Persepolis Rising

Chapter Thirty-Two: Holden

The electric cart they rode on seemed almost as old as the station. The magnetic wheels gripped the ramp and kept them on track even as the spin gravity of the drum fell slowly away. If Medina Station had followed its intended path, it would have been well away from Earth by now, gone into the vast depths between the stars where spare carts were pretty hard to come by. The Mormons had built everything about the ship to last for generations, to grow and renew itself, to recycle with the least possible loss. Medina Station would outlive them all.

Except that he was going to blow a hole in it.

Amos rode shotgun, his hands splayed wide on his knees, his head freshly shaved. From his place in the backseat, Holden mostly saw the back of the big man’s neck—white skin flecked with age spots but still muscular and hard. He didn’t need to see the amiable smile to know it was there, and how little it meant. A massive conduit wrench clanked at Amos’ feet. Katria drove with the studied boredom of someone who knew the consequences of drawing the attention of station security. Her hair was already in a tight bun, prepped for the null g of engineering. She tapped her palm against the side of the cart as if she were listening to music, so maybe she already had her earpiece in. Holden tried to lean back against the seat, but in the lower g, it just scooted him forward. The bomb rested on the bench beside him like a fourth person.

It wasn’t big. A square box, safety orange with scratches at the edges and corners, the marks of long use. He didn’t know exactly what was inside it, only that Katria was certain it would blow the right kind of hole into the pressure tanks and that the ruptured pressure tanks would blow the right part of the station apart. She also said that, in its present form, it was both hard for security to detect and stable enough to play football with if you didn’t mind a square ball. Still, Holden didn’t rest his elbow on it.

They were nearly at the top of the ramp when a line of carts stopped them, all heading the same direction as they were and all stuck waiting. At the entrance to the transfer point, three Laconian Marines in power armor were talking to a dark-skinned woman in a green jumpsuit.

“Checkpoint,” Holden said.

“Inconvenient,” Katria said. She sounded like it was an annoyance more than an immediate threat to all their lives and the safety of everyone in the underground who was counting on them. He really did admire the way she did that.

The raid had come two shifts before, when Holden had been in his sleep cycle. Between the time he’d curled up in the bunk and put his head on the thin pillow and when he’d opened his eyes again, a quarter of Saba’s people had been snatched up and a man named Overstreet was on all the screens in the station telling the rest of Medina about it. And the Typhoon was already past its flip-and-burn, braking now toward the other side of the Laconia gate. They weren’t saying exactly when it was supposed to arrive, but their data placed it at around ten days. And the news from Sol looked grim, even correcting for the fact that it was all coming through the state-run newsfeed.

The noose was drawing tight. And in order to have any chance of escaping it, they were about to at least risk the lives of, and most probably kill, a bunch of people who were on the engineering decks at the wrong time.

“Holden. Do you have to do that?” Katria asked.

“Do what?”

“Grunt.”

“Was I grunting?”

“Cap does that when he’s thinking about something he don’t like,” Amos said.

“He has a wide variety to choose from,” Katria said.

From the way they talked, Holden could almost believe that they wouldn’t kill each other, given the chance. Almost, but not enough that he was sorry to be there. Maybe Katria really didn’t hold a grudge about the fight that Amos had started. And maybe Amos wasn’t spoiling to start another one. Or maybe the bomb was the most stable thing in the cart.

“I’ll think happy thoughts,” Holden said. “Butterflies. Rainbows.”

“What the fuck is a butterfly?” Katria said.

The cart ahead of them shifted, and they followed. It took fifteen minutes to get to the guards and then a minute and a half to get past them. Their cover story—Holden and Amos were applying for on-station work permits since their ship was locked down, and Katria was taking them to an on-site test—never even came up. Katria drove the cart to its queue, strapped the bomb to her back, and led them into the engineering decks, moving from handhold to handhold with the unremarked grace of someone who’d spent a good portion of their life on the float. Amos followed with the conduit wrench in his fist like a club.

Once the drum was well behind them, Holden pulled the earpiece out of his pocket and turned on the contact microphone.

“—is clear,” Clarissa said. “Can you confirm?”

“Yup,” Alex replied, his voice slow in the way that meant he was concentrating. “I’m moving my little pixies through now. Gimme just a … All right, I’m through.”

“Turning the recycler back on,” Clarissa said.

Clarissa and her team were in the drum, tapped into the environmental controls through a back door that, if they were found out, Saba would never be able to use again. Alex was back in the underground’s galley, flying the drones with his hand terminal and several layers of encryption. Naomi and Bobbie were, he assumed, loitering outside the secure server room, ready to force their way in. It was strange hearing their voices as if they were with him. It made him feel like he was back on the Rocinante.

