Persepolis Rising

Chapter Twenty-Six: Bobbie

Bobbie, Alex, and Clarissa ate lunch together in a tiny compartment with ELECTRICAL SUPPLIES stenciled on the door in four languages. It had a few unlabeled crates in it that they could use as tables and benches, so they’d taken to calling it the Diner. The meal was the heavily spiced and deep-fried balls of bean paste that Belters called red kibble. On the side they had a few bits of dried fruit, and a thin seafood soup that tasted like the flavor came from having a fish swim through the broth.

“You know what I miss most about the Roci about now?” Alex said, poking at his kibble, which rolled around his plate. “My ship knows how to make Martian food. I’m so sick of this Belter shit.”

He was exaggerating his Mariner Valley drawl the way he always did when he spoke of the ship. Bobbie laughed at him, then noisily drank off the last of her broth.

“It’s good for you, boy,” she said, mocking his drawl.

“It keeps body and soul attached, and that’s about the best I can say for it.”

Clarissa smiled at their banter, but said nothing. She was picking up a single ball of kibble at a time, then carefully chewing it. It was like watching a bird eat in slow motion.

“I wonder if the Laconians still eat Martian food,” Bobbie said. “We could ask.”

Alex tossed his plate down onto their crate-table in disgust. “You know, I think what chaps my ass more than anything else about this shit? The guys who came out of the gate and started wreckin’ our shit and takin’ over aren’t some damn aliens. It’s fucking Martians. I bet there’re people on that Laconian ship I served with back in the day. Dollars to donuts, the top brass in the Marine detachment here are people you know, at least by name.”

Bobbie nodded, chewing the last of her kibble. “That’s actually an interesting idea. I mean, could that be useful? Find some people in their command structure that know us? Is that an in?”

“I ain’t talkin’ about how it’s useful, Bob,” Alex said, nearly knocking over Clarissa’s water glass with his angry hand gestures. “I’m talkin’ about the idea that people just like us, Martian patriots, picked up and ran off with this Duarte guy, and took about a third of the fleet with them.”

“You ever wonder if it could have been us?” Bobbie asked.

Alex lowered his brows at her. “You lost your mind?”

“No, really, think about it,” Bobbie said. “We were both out of the service when Duarte started making his move. You’d been retired for a decade at that point. I’d been out of the Corps for a couple years. But if we’d still been active duty, could we have fallen for his pitch? I mean, a lot of good people did.”

“A third of the stars of heaven,” Clarissa said, as if she were agreeing.

“Uh,” Alex replied, cocking his head in confusion.

“A third of the what now, honey?” Bobbie said.

“From the Bible. Revelation. When the devil fell from grace, he took a third of the angels with him. It’s described as the great dragon pulling a third of the stars of heaven down with its tail.”

“Huh,” Alex said like he had no idea what she was talking about.

“Why’d that pop into your head?” Bobbie asked.

“Whatever story Duarte was selling was compelling enough to get a big chunk of the Martian military to buy in. The devil’s story was freedom from the oppression of God’s rules, and it was good enough to win a lot of angels to his side. Whatever Duarte’s pitch was, it’s a good one. Don’t be so sure you wouldn’t have bought it.”

“Oh, I’m pretty fucking sure,” Alex replied with a snort.

Bobbie had to admit she wasn’t. A galaxy-spanning human civilization run the way the Martians, at their best, ran things. Organized, focused on a single overarching goal. Efficient, well planned, not wasting anything. She could see why that appealed to a lot of people when Mars was watching its dream of terraforming die. Duarte could step in and sell them a new dream that used all the same skills and attitudes that the old one had, but was even grander in scope. Bobbie recognized that there was a version of her that was fighting on the Laconian side right now, and it made her itchy.

Alex had started to gather up the plates and cups from their meal when Amos walked into the room. “Hey, Babs. Cap wants to see us about that thing.”

“Which thing?”

“The making-sure-no-more-bombs-go-off-we-don’t-know-about thing.”

“Oh, that thing. Be there in five,” she replied, and he shrugged and walked off without another word.

“Still kinda chafes, don’t it?” Alex said, his voice gentle.

“What? Hearing him go back to calling Holden ‘Cap’?” Bobbie said, ready to shrug it off. But something caught in her throat. “Yeah. I gotta admit it does. I might have a word with him on that.”

“Be gentle,” Clarissa said. “He’s fragile right now.”

Bobbie had no idea what the word fragile meant when applied to Amos. She wasn’t sure she wanted to learn.

Saba leaned against one wall in the larger storage space that they’d been using as their insurgent-cell meeting room. Someone had finally pushed all the crates and boxes up against the walls to serve as seating, and some enterprising thief on the crew had even managed to steal a few benches from one of the parks. About twenty members of their group were scattered around the space, including Holden, Naomi, and Amos.

On the wall screen behind Saba was a diagram of Medina, and a picture of a severe-looking woman with black hair and a lot of facial piercings. She stared at the camera with angry eyes, giving the picture a mug-shot feel. The name Katria Mendez floated beneath her photo.

