I blinked. I hadn’t thought of that.
We weren’t close enough to hear what the Harts were saying to each other, but we did notice when the volume of the discussion went from “happy excitement” to “worrying disagreement.” Ken and I both stopped where we were, about sixty meters away from the trio, and turned around quickly.
“Uh . . . that doesn’t sound good,” I whispered.
“What do we do? They’ve already seen us coming.”
“Let’s stay right here and pretend to be talking,” I suggested.
For the most awkward five minutes of my life, I pretended not to listen as Devlin’s parents argued and he pleaded. At last, his mother left them and came up the path, striding angrily past us without a second look. Devlin and his father followed her, but slowly. There was only one way out of the park, after all.
When they reached us, no one dared speak first. Ken and I looked at each other, completely at a loss.
“Devlin, do you want me to . . . I can go . . .” I didn’t know what I was trying to say, but Devlin understood.
“Please,” he said. “I have to go with my father. The Accordance has offered him full citizenship with some conditions. We’re going to accept.”
“Oh” was all I managed. His words knocked the breath out of me.
Thomas Hart raised his chin, not in defiance, not in guilt, but with weary resignation. “I didn’t ask for it. TJ, an old student of mine, he thinks I can do more fighting within the system than against it. It wasn’t an easy decision.” His eyes went to Devlin, who was standing with his head down, biting his lip as if trying not to let tears fall. “But my son thinks we might be able to make a difference together.”
“Sir,” Ken said, his voice low and intense. “Do whatever you can however you can. It’s going to be a long game, but trust me when I say we are on the same side.”
Devlin looked up with a small sound of relief, half laugh, half gasp, and Ken immediately stepped forward and gripped his shoulders. “Brothers,” he reminded him with a firm shake.
“Brothers,” Devlin replied, gripping back just as strongly before pulling him into a hug.
Devlin’s father watched them, and his smile was bittersweet. I looked down the path, and I could see Mrs. Hart still walking away.
“Excuse me,” I muttered, and began to run.
+ + + +
When I caught up with her, she refused to stop, but she did slow down a little. I walked on for a bit to catch my breath and settle my thoughts.
“Mrs. Hart,” I began.
“Rodriguez,” she snapped. “My name is Linda Rodriguez. Devlin told me that you agree with this?”
I almost stumbled, taken aback. “Well, there are pros and cons. Why are you walking away from him? He’s your son! And that’s your husband!”
She glanced over her shoulder, but the regret showing in her eyes wasn’t strong enough to make her stop or go back. “Thomas and I have been drifting apart for a while. We can’t walk the same road anymore. But you wouldn’t understand that. Your parents were such a model revolutionary pair.”
“No ma’am,” I said, a little edge creeping into my voice. “They separated, actually, but they kept working together. Love and ideology are different things. You’re walking away from your family because you disagree with their choices? Because they’ll be Accordance citizens?”
“You dare ask me that? Your parents tried to bomb the Accordance in Atlanta and they were executed for it! By your same precious Accordance!”
Execution by suicide mission. “Yes,” I said tiredly. “I know. They were set up. Groups like Earth First don’t forgive mistakes any more than the Accordance does. Remember that. Would you prefer to face a firing squad of your enemies or know that your friends left you to die?”
She didn’t answer. She was so angry, she was shaking.
“Look, me and Ken, we’re trying to find a middle way. If you ever need sanctuary, from friends or enemies, send me a message. I’ll find you. I’ll always help you . . . for Devlin’s sake.”
She stopped. We had reached the exit building. “Goodbye, Amira Singh,” she said.
“Wait, Linda. Where will you go? Can you at least tell me that?”
She left without once looking back at me.
+ + + +
Days later, we went to the orbital station to see Devlin off. He had to return to duty, his father had already left for Earth, and about his mother he said nothing. We were all three as cheerful as a funeral.
