Persepolis Rising (The Expanse)

by James S. A. Corey

  Sitting alone on her new, thin bunk, she built a list on Saba’s terminal. If she thought too much about the dangers, the time pressure, she knew the dark thoughts would start coming. There wasn’t time for that. If she could focus, though, problem-solve, she’d be okay. She’d known herself long enough to learn that. The care and feeding of a well-used mind.

  The final goal was to get out of the slow zone and find someplace safe to hide and regroup. So the last step was at the top of the list:

  REGROUP

  She didn’t have the details of what that would look like. Probably keep her head down and see what happened. Wait for the enemy to stumble or new allies to appear. The old, old strategies. But whatever shape it took, that was the final goal. In order for that to happen, they would have to manage some other things …

  REACH SAFETY

  Before that …

  IDENTIFY SAFETY

  After all, they’d need to know where they were fleeing to before they fled. It had to be someplace that they could land the Roci. Someplace that wasn’t likely to fall in line with Duarte and turn them in. So none of Fisk’s association worlds, and not Sol either. That was tricky, but she felt the beginnings of some ideas for it. So all right. But there was more than one dependency for that, so she split the column and added the other track.

  BLIND MEDINA AND GATHERING STORM

  If the Laconians knew where they’d gone, they wouldn’t stay hidden long. So that would be important. And it would be the last thing they did before they left, so the enemy wouldn’t have time to fix whatever they chose to break. She’d have to have everyone ready to go before the sensor arrays went down, so …

  GATHER EVACUATION GROUPS

  And in order to do that, they’d have to get the word to everyone in Saba’s networks. All the underground. All of them. And there it was. The sorrow and the fear. And the tightness at the back of her throat. It was all right. She just had to put it on her list. It was just part of the plan.

  SAVE JIM

  Saba sent a message an hour before “Ami Henders” was supposed to get off her shift. Bobbie got the same message, though none of the others did. It was a restaurant just one level under the drum’s inner surface and a route to reach it that would, if everything went well, avoid any checkpoints. Naomi washed her face in the little sink no wider than her two palms together and tugged her hair into something like order. When she got home to the Roci, she was going to spend a day in the showers. A whole damned day.

  Alex and Clarissa were waiting for her in the public hall. Bobbie and Amos were a few meters down, pretending to talk, but actually keeping watch. They were both bruised, and there was a cut over Amos’ eye. They looked like they’d been caught in the explosion, which was technically true, but the tension that had been showing in the way Amos held his gut and shoulders was gone.

  No, not gone. But lessened. That was good.

  “We ready to paint the town red?” Clarissa asked, taking Naomi’s arm. It had the form of a playful gesture, but the need for support was there too.

  “I hope this place serves margaritas,” Alex said. “It’s been a long time since I had a good margarita.”

  “Trust me when I say you’ve never had a good margarita, Martian,” Amos replied. “Still some things only Earth does well.”

  Bobbie caught Naomi’s eye, gave a little nod, and started off along the route. Amos walked at her side, his steps rolling a little in the fractional gravity, like something hurt with each step. Naomi gave them a few seconds, and then started after them. There was a story behind those bruises, and she had the impression she’d never know what it was.

  James Holden had shipped with five others on his crew, but they weren’t five. They were a couple up ahead, and a different group of three behind. As ways to avoid pattern recognition, it was thin. But it was something.

  The restaurant was a wide, white ceramic bar open to the corridor. Billows of steam came from the back, rich with the smells of fish and curry. The design didn’t fit into the aesthetic of the original ship. This space was a modification, the Nauvoo, which became the Behemoth, which became Medina Station in the process of learning what it was and would be. Looked at that way, Naomi liked the restaurant, even if it was a little ugly.

  The man behind the counter nodded, greeted them all in a dialect Naomi didn’t recognize, and waved them back into the steam. The kitchen was small, with two women—one very old, the other hardly more than a girl—who looked at them curiously as they passed through.

