Guided by Starlight

by Matt Levin

  “I suppose that’s a question for the future, then,” Isadora said with a sigh. Maybe when the needs of survival weren’t as immediate, they could renegotiate some of these deals. But until then, desperation made all the choices easy.

  “Agreed,” Alexander said. “For now, we’ll survive while others thrive. Maybe we can change that dynamic someday. But not while the deck’s stacked against us as bad as it is right now.”

  Isadora nodded. “Thank you for your counsel. That’s all I need for now.”

  “Of course, ma’am,” Alexander said, and pushed himself to his feet. They exchanged goodnights, and her financial adviser headed for the door.

  Once he left, Isadora returned to the messages from Nadia and Russ on her wrister. She wondered what Tricia Favan might think about her dealings with the Union’s old enemy and the black market. But even if the government had set up listening devices in their embassy, the de-bugging software Vincent had helped her install hopefully kept prying eyes away.

  Isadora was grateful that the Union wasn’t able to listen in on what she and her people were up to. Taking a deep breath, Isadora signed off approvals for both the Horde and the Syndicate deals.

  CHAPTER 27

  * * *

  In politics, nothing ever changes quickly. Until it does, and then it changes faster than you have time to prepare for. Those were the main takeaways from Tricia’s tenure as prime minister.

  She had already been reflecting on the seismic changes underway in the outer rim—the arrival of the refugees, the revival of the Calimor spice trade, and the beginnings of a Horde-refugee trading network—as she cycled through various media outlets during her lunch break.

  Tricia had it down to a ritual. Her sandwich, topped with cucumbers, onions, tomatoes, and hummus. In the colder months, a bowl of squash soup. Sitting at a small table on the patio outside her office. Reviewing a compendium of major news stories published between morning and midday.

  She dutifully read the first few paragraphs of a handful of net articles, but she didn’t need to. Most were saying the same thing: a caucus of young upstarts in her own party had broken away from her leadership, criticizing her for not doing more to ensure protections for native Natonese workers in light of the refugees’ arrival. The caucus was proposing new legislation to track all the refugees who had been brought out of cryo so they couldn’t migrate illicitly to a Union planet, coupled with a limited work/tourism visa system to only admit a handful of refugees to visit the core worlds.

  Never mind that those worries were stupid and irrelevant. After the track record Tricia had, no reasonable person could say she hadn’t made workers’ livelihoods her primary focus. Of course, reasonable people were few and far between in politics. And the kinds of people who were part of the renegade caucus were hardly motivated by high-minded concerns.

  No, they were ambitious, young careerists who had entered office well after she had already been through the ringer of her first half-decade in politics. After she’d fought and won her battles against the titans of industry and the predatory insurance giants and all the rest of their ilk. They were the kind of fresh-faced sociopaths who called for her ouster despite the fact that she had brought their party from nothing to the pinnacle of solar politics, because somehow three terms were too long even though there was no law saying she couldn’t run as many times as she damn well pleased.

  And besides, Tricia still had work to do. Honestly, she had been thinking about retirement on and off before her long-range scanners had picked up the Preserver. Figuring out how to manage the refugee migration needed an experienced hand at the helm. Tackling that would be her final task. Then, she could rest and retire.

  Meanwhile, a group of legislators in the opposition coalition, most belonging to the Reform Party, had been hounding her in the press for being too harsh on the refugees. Led by a Parliament member named Robert Nurm, a group of Reform MPs had called for the Union to reexamine the settlement charter referenda in light of the ongoing legal battle in the courts. Tricia had met Robert a handful of times, and she didn’t hate him—probably the highest praise she’d ever given another politician—but he had a mind-numbingly simplistic view of politics and the constraints she operated under.

  It was one of the main issues with governing: when you had people criticizing you from both sides, it was hard to tell whether you were a genius threading the needle between two extremes, or whether you were just a fucking moron pissing everyone off. Most of the latter always ended up convincing themselves they were the former.

  When Tricia was done sneering self-righteously at her wrist terminal, she realized she should have seen this coming. Over the past few months, plenty of the renegade caucus members had been visiting her office and expressing their concerns about the refugees. She couldn’t remember any specific details from those meetings, which was maybe a clue as to how seriously she had taken them. Sometimes, the people you most wanted to shut up and go away were the ones who got louder and more belligerent the harder you tried to brush them off.

  Plus, it was an age-old dynamic. She had let herself become content with managing the day-to-day affairs of governance, satisfied with what she had already accomplished. Plenty of others in the Workers’ Party had done the same. The new generation was insistent on finding something, or anything, to beat her over the head with.

  Even if it meant scapegoating an entire population of people who had done nothing wrong to them.

  The news media was lapping up the story as though they were starved prisoners catching their first glimpse of food in weeks. Politics had probably gotten boring to write about, Tricia thought with a snort: “Tricia Favan wins reelection, again” followed by “Tricia Favan gets whatever she wants, again” and “Tricia Favan continues to run government competently and unopposed, again.”

