Persepolis Rising

by James S. A. Corey

“Yup.”

  “Stand by. If I need you to go back to plan A, I’ll know in about a minute.”

  Davenport looked from her to her team arrayed behind her. He scowled. Bobbie felt her breath go shallow. She waited.

  “Thirty seconds, Mister Davenport,” she said.

  “You joined the wrong side, gunny,” Davenport said. “You should have been one of ours.”

  Twenty-five minutes later, the surviving crew of the Gathering Storm were tethered together in the cargo airlock. Their arms were secured behind their backs, their ankles were tied together, and the maneuvering thrusters on their vac suits didn’t have any canisters. Amos and one of his team went through checking their seals one last time and strapping emergency beacons to their knees. The Laconian commanding officer watched Bobbie now with the intensity of someone planning his revenge.

  Amos knocked on Davenport’s faceplate to get his attention. “Can you breathe in there? Getting good air? ’Cause if you’re not, this is the time to say something.”

  He nodded once, a perfect physical representation of resentment.

  Outside the Storm, ships were fleeing through the gates following the schedule Naomi had built. By and large, they were going to the smaller colonies where there was less traffic parked waiting for the gates to reopen. But some were going to the well-established places like Bara Gaon Complex and trusting to their ability to evade any traffic monitoring on the other side to get them to safety. There was still a little more than an hour before the last of them was slated to go, and then the Storm, following up at last. If things went right, Medina’s sensors would be deep in their routing seizures for at least four hours. And the prisoners had enough air for ten. A six-hour window for pickup seemed like more than enough.

  Amos gave her the thumbs-up, and Bobbie nodded him on. He undid the tether from the airlock deck, pushed off, and floated through to pull himself to a stop beside her. Bobbie cycled the lock, and when the outer door opened to the darker-than-space of the slow zone, she touched her radio.

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s see if the controls work the way they said.”

  “Copy that, bossmang,” her new Belter pilot said.

  The Storm shifted, pushing gently to the side. The prisoners seemed to float away, though really Bobbie was the one moving. Out beyond them in the darkness, a distant drive plume glowed like a star, and then, passing through a gate, went out.

  “Okay,” she said. “We’re good. Make sure we get far enough away before we light up the drive. I don’t want to save them just so you can burn them down in the drive plume.”

  “Sa sa,” the pilot said.

  “Alex?” she said, then remembered her suit was still on the low-power stealth settings. She changed it and tried again. “Alex? Where do we stand?”

  A different voice answered. A man that it took Bobbie a few seconds to recognize. “We’re hugged close to Medina for the extraction.”

  “Houston?” she said. “Is that you?”

  “Now that you fuckers have come to your senses about the immorality of centralized power? Yeah, it’s me. And I’m ready to accept your apology as soon as you untwist your diapers.”

  “He’s gonna be a joy,” Amos said placidly. “I kind of missed him.”

  Bobbie killed her mic. “I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic. I need to know these things.” She turned the mic back on. “We have a change of plan. We won’t need pickup.”

  “Negative,” Alex said. “I’m not leaving you behind.”

  “We’re flying escort,” Bobbie said. “The Storm is ours.”

  “No shit?” Alex said, then whooped. “Holy crap, you took a prize? Looks like you got yourself a ship after all, Captain Draper.”

  Naomi’s voice cut in, clipping into Alex’s last syllables. “I’m coming out.”

  “All right,” Alex said. “Two to pick up, and then we can get in the flight queue out of this dump.”

  “One,” Naomi said. “One to pick up. We ran into a problem. Clarissa went down fighting. I wouldn’t have made it out without her. None of us would.”

  Bobbie’s throat went tight. She looked over at Amos, and he smiled his usual amiable smile, shrugged. Just for a moment, she saw something underneath the expression. Pain and loss and sorrow and rage, and then he was just himself again.

  “Damn,” Alex said. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Okay,” Houston said. “I have you on the scope. We’ll slide over and get you.”

