Persepolis Rising (The Expanse)

by James S. A. Corey

  Still, as a person who’d stood a watch in enemy territory, the sightless eyes of the two dead men made her scalp crawl the way she’d always imagined it would when a sniper had you in their sights for the kill shot.

  “Your turn now,” she told the dead man. “My turn later.”

  She pushed out into the corridor to keep watch. The shrill electronic screech of alarms echoed down the hall and all around her. So far, no one had come to check on the computer-room alarm. Why would they? Holden had made sure that the only important alarm was drowned out. She had to hand it to him, as an improvised element of the plan it was a pretty good idea. Probably something they should have included, just in case.

  Next time, she thought, knowing there would never be a next time.

  “Got it,” Naomi said from behind her. Bobbie nearly elbowed her in the face before her brain could override the startle response.

  “Great,” she said instead. “Let’s get to the shelter before Katria gets itchy and blows us all to hell for the fun of it.”

  “Jim won’t be there,” Naomi said.

  Amos and Katria were floating in the cramped space of their chosen radiation shelter. It was nothing more than a four-meter length of hallway with heavy pressure doors at both ends. Netting hung on both walls with rebreathers, first-aid kits, emergency vac suits. Bobbie had stowed a gear bag with the less-standard equipment.

  As soon as she and Naomi climbed in through the one open door, Katria slapped her hand to the panel and it slammed shut.

  “What the fuck?” Amos said, rounding on her.

  “We need that closed when the bomb goes off,” Katria replied, pulling the detonator out of her pack. “You know, to live.”

  “Nothing happens without my direct order,” Bobbie said to her and put a restraining hand on Amos’ chest. He reacted by mag-booting himself to the deck, so she kicked on her own boots and clamped them to the bulkhead to keep her leverage.

  “Babs,” Amos said, “I’m going to go get Cap, and it’d be nice if you held off on the boom till I’m done.”

  Bobbie waited for Naomi to voice her agreement, then Katria to argue against it, and for their tiny shelter to turn into shouting and chaos. But to her surprise, everyone just looked at her. It was an interesting fact of her brief captaincy that the only time anyone seemed to want her to make a decision was when it was one she didn’t want to make.

  Amos was staring at her, his expression as blank as always. But he held his fists with the ease of long use, and Bobbie knew how fast the old man was in a fight. With his feet clamped to the deck for leverage, he’d be tough to restrain if he decided to start swinging.

  “Our window is closing,” Bobbie said, raising her hands, making it about the logic of her words instead of a threat. “At some point someone checks that alarm and finds two dead guys. We don’t have time for a rescue.”

  “She’s right. So let me blow this fucker and get on with it,” Katria added. Bobbie winced at the cold disregard in her words, but didn’t take her eyes off Amos.

  Naomi still hadn’t weighed in, but Amos’ eyes kept cutting to her, waiting for the go sign. If Naomi said, Yes, go get him, Bobbie knew the only way they’d keep Amos in the room was to physically restrain him. Bobbie couldn’t see what Naomi was doing behind her back, but whatever it was, Amos wasn’t getting the signal he wanted, because he didn’t make a move.

  “Those alarms were moving away from us, fast,” Bobbie said, still only looking at Amos. “Holden knew the schedule. Either he’s made his way to a shelter or he’s told whoever has him now to get to one.”

  “You don’t know that,” Naomi finally said.

  “No, I don’t. But I hope. And right now, that’s what I’ve got. Because we have to blow that bomb now, or this whole operation fails and we still don’t get Holden back.”

  “Yeah, so let’s get on with it,” Katria said.

  “Stop fucking helping me, lady,” Bobbie snarled at her without turning around.

  Naomi spoke, and her voice was as calm as it was empty. “Bobbie’s right. This can’t all be for nothing.”

  Amos flicked his eyes to Naomi, then locked on Bobbie. His face had the same meaningless half grin it always wore, but his shoulders were tense, and his fists were white-knuckled. A flush of blood darkened his neck. Bobbie had never seen him like this before, and she didn’t like it now.

  Not that it changed anything.

