Persepolis Rising

Chapter Forty-Two: Drummer

“… and if you fail to turn back,” Secretary-General Li said, “we will be forced to respond with force. There will be no further warnings.”

“He looks good,” Lafflin said. “Statesman-like.”

Drummer thought he looked sad, which actually came off pretty well, all things considered. It made it seem as if it was the impending loss of life that had dragged his spirits down. She was fairly certain that if she’d done the announcement, it would have come off as anger. Or fear. Or a near-psychosis-inducing lack of sleep.

She went back in the spooled message and watched it again. The line had been drawn where everyone had known it would. Point Leuctra, 2.1 AU from the sun. By conventions of mining law and centuries of precedent, that placed the Heart of the Tempest inside the asteroid belt. An invisible line in space, unmarked by anything more than what people believed about it. And that was enough.

The combined fleet of the EMC and her union hadn’t played coy. They had burned and braked to reach this position. Two hundred and thirty-seven ships, ranging from the void cities to traffic-control skiffs. Anything with a gun was spread across the surface of a modified parabola with one focus on the Tempest’s flight path. The ships on her side might shift and evade, but everything the secretary-general had said was for the newsfeeds and posterity. Anyone with a map and half a semester of military history could have drawn accurate conclusions without him.

She wondered if Saba would see it, back on Medina. She wondered if he was still alive. There hadn’t been a reply to her desperate question about the time slip, and the Tempest showed every sign of ignoring the EMC’s warning. Drummer went from optimism that Cameron Tur was right—that the Laconians wouldn’t dare use their magnetic matter-ripping beam for fear of its mysterious side effects—to expecting time to stutter, stop, and come back with the fleet already in ruins.

If she died here, would Saba see it? Would the official Laconian newsfeeds be how they said goodbye?

Lafflin changed the display to the tactical map—the hundreds of green dots that were their fleet including the one that was People’s Home. The single orange blip that was their doom. As a piece of abstract art, it looked like something a student would have come up with at lower university. If she’d ever thought to put together a visual display that said destined to fail, it would have been that small, glowing bit of orange.

But still …

Somewhere, when she’d still been working security contracts, she’d seen an interview with an old, smiling imam, whose name she didn’t remember. The one thing he’d said that stuck with her was, I am a human being. Anything that happens to human beings could happen to me. One time and another in the years since, she’d taken comfort from that. Or warning. People fall in love, so maybe I will too. People get jobs, so maybe I will too. And people get sick. People have accidents. And now, she supposed, people are divided from their families by war and history. And so that could happen to me too. Even when they won, would it mean she would wake up beside Saba again? There were so many variations of victory and loss.

“They’re confident, aren’t they?” Lafflin said, leaning back in his chair. “It’s astounding.”

“I suppose it is,” she said. She didn’t know where his mind had been, but it had clearly been somewhere different from her own. “You should probably get to the transport.”

Lafflin’s smile was rueful. “Is there anything you’d like me to pass on?”

“No,” Drummer said. “Anything that needs saying, I’ll say after.”

Or, she didn’t say, not at all. That part was understood.

As with Pallas Station and Independence, the plan was to evacuate the civilian population before the violence began. Ships had been docking with People’s Home for days now, hauling off families that had lived there for years and taking them to Mars and Earth, Luna and the Lagrange stations, or any of the thousand little holes in the Belt that could still hold air. Going to the docks with Lafflin now was like walking through a graveyard. The wide, curving halls should have been filled with people. Music and voices should have echoed down through the common parks, the transfer tubes, the docks. Even the air smelled different—closer and musty as the recyclers shifted down to match their reduced loads.

She gave Lafflin points for waiting until near the end. Most of the EMC political types in his staff had been among the first out, just after families with children. The lines of refugees waiting to leave were all older people now. The staff and citizenry that didn’t have the skills to help in a battle, all with small bags floating beside them. Overnight bags, many of them. As if they might be coming right back. There was a lot of laughter in the line, and a sense of anticipation that bordered on feverish.

Part of her wanted to stop, to shake hands, to take a little of that bright, jittering energy for herself, but Drummer and Lafflin didn’t pause. There was still some decorum that came with rank. The executive waiting area was well appointed with bulbs of coffee or liquor, living plants in wall gardens, soft music and LEDs that matched the spectrum of the morning light in early spring. Or so they told her. It wasn’t as if spring were a concept with any practical existence in her life. It was nice, anyway.

Avasarala floated in a white sari with a golden sash. Drummer admired the old woman’s ability to wear it and remain decent. It wasn’t something a lot of Earthers could manage.

She touched Lafflin’s shoulder. “You’ll excuse me?”

“Of course, Madam President,” he said. “I look forward to seeing you at the post-action debrief.”

“You too,” Drummer said.

Avasarala nodded as Drummer slid close, braced on a handhold to kill her momentum.

“You’re leaving too?” Avasarala asked, her voice carefully neutral.

“No,” Drummer said. “I live here.”

