Persepolis Rising

by James S. A. Corey

  The hardest thing was to trust his own people to do their jobs well, but it was what he had to do. He wondered if the high consul suffered the same thing—knowing that all the critical action would be taken by others who were guided by his orders, but in conditions he could only guess at, and in places where his intervention, even if it were possible, could only muddy the waters. It was a subtle and terrible insight. The powerlessness of control.

  The warning echoed through the station. A man ran through an intersection ahead of them without pausing to look. Singh’s legs burned a little from his pace.

  “Where are we going?” he asked the head of the fire team.

  “We have a hard shelter at the end of this corridor, sir. It’s a bit away from the main offices to be a less obvious target, but it has independent environmental controls and—”

  The Marine froze in midstride. Singh felt a rush of fear, looked down the corridor to see what danger the man was reacting to. There was nothing.

  “What’s the matter?” he said. It was only when he got no answer that he realized all the Marines had stopped. Their visors were opaque, their radios silent, their power armor in lockdown. Singh stood, suddenly alone and terribly aware of his own vulnerability. The back of his head itched at the idea that someone might be targeting him right then, and he had no protection.

  For a moment, he saw Kasik again, dying before him. Was all of this a distraction to pull him away from safety? Hands trembling, he strode fast down the corridor to the first door. A public restroom. He stepped in, made certain he was alone, and locked the door behind him. His heart was beating hard enough to feel the ticking of it in his neck. Leaning against a narrow sink, he pulled his monitor and keyed in his security codes. His Marine lockdown hadn’t been triggered. The Marines shouldn’t have been disabled. Someone was putting out a false shutdown signal.

  Overstreet answered his connection request at once.

  “My fire team is disabled,” he said.

  “Yes, sir. I’m seeing the same with all the powered teams. Stay where you are. I am sending a conventional escort to your location.”

  “What the hell is going on out there? I need a report!”

  Annoyance flickered across Overstreet’s face, gone almost before Singh could register it. “The loss of functioning fire teams has let the situation at the detention cells deteriorate. I have initial reports that something’s happening at the dockmaster’s office. I’m waiting for better intelligence on that, but I am seeing what looks like several ships getting ready for launch. The Storm has engaged with the Rocinante, but not conclusively as yet.”

  Now, may I please go do my job instead of talking about it? He didn’t say it, but Singh heard it anyway.

  “I will wait for the second escort,” Singh said. “Carry on.”

  He dropped the connection. In the mirror, he looked small. Frightened. He stood, straightened his uniform, and composed himself until his reflection looked more like a man confident in his control of the situation. It was important when his people came that he give the right impression. That was all he could do now.

  Something thumped deep below him. A strike on the station drum, maybe. A sign of the battle going on all around him while he hid in a public toilet.

  The underground had caught him unprepared. To give them their due, he’d underestimated their coordination and their numbers and their will. He had been told that the Belters of the old regime had a culture of violent resistance. After the sabotage of the oxygen tank, he had thought he understood what that meant, but he hadn’t appreciated the depth of it until now.

  Their plan was unfolding right now all around the station. All he could hope was that the one place he knew that he was ahead of them would prove decisive. If disabling the sensor arrays was critical to their plan, he could still bring all the rest of it crashing down.

  Chapter Forty-Seven: Bobbie

  Bobbie’s harness consisted of three magnetic locks about the size of her palm and two bands of woven nylon that looked like they’d been green sometime in their past. Basic safety equipment, standard on any ship, any dock, any station outside a gravity well. Wondering whether they worked was like wondering if her next footstep would sink through the atoms of the deck.

  “You think these things are going to hold?” she asked. Her radio was set to a broadcast strength so low a thick T-shirt would have jammed her. Amos, beside her, looked up the long curve of the Gathering Storm’s exterior. His helmet hid his expression, but his tone was fatalistic.

  “If it doesn’t, this’ll be a weird day.”

