Persepolis Rising (The Expanse)

by James S. A. Corey

  “I was captain for about a week,” Bobbie said, the beer in her cup sloshing dangerously as she jabbed at the air with it. “I mean, depending on if you count from when Holden offered it to me. Or when we did the paperwork. The paperwork came later, so officially, I guess. Houston clocked as much time in control of the Rocinante as I did.”

  “You’re drunk,” Alex said, gently pushing her beer hand back down to the table. He was sitting next to her at a long, faux-wood table. Amos and Clarissa sat across the table from them. Amos had a beer in his hand and half a dozen empties on the table and didn’t appear impaired in the slightest. Clarissa had a plate of cold, soggy french fries in front of her and was using them to push ketchup into spiral art.

  “I’m a little drunk,” Bobbie agreed. “I was just starting to like the idea of being captain of my own ship and these Laconian assholes took it away.”

  She punctuated the word Laconian by jabbing her glass toward one of their Marines walking past the bar. Beer splashed across the table and into Clarissa’s fries. She didn’t seem to notice or care. Bobbie plucked up her napkin and dabbed the worst of it away anyhow, with only a little pang of guilt.

  “And that’s why you need to ease down on the brews, sailor,” Alex said, just taking the glass away from her now. “We need to skip past this grief stage and get on to the kickin’-ass and gettin’-our-ship-back stage.”

  “You got a plan?” Amos asked. His tone said he found this dubious.

  “Not yet, but that’s what we need to be doing,” Alex shot back.

  “Cuz, a couple hundred Marines, one destroyer in the docks, and one whatever the fuck that flying violation of the laws of physics is,” Amos said, pausing to sip his beer and smack his lips. “That’s gonna be one hell of a plan. I gotta get in on that action.”

  “Hey, asshole,” Alex said, half standing up from his chair. “At least I want to do something more than feel sorry for myself.”

  “This here?” Amos said. He pointed at the Marine outside, the security drones that now hovered over every part of Medina’s drum, the people in Laconian Navy uniforms everywhere. “I’ve seen this before. This is us getting paved over. All we can do now is try to find some cracks to grow through.”

  “Cracks?” Alex said, then sat back down with a thump. “How long I known you? Half the time I still got no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.”

  “No one is doing anything,” Bobbie said. “Not till I give the order. We get this pass to get our stuff off the Roci, maybe we can start making a strategy from there. I may not have a ship, but I can sure as hell still have my crew.”

  “Be nice to sneak a gun or two off the ship,” Amos agreed.

  “Be nicer to find a way to get Betsy off,” Alex said to her. “If that’s possible.”

  “So until then, we wait,” Bobbie said, then started pressing on the table trying to order another beer. “I just wish I understood what this Duarte asshole wants.”

  “They haven’t started killing people,” Amos said. “I mean, it’s still early days. Lots of room for shit to go pear-shaped.”

  “But why now?” Bobbie waved her arms around at the bar, at Medina, at all of human space beyond them. “We were just starting to figure this shit out. Earth and Mars working together, the colonies talking out their problems. Even the Transport Union turned out to be a pretty good idea. Why come kick the table over? Couldn’t he have just pulled up a chair with the rest of us?”

  “Because some men need to own everything.”

  The voice was so quiet, it took Bobbie a moment to realize Clarissa had spoken. She was still making ketchup art with her french fries and not looking at any of them.

  “What’s that, Peaches?” Amos said.

  “Some men,” Clarissa replied, louder and looking up at them now, “need to own everything.”

  “Hell, I met this Duarte guy,” Alex said. “I don’t remember him being—”

  “This sounds like personal experience,” Bobbie said, cutting him off. “What are you thinking, Claire?”

