Persepolis Rising (The Expanse)

by James S. A. Corey

  From the way they talked, Holden could almost believe that they wouldn’t kill each other, given the chance. Almost, but not enough that he was sorry to be there. Maybe Katria really didn’t hold a grudge about the fight that Amos had started. And maybe Amos wasn’t spoiling to start another one. Or maybe the bomb was the most stable thing in the cart.

  “I’ll think happy thoughts,” Holden said. “Butterflies. Rainbows.”

  “What the fuck is a butterfly?” Katria said.

  The cart ahead of them shifted, and they followed. It took fifteen minutes to get to the guards and then a minute and a half to get past them. Their cover story—Holden and Amos were applying for on-station work permits since their ship was locked down, and Katria was taking them to an on-site test—never even came up. Katria drove the cart to its queue, strapped the bomb to her back, and led them into the engineering decks, moving from handhold to handhold with the unremarked grace of someone who’d spent a good portion of their life on the float. Amos followed with the conduit wrench in his fist like a club.

  Once the drum was well behind them, Holden pulled the earpiece out of his pocket and turned on the contact microphone.

  “—is clear,” Clarissa said. “Can you confirm?”

  “Yup,” Alex replied, his voice slow in the way that meant he was concentrating. “I’m moving my little pixies through now. Gimme just a … All right, I’m through.”

  “Turning the recycler back on,” Clarissa said.

  Clarissa and her team were in the drum, tapped into the environmental controls through a back door that, if they were found out, Saba would never be able to use again. Alex was back in the underground’s galley, flying the drones with his hand terminal and several layers of encryption. Naomi and Bobbie were, he assumed, loitering outside the secure server room, ready to force their way in. It was strange hearing their voices as if they were with him. It made him feel like he was back on the Rocinante.

  The engineering decks of Medina were a lesson in the way ships learned and changed over time. If he squinted, he could still see the bones of the original, unmodified space, but years and mission drift had altered everything. Here, a section of floor had a slightly different color where a bulkhead had been taken out. There, a set of conduits had been rerouted with the three-point welding style that Martians favored. The pipes along the walls were labeled in half a dozen languages and safety-regulation styles. History made physical. Even where the walls were had changed over the years, added extra reinforcement from when the docks had been built or taken away when the new generation reactors had been put in place. Katria led the way down a side corridor, moving from handhold to foothold to handhold. Amos followed close behind her, only crowding her a little, and she seemed not to notice. Or at least not to care. Their little triumvirate. Katria to place the charge, Amos to keep an eye on her, and Holden to keep an eye on him.

  A young woman floated past them, coming the other way. She had an electrician’s rig strapped to her arm, and her hair was the same texture Naomi’s had been when they’d first met. She passed Katria, then Amos. When she and Holden landed at the same handhold, she smiled an apology and pushed quickly off. He wondered whether they were about to kill her. Seemed possible. He hated the thought.

  “Alex?” Bobbie said. “You’re awfully quiet there, buddy. Everything all right?”

  “Yeah, sorry. Just … there’s a little lag. It’s not bad, but it makes me paranoid. Last thing I want is one of these charges to go off in a vent someplace. Take the whole group out.”

  “That would be bad,” Bobbie agreed.

  “Jim?” Naomi said. “Are you on yet?”

  “We’re here,” he said softly. “Past the checkpoint. Not at the pressure tank yet.”

  “There was a checkpoint?” Bobbie said.

  Amos’ voice was calm. “Nothing we couldn’t handle, Babs.”

  “I’m coming up on the last turn here,” Alex said.

  “There’s a carbon dioxide scrubber intake,” Clarissa said. “Don’t get caught in the draft. I’m accessing it now.”

  Katria started whistling between her teeth, a tuneless sound that her mic didn’t pick up. They reached an access panel with caution placards in a dozen languages and half the colors of the rainbow. CAUTION HIGH PRESSURE SYSTEM. Katria plucked a knife from her boot and pried the panel open as casually as if she did it every day.

