“Fair enough,” she said. “And how does the union fit in with this?”
“There are several things that the Transport Union can do to help with the effort. The first being, of course, a contract to grant passage to Institute ships. We’ve got fieldwork proposals for sites on half a dozen planets whose preliminary surveys look most promising. But we have to get there first.” His grin was an invitation for her to smile back.
“That makes sense,” Drummer said. His grin lost its edge.
“The other thing that we’d like to open a conversation about … the Transport Union is in a singular position. The fruits of our work stand to benefit the union as much or more than anyone else in any system.”
“And so you’d like us to underwrite your work,” Drummer said. “Is that it?”
“I had some more preliminaries that help lay the groundwork for why,” Okoye-Sarkis said, “but yes.”
“You understand we aren’t a government,” Drummer said. “We’re a shipping union. We take things from one place to another and protect the infrastructure that lets us do that. Research contracts aren’t really in our line.”
Okoye-Sarkis looked around the table, searching for sympathetic eyes. Maybe he even found a few. Drummer knew that her reaction might have been different if the proposal had been made a day earlier. But Holden’s message from Freehold …
“The Institute respects that, ma’am,” Okoye-Sarkis said. “This is a very new project, but one I think has the potential to yield real benefits for everyone. I have a breakdown of our mission proposals I can leave with you and whoever in your staff wants to look at them.”
“All right,” Drummer said.
“And the passage agreement. I don’t mean to press, but we’re still getting our backers together, and the fees—”
“Give us your proposals,” Drummer said. “The board can go over them. Whatever conclusion they make about reducing or waiving the contract fees will be fine with me.”
“Thank you, Madam President. That’s wonderful. Thank you very much.”
The scientist practically bowed himself out of the room. Drummer ticked off the last entry in her morning agenda. The afternoon’s list looked just as long and at least equally irritating. Santos-Baca caught her eye and lifted an eyebrow.
“It’s an interesting proposal. It should make for a lively debate,” she said, meaning I see you just gave the board another issue to deal with.
“It’s important that the board be involved in any serious decisions,” Drummer said, meaning Suck it up. Emily Santos-Baca chuckled, and half against her will, Drummer smiled. But only for a few seconds.
She suffered through the small talk and pleasantries that came before and after all meetings like social plaque, then went back to her private office as soon as she could. Vaughn or one of his staff had left a bowl of soy pasta with mushrooms and a glass of wine for her. She started with the wine.
She pulled up the display of the full Sol system. Planets, void cities, stations. The asteroids swirling in the complex orbital dances where gravity and system geography made pools of stability. It looked like images of a snowstorm on Earth. She’d never seen snow to know how accurate that was.
She cut out most of the data, simplifying it enough for a human eye to make sense of. There was People’s Home, in Mars’ orbit, but not near the planet. And there, nearer the ring gate, was Independence. She placed a query, and the Malaclypse appeared—a single bright-yellow dot that seemed like it was almost on top of People’s Home. Like the ship had never left.
It was a failure of scale. That superposition of light in the display was a hundred thousand kilometers by now. More than the circumference of Earth twice over and getting larger every second. It was just that the unbridgeable distance between her and Saba was nothing compared to the vastness around them. Here in the system, and then out in all the other systems beyond the gates.
Even for a woman born to the void, it was overwhelming. And everyone seemed to want her to control it for them. To take responsibility for it all so that they could feel like someone, somewhere was in charge.
She’d never have said it aloud, but there was part of her that missed the way it had been in her youth. The Belt had been the OPA. Earth and Mars had been the enemy. That had seemed overwhelming at the time. It was only everything that had happened since then that made it seem small and manageable by comparison. A nostalgia for the age that had forged her into who she was. That had given her all the skills she’d needed and then changed into a place where half the time she felt like an impostor in her own clothes.
The Rocinante was light-hours away through the gates. Light-centuries by more traditional paths. She pictured Holden as if he were across the table. She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and then started the recording.
“Captain Holden. I’ve gotten your status report about the situation on Freehold. Politely put, your proposed solution isn’t going to work …”
Chapter Six: Holden
Politely put,” Drummer said on the screen, “your proposed solution isn’t going to work. What you’re doing would fundamentally change the union. Jailing someone isn’t a thing we do. We’re a transport union, not a police force. We don’t have prisons. We don’t have prisoners. We don’t have judges. We have contracts. When someone breaks the terms of the contract, we object. Then we levy fines and penalties. And then, if they still won’t do what they said, we stop playing with them. What we don’t do is arrest them.”
“She sounds pissed,” Alex said.
Holden paused the message playback. The ops deck was dim, the way Alex liked it. The air recycler clicked and the drive hummed through the bones of the ship, as familiar as silence.
“Yeah,” Holden said. “That doesn’t sound like her happy voice, does it?”
Alex scratched at his beard and gave Holden a sympathetic shrug. “You want to finish that someplace private?”