Persepolis Rising

Chapter Thirty-Five: Singh

“An improvised explosive device punctured a liquid-oxygen storage tank on deck four of the engineering section,” Overstreet said. He was reading from a report that scrolled by on the monitor wrapped around his thick forearm. “We’ve recovered very little of the device itself, but what few pieces we have indicate it was made with material common to this facility. It’ll be difficult if not impossible to track the exact source.”

Singh sat and listened to the report and tried to look present and thoughtful. But the truth was, his mind was bouncing around like a tiny animal trying to escape a predator. He found he only processed about half of what Overstreet was saying. His hands were shaking so badly that he didn’t trust himself to pick up the glass of water on the desk in front of him. He kept them under the desk, where Overstreet wouldn’t see them. The sense that he was in immediate danger was inescapable because it was true.

“The damage to that deck was significant. Total loss of the primary liox storage. The thrust from the breach caused the station’s maneuvering thrusters to fire, and the shaking knocked down several structures in the habitat cylinder. The network-traffic station for the Storm was completely destroyed. A backup environmental-systems plant was significantly damaged, and will probably not be repairable.”

“The Storm,” Singh said. My first command. The symbol of Laconian power at Medina.

“This is preliminary, of course,” Overstreet replied, flicking one finger to skip down the report on his arm. “It does seem like that might have been the target of this attack, so minor hull damage and the loss of one sensor array feels like we got off light.”

Singh’s hands felt like they were shaking hard enough to be visible, even under the desk, so he gripped his thighs with both hands and held on tight.

“Preliminary casualty reports?”

“Again, light,” Overstreet said. “At this time, we have five confirmed Laconian fatalities, three from the engineering detail, two from security. Seven injuries ranging from life threatening to minor. Only two locals confirmed dead at this time. But we also have another dozen missing, so that number will probably go up.”

“To be willing to do so much damage to their own station, to their own people, just to try to hurt us …” Singh said, then trailed off.

“We have several persons of interest in custody,” Overstreet said. “One of them was setting off alarms immediately before the blast. It’s possible he wasn’t involved, but the coincidence seems unlikely. I will be debriefing him once we’re done here.”

“Is he a local?”

“Former captain of a Transport Union ship. James Holden.”

Singh frowned. “Why do I know that name?”

“Apparently he’s something of a celebrity, sir. He was involved in the Io Campaign and the defeat of the Free Navy back in the day.”

Both things that had happened when Singh was a child. The old guard still playing old-guard games.

“We will need to make the strongest possible response to this,” Singh said.

Overstreet nodded, his face grim. The hesitation meant something that Singh didn’t understand. “Sir, the radical factions of the Outer Planets Alliance fought a guerrilla war with Earth and Mars for nearly two centuries. The veterans of that war are almost certainly in leadership positions in this insurgency. That means we have some difficult decisions to make. About the scope of response.”

“I’m sorry,” Singh said. “I’m not following …”

“Insurgencies are historically nearly impossible to eradicate, for a few very simple reasons. The insurgents don’t wear uniforms. They look just like the innocent populace. And, they’re the friends and family of that populace. This means that every insurgent killed tends to increase recruiting for the insurgency. So unless you are willing to rack up a sizable civilian casualty count, we can’t just shoot everyone we suspect. If we take the strongest possible response, we stop calling it counterinsurgency and start calling it genocide.”

“I see,” Singh said. He’d studied counterinsurgency and urban pacification at the academy, of course. Afghanistan had been impossible to conquer going all the way back to Alexander the Great. Ireland in the twentieth century. The Belter troubles for the last two centuries. It was different reading about it, but now he saw how this cycle of violence could go on and on for him too. “I’m not prepared to execute every Belter on the station.”

Overstreet seemed to relax without visibly moving at all.

“I agree, sir. All we can do is make it harder for them to operate,” Overstreet said. “We’re going to have Marines enter every compartment on the station. Anything we don’t control or have immediate use of will be sealed and the atmosphere removed. It won’t end this, but it’ll make it harder for them to plan and execute with no spaces under their control.”

“Agreed,” Singh said. “You have authorization to conduct this operation, and shut down any sections of the station you see fit. Let’s see if these people can work in daylight, not hiding in the sewers.”

Overstreet stood and saluted, then headed for the door. But just before he left, he turned back as if suddenly remembering something. “Sir, you might consider putting more pressure on your civilian informants. This is exactly the sort of thing they should be doing for us.”

“Yes,” Singh agreed. “That’s next on my list.”

The Belter with the badly broken nose—Jordao, Singh thought he called himself—was ushered into the office by two Marines. They held him by the arms, his feet barely touching the ground. His expression was somewhere between angry and sniveling.

“Put him down,” Singh told the Marines. When Jordao moved toward a chair, he said, “Don’t sit.”

