Persepolis Rising (The Expanse)

by James S. A. Corey

  “How the fuck would I know? But I do know you can’t get it back as your first step. And I know how much you want to. It feels like if you’re just smart enough, fast enough, strong enough now, it won’t have happened the way it already did. But that’s not how it’s going to work. And I know how consuming that grief can be. Grief makes people crazy. It did me.”

  It was like the air mix in the room was wrong. Nothing Avasarala was saying was news to her, but the sympathy in the old woman’s voice was worse than shouting. A vast fear, wide and cruel, welled up in Drummer’s gut. She put her mug back down with a click, and Avasarala nodded.

  “I was briefed about Duarte, back in the day,” the old woman said. “Mars didn’t want to share anything back then. I thought at the time it was because they’d just been surprise ass-fucked by one of their own, and it was shame. That was true as far as it went, but after I retired, I made him a hobby of mine.”

  “A hobby?”

  “I’m shitty at quilting. I had to do something,” she said, waving a hand. Then a moment later, “I found his thesis.”

  The little book she held out was printed on thin paper with a pale-green cover. It was rough against her fingertips. The title was in a simple font with no adornment: Logistics-Based Strategy in Interplanetary Conflict, by Winston Duarte.

  “He wrote it at university,” Avasarala said. “He tried to have it published, but it never went anywhere. It was enough to get him a position in the Martian Navy, put him on a career path.”

  “All right,” Drummer said, thumbing through the pages.

  “After the Free Navy, the best intelligence services in two worlds went over that man’s life in so much detail you could get the Christian names of every flea that bit him. I’ve read … fuck, fifty analyses? Maybe more than that. It all comes back to those hundred and thirty pages there.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s a plan for Mars to take control of the solar system away from Earth and the Belt without firing a shot. And it would have worked.”

  Drummer frowned, opened the book to a random page. The control of resources can be achieved through three strategies: occupation, influence, and economic necessity. Of these, occupation is the least stable. A chart on the facing page listed minerals and their locations in the Belt. Avasarala was watching her, dark eyes fixed and penetrating. When she spoke, her voice was soft.

  “At twenty years old, Winston Duarte saw the path that none of his superiors did. That no one on Earth did. He laid it all out, point by point, and the only reason history ran the way it did is that no one took much notice. Then he was a good, solid career officer for decades, until he saw something—an opportunity, maybe—in the data from the first wave of probes that went through the gates. Without changing the time of day when he got his hair cut, he shifted into engineering the biggest theft in the history of warfare. He took the only active protomolecule sample, enough ships to defend a gate, and engineered the chaos that knocked Earth and Mars on their asses.”

  “I know all that,” Drummer said.

  “You do,” Avasarala said. “And you know what that means. But you’re scared and you’re traumatized and you don’t want to look it in the face because your husband is on Medina Station.”

  Drummer picked up her tea and sipped without tasting it. Her stomach felt tight. Her throat was thick. Avasarala waited, letting the silence stretch between them. Saba was on Medina Station. It was a thought she’d been avoiding, and it was like touching a wound.

  “Duarte’s good,” Drummer said at last. “He’s very good at what he does. And he came back in his own time and on his own terms.”

  “Yes,” Avasarala agreed.

  “You’re telling me he won’t overreach.”

  “I’m telling you he came back because he thinks he can win,” Avasarala said. “And if he thinks that, you should prepare yourself for the idea that it’s true.”

  “There’s no point, then,” Drummer said. “We should just roll over? Put our necks under his boot and hope he doesn’t step on us too hard?”

  “Of course not. But don’t talk yourself into underestimating him because you want him to be the next Marco Inaros. Duarte won’t hand you a win by being a dumbfuck. He won’t spread himself too thin. He won’t overreach. He won’t make up half a dozen plans and then spin a bottle to pick one. He’s a chess player. And if you act on instinct, do the thing your feelings demand, he’ll beat us all.”

  “Give up Medina. And the slow zone. And all the colony worlds.”

  “Recognize that they’re occupied territory,” Avasarala said. “Protect what you can protect. Sol system. Reach out where you can, if you can. There are still people loyal to the union on Medina. And Duarte’s intelligence on the last few decades is going to be thin, at least at first. Find angles he doesn’t know. But don’t take him on straight.”

  Drummer felt a little click in her heart, the physical sensation of comprehension. Avasarala was making the case for defending Earth. That was why she’d come to her. Drummer and the union, the void cities and the gunships, were critical to keeping Earth and Mars safe. The strategy she was arguing for was all about playing defense, and the thing Drummer would be defending was, in the final analysis, the inner planets. That’s what she and her people would be asked to die for: Earth and Mars and all the people who’d made their civilizations on the back of the Belters back in the days before the union. It wasn’t just strategy. It was naked self-interest.

  Also, it was right.

  Medina was behind enemy lines now. And Drummer wasn’t going to be able to take it back. That didn’t mean she was powerless.

  “So,” she said, “what do we have to work with?”

  “The coalition fleet,” Avasarala said. “The union fleet. And whatever agents we can coordinate with on Medina.”

