Persepolis Rising

Chapter Five: Drummer

Drummer didn’t want to be awake, but she was. The couch was built for the two of them, Saba and her. Acceleration gel over a frame designed to give them freedom to spoon while People’s Home, first and largest of the void cities, was spun up or under gentler thrust or to divide them if they went into an unexpected hard burn while they were asleep. Balancing to keep from shifting the couch and troubling Saba, she checked the system console in the wall nearest her bedside. It was still two hours before she needed to get up. Not long enough for a full sleep cycle. Not short enough to ignore. She was, by some measures, the most influential woman in thirteen hundred worlds, but it didn’t fix insomnia.

Saba shifted in his sleep and muttered something she couldn’t make out. Drummer put a hand on his back, petting down his spine, not sure if she hoped to quiet him back to sleep or wake him up. He picked the former, snuggling himself down into the gel the way animals in their nests had been doing since before humanity had been more than an upstart hamster trying to avoid the dinosaurs.

She smiled in the darkness and tried not to be disappointed. She needed to pee, but if she got up now, it would wake Saba for certain, and then she’d feel bad. She could suffer a little instead. People’s Home muttered around her like it was glad to have her back.

There were ways that she didn’t have a home anymore. Hadn’t since she’d accepted the presidency. Their quarters on Medina near the administration levels. The captain’s cabin of Saba’s ship, the Malaclypse. Back before she’d become the leader of the Transport Union, they’d been enough. Now she had more space devoted to her than she would ever see. Like a palace minced and scattered across light-years. Medina Station, Ganymede, Ceres, Pallas, Iapetus, Europa. The Vanderpoele, which was at her disposal as long as she held office. TSL-5 had quarters set aside for her, as would all the transfer stations when they were built. And the three void cities that made up the spine of the Belters’ dominion: Independence and Guard of Passage and People’s Home.

At rest, the central core of People’s Home stayed on the float, seventy decks of permanent facilities and infrastructure that wore the drum section like a cloak. The dock at one end, the drive at the other. Magnetic fields more powerful than a maglev track held the core separate from the drum levels and corrected when the drum spun up, holding the core stationary while the body shifted from thrust gravity to spin. The rooms and hallways in the drum were fashioned to shift, their floors orthogonal to the direction of thrust when the drive was on, their feet pointing down to the stars at a constant tenth of a g when they were at rest. Enough to make a consistent up and down, but light enough for even the most float-adapted. Not a ship, but a city that had never suffered a gravity well.

Saba yawned and stretched, his eyes still shut. Drummer ran a hand over his wire-brush hair, a little more insistently this time. His eyes opened and his wicked little half smile flickered on and then off again.

“Are you up?” she asked, trying to keep her voice soft, but really wanting the answer to be yes.

“Yes.”

“Thank God,” she said, and hauled herself up off the couch and went to the head. By the time she was back, Saba was standing naked at the little tea dispenser that had been provided for the exclusive use of the president. Saba had been with her for almost a decade now, and if his age showed a little in the softness of his belly and the roundness of his face, he was still a very pretty man. Sometimes, seeing him like this, she wondered whether she was aging as gracefully. She hoped so, or if not, that he didn’t notice.

“Another beautiful morning in the corridors of power, ah?” he said.

“Budget hearings in the morning, trade approval in the afternoon. And Carrie Fisk and her fucking Association of Worlds.”

“And fish on Friday,” he said, turning to hand her a bulb of hot tea. As little time as People’s Home spent on the float, she might as well have had Earther cups. But she never would. “What’s an Association of Worlds?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Drummer said. “Right now it’s a couple dozen colonies that feel like I’d listen to them better if they spoke with one voice.”

“Are they right?”

He took another bulb for himself and leaned against the wall. He had a weirdly intense way of listening. More than his eyes, it was what made him pretty. Drummer sat on the couch, scowled at nothing in particular and everything in general. “Yes,” she said at last.

“And so you don’t like them?”

“I don’t dislike them,” Drummer said and took a sip of her tea. It was green and flavored with honey and still just a little too hot. “They’ve been around since Sanjrani, in one form or another. It’s all been sternly worded press releases and political grandstanding.”

“And now?”

“Sternly worded press releases, grandstanding, with occasional meetings,” she said. “But that actually means something. I didn’t use to have to make room on the agenda for them. Now it seems like I do.”

“What of Freehold?”

“Auberon is more the issue,” she said. “There’s talk that they’re making progress toward a universal polypeptide cross-generator.”

“And what is that, when it’s at home?”

It was a mechanism for pouring whatever toxic, half-assed soup the biospheres of the scattered planets had come up with into one end of a machine and getting something that humanity could eat out the other. Which meant sometime in the next ten or fifteen years, the effective end of Sol system’s monopoly on soil and farming substrates. And it meant Auberon was about to become the new superpower in the wide-flung paths of the human diaspora, provided that Earth and Mars didn’t decide to fly a navy out through the gates and start the first interstellar war.

All assuming, of course, that the breakthrough wasn’t vapor and tricks, which she wasn’t ready to discount. Every great nation, they said, was founded on a knife and a lie.