The engineering decks of Medina were a lesson in the way ships learned and changed over time. If he squinted, he could still see the bones of the original, unmodified space, but years and mission drift had altered everything. Here, a section of floor had a slightly different color where a bulkhead had been taken out. There, a set of conduits had been rerouted with the three-point welding style that Martians favored. The pipes along the walls were labeled in half a dozen languages and safety-regulation styles. History made physical. Even where the walls were had changed over the years, added extra reinforcement from when the docks had been built or taken away when the new generation reactors had been put in place. Katria led the way down a side corridor, moving from handhold to foothold to handhold. Amos followed close behind her, only crowding her a little, and she seemed not to notice. Or at least not to care. Their little triumvirate. Katria to place the charge, Amos to keep an eye on her, and Holden to keep an eye on him.

A young woman floated past them, coming the other way. She had an electrician’s rig strapped to her arm, and her hair was the same texture Naomi’s had been when they’d first met. She passed Katria, then Amos. When she and Holden landed at the same handhold, she smiled an apology and pushed quickly off. He wondered whether they were about to kill her. Seemed possible. He hated the thought.

“Alex?” Bobbie said. “You’re awfully quiet there, buddy. Everything all right?”

“Yeah, sorry. Just … there’s a little lag. It’s not bad, but it makes me paranoid. Last thing I want is one of these charges to go off in a vent someplace. Take the whole group out.”

“That would be bad,” Bobbie agreed.

“Jim?” Naomi said. “Are you on yet?”

“We’re here,” he said softly. “Past the checkpoint. Not at the pressure tank yet.”

“There was a checkpoint?” Bobbie said.

Amos’ voice was calm. “Nothing we couldn’t handle, Babs.”

“I’m coming up on the last turn here,” Alex said.

“There’s a carbon dioxide scrubber intake,” Clarissa said. “Don’t get caught in the draft. I’m accessing it now.”

Katria started whistling between her teeth, a tuneless sound that her mic didn’t pick up. They reached an access panel with caution placards in a dozen languages and half the colors of the rainbow. CAUTION HIGH PRESSURE SYSTEM. Katria plucked a knife from her boot and pried the panel open as casually as if she did it every day.

“Make sure no one’s coming,” she said.

“You got it,” Amos replied, sailing on a little farther down the corridor and slipping to the center of the narrow space so that anyone coming the other way would have a hard time getting past him and his massive wrench. Katria pulled the bomb off her back and popped the case open. The workings inside didn’t look like much. A cone of carbon-silicate lace, the same as a ship’s plating. A hand terminal. A pair of standard wires. It didn’t look like enough to do much damage. Certainly not enough to blow out the side of the station. But of course, it wasn’t. That was all coming from the pressure tanks on the other side of the bulkhead. This was just the pin that popped that balloon.

“Okay,” Clarissa said. “You’re good to go.”

“Heading through,” Alex said. “And we’re past. The vent for the server room should be just ahead. Looks … looks a little higher grade than I was expecting.”

“Do we have a problem?” Bobbie asked. He could hear the tension in her voice. The electrical technician he’d bumped into intruded into his memory, and with it the faint and compromised hope that maybe it would all go wrong and they’d have to abort the mission.

“I think we’ll be fine,” Alex said. “My little pixies here are armed for bear. But I’m pulling five of them back around the corner here so they don’t get mussed up when the vent goes.”

Katria closed the case, set it in behind the access panel, squinted at it, shifted it fifteen degrees. What was it like, Holden wondered, being able to picture blast cones in your mind? What kind of life did you have to lead to have that come naturally? Katria rubbed her throat, and when she spoke, her voice had doubled, coming from the air they were breathing and through the earpiece. The reverb gave her words a weight.

“We’re done here. We’ll see you in the place.”

Meaning, the shelter. Where, when Naomi and Bobbie joined them, they could trigger the blast and wipe out the evidence.

“Hey,” Katria called down the corridor. “You coming?”

Amos floated back toward them as Katria slid the panel back into place and slipped her knife back into her boot. They were skimming along through the air together when it all fell apart.

“Um,” Alex said. “I think we’ve got a problem here.”

“What’s up, Alex?” Bobbie asked.

“Well, I got my little pixie looking through this vent. I’ve got eyes on both of these Laconian fellas, and one of them’s got his hand on something that sure looks like a dead man’s switch.”

“That’s not protocol,” Bobbie said.

“It ain’t Martian protocol,” Alex agreed. “But I’m pretty certain that’s what I’m seeing here. If I move forward with this, I won’t even have the door open before the Laconian fellas know about it. You’re going to be ass deep in alligators pretty damned quick.”

“We knew we were going to have to move fast,” Bobbie said. “This just means we move faster.”

“It means more than that,” Clarissa said. “It means they’ll log the alarm. The whole point of blowing out the pressure tanks was so they wouldn’t know we’d compromised them. If the secure room shows an alert right before the explosion, they’ll know what we did. They’ll change all the procedures. The data we recover won’t be worth anything.”

The silence lasted one long breath. Then another. Holden felt something in his chest loosen, it was almost like relief. And almost like dread too.

