Persepolis Rising

Chapter Eleven: Bobbie

When the Roci pulled into port at Medina, the security detail was there to take Houston into custody. Bobbie watched Holden as the prisoner marched away. She thought there’d been a melancholy look in Holden’s eyes. The last thing he’d done as captain was hand over a man to live in a cell. Or she might have been reading more into the situation than was there. Drummer’s threatened press release didn’t appear.

After that, they’d all gone out to a club. Naomi rented a private room for all of them, and they’d eaten a dinner of vat-grown beef and fresh vegetables seasoned with mineral-rich salt and hot pepper. Bobbie tried not to get drunk or maudlin, but she was the only one. Except Amos. He’d watched all the hugging and weeping and protestations of love like a mom at a five-year-old’s birthday party, indulgent and supportive, but not really engaged with it.

After they’d eaten, they went out to the floor of the club and danced and sang karaoke and drank a little more. And then Holden and Naomi left together, their arms around each other’s hips, strolling out into Medina Station’s corridors as if they were going to come back. Only they weren’t.

The four of them made their way back to the port talking and laughing. Alex was reciting lines and acting out scenes from one of the neo-noir films he collected. She and Clarissa egged him on. Amos grinned and ambled along behind them, but she saw him watching the halls in case four old half-drunk space jockeys attracted any trouble. Not that there was a reason to expect it. It was just something he did. She noticed it in part because she did it too.

Back at the ship, the others scattered, floating to their rooms. Bobbie waited in the galley sipping a bulb of fresh coffee until they were gone. There was still one more thing she wanted to do before she called it a day, and it was something she wanted to do alone.

Around her, the Rocinante ticked as the residual heat of their journey slowly radiated out into the absolute vacuum of the slow zone. The air recyclers hummed. A sense of peace descended over everything like she was a child again and this was the night after Christmas. She let her breath deepen and slow, feeling the ship around her like it was her skin. When she finished the last drop of coffee, she put the empty bulb into the recycler and drew herself down the corridor to Holden’s cabin. The captain’s cabin.

Hers.

Holden and Naomi had taken everything out already. The drawers were unlocked. The captain’s safe was open and scrubbed, waiting for a new access code. The double-sized crash couch—the one Holden and Naomi had shared for so long—gleamed, clean and polished. The slightly acrid smell of fresh gel told her that Naomi had replaced it all before she went. Clean sheets for the new tenant. Bobbie let herself drift into the space, stretching out her arms and legs. Eyes closed, she listened to the peculiar quietness of this cabin, how it was like the one she’d been using these last years. How it was different. When she reached out to take a handhold, the wall was still a half a meter away. A double-sized crew cabin, created so Naomi and Holden could share the space, had become the privilege of being the Rocinante’s captain. She smiled at the thought.

The safe waited for her passcode. She fed it the prints from her thumb and two index fingers, then typed in the password she’d chosen and spoke it out loud for the system to learn. Sixteen digits long, committed to her memory, and not associated with anything outside itself. The safe closed with a solid clack, magnetic locks falling into place where it would take a welding torch and a lot of time to force. She pulled up her partition on the wall screen, checking to see that everything was in place. The drive was quiet, the reactor shut down, the environmental systems well within the green. Everything just the way it should be on her ship. It was going to take a while, she figured, before that thought didn’t seem like she was playacting. Better that she got used to it, though. Her ship.

Four messages waited for her in the queue. The first two were automated messages, one confirming the docking agreement and fee structure for their present stay on Medina, the other showing the withdrawal from the group account of Holden and Naomi’s lump cash-out. The Rocinante already sending her the things it used to route to Holden. The third was from Medina traffic control, but the fourth was from the man himself. James Holden. She opened that one first.

His face appeared on the screen, floating in the same room she was in now, back when it had been his. He was smiling, and she felt herself smiling back.

“Hey, Bobbie,” he said, and his voice seemed loud in the quiet. “I just wanted to leave this here for you as a note. I’ve spent a lot of time on the Roci. My best moments are part of this boat. And a bunch of the worst ones. And most of the people I love. I can’t think of anyone else in thirteen hundred worlds I’d trust with it the way I trust you. Thank you for taking this cup from me. And if there’s ever anything I can do to help out down the line, just say so. I may not be part of the crew anymore, but we’re still family.”

The message ended, and she flagged it to be saved. She opened the one from traffic control. A young man with deeply black skin and close-cropped hair nodded into his camera at her.

“Captain Holden, I am Michael Simeon with Medina Station security. I am sending this to inform you that, in accordance with union policy, the Rocinante is being called to a mandatory security contract. Your presence is required at a briefing on the incoming ambassadorial contact from Laconia at the location and time embedded in this message. Please confirm that you or your representative will be attending.”

Bobbie tapped the reply, considered herself in the screen for a moment before she pulled her hair back into a bun, and scowled her reply.

“This is Captain Draper of the Rocinante,” she said. “I’ll be there.”

Ten minutes into the briefing, Bobbie thought, Oh. This is why he didn’t want the job anymore.

