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
“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,
“Yes,” Drummer said. Meaning
“When my wife was an undergraduate, back in the day,” he said, “her fieldwork involved tracking rodent species that had adapted to live in high-radiation zones. Old reactors and fission test sites. They had evolved to fit into environments that were specifically created. By humans. Well, we’re those rodents now. We’re adapting ourselves into spaces and environments that were left behind by the vanished species or groups of species that created all this. The changes in technology we’ve seen are immense, and they promise to be just the beginning.”
