Persepolis Rising (The Expanse)

by James S. A. Corey

  “Sa—I mean, yes, boss, I heard.”

  “It shook the station hard enough to knock down buildings in the drum section,” Singh said. “So, of course, everyone knows about it. I’m not asking that. I’m asking if you know about it.”

  “Knew the underground was up to something, them, but details? I don’t—”

  “Because, you see,” Singh continued, “I released your sister from our lockup as a down payment for future services rendered. Services like letting me know when a bomb was going to blow up half the engineering section of my station, for example.”

  All the servility left Jordao’s face. Singh watched it happen, like a switch had been flipped in the man’s head. He was a man who would grovel only so far and no farther. It was a useful fact about him, though it did seem to diminish his value.

  “Old OPA, them, sa sa que? The ones the inners couldn’t kill,” Jordao said, not attempting to hide his thick Belter accent now. “The ones like me? We never get to know.”

  “Before you leave this room, you will give me a list of every name you think might be involved in this underground so we can add them to our surveillance list. You will also make sure that whatever happens next, you are part of it, so that we can catch the conspirators in the act and bring the full force of the law against them.”

  Jordao was shaking his head. “Kenna nothing, you—”

  “Or,” Singh continued. “I will have your sister rearrested, tried for larceny and crimes against the empire, and hanged in a public space as a warning to others.”

  Before Jordao could respond, Singh nodded at his Marines, and they picked the Belter up off the floor again. “He doesn’t leave until his list is delivered and verified.”

  “Copy that, sir,” one Marine said, and saluted with the hand that wasn’t holding Jordao.

  The Belter looked from him to the Marine and back again, understanding blooming in his eyes. Understanding and fear.

  When it was over and he was alone in his office, Santiago Singh found that he very much wanted to send a message to his wife. Tell her how afraid he was. Tell her that maybe accepting this assignment had been a terrible mistake. That walking the line between the man he had always thought he was and the ruthless authoritarian ruler the job required of him wasn’t something he could do and remain whole. That the man who could order civilian deaths as a reprisal could not share the same space with the man who loved his wife and played with his daughter and couldn’t wait for her to get old enough so he could buy her a kitten.

  But he couldn’t make that call, because the explosion had cut the Storm off from the station, until they could replace the network encryption node. Which was probably a good thing, because he suspected that everything he would have told his wife was a lie.

  The truth—the one that he didn’t think he’d ever be able to admit to her—was that he could be both men at once. He’d already delivered the ultimatum to Carrie Fisk that any colony world that joined the resistance would be destroyed. He understood that, should it become necessary, he could order Overstreet to execute every person on the station that hadn’t come through the gates on the Tempest and the Storm. The Marine commander would do it. And that when Natalia and the monster arrived, he would be able to hold them and kiss them and be the man he’d always been around them. And know that he’d made them safe.

  That was what terrified him. Not that the job would force him to be both of those men but that he was capable of being both. That all it would take is a bit more pressure, and Santiago Singh would be a man who loved his daughter with all his heart and who also ordered genocides.

  He tapped at his desk. “Chief.”

  “Sir,” came the immediate reply.

  “How long until we have the network back up so I can send traffic back through the Storm?”

  “It’s on the priority list. I’ve been told eleven hours until the replacement system is in place.”

  “Thank you,” Singh said. “Please let me know the instant it’s done. I have priority traffic for Laconia.”

  “Yes, sir. Sir? On that topic, the Storm reports traffic incoming from the Sol gate, marked highest priority. They have a courier bringing it over now.”

  “Very well. Bring them directly in,” Singh said, then killed the connection.

  It seemed too early for the Tempest to be reporting the Sol system’s surrender, but he was open for a pleasant surprise. According to his tactical map, they would barely be crossing the asteroid belt now. Their projections placed the earliest expected surrender point at the Mars crossing.

  Singh needed a distraction to pull himself out of his self-pitying and introspection. Whatever Admiral Trejo needed to tell him so urgently, it was bound to be interesting.

  The petty officer who was ushered into his office half an hour later was a tall woman with pale hair that had been turned dark by sweat. She was breathing heavily, and her uniform was damp.

  “Sir,” she said, then held out a small black wafer to him.

  “You look terrible, sailor,” Singh replied, taking the chip. “Are you all right?”

  “The Marines are using all the carts for patrol duty, so …”

  “Did you actually run this over all the way from the Storm?” Because of the attack, traveling from the ship to his office meant donning a vacuum suit, moving through the damaged sections of the station, then removing the suit and running down the long spiraling ramp that went from the center of rotation down to the drum floor. And after that a kilometer-and-a-half run across the drum to reach his office complex.

  “Yes, sir,” the petty officer said, starting to get her breathing under control.

  “I’ll be sending my compliments to your senior chief. Outstanding effort, sailor. Take a moment to clean up, and we’ll round up a cart to drive you back.”

  “Thank you, sir,” she said, then gave him a sharp salute and left.

