Cleve stops in to check on me later in the afternoon, and we decide the first person to bring our troubles to should be Roze. I follow Cleve to their computery lair, moving a bit slower than usual and staying close to walls. My leg isn’t really bothering me much now—any pain from it is swamped out by my more recent injuries—but it makes me nervous to not have my cane, just in case. I haven’t needed my cane much in the past few years; there haven’t been any new surgeries since I finished growing. But since waking up on Chiron, I’ve had to depend on it a few times, and I’m uneasy without it. Not that my left hand is free to hold it, anyway. That’s strapped to my chest, under my poncho.
We find Roze still poring through the data we recovered from the network node. They don’t notice us until I speak their name. “Hmm? Oh! You two made it back!” they say with some surprise as they spin around in their chair. “That’s right, I saw Arx and Taku—I saw Arx again! Thank you for rescuing them.”
“Yeah, we got Arx. We also got Mr. Fuzzy for Corazon, so if you hear the pitter-patter of little wolf beetle feet, that’s why,” I tell them. I drift over to one of the unoccupied chairs in the room, hovering behind it with my right hand resting lightly on its back.
“You know… I thought I heard something strange. Thought my audio was all messed up.” Roze taps the earpiece attached to the HUD that’s still streaming data in front of one eye.
“Two wolf beetles came back,” Cleve reports.
“All right, whatever,” Roze says with a shrug.
“Also, um…” I begin, rather ineloquently. Where to start? “We have a variety of types of news from Morganland.”
“Yeah, we’ve kind of got a problem,” Cleve agrees.
“Who’s ‘we’ and what’s the problem?” Roze asks.
“‘We’ is Data Haven—”
Roze frowns. “I don’t like this.”
“—and the problem is Morgan’s new army,” Cleve finishes.
Roze’s eyes go wide. “You recall, we saw those flyers in the data pull from the network node. The ones for the Planetary Security Force?” I prompt. “Well, they’re going to be marching overhead on their way to the Stepdaughters of Chiron.”
“Oh, I’m sure it won’t be a big deal,” Roze says, waving away the problem. “We’re all nice and secure down here. None of them have the password, right? No, of course not! Morris is the only person in the dome that knows the password.”
“We’re going to make sure it’s not a big deal,” Cleve says firmly.
Roze does not like the sound of that. “What do you mean, you’re going to make sure?”
“Well, we haven’t decided the particulars of it yet, but I think that if we want Data Haven to be safe, we need to ensure that Data Haven is safe.”
“On that point, I agree,” Roze tells Cleve, anxiousness starting to leak into their voice.
“We have some ideas on how to slow them down,” I assure them.
“First of all, I’m not in charge of Data Haven,” they say with a nervous chuckle. “I think I’ve been very clear about this.” People may look up to Roze, but they don’t want the responsibility that comes with leadership.
That is not an insecurity Cleve shares. “Right, right, right,” he says, “you’re not in charge. We get it.” He then proceeds to plow over their objections anyway, treating Roze like they are the decision maker here. “Here’s what we’re looking at…” He flips open his journal and reads off all the numbers he recorded at the Planetfall Day demonstration.
The flood of logistical information overwhelms Roze. “Okay, okay! I’m not the leader! I’m not in charge of Data Haven! Whatever we,” they wave their arm all about, “as a society want to do, we have to come to a consensus on.” Cleve swallows a snort of amusement at the idea of these hundred or so people all agreeing on something. “I can speak for, like, the hackers,” Roze allows. “But we’re just one group in here.”
“So tell us about these other groups,” I request, more willing to invest effort in convincing people than Cleve is. His energies are better spent on making the actual plans.
Roze gives us a rundown on the movers and shakers in Data Haven. As the conversation goes on, I begin to think in terms of political parties. Some of the people Roze highlights are ones we’ve already dealt with. Tenoch, for example, is the most prominent of the tinkers, people who play with more mechanical things. “They have different interests and different views on this than the hackers do, probably,” Roze says. “And then there’s Chloe. She wouldn’t say she’s their leader, but people look up to her among the survivalists. We don’t have a ton of those folks here. You know, people who want to work with this environment and eat bush bugs or whatever.”
The next two people are ones that I don’t think I’ve talked to yet, a pair of planetfaller twins named Shilp and Astrid Eke. There’s a group of people here who haven’t integrated into the ethos of Data Haven; they’re just here because they can’t go back to the Morgan domes. Roze calls them the exiles and says they look up to Shilp. This group mainly wants peace and quiet. “They don’t want to get involved in other things,” Roze says. “They don’t want to get murdered. Some of them—maybe, I can’t say for sure—would love to be able to move back into Morgan domes, but they’ve accumulated too much debt, so that’s not a possibility.”
The final group is the one that Astrid is aligned with. “These folks have a bit of an agenda: they’d like Data Haven to grow into a full-fledged, you know, city, colony, whatever.” These Roze calls the expansionists.
“So each of these people has sway with each of these informal subgroups,” I summarize, checking my understanding of Roze’s point here. Cleve jots the names down into a checklist.
“Yes, but right now I imagine each subgroup has different ideas on what they’d want to do about an army marching right over us. For example, I’d like to do nothing and hope that they don’t find us. And I know Tenoch very well, we’re pretty good friends. The tinkers are not going to want to just do nothing. That’s not the kind of people they are. They’ll want to do something, but they don’t usually like violence.”
“Ah, but traps… maybe they would have ideas about blocking the pass,” I suggest. Roze agrees with that assessment.
“They’d probably also be onboard with some sort of negotiation, either with the Morgan forces or with the Stepdaughters of Chiron. If you present your ideas that way, Tenoch will likely be agreeable,” Roze says, once again pushing for someone other than themself to work on this problem. “You two, along with Arx, have the most recent experience in the dome. People are going to want your input on this, and they should put some weight on it, but everybody’s got their own ideas on how things should go.”
“But you will represent the hackers on the council,” Cleve says. It’s not a question.
“Look, you’re the one who said council!” Roze objects.
“Yes, I did,” Cleve agrees matter-of-factly.
“But so did you,” I point out. Roze spoke of a Council of Datajacks when we first arrived here and I was asking about local governments.
“That was just playing around!” Roze protests. But they let out a sigh and agree. Cleve places a checkmark next to their name on his list.