Persepolis Rising (Expanse 7)

he knew, what mattered, was that between one breath and the next, Independence was dead.

“We’re counting eight simultaneous impacts on the void city,” an analyst said from somewhere farther away than the control room. “They seem to have been placed to exploit resonance. We’re seeing some structural breakdown.”

Emily Santos-Baca was on Independence, Drummer thought, and she’d been dead already for over an hour. It didn’t matter how much adrenaline was pumping through Drummer’s veins, how tightly she gripped her bulb of old tea. She could shout the retreat order if she wanted to, but anyone in a position to hear her was dead already, or would be by the time her words could reach them.

The PDCs along the Tempest’s side fluttered again. Another group of EMC torpedoes died, faster this time because it was a smaller attack. The Tempest seemed to pause, floating in the distant nothingness as if inviting the EMC ships to take their best shots. Taunting them.

An hour and twenty-three minutes before, the EMC ships shifted, lit their Epstein drives as hard as they’d go, and turned to whatever vector got them away from the theater of battle as quickly as they could. The Tempest didn’t react. No new blooms from their rail guns. No more torpedoes. Drummer didn’t believe for a second that the enemy’s supplies had been exhausted. Trejo wasn’t killing the other ships because he didn’t need or want to. That was all.

Drummer put her tea on the little side table next to Hu’s, turned, and walked out. She was aware in a vague, distant way of Vaughn behind her, calling her name. It wasn’t something that mattered enough to attend to.

The decking of People’s Home felt fragile under her feet, as if her footsteps might be enough to break them and spin her and everyone else in the city flying out into the vacuum. She passed her security detail, distantly aware of the men and women assigned to make sure she was safe in any circumstances scrambling to follow her.

It didn’t matter. Because they didn’t matter. Not when a whole city could die in a heartbeat.

She was in the lobby of the union’s executive offices, sitting in an uncomfortable couch with her eyes locked on nothing in particular when Avasarala found her. The old woman steered her wheelchair across from Drummer like they were in someone’s private quarters or a back porch back on Earth. There was no one else in the lobby. That was Vaughn’s doing, more likely than not. In her imagination, the decking beneath her and Avasarala bucked and split open. What had Santos-Baca thought when it happened? Had she had time to think about it at all? She was trying to understand that she would never see the younger woman again, but the thought wouldn’t take. She dreaded what came after it did.

“I’m sorry,” Avasarala said.

Drummer shook her head.

“It won’t help you,” the old woman said, “but they all knew the risks going in. The chances that we would turn the Tempest back the first time we tried? Always thin.”

“We should have waited,” Drummer said. “We should have pulled them all back. Gathered everyone together and had every goddamn ship we have attack that fucking monstrosity at the same time. Wipe it out.”

Her voice broke. She was crying, but it didn’t feel like it was her doing it. Avasarala handed her a cloth. “You’re mistaken, Camina. The cost was higher than we wanted. Higher than we’d thought. But we did what we came here to do.”

“Die? Badly?”

“Learn,” Avasarala said. “How quickly the deck healed itself? That’s something we needed to know. But the places where a rail-gun round hit their PDCs, the weapons system there didn’t grow right back into place? We needed those too, and we didn’t even know to look for them. Maybe the ship can’t fix more complex mechanisms. We have a map of the armaments now. Where the PDCs are. Where the rail guns are. Where the torpedoes launch from. Next time, you can target those specifically. Degrade its attacking power, push it in ways we couldn’t this time because we just didn’t know.”

“All right,” Drummer said.

“They didn’t die for nothing,” Avasarala said.

“Everyone dies for nothing,” Drummer said.

They were quiet for a moment. Drummer coughed, blew her nose into the cloth, and then leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. Since the moment she’d taken the oath of office, there had been moments—not many, but enough to recognize—that she’d been certain that her place at the head of the union was all a terrible mistake. Saba promised her that everyone felt like that, like an impostor, sometimes. It was part of being human. His words had seemed comforting before. In her mind, Independence died again. She had the sick feeling that it would die a thousand more times before she got to sleep. More when she dreamed it.

“Did you do this to me?” she asked.

Avasarala frowned, papery forehead folding itself like a slept-on sheet.

“Did you manipulate me into sacrificing my people so that you’d get the data you wanted?” Drummer said. “Was this you?”

“This was history fucking us both,” Avasarala said. “Live as long as I have? See the changes that I’ve seen? You’ll learn something terrible about this.”

“Tell me.”

“No point. Until you see it yourself, you won’t understand.”

“Hey, you know what? Fuck you.”

Avasarala laughed hard enough that her wheelchair thought something was wrong and bucked forward a few centimeters before she could stop it. “Fair enough, Camina. Fair enough. Here then. See if you can follow me. Last long enough, and you’ll see that they’re all our people.”

“Independence and the Ontario,” Drummer spat. “Union and EMC, all one big happy family standing against the blowtorch together. Wonderful.”

“I told you that you wouldn’t understand,” Avasarala said, her voice cold and cutting. “The fuckers on the Tempest? I’m telling you they’re us too.”