Persepolis Rising

Chapter Thirty-Four: Drummer

“The battle will be here,” Benedito Lafflin said, indicating a space between the curve of the asteroid belt and the orbit of Mars. The place where physics and geometry calculated that the paths of the Tempest and those of the fleets of the EMC and the union would cross. There was nothing there now—no port, no city, no outpost of any civilization. Only a hard vacuum wider than worlds, an emptiness of strategic importance. “We’re calling it Point Leuctra.”

“Luke-tra?”

“The Spartans were decisively defeated there by Thebes,” Lafflin said. “I mean, they call their planet Laconia. Psy ops thought it might speak to their sense of their own invincibility.”

They stared at each other a moment. That’s the best we’ve got? Intimidate them with classical allusions? floated at the back of her throat. Lafflin shrugged uncomfortably.

“All right,” Drummer said. Because what else was there to be said? It wasn’t as though her will was going to change any of the factors involved. The timetable was listed at the side of the display, days and hours as ticks of red and gold.

“The eggheads have a good model of the Tempest,” Lafflin went on, swapping out the map of the system for a schematic of the Tempest. The weird, organic shape of it made her feel like she was looking at a detail from an autopsy. Here is the vertebra where things went wrong. You can see the malformation. She smiled at the absurdity of the thought. Lafflin smiled back reflexively. “The only hard data we have is where the PDCs and torpedoes came out, but we also got a lot of good heat data from the last engagement.”

“The death of Independence,” Drummer said. The death of the first void city and everyone who hadn’t fled their home.

Lafflin looked down. “That, yes, ma’am. The data’s given us some idea about the internal structures too. Enough that we feel confident that we can target the right places on that bastard. Take it out before it reaches Earth.”

Because that was the point, Drummer thought. That was always the point. Protect Earth and Mars. Keep the inner planets safe and independent, even at the cost of more Belters’ lives. And she’d known that. From the moment Avasarala had stepped into her meeting, she’d known. Some part of her expected to feel some kind of outrage, some betrayal. Resentment that the wheel of history was still rolling over the backs of her people first.

She didn’t. There was a term she remembered from her years in the OPA. Saahas-maut. She didn’t know where the term came from, but it meant something like the pleasure you take in hardship. It was supposed to be a peculiarly Belter emotion, something that the inners didn’t name because they didn’t feel it. She looked at the Tempest now, the guesswork lines of her superstructure and drive, the target points along her hull. Drummer wasn’t angry at the inners for using the union to protect Earth. She wasn’t even angry at the Laconians for being another iteration of everything the inners had been before the union existed. War and loss, the prospect of the oppressor’s boot. There was a nostalgia to it. A bone-deep memory of what it had been to be young.

She couldn’t help wondering what that girl, riding rock hoppers and taking gigs at Ceres and Iapetus and Tycho, would have thought of the woman she’d become. The leader of her own oppressions. Not much, probably.

Lafflin cleared his throat.

“Sorry,” Drummer said. “Didn’t sleep well. Vaughn? Could you get me some tea?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Vaughn said. “Also, Pallas.”

“Thank you,” she said. She didn’t mean it.

She’d placed the strategic update with Lafflin on her schedule on purpose. The Tempest’s inexorable flight sunward was slated to reach its point nearest to Pallas Station within the hour. The evacuation was complete, or as near to complete as it would be. There was always some old rock hopper with a gun and an attitude who’d stay behind out of spite and rage. It wouldn’t help. One of humanity’s oldest homes in the Belt would be dead before she went to sleep again, or if it wasn’t, it would be because Admiral Trejo had seen fit to grant his mercy. She was pretty sure that wasn’t going to happen. At least she could go into the terrible, predictable tragedy with all the vulnerable points of the Tempest firmly in mind. She had some hope of retribution.

