Persepolis Rising

Chapter Four: Holden

Holden had been in his twenties when the Earth Navy kicked him out. He looked back at that version of himself with the kind of fondness and indulgence that people usually extended to puppies that were overly proud of themselves for scaring off a squirrel. He’d signed up to work ice-hauling runs with a sense of turning his back on the whole corrupt, authoritarian, cynical history of his species. Even the name of the company he’d signed on with—Pur ’n’ Kleen—had seemed rich with meaning. A promise of integrity and purity. If it was also a little cartoonish, it hadn’t felt like that at the time.

Back then, the Belt had been the rugged frontier. The UN and the Martian Congressional Republic, the political gods of a solar system more isolated than an ancient island in the middle of the ocean. Belters had been a structural underclass fighting to have people on the inner planets even notice when they were dying.

Now humanity was scattered to more than thirteen hundred new solar systems, and Earth might not even be the most hospitable planet for human life. Anytime a few like-minded people could put together the resources for a colony and the fees for passage through the ring gates, the seeds of a new society could be sown out there among the stars. Even the most populous of the new systems only had eight or ten cities on a whole planet. It was a massive parallel experiment in the possible forms of human collective, a chance to remake the structure of culture itself. But somehow, it all wound up seeming very familiar.

“What makes you people believe you have the right to dictate trade between sovereign states?” Governor Payne Houston of Freehold demanded. “We are a free people. And despite what your masters on Medina may think, we do not answer to you.”

When Houston had come into the meeting, he’d already been pretty worked up, and Holden hadn’t had much opportunity to talk him back down to a meaningful, productive level of raising hell just yet. Instead, he watched and listened and tried to decide whether the governor’s anger was based more in fear, frustration, or narcissism. Fear, Holden could understand. Frustration would have made sense too. All the planets connected by the ring gate had their own biomes, their own biologies, their own unexpected obstacles for someone trying to carve out an environmental niche for humans. Being able to trade for what they needed was quite often the difference between life and death. Anyone who thought they and the people they cared about were being arbitrarily blocked from the things they needed would be scared down to their bones.

The more the governor went on, though, the more it seemed like the guy was just an asshole.

“Freehold is an independent sovereign state,” Houston said, slapping his table with an open palm. “We will engage in trade with willing partners, and we will not pay tribute to parasites like you, sir. We will not.”

The council chamber was built like a courtroom, with Holden and Bobbie sitting at a low table and the governor and his eleven cabinet members above them looking down like a panel of judges. Their table was a dark-stained wood analog. Windows behind Houston and his cohort silhouetted them. Interior design as a political tool. The sidearms that all the Freeholders wore underscored it.

He glanced over at Bobbie. Her expression was calm, but her gaze shifted between the people looking down at them, then to the guards at the door. Calculating who she’d take out first, how she’d disarm them, where to take cover, how to escape. It was something Bobbie did the way other people knitted.

“So here’s the thing,” Holden said as Houston took a breath. “You think I’m here to negotiate with you. I’m not.”

Houston scowled. “There is a right given by God to all free men, and we will have no tyrants or kings—”

“I understand why you’re confused,” Holden said, his voice louder, but still friendly. “You see a gunship coming out. Takes weeks to get here. You think this must be something where we’re expecting a lot of give and take. Light delay would make back and forth awkward, so it makes sense to have someone right here breathing your air, right? You say something, we say something. No lag. But the thing is, the Transport Union has already decided what’s going to happen. We aren’t mediators. We’re not looking for an amicable solution.”

The woman to Houston’s left put a hand on his arm. Houston leaned back. That was interesting. Holden shifted a little, speaking to the space between the two of them to include her in the conversation.

“We’re all adults here,” Holden said. “We don’t need to pretend with each other. The union sent us here in person because they don’t want to have to do this kind of thing over and over with a bunch of other colonies. They wanted to make sure that everyone else was watching this situation. Especially your friends and trading partners on Auberon.”

“Political theater,” Houston said with contempt in his voice. Which was kind of funny coming from a guy sitting a meter and a half higher than he needed to.

“Sure,” Holden said. “Anyway, here’s the thing. You sent a ship through the gates without authorization. You endangered the other ships using the gates—”

Houston huffed and waved a dismissive hand.

“—and there are consequences for that kind of thing,” Holden went on. “We’re just here to tell you what they are.”

Bobbie shifted her chair, turning it out so her legs were free. It might have been a casual gesture, except that it wasn’t. Holden ran his hands over the top of the table. Whatever it was made from wasn’t wood, but it had the same hardness and subtle texture. Houston and his cabinet were quiet. He had their attention now.

Holden needed to decide what to do with it. Follow instructions or fudge it a little.

“There are two ways this can go,” he said, fudging a little. “The first one is the union cuts off gate access to Freehold for three years.”

“We aren’t self-sustaining yet,” one of the other cabinet members said. “You’re talking about a death sentence for three hundred people.”