  “Naomi,” Bobbie said. “When you get on the Roci, I’ll need you to find a safe place for the Storm in the escape queue.”

  “I’m on it,” Naomi said. Now that Bobbie knew to listen, she heard the exhaustion in her voice. The weariness of grief. She turned off her mic, turned toward Amos, but he was pulling himself back toward the lift. She followed him, a little trickle of adrenaline coming in. Waiting to see what was coming next.

  At the lift, Amos stopped and scratched his nose. “I was thinking I should probably get a few of the new kids. Go through the ship. Just make sure we don’t have anyone on board we didn’t mean to have on the ride.”

  For a moment, she thought about letting it go. Letting Amos fall back into his usual self. It would be easier. It would feel more respectful.

  It was what Holden would have done.

  “I need to know if you’re okay,” she said.

  “I don’t really—”

  She pulled herself in close, almost nose to nose. She wasn’t smiling and he wasn’t either. “I didn’t ask if you wanted to talk. I said, I need to know. Whatever ship I’m the captain of, if you’re on it, that means you and I have clear, open, and honest conversations about your mental health. This isn’t friendship. This isn’t nurturing. This is me telling you how it goes. We both know what happens when you’re off the rails, and I’m not going to pretend that you’re anything more or less than what you are. So when I say I need to know if you’re okay, it’s an order. Are we clear?”

  Amos’ jaw clenched and his eyes went flat. She didn’t back away. When he smiled, it wasn’t the empty, amiable expression he usually reached for. It wasn’t a version of him she’d seen before.

  “I’m sad, Babs. I’m angry. But I’m okay. Going down fighting was a good way for her to go too. I can live with it.”

  Bobbie let herself drift back. Her heart was going a little faster than she liked, but she kept it off her face. “All right, then. Take your team and go through the ship. I’ll warn you when we’re going on the burn.”

  “I’m on it,” Amos said. And a moment later, “You know, you’re gonna be good at this captain thing.”

  Chapter Fifty: Singh

  This is exactly the kind of recklessness that has been underlying the Transport Union since its inception,” Carrie Fisk said. Her face was flushed, her gestures sharp, and her voice had the buzz of rage behind every word. Her blouse was tan with black, and she wore the green armband that had come to symbolize antiterrorist solidarity among those loyal to Laconia and High Consul Duarte. “The union claimed that stability and safety were their primary mandate. That was the whole point of letting it administrate ring space! But the minute—the minute—someone arrives with the power to question that? Bombings. Theft. Murder. The hypocrisy is mind-boggling. It’s unreal.”

  The interviewer was a young man apparently well known in Sol system and on Medina. Singh watched the man nod and stroke his chin like an ancient sage considering a deep mystical truth. His seriousness made Fisk look even more formidable.

  “And would you say the situation is stabilized now?” he asked.

  “We can hope it is,” Fisk said as she shook her head no. “When I look at the patience that the present administration has shown to us and the violence with which it was answered, it leaves me … not angry, even. Embarrassed. We called ourselves a civilization, and this thuggery is all we have to offer. I can only hope that the people who were fooled into thinking any of this could be justified are embarrassed too.”
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  It was a sentence Singh had written himself and delivered to Fisk. She repeated it now as if it were an off-the-cuff thought, and she made it sound mostly convincing.

  Of all the things he had done since he’d come to Medina, Fisk and the Laconian Congress of Worlds was by far the most successful. Everything else—moving up the timetable for the Tempest’s transit to Sol system, flushing out the underground, managing Medina Station—was tainted.

  The catastrophe had lasted five and three-quarter hours from the launch of James Holden’s ship to the restoration of full function to Medina Station. In that time, his best informant and the team sent to back him had been slaughtered, the station’s external sensors had been compromised, the Laconian Marine forces neutralized, the detention centers broken open and fifty-two prisoners lost and not yet recovered, twenty union ships had transited through no one knew which gate or gates, and the Gathering Storm had been boarded and hijacked.