  The old man opened a thick metal door and nodded, smiling, at the walk-in freezer beyond it. Saba was already there, a blanket over his shoulders and a thin, black cigarette in his mouth. His cheeks were ruddy with the cold. The old man closed the door behind them, and a golden emergency light came on, throwing shadows across them from crates of vat-raised fish. Amos’ gaze cut over to Clarissa, but if anything she seemed to be enjoying the cold.

  “Not perfect,” Saba said, “but hard for them to hear us.”

  “You think they’re listening?”

  “No,” Saba said. “But here, seems less likely I’m wrong. Perdón for the fast change. I didn’t have much warning.”

  “Shikata ga nai,” Naomi said, and Saba nodded ruefully.

  “We have a plan,” Bobbie said. “Well, Naomi does.”

  “The outline of one anyway,” Naomi said. “I don’t love it, because a lot of things have to happen in a very small time frame. But the Typhoon arrives in less than a week, and slowing that down isn’t something I can do.”

  “I have people,” Saba said. “You tell me, I’ll tell who needs telling.”

  “There’s just a lot of moving parts,” Naomi said. “Lots of ways for things to break down.”

  “Tell me a story,” Saba said through a cloud of smoke and visible breath.

  Naomi did. She went through step by step, detail by detail. As she talked, the whole operation solidified in her mind, letting her speak with a clarity and authority she only halfway felt. It was a terrible plan, open to a thousand different failures, and some of them wouldn’t be things they could recover from. If the assault team couldn’t get onto the Storm. If the kill code was changed or unhackable. If the Laconian repair crews could get the sensors fixed more quickly than she expected.

  But with every word she spoke, with every detail she provided, she felt the Typhoon looming behind her. Coming close. Ending any chance they had.

  “Gonya need two bombs,” Saba said, pulling up his hand terminal. The one that didn’t connect to the station’s legitimate network. He talked as he composed a message. “One for sensors, one for the jail. Katria’s good for one. Have to see who she likes for two. Which one matters more?”

  They both matter, Naomi said at the same moment Clarissa said, The jail.

  “I worked on this station, back in the day,” Clarissa said. “Get me access to the secondary power junction that feeds them and a way to reset the primary. I can keep the sensors down.”

  “Claire,” Bobbie said, concern in her voice.

  “I’m good for it,” Clarissa said. “It will work.”

  And then that was decided. Saba was already putting a message into his hand terminal.

  “Bist bien alles,” he said.

  “Amos and I are dealing with the Storm,” Bobbie said. “You give us a team, but we’re point or no deal.”

  “Deal,” Saba said. “I’ll put me and mine on the Malaclypse as soon as the signal goes. If the muscle here has trouble, at least there can be two against the one. Plan B, sa sa?”

  Alex raised his hand. “No one’s flying the Roci on this but me. We all knew that, right?”

  “I’ll take the jail,” Naomi said. I’ll get Jim.

  Saba’s terminal chirped, and he looked at it with pleasure. “Katria has someone. Coyo with experience in demolitions. He’ll need to know what we’re doing. Just his part, though. Inner circle, us.”

  “Inner circle,” Naomi said. “Claire and I can mee
t with him.”

  “Good,” Saba said as he trundled to the freezer door and pounded on it with a blanket-wrapped fist. Then he pointed to Bobbie and Amos. “You come with me. We’ll see Katria. Talk about how to hunt Marines.”

  Something flickered over Bobbie’s face. Hardly even an expression, but Naomi saw it.

  “You lead, we’ll follow,” Amos said, smiling his empty smile.

  “Any thoughts on how to get me onto my ship?” Alex asked as the door opened.

  “Several,” Saba said. “You should come with.” Then he shook his head. “Too many things. Not enough time.”

  They stepped out into the suddenly burning air. Naomi hadn’t even noticed she was getting cold until suddenly she wasn’t anymore. Saba led them out to the kitchen, and then they slipped through the steam and into the civilian world two by two until she and Clarissa were all that remained.

