This is exactly the kind of recklessness that has been underlying the Transport Union since its inception,” Carrie Fisk said. Her face was flushed, her gestures sharp, and her voice had the buzz of rage behind every word. Her blouse was tan with black, and she wore the green armband that had come to symbolize antiterrorist solidarity among those loyal to Laconia and High Consul Duarte. “The union claimed that stability and safety were their primary mandate. That was the whole point of letting it administrate ring space! But the minute—the minute—someone arrives with the power to question that? Bombings. Theft. Murder. The hypocrisy is mind-boggling. It’s unreal.”
The interviewer was a young man apparently well known in Sol system and on Medina. Singh watched the man nod and stroke his chin like an ancient sage considering a deep mystical truth. His seriousness made Fisk look even more formidable.
“And would you say the situation is stabilized now?” he asked.
“We can hope it is,” Fisk said as she shook her head no. “When I look at the patience that the present administration has shown to us and the violence with which it was answered, it leaves me … not angry, even. Embarrassed. We called ourselves a civilization, and this thuggery is all we have to offer. I can only hope that the people who were fooled into thinking any of this could be justified are embarrassed too.”
It was a sentence Singh had written himself and delivered to Fisk. She repeated it now as if it were an off-the-cuff thought, and she made it sound mostly convincing.
Of all the things he had done since he’d come to Medina, Fisk and the Laconian Congress of Worlds was by far the most successful. Everything else—moving up the timetable for the Tempest’s transit to Sol system, flushing out the underground, managing Medina Station—was tainted.
The catastrophe had lasted five and three-quarter hours from the launch of James Holden’s ship to the restoration of full function to Medina Station. In that time, his best informant and the team sent to back him had been slaughtered, the station’s external sensors had been compromised, the Laconian Marine forces neutralized, the detention centers broken open and fifty-two prisoners lost and not yet recovered, twenty union ships had transited through no one knew which gate or gates, and the Gathering Storm had been boarded and hijacked.
It was, without exception, the greatest failure of security Singh had ever heard of, and as governor of Medina Station, he had spent almost the whole time hiding in a public toilet. Humiliation sat in his belly like a stone, and he had the distinct sense that it would remain there forever.
Every decision he had made since he’d arrived at Medina returned to him in the light of his failure, and he considered each of them like a wound in his skin. If he had treated the local population with greater caution from the first, would Kasik have lived? If he had chosen to respond to the assassination attempt with a more focused response, would the underground have gained fewer followers and allies? If he had avoided the confusion of restructuring his security forces by retaining Tanaka, would they have exposed the underground in time to prevent this?
The list seemed to go on forever. And each choice he’d made—sending the Storm out despite Davenport warning him it was undercrewed, shipping James Holden to Laconia instead of questioning him more deeply about the underground, encouraging Trejo and the Tempest to move the timetable forward for the transit into Sol system—had led him here. So on some level each of them had been wrong. No matter how wise they had seemed at the time, how forgivable and subtle his failures of judgment had been, the final evidence was unmistakable. He had treated the people of Medina as though he were their leader instead of their warden. Instead of their zookeeper. And they had paid him back with violence, death, and dishonor. All of that was a given now.
There was no standing apart from the failure. It had happened on his watch, and so it was his problem to fix. And it didn’t apply only to Medina. He saw that now. His mandate was to coordinate the empire from this, its hub. And that would mean crushing the underground wherever it had fled. Wherever it emerged from the fresh dung heap of the union’s demise. He’d thought of Medina as a station to run, a logistical heart to sustain a glorious future for humanity.
He’d been mistaken.
His system chirped a connection request. He checked himself in the monitor, smoothed his hair, and straightened his tunic. He was done looking less than knife sharp. These were, after all, the first days of his career’s rehabilitation.
He accepted the request. A woman’s face appeared on the screen, a small identifier hovering above her to say who and what she was to him.
“Lieutenant Guillamet,” he said crisply.
“Rear Admiral Song of the Eye of the Typhoon is requesting command-to-command, Governor.”
“Of course,” he said. The monitor flickered. He straightened his tunic again and felt immediately self-conscious that he’d done it. It was a sign of insecurity, even if he was the only one who knew about it.
Rear Admiral Song appeared. Her wide mouth was set in a polite smile. The light delay was almost trivial. Evidence that the Typhoon was on track to pass through the gate. “Governor Singh,” she said. “It’s good to see you.”
“Likewise,” he replied.
“We’re on approach to the ring gate,” Song said, then looked away. “I’m very sorry, but given everything that’s happened recently, I have to ask you this. Can you assure me that this transit is safe?”
Singh settled more deeply into his couch. Of course it is, floated at the back of his mouth. The Typhoon can come through the gate, and there won’t be any rogue ship zipping through some other gate in the seconds before to change the safety curve. You and your crew will survive the trip and take its place as the protector of the ring space.
He swallowed the words. It was like another fine cut on his soul to admit that he wasn’t certain.
“I have had no new security alerts,” he said. “We see no ships on approach through the other gates and have no reason to suspect any interference from fringe elements. But if you would like, I will consult with my chief of security to make certain we have done everything in our ability to minimize your risk.”
“I would appreciate that,” Song said, and her tone meant, I’m sorry to ask it.
“The safety of your ship and your crew are the most important thing,” Singh said. “I understand your caution.”
“I’ll match orbit with the gate until we hear from you,” Song said. “And thank you, Governor. I do appreciate this.”
He nodded and dropped the connection. She didn’t trust him. Of course she didn’t. He didn’t trust himself.
The Marines who accompanied him on his review of the docks were a mixed group—half of them in power armor and half in standard ballistic plates. Even if the underground managed to disable the power armor again—which Overstreet had assured Singh would be impossible—there would still be a guard ready to take point. Singh hated that they’d had to change their protocol. He hated remembering the fear of realizing his protection was gone, and he hated knowing that the fear would never completely go away. He still didn’t know how the underground had even known the antimutiny protocols existed, much less how they’d managed to reverse engineer them. Was someone—a Laconian—a turncoat? Had they been careless? He had no way of finding where the information had leaked out. It was another little insult that burrowed into his skin.
He maneuvered through the docks on a small thruster of compressed air. The empty berths stared back at him like an accusation. The pocks in the decks and bulkheads where bullets had struck during the fighting hadn’t been buffed out or painted over yet, though they would be. He felt the attention of the dockworkers. They were, after all, the audience for this excursion. Meant to see that the governor of the station wasn’t cowering in his office, afraid to peek out from behind his desk. That he wasn’t hiding in a public restroom. The heavy guard undercut the message, as did the fear in his gut. But he would pretend and pretend and pretend in the hopes that it would somehow become true.
So he lifted his chin, and made his way through the full round of the docks—even where the damage from the bombing of the primary oxygen tanks twisted and deformed the deck. He looked at the temporary plating with what he hoped was dignity and thoughtfulness. All he really wanted was to be done with this and back in his office.
The acting dockmaster followed along just behind him. The anger in her expression was unmistakable, but he didn’t know if it was rage at the terrorists who’d done the damage or at him for not preventing it.