“Tribute,” Vaughn said. “A pledge of financial and resource support if called on, but with very little suggestion that there will be occasion for it.”
“Plus the promise that he won’t kill the shit out of them, I’m guessing?”
Vaughn’s smile was flinty. “Fisk didn’t make that explicit, but I think the implication’s there, yes.”
Drummer pressed her hand to her chin, stood up. Part of her wanted to send Vaughn to the med bay to come back with something to keep her awake. Amphetamines, cocaine, anything stronger than another bulb of tea.
“It’s been a long day,” she said. “When the EMC’s messages start coming through, tell them to calm their shit down, and that we’re going to address this.”
“And for the board members?” Vaughn asked.
“Tell ’em the same,” Drummer said as she walked out. “Tell ’em it’s all under control.”
Back in her quarters, she stripped, leaving her clothes in a pathway from the door to the shower. She stood under the near-scalding water, letting it run down her back and over her face. It felt wonderful. Heat conduction as raw, physical comfort. Eventually, she killed the water, took a towel to sluice off most of the moisture, and then dropped to her crash couch, one arm flung over her eyes. Exhaustion pulled down into the gel more powerfully than the spin of the drum. She waited for the despair to come.
It didn’t. The union was facing an existential threat. The fragile fabric of human civilization in the colonies was ripping before her eyes, and she was relieved. From her first memories to the death of the Free Navy, she’d been a Belter and a member of one faction or another of the OPA. Her brain and soul and identity had all matured with the inners’ boot at her throat. At the throat of everyone she loved.
The respectability of Tycho Station and then of the union and now of the presidency had been her dream from the start. The prospect of a Belter reaching power equal to the inners had guided her on, if not for her, then at least a Belter like her. And like all dreams, the closer she’d come to it, the better she understood what it really was. For years, she’d worn power and authority like it was someone else’s jumpsuit. Now, with Duarte and Laconia, everything she’d built was falling away. And part of her was happy about it. She’d been raised to fight against great powers. To wage wars she couldn’t win, but also couldn’t lose. Returning to that now was a staggering loss, but it also felt like coming home.
Her mind began to slip away, her consciousness falling into dream. History was a cycle. Everything that had happened before, all the way back through the generations, would happen again. Sometimes the wheel turned quickly, sometimes it was slow. She could see it like a feed gear, all teeth and bearings with her on the rim along with everybody else. Her last thought before forgetfulness took her and she fell deeply into slumber was that even with the gates, nothing really ever changed so much as repeated itself, over and over, with all new people, forever.
Which, in light of the next morning’s first meeting, was more than a little ironic.
“We’ve never seen anything like this before.” She’d known Cameron Tur professionally since she’d first taken a job with the union, and he’d never registered as more than vaguely interested in anything.
Now he sat across the table from her, gesturing with a tortilla like he was conducting an orchestra with it. His eyes were wide and bright, his voice higher and faster than usual, and she couldn’t make out what the hell he was saying.
“Hot places in space,” she repeated, looking at the schematic. “So, like stealth ships? Are you saying there are stealth ships waiting outside the ring gate?”
“No, no, no,” Tur said. “Not that kind of hot. Not temperature hot.”
Drummer gave a short, frustrated laugh and put the hand terminal down. “Okay, maybe we should try this again like you were talking to a civilian. There are these areas we’ve seen that are … what exactly?”
“Well,” Tur said, nodding more to himself than to her. “Of course you know that a vacuum isn’t really empty. There are always electromagnetic waves and particles that pop in and out of existence. Quantum fluctuation.”
“My background is in security and politics,” she said.
“Oh. Right,” Tur said. He seemed to notice his tortilla, took a bite from it. “Well, vacuum state isn’t at all just emptiness. There are always spontaneous quantum creations and annihilations. Hawking-Zel’dovich radiation that allows for—”
“Security, Tur. Politics and security.”
“Sorry. Really small things just show up and then they just go away,” Tur said. “Much smaller than atoms. It happens all the time. It’s perfectly normal.”
“All right,” Drummer said, and took a sip of her morning coffee. Either it was a little more bitter than usual or she was overly sensitive today.
“So when we turned all the sensor arrays on the gate? To try to get more information about the war and all that? There was interference we couldn’t make sense of. It was like the kind we see when si
gnals pass through the gates, but it wasn’t localized there. It was out in normal space.” He pulled the schematic back up. “Here and here and here. That we know of. There may be others, but we haven’t done a full sweep looking for them. But we never saw anything like this, and the logs make it seem like they may have appeared about the same time that the Laconian ship went through the gate. Or when it fired at the ring station. We don’t have great data on timing.”
“All right,” Drummer said again. She was growing impatient.
“It’s the rate, you see. The rates of quantum creation and annihilation are … they’re through the roof. The uptick is massive.”
She was still struggling to get her mind around the idea that emptiness wasn’t empty, but something about the awe in Tur’s voice sent a chill down her back all the same.
“So you’re telling me … what exactly?”
“That the space near the ring started boiling,” Tur said. “And we don’t know why.”