“Any word yet on the target?” Jillian Houston asked. She was the daughter of Freehold’s governor, Payne Houston, and had been one of the first volunteers for Bobbie’s team. She was tall and rangy, with white-blond hair, the muscles and bone structure of a born Earther, and a perpetual scowl line between her eyes. She’d become Bobbie’s unofficial second in the time they’d worked together. Alex worried about that. Jillian was mean as a snake. When he’d told Bobbie that, she’d responded, I just make sure she never runs out of mice. He still didn’t know quite what that meant.
“No. The kids upstairs are playing this one close to the vest,” Bobbie said. “It’s starting to feel like we’ll know when we’re already doing it.”
“Outstanding,” Jillian said.
“The Storm is buttoned up, and we’ll be heading Solward on the Pendulum in thirty hours,” Bobbie said. “Enjoy your time on Paternity Row, but make sure you’re on the ship and squared away twenty-four hours from now or find my foot uncomfortably up your ass.”
That drew a good-natured chuckle from the crowd.
“Dismissed.”
A few chaotic moments later, Bobbie, Jillian, and Alex were the only three left in the room. Bobbie still wore the nondescript flight suit she’d had on when they met with Naomi, but Jillian wore the black jumpsuit adopted by Bobbie’s strike team as its unofficial uniform. She also had a large pistol in a holster. Alex had never seen her without it. For Freeholders, wearing a gun was like wearing pants.
“I don’t like Saba giving us the runaround on this,” Jillian said. “It feels like he’s fucking improvising.”
“There could be a lot of legitimate reasons why the mission details are still being formulated,” Bobbie replied. Her voice was gentle, but firm. I understand your concern, but do it anyway was implicit in it.
“It has to be Callisto,” Jillian continued as if she hadn’t heard the quiet warning in Bobbie’s tone. “Only thing worth a damn that’s far enough away from that battleship to be a realistic target.”
Bobbie took a half step toward her and straightened up, magnifying the size difference between the two women. Jillian stopped talking, but didn’t back down at all. Mean as a snake, and with giant brass balls, Alex thought.
“That sort of speculation is unproductive. And, frankly, dangerous,” Bobbie said. “Keep it to yourself. Go get a drink or five. Get in a bar fight if you have to. But get it out of your system and be back at the Storm tomorrow. We’ll know more then.
“Dismissed.”
Jillian finally seemed to get the message. She threw Bobbie a half-mocking salute and sauntered out of the room.
Alex opened his mouth, and Bobbie pointed her finger at him. “Don’t fucking say it.”
“Copy that,” he said instead. “A day on station with nothing to do. Wish Naomi was hangin’ around. Could’ve done more than eat shitty kibble with her.”
“She’s got her mission too,” Bobbie said. Her lips pressed thin and pale.
“So,” Alex said, “you gonna tell me what went on between you, or am I gonna have to beat it out of you?”
Caught off guard, Bobbie let out a bark of laughter just the way he’d hoped she would. It was like a Chihuahua threatening an office building, and Alex grinned to show he was in on the joke.
Bobbie sighed. “She still thinks we should negotiate our way out of this. We disagree on that point. Same shit, different year.”
“She’s lost a lot,” Alex said. “She’s afraid of losing it all.”
Bobbie grabbed Alex’s upper arm and gave it an affectionate squeeze.
“And that’s the point I keep trying to make with her, my friend. In a fight like this, unless you’re willing to lose everything to win, you lose it all by losing.”
Chapter Four: Teresa
We don’t know what they called themselves,” Colonel Ilich said, lying back on the grass, his hands pillowing his bald head. “We don’t know that they called themselves anything, really. They may have done without language at all.”
Teresa had known Colonel Ilich her whole life. He was a fact of the universe, like stars or water. He was a calm, thoughtful presence in a life full to spilling with calm, thoughtful people. What made him different was that he was entirely focused on her. That, and that he wasn’t afraid of her.
He shifted, stretched. “Some people call them ‘the protomolecule,’ even though that was really just a tool they made. It’d be like calling humans ‘wrenches.’ ‘Protomolecule engineers’ is closer, but it’s kind of a mouthful. ‘Initial organism’ or ‘the alien society’ or ‘the architects.’ They all get used to mean more or less the same thing.”
“What do you call them?” Teresa asked.
He chuckled. “I call them ‘the Romans.’ The great empire that rose and fell in antiquity, and left their roads behind.”
It was an interesting thought. Teresa turned it over in her mind for a few seconds like she was getting the taste of it. She liked the analogy not because it was accurate, but because it was evocative. That was what made analogies useful. Her mind wandered down that rabbit hole for a few breaths, seeing what was there, what was interesting in it, and decided to ask Timothy what he thought. He always had views that surprised her. It was why she liked him. He wasn’t afraid of her any more than Colonel Ilich was, but Ilich’s respect tasted like respect for her father, and that made it . . . not lesser exactly. Just different. Timothy was hers.
She felt the quiet stretching on too long. Ilich would be expecting her to say something, and Timothy wasn’t something she talked about. She found something else.
“So they built all of this?”
“Not all of it, no. The gates, the construction platforms, the repair drones. The artifacts, yes. But the living systems existed on the other worlds first. Stable replicators aren’t as rare as we used to imagine. A little water, a little carbon, a consistent stream of energy from sunlight or a thermal vent? Add a few million years, and more often than not something will happen.”
“Or if it doesn’t, then the Romans don’t have anything to work from.”
“One thousand three hundred and seventy three times that we know of,” Ilich said. “That’s a lot.” The colony worlds—Sol system included—were only on the gate network because there had been life for the Romans to hijack. A few hundred systems in a galaxy of billions. Ilich was old enough that anything more than one was miraculous to him. Teresa hadn’t grown up in a lonely universe the way the colonel had. She’d grown up in a lonely universe the way she had, and the two didn’t compare.
She closed her eyes and turned her face toward the sun. The light and heat felt good on her skin. The brightness pressed through her eyelids, turning everything red. Nuclear fusion filtered through blood.
She smiled.
Teresa Angelica Maria Blanquita Li y Duarte knew that she wasn’t a normal child the way she knew that light reflected off a level surface became polarized. A not-particularly-useful academic fact. She was the only daughter of High Consul Winston Duarte, which all by itself meant her childhood had been strange.