  “Make sure no one’s coming,” she said.

  “You got it,” Amos replied, sailing on a little farther down the corridor and slipping to the center of the narrow space so that anyone coming the other way would have a hard time getting past him and his massive wrench. Katria pulled the bomb off her back and popped the case open. The workings inside didn’t look like much. A cone of carbon-silicate lace, the same as a ship’s plating. A hand terminal. A pair of standard wires. It didn’t look like enough to do much damage. Certainly not enough to blow out the side of the station. But of course, it wasn’t. That was all coming from the pressure tanks on the other side of the bulkhead. This was just the pin that popped that balloon.

  “Okay,” Clarissa said. “You’re good to go.”

  “Heading through,” Alex said. “And we’re past. The vent for the server room should be just ahead. Looks … looks a little higher grade than I was expecting.”

  “Do we have a problem?” Bobbie asked. He could hear the tension in her voice. The electrical technician he’d bumped into intruded into his memory, and with it the faint and compromised hope that maybe it would all go wrong and they’d have to abort the mission.

  “I think we’ll be fine,” Alex said. “My little pixies here are armed for bear. But I’m pulling five of them back around the corner here so they don’t get mussed up when the vent goes.”

  Katria closed the case, set it in behind the access panel, squinted at it, shifted it fifteen degrees. What was it like, Holden wondered, being able to picture blast cones in your mind? What kind of life did you have to lead to have that come naturally? Katria rubbed her throat, and when she spoke, her voice had doubled, coming from the air they were breathing and through the earpiece. The reverb gave her words a weight.

  “We’re done here. We’ll see you in the place.”

  Meaning, the shelter. Where, when Naomi and Bobbie joined them, they could trigger the blast and wipe out the evidence.

  “Hey,” Katria called down the corridor. “You coming?”

  Amos floated back toward them as Katria slid the panel back into place and slipped her knife back into her boot. They were skimming along through the air together when it all fell apart.

  “Um,” Alex said. “I think we’ve got a problem here.”

  “What’s up, Alex?” Bobbie asked.

  “Well, I got my little pixie looking through this vent. I’ve got eyes on both of these Laconian fellas, and one of them’s got his hand on something that sure looks like a dead man’s switch.”

  “That’s not protocol,” Bobbie said.

  “It ain’t Martian protocol,” Alex agreed. “But I’m pretty certain that’s what I’m seeing here. If I move forward with this, I won’t even have the door open before the Laconian fellas know about it. You’re going to be ass deep in alligators pretty damned quick.”

  “We knew we were going to have to move fast,” Bobbie said. “This just means we move faster.”

  “It means more than that,” Clarissa said. “It means they’ll log the alarm. The whole point of blowing out the pressure tanks was so they wouldn’t know we’d compromised them. If the secure room shows an alert right before the explosion, they’ll know what we did. They’ll change all the procedures. The data we recover won’t be worth anything.”

  The silence lasted one long breath. Then another. Holden felt something in his chest loosen, it was almost like relief. And almost like dread too.

  He knew what had to happen before anyone else did.

  “All right,” Bobbie said, and Holden could see her clenched jaw as clearly as if s
he were there with him. “Let me think.”

  “You’ll be fine,” Holden said. “Just wait until the … I don’t know. The tenth alarm goes off.”

  “The tenth what?” Alex said, but Holden plucked out his earpiece and the mic and tossed them to Amos. The big man caught them in one wide hand.

  “You going somewhere, Cap?”

  “Yeah,” Holden said. “Can I borrow that wrench?”

  Amos pushed it gently out to him. It was massive enough that Holden had to readjust his grip on the handhold to stop it.

  “Am I getting that back?” Amos asked.

  “Maybe. You get Katria to the shelter. Everything goes forward, just like we planned.”

  Amos’ face went still as a mask for a moment, and then he smiled his empty smile. “You got it.”

  Holden squared himself on the wall’s footholds and launched down the corridor. In an instant, Amos and Katria were behind him. It’ll be okay, he told himself, but he didn’t dig into why that might be true. He was pretty sure it wouldn’t hold up.