  And with the influence of the opposition parties dwindling every five years, the media had suddenly gotten their appetites whetted by the taste of internecine warfare within the Workers’ Party. Maybe Tricia Favan’s iron grip on the system’s politics was finally coming loose. It sounded like a better headline, she thought.

  Closing the file compendium, she looked out at the city skyline and wondered how she had let political bullshit consume one of her only breaks. Tricia was all work and no soul.

  There were some things she did, of course. She played cards with a few senior members of her party in the evenings once a week. She would occasionally plan staff retreats to one of the mountainous resort cabins out in the Obrigan wilderness. She had taken up the habit of carving small wooden figurines right before bed. But none of those things really felt like they defined her life.

  Once, she had believed that she could learn to settle down and start a family. Back when she was a civil rights’ lawyer, she had been married to the district attorney in the ward where she lived. They had quarreled over politics and how soon Tricia would abandon her career to have their first child.

  So she’d left. Left not only her ex-husband, but also her job, since she had signed up with a rebel guerrilla movement. Never once had she regretted the decision. She was still pretty sure she didn’t regret it, but there were times when some kind of companionship in old age felt like it would be nice. Maybe all the old arguments would’ve faded away. Probably not, actually, she thought.

  She dipped the last of her sandwich in her soup for warmth and finished it, wiping the crumbs and soup residue on her mouth with a napkin. Her lunch break was up, and she had a security briefing scheduled with the joint chiefs directly afterward. That at least was comforting: the situation room was always a welcome reprieve whenever everything else got to be too much.

  As she passed through her office and headed to the basement level of the Government-General’s executive wing, a flock of aides nearly ambushed her. They were frantically asking how to best respond to the formation of the renegade caucus.

  Tricia shrugged. “Just let them run their mouths till they’re red in the face. I’
m not giving legitimacy to the inflated egos of a dozen nobodies who only got into office on my coattails.”

  One of the aides protested that the story was just going to spiral out of control unless she got in front of it, but she waved them away. She knew how to deal with young upstarts, and the answer was always don’t feed the flames if you want the fire to die. Ignoring them was the greater insult. Plus, this was her security briefing, dammit, and she wasn’t going to let the media circus keep her away from the joint chiefs.

  The room where she had the ability to order airstrikes on any planet or settlement in the entire system had somehow become her safe space, she realized as she went through the motions of heading down the staircase and keying herself past the secure door.

  A dozen salutes, and a light on the end of her cigarette. The meeting could start now. Even as the political dynamics all around her were raging and transforming, there was something timeless and eternal about the cool blue lighting of the situation room.

  “I’m surprised you weren’t tied up with parliamentary politics,” Admiral Philip Eswan said, a knowing grin peering out from behind the bristles of his mustache.

  “I think I’d rather just go to an early grave,” she muttered. “So what do you have for me?”

  She had asked the ISB and the military to begin drone surveillance of the outer rim planets almost a month and a half earlier, while simultaneously using unmanned craft to repair the Union’s planetary satellites in orbit of the three outer planets. Hopefully, they had something tangible to report.

  Karen Pitera closed a file on her wrist terminal and cleared her throat. “We have surveyed the outer rim territories and settlements extensively, and brought about 90% of our planetary satellites back to full functionality. For most of the outer rim, we have relatively little to report. Surveillance of Ikkren indicates no Horde military buildup of any kind, and their settlements appear to be somewhat stagnant. If anything, a few of the larger trading outposts look like they’re smaller than our last data points would indicate. Trade between settlements also appears to be lower than before.”

  After the war, Tricia had warned the new Horde leader that isolation would slowly cripple her people. She added that particular data point to the things I was proven right about column.

  “Bitanu also shows few significant developments,” Karen continued. “Our research base there remains intact, but the planet is largely uninhabited besides that. There are probably a dozen wildcat settlements out in the frozen wastelands, but they demonstrate no threat. Most likely, they’re trying to sell Bitanu ice at a markup to other desperate frontier settlers.”

  Bitanu was the wettest of the three outer rim planets, Tricia knew, and melted Bitanu ice could provide needed water elsewhere. She wondered if a handful of enterprising individuals were trying to melt Bitanu ice to sell to the refugee settlements on dry, dusty Calimor. A hustle, to be sure, but probably a stupid one. That didn’t stop people from trying.

  “Outside of the refugee colony at New Arcena, Calimor continues to be mostly barren. A couple of Horde scouting parties have launched expeditions to the other abandoned domes, but no definitive colonization attempts have been made.”

  Outside of the refugee colony at New Arcena was a hell of an exception, Tricia thought. It was like saying that—other than the floor being on fire—everything else in the building was just fine.

  “As for New Arcena, we have a lot to discuss,” General Owen Yorteb said, frowning. He pressed a button on the console at his seat, and the holographic display switched from a readout of solar traffic to a sequence of images of the colony.

  The first few were all innocuous: images of farmers and workers inside their domes cultivating crops and repairing the damage to the old settlement. But then they shifted, showing entire battalions of armed refugees engaging in military drills. Sometimes they were inside the settlement, sometimes they were outdoors, clad in military-grade enviro-suits.

