Persepolis Rising (Expanse 7) - Page 86

Saba tilted his head. There was no surprise in his expression. He’d been thinking along the same lines, so maybe he’d come to the same conclusions. “The decryption safe room.”

“I don’t like losing it,” Holden said, looking more at Bobbie now than Saba. “We’re still getting in a lot of data from the sniffer, and I know once we move forward with the plan, we lose that. We won’t get it back. But until we can decrypt what we do have, we can’t use it. And the Typhoon? It’s due in thirty-three days.”

“Thirty-two,” Naomi said.

“I don’t want to die with one still in the chamber,” Bobbie said. “I’m good with the timing.”

“Bien,” Saba said. “I’m in.”

“Great,” Holden replied. “Get word to every cell leader and ship captain you trust. We need to have everyone ready when the time comes.”

“This is gonna be some strange bedfellows,” Saba said as he left.

“Find some lunch?” Holden said to Naomi.

“Give me half an hour,” she replied. “I want to get a computer crunching the tactical data that video gave us. But after that, meet out front?”

“OK,” Holden said, wondering how to waste half an hour in the cramped space of their little hideout.

“Hey, Holden,” Bobbie said as Naomi left the room. “Can I hang on to you for a second?”

Holden shrugged and sat on a crate. Bobbie sat flexing her hands and staring at the floor so long that Holden started to wonder if he’d misheard her. He braced himself. He didn’t know where this conversation was going to go, but he had a suspicion it was about her and him and the captaincy of the Rocinante, and he didn’t know what to say about any of that. So it came as kind of a relief that he was wrong.

“Amos is going to be a problem,” she finally said. “I had the Voltaire people talked off the ledge when he started that fight. He wanted to crack some heads, and he made it happen. That’s fine for shore leave when he wants to blow off some steam, but it won’t fly when we’re under the radar like this.”

“Huh. Okay. I’d wondered about that.”

“It’s a problem I don’t know how to fix,” Bobbie said.

“Me neither,” Holden said. “But give it a couple days.”

“Not sure we have them,” Bobbie said.

“Why not?”

Bobbie pointed behind her back, meaning not what was physically behind her but backward in time. “You just gave us all a goal,” she said. “Something to bring us all together.”

“I did,” Holden said. “And I’m thinking from the way you’re looking at me right now that there’s some aspect of that I’ve maybe overlooked?”

“Some of us are Katria Mendez and her mad bombers.”

Holden felt a coolness down his spine. “Yeah. That could be interesting,” he said.

“Right?”

He found Amos in a narrow side hall, a welding torch in his hand. The big man’s arms showed little pocks of red where sparks had landed, but Amos hadn’t done so much as find a long-sleeved work shirt.

“Hey,” Holden said. “How’s it going?”

“Doing all right,” Amos said, gesturing at the conduits that textured the wall. “Saba’s folks said we should reroute the power. Makes it a little harder for the cops to track down where they’re losing it from if it keeps moving.”

“Yeah?”

“Decent plan in theory,” Amos said. “In practice, kind of an ass-pain, but whatever.”

“I can see that,” Holden said, then paused.

The truth was, in spite of decades flying the same ship, Holden still had very little idea what made Amos tick. He liked food, booze, meaningless sex, jokes. He seemed to like palling around with Alex, but when their pilot had decided to try being married again, Bobbie had been his best man. Amos treated every word out of Naomi’s mouth as if it were gospel, but the truth was all of them did these days.

Tags: James S.A. Corey Expanse Horror
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