Persepolis Rising

Chapter Two: Bobbie

The transit from the slow zone was behind them and Freehold was still weeks away, but an atmospheric landing in a ship as old as the Rocinante wasn’t the trivial thing it had once been. Age showed up in unexpected ways. Things that had always worked before failed. It was something you prepared for as much as you could.

Bobbie squinted at a wall panel on the engineering deck and watched as a long list of data scrolled by, ending with the ship’s reassurance that it could handle at least one more descent without burning up.

“All greens on the atmospheric braking thrusters,” Bobbie said.

“Hmmm?” Alex’s sleepy drawl replied from the panel.

“You awake up there? This is your damn landing prep list. I’m down here doing the work. Could at least seem interested.”

“Yeah, not sleepin’,” the pilot replied, “just got my own list of shit to do.” She could hear his smile.

Bobbie closed the diagnostic screen. Verifying the status on the thrusters was the last item on her work order. And short of putting on a suit and climbing outside to physically look into the nozzles, there wasn’t much more she could do.

“I’m going to do some housekeeping, then head up,” she said.

“Mmhm.”

Bobbie put her tools away and used a mild solvent to wipe up some lubricant she’d spilled. It smelled sweet and pungent, like something she’d have cooked with back when she’d been living alone on Mars. Anxiety pushed her toward preparing more for the mission even after she was prepared. In the old days, this was when she’d have cleaned and serviced her power armor again and again and again until it became a kind of meditation. Now, she went through the ship the same way.

She’d lived on the Rocinante for more years now than anyplace else. Longer than her childhood home. Longer than her tour in the Marines.

The engineering deck was Amos country, and the mechanic kept a tidy shop. Every tool was in its place, every surface spotless. Other than the oil and solvent, the only other smell in the compartment was the ozone scent that hinted at powerful electricity coursing nearby. The floor vibrated in time with the fusion reactor on the deck below, the ship’s beating heart.

On one bulkhead, Amos painted a sign that read:

Bobbie patted the words as she walked by and climbed onto the ladder lift that ran up the center of the ship. The Roci was at a very gentle 0.2 g braking burn, and there had been a time when riding the lift instead of climbing the ladder would have felt like admitting defeat, even if the ship was burning ten times that hard. But for the last couple years Bobbie’s joints had been giving her trouble, and proving to herself that she could make the climb had stopped mattering as much.

It seemed to her that the real sign you were getting old was when you stopped needing to prove you weren’t getting old.

The hatches separating each deck slid open at the lift’s approach, and then quietly closed after she’d passed. The Roci might be a decade or two past her sell-by date, but Clarissa tolerated no sticking or squeaking on her ship. At least once a week, Claire made a complete pass through every environmental system and pressure hatch. When Bobbie had mentioned it to Holden, he’d said, Because she broke the ship once, and she’s still trying to fix it.

The lift hummed to a stop on the ops deck, and Bobbie stepped off. The hatch up to the cockpit was open. Alex’s brown and almost entirely bald head poked up over the back of the pilot’s crash couch. The crew spent most of their working time in Operations, and the air felt subtly different. Long hours spent in the crash couches meant the smell of sweat never entirely went away, no matter how hard the air recyclers worked. And, like any room James Holden spent a lot of time in, the comfortable scent of old coffee lingered.

Bobbie ran a finger along the bulkhead, feeling the anti-spalling fabric crackle under the pressure. The dark-gray color had faded, and it was getting harder to tell where the fabric didn’t match because it had been damaged and patched and where it was just aging unevenly. It would need to be replaced soon. She could live with the color, but the crunching meant that it was losing its elasticity. Getting too brittle to do its job.

Both of Bobbie’s shoulders ached, and it was getting trickier to tell the difference between the one that had been explosively dislocated during hand-to-hand training years before and the one that just hurt from decades of not being gentle with her body. She’d picked up a lot of battle scars during her life, and they were getting harder and harder to differentiate from the normal damage of wearing out. Like the discolored patches on the Roci’s bulkheads, everything was just fading to match.

She climbed the short ladder up through the hatch into the cockpit, trying to enjoy the ache in her shoulders the way she’d once enjoyed the burn after an intense workout. As an old drill sergeant had told her, pain is the warrior’s friend. Pain reminds you that you aren’t dead yet.

“Yo,” Alex said as she dropped into the gunner’s chair behind him. “How’s our girl look?”

“Old, but she can still get around.”

“I meant the ship.”

Bobbie laughed and called up the tactical display. Off in the distance, the planet Freehold. The mission. “My brother always complained I spent too much time looking for metaphors.”

“An aging Martian warrior living inside an aging Martian warrior,” Alex said, the smile audible in his voice. “Don’t have to look too hard there.”

“Not too aged to kick your ass.” Bobbie zoomed in on Freehold on their tactical screen. A mottled marble of brown continents and green oceans, with the occasional white swirl of cloud. “How long?”

“We’ll be there in a week.”

“Talk to Jizz lately? How’s my future baby daddy doing?”

