Saba yawned and stretched, his eyes still shut. Drummer ran a hand over his wire-brush hair, a little more insistently this time. His eyes opened and his wicked little half smile flickered on and then off again.
“Are you up?” she asked, trying to keep her voice soft, but really wanting the answer to be yes.
“Yes.”
“Thank God,” she said, and hauled herself up off the couch and went to the head. By the time she was back, Saba was standing naked at the little tea dispenser that had been provided for the exclusive use of the president. Saba had been with her for almost a decade now, and if his age showed a little in the softness of his belly and the roundness of his face, he was still a very pretty man. Sometimes, seeing him like this, she wondered whether she was aging as gracefully. She hoped so, or if not, that he didn’t notice.
“Another beautiful morning in the corridors of power, ah?” he said.
“Budget hearings in the morning, trade approval in the afternoon. And Carrie Fisk and her fucking Association of Worlds.”
“And fish on Friday,” he said, turning to hand her a bulb of hot tea. As little time as People’s Home spent on the float, she might as well have had Earther cups. But she never would. “What’s an Association of Worlds?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Drummer said. “Right now it’s a couple dozen colonies that feel like I’d listen to them better if they spoke with one voice.”
“Are they right?”
He took another bulb for himself and leaned against the wall. He had a weirdly intense way of listening. More than his eyes, it was what made him pretty. Drummer sat on the couch, scowled at nothing in particular and everything in general. “Yes,” she said at last.
“And so you don’t like them?”
“I don’t dislike them,” Drummer said and took a sip of her tea. It was green and flavored with honey and still just a little too hot. “They’ve been around since Sanjrani, in one form or another. It’s all been sternly worded press releases and political grandstanding.”
“And now?”
“Sternly worded press releases, grandstanding, with occasional meetings,” she said. “But that actually means something. I didn’t use to have to make room on the agenda for them. Now it seems like I do.”
“What of Freehold?”
“Auberon is more the issue,” she said. “There’s talk that they’re making progress toward a universal polypeptide cross-generator.”
“And what is that, when it’s at home?”
It was a mechanism for pouring whatever toxic, half-assed soup the biospheres of the scattered planets had come up with into one end of a machine and getting something that humanity could eat out the other. Which meant sometime in the next ten or fifteen years, the effective end of Sol system’s monopoly on soil and farming substrates. And it meant Auberon was about to become the new superpower in the wide-flung paths of the human diaspora, provided that Earth and Mars didn’t decide to fly a navy out through the gates and start the first interstellar war.
All assuming, of course, that the breakthrough wasn’t vapor and tricks, which she wasn’t ready to discount. Every great nation, they said, was founded on a knife and a lie.
“I’m not supposed to talk about that,” she said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”
Saba’s face went hard for a moment, but he pushed it back into a smile again. He hated it when she closed him out of things, but however much she trusted him—however much the union’s security division had cleared him—he wasn’t in the chain of authority. Drummer had spent too much of her life enforcing security protocols to ignore them now.
“The upshot is,” she said, trying to bring him in enough to salve his feelings and still not say anything compromising, “that Freehold is, among other things, a warning to Auberon not to get too cocky, and Carrie Fisk and the Association of Worlds is sniffing around to see if there’s any opportunities in it for them. Including how far they can push me.”
Saba nodded and, to her mild disappointment, started to get dressed. “So more palace intrigue, savvy sa?” he said.
“Comes down to that,” Drummer said, apologizing and also being angry for apologizing, even if it was only by implication.
Saba saw the storm in her almost before she knew it was there. He stepped over to her, knelt at her feet, and put his head in her lap. She coughed out a laugh and patted his hair again. It was an obeisance that he didn’t mean, and she knew it. He knew it too. But even if it didn’t mean he was actually abasing himself before her, it still meant something.
“You should stay another night,” she said.
“I shouldn’t. I have crew and cargo and a reputation as a free man to maintain.” The laughter in his voice pulled the sting a little bit.
“You should come back soon, then,” she said. “And stop hooking up with all the girls on Medina.”
“I would never be unfaithful to you.”
“Damned right you wouldn’t,” Drummer said, but there was laughter in her voice too now. Drummer knew that she wasn’t an easy woman to love. Or even to work with. There weren’t many people in the vast span of the universe that could navigate her moods, but Saba was one of them. Was the best at it of anyone.
The system made its broken bamboo tock. Vaughn, making the first approach of the day. Soon, there would be briefings and meetings and conversations off the record with people she liked or trusted or needed, but never all three at once. She felt Saba’s sigh more than she heard it.
“Stay,” she said.
“Come with me.”
“I love you.”
“Te amo, Camina,” he said, and rose to his feet. “And I will flitter off to Medina and back so quickly you’ll hardly know I was gone.”
They kissed once, and then he left, and the cabin seemed empty. Hollow as a bell. The system made another little tock.
“I’ll be there in five,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” Vaughn replied.
She dressed, did her hair, and was in the office in slightly less than fifteen minutes, but Vaughn didn’t chide her for it.
“What’s up first today?” she asked as he handed her a little cup of white kibble and sauce.
His hesitation was almost too small to notice. But only almost. “Message came in from Captain Holden of the Rocinante.”
“Sum it up?”
The hesitation was more pronounced this time. “Perhaps you should watch it, ma’am.”
The meeting room was on the outermost deck of the People’s Home drum. Coriolis in the void city was trivial to anyone who’d spent time on a ring station, but outsiders who’d only known mass and acceleration gravity before still found it bothersome. The walls were a pearlescent gray, the table a veneer of blond bamboo over titanium that was bolted straight to the deck. Drummer sat at its head, seething. Most of the others around her—Emily Santos-Baca, Ahmed McCahill, Taryn Hong, and all the other representatives of the board and budget office—knew her well enough to gauge her mood and tread lightly. The poor man making the presentation had never met her before.
“It’s been a question of priorities,” the man said. His name was Fayez Okoye-Sarkis, and he’d come to speak on behalf of some kind of nongovernmental, nonacademic group that pushed for science research. Chernev Institute, based out of Ganymede and Luna. “Over the last decades—really since the bombardment of Earth—the vast, vast majority of research has been in increasing food yield and infrastructure. And mostly, it’s been reverse engineering the technology that made things like the protomolecule and the ring station. Every planet we’ve been to has had artifacts and old technologies.”