He knew what had to happen before anyone else did.

“All right,” Bobbie said, and Holden could see her clenched jaw as clearly as if she were there with him. “Let me think.”

“You’ll be fine,” Holden said. “Just wait until the … I don’t know. The tenth alarm goes off.”

“The tenth what?” Alex said, but Holden plucked out his earpiece and the mic and tossed them to Amos. The big man caught them in one wide hand.

“You going somewhere, Cap?”

“Yeah,” Holden said. “Can I borrow that wrench?”

Amos pushed it gently out to him. It was massive enough that Holden had to readjust his grip on the handhold to stop it.

“Am I getting that back?” Amos asked.

“Maybe. You get Katria to the shelter. Everything goes forward, just like we planned.”

Amos’ face went still as a mask for a moment, and then he smiled his empty smile. “You got it.”

Holden squared himself on the wall’s footholds and launched down the corridor. In an instant, Amos and Katria were behind him. It’ll be okay, he told himself, but he didn’t dig into why that might be true. He was pretty sure it wouldn’t hold up.

It only took about twenty seconds to find a panel with a manual fire alarm. He flipped the case open, pulled the switch down, and a Klaxon started screaming. One.

In the next corridor, he picked a thin copper pipe, set the wrench around it and pulled until it popped. Green fluid that stank like vinegar and acetate spewed out into the hall. Somewhere, the system would register the pressure drop and raise a flag. That was two. He heard voices shouting from the main deck. They weren’t raised in panic, not yet. More like they were trying to be heard over the alarm. He passed a radiation alarm and tripped that too—three—then headed toward the voices.

Naomi would understand, even if the others didn’t. She knew him well enough to follow his mind without so much as a question. There were two ways to hide something. Either put it where no one could see it or leave it in plain sight with a thousand others just like it. If the alarm went off in the secure room, that would mean one thing. If a bunch of alarms went off all through the engineering and dock levels, and it was only one, maybe the guards had panicked. It would just be more noise in the chaos. Unremarkable.

In the wide space leading to the transfer hub, half a dozen people were clinging to a wall, each of them talking over the others. He recognized the electrical tech they’d passed going in.

“Hey,” he shouted, waving his wrench. “Can’t you people hear? Get to the shelters!”

It was enough to start them moving. He picked another corridor at random and launched himself down it. He broke three electrical conduits, tripped another fire alarm and another radiation. If he could make his way down closer to the reactors, there’d be more he could break, but there would also be guards there. The wrench was unwieldy and massive enough that cracking the conduits and pipes open was starting to leave his shoulders and palms aching. He ducked into an access crawl and pulled two power exchanges out of the wall. That had to be good for at least one alert. He floated out into another hallway. The engineering deck was drowned in a cacophony of blaring alarms. He pulled himself toward a ladder. When the station was under thrust, it would lead down toward the drive cones.

It took the Laconians about two minutes to find him, but it felt like longer. Holden was trying to fit the wrench behind a support strut when two Marines in power armor came around the corner, their suits clicking as the actuators fired. Holden started to raise his hands, but the first one slammed into him before he had the chance. The impact knocked a few seconds off his awareness. The next thing he was sure of, there was a barrel pressed just above his left eye and his ribs hurt badly when he tried to breathe.

“You just fucked up, old man!” the guard growled.

Holden blinked. “I surrender,” he said. Breathing really hurt. There were bones broken. He was sure of it.

“You don’t have that option,” the guard said. Holden realized his life was now based on whether a Laconian Marine who looked like he was maybe in his early twenties had the self-control not to shoot his brainpan empty out of anger and excitement. Holden nodded.

“I understand, sir,” he said, and hoped that submission and respect would be enough to keep that one critical neuron from firing. “I am not resisting. You got me. I’m no threat.”

“CJ,” the other Marine said.

The one with the gun snarled, pulled back a few centimeters, and hit Holden along the side of his face hard enough to split the skin. Bright red globes of blood flew in a cloud and painted the pale anti-spalling cloth of the hallway. The pain was dull first, and then bright.

“You are an ungrateful piece of shit,” the Marine—CJ, apparently—said. “If we were someplace civilized, your sad ass would be in the pens.”

“What are the pens?” Holden asked, and the guard hit him again, hard against his right ear. He had the impression that CJ enjoyed this kind of thing. Holden wasn’t frightened so much as resigned. He’d known that he’d be trading his freedom for the chance that Bobbie’s plan would work. And for the electrical tech’s life. He was past the good part of his plan now, and the bad part might last a very long time or a very short one. Either way, probably the rest of his life.

CJ hauled him out into the free air where there was nothing for Holden to grab onto. A drop of his blood smeared the Laconian’s faceplate.

“What the fuck do you have to say for yourself now, asshole?” CJ said, shaking him just enough to make his teeth rattle. Holden took a deep, painful breath.

“We should probably get to an emergency shelter,” he said.