  Part of the self-pity trap that Singh had realized it would be easy to fall into was the terrible sense of being utterly alone in his job. He needed more interactions with his fellow Laconians. With his ship, and the sailors under his command. He needed these reminders that he wasn’t working alone. That hundreds of like-minded and dedicated professionals shared the dream of the empire. Singh made a mental note to spend more time on the Storm.

  He rolled his monitor out onto the desktop and dropped the small black chip on it. “Transfer all files and wipe,” he said, then when the monitor blinked its acknowledgment, snapped the little black chip in two and dropped it in the recycler.

  Admiral Trejo’s face appeared on his monitor. Singh found he was a little excited. Trejo was a man with even greater responsibility than his own, and one who handled it with dedication and grace. He was a man who always knew the right thing to do, and did it without hesitation. If Singh wanted to spend more time with the Laconian sailors like himself, he wanted to be Admiral Trejo. He told the monitor to play the message.

  Trejo’s face blurred into motion, and his expression became one of puzzlement, and maybe even fear. “Sonny. Something’s happened, and we have no idea what it is or what to do about it. We need some help.”

  He paused, and something like dread took root in his expression. “It seems we’ve taken on a passenger of sorts.”

  Singh watched the message play out in fascination and then horror and then fascination again.

  The object—there really wasn’t any other word to describe it—was a floating sphere of light and darkness hovering about three feet off the deck in a corridor on the Heart of the Tempest. Just looking at a recording of it on the monitor’s small screen made his head hurt. Someone passed a length of pipe through it and back again on the recording. The pipe did not seem to interact with the object at all. And in fact Singh had the sense that he saw both the pipe and the object at the same time with equal clarity even when that should be impossible. It made his head hurt even worse.

  Mercifully, the person with the pipe stopped doing it, and Trejo began speakin
g.

  “As you can see, the anomaly doesn’t seem to exist as a physical object. It doesn’t appear to radiate on any wavelength, except for visible-spectrum photons. Not one sensing device we’ve aimed at it can even tell that it’s there, but we can record it and see it just fine. Being in the same room with it, looking at it, it’s quite disorienting and causes double vision and severe headaches.”

  As if in response to this, four sailors set up a curtain around it using poles and blankets. While they worked, Trejo continued. “It’s moving with us. With the ship, because we’re still under thrust and it hasn’t moved a millimeter since it first appeared. I’ve tried making some minor course adjustments, but it keeps us as its frame of reference. I’ve included all the data we’ve collected on this file, but I can tell you that its first appearance almost exactly matches the moment when we destroyed Pallas Station. It also includes a nearly three-minute blackout shared by every single person on this ship.”

  The sailors had finished setting up their curtain, and left. Trejo pulled his monitor close, so his face filled the screen. He lowered his voice, as though telling Singh a secret.

  “If this is some new weapon of the inner planets, we need to understand it and now. Blacking out a crew for three minutes, the right three minutes, would create a serious tactical advantage for them. I need you to pass along this information to Laconia through our most secure channels. Get me answers fast, Sonny. I’m about to engage with the combined might of the inner planets’ navies, and this is the first thing that’s made me wonder if I can win.”

  Singh sank back in his chair, and rubbed his face with both hands. What if everything, including the attacks on Medina, had just been a distraction? What if the inner planets needed time to bring some new superweapon to bear, and feints and jabs from the Sol fleet and his own insurgents were just to create confusion and buy time?

  “Major Overstreet?” Singh said to his monitor.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll need a cart with an armed guard. I’m going to the Storm.”

  “Copy that, sir,”

  Singh took another data chip out of his desk, laid it on the monitor, and copied all the files Trejo had sent. He then told his monitor to wipe everything. He placed the chip into a lockable metal briefcase, and waited for his ride to arrive.

  While he waited, something tugged at his mind. Some memory, from the academy, maybe. Another mention of a sphere of light and darkness. It had to do with the first wave of colonization, even before the high consul had led his people to Laconia …

  He took a moment to have his monitor search the local network for any mention of such an object with the properties Trejo had described.

  The search took less than a second, and what it found was a minor colony world named either Ilus or New Terra. In among the list of names connected to what the article was calling the “Ilus Incident” was one that his monitor underlined. When he tapped it, he understood why.

  In the report, Captain James Holden of the Rocinante had reported seeing the exact object that was currently residing on Admiral Trejo’s ship. The same James Holden who was now in their security lockup, under suspicion of terrorist acts.

  Chapter Thirty-Six: Bobbie

  The public prison was full, but not with her people. Laconian guards stood at the corners with weapons drawn, watching the crowd watch the prisoners. Drones buzzed overhead, scanning constantly. On the far side of the steel mesh, men and women sat disconsolately waiting for trial or judgment. Bobbie stuffed her fists deep into the pockets of her plain gray jumpsuit. A man at the back of the lowest cell on the left looked a little bit like Holden, but not so much she could talk herself into thinking it was him. Even if they had him, Holden probably wouldn’t be put here. This jail was more than half for show—public stocks for a new generation. Anyone with real value to the security forces would be somewhere else.

  Still. She had hoped. It never hurt to hope, except when it did.

