Cibola Burn

Epilogue: Avasarala

Vyakislav Pratkanis, the Martian congressional Speaker of the House, had an excellent poker face. Over three days of meetings and meals and evenings at the theater and cocktails, he’d never registered more than a milquetoast kind of surprise. Either he was panicking on the inside, or he simply didn’t understand the situation. Avasarala’s guess was the latter.

“I’m sorry I can’t come with you this evening,” he said, his hand shaking hers with a crisp, dry efficiency.

“You’re a good liar,” she said with a smile. “Most men who’ve spent so much time with me seem convinced their cocks will fall off if they can’t get away from me.”

His eyes widened with a gentle laughter that he’d almost certainly practiced in a mirror. She responded in kind. The government houses were in Aterpol, the highest-status of the buried neighborhoods of Londres Nova. Six more communities were scattered under the soil of Mars’ Aurorae Sinus. She had to admit, the Martians had done a respectable job recreating the world here underground. The false dome of Aterpol was high above her and lit with a carefully balanced spectrum that managed to convince her lizard brain that she was in the open air of Earth. The government buildings were designed with a light airiness that almost forgave the fact that the entire city—the entire planetary network—was built like a fucking tomb. The absence of a magnetosphere had made Mars’ first priority protection from the radiation. Between that and the low gravity that left her unintentionally skipping down the corridors like a schoolgirl, she hadn’t fallen in love with the planet.

“It has been an honor to share perspectives with you,” he said.

She bowed her head. “Really, Vyakislav. We’re off the clock now. You can stop blowing smoke up my ass.”

“As you say,” the man said, his expression not changing at all. “As you say.”

In the corridor down to the atrium, she tugged at her sari, pulling the cloth back into place. Not that it had particularly been out, but the weight was wrong and the back of her head kept wanting to pull on it until it was right. Soft lights nestled in stone sconces along the walls. The air smelled of sandalwood and vanilla and chimed with gentle, soothing music. It was like the government was a middle-grade day spa.

“Chrisjen!” a man called out as she reached the high-vaulted atrium. She turned back. He was a large man with skin several shades darker than her own and hair only a little whiter than her steel gray. He held out his arms as he walked forward and she embraced him. No one would have guessed, seeing them, that they ran the governments of two of the three great political organizations of humanity. Earth might fear the Belt, and the Belt might resent Earth, but the OPA and the United Nations had diplomatic decorum to maintain, and in truth, she halfway liked the old bastard.

“You weren’t going to leave without saying goodbye, were you?” he asked.

“I don’t ship until tomorrow,” she said. “I was just going out for dinner with friends.”

“Well, I’m pleased to see you all the same. Do you have a minute?”

“For the military head to the largest terrorist organization in known space?” she said. “How could I not. What’s on your mind?”

Fred Johnson walked forward slowly and she fell into step with him. The atrium was polished stone. A fountain in the center let water flow slowly down the sides of an abstract and genderless human figure. He sat at the fountain’s edge. She thought the slow ripples made the liquid seem oily.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t support you more in there,” Fred said. “But you understand how it is.”

“I do. We’ll do what we can around the edges, the same as we always do.”

“We have a lot of Belters in those ships. If I take too hard a line with them, it’ll be worse than taking one that’s too soft.”

“You don’t have to apologize to me,” Avasarala said. “We’re both constrained by the realities of the situation. And anyway, at least we’re not as fucked as Pratkanis.”

“I know,” Johnson said, shaking his head.

“Is Anderson Dawes still managing the political side out there?”

Johnson shrugged. “For the most part. It’s herding kittens. If kittens had a lot of guns and an overdose of neo-Libertarian property theory. What about you? How’s Gao doing as secretary-general?”

“She isn’t stupid, but she’s learning to fake it,” Avasarala said. “She’ll say all the right words and make all the right hand gestures. I’ll see to it.” Fred Johnson grunted. The fountain burbled and the crappy soothing music failed to soothe. She felt like they were on the edge of something, but that was an illusion. In truth, they’d gone over the edge a long time back.

“Take care of yourself, Fred,” she said.

