Persepolis Rising (The Expanse)

by James S. A. Corey

  The guards escorted them along the nearly empty docks, back toward the transfer point to the drum and spin gravity, then went back for the next crew to the next ship. When they were alone, Bobbie cleared her throat.

  “All right. How did that go?” she asked.

  “They’ve locked her down pretty tight,” Alex said. “But they didn’t get everything. Give me twenty minutes, I can probably get her working.”

  “I’ve got a decent kit,” Amos said, holding up the toolbox. “Could get some low-level work with just this. Not cutting through any decking, though.”

  “Claire?”

  Clarissa smiled and shrugged. “I feel a little better, and I’ve got enough blockers.”

  Bobbie put a hand on her thin shoulder. “We’ll take care of you,” she said.

  “I know you will,” Clarissa said.

  “All right, then,” Bobbie said. “The way I see it, the next step is find someone who can get messages back to the union. Or Earth-Mars. See if there’s anyone out there with a plan, or if we’re going to have to make one up on our own.”

  “We can do that,” Amos said. “Shouldn’t be hard.”

  “You sure?” Alex said. “This is Medina Station under occupation by a bunch of splinter Martian military expats. It’s not Baltimore.”

  Amos’ smile was as placid as always. “Everywhere’s Baltimore.”

  Bobbie had known and worked with Amos Burton for years, and he kept being able to surprise her. For the next two days, Amos took the lead, moving through Medina Station apparently without any particular aim or purpose. They went to sit in a bar by the water recycling plant, went to interview with a pop-up service that was matching people who’d been locked off their ships with accommodations, played a little dirt football with a crew of technicians whose old split-circle OPA tattoos had been softened and smudged by the years.

  Every now and then, Bobbie caught something—a phrase or a gesture—that didn’t quite feel right, like there was a second conversation going on at some frequency her ears couldn’t pick up. She took up her position at Amos’ back and watched for threats, either from the Laconians or the locals.

  Everywhere they went, the station seemed to be on the edge of something. It was in the air and the voices of everyone they spoke to. Guards in power armor. Checkpoints. The Laconians had erected an open-air jail, and filled it with men and women living behind bars like animals at a particularly shitty zoo. With hand terminals locked down and the internal communications network restricted to the point of uselessness, every conversation seemed fraught and dangerous. Anything worth encrypting is worth not putting on a network in the first place, Amos would sometimes say. Bobbie had never really thought about how much communication changed when every time you spoke, you had to be close enough that the other person could stab you if they wanted to. Never before, anyway.

  And then, after three days, the old Belter who’d been the opposing goalie at their football game came to them at the little public table where they were eating mushrooms and noodles, nodded to Amos, and walked away. The big man got up, stretched his neck until it popped, and turned to Bobbie.

  “We’ve got a thing,” he said.

  “A good one or a bad one?” she said.

  “One or the other.”

  Bobbie took a last mouthful of her breakfast, chewed, and swallowed. “Understood,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  Clarissa and Alex stood when she did. Part of her wanted to order them to stay back. If things went south, they’d be safe. As if anywhere was safe. She didn’t say anything.

  The old Belter led them to an access corridor with a ramp that sank down, out toward the skin of the drum and the emptiness beyond it, the void always just underfoot. They passed two different concealed guard posts that she saw, and while she didn’t think there were any others that had escaped her notice, she couldn’t be sure. The old Belter didn’t say anything, and Amos didn’t try to strike up a conversation.

  The warehouse they ended up in was half filled with storage boxes fixed to the deck with maglocks. The lighting was harsh, restricted-wavelength worklights with a flicker that made her feel like her vision was strobing if she moved her hand too quickly. Three men leaned on the crates, their arms loose at their sides so they wouldn’t have to spend the quarter second uncrossing them if things came to violence. Bobbie felt a warmth in her gut, a presentiment of trouble that was almost welcome. Invading ships with unimaginable weapons, protomolecule technology that could rip atoms apart, sudden empires imposed without warning or precedent. She’d grit her teeth and move forward because there wasn’t another option. But thugs in warehouses was territory she understood.

