Persepolis Rising (Expanse 7)

She wanted to say something comforting, but she couldn’t bring herself to lie. The best she could think of was to change the subject.

“When we get out,” she said. “Not if. When. We’re going to need a plan. If every ship just bolts off on its own, we’ll lose contact. They shouldn’t know where we went, but we should. At the very least, we should have a record of who went where. This every-man-for-himself-and-God-against-all shit’s romantic, but we have to plan for something past just this.”

Saba nodded. In the distance, voices and footsteps.

“Not just encrypted but in code,” Saba said. “Something where only we know what it means.”

“We?”

“Ou y mé,” Saba said. “Leaders of the underground, us. First among dissidents.”

Bobbie chuckled. “Well, there’s a fucking job title.”

The footsteps came faster now, and coming closer. Saba looked up like an animal smelling smoke. Fuck, Bobbie thought. Not something else. It’s too much already. We can’t carry something else.

The woman who appeared in Saba’s doorway was older, white hair pulled back in a tight braid. Her body was long and thin, her head a little too large for her shoulders. The classic build of someone who’d grown up without gravity to hold her down. She even had the split circle of the OPA tattooed on her arm. She should have looked ancient, but the brightness in her eyes belonged on a woman a third her age. She looked from Saba to Bobbie and back with something like triumph in her eyes.

“Maha?” Saba said. “Que?” And then to Bobbie, “Maha one of our best communications techs. Had her hands in the codes since before I was born, yeah?”

“And I know all their secrets,” she said in a weirdly accented voice. She held out a dumb terminal that wasn’t connected to Medina’s system. “The new decryption run turned over some stones. And look you what was squirming under one.”

Bobbie was closer. She took the handheld terminal and flipped through the file there. It was titled MEDINA STATION SUPPLEMENTARY SECURITY REVIEW AS REQUESTED BY GOVERNOR SANTIAGO SINGH. The file’s creator was listed as Major Lester Overstreet. She checked the file length and whistled.

“Que?” Saba said.

“This is way too long to just be an incident report,” Bobbie said. “It’s …”

The section headings were Materials, Procedures, Personnel, Protocols, Audit Summary, Recommendations. She recognized the style of paragraph marking from when she’d trained back on Olympus Mons. It looked like an MMC security report, but twice as long. Maybe three times. She shifted through one after another, her head starting to swim a little.

“I think … Saba, I think this is everything,” she said.

Chapter Thirty-Seven: Alex

His back hurt. Of all the thousand things that were jacked up and wrong in his life right now, the one that chose to make him crazy was that. His back hurt, just below his rib cage where it clicked for a couple days after they’d been on the float for a while. Now it clicked and ached a little. Just time and age catching up with him, but it made him crazy. Probably anything that he couldn’t fix was going to make him crazy right now.

He walked down the tight hallway, his shoulder brushing the conduits and pipes, and told himself that things were getting better. Not losing Holden. That was still a long way from better. But the rest of it. The rest of them. Whatever else happened, he still had Bobbie.

And for him anyway, Bobbie counted double.

Taking care of their little family had been his job damn near since the day the Canterbury died, back in some other lifetime. And usually, he felt like he managed it pretty well. The only time things had really come apart, he’d been married to Giselle and preoccupied with trying to pump air into that leaking sack of a relationship. But all the times he hadn’t lost focus, Alex felt like he’d kept the crew of the Roci working together, mostly. It wasn’t big things. The powerful stuff was always small. A kind word when Clarissa was feeling unappreciated, a little elbow in the ribs when Holden’s outrage on someone else’s behalf threatened to eclipse the person in question, a cordon around Amos when the big man was in the bad part of his head. Every crew that lasted more than three runs together had someone who kept a weather eye on the balance. For decades now, he’d been that man on the Roci.

Only they weren’t on the Roci now. And that, so far as he could see it, was more than half of the problem. Not the whole problem. But more than half.

“Hoy, hoy, hoy,” one of Katria’s people said, trotting up behind him. Alex recognized him from the galley. Young guy with a nose that had gotten bent sometime back and never put straight. “Passé alles gut?”

“Sure,” Alex said. “Everything’s fine.” It wasn’t true, but he wasn’t looking to talk about family business outside the family.

“Bist bien,” the crook-nosed guy said. “Just. We’re alles busted about Holden, yeah? Whatever Voltaire can do, help out, yeah?”

Alex clapped the crook-nose on the shoulder, and looked deeply into his eyes. “Thank you. Seriously. That means a lot.”

The kid was just another someone who wanted to get close to the action. There had been a million like him over the years. Holden had always been the one who soaked up the fame and celebrity, because for the most part he didn’t notice it. He just kept on being himself, and got vaguely surprised when anyone recognized him. The rest of them had to build up their routines and diversions, ways of being polite to the people who wanted to insert themselves into anything that the Rocinante did so they could tell their friends and feeds that they knew James Holden. Shaking Crook-nose’s hand and sending him away didn’t cost Alex much, but it didn’t cost him nothing. Part of him wanted to ignore the guy or yell at him. But this was easier in the long run. He had enough experience to know that, and he was pretty good with patience when he needed to be.

After a well-calculated moment, he turned away and resumed walking toward the makeshift bunkroom. And Naomi.

It had been hard when Holden and Naomi pulled the ripcord, but it hadn’t been unexpected. Part of him had been braced for it since his own second divorce. He’d been ready for the blow when those two packed up their things and retired. When Duarte’s forces blew through the gate and changed everything, part of him had thought that getting Holden and Naomi back was going to be the silver lining.

He’d called it wrong, though.