Persepolis Rising (The Expanse)

by James S. A. Corey

  Bobbie opened the mesh bag at her hip, checking again that she had everything the same way she had a dozen times before. Spare air bottles for herself and Clarissa. They’d be outside for hours making the long climbs. A magnetic grappling gun with high-tensile cable and a winch. And finally, a fat black recoilless handgun that one of the Belters had managed to hide from the Laconian weapon sweeps. If they actually needed to use it, the mission was fucked anyway, but there was a dignity in going down fighting that appealed to Bobbie’s romantic notions.

  She hooked the emergency cable on her suit to a loop at Clarissa’s waist, then unhooked herself from the airlock. The station tried to throw her out the door, but she grabbed the lip of the outer airlock with one hand and held on. In the other hand, she held the grapple gun. Behind her, Clarissa had one hand on her shoulder, and one hand on the bulkhead.

  “Three, two, one, go!” Bobbie shouted, hoping enough sound would travel up Clarissa’s arm. She launched herself out the outer airlock door by releasing her grip on it, and was shooting off into the void at 3.3 meters per second.

  The massive rectangular structure of the maintenance shaft rushed toward her, and she fired the magnetic grapple into it as she passed. If the grapple failed to connect, they’d keep flying off into the empty space of the slow zone until they ran out of air and their lifeless bodies eventually flew into the eerie curtain of black at the edge of the alien space. Dangerous, but no more so than a challenging free climb back on Mars. She didn’t even think about it. Her eye spotted the place she wanted the grapple to go, her hand and arm did the rest. The grapple landed less than half a meter from the spot she was aiming for. Like riding a bike.

  The grappling line and the leash that connected the grappling gun to her suit snapped taut and pulled her in a fast arc around the maintenance shaft, dragging Clarissa helplessly behind. Bobbie started up the winch, pulling them closer as the speed of their arc increased. Just before impact, she bent her knees and activated her mag boots. The landing was going to hurt a bit.

  She hit the metal surface of the maintenance shaft like the tip of a whip being cracked, and let the impact fold her knees up into her abdomen. Clarissa slammed into her back, and it felt like someone dropping a bag of cement on her from a couple stories up. Bobbie rolled with it, slapping the decking with her hands to activate the glove magnets, and hung on.

  A few punishing seconds later, they were on the side of the maintenance shaft, all the violence of their motion gone, having been converted into lightly sprained knees and a collection of bruises.

  “Ouch,” Bobbie said, and floated motionless for a few seconds, tethered to the shaft by only one gloved hand.

  “Yeah,” Clarissa replied, faintly, through the helmet she had against Bobbie’s back.

  Bobbie pushed her helmet against Clarissa’s. “It’s a long climb, but at least there’s no gravity to fight. You up for this?”

  Clarissa answered by unhooking the tether, and pulling herself up the flat gray wall of the shaft.

  “Alrighty, then,” Bobbie said, and followed.

  Two hours and an O2 bottle change later, they floated near the massive Medina comm array. A bewildering cluster of antennae, dishes, and radio broadcast towers, and at its heart sat a laser powerful enough to send messages back to Earth from a hundred light-years away. It had never been used.

  “I remember when that almost ended all human life,” Clarissa said, pressing her faceplate to Bobbie’s. “It doesn’t look so scary now.”

  “I’ve heard that story,” Bobbie replied. “Wish I’d been here to back you guys up in that fight.”

  Clarissa shrugged. “The story’s more fun than the actual experience was. You didn’t miss much.”

  Clarissa pulled herself over the rigging of the comm array, coming to a stop next to an oversized receiver dish. She pointed at an access panel below it, then flashed the Belter sign for This one.

  Bobbie nodded with one hand, then tapped the side of her helmet. Now we wait for word from Holden. She turned on the small emergency radio in her suit, already tuned to the channel Holden would be using to call Daphne Kohl up in station ops, and waited. Clarissa stared at her across the vacuum between them, motionless and patient as a hunting cat.

