Persepolis Rising

Chapter Fifteen: Bobbie

As an operator in the Orbital Drop Task Force, Bobbie had trained with Spec Ops personnel from every command in the Martian military for a single purpose: the invasion of Earth. And while the old axiom “If you wish for peace, prepare for war” was not without its skeptics, that skepticism wasn’t shared by the Martian military. The doctrine that drove Mars in the century and a half following its declaration of independence relied on it. Mars would never have as large a population or as big an industrial base as Earth. The only thing that prevented Earth from reconquering her wayward colony was a constant demonstration of Mars’ willingness and ability to hit back hard. As long as they could land on Earth streets, Earth would hesitate to fight in their tunnels.

Bobbie and her fellow Marines in Force Recon regularly and visibly trained for that day. They took drugs and worked out in full gravity until Earth would be merely uncomfortable, not bone-crushing. They practiced dropping from orbit in troop carriers and one-person pods. They trained in urban pacification and insurgent elimination. They learned to make up for what they lacked in troop numbers by using aggression and intimidation to keep the conquered people in line. She had literally spent years preparing to move through the streets of Earth commanding obedience through the threat of death.

The invasion and conquest of Medina Station was civilized by comparison. She wondered whether that would last.

Four Laconian Marines in their power armor stood watch in the dock offices, mag boots locked to the deck, and kept a close eye on the line of people waiting to talk to the dockmaster. But while they appeared vigilant, they were not aggressive. They acted like their presence was sufficiently intimidating to keep the populace in line. With some sort of slug thrower built into the armor in each forearm, and a pair of what looked like grenade launchers on each shoulder, Bobbie decided they were right. There were probably thirty people on the float waiting for the dockmaster. The four Laconians looked like they could have handled ten times that number.

She’d been like them, once.

“I like your suit,” she said to the Laconian closest to her.

“Excuse me?” he said, not looking at her, continuing to scan the room.

“I like your suit. I wore an old Goliath back in the day.”

That got his attention. The Laconian looked her over once, feet on up. He was so much like the teams she’d trained with when she’d joined up, it felt like looking back through time. She wondered if he was as ignorant as she’d been back then. Probably. Hell, maybe more so.

“MMC Force Recon?” he said. There was something like respect in his voice.

“Once was,” she agreed. “You guys have made some improvements.”

“Studied the Recon operators at the academy,” the Laconian said. “You guys were the real deal. Heart breakers and life takers.”

“Less and less of both, as time goes on,” Bobbie said, and tried out a smile. The Laconian smiled back. He was half her age, at most, but it was nice to know she could still pull ’em when she wanted to. She could have imagined the kid on the tube station back at home. Shit, he probably had family back on Mars.

“I bet you do okay,” he replied, still smiling. “You see any action?”

She smiled back, and the kid realized what he’d said. A little blush touched his cheek.

“Some,” Bobbie said. “I was on Ganymede in the lead-up to the Io Campaign. And I was on Io.”

“No shit?”

“I don’t suppose there’s any way an old Marine could try one of those suits out, is there?” Bobbie said, ratcheting the smile up a notch. I don’t use sex as a weapon, she thought to herself. But I’d love to get my hands on your outfit.

The Laconian started to reply, then got a distant look on his face that Bobbie recognized. Someone on the group comm was talking in his ear.

“Move along, citizen,” he said to her, the smile gone.

“Thanks for the time,” she said, then pulled herself to the back of her line.

The wait was long and uncomfortably warm. The others there with her had flight-suit patches from a dozen other ships, and the same hangdog expression. It was like they were being treated this way because they’d done something to deserve it. Bobbie tried not to look like that.

The dockmaster’s office was small and harshly lit. She identified herself and her ship, and before she could give any context, the new dockmaster cut her off.

