Persepolis Rising (The Expanse)

by James S. A. Corey

  The politeness of it was foul. The pretense that she was still autonomous, the master of her own fate. Oh, she could probably refuse. Duarte seemed smart enough not to welcome people into his projects who were willing to openly oppose him. But there would be consequences. That they weren’t even spelled out made them more ominous.

  “This is like the colonies, isn’t it?” she said.

  Trejo lifted his eyebrows, answering her question with a wordless one of his own.

  “You’re shifting everything to Laconia,” she said. “Not just ships or money. The culture.”

  Trejo smiled. “Earth will always be the home from which humanity sprang, but yes. The high consul thinks that … fetishizing Earth is bad for the long-term future of the species. We will also put in place an accelerated repopulation scheme. Try to adjust the balance so that Sol system isn’t such an overwhelming majority of the population either.”

  “You can’t put billions of people through the ring gates,” Drummer said. “It won’t work.”

  “Not in our lifetimes,” Trejo said. “We’re talking about the work of generations. But … well, I was Martian before I was Laconian. Thinking for the long term doesn’t intimidate me.”

  A woman in a white dress with gold at her throat and wrists sloped by, nodding to Trejo as she passed. He smiled back, glanced at her ass, and then back so quickly it might have passed for politeness.

  “Your terraforming plan didn’t work out too well,” Drummer said more acidly than she should have. It just came out that way.

  “It would have,” Trejo said, “if something bigger hadn’t come along. Anyway, please do consider the invitation. The high consul is looking forward to meeting you.”

  Trejo put a hand on her arm like they were old friends and made his way back out to some other conversation on his list. All around her, the eyes and attention of the crowd followed him and left her behind. She drank her champagne in a gulp and started looking for someplace to ditch the glass so she could get another one.

  “Getting drunk, Camina? You think that’s smart, or are you just past giving a fuck anymore?”

  Avasarala was in her wheelchair. Her snow-white hair was pulled back in a bun, and her sari was a shimmer of green that almost hid the thinness of her body. She looked older than the last time Drummer had seen her. And she’d looked older than dirt then.

  “I am taking the edge off the pain,” Drummer said. “Because what else can I do?”

  Avasarala turned her chair and started off toward the podium and the seats. They were empty now, but the journalists were starting to filter in. The show would be starting soon.

  “I’d join you, but they tell me I’m on my last liver these days,” Avasarala said. “No more liquor for me.”

  “You seem to be taking the conquest fairly well.”

  “The fuck option do I have?” Avasarala said. “I’m an old lady who spent her life trying to make peace between Earth and Mars. All this shit? It’s like I missed a day at school, and everyone else learned to speak Mandarin while I was gone. I don’t understand any of this.”

  “Yeah,” Drummer said. “I can see that.”

  “It’s the reward of old age,” Avasarala said. “You live long enough, and you can watch everything you worked for become irrelevant.”

  “You’re not selling it,” Drummer said.

  “Fuck you, then. Die young. See if I care.”

  Drummer laughed. Avasarala grinned, and for a moment, they understood each other perfectly. For a moment, Drummer didn’t feel alone.

  “Are you going to his orgy pit or whatever the fuck it is Duarte’s setting up?” Avasarala asked.

  Across the room, Vaughn caught Drummer’s eyes and began walking toward the two women with purpose. Drummer didn’t want to go with him. Didn’t want to face the theater and falsehood of the next part. She turned back to Avasarala.

  “I don’t know. I suppose I have to.”

  “Always a bad idea to ditch the emperor,” Avasarala agreed. Then, “Do you know why they’re looking for Okoye?”

  “Who?”

  “Elvi Okoye,” Avasarala said, and Vaughn reached them.

  “It’s time, ma’am,” he said.

  Drummer nodded and handed him her glass. Avasarala’s claw of a hand grabbed hers, held her for a moment. “Chin up, Camina. These fuckers can smell blood. And this shit’s not over, no matter what it looks like now.”

