Persepolis Rising

by James S. A. Corey

  In the hallway, Saba’s voice. A woman replied. It was all too quiet to make out the words. The people at the other table laughed about something. Bobbie hunched forward, her scowl deep enough to ache.

  “Holden’s not just Holden,” she said, knowing it was an evasion but saying it anyway. “He’s the face of the Rocinante. He’s been on newsfeeds since before I joined up. He’s the special man. We pulled this thing off, and we lost one person in the operation. That’s a win. If it had been you or me or Claire that got caught, we’d still be celebrating, but it was Holden. Now it feels like we lost our good-luck charm.”

  “Feels like that to them, sure,” Alex said, pointing to the others with his thumb. “But we lost him before, and it didn’t break us. Him and Naomi retiring was sad. And then he didn’t go away, and that was weird.”

  “Yeah. The whole Captain Draper thing might have worked if he’d actually been out of the picture—”

  Alex leaned forward, talking over her.

  “But we know better. Whatever’s going on with Amos and you, it didn’t start when Holden left. Or when he came back. It was when that big-ass ship steamed through the gate from Laconia and fucked everything sideways. And now Naomi’s curling up in her bunk while everything’s still on fire.”

  “She’s not helping with the decrypt?”

  Alex shook his head once, sharply.

  “She can’t pull back,” Bobbie said. “She’s the best tech on the station. Saba’s people are fine, but she’s better. She can’t just stop working because …”

  Because her lover’s dead. Or worse. Bobbie felt the hurt and the guilt again.

  “We need her,” Alex agreed. “I’ll have a talk with her if you want. Unless you want to be the one who kicks her butt?”

  “I really don’t.”

  “Good, because I don’t want to be the one who tells Amos to get his shit together. So that one’s on you.”

  To Bobbie’s surprise, she smiled. For a moment, she could pretend the cramped little galley was the Rocinante. That she and Alex were burning between the gates and the stars. She put a hand on his arm, grateful that her friend was there. And that however shitty things got, the plan was still to fix them.

  Alex’s smile was enough to show he understood everything she hadn’t spoken. “Right?” he said.

  “You’re Naomi. I’m Amos. Then if Holden’s still alive, we find him, crack him loose, and get the hell out of Dodge before the next big-ass ship comes through that gate.”

  “See? Now you’re talking sense,” Alex said. He sighed. “Which is good, because I thought I was going to have to tell you to stop sulking, and I really wasn’t looking forward to the part where you punched me in the mouth.”

  Saba stood at the wider part of the hallway where an access panel had been taken out and never replaced. He held his arms above his head, bracing against the ceiling with the unconscious ease of someone ready for a ship that might move unexpectedly. He lifted his chin as Bobbie came close.

  “Hey, I’m looking for Amos,” she said.

  “Problem?”

  “Tell you when I find out,” she said. “He’s not answering his comms.”

  Saba’s brow furrowed. “Que shansy que he’s after Holden?”

  “I wouldn’t put the odds high that he’d go on an extraction by himself,” Bobbie said. Then, a moment later, “I mean not zero, but not high.”

  “See it stays, if you can,” Saba said. “We’re carrying plenty enough already, and more rolling down, yeah?”

  Something in his voice caught her. “More news?”

  Saba hesitated, then shifted his head. Come this way. “You looking for yours, me looking for you. You want the good word first, or the worrying?”

  “Good,” Bobbie said. “I’m looking for good.”

  “Word from a coyo on the cleaning crew is Holden’s alive. Locked down tight, but not dead.”

  A tightness released in Bobbie’s gut. Whatever else happened, she hadn’t killed him. And more than that, when she found Amos, she’d have it on her side. She felt a deep gratitude that she’d run into Saba before he’d found him. She had to let Alex know. And Naomi. And everyone. The relief was profound.

  “That’s … Okay. What’s the worrying?”

  “Message from the union. From the spy repeater.”

  “Wait,” Bobbie said, following him as he walked toward his cabin. “We’ve got communications lines open? I thought we shut that down.”

