If Katria had any objections, she kept them to herself.
“Great. So, look. This could have gone better. We kicked your ass and you’re pissed now, I get that. If you want to be part of the revolution, great, we’d love to have you. But you run all your ops through Saba’s group. That’s nonnegotiable. Anything else, and we’re killing you and hiding your bodies in the fertilizer-recycling system.”
Bobbie grabbed the front of Katria’s shirt and picked her back up to her feet, then kept lifting until they were eye to eye.
“Do we understand each other?”
To her surprise, Katria laughed. There was a brightness in her eyes that looked like fever. “We do indeed,” the woman said. It could have been a sparring partner’s salute or the threat of retribution. Bobbie really wished she could tell the difference.
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Drummer
It was easy to forget sometimes that the void cities hadn’t always been there. During the starving years, they’d been something like a dream. A promised land without the land. Homes for the Belt that could move through the gates to whatever system they chose. There had been a magic to them then. A sense of the unprecedented.
Time had worn that shine away. Drummer had spent more time in the last decade on People’s Home and Independence and Guardian than on ships or asteroid stations. They’d become so familiar that they’d bled back in her memory until it felt as though the corridors and chambers had been present since her childhood, even if she hadn’t been on them. Like a city often mentioned, but not visited until adulthood. She had to remind herself that war was always this way. Had always been. Cities had been falling under siege since the time there were cities. Mortars had fallen on schools. Soldiers had stormed hospitals. Bombs had set churches and parks and children on fire. Homes had been lost before now.
The tactical display floating over the table was off by orders of magnitude. If it had been to scale, Independence would have been too small to make out with a microscope. As it was, the identifying code was larger than the ship icon. A smear of light smaller than a crumb of bread that meant a city where two hundred thousand people, more or less, lived and worked, raised children, divorced and married, drank and danced and died. And then burning sunward from it, the evacuation ships—even smaller—that carried as many people as would fit away from the theater of battle. She looked at them and saw all the other times children had been carried away from a disaster that was approaching and that could not be stopped: London, Beijing, Denver. History, she reminded herself, was peppered with moments like this one. It only felt different because this was her city, a void city, and this had never happened before.
She had repurposed the central traffic-control station of People’s Home for this. Military analysts and engineers, some of them union, most of them EMC, sat at the desks where civilians usually were. Feeds to the war rooms on Earth and Mars showed similar rooms with similar people, but considerably less light delay. The screens that usually listed incoming and outgoing ships with approach vectors and expected times were devoted to the incoming signals from all the active telescopy in the Belt. Images of the major observation stations showed when fresh data streams were coming in, where they were coming from, when People’s Home was transmitting. Images from Independence and the dozen EMC ships included flags for time delay—an hour and twenty-three minutes—and a composite of the enemy claimed the central display. Pale as a bone, burning lazily toward the point where the battle would begin. Maybe had begun. Maybe had started and ended in the hour and twenty-three minutes it took light to bring the message to them.
“The, ah, the resolution will get better as we get the signal bounce,” the EMC technician said. She was younger than Drummer had been when she started working on Tycho, with red hair pulled back in a bun and a wide, doughy face. On Earth and Mars, other technicians were probably having the same conversations with the prime minister and secretary-general. “It’s a trade-off, of course, between immediacy of the direct signals and the better information density of delaying a few minutes to get the extra feeds.”
“I just need to know what’s happening,” Drummer said.
Avasarala, who still hadn’t made the passage back to Earth, and Vaughn were at the edge of the room. Admiral Hu was at one of the central control consoles, sitting forward like an overeager schoolgirl at the first lecture of term. She’d come as a forward observer, the military leader of the EMC nearest to the battle without being in it. A bulb of what smelled like green tea rested on a side table Vaughn had brought out so that the admiral wouldn’t risk spilling on the control board. Drummer walked to her less because she wanted to talk than because she had to move.
“Madam President,” Hu said, nodding to her.
“Admiral.”
“Odd being on the same side of a shooting war, isn’t it? I never thought the day would come.”
That says more about you than the reality of things, Drummer thought. The EMC wasn’t its own side any more than Ilus or Surabhi or Neue Ausland were. The dreams of empire faded slowly. It didn’t matter.
“We’ve
got a comm report, Madam President.”
“Play it,” Drummer snapped. The main screen shifted. The Laconian admiral appeared. His voice was patient and calm, but there was a glitter in his eye. An excitement. It made Drummer’s gut ache to see.
“This is Admiral Trejo of the Heart of the Tempest to the approaching warships. I ask that you stand down. Any interference with our ship will be met in kind. Don’t make this worse than it has to be.”
“Fuck you,” Drummer said to the screen, but not softly enough that Admiral Hu didn’t chuckle. It was only ten seconds before the answer came. God, that’s how close the distant war ships all were to each other. Light-seconds.
Emily Santos-Baca, the ranking board member who lived on Independence. Her hair was pulled back in a tight braid in preparation for null g. Or it had been an hour and twenty-three minutes ago.
“Admiral Trejo,” Santos-Baca said, “on behalf of the Transport Union and the Earth-Mars Coalition, I am informing you that your presence in Sol system is a violation of territorial space and is being considered an act of war. Your ship will brake immediately and return to Laconia until appropriate contracts and diplomatic resolutions are in place.”
They were reports from two competing realities. Drummer wished that Santos-Baca’s sounded more plausible. The icons that marked the EMC ships were like dots drawn on the skin of a balloon, the Tempest moving in like a pin. It couldn’t be long. Couldn’t have been.
“The dispersal,” Hu said. “You see that? The way they’re spread out? That’s based on the Medina data your people sent. The spread of that magnetic whatever-the-hell-it-was. We placed the ships so that no matter which one it aims at, it won’t be able to get two. Good, eh?”
“Excellent,” Drummer said. Her throat was dry, but the smell of the tea was a little nauseating.
“The range of it can’t be good either,” Hu said. “The science wonks say the power curve would be logarithmic. Remaining at range should force the bastards to use any other weapons systems they have. Assuming that the magnetic cannon even works in normal space. Because there’s at least one idea that it’s using special properties that only exist in the ring space. And if that’s the case—”
“Gloria.” The old woman’s voice was like a knife. “You’re doing it again.”
Admiral Hu glanced back at Avasarala. Drummer hadn’t heard her approach, but there she was. Her smile was indulgent and warm and, Drummer had to assume, utterly false.