  “We can’t reach anyone on Medina,” Drummer said. “The communications channels are all under Duarte’s control.”

  Avasarala sighed and looked at her hands. “Yours are,” she said. It took a moment for Drummer to understand.

  Avasarala shrugged. “Everyone spies on everyone, Camina. Let’s not pretend to be outraged at water for being wet.”

  “You have a way to get messages to Medina?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Avasarala said. “But I know a lot of people.”

  Chapter Fourteen: Singh

  There have been significant changes to the internal structure of the station,” Colonel Tanaka said. “Not that surprising. This was all supposed to be a generation ship that spun at a full g for a few centuries. Now it’s a waystation at a third. A lot of the infrastructure would want rethinking, and there’s never been a Belter ship that didn’t get modified to suit the moment. If they hadn’t purged their security and maintenance databases, we’d know a great deal more. But there’s nothing lost there we can’t build back, given time.”

  “I see,” Singh said, considering the possible methods of recapturing the lost data.

  “In addition, we’ve recovered one thousand two hundred and sixty-four firearms in our sweeps, the vast majority of which were handguns,” she said, scrolling through a list on her monitor. “Areas with complex compounds that can easily be used in bomb making are under strict security watches, but we’ll need to make some extensive redistribution and security changes before everything can be effectively locked down.”

  “Anything else?” Singh asked.

  “They still have kitchen knives and power tools. And anything we missed.”

  Tanaka was out of her power armor, and her long, lean form was insolently stretched out across a chair in Singh’s office. She was older than him by almost two decades, and he could see her reaction to his relative youth in the way she held her shoulders and the shape of her smile. She playacted respect for him.

  The office—his office—was small enough to be functional. A desk, chairs, a small decorative counter with its own bar. The workspace of an important administrator. He’d taken over
a complex that had once been accounting space, based on the names and titles they hadn’t scraped off the doors yet. The ops and command decks, like engineering and the docks, were in the part of the station that was permanently on the float, and he found the idea of working in null g uncomfortable. And more than that, he’d seen from Duarte and from Trejo what a real commander’s space looked like, and it looked humble.

  He went back to the issue that bothered him most.

  “Twelve hundred guns? There were less than a hundred security personnel on the whole station.”

  “Belters have a long tradition of not trusting governmental authorities to protect them,” Tanaka replied with a shrug. “Nearly all of these weapons were in civilian hands.”

  “But the Belters are the government here.”

  “They’re Belters,” she said, as if her experiences before Laconia explained everything that was happening now. “They resist centralized authority. It’s what they do.” She gave the report one last glance, then slapped the monitor against her arm, where it curled up into a thick bracelet.

  “I have meetings today with their ‘centralized authority,’ so that should be illuminating,” Singh said, surprised at the contempt in his voice. Tanaka gave him a little half smile.

  “How old were you during the Io campaign?” she asked.

  It felt like a bit of a dig. He remembered the Io campaign the way most children in his generation did. The newsfeeds announcing the launches toward Mars. The gut-clenching fear that one of the missiles bearing the alien hybrids would make it as far as the Martian surface. Even after the crisis had passed, the weeks of nightmares. He’d been a child then, and the memory had the near-mythical feel of a story retold until it barely resembled its truth. Those terrible days that had convinced his parents that something more would have to be done to protect humanity from itself and its new discoveries. It had planted the seeds that bloomed under the skies of Laconia.

  But bringing up his age now felt like a power play. A way to point out how little experience he had. He tried not to show that it got under his skin.

  “Not old enough to think of it as the Io Campaign, though of course I’m thoroughly versed on the history.”

  “I was a JG when that shitstorm went down,” Tanaka said. “We were actively fighting with Belter factions back then. You probably think these people are a half step up from spear-carrying savages—”

  “I don’t—”

  “And you’d be right,” she continued. “They can be the most stupidly stubborn people you’ll ever meet. But they’re tough as nails, and resourceful.”

  “I think you misunderstood me,” Singh said, fighting to keep a flush out of his cheeks.

  “I’m sure,” Tanaka said, then stood up. “I have an interview with the technical-assessment crew. I’ll report in when I’m done with them. In the meantime, don’t leave this office without your monitor on. Security directive.”

  “Of course,” Singh said, the flush of shame he’d felt shifting over into anger. Personnel security fell under Tanaka’s operational command while they were occupying the station. It was one of the few areas where Singh could not countermand her orders. So, after dressing him down and questioning his understanding of their situation, she was now delivering a direct order. The humiliation stung.

  “Appreciated,” she said, and headed for the door.

  “Colonel,” Singh said at her back. He waited until she’d turned to look back at him. “I am the provisional governor of this station, by direct order from High Consul Duarte himself. When you’re in this office, you will stand at attention until I offer you a seat, and you will salute me as your superior. Is that understood?”