There was a certain peace in the impossibility of subterfuge. Sure, there were stealth ships and long-range torpedoes. The cloak and dagger of vanishing into the vastness between worlds. They worked for a ship here and there. For the small and swift and furtive. But on this scale—the scale of war on the battlefield of the abyss—everyone knew more or less where everyone else was. Their drive plumes and heat signatures announced them. The hard laws of orbital mechanics and time placed every base, every planet, every person predictably in front of their own personal firing squads. Situations like this one, they could see death coming, and it didn’t matter. Death still came.

“Did you …” Lafflin said. “We can continue this after. If you’d like.”

Drummer didn’t like. She didn’t want to see it happen. Didn’t want to hope that Pallas might survive. But she was the president of the union, and bearing witness was part of what she was supposed to do. She wondered where Avasarala was, and whether the old lady was going to watch too.

“Yes,” Drummer said. “That’ll be fine.”

Lafflin nodded, rose from the table, and made his way out of the meeting room. Drummer stood, stretched, and switched the display to the tactical service’s analytics. The image wasn’t real. It was a composite of visual telescopy and Pallas’ internal data cobbled together into a best guess that was five minutes old from light delay before it reached her. Without Tycho beside it, Pallas looked … Calm? Still. The curves of the bases’ structures didn’t spin against the starscape. Pallas was older than that. By the time they’d learned how to spin asteroid stations up, Pallas had been in business for more than a generation. It would die without changing. A countdown timer showed the minutes to the Tempest’s closest pass. Seven minutes and thirty-three seconds.

The door slid open again, and Vaughn ghosted into the room, a drinking bulb in either hand. The smell of tea wafted to her seconds later. He didn’t speak as he reached out to her. The bulb warmed her palm and the tea was rich and sweet.

“Hard day,” Vaughn said. It was strange. She didn’t like Vaughn or dislike him, but she’d come to rely on him. And now, in this traumatic hour, it was this crag-faced political operative at her side instead of Saba. The universe was tricky, and its sense of humor came with teeth.

“Hard day,” Drummer agreed.

On the display, the Tempest fell slowly toward the sun. Pallas Station would pass on the ship’s starboard, and too far away to see with the naked eye. Admiral Trejo would be watching the show on a screen of his own. The death of Pallas would be one of the most observed events in history. Five minutes and fifteen seconds. Which meant, in Pallas’ frame of reference, now.

She took another sip of tea, feeling the hot water against her tongue and the roof of her mouth, Brownian motion making it seem to fizz against the soft flesh of her palate, beat against the individual taste buds. Molecules of sugar latched to contact sites, and the nerves ran through the meat of her tongue, back into her body like she was drinking twice, once with the liquid and once with electrical fire. A sense of vertigo washed through her.

She tried to put the bulb down, but the surface of the table was distant, visible, but through a distracting cloud that was the air—atoms and molecules bouncing against each other, striking and spinning away and striking again. Thicker than bodies at a tube station.

She tried to call out to Vaughn. She could see him, right there before her, the jagged territory of his skin fractally similar at every scale. She tried to make out his expression, but she couldn’t bring her focus back that far. It was like trying to see the face of God. Something hummed and throbbed, ticking faster than she could quite be aware of. The pulse of her own brain, the tempo of her consciousness. It sang like a chorus, and she heard herself hearing it.

She dropped the bulb. It clattered against the table, rolled, and dropped to the ground, falling closed so that it kept even a drop of tea from escaping. Vaughn took a step, then sank down to his knees. His eyes were wide, and his face pale as death and covered by sweat. Drummer sat slowly. Her knees felt weak.

“God,” Vaughn said. “Besse God.”

Drummer couldn’t tell if it was profanity or prayer.

The timer on the display read two minutes and twenty seconds. Whatever had happened, it had taken almost three minutes out of her life. It hadn’t seemed that long. Maybe she’d passed out?

“I need,” she began, and her voice felt strange. Like she could still hear overtones fluting up from her vocal cords. “I need to know what that was.”

