Текст книги "The Human Division"

Автор книги: John Scalzi

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“And you say, Well, fine, the Colonial Union kept us safe,but it also kept space from us Earthlings unless we became soldiers or colonists. But think about what that means—it means every person who went into space from Earth filled a role designed to protect humanity out there in the stars, or to build humanity’s place in the stars. You know that I take no backseat to anyone in my praise and honor of those who serve this nation in uniform. Why should I do any less for those who serve in a uniform that protects all of humankind, including those of us here on Earth? Our people– Earthlings, ladies and gentlemen—are the ones the Colonial Union turns to when it comes time to keep us allalive. The official narrative calls it slavery. I call it duty. When I turn seventy-five, do I want to sit here on Earth in a rocking chair, napping my days away until I kick off? Hell, no! Paint me green and put me in space! This administration isn’t protectingme from the Colonial Union by keeping me or anyone else from joining the Colonial Defense Forces. It’s threatening the survival of all of usby starving the one organization designed to keep all of us safe!

“And I know there are still some of you out there clinging to the official narrative, saying to me, Well, it kept us down technologically and socially, didn’t it? I ask you, did it? Did it really? Or did it make it so that we, out of all humans anywhere, are the ones totally technologically self-sufficient? We don’t have the advantage of seeing how other alien races do things. If we want something, we have to build it ourselves. We have a knowledge base no other species can hope to match because they spend all their time poaching technology from everyone else! And far from controlling us, the Colonial Union left us here on Earth alone to pursue our own political and national destinies. Jason, do you think that if the Colonial Union hadn’t had our backs all this time, that we could have avoided a world government? That people wouldn’t have been screaming for a world government in the face of almost certain alien race subjugation?”

“Uh—,” Jason began.

“You know they would have,” Birnbaum continued. “And maybe some people want the same government here that they have in Beijing and New Delhi and Cairo and Paris, but I don’t. Are we so naïve as to believe the world government that we have would be like the one right here in America? Hell, this administration has been busy enough trying to trade in our rights to make us more like everyone else!

“So I say, throw out the official narrative, people. Get with the truth. The truth is, the Colonial Union hasn’t been keeping us down. It’s been keeping us free. The longer we delude ourselves into thinking otherwise, the closer we are to doom as a species. And maybe I don’t have all the answers—I’m just a guy talking on a show, after all—but I do know that at the end of the day, humanity needs to fight to stay alive in the universe. I want to stand with the fighters. Where do you stand, people? That’s the question I want to talk about when we come back from the commercial break. Jason from Canoga Park, thanks for calling in.”

“I have one more point—”

Birnbaum closed the circuit and shut Jason down, then threw to Louisa Smart for the commercials.

“Okay, seriously, what the hell was that?” Smart said, over the headset. “Since when do you have a bug in your ass about the Colonial Union?”

“You said you wanted me to spend more time thinking about how to turn the show around,” Birnbaum said.

“You think championing the group that’s been pissing on Earth for two hundred years is a winning strategy for that?” Smart said. “I question your judgment, more than I usually do.”

“Trust me, Louisa,” Birnbaum said. “This is going to work.”

“You don’t actually believe what you just spouted, do you?” Smart said.

“If it gets the numbers up, I believe every goddamned word of it,” Birnbaum said. “And for the sake of your job, Louisa, so should you.”

“I have a job whether you’re here or not,” Smart reminded him. “So I think I’ll keep my own opinion out of the ‘sale’ rack, if it’s all the same to you.” She looked down at her monitor and made a face.

“What is it?” Birnbaum asked.

“It looks like you pinked somebody,” Smart said. “I’ve got a caller here from Foggy Bottom. It’s not every day we have someone from the State Department calling in, that’s for sure.”

“Are we sure it’s from the State Department?” Birnbaum asked.

“I’m checking the name right now,” Smart said. “Yup. It’s a deputy undersecretary for space affairs. Small fry in the grand scheme of things.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Birnbaum said. “Get him on when we come back. I’m going to light him up.”

“Her,” Smart said.

“Whatever,” Birnbaum said, and girded himself for battle.

*   *   *

Having furnished the pictures, Birnbaum fully expected Washington’s clients to furnish a war. What he wasn’t expecting was a blitzkrieg.