“As a military vessel, the Ceres-registered ship called Rocinante is now impounded by the Laconian Naval Command.” He was a small, dark man in a Laconian naval uniform, and the look on his face was the mix of boredom and irritation shared by all natural-born bureaucrats. A screen on the wall listed all the ships in the slow zone and their statuses: LOCKDOWN in red, over and over again like it was a mantra. The counter in front of him glowed with the name CHIEF PETTY OFFICER NARWA.

“Okay,” Bobbie said. She’d waited in line for nearly two hours to get up to the window, and she certainly hadn’t done it to be told things she already knew. Behind her, the press of bodies was enough to give the office a little extra warmth, the air a little too much closeness. “I understand that. But I have questions.”

“I feel like I’ve told you everything you need to know,” Narwa said.

“Look, Chief,” Bobbie said, “I just need to get a few clarifying details and I’m out of your hair.”

Narwa gave her a delicate shrug of his shoulders. If there had been any spin gravity, he’d have leaned on the counter. He looked like a guy who ran a noodle shop in Innis Shallows. She wondered if they were related.

“I own that ship,” Bobbie continued. “Is this a permanent impound? Are you commandeering it? Will I be paid any compensation for the loss of the ship? Will I or my crew be allowed on board to get our personal effects if the ship is being confiscated?”

“A few points?” Narwa said.

“Just those,” Bobbie agreed. “For now.”

Narwa pulled something up on the counter and flicked it over to her. She felt her hand terminal buzz in her pocket.

“This is the form you can fill out to file for return of property or compensation for the loss of the ship. We are not thieves. The navy will provide one or the other.”

“What about our stuff,” Bobbie asked. “While the naval wheels of justice slowly turn?”

“This form,” Narwa said, and her terminal buzzed again, “is to get an escorted pass onto the ship to get your personal items off it. They’re usually processed within forty-eight hours, so you shouldn’t have to wait long.”

“Well, thank—” Bobbie started, but Narwa was already looking at the person behind her in line and yelling, “Next.”

“Any word from Holden and Naomi yet?” Alex asked.

“Not yet,” Amos said, tapping his hand terminal with a thumb. “System’s pretty loaded up right now, though. May be getting stuck in queue.”

“They have it in lockdown,” she said. “There’s not going to be free comms on Medina that aren’t getting scanned by their systems.”

“Sounds like that could add some time to delivery,” Amos said.

“Standard occupation protocols care a lot more about security than convenience,” Bobbie said. “Message tracking, air-gapped encryption, pattern-based censorship, human-review censorship, throttled traffic. You name it.”

It fit with everything else that was suddenly changed and beyond her control. She couldn’t have her ship. She couldn’t get her people back together. She had to ask permission and an escort to let her retrieve her own clothes. So of course their messages were getting stuck in Medina’s system. They’d found a bar on the inner face of the drum. The long ramp from the transfer point at the center of spin had been thick with carts and people on foot, some heading up toward the docks, and many—like them—coming back down. The grim expressions had been the same both ways.

“I was captain for about a week,” Bobbie said, the beer in her cup sloshing dangerously as she jabbed at the air with it. “I mean, depending on if you count from when Holden offered it to me. Or when we did the paperwork. The paperwork came later, so officially, I guess. Houston clocked as much time in control of the Rocinante as I did.”

“You’re drunk,” Alex said, gently pushing her beer hand back down to the table. He was sitting next to her at a long, faux-wood table. Amos and Clarissa sat across the table from them. Amos had a beer in his hand and half a dozen empties on the table and didn’t appear impaired in the slightest. Clarissa had a plate of cold, soggy french fries in front of her and was using them to push ketchup into spiral art.

“I’m a little drunk,” Bobbie agreed. “I was just starting to like the idea of being captain of my own ship and these Laconian assholes took it away.”

She punctuated the word Laconian by jabbing her glass toward one of their Marines walking past the bar. Beer splashed across the table and into Clarissa’s fries. She didn’t seem to notice or care. Bobbie plucked up her napkin and dabbed the worst of it away anyhow, with only a little pang of guilt.

