Persepolis Rising

Chapter Forty-Three: Naomi

The scratch came in the middle of the third shift. If Naomi had been able to sleep, it would have been her midnight, but she was in her bunk, staring into the darkness and waiting for something she knew wouldn’t come. So she heard it—fingernails against the access door that led to the corridor. It was softer than a knock, but it meant the same thing. I’m here. Let me in.

She sat up. Her body ached like she’d worked out too hard, but it was just stress and fatigue. She pulled herself up, opened her door as Bobbie, across from her, opened her own. Bobbie was wearing a tight jumpsuit. The kind you’d put on under a vac suit. Or, she supposed, power armor. She nodded to Naomi, but didn’t speak. They were both being quiet for the others—Amos and Alex and Clarissa. The ones who could sleep, maybe. Someone ought to.

Bobbie opened the door to the public corridor.

Katria wore the uniform of the Medina maintenance crew. Green with a station logo printed on the shoulders and back. A ceramic toolbox rested on the deck by her left foot. Gray where it wasn’t scratched white by long use. Naomi guessed there was enough explosive in it to kill all of them so fast they wouldn’t know they were dead until the funeral. Katria’s nonchalance with it was like a boast. Voltaire Collective had always been like that, even back in ancient days when Earth and Mars had ruled the solar system and no one had ever heard of Protogen. Every revolution needed its mad bombers, apparently.

“Tag,” Katria said to Naomi. Then to Bobbie, “You ready to play a game?”

Bobbie put her hand on Naomi’s shoulder. “Take care of the kids until I get back.”

“I will,” Naomi said. “Good hunting.”

“Thanks,” Bobbie said. Katria stood aside and let the big woman pass. The emptiness on Bobbie’s face could have read as indifference to someone who didn’t know her. To someone who didn’t understand the kinship that Bobbie felt to Mars and its military, and to those who had served once and then been forced by conscience or circumstance to walk away.

“Bobbie,” Naomi said. “I’m sorry.”

Bobbie nodded. That was all. An acknowledgment that they both understood the situation, and would do what needed to be done. Katria plucked the toolbox up, and the two of them walked away down the corridor. Naomi closed the door behind them.

Back in her bunk and sleepless, she wondered what Jim would have done. Something idealistic and impulsive that would lead to more complications, probably. Certainly. And he would have done it in a way that kept that expression off Bobbie’s face if he could. Even if it meant doing something terrible to himself. Like languishing in a Laconian brig. An image came to her mind of Jim being tortured, and she pushed it away. Again. Feeling fear and sorrow would come later, when they were done. When he was back. There’d be time for it then. She didn’t manage actual sleep, but she was able to drift a little before the shift change. It was enough to let her feel rested, but not deeply.

She met Saba at the same public counter where they’d used the freezer, but this time they sat at the front like customers. The girl behind the counter turned up the music playing from her system speakers loud enough that they could barely hear each other, their words drowned in drums and strings and ululating voices. Saba looked as tired as she felt.

“Something happening back in Sol system,” he said. “Looks like the big fight. Not sure how it’s going to play.”

Half a dozen possibilities flashed through her sleep-starved mind ranging from the miraculously good to the catastrophically bad. It didn’t matter. Nothing that happened there changed what they were doing here. But Saba’s wife was there, back in the empty spaces where they’d all lived, once upon a time. She knew too well what that fear felt like.

“You have the list?” she asked.

Saba nodded and pressed a silver memory chip into her hand. “All the ships we could make contact with,” he said.

“How many?”

“Twenty-one.”

Naomi nodded. Twenty-one ships docked on Medina and waiting for their chance to load up and fly. It was more than she’d hoped for. It was also enough to pose some problems. “I don’t like having this many people knowing what’s going on.”

“It’s a risk,” Saba said, as if he were agreeing with something she’d said. “How does it make us for time?”

“If you don’t mind half of them vanishing in transit, we can go pretty fast,” Naomi said, more sharply than she’d intended. She shook her head, apologizing, but Saba ignored both the snappishness and the regret for it.

“Say we don’t. Everyone through the gates safe and sound. What does that look like?”

“I can’t know that until I look at the ship profiles. Mass, drive type, cargo. All of that’s going to make a difference.”

“Ballpark.”

“A hundred minutes. That’s conservative. I can probably find a way to make it less.”

The girl at the counter swung past, pouring fresh tea into their glasses. Tiny bits of mint leaf swirled in the reddish amber. Naomi took a sip while Saba scowled. “That’s a long time for the station’s eyes to stay blind. And a lot to lose if they find a way to put it back together.”

“Truth,” Naomi said.

Saba scratched his chin with the back of his hand. If they ever played poker together, it was a gesture she’d remember. His tell.

“Your technician. The one to break the system?”

“Clarissa.”

“Her, yeah. If she doesn’t do the thing and do it well, everyone on those ships is going to die from trusting me. Not disrespect, but it’s mine to say. Not sure she’s good for it.”

“Clarissa knows what she’s doing,” Naomi said. “She’s smart, she’s studied, and she knows this station. She broke it once already.”

