THIS SENSE OF PURPOSE IS EXACTLY WHAT MARS LOST WHEN THE GATES OPENED. THIS ISN’T AN INVASION AT ALL. IT’S THE RETURN OF THE REAL MARTIAN SPIRIT TO ITS PROPER PLACE, AND I AM HAPPY—FUCK, DELIGHTED—THAT I HAVE LIVED LONG ENOUGH TO SEE IT.
The way it played out was predictable. During her days, she felt like People’s Home was turning too fast on its axis. Only it wasn’t just her body that was getting spun. Her mind was too heavy to lift. She was controlling herself with a bad lag, like driving a mech with choppy software or running a waldo at the edge of its range. Meetings with the union board, with the EMC admiralty, with her own staff. Interviews and speeches in which she declared the independence of the union. She got through all of them with a physical sensation like her brain was evaporating. All she wanted to do from the start of her shift to the last moment before bed was close her eyes.
And then, as soon as she did, they opened again, as if by themselves.
THESE ASSHOLES SHOULD HAVE BEEN CUT OFF BEFORE THEY COULD GET THROUGH THE GATE. THIS IS EXACTLY THE PROBLEM I’VE BEEN TALKING ABOUT FOR YEARS. A TRADE UNION DOESN’T MATTER FOR SHIT WHEN AN ARMY COMES KNOCKING. IF YOU EVER NEEDED ANY PROOF THAT THE TRANSPORT UNION ADMINISTRATION WAS INCOMPETENT, THERE YOU GO. IT’S RIGHT HERE FOR YOU, AND IN SPADES.
She’d try to rest. Try to lure sleep back. Her eyes felt gritty. Her mouth felt dry. She wanted to eat, even though she wasn’t hungry. Wanted water, even though she wasn’t thirsty. It was like her body knew it needed something, and all it could do was run through the list of possibilities over and over, hoping that something would give her solace that hadn’t the last time. She found herself craving a pipeful of marijuana, even though she hadn’t smoked in decades.
She waited an hour, maybe two, then got up and spooled through the feeds and networked discussions with a dummy account she’d made for the purpose. She told herself it was research, that she was gauging the morale of the populace. It was easy to pretend that she was somehow learning something that would help. It felt like tearing off a scab and pressing salt into the opened sore, but it was better than paging through the names of the dead. Emily Santos-Baca …
From Ganymede, an independent journalist’s twenty-minute recording on the importance of solidarity in the face of the enemy. An old Earther’s open letter about surviving the terrible years after the rocks fell and why this time was different. A roundtable discussion by an open salon on Ceres about how the union was or wasn’t able to rise to the occasion and address the Laconian threat. A dozen languages, a thousand faces and voices and rhetorical styles. If she was looking for clarity there, she didn’t find it.
MY WIFE IS ON MEDINA STATION. I JUST GOT A MESSAGE FROM HER SAYING THAT THE LACONIAN GOVERNOR IS OFFERING BETTER TERMS THAN THE TRANSPORT UNION DID FOR EVERYONE WHO WORKS FOR THEM. AND SHE SAID THE TECHNOLOGY THAT’S COMING THROUGH LACONIA GATE IS GENERATIONS AHEAD OF ANYTHING WE HAVE. I KNOW IT’S NOT A POPULAR OPINION, BUT IF THEY’RE GOING TO TREAT THE WORKERS BETTER, BRING BETTER EQUIPMENT, AND STAY OUT OF OUR BUSINESS OTHERWISE, I THINK OUR REAL ENEMY IS THE BUREAUCRACY IN THE TRANSPORT UNION OFFICES!
There were other voices—many more of them, really—that saw the attack on Medina for what it was. She read essays on defiance in the face of tyranny, listened to music designed to rally the patriotic against the enemy. A school on Luna had started a campaign where the children were dyeing their right hands red in defiance of Laconia. The symbolism of it escaped her, but the trend spread far past the school, and half of the interviewers and journalists on the feeds had some version of it. Red gloves or finger sleeves or rings.