Birnbaum’s show numbers for the day were actually about 1 percent below average; fewer than a million people heard his rant live, streamed to the listening implement of their choice. Within ten minutes of the rant, however, the archived version of the rant started picking up listeners. Relatively slowly at first, the archived version’s numbers began to climb as more political sites linked in. Within two hours, the archived version reached another million people. Within three, it was two million. Within four, four million. The show archive’s hits grew at a roughly geometric rate for several hours afterward. Overnight there were seven million downloads of the Voice in the WildernessPDA ’gram. By the next day’s show—a show devoted entirely to the subject of the Colonial Union, as were the next several shows—the live audience was 5.2 million. By the end of the week, it was twenty million live streams per show.

Like a crack in an overburdened dam, Birnbaum’s pro–Colonial Union rant created a rapid collapse in a polite silence from various political quarters, followed by a swamping flood of agreement with Birnbaum’s vituperation for the current administration position of holding the Colonial Union at arm’s length. Birnbaum had occupied a sweet spot in the media discourse—not so influential that he was unable to promote a potentially unpopular (and possibly crazy) theory, but not so obscure that he could be dismissed outright as a kook. Too many Washington insiders, politicians and journalists knew him too well for that.

The administration, wholly unprepared for the tsunami of opposing views on this particular topic, flubbed its immediate response to Birnbaum and his followers, beginning with the unfortunately clueless deputy undersecretary for space affairs who had called in to Birnbaum’s show, who was so thoroughly dismantled by Birnbaum that three days later she tendered her resignation and headed to her home state of Montana, where she would eventually become a high school history teacher.

At least she was well out of it. The government’s response was so poorly done that for several days its hapless handling of the event threatened to eclipse the discussion of the Colonial Union itself.

Threatened but did not eclipse, in part because Birnbaum, who knew a good break when he saw one, simply wouldn’t let it. From his newly elevated vantage point, Birnbaum dispensed opinion, gathered useful tidbits of information from insiders who, two weeks before, wouldn’t have given him the time of day, and set the daily agenda for discussion on the topic of the Colonial Union.

Others attempted to seize the issue from him, of course. Rival talk show hosts, stunned by his sudden ascendancy, claimed the Colonial Union topic for their own but could not match his head start; even the (formerly) more influential show hosts looked like also-rans on the subject. Eventually, all but the most oblivious of them ceded supremacy on the topic to him and focused on other subjects. Politicians would try to change the subject; Birnbaum would either get them on the show to serve his purposes or harangue them when they wouldn’t set foot into his studio.

Either way the subject was his, and he milked it for all it was worth, carefully tweaking his message for statesmanlike effect. No, of course the Colonial Union should not be excused for keeping us in the dark, he would say, but we have to understand the context in which that decision was made. No, we should never be subjugated to the Colonial Union or be just another colony in their union, he’d say other times, but there were distinct advantages in an alliance of equal partners. Of course we should consider the Conclave’s positions and see what advantages talking to it holds for us, he’d say still other times, but should we also forget we are human? To whom, at the end of the day, do we truly owe our allegiance, if not our own species?

Every now and again, Louisa Smart would ask him if he truly believed the things he was saying to his new, widely expanded audience. Birnbaum would refer her to his original answer to the question. Eventually Smart stopped asking.

The new monthlies came in. Live audience of the show was up 2,500 percent. Archived show up a similar number. Forty million downloads of the PDA ’gram. Birnbaum called his agent and told her to renegotiate his latest contract with SilverDelta. She did, despite the fact it had been negotiated less than two years earlier. Walter Kring might have been a six-foot-ten-inch alpha male right through to his bones, but he was strangely terrified of Monica Blaustein, persistent Jewish grandmother from New York, five feet tall in her flats. He could also read a ratings sheet and knew a gold mine when he saw it.

Birnbaum’s life became the show and sleeping. His thing on the side, miffed at the inattention, dropped him. His relationship with Judith, his third wife, the smart one, the one who had maneuvered him out of the prenup, became commensurately better in nearly all respects. His son Ben’s soccer team actually won a soccer game. Birnbaum didn’t feel he could really take credit for that last one.

“This isn’t going to last,” Smart pointed out to him two months into the ride.

“What is it with you?” Birnbaum asked her. “You’re a downer.”