“She’s as thin as wire,” Saba said. “I could blow her over from whistling.”

There was no humor in his face.

“I trust her with my life,” Naomi said. “No hesitation.”

“You’re asking me to trust her with more than that,” Saba said. “I don’t. Not that she doesn’t know, not that she’s unwilling or not to trust. But straight between us, sister. Putting all of us on one girl just this side of hospital? It’s not prudence.”

“I think you’re asking me for something.”

“You go with her,” Saba said. “Leave the prison work to me and mine. We’ll do that. You back up your crew.”

Naomi shook her head. “The prison’s mine,” she said. “Clarissa will do whatever needs doing. She’s got backup already. Jordao. Katria’s man. Unless you don’t trust him?”

“I don’t trust anyone,” Saba said. “Not him, not her, not you. But I work with what I have to work with, and I know you’re not going to run when things go harsh. Maybe Katria’s people will, maybe they won’t. You won’t. And … the sensors are more important than the prisons. We lose the prisons, we only lose the prisoners, savvy sa?”

He was right, and she knew it. Putting the success or failure of the mission in the hands of a medically fragile woman—however competent she was—and then not giving her the backup to deal with an emergent problem was bad practice. But in her imagination, Naomi saw the letters on her list as clearly as if she’d been reading them afresh. SAVE JIM. She shook her head. “Prison’s mine. Sensor arrays are hers. Won’t be a problem.”

Saba sighed as the music shifted key and tempo. A man’s voice growling like a bearing going bad lamented his own failings in a mix of Hindi and Spanish that she could almost follow. She looked Saba in the eyes until he looked away. “Work up a schedule, then. All the ship data’s on there. But do it fast. We have to distribute it by hand before we pull the trigger.”

“Two hours,” Naomi said. “I’ll have it ready.”

An hour later, there was still no word from Bobbie. No way to check in. They waited in their bunks, the doors open on their little common hallway. Amos stood in the head, leaning against the sink with his arms crossed. Alex sat in the doorway of his cabin. Clarissa stretched out on the deck like a bored teenager waiting for the hours to pass until she could begin living. Her skin was unnaturally smooth and tight. It helped the illusion. Naomi sat on her bunk, hand terminal in her lap, and arranged the flight schedule while they talked.

“I don’t know,” Alex said. “I mean, sure, it’s a risk that there’ll be ships waiting on the other side of the gates. There have got to be some queuing up to get to Medina when they don’t think they’ll get shot at. But if we’re only looking at twenty-one ships?”

“I’m only lookin’ at one,” Amos said.

“So let’s say there’s two hundred ships waiting to come through,” Clarissa said, ignoring him. “High end of plausible, but what the hell, right? That’s eleven hundred gates with no one standing by close enough to get a really good look at whoever came through. That’s still a fifteen percent chance of getting seen.”

“That high?” Alex said. “You sure? I thought it’d be less than that.”

Naomi went through the data Saba had given her. The Old Buncome, a recent-generation transport ship with a high-capacity Epstein drive and a cargo hold full of refined titanium. The Lightbreaker, a three-generation-old yacht salvaged by a semigovernmental courier service. The Rosy Cross, a rehabilitated prospecting ship with five previous owners and a drive that leaked enough radiation to cook with. The Han Yu, a privately owned coyote with authorization to carry settlers to the colony worlds.

Each ship had its own specs, its own limitations. And each one would have an effect on the ring gates that could make the ship leaving after it vanish into wherever ships went when they went dutchman. Naomi knew the curve as well as she knew her name, and the hand terminal—limited as it was—had enough native computing power to lay that in. Writing a program to weigh all the variables, evaluate each ship, and create a best-speed model wasn’t hard, but it took time and focus. Neither of which she had in great supply.

“It ain’t that high if you’re only looking at one ship,” Amos said. “You can bend the odds pretty good. I mean, no one’s going for Sol gate unless they’re tired of life. And there’s not going to be any ships waiting to come through from Charon or Naraka.”

“If we’re down to hiding out in dead systems …” Alex began.

Clarissa interrupted him. “We should go to Freehold.”

“You feeling okay, Claire?” Alex asked. “You remember we didn’t leave on good terms, right? It was even money for a while that they were going to shoot Bobbie and Holden before they could get back to the ship.”

From where Naomi was sitting, she could see Clarissa’s ankles shift around each other as she rolled onto her belly. “No, I’m serious. They’re fiercely independent. They were willing to stand up to the Transport Union, and I don’t see them rushing to wave the Laconian flag either. They’re underdeveloped enough that there won’t be complex local politics. No factions within factions that we don’t understand. Or at least fewer than you’d get somewhere like Gaon Complex. Plus which, we know there aren’t any ships observing the other side of their ring, because we were the only ship in the system, and no one’s gone out there since the occupation started.”

“That Houston asshole was pretty smart,” Amos said.

“Ah! I see what you’re doing,” Alex said. “You’re trying to make flying out to Charon and dodging radiation flares sound like a good idea. It’s that whole ‘I’ll put a shitty idea next to a really shitty idea so the first one looks shiny by comparison’ thing.”