  The minutes dragged. When her radio crackled to life, Bobbie found herself grinning. “Medina control, this is workcrew kilo alpha, do you copy?”

  Bobbie could only hear Holden’s side of the conversation, so there was a long pause and then his voice again. “Copy that. Can I get Chief Kohl on the line? Gotta route some repairs though her office.”

  Office was their code that meant Ramez was outside of ops, waiting for permission to enter, so the plan was proceeding, and waiting only on Kohl’s cooperation.

  “Hey, Chief. Good to hear your voice again,” Holden said, hitting the words hard. He hadn’t identified himself by name, and he wouldn’t. If Daphne Kohl didn’t pick up on what was going on, they’d scrub the mission. If she raised the alarm … Well, that would be an interesting problem. “Working with Saba down here in electrochemical. Tracking a grid problem that Laconian death ray caused, and we’d love to pull a panel up there to really nail it down.”

  And here’s where the most dangerous part of the plan happened. It wasn’t flying through space on a tether, or climbing up the outside of a massive station wearing the thinnest and crappiest vacuum suits. It wasn’t even going to be later, when they climbed down to the Laconian ship to hook in their signal sniffer, hoping no one was watching the outside of the dock. It was here, where Holden was counting on his voice, Saba’s name, and the mention of Laconians to signal Kohl that they were up to no good and needed her help.

  And more than that, counting on her Belter pride being stronger than her fear of execution by their Laconian masters. Because if any of those things weren’t true, Kohl could refuse them, and that was the end of the plan. Or worse.

  Bobbie waited a very tense minute of radio silence, and then Holden said, “That’s great. I’ve got a tech heading to ops to pull that panel, if you can let him in. He’ll take a gander at our glitch and get out of your hair.”

  Gander. Code for Go in five.

  “Copy that, Chief. We appreciate the patience while we sort this out.”

  Bobbie gave Clarissa a thumbs-up, then flashed her five fingers. Clarissa nodded with her fist, then started pulling tools out of the mesh bag at her hip.

  First thing down, Bobbie thought. Just a two-kilometer climb aft and planting a bug on a Laconian destroyer without getting caught left to go.

  With Medina Station functionally motionless in the slow zone, it was less of a climb than a mag-booted shuffle down the two-kilometer length of the maintenance shaft. Bobbie pulled the blocky module containing the field-strength sensor on a short leash behind her. It didn’t have much mass, but she’d taken it without conversation when she’d looked through Clarissa’s visor and seen the technician’s complexion going a sickly gray. Other than jumping out of a rotating airlock, they hadn’t done anything particularly taxing, but it was pretty clear that Claire was already running on fumes.

  As they got closer to the engineering-and-docking-bay section of Medina, the Laconian ship came into view around the curve of the station. Bobbie couldn’t help but whistle her appreciation of the beauty of the thing. Say what you would about Laconian authoritarianism, their engineering included a lot of aesthetic beauty in its design.

  The destroyer—Holden had called it the Gathering Storm—looked like a natural crystal formation that someone had chipped into a knife. The colors were all translucent pinks and blues, faceted like a gem. She spotted something at the tail that probably served as the ship’s drive cone but didn’t look anything like the UN or Martian designs she was familiar with. The nose of the ship ended in a pair of sharp projections, like a dagger point with a channel cut down the center that left her almost certain it was a rail gun. If the ship had torpedo launchers or PDCs, she couldn’t see them.

  T
he ship was so strange, so unlike anything humans had ever designed or flown before, that if it had docked and green three-eyed aliens had walked off, it would have felt more appropriate than the humans that actually flew her.

  Clarissa stopped and turned, so Bobbie yanked the sensor array to a stop on its leash, then pushed their two helmets together.

  “There,” Clarissa said, pointing to a maintenance access hatch that looked exactly like a hundred they’d already passed. “That’s the router that feeds from the dock into the station network.”

  “You’re sure?” Bobbie said, looking around at all the other hatches.