“It’s called being a realist, Al,” she said. “I’m delighted that everything’s coming up roses for you at the moment. But you’re a single-issue show right now. And no matter what, the fact is this issue is going to get solved one way or another in the not-all-that-distant future. And then where will you be? You will be last month’s fad. I know you have a shiny new contract and all, but Kring will still cut your ass if you have three bad quarters in a row. And now, for better or worse, you have much, much further to fall.”

“I like that you think I don’t know that,” Birnbaum said. “Fortunately for the both of us, I am taking steps to deal with that.”

“Do tell,” Smart said.

“The Rally,” Birnbaum said, making sure the capital “R” was evident in his voice.

“Ah, the rally,” Smart said, omitting the capital. “This is the rally on the Mall in support of the Colonial Union, which you have planned for two weeks from now.”

“Yes, that one,” Birnbaum said.

“You’ll note that the subject of the rally is the Colonial Union,” Smart said. “Which is to say, that single issue that you’re not branching out from.”

“It’s not what the Rally is about,” Birnbaum said. “It’s who is going to be there with me. I’ve got both the Senate majority leader and House minority leader up there on the stage with me. I’ve been cultivating my relationships with them for the last six weeks, Louisa. They’ve been feeding me all sorts of information, because we have midterms coming up. They want the House back and I’m going to be the one to get it for them. So after the Rally, we begin the shift away from the Colonial Union and back to matters closer to home. We’ll ride the Colonial Union thing as long as we can, of course. But this way, when that horse rides into the sunset I’m still in a position to influence the political course of the nation.”

“As long as you don’t mind being a political party’s cabana boy,” Smart said.

“I prefer ‘unofficial agenda setter’ myself,” Birnbaum said. “And if I deliver this election, then I think I’ll be able to call myself something else. It’s all upside.”

“Is this the part where I stand at your side as you roll into Rome in triumph, whispering ‘Remember thou art mortal’ into your ear?” Smart asked.

“I don’t entirely get the reference,” Birnbaum said. His world history knowledge was marginally worse than his United States history knowledge.

Smart rolled her eyes. “Of course not,” she said. “Remember it anyway, Al. It might come in handy one day.”

Birnbaum made a note to remember it but forgot because he was busy with his show, the Rally and everything that would follow after it. It came back to him briefly on the day of the Rally, when, after stirring fifteen-minute speeches from the House minority leader and the Senate majority leader, Birnbaum ascended the podium and stood at the lectern on the stage of the Rally, looking out at a sea of seventy thousand faces (fewer than the one hundred thousand faces they had been hoping for, but more than enough, and anyway they’d round up because it was all estimates in any event). The faces, mostly male, mostly middle-aged, looked up at him with admiration and fervor and the knowledge that they were part of something bigger, something that he, Albert Birnbaum, had started.

Remember thou art mortal,Birnbaum heard Louisa Smart say in his head. He smiled at it; Louisa wasn’t at the Rally because of a wedding. He’d rib her about it later. Birnbaum brought up his notes on the lectern monitor and opened his mouth to speak and then was deeply confused when he was facedown on the podium, gasping like a fish and feeling sticky from the blood spurting out of what remained of his shoulder. His ears registered a crack, as if distant thunder were finally catching up with lightning, then he heard screams and the sound of seventy thousand panicked people trying to run, and then blacked out.

*   *   *

Birnbaum looked up and saw Michael Washington looking down at him.

“How did you get in here?” Birnbaum asked, after he had taken a couple of minutes to remember who he was (Albert Birnbaum), where he was (Washington Sacred Heart Catholic Hospital), what time it was (2:47 a.m.) and why he was there (he’d been shot).

Washington pointed with a gloved hand to the badge on his chest, and Birnbaum realized Washington was in a police uniform. “That’s not real,” Birnbaum protested.

“Actually it is,” Washington said. “I usually work plain clothes, but this was useful for the moment.”

“I thought you were some sort of facilitator,” Birnbaum said. “You have clients.”

“I am and I do,” Washington said. “Some cops tend bar on the side. This is what I do.”

“You’re joking,” Birnbaum said.

“That’s entirely possible,” Washington said.

“Why are you here now?” Birnbaum asked.

“Because we have unfinished business,” Washington said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Birnbaum said. “You asked me to pimp a pro–Colonial Union story. I did that.”

“And you did a fine job with it,” Washington said. “Although at the end things were beginning to flag. You had fewer people at your rally than you had anticipated.”