  “Turned it back on for this,” Saba said. “It ate a missile right after. Drummer thought it was worth burning the channel for.”

  “Something big, then?”

  “Come see.”

  Saba had Drummer’s message up on his cabin’s monitor. The change in her face was shocking. It wasn’t only that the president looked tired and thinner. She looked older, like the last few weeks had been measured in years instead of days. Saba didn’t speak, but started the message from the beginning. Bobbie listened until the end, then played it again, making sure she understood. The loss of Pallas, and the loss of time.

  “Well,” she said. “Holy shit.”

  “Yeah,” Saba said. “Got my people going through all the information we intercepted. All that’s finished decrypting, anyway. Nothing about lost time or boiling up the vacuum.”

  “Even if we found something, it’s not like we can sneak a message back if the repeater’s dead.”

  “Not sneak one, no,” Saba agreed. “Can shout, though. If it was the right time. Medina’s not home anymore. Not for us. When we scatter, maybe send something back down to People’s Home. Tell them what we’ve got to tell them. If we get anything.”

  “Fair point,” Bobbie agreed. “And that is the plan now, right? Clear a path and evacuate as many as we can before the new ship gets here?”

  “Already putting out the word to the underground,” he said. He sounded as tired as she was. “Just the ones we trust. Saying to get ready. Window opens, and get to the ships and go. Everyone someplace different. Harder to kill us if we’re not in one place.”

  “Even better if they don’t know who went where,” Bobbie said. “I’d love to find a way to take out Medina’s sensor arrays when we go.”

  “Would be sweet,” Saba said, his voice dull.

  “You holding up okay?” Bobbie asked.

  Saba shrugged toward the image of Drummer still on the screen. “That woman is my heart, and I lost her. Lost my ship. Lost my place for my people. Got an enemy ship killing my cities and stations, and now it can turn off minds in a whole system at once. Got another one like it braking toward me. Got all those Marines in power armor ready to shoot me and mine through the brainpan, and the loosest mouth on a thousand worlds is in the enemy’s jail. So given so, I’m all right.”

  “Holden won’t rat us out. He’s given a lot of unvetted press releases over the years, but that’s not the same as this.”

  “They have him, they’ll have us. Not talking him down, but these people were Mars before they were this. Ask anyone in the OPA from the old days. Martian interrogation, it’s a question of how long until the break. Never if. Better that he’d died.”

  “We can move,” Bobbie said. “Do you have any holes that Holden didn’t know about?”

  “Few,” Saba said, reluctantly. “But fewer now. My people are moving now. Still room for you and yours, but there won’t be. Not for long. And …”

  He shook his head.

  “And what,” Bobbie said. “If there’s something more, I need to know.”

  Saba shrugged and nodded at the screen. “When it comes, if it comes, the one system we can’t go to? Sol. Anyplace else, I can try for. Anyplace else, I can go. But no matter where it is, she won’t be there. Wasn’t so bad when the repeater still was, but with it gone, it feels …”

  A tear tracked down Saba’s brown cheek. Bobbie looked away.

  It was so easy to forget all the others. Not just Saba, but all of them. The crews of all the ships trapped in
the dock beside the Roci. The children in Medina’s schoolrooms, the medical staff in the clinics. The artists playing music live outside the cafés out of love of doing it. Medina Station had been the nearest thing to a void city before the void cities were built. It was a home for a generation of people, and every one of them was carrying something now that made their days harder. She thought of the prisoners in the public jail, the angry man who’d come to watch them. Who had he lost back on Sol? What was keeping him awake in the nights?

  There were so many families, so many crews, parents and children, lovers and friends, whose lives had been changed past recognition since Laconia gate had opened. It wasn’t just her and the Roci crew. It wasn’t just Saba. Everyone was dancing on this same landslide, and no one knew how to make it end well.

  She wanted to say something comforting, but she couldn’t bring herself to lie. The best she could think of was to change the subject.

