Watching it all happen from his position in the ops center, Holden found that he had to admire the level of training and discipline the Laconians displayed. They left no doubt that they were absolutely in charge, and they responded to any aggression with immediate lethal force. But they didn’t abuse the civilians. They didn’t push anyone around. They showed nothing that looked like bravado or bullying. Even the violence didn’t have any anger behind it. They were like animal handlers. Holden, Naomi, and the rest of the ops-center techs did what they could to keep the station populace from panicking or foolishly resisting, but it was almost irrelevant. Nothing kept the people calmer than the calm their invaders demonstrated.
When the door to the ops center opened and one of the fire teams entered, Holden told everyone in the room to raise their hands in surrender. A tall, dark-skinned woman in armor with insignia that looked like a modified Martian colonel rank walked toward him on magnetic boots.
“I am Colonel Tanaka,” she said, her voice booming with electronically augmented volume. “Medina Station is under our control. Please indicate that you understand and are complying.”
Holden nodded and gave her his best fake smile. “I understand and as long as you continue to not abuse the people here, we will not violently resist.”
It was a deliberate provocation. If Tanaka were there to flex her muscles and show how important and in charge she was, she’d point out that her people could abuse the populace to their heart’s content and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.
Instead she said, “Understood. Prepare a hard dock at the reactor level of the station for our ship.”
When the dockmaster indicated that it was ready, Tanaka touched a control on her wrist and said, “Captain Singh, a berth is being prepped for docking. The station is ours.”
“I am Captain Santiago Singh of the Laconian destroyer Gathering Storm,” the young man said. “I’m here to accept your surrender.”
His uniform was trim and spotless. The design looked Martian, except for the blue-gray color scheme where Holden was used to red and black. Kohl floated before him, confusion in her eyes.
“This is an act of war,” she said, her voice trembling. Holden felt an urge to step in, refocus the man onto him just to make her safer. It was a stupid impulse. “The union. The Earth-Mars Coalition. The Association of Worlds. They won’t stand for this.”
“I know,” the young man said. “This is going to be all right. But I have to accept your surrender now, please.”
She braced to attention, and it was over.
It had taken less than four hours from the first transit. Marines in Laconian power armor patrolled the corridors and command points of the station. Naval personnel in sharply designed uniforms hurried about hooking equipment into various communication and environmental systems with a well-practiced efficiency. The people of Medina mostly watched in a sort of dazed shock.
It had all happened so quickly. It was impossible to process.
He and Naomi were swept up along with the hundreds of representatives from the colonized worlds, several dozen reps from the Transport Union, the senior staff of Medina Station. He didn’t have any actual authority. He wasn’t even technically the captain of a ship or a member of the Transport Union anymore, but no one argued. They all gathered in the coalition-council room, an amphitheater with two thousand seats and a stage with a podium on it that consciously aped the layout of the General Assembly of the UN back on Earth.
Admiral Trejo was a stocky older man, with the relaxed air of a person who’d spent so long holding a military posture that he looks comfortable in it. He took his place at the podium flanked by a pair of Marines. Captain Singh and Colonel Tanaka stood respectfully behind him and off to one side.
“Greetings,” the admiral said, smiling out at them. “I am High Admiral Anton Trejo of the Laconian Empire, and personal representative of High Consul Winston Duarte, our leader. And now your leader as well.”
He paused as though waiting for applause. After a moment, he continued.
“As you know, we have accepted control of Medina Station. And yes, we intend to take control of all the thirteen hundred worlds it leads to. This isn’t an act of aggression, but necessity. We bear no ill will or animosity toward any of you. As you’ve seen, this will be as bloodless a transition as you allow it to be. I’m bringing you here to implore you to please, please, contact your home worlds. We will make communications available for anyone who will tell them to peacefully relinquish control to us. If they do this, there will be no need for violence of any kind.”
“I admit I kind of like these guys,” Holden whispered to Naomi. “I mean as conquistadors go.”
“There’ll be a ‘but,’” she said. “There’s always a ‘but.’”
“Cooperation is the coin of the empire,” Trejo continued. “The beginnings were already in motion here. Your Association of Worlds. The Transport Union. All of these things will continue. High Consul Duarte wants input and representation from all the systems humanity has colonized and will colonize. The Transport Union is a vital apparatus in supporting those efforts. Both organizations can and must continue their important work.
“The only thing that has changed is that High Consul Duarte will be expediting the process. The Laconian fleet will be the defenders of a new galactic civilization of which you will all be welcome citizens. The only price is cooperation with the new order, and a tax to be paid to the empire that will not be onerous, and will be entirely invested back into the creation of new infrastructure and aid to fledgling or struggling planetary economies. The golden age of man will begin under the high consul’s leadership.”
Trejo paused again, his smile slipping. He looked pained and saddened by what he was about to say.
“Here it comes,” Naomi whispered.
“But to those who intend to defy this new government and try to deny humanity its bright future, I say this: You will be eradicated without hesitation or mercy. The military might of Laconia has only one function, and that is the defense and protection of the empire and its citizens. Loyal citizens of the empire will know only peace and prosperity, and the absolute certainty of their own safety under our watchful eye. Disloyalty has one outcome: death.”