The room was in the drum section of the station, up near the nonrotating command decks. The desks were lined up in rows like the worst kind of classroom, with hard seats and built-in drink holders that didn’t quite fit the cheap ceramic mugs they’d given out. There were around forty people in the uncomfortable seats with her—representatives of all the ships presently in the slow zone—but she and the executive officer of the Tori Byron had places of honor. Front row, center. Where the smart kids sat. The Rocinante and the Tori Byron were, after all, the only gunships around Medina at the moment. All the rest were tugs and cargo haulers.

The man at the front of the room wasn’t the one who’d summoned her, but his boss. Onni Langstiver was the head of the security forces and so, for the length of her mandatory temporary contract, technically her boss. He wore a Medina Station uniform like it was a mech driver’s undersuit. Dandruff dotted his shoulders.

“The biggest thing is we don’t want to seem aggressive,” Langstiver said, “but we don’t want to look passive either.”

In her peripheral vision, the others nodded. Bobbie tried to crack her knuckles, but she’d already done it twice since she sat down and her joints were silent. Langstiver went on.

“We’ve got the rail-gun emplacements on the hub station, same like always, sa sa? So that anyone tries anything, we spark those up and—” The director of station security for the Transport Union cocked his fingers into little gun shapes and made pew-pew noises. “Probáb they come through like any ambassador. Dock, talk, and los politicos do their dance. But if they come through with ideas, we’re ready. Not starting, but not a clean shot too, yeah?”

A general murmur of assent.

“You have to protect the guns,” Bobbie said. “The rail-gun emplacements on the hub station? If they get a force onto the surface—”

“Savvy, savvy,” Langstiver said, patting the air. “This is the Tori Byron, yeah?”

“What we need is intelligence about what’s coming through that gate before it comes through,” Bobbie said, knowing as the words passed her lips that she wasn’t going to be thanked for them. Still, now that she’d started …“A dozen probes going through the gate now could relay back whether we’re looking at a Donnager-class battleship or a few gunships or just a shuttle. How we get ready for any of those should be different—”

“Yeah, thought of that,” Langstiver said. “Don’t want to be provocative, though, yeah? And anyway, we’re not going to act much different no matter what. Working with what we’re working with.”

“So send a ship through with a fruit basket,” Bobbie said. “Greet them on their territory and get a report back.”

Langstiver stopped and stared at her. She stared back. The room was quiet for a long breath. Then another. He looked away first. “Can’t send a manned ship through. Union rules. Is in the work agreement, yeah? So we put Tori Byron up like an honor guard. The Rocinanate in Medina’s shadow, make sure no one lands that isn’t welcome. Everyone else in dock or cleared out enough to put a clear path between Laconia gate and Medina. Everyone that gets delayed, the union picks up the fees. Tori Byron gets full security contract schedule. Rocinante gets three-quarters for support role. Standard.”

Bobbie wondered what Holden would have done in this moment. Made an impassioned speech about how the union rules were restricting them past the point of tactical competence? Smiled his I-don’t-actually-like-you-very-much smile, then gone back to the ship and done whatever the hell he wanted to do anyway? Or sucked it up as a battle that wasn’t worth fighting?

Only it was her battle now, and while she was very clear that she was in the right, it was also evident that her position wasn’t going to help her change Langstiver’s plan. She couldn’t beat sense into a stone. Not even when it seemed fun to try.

“Understood,” Bobbie said.

All the way back to the dock, her jaw was clenched. It was just people. They were the same everywhere. She’d dealt with bureaucracy when she was in the service and when she’d done her veteran’s outreach work. She’d run up against it when Fred Johnson had the idiotic plan to make her kind of an ersatz Martian ambassador during the constitutional crisis. And when she’d taken her place on the Rocinante, she’d been happy to let Holden or sometimes Naomi take point on the bullshit diplomatic dance-and-kiss charade.

It wasn’t even that she was worried about the outcome of this particular encounter. It was that there was a better approach, she’d told them what it was, and they weren’t going to do it. And her ship—her people—were going to shoulder some part of the unnecessary risk. There was no scenario ever that was going to make that okay with her.

As a generation ship, the Nauvoo hadn’t expected to berth a lot of ships. As a battleship, the Behemoth’s needs had been minimal. What hadn’t been there, time and necessity had added. The major docks on Medina Station were outside the drum, down near the engineering decks and the long-quiescent drive that had been designed to launch the ship on a centuries-long voyage to the stars. A smaller dock had been built on the far end of the drum, near the command decks, but it was used more for private shuttles and diplomatic meetings. The Rocinante was berthed in the main docks, not far from the Tori Byron, and Bobbie cycled into the airlock with her sense of rage starting to fade. A little. She could hate it and still do the job. That was all she could do, really.

“Welcome back,” Alex said over the ship comms as the inner doors of the airlock cycled closed. “There a plan?”

“Plan is to hang back and see if the new Laconian ambassador needs to show everyone how big his dick is,” Bobbie said. “The Tori Byron and the rail-gun emplacements are taking point. We’ll hang back and splash any boarding teams that get close.”