  “When we get out,” she said. “Not if. When. We’re going to need a plan. If every ship just bolts off on its own, we’ll lose contact. They shouldn’t know where we went, but we should. At the very least, we should have a record of who went where. This every-man-for-himself-and-God-against-all shit’s romantic, but we have to plan for something past just this.”

  Saba nodded. In the distance, voices and footsteps.

  “Not just encrypted but in code,” Saba said. “Something where only we know what it means.”

  “We?”

  “Ou y mé,” Saba said. “Leaders of the underground, us. First among dissidents.”

  Bobbie chuckled. “Well, there’s a fucking job title.”

  The footsteps came faster now, and coming closer. Saba looked up like an animal smelling smoke. Fuck, Bobbie thought. Not something else. It’s too much already. We can’t carry something else.

  The woman who appeared in Saba’s doorway was older, white hair pulled back in a tight braid. Her body was long and thin, her head a little too large for her shoulders. The classic build of someone who’d grown up without gravity to hold her down. She even had the split circle of the OPA tattooed on her arm. She should have looked ancient, but the brightness in her eyes belonged on a woman a third her age. She looked from Saba to Bobbie and back with something like triumph in her eyes.

  “Maha?” Saba said. “Que?” And then to Bobbie, “Maha one of our best communications techs. Had her hands in the codes since before I was born, yeah?”

  “And I know all their secrets,” she said in a weirdly accented voice. She held out a dumb terminal that wasn’t connected to Medina’s system. “The new decryption run turned over some stones. And look you what was squirming under one.”

  Bobbie was closer. She took the handheld terminal and flipped through the file there. It was titled MEDINA STATION SUPPLEMENTARY SECURITY REVIEW AS REQUESTED BY GOVERNOR SANTIAGO SINGH. The file’s creator was listed as Major Lester Overstreet. She checked the file length and whistled.

  “Que?” Saba said.

  “This is way too long to just be an incident report,” Bobbie said. “It’s …”

  The section headings were Materials, Procedures, Personnel, Protocols, Audit Summary, Recommendations. She recognized the style of paragraph marking from when she’d trained back on Olympus Mons. It looked like an MMC security report, but twice as long. Maybe three times. She shifted through one after another, her head starting to swim a little.

  “I think … Saba, I think this is everything,” she said.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: Alex

  His back hurt. Of all the thousand things that were jacked up and wrong in his life right now, the one that chose to make him crazy was that. His back hurt, just below his rib cage where it clicked for a couple days after they’d been on the float for a while. Now it clicked and ached a little. Just time and age catching up with him, but it made him crazy. Probably anything that he couldn’t fix was going to make him crazy right now.

  He walked down the tight hallway, his shoulder brushing the conduits and pipes, and told himself that things were getting better. Not losing Holden. That was still a long way from better. But the rest of it. The rest of them. Whatever else happened, he still had Bobbie.

  And for him anyway, Bobbie counted double.

  Taking care of their little family had been his job damn near since the day the Canterbury died, back in some other lifetime. And usually, he felt like he managed it pretty well. The only time things had really come apart, he’d been married to Giselle and preoccupied with trying to pump air into that leaking sack of a relationship. But all the times he hadn’t lost focus, Alex felt like he’d kept the crew of the Roci working together, mostly. It wasn’t big things. The powerful stuff was always small. A kind word when Clarissa was feeling unappreciated, a little elbow in the ribs when Holden’s outrage on someone else’s behalf threatened to eclipse the person in question, a cordon around Amos when the big man was in the bad part of his head. Every crew that lasted more than three runs together had someone who kept a weather eye on the balance. For decades now, he’d been that man on the Roci.

  Only they weren’t on the Roci now. And that, so far as he could see it, was more than half of the problem. Not the whole problem. But more than half.

  “Hoy, hoy, hoy,” one of Katria’s people said, trotting up behind him. Alex recognized him from the galley. Young guy with a nose that had gotten bent sometime back and never put straight. “Passé alles gut?”

  “Sure,” Alex said. “Everything’s fine.” It wasn’t true, but he wasn’t looking to talk about family business outside the family.