  Tanaka cocked her head to the side and gave him another of her enigmatic little half smiles. It occurred to Singh that Aliana Tanaka had risen to the rank of colonel in the most punishingly trained combat unit humanity had ever known, and that he was alone in his office with her. He wanted to look down at her legs, see if she was rolling up onto the balls of her feet or shifting her stance. Instead, he stared her in the eye and clamped his stomach down into a knot. If he was supposed to be kind and humble, to ask about her family and trade familiarities with her, he was doing a poor job of it.

  “Sir,” Tanaka said, coming to attention with a sharp salute. “Yes, sir.”

  “Dismissed,” Singh said, then sat down and looked at his monitor as though she’d already disappeared. A moment later, his door opened and then closed.

  Only then did he collapse back into his chair and wipe the sweat off his face.

  “Give me one reason we don’t tell you to go fuck yourselves,” the head of Medina Station’s Air, Water, and Power Authority said. “The AWP—”

  “The AWP works for us now,” Singh replied, keeping his voice level.

  “Like hell we do.”

  It’s shock, Singh told himself. It’s surprise and confusion and sorrow that the universe doesn’t behave the way they thought it did. And everyone on Medina Station—maybe everyone on the colonies and in Sol system too—was going to be struggling with it. All he could do for them was keep telling the truth, as clearly and as simply as he could, and hope it sank in.

  “You do,” Singh continued. “And if you do not order your workers to resume their duties, I will have technicians from the Gathering Storm take over for them, and then I will have every single member of your organization arrested.”

  “You can’t do that,” the AWP chief said with bravado, but he rubbed his bald head, and his expression wasn’t as certain.

  “I can,” Singh said. “Everyone on your staff is back at work by next shift rotation or I start issuing arrest orders.”

  “You won’t—”

  “Dismissed,” Singh said, then gestured at one of his Marine guards, who ushered the AWP chief out of the room. Putting Medina Station in order was messy. He had imagined, coming out, that as governor of the station, he would be kept apart from the normal rank-and-file citizens and laborers. That he would have a status that kept those around him a little more in awe, with underlings to deal directly with the hands-on administration. In practice, Admiral Trejo had the role of power, and he was the underling. He accepted it with good grace. It would all be more pleasant in a few months, when the new defense emplacements were complete and the Tempest could progress to the next phase of their mission.

  The briefings he’d had on the way out—all information gleaned from passively monitoring the backsplash radio that leaked through Laconia’s ring gate—were accurate, but wildly incomplete. It left him feeling a half step behind himself all the time. It wasn’t even the basic structures—those were constrained by the biological and energetic needs of the ships and station and so were, in a sense, predictable. It was the cultural forms and expectations. The absurdities and accidents of human character that affected the flow of goods and information in ways that were as unpredictable as they were exhausting. Like having to throw an entire branch of Medina’s infrastructure staff in the brig.

  “Who’s next,” Singh asked his aide, a junior lieutenant named Kasik he’d grabbed from the admin pool on the Storm. Kasik scrolled through a list on his monitor.

  “You have Carrie Fisk next,” Kasik said.

  “The president of the Association of Worlds,” Singh said with a laugh. “Bring her in.”

  Carrie Fisk entered his office, her frown lines and fidgety hands telling Singh she’d be trying to hide her fear with anger. She was a short, thin woman, with a severe face and beautiful black hair piled up on her head. Her clothes were expensive. Someone from one of the richer colonies, then. He knew her from the newsfeeds they’d captured. She looked thinner and less pleasant in person.

  Singh gestured at the chair across from his desk and said, “Please sit, Madam President.”

  She sat, the anger dissipating at his politeness.

  “Thank you.”

  “Madam President, I have news,” Singh said, flicking a document from his monitor at her. The
hand terminal in her pocket chimed. “And it will be good news or bad news, depending on how seriously you take your job, and how much you like doing actual work. You may read that later, to get all the details.”

  She’d started to take the terminal out of her pocket, but slid it back in at his words. “I take my job very seriously.”

  “Excellent, because it seems you used to have a title that held no actual power, except that you presided over the Association of Worlds in their meetings here. Which is a body that negotiates interplanetary laws it has absolutely no ability to enforce. Earth and Mars haven’t formally joined your coalition, and the Transport Union has been in a position to dictate terms in all your agreements. Or so I am led to understand. My access to the newsfeeds has been limited.” He tried for a self-deprecating smile, and thought he probably got about three-quarters of the way there.

  “It’s a start,” Fisk said, the frown returning to her face. “At least we have people here talking out their problems, rather than immediately reaching for a gun.”

  “I agree,” Singh said. “And more importantly, so does High Consul Duarte. The document I just sent you empowers the Association of Worlds to make laws that will have binding authority on the member systems, which now includes every human colony. You, as president of that body, will be granted a variety of legislative powers to aid in that cause.”

  “And who is granting us this new power?” Fisk asked. Her face had twisted up like he’d asked her to eat something distasteful. She knew the answer to his question, but she wanted him to say it so that she could begin her counterargument. A counterargument Singh had no interest in entertaining.

  “High Consul Winston Duarte, who is now the supreme executive authority of the Association of Worlds and all subsidiary governments. All edicts passed by this body that are not vetoed by executive power will have the force of law, backed by the military power of Laconia.”