He opened a connection. “This is Captain Holden of the Rocinante. Hang tight. We’ll be right out.”
“Be careful,” Naomi said. “Just because this looks like one thing, that doesn’t mean it can’t be something different.”
“Right,” he said, opening a connection to ops. “Alex? You there?”
“He’s sleeping,” Clarissa answered. “I have the PDCs warmed up, and Amos and Bobbie are on their way to the airlock. If it’s an ambush, it will be a very unsuccessful one.”
“Thank you for that,” Holden said, walking along the side of the lift shaft toward the airlock. The mixed voices of Bobbie and Amos already echoed down toward him.
“Give the sign if you need me to do more than watch,” Clarissa said, and cut the connection.
When the airlock opened and they lowered the ladder, Holden went first. A woman with sharp features and thick gray-black hair pulled back in a bun stepped out toward him.
“Captain Holden,” she said. “I’m Interim Governor Semple Marks. We’re here to accede to your government’s demands.”
“Thank you for that,” Holden said as Bobbie slid down the ladder behind him. Amos followed, his shotgun clanking as he came.
“We’re lodging a formal complaint with the union about this infringement on our sovereignty,” Marks said. “This should have been handled internally in Freehold.”
“I’ll let you take that up with the union,” Holden said. “Thank you for being willing to bend on this one. I didn’t want to quarantine your system.”
Marks’ eyes said, I think you did, but she stayed silent. Bobbie helped the prisoner to his feet. Houston’s face was gray where it wasn’t red. He seemed unsteady.
“Hey,” Amos said. A moment later, Houston seemed to find him. Amos nodded encouragement. “I’m Amos. This is Bobbie. We’ve done this kind of duty before, so there’s some rules about how this goes you’re going to want to listen to very carefully …”
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.