“You’re a fucking idiot,” the old woman sighed, “but you’d be one if you left too. It’d be a better world if there was always at least one right answer instead of a basket of fucked.”

“Are you all right?” Drummer asked.

Avasarala waved the comment away, then reached out to the handhold to steady herself. “I’m trying to decide if we’re absolutely certain to lose or absolutely certain to win,” she said. “I change my mind every ten minutes or so.”

“It’s one ship that hasn’t been able to resupply in weeks,” Drummer said. “It’s already been through a battle. And that turning-off-people’s-minds-for-a-while thing it did, we’re ready for it this time. The automated systems have their governors off. We may have to get clever before the next one shows up, but no matter what happens, we’ll keep firing until that thing is a cloud of complex molecules and regret.”

“And because it’s this ten minutes,” Avasarala said, “I find that argument persuasive. Next one, I’m going to remember that Duarte sent it, and then I’ll get scared.” She shook her head. “Who knows? The son of a bitch has been off in his own private system since before the Free Navy got their nuts handed to them. And it’s pretty clear he’s been rubbing up against whatever artifacts he found there. Maybe it made him stupid.”

“Doesn’t change what we have to do,” Drummer said.

“It doesn’t,” Avasarala agreed. “I hate this part. You have a clear succession? Santos-Baca went down with her ship too, and even if you turn that ugly motherfucker of a ship to slag, one of the EMC bastards is as likely to throw something the wrong direction. If this goes badly, the last thing we’re going to need is a long, angry committee meeting with everyone saying they’ve got the conch.”

Drummer felt a blaze of annoyance, but pushed it down. The old woman wasn’t trying to be insulting. She was just flailing around trying to find something she still had control over.

“We have bylaws,” Drummer said. “And it won’t matter. If I eat a stray torpedo, Albin Nazari takes over.”

“That whiner? He’s just gotten used to Santos-Baca’s chair, and then to get yours too? He’d be like a five-year-old driving a mech loader.”

“I’ll be dead,” Drummer said. “So I won’t give a fuck.”

Avasarala’s laugh was short, surprised, and joyful. “I don’t hate you, Camina. I hate almost everyone these days, but I don’t hate you.”

“I’m not planning to put Nazari in charge,” Drummer said. “I’m planning to win.”

In the scheme of the battle, People’s Home was many things: battleship, medical facility, port, and resupply. It was all the things a city could be. In the display, it was slightly paler than the other green dots that were its fellows. Guard of Passage had a position that mirrored it. The two great cities of the union with their drums spun down, burning into the fight as anchors for the fleet. Cities that had become battleships.

“Coffee?” Vaughn asked, and Drummer waved him away.

The control room was lit like a theater—dim and warm with the tactical display in a multinetworked holographic output. Drummer had been in other battles. She had studied more than that. She had never seen more firepower leveled at a single target. She was fairly certain it had never happened before.

She strapped herself into her crash couch, checked the juice. The chances were very slim that People’s Home would go on the burn, but if it did, she’d be ready. The whole sphere of battle was less than three light-seconds across. Eight hundred and fifty thousand kilometers from the two most distant ships in the EMC fleet, a balloon holding three hundred quadrillion cubic kilometers of nothing, with a few hundred ships dotting its skin. If she’d been in a vac suit, the drive plumes of the navy would have been invisible among the stars. It was the most tightly formed major battle in decades—maybe ever—and she wouldn’t have been able to see her nearest ally with her naked eye.

“The enemy’s crossed Leuctra Point,” the weapons tech said, his voice calm.

“Are the EMC ships opening fire?”

“They are, ma’am.”

“Then let’s do too,” she said.

She wanted there to be a throb of rail guns, the chatter of PDC fire, but People’s Home was a huge structure. Even as her display told her that the rail guns were firing, the room was silent. Hundreds of other ships were doing the same thing at the same moment. Tens of thousands of tungsten slugs moving at a nontrivial fraction of c. It would be less than a minute before they converged on the Tempest, staggered and spread to make dodging difficult. But not impossible.

“And the enemy is evading,” the sensor tech reported, her voice sharp.

“Do we have visual?”

In answer, she put up the live feed. A second’s delay. Maybe two. Hardly anything at all. They were so close, they could have spoken in real time. It made her feel uncomfortable to be so near the Tempest. But there it was, its weirdly organic shape bright in the enhanced colors. Jets of reaction mass gouted from one side, pushing the ship to a slightly different course.

“Correcting for new vector,” the weapons station said. “And firing. EMC forces are also launching torpedoes.”

“Do the same,” Drummer said. She checked the time. Three minutes had passed. She took control of the visual display, zooming in on the skin of the enemy ship. It didn’t look like it had plating so much as a single, textured surface. She threw on the tactical overlay, and a dozen points appeared that weren’t visible in reality. The high-value targets, the vulnerable places on the Tempest that didn’t grow back, or at least not quickly. A dozen carefully placed dots that Emily Santos-Baca and Independence had died to find.