“I don’t,” Vaughn said. He was weeping. Wide, thick tears dripping down his cheeks.

“Vaughn,” she snapped, and it sounded more like her own voice again. “Come to! I need to know what that was.”

“I saw everything,” he said.

“How widespread. What happened. Everything. Get me reports.”

“Yes,” he said, and then a moment later, “Yes, ma’am.” But he rested his head on his knees and didn’t move.

On the display, the timer came to twelve seconds, and the Tempest fired. Not missiles, but the magnetic beam that Saba had reported. The thing that had stripped the defenses from the slow zone and burst gamma radiation out all the gates. Pallas Station vanished like a blown-out candle with eleven seconds to spare. They were roughly five light-minutes away, so it had happened … the two things had happened together in the Tempest’s frame of reference.

“Tur,” she said. “Get me Cameron Tur.”

“The thing you have to understand is that the technology of the ring stations doesn’t break the speed of light,” Tur said, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a ball on a string. “The one thing we can absolutely say is that the protomolecule is bound by the speed of light. Everything they designed got around it with a different understanding of locality. That’s not the same thing at all.”

He was talking fast and, Drummer thought, more than half to himself. That she was in the room let him think out loud, but he didn’t have his science-advisor voice tuned up. This was one step short of a chimpanzee shrieking and pointing at the charred spot where lightning had struck.

“If you look at it, the gates themselves are clearly bounded by lightspeed. The strategy the protomolecule employs is to send out bridge builders at subluminal speeds to environments where there are stable replicators to hijack and employ to … to poke holes into a different space. Going from Sol gate to Laconia or Ilus or wherever, we don’t accelerate ships past lightspeed, we just take a shortcut because the slow zone is a place outside locality where very different places in our reference can be very nearby in that frame.”

“That’s great,” Drummer said. “Was it a weapon?”

Tur goggled at her. “Was what a weapon?”

“That—” She waved her fingers in front of his eyes. “That whatever the hell that was. With the hallucinations and the missing time. Was it a weapon? Can the Laconians turn us off like that anytime they want?”

“It was … it was associated with their weapon,” Tur said. “I mean it happened at the same time, but that’s the thing. Time doesn’t actually work like that. ‘The same time’ is a weird linguistic fantasy. It doesn’t exist. Simultaneity doesn’t act like this.”

He waved his arms, flapping them out toward the sides of the room. This.

The whatever-the-hell-it-had-been hadn’t just happened in Drummer’s meeting room, or on People’s Home. It had been spread throughout the system—Earth and Mars, Saturn’s moons and Jupiter’s. Even the science stations on moons around Neptune and Uranus, and the deep labs in the Kuiper Belt. The reports were startlingly similar—hallucinations and lost time that began uniformly at the moment the Tempest had fired its magnetic weapon at Pallas Station. Or, more accurately, the moment in the Tempest’s frame of reference. Tur seemed very specific about that. Like it was important.

“But it didn’t happen when they fired it in the slow zone,” Drummer said. “Why didn’t Medina have this happen?”

“What? Oh, no, we don’t know. The ring space and the station there and the gates, we don’t know what their relationship is with normal space. The rules of physics may be different. I mean, it’s clearly an active system, and the energy output from the magnetic weapon there was smaller than the gamma bursts that came from it, so it was tapping into an energy supply that didn’t have anything to do with the Tempest per se. But the thing is I’m not sure that was a propagating event. If it wasn’t a propagating event, then maybe it didn’t violate lightspeed.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Drummer said between clenched teeth.

“Well, I mean when you drop a pebble in a pond, there are ripples. They propagate, and all propagation is limited by lightspeed. But instead of a pebble, imagine you dropped a sheet of plating. So that the surface of the plating hit the surface of the pond everywhere at once. It doesn’t matter that the trigger that dropped the plate was in one place, because it happened everywhere. Not a point location, but a nonlocalized location.”