“The Voltaire Collective,” Saba said, pointing at her. “Bomb throwers from ancient days.”

“Fighters,” someone in the room replied, making the word a term of respect.

“Sa bien,” Saba replied. “Now with Laconia? They go back to the old script.”

“Apart from the fact that their strategy doesn’t work anymore and it’s fucking our shit up, they seem like people we want in our team,” Holden said. “We should recruit them. Coordinate with them. Killing them or feeding them to the Laconians should be our last option.” He sounded a little scattered. Distracted. She wondered what was up with him. He knew something or suspected something that was eating up all his spare cycles. Bobbie had seen it before.

Saba nodded with one fist. “If we can, we should.” He pointed to a sublevel on the Medina map marked Water Reclamation. “Holed up here, them. I say we send our envoys to make them an offer of alliance.”

Holden turned on his bench to look back at Bobbie. She gave him a tiny nod. He stood up to take a spot next to Saba and said, “I think we should send Bobbie to speak for us. She can pass along our respects, tell them we need to join up, and if they get belligerent … well, she can handle that too.”

“Agreed,” Saba said. “How many you want with you?”

“Let’s keep this small,” Bobbie replied. “Just me and Amos for now. This should feel like natural allies reaching out. Not a war party.”

“Sabe bien,” Saba said. “But this ends with they don’t plant more bombs unless we say so. Our house gets in order now. One way or.”

“Yeah,” Bobbie agreed. “One way or, that’s where this ends.”

The shortest path to Water Reclamation included a short jaunt through the inner drum. Bobbie didn’t mind. Hiding out with her resistance-fighter buddies included an awful lot of sleeping and eating in tiny metal rooms. Getting out into the habitat space with open air and a dirt floor and the full-spectrum light on her face was a welcome change.

Even the ubiquitous Laconians didn’t ruin the mood. For the most part, their conquerors were easy to get along with. They acted like people who’d lived on Medina for years: eating in the restaurants, browsing the shops, making use of the entertainment districts. If you gave them a nod, they nodded back like old neighbors. Even the Marine patrols moving past in their exotic blue power armor looked alert, but not particularly threatening.

Bobbie had seen the other version of them during the assassination attempt on the governor, so she knew they could go from friendly and professional to full rock-and-roll at the flip of a switch. Easy to get along with or not, the Laconians were a military occupation. You forgot that at your peril.

“How are you doing?” Bobbie asked as they walked through a particularly lush section of park. The lovingly tended path curved through grass, patches of flowers, and even past the occasional tree. Insects buzzed about, still the best-designed pollinating system there was. Technology did a lot of things well, but evolution had it beat when it came to environmental systems.

“My feet hurt,” Amos said. “Kind of all the time now. Glad these Belters keep the rotation at a third of a g.”

“It’s quicker to list the shit that doesn’t hurt, these days,” Bobbie said. “But that’s not really what I meant.”

“Yeah?” Amos said. His tone didn’t change at all, but Bobbie had flown with him for a couple decades now. She could hear the tension that had crept in.

“Claire thinks maybe you’re having a tough time right now.”

“Does she.” Amos’ voice had gone so flat, it might have been a badly written computer simulation of him. He was checking out of the conversation. Pushing it farther wouldn’t help.

“Anyway,” Bobbie said, keeping it light. “You need anything, I’m up for whatever.”

“Yeah, I know, Babs,” Amos said. “But these Voltaire guys are no joke. We better get our game faces on.”

The Voltaire Collective occupied a dusty crawl space beneath and between half a dozen gigantic stainless-steel tanks. It was a good spot. Unless the piping sprang a leak, there was literally no reason for anyone to come down to the space. The Collective definitely still had some skill sets left over from their OPA resistance-fighter days. Katria Mendez in person was all hard angles and sharp edges, and her dark eyes burned with a constant low-level fury.

“You’re actually coming here to lecture us on how to run an occupied insurgency,” she said. Her voice was gentle and warm. The voice of a favorite teacher, or beloved aunt. A voice that asked if you wanted some lemonade with your cookies. It also had the precise diction and studied lack of accent that Bobbie associated with advanced education. Her Belter accent could have been measured in parts per billion.

“Not at all,” Bobbie started.

“Because,” Katria continued, “the Collective has been a militant branch of the OPA, resisting inner-planets control, for nearly a century.”

“I understand,” Bobbie said.

“Do you? Because it seems like you just showed up here and told us that we’re not allowed to run any resistance operations without your consent. Or did I misunderstand what you were telling me?”

Bobbie heard shuffling feet behind her, and turned around to see five members of Katria’s cell had taken up a loose semicircle at her back. None of them held weapons in their hands, but they all wore the loose-fitting jumpsuits of the Medina Station maintenance workers. Lots of big pockets that could be hiding anything from a hammer to a compact machine pistol. Amos, standing to her left, caught her eye without losing his smile. He took a half step back, managing to make it look casual.

“Look,” Bobbie said to Katria, stepping up and looking down at her from their half-meter height difference. “We didn’t come here to start a fight. As far as I’m concerned, we’re all on the same team. But if you force it to go the other way, we’re prepared for that, too. And I promise you it will not go the way you want.”