  “Bist bien,” the crook-nosed guy said. “Just. We’re alles busted about Holden, yeah? Whatever Voltaire can do, help out, yeah?”

  Alex clapped the crook-nose on the shoulder, and looked deeply into his eyes. “Thank you. Seriously. That means a lot.”

  The kid was just another someone who wanted to get close to the action. There had been a million like him over the years. Holden had always been the one who soaked up the fame and celebrity, because for the most part he didn’t notice it. He just kept on being himself, and got vaguely surprised when anyone recognized him. The rest of them had to build up their routines and diversions, ways of being polite to the people who wanted to insert themselves into anything that the Rocinante did so they could tell their friends and feeds that they knew James Holden. Shaking Crook-nose’s hand and sending him away didn’t cost Alex much, but it didn’t cost him nothing. Part of him wanted to ignore the guy or yell at him. But this was easier in the long run. He had enough experience to know that, and he was pretty good with patience when he needed to be.

  After a well-calculated moment, he turned away and resumed walking toward the makeshift bunkroom. And Naomi.

  It had been hard when Holden and Naomi pulled the ripcord, but it hadn’t been unexpected. Part of him had been braced for it since his own second divorce. He’d been ready for the blow when those two packed up their things and retired. When Duarte’s forces blew through the gate and changed everything, part of him had thought that getting Holden and Naomi back was going to be the silver lining.

  He’d called it wrong, though.

  They treated it like Laconia was the only problem because it was the one most likely to get them all killed, but there was more than that. Now that Holden was out of the picture, the only one in a position to fix it was Naomi.

  Fix it. That was optimism. The only one who could fix as much of it as was fixable. He hoped she was able to rise to the occasion. He hoped he was too. But no matter how bad it was, things had gone pretty well with Bobbie. He still had Bobbie.

  The smuggler’s cabin was dim. Golden light spilled from the toolkit light they used for illumination when the built-in fixtures were too harsh. The air was warmer here, and it had the vague smell of bodies and old laundry. They hadn’t changed out the sheets since they’d gotten here. Some things slipped when you were hiding from authoritarian police squads and trying to topple a conquering army. Linens appeared
to be one of those things.

  Naomi sat against the back wall, her stool tipped back so that she could rest against the bulkhead. She smiled when he came in and put a finger to her lips. Alex paused, and Naomi nodded toward the bunk to his left. The lump under the blanket was the curve of Clarissa’s back. It rose and fell slowly. She was asleep. Alex turned back to Naomi, gestured to the door behind him in invitation, but Naomi shifted her stool to one side, making room for Alex to sit on the lower bunk beside her. Come sit with me. I will not go outside.

  With a sinking sensation in his gut, Alex sat. His back popped like a bolt shearing off, and the ache went away. In the shadows, Naomi seemed like someone just waking up from sleep or just falling into it. On a borderline, regardless, between one state and another.

  “Hey,” Alex said softly.

  Naomi made a little wave with a smile behind it. “I’ve been sitting with her for the last couple hours. Amos is trying to get something to take the edge off in the short run, but we need to get her to the med bay. That sludge in her blood is building up. It’s making her jittery.”

  “Soon as we’re out of here,” Alex said. “First thing. How’re you holding together?”

  She shrugged with her hands.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “You coming to tell me that I need to put my big-girl boots on? Stop sulking in my tent and rejoin the battle, quick before Patroclus does something rash?” There was a warmth and a humor in her voice he hadn’t expected. It almost undercut the sorrow that he had expected.

  “Yeah, I don’t actually know who Patroclus is,” Alex said.

  “Greek kid, got in over his head,” Naomi said, waving it away. “I’ll be fine, Alex. I’ll be out there. Just I needed to be away for a little while. It’s just the down cycle.”

  He went through all of the things he’d planned to say, all the arguments he’d prepared to make. None of them seemed to quite fit the situation.

  “Yeah, okay,” he said instead. And then, a moment later, “Down cycle?”