Persepolis Rising

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.

“Gloria is a good warrior, but she gets chatty when she’s nervous.”

“We’re seeing fire,” one of the analysts said. His voice was as calm and businesslike as a surgeon announcing a bleeder.

The display shifted. The EMC ships and Independence were still there, but backgrounded as the focus changed to swarms of missiles pouring out toward the Tempest. Each one burned hard enough that a human body would have been pulped by the g forces, and they barely seemed to move. The distances they traveled were vast. Even at their speed, three million klicks was a long time. Verbal threats that took seconds at lightspeed followed by punches that would take minutes or hours. Even without the warheads, the kinetic force of the torpedoes would be massive. If they hit. The swarm crept forward, pixel by imperceptible pixel. Drummer waved a steward over and ordered a bulb of ice water and a bowl of hummus with bread. She had to try to eat.

The hummus was half gone and the tea tepid before the first of the missiles started winking out of existence.

“What are we seeing, please?” Hu said.

“It appears to be long-range PDCs,” one of the analysts said. “We’re waiting for the bounce feed so we can get higher resolution.”

Another twenty minutes, and a much sharper image of the Tempest appeared with the timestamp to show it was just after the fleet’s launch. All along the sides of the ship, tiny dark eruptions like the spots on a shark.

“The PDCs’ housings appear to be covered by the hull. Telemetry from the Michael Souther is that the remaining missiles were redirected toward those structures.” Were. An hour and twenty minutes ago.

“They’re not using their magnet beam,” Hu said. “That’s good. If it was cheap for them to fire it, they could use it to knock down missiles. If it’s expensive to use, we may be able to exhaust it.”

Drummer thought that sounded like wishful thinking, but she didn’t say so. She tried to take comfort in Hu’s optimism. The data feeds shifted, more information coming in. The images of the Tempest sharpened. The PDCs came into clearer focus, but it didn’t help Drummer understand them. The openings in the side of the ship looked like little mouths opening and closing. Like the whole side of the ship was singing. There was no mechanism she could see. She shuddered. The cloud of torpedoes was thinning. None of them would reach the body of the enemy ship.

A bloom of glowing gas erupted from the Tempest’s side, flinched, and then dissipated.

“Rail guns,” an analyst said.

The chatter of voices went into a higher gear. Tracking the rail-gun round, examining the spectrum of the plasma that had accompanied it, identifying the particular torpedo that it turned to dust.

“Are their PDCs running low already?” Hu said, to herself as much as anyone.

“It was a warning,” Avasarala answered. “They’re showing us that they have teeth and giving us the chance to back away.”

“Maybe we should,” Drummer said.

No one replied. The markers for the EMC ships shifted like a school of fish moving together, and Independence with them. Their own volley of rail guns, the slugs raining down from all directions. The Tempest had no way to stop them. All it could do was dodge. Drummer counted the minutes, watching the Tempest pull back and corkscrew out of the paths of danger. Mostly.

“I’m seeing contact.”

“Two impacts on the starboard. Waiting for confirmation from Pallas and Luna, but I think we did them some damage.”

The knot in Drummer’s gut eased a little. If they could hurt it, they could kill it. It was just a question of scale and tactics.

“The hull appears to be self-repairing.”

“Matches the Medina battle,” Hu said.

“Show me,” Drummer barked, and the image on her screen shifted again. It was a fresh image, still fuzzy. The bone-pale skin of the Tempest rippled as a round struck it, and then again with a second strike. Waves passed through the ship like the surface of water. Nasty black-and-red welts glowed where the rail-gun rounds had hit, but the plating—or whatever it was—folded over the wound, closing it, then folded again, and the damage was gone as if it had never been there.

Another volley of rail-gun fire from the EMC ships, but as the Tempest flinched back again and spun away again, it erupted in a cloud of plasma, and then emerged from it. Drummer didn’t understand until Hu spoke.

“Holy shit. How many rail guns does that bastard have?”

Now the Tempest shifted and swirled, leaving a trail of glowing gas behind it like an afterimage. It was beautiful in its way, a warrior’s dance—power and intention and technique that were almost balletic. And then the EMC ships began to die.

“The Ontario is hit. Reporting reactor breach and dumping core. We are seeing impacts on the Severin, the Talwar, and the Odachi, but no system confirmation yet. Rounds arrived thirty seconds earlier than the model anticipated.”

“Fuckers,” Avasarala said. “That’s why they took out the missile. Throw a changeup and let us think it was their fastball.”

“Whatever they’re using for predictive algorithms, it’s really good,” Hu said, awe in her voice. “That’s almost a third of our attack group down. And if … Oh.”

For a moment, Drummer didn’t understand what she was seeing. Independence, the second void city to launch, the home to hundreds of thousands, seemed to bloom like a flower. Long petals of carbon lace and titanium peeled back, turning as they did. Something terrible and bright happened in the center of the city, but Drummer couldn’t guess what it was. What she knew, what mattered, was that between one breath and the next, Independence was dead.

