Persepolis Rising

Chapter Forty-Five: Drummer

Bright-green dots were blinking out. Not all at once, but enough to notice. A wave of darkness moving through the cloud of attacking ships. Drummer checked the timestamp, but there was no gap. Whatever the Tempest had done at Pallas, it still hadn’t repeated here. So what the hell was going on?

“Is it the Tempest? Is it firing?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the sensors tech said. “The missiles are coming from the Tempest. Yes.”

“How fucking many of them?”

The cloud of green, the orange dot, and now a new form. Red threads blooming out from the enemy, thick and ropey as a capillary map. The ship itself was lost in them. They reached out toward the EMC vessels. The union fighters. The void cities.

“That isn’t possible. That’s wrong,” Drummer said.

The Tempest hadn’t resupplied since it had come through the ring gate. It had been in a major engagement already. There was no way for what she was looking at to be real.

“The data is confirmed,” the sensor tech said. “Guard of Passage is reporting the same thing.”

“Get me Cameron Tur,” she said. “Or Lafflin.” Anyone who might be able to make the incomprehensible make sense.

“Should I continue to fire?” the weapons tech asked.

“Are we still in a fucking fight? Then yes, you should keep firing.”

Vaughn made a small, disapproving sound in his throat, but she was far past caring about the delicacy of his sensibilities. The red threads swam through the void. They only seemed slow on the display because the distances were so vast …

Here and there a thread died, a PDC round or a missile destroying the Tempest’s attack. But there were so many, and when even one slipped past the guard, another green dot blinked out. The green dots shifted, swirling in the display as the ships did in the darkness. A few dove toward the Tempest, moving almost at the same speed as the torpedoes. As gentle as it looked on the display, it was a killing burn. A suicide run for the crews of every ship that did it. More followed suit until dozens of ships were driving down toward the enemy.

It was a tactic of unspeakable bravery and desperation. Drummer didn’t notice that her hands were in fists until the ache caught her attention. She made her fingers open, looked at the little flaps of skin she’d carved off with her nails.

The suicide attack reached its peak. It reminded her of pictures she’d seen of cloudbursts over the deserts of Earth. Huge, angry clouds with numberless tentacles of gray falling from them. A torrent of water racing toward a parched landscape, and evaporating again before a drop could darken the soil.

On the visual display, the bright, dancing veins on the Tempest were fading, and now that she knew to look, Drummer could see tiny openings along the sides of the ship opening and closing like pores. The lights of the missiles’ drive plumes were like blue fireflies.

“How can they do that?” she whispered past the tightness in her throat.

“I have Cameron Tur,” the communications tech said.

The camera made his face even longer than it seemed in person. The light shone in his eyes.

“Where the fuck are you?” Drummer snapped. “Are you seeing this?”

There was almost no lag before he answered. He was close, then. One of the escape ships. “I don’t understand. The number of missiles they’ve fired … that they’re firing. These can’t be normal devices.”

On the display, the last three suicide attackers blinked out. If the Tempest moved to avoid the debris fields, it wasn’t enough to register at this scale. It looked as though the enemy wasn’t even bothering to evade anymore.

“The first battle, we wanted to learn from them,” Tur said, talking fast and not looking directly at the camera. “I mean, we wanted to win. Of course we wanted to win, but we didn’t expect to. The data—how we lost—was as important as stopping them.”

“Tur?”

“Maybe they were learning from us too. Maybe they recalibrated something about the regrowth of the ship. Or the missiles.”

“They survived a direct nuclear strike,” Drummer said. “Are you telling me that’s something they can just do?”

“Apparently?” Tur said. He licked his lips anxiously. “We knew from the moment they stripped the rail guns off the ring station that they are capable of focusing and directing incredible sources of power. Things we’ve only ever seen on celestial levels. Collapsing stars.”

“Collapsing stars? We’re fighting a supernova in the shape of a ship? Why the hell didn’t you see this coming?” She was shouting. Her throat hurt with it.

Tur blinked and his jaw shifted forward. He would have looked like a man spoiling for a fight if it hadn’t been for the tears on his cheeks. She didn’t think those tears had anything to do with her raising her voice. “Ma’am, that ship stripped Pallas Station down to something less than atoms. It shut down consciousness throughout the system in a way that I don’t have the structural language to explain, and it seems pretty fucking unimpressed by the idea of locality. It’s affecting the nature of vacuum through the whole solar system. If you didn’t know we were punching above our weight here, I’m not sure what I could have said to clarify that.”

“There is a way to beat them,” Drummer said, “and we are running out of time. Find me how to win this, and do it now.”

She cut the connection before he had the chance to reply. Silence filled the control room. No one was looking straight at her, but she felt their attention like a weight. All the time she’d spent resisting the pressure to make the Transport Union into a police force—into a military—and here she was anyway.

