Persepolis Rising (Expanse 7)

“Katria, get ready to blow on my signal,” Bobbie said. “Let’s get into these emergency suits for evac immediately after. You’ve got one minute to dress.”

Bobbie heard the Velcro ripping sounds of vac suits being pulled off the walls and hastily donned. Amos wasn’t moving.

“Put your suit on, big man,” Bobbie said.

“You’re really gonna blow it,” Amos replied. He didn’t sound surprised. Or like he was issuing a challenge. He didn’t sound like anything. Bobbie involuntarily braced for violence.

“Yes,” she said.

Without changing his expression, Amos squared up on her, hands at his sides.

“I guess you really want that captain’s chair back, huh Babs?”

Before she knew she was going to do it, Bobbie had already grabbed his collar and yanked him up hard enough to pull his mag boots off the floor, then slammed him against the bulkhead.

“If we had more time,” she hissed at him through her teeth, “you and I would be dancing right now.”

Amos smiled at her. “I got time.”

“Katria. Blow it,” Bobbie said, and the world ended.

When Katria’s charge went off, it demolished the control panel and ripped a seventeen-centimeter hole in the oxygen storage tank. Bobbie didn’t know the exact size of the tank, but she had a vague memory that liquid oxygen compressed down to about eleven hundred kilograms per cubic meter, and now all of it was trying to become a gas again, all at once.

The initial blast of expanding gas was deafening. The shock wave ripped apart bulkheads and piping. All the liquid oxygen in those pipes joined the explosion as additional expanding gas. From inside the relative safety of their reinforced emergency compartment, it sounded like someone had set off a tactical nuke in the next room.

And then, as was inevitable, something oxidized fast enough to produce a flame, and the initial blast of air became fire.

The entire emergency shelter shuddered, then canted over onto its side. The reinforced and blast-hardened bulkheads didn’t break, but the mounts holding the compartment to the deck were sheared off by the force of the blast. It took seconds that lasted for hours.

The inner walls and the pressure doors at each end of the compartment got hot enough to start smoking. Bobbie shared a look with Amos, then let go of him and they both scrambled to get into the emergency vacuum suits.

When the exterior bulkhead blew out, there wasn’t another deafening explosion, but rather a sudden drop in the sound level. The roar was replaced by the hiss of rushing air, then a high whine, then nothing. The seals on their shelter stayed intact, so afterward all they could hear was their own panicked breathing.

“Okay, we’re getting massive alarms,” Clarissa said, her voice the only calm thing in the universe. “The station’s going into shutdown. I’m pulling out too. I’ll see you back at the place.”

“God damn,” Naomi said.

“Told you,” Katria said. “My shit always works.”

Bobbie finished pulling on her vac suit, and saw Amos was sealing up his own. They traded a look. “We need to get out of here,” she said to him, and he nodded his agreement. Whatever was going to happen between them, it was on hold for now. They’d come back to it, she was certain of that. And it would need to get settled.

If I just killed Holden, this probably ends with one of us dead.

Whatever she’d imagined when she heard the blasts from inside the shelter, the reality was worse.

They opened the door to an entire deck that had been dropped in a blender, then spun up in a centrifuge. Bulkhea

d panels, control stations, equipment, decking. It had all been torn, twisted, burned, and then thrown out against the outer walls at high speed. A long piece of pipe was embedded in a wall, still quivering like an arrow shot into a tree. Something that looked like a metal desk had been slammed into a support beam so hard that the metal had actually fused. And in one corner, a single boot had been pinned to the ceiling and then melted into a stalactite of rubber. She hoped there wasn’t a foot in it.

They floated silently through the wreckage looking for their exit. It wasn’t hard to find.

A hole gaped in the exterior bulkhead of the drum nearly five meters across. The nearly circular rim of it was all bent outward, like the metal wall had been breached by a giant’s battering ram. Which, Bobbie supposed, it had. Only instead of concrete and steel, it had been oxygen and fire. Outside, she saw the faint twinkle of light on the ejecta as it raced away from the station and toward the curtain of black at the edge of the ring space.

“Exactly where I said it would be,” Katria cackled. “Damn near half a meter from the exact spot I marked as the weak point. I should charge money for this.”

“Do you think anyone survived?” Naomi asked.

“We kept everyone we could out of the affected area,” Bobbie replied. “Only should have been Laconians down here …”