It was possible that he would live his whole life and die as the governor of Medina Station and never see a real cloud again. He’d known that from the moment he’d met with the high consul, all those months ago. It hadn’t started chafing until just now.
The draft of his monthly report was open on his monitor, his personal journal inset in a smaller window. Everyone above him in the chain of command could see his journal if they chose to, but his report gave him the chance to summarize his experiences. To say what, from his perspective, was important. His fingers hovered over his keyboard, where they had been since the memory of Natalia and their old bedroom and the clouds had intruded on his thoughts. He wished he could pause longer.
Many of the locals persist in referring to the transfer of control in Sol system as a war. This kind of rhetoric has emboldened dissident factions on Medina Station. Given the escalating violence employed by the dissidents, I have elected to maintain the closed-gate policy until the arrival of the Typhoon. Ships coming in from colonial systems have too great a potential to smuggle in relief supplies and reinforcements for the recalcitrant elements here.
He paused again. A small, angry voice in the back of his mind said, In the event of another large-scale attack on the station, I recommend pulling Laconian forces back to the Storm and venting Medina Station. He pushed the thought away without writing it down. It wasn’t only that it was immoral, though that should have been enough. It was also a statement of weakness. An admission that he could not cut the rot out of this tree without burning it all. And still, the elegance of it made it hard to turn away.
If Holden and his allies had been held to truly Laconian standards, they would be dead. It was that simple. If Singh treated them with the respect and dignity with which Duarte treated him—to which Singh held himself—removing them all from the equation would just be proper discipline. But he had grown to understand that they weren’t Laconian. Not yet. They hadn’t had time to understand the necessity of the empire. Holden’s arguments were more than proof of that.
He had to be patient with them. Firm, but patient. He had to keep them from hurting themselves or others until the ripples of this admittedly vast change had calmed. Until the new patterns of life had become normal for them.
While I am certain that James Holden knows more of the local dissident factions than he is presently admitting, he is not our only resource on that matter. His experience and expertise in the anomaly that Admiral Trejo reported make him a genuinely unique asset on that issue. For that reason, I have chosen to break off his interrogation here and remove him immediately to Laconia for debriefing in whatever context the high consul considers most appropriate.
Meaning that the terrorist figurehead would see Laconia before he did. Might even come across Natalia and the monster before they came out to Medina, if the high consul chose to treat him gently. Holden would smell the rain. See the sunrise. And Singh would be here, in this spinning can in an eerie non-space that didn’t even have stars to make it feel like home. It was a deep irony that being a prisoner and being in power could be so mismatched.
“Damn it,” he said to his empty office, then leaned back, running one hand across his scalp. There was so much more to put into the report. The preparations he’d made—was making—for the stationing of the Typhoon and the additional personnel that it was bringing to Medina. The victories he’d had in rooting out the bombers and repairing the damage they had done. His schedule for coordinating and controlling the traffic between the worlds. The empire would succeed or fail on the back of its logistical planning, and his implementation of the high consul’s vision was actually quite detailed. Only just now, something itched in his soul, and he couldn’t concentrate.
He wondered whether Duarte ever suffered the same base animal distractions. It seemed he would have, but Singh couldn’t imagine it. He closed the draft report, opened his personal journal wide enough to edit, and then closed it too. The walls themselves seemed to push the air at him. It was like an optical illusion of something falling that never quite fell.
“Damn it,” he said again, less forcefully this time.
The reports coming in from Sol were distracting too. Trejo’s private reports tracked through the Gathering Storm, but they were meant for Duarte. Singh wished he could read them himself. There were so many questions—whether the Tempest had taken any lasting damage in its first foray against the enemy. Whether anything had changed with the anomaly that had appeared after Pallas. When Trejo anticipated the next battle would come. And if he believed it would be the last one.
There were the public feeds, of course. The positions of the combined navies were, for the most part, a known thing. The larger cruisers were impossible to hide, and the massive union ships they called void cities. But there might be stealth ships lying in wait or fields of torpedoes launched into a quiet orbit, counting on the vastness of space to conceal them until they burned to life. Just looking at the declassified tactical map made Singh’s flesh crawl. The vast cloud of the enemy shifting through the gravity-bent space of inner planets, like a swarm of insects with a single, hated enemy. And the Tempest alone in its simple course. Trejo wouldn’t evade and he wouldn’t retreat. He had his orders, and he would follow them.
Singh reminded himself of how powerful the Tempest was. How resilient. The high consul wouldn’t have committed the ship to a path that led to embarrassment for the empire and death for Trejo. And yet, what if he’d miscalculated? Or what if Earth or Mars or the union had been behind the wave of lost time? Or …
This speculation was pointless. Worse, it was self-indulgent. Even if he knew everything else he needed to put into his official report, it was going to have to wait. He had to get out of his offices, if only for a while. He had to collect himself.
Overstreet answered the connection request almost at once. “Governor?”
“I will need a security detail to my office at once.”
Overstreet’s silence was less than a heartbeat. “Is there a problem, sir?”
“No. I want to inspect the docks. When will there be sufficient security for that?”
If Overstreet was surprised or annoyed, there was no sign of it in his voice. “I’ll have a detail to you in five minutes, sir.”
“Thank you,” Singh said, then dropped the connection.
The Lightbreaker was a cargo ship that had been in the union’s fleet. A small vessel, but fast and with an efficient drive. All of the ships and their crews were guests of the empire until the Typhoon arrived. But not the Lightbreaker. Of all the ships on the station manifest, that was the one best suited to act as a prisoner transport. It was slated to push off in half an hour’s time with James Holden in its brig and a crew Singh had chosen from the Gathering Storm. And Singh found he very much wanted to be there when the first ship left Medina Station for Laconia. The first transit to happen while he was in charge of the ring space. His watch.
He straightened his uniform and checked himself in the mirror before stepping smartly into the outer offices. He heard the change when he walked into the room. The men and women under his command making certain that he saw them busy. Eight Marines in armor were waiting outside, along with a driver, who wasn’t in power armor but did carry an assault rifle beside her in the cart.
“The docks, sir?” the driver asked.
“Berth K-eighteen,” Singh said, then sat back as the cart started off.
The Marine escort loped along as fast as the cart could drive and with the sense that they weren’t anywhere near an uncomfortable pace. The hallway had been cleared, and guards stood at the intersections with weapons drawn. It was like traveling through the dream of a tube station that had grown out in all directions until there wasn’t even the promise of finding a way up to the surface. A woman with a heart-shaped face peered past the guard’s shoulder, straining to catch a glimpse of him, and Singh waved at her. Let the civilians see that their governor was here, not hiding away in his office. If he wasn’t scared of the terrorists, the loyal faction of the population wouldn’t be either. Or less so, anyway.
And still, he did wonder how many of those people he passed would have been as happy to see him dead. He wondered if the girl with the heart-shaped face would have shot him if she’d had the chance. There was no way to be certain. Would never be a way to be totally certain. Or at least no way other than …