“Nonlocalized. Location,” Drummer said, pressing her palms into her eye sockets. Annoyance and fear curled in her throat. So you’re telling me you don’t know shit floated at the back of her mouth.

“Everyone would experience it as if the effect began exactly with them and then propagated away in every direction at the speed of light, but in reality—”

“I don’t care,” she said. It was still harsh, but less than what she wanted to do. Tur reared back from her anyway. “What it is, what it means about the way you understand the universe or physics? I don’t care. None of that matters to me.”

“But—”

“They just demonstrated a weapon that at its minimum ripped Pallas Station down to hyperaccelerated dust. I am preparing to lead thousands of soldiers on hundreds of ships into battle against this thing. You need to tell me was that a glitch in consciousness because of their attack, or can they make that happen again anytime they want? Did they know it was going to happen? Did they suffer all the same high weirdness that we did? Because if they can turn our brains off for a few minutes at will, I’m going to need some very different strategies.”

By the end, she was shouting. She hadn’t meant to shout. Tur had his hands up, palms toward her, like he was afraid she might attack. Fine, let him wonder. Maybe it would focus him up.

“I … that is …” Tur took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “I feel comfortable saying that the glitch, if that’s what we’re calling it, was associated with Tempest’s attack on Pallas. Given that it didn’t happen in the slow zone, I can’t say whether it was a controlled effect or an artifact of the weapon with some quality of local space around Sol.”

“All right,” Drummer said.

“Whether the enemy anticipated it or not, I can’t say.”

“That’s fair,” Drummer said. The first pricks of regret were forming at the back of her mind. She shouldn’t have yelled at him.

“And I can’t say whether they suffered the same effect … but I would guess they did. If I’m right about the mechanism, there isn’t any sort of shielding against it. You can’t block something that’s already there. That’s what nonpropagating means. It doesn’t come from anyplace. Everywhere it is, that’s where it came from.”

Drummer leaned back. That, at least, was interesting. If the Laconians had to go through the same things she had every time they fired their big gun, it would make a gap when automated systems might be able to penetrate their defenses.

“We’re also seeing the increased quantum creations and annihilations much more broadly,” Tur was saying somewhere nearby. “Like system-wide broadly. And there’s early suggestion that some experiments on Neptune and Luna that were working with controlled entanglement structures collapsed. So maybe—”

Drummer leaned back in her chair, folding her hands together. Her eyelids fell to half-mast. She knew—they all knew—that this was the first time one of the Laconian ships had left its home system. This wasn’t only an invasion, it was also a shakedown cruise. And nothing ever went completely as expected on a shakedown. The question was whether the Laconians knew what had happened. Whether they’d been anticipating it. If they’d been taken by surprise as well, they might not risk using the magnetic beam again.

Tur wouldn’t be able to tell her that. Or Vaughn or Lafflin. Admiral Trejo could say it, but not to her. Which meant there was only one plausible way for her to find out.

Her heart leaped at the idea, and she waited for the joy to fade before she risked thinking about it again. It was always dangerous when the universe fell down in a pattern where the thing you wanted and the wise path were the same.

Somewhere, Tur was still talking. He might as well have been on another ship. Drummer’s mind pressed through the possibilities, the dangers, the possible profits, and the certain loss. Each time, she found herself at the same conclusion.

She thanked Tur, using the social conventions of conversation to signal him it was time for him to go. She even shook his hand to make up a little for losing her temper before. As she walked him to the door, he was still talking about locality and signal loss. She closed the door behind him and went back to her desk.

Vaughn answered the connection request like his finger had been hovering over the button.

“Ma’am?”

“The Tempest is going to make a report. It may go back to Medina, or route through Medina back to Laconia,” she said. “We’re going to find out what it says.”

“Yes, ma’am. And how are we going to do that?”

“Saba,” she said. “The risk is worth it now. We’re reopening communications with Medina.”