“That’s a decision you folks made when you sent your unauthorized ship through the gates,” Holden said. “Or maybe you can find some way to up the timetable. Get a way to feed people sooner. That’s up to you. But for three years, any ship going in or out of the Freehold gate gets killed without warning. No exceptions. Communications in and out of the gate are jammed. You’re on your own. Or, option two is Governor Houston comes with us for trial and probably just a whole lot of jail time.”

Houston snorted. His expression looked like he’d taken a bite of something rotten. The other people on the bench were less demonstrative. Freehold was a colony of pretty good poker faces.

“You forget the third option,” Houston said. “Being the ambassador of tyranny is a job with risks, Captain Holden. Very. Real. Risks.”

“Okay, so let’s do the math on that,” Holden said. “We’re here, and there are a dozen of you up there and four guards at the doors—”

“Six,” Bobbie said.

“Six guards at the doors,” Holden said, not missing a beat. “If you just look at the hundred or so meters around this building, we’re totally outnumbered and outgunned. But if you expand that to half a klick out, I have a gunship. My gunship has PDCs. It has a rail gun. It has twenty torpedoes. Hell, it’s got an Epstein drive that can put out a plume that would glass this whole settlement if we pointed it at the right angle.”

“So force,” Houston said, shaking his head. “Taxation always comes at the end of a gun.”

“I thought of it more as an argument against shooting ambassadors,” Holden said. “We’re leaving now and going back to our ship. Twelve hours after we get there, we’re taking off. If we have Governor Houston here on board, you can start scheduling ships with the union again. If not, we’ll send someone back in three years to check in.”

Holden stood up, Bobbie following his lead so closely that she was on her feet before him. Houston leaned forward, his left hand on the table and his right at his side like it was resting on the butt of a gun. Before the governor could say anything, Holden started for the door. The guards watched him step forward, their eyes cutting from him to Bobbie, then up to Houston. In Holden’s peripheral vision, Bobbie settled a little deeper into her legs, her center of gravity solidifying. She was humming softly, but he couldn’t quite pick out the melody.

As they reached the door, the guards stood aside, and Holden started breathing again. A short corridor to the anteroom, then out to the dirty street. He eased his hand terminal out of his pocket as they walked. Alex picked up the connection as soon as he put in the request.

“How’s it going out there?” Alex asked.

“We’re on our way back now,” Holden said. “Make sure the airlock’s open when we get there.”

“You coming in hot?” Alex asked.

“Maybe,” Holden said.

“Copy that. I’ll have the welcome mat out and the PDCs warmed up.”

“Thank you for that,” Holden said and dropped the connection.

“You really think they’ll be dumb enough to make a play?” Bobbie asked.

“I don’t want to bet my life on other people being smart,” Holden said.

“Voice of experience?”

“I’ve been hurt before.”

Freehold was the name of the town and the planet and the solar system. Holden couldn’t say which had come first. The town nestled in a valley between two ridge mountains. A soft breeze smelled faintly of acetate and mint, by-products of whatever chemistry the local biosphere had figured out for its life cycles.

The sunlight was subtly redder than Holden expected, making the shadows seem blue and giving the sense of permanent twilight. Or maybe dawn. A flock of local bird-analogs flew overhead in a V, their wide, transparent wings buzzing in an eerie harmony. It was a beautiful planet in its way. The gravity was a little less than half a g—more than Mars, less than Earth—and the planetary tilt and spin made the daylight just eight hours and change, the night a little over nine. Two minor moons were tide-locked to a big one almost a third the mass of the planet. The large moon even had a thin atmosphere, but nothing lived there. Not yet, anyway. If Freehold made it another few generations, someone would probably put another little town up there too, if only to get away from the locals. That seemed to be the human pattern—reach out to the unknown and then make it into the sort of thing you left in the first place. In Holden’s experience, humanity’s drive out into the universe was maybe one part hunger for adventure and exploration to two parts just wanting to get the hell away from each other.

It was always strange seeing the Rocinante on her belly. The ship had been designed to rest that way when it came down the gravity well. It didn’t do any damage. It just seemed wrong. The PDCs that studded her side shifted as they got closer, restless and active. The crew airlock stood open, a length of ladder leading down to the ground. Amos sat with his legs dangling over the lip of the open airlock door, a rifle resting across his thighs. Holden was a little surprised that Clarissa wasn’t there with him. Bobbie waved as they drew close, and Amos lifted his hand in response without taking his eyes off the trail behind them.

Holden went up first, then turned, standing between the ladder and Amos while Bobbie clambered up to them. Back toward the town, four people stood in a clump, not coming close, but clearly watching. At this distance, Holden wasn’t sure if they’d been at the meeting or if they were new. Bobbie hit the panel, and the ladder retracted into the ship.

“How’d it go?” Amos asked, levering himself to his feet and stepping back from the outer door.

Bobbie cycled the door closed, raising her voice over the sound of the servos. “Back with no shots fired. I count that as a win.”

The inner door opened, and Amos stowed the rifle in a locker that their weird orientation made look like a drawer. Holden walked along the wall, heading toward the ops deck. Which should have been up, but was, for the moment, to the left.

