Persepolis Rising

Chapter Thirteen: Drummer

McCahill, head of the security council, spread his hands before him like he was trying to talk a gunman into putting down his weapon. “We were all taken by surprise. And I think we can all agree this was a failure of intelligence.”

“Well, if we all agree, then I guess it’s not a problem,” Drummer said. McCahill flinched a little. “What the hell happened out there?”

The meeting room was small—McCahill, Santos-Baca, and the present liaison of the Earth-Mars Coalition, Benedito Lafflin. And Vaughn haunting the back of the room like a funeral director at a wake. There were others in her feed. Messages from every division of the union and dozens of organizations outside it too. A kicked anthill the size of the solar system, and all of them wanting answers and leadership from her. It would take days to view all of them, weeks to reply, and she didn’t have the time or the energy. She needed answers.

Answers and a way to turn time backward long enough to undo what had already happened.

Lafflin was a thick-faced man with a tight haircut that made him look like a particularly self-satisfied toad. He cleared his throat. “Data on Laconia has always been thin,” he said. He had a reedy voice and the manner of a doctor explaining why he’d left a sponge in someone’s belly by mistake. “The defecting forces from Mars have been playing their keep-away message since before the Transport Union was chartered. They’ve flooded the gate from the realspace side with chatter along the whole electromagnetic spectrum—radio, visible light, X-ray, everything. We’ve had no passive intelligence to speak of. The few times that probes were sent through, they were disabled or destroyed.

“The official doctrine put in during the first years of the union was blockade. The navies of Earth and Mars were both badly damaged in the fight against the Free Navy, the focus of governance was disaster recovery on Earth and minimizing the collapse of infrastructure. Laconia never presented an active threat, and …”

“You’re telling me the missing navy was just never a priority?” Drummer said, but she already knew the answer: Yes, that’s what he was saying.

Sleeping dogs had been left to lie until they were good and rested. And the sting of it was worse because some of that at least had been during her watch. She was as guilty as anyone of taking her eye off the ball.

The images that had come through from Medina were surreal. The ship that had sailed through from Laconia didn’t resemble anything that had gone out through the gate decades ago. The blast that had scattered the Tori Byron was more like high-energy stellar phenomena than a weapon humanity had conceived. And the destruction of the rail-gun emplacements had been accompanied by a blast of gamma radiation from the gates themselves that Cameron Tur had described as the energetic equivalent of a solar flare. It had destroyed the Sharon Chavez, a freighter that had been waiting for clearance from Medina’s traffic control. Her crew died in the blink of an eye, and not even from a direct attack. It wasn’t something Drummer could get her mind to accept. It was too big. Too strange. Too sudden.

“The attacker has disabled the relay network,” Vaughn said, answering something Santos-Baca had asked. “There are no new signals coming in or out of the ring space. Medina is effectively cut off.”

Drummer squeezed her fists until they ached. She couldn’t let her mind wander like that. It didn’t matter that she felt traumatized. The union was under attack, and it was all on her. She had to keep focus. “We do have some record from the freighter that was parked outside the gate. The interference is too severe to get anything with high definition, but enough that we can say with some confidence that Medina Station was boarded. We have to assume it’s been taken.”

“Can we get data through the gates?” Drummer asked. “Radio loud enough to carry through the interference on both sides? Or tightbeams? Something to get messages to the other systems?”

“It’s possible,” Lafflin said in a tone of voice that meant he didn’t actually think it was possible. “But it would certainly be monitored. And our encryption schema aren’t breakable by any known tech, but we’re not looking at known tech.” His hand terminal chimed. He glanced at the message and lifted his eyebrow. “Excuse me for a moment. Someone’s made a mistake.”

Drummer waved her permission, and the inner left them to themselves. When the doors had closed behind him, she turned to Santos-Baca and McCahill. “Well, seeing as it’s just us, what are the options?”

“If we can find a way to communicate with the other systems, we can coordinate a counterattack,” Santos-Baca said. “I’ve been putting together a spreadsheet of the resources we have in each system.”

“Let me see,” Drummer said. Santos-Baca flipped the data to Drummer’s display. More than thirteen hundred gates, each opening onto a new solar system. Almost all of them with colonies that varied from barely functioning villages to scientific complexes that were on the ragged edge of self-sustainability. The union’s void cities were the largest ships, but she could only pour attacking forces through so quickly without losing them to the gate’s glitches. She’d be sending them through one at a time to be mowed down. She pressed her fingers to her lips, pinching the flesh against her teeth until it ached a little. There was a way. There had to be a way.