“Giselle is fine, and she says Kit is doing great. Picked planetary engineering as his major at Mariner Tech.”

“It is the hot job market right now,” Bobbie agreed.

She’d been Alex’s best man when he’d married Giselle, and she’d waited at the hospital on Ceres when Kit had been born thirteen months later. And now Kit was going into upper university, and Alex had been divorced for over a decade. He was her best friend, but he was terrible husband material. After his second failure at it Bobbie pointed out that if he just wanted something to hurt, she could break his arm for him and save everyone time.

But for all the unnecessary drama, Alex and Giselle’s short-lived trainwreck of a marriage had produced Kit, and that made the universe a better place. The boy had all of Alex’s laconic charm and all of his mother’s regal good looks. Every time he called her Aunt Bobbie, she wanted to hug him until his ribs cracked.

“When you reply, make sure to tell Jizz I said ‘fuck off,’” Bobbie said. The failure of the marriage wasn’t entirely Giselle’s fault, but Bobbie had picked Alex in the divorce, so acting like she blamed his ex for everything was part of the best-friend pact. Alex pushed against it, but she knew he also appreciated her saying all the things that he couldn’t.

“I’ll send Giselle your love,” Alex said.

“And tell Kit that Aunt Bobbie says hi, and I want new pictures. Everything I have of him is a year old. I wanna see how my little man is filling out.”

“You know it’s creepy to flirt with a kid you’ve known his entire life, right?”

“My love is a pure love,” Bobbie replied, then switched tactical to the mission parameters. Freehold had a population of just under three hundred, all Earth-born. They called themselves an Assembly of Sovereign Citizens, whatever that meant. But the colony-ship manifest had included a lot of firearms and ammunition. And with the weeks the Roci had spent dropping down toward Freehold’s sun, the locals had had plenty of time to work themselves up.

Reading along with her, Alex said, “Captain’ll need some backup down there.”

“Yeah. Talking to Amos about that is the next thing on my list.”

“Taking Betsy?”

“This is probably not a Betsy-level situation, sailor,” Bobbie said. Betsy was Alex’s nickname for the suit of Martian Marine Recon armor she kept in the ship’s cargo bay. She hadn’t put the thing on in years, but she kept it operational and charged anyway. It made her feel warm and comfortable knowing it was there. Just in case.

“Copy that,” Alex said.

“Where is Amos, anyway?”

It was subtle, the difference between Alex being at ease and Alex trying to sound like he was at ease. “Ship thinks he’s in the sick bay,” Alex said.

Clarissa, Bobbie thought. Well, shit.

The Rocinante’s medical bay smelled like antiseptic and vomit.

The antiseptic came from the little floor scrubber that was humming around the room, leaving a trail of shiny decking in its wake. The acid-and-bile smell of vomit came from Clarissa Mao.

“Bobbie,” she with a smile. She was on one of the med bay’s couches, an autodoc cuff around her upper arm that buzzed and hummed and occasionally clicked. Claire’s face would tighten at each click. Injections, maybe, or something worse.

“Hey, Babs,” Amos said. The hulking mechanic sat at Claire’s bedside reading something on his hand terminal. He didn’t look up when Bobbie entered the room, but raised a hand in greeting.

“How’re you feeling today?” Bobbie asked, grimacing internally as she said it.

“I’ll be out of bed in a few minutes,” Claire said. “Did I miss something on the pre-landing check?”

“No, no,” Bobbie replied, shaking her head. She feared that Claire would tear the tubes out of her arm and leap out of bed if she said yes. “Nothing like that. I just need to borrow the lunk for a minute.”

“Yeah?” Amos said, looking at her for the first time. “That okay with you, Peaches?”

“Whatever you need,” she said, gesturing at the med-bay in general. “You will always find me at home.”

“All right,” Amos stood up, and Bobbie guided him out into the corridor.

Surrounded by the fading gray walls, and with the sick-bay hatch closed behind him, Amos seemed to deflate a little. He leaned his back against the wall and sighed. “That’s tough to watch, you know?”

“How is she?”

“Good days and bad days, same as anyone,” Amos said. “Those aftermarket glands she had put in keep leaking their rat shit into her blood, and we keep filtering it back out. But taking ’em back out would fuck her up worse, so …”

Amos shrugged again. He looked tired. Bobbie had never really been able to figure out what the relationship between the Roci’s mechanic and his tiny counterpart was. They weren’t sleeping together, and it didn’t seem like they ever had. Most of the time they didn’t even talk. But when Claire’s health had started its decline, Amos was usually there by her side in the sick bay. It made Bobbie wonder if he’d do that for her if she got sick. If anyone would.

The big mechanic was looking a little thinner himself these days. Where most big men tended toward pudge in their later years, Amos had gone the other direction. What fat he’d had was gone, and now his arms and neck looked ropey with old muscle just under the skin. Tougher than shoe leather.

“So,” he said, “what’s up?”

“Did you read my briefing on Freehold?”