  “Katria, get ready to blow on my signal,” Bobbie said. “Let’s get into these emergency suits for evac immediately after. You’ve got one minute to dress.”

  Bobbie heard the Velcro ripping sounds of vac suits being pulled off the walls and hastily donned. Amos wasn’t moving.

  “Put your suit on, big man,” Bobbie said.

  “You’re really gonna blow it,” Amos replied. He didn’t sound surprised. Or like he was issuing a challenge. He didn’t sound like anything. Bobbie involuntarily braced for violence.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Without changing his expression, Amos squared up on her, hands at his sides.

  “I guess you really want that captain’s chair back, huh Babs?”

  Before she knew she was going to do it, Bobbie had already grabbed his collar and yanked him up hard enough to pull his mag boots off the floor, then slammed him against the bulkhead.

  “If we had more time,” she hissed at him through her teeth, “you and I would be dancing right now.”

  Amos smiled at her. “I got time.”

  “Katria. Blow it,” Bobbie said, and the world ended.

  When Katria’s charge went off, it demolished the control panel and ripped a seventeen-centimeter hole in the oxygen storage tank. Bobbie didn’t know the exact size of the tank, but she had a vague memory that liquid oxygen compressed down to about eleven hundred kilograms per cubic meter, and now all of it was trying to become a gas again, all at once.

  The initial blast of expanding gas was deafening. The shock wave ripped apart bulkheads and piping. All the liquid oxygen in those pipes joined the explosion as additional expanding gas. From inside the relative safety of their reinforced emergency compartment, it sounded like someone had set off a tactical nuke in the next room.

  And then, as was inevitable, something oxidized fast enough to produce a flame, and the initial blast of air became fire.

  The entire emergency shelter shuddered, then canted over onto its side. The reinforced and blast-hardened bulkheads didn’t break, but the mounts holding the compartment to the deck were sheared off by the force of the blast. It took seconds that lasted for hours.

  The inner walls and the pressure doors at each end of the compartment got hot enough to start smoking. Bobbie shared a look with Amos, then let go of him and they both scrambled to get into the emergency vacuum suits.

  When the exterior bulkhead blew out, there wasn’t another deafening explosion, but rather a sudden drop in the sound level. The roar was replaced by the hiss of rushing air, then a high whine, then nothing. The seals on their shelter stayed intact, so afterward all they could hear was their own panicked breathing.

  “Okay, we’re getting massive alarms,” Clarissa said, her voice the only calm thing in the universe. “The station’s going into shutdown. I’m pulling out too. I’ll see you back at the place.”

  “God damn,” Naomi said.

  “Told you,” Katria said. “My shit always works.”

  Bobbie finished pulling on her vac suit, and saw Amos was sealing up his own. They traded a look. “We need to get out of here,” she said to him, and he nodded his agreement. Whatever was going to happen between them, it was on hold for now. They’d come back to it, she was certain of that. And it would need to get settled.

  If I just killed Holden, this probably ends with one of us dead.

  Whatever she’d imagined when she heard the blasts from inside the shelter, the reality was worse.

  They opened the door to an entire deck that had been dropped in a blender, then spun up in a
centrifuge. Bulkhead panels, control stations, equipment, decking. It had all been torn, twisted, burned, and then thrown out against the outer walls at high speed. A long piece of pipe was embedded in a wall, still quivering like an arrow shot into a tree. Something that looked like a metal desk had been slammed into a support beam so hard that the metal had actually fused. And in one corner, a single boot had been pinned to the ceiling and then melted into a stalactite of rubber. She hoped there wasn’t a foot in it.

  They floated silently through the wreckage looking for their exit. It wasn’t hard to find.

  A hole gaped in the exterior bulkhead of the drum nearly five meters across. The nearly circular rim of it was all bent outward, like the metal wall had been breached by a giant’s battering ram. Which, Bobbie supposed, it had. Only instead of concrete and steel, it had been oxygen and fire. Outside, she saw the faint twinkle of light on the ejecta as it raced away from the station and toward the curtain of black at the edge of the ring space.