“Come on,” she said, willing the missiles to strike.

“The enemy is firing PDCs,” the sensor tech said.

“Show me,” Drummer said, and the Tempest almost vanished in a cloud of tracers. The data field was too rich to comprehend—missiles, streams of PDC fire, the straight-line paths of the rail-gun rounds.

“EMC Battleship Frederick Lewis is reporting damage,” Vaughn said.

“Are you working comms now?” Drummer asked. “Who’s going to get me my coffee?”

“They’re dropping core,” Vaughn said, ignoring her.

A little cheer went up, and it took Drummer half a second to see why. One of the hardpoints on the Tempest was blinking—the system reporting a missile strike that had connected with the target. The cloud of PDC fire grew a degree thinner. Any ship Drummer knew, any station she’d ever heard of, would have been reduced to slivers of metal and flakes of lace by now. The only thing she could think of that would withstand that barrage was a planet. Even then, cities would have been pounded to dust by what had been launched in the last fifteen minutes. Sixteen now. It was so fast. There should have been hours between launch and response. But this wasn’t that kind of battle. There was no finesse to it. Just brutal, constant violence.

The tightness in her throat was the memory of Pallas. The harder they pushed the Tempest, the more Drummer feared the magnetic beam. If the Laconians used it on People’s Home, she wouldn’t live long enough to notice she was being ripped apart. And if the glitch happened again … well, the observatories on Earth and Mars might get more data about how long it took the enemy to recharge the damned thing.

But they hadn’t used it yet. Maybe the time slip had been the fucking thing breaking. The universe owed her a little slice of luck like that.

Another two hits on the Tempest. It shifted, plumes of steam appearing from its thrusters as it evaded incoming fire. Five more of the EMC ships took crippling damage or turned to bright dust, too far away to see. The Tempest veered and danced. Dark streaks marked its sides where the missiles and rail-gun rounds hit, and while most of the marks faded, not all of them did.

“We have expended two-thirds of our rail-gun ammunition,” the weapons tech announced. “Shall I maintain fire?”

“Yes,” Drummer said. “Then start putting chairs in the launcher. We hit that thing until we’re down to pillows and beer.”

“Understood, ma’am,” the weapons tech said. She could hear the smile in his voice. She felt it too—the giddy sense that even if they were winning ugly, they were at least winning.

On the display, the Tempest shifted and dodged like a fish in a tank. The organic curves of its design made it hard not to think of it as an animal. An apex predator surprised to find itself outmatched by its prey. And there was something …

“On the aft. By that third contact point. Is that a gas plume?”

The sensors tech shifted through half a dozen slices of the spectrum in less than a second. “That is correct, ma’am. The Tempest appears to be venting atmosphere.”

“EMC Governor Knight is launching high-yield nuclear torpedoes,” Vaughn said.

Drummer sat back in her crash couch. Anticipation was a tightness in her throat and her hands. The Tempest’s PDCs weren’t all disabled. There was still the chance it might kill the nukes before they got close enough to detonate. Seconds stretched into minutes. Her neck ached from straining toward the display.

The light of the explosion whited out the sensor array. A ragged cheer came from all around the control room.

“One down,” she said to herself. “And fuck you all along with it.”

It wasn’t over. Laconia would send another ship after this one. A fleet, next time. The union and the EMC would have to get much more clever. But they knew more now—about how the enemy ships functioned, how they maneuvered in battle, and most important of all, how they could be killed.

And she had to expect reprisals. By deciding to send her one last, desperate message, she had as good as told the Laconians that she still had allies on Medina. The choice had seemed like the right and obvious thing at the time. She’d pointed at Medina and said, Look for my people here. It might be the thing that killed Saba and his crew.

It was a problem for another day. A tragedy she’d face when she could do something about it, and not before. There was too much that had to be done here and now.

“Send the return signal to all the transport ships and get the docks ready to bring everyone home,” she said. “It’s going to be a long couple weeks, people. We may as well get to it.”

Another cheer, this one louder. They’d all been so hungry for a win, they were drunk with it. She was too.

“Ma’am?” the sensor tech said, the word like a drop of ice in a sauna.

The sensors had finished their reset. The Tempest was still where it had been, not scattered into atoms. An eerie blue mottling danced in lines like veins under the ship’s skin, bright but fading. The EMCs’ nukes might not have made contact before they detonated, but the fireball should have been enough to kill anything. Or at least anything that Drummer knew of.

“It’s firing missiles, ma’am,” the sensor tech said.

They’d known. Laconia had known they’d be facing nuclear torpedoes. And now everyone on all the colony worlds would see that even that wasn’t enough to kill their ships. Maybe that had been the point all along.

“Tactical,” she said. “Get me tactical.”

The display jittered and shifted. The orange dot was now deep in the cup they’d created to destroy it, and it was still not destroyed. Even with its tactical maneuvering, its course toward the inner planets hadn’t shifted.

All around it, bright-green dots were blinking out.