“And that’s why you need to ease down on the brews, sailor,” Alex said, just taking the glass away from her now. “We need to skip past this grief stage and get on to the kickin’-ass and gettin’-our-ship-back stage.”

“You got a plan?” Amos asked. His tone said he found this dubious.

“Not yet, but that’s what we need to be doing,” Alex shot back.

“Cuz, a couple hundred Marines, one destroyer in the docks, and one whatever the fuck that flying violation of the laws of physics is,” Amos said, pausing to sip his beer and smack his lips. “That’s gonna be one hell of a plan. I gotta get in on that action.”

“Hey, asshole,” Alex said, half standing up from his chair. “At least I want to do something more than feel sorry for myself.”

“This here?” Amos said. He pointed at the Marine outside, the security drones that now hovered over every part of Medina’s drum, the people in Laconian Navy uniforms everywhere. “I’ve seen this before. This is us getting paved over. All we can do now is try to find some cracks to grow through.”

“Cracks?” Alex said, then sat back down with a thump. “How long I known you? Half the time I still got no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“No one is doing anything,” Bobbie said. “Not till I give the order. We get this pass to get our stuff off the Roci, maybe we can start making a strategy from there. I may not have a ship, but I can sure as hell still have my crew.”

“Be nice to sneak a gun or two off the ship,” Amos agreed.

“Be nicer to find a way to get Betsy off,” Alex said to her. “If that’s possible.”

“So until then, we wait,” Bobbie said, then started pressing on the table trying to order another beer. “I just wish I understood what this Duarte asshole wants.”

“They haven’t started killing people,” Amos said. “I mean, it’s still early days. Lots of room for shit to go pear-shaped.”

“But why now?” Bobbie waved her arms around at the bar, at Medina, at all of human space beyond them. “We were just starting to figure this shit out. Earth and Mars working together, the colonies talking out their problems. Even the Transport Union turned out to be a pretty good idea. Why come kick the table over? Couldn’t he have just pulled up a chair with the rest of us?”

“Because some men need to own everything.”

The voice was so quiet, it took Bobbie a moment to realize Clarissa had spoken. She was still making ketchup art with her french fries and not looking at any of them.

“What’s that, Peaches?” Amos said.

“Some men,” Clarissa replied, louder and looking up at them now, “need to own everything.”

“Hell, I met this Duarte guy,” Alex said. “I don’t remember him being—”

“This sounds like personal experience,” Bobbie said, cutting him off. “What are you thinking, Claire?”

“When I was a little girl, I remember my father deciding to buy up a majority share in the largest rice producer on Ganymede. Rice is a necessity crop, not a cash crop. You’ll always sell everything you can grow, but the prices aren’t high, because it’s easier to grow than a lot of other things. And at that time, his companies had an annual revenue in excess of one trillion dollars. I remember an advisor telling my father that the profits from owning rice domes on Ganymede would add a one-with-five-zeroes-in-front-of-it percent to that.”

“Not sure I—” Alex started, but Clarissa ignored him, so he trailed off.

“But the largest food producers were the rice growers. They had the biggest domes and farms. The most real estate. By owning a controlling share in their company, my father was in a position to dictate policy to the Ganymede Agriculture Union. It meant, in terms of Ganymede food production, he couldn’t be ignored by the local government.”

“What did he use that for?” Bobbie asked.

“Nothing,” Clarissa said with a delicate wave of one hand. “But he had it. He owned an important piece of Ganymede, a thing he hadn’t controlled before. And some men just need to own everything. Anything they lay their eyes on that they don’t possess, it’s like a sliver in their finger.”

Clarissa pushed her soggy fries away and smiled at them all.

“My father could be the kindest, most generous and loving man. Right up until he wanted something and you wouldn’t give it to him. I don’t know why I think this, but Duarte feels the same. And these are men who will mercilessly punish anyone who won’t comply, but with tears in their eyes and begging you to tell them why you made them do it.”