  “When I was a little girl, I remember my father deciding to buy up a majority share in the largest rice producer on Ganymede. Rice is a necessity crop, not a cash crop. You’ll always sell everything you can grow, but the prices aren’t high, because it’s easier to grow than a lot of other things. And at that time, his companies had an annual revenue in excess of one trillion dollars. I remember an advisor telling my father that the profits from owning rice domes on Ganymede would add a one-with-five-zeroes-in-front-of-it percent to that.”

  “Not sure I—” Alex started, but Clarissa ignored him, so he trailed off.

  “But the largest food producers were the rice growers. They had the biggest domes and farms. The most real estate. By owning a controlling share in their company, my father was in a position to dictate policy to the Ganymede Agriculture Union. It meant, in terms of Ganymede food production, he couldn’t be ignored by the local government.”

  “What did he use that for?” Bobbie asked.

  “Nothing,” Clarissa said with a delicate wave of one hand. “But he had it. He owned an important piece of Ganymede, a thing he hadn’t controlled before. And some men just need to own everything. Anything they lay their eyes on that they don’t possess, it’s like a sliver in their finger.”

  Clarissa pushed her soggy fries away and smiled at them all.

  “My father could be the kindest, most generous and loving man. Right up until he wanted something and you wouldn’t give it to him. I don’t know why I think this, but Duarte feels the same. And these are men who will mercilessly punish anyone who won’t comply, but with tears in their eyes and begging you to tell them why you made them do it.”

  “I knew a few guys like that,” Amos said.

  “So, he won’t stop until he has it all,” Bobbie said. “And it looks like he has the tech to make it work. The armor, that destroyer, and that planet killer floating outside. All of this? They all look like they came out of the same factory to anyone else?”

  “Yeah, it’s protomolecule shit,” Amos agreed. “Some of it looks like the stuff growing on Eros.”

  “I’m seeing a timeline here,” Bobbie said.

  “We were looking into those missing ships when I talked to this Duarte guy,” Alex said. “It was about the time Medina was throwing a lot of probes through the gates to get a gander at the usable planets.”

  Bobbie finally got the ordering screen to come up on the table, but on impulse bought a glass of club soda instead of another beer. It felt like something important was on the tip of her mind, and she didn’t want to drown it in booze.

  “So,” she said, letting the words come out of the back of her head, hoping her subconscious had an insight it hadn’t shared yet. “A probe finds something in the Laconia system, something that makes ships and armor and who knows what else.”

  “What, like a big volumetric printer that says, ‘Insert protomolecule here’ on the side?” Amos scoffed.

  “Hey,” Alex replied, “we found a planet-sized power generator with moons that could turn off fusion.”

  Amos considered that for a moment. “Yeah. Fair enough.”

  “Marco’s people are running a fifth column on Medina by that point,” Bobbie continued. “Duarte must have been working with them already. Said he’d slip them a fat payday for early info on the ring probes. They call him up and say, ‘Hey, we found this awesome thing.’”

  “He hands them a bunch of Martian ships,” Alex said.

  “And Marco starts fucking up the solar system while Duarte takes the rest of his fleet and a bunch of like-minded Martians and takes over in Laconia,” Bobbie finished.

  “Where he spends a few decades making ships and fancy armor and whatnot, then rolls through the gate ready to name himself king,” Alex said as her club soda arrived.

  “Which means Marco was just a tool,” Bobbie said.

  “Kind of knew that,” Amos chimed in.

  “Free Navy kept
everyone distracted while Duarte got set up on Laconia. And we’ve been sitting here patting ourselves on the back and trying to keep all the food supplies where they need to be for thirty-odd years while he’s been getting ready to kick the shit out of us,” Bobbie said. “Alex, maybe you should write up your thoughts on meeting him. What kind of guy he was.”

  “I sat in his office for a few minutes. There are probably some people on Medina who served around the same time he did,” Alex said. “If we can find where the Martian vets hang out, we could see if anyone knew him.”

  “Yeah, that’s a good—” Bobbie started, then stopped when she noticed Amos stiffen in his chair. The big mechanic’s hand drifted toward his right hip and the gun that was no longer there since the Laconian weapon sweeps.