  The surface of the ship wasn’t like anything Bobbie had ever seen. Faceted like a gem, without the protrusions of PDC cannons or sensor arrays. The pinks and blues seemed less like the color of the material itself and more like some kind of refraction. Something that it did to light that was much weirder than selective absorption. The darkness of the slow zone was profound. Her helmet had to enhance everything with what it picked up from the glow of the ring station. It even stretched the edges, pulling ultraviolet and infrared into the visible range, just to have more to work with. It was always like this, but waiting—exposed and uncertain—made it seem ominous.

  While the surface of the ship looked like crystal, it was soft in a way that she wanted to think of as foam. What it really reminded her of was skin. The magnetic locks bound her to it in a rough, uncomfortable cradle, or would once the ship was under way. Provided that the magnetic locks held on. The red glow that said they were clamped was solid, except that every now and then she thought she caught a flicker of amber. The other ten members of the insertion team besides her and Amos were all using the same equipment. Their suits were all low-level environment suits. None of them had better than welder’s padding as armor. They looked more like a cleaning crew than a crack military force. It worried her how true that might be, but that was for after the locks held. If the Storm pushed off from the dock and left them all floating behind it like a snake’s shed skin, it would be up to Alex to solve the problem of the enemy destroyer. And they’d probably all die. There was no upside.

  “Really hope these hold,” Bobbie said.

  The encrypted alert came. Bobbie tapped her forearm controls. When Alex’s voice came through, it had the thick Mariner Valley drawl that meant he was scared shitless but also a little euphoric on the fear. “This is Alex Kamal of the Rocinante calling out to my friends and family and all ships at sea. We are about to start this rodeo. Breaking loose from the docking clamps in ten. Nine …”

  “Brace,” Bobbie said. “We don’t know how fast this is going to happen.”

  She took the nylon cords, tracked them in tight, and waited for the Gathering Storm to leave port.

  In order to get there, they’d crawled out from the elevator shaft that ran the length of the station from the command and control at the bow down to engineering at the stern. They’d moved quickly, skimming along centimeters above the station. The others had been laughing until Bobbie reminded them that low-power radio wasn’t radio silence and politely suggested they all shut the fuck up instead of getting the team killed. After that, she’d been alone with the sound of her own breath, the smells of old rubber and someone else’s sweat. Alex had been on her right, Amos on her left, and the dock spiked with ships a quarter of a klick before them. Past that, just the blackness of the slow zone, and the killing nothingness beyond the gates.

  The drum had spun beneath them. The scars and damage from the brief battle with the Storm still showed in blackened streaks and bright patch foam. Medina had taken more than her fair share of licks in her life, and today wasn’t going to be any better.

  They’d pulled out every trick that any of Saba’s underground had up their sleeves. Stealing the welding rigs, uncrating the hidden caches of weapons, compromising the access shaft that let them through. Ever since the Laconians had come through the gate, smart people familiar with the station had been planning for this moment. Maybe since before that, if some o
f them were smugglers.

  As they passed over the last of the drum, Alex split off. He had to make his way almost a third of the way anti-spinward from the Storm to reach the Rocinante. She told herself it wasn’t the last time she’d see him as if she knew it were true. Then with a flick of her fist, she’d directed the insertion team toward the dark, looming form of the destroyer.

  The plan was to lure the Gathering Storm off the station. As soon as its docking clamps were off and no new soldiers could get on, Bobbie and Amos would breach the hull and lead an insertion and take the Storm off the playing field. Whether they did that by blowing its reactor, sabotaging its controls, or steering it out toward the nothingness between the gates was going to be a game-day call once she was inside. Without better knowledge of the ship’s internal workings, improvising was a better option than pretending she could make a solid plan.

  The secondary objective was to get her people off the Storm and safely picked up by one of the fleeing ships. The tertiary objective was to get away herself.

