Persepolis Rising

Chapter Fifty-Two: Naomi

Freehold was pain. Some days that was a good thing. It gave her something to push against, something to fight. Other days it was just wearying.

The pencil-thin valley where they’d set the Roci down had steep, high mountains to the north, east, and southwest. A thin creek ran along the bottom with glacier meltwater. Pale-green treelike organisms clung to the stone with finger-thick roots and stretched out vines studded with pale-green bladders that floated into the open air as if Nature itself were putting up balloons for a party. A high breeze would shift the vines one way and then the other. Every now and then, one would break off and swirl away down the valley, maybe to die or maybe to find some new place to take root.

She understood it was all the product of evolutionary arms races. Photosynthesizing structures had spent centuries, maybe millennia, trying to choke each other in darkness until one of them had figured out how to both be rooted and fly, how to both command the high air and drop everything below it into permanent twilight. None of it had been created with the Rocinante in mind. It just worked out well.

The Roci itself huddled in a wide space where the creek curved around. The landing thrusters had scorched the landscape around it, but it didn’t take more than a day or two before the local plants began growing back. The fight for survival made everything either resilient or forgotten. The floating vines made a moving canopy fifteen meters above them that would help hide them from observation, if anything ever came into the system to look. As hiding places went, it was decent.

The colony itself—the only other three hundred people on the planet—was in an arid biome a six-hour hike down the valley. At least it was for her. The locals could make the trip in half the time. Houston lived down there, among his people, and sometimes she and Alex would stay there too. But most days, she was at the Roci—her real home. There was maintenance to be done, restocking. Distilling the creek water until it was pure enough to put in the Roci’s tanks. The reactor could run for months without needing more fuel, but reaction mass was always a problem. If they wanted to go anywhere. If they just stayed put … well, less of an issue, then.

Today she’d spent half the daylight hours discouraging a cluster of very slow animals or possibly semimobile plants that were exploring whether the niches around the Roci’s PDCs would be a good place to live. When the light faded, she stopped for lunch. The planet’s sixteen-hours-and-change diurnal cycle meant that most of her workdays had at least half a night in them.

The Roci had been built to rest on its belly in a gravity well. All of her systems functioned, even at ninety degrees from what she’d become used to. That seemed right too. Being at home, but also in a space her body didn’t understand. Being in control of her day, but not of her life. Being achingly alone, but not wanting people around. It was all of a piece. If she’d dreamed it, it would have meant something.

As soon as she crawled back into the ship, she showered. There were compounds in the life cycle of Freehold that irritated her skin if she didn’t wash them off. Then she pulled on a fresh jumpsuit, went to the galley, made herself a bowl of white kibble, and sat. A message was waiting for her from Bobbie, and she set her hand terminal on the table when she played it so she could use both hands to eat. The kibble was warm and peppery; the mushroom squeaked against her teeth just the way it was supposed to.

Bobbie looked exhausted and excited at the same time. Her hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail the way she wore it when she was working on machinery, not the bun she had for workouts. Her eyes were bright and the suggestion of a smile teased her mouth without ever quite appearing. She looked ten years younger. More than that, she looked happy.

“Hey, Naomi. Hope things are going well down there. I think we’re making some real progress up here. I’m not positive, but I think I’ve found how the Storm manages its energy profiles. It’s a little screwy, same as everything on this rig. I was wondering if I could get you to take a quick skim through the new dataset I pulled. Maybe you’ll see something I didn’t?”

The embedded data was structured as environmental-control buffers, and it was half again the size of the Roci’s. Naomi popped it open and glanced at the gross index. A lot of familiar parts, yes, but some strangeness in the large-scale structure. If it was anything like the other bits of the Gathering Storm’s operating code they’d harvested for analysis, it would get weirder the deeper in she went. She dropped it to a secure partition in the Roci and started unpacking it with her favorite tools, converting the language of the ships into something with handholds that her mind could brace on.

She set her hand terminal to Record. “Dataset received and in process. It may take me a day or two, but I’ll let you know what I think. In the meantime, all is well down here. No need for rescue.”

It was the rule. Somewhere in the message she sent up the well, there was always the word rescue and always would be until she needed one. Bobbie’s word was progress. A message went back and forth every twenty-four hours at a minimum. Not that there was any real risk that Naomi could see, but protocol was protocol. The locals on Freehold had been at least willing to listen when they’d arrived with Payne Houston in tow, and there had been nothing but cautious goodwill since. Not that Naomi trusted that to last. The colony of Freehold would support her in her guise as a refugee and freedom fighter as long as it was convenient for them. She understood that having the only gunship in the system and a ring gate far enough away that she’d have a free hand how to use it for weeks before help could arrive figured into the local council’s calculus of the situation.

