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.”