“We had a hundred thousand,” Birnbaum said, weakly.

“No,” Washington said. “But I appreciate you making the effort there.”

Birnbaum’s mind began to wander, but he focused on Washington again. “So what unfinished business do we have?” he asked.

“You dying,” Washington said. “You were supposed to have been assassinated at the rally, but our marksman didn’t make the shot. He blamed it on a gust of wind between him and the target. So it fell to me.”

Birnbaum was confused. “Why do you want me dead? I did what you asked.”

“And again, you did a fine job,” Washington said. “But now the discussion needs to be brought to another level. Making you a martyr to the cause will do that. Nothing like a public assassination to embed the topic into the national consciousness.”

“I don’t understand,” Birnbaum said, increasingly confused.

“I know,” Washington said. “But you never understood, Mr. Birnbaum. You didn’t want to understand all that much, I think. You never even really cared who I worked for. All you were interested in was what I was dangling in front of you. You never took your eyes off that.”

“Who doyou work for?” Birnbaum croaked.

“I work for the Colonial Union, of course,” Washington said. “They needed some way to change the conversation. Or, alternately, I work for Russians and the Brazilians, who are upset that the United States is taking the lead in the international discussions about the Colonial Union and wanted to disrupt its momentum. No, I work for the political party not in the White House, who was looking to change the election calculus. Actually, all of those were lies: I work for a cabal who wants to form a world government.”

Birnbaum bulged his eyes at him, disbelieving.

“The time to have demanded an answer was before you took the job, Mr. Birnbaum,” Washington said. “Now you’ll never know.” He held up a syringe. “You woke up because I injected you with this. It’s shutting down your nervous system as we speak. It’s intentionally obvious. We want it to be clear you were assassinated. There are enough clues planted in various places for a merry chase. You’ll be even more famous now. And with that fame will come influence. Not that youwill be able to use it, of course. But others will, and that will be enough. Fame, power and an audience, Mr. Birnbaum. It’s what you were promised. It’s what you were given.”

Birnbaum said nothing to this; he’d died midmonologue. Washington smiled, planted the syringe in Birnbaum’s bed and walked out of the room.

*   *   *

“They have the assassin on video,” Jason from Canoga Park said, to Louisa Smart, who had taken over the show, temporarily, for the memorial broadcast. “They have him on video injecting him and talking to him before he died. That was when it happened. When he revealed the plot of the world government.”

“We can’t know that,” Smart said, and for the millionth time wondered how Birnbaum managed to talk to his listeners without wanting to crawl down the stream to strangle them. “The video is low resolution and has no audio. We’ll never know what they had to say to each other.”

“What else could it be?” Jason said. “Who else could have managed it?”

“It’s a compelling point, Jason,” Smart said, preparing to switch over to the next caller and whatever theircockamamie theory would be.

“I’m going to miss Al,” Jason said, before she could unplug him. “He called himself the Voice in the Wilderness. But if he was, we were all in the wilderness with him. Who will be that voice now? Who will call to us? And what will they say?”

Smart had no good answer to that. She just went to the next caller instead.

EPISODE FIVE

Tales from the Clarke

“So, Captain Coloma,” Department of State Deputy Undersecretary Jamie Maciejewski said. “It’s not every starship captain who intentionally maneuvers her ship into the path of a speeding missile.”

Captain Sophia Coloma set her jaw and tried very hard not to crack her own molars while doing so. There were a number of ways she expected this final inquiry into her actions in the Danavar system to go. This being the opening statement was not one of them.

In Coloma’s head a full list of responses, most not in the least appropriate for the furtherance of her career, scrolled past. After several seconds, she found one she could use. “You have my full report on the matter, sir,” she said.

“Yes, of course,” Maciejewski said, and then indicated with a hand State Department Fleet Commander Lance Brode and CDF liaison Elizabeth Egan, who with Maciejewski constituted the final inquiry panel. “We have your full report. We also have the reports of your XO, Commander Balla, of Ambassador Abumwe, and of Harry Wilson, the Colonial Defense Forces adjunct on the Clarkeat the time of the incident.”

“We also have the report of Shipmaster Gollock,” Brode said. “Outlining the damage the Clarketook from the missile. I’ll have you know she was quite impressed with you. She tells me that the fact that you managed to get the Clarkeback to Phoenix Station at all is a minor miracle; by all rights the ship should have cracked in half from material stresses during the ship’s acceleration to skip distance.”