If she’d wanted to feel hopeful or resolved, it would have been easy to find those people and spend her insomniac hours only with them. But like a tongue prodding a sore tooth, she kept reaching for the others. Laconia is the future. The conquest is inevitable. Stop the war.
Capitulate.
There were also whole subfeeds devoted to speculating on the strategy of the EMC and the union. Some of the conversations there were eerily like briefings from the EMC admiralty. Others were desperation-fueled optimism dressed as military theory. None brought Drummer any more hope than she’d had before, and some left her mood darker.
And she hadn’t heard from Saba. Even when Medina lifted its comms blackout for propaganda, there’d been no message from him. From the others fighting against the occupation. She imagined that he was still there, sneaking between the decks like a rat made for gnawing through steel. That Medina would fall, and she’d hear his voice declaring their victory. Or failing that, that she’d hear his voice at all.
And behind it all, pressing down on her soul like a suffocating hand, the Tempest made its vast, stately way sunward. Already past the halfway point. Already braking. She understood their strategy perfectly. A single ship, making its way for everyone in every system to see. It was a demonstration of authority. Of inevitability. A piece of theater designed to humiliate, to subjugate, to control.
It was what she had done to Freehold.
That, as much as anything, kept her at the table in her quarters as the hours of sleeplessness slipped by. When she’d made the call, it had seemed like the obvious thing to do. Hard, yes, but in the service of a greater peace. A more orderly universe. Someplace where there’d be some respect for the rules.
The colonists on Freehold had made their choices. They’d broken the rules she and the people before her had set down. She’d felt justified when she sent the Rocinante. Now she wondered whether the colonists there had sat up in their beds in the night. Wondered how they would feed their children. Whether there was some way to finesse their way out of the future that was bearing down on them. Probably they had.
Maybe this was the way the universe showed her the errors of her ways. Taking the evil that she’d committed so offhandedly and turning it around to point at her. Her and Santos-Baca. All the refugees of Independence. All of the void city’s dead. If it was, then the universe hadn’t embraced the idea of proportional response yet.
The small, quiet part of her mind that watched all the rest knew that she wasn’t right. That there was no way for her to be right, not in a situation like this. If she’d been able to sleep, maybe. But the fear was eroding her bit by bit and taking away all the things that let her recover. Like a recycling pond with a plugged drain, she was filling with shit, and sooner or later, she’d overspill. It wasn’t a source of anxiety. It was just something she knew about herself, as if she were thinking about some different woman.
She drew her robe closer around her chest, spooled through the feeds. Watched a few seconds of the news from Loundres Nova, a few seconds out of the shipyards at Tycho-Pallas Complex, Ceres, Luna, Earth. Never enough to hear a whole story.
Weirdly, not all of it was about Laconia. There was a fire at an arcology outside Paris. A popular musician Drummer had liked as a girl had died. It was as if not everything were defined by Laconia and Duarte and her own failures. And then the top traffic on the feed would re-sort, and there was an image of the Tempest in all its threat and glory.
Holden had been right. Her plan for Freehold had been cruel, and she’d done it for the convenience of not being a government, not really. So that she could be unprepared when a navy no one knew existed arrived in force. She should have been kinder, wiser, more cunning. She should have been something other than what she was. There had to have been a moment when she could have chosen something different, when all of this could have been stopped. She couldn’t think when it had been.
Her system made its tock. If she’d been asleep, her lights would have come up.
“Ma’am?” Vaughn said. Not even his nighttime staff. Whatever it was, they’d woken him up for it first, and he’d made the decision to wake her. That couldn’t be good.
“I’m awake,” she said.
“We’ve had a message for you from the Tempest. It came in on tightbeam an hour ago. Signal intelligence says it’s genuine.”
“Not broadcast?”
“No, ma’am. Unencrypted, but not broadcast.”
Something the enemy wanted her and her people to see, but not as a press release. The switch in her mind flipped, and she wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed and sleep forever. “I’ll take it in my room,” she said.