  Clarissa didn’t answer, just rolled her eyes and took the leash. She pulled the sensor array down and attached it to the hull, right next to the hatch. She pulled a few leads from the box and plugged them into slots inside the hatch, then stuck a hand terminal on the side of the array and spent several minutes going through what looked like menus. Bobbie replaced both of their air bottles while she worked.

  A few minutes later, Clarissa stood up and gave her the thumbs-up. Bobbie looked over at the massive blade of the Laconian destroyer. If anyone on it had seen them working, the ship itself gave no hint. Clarissa walked over holding her hand terminal and touched it to the side of Bobbie’s helmet. Her HUD snapped on, and a wall of text rolled past. The signal traffic between the destroyer and the local decrypt facility, complete with routing flags and timestamps. It was still locked behind military encryptions, but everything that the Gathering Storm sent down to Medina and everything it got back was here, and the underground was skimming a copy of all of it.

  “Huh,” Bobbie said to no one. “I honestly thought that would be harder.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Drummer

  The ship came through the ring like an old video of a whale breaching the surface of the sea. The thousand kilometers of the ring gate was tiny in the scale of the solar system, huge by human measure, and the Laconian battleship fit between the two—too large to be comfortable in one, too small to fit well in the other. Its design seemed to come from the same uncomfortable place, neither the now-familiar eeriness of the protomolecule nor the history of human manufacture, but both and neither. Drummer watched the observations feed again and again, and it made her skin crawl a little every time.

  She wasn’t ready. Rock hoppers full of gravel were burning hard for positions that didn’t matter anymore. The EMC fleet was consolidating around the inner planets and the Jovian system, but with days—sometimes weeks—left on their burns. The void cities were looping down to meet them. All of it preparation for tactical situations that weren’t on the board anymore. Duarte and his Admiral Trejo had stolen the tempo. She had to make sure the price would be higher than they’d intended to pay.

  “Madam President,” Vaughn said. Drummer watched the Tempest emerge through the gate again before she spoke. It was astounding to her that something so large could make it through the gate at all. It looked big enough to break the safety barriers with its own mass and energy. Maybe there would have been a way to use that with Laconia the way they had with the Free Navy. Except that the fucking thing was already through the gate.

  “Vaughn,” she said, not looking back at him.

  “Communications is asking for your decision on the repeater,” Vaughn said.

  She took a deep breath, let it out slowly between her teeth. There were thousands of radio signal repeaters scattered through the system, but she knew which one Vaughn meant. Their clandestine traffic to and from Medina—Avasarala’s gift to her—ran through a low-energy repeater that was floating dark outside the ring gate. From Medina, its signal was weak and the wavelengths it jumped among similar enough to the gates’ usual interference that it was easy to overlook. From normal space, it was more obvious.

  And the closest ship to it right now was the Tempest.

  She could order her communications forces not to use it. That was easy. But the EMC intelligence forces also had access to it. And Saba’s underground. The more people who could make a mistake, the more likely that something would go wrong. And it was easy enough for her to shut it down. One signal packet would do it, like toggling a light off. It would go into a passive listening state, and someone would have to know where to look for it to register as more than a grain of sand floating in the unimaginably vast ocean of the void.

  Going dark was the right thing to do. But she rebelled at it.

  “What’s the point,” she said, “of having something you can’t use? Functionally, it’s the same as not having it.” On her screen, the loop ended and began again. The Tempest rising up from the gate.

  “Preserving something to use at the right time isn’t nothing, sa sa que?” Vaughn said.

  “Was being rhetorical,” Drummer said.

  “Apologies,” Vaughn said.

  “Tell them …” It was more than her window into Medina. It was her link to Saba. What if he needed to reach her? What if something happened, and his call for help died in silence because she was being too careful? Loneliness widened in her chest, stretched until it felt bigger than she was. Emptier. “Tell them to shut it down. Save it for a rainy day.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Vaughn said, and turned to leave.

  “Have you ever seen rain, Vaughn?” she said, stopping him. Giving herself a few more seconds with the connection to Medina and Saba still there. Even if she couldn’t use it.