“We’ll be in touch.”

Joint Martian and UN security had blocked off the tube station for her. She sat in a tube car with blacked-out windows and three armed security men at the doors. The shaped-plastic seat faced the side, and she could see herself in the reflection. She looked tired, but at least the low g made her seem younger. She was afraid age had been making her jowly. The car hissed along its track. Outside, the tube was in vacuum to reduce drag. She laid her head against the side of the car and let her eyes close for a moment.

Mars had been the first. Not the first station or the first colony, but the first attempt by humanity to cut ties from Earth. The upstart colony that declared its independence. And if Solomon Epstein hadn’t been a Martian and hadn’t perfected his drive just when he had, Mars would have been the site of the first true interplanetary war. Instead, Earth and Mars had made the kind of rough friendship where each side could feel superior to the other and they’d set about carving up the solar system. So it had been for as long as she could remember.

That was the danger of being old and a politician. Habits outlived the situations that created them. Policies remained in place after the situations that inspired them had changed. The calculus of all human power was changing, and the models she used to make sense of it shifted with them, and she had to keep reminding herself that the past was a different place. She didn’t live there anymore.

The tube stopped in Nariman, and Avasarala got out. The station was packed with locals who’d been put off until her journey was complete. On Earth, they would have been a mishmash of Anglo and African, Asiatic and Polynesian. Here, they were Martian, and she was an Earther. As the security detail ushered her out to an electric cart, she wondered what they would be next. New Terrans, she supposed. Unless the squatters’ naming schema won out. Then… what? Ilusians? Illusions? It was a stupid fucking name.

And God, but she was tired. It was all so terribly large and so terribly dangerous, and she was so tired.

The private room at the back of the restaurant had been closed off for her. A space made for two, maybe three hundred people. Crystal chandeliers. Silverware that was actually silver. Cut crystal wineglasses and carpeting that had been manufactured to mimic centuries-old Persian carpets. Bobbie Draper sat at the table making everything around her seem small just by being near it.

“Fuck,” Avasarala said. “Am I late?”

“They told me to come here early for the security check,” Bobbie said, standing up. Avasarala walked to her. It was odd. She could embrace Fred Johnson with ease and grace, and she barely cared about him as anything more than a political rival and a tool. Bobbie Draper she genuinely liked, and she wasn’t sure whether she should hug the former gunnery sergeant, shake her hand, or just sit down and pretend they saw each other every day. She opted for the last.

“So veteran’s outreach?” she said.

“It pays the bills,” Bobbie said.

“Fair enough.”

A young man with sharp, beautiful features and carefully manicured hands ghosted forward and poured water and wine for them both.

“And how have you been?” Bobbie asked.

“All right, over all. I got a new hip. Arjun says it makes me cranky.”

“He can tell?”

“He’s got a lot of practice. I fucking hate the new job, though. Assistant to the undersecretary was perfect for me. All the power, less of the bullshit. Now with the promotion, I have to travel. Meet with people.”

“You met with people before,” Bobbie said, sipping the water and ignoring the wine. “That’s what you do. You meet with people.”

“Now I have to go there first. I don’t like being on a ship for weeks to have a conversation I could have had over a link from my own fucking desk.”

“Yeah,” Bobbie said, smiling. “I think I see what Arjun meant.”

“Don’t be a smartass,” Avasarala said, and the beautiful young man brought them salads. Crisp lettuce and radishes, dark, salty olives. None of it had ever seen the sun. She picked up her fork. “And now this.”

“I’ve been following it in the newsfeeds. Right-to-gate access treaties?”

“No, that’s bullshit. We feed that to the reporters so they have something to talk about. We’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

Bobbie’s fork paused halfway to her mouth. She frowned. Avasarala swigged down half a glass of wine. It was good, she supposed.

“The problem,” she said, pointing her fork at Bobbie for emphasis, “is that I trusted James Holden. Not to do anything I told him to. I’m not an idiot. But I thought he would be himself.”

“Himself, how?”

