Lafflin looked down. “That, yes, ma’am. The data’s given us some idea about the internal structures too. Enough that we feel confident that we can target the right places on that bastard. Take it out before it reaches Earth.”
Because that was the point, Drummer thought. That was always the point. Protect Earth and Mars. Keep the inner planets safe and independent, even at the cost of more Belters’ lives. And she’d known that. From the moment Avasarala had stepped into her meeting, she’d known. Some part of her expected to feel some kind of outrage, some betrayal. Resentment that the wheel of history was still rolling over the backs of her people first.
She didn’t. There was a term she remembered from her years in the OPA. Saahas-maut. She didn’t know where the term came from, but it meant something like the pleasure you take in hardship. It was supposed to be a peculiarly Belter emotion, something that the inners didn’t name because they didn’t feel it. She looked at the Tempest now, the guesswork lines of her superstructure and drive, the target points along her hull. Drummer wasn’t angry at the inners for using the union to protect Earth. She wasn’t even angry at the Laconians for being another iteration of everything the inners had been before the union existed. War and loss, the prospect of the oppressor’s boot. There was a nostalgia to it. A bone-deep memory of what it had been to be young.
She couldn’t help wondering what that girl, riding rock hoppers and taking gigs at Ceres and Iapetus and Tycho, would have thought of the woman she’d become. The leader of her own oppressions. Not much, probably.
Lafflin cleared his throat.
“Sorry,” Drummer said. “Didn’t sleep well. Vaughn? Could you get me some tea?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Vaughn said. “Also, Pallas.”
“Thank you,” she said. She didn’t mean it.
She’d placed the strategic update with Lafflin on her schedule on purpose. The Tempest’s inexorable flight sunward was slated to reach its point nearest to Pallas Station within the hour. The evacuation was complete, or as near to complete as it would be. There was always some old rock hopper with a gun and an attitude who’d stay behind out of spite and rage. It wouldn’t help. One of humanity’s oldest homes in the Belt would be dead before she went to sleep again, or if it wasn’t, it would be because Admiral Trejo had seen fit to grant his mercy. She was pretty sure that wasn’t going to happen. At least she could go into the terrible, predictable tragedy with all the vulnerable points of the Tempest firmly in mind. She had some hope of retribution.
There was a certain peace in the impossibility of subterfuge. Sure, there were stealth ships and long-range torpedoes. The cloak and dagger of vanishing into the vastness between worlds. They worked for a ship here and there. For the small and swift and furtive. But on this scale—the scale of war on the battlefield of the abyss—everyone knew more or less where everyone else was. Their drive plumes and heat signatures announced them. The hard laws of orbital mechanics and time placed every base, every planet, every person predictably in front of their own personal firing squads. Situations like this one, they could see death coming, and it didn’t matter. Death still came.
“Did you …” Lafflin said. “We can continue this after. If you’d like.”
Drummer didn’t like. She didn’t want to see it happen. Didn’t want to hope that Pallas might survive. But she was the president of the union, and bearing witness was part of what she was supposed to do. She wondered where Avasarala was, and whether the old lady was going to watch too.
“Yes,” Drummer said. “That’ll be fine.”
Lafflin nodded, rose from the table, and made his way out of the meeting room. Drummer stood, stretched, and switched the display to the tactical service’s analytics. The image wasn’t real. It was a composite of visual telescopy and Pallas’ internal data cobbled together into a best guess that was five minutes old from light delay before it reached her. Without Tycho beside it, Pallas looked … Calm? Still. The curves of the bases’ structures didn’t spin against the starscape. Pallas was older than that. By the time they’d learned how to spin asteroid stations up, Pallas had been in business for more than a generation. It would die without changing. A countdown timer showed the minutes to the Tempest’s closest pass. Seven minutes and thirty-three seconds.
The door slid open again, and Vaughn ghosted into the room, a drinking bulb in either hand. The smell of tea wafted to her seconds later. He didn’t speak as he reached out to her. The bulb warmed her palm and the tea was rich and sweet.
“Hard day,” Vaughn said. It was strange. She didn’t like Vaughn or dislike him, but she’d come to rely on him. And now, in this traumatic hour, it was this crag-faced political operative at her side instead of Saba. The universe was tricky, and its sense of humor came with teeth.
“Hard day,” Drummer agreed.
On the display, the Tempest fell slowly toward the sun. Pallas Station would pass on the ship’s starboard, and too far away to see with the naked eye. Admiral Trejo would be watching the show on a screen of his own. The death of Pallas would be one of the most observed events in history. Five minutes and fifteen seconds. Which meant, in Pallas’ frame of reference, now.
She took another sip of tea, feeling the hot water against her tongue and the roof of her mouth, Brownian motion making it seem to fizz against the soft flesh of her palate, beat against the individual taste buds. Molecules of sugar latched to contact sites, and the nerves ran through the meat of her tongue, back into her body like she was drinking twice, once with the liquid and once with electrical fire. A sense of vertigo washed through her.
She tried to put the bulb down, but the surface of the table was distant, visible, but through a distracting cloud that was the air—atoms and molecules bouncing against each other, striking and spinning away and striking again. Thicker than bodies at a tube station.
She tried to call out to Vaughn. She could see him, right there before her, the jagged territory of his skin fractally similar at every scale. She tried to make out his expression, but she couldn’t bring her focus back that far. It was like trying to see the face of God. Something hummed and throbbed, ticking faster than she could quite be aware of. The pulse of her own brain, the tempo of her consciousness. It sang like a chorus, and she heard herself hearing it.
She dropped the bulb. It clattered against the table, rolled, and dropped to the ground, falling closed so that it kept even a drop of tea from escaping. Vaughn took a step, then sank down to his knees. His eyes were wide, and his face pale as death and covered by sweat. Drummer sat slowly. Her knees felt weak.
“God,” Vaughn said. “Besse God.”
Drummer couldn’t tell if it was profanity or prayer.
The timer on the display read two minutes and twenty seconds. Whatever had happened, it had taken almost three minutes out of her life. It hadn’t seemed that long. Maybe she’d passed out?
“I need,” she began, and her voice felt strange. Like she could still hear overtones fluting up from her vocal cords. “I need to know what that was.”
“I don’t,” Vaughn said. He was weeping. Wide, thick tears dripping down his cheeks.
“Vaughn,” she snapped, and it sounded more like her own voice again. “Come to! I need to know what that was.”
“I saw everything,” he said.
“How widespread. What happened. Everything. Get me reports.”
“Yes,” he said, and then a moment later, “Yes, ma’am.” But he rested his head on his knees and didn’t move.
On the display, the timer came to twelve seconds, and the Tempest fired. Not missiles, but the magnetic beam that Saba had reported. The thing that had stripped the defenses from the slow zone and burst gamma radiation out all the gates. Pallas Station vanished like a blown-out candle with eleven seconds to spare. They were roughly five light-minutes away, so it had happened … the two things had happened together in the Tempest’s frame of reference.
“Tur,” she said. “Get me Cameron Tur.”
“The thing you have to understand is that the technology of the ring stations doesn’t break the speed of light,” Tur said, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a ball on a string. “The one thing we can absolutely say is that the protomolecule is bound by the speed of light. Everything they designed got around it with a different understanding of locality. That’s not the same thing at all.”