  They sat at the counter and watched people go by. The fish was unremarkable, but the curry and mushroom rice actually were good. Across the corridor, a monitor spooled out the newsfeed until it repeated. Clarissa ate, drank tea, talked about everything and nothing. Naomi almost didn’t notice the tremble in the other woman’s hand or the way her eyes jittered sometimes. If she thinks she can do it, she can do it, Naomi told herself.

  The man arrived, sliding into the chair beside them. Dark, handsome eyes and a bright, excited smile with a crooked nose between them. “Namnae na Jordao,” he said. “Seen you both back at home, yeah?”

  “I remember,” Clarissa said.

  “Katria, she sent me,” he said, then leaned forward. “So what is it we’re going to do?”

  Chapter Forty-One: Singh

  He had trained on ships back home, as anyone at his rank would. He’d spent weeks sleeping in a tight cabin and eating elbow to elbow with his fellow officers, but at the end of training, he went home, back to Laconia and Natalia and the monster. The weekends after a training run had been some of the best he’d ever had, waking up late with Natalia beside him. Before the monster came, they’d had quarters with a bedroom on the third story and a folding wall that they could pull back to get fresh air and the view. He remembered lying in that bed, looking out over the city as twilight fell. Vast clouds turning gold and violet on the horizon, and the alien construction platforms glittering among the stars.

  He’d laid his head against Natalia’s as-yet-unoccupied belly and thought about the ships being made up above the planet’s atmosphere. How one day, he might command one. It had seemed glorious at the time.

  He’d known without checking the dates when his exile on Medina Station had lasted as long as a full training tour. Something in the back of his mind had been anticipating the end of low ceilings and false skies. Each day, he found himself growing more anxious, and it wasn’t only the threat from local terrorists or the mounting pressure he felt to reopen the traffic through the gates. It was his flesh itself, grown accustomed to these long isolations having an end, expecting relief and not getting it. Wanting his wife and his child and their sky, even as his conscious mind knew the first two would come much later, and the last … perhaps never.

  It was possible that he would live his whole life and die as the governor of Medina Station and never see a real cloud again. He’d known that from the moment he’d met with the high consul, all those months ago. It hadn’t started chafing until just now.

  The draft of his monthly report was open on his monitor, his personal journal inset in a smaller window. Everyone above him in the chain of command could see his journal if they chose to, but his report gave him the chance to summarize his experiences. To say what, from his perspective, was important. His fingers hovered over his keyboard, where they had been since the memory of Natalia and their old bedroom and the clouds had intruded on his thoughts. He wished he could pause longer.

  Many of the locals persist in referring to the transfer of control in Sol system as a war. This kind of rhetoric has emboldened dissident factions on Medina Station. Given the escalating violence employed by the dissidents, I have elected to maintain the closed-gate policy until the arrival of the Typhoon. Ships coming in from colonial systems have too great a potential to smuggle in relief supplies and reinforcements for the recalcitrant elements here.

  He paused again. A small, angry voice in the back of his mind said, In the event of another large-scale attack on the station, I recommend pulling Laconian forces back to the Storm and venting Medina Station. He pushed the thought away without writing it down. It wasn’t only that it was immoral, though that should have been enough. It was also a statement of weakness. An admission that he could not cut the rot out of this tree without burning it all. And still, the elegance of it made it hard to turn away.

  If Holden and his allies had been held to truly Laconian standards, they would be dead. It was that simple. If Singh treated them with the respect and dignity with which Duarte treated him—to which Singh held himself—removing them all from the equation would just be proper discipline. But he had grown to understand that they weren’t Laconian. Not yet. They hadn’t had time to understand the necessity of the empire. Holden’s arguments were more than proof of that.

  He had to be patient with them. Firm, but patient. He had to keep them from hurting themselves or others until the ripples of this admittedly vast change had calmed. Until the new patterns of life had become normal for them.