“I knew a few guys like that,” Amos said.

“So, he won’t stop until he has it all,” Bobbie said. “And it looks like he has the tech to make it work. The armor, that destroyer, and that planet killer floating outside. All of this? They all look like they came out of the same factory to anyone else?”

“Yeah, it’s protomolecule shit,” Amos agreed. “Some of it looks like the stuff growing on Eros.”

“I’m seeing a timeline here,” Bobbie said.

“We were looking into those missing ships when I talked to this Duarte guy,” Alex said. “It was about the time Medina was throwing a lot of probes through the gates to get a gander at the usable planets.”

Bobbie finally got the ordering screen to come up on the table, but on impulse bought a glass of club soda instead of another beer. It felt like something important was on the tip of her mind, and she didn’t want to drown it in booze.

“So,” she said, letting the words come out of the back of her head, hoping her subconscious had an insight it hadn’t shared yet. “A probe finds something in the Laconia system, something that makes ships and armor and who knows what else.”

“What, like a big volumetric printer that says, ‘Insert protomolecule here’ on the side?” Amos scoffed.

“Hey,” Alex replied, “we found a planet-sized power generator with moons that could turn off fusion.”

Amos considered that for a moment. “Yeah. Fair enough.”

“Marco’s people are running a fifth column on Medina by that point,” Bobbie continued. “Duarte must have been working with them already. Said he’d slip them a fat payday for early info on the ring probes. They call him up and say, ‘Hey, we found this awesome thing.’”

“He hands them a bunch of Martian ships,” Alex said.

“And Marco starts fucking up the solar system while Duarte takes the rest of his fleet and a bunch of like-minded Martians and takes over in Laconia,” Bobbie finished.

“Where he spends a few decades making ships and fancy armor and whatnot, then rolls through the gate ready to name himself king,” Alex said as her club soda arrived.

“Which means Marco was just a tool,” Bobbie said.

“Kind of knew that,” Amos chimed in.

“Free Navy kept everyone distracted while Duarte got set up on Laconia. And we’ve been sitting here patting ourselves on the back and trying to keep all the food supplies where they need to be for thirty-odd years while he’s been getting ready to kick the shit out of us,” Bobbie said. “Alex, maybe you should write up your thoughts on meeting him. What kind of guy he was.”

“I sat in his office for a few minutes. There are probably some people on Medina who served around the same time he did,” Alex said. “If we can find where the Martian vets hang out, we could see if anyone knew him.”

“Yeah, that’s a good—” Bobbie started, then stopped when she noticed Amos stiffen in his chair. The big mechanic’s hand drifted toward his right hip and the gun that was no longer there since the Laconian weapon sweeps.

“Amos?” she said.

“Trouble on the move,” he replied with a gentle tilt of his head.

The people he’d nodded toward were a group of Belters, old-school OPA by the tats. They were walking through the drum section nearby. They wore coats too large and heavy for the constant perfect weather of Medina’s drum section, and several carried large bags. They kept their heads down and moved fast, like people with a purpose. She recognized one of them. Onni Langstiver, the asshole head of security.

“What’s over there?” Bobbie asked.

“Some offices? The banking section, and some administrative stuff,” Alex replied.

“The Laconians took it over,” Clarissa added.

“Here we go,” Amos said, and stood up. In the distance, the Belters were pulling things out of their coats and bags. Bobbie felt the surge of adrenaline in her blood the same moment as the calm descended on her: danger followed immediately by the well-cultivated response to danger. It felt like being home.

Bobbie looked around the little bar for likely cover. Nothing within ten steps looked like it would stop a bullet, so she grabbed Alex with one arm and Clarissa with the other and pulled them both to the ground with her. Amos was still standing up, watching the drama play out.

“Get down, you idi—” Clarissa started, but whatever else she was about to say was drowned out by the gunfire.