“Skimmed it.”

“Three hundred people who hate centralized authority and love guns. Holden’s going to insist on meeting them on their turf, because that’s the kind of shit he does. He’ll need backup.”

“Yeah,” Amos agreed. “I’ll keep an eye on him.”

“I was thinking maybe I should take this one,” Bobbie said, nodding her head toward the sick-bay hatch. Not saying, She doesn’t look good. Amos pursed his lips, considering.

“Yeah, okay,” Amos said. “Atmospheric landing will probably shake the damn ship apart. I’ll have plenty to do here.”

Bobbie started to leave, then something made her stop. Before she knew she was going to say it, she asked, “How much longer?”

“Rest of her life,” Amos said, then went back into the sick bay and closed the hatch behind him.

She found Holden and Naomi eating breakfast in the galley. The smell of scrambled eggs with powdered onions and what passed for peppers competed with brewing coffee. Bobbie’s belly growled as soon as she walked into the room, and without a word Holden pushed a plate toward her and began slopping eggs onto it.

“Enjoy, because this is the last of the real eggs until we get back to Medina,” Holden said as he dished her up.

Naomi finished chewing a mouthful and said, “What’s going on?”

“Did you guys read my threat assessment on Freehold?”

“Skimmed it,” Holden replied.

“First-generation colony,” Naomi said. “Eight years since founding, and it’s still only got one township on it in a semiarid temperate zone. Low-level agriculture, but most of the food supply is salvaged hydroponics. Some goats and chickens, but the livestock is surviving on the hydroponics too, so not the most efficient model. Lithium in the planetary crust and a weirdly lot of uranium trapped in polar glaciers that hopefully means it’ll be easily harvested helium if they ever get the infrastructure to mine something. Charter that calls for radical personal autonomy enforced by a citizen militia made up of the whole colonial population.”

“Really?” Holden said. “The whole population?”

“So three hundred people who like guns,” Naomi said, then pointed at Holden. “This one will insist on getting off the ship and speaking to them in person.”

“Right?” Bobbie said, then quickly shoveled a heaping scoop of eggs into her mouth. They were as good as her nose had promised they’d be.

“This has to be done face-to-face,” Holden said. “If not, we could just have radioed the message to them from Medina and saved ourselves the trip.”

“Diplomacy is your thing,” Bobbie said. “I’m strictly concerned with tactical issues. And when we talk to the powers that be on Freehold, we’ll be telling them there’s no reason not to just start shooting and hope for the best.”

Holden pushed his half-empty plate away and leaned back with a frown. “Explain that.”

“You really should read my assessments.”

Naomi grabbed Holden’s mug and moved over to the coffee machine. “I think I know where she’s going with this. You want any coffee, Bobbie?”

“Yes, thank you,” Bobbie said, then pulled up the tactical assessment on her hand terminal. “These are people who left Earth to form a colony based on personal sovereignty. They believe in the absolute right of each citizen to defend themselves and their property, with lethal force if necessary. And they are well armed for this purpose.”

“I followed that part,” Holden said.

“They are also years from self-sustaining at this point. The reason they’re relying on hydroponics is that they’re having a difficult time developing soil for their greenhouses. Something about the mineral content. The money they’ve been able to get from preliminary mining futures is all going to Auberon for agricultural supplies trying to get around that. They don’t agree that the Transport Union should be taking tariffs on any basic life-sustaining trade. Which is what got us here.”

Naomi handed her a steaming mug of coffee with lots of cream, just the way she liked it. Holden nodded in a way that probably meant trouble. He’d understood what she was saying.

“How long till they have local crops?” Naomi asked, leaning over her shoulder to look at the report.

“I don’t know, but that’s not the issue here—”

“The issue here,” Holden said, “is that we’re delivering a death sentence. Isn’t that right? We’re going to land and tell them they’re cut off from trading with other colonies. And they know they’re going to run out of usable food in a few months, and won’t be able to grow their own for years. The union is putting them in an impossible position. And by union right now, I mean us. We are.”

“Yes,” Bobbie agreed, glad he seemed to understand. “These are people who believe in the inviolate right to use lethal force in defense of their own lives. When we land and tell them they’re cut off, we’ll leave them with no reason not to try to take the ship.”

“I don’t understand the penalty,” Naomi said. “Seems harsh.”

“Drummer’s been waiting for this one, I’d guess,” Holden said. He didn’t look happy. “The first colony to really test how far the union will go to protect its monopoly on gate usage. And she’s going to crush this first example so hard that no one else will even try. She’s killing one colony now so she doesn’t have to kill thirteen hundred colonies later.”

The idea hung in the air like smoke over a poker game. Naomi’s expression mirrored Bobbie’s concern. Holden had the inward focus he got when he was thinking about something too hard for safety. A three-year timeout was rough. A three-year timeout when you’d start starving in less than one was something worse. Motive enough for violence, at least. Maybe something more.

“So,” Bobbie said, “this is going to be interesting.”