“Sabe, bossmang.”

“You know about the attack?” Singh’s hands had mostly stopped shaking after Overstreet left, so he took a sip of his water. It was all playacting. Look calm, casual, in control. Make Jordao feel like Singh already knew the answer to every question he was asked. Make him afraid to lie. It seemed to be working. Jordao rubbed his hands together and bobbed his head like a supplicant.

“Sa—I mean, yes, boss, I heard.”

“It shook the station hard enough to knock down buildings in the drum section,” Singh said. “So, of course, everyone knows about it. I’m not asking that. I’m asking if you know about it.”

“Knew the underground was up to something, them, but details? I don’t—”

“Because, you see,” Singh continued, “I released your sister from our lockup as a down payment for future services rendered. Services like letting me know when a bomb was going to blow up half the engineering section of my station, for example.”

All the servility left Jordao’s face. Singh watched it happen, like a switch had been flipped in the man’s head. He was a man who would grovel only so far and no farther. It was a useful fact about him, though it did seem to diminish his value.

“Old OPA, them, sa sa que? The ones the inners couldn’t kill,” Jordao said, not attempting to hide his thick Belter accent now. “The ones like me? We never get to know.”

“Before you leave this room, you will give me a list of every name you think might be involved in this underground so we can add them to our surveillance list. You will also make sure that whatever happens next, you are part of it, so that we can catch the conspirators in the act and bring the full force of the law against them.”

Jordao was shaking his head. “Kenna nothing, you—”

“Or,” Singh continued. “I will have your sister rearrested, tried for larceny and crimes against the empire, and hanged in a public space as a warning to others.”

Before Jordao could respond, Singh nodded at his Marines, and they picked the Belter up off the floor again. “He doesn’t leave until his list is delivered and verified.”

“Copy that, sir,” one Marine said, and saluted with the hand that wasn’t holding Jordao.

The Belter looked from him to the Marine and back again, understanding blooming in his eyes. Understanding and fear.

When it was over and he was alone in his office, Santiago Singh found that he very much wanted to send a message to his wife. Tell her how afraid he was. Tell her that maybe accepting this assignment had been a terrible mistake. That walking the line between the man he had always thought he was and the ruthless authoritarian ruler the job required of him wasn’t something he could do and remain whole. That the man who could order civilian deaths as a reprisal could not share the same space with the man who loved his wife and played with his daughter and couldn’t wait for her to get old enough so he could buy her a kitten.

But he couldn’t make that call, because the explosion had cut the Storm off from the station, until they could replace the network encryption node. Which was probably a good thing, because he suspected that everything he would have told his wife was a lie.

The truth—the one that he didn’t think he’d ever be able to admit to her—was that he could be both men at once. He’d already delivered the ultimatum to Carrie Fisk that any colony world that joined the resistance would be destroyed. He understood that, should it become necessary, he could order Overstreet to execute every person on the station that hadn’t come through the gates on the Tempest and the Storm. The Marine commander would do it. And that when Natalia and the monster arrived, he would be able to hold them and kiss them and be the man he’d always been around them. And know that he’d made them safe.

That was what terrified him. Not that the job would force him to be both of those men but that he was capable of being both. That all it would take is a bit more pressure, and Santiago Singh would be a man who loved his daughter with all his heart and who also ordered genocides.

He tapped at his desk. “Chief.”

“Sir,” came the immediate reply.

“How long until we have the network back up so I can send traffic back through the Storm?”

“It’s on the priority list. I’ve been told eleven hours until the replacement system is in place.”

“Thank you,” Singh said. “Please let me know the instant it’s done. I have priority traffic for Laconia.”

“Yes, sir. Sir? On that topic, the Storm reports traffic incoming from the Sol gate, marked highest priority. They have a courier bringing it over now.”

“Very well. Bring them directly in,” Singh said, then killed the connection.

It seemed too early for the Tempest to be reporting the Sol system’s surrender, but he was open for a pleasant surprise. According to his tactical map, they would barely be crossing the asteroid belt now. Their projections placed the earliest expected surrender point at the Mars crossing.

Singh needed a distraction to pull himself out of his self-pitying and introspection. Whatever Admiral Trejo needed to tell him so urgently, it was bound to be interesting.

The petty officer who was ushered into his office half an hour later was a tall woman with pale hair that had been turned dark by sweat. She was breathing heavily, and her uniform was damp.

“Sir,” she said, then held out a small black wafer to him.

“You look terrible, sailor,” Singh replied, taking the chip. “Are you all right?”

“The Marines are using all the carts for patrol duty, so …”

“Did you actually run this over all the way from the Storm?” Because of the attack, traveling from the ship to his office meant donning a vacuum suit, moving through the damaged sections of the station, then removing the suit and running down the long spiraling ramp that went from the center of rotation down to the drum floor. And after that a kilometer-and-a-half run across the drum to reach his office complex.

