Her father blinked, then laughed. Muskrat pushed her head up into his hand, demanding more attention. He went back to rubbing her ears. “No, not at all. It’s Admiral Waithe’s report on the expansion plan for Bara Gaon Complex. You aren’t expected to contribute, but I’d like you to listen. Then afterward, we can talk about it.”
Teresa nodded. If it was what he wanted, of course she could, but it sounded dull. And strange. Her father’s eyes went unfocused for a moment, the way they did sometimes, and then he shook his head like he was trying to clear it. He leaned against the arm of the couch, not quite sitting but not standing either. He tapped Muskrat’s side firmly twice in a way that meant petting time was over. The dog sighed and flopped her head down on the cushion.
“Something’s bothering you,” he said.
“You’ve been asking me to do this more often,” she said. “Am I doing it wrong?”
His laughter was warm, and it made her relax a little.
“When I was your age, I was pushing for early entrance to upper university. You’re like me. You learn fast, and I want to keep up with you. I’m bringing you in more because you’re old enough to understand things now that you weren’t able to when you were a child. And Colonel Ilich says that your studies are on track. Even advanced.”
She felt a little glimmer of pride in that, but also confusion. Her father sighed.
“It’s hard work, keeping people safe,” he said. “Part of that is that we’ve come up against very dangerous, unknown things. I can wish that weren’t the case, but I can’t take it back. And the other part is that we’re working with people.”
“And people are terrible, terrible monkeys,” Teresa said.
“Yes, we are,” her father said. “We have a very close horizon almost all the time. Including me. But I’m trying to get better.”
The way he said it, he sounded tired. She leaned forward, and Muskrat took it as a sign that she was looking for someone to pet. She shifted, breathing hot on Teresa’s face until she gently pushed the dog back.
“Is the Bara Gaon Complex expansion really important, then?” Teresa asked.
“Everything’s important. All of it,” her father said. “And so every part of it needs to be able to fail without destroying the whole project. Including me. Which is why I’ve been asking you to come to the briefings more often.”
“What do you mean?” she said.
“I’m fine,” her father said. “Everything’s fine. There isn’t a problem. It’s only that… if there were to be, sometime later. Decades from now. Someone would need to understand the shape of the whole plan, and be able to step in. And people trust what they already know. Having a new high consul would be difficult under any circumstances, but it would be less difficult if there were a story with it. A succession. I want to train you to be that, if—God forbid—something happened to me.”
“But why should I be good at it just because you were?” Teresa said. “There’s no reason to think that. That’s dumb.”
“It is,” her father said. “But it’s a mistake people have made all through history. And since we know that, the two of us can use the tool we’ve been given. Come sit in the briefings and the meetings. Listen. Watch. Talk to me afterward. This is the next phase of your education. So that if you need to step in, you’ll actually be the leader they need you to be.” It took a few seconds to really understand what he was saying. The huge moments in life seemed like they should have more ceremony and effects. The important words—the life-changing ones—should echo a little. But they didn’t. They sounded just like everything else.
“You want to train me up to be the next high consul?”
“In case something happens to me,” Duarte said.
“But just in case,” she said. “Only just in case.”
“Just in case, princess,” he said.
Chapter Five: Elvi
A few decades earlier and about two hundred thousand trillion kilometers from where she currently sat, a tiny node of active protomolecule in a biological matrix had entered the orbit of a planet called Ilus, hitchhiking on the gunship Rocinante.
As the uncanny semisentient intelligence of the protomolecule tried to make contact with other nodes in the gate builders’ long-dead empire, it woke up mechanisms that had been dormant for millions—or even billions—of years. The end result had been an ancient factory returning to life, a massive robot attack, the melting of one artificial moon, and the detonation of a power plant that nearly cracked the planet in two.
All in all, a really shitty experience.
So when Elvi’s team took the catalyst out of isolation in unexplored systems to do a similar if slightly better-controlled reaching out to the artifacts and remains, she made sure they were careful. They watched what happened, they were ready to put the catalyst back in its box, and they didn’t get too close to anything.
“Falcon in position,” the pilot said.
If anything went terribly wrong, the pilot or Sagale or Elvi could give a single spoken order—Emergency evacuation, their name, and the delta-eight authorization code—and the ship would take it from there. Given the Falcon’s oversized engine and massive acceleration, anyone not in one of the ship’s specially designed high-g couches would be injured or killed, but the data they’d already collected would be preserved. Laconia had a lot of fail-safe logic like that. It wasn’t her favorite part of the job.
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Admiral Sagale replied. He was strapped into a crash couch on the bridge too. Another sign of how seriously everyone took this part of the mission. “Major Okoye, you may proceed.”
“Take her out,” Elvi said into the comm. In this situation, there was only one her.