  “Thank you,” Drummer said, and pulled away.

  The seats for the journalists were full now. She recognized their faces. Sometimes even the way they sat, the way they moved. She’d done this for years. She’d never done this before.

  Admiral Trejo made some brief opening remarks—thanked everyone for being there, expressed bright hopes for the future, extended the greeting of High Consul Duarte—and brought her up. The others would come later. The secretary-general. The speaker of the Martian parliament. Whoever else. But she was the last president of the Transport Union. Her dignity was first for the chopping block.

  She looked out over the faces and remembered a time she’d enjoyed this.

  “President Drummer?” Her podium identified the woman. Monica Stuart. “Is the Transport Union cooperating in the transfer of control?”

  No, it is not. No, I am not. No, we have been conquered, but we will fight to the last breath because living with someone else’s hand on our necks is intolerable, has always been intolerable, will always be intolerable. Not because of Laconia, not because of the union, not because of any of the authorities through all of history that have made rules and then dared people to break them. Because we’re human, and humans are mean, independent monkeys that reached their greatness by killing every other species of hominid that looked at us funny. We will not be controlled for long. Not even by ourselves. Any other plan is a pipe dream.

  In the front row, Avasarala coughed.

  Drummer smiled thinly.

  “The Transport Union has always been a temporary structure,” she began.

  Chapter Fifty-Two: Naomi

  Freehold was pain. Some days that was a good thing. It gave her something to push against, something to fight. Other days it was just wearying.

  The pencil-thin valley where they’d set the Roci down had steep, high mountains to the north, east, and southwest. A thin creek ran along the bottom with glacier meltwater. Pale-green treelike organisms clung to the stone with finger-thick roots and stretched out vines studded with pale-green bladders that floated into the open air as if Nature itself were putting up balloons for a party. A high breeze would shift the vines one way and then the other. Every now and then, one would break off and swirl away down the valley, maybe to die or maybe to find some new place to take root.

  She understood it was all the product of evolutionary arms races. Photosynthesizing structures had spent centuries, maybe millennia, trying to choke each other in darkness until one of them had figured out how to both be rooted and fly, how to both command the high air and drop everything below it into permanent twilight. None of it had been created with the Rocinante in mind. It just worked out well.

  The Roci itself huddled in a wide space where the creek curved around. The landing thrusters had scorched the landscape around it, but it didn’t take more than a day or two before the local plants began growing back. The fight for survival made everything either resilient or forgotten. The floating vines made a moving canopy fifteen meters above them that would help hide them from observation, if anything ever came into the system to look. As hiding places went, it was decent.

  The colony itself—the only other three hundred people on the planet—was in an arid biome a six-hour hike down the valley. At least it was for her. The locals could make the trip in half the time. Houston lived down there, among his people, and sometimes she and Alex would stay there too. But most days, she was at the Roci—her real home. There was maintenance to be done, restocking. Distilling the creek water until it was pure enough to put in the Roci’s ta
nks. The reactor could run for months without needing more fuel, but reaction mass was always a problem. If they wanted to go anywhere. If they just stayed put … well, less of an issue, then.

  Today she’d spent half the daylight hours discouraging a cluster of very slow animals or possibly semimobile plants that were exploring whether the niches around the Roci’s PDCs would be a good place to live. When the light faded, she stopped for lunch. The planet’s sixteen-hours-and-change diurnal cycle meant that most of her workdays had at least half a night in them.

  The Roci had been built to rest on its belly in a gravity well. All of her systems functioned, even at ninety degrees from what she’d become used to. That seemed right too. Being at home, but also in a space her body didn’t understand. Being in control of her day, but not of her life. Being achingly alone, but not wanting people around. It was all of a piece. If she’d dreamed it, it would have meant something.