  It was, without exception, the greatest failure of security Singh had ever heard of, and as governor of Medina Station, he had spent almost the whole time hiding in a public toilet. Humiliation sat in his belly like a stone, and he had the distinct sense that it would remain there forever.

  Every decision he had made since he’d arrived at Medina returned to him in the light of his failure, and he considered each of them like a wound in his skin. If he had treated the local population with greater caution from the first, would Kasik have lived? If he had chosen to respond to the assassination attempt with a more focused response, would the underground have gained fewer followers and allies? If he had avoided the confusion of restructuring his security forces by retaining Tanaka, would they have exposed the underground in time to prevent this?

  The list seemed to go on forever. And each choice he’d made—sending the Storm out despite Davenport warning him it was undercrewed, shipping James Holden to Laconia instead of questioning him more deeply about the underground, encouraging Trejo and the Tempest to move the timetable forward for the transit into Sol system—had led him here. So on some level each of them had been wrong. No matter how wise they had seemed at the time, how forgivable and subtle his failures of judgment had been, the final evidence was unmistakable. He had treated the people of Medina as though he were their leader instead of their warden. Instead of their zookeeper. And they had paid him back with violence, death, and dishonor. All of that was a given now.

  There was no standing apart from the failure. It had happened on his watch, and so it was his problem to fix. And it didn’t apply only to Medina. He saw that now. His mandate was to coordinate the empire from this, its hub. And that would mean crushing the underground wherever it had fled. Wherever it emerged from the fresh dung heap of the union’s demise. He’d thought of Medina as a station to run, a logistical heart to sustain a glorious future for humanity.

  He’d been mistaken.

  His system chirped a connection request. He checked himself in the monitor, smoothed his hair, and straightened his tunic. He was done looking less than knife sharp. These were, after all, the first days of his career’s rehabilitation.

  He accepted the request. A woman’s face appeared on the screen, a small identifier hovering above her to say who and what she was to him.

  “Lieutenant Guillamet,” he said crisply.

  “Rear Admiral Song of the Eye of the Typhoon is requesting command-to-command, Governor.”

  “Of course,” he said. The monitor flickered. He straightened his tunic again and felt immediately self-conscious that he’d done it. It was a sign of insecurity, even if he was the only one who knew about it.

  Rear Admiral Song appeared. Her wide mouth was set in a polite smile. The light delay was almost trivial. Evidence that the Typhoon was on track to pass through the gate. “Governor Singh,” she said. “It’s good to see you.”

  “Likewise,” he replied.

  “We’re on approach to the ring gate,” Song said, then looked away. “I’m very sorry, but given everything that’s happened recently, I have to ask you this. Can you assure me that this transit is safe?”

  Singh settled more deeply into his couch. Of course it is, floated at the back of his mouth. The Typhoon can come through the gate, and there won’t be any rogue ship zipping through some other gate in the seconds before to change the safety curve. You and your crew will survive the trip and take its place as the protector of the ring space.

  He swallowed the words. It was like another fine cut on his soul to admit that he wasn’t certain.

  “I have had no new security alerts,” he said. “We see no ships on approach through the other gates and have no reason to suspect any interference from fringe elements. But if you would like, I will consult with my chief of security to make certain we have done everything in our ability to minimize your risk.”

  “I would appreciate that,” Song said, and her tone meant, I’m sorry to ask it.

  “The safety of your ship and your crew are the most important thing,” Singh said. “I understand your caution.”

  “I’ll match orbit with the gate until we hear from you,” Song said. “And thank you, Governor. I do appreciate this.”

  He nodded and dropped the connection. She didn’t trust him. Of course she didn’t. He didn’t trust himself.