  Alex reached zero, and Bobbie thought she felt a little tremor through the Storm as the Roci blew her clamps and spun out away from the docks using the body of Medina as cover. Two of her magnetic locks flickered amber, and then safely back to red.

  It was a day with a lot of ways to die packed in it. Like Alex, she couldn’t keep from grinning. Maybe it was a Martian thing. She stayed braced, her feet against the hull, knees bent. The minutes stretched. The blower in her helmet felt cold against her forehead. That meant she was starting to sweat.

  “How you holding together there, Babs?” Amos asked. The radio made it sound like he was half a klick away and whispering.

  “I’ll be fine once they get this ship out of dock.”

  “Yeah. Not really leaping into action, are they?”

  “We were hoping to catch them flat-footed.”

  “That’s true,” Amos said. “Still.”

  “Maybe they didn’t notice,” one of the others said.

  Or maybe they’re waiting for more troops to get on board, Bobbie thought, and the Gathering Storm surged out to the black, snapping the nylon bands taut.

  They were on maneuvering thrusters. Fifteen meters down from them, a blast of superheated steam vented, pushing the destroyer into a fast rotation. It didn’t seem to come from anyplace, as if the thruster were hidden under the weird not-metal of the hull until they wanted it. Good thing they hadn’t set up their camp there or at least one of them would probably have been blasted off the ship and cooked to death already.

  The Storm lurched. The rumble of the thrusters translated itself up her legs. Medina fell away like someone had dropped it. The drive plume of the Storm’s main drive flared, and the ship jumped forward. Only about a quarter of a g. They weren’t going to risk melting Medina to slag. Still, it was a little eerie seeing her shadow stretched long ahead of her on the body of the ship. A reminder that if she fell, she’d die in fire.

  “Amos,” she said. “Make us a hole.”

  “I see you coming after me,” Alex shout-sang. “You ain’t catching the Roci, friend. We’re just too damned pretty for you.”

  “Alex, get off this channel,” she yelled, then remembered that her signal was intentionally too weak to carry. She shook her head and hoped he wouldn’t be too distracting.

  Amos had the welding kit out, power supply strapped to his side. With two broken ribs, she figured the rig had to hurt like hell, but nothing about his movement betrayed the pain. Her own cracked tailbone wasn’t making it any more comfortable either. They’d done themselves a lot of damage getting this far. She had to make sure it didn’t make a difference. Pain was just her body telling her something. She could choose to ignore it. Amos held the torch to the hull, and everything went bright. Sparks seemed to stream away behind them, curving down and vanishing against the hull like gravity was pulling them and not just the turning of the ship.

  “Weapons ready,” she barked, and the others acknowledged. If the destroyer had the double-hulled design that all Martian ships had, cutting their way through here would only be the first step. But it was a critical one. There was damage they could do there, but it was also difficult to defend, and with none of the Storm’s crew there, tactics like flooding it with hydrogen and oxygen could take out her whole team without risk to the enemy. Tempting as it was, she had to get into the ship proper, and—

  “Ah, Babs? This is weird as shit.”

  Amos stood braced. The cut from the welding torch was a line of brightness in the hull half a meter long. Half a meter long and shrinking fast.

  “What have we got?”

  “Remember how it looked like the hull could repair itself? It’s doing it now too.”

  “That going to be a problem?”

  “Yeah,” Amos said. “I’d say that’ll make this hard.”

  The Storm lurched under them. The drive plume brightened below them, and the Storm gathered speed. The acceleration pulled the straps taut as the thrust gravity made the nuclear-powered flames of the plume more definitively down. The bow-most of Bobbie’s magnetic locks flickered amber and slid a few centimeters before it went red again and stopped. The little moment of give shot adrenaline through her body. Her heart was thudding in her ears. Her voice was so calm it sounded like someone else.

  “Got any bright ideas?”

  “Lemme try something,” he said, and hunkered down.