  As soon as she crawled back into the ship, she showered. There were compounds in the life cycle of Freehold that irritated her skin if she didn’t wash them off. Then she pulled on a fresh jumpsuit, went to the galley, made herself a bowl of white kibble, and sat. A message was waiting for her from Bobbie, and she set her hand terminal on the table when she played it so she could use both hands to eat. The kibble was warm and peppery; the mushroom squeaked against her teeth just the way it was supposed to.

  Bobbie looked exhausted and excited at the same time. Her hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail the way she wore it when she was working on machinery, not the bun she had for workouts. Her eyes were bright and the suggestion of a smile teased her mouth without ever quite appearing. She looked ten years younger. More than that, she looked happy.

  “Hey, Naomi. Hope things are going well down there. I think we’re making some real progress up here. I’m not positive, but I think I’ve found how the Storm manages its energy profiles. It’s a little screwy, same as everything on this rig. I was wondering if I could get you to take a quick skim through the new dataset I pulled. Maybe you’ll see something I didn’t?”

  The embedded data was structured as environmental-control buffers, and it was half again the size of the Roci’s. Naomi popped it open and glanced at the gross index. A lot of familiar parts, yes, but some strangeness in the large-scale structure. If it was anything like the other bits of the Gathering Storm’s operating code they’d harvested for analysis, it would get weirder the deeper in she went. She dropped it to a secure partition in the Roci and started unpacking it with her favorite tools, converting the language of the ships into something with handholds that her mind could brace on.

  She set her hand terminal to Record. “Dataset received and in process. It may take me a day or two, but I’ll let you know what I think. In the meantime, all is well down here. No need for rescue.”

  It was the rule. Somewhere in the message she sent up the well, there was always the word rescue and always would be until she needed one. Bobbie’s word was progress. A message went back and forth every twenty-four hours at a minimum. Not that there was any real risk that Naomi could see, but protocol was protocol. The locals on Freehold had been at least willing to listen when they’d arrived with Payne Houston in tow, and there had been nothing but cautious goodwill since. Not that Naomi trusted that to last. The colony of Freehold would support her in her guise as a refugee and freedom fighter as long as it was convenient for them. She understood that having the only gunship in the system and a ring gate far enough away that she’d have a free hand how to use it for weeks before help could arrive figured into the local council’s calculus of the situation.

  Bobbie’s improvised crew of Belters were with her on a little moon circling one of Freehold’s three gas giants, tucked in an ancient lava tube and showing no signs of mutiny. Bobbie as captain and Amos as acting XO would, Naomi thought, be more than enough to ensure discipline. It also gave Freehold another reason to play nice, and a spare set of eyes on the ring gate in case anything nasty came through.

  The Storm was slow to give up its secrets, not because of the internal security—though that was an issue—as much as the profound unfamiliarity of some of its technology. Its reliance on calcium, for instance, was an order of magnitude more than Naomi had ever seen, and the vacuum channels it used instead of wiring still made her head ache a little if she thought about them too much. With enough time, though, she was certain they’d come to understand the ship. On her good days, she thought they’d be ready, even if she wasn’t sure yet what they were getting ready for.

  While the Roci arranged the data for her and the kibble broke down pleasantly in her stomach, she lay back and let her eyes close for a few minutes. Her knees ached. Her spine ached. It wasn’t even the gravity of Freehold. This world was smaller than Mars, and only a little bit denser. She’d been on long burns worse than this. Part of the problem was that she wasn’t doing her exercises. She was doing work, and there turned out to be a suite of small, neglected muscles that had atrophied over the years and weren’t happy to be put into service clearing vegetation and crawling around the bottom of a gravity well.

  There was also, she suspected, something of a placebo effect. She’d spent so many years equating life in free atmosphere on a planetary surface with a constant, grinding full g, that now even though the gravity was actually fairly mild, she was primed to notice the discomfort. She expected it, and so it was there.

