Persepolis Rising

by James S. A. Corey

  He kicked straight, hitting just above her hip with his knee still bent. It wasn’t to break her but to push her back, then with the room he’d opened between them, he rushed her. Right fist to her face, left swinging up into her ribs. She lifted her arms into a boxer’s stance, but a fraction of a second too late. He finally got inside her guard, his right elbow across her throat, and he had her back against the door. Pushing against her windpipe. She shifted under him, looking for a way to get a breath. His legs and back ached with the effort of closing her throat for her. He gritted his teeth until they creaked.

  The pain in his balls started with a thump like hearing someone drop a brick, then a second later the brightness came, spreading out through his whole body. He felt himself stumble back. Bobbie turned out from under his arm, hitting him once with each fist on exactly the same rib. He felt it give.

  She wasn’t pulling her punches. She meant it. He let go of the last shred of restraint, and surged forward, roaring. Ready to kill or get killed. The tiny part of him that was still watching him, still thinking and aware, expected her to flinch back. Instead, she jumped in toward him. They hit like a wreck, her hand on his neck, her hip against his, and he was in the air. He hit the bulkhead hard enough that sound faded away for a second. He pushed off just as she swung a knee into his gut, grabbed her around the thigh, and lifted, swinging her up over his head, and then both of them down to the deck as hard as the spin gravity would take them.

  Someone was shouting, and it might have been him. It was all ground game now, and her hands were on his head, fingertips digging into his skin, looking for a grip. If she got his ear, she was keeping it. He reared back, grabbing for her arm, trying to get her elbow where he could bend it back. Snap it. For a second, he was almost there, but she twisted, got a foot against his waist, pushed him back. He caught her ankle and tried the same move on her knee, but the muscles there were too strong, the joint too solid to break. And while he was trying it, he couldn’t move as well.

  Her other heel came down on his left eyebrow, popping it open. He pushed in toward her, driving her back. The blood stung his eye, but he moved fast and with a lifetime of practice. He had his hands around her throat, squeezing as hard as he could. Her windpipe was between his thumbs where he could crack it like a walnut—

  Except she was already bringing her arms up inside his, rolling her shoulders and shrugging off his grip. She’d planned it. She wasn’t lost in rage haze. She was still thinking.

  She locked her legs with his, and rolled so she was on top. The heel of her left hand pushed his chin up and away so her right fist could land on his throat. Amos coughed, tried to roll away. His breath was a thick wheeze. The air that made it into his lungs felt pressed thin. He struggled to get to his feet, but she was already up, kicking his knee out from under him. He hit the deck hard. She was over him, kicking down. Curb-stomping him. He tried to curl away from her. Her heel hit his shoulder, his back. She was going for his kidneys, and he tried to shift away, but he couldn’t. The pain was exquisite and vast. He was helpless. He was fucked. She kicked him again, the whole weight of her body behind it, and he felt another rib go.

  He wasn’t going to make it up. The violence was going to go on until she decided it was over, and there was nothing he could do to make it stop. He curled against blow after blow after blow, felt the damage in his body getting deeper. There was nothing he could do to defend himself. If Bobbie wanted him dead, he’d die.

  He endured, helpless. The pain smeared into itself until it wasn’t any part of him that hurt. Until it was bigger than his body.

  His mind slipped, shifted. Images flickered through him like a memory too deep to bother being coherent. A perfume smell like lilacs and bergamot. A white blanket so used that the cotton fibers were shattering, but soft. The way the cheap ice pops they sold at the shitty little bodega at Carey and Lombard tasted. The sound of a feed in the next room, of rain. It had been a long time since he’d thought about how the rain sounded in Baltimore. Violence, helpless pain, but cheap ice pops too.

  A deep peace welled up in his gut, flowing out through him, lifting him up and out of his body. He relaxed into it. The thing in his throat was gone. Or no. That was never going to happen. It was sated. Back in the deep place where it belonged. He felt like the moment after orgasm, only better. Deeper. More real.

