Persepolis Rising (Expanse 7)

While he waited, something tugged at his mind. Some memory, from the academy, maybe. Another mention of a sphere of light and darkness. It had to do with the first wave of colonization, even before the high consul had led his people to Laconia …

He took a moment to have his monitor search the local network for any mention of such an object with the properties Trejo had described.

The search took less than a second, and what it found was a minor colony world named either Ilus or New Terra. In among the list of names connected to what the article was calling the “Ilus Incident” was one that his monitor underlined. When he tapped it, he understood why.

In the report, Captain James Holden of the Rocinante had reported seeing the exact object that was currently residing on Admiral Trejo’s ship. The same James Holden who was now in their security lockup, under suspicion of terrorist acts.

Chapter Thirty-Six: Bobbie

The public prison was full, but not with her people. Laconian guards stood at the corners with weapons drawn, watching the crowd watch the prisoners. Drones buzzed overhead, scanning constantly. On the far side of the steel mesh, men and women sat disconsolately waiting for trial or judgment. Bobbie stuffed her fists deep into the pockets of her plain gray jumpsuit. A man at the back of the lowest cell on the left looked a little bit like Holden, but not so much she could talk herself into thinking it was him. Even if they had him, Holden probably wouldn’t be put here. This jail was more than half for show—public stocks for a new generation. Anyone with real value to the security forces would be somewhere else.

Still. She had hoped. It never hurt to hope, except when it did.

“Pinché schwists, alles la,” the man next to her said under his breath. She’d been around Belters long enough to translate it in her head. Lousy kids, all of them. The man who’d said it had long brown-gray hair and an expression as sour as old lemons. She only smiled her agreement. This wasn’t a place where she wanted to say anything aloud against the Laconians.

It turned out it was just as good she didn’t.

“Esá all the fucking underground, yeah?” he said. “Things aren’t hard enough, now they’re killing our goddamn station?”

Bobbie felt her smile grow tighter, less sincere. The rage in the man’s eyes wasn’t for the invaders who’d swept in, destroyed their defenses, and taken over. It was for the people fighting against them. It was for her.

“Hard times,” she said, because the drones might be listening.

She walked away, heading north along the drum. The straight line of sun above her, the ruins of the engineering decks far away at her back. Being out in public like this left her feeling exposed. The Laconians were everywhere, the checkpoints twice as thick as they’d been before, and everywhere she looked, faces shaped by fear. The Laconians’ fear that their control over the station hadn’t been enough to stop the underground. The locals’ fear of Laconian reprisals. Her fear that she’d be found out, or that she’d broken something she wasn’t going to be able to mend.

Saba’s network had managed to get the warning out pretty well. The death toll in the explosion was low. She’d heard a dozen, and most of them Laconian, but it was hard to know what was true. It was as deep in the culture of the Belt as bones in their bodies that you didn’t fuck with the environmental systems. She hadn’t thought about the symbolic meaning of her plan, or what it took for Saba and Katria to agree to it. To Bobbie, they’d been getting important intelligence and covering their tracks. To the Belters, they’d been saying that they would be free of Laconian rule, even if the only freedom was death. If not everyone on the station signed on for that, she couldn’t blame them.

A swath of green grass lawn on her right had a classroom’s worth of children, a teacher talking about insects and soil. A man on a bicycle rode past her, whistling to let people know he was coming, and to clear the path. All the things that had happened before Duarte and Trejo and Singh. She couldn’t guess how many of the people she was walking past would have turned her in to the authorities if they’d known. How many would have applauded her. There was no way for her to ask.

That was the trick of living under the thumb of a dictator. It broke every conversation, even the private ones. The invasion had wounded everyone, one way or another. Herself very much included.

Her hand terminal chimed, and she plucked it out of her pocket with a sense of dread. The message was from Alex, and all it said was WHEN YOU HAVE A MINUTE. The underground was still using encrypted back channels. The security forces wouldn’t see the message in their logs. But if Bobbie got picked up, or someone looked over her shoulder, the words would be innocuous. Saba’s cramped halls and corridors were the only place they could speak freely. Everywhere else on Medina had become the land of subtext.

She found an escalator and let it carry her down into the body of the drum. It wasn’t far to the entry to Saba’s alternate station, but they all had to be careful to see they weren’t followed. Their bubble of freedom was fragile, and once it popped, it wouldn’t come back.

Alex was waiting for her when she ducked into the access corridor. The flesh under his eyes looked ashy and his shoulders slumped like he was under a higher gravity than they were. He smiled, though, and that her friend seemed pleased to see her counted for a lot. For more than it should have, even.

“How’s the weather out there?” he asked as they made their way down toward the makeshift galley.

“Stormy,” she said. “Get the feeling it’ll get worse before it gets better too.”

“That was a given.”

In the galley, half a dozen of Saba’s people sat at the tables, talking. The air smelled like noo

dles in black sauce, but the food was gone. Bobbie wasn’t hungry anyway. One of Katria’s men, a crook-nosed guy named Jordao, nodded to her, smiling a little too widely. She nodded back with a sense of dread. This was not a time she wanted someone hitting on her.

“Any word?” she asked, her voice low even though security wouldn’t hear her. She wasn’t afraid of being found out here, but the wounds were fresh. Some things didn’t need to travel outside the family.

“On Holden, no,” Alex said.

“Okay,” Bobbie said. It cut her a little every time there was nothing, and she welcomed it. If it came back that she’d killed him, the hurt would be a million times worse. Every little wound was a good thing because it wasn’t the killing blow.

“That stuff Naomi pulled off the encryption machine? It’s working. Saba’s folks are able to dig through a bunch of stuff we intercepted before. Of course, the Storm’s not talking to Medina anymore since we blew the channel, so we’re not getting anything new. But it makes it rough for the bad guys that they can’t have their ship talk to the station without radio or tightbeam, so …”

He trailed off like his words were running out of pressure.

“So we won,” she said. “Go us.”