemed to simply tick those lost lives off as acceptable losses chilled her.
That was before one considered the hidden asteroid lab and the government’s own work with proscribed technology, and whatever role Vega had played in all that.
So that left her with a question: where would the Governorship lead, if she took that road? If she jumped the tracks to the purely political side? Not that she wasn’t something of a political animal already: no one achieved her rank in the Constabulary without being one. But this was a bigger game, and she knew enough to understand the size of her knowledge gaps, to have a clue about just how ill-prepared for this role she truly was.
And yet part of her welcomed the challenge. And if the canvas she’d have as High Commissioner was broad, how much bigger was the one open to her as governor, sitting atop the cable of her world’s gateway? Or perhaps, and the thought made her dizzy, as a Member of Parliament, the cabinet, or even the seat Vega now occupied?
She took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. I can’t decide this now. “Please forgive me, Prime Minister, but I need a little time to consider this,” she said. “And to talk with my family. This is something that will affect all of us.”
Vega chuckled. “That’s putting it mildly,” she said. “And that’s fine. You don’t need to decide right away. I’m pleased, in fact, that you want to think it over.” But, Toiwa thought, her eyes told a different story. She thought I’d jump at the chance to be High Commissioner. I’m not playing the game the way she expected.
The PM changed subjects. “There’s a less pleasant matter we still need to discuss. The Saljuan spies you’re holding.”
She knew it only felt like the room’s temperature dropped by five degrees. Dinata and the surviving crew of Iwan Goleslaw, their shuttles damaged by the explosion of their ship, had been rescued by the Navy and currently enjoyed Vega’s hospitality on one of the orbital bases. The minister’s disposition hadn’t been improved by her near brush with death and the destruction of her vessel. “Are they upset about how we interrogated their agents?”
Vega chuckled. “Surprisingly, no. Minister Dinata wasn’t concerned a
t all that we used facilitated questioning; it’s apparently routine procedure on Salju. No, she claims that we’d never have discovered the truth without their spying. And she maintains that we should be grateful Mizwar and his crew started the housecleaning, discovered the aerosolized plague vector and destroyed most of it.”
Toiwa nodded slowly. “She’s... not entirely wrong,” she said. “We’d have found them soon, after discovering their private network. But maybe not before the coup. Of course, it looks like the coup was triggered prematurely by her arrival and threats, so who’s to say?” She realized the fingers of her left hand were softly drumming on the table and put her hand into her lap to still it. “What do we need to decide?”
“Dinata wants us to return Mizwar and all the other agents to their custody and give them safe passage out of the system.”
“They’re hardly candidates for diplomatic immunity,” Toiwa protested, and let a little of her anger show in her voice. “We’re to let them go, without justice for their victims?”
“That,” Vega said, “is what I want to discuss with you.”
Oh. Another test. She wondered if she’d get used to this; if she was going to keep working with Vega, either as governor or High Commissioner, she’d have to get used to it. “What are they offering in return for the prisoners?” she said.
“For one, a recommendation against invoking full Interdiction, opting for a temporary quarantine instead,” Vega said. “Assuming the government can fully re-establish our authority across the planet and system.”
“I see,” Toiwa said. From Dinata, at least, that was a major concession. “There’s no question about our ability to re-secure the peace, I trust.”