“I’m not supposed to talk about that,” she said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

Saba’s face went hard for a moment, but he pushed it back into a smile again. He hated it when she closed him out of things, but however much she trusted him—however much the union’s security division had cleared him—he wasn’t in the chain of authority. Drummer had spent too much of her life enforcing security protocols to ignore them now.

“The upshot is,” she said, trying to bring him in enough to salve his feelings and still not say anything compromising, “that Freehold is, among other things, a warning to Auberon not to get too cocky, and Carrie Fisk and the Association of Worlds is sniffing around to see if there’s any opportunities in it for them. Including how far they can push me.”

Saba nodded and, to her mild disappointment, started to get dressed. “So more palace intrigue, savvy sa?” he said.

“Comes down to that,” Drummer said, apologizing and also being angry for apologizing, even if it was only by implication.

Saba saw the storm in her almost before she knew it was there. He stepped over to her, knelt at her feet, and put his head in her lap. She coughed out a laugh and patted his hair again. It was an obeisance that he didn’t mean, and she knew it. He knew it too. But even if it didn’t mean he was actually abasing himself before her, it still meant something.

“You should stay another night,” she said.

“I shouldn’t. I have crew and cargo and a reputation as a free man to maintain.” The laughter in his voice pulled the sting a little bit.

“You should come back soon, then,” she said. “And stop hooking up with all the girls on Medina.”

“I would never be unfaithful to you.”

“Damned right you wouldn’t,” Drummer said, but there was laughter in her voice too now. Drummer knew that she wasn’t an easy woman to love. Or even to work with. There weren’t many people in the vast span of the universe that could navigate her moods, but Saba was one of them. Was the best at it of anyone.

The system made its broken bamboo tock. Vaughn, making the first approach of the day. Soon, there would be briefings and meetings and conversations off the record with people she liked or trusted or needed, but never all three at once. She felt Saba’s sigh more than she heard it.

“Stay,” she said.

“Come with me.”

“I love you.”

“Te amo, Camina,” he said, and rose to his feet. “And I will flitter off to Medina and back so quickly you’ll hardly know I was gone.”

They kissed once, and then he left, and the cabin seemed empty. Hollow as a bell. The system made another little tock.

“I’ll be there in five,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Vaughn replied.

She dressed, did her hair, and was in the office in slightly less than fifteen minutes, but Vaughn didn’t chide her for it.

“What’s up first today?” she asked as he handed her a little cup of white kibble and sauce.

His hesitation was almost too small to notice. But only almost. “Message came in from Captain Holden of the Rocinante.”

“Sum it up?”

The hesitation was more pronounced this time. “Perhaps you should watch it, ma’am.”

The meeting room was on the outermost deck of the People’s Home drum. Coriolis in the void city was trivial to anyone who’d spent time on a ring station, but outsiders who’d only known mass and acceleration gravity before still found it bothersome. The walls were a pearlescent gray, the table a veneer of blond bamboo over titanium that was bolted straight to the deck. Drummer sat at its head, seething. Most of the others around her—Emily Santos-Baca, Ahmed McCahill, Taryn Hong, and all the other representatives of the board and budget office—knew her well enough to gauge her mood and tread lightly. The poor man making the presentation had never met her before.

“It’s been a question of priorities,” the man said. His name was Fayez Okoye-Sarkis, and he’d come to speak on behalf of some kind of nongovernmental, nonacademic group that pushed for science research. Chernev Institute, based out of Ganymede and Luna. “Over the last decades—really since the bombardment of Earth—the vast, vast majority of research has been in increasing food yield and infrastructure. And mostly, it’s been reverse engineering the technology that made things like the protomolecule and the ring station. Every planet we’ve been to has had artifacts and old technologies.”

“Yes,” Drummer said. Meaning Get on with it. Okoye-Sarkis smiled like he was used to people finding him charming.

“When my wife was an undergraduate, back in the day,” he said, “her fieldwork involved tracking rodent species that had adapted to live in high-radiation zones. Old reactors and fission test sites. They had evolved to fit into environments that were specifically created. By humans. Well, we’re those rodents now. We’re adapting ourselves into spaces and environments that were left behind by the vanished species or groups of species that created all this. The changes in technology we’ve seen are immense, and they promise to be just the beginning.”

“Okay,” Drummer said. Okoye-Sarkis took a drink of water from a bulb. The furrows in his forehead said he knew he was losing her. Hopefully it would make him tighten the presentation up, skip the boring parts, and get to what he wanted so she could say no and get back to her job.

“There has been a lot of speculation about what sort of beings built all the things we’ve found. Whether they were conscious individuals like us or some kind of hive mind. Whether they were one species in a community or a variety of interconnected species acting in concert. Whether—and I know this sounds weird—whether they had the same relationship to matter that we do. There’s been a lot of great thought. Great theory. What there hasn’t been is testing. The Chernev Institute wants to be the spearhead for a new generation of scientific research into the deepest questions that the ring gates embody. Who or what built them? What happened to those species between the time they launched Phoebe and the creation of the Sol gate? Did they leave records that we can translate and understand? Our belief is that somewhere in the systems on the far side of the gates or within the gates themselves, we will find something that acts like a kind of Rosetta stone. Something that places all the other discoveries in context. Our goal is to crack the present work in materials science, high- and low-energy physics, biology, botany, geology, even the philosophy of science wide open.”