  “Amos?” she said.

  “Trouble on the move,” he replied with a gentle tilt of his head.

  The people he’d nodded toward were a group of Belters, old-school OPA by the tats. They were walking through the drum section nearby. They wore coats too large and heavy for the constant perfect weather of Medina’s drum section, and several carried large bags. They kept their heads down and moved fast, like people with a purpose. She recognized one of them. Onni Langstiver, the asshole head of security.

  “What’s over there?” Bobbie asked.

  “Some offices? The banking section, and some administrative stuff,” Alex replied.

  “The Laconians took it over,” Clarissa added.

  “Here we go,” Amos said, and stood up. In the distance, the Belters were pulling things out of their coats and bags. Bobbie felt the surge of adrenaline in her blood the same moment as the calm descended on her: danger followed immediately by the well-cultivated response to danger. It felt like being home.

  Bobbie looked around the little bar for likely cover. Nothing within ten steps looked like it would stop a bullet, so she grabbed Alex with one arm and Clarissa with the other and pulled them both to the ground with her. Amos was still standing up, watching the drama play out.

  “Get down, you idi—” Clarissa started, but whatever else she was about to say was drowned out by the gunfire.

  Chapter Sixteen: Singh

  As he stepped out of the office complex, Singh made the mistake of looking up. The thin line of blazing full-spectrum light that ran down the center of Medina’s habitat drum blinded him, just a little. It cut a glowing streak across his vision, and filled his eyes with tears. Like looking into a sun, if instead of an orb several light minutes away, it was a line drawn in the sky and very close.

  “Hold on a moment,” he said to his Marine escort, as he tried to get his vision back.

  “Copy that,” the Marine replied, then said, “we’re oscar mike, triphammer two minutes from the cart. Rolling teams for cover to station ops.”

  It took Singh a moment to realize that most of that was comm chatter to his security detail. He had nothing but respect for the Marines under his command and for the security they provided, but they did love their jargon and code names. A moment later he’d shaken most of the water out of his eyes, and the yellow-green afterimage line across his vision was fading.

  “Okay, I’m ready.”

  “Copy that,” the Marine replied, and pointed to a parking area about fifty meters away with three electric carts lined up and waiting. Lieutenant Kasik was hurrying toward him from the carts, waving a monitor that had been extended to its full size. He met them a few seconds later, puffing with exertion.

  “I have the initial defense reports,” Kasik said, handing the monitor to Singh.

  “Excellent.” Singh scrolled past a spreadsheet of incomprehensible numbers. “I hope there’s a summary?”

  “Yes, sir, and the tech group is waiting for you in station ops to answer any questions. But the initial findings are very exciting.”

  “Tell me.”

  “What we can see,” Kasik said, “is the ring system converted all of the energy from the Tempest’s field projector into gamma rays released through the rings.”

  “We knew that,” Singh replied with a frown.

  “But … the energy released was orders of magnitude more than the energy the central sphere absorbed. The ring system amplified it. Exponentially. If the factor is consistent, we can create predictive models for input versus output very quickly.”

  It was exactly what he’d hoped. The alien rings could be made into their own defenses, and the reconstruction of the defense battery skipped entirely. The Tempest would be free to move into Sol system months ahead of the original plan. Any attack would fail, even if it were coordinated through every ring at once. One Magnetar-class battle cruiser could guard thirteen hundred gates at once and never miss its shot. The battle to seize control of every human-controlled world in the galaxy was already over.

  After that, it was just administration of the new empire. Singh tried to imagine the high consul’s pleasure, the possible rewards, and his imagination failed him. But one thing still bothered him.

  “Why was it, Kasik, that we heard about this from a local? If this had gone overlooked—”

  “I’m sure we’d have found it, sir. But we weren’t looking at the logs. We have additional data in Operations,” Kasik said. “And I’ve requested technicians for more analysis.”

