“I am taking the edge off the pain,” Drummer said. “Because what else can I do?”
Avasarala turned her chair and started off toward the podium and the seats. They were empty now, but the journalists were starting to filter in. The show would be starting soon.
“I’d join you, but they tell me I’m on my last liver these days,” Avasarala said. “No more liquor for me.”
“You seem to be taking the conquest fairly well.”
“The fuck option do I have?” Avasarala said. “I’m an old lady who spent her life trying to make peace between Earth and Mars. All this shit? It’s like I missed a day at school, and everyone else learned to speak Mandarin while I was gone. I don’t understand any of this.”
“Yeah,” Drummer said. “I can see that.”
“It’s the reward of old age,” Avasarala said. “You live long enough, and you can watch everything you worked for become irrelevant.”
“You’re not selling it,” Drummer said.
“Fuck you, then. Die young. See if I care.”
Drummer laughed. Avasarala grinned, and for a moment, they understood each other perfectly. For a moment, Drummer didn’t feel alone.
“Are you going to his orgy pit or whatever the fuck it is Duarte’s setting up?” Avasarala asked.
Across the room, Vaughn caught Drummer’s eyes and began walking toward the two women with purpose. Drummer didn’t want to go with him. Didn’t want to face the theater and falsehood of the next part. She turned back to Avasarala.
“I don’t know. I suppose I have to.”
“Always a bad idea to ditch the emperor,” Avasarala agreed. Then, “Do you know why they’re looking for Okoye?”
“Who?”
“Elvi Okoye,” Avasarala said, and Vaughn reached them.
“It’s time, ma’am,” he said.
Drummer nodded and handed him her glass. Avasarala’s claw of a hand grabbed hers, held her for a moment. “Chin up, Camina. These fuckers can smell blood. And this shit’s not over, no matter what it looks like now.”
“Thank you,” Drummer said, and pulled away.
The seats for the journalists were full now. She recognized their faces. Sometimes even the way they sat, the way they moved. She’d done this for years. She’d never done this before.
Admiral Trejo made some brief opening remarks—thanked everyone for being there, expressed bright hopes for the future, extended the greeting of High Consul Duarte—and brought her up. The others would come later. The secretary-general. The speaker of the Martian parliament. Whoever else. But she was the last president of the Transport Union. Her dignity was first for the chopping block.
She looked out over the faces and remembered a time she’d enjoyed this.
“President Drummer?” Her podium identified the woman. Monica Stuart. “Is the Transport Union cooperating in the transfer of control?”
No, it is not. No, I am not. No, we have been conquered, but we will fight to the last breath because living with someone else’s hand on our necks is intolerable, has always been intolerable, will always be intolerable. Not because of Laconia, not because of the union, not because of any of the authorities through all of history that have made rules and then dared people to break them. Because we’re human, and humans are mean, independent monkeys that reached their greatness by killing every other species of hominid that looked at us funny. We will not be controlled for long. Not even by ourselves. Any other plan is a pipe dream.
In the front row, Avasarala coughed.
Drummer smiled thinly.
“The Transport Union has always been a temporary structure,” she began.
Chapter Fifty-Two: Naomi
Freehold was pain. Some days that was a good thing. It gave her something to push against, something to fight. Other days it was just wearying.
The pencil-thin valley where they’d set the Roci down had steep, high mountains to the north, east, and southwest. A thin creek ran along the bottom with glacier meltwater. Pale-green treelike organisms clung to the stone with finger-thick roots and stretched out vines studded with pale-green bladders that floated into the open air as if Nature itself were putting up balloons for a party. A high breeze would shift the vines one way and then the other. Every now and then, one would break off and swirl away down the valley, maybe to die or maybe to find some new place to take root.
She understood it was all the product of evolutionary arms races. Photosynthesizing structures had spent centuries, maybe millennia, trying to choke each other in darkness until one of them had figured out how to both be rooted and fly, how to both command the high air and drop everything below it into permanent twilight. None of it had been created with the Rocinante in mind. It just worked out well.
The Roci itself huddled in a wide space where the creek curved around. The landing thrusters had scorched the landscape around it, but it didn’t take more than a day or two before the local plants began growing back. The fight for survival made everything either resilient or forgotten. The floating vines made a moving canopy fifteen meters above them that would help hide them from observation, if anything ever came into the system to look. As hiding places went, it was decent.
The colony itself—the only other three hundred people on the planet—was in an arid biome a six-hour hike down the valley. At least it was for her. The locals could make the trip in half the time. Houston lived down there, among his people, and sometimes she and Alex would stay there too. But most days, she was at the Roci—her real home. There was maintenance to be done, restocking. Distilling the creek water until it was pure enough to put in the Roci’s tanks. The reactor could run for months without needing more fuel, but reaction mass was always a problem. If they wanted to go anywhere. If they just stayed put … well, less of an issue, then.
Today she’d spent half the daylight hours discouraging a cluster of very slow animals or possibly semimobile plants that were exploring whether the niches around the Roci’s PDCs would be a good place to live. When the light faded, she stopped for lunch. The planet’s sixteen-hours-and-change diurnal cycle meant that most of her workdays had at least half a night in them.
The Roci had been built to rest on its belly in a gravity well. All of her systems functioned, even at ninety degrees from what she’d become used to. That seemed right too. Being at home, but also in a space her body didn’t understand. Being in control of her day, but not of her life. Being achingly alone, but not wanting people around. It was all of a piece. If she’d dreamed it, it would have meant something.
As soon as she crawled back into the ship, she showered. There were compounds in the life cycle of Freehold that irritated her skin if she didn’t wash them off. Then she pulled on a fresh jumpsuit, went to the galley, made herself a bowl of white kibble, and sat. A message was waiting for her from Bobbie, and she set her hand terminal on the table when she played it so she could use both hands to eat. The kibble was warm and peppery; the mushroom squeaked against her teeth just the way it was supposed to.
Bobbie looked exhausted and excited at the same time. Her hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail the way she wore it when she was working on machinery, not the bun she had for workouts. Her eyes were bright and the suggestion of a smile teased her mouth without ever quite appearing. She looked ten years younger. More than that, she looked happy.
“Hey, Naomi. Hope things are going well down there. I think we’re making some real progress up here. I’m not positive, but I think I’ve found how the Storm manages its energy profiles. It’s a little screwy, same as everything on this rig. I was wondering if I could get you to take a quick skim through the new dataset I pulled. Maybe you’ll see something I didn’t?”