“We have established that this system has nothing that—”
Elvi didn’t let him finish. “But putting that aside for a moment, I just said whatever lives inside those gates has a very different understanding of physics than we do. Is it limited to taking its anger out on only one solar system? You don’t know that. You can’t know that.”
“Passivity didn’t save the gate builders. It won’t save us. The high consul has considered the risks and judged a proactive, direct path to be the best option available.”
He spread his hands. What can be done? As if Duarte’s word were a force of nature, inescapable and unquestionable. It was like talking to a recording.
“You are about to run an n-equals-one experiment where one is the number of universes we can break trying to satisfy Duarte’s curiosity.”
Chapter Eleven: Alex
The shipyards on Callisto were a perfect example of the old idea that ships and buildings keep learning even after they’re built. History took whatever it found and used it for what was happening at the time, remaking the spaces into whatever worked well enough to get by at the moment, until history itself became a kind of architect.
Callisto had been a divided base once. Pretty much the same way medieval villages had been built just outside castle walls, civilian shipyards had grown up around the older MCRN base until the military and commercial concerns were almost the same size. The Free Navy had raided the Martian side even before the Free Navy really existed, pounding that half of the base into dust and bodies. Then, in the aftermath of the great defection that became the seeds of Laconia, the rebuilding of the Martian shipyards had been left incomplete. During the starving years, it had been abandoned. But the real estate was there, and as the need grew again, what had been military structures were taken over again. Nothing died without becoming the foundation for what came after.
They had been on Callisto for eight days so far, and it wasn’t certain when they’d ship back out. There were several of the big cargo ships in Sol system that might be able to smuggle the Storm, if that was what the underground decided to do next. Or maybe they’d stay in Sol. For all Laconia’s ambitions, there were still more people, stations, and ships in the Sol system than outside it. That was changing, though. Someday within Alex’s lifetime, they’d cross the threshold, and Sol really would be just one system among many. The oldest, most human system in the empire, sure. But not home. There would be a thousand homes, and if history was a guide, in a generation or two, everyone would think wherever they were was the most important one.
The restaurant Caspar had taken him to, for example, was in a reinforced dome that had clearly been Martian military construction. A supply depot, probably. Now all the fail-closed locks were gone, and the reinforced walls were hung with batiked cloth and the kind of tapestry that interior decorators churned out by the square meter. The menu billed itself as Moroccan, but the couscous was made with mushrooms and the beef all had the overly consistent grain that meant it had grown in a vat. The recipes might have had their roots on Earth, but Alex knew Belter food when he tasted it.
He and Caspar and the rest of the crew wore printed flight suits with a triangle-and-curve logo that implied they worked for a gas-mining cooperative called Három állam that worked the Jovian moons. The Gathering Storm was hidden in a generations-old mine that was marked on the surveys as having been lost to collapse fifteen years before. It had been an OPA smuggling base, and the plan was to leave it there for a few weeks while the Laconian security forces were on high alert. Which meant, in the meantime, the crew could take a little time off the ship, drink, visit brothels, play golgo and handball and two-court football. Or fold up their legs on soft, woven cushions, listen to flute and drum music from hidden speakers, and scoop up little bits of fungus pretending to be wheat flour and cubes of spiced beef that had never been a cow.
Another advantage was that a little time on Callisto with civilians meant they could take the temperature of the system. See how everyone was reacting to the news of the underground’s attack. It turned out the response wasn’t what Alex had expected.
“Nothing?” Caspar said.
Alex cycled through the newsfeeds again. Food production on Earth and Ganymede were up this quarter, easily matching the established projections. A group in the Krasnoyarsk-Sakha Shared Interest Zone was petitioning for trade autonomy. The settlement on Navnan Ghar was reporting the discovery of a massive underground crystal network, and a special scientific commission was being assembled to determine whether it was another alien artifact or something that had occurred naturally on the planet. The lead singer of Tuva T.U.V.A. had sent nude photos of himself to an underage fan, and the authorities were investigating. The Laconian Science Directorate was reporting a potential breakthrough in the survey of dead systems: a massive green diamond that experts suspected might contain records that, if decoded, would spell out the history of the species that had created the ring gates.
That two Laconian frigates and a freighter carrying a critically important political officer had been destroyed in Sol system was listed precisely nowhere.
Or at least nowhere he could see without searching the newsfeed indexes. And since Saba had it on good authority that Laconia was keeping a close eye on search terms, Alex was stuck browsing and hoping for something. Anything. But . . .
“Nope,” he agreed. “Nothing.”
Caspar took bit of bread and scooped up a bite of his tagine. “I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad one.”
“When I was your age,” Alex said, “it would have been on every feed. Earth and Mars would have had official responses, and there would’ve been eighteen different mainline feeds analyzing every word they said from different perspectives. The Belt would have had a thousand different pirate broadcasts with at least a dozen of them taking credit for it personally, and at least one saying it was all a Jesuit conspiracy.”
Caspar grinned. One of his eyeteeth was a little yellowed. Alex had never noticed that before. “Sounds like you miss it, grandpa.”
Alex looked up, questioning. Caspar put on a comic frown and an exaggerated drawl. “When I was your age, we had to make our own water from scratch every morning and dinosaurs roamed Mariner Valley.”
Alex felt a little stab of annoyance, but he pushed it back and laughed. “There was some variety at least.” He gestured toward the feeds spooling through on the tabletop monitor. “Everything on this feels like it’s been vetted by the same bureaucrat on Luna. It’s all got the same voice.”
“Probably was.”
“Yeah,” Alex said, shutting it off. “It probably was.”
Caspar stretched like a cat waking up from a nap, then tapped the monitor. The newsfeeds vanished and the restaurant’s interface popped up.
“We can split this,” Alex said.
“You buy next time,” Caspar said. “Anyway. Not like it’s real money, right?”
All the Storm crew on Callisto had false identities generated by the underground and slipped into the systems. Including biometrics and bank accounts. It was an uncomfortable way to live, knowing that everything was brittle. Alex’s fake records could all be exposed if the Laconian security system raised a red flag. He could spend tonight and then the rest of his life in a jail cell. Everything could fall apart at any moment.
Which, to be fair, had always been true. It was just harder to forget now.
“I’m meeting some of the engineering crew down on the third level. There’s a bar that has open mic comedy and half-price whiskey. Enough karaoke, and a pretty boy like me might even find someone to take him home tonight.”
“Drink one for me, and don’t make any mistakes you can’t regret the next morning,” Alex said, rising from his cushion. “I’ve got some things of my own to do.”
“Fair enough,” Caspar said. “See you when I see you.”