“Ah,” Naomi said, though it was more a long exhalation than a word. “The nicest totalitarian government ever, I’m sure.”
“By the time we figure out all the ways it isn’t,” Holden said, “it will be too late to do anything about it.”
“Will be?” Naomi asked. “Or is?”
Chapter Thirteen: Drummer
McCahill, head of the security council, spread his hands before him like he was trying to talk a gunman into putting down his weapon. “We were all taken by surprise. And I think we can all agree this was a failure of intelligence.”
“Well, if we all agree, then I guess it’s not a problem,” Drummer said. McCahill flinched a little. “What the hell happened out there?”
The meeting room was small—McCahill, Santos-Baca, and the present liaison of the Earth-Mars Coalition, Benedito Lafflin. And Vaughn haunting the back of the room like a funeral director at a wake. There were others in her feed. Messages from every division of the union and dozens of organizations outside it too. A kicked anthill the size of the solar system, and all of them wanting answers and leadership from her. It would take days to view all of them, weeks to reply, and she didn’t have the time or the energy. She needed answers.
Answers and a way to turn time backward long enough to undo what had already happened.
Lafflin was a thick-faced man with a tight haircut that made him look like a particularly self-satisfied toad. He cleared his throat. “Data on Laconia has always been thin,” he said. He had a reedy voice and the manner of a doctor explaining why he’d left a sponge in someone’s belly by mistake. “The defecting forces from Mars have been playing their keep-away message since before the Transport Union was chartered. They’ve flooded the gate f
rom the realspace side with chatter along the whole electromagnetic spectrum—radio, visible light, X-ray, everything. We’ve had no passive intelligence to speak of. The few times that probes were sent through, they were disabled or destroyed.
“The official doctrine put in during the first years of the union was blockade. The navies of Earth and Mars were both badly damaged in the fight against the Free Navy, the focus of governance was disaster recovery on Earth and minimizing the collapse of infrastructure. Laconia never presented an active threat, and …”
“You’re telling me the missing navy was just never a priority?” Drummer said, but she already knew the answer: Yes, that’s what he was saying.
Sleeping dogs had been left to lie until they were good and rested. And the sting of it was worse because some of that at least had been during her watch. She was as guilty as anyone of taking her eye off the ball.
The images that had come through from Medina were surreal. The ship that had sailed through from Laconia didn’t resemble anything that had gone out through the gate decades ago. The blast that had scattered the Tori Byron was more like high-energy stellar phenomena than a weapon humanity had conceived. And the destruction of the rail-gun emplacements had been accompanied by a blast of gamma radiation from the gates themselves that Cameron Tur had described as the energetic equivalent of a solar flare. It had destroyed the Sharon Chavez, a freighter that had been waiting for clearance from Medina’s traffic control. Her crew died in the blink of an eye, and not even from a direct attack. It wasn’t something Drummer could get her mind to accept. It was too big. Too strange. Too sudden.
“The attacker has disabled the relay network,” Vaughn said, answering something Santos-Baca had asked. “There are no new signals coming in or out of the ring space. Medina is effectively cut off.”
Drummer squeezed her fists until they ached. She couldn’t let her mind wander like that. It didn’t matter that she felt traumatized. The union was under attack, and it was all on her. She had to keep focus. “We do have some record from the freighter that was parked outside the gate. The interference is too severe to get anything with high definition, but enough that we can say with some confidence that Medina Station was boarded. We have to assume it’s been taken.”
“Can we get data through the gates?” Drummer asked. “Radio loud enough to carry through the interference on both sides? Or tightbeams? Something to get messages to the other systems?”
“It’s possible,” Lafflin said in a tone of voice that meant he didn’t actually think it was possible. “But it would certainly be monitored. And our encryption schema aren’t breakable by any known tech, but we’re not looking at known tech.” His hand terminal chimed. He glanced at the message and lifted his eyebrow. “Excuse me for a moment. Someone’s made a mistake.”
Drummer waved her permission, and the inner left them to themselves. When the doors had closed behind him, she turned to Santos-Baca and McCahill. “Well, seeing as it’s just us, what are the options?”
“If we can find a way to communicate with the other systems, we can coordinate a counterattack,” Santos-Baca said. “I’ve been putting together a spreadsheet of the resources we have in each system.”
“Let me see,” Drummer said. Santos-Baca flipped the data to Drummer’s display. More than thirteen hundred gates, each opening onto a new solar system. Almost all of them with colonies that varied from barely functioning villages to scientific complexes that were on the ragged edge of self-sustainability. The union’s void cities were the largest ships, but she could only pour attacking forces through so quickly without losing them to the gate’s glitches. She’d be sending them through one at a time to be mowed down. She pressed her fingers to her lips, pinching the flesh against her teeth until it ached a little. There was a way. There had to be a way.