  What was so striking was how many there were. Tricia figured that the refugees would probably defrost a handful of soldiers to defend the colony, but the images showed that work in the hydroponics bays virtually ceased during the military drills.

  “An initial analysis would suggest that the newars selectively brought soldiers and not farmers out of cryo,” Owen continued. “They seem to be practicing relatively advanced tactics. This isn’t basic training, and they’re combining assault drills on top of defensive ones.”

  Another thing was bothering Tricia. During the drills, everyone had an assault rifle. Five months ago, when the Preserver first arrived in the system, she had a marine detail sweep the ship to check for any weapons. Of course, it would’ve been impossible to scour a vessel as big as the Preserver, but they had investigated every armory they could find, and the results were the same: a few lockers filled with handguns, but nothing more advanced than that.

  “Where are those guns coming from?” Tricia asked.

  “We have a theory on that,” Karen spoke up. “We don’t have anything conclusive yet, but known shipping associates of the Syndicate have been making frequent trips to Calimor. Moreover, it appears that most of the rifles we’re seeing in the surveillance footage resemble Syndicate models.”

  Tricia was uncharacteristically silent. Some kind of quip would have been far more on-brand for her, but imagining Isadora Satoro developing ties to the notorious Natonese black market and filling her settlement with soldiers…

  Clearly, she needed to reevaluate her mental image of the woman she was dealing with.

  “This looks like the first stage of an invasion, ma’am. We need to be very careful how we proceed here,” Owen said.

  “They have no warships,” Tricia said. “They can’t seriously be thinking about an actual war.”

  “We have no idea what’s going on in the newars’ heads,” Owen said. “And the bugs we installed in their embassy have all been blocked by some kind of jamming device, which means this footage is our only clue to the newars’ intentions. And it doesn’t look good.”

  Tricia looked around to her other advisers. All of them were giving dark looks at the reel of footage still cycling on the main projector. Even Karen and Philip had frowns on their faces.

  She took it as a personal offense how much Isadora Satoro had been doing under Tricia’s nose. A good judge of character was tantamount to all else in politics, and Tricia had just assumed she had a good one. After all, she’d been successful so far. But now, her caucus was turning against her—was I wrong to ignore them? she suddenly wondered—and Isadora was playing games behind her back.

  She rested her forehead in her palm and closed her eyes. She had hoped to find solace in the situation room, but the same chaos and fragmentation that had gripped Parliament had found her down here.

  “Okay,” she said weakly. “What are our options?”

  “We could send a detachment to Calimor to shut down the flow of Syndicate weapons into the outer rim,” Owen said. “And bring in the colony’s leaders for interrogation.”

  “If you want to do something less overt, I can have the ISB crack down on illicit Syndicate shipping,” Karen said. “They’ve been discreetly smuggling their goods on commercial vessels for ages, just because we’ve had other priorities on our plate. But a flow of weapons to the outer rim at this magnitude could destabilize the entire region of space.”

  “Doing nothing is also an option,” Philip said. Tricia wasn’t sure if he genuinely believed that, or if he was just giving her cover. “They could just be protecting their settlement in case the Junta returns. Or if their relationship with the Horde shows signs of friction.”

  “But that still leaves the issue of weapons smuggling outstanding,” Karen said.

  Tricia thought about ordering the ISB to clamp down on Syndicate smuggling, but she had tangled with the criminal empire before. It rarely ended up being worth it. But there was one thing she wanted to do immediately, regardless of everything else.

  “I wa
nt to talk to Isadora Satoro,” she said, pressing her forearms into the table.

  CHAPTER 28

  * * *

  There were a number of things Tanner hadn’t told his sister Rebecca. The real reason he had been fired from Veltech. His growing involvement with the Offspring. The fact that they were only financially secure due to an influx of contributions from other Offspring members.

  Even still, she seemed worried about him. It was the weekend, and normally she would hole up on her bunk, engrossed in some novel or magazine. Today, she kept checking in on him to see if he was doing okay. If he wanted anything, or if he was interested in getting out for some fresh air.

  He closed the Offspring video he was watching—on silent with subtitles, to not disturb Rebecca—looked up at her, and grinned. “Okay,” he said. “Where do you want to go?”

  Rebecca perked up in excitement. “How about Eltanos Park? It’s only a few stops from here in an airbus…”

  “That sounds good to me,” he said, donning a synthetic fleece jacket he had draped over a desk chair next to the couch. Rebecca ran to the door and wrapped herself in a puffy, insulated coat and draped a satchel around her neck. A minute later, the siblings were out the door and down the staircase.

  It had been a month since Tanner’s boss fired him from Veltech, and they still hadn’t gotten the eviction notice he was sure was coming. The company was probably busy with its new lucrative trade deal with the newars.

  The thought sent a spate of muscle spasms through his arms. He wouldn’t let himself get angry. Not when he was out with his sister. He had even turned down an invitation to attend an Offspring protest at a villa where some of the refugees’ representatives were staying, just to spend more time with Rebecca.