  The man in the middle of the three was a Belter, tall and muscular. His skin was the same brown as his hair and eyes. Even if he hadn’t been pretty, he’d have been striking. And he was pretty.

  “Heard you wanted to talk,” he said.

  Amos looked back at her, and pointed to the pretty man with his chin. He’d gotten them this far, but she was the boss. This was hers now.

  “Who’d you hear we wanted to talk to?” Bobbie asked, stepping forward. Clarissa shifted out to her side. As weak and compromised as she looked, they’d underestimate her. Bobbie didn’t know what using the implants would do to Clarissa, but by the time it took its toll, all three of the men would be incapacitated or dead. And that was without her and Amos weighing in.

  The pretty man tilted his head.

  “Names are dangerous, coyo,” he said.

  Bobbie pointed a thumb to herself. “Captain Bobbie Draper.” She turned to the others. “Alex Kamal. Clarissa Mao. Amos Burton. Now, who the fuck are you?”

  The pretty man scowled, tilting his head like he was trying to recall a song that was just at the edge of memory. It was a look she’d seen before, and she didn’t feel like helping him place her. Not yet, anyway.

  “Saba,” the man said at last, “and that’s enough for you right now.”

  “You’re playing this all pretty close to the chest, Saba,” Bobbie said.

  “Not interested in being under the authority of the authorities,” he said. “I’ve got reasons for that.”

  “Well, I’m not working for Laconia, so we can stop the bullshit, right?”

  “Not sure we can,” Saba said. His hand terminal chimed—a sound Bobbie didn’t remember hearing since the crackdown—but he ignored it. Interesting that he had a working hand terminal, though. The chances that he was the real deal went up in her estimation.

  “Heard you were looking to get in touch with the underground,” Saba said. “Leaves a man wondering why. You looking to trade with the new boss?”

  “Nope,” Bobbie said.

  “Then you thinking you’re going to come tell us what to do?”

  Bobbie smiled. She could feel her teeth against her lips. Either they were going to back each other down, or this was going to end in blood. She hoped it was the former, but it wasn’t her call. “We were there when that fucking idiot tried to kill the governor. If that’s the level you people are working at, then yes, I’d be happy to help organize. Someone ought to.”

  Saba’s face was cool. “Belters been standing under the oppressors’ boot for generations. You think you’ve got something to teach us?”

  “Apparently so,” Bobbie said. “Seems like some of you assholes have gotten pretty rusty.”

  A little darkness came to Saba’s olive cheeks. He stood up, stepped forward. Bobbie took her own step in to meet him. If she showed weakness now, they’d never take her seriously again. The chirp of his hand terminal seemed to come from another universe.

  “What?” Bobbie said, not giving him the tempo. “You planning to do this without any allies? Without any support? You against the Laconian Empire? I’ve seen how that went up to now, and—”

  “Saba!”

  The new voice came from behind her. She didn’t want to turn her back on the three Belters, but she didn’t want someone unknown at her back eith
er.

  “Saba!” the voice said again. It sounded young. Excited. Bobbie threw a glance over her shoulder. A young woman in a green jumpsuit, grinning like someone had just given her a present.

  “Que, Nanda?” Saba asked.

  “Found someone,” the girl said. “Look.”

  And from behind the girl, Holden and Naomi came into the room, squinting at the ugly light.

  “Hey!” Holden said, and then “Bobbie. This is great. I wasn’t sure how we were going to find you.”

  Saba whistled low. “James fucking Holden. You’ll no believe how much I’ve heard about you.”

  “All good, I hope?” Holden said, walking forward, oblivious to the tension in the room. Or maybe choosing to ignore it. It was always hard to tell with him. “You’ve met my old crew already?”

  “You crew?” Saba said, then looked at Bobbie as if seeing her for the first time. He laughed. “Savvy I did. Well, then. Welcome to the underground.”

