“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.