Bobbie’s improvised crew of Belters were with her on a little moon circling one of Freehold’s three gas giants, tucked in an ancient lava tube and showing no signs of mutiny. Bobbie as captain and Amos as acting XO would, Naomi thought, be more than enough to ensure discipline. It also gave Freehold another reason to play nice, and a spare set of eyes on the ring gate in case anything nasty came through.

The Storm was slow to give up its secrets, not because of the internal security—though that was an issue—as much as the profound unfamiliarity of some of its technology. Its reliance on calcium, for instance, was an order of magnitude more than Naomi had ever seen, and the vacuum channels it used instead of wiring still made her head ache a little if she thought about them too much. With enough time, though, she was certain they’d come to understand the ship. On her good days, she thought they’d be ready, even if she wasn’t sure yet what they were getting ready for.

While the Roci arranged the data for her and the kibble broke down pleasantly in her stomach, she lay back and let her eyes close for a few minutes. Her knees ached. Her spine ached. It wasn’t even the gravity of Freehold. This world was smaller than Mars, and only a little bit denser. She’d been on long burns worse than this. Part of the problem was that she wasn’t doing her exercises. She was doing work, and there turned out to be a suite of small, neglected muscles that had atrophied over the years and weren’t happy to be put into service clearing vegetation and crawling around the bottom of a gravity well.

There was also, she suspected, something of a placebo effect. She’d spent so many years equating life in free atmosphere on a planetary surface with a constant, grinding full g, that now even though the gravity was actually fairly mild, she was primed to notice the discomfort. She expected it, and so it was there.

The Rocinante chimed to announce the completion of the data run, and then again almost immediately to announce Alex’s return. It was less than a minute before she heard him walking up the hallway that was usually the lift tube. He was singing to himself. A light, lilting melody with words she didn’t recognize.

“In here,” she called as he came close.

Alex poked his head into the galley. He was more comfortable going into town, and the combination of long walks and sunlight had darkened his skin and given him his cheekbones back.

“Hola,” he said. “Good news from Freehold. We’re a business!”

He lifted his right arm. The satchel in it was heavy with batteries ready to be recharged. It was a minor convenience for the township to have Alex come by and collect batteries, recharge them from the Roci’s reactor, and deliver them again full up instead of waiting for their turn at the solar array. So Freehold’s poor foresight on solar energy was now their cottage industry. At least for now.

Alex’s grin widened. “And …”

“And?”

He lifted his left hand. A second satchel. “They paid in beer and curried goat. I’ve got a little cook fire started outside. It’s going to be great.”

Naomi started to say that she’d just eaten, but the joy in Alex’s eyes was infectious. She swung herself up to sitting. “On my way,” she said.

The moons weren’t shining in the valley when she reached the airlock, but Alex’s little cook fire was glowing happily next to the landing strut, and the stars glittered between the floating vines above them. They burned dried-out vines and the shed carapaces of huge, slow-moving animals that lived in shallow caves all up and down the valley. The smoke was pale and fragrant. The shards of carapace popped and cracked now and then, sending little sprays of spark up with the smoke to vanish as they cooled. The smoke kept away the night hoppers—tiny, nocturnal insect-like animals that usually found humans fascinating.

Alex had two skewers of meat dripping grease and curry onto the flames, and Naomi had to admit that they smelled better than kibble. She sat with her back against the landing strut. Alex took a bottle from his satchel, opened its neck, and passed it over. The beer was cold and rich and more biting than she’d expected.

“Robust,” she said.

“Danielle likes a higher proof than some brewers,” Alex said with a smile as he leaned back to look at the vines and the sky beyond them.

“Seems like you’re getting along well with the locals.”

“They’re all right,” Alex said. “Just don’t get them talking about the nature of sovereignty and you’re fine. Even then you’re all right, it’s just a conversation they’ve all had a lot. Tends to go along the ground they’ve already plowed.”

He reached over and turned the skewers. High above them, something set off one of the vine bladders, and it glowed a pale yellow-green for a moment, then went dark again.

“Good to build rapport,” Naomi said. “Freehold’s going to have to look like a polite, compliant little colony for a while.”

“No trouble. The council’s on board for an ‘enemy-of-my-enemy, hail Laconia, down with the union’ stance. For the time being anyway. I think they kind of like having us here, actually. The founding impulse of Freehold is sticking it to the government.”

“Loses some of its shine after you get elected.”

“Right?” Alex tested the curried meat with his finger, pinching and releasing fast enough that he didn’t get burned. He handed it over to Naomi. She waved it in the night air for a moment to let it cool, then took the first cube off the end and popped it in her mouth. The char on the meat was good. The spices that infused it were better. She chewed slowly, letting herself enjoy it.

“Do you think they’ll sell us out?”

“Eventually, sure,” Alex said cheerfully. “But not right away. And probably not for cheap, so long as they like us.”