  She smiled, but something ugly plucked at her guts. James fucking Holden, Bobbie thought. Three magic words, and just like that, someone else was in charge.

  Chapter Nineteen: Drummer

  The image was grainy, the sound almost as much noise as signal. Half a dozen encryption layers poured on and then stripped back out left their artifacts in the flattened audio and near-false colors. Drummer’s heart softened all the same, because there in the middle of it—unmistakably—was Saba. His eyes had the little puff at the lower lid that he got when he was tired, but his smile was luminous.

  “No savvy you how good it was to get your message, Cami,” he said. “Heart outside my body, you are. And no one better than us two to be where we’re sitting.”

  “I love you too,” she told the screen, but only because no one else was in her office.

  Avasarala’s covert contacts had come through faster than Drummer had hoped. That they’d come through at all was something of a shock. She had been willing to believe the old woman was overstating her powers, claiming a level of influence that retirement and age had long since taken from her. But here was evidence that, whatever else she was, Chrisjen Avasarala wasn’t completely full of shit. Saba had burrowed deep into Medina Station like a tick, making connections with as many union operatives as he safely could. And by union, more often than not, he meant OPA.

  She listened and took notes by hand as he went through his full report. Writing it out helped her to remember. Sixty-eight people on Medina Station broken into independent cells that went from three to eight. The amateur, botched assassination and the crackdown that followed. Saba didn’t have to say that he was using it to recruit more for his effort. That was obvious. The focus moving forward was intelligence gathering and infrastructure. Avasarala’s network was all well and good, but having multiple backups, blind zones in the station where the Laconian security couldn’t reach, and opening backdoors into the communications of the enemy were how to prepare for the next wave. And find out what the next wave was going to be.

  Drummer found herself nodding with his words, thinking through their implications. The Laconians were routing their comms through a destroyer-sized ship docked on Medina with heavy encryption and an off-ship decrypt local to the station to physically isolate the two. No good way to gather intelligence there, and no chance of breaking into the enemy’s system. She’d need to find the firmware code for the antennas and repeaters. Maybe Avasarala’s henchmen in the Earth-Mars Coalition had some exploits they’d been sitting on that she could pass on to Saba. The Laconian checkpoints were tying up a third of their ground force. That kept the soldiers busy in the known and public corridors, and gave Saba’s people more time to create bolt holes and blind zones. If the crackdown slacked off, they’d want to do something provocative to keep the enemy busy with identity checks and traffic control. Trivial security theater, while the underground dug more tunnels into the body of the station. It was possible that all the updated plans for Medina were in Laconian hands. Any known holes, they had to assume were known to all the players, but making new ones wouldn’t be hard for Saba. He understood smuggling as well as she ever had, and maybe better.

  The message ended with Saba’s impish grin.

  “You watch you, m’dil,” he said, and blew a kiss to the camera. “Live like you’re dead.”

  Drummer touched the screen as if it were his cheek, but it was cold and hard. Live like you’re dead. There was a phrase she hadn’t heard in a long time. Once, it had been the motto of the Voltaire Collective. A call to courage with a fatalistic bravado that angry adolescents found romantic. She’d found it romantic once too.

  She checked the time. Saba’s message had run almost twenty minutes. Part of her found it hard to believe it had been that long. She could have drunk in the sound of his voice for another hour and still been thirsty. From her screen after screen after screen of written notes, it was astounding that he’d fit so much information into so short a time.

  She went through all she’d written again, committing it to memory, then wiped her notes. Information couldn’t be compromised if it didn’t exist. She put in a comm request for Vaughn. He answered immediately.

  “Where do we stand with the military attaché?” she asked.

  “Waiting on word from you, ma’am,” Vaughn said.

  “Have them in the conference room in ten minutes.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Vaughn said. There was a surreptitious pleasure in his voice. The diplomats and coordinators from the Earth-Mars Coalition had been flooding into People’s Home since the fall of Medina, and Vaughn enjoyed telling them what to do. It was probably a vice, but she didn’t mind indulging it.