She had to put first things first. And that meant reestablishing communications with all the union forces in all the systems. Some kind of stealth relay system had to be put in place. Maybe some kind of feint that would draw the enemy’s attention long enough to let her sneak new repeaters on either side of if not all the gates, then a strategic few—

“Ma’am,” Lafflin said from behind her, “please, you can’t—”

An unfamiliar voice answered. “Give it a fucking rest, Benedito. I can do whatever the fuck I want. Who’s going to tell me not to? You?”

The old woman moved slowly, using a cane even in the light gravity of People’s Home. Her hair was blindingly white, thinning, and pulled back in a bun at the base of her skull. Her skin was slack and papery, but there was an intelligence in her eyes that the years hadn’t dimmed. She looked up at Drummer, and smiled with the warmth of a grandmother. “Camina. It’s good to see you. I got the first shuttle I could. How’s your brother doing?”

Drummer pushed through a flurry of reactions—surprise that the woman was here, a flicker of starstruck awe, disorientation at being called by her first name in public, distrust that Chrisjen Avasarala—the retired grand dame of inner-planet politics—knew about her brother at all, and finally the solid certainty that every feeling she’d just experienced had been anticipated. More than anticipated. Designed. It was all a manipulation, but done so well and with such grace that knowing that didn’t make it ineffective.

“He’s fine,” Drummer said. “The regrowth went well.”

“Good, good,” Avasarala said, lowering herself into a chair. “Astounding what they can do with neural replacement these days. When I was growing up, they cocked it up more than they got it right. I had most of my peripheral nervous system redone a couple years ago. Works better than the old stuff, except my leg gets restless at night.”

Santos-Baca and McCahill both smiled, but with anxiety in their eyes.

“Ma’am,” Lafflin said, “please. We’re in the middle of a meeting.”

“You can finish it later,” Avasarala said. “President Drummer and I need to talk.”

“I didn’t see you on my schedule,” Drummer said mildly. Avasarala turned back to her. The warmth was gone, but the intellect was there, sharp and feral.

“I’ve been where you are right now,” the old woman said. “I’m the only one in the whole human race who has. The way your stomach feels when you try to eat? The part of you that’s screaming all the time, even when you’re acting calm? The guilt? Anyone who’s had a child in the hospital has suffered through that shit. But the part where all human history rides on what you do, and you only get one shot? That’s only you and me. I came because you need me here.”

“I appreciate—”

“You’re about to fuck up,” Avasarala said, and her voice was harder than stone. “I can keep that from happening. And we can have that conversation here in front of these poor fucking shitheads, or you can roll your eyes and humor the crazy old bitch with a cup of tea and we can have a little privacy. You can blame me for it. I won’t mind. I’m too old and tired for shame.”

Drummer laced her fingers together. Her jaw ached, and she had to focus to unclench it. She wanted to scream. She wanted to have Avasarala thrown out of the city in a plastic emergency bubble with a note tacked to her cane that said Make an appointment first. She wanted to see McCahill and Santos-Baca look at her with awe and fear at the violence of her reaction. And none of those things had anything to do with Chrisjen Avasarala. They were all of them about what had happened to Medina.

“Vaughn,” Drummer said. “Could you get Madam Avasarala a pot of tea? We’ll take a recess of an hour or so.”

“Of course, Madam President,” Vaughn said. The others rose from their chairs. Santos-Baca took a moment to shake Avasarala’s hand before she left. Drummer scratched her chin even though it didn’t itch and kept her temper until the room was empty except for the two of them. When she spoke, it was with a careful, measured tone.

“If you ever undermine me like that again, I will find a way to make everyone in the EMC stop taking your calls. I will isolate you like no one this side of a prison door has ever been isolated. You’ll spend the last days of your life trying to talk interns into getting you coffee.”

“It was a dick move,” Avasarala said, pouring a cup of tea for herself and then another one for Drummer. “It’s my fault. I overreact when I’m scared.”

She hobbled across the room and set the mug down in front of Drummer. An act of submission as calculated as everything she’d done. Whether it was sincere or insincere didn’t matter. She’d kept the form. Drummer picked up the tea, blew across it, and sipped. Because keeping the form was all that was keeping her together now too. Avasarala nodded her approval and went back to her seat.