She had to put first things first. And that meant reestablishing communications with all the union forces in all the systems. Some kind of stealth relay system had to be put in place. Maybe some kind of feint that would draw the enemy’s attention long enough to let her sneak new repeaters on either side of if not all the gates, then a strategic few—
“Ma’am,” Lafflin said from behind her, “please, you can’t—”
An unfamiliar voice answered. “Give it a fucking rest, Benedito. I can do whatever the fuck I want. Who’s going to tell me not to? You?”
The old woman moved slowly, using a cane even in the light gravity of People’s Home. Her hair was blindingly white, thinning, and pulled back in a bun at the base of her skull. Her skin was slack and papery, but there was an intelligence in her eyes that the years hadn’t dimmed. She looked up at Drummer, and smiled with the warmth of a grandmother. “Camina. It’s good to see you. I got the first shuttle I could. How’s your brother doing?”
Drummer pushed through a flurry of reactions—surprise that the woman was here, a flicker of starstruck awe, disorientation at being called by her first name in public, distrust that Chrisjen Avasarala—the retired grand dame of inner-planet politics—knew about her brother at all, and finally the solid certainty that every feeling she’d just experienced had been anticipated. More than anticipated. Designed. It was all a manipulation, but done so well and with such grace that knowing that didn’t make it ineffective.
“He’s fine,” Drummer said. “The regrowth went well.”
“Good, good,” Avasarala said, lowering herself into a chair. “Astounding what they can do with neural replacement these days. When I was growing up, they cocked it up more than they got it right. I had most of my peripheral nervous system redone a couple years ago. Works better than the old stuff, except my leg gets restless at night.”
Santos-Baca and McCahill both smiled, but with anxiety in their eyes.
“Ma’am,” Lafflin said, “please. We’re in the middle of a meeting.”
“You can finish it later,” Avasarala said. “President Drummer and I need to talk.”
“I didn’t see you on my schedule,” Drummer said mildly. Avasarala turned back to her. The warmth was gone, but the intellect was there, sharp and feral.
“I’ve been where you are right now,” the old woman said. “I’m the only one in the whole human race who has. The way your stomach feels when you try to eat? The part of you that’s screaming all the time, even when you’re acting calm? The guilt? Anyone who’s had a child in the hospital has suffered through that shit. But the part where all human history rides on what you do, and you only get one shot? That’s only you and me. I came because you need me here.”
“I appreciate—”
“You’re about to fuck up,” Avasarala said, and her voice was harder than stone. “I can keep that from happening. And we can have that conversation here in front of these poor fucking shitheads, or you can roll your eyes and humor the crazy old bitch with a cup of tea and we can have a little privacy. You can blame me for it. I won’t mind. I’m too old and tired for shame.”
Drummer laced her fingers together. Her jaw ached, and she had to focus to unclench it. She wanted to scream. She wanted to have Avasarala thrown out of the city in a plastic emergency bubble with a note tacked to her cane that said Make an appointment first. She wanted to see McCahill and Santos-Baca look at her with awe and fear at the violence of her reaction. And none of those things had anything to do with Chrisjen Avasarala. They were all of them about what had happened to Medina.
“Vaughn,” Drummer said. “Could you get Madam Avasarala a pot of tea? We’ll take a recess of an hour or so.”
“Of course, Madam President,” Vaughn said. The others rose from their chairs. Santos-Baca took a moment to shake Avasarala’s hand before she left. Drummer scratched her chin even though it didn’t itch and kept her temper until the room was empty except for the two of them. When she spoke, it was with a careful, measured tone.
“If you ever undermine me like that again, I will find a way to make everyone in the EMC stop taking your calls. I will isolate you like no one this sid
e of a prison door has ever been isolated. You’ll spend the last days of your life trying to talk interns into getting you coffee.”
“It was a dick move,” Avasarala said, pouring a cup of tea for herself and then another one for Drummer. “It’s my fault. I overreact when I’m scared.”
She hobbled across the room and set the mug down in front of Drummer. An act of submission as calculated as everything she’d done. Whether it was sincere or insincere didn’t matter. She’d kept the form. Drummer picked up the tea, blew across it, and sipped. Because keeping the form was all that was keeping her together now too. Avasarala nodded her approval and went back to her seat.
“I’m scared too,” Drummer said.
“I know. That was some frightening shit that came back from Medina. That ship? I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve never seen speculation about anything like it.” Avasarala picked up her own mug, sipped, and nodded toward the tea. “This is good.”
“We grow it here. Real leaves.”
“All the food chemists in the system will never do better than evolution at making a decent tea leaf.”
“How am I about to fuck up?”
“By trying to get back your losses,” Avasarala said. “It’s not just you either. You’re going to have advisors on all sides who want the same damn thing. Mass a force to reclaim Medina, find a way to coordinate, take the fight back to Laconia. Through a massive effort and at tremendous cost, push our way back to the status quo ante.”
“Sunk-cost fallacy?”
“Yes.”
“So you don’t think—” Drummer had to stop. The words were physically gagging her. She swallowed more tea, the heat of it loosening her throat. “You don’t think we can get the slow zone back?”
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