  He cut again, but in a tight curve, not making a hole they could breach through, but something smaller. When he got around it, he punched in, pushing the little core of hull material into the space within the ship. The circle he’d made instantly began closing, but Amos was carving slivers off its edge. He pared the hole wider and wider, even as it fought to narrow. His motions were fast and efficient. He didn’t slow down even as the ship bucked and turned under them, the proof of a lifetime’s physical labor made into elegance. Bobbie knew that if she’d tried this, she’d never have been able to keep up, but with Amos, the hole grew wider.

  “Edges are going to be toasty,” Amos said. “Nothing I can do about that.”

  Saba’s voice murmured in Bobbie’s ear. Marine fire teams have reached the detention cells. Time to turn our little friends off.

  “Sooner would be better than later,” Bobbie said.

  “You ain’t wrong about that,” Amos said. He started whistling tunelessly between his teeth. “I’m not going to be able to stop this while folks go through.”

  “Fuck that,” one of the others said. “Not winding up half in and half out, me.”

  Bobbie turned to the solider. “You’ll do as you’re told, or I will shoot you in the head as an example to others,” she said, she thought more politely than the man deserved. “Get next to the hole. You’re going in on one. Three … two …”

  The man dove through, Amos cutting through the nylon bands as he went. The hole didn’t close over him, but only because Amos kept carving the sides.

  “Next up,” Bobbie said, pointing at the nearest soldier. “You. Three. Two. One.”

  Again and again, Bobbie shoved one of her team through the molten hole of the hull. The abandoned magnetic locks clustered around it like wildflowers in a garden, the cut tethers shifting as the ship shifted. Like seaweed in an unsteady current.

  Medina swam above them, and twice Bobbie caught glimpses of the Rocinante’s drive plume limning the station like a sunrise that never came.

  “Gonna be tight, Babs. This is taking a lot more fuel than I budgeted.”

  “Keep going,” she said.

  He did. Eight. Nine. Ten. And then it was just the two of them.

  “We’re good,” she said. “Give me the rig. I’ll get you in.”

  “I appreciate that thought,” Amos said. “But just between you and me? You’re not that good a welder. Head in. I’ll make it.”

  “No heroic gestures.”

  “Oh, I’m not dying out here,” Amos said, and pointed toward the interior of the ship with
his chin. “Worst-case scenario, I’m dying inside there.”

  Bobbie shifted her magnetic locks to the edge of the burning hole, then launched through, tucking her legs in. Arms caught her and pulled her to the side. The suits’ worklights filled the space between the hulls with blue-white radiance.

  It was eerie. It was familiar as a well-loved face, but wrong. Where spars of titanium, ceramic, and steel should have been, crystals grew. Lines of fracture shot through them and then disappeared like watching lightning discharge in a bottle. Where sheets of metal and carbon lace should have been, seamless blankets of something that she tried to think of as lobster shell and then fabric and then ice defined the spaces.

  It was unmistakably a Martian destroyer. And it was like nothing she’d ever seen before.

  “Coming through,” Amos said, and she turned to pull him safely to a handhold. The hole where they’d breached squeezed tight. It didn’t completely close, but the opening ended up five centimeters across. In the worklights, Amos smiled his empty, amiable smile.

  “Well, that part’s done,” he said. “Hope the next hull’s a bit more familiar, if you know what I mean.”

  Alex was keeping the chase consistent. It was the only reason they weren’t being bounced through the space between the hulls like rats in a dryer. The entry into the ship proper was always the most dangerous moment. Bobbie had known that from the start.

  They moved quickly, bracing at the hand- and footholds, until they found a stretch of bulkhead. Amos checked the fuel on the welding rig and shook his head, but he didn’t speak. The smoke shook and fell away with every turn of the ship like water falling from a faucet. The hull didn’t heal itself, but that was the only good thing.

  “That’s going to be small,” she said.

  “It’s going to get done,” Amos said. “Any more, and we’ll be trying to bend it to get through.”