Avasarala took a bite of the lettuce. “Do you know how many ships are on track to the Ring? Right now, right now, we have sixteen hundred ships, and every one of them has been watching New Terra like they were reading fucking tea leaves. Johnson and I sent Holden to mediate because he was the perfect person to show what a clusterfuck it was out there. How ugly it could be. I was expecting press releases every time someone sneezed. The man starts wars all the fucking time, only this time, when I needed a little conflict? Now he’s the fucking peacemaker.”

“I don’t understand,” Bobbie said. “Why did you want conflict?”

“To put the brakes on,” Avasarala said. “To save Mars. Only I couldn’t.”

Bobbie put down her fork. The beautiful young man had vanished. He was good at this job. It was time for them to be truly alone.

“A thousand suns, Bobbie. Three orders of magnitude more than we have ever had before. Can you even imagine that, because most days, I can’t. And some—maybe all—have at least one planet with a breathable atmosphere. A place that can sustain life. It’s what they were selected for. Whatever those fucking boojums were that made the protomolecule, they were looking for places like Earth. And places like Earth are what they found. Places a lot more like Earth than Mars is. New Terra was the precedent, and the precedent is a fucking feel-good story about how we all come together in a pinch. We have an example of how, if you just get out to one of these planets fast enough and squat hard enough, you get to keep it. Welcome to the greatest migration in the history of human civilization. Fred Johnson thinks he can keep control of it because he’s got the choke point at Medina Station, but he’s also got the OPA. It’s already too late.”

“Why try to control it at all? Why not let people settle where they want?”

“Because Mars,” Avasarala said.

“I don’t understand.”

“Mars has the second largest fleet in the system. Something like fifteen thousand nuclear warheads. Sixteen battlecruisers. Who the fuck knows how many other fighting vessels. The ships are newer than Earth’s. The designs are better. They’re faster. They have heat signature masking and fast water cycling and high-energy proton cannons.”

“The proton cannons are a myth.”

“They aren’t. So here you have the second most powerful navy that there is. What’s going to happen to it?”

“It’s going to protect Mars.”

“Mars is dead, Bobbie. Holden and this Havelock sonofabitch and Elvi Okoye, whoever the fuck she is? They killed it. Half the Martian government understands, and they’re shitting themselves so hard, they won’t have bones left. Who the fuck’s going to stay on Mars? A thousand new worlds where you don’t have to live in caves and wear environment suits to walk under the sky. No one’s going to be here. Do you know what would happen if half the population of Earth left for the worlds beyond the Ring?”

“What?”

“We’d knock down some walls and make bigger apartments. That’s how many people we have on basic. Do you know what happens to Mars if twenty percent of the population leaves?”

“The terraforming project shuts down?”

“The terraforming project shuts down. And upkeep on the basic infrastructure becomes harder. The tax base collapses. The economy craters. The Martian state fails. That is going to happen, and the one chance we had to keep it in check is gone. You will have a shell of a government with a planet nobody wants because nobody needs. The raw materials they have to put on the market are now abundant in a thousand new systems where the mining is simple and you don’t choke to death on vacuum if the rig fails out. And the one thing—the one thing—you have left you can sell? Your one resource?”

“Is fifteen thousand nuclear weapons,” Bobbie said.

“And the ships to use them. Who’s going to have those ships when Mars is a ghost town, Bobbie? Where are they going to go? Who are they going to kill? We’re all moving out our pawns for the first interstellar military conflict. And James Holden, who could have made New Terra a poster for why you might rather stay home and give us a little breathing room, instead found a bright new way to fuck things up.”

“By succeeding?”

“By some definition of that word.”

“The planet blew up on him,” Bobbie said.

“Small favors,” Avasarala replied with a snort.

“Well,” Bobbie said. “Shit.”

“Yes.”

They were quiet for a long moment. Bobbie looked at her salad without seeing it. Avasarala finished her wine. She could see the former marine tracking though the lines of implication and consequence. Bobbie’s eyes went hard.

“This dinner. We’re at a recruitment meeting, aren’t we?”

Avasarala folded her hands.

“Bobbie, as long as we’re all pushing out our pieces…”

“Yes?”

“I need to put you back on the board, soldier.”