“She also says that the damage to the Clarkeis extensive enough that repairs will take longer to make than it would take for us to just build an entire new Robertson-class diplomatic ship,” Maciejewski said. “It would possibly be more expensive to boot.”

“And then there is the matter of the lives you put at risk,” Egan said. “The lives of your crew. The lives of the diplomatic mission to the Utche. More than three hundred people, all told.”

“I minimized the risk as much as possible,” Coloma said. In the roughly thirty seconds I had to make a plan,she thought but did not say.

“Yes,” Egan said. “I read your report. And there were no deaths from your actions. There were, however, casualties, several serious and life-threatening.”

What do you want from me?Coloma felt like barking at the inquiry panel. The Clarkewasn’t supposed to have been in the Danavar system to begin with; the diplomatic team on it was chosen at the last minute to replace a diplomatic mission to the Utche that had gone missing and was presumed dead. When the Clarkearrived they discovered traps had been set for the Utche, using stolen Colonial Union missiles that would make it look as if the humans had attacked their alien counterparts. Harry Wilson—Coloma had to keep in check some choice opinions just thinking the name—took out all but one of the missiles by using the Clarke’s shuttle as a decoy, destroying the shuttle and nearly killing himself in the process. Then the Utche arrived and Coloma had no choice other than to draw the final missile to the Clarke,rather than have it home in on the Utche ship, strike it and start a war the Colonial Union couldn’t afford at the moment.

What do you want from me?Coloma asked again in her mind. She wouldn’t ask the question; she couldn’t afford to give the inquiry panel that sort of opening. She had no doubt they would tell her, and that it would be something other than what she had done.

So instead she said, “Yes, there were casualties.”

“They might have been avoided,” Egan said.

“Yes,” Coloma said. “I could have avoided them entirely by allowing the missile—a Colonial Union Melierax Series Seven—to hit the Utche ship, which would have been unprepared and unready for the attack. That strike would have likely crippled the ship, if it did not destroy it outright, and would have caused substantial casualties, including potentially scores of deaths. That seemed the less advisable course of action.”

“No one disputes your actions spared the Utche ship considerable damage, and the Colonial Union an uncomfortable diplomatic incident,” Maciejewski said.

“But there still is the matter of the ship,” Brode said.

“I’m well aware of the matter of the Clarke,” Coloma said. “It’s my ship.”

“Not anymore,” Brode said.

“Pardon?” Coloma said. She dug her fingernails into her palms to keep herself from leaping across the room to grab Brode by the collar.

“You’ve been relieved of your command of the Clarke,” Brode said. “The determination has been made to scrap the ship. Command has been transferred to the port crew that will disassemble it. This is all standard practice for scrapped ships, Captain. It’s not a reflection on your service.”

“Yes, sir,” Coloma said, and doubted that. “What is my next command? And what is the disposition of my staff and crew?”

“In part, that’s what this inquiry is about, Captain Coloma,” Egan said, and glanced over at Brode, coolly. “It’s regrettable that you had to learn about the disposition of your ship in this way, in this forum. But now that you do know, you should know what we’re going to decide is not what we think about what you did, but where we think you should go next. Do you understand the difference here?”

“With apologies, ma’am, I’m not entirely sure I do,” Coloma said. Her entire body was coated in a cold sweat that accompanied the realization that she was now a captain without a ship, which meant in a very real sense she was no longer a captain at all. Her body wanted to shiver, to shake off the clamminess she felt. She didn’t dare.

“Then understand that the best thing you can do now is to help us understand your thinking at every step in your actions,” Egan said. “We have your report. We know what you did. We want a better idea of the why.”

“You know the why,” Coloma said before she could stop, and almost immediately regretted it. “I did it to stop a war.”

“We all agree you stopped a war,” Maciejewski said. “We have to decide whether how you did it justifies giving you another command.”

“I understand,” Coloma said. She would not admit any defeat into her voice.

“Very good,” Maciejewski said. “Then let’s begin at the decision to let the missile hit your ship. Let’s take it second by second, shall we.”