  It only took about twenty seconds to find a panel with a manual fire alarm. He flipped the case open, pulled the switch down, and a Klaxon started screaming. One.

  In the next corridor, he picked a thin copper pipe, set the wrench around it and pulled until it popped. Green fluid that stank like vinegar and acetate spewed out into the hall. Somewhere, the system would register the pressure drop and raise a flag. That was two. He heard voices shouting from the main deck. They weren’t raised in panic, not yet. More like they were trying to be heard over the alarm. He passed a radiation alarm and tripped that too—three—then headed toward the voices.

  Naomi would understand, even if the others didn’t. She knew him well enough to follow his mind without so much as a question. There were two ways to hide something. Either put it where no one could see it or leave it in plain sight with a thousand others just like it. If the alarm went off in the secure room, that would mean one thing. If a bunch of alarms went off all through the engineering and dock levels, and it was only one, maybe the guards had panicked. It would just be more noise in the chaos. Unremarkable.

  In the wide space leading to the transfer hub, half a dozen people were clinging to a wall, each of them talking over the others. He recognized the electrical tech they’d passed going in.

  “Hey,” he shouted, waving his wrench. “Can’t you people hear? Get to the shelters!”

  It was enough to start them moving. He picked another corridor at random and launched himself down it. He broke three electrical conduits, tripped another fire alarm and another radiation. If he could make his way down closer to the reactors, there’d be more he could break, but there would also be guards there. The wrench was unwieldy and massive enough that cracking the conduits and pipes open was starting to leave his shoulders and palms aching. He ducked into an access crawl and pulled two power exchanges out of the wall. That had to be good for at least one alert. He floated out into another hallway. The engineering deck was drowned in a cacophony of blaring alarms. He pulled himself toward a ladder. When the station was under thrust, it would lead down toward the drive cones.

  It took the Laconians about two minutes to find him, but it felt like longer. Holden was trying to fit the wrench behind a support strut when two Marines in power armor came around the corner, their suits clicking as the actuators fired. Holden started to raise his hands, but the first one slammed into him before he had the chance. The impact knocked a few seconds off his awareness. The next thing he was sure of, there was a barrel pressed just above his left eye and his ribs hurt badly when he tried to breathe.

  “You just fucked up, old man!” the guard growled.

  Holden blinked. “I surrender,” he said. Breathing really hurt. There were bones broken. He was sure of it.

  “You don’t have that option,” the guard said. Holden realized his life was now based on whether a Laconian Marine who looked like he was maybe in his early twenties had the self-control not to shoot his brainpan empty out of anger and excitement. Holden nodded.

  “I understand, sir,” he said, and hoped that submission and respect would be enough to keep that one critical neuron from firing. “I am not resisting. You got me. I’m no threat.”

  “CJ,” the other Marine said.

  The one with the gun snarled, pulled back a few centimeters, and hit Holden along the side of his face hard enough to split the skin. Bright red globes of blood flew in a cloud and painted the pale anti-spalling cloth of the hallway. The pain was dull first, and then bright.

  “You are an ungrateful piece of shit,” the Marine—CJ, apparently—said. “If we were someplace civilized, your sad ass would be in the pens.”

  “What are the pens?” Holden asked, and the guard hit him again, hard against his right ear. He had the impression that CJ enjoyed this kind of thing. Holden wasn’t frightened so much as resigned. He’d known that he’d be trading his freedom for the chance that Bobbie’s plan would work. And for the electrical tech’s life. He was past the good part of his plan now, and the bad part might last a very long time or a very short one. Either way, probably the rest of his life.

  CJ hauled him out into the free air where there was nothing for Holden to grab onto. A drop of his blood smeared the Laconian’s faceplate.

  “What the fuck do you have to say for yourself now, asshole?” CJ said, shaking him just enough to make his teeth rattle. Holden took a deep, painful breath.

  “We should probably get to an emergency shelter,” he said.

