Persepolis Rising (Expanse 7)

“So,” Katria said once the requisite sniffing was done, “I’m surprised at having so civil a meeting. I have to think you need something from me you can’t manage by yourselves?”

Saba smiled, but waved his hand twice sharply. “Too many ears, sa sa? Come sit with me and mine, have a drink, and we’ll talk about what we talk about.”

Katria crossed her arms.

“It’s not you,” Holden said. “It’s just that the fewer people know about this, the less chance someone gets picked up by security. You can’t tell anyone what you don’t know, right?”

Katria Mendez looked from Saba to Holden and then, pointedly over to where the Roci crew were sitting. Not just Bobbie and Amos, but Naomi and Alex and Clarissa besides. “So none of mine but all of theirs?”

“All of theirs already know,” Saba said. “They’re who wants to talk with you most.”

“They have strange ways of showing it,” Katria said.

“This is my house,” Saba said. “My salt on it, yeah? Parley. And if it’s nothing, it’s nothing. But we’re under the same thumb, you and me. Not asking you to love anyone. Just listen to.”

For a moment, Katria hesitated. Her scowl bit into her cheeks like it was going for bone. Bobbie had a brief flash of certainty that the whole Voltaire Collective was about to turn and walk away without even hearing her pitch, and she was more than a little relieved at the idea.

“Esá es bullshit,” the one with the nose spat. “They’re just trying to get you on your own, que? Make you not be here, that’s all. It’s all of us or none!”

“It’s my call, Jordao,” Katria snapped. “Not yours.”

The one with the nose—Jordao, apparently—stepped back, sulking. Holden was smiling like a salesman, as if his radiant goodwill could warm up every other interaction in the room. It left him looking more than a little ridiculous, but damned if Katria didn’t consider him for a long moment and chuckle.

“If I refuse, then we all took a long walk for nothing,” she said. Holden beamed. Bobbie wasn’t sure how he did it. The way he could disarm a situation with his almost palpable guilelessness astonished her every time.

“Thank you,” Holden said. “I really appreciate this.”

Saba lifted a hand and two of his people ghosted in from the corridor and led Katria’s guard away. Standing by herself, she didn’t seem any less imposing. The door to the corridor slid shut, and the bolt clicked. It was as near to privacy as anyone on Medina could have.

“So,” Katria said. “What’s on your mind?”

Bobbie took a long breath, let it out between her teeth. The idea had been hers from the start, and she’d been mulling it over for days. She hadn’t slept as much as she’d wanted. Even when she hadn’t been reviewing it and looking for holes in the plan, she’d felt too jagged and amped up to sleep. Part of that had been thinking about how to make the approach she was going for now.

“There’s a single point of contact between the Laconian destroyer and Medina,” Bobbie said. “And we have a bug on it.”

Katria’s eyes went a degree wider. She glanced over to Saba, who nodded. It was true. Katria didn’t sit, but her weight settled into her hips a little. Bobbie had her attention. That was good.

“The encryption isn’t breakable,” she said. “Not from the outside. The Martian codes it’s based on are solid. We might be able to crack them if we had between now and about a decade on, but we’re down to a countable number of days. So we’ve got enough intelligence gathered to fill libraries that we can’t read. But I think we can fix that.”

She plucked her hand terminal out of her pocket, slaved it to Saba’s local system, and pulled up the schematic of Medina that she’d been using. The cavernous center of the drum, command and control on one end, engineering and the docks and the massive but quiescent engines on the other. The elevator shafts that ran between them outside the surface of the drum. And also the ships in the dock, including—highlighted in red—the Gathering Storm.

“The longer goal is that we find a way to disable the Storm, here, shut down Medina’s sensor arrays, and distract or isolate the security forces on Medina long enough to let all these ships get off station and out through the rings before their reinforcements from Laconia get here. The short-term goal”—she zoomed in on a small red mark inside Medina proper, near the docks—“is this.”

“And that is?” Katria asked.

“It used to be backup power storage,” Bobbie said. “But since our guests from Laconia got here, it’s been repurposed.”

“The thing is,” Alex said, breaking in, “these Laconian fellas? They were all Martians to start, or their leadership were a

nyway. And they were serving just a little after me and Bobbie here did our tours.”

He looked from Bobbie to Katria to Saba and then back. Bobbie nodded him on. Alex licked his lips.

“One of the things we trained on was how to go about securing an enemy station,” he said, which wasn’t true. It was something Bobbie had trained to do, not him. Storm and control the homes and communities of Belters. If there was going to be a sore spot, this would be it. It was why Alex was saying it instead of the woman who’d cleaned Katria’s clock and left her zip-tied to her friends. It seemed less likely to rub on Katria wrong that way. “You heard of air-gap encryption strong rooms?”

Katria’s eyes were brighter. She hadn’t, but she didn’t want to admit that. Alex licked his lips again, shot a look from Bobbie to Katria and back to Bobbie, then went on. “One thing that we did was maintain physical separation between whatever ship was taking control and the local systems. Lay in a pipe to one of our own boxes on the station, and send any commands we wanted for the base there. Communications, control protocols, everything. It gets unencrypted there, and set onto onetime physical media to walk over to the local system. No live connections at all.”

“Bullshit,” Katria said.