Her plan was the long one. The only one, really, that made sense. Laconia’s strength seemed overwhelming. A force without weakness that nothing could ever overcome. That was an illusion. Earth had seemed like that once, when she’d been a girl scraping together a life in the Belt. It hadn’t been true then either.

They’d wait. They’d watch. They’d be small and quiet and aware. Sooner or later, Laconia would show them where it was weak. And between then and now, life. Charging batteries in exchange for beer. Making friends with the township. Working to crack open the mysteries of the Gathering Storm with Bobbie and Amos. Keeping the Rocinante in good trim, and keeping herself from falling into despair. It was enough to fill her days. It would have to be enough.

“Which one of those is Bobbie?” Alex asked.

“Hmm?”

With the second skewer, he pointed up at the night sky peeping through from behind the vines. “One of those stars isn’t a star, right? I mean, we can see her from here, can’t we?”

Naomi looked up at the little slice of stars. The galactic disk looked the same as it had in Sol system, but the constellations not quite like her own. Parallax, she knew, was how they’d started mapping which systems were on the other sides of the gates. She’d seen a map once—the splash of systems that the gates connected. Thirteen hundred stars in a galaxy with three hundred billion of them. They’d been clumped together, the gate-network stars. The two farthest systems were hardly more than a thousand light-years apart. A little more than one percent of the galaxy, and still unthinkably vast.

“Look just above the ridge there,” she said, pointing. “You see where the rock looks like a bent finger? The round knuckle?”

“Yeah, I see it.”

“Track just up from that, and to the right. There are three stars almost in a row. The middle one is Bobbie.”

“Hmm,” Alex said, then went quiet. He wasn’t singing anymore, but sometimes Naomi thought she heard a few hummed notes under his breath. It was maybe five minutes before he spoke again. “I wonder which one’s Mars.”

“Sol system?” she said. “I don’t know.”

“I think about Kit,” Alex said and took another drink of his beer. “And Giselle, I guess, but more about Kit. I have a son out there. He’s just starting his own life. His adulthood. I won’t be there for it. I don’t even know that I’d be any use if I were. I mean, when I was his age, I was getting into the navy, and Earth and Mars were the biggest things in the universe. Now … I don’t know. Everything’s different. He has to find his own way.”

“That’s always how it is,” Naomi said.

“I know. Every kid has to find who they are without Mom and Dad, but—”

“History too. Mars before Solomon Epstein. Earth before the seas came up. Before there were airplanes and then after. When we figured out how to grow our own food. Everything’s always changed.”

“But up to now it wasn’t my problem,” Alex said, with an affected disconsolate buzz in his voice. They both laughed together. A half dozen of the vine bladders lit up and faded. She didn’t know what made them do that, but it was pretty. She felt a pleasant warmth growing in her belly. The beer, probably. Or the meat, since she’d eaten almost all of it despite her expectations. Or the sense of being in midnight under stars in the middle of an ocean of air that wouldn’t run out or leak away. It really was reassuring in a way that even the best station atmosphere could never quite equal.

“I think about Jim the same way,” she said. “Not that he’s beginning his adulthood, but he always wanted to take me back to Earth. To show me what living on a planet was like. Now I’m here, and I’m finding out, and he’s not.”

“He’ll be all right,” Alex said. “He always is.”

“I know,” she said aloud, but they both knew she meant Maybe.

Something crashed through the underbrush, made a high keening sound, and crashed away. They’d heard it before often enough that they both ignored it. Alex finished off the last of his beer and tucked the empty bottle back in his satchel. He levered himself up to standing and stretched his arms above him, looking like some ancient priest in the firelight.

“I should get these things hooked up,” he said, hefting the dead batteries. “I said I’d have them back tomorrow. I’ll probably take a sleep shift in town after that, if you’re all right solo?”

“That’s fine,” she said. “Bobbie sent me a new dataset. I’ll be working on that. I wouldn’t be much company anyway.”

“Should I douse the fire?”

Naomi shook her head. “I’ll do it when I go in. I think I overate. I need to just sit for a little while.”

“Right,” Alex said, and trudged over to the airlock. He lifted himself in, and she heard him starting to sing again until the door closed behind him. She lay back.

Everything changed, and it went right on changing. A terrible thought when things were good, a comforting one now. Whatever happened, she could be certain that things wouldn’t stay the way they were now. And if she stayed smart and clever and lucky, she’d be able to affect how the next change came. Or take advantage of it. She’d find Jim again, if she could just be patient enough.

One of the vines broke loose from the mountain wall and drifted along with some high breeze that she didn’t feel. She watched it blunder away to the southwest, catching on another vine for a moment, then losing its grip and floating on. Where it had been, there was a new spray of stars now, glittering from decades and centuries ago, their light only happening to fall on her here and now.

She wondered if one of them was Laconia.