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Bobbie

  Tenth what?” Alex said. His voice was reedy and distant. Not all of that was because of the tiny speaker it was coming out of. Alex understood what Holden was doing just as much as she did. One alarm was significant. One alarm out of a dozen meant less. Holden was giving them cover, and Alex was asking Bobbie to say that Holden hadn’t just decided to sacrifice himself to keep the mission on track.

  Her mouth was dry.

  “You heard him,” she replied, keeping her tone all business. “As soon as that tenth alarm goes off, blow the vent, take out the guards, and get us into the room.”

  “Am I getting that back?” Amos asked, but not to them.

  Naomi was staring at her, wide-eyed. She was on the radio, too. She knew what was happening. But she tightened her grip on her tools and pressed her lips together, then gave Bobbie a nod. Good to go. The Roci’s former XO would finish her mission. Then she’d worry about Holden afterward. They both would.

  The sound of the alarms had started close to them, and grew more distant as new sirens joined the cacophony. Holden was moving away from them. Which was good, considering what was about to happen.

  “Chief,” Alex said. “That was ten.”

  Bobbie took one last look at her surroundings. She and Naomi floated alone in the narrow corridor. The door to the computer room was five meters away, and she had her improvised battering ram in one hand. As it always did in the calm seconds before a mission began, her mind ran through the checklist of things that were about to happen. Nothing popped up as a red flag, so she said, “Go, go, go.”

  For three long breaths, nothing happened.

  There was a distant thump, like a firecracker going off inside a locker. The first drone just blew itself up to take out the venting cover. This was followed by a shout of surprise. Bobbie could picture the two men in the room looking up in shock as the vent turned into shrapnel behind them, and five tiny drones flew into the room. Then two more bangs, close together like firing a double tap with a pistol. This time louder, and closer. Two more drones going off to take out the guards.

  The alarm in the room started screeching as the man with his hand on the dead man’s switch went down. But now, instead of drawing every guard in the area, it was just one of over a dozen alarms going off, and new ones coming up every few seconds. Holden had been busy.

  “I’m getting smoke in the vents,” Clarissa said. “I’m turning up the recycler
s.”

  The last explosion was the loudest yet, right on the other side of the door. The last three drones clustering around the latch and detonating. Alex said, “My guys are done. Me and my team are cleaning up the logs and shutting down.”

  Bobbie planted her feet on the corridor wall and launched toward the door. The heavy length of ceramic-filled pipe she was using as a ram was gripped in both hands, and she slammed it into the door just above the latch. The door exploded open so violently that it bounced off the bulkhead and swung back hard enough to clip her knee as she flew by. It hurt, but not enough to think about.

  She had a split second to clock the room: workstation and two dead men with blood soaking their suits floating next to it, server rack bolted to the deck in the center of the compartment, plain metal walls. She slammed into the server rack and bounced off into an empty corner of the room.

  “Ouch. Fuck.”

  “What’s that, Chief?” Alex asked.

  “Nothing. Just went a hundred kph when twenty would have done,” Bobbie replied. “We’re good, Naomi. Do your thing.”

  Naomi’s lean form slid through the opening with Belter grace, tapped one foot against the bulkhead, and came to a perfect stop next to the server rack. Watching her slide through the air like a fish in water made Bobbie feel overlarge and clumsy.

  “I’ll be in the hall, watching for gawkers,” she said.

  “Mmhmm,” Naomi replied, already ignoring her. She was pulling panels off the server rack, and a variety of gear floated in the space around her like a high-tech cloud.

  Before she left, Bobbie pushed over to the two Laconian guards and checked their pulse. Up close, it was hardly necessary. Both men had massive head injuries, and bits of bone, blood, and drone parts floated around them. It was a shitty way for a soldier to die, ambushed like that, and Bobbie pushed down the feeling of guilt and regret. It was war. Right now, her brothers and sisters in the Martian fleet were fighting and dying in the Sol system in that same war. And a lot more blood was being spilled on their side than on the Laconian one so far.