Drummer leaned back in her chair, tilted her head. “So … you think the problem is that things aren’t changing fast enough?”

“Well, I think that progress is always better and more efficient when—”

“Because it seems to me,” Drummer interrupted, “like we’re on the ragged edge of being able to deal with what’s already on our plate. I don’t see how more growing pains are going to help us.”

“This is meant to help us with growing pains,” the man said. He delivered the line with a certainty and authority that Drummer respected as a performance. He was a charismatic little shit. She saw why they’d sent him. To her left, Emily Santos-Baca cleared her throat in a way that might have meant nothing, but if it meant anything, it meant a lot. Drummer was being an asshole. With a conscious effort, she pulled her irritation back.

“Fair enough,” she said. “And how does the union fit in with this?”

“There are several things that the Transport Union can do to help with the effort. The first being, of course, a contract to grant passage to Institute ships. We’ve got fieldwork proposals for sites on half a dozen planets whose preliminary surveys look most promising. But we have to get there first.” His grin was an invitation for her to smile back.

“That makes sense,” Drummer said. His grin lost its edge.

“The other thing that we’d like to open a conversation about … the Transport Union is in a singular position. The fruits of our work stand to benefit the union as much or more than anyone else in any system.”

“And so you’d like us to underwrite your work,” Drummer said. “Is that it?”

“I had some more preliminaries that help lay the groundwork for why,” Okoye-Sarkis said, “but yes.”

“You understand we aren’t a government,” Drummer said. “We’re a shipping union. We take things from one place to another and protect the infrastructure that lets us do that. Research contracts aren’t really in our line.”

Okoye-Sarkis looked around the table, searching for sympathetic eyes. Maybe he even found a few. Drummer knew that her reaction might have been different if the proposal had been made a day earlier. But Holden’s message from Freehold …

“The Institute respects that, ma’am,” Okoye-Sarkis said. “This is a very new project, but one I think has the potential to yield real benefits for everyone. I have a breakdown of our mission proposals I can leave with you and whoever in your staff wants to look at them.”

“All right,” Drummer said.

“And the passage agreement. I don’t mean to press, but we’re still getting our backers together, and the fees—”

“Give us your proposals,” Drummer said. “The board can go over them. Whatever conclusion they make about reducing or waiving the contract fees will be fine with me.”

“Thank you, Madam President. That’s wonderful. Thank you very much.”

The scientist practically bowed himself out of the room. Drummer ticked off the last entry in her morning agenda. The afternoon’s list looked just as long and at least equally irritating. Santos-Baca caught her eye and lifted an eyebrow.

“It’s an interesting proposal. It should make for a lively debate,” she said, meaning I see you just gave the board another issue to deal with.

“It’s important that the board be involved in any serious decisions,” Drummer said, meaning Suck it up. Emily Santos-Baca chuckled, and half against her will, Drummer smiled. But only for a few seconds.

She suffered through the small talk and pleasantries that came before and after all meetings like social plaque, then went back to her private office as soon as she could. Vaughn or one of his staff had left a bowl of soy pasta with mushrooms and a glass of wine for her. She started with the wine.

She pulled up the display of the full Sol system. Planets, void cities, stations. The asteroids swirling in the complex orbital dances where gravity and system geography made pools of stability. It looked like images of a snowstorm on Earth. She’d never seen snow to know how accurate that was.

She cut out most of the data, simplifying it enough for a human eye to make sense of. There was People’s Home, in Mars’ orbit, but not near the planet. And there, nearer the ring gate, was Independence. She placed a query, and the Malaclypse appeared—a single bright-yellow dot that seemed like it was almost on top of People’s Home. Like the ship had never left.

It was a failure of scale. That superposition of light in the display was a hundred thousand kilometers by now. More than the circumference of Earth twice over and getting larger every second. It was just that the unbridgeable distance between her and Saba was nothing compared to the vastness around them. Here in the system, and then out in all the other systems beyond the gates.

Even for a woman born to the void, it was overwhelming. And everyone seemed to want her to control it for them. To take responsibility for it all so that they could feel like someone, somewhere was in charge.

She’d never have said it aloud, but there was part of her that missed the way it had been in her youth. The Belt had been the OPA. Earth and Mars had been the enemy. That had seemed overwhelming at the time. It was only everything that had happened since then that made it seem small and manageable by comparison. A nostalgia for the age that had forged her into who she was. That had given her all the skills she’d needed and then changed into a place where half the time she felt like an impostor in her own clothes.

The Rocinante was light-hours away through the gates. Light-centuries by more traditional paths. She pictured Holden as if he were across the table. She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and then started the recording.

“Captain Holden. I’ve gotten your status report about the situation on Freehold. Politely put, your proposed solution isn’t going to work …”