“Honestly, I’m just not sure why Saba didn’t come himself,” Katria said, not backing down at all. “Or why he thought sending a Martian and an Earther to tell Belters how to fight was the right message.”

Bobbie didn’t know any answer to that other than because we’re the most intimidating soldiers he’s got, now that walking through Medina with firearms has become a really bad idea. She winged it instead.

“Because maybe that is the message. Because this isn’t about Belters and inners and last century’s bullshit. Because now it’s about all of us versus the assholes who popped out of their gate thirty years into our game and decided they get to flip the table over.”

Katria nodded and smiled. “That’s actually not a terrible answer.”

“Then let’s ease down,” Bobbie said, taking a half step back again to give Katria her space. “Let’s find a place to sit and have a drink and chat about how all of us can work together to fuck these Laconian assholes up. Yeah?”

“You keep giving me that eye, boy, and I’m gonna pull it out of your head and hand it back to you,” Amos said, his tone so mellow and conversational that it took Bobbie a moment to recognize the threat was real. He was looking back at the semicircle of OPA toughs at their back, directing his empty gaze at them. But Bobbie saw a vein at his temple throbbing like he was at risk of a stroke. The muscles moved under his skin like taut cable dragging over his jawbone.

“Amos,” she said, and then she wasn’t talking anymore because she was in a fight.

Amos threw himself at someone behind her, and she heard grunts and the meaty thud of fists hitting flesh, but she couldn’t turn around to see what was happening because a long knife had appeared in Katria’s hand and the woman was dancing toward her. Fighters, one of Saba’s people had said. And like the Laconians, the Voltaire Collective folks also seemed ready to go from zero to a hundred at the flip of a switch.

Bobbie didn’t have time to dance with Katria, nor did she want to get herself stitched up from a knife fight, so she straight-kicked the woman in the diaphragm and dropped her to the deck with an explosive oof. She took a second to kick the knife away, then started to turn when something heavy slammed into her cheek.

Through the explosion of stars in her vision, she saw Amos grappling with two men at the same time, choking one with his left arm while he slammed the second man into one of the water tanks over and over again with his right. A third man had climbed onto his back and was attempting a sleeper hold, but couldn’t get his forearm under Amos’ chin to lock it up. The other two OPA goons were flanking Bobbie, and one of them was holding the crowbar he’d just cracked her cheekbone with. In the sort of slow-motion clarity Bobbie always experienced during a fight, she saw skin and blood on the crowbar’s edge.

Oh, she thought, that’s why my face feels wet.

Crowbar was pulling back for another swing, while his partner tried to get behind her. Bobbie decided Crowbar was the more serious threat and lunged at him to get inside the arc of his swing. His arm went around her, and she felt the bar slam into her shoulder blade, which made her right arm go pins-and-needles numb. She threw a throat punch at him with it, and even though she couldn’t feel it, her arm did what she told it to. Crowbar dropped his weapon and clutched his throat with both hands, gagging.

His partner kicked her in the back, twice. One kick hit her kidney, and the other her butt. While the kidney shot might have her pissing blood for a few days, it was the kick to the ass that almost put her on the ground. It felt like someone set off a small bomb in her lower back, and she felt a sharp crack that almost certainly meant he’d snapped her tailbone.

She turned to see him unleashing another kick, and managed to mostly sidestep it, letting it bounce off her hip and forcing him to stumble forward into her. She grabbed hold of his left arm and rotated through the hips to throw him face-first into a pressure-monitoring console a few feet away. He hit it with a thud and a crunch, and started to sag.

Then, just because he’d kicked her in the ass, she snapped his left arm before she let him drop.

Five minutes later, Katria and her five friends sat or lay on the floor, hands tied behind their backs. Amos had an eye that was already starting to swell shut, and four scrapes down his cheek that looked like he’d been clawed by a big cat. Bobbie had carefully avoided looking at her own face in anything reflective. But based on the volume of blood in her shirt, the wound on her face had to be pretty grotesque. There goes my not-needing-stitches plan. The pain in her backside also meant she wasn’t going to enjoy sitting for the next couple of months. That thought made her want to kick the unconscious man with the broken arm again. Or maybe Amos.

“Katria,” Bobbie said, leaning down over the Voltaire Collective cell leader. “Is it okay if I call you Katria?”

If Katria had any objections, she kept them to herself.

“Great. So, look. This could have gone better. We kicked your ass and you’re pissed now, I get that. If you want to be part of the revolution, great, we’d love to have you. But you run all your ops through Saba’s group. That’s nonnegotiable. Anything else, and we’re killing you and hiding your bodies in the fertilizer-recycling system.”

Bobbie grabbed the front of Katria’s shirt and picked her back up to her feet, then kept lifting until they were eye to eye.

“Do we understand each other?”

To her surprise, Katria laughed. There was a brightness in her eyes that looked like fever. “We do indeed,” the woman said. It could have been a sparring partner’s salute or the threat of retribution. Bobbie really wished she could tell the difference.