“Mister Vaughn?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Find me whoever is in command of the EMC wing of the fleet. I need them now.” Whoever’s still alive, she thought, but didn’t say.

“Yes, ma’am.”

The weapons tech’s voice shook. “Should we—”

“Keep firing,” Drummer said.

Drummer felt a heat in her chest. A rage and a certainty. This was the moment that tested everything she’d meant to be. This was what it was to be a leader in a time of crisis. She felt the power of it, the raw will to succeed. To devastate and end the people who would destroy her and the systems she embodied. She rose to her feet, her hands behind her, and she knew that everyone in the control room who looked at her would see nothing beyond her superhuman resolve. Not even Vaughn.

And she knew it for the hollow mask that it was. How fragile.

“Guard of Passage is reporting a missile strike that got past their PDCs,” Vaughn said. “They’re requesting permission to withdraw.”

“We can’t run away,” Drummer said. “If we break now—”

People’s Home shuddered. A sound like the wail of a demon rattled up from the deck, bellied out from the bulkheads, rained from the ceiling. She waited for the wide, low hiss of escaping atmosphere. The fading of screams as the air became too thin to carry them. Instead, Klaxons blared.

She held her voice as steady as she could. “Report?”

“We’re hit,” the sensors tech said. “Something hit us.”

“Do we know what?” Drummer said.

“Rail gun,” Vaughn said. “Appears to have impacted section twelve, just spinward of the medical facilities.”

“How bad’s the damage?”

“I’ll let you know as I have reliable information,” he said. “Still trying to identify the chain of command with the EMC.”

Which meant they were in disorder. She wondered whether the band of suicide ships had been led by some admiral bent on making their last stand count for something. People’s Home bucked again, then twice more.

“Engineering’s been hit,” Vaughn said. “The reactor’s … I can’t tell. Something’s wrong with the reactor.”

If the magnetic bottle failed, it would be like a low-yield nuke going off. Even if it didn’t crack the city open like an egg, the systems that kept them all alive would be melted and fused. And the prospect of aid ships reaching them in the chaos of the battle were low enough to pass for never.

“Drop core,” Drummer said.

Vaughn didn’t reply, but the thrust gravity stopped. Drummer grabbed the edge of her crash couch and dragged herself back into it, strapping down with the ease of a lifetime’s habit. The automated emergency report showed long swaths of the city under lockdown, pressure doors isolating levels and halls. Keeping the air in the city as best they could. If she hadn’t sent away as many nonessential personnel as the ships would hold, it would have been worse. As it was, it still meant deaths. People who’d trusted the union elections to put someone in charge who would protect them. How many of them were dead now who’d been alive an hour ago? And how many more seconds before the next round came? It was like someone else’s thought dropped into her own brain.

A sickly calm washed over her. This was what it felt like to see death. To know that the worst was coming, and there was nothing she could do to turn it aside.

“Keep firing,” she said. If we’re going down, let’s go down swinging.

The weapons tech coughed out something between laughter and despair. “We are dry on rail-gun rounds. We are at six conventional plasma torpedoes, and five percent on PDC.”

Fire anyway, Drummer thought. Throw everything at them. Except that if the Tempest threw a missile at them, there would be no defense. Drummer closed her eyes. The temptation was still there. If it meant that she died—that all the men and women under her command died with her—at least it would be over. She wouldn’t wake up in a wave of dread. She wouldn’t watch the structures she’d sworn to protect be peeled away by a threat she hadn’t considered worth thinking about until the Tempest had flown through Laconia gate.

Come on. There has to be a way. Think of it. Find it.

“Should I maintain fire?” the weapons tech asked.

Drummer didn’t open her eyes. The moment stretched. “No,” she said. “Shift to defensive fire only. We can’t shoot down rail-gun rounds, but we can hold their missiles off.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the weapons tech said. She could hear the relief in his voice. She wondered if he would have thrown away the last scrap of protection on her order. And she wondered whether she’d have done it, in his position. Maybe.

“I have a connection to Colonel Massey,” Vaughn said.

“Who?”

“Commander Fernand Massey. Of the Arcadia Rose, ma’am. He’s in command of the EMC ships.”

“I’ve never heard his name before,” Drummer said.

“No, ma’am,” Vaughn said. All the admirals were dead. All the people she might have known. As ruined as People’s Home was, the fleet was in tatters. Her tactical display listed the ships disabled or dead. There were so many. A quarter of the combined fleet incapacitated or destroyed. They’d thrown everything at the Tempest. A wall of tungsten and explosives. And the enemy was still under thrust. Still firing.

It had all been a show. She’d known that. The Tempest’s intentionally predictable approach to Earth and Mars. Letting the EMC and union prepare themselves. She’d thought it was just a way to erode their morale, but it was more than that. She saw it now. They’d known that they would win, so they’d invited the enemy to make the strongest showing it could. That way, when victory came, it would be unequivocal.