“I think we should go to Freehold,” Amos said. “Naomi? You think we should go to Freehold?”

“Sure,” she said, starting the data run.

“Seriously?” Alex said.

“Her points are all solid,” Naomi said. The data run stopped a third of the way through. She ended the process and opened the run logs. “We have to get small for a while. Be hard to see. Wait for Laconia to show us where its weak spots are. We’ll have to be someplace while that happens. It might as well be there.”

“But the shooting-us part?”

“Is something we’ll need to work through,” Naomi said. “Hey, those paper uniforms people can get out of the station kiosks? Do you think we could get that to print out sheets?”

“Like bedsheets?” Alex said.

“Something to write on so we can distribute this when I’m done. Can’t put it on the system.”

“Maybe,” Amos said. “Be kind of weird, though.”

The run log looked decent until it started the confirmation routine. Then it hung on something. She grabbed the code reference and went back to the original script.

The others were still talking, but her focus on the screen lowered the volume on them. She was aware of Amos’ low, gravel-strewn voice. Clarissa, higher and more musical. Alex with the ghost of a Mariner Valley drawl that was more habit than accent. Her family. Part of her family.

There was a zero result where there should have been a berth number. That was where the code was choking. It probably made sense to just chuck the routine entirely. Reaching beyond Saba’s secret network—even if it was only for passive information like reading docking records—was a little risky. But building a schedule on unconfirmed data could screw them up as well.

She hesitated, pulled the code, then put it back and reopened the logs. The bad entry was the twelfth ship in the logs. The Lightbreaker. She tapped her fingers against her thigh. Dig deeper and risk being noticed by security or ignore the error and move ahead as if everything was as expected. If she’d gotten a little more sleep, it would have been easier to make the decision.

“Bárány o juh, son toda son hanged,” she said to herself and opened a low-level request to the docking records. It only took seconds for confirmation to come through. The Lightbreaker wasn’t in its berth. It had shipped out two days ago. The flight plan listed the destination as Laconia with a service code that looked military. Well, that was one less for the evacuation plan. It would make things faster, but Saba would need to know. The crew, if they weren’t on the burn for the heart of the enemy, would need other bunks.

She looked at the service code. Touched it with a fingertip.

“Alex? Did the MCRN have a code eighteen twenty-SKS?”

“Sure,” he said from the hall. “Did a few of those myself, way back when. Priority prisoner transfer. Why?”

When she’d been about eleven, Naomi had been working in a warehouse on Iapetus. A steel support beam had popped its welds and sprung out, clipping the back of her head. It hadn’t been pain, not at first. Just a feeling of impact, and her senses receding a little. The agony had two, maybe three seconds to clear its throat and straighten its sleeves before it crashed over her. This felt very much the same.

Her hand trembled as she looked for a manifest. Something to say who’d been on the Lightbreaker. Who’d been important enough to the empire that they’d commandeered a ship just to take them away. There was nothing. Of course there wasn’t. Why would the Laconians announce that to anyone? She checked the dates, the times. It didn’t have to be Jim. It could have been someone else. But it wasn’t. She took a moment for herself and the pain. Five seconds. She could let herself hurt for five seconds. Then she had to get back to work. The rest would be for later.

She sent a message—text only—to Saba. The missing ship, the service coding, her suspicion that James Holden was already past the ring gate and into Laconian space. Did Saba have any contacts who could confirm that? After the message sent, she took a deep breath. Then another. She pulled the Lightbreaker out of her dataset and ran her code again. It didn’t hang this time.

She got up, surprised by how steady she felt, and took the two steps to the door.

“What’s the matter, boss?” Amos asked.

Naomi shook her head. When she spoke, she spoke to Clarissa.

“I had a talk with Saba. I’m going with you on the sensor-array leg of this.”

Clarissa’s brow was bent by whatever she saw in Naomi’s face. “Okay. Why?”

“Risk management,” Naomi said. “If the prison break fails, we don’t get as many people out. If the sensors come back up and they’re able to track which ships went through which gates, the whole mission fails. Better that we spend our resources where they matter the most.”

“But if Holden is …” Clarissa began, then went quiet. Naomi watched her understand. “The prisoner transfer.”

Alex’s face was grayish. And pale. “Fuck,” he said.

“And we need something to write down the evacuation plan on,” Naomi said. “Something small and portable, and not connected to the computer networks at all.”

Amos pushed himself up from the sink. “You got it, boss. Give me twenty minutes.”

“And something to write with,” Naomi said as the big man walked out into the public corridor.

Her hand terminal chimed, and she went back to her crash couch. The run was finished. Twenty ships, in the order that would get them through the gates and gone at the min-max point of risk and speed. Optimal was eighty-seven minutes, even with the Rocinante looping back to pick up Amos, Bobbie, Clarissa, and her. It was a solid plan.

She had a solid plan.

She pulled up her organizational notes and sat for a moment, looking at the words she’d put there.

SAVE JIM.

She drew a line through them.