  Singh realized his daydreaming of the high consul’s patronage had stretched into an awkward pause. Before he could reply, something shifted at the edge of his vision. Someone walking toward him with the purposeful stride of a messenger making a delivery. Except that the person striding toward him was Langstiver. The man who’d brought him the news of the new and glorious discovery. A small group of Belters were following him. He assumed Langstiver was coming to demand a reward for his information.

  “I don’t want—” Singh began, but his Marine guard had put one hand on his chest and shoved him back. Kasik nodded at him sharply one time, then spit berry-colored saliva all over his face.

  The Marine yanked Singh to the ground, hard, then knelt over him, shielding him with her body. Her knees pressed into his spine until it hurt. Singh heard her shouting orders, muffled by her helmet, to the rest of her detail. And then he heard nothing but the deafening ripping-paper sound of multiple rapid-fire weapons opening up. His guard was sitting on top of him and blocking his view, but the space between her thigh and calf as she crouched created a small triangular window on the carnage.

  Langstiver and half a dozen other people were dancing backward as four Laconian Marines cut them to pieces with streams of high-velocity plastic safety rounds. It felt like the firing went on forever, like the bullets were keeping the assassins from falling. In reality it could only have lasted a few seconds. He experienced a little discontinuity in his consciousness, like he’d fallen briefly asleep, though that was impossible, and his Marine had yanked him to his feet and was shoving him back toward the administrative offices. The other members of her fire team slowly backed toward them, weapons at the ready.

  Lieutenant Kasik still stood near the carts, not having moved during the entire firefight. He looked like he’d spit raspberry pie filling onto his lips, and he was twitching like an epileptic experiencing a grand mal. Singh understood something that had been eluding him.

  “Kasik’s been shot,” he said. The pie filling on his face was the ruins of his lips from where the bullet had exited. The spray of red on Singh’s face and uniform wasn’t spit, it was his aide’s blood.

  “Medical has already been alerted,” his Marine said, thinking he was talking to her.

  “But no,” Singh said. She didn’t understand. “He’s been shot.”

  She shoved him through the admin-building door and slammed it shut behind her. Just before it closed, the shocked silence that had followed the gunfire ended, and from a hundred voices outside the screaming started.

  Kasik died on an operating table three hours after the attack. According to the report, he’d been shot in the back of the head, the bullet fracturing the occipital lobe of hi
s skull and nicking his medulla oblongata. It then passed through the back of his throat and nearly severed his tongue, before shattering five teeth and exiting through his lips. Singh read the surgeon’s section of the incident report half a dozen times. Each time felt like the first.

  None of the Marine security detail had been harmed in the exchange of fire, though several civilians had received minor injuries from bullet fragments, and one boy of nine had broken his arm while attempting to flee down a short flight of steps. All seven of the Belter radicals who’d attempted the assassination were dead. The intelligence people were digging into their past associations to see if the rebellion had roots that spread farther.

  Rebellion.

  The word felt wrong to Singh. The most Langstiver and his accomplices could have hoped for was his death. It would have done nothing to hand control of the station back to the Belters who’d once run it. Trejo would simply have assigned another officer to fill his place until a new governor could be dispatched from Laconia. It was all so short-sighted. So wasteful. Seven people had decided to toss their lives away on a symbol.

  These are people who have a history of resisting centralized authority, Colonel Tanaka had said. He hadn’t understood. He did now. They weren’t rational. They weren’t disciplined. They valued their own lives less than the prospect of his death.

  What struck him most—what offended him as much as the still-implausible idea that he’d watched Kasik be murdered—was the monstrous ingratitude of it. The hubris of believing that Duarte’s path for humanity’s future was worth killing innocent people to resist. And after Trejo had been so generous with them.

  He tapped the monitor lying on his desk, and the comm officer in security replied with a crisp, “Yes, sir.”

  “Please have Colonel Tanaka report to me in my office immediately.”