  The Marines who accompanied him on his review of the docks were a mixed group—half of them in power armor and half in standard ballistic plates. Even if the underground managed to disable the power armor again—which Overstreet had assured Singh would be impossible—there would still be a guard ready to take point. Singh hated that they’d had to change their protocol. He hated remembering the fear of realizing his protection was gone, and he hated knowing that the fear would never completely go away. He still didn’t know how the underground had even known the antimutiny protocols existed, much less how they’d managed to reverse engineer them. Was someone—a Laconian—a turncoat? Had they been careless? He had no way of finding where the information had leaked out. It was another little insult that burrowed into his skin.

  He maneuvered through the docks on a small thruster of compressed air. The empty berths stared back at him like an accusation. The pocks in the decks and bulkheads where bullets had struck during the fighting hadn’t been buffed out or painted over yet, though they would be. He felt the attention of the dockworkers. They were, after all, the audience for this excursion. Meant to see that the governor of the station wasn’t cowering in his office, afraid to peek out from behind his desk. That he wasn’t hiding in a public restroom. The heavy guard undercut the message, as did the fear in his gut. But he would pretend and pretend and pretend in the hopes that it would somehow become true.

  So he lifted his chin, and made his way through the full round of the docks—even where the damage from the bombing of the primary oxygen tanks twisted and deformed the deck. He looked at the temporary plating with what he hoped was dignity and thoughtfulness. All he really wanted was to be done with this and back in his office.

  The acting dockmaster followed along just behind him. The anger in her expression was unmistakable, but he didn’t know if it was rage at the terrorists who’d done the damage or at him for not preventing it.

  “How long will it take us to make repairs?” he asked.

  “That will depend on the supply chain, sir,” she said. “Once we have the Typhoon, we should be able to get started in earnest, but they’ve been breaking more than we have the decking to replace.”

  “It’s heartbreaking,” he said because he didn’t know what else to say. She didn’t respond. “What is our capacity at this point?”

  “It’s not bad. The only berth that took serious damage was the first. Sheared off the docking clamps. Once that old gunship was out, the bastards took over my office. All the rest were released from the controls. That’s one way it could have been worse, I suppose.”

  What if he’d brought Natalia and the monster had been here? Laconians had died in these uprisings. If his famil
y had come to Medina, would they have been targets too? Would he have watched his daughter die the way he’d watched Kasik?

  And yes, locals suffered too, but to have his people dead and hurt … And with what repercussions? The criminals had scattered like seeds on the wind, and taken his ship with them. What colony would see these images and not think that they could do the same?

  He pushed over to the broken decking and put his hands on it. He’d been weak before. Lenient. He’d thought that by treating the people of Medina as if they were citizens of the empire, they would be transformed somehow. They would be civilized. The decking was half a meter thick, and twisted like a torn leaf. They’d been willing to do this, and he’d pretended he could treat them as if they were sane. Another of his mistakes.

  He had hesitated to wield his power before. And the universe had taught him what rewards hesitation brought. Well, he’d learned his lesson.

  “Thank you. I understand now,” he said. Possibly to the acting dockmaster. Possibly to something deeper in his own soul. He turned to her. “This won’t happen again.”

  “This was what they were building toward,” Overstreet said. “The bad news is, they were by and large quite successful in their aim. I’m not going to make this pretty, sir, they trounced us.”

  “I agree,” Singh said.

  Overstreet leaned forward in his chair and threw the image from his wrist monitor to the screen over Singh’s desk. A list of all the people presently unaccounted for on Medina. The people that they knew had escaped. Or died.

  “On the other hand,” Overstreet said, “their objective was defensive. This was a retreat. I’ve had the technicians make a complete audit, and I’m prepared to certify that it’s safe for the Typhoon to make its transit.”

  “You’re sure about that? Completely safe?”

  “I think we’ve established that perfect knowledge isn’t possible in this context. But in order to pull off this last series of attacks, the underground had to spend a tremendous amount of its resources and capital on Medina. If they’d stayed here, they could have used the same knowledge of the station and agents within the civilian population to protract the struggle here for months. Maybe years. Instead, they burned it all in one day.”