“We’re counting eight simultaneous impacts on the void city,” an analyst said from somewhere farther away than the control room. “They seem to have been placed to exploit resonance. We’re seeing some structural breakdown.”

Emily Santos-Baca was on Independence, Drummer thought, and she’d been dead already for over an hour. It didn’t matter how much adrenaline was pumping through Drummer’s veins, how tightly she gripped her bulb of old tea. She could shout the retreat order if she wanted to, but anyone in a position to hear her was dead already, or would be by the time her words could reach them.

The PDCs along the Tempest’s side fluttered again. Another group of EMC torpedoes died, faster this time because it was a smaller attack. The Tempest seemed to pause, floating in the distant nothingness as if inviting the EMC ships to take their best shots. Taunting them.

An hour and twenty-three minutes before, the EMC ships shifted, lit their Epstein drives as hard as they’d go, and turned to whatever vector got them away from the theater of battle as quickly as they could. The Tempest didn’t react. No new blooms from their rail guns. No more torpedoes. Drummer didn’t believe for a second that the enemy’s supplies had been exhausted. Trejo wasn’t killing the other ships because he didn’t need or want to. That was all.

Drummer put her tea on the little side table next to Hu’s, turned, and walked out. She was aware in a vague, distant way of Vaughn behind her, calling her name. It wasn’t something that mattered enough to attend to.

The decking of People’s Home felt fragile under her feet, as if her footsteps might be enough to break them and spin her and everyone else in the city flying out into the vacuum. She passed her security detail, distantly aware of the men and women assigned to make sure she was safe in any circumstances scrambling to follow her.

It didn’t matter. Because they didn’t matter. Not when a whole city could die in a heartbeat.

She was in the lobby of the union’s executive offices, sitting in an uncomfortable couch with her eyes locked on nothing in particular when Avasarala found her. The old woman steered her wheelchair across from Drummer like they were in someone’s private quarters or a back porch back on Earth. There was no one else in the lobby. That was Vaughn’s doing, more likely than not. In her imagination, the decking beneath her and Avasarala bucked and split open. What had Santos-Baca thought when it happened? Had she had time to think about it at all? She was trying to understand that she would never see the younger woman again, but the thought wouldn’t take. She dreaded what came after it did.

“I’m sorry,” Avasarala said.

Drummer shook her head.

“It won’t help you,” the old woman said, “but they all knew the risks going in. The chances that we would turn the Tempest back the first time we tried? Always thin.”

“We should have waited,” Drummer said. “We should have pulled them all back. Gathered everyone together and had every goddamn ship we have attack that fucking monstrosity at the same time. Wipe it out.”

Her voice broke. She was crying, but it didn’t feel like it was her doing it. Avasarala handed her a cloth. “You’re mistaken, Camina. The cost was higher than we wanted. Higher than we’d thought. But we did what we came here to do.”

“Die? Badly?”

“Learn,” Avasarala said. “How quickly the deck healed itself? That’s something we needed to know. But the places where a rail-gun round hit their PDCs, the weapons system there didn’t grow right back into place? We needed those too, and we didn’t even know to look for them. Maybe the ship can’t fix more complex mechanisms. We have a map of the armaments now. Where the PDCs are. Where the rail guns are. Where the torpedoes launch from. Next time, you can target those specifically. Degrade its attacking power, push it in ways we couldn’t this time because we just didn’t know.”

“All right,” Drummer said.

“They didn’t die for nothing,” Avasarala said.

“Everyone dies for nothing,” Drummer said.

They were quiet for a moment. Drummer coughed, blew her nose into the cloth, and then leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. Since the moment she’d taken the oath of office, there had been moments—not many, but enough to recognize—that she’d been certain that her place at the head of the union was all a terrible mistake. Saba promised her that everyone felt like that, like an impostor, sometimes. It was part of being human. His words had seemed comforting before. In her mind, Independence died again. She had the sick feeling that it would die a thousand more times before she got to sleep. More when she dreamed it.

“Did you do this to me?” she asked.

Avasarala frowned, papery forehead folding itself like a slept-on sheet.

“Did you manipulate me into sacrificing my people so that you’d get the data you wanted?” Drummer said. “Was this you?”

“This was history fucking us both,” Avasarala said. “Live as long as I have? See the changes that I’ve seen? You’ll learn something terrible about this.”

“Tell me.”

“No point. Until you see it yourself, you won’t understand.”

“Hey, you know what? Fuck you.”

Avasarala laughed hard enough that her wheelchair thought something was wrong and bucked forward a few centimeters before she could stop it. “Fair enough, Camina. Fair enough. Here then. See if you can follow me. Last long enough, and you’ll see that they’re all our people.”

“Independence and the Ontario,” Drummer spat. “Union and EMC, all one big happy family standing against the blowtorch together. Wonderful.”

“I told you that you wouldn’t understand,” Avasarala said, her voice cold and cutting. “The fuckers on the Tempest? I’m telling you they’re us too.”