He blinked. “Ah … Well, that’s …”
Drummer smiled. “I’ll probably still be okay with it. What do you have?”
He took out a hand terminal and threw the data onto the conference room wall. The solar system unfolded before them. Nothing quite to scale, of course. Space was too huge and too empty for that. The fleets of Earth and Mars and the Transport Union were all outlined—location and vector for everything in transit, planetary body and orbital period for everything else. All of it tracked through time. Nothing was ever at rest.
And on the edge of the system, hell and gone from anything, the gate where the enemy would arrive.
“Given what we know about the enemy battleship,” Lafflin began, “we have worked up several scenarios that we think will give our combined forces the best tactical advantage. The first, of course, being to interrupt it in transit.”
“Walk me through it,” Drummer said.
For the next two hours, Drummer reviewed scenario after scenario after scenario. Lafflin made his case for each of them. Another person like him
was with every member of the union board making all the same arguments. Soon the debates would start. With the void cities, the union had a fleet at least as powerful as the EMC. If Saba could make contact with ships in the colonies, it might be possible to coordinate attacks on the slow zone, no matter what Avasarala thought. If not, there was local action to be done on Medina that might be just as good or better.
Time after time, his plans came back to the same thing—protecting Earth, protecting Mars. Keeping the inners from being disrupted, no matter what the cost. Her guess was that the board would see the same things she did. And then …
She hadn’t wanted to be a police force for the thirteen hundred worlds. She certainly hadn’t wanted to lead a military. But with every new twist, every tactical suggestion, she heard the imagined voices of the board, of Secretary-General Li, of Avasarala. It wouldn’t work. Someone was going to have to take charge, and she didn’t see many scenarios where that wasn’t her.
“Thank you,” she said when the last of the imagined battles had played out on her monitor. “I appreciate your time. Let me confer, and we’ll talk again in the morning?”
“Thank you, Madam President,” he said as Vaughn escorted him out of the room.
As soon as he was gone, she pulled up the scenarios, paging through them all again without him. They’d considered mining their side of the gate with a wall of high-yield nukes, but abandoned it because no one was really sure if the ring could be damaged or not. A safer plan was a series of ships looping up above the ecliptic, doing a high burn and dumping gravel that could make a stone veil over the mouth of the gate. She would be able to control when there were gaps that allowed passage and when any ship making the transit would step into a shotgun blast. And it would last until they ran out of reaction mass and gravel. It was a Belter tactic. Another gift from the old days. She thought about putting the idea in her response to the EMC, but the truth was she didn’t need their permission, and the void city Independence was close enough to the gate that if they went on the burn now, they could have something in place before the board even finished debating …
Drummer let her head sink into her hands. Her neck ached and a deep, vague craving bothered her—something like thirst, but without a clear sense of what could slake it. If anything could.
She heard the door open behind her, but she didn’t bother looking up. Whoever it was, she didn’t care. And anyway, it would only be Vaughn.
“Madam President,” Vaughn said.
“Yeah.”
“Something’s come through you should probably see.”
“Something wonderful that’s going to fill my life with joy?”
“No.”
She sat up, waving one hand in a circle. Get on with it.
“There’s been a new transmission from Medina,” Vaughn said. “On the official feeds.”
“More threats and posturing from Laconia? Or have they made the war official?”
“Neither one,” Vaughn said, and took the monitor focus. A simple video feed of a podium in front of a few tiers of chairs. Drummer was a little surprised by the simple blue curtains at the back. She’d expected more imperial pomp. A Signa Romanum with a double-headed eagle. The chairs were filled with people meant to look like journalists, whether they were or not.
Carrie Fisk walked into the frame and took her place at the podium. Drummer felt her mouth go hard.
“Thank you all for coming today,” Fisk said, nodding to her audience. She gathered herself. Looked out, then down again. “Since its creation, the Association of Worlds has been a staunch advocate of independence and planetary sovereignty. As such, we have tracked issues of self-rule in the newly colonized systems and fought for the rights of people living on them. The hegemonic power of Sol system and the Transport Union have proven time and again that those in power have valued the systems unequally. Sol and the union have claimed a de facto sovereignty over what they have, through their actions, made clear they consider second-class planets and governments.”
“Oh, fuck you,” Drummer murmured. “Fuck you and your quisling bullshit.”
“I have had the opportunity to meet several times with the representatives of the Laconian system about the future of the ring gates and the nature of commerce and governance between the worlds. And I am very happy to be able to say that the Association of Worlds has voted unanimously to accept Laconia’s offers of protection and the coordination of trade. In exchange, High Consul Duarte has accepted the association’s requirements for self-rule and political autonomy. With this—”
Drummer killed the feed. Duarte had planned this too. Not only the military campaign but the story that made it something other than a blatant conquest. He came back because he thinks he can win, and if he thinks that, you should prepare yourself for the idea that it’s true. Carrie Fisk would be on the newsfeeds of thirteen hundred worlds—worlds that Drummer was cut off from—and the story she told would find rich enough soil to take root.
“Self-rule and political autonomy?” she said. “At the end of a gun? How does that work?”