Devlin tried to lighten the mood. “This isn’t goodbye,” he told us firmly. “I just have to get some annoying PR out of the way, and then they’re sending me back into space. I’ll come see you guys, honest. We’ve still got a lot to do together.”
“PR, huh?” Ken said. “Do me a favor, kick Anais up the ass for me.”
Devlin snorted. “Consider it done.”
“And my regards to Buchanan, if they’ll let you see her,” I added.
Devlin sobered. In spite of everything she’d done to save us, Buchanan’s rejection of citizenship and support of Major Diop had put her firmly on the Accordance shit list. “I’ll try,” he said.
+ + + +
We left as soon as Devlin boarded, and ran into Chief Engineer Abreham Selassie, the man who ran the orbital station, just as we were returning from the departure gate. A younger man in a CPF uniform was with him. “Good to see you Ken, Amira,” Chief Selassie greeted us. “We’ve been looking for you.”
Something nudged my brain. I ran a search, pulled up a file and an image, and said coolly, “Lieutenant Wilmer, you should really contact your sister.”
The lieutenant’s eyes widened. “How did you know about that?”
“About what?”
“I just sent a message off to Jody. First time in months. When they shipped me out, it didn’t make any sense trying to reach her. She got out at the right time and I didn’t want to risk them finding her. Now I’m with the CPF Resistance, I don’t have to worry about that.” His smile glowed with admiration. “You really do know everything.”
I shrugged modestly. “Not everything. I don’t know why you came looking for us.”
He pulled himself together. “Oh, yes. Ms. Singh, Sergeant Awojobi, we want to show you something.”
I didn’t like the way they said my name. “Sergeant” had its own baggage, and “Amira” was too personal, but my grandfather’s surname came with the gravity of legend and possibility and was turning into a title. Buchanan of the Buchanans, Singh of the Singhs, Keeper of the Name and Pride and Hope. Was that how clans and dynasties began?
The CPF lieutenant and the chief engineer took me and Ken through several heavily secured and coded doors. My curiosity increased at every new barrier, and perhaps a little fear as well. I had an inkling, and when I exchanged a worried glance with Ken, I knew he had that same inkling.
The journey terminated in a large bunker. Lieutenant Wilmer flipped the large switch at the last door and bright light filled every corner of the storage space. About one hundred black capsules were arranged in a perfect square with seven more ranged in a short file at one side. Bitter, bitter medicine that I did not want to have on my hands, but it was as I’d feared, and there was no way to get rid of them.
“How, exactly,” Ken asked gravely, “did these come to be here?”
Wilmer answered. “CPF Resistance brought them in, salvaged from the battlefield debris before the Conglomeration chased us off. We weren’t about to hand them back to the Accordance.”
“Wilmer, are they . . . ?” I questioned.
“Disarmed, Ms. Singh.”
“And what would it take to arm them?”
He waved an arm to a set of boxes stacked at the back. “Those bits and pieces.”
I turned to the engineer. “Chief Selassie?”
His mouth twitched, but he gave the full answer I wanted. “Timing and proximity device, fuse for primary detonation, precision mixer, damper for the pre-detonation
phase, fuse for the main detonation, and the lock for the main casing.”
“Thank you, Chief Selassie. Lieutenant Wilmer, I want ‘those bits and pieces’ on a ship in two hours. I’ll give you the precise coordinates in a while, but I can tell you now that your destination will be the asteroid that maintains the farthest mean distance from Ceres while not actually passing close to any Conglomeration bases.”
“And if you don’t mind, Chief Selassie,” Ken added, “we’d rather store the bio-bomb capsules in one of the uninhabited asteroids, at a reasonable distance from the orbital station.”
“Please do,” he begged us. He looked around at the bunker. “I want this room cleared. I have other plans for it.”
+ + + +
At first we had no official titles. People asked us questions, we discussed the matter with each other, and we gave them answers. There was so much to do that everyone cooperated and collaborated and the hierarchy shook itself out naturally. Ken and I stuck together, and that too felt natural. We brought together two very different worlds: the Ships and the CPF.