  Drummer rose from her desk and stretched. Her spine popped once between her shoulders, loudly. She yawned, but not from fatigue. It was the kind of yawn that a runner made before a race. The deep inhalation of someone anticipating great effort. If she’d been keeping a normal schedule, her watch would almost be over. That wasn’t how she lived anymore. Now she was awake when she needed to be awake, and asleep when she could. Sin ritma they’d called that lifestyle back when she’d been younger. It was harder on her body now, and it took an extra bulb of coffee to sharpen her mind sometimes, but it also left her smiling in a way she didn’t wholly understand.

  Benedito Lafflin, the EMC liaison, was waiting for her twenty minutes later. His fist was closed around a bulb of soda water that was already half collapsed. His wide, toadlike face looked less smug than usual. “Madam President,” he said, standing.

  Drummer waved him back down. As she sat, Vaughn brought her a bulb of tea. She took a sip. Hot, but not scalding. Vaughn drifted back to the wall like he was part of the ship’s machinery.

  “What are we looking at?” Drummer said.

  Lafflin cleared his throat. “Candidly? I think you’re going to be quite happy with the plan.”

  “Are you giving me direct control over your fleets?”

  He blinked. “Ah … Well, that’s …”

  Drummer smiled. “I’ll probably still be okay with it. What do you have?”

  He took out a hand terminal and threw the data onto the conference room wall. The solar system unfolded before them. Nothing quite to scale, of course. Space was too huge and too empty for that. The fleets of Earth and Mars and the Transport Union were all outlined—location and vector for everything in transit, planetary body and orbital period for everything else. All of it tracked through time. Nothing was ever at rest.

  And on the edge of the system, hell and gone from anything, the gate where the enemy would arrive.

  “Given what we know about the enemy battleship,” Lafflin began, “we have worked up several scenarios that we think will give our combined forces the best tactical advantage. The first, of course, being to interrupt it in transit.”

  “Walk me through it,” Drummer said.

  For the next two hours, Drummer reviewed scenario after scenario after scenario. Lafflin made his case for each of them. Another person like him
was with every member of the union board making all the same arguments. Soon the debates would start. With the void cities, the union had a fleet at least as powerful as the EMC. If Saba could make contact with ships in the colonies, it might be possible to coordinate attacks on the slow zone, no matter what Avasarala thought. If not, there was local action to be done on Medina that might be just as good or better.

  Time after time, his plans came back to the same thing—protecting Earth, protecting Mars. Keeping the inners from being disrupted, no matter what the cost. Her guess was that the board would see the same things she did. And then …

  She hadn’t wanted to be a police force for the thirteen hundred worlds. She certainly hadn’t wanted to lead a military. But with every new twist, every tactical suggestion, she heard the imagined voices of the board, of Secretary-General Li, of Avasarala. It wouldn’t work. Someone was going to have to take charge, and she didn’t see many scenarios where that wasn’t her.

  “Thank you,” she said when the last of the imagined battles had played out on her monitor. “I appreciate your time. Let me confer, and we’ll talk again in the morning?”

  “Thank you, Madam President,” he said as Vaughn escorted him out of the room.

  As soon as he was gone, she pulled up the scenarios, paging through them all again without him. They’d considered mining their side of the gate with a wall of high-yield nukes, but abandoned it because no one was really sure if the ring could be damaged or not. A safer plan was a series of ships looping up above the ecliptic, doing a high burn and dumping gravel that could make a stone veil over the mouth of the gate. She would be able to control when there were gaps that allowed passage and when any ship making the transit would step into a shotgun blast. And it would last until they ran out of reaction mass and gravel. It was a Belter tactic. Another gift from the old days. She thought about putting the idea in her response to the EMC, but the truth was she didn’t need their permission, and the void city Independence was close enough to the gate that if they went on the burn now, they could have something in place before the board even finished debating …