  While I am certain that James Holden knows more of the local dissident factions than he is presently admitting, he is not our only resource on that matter. His experience and expertise in the anomaly that Admiral Trejo reported make him a genuinely unique asset on that issue. For that reason, I have chosen to break off his interrogation here and remove him immediately to Laconia for debriefing in whatever context the high consul considers most appropriate.

  Meaning that the terrorist figurehead would see Laconia before he did. Might even come across Natalia and the monster before they came out to Medina, if the high consul chose to treat him gently. Holden would smell the rain. See the sunrise. And Singh would be here, in this spinning can in an eerie non-space that didn’t even have stars to make it feel like home. It was a deep irony that being a prisoner and being in power could be so mismatched.

  “Damn it,” he said to his empty office, then leaned back, running one hand across his scalp. There was so much more to put into the report. The preparations he’d made—was making—for the stationing of the Typhoon and the additional personnel that it was bringing to Medina. The victories he’d had in rooting out the bombers and repairing the damage they had done. His schedule for coordinating and controlling the traffic between the worlds. The empire would succeed or fail on the back of its logistical planning, and his implementation of the high consul’s vision was actually quite detailed. Only just now, something itched in his soul, and he couldn’t concentrate.

  He wondered whether Duarte ever suffered the same base animal distractions. It seemed he would have, but Singh couldn’t imagine it. He closed the draft report, opened his personal journal wide enough to edit, and then closed it too. The walls themselves seemed to push the air at him. It was like an optical illusion of something falling that never quite fell.

  “Damn it,” he said again, less forcefully this time.

  The reports coming in from Sol were distracting too. Trejo’s private reports tracked through the Gathering Storm, but they were meant for Duarte. Singh wished he could read them himself. There were so many questions—whether the Tempest had taken any lasting damage in its first foray against the enemy. Whether anything had changed with the anomaly that had appeared after Pallas. When Trejo anticipated the next battle would come. And if he believed it would be the last one.

  There were the public feeds, of course. The positions of the combined navies were, for the most part, a known thing. The larger cruisers were impossible to hide, and the massive union ships they called void cities. But there might be stealth ships lying in wait or fields of torpedoes launched into a
quiet orbit, counting on the vastness of space to conceal them until they burned to life. Just looking at the declassified tactical map made Singh’s flesh crawl. The vast cloud of the enemy shifting through the gravity-bent space of inner planets, like a swarm of insects with a single, hated enemy. And the Tempest alone in its simple course. Trejo wouldn’t evade and he wouldn’t retreat. He had his orders, and he would follow them.

  Singh reminded himself of how powerful the Tempest was. How resilient. The high consul wouldn’t have committed the ship to a path that led to embarrassment for the empire and death for Trejo. And yet, what if he’d miscalculated? Or what if Earth or Mars or the union had been behind the wave of lost time? Or …

  This speculation was pointless. Worse, it was self-indulgent. Even if he knew everything else he needed to put into his official report, it was going to have to wait. He had to get out of his offices, if only for a while. He had to collect himself.

  Overstreet answered the connection request almost at once. “Governor?”

  “I will need a security detail to my office at once.”

  Overstreet’s silence was less than a heartbeat. “Is there a problem, sir?”

  “No. I want to inspect the docks. When will there be sufficient security for that?”

  If Overstreet was surprised or annoyed, there was no sign of it in his voice. “I’ll have a detail to you in five minutes, sir.”

  “Thank you,” Singh said, then dropped the connection.

  The Lightbreaker was a cargo ship that had been in the union’s fleet. A small vessel, but fast and with an efficient drive. All of the ships and their crews were guests of the empire until the Typhoon arrived. But not the Lightbreaker. Of all the ships on the station manifest, that was the one best suited to act as a prisoner transport. It was slated to push off in half an hour’s time with James Holden in its brig and a crew Singh had chosen from the Gathering Storm. And Singh found he very much wanted to be there when the first ship left Medina Station for Laconia. The first transit to happen while he was in charge of the ring space. His watch.