  “Exactly where I said it would be,” Katria cackled. “Damn near half a meter from the exact spot I marked as the weak point. I should charge money for this.”

  “Do you think anyone survived?” Naomi asked.

  “We kept everyone we could out of the affected area,” Bobbie replied. “Only should have been Laconians down here …”

  “And anyone who didn’t get our fucking memo,” Amos added.

  “Jim would have warned anyone he ran into,” Naomi said. “He wouldn’t be able to stop himself.”

  “Yeah, by then it wouldn’t matter much,” Amos agreed. “No time to track the bomb down before it did its business.”

  “And fuck any Laconians who were here,” Katria said in a tone that sounded like she’d have spit if she weren’t wearing a helmet. “I hope they fucking saw it coming.”

  “Kat,” Bobbie said, “please shut up now.”

  “This is going to work,” Naomi said, pointing out the hole toward the docks. “They’re going to think that was our target.”

  The Gathering Storm sat a few dozen meters away. The nose of the ship and its port-side flank showed significant hull damage. Debris from the blast had punched holes in the landing clamps and dragged long gouges down its side. A large cluster of objects that looked like a sensor or communication array had nearly been ripped off the side of the ship, floating now at the end of a tether of cables.

  It was an eerie ship. The angles of it were like something cut from crystal, and the curves felt like something grown more than built. It was like looking at a venomous snake. She had a hard time pulling her eyes away.

  “Too bad we didn’t kill it,” Katria said, ignoring Bobbie’s request.

  “Yeah,” Bobbie agreed. “Too bad.”

  Amos pulled a magnetic grapple gun out of the gear bag he was carrying and fired a line over to the elevator shaft exterior. They’d need to climb up to a point not far from the maintenance hatch on the outside of the drum she and Clarissa had used earlier. The hard part would be getting a grapple onto the drum, then hanging on while the station tried to hurl them away at a third of a g. After that, it was an easy climb up to their secret entrance back into the station. Up into Medina from the underworld, and mission accomplished.

  Unless something else went wrong. The only thing worse than losing Holden would be losing him for no damned reason.

  “Laconians are gonna find this hatch,” Amos said. “Shouldn’t plan to use it again after this. No way the crews that come to fix that hole are gonna miss it.”

  “Yeah,” Bobbie agreed. “If we thought the sweeps before were bad, they’re about to get a hundred times tighter.”

  “Yeah, fuck ’em,” Katria snorted.

  “No,” Naomi said. “It’ll be worse than that. We stung their pride before. But today we hurt them. Hurt them bad. And they’re going to try to make it better by hurting us back. Not just us either. Anyone who they think might be like us.”

  While Amos hooked his grapple line to the edge of the hole so that they could climb up to the elevator housing, Naomi remained staring at the damaged Laconian ship.

  “We killed a lot of people today,” she said. “Some of them just don’t know it yet.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four: Drummer

  The battle will be here,” Benedito Lafflin said, indicating a space between the curve of the asteroid belt and the orbit of Mars. The place where physics and geometry calculated that the paths of the Tempest and those of the fleets of the EMC and the union would cross. There was nothing there now—no port, no city, no outpost of any civilization. Only a hard vacuum wider than worlds, an emptiness of strategic importance. “We’re calling it Point Leuctra.”

  “Luke-tra?”

  “The Spartans were decisively defeated there by Thebes,” Lafflin said. “I mean, they call their planet Laconia. Psy ops thought it might speak to their sense of their own invincibility.”

  They stared at each other a moment. That’s the best we’ve got? Intimidate them with classical allusions? floated at the back of her throat. Lafflin shrugged uncomfortably.

  “All right,” Drummer said. Because what else was there to be said? It wasn’t as though her will was going to change any of the factors involved. The timetable was listed at the side of the display, days and hours as ticks of red and gold.

  “The eggheads have a good model of the Tempest,” Lafflin went on, swapping out the map of the system for a schematic of the Tempest. The weird, organic shape of it made her feel like she was looking at a detail from an autopsy. Here is the vertebra where things went wrong. You can see the malformation. She smiled at the absurdity of the thought. Lafflin smiled back reflexively. “The only hard data we have is where the PDCs and torpedoes came out, but we also got a lot of good heat data from the last engagement.”