*   *   *

The Clarke,like other large ships, did not dock with Phoenix Station directly. It was positioned a small distance away, in the section of station devoted to repair. Coloma stood at the edge of the repair transport bay, watching crews load into the work shuttles that would take them to the Clarke,to strip the ship of anything and everything valuable or salvageable before cutting down the hull itself into manageable plates to be recycled into something else entirely—another ship, structural elements for a space station, weapons or perhaps foil to wrap leftovers in. Coloma smiled wryly at the idea of a leftover bit of steak being wrapped in the skin of the Clarke,and then she stopped smiling.

She had to admit that in the last couple of weeks she’d gotten very good at making herself depressed.

In her peripheral vision, Coloma saw someone walking up to her. She knew without turning that it was Neva Balla, her executive officer. Balla had a hitch in her gait, an artifact, so Balla claimed, of an equestrian injury in her youth. The practical result of it was that there was no doubt of her identity when she came up on you. Balla could be wearing a bag on her head and Coloma would know it was her.

“Having one last look at the Clarke?” Balla asked Coloma as she walked up.

“No,” Coloma said; Balla looked at her quizzically. “She’s no longer the Clarke. When they decommissioned her, they took her name. Now she’s just CUDS-RC-1181. For whatever time it takes to render her down to parts, anyway.”

“What happens to the name?” Balla asked.

“They put it back into the rotation,” Coloma said. “Some other ship will have it eventually. That is, if they don’t decide to retire it for being too ignominious.”

Balla nodded, but then motioned to the ship. “ Clarkeor not, she was still your ship.”

“Yes,” Coloma said. “Yes, she was.”

The two stood there silently for a moment, watching the shuttles angle toward what used to be their ship.

“So what did you find out?” Coloma asked Balla after a moment.

“We’re still on hold,” Balla said. “All of us. You, me, the senior staff of the Clarke. Some of the crew have been reassigned to fill holes in other ship rosters, but almost no officers and none of those above the rank of lieutenant junior grade.”

Coloma nodded. The reassignment of her crew would normally come through her, but technically speaking they were no longer her crew and she no longer their captain. Balla had friends in the Department of State’s higher reaches, or more accurately, she had friends who were assistants and aides to the department’s higher reaches. It worked out the same, informationwise. “Do we have any idea why no one important’s been reassigned?”

“They’re still doing their investigation of the Danavar incident,” Balla said.

“Yes, but in our crew that only involves you and me and Marcos Basquez,” Coloma said, naming the Clarke’s chief engineer. “And Marcos isn’t being investigated like the two of us are.”

“It’s still easier to have us around,” Balla said. “But there’s another wrinkle to it as well.”

“What’s that?” Coloma asked.

“The Clarke’s diplomatic team hasn’t been formally reassigned, either,” Balla said. “Some of them have been added on to existing missions or negotiations in a temporary capacity, but none of them has been made permanent.”

“Who did you hear this from?” Coloma asked.

“Hart Schmidt,” Balla said. “He and Ambassador Abumwe were attached to the Bula negotiations last week.”

Coloma winced at this. The Bula negotiations had gone poorly, in part because the Colonial Defense Forces had established a clandestine base on an underdeveloped Bula colony world and had gotten caught red-handed trying to evacuate it; that was the rumor, in any event. Abumwe and Schmidt having anything to do with that would not look good for them.

“So we’re all in limbo,” Coloma said.

“It looks like,” Balla said. “At least you’re not being singled out, ma’am.”

Coloma laughed at this. “Not singled out, but being punished, that’s for sure.”

“I don’t know why we would be punished,” Balla said. “We were dropped into a diplomatic process at the last minute, discovered a trap, and kept the trap from snapping shut. All without a single death. And the negotiations with the Utche were successfully completed on top of that. They give people medals for less.”

Coloma motioned to what used to be the Clarke. “Maybe they were just very attached to the ship.”

Balla smiled. “It seems unlikely,” she said.

“Why not?” Coloma said. “I was.”

“You did the right thing, Captain,” Balla said, becoming serious. “I said so to the investigators. So did Ambassador Abumwe and Lieutenant Wilson. If they don’t see that, to hell with them.”

“Thank you, Neva,” Coloma said. “It’s good of you to say that. Remember it when they assign us to a tow barge.”

“There are worse assignments,” Balla said.

Coloma was about to respond when her PDA pinged. She swiped to her message queue and read the mail there. Then she shut down the screen, put the PDA away and returned her gaze to what used to be the Clarke.