“Of course not. But don’t talk yourself into underestimating him because you want him to be the next Marco Inaros. Duarte won’t hand you a win by being a dumbfuck. He won’t spread himself too thin. He won’t overreach. He won’t make up half a dozen plans and then spin a bottle to pick one. He’s a chess player. And if you act on instinct, do the thing your feelings demand, he’ll beat us all.”
“Give up Medina. And the slow zone. And all the colony worlds.”
“Recognize that they’re occupied territory,” Avasarala said. “Protect what you can protect. Sol system. Reach out where you can, if you can. There are still people loyal to the union on Medina. And Duarte’s intelligence on the last few decades is going to be thin, at least at first. Find angles he doesn’t know. But don’t take him on straight.”
Drummer felt a little click in her heart, the physical sensation of comprehension. Avasarala was making the case for defending Earth. That was why she’d come to her. Drummer and the union, the void cities and the gunships, were critical to keeping Earth and Mars safe. The strategy she was arguing for was all about playing defense, and the thing Drummer would be defending was, in the final analysis, the inner planets. That’s what she and her people would be asked to die for: Earth and Mars and all the people who’d made their civilizations on the back of the Belters back in the days before the union. It wasn’t just strategy. It was naked self-interest.
Also, it was right.
Medina was behind enemy lines now. And Drummer wasn’t going to be able to take it back. That didn’t mean she was powerless.
“So,” she said, “what do we have to work with?”
“The coalition fleet,” Avasarala said. “The union fleet. And whatever agents we can coordinate with on Medina.”
“We can’t reach anyone on Medina,” Drummer said. “The communications channels are all under Duarte’s control.”
Avasarala sighed and looked at her hands. “Yours are,” she said. It took a moment for Drummer to understand.
Avasarala shrugged. “Everyone spies on everyone, Camina. Let’s not pretend to be outraged at water for being wet.”
“You have a way to get messages to Medina?”
“I didn’t say that,” Avasarala said. “But I know a lot of people.”
Chapter Fourteen: Singh
There have been significant changes to the internal structure of the station,” Colonel Tanaka said. “Not that surprising. This was all supposed to be a generation ship that spun at a full g for a few centuries. Now it’s a waystation at a third. A lot of the infrastructure would want rethinking, and there’s never been a Belter ship that didn’t get modified to suit the moment. If they hadn’t purged their security and maintenance databases, we’d know a great deal more. But there’s nothing lost there we can’t build back, given time.”
“I see,” Singh said, considering the possible methods of recapturing the lost data.
“In addition, we’ve recovered one thousand two hundred and sixty-four firearms in our sweeps, the vast majority of which were handguns,” she said, scrolling through a list on her monitor. “Areas with complex compounds that can easily be used in bomb making are under strict security watches, but we’ll need to make some extensive redistribution and security changes before everything can be effectively locked down.”
“Anything else?” Singh asked.
“They still have kitchen knives and power tools. And anything we missed.”
Tanaka was out of her power armor, and her long, lean form was insolently stretched out across a chair in Singh’s office. She was older than him by almost two decades, and he could see her reaction to his relative youth in the way she held her shoulders and the shape of her smile. She playacted respect for him.
The office—his office—was small enough to be functional. A desk, chairs, a small decorative counter with its own bar. The workspace of an important administrator. He’d taken over
a complex that had once been accounting space, based on the names and titles they hadn’t scraped off the doors yet. The ops and command decks, like engineering and the docks, were in the part of the station that was permanently on the float, and he found the idea of working in null g uncomfortable. And more than that, he’d seen from Duarte and from Trejo what a real commander’s space looked like, and it looked humble.
He went back to the issue that bothered him most.
“Twelve hundred guns? There were less than a hundred security personnel on the whole station.”
“Belters have a long tradition of not trusting governmental authorities to protect them,” Tanaka replied with a shrug. “Nearly all of these weapons were in civilian hands.”
“But the Belters are the government here.”
“They’re Belters,” she said, as if her experiences before Laconia explained everything that was happening now. “They resist centralized authority. It’s what they do.” She gave the report one last glance, then slapped the monitor against her arm, where it curled up into a thick bracelet.
“I have meetings today with their ‘centralized authority,’ so that should be illuminating,” Singh said, surprised at the contempt in his voice. Tanaka gave him a little half smile.
“How old were you during the Io campaign?” she asked.
It felt like a bit of a dig. He remembered the Io campaign the way most children in his generation did. The newsfeeds announcing the launches toward Mars. The gut-clenching fear that one of the missiles bearing the alien hybrids would make it as far as the Martian surface. Even after the crisis had passed, the weeks of nightmares. He’d been a child then, and the memory had the near-mythical feel of a story retold until it barely resembled its truth. Those terrible days that had convinced his parents that something more would have to be done to protect humanity from itself and its new discoveries. It had planted the seeds that bloomed under the skies of Laconia.