“Ma’am,” Vaughn said.

“Yes, fuck it. Fine. I’ll talk to him.”

“No, ma’am. There’s a new message for you. A tightbeam from the Tempest. It’s listed as ‘command to command.’”

Something twisted in her gut. Part despair and part relief. If they were sending messages, maybe they weren’t sending nukes. At least not until she’d had the chance to hear what they had to say.

She undid her restraints and launched herself to a wall handhold. Her crash couch hissed and spun on its gimbals. “Route to my office, please,” she said, as if it were a normal message on a normal day and not the dividing line between living under a conquering boot and dying before the end of shift.

Anxious curiosity shone in every expression—even Vaughn’s—as she passed. She could have played the message there, in front of all of them. Maybe she should have. Nothing in it would be secret for long anyway. But she didn’t want anyone watching her when she saw it. Except Saba, and she wanted him there badly.

In her office, she closed the door, then locked it. The little fern in the corner held its fronds high in the null g. A few things she hadn’t stowed—a drinking bulb, a printout on plastic flimsy, a clump of potting soil—floated in the air. She’d spent too long in spin gravity. She’d come to assume it would always be there, a few years’ habit enough to erase generations of experience and Belter identity.

She was aware that her brain wasn’t functioning normally. She felt more like she was piloting her body than living it. She knew it was shock and trauma, but knowing it changed nothing.

She strapped herself into her chair, took control of her personal interface, and opened her pending messages. Three were listed as unread. One was from the commander of one of the refugee ships, one from a captain of one of the EMC ships, and the last was listed as Admiral Anton Trejo of the Laconian Imperial Navy. Somewhere in a different universe, the Klaxons stopped their wailing. She wished now that she’d brought Vaughn at least. And maybe a whiskey.

She started the message playback.

Trejo sat at his station, his uniform immaculate and pressed. His thinning black hair was in place and his eyes a bright green. He didn’t even have the good taste to look disheveled. His smile radiated warmth and sympathy. She half expected him to start talking to her about his relationship to God or a business opportunity she should keep quiet about for fear of starting a rush.

“President Drummer, I hope.” He drawled like someone from the Mariner Valley. “If not, then please accept my condolences for her passing. I am Admiral Trejo of the Laconian battleship Heart of the Tempest, but you knew that. I’m reaching out to you now because I don’t want to be misunderstood. Despite all the hostilities the Transport Union and the Earth-Mars Coalition have greeted me with, we’re not enemies. Not you and me. Not the union and the empire. Not Sol system and Laconia. The high consul knew that there would be resistance to this change. We all did, and we respect that you had to do the things you’ve done.

“When people like you and I enter into a new phase of history, there’s … I don’t know what you’d call it. Birth pangs? There’s a time when you have to expect violence, even though you don’t celebrate it. When the high consul first explained to me the parameters of this mission, I wasn’t pleased. One ship, no backup, against an entire system? But he brought me around. And this moment, this message, is part of why I felt that his approach was the only moral way forward.

“I have tried to reach Secretary-General Li, but he isn’t returning my messages yet. You’re here, and you are at least equal in dignity to anyone on the inner planets. You can end this. I understand that you had to fight. You had to try to destroy me. I don’t blame you for this. But I am permitted at this point to accept your surrender. Do this, and the inner planets will follow you. You will be treated fairly by the new administration. I promise you that.

“If you are not yet willing to accept defeat, then I would ask you, out of what I hope is mutual respect, to tell me one thing. What is the number of dead that you need in order to show history that your choice to end this was wisdom? That carrying on the fight would not have been bravery but foolishness. A hundred more. A thousand more. A million. A billion. Only say how many more corpses will make this possible for you, and I will provide them.” He spread his hands. “Tell me the number. I await your reply.”

The message ended. Drummer floated against her restraints and thought about whether to play the message again, if only to give herself a few more moments before she went back to the command center. She could feel her pulse in her throat and in her wrists—a throbbing exhaustion. Released herself, pushed toward the door, down the short hall.

They were all silent when she arrived. She looked at her crash couch, there before the display. The moth-eaten wave of green. The tiny, indomitable dot of orange.

“Vaughn, I’ll need you to send a message to the Heart of the Tempest.”

“Ma’am,” Vaughn said, nodding crisply. I could order him to his death. I could tell them all to fight to the last breath.

“The message is this: ‘The number is zero.’ Send that, and then order all union ships to stand down.”

She looked for some reaction in Vaughn’s face. Rage or relief or disappointment. It was like expecting emotions from a stone.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Is there anything else?”

“No,” she said.

There is nothing else. No way forward. Her fight was over. If there was any hope to stand against this empire, it was someplace else now.

If.