The status of the CPF within the asteroid belt was undefined and evolving. Roughly two thirds of the CPF that fled the Jupiter front continued to operate within the Accordance establishment. The remainder settled semi-permanently in the asteroid belt and went slightly . . . rogue. I met plenty of CPF officers and enlisted who declared they would never take orders from the Accordance again, but who also insisted that they were still very much a part of the Colonial Protective Forces. Others drifted back and forth across the boundary of allegiance, depending on their location and inclination. CPF headquarters on Earth had to figure out how to juggle the degrees of insubordination, and mostly they took the Anais route. Those whose actions could not be ignored or covered up were sentenced to demotion, exile, or death, but many careers were salvaged in various creative ways. I still hated Anais for dropping Ken into the shit without warning, but I could admit to being impressed at the glorious whirlwind of spin, PR, and general misdirection that framed the post-Jupiter days.
And so the CPF Resistance was born. The name began as a quasi-joke, but it was reused with increasing seriousness until eventually it stuck.
The situation on Ceres finally settled down enough that we were assigned permanent places to work and live. Two of the top brass, Sergeant Danner and General Mohr, took great pleasure in showing me to my new office. Office. What a weird fate for a street-running sneak.
The writing on the door said, AMIRA SINGH. DIRECTOR.
I tried to stop them. “You’re not putting me in charge!”
“Oh no, of course not,” said General Mohr with a slightly patronizing smile. “We’re still in charge. You’re just the person who will make sure that our decisions coordinate. You have the information at your fingertips and skill to assess it and advise us objectively. Hence ‘Director.’ ”
“She’s a Singh,” Sergeant Danner growled. “The Ships know her and respect her. She’ll be in charge.”
Ironically, although Sergeant Danner was subordinate to General Mohr in the CPF, she outranked him in the hierarchy of the Ships. I closed my office door and left them still arguing. A week later, it was confirmed that the Ships of Earth and the Generals of the CPF had voted me in as Director of the CPF Resistance. At first, I wasn’t sure if I was a figurehead, but the staggering amount of work that descended on me later suggested not.
Ken Awojobi, dishonorably discharged ex-sergeant of the CPF and fugitive from Accordance justice, was placed in charge of military operations with the rank of commander in the CPF Resistance. Part of it was because he’d rallied everyone together and shown the best grasp of tactics during the retreat and restructuring, but mainly it was the best, strongest “fuck you” they could give to the Accordance in general and the Arvani in particular. So, he was a bit of a figurehead, like me, but to my surprise, he didn’t care.
“If there’s anything this war has taught me, it’s that opportunity counts as much as ability. I’m going to seize this opportunity, Amira,” he told me. “I don’t believe in much anymore, but there’s a reason we survived Icarus. There’s a reason we’ve ended up where we are. I’m here and I’ll do my best with what I’ve been given, whether I’ve earned it or not.”
“I think you’ll be amazing,” Lang said shyly.
We were in a private area of the main orbital station, looking through the huge viewport at the sights. The station was in the center of a construction boom: the number of docks and ports was being increased and structures added to link and delink massive Trojan-style asteroid carriers to the station’s main hub.
Watching the ongoing expansion provided a pleasant distraction for a day off, but we were there for a reason. I had seen it coming and tried to ignore it, but I couldn’t avoid it anymore. Emilia Lang wanted to go home.
I tried one last time to persuade her. “Lang, we need people like you—”
“This isn’t for me,” she interrupted. “Space, aliens, everyone and everything trying to kill you. It’s stressful.”
“But you always acted like you were handling it,” I said.
She grimaced. “Yeah. I’m really good at acting, but any more of this and I’ll start screaming some day and I won’t stop.”
“Look!” Ken exclaimed.
