Persepolis Rising

Chapter Nineteen: Drummer

The image was grainy, the sound almost as much noise as signal. Half a dozen encryption layers poured on and then stripped back out left their artifacts in the flattened audio and near-false colors. Drummer’s heart softened all the same, because there in the middle of it—unmistakably—was Saba. His eyes had the little puff at the lower lid that he got when he was tired, but his smile was luminous.

“No savvy you how good it was to get your message, Cami,” he said. “Heart outside my body, you are. And no one better than us two to be where we’re sitting.”

“I love you too,” she told the screen, but only because no one else was in her office.

Avasarala’s covert contacts had come through faster than Drummer had hoped. That they’d come through at all was something of a shock. She had been willing to believe the old woman was overstating her powers, claiming a level of influence that retirement and age had long since taken from her. But here was evidence that, whatever else she was, Chrisjen Avasarala wasn’t completely full of shit. Saba had burrowed deep into Medina Station like a tick, making connections with as many union operatives as he safely could. And by union, more often than not, he meant OPA.

She listened and took notes by hand as he went through his full report. Writing it out helped her to remember. Sixty-eight people on Medina Station broken into independent cells that went from three to eight. The amateur, botched assassination and the crackdown that followed. Saba didn’t have to say that he was using it to recruit more for his effort. That was obvious. The focus moving forward was intelligence gathering and infrastructure. Avasarala’s network was all well and good, but having multiple backups, blind zones in the station where the Laconian security couldn’t reach, and opening backdoors into the communications of the enemy were how to prepare for the next wave. And find out what the next wave was going to be.

Drummer found herself nodding with his words, thinking through their implications. The Laconians were routing their comms through a destroyer-sized ship docked on Medina with heavy encryption and an off-ship decrypt local to the station to physically isolate the two. No good way to gather intelligence there, and no chance of breaking into the enemy’s system. She’d need to find the firmware code for the antennas and repeaters. Maybe Avasarala’s henchmen in the Earth-Mars Coalition had some exploits they’d been sitting on that she could pass on to Saba. The Laconian checkpoints were tying up a third of their ground force. That kept the soldiers busy in the known and public corridors, and gave Saba’s people more time to create bolt holes and blind zones. If the crackdown slacked off, they’d want to do something provocative to keep the enemy busy with identity checks and traffic control. Trivial security theater, while the underground dug more tunnels into the body of the station. It was possible that all the updated plans for Medina were in Laconian hands. Any known holes, they had to assume were known to all the players, but making new ones wouldn’t be hard for Saba. He understood smuggling as well as she ever had, and maybe better.

The message ended with Saba’s impish grin.

“You watch you, m’dil,” he said, and blew a kiss to the camera. “Live like you’re dead.”

Drummer touched the screen as if it were his cheek, but it was cold and hard. Live like you’re dead. There was a phrase she hadn’t heard in a long time. Once, it had been the motto of the Voltaire Collective. A call to courage with a fatalistic bravado that angry adolescents found romantic. She’d found it romantic once too.

She checked the time. Saba’s message had run almost twenty minutes. Part of her found it hard to believe it had been that long. She could have drunk in the sound of his voice for another hour and still been thirsty. From her screen after screen after screen of written notes, it was astounding that he’d fit so much information into so short a time.

She went through all she’d written again, committing it to memory, then wiped her notes. Information couldn’t be compromised if it didn’t exist. She put in a comm request for Vaughn. He answered immediately.

“Where do we stand with the military attaché?” she asked.

“Waiting on word from you, ma’am,” Vaughn said.

“Have them in the conference room in ten minutes.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Vaughn said. There was a surreptitious pleasure in his voice. The diplomats and coordinators from the Earth-Mars Coalition had been flooding into People’s Home since the fall of Medina, and Vaughn enjoyed telling them what to do. It was probably a vice, but she didn’t mind indulging it.

Drummer rose from her desk and stretched. Her spine popped once between her shoulders, loudly. She yawned, but not from fatigue. It was the kind of yawn that a runner made before a race. The deep inhalation of someone anticipating great effort. If she’d been keeping a normal schedule, her watch would almost be over. That wasn’t how she lived anymore. Now she was awake when she needed to be awake, and asleep when she could. Sin ritma they’d called that lifestyle back when she’d been younger. It was harder on her body now, and it took an extra bulb of coffee to sharpen her mind sometimes, but it also left her smiling in a way she didn’t wholly understand.

Benedito Lafflin, the EMC liaison, was waiting for her twenty minutes later. His fist was closed around a bulb of soda water that was already half collapsed. His wide, toadlike face looked less smug than usual. “Madam President,” he said, standing.

Drummer waved him back down. As she sat, Vaughn brought her a bulb of tea. She took a sip. Hot, but not scalding. Vaughn drifted back to the wall like he was part of the ship’s machinery.

“What are we looking at?” Drummer said.

Lafflin cleared his throat. “Candidly? I think you’re going to be quite happy with the plan.”

“Are you giving me direct control over your fleets?”

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?”

“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 signals 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.”