“Yes, sir,” the petty officer said, starting to get her breathing under control.

“I’ll be sending my compliments to your senior chief. Outstanding effort, sailor. Take a moment to clean up, and we’ll round up a cart to drive you back.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said, then gave him a sharp salute and left.

Part of the self-pity trap that Singh had realized it would be easy to fall into was the terrible sense of being utterly alone in his job. He needed more interactions with his fellow Laconians. With his ship, and the sailors under his command. He needed these reminders that he wasn’t working alone. That hundreds of like-minded and dedicated professionals shared the dream of the empire. Singh made a mental note to spend more time on the Storm.

He rolled his monitor out onto the desktop and dropped the small black chip on it. “Transfer all files and wipe,” he said, then when the monitor blinked its acknowledgment, snapped the little black chip in two and dropped it in the recycler.

Admiral Trejo’s face appeared on his monitor. Singh found he was a little excited. Trejo was a man with even greater responsibility than his own, and one who handled it with dedication and grace. He was a man who always knew the right thing to do, and did it without hesitation. If Singh wanted to spend more time with the Laconian sailors like himself, he wanted to be Admiral Trejo. He told the monitor to play the message.

Trejo’s face blurred into motion, and his expression became one of puzzlement, and maybe even fear. “Sonny. Something’s happened, and we have no idea what it is or what to do about it. We need some help.”

He paused, and something like dread took root in his expression. “It seems we’ve taken on a passenger of sorts.”

Singh watched the message play out in fascination and then horror and then fascination again.

The object—there really wasn’t any other word to describe it—was a floating sphere of light and darkness hovering about three feet off the deck in a corridor on the Heart of the Tempest. Just looking at a recording of it on the monitor’s small screen made his head hurt. Someone passed a length of pipe through it and back again on the recording. The pipe did not seem to interact with the object at all. And in fact Singh had the sense that he saw both the pipe and the object at the same time with equal clarity even when that should be impossible. It made his head hurt even worse.

Mercifully, the person with the pipe stopped doing it, and Trejo began speaking.

“As you can see, the anomaly doesn’t seem to exist as a physical object. It doesn’t appear to radiate on any wavelength, except for visible-spectrum photons. Not one sensing device we’ve aimed at it can even tell that it’s there, but we can record it and see it just fine. Being in the same room with it, looking at it, it’s quite disorienting and causes double vision and severe headaches.”

As if in response to this, four sailors set up a curtain around it using poles and blankets. While they worked, Trejo continued. “It’s moving with us. With the ship, because we’re still under thrust and it hasn’t moved a millimeter since it first appeared. I’ve tried making some minor course adjustments, but it keeps us as its frame of reference. I’ve included all the data we’ve collected on this file, but I can tell you that its first appearance almost exactly matches the moment when we destroyed Pallas Station. It also includes a nearly three-minute blackout shared by every single person on this ship.”

The sailors had finished setting up their curtain, and left. Trejo pulled his monitor close, so his face filled the screen. He lowered his voice, as though telling Singh a secret.

“If this is some new weapon of the inner planets, we need to understand it and now. Blacking out a crew for three minutes, the right three minutes, would create a serious tactical advantage for them. I need you to pass along this information to Laconia through our most secure channels. Get me answers fast, Sonny. I’m about to engage with the combined might of the inner planets’ navies, and this is the first thing that’s made me wonder if I can win.”

Singh sank back in his chair, and rubbed his face with both hands. What if everything, including the attacks on Medina, had just been a distraction? What if the inner planets needed time to bring some new superweapon to bear, and feints and jabs from the Sol fleet and his own insurgents were just to create confusion and buy time?

“Major Overstreet?” Singh said to his monitor.

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll need a cart with an armed guard. I’m going to the Storm.”

“Copy that, sir,”

Singh took another data chip out of his desk, laid it on the monitor, and copied all the files Trejo had sent. He then told his monitor to wipe everything. He placed the chip into a lockable metal briefcase, and waited for his ride to arrive.

While he waited, something tugged at his mind. Some memory, from the academy, maybe. Another mention of a sphere of light and darkness. It had to do with the first wave of colonization, even before the high consul had led his people to Laconia …

He took a moment to have his monitor search the local network for any mention of such an object with the properties Trejo had described.

The search took less than a second, and what it found was a minor colony world named either Ilus or New Terra. In among the list of names connected to what the article was calling the “Ilus Incident” was one that his monitor underlined. When he tapped it, he understood why.

In the report, Captain James Holden of the Rocinante had reported seeing the exact object that was currently residing on Admiral Trejo’s ship. The same James Holden who was now in their security lockup, under suspicion of terrorist acts.