  Eventually, he noticed Bobbie wasn’t kicking him anymore. He rolled onto his back. Opened his eyes. There was blood on the bulkheads and the deck. His testicles felt like soccer balls made of agony. Drying blood glued his left eye closed. His throat ached and burned when he swallowed, but the thing was gone. Something was weird about his breathing, though. It took him a second to figure out what. It was that he wasn’t the only one wheezing.

  Bobbie sat with her back against the door. Her legs were spread a little, taking up the space. Her hands were on her knees. The little bleeding divots where the skin over her knuckles had split looked like art. Her hair was plastered to her neck. Mostly by sweat.

  He looked at her looking back at him. Neither one of them spoke for a while. The hum of the station was the only sound.

  “So,” Bobbie said, then took another couple breaths before she went on. “The fuck was that?”

  Amos swallowed. It hurt a little less this time. He tried to sit up, then thought better of it. There were even a few spatters of blood on the ceiling. One of them looked a little like a cartoon dog face.

  “I don’t,” he said, then gulped in another breath. “I don’t want things. You know what I mean?”

  “Nope.”

  “People … people want things. They want kids. Or they want to get famous or rich or something. And then they get all screwed up trying to get it. So I just don’t want anything. Not like that.”

  “All right,” Bobbie said.

  “Only I fucked up. Didn’t even know I was doing it, but it got where I wanted a thing.” He waited for the lump to come back to his throat, and when it didn’t, he went on. “I want Peaches to get to die at home. With her family.”

  “On the Roci,” Bobbie said. “With us.”

  “Yeah, I want that. Only ever since we got back from Freehold, it’s all coming apart. It wasn’t so bad when it was just Holden and Naomi peeling off on their own, because they picked that.”

  “And also they never actually went away,” Bobbie said.

  “But then that big bastard came through the Laconia gate, and now we’re locked off the Roci, and it’s like the chance to do it right’s just slipping too far away to get a hold of it, you know? I see her acting like it’s not much one way or the other, only it is to me. And then … then everything gets harder. I get cranky. Start thinking about shit I don’t want to think about. You know.”

  They were silent for a long moment. Amos tried sitting up again, and managed it this time.

  “All right,” Bobbie said. “I get it.”

  “You do?”

  “Close enough,” she said. “I get it close enough.”

  She levered herself up to standing, then held a hand out to him. He took it, his hand on her wrist, hers on his. They pulled together and got him to standing. Her face was almost unmarked, but there were some bruises starting to show around her neck. “You really beat the shit out of me,” he said.

  “Would have been easier to kill you,” Babs said, and grinned with bloody teeth. “But I feel like we still need your dumb ass.”

  He nodded. She was right about both things.

  “We should get you some ice,” he said.

  “Fuck you,” she said. “If I did half my job, you’ll be stuffing your jock with every cold thing we have.”

  “Yeah. You can have it when I’m done, though.”

  She managed another bloody smile and turned toward the door.

  “Hey, Babs,” he said. “No hard feelings, right?”

  “Just next time you need to beat someone up, how about you don’t insult me first.”

  He chuckled. It hurt.
“If I need to beat someone up, I’ve got a whole station full of possibilities. But if I’m looking to lose a fight, I’m pretty much down to just you.”

  She took a second. “Fair point.”

  It took him about five minutes to get to the head. He washed up the best he could, but he was going to need some fresh clothes, and washing his eye pulled the clot a little bit loose. It started bleeding again. He’d talk to Saba about getting someone to stitch it closed. But clothes first.

  “Jesus Christ,” Peaches said when he stepped into the room. “What happened?”

  “Huh? Oh, you mean this? Me and Babs were doing a little sparring. I put my face where it shouldn’t have been. It ain’t nothing.”

  Her face balanced between not believing him and choosing to, despite the thinness of the lie. He looked at her collarbone, waiting for the thing to come up with some way to break it, but nothing came. So that was good.

  “You need to be less rusty,” she said at last.

