Drummer pushed through a flurry of reactions—surprise that the woman was here, a flicker of starstruck awe, disorientation at being called by her first name in public, distrust that Chrisjen Avasarala—the retired grand dame of inner-planet politics—knew about her brother at all, and finally the solid certainty that every feeling she’d just experienced had been anticipated. More than anticipated. Designed. It was all a manipulation, but done so well and with such grace that knowing that didn’t make it ineffective.
“He’s fine,” Drummer said. “The regrowth went well.”
“Good, good,” Avasarala said, lowering herself into a chair. “Astounding what they can do with neural replacement these days. When I was growing up, they cocked it up more than they got it right. I had most of my peripheral nervous system redone a couple years ago. Works better than the old stuff, except my leg gets restless at night.”
Santos-Baca and McCahill both smiled, but with anxiety in their eyes.
“Ma’am,” Lafflin said, “please. We’re in the middle of a meeting.”
“You can finish it later,” Avasarala said. “President Drummer and I need to talk.”
“I didn’t see you on my schedule,” Drummer said mildly. Avasarala turned back to her. The warmth was gone, but the intellect was there, sharp and feral.
“I’ve been where you are right now,” the old woman said. “I’m the only one in the whole human race who has. The way your stomach feels when you try to eat? The part of you that’s screaming all the time, even when you’re acting calm? The guilt? Anyone who’s had a child in the hospital has suffered through that shit. But the part where all human history rides on what you do, and you only get one shot? That’s only you and me. I came because you need me here.”
“I appreciate—”
“You’re about to fuck up,” Avasarala said, and her voice was harder than stone. “I can keep that from happening. And we can have that conversation here in front of these poor fucking shitheads, or you can roll your eyes and humor the crazy old bitch with a cup of tea and we can have a little privacy. You can blame me for it. I won’t mind. I’m too old and tired for shame.”
Drummer laced her fingers together. Her jaw ached, and she had to focus to unclench it. She wanted to scream. She wanted to have Avasarala thrown out of the city in a plastic emergency bubble with a note tacked to her cane that said Make an appointment first. She wanted to see McCahill and Santos-Baca look at her with awe and fear at the violence of her reaction. And none of those things had anything to do with Chrisjen Avasarala. They were all of them about what had happened to Medina.
“Vaughn,” Drummer said. “Could you get Madam Avasarala a pot of tea? We’ll take a recess of an hour or so.”
“Of course, Madam President,” Vaughn said. The others rose from their chairs. Santos-Baca took a moment to shake Avasarala’s hand before she left. Drummer scratched her chin even though it didn’t itch and kept her temper until the room was empty except for the two of them. When she spoke, it was with a careful, measured tone.
“If you ever undermine me like that again, I will find a way to make everyone in the EMC stop taking your calls. I will isolate you like no one this side of a prison door has ever been isolated. You’ll spend the last days of your life trying to talk interns into getting you coffee.”
“It was a dick move,” Avasarala said, pouring a cup of tea for herself and then another one for Drummer. “It’s my fault. I overreact when I’m scared.”
She hobbled across the room and set the mug down in front of Drummer. An act of submission as calculated as everything she’d done. Whether it was sincere or insincere didn’t matter. She’d kept the form. Drummer picked up the tea, blew across it, and sipped. Because keeping the form was all that was keeping her together now too. Avasarala nodded her approval and went back to her seat.
“I’m scared too,” Drummer said.
“I know. That was some frightening shit that came back from Medina. That ship? I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve never seen speculation about anything like it.” Avasarala picked up her own mug, sipped, and nodded toward the tea. “This is good.”
“We grow it here. Real leaves.”
“All the food chemists in the system will never do better than evolution at making a decent tea leaf.”
“How am I about to fuck up?”
“By trying to get back your losses,” Avasarala said. “It’s not just you either. You’re going to have advisors on all sides who want the same damn thing. Mass a force to reclaim Medina, find a way to coordinate, take the fight back to Laconia. Through a massive effort and at tremendous cost, push our way back to the status quo ante.”
“Sunk-cost fallacy?”
“Yes.”
“So you don’t think—” Drummer had to stop. The words were physically gagging her. She swallowed more tea, the heat of it loosening her throat. “You don’t think we can get the slow zone back?”
“How the fuck would I know? But I do know you can’t get it back as your first step. And I know how much you want to. It feels like if you’re just smart enough, fast enough, strong enough now, it won’t have happened the way it already did. But that’s not how it’s going to work. And I know how consuming that grief can be. Grief makes people crazy. It did me.”
It was like the air mix in the room was wrong. Nothing Avasarala was saying was news to her, but the sympathy in the old woman’s voice was worse than shouting. A vast fear, wide and cruel, welled up in Drummer’s gut. She put her mug back down with a click, and Avasarala nodded.
“I was briefed about Duarte, back in the day,” the old woman said. “Mars didn’t want to share anything back then. I thought at the time it was because they’d just been surprise ass-fucked by one of their own, and it was shame. That was true as far as it went, but after I retired, I made him a hobby of mine.”
“A hobby?”
“I’m shitty at quilting. I had to do something,” she said, waving a hand. Then a moment later, “I found his thesis.”
The little book she held out was printed on thin paper with a pale-green cover. It was rough against her fingertips. The title was in a simple font with no adornment: Logistics-Based Strategy in Interplanetary Conflict, by Winston Duarte.
“He wrote it at university,” Avasarala said. “He tried to have it published, but it never went anywhere. It was enough to get him a position in the Martian Navy, put him on a career path.”
“All right,” Drummer said, thumbing through the pages.
“After the Free Navy, the best intelligence services in two worlds went over that man’s life in so much detail you could get the Christian names of every flea that bit him. I’ve read … fuck, fifty analyses? Maybe more than that. It all comes back to those hundred and thirty pages there.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s a plan for Mars to take control of the solar system away from Earth and the Belt without firing a shot. And it would have worked.”
Drummer frowned, opened the book to a random page. The control of resources can be achieved through three strategies: occupation, influence, and economic necessity. Of these, occupation is the least stable. A chart on the facing page listed minerals and their locations in the Belt. Avasarala was watching her, dark eyes fixed and penetrating. When she spoke, her voice was soft.
“At twenty years old, Winston Duarte saw the path that none of his superiors did. That no one on Earth did. He laid it all out, point by point, and the only reason history ran the way it did is that no one took much notice. Then he was a good, solid career officer for decades, until he saw something—an opportunity, maybe—in the data from the first wave of probes that went through the gates. Without changing the time of day when he got his hair cut, he shifted into engineering the biggest theft in the history of warfare. He took the only active protomolecule sample, enough ships to defend a gate, and engineered the chaos that knocked Earth and Mars on their asses.”