"Today? The Board hasn't even approved the shield yet, much less this tech."
"They will," said Lem. "They'll approve both. As far as they're concerned, this is a financial no-brainer."
"And if you're wrong? If they don't approve?"
"We'll do it anyway. I'll finance it myself. And you can be sure that Chubs and his crew and plenty of the other ships will join us in the fight, regardless of what the Board decides."
She considered that and nodded. She knew Chubs as well as he did. All of the workers had gathered now. The mood of the room had shifted. There was an excitement among them. Lem could feel it.
"How do we move this into production?" said Benyawe. "We need facilities, crews, raw materials, bots."
"We'll use the drone production facility to build the shatter boxes. They're not doing anything at the moment. That whole division is a sunken ship. They'll be eager for the work. Then we move the shatter boxes and drone crews to Kotka and retrofit all the ships there. We'll need every engineer here as well," Lem said, looking around the room at their faces. "The ships at Kotka are of various sizes and shapes, with differing drive systems. We'll have to custom-make the fittings for the sling mechanisms for each ship, placing the sling wherever it will give the crews the most accurate targeting." He turned back to Benyawe. "So I repeat my final question to you: Do these pose a threat to Earth? We fretted over the glasers misfiring and hitting the planet. Is that a problem here?"
"No," said Benyawe. "The shatter boxes only emit the tidal forces once they've attached to their target and confirmed that their positions are polar opposites. There's no chance of them firing as they're rotating through space. I made certain of that. You don't want them misfiring and hitting the ship that launched them."
"What if they miss?" asked Lem. "What if one is slung down toward Earth?"
She shrugged. "It will burn up on reentry. It will never get near the surface."
Lem nodded. "That's good enough for me. Let's get busy. And Dr. Benyawe, a word in private please."
She followed him into his office, a cramped space with bare walls and two old, mismatched office chairs he had found discarded in the warehouse. He motioned Benyawe to one, and he sat opposite. He tapped his wrist pad, and the walls and ceiling went black, dotted with stars and vibrant nebulae, giving Lem and Benyawe the sensation of sitting on a platform in the immensity of space.
"Trying to set a mood?" she asked.
He nestled back into his chair, a musty threadbare thing that smelled like an attic. "It's funny. I hated every moment of our trip to the Kuiper Belt. The cramped spaces, the food, the inconvenience, the confinement. And yet I do miss this." He gestured around him. "There is nothing more peaceful than space."
"Is that what this is?" she asked. "An attempt at peace?"
"Between us?" he said. "I hope so. You're angry that I severed communications with Victor and Imala. But you have to understand--"
She cut him off. "I know why you made the decision you did, Lem. You don't have to justify your actions to me. You tried to stop your father. He had his reasons for moving forward. My issue is that you made that decision without consulting me or anyone else on the team."
"You would have objected," Lem said. "And if you had, I couldn't have stopped you from making a transmission. The only way to ensure that no transmission was sent was to keep you in the dark and pull the plug myself. I did this for their sake, Benyawe. As a kindness, a mercy."
She looked sad. "One day, Lem, you're going to wake up and realize how arrogant you are and how lonely your world is as a result."
He raised an eyebrow. "So much for passing the peace pipe. How am I being arrogant here? Please, I'd be fascinated to hear."
"You assume you're the only person intelligent enough to make a rational decision."
"That's not true. I ask for your counsel all the time."
"No, you ask that I advise you on how to achieve the decision you've already made. You don't ask what we should be doing in the first place. And what's ironic is that your father has this same trait and you find it maddening."
"Is this what this is about, Benyawe? You feeling slighted? You not having enough authority?"
She laughed. "Is that what you think? That I want authority?" She practically spit the word out. "I would have told Victor and Imala that drones were coming, yes. But I also would have done everything in my power to save their lives."
"There was no way to save them."
"This is my point. You decided it was hopeless. And if you couldn't think of a solution, then there must not be one."
"Are you saying you had a solution?"
"As impossible as that might seem to you, yes. I would have told them both to get as far inside the Formic ship as possible."
"Inside the target? The thing the drones were sent to destroy? That would've been your plan?"