  “Pinché schwists, alles la,” the man next to her said under his breath. She’d been around Belters long enough to translate it in her head. Lousy kids, all of them. The man who’d said it had long brown-gray hair and an expression as sour as old lemons. She only smiled her agreement. This wasn’t a place where she wanted to say anything aloud against the Laconians.

  It turned out it was just as good she didn’t.

  “Esá all the fucking underground, yeah?” he said. “Things aren’t hard enough, now they’re killing our goddamn station?”

  Bobbie felt her smile grow tighter, less sincere. The rage in the man’s eyes wasn’t for the invaders who’d swept in, destroyed their defenses, and taken over. It was for the people fighting against them. It was for her.

  “Hard times,” she said, because the drones might be listening.

  She walked away, heading north along the drum. The straight line of sun above her, the ruins of the engineering decks far away at her back. Being out in public like this left her feeling exposed. The Laconians were everywhere, the checkpoints twice as thick as they’d been before, and everywhere she looked, faces shaped by fear. The Laconians’ fear that their control over the station hadn’t been enough to stop the underground. The locals’ fear of Laconian reprisals. Her fear that she’d be found out, or that she’d broken something she wasn’t going to be able to mend.

  Saba’s network had managed to get the warning out pretty well. The death toll in the explosion was low. She’d heard a dozen, and most of them Laconian, but it was hard to know what was true. It was as deep in the culture of the Belt as bones in their bodies that you didn’t fuck with the environmental systems. She hadn’t thought about the symbolic meaning of her plan, or what it took for Saba and Katria to agree to it. To Bobbie, they’d been getting important intelligence and covering their tracks. To the Belters, they’d been saying that they would be free of Laconian rule, even if the only freedom was death. If not everyone on the station signed on for that, she couldn’t blame them.

  A swath of green grass lawn on her right had a classroom’s worth of children, a teacher talking about insects and soil. A man on a bicycle rode past her, whistling to let people know he was coming, and to clear the path. All the things that had happened before Duarte and Trejo and Singh. She couldn’t guess how many of the people she was walking past would have turned her in to the authorities if they’d known. How many would have applauded her. There was no way for her to ask.

  That was the trick of living under the thumb of a dictator. It broke every conversation, even the private ones. The invasion had wounded everyone, one way or another. Herself very much included.

  Her hand terminal chimed, and she plucked it out of her pocket with a sense of dread. The message was from Alex, and all it said was WHEN YOU HAVE A MINUTE. The underground was still using encrypted back channels. The security forces wouldn’t see the message in their logs. But if Bobbie got picked up, or someone looked over her shoulder, the words would be innocuous. Saba’s cramped halls and corridors were the only place they could speak freely. Everywhere else on Medina had become the land of subtext.

  She found an escalator and let it carry her down into the body of the drum. It wasn’t far to the entry to Saba’s alternate station, but they all had to be careful to see they weren’t followed. Their bubble of freedom was fragile, and once it popped, it wouldn’t come back.

  Alex was waiting for her when she ducked into the access corridor. The flesh under his eyes looked ashy and his shoulders slumped like he was under a higher gravity than they were. He smiled, though, and that her friend seemed pleased to see her counted for a lot. For more than it should have, even.

  “How’s the weather out there?” he asked as they made their way down toward the makeshift galley.

  “Stormy,” she said. “Get the feeling it’ll get worse before it gets better too.”

  “That was a given.”

  In the galley, half a dozen of Saba’s people sat at the tables, talking. The air smelled like noo
dles in black sauce, but the food was gone. Bobbie wasn’t hungry anyway. One of Katria’s men, a crook-nosed guy named Jordao, nodded to her, smiling a little too widely. She nodded back with a sense of dread. This was not a time she wanted someone hitting on her.

  “Any word?” she asked, her voice low even though security wouldn’t hear her. She wasn’t afraid of being found out here, but the wounds were fresh. Some things didn’t need to travel outside the family.

  “On Holden, no,” Alex said.

  “Okay,” Bobbie said. It cut her a little every time there was nothing, and she welcomed it. If it came back that she’d killed him, the hurt would be a million times worse. Every little wound was a good thing because it wasn’t the killing blow.

  “That stuff Naomi pulled off the encryption machine? It’s working. Saba’s folks are able to dig through a bunch of stuff we intercepted before. Of course, the Storm’s not talking to Medina anymore since we blew the channel, so we’re not getting anything new. But it makes it rough for the bad guys that they can’t have their ship talk to the station without radio or tightbeam, so …”

  He trailed off like his words were running out of pressure.

  “So we won,” she said. “Go us.”

  “Doesn’t feel like it, does it? I keep asking myself what the hell happened.”

  “We lost Holden.”

  Alex shook his head, tapped four fingertips on the table. “Yeah, and that’s hard, but something happened before that. We’ve faced all kinds of bad before now, and it never split up the family. It was always everyone else, never us. Now Naomi’s off in her room, and Amos is wherever the hell Amos is. You’re going for long walks. We used to be a crew. Now it’s me and Claire playing cards and worrying about everyone.” She heard the accusation in his voice, and she wanted to push back at him. Only he was right. Something deeper was wrong. Had been wrong.