She pulled herself past the lockers, out to the lift, and up toward ops. Alex’s voice shifted from the comms to his actual voice as she got close.

“Well, good that we won’t be the first ones getting shot at. I mean, assuming anyone gets shot at all. Got to admit I’m a little bit hoping they try something.”

“You mean because Duarte and his people are a bunch of traitors to the republic who all deserve to hang for treason?”

“And theft. Don’t forget theft. And not warning anyone when the Free Navy was looking to kill a few billion people. I mean, I’m all for forgiveness and bygones being bygones, but it’s easier to stomach that after the assholes are all dead.”

Bobbie strapped herself into a crash couch. “This may not even be Duarte’s people. For all we know, he got stabbed in his bathtub fifteen years ago.”

“A man can hope,” Alex agreed. The dimness of the ops deck meant most of the light on his face was splashing up from the monitor. “I shifted the Roci back to a four-person-crew configuration.”

“It’s not enough,” Bobbie said. “We need more crew.”

“We did it this way for years before you and Claire joined up. It works better than you expect. Hey … Look, since there’s a chance that someone might be trying to poke holes through Medina Station, would you mind if I kept Holden and Naomi on the ship’s channel? Just in case?”

Bobbie hesitated. Part of her bridled at the prospect of having personnel who weren’t on the operation still be in the communications chain. But it was Holden and Naomi, and cutting them out also felt strange. Alex was waiting for an answer. She made a gesture as if she’d been thinking of something else.

“Of course not,” Bobbie said. “They’re family.” Alex’s faint smile meant he’d known she’d say it, and was glad she’d said it that way. She opened a connection to Amos and Clarissa. “Okay, everyone. Preflight checks. Let’s get ourselves into position.”

The slow zone—gates, Medina Station, and the alien hub station with the rail guns—was only tiny if compared to the vastness of normal space. The whole volume was smaller than the sun, and with the guesses she’d seen about how much energy it took to hold the gates open and stable, probably equally energetic, but controlled by forces they were still struggling to make sense of. And between the gates, a darkness that matter and energy slipped into, but from which nothing ever came back. The not-emptiness past the gates left her feeling a little claustrophobic, with only a sphere a million klicks across to move in.

Even that constrained, Medina Station would have been too small to see on her monitor if it had all been rendered to scale. Instead, she had a window with the full system—gates, stations, the Roci, the Tori Byron, the rail-gun emplacements—on one side of her monitor and three smaller displays showing tactical displays of the Roci in the needle-thin radar shadow of Medina, the Tori Byron, and Laconia gate respectively. A countdown timer marked the minutes and seconds until this Admiral Trejo said he’d be coming through. Her shoulders were tight. She felt like they were in the moment between throwing dice and seeing what numbers had come up. The gambler’s high. She didn’t like how much she liked it.

“Medina’s sensors are getting something,” Clarissa said from the engineering deck.

“Throw me the update, please,” Bobbie said, and the screen with Laconia gate on her monitor shifted to a live feed of the gate itself, enhanced in false color to make the darkness legible. The weird circle of the gate. The wavering stars beyond it, and a looming shadow coming through. Even just watching the stars go out behind it, Bobbie could tell it was a big ship. Maybe it was their Donnager-class battleship. And that in itself would be the Laconians making a statement.

Unless it was something else.

The ship that came through first looked wrong. It was something more than the weirdly organic shape of it. The way the false color struggled to make sense of its surface was like a graphical glitch or something out of a dream. She found herself looking for seams where its plating came together, and there was nothing. Her mind kept trying to see it as a ship, but defaulting to some kind of ancient sea creature from the deep trenches of Earth.

“That ain’t one of ours,” Alex said. “Shit. Where did they get that?”

“I don’t like this,” Clarissa said.

Me neither, little sister, Bobbie thought.

On the traffic-control channel, the captain of the Tori Byron was hailing the Laconian whatever it was, ordering it to come to a full stop. Bobbie nodded at the screen, willing Trejo to respond. To make this a more normal interaction. Instead the strange ship continued on its course, placid and implacable. Another drive plume still showed on the other side of the gate. Much smaller, but a second ship all the same. After a moment, the Tori Byron lit its main drive, moving itself in on an intercept. It was like watching a house cat preparing to face down a lion.

This is your final warning, the Tori Byron announced. Bobbie’s monitor updated. The Tori Byron had hit the big ship with a target lock—

And then it was gone. Where the Tori had been, only a sparkling cloud of matter so strange the Roci’s sensors didn’t know what to make of it.

“What the fuck!” Alex breathed. “Did they shoot something? I didn’t see them shoot anything!”

Bobbie’s stomach felt so heavy, it seemed like it ought to be dragging her down, even on the float. She opened a channel to the rail-gun emplacements before she was consciously aware she’d done it, the certainty growing in her even as she got the lock that it wouldn’t be enough. That nothing would be. But there was a way you did these things. An order to battle, even when the battle was doomed.

“Fire, fire, fire!” she shouted.

On her screen the rail guns spat.