“I’m going to be glad when we’re out of here,” he said.

Amos smiled, the expression amiable and empty as ever, and followed after. Naomi and Alex were sitting in their crash couches, playing a complex combat-simulation game that they’d picked up in the last couple of years. Holden was reassured to see an exterior feed of the path to the town on both of their screens. Whatever else they were doing to pass the time, everyone was keeping their eyes on the town. Just in case.

“Hey, there, Captain,” Alex said, his drawl a little thicker than usual. “We ready to pull up stakes and mosey on out of here?”

“We’re waiting twelve hours,” Holden said, sitting in his couch. The gimbals didn’t shift. The fixed gravity of the planet meant all the couches were locked in place, their workstations rotated to the correct orientation. Naomi twisted to look at him.

“Twelve hours? For what?”

“I may have renegotiated the deal a little,” he said. “I said if they turned over the governor to us for trial, there wouldn’t be a quarantine.”

Naomi lifted an eyebrow. “Does the union know about this?”

“I figured I’d send them a message when I got back here.”

“You think Drummer’ll be okay with it?”

“Cap changing the rules?” Amos said with a shrug. “That’s just a day that ends in y far as I can tell. If she didn’t leave some wiggle room for it, that’s her mistake.”

“I’m not going to hold the whole colony responsible for what a few administrators did,” Holden said. “It’s collective punishment, and it’s not the kind of thing that the good guys should do.”

“At least not without twelve hours’ warning?” Naomi said.

Holden shrugged. “This is the window they have to make a choice. If they have the chance to do something different and they still double down, I feel a little better about closing them off. At least we’ll have tried.”

“‘A little better’ meaning ‘not totally guilt-ridden.’”

“Not totally,” Holden said, lying back. The gel was cool against the back of his head and shoulders. “Still don’t love the whole cutting-people-off-from-supplies-they-need thing.”

“Should have agreed to run the union when you had the chance,” Alex said. “Then it could all be the way you wanted.”

“It’d be pretty to think so anyway,” Holden said.

Twelve hours. A night and part of a day, for Freehold. And not quite enough time for a message to go from the Roci to Medina to the office of the president of the Transport Union and come back again. If Drummer threw a fit, they’d still be burning for Medina before her message came through. He’d have given the Freeholders more time to think things through if he could have. But lightspeed was lightspeed.

It was the irony of making threats while having mass. The messages and voices, culture and conversation, could move so much more quickly than even the fastest ship. In the best case, it would have made persuasion and argument much more important. Moving ideas across the gap between planets was easy. Moving objects was hard. But it meant that whoever was on the other side had to be listening and willing to let their minds be changed. For all the other times, it was gunships and threats, same as ever.

Holden was asleep when the answer finally came.

“Wake up,” Naomi said. “We’ve got visitors.”

He wiped his eyes, swung his feet to the wall that was now temporarily the floor, ran his hands through his hair, and looked blearily at the screen. A crowd of people were outside the ship. He recognized a couple of the faces from the council meeting. And in the middle of them, Governor Houston was hog-tied in a wide, gray ceramic wheelbarrow. The relief that poured through Holden’s body was only tempered a little bit by the prospect of months on the burn with the disgraced governor on board.

He opened a connection. “This is Captain Holden of the Rocinante. Hang tight. We’ll be right out.”

“Be careful,” Naomi said. “Just because this looks like one thing, that doesn’t mean it can’t be something different.”

“Right,” he said, opening a connection to ops. “Alex? You there?”

“He’s sleeping,” Clarissa answered. “I have the PDCs warmed up, and Amos and Bobbie are on their way to the airlock. If it’s an ambush, it will be a very unsuccessful one.”

“Thank you for that,” Holden said, walking along the side of the lift shaft toward the airlock. The mixed voices of Bobbie and Amos already echoed down toward him.

“Give the sign if you need me to do more than watch,” Clarissa said, and cut the connection.

When the airlock opened and they lowered the ladder, Holden went first. A woman with sharp features and thick gray-black hair pulled back in a bun stepped out toward him.

“Captain Holden,” she said. “I’m Interim Governor Semple Marks. We’re here to accede to your government’s demands.”

“Thank you for that,” Holden said as Bobbie slid down the ladder behind him. Amos followed, his shotgun clanking as he came.

“We’re lodging a formal complaint with the union about this infringement on our sovereignty,” Marks said. “This should have been handled internally in Freehold.”

“I’ll let you take that up with the union,” Holden said. “Thank you for being willing to bend on this one. I didn’t want to quarantine your system.”

Marks’ eyes said, I think you did, but she stayed silent. Bobbie helped the prisoner to his feet. Houston’s face was gray where it wasn’t red. He seemed unsteady.

“Hey,” Amos said. A moment later, Houston seemed to find him. Amos nodded encouragement. “I’m Amos. This is Bobbie. We’ve done this kind of duty before, so there’s some rules about how this goes you’re going to want to listen to very carefully …”