  “No, ma’am. Never been to Earth. Never plan to.”

  “‘Rainy day,’ though. We still say it.”

  “Inner planet cultural imperialism is in everything,” Vaughn said.

  “Rain isn’t just for inners. It rains on Titan too. It’s methane instead of water, but you can see it if you’re in the domes there. I spent my madhu chandra week there. A billion dots on the surface of the dome with the orange clouds behind it? They look like tiny dark stars. If you can see them. Saba’s distance vision isn’t good. He couldn’t see them. But I could.”

  “If you say so, ma’am,” Vaughn said. Either he was mildly embarrassed for her, or she imagined he was. Well, fuck you too, she thought, but didn’t say it in case it was just her.

  “All right,” she said, turning back to her screen. “Send the order.”

  Vaughn didn’t answer, just walked out and closed the door behind him. She watched the Tempest pass through the ring gate one last time, looking for a clue in it. Or a ray of hope. She didn’t see one, and she closed the recording down and opened the other one.

  This is Admiral Anton Trejo of the Laconian Imperial Navy, and high commander of the Heart of the Tempest. I am presently on a mission to secure Laconian interests in Sol system. We recognize the deep cultural and historical importance of Sol system, and hope that this transition can be made peacefully and with the minimum of disruption. In the event that local forces resist, I am prepared and authorized to take any actions necessary to complete my mission. High Consul Duarte and I extend our best wishes to the local residents, and ask that you contact your governments to urge them to act in the name of peace. Violence is always a loss, and the measure of that loss is entirely in your control.

  The false gentility of the threat made her wish he’d just said he’d burn their cities and take their children. It would have felt more honest.

  People’s Home was on its braking burn to meet with the EMC’s second fleet, where Guard of Passage already waited. Independence was already with the first fleet and Jupiter. The newest void city—Assurance of Peace—was half built at the Pallas-Tycho shipyards and wouldn’t be ready for another year, assuming that they had another year.

  The unspoken truth was that the union had commissioned the void cities as a permanent response to the colony worlds’ interest in building their own fleets. A void city couldn’t control a whole solar system, but it could command a ring gate. Or that’s what Drummer and the union board had assumed. Now, People’s Home was only a battleship. A massive one, with greenhouses and schools, children and common space, universitie
s and research labs. But the prospect of violence meant that none of that mattered. People’s Home was a delivery system for rail guns, missiles, PDCs. And she would drive it down to protect Earth and Mars, and be protected by their ships. She’d hate everything about it, but she’d do it.

  And goddammit, she’d have to smile while she did.

  The under-burn configuration of People’s Home put the meeting rooms down near the massive array of Epstein drives. The EMC was represented by Admiral Hu of Mars and Undersecretary of Executive Affairs Vanegas. Chrisjen Avasarala sat in a wheelchair at the back of the hall, eating pistachios and pretending to be dotty so that people left her alone. The lights had been set to a warm cut of the spectrum that was alleged to match a summer afternoon on Earth, and the air smelled of cut cucumber and soil. A reassuring environment that would hopefully affect the tone of the event, even if it was all engineering. The reporters and dignitaries on the formed bamboo benches all wore formal suits and dresses, as if a press conference were the same as going to church.

  Maybe it was. Drummer had read somewhere that newsfeeds were where secular societies went to find out what cultural narratives were important and what could be ignored. There were thousands of feeds streaming right now, all around the system, with every variation of the ways to make sense of the history they were living through. In most, Laconia was an invading force to be resisted, but there were people who said Laconia was a liberating influence, an end to the oppression of the EMC and the Transport Union. Or that they were the true spirit of Mars, betrayed by the old congressional republic and now returned in triumph. Or that they were unbeatable, and capitulation was the only choice. Put a dozen people in front of their cameras, and you’d wind up with thirteen opinions. None of them would matter as much as hers, because she was the president of the Transport Union, and that, despite all her intentions and efforts, meant she was a war leader now.