“I’m scared too,” Drummer said.

“I know. That was some frightening shit that came back from Medina. That ship? I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve never seen speculation about anything like it.” Avasarala picked up her own mug, sipped, and nodded toward the tea. “This is good.”

“We grow it here. Real leaves.”

“All the food chemists in the system will never do better than evolution at making a decent tea leaf.”

“How am I about to fuck up?”

“By trying to get back your losses,” Avasarala said. “It’s not just you either. You’re going to have advisors on all sides who want the same damn thing. Mass a force to reclaim Medina, find a way to coordinate, take the fight back to Laconia. Through a massive effort and at tremendous cost, push our way back to the status quo ante.”

“Sunk-cost fallacy?”

“Yes.”

“So you don’t think—” Drummer had to stop. The words were physically gagging her. She swallowed more tea, the heat of it loosening her throat. “You don’t think we can get the slow zone back?”

“How the fuck would I know? But I do know you can’t get it back as your first step. And I know how much you want to. It feels like if you’re just smart enough, fast enough, strong enough now, it won’t have happened the way it already did. But that’s not how it’s going to work. And I know how consuming that grief can be. Grief makes people crazy. It did me.”

It was like the air mix in the room was wrong. Nothing Avasarala was saying was news to her, but the sympathy in the old woman’s voice was worse than shouting. A vast fear, wide and cruel, welled up in Drummer’s gut. She put her mug back down with a click, and Avasarala nodded.

“I was briefed about Duarte, back in the day,” the old woman said. “Mars didn’t want to share anything back then. I thought at the time it was because they’d just been surprise ass-fucked by one of their own, and it was shame. That was true as far as it went, but after I retired, I made him a hobby of mine.”

“A hobby?”

“I’m shitty at quilting. I had to do something,” she said, waving a hand. Then a moment later, “I found his thesis.”

The little book she held out was printed on thin paper with a pale-green cover. It was rough against her fingertips. The title was in a simple font with no adornment: Logistics-Based Strategy in Interplanetary Conflict, by Winston Duarte.

“He wrote it at university,” Avasarala said. “He tried to have it published, but it never went anywhere. It was enough to get him a position in the Martian Navy, put him on a career path.”

“All right,” Drummer said, thumbing through the pages.

“After the Free Navy, the best intelligence services in two worlds went over that man’s life in so much detail you could get the Christian names of every flea that bit him. I’ve read … fuck, fifty analyses? Maybe more than that. It all comes back to those hundred and thirty pages there.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s a plan for Mars to take control of the solar system away from Earth and the Belt without firing a shot. And it would have worked.”

Drummer frowned, opened the book to a random page. The control of resources can be achieved through three strategies: occupation, influence, and economic necessity. Of these, occupation is the least stable. A chart on the facing page listed minerals and their locations in the Belt. Avasarala was watching her, dark eyes fixed and penetrating. When she spoke, her voice was soft.

“At twenty years old, Winston Duarte saw the path that none of his superiors did. That no one on Earth did. He laid it all out, point by point, and the only reason history ran the way it did is that no one took much notice. Then he was a good, solid career officer for decades, until he saw something—an opportunity, maybe—in the data from the first wave of probes that went through the gates. Without changing the time of day when he got his hair cut, he shifted into engineering the biggest theft in the history of warfare. He took the only active protomolecule sample, enough ships to defend a gate, and engineered the chaos that knocked Earth and Mars on their asses.”

“I know all that,” Drummer said.

“You do,” Avasarala said. “And you know what that means. But you’re scared and you’re traumatized and you don’t want to look it in the face because your husband is on Medina Station.”

Drummer picked up her tea and sipped without tasting it. Her stomach felt tight. Her throat was thick. Avasarala waited, letting the silence stretch between them. Saba was on Medina Station. It was a thought she’d been avoiding, and it was like touching a wound.

“Duarte’s good,” Drummer said at last. “He’s very good at what he does. And he came back in his own time and on his own terms.”

“Yes,” Avasarala agreed.

“You’re telling me he won’t overreach.”

“I’m telling you he came back because he thinks he can win,” Avasarala said. “And if he thinks that, you should prepare yourself for the idea that it’s true.”

“There’s no point, then,” Drummer said. “We should just roll over? Put our necks under his boot and hope he doesn’t step on us too hard?”

“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.”