  “That’s not wrong,” Amos said. “What’re you up to?”

  “I was going to go smear some food on my mouth like a toddler,” she said.

  “Sounds good,” he said. “I’ll go with you.”

  Chapter Forty: Naomi

  Wake up. We have to go,” someone said. “Now. Go, go, go.”

  Naomi forced her eyelids open. Her feet hit the decking before the dream she’d been in loosed its grip on her mind. There had been a fire. She’d been talking to it … she felt herself forgetting, the dream dissolving like sugar floss in water.

  Amos rolled off his bunk with a grunt of pain and went to help Clarissa up. Alex was tugging his jumpsuit up over thin, brown legs. The new voice belonged to a girl too young for the split-circle tattoo on the back of her hands.

  “What’s going on?” Bobbie said. “We got a problem?”

  “Saba got word we need to go, so we go. Now go.”

  “Where is he?” Bobbie asked.

  “Gone,” the girl said, and then she was gone too. Light spilled into the bunk from the door she hadn’t closed. The voices and sounds of metal against metal were loud and panicky, but they weren’t battle. There wasn’t gunfire. The fear and the urge to motion that grabbed Naomi’s heart were still as violent.

  “You good, Peaches?” Amos asked. Clarissa nodded, and pulled her hair back into a ponytail like she was getting ready to go to work. There was more color in her cheeks since she’d gotten the new medicine. If Amos hadn’t found a supply, they’d have been carrying her right now. Heaven. Small favors. Like that.

  They piled out into the corridor, and Naomi paused, looked back. There were no tools, no terminals, nothing left behind but traces of hair and DNA. Which would be plenty enough to identify them.

  “Naomi?” Alex said from the hall. “Everyone else is getting out mighty quick here. We should maybe—”

  She moved quickly, decisively, pulling blankets and pillows and sheets up in her arms. They were cheap, so they pressed down to almost nothing. Another small favor. She shoved them into the makeshift recycler feed at the end of the hall. Maybe it wouldn’t make a difference. Maybe she’d been foolish to take the time. It didn’t matter. She’d done what she’d done.

  A lot of her life was like that now.

  Saba was at the service doorway that led out to the rest of the station. The vast body of Medina that the underground didn’t control. His jaw was tight, and there was a darkness around his eyes that the brown of his skin couldn’t hide.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “Had word from one of ours in system logistics. Laconia’s slated this section for survey. If they’re going to find our holes here, best we not be in them.”

  “Well. We knew it would come.”

  He pressed a hand terminal into her palm. “This is yours. Cooked profile. Got one for alles la along with. Rooms, jobs. Don’t scratch the chrome, it’ll come off, but it’s what I could do fast.”

  “Thank you,” Bobbie said as he passed one to her.

  “Messages too. Just text. And just to me. Your circle is your circle.”

  Naomi nodded. It felt like being young again, in all the worst ways. Amos, Alex, and Clarissa were already moving toward the common corridor, Bobbie trotting to catch up to them. Naomi put her hand on Saba’s arm. “The false identities don’t have to hold up long. We’re close to doing this. No despair.”

  Saba’s eyes softened. “My lady wife is back in Sol leading the fight against these bastards. And I will move worlds to wake up beside her again. Just once more.”

  Naomi thought of Jim, and the ache of fear in her stomach. Saba touched her shoulder, and pushed her gently away toward her friends. Her crew. Her family, less one.

  The inner layer of Medina’s drum could have been any of the old spin stations. Wider, common corridors with room for carts and foot traffic both, ramps that led up toward the soil and false sun of the inner face or down toward the vacuum beneath her feet. She hadn’t stepped outside Saba’s hidden dens since they’d lost Jim. Now, walking with the normal inhabitants of Medina, trying to fit in with the midshift patterns, she kept noticing how open everything felt. In another context, it might have been a relief. Now it left her feeling exposed as a mouse in cat territory.

