“Difficult,” Emily Santos-Baca agreed. She was the representative of the policy council for the union’s board. Officially, she didn’t have a higher rank than any of the other councilors, but she got along with Drummer better than any of the others. It made her a sort of first-among-equals. She was younger than Drummer by exactly two years. They even had the same birthday. It made Drummer like the woman just a little bit, even when she was being a pain in the ass.
Drummer looked at the images again. The whatever-it-was was little longer than two hand-widths together, curved like a claw or a seedpod, and shining green and gray in the sunlight outside Gallish Complex on Fusang. She started the image playback, and the young man sprang into life, slotting one—claw, pod, whatever the hell it was—into another with an audible click to create an empty space roughly the shape of an almond. Light flickered into the space, shifting shapes that danced on the edge of meaning. The young man grinned into the camera and said the same things he had every time she’d watched him. Watching the light is associated with feelings of great peace and connection with all forms of life in the galaxy, and appears to stimulate blah blah fucking blah. She stopped it again.
“Millions of them?” she asked.
“So far,” Tur agreed. “Once the mine goes deeper, they may find more.”
“Fuck.”
The colony worlds had begun simply enough. A few households, a few townships, a desperate scrabble against the local biosphere to make clean water and edible food. Sometimes colonies would falter and die before help could arrive. Sometimes they’d give up and evacuate. But more than a few took root on the rocks and unfamiliar soil of the distant planets. And as they found their niches, as they became stable, the first wave of deep exploration had begun. The massive underwater transport arches on Corazón Sagrado, the light-bending moths on Persephone, the programmable antibiotics from Ilus.
Evolution alone had created all the wonders and complexities of Earth. That same thing thirteen hundred times over would have been challenge enough, but added to that were the artifacts of the dead species of whatever the hell they’d been that had designed the protomolecule gates, the slow zone, the massive and eternal cities that seemed to exist somewhere on every world they’d discovered. Artifacts of alien toolmakers that had been able and willing to hijack all life on Earth just to make one more road between the stars.
Any of it could be the key to unimagined miracles. Or catastrophe. Or placebo-euphoric snake-oil light-show bullshit. The images from the seedpods could be the encrypted records of the fallen civilization that had built miracles they were still only beginning to understand. Or they could be the spores of whatever had killed them. Or they could be lava lamps. Who fucking knew?
“The science stations on Kinley are very anxious to get a shipment for study,” Santos-Baca said. “But without knowing whether these are technological artifacts or natural resources—”
“Which,” Tur apologized, “is difficult to determine with only the resources on Fusang—”
“I get it,” Drummer said and shifted to look at Santos-Baca. “Isn’t this kind of decision pretty much within your wheelhouse?”
“I have the votes to allow the contract,” Santos-Baca said, “but I don’t have enough to override a veto.”
Drummer nodded. The question wasn’t whether moving psychoactive alien seedpods between worlds was a good idea so much as whether someone was going to lose face in front of a committee meeting. Thus were the great decisions of history made.
“If we don’t think they pose any immediate danger, ship them as alien artifacts with a third-level isolation protocol, and I’ll let it pass.”
“Thank you,” Santos-Baca said, rising from her seat. A moment later, Tur did the same.
“Stay with me for a minute, Emily,” Drummer said, shutting down the demonstration video from Fusang. “There’s something else I wanted to talk to you about.”
Tur left, closing the door behind him, and Santos-Baca sank back into her seat. Her empty half scowl was a mask. Drummer tried a smile. It worked as well as anything else.
“One of the things I learned working for Fred Johnson back in the day?” Drummer said. “Don’t let things sit for too long. It’s always tempting to just ignore the things that aren’t actually on fire just at the moment, but then you’re also committing to spend your time putting out fires.”
“You’re talking about the tariff structure Earth and Mars are proposing for Ganymede?”
Drummer’s heart sank a little. She’d managed to forget about that nascent issue, and being reminded felt oppressive. “No, I mean the Rocinante problem. And how it relates to—” She jerked a thumb toward the empty monitor where the seedpod video had been. “We’ve just taken control of the governor of a colony planet. The Association of Worlds hasn’t formally asked about his status with us yet, but it’s just a matter of time. I can feel Carrie Fisk rubbing her stubby little fingers together. It would make me very happy to get out in front of this.”
“So,” Santos-Baca said. “Well, I have had some informal conversations about it. The idea of asking the UN for a charter is … it’s a hard sell. We didn’t come all this way to go back down dirtside to ask permission for things, now did we?”
Drummer nodded. The enmity between the inners and the Belt was still the biggest obstacle Drummer faced. And even she didn’t have much use for the Earth-Mars Coalition.
“I understand that,” Drummer said. “I don’t like it either. But it gives us a level of deniability for things like James Holden’s new policing schemes. What I don’t want is thirteen hundred planets deciding that the union is the problem. If the UN is behind a crackdown—even just nominally—it spreads out the responsibility. This Houston and his band of merry men can rot in a UN jail, and then we’re still just the ships that take things from one place to another. Prisoners, among other things.”
“Or,” Santos-Baca said, “we admit what we’ve been playing footsie with since we crawled up out of the starving years. We start treating the union like the government of the thirteen hundred worlds.”
“I don’t want to be president of thirteen hundred worlds,” Drummer said. “I want to run a transport union that regulates trade through the gates. And then I want all those planets and moons and satellites to work out their own issues without it gumming up our works. We’re already stretched too thin.”
“If we had more personnel—”
“Emily,” Drummer said, “do you know the one thing I am absolutely sure won’t fix any of our problems? Another committee.”
Santos-Baca laughed, and a soft chime came from Drummer’s desk. An alert from Vaughn. High priority. She let it ride for a little bit. If it wasn’t People’s Home about to break apart, another minute wasn’t going to hurt. If it was, it wouldn’t help.
“You’ve seen all the same logistical reports that I have,” Drummer said. “Expecting the union to police the whole—”
The chime came again, louder this time. Drummer growled and tapped the screen to accept. Vaughn appeared, and before she could snap at the man, he spoke.
“Laconia put out a message, ma’am.”
Drummer looked at him. “What?”
“The warning message from Laconia gate was taken down,” Vaughn said. “It’s been replaced by a new message. The report from Medina came in”—he looked away and then back to her—“four minutes ago.”
“Is it broadcast?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Vaughn said. “Audio only. Not encrypted either. This is a press release.”
“Let me hear it,” she said.
The voice, when it came, was low and warm. It reminded her of a scratchy blanket she’d had once, comforting and rough in equal measure. She didn’t trust it.
“Citizens of the human coalition, this is Admiral Trejo of the Laconian Naval Command. We are opening our gate. In one hundred and twenty hours, we will pass into the slow zone in transit to Medina Station with a staff and support to address Laconia’s role in the greater human community going forward. We hope and expect this meeting will be amicable. Message repeats.”
“Well,” Santos-Baca said, and then stopped. “Didn’t see that coming.”
“All right,” Drummer said, and looked into Santos-Baca’s wide eyes. “Emily, get me everyone.”
The void city People’s Home was still in Mars orbit, down close to Earth and the sun, and hell and gone from the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. It took ten hours to hear back from all the experts in the union hierarchy, and five more for the system to review everything and build a unified report. Every question, every clarification, every new nuance or caveat would take about as long. Drummer was going to be spending most of the hundred and twenty hours before Laconia reopened waiting to hear from people. Their messages were flying between planets and moons, void cities and stations at the speed of light in vacuum, and it was still too damned slow.