  “The death of Independence,” Drummer said. The death of the first void city and everyone who hadn’t fled their home.

  Lafflin looked down. “That, yes, ma’am. The data’s given us some idea about the internal structures too. Enough that we feel confident that we can target the right places on that bastard. Take it out before it reaches Earth.”

  Because that was the point, Drummer thought. That was always the point. Protect Earth and Mars. Keep the inner planets safe and independent, even at the cost of more Belters’ lives. And she’d known that. From the moment Avasarala had stepped into her meeting, she’d known. Some part of her expected to feel some kind of outrage, some betrayal. Resentment that the wheel of history was still rolling over the backs of her people first.

  She didn’t. There was a term she remembered from her years in the OPA. Saahas-maut. She didn’t know where the term came from, but it meant something like the pleasure you take in hardship. It was supposed to be a peculiarly Belter emotion, something that the inners didn’t name because they didn’t feel it. She looked at the Tempest now, the guesswork lines of her superstructure and drive, the target points along her hull. Drummer wasn’t angry at the inners for using the union to protect Earth. She wasn’t even angry at the Laconians for being another iteration of everything the inners had been before the union existed. War and loss, the prospect of the oppressor’s boot. There was a nostalgia to it. A bone-deep memory of what it had been to be young.

  She couldn’t help wondering what that girl, riding rock hoppers and taking gigs at Ceres and Iapetus and Tycho, would have thought of the woman she’d become. The leader of her own oppressions. Not much, probably.

  Lafflin cleared his throat.

  “Sorry,” Drummer said. “Didn’t sleep well. Vaughn? Could you get me some tea?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Vaughn said. “Also, Pallas.”

  “Thank you,” she said. She didn’t mean it.

  She’d placed the strategic update with Lafflin on her schedule on purpose. The Tempest’s inexorable flight sunward was slated to reach its point nearest to Pallas Station within the hour. The evacuation was complete, or as near to complete as it would be. There was always some old
rock hopper with a gun and an attitude who’d stay behind out of spite and rage. It wouldn’t help. One of humanity’s oldest homes in the Belt would be dead before she went to sleep again, or if it wasn’t, it would be because Admiral Trejo had seen fit to grant his mercy. She was pretty sure that wasn’t going to happen. At least she could go into the terrible, predictable tragedy with all the vulnerable points of the Tempest firmly in mind. She had some hope of retribution.

  There was a certain peace in the impossibility of subterfuge. Sure, there were stealth ships and long-range torpedoes. The cloak and dagger of vanishing into the vastness between worlds. They worked for a ship here and there. For the small and swift and furtive. But on this scale—the scale of war on the battlefield of the abyss—everyone knew more or less where everyone else was. Their drive plumes and heat signatures announced them. The hard laws of orbital mechanics and time placed every base, every planet, every person predictably in front of their own personal firing squads. Situations like this one, they could see death coming, and it didn’t matter. Death still came.

  “Did you …” Lafflin said. “We can continue this after. If you’d like.”

  Drummer didn’t like. She didn’t want to see it happen. Didn’t want to hope that Pallas might survive. But she was the president of the union, and bearing witness was part of what she was supposed to do. She wondered where Avasarala was, and whether the old lady was going to watch too.

  “Yes,” Drummer said. “That’ll be fine.”

  Lafflin nodded, rose from the table, and made his way out of the meeting room. Drummer stood, stretched, and switched the display to the tactical service’s analytics. The image wasn’t real. It was a composite of visual telescopy and Pallas’ internal data cobbled together into a best guess that was five minutes old from light delay before it reached her. Without Tycho beside it, Pallas looked … Calm? Still. The curves of the bases’ structures didn’t spin against the starscape. Pallas was older than that. By the time they’d learned how to spin asteroid stations up, Pallas had been in business for more than a generation. It would die without changing. A countdown timer showed the minutes to the Tempest’s closest pass. Seven minutes and thirty-three seconds.