  She plucked up the terminal that Saba had given her, trying to look bored as she checked who she was, where she lived, all the answers she’d need to give the Laconians if she was stopped. She’d seen plenty of faked identities before, and this one was decent. The real question was how deeply Saba’s moles had been able to get into the Laconian datasets. With the link between Medina and the Storm severed, they’d be working from local copies. Corruptible ones. Odd to think that without Jim’s sacrifice, the underground might have ended right then. Her gratitude was complicated by anger.

  Wide screens showed the station newsfeed. Laconian propaganda, but maybe true, some of it. They were playing images of Sol system and the war there. She didn’t watch that, but when it shifted, she paused. A young woman with olive skin and a wide jaw in Laconian blues. The text below her said, ADMIRAL JAE-EUN SONG OF THE EYE OF THE TYPHOON. And on the other side of the screen, a young man. Santiago Singh, governor of Medina.

  “What are your hopes for your arrival at Medina Station?” he asked, the subtitles in Spanish, Chinese, and—unnervingly—Belter Creole.

  The woman nodded seriously, and answered. “The important thing is that we ensure the safety of the people on the station. High Consul Duarte has made it very, very clear that—”

  Naomi didn’t realize she’d stopped until Amos prodded her.

  “Should probably keep moving, boss. Less attention.”

  “Yes,” Naomi said.

  “It’s editing,” Clarissa said. “They do it all the time. That’s not what the light delay really is. There’s still time.”

  Naomi nodded. She didn’t trust herself to speak.

  Her name, according to Saba’s faked ID, was Ami Henders, and her address was listed as refugee housing on level four. She was supposed to be the pilot of the Blue Genius, a water hauler presently burning somewhere on the far side of the Athens gate without her. She wondered whether Saba had been able to scrub Naomi Nagata from the station records. He wouldn’t have been able to get her out of decades of newsfeed footage, standing behind Jim and wishing the cameras were elsewhere.

  She was walking on the surface of a soap bubble and hoping it wouldn’t pop.

  The refugee quarters, when they reached them, were a little better than living in the underground had been. A little suite of five rooms with a narrow common hall and a shared head at the end. She could have touched one wall with her elbow and the other with her shoulder. It was tighter than their quarters on the Roci, but with doors, so they could sleep without breathing each other’s dreams. A little monitor in the wall was set to the official newsfeed, but the captain of the Typhoon was gone, replaced by a sober-faced man in a security uniform.

  “The base was exactly what we thou
ght we would find. These rat holes are what allowed the terrorists to function and plan in secret. Without them, they’ll be forced out into the light. That’s where they can be stopped.

  “We don’t know how many people were using the secret base, but we’ve cordoned it off and we’re making a full investigation. We feel certain that the threat to the station is reduced, but we can’t be complacent. These people are willing to risk the integrity of the environment for their ideological purity. Risk the lives of the whole station. It’s important that we isolate and disarm these terrorists before another attack like the one on the oxygen tank.

  “With that in mind, the governor has authorized a limited amnesty for anyone who—”

  Clarissa turned the monitor off with her thumb. She met Naomi’s eyes, and the determination and exhaustion in them was clearer than words could have been. Let it go. We have work to do.

  Alex cleared his throat. “Well, since there’s no galley anymore, I guess I’ll head down the hallway and see if I can’t find a coffee shop or something. Anybody else need breakfast?”

  There would be guards. There would be drones. There would be the risk that trying to pay for something would collapse Alex’s false identity or flag his real one. She wanted to grab him and lock him in his room. She wanted to make sure no one left the uncertain safety of their cabin.

  “Tea,” she said. “Maybe some protein cakes.”

  “All right,” Alex said. “I’ll be back.” The way he said it made it a promise. As if he could keep it.

  “I’m gonna …” Amos said, gesturing to Clarissa.

  Naomi nodded. “I’ll get some work done.”

  “That leaves me for watch,” Bobbie said with a lopsided smile. “Not much of a plan, but it isn’t nothing.”

  “I’ll get you a plan,” Naomi said.

  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.