A long, slow shadow moved over the orbital station, dimming the light of both suns and giving an illusion of chill to the air. It was one of the Pcholem, arriving to take the struthiforms who fled from Earth to their new settlement on Mars. The sight of them always made me feel like my head was being turned inside out. Here was something too huge, too incredible to be limited by mere risk assessment, indexing, or mathematics. I could be cynical about many things, but not about the Pcholem.
“Look,” I echoed. “Look, Emilia.”
Silence. I glanced at her. There was awe in her eyes, as in ours, but it came closer to terror than delight.
I cleared my throat. “Hey, Lang, before I forget, this is for you.”
I handed her a soft, cloth-wrapped package. She took it with a puzzled frown, but after two experimental squishes she winced and gave me a slightly pained look. “His coat?”
“Waste not, want not. If you don’t need it, I’m sure you can find someone in Ship 1 who can use it. And you’ve more than earned the right to keep your kit, so we packed that up for you and sent it with the rest of your stuff.”
Ken gave her a gentle hug. “Take care, Emilia. I hope you’ll at least visit someday.”
She smiled at us. “Someday, I will. Thanks for an incredible adventure.”
We watched sadly as she walked away. Ken nudged me. “Time for a drink?”
“Oh yes,” I agreed.
Infrastructure on the orbital station was too recent and too well recorded for anything to be really secret, but if you knew the mining community and they liked you well enough, you got access to some of the secure tunnels and private bunkers. Ken and I wandered down a few levels and passed through a few code-locked doors until we found ourselves in a familiar space now greatly transformed to new purpose.
The room cheered; glasses were raised in salute. We waved sheepishly in reply.
“Come in, come in,” said Chief Selassie. He was behind the bar, slowly and expertly pulling a pint. “Have a seat. Tell me, what’s your pleasure?”
25
* * *
It was hard to adjust to a public life. There were so many faces, but unlike recruits who could be kept at a respectful distance and moved at your command, these faces all wanted something and wouldn’t go away. Ken tried to act as filter for the unnecessary meetings, the people who asked to see me and speak to me for their own satisfaction and not for anything to do with the establishment of the CPF Resistance. It was never enough. I felt myself getting wearier and stupider until I learned to schedule time for data-scanning and naps.
Occasionally, out of all the many faces, I got back something unexpected.
Chief Selassie introduced me to t
he administrator of a small mining operation. His name—Heath Buchanan. Refreshingly, he had no awe of me nor of the Singh name. He wanted to hear all about my time serving with Major Buchanan, who he had known well and was distantly related to but had never personally met.
“Was it true that you were present on the day she refused the Union?” he asked in a voice that vibrated with awe.
“You mean when she turned down the Accordance’s offer of full citizenship? Yes, I was there, but—”
“No, Director Singh, it was much more than that. If she had accepted citizenship with her standing as Chief of the Name and Arms, it would have had consequences for all those affiliated with the Name. She refused on behalf of the Buchanans and their septs.”
My mouth dropped open. I remembered when she first introduced herself, all that pomp, but then she’d said “not that it matters anymore.” “But I thought her title was a ceremonial thing, heritage and history with nothing political?”
“It was once,” he acknowledged, “but after the Accordance came, we became a lot more political. I think you know a bit about that sort of thing yourself.”
I discovered much later that the date of the Refusal of the Union became an unofficial holiday in Scotland and Eire. That made me smile. I hadn’t always agreed with Buchanan’s decisions, but she had both style and substance.
Another day, Ken and I sat down with the Chair of the Consolidated Mining Group to discuss supplying raw ores, minerals, and scrap to a shipbuilding and mining support services company that was their largest client. The wheels of commerce whirled on in the midst of war. The company was represented at the meeting by its COO, Tan Sri Dr. Diana Chen. I was keeping my mouth shut, letting the specialists talk and only intervening to agree with Ken when he gave the military viewpoint.
Chen’s interest in the military appeared to go only so far as the protection of her company’s supply chain, so I was pretty startled when she turned to me and said. “Amira Singh. Any relation to Mia Gopwani-Singh who worked on the Ceres rig infrastructure project?”
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