  The Rocinante chimed to announce the completion of the data run, and then again almost immediately to announce Alex’s return. It was less than a minute before she heard him walking up the hallway that was usually the lift tube. He was singing to himself. A light, lilting melody with words she didn’t recognize.

  “In here,” she called as he came close.

  Alex poked his head into the galley. He was more comfortable going into town, and the combination of long walks and sunlight had darkened his skin and given him his cheekbones back.

  “Hola,” he said. “Good news from Freehold. We’re a business!”

  He lifted his right arm. The satchel in it was heavy with batteries ready to be recharged. It was a minor convenience for the township to have Alex come by and collect batteries, recharge them from the Roci’s reactor, and deliver them again full up instead of waiting for their turn at the solar array. So Freehold’s poor foresight on solar energy was now their cottage industry. At least for now.

  Alex’s grin widened. “And …”

  “And?”

  He lifted his left hand. A second satchel. “They paid in beer and curried goat. I’ve got a little cook fire started outside. It’s going to be great.”

  Naomi started to say that she’d just eaten, but the joy in Alex’s eyes was infectious. She swung herself up to sitting. “On my way,” she said.

  The moons weren’t shining in the valley when she reached the airlock, but Alex’s little cook fire was glowing happily next to the landing strut, and the stars glittered between the floating vines above them. They burned dried-out vines and the shed carapaces of huge, slow-moving animals that lived in shallow caves all up and down the valley. The smoke was pale and fragrant. The shards of carapace popped and cracked now and then, sending little sprays of spark up with the smoke to vanish as they cooled. The smoke kept away the night hoppers—tiny, nocturnal insect-like animals that usually found humans fascinating.

  Alex had two skewers of meat dripping grease and curry onto the flames, and Naomi had to admit that they smelled better than kibble. She sat with her back against the landing strut. Alex took a bottle from his satchel, opened its neck, and passed it over. The beer was cold and rich and more biting than she’d expected.

  “Robust,” she said.

  “Danielle likes a higher proof than some brewers,” Alex said with a smile as he leaned back to look at the vines and the sky beyond them.

  “Seems like you’re getting along well with the locals.”

  “They’re all right,” Alex said. “Just don’t get them talking ab
out the nature of sovereignty and you’re fine. Even then you’re all right, it’s just a conversation they’ve all had a lot. Tends to go along the ground they’ve already plowed.”

  He reached over and turned the skewers. High above them, something set off one of the vine bladders, and it glowed a pale yellow-green for a moment, then went dark again.

  “Good to build rapport,” Naomi said. “Freehold’s going to have to look like a polite, compliant little colony for a while.”

  “No trouble. The council’s on board for an ‘enemy-of-my-enemy, hail Laconia, down with the union’ stance. For the time being anyway. I think they kind of like having us here, actually. The founding impulse of Freehold is sticking it to the government.”

  “Loses some of its shine after you get elected.”

  “Right?” Alex tested the curried meat with his finger, pinching and releasing fast enough that he didn’t get burned. He handed it over to Naomi. She waved it in the night air for a moment to let it cool, then took the first cube off the end and popped it in her mouth. The char on the meat was good. The spices that infused it were better. She chewed slowly, letting herself enjoy it.

  “Do you think they’ll sell us out?”

  “Eventually, sure,” Alex said cheerfully. “But not right away. And probably not for cheap, so long as they like us.”

  Her plan was the long one. The only one, really, that made sense. Laconia’s strength seemed overwhelming. A force without weakness that nothing could ever overcome. That was an illusion. Earth had seemed like that once, when she’d been a girl scraping together a life in the Belt. It hadn’t been true then either.

  They’d wait. They’d watch. They’d be small and quiet and aware. Sooner or later, Laconia would show them where it was weak. And between then and now, life. Charging batteries in exchange for beer. Making friends with the township. Working to crack open the mysteries of the Gathering Storm with Bobbie and Amos. Keeping the Rocinante in good trim, and keeping herself from falling into despair. It was enough to fill her days. It would have to be enough.