“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:
“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.
“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.”
“I know all that,” Drummer said.
“You do,” Avasarala said. “And you know what that means. But you’re scared and you’re traumatized and you don’t want to look it in the face because your husband is on Medina Station.”
Drummer picked up her tea and sipped without tasting it. Her stomach felt tight. Her throat was thick. Avasarala waited, letting the silence stretch between them. Saba was on Medina Station. It was a thought she’d been avoiding, and it was like touching a wound.
“Duarte’s good,” Drummer said at last. “He’s very good at what he does. And he came back in his own time and on his own terms.”
“Yes,” Avasarala agreed.
“You’re telling me he won’t overreach.”
“I’m telling you he came back because he thinks he can win,” Avasarala said. “And if he thinks that, you should prepare yourself for the idea that it’s true.”
“There’s no point, then,” Drummer said. “We should just roll over? Put our necks under his boot and hope he doesn’t step on us too hard?”
“Of course not. But don’t talk yourself into underestimating him because you want him to be the next Marco Inaros. Duarte won’t hand you a win by being a dumbfuck. He won’t spread himself too thin. He won’t overreach. He won’t make up half a dozen plans and then spin a bottle to pick one. He’s a chess player. And if you act on instinct, do the thing your feelings demand, he’ll beat us all.”
“Give up Medina. And the slow zone. And all the colony worlds.”
“Recognize that they’re occupied territory,” Avasarala said. “Protect what you
Drummer felt a little click in her heart, the physical sensation of comprehension. Avasarala was making the case for defending Earth. That was why she’d come to her. Drummer and the union, the void cities and the gunships, were critical to keeping Earth and Mars safe. The strategy she was arguing for was all about playing defense, and the thing Drummer would be defending was, in the final analysis, the inner planets. That’s what she and her people would be asked to die for: Earth and Mars and all the people who’d made their civilizations on the back of the Belters back in the days before the union. It wasn’t just strategy. It was naked self-interest.
Also, it was right.
Medina was behind enemy lines now. And Drummer wasn’t going to be able to take it back. That didn’t mean she was powerless.
“So,” she said, “what do we have to work with?”
