Persepolis Rising (Expanse 7)

“Inner circle,” Naomi said. “Claire and I can meet with him.”

“Good,” Saba said as he trundled to the freezer door and pounded on it with a blanket-wrapped fist. Then he pointed to Bobbie and Amos. “You come with me. We’ll see Katria. Talk about how to hunt Marines.”

Something flickered over Bobbie’s face. Hardly even an expression, but Naomi saw it.

“You lea

d, we’ll follow,” Amos said, smiling his empty smile.

“Any thoughts on how to get me onto my ship?” Alex asked as the door opened.

“Several,” Saba said. “You should come with.” Then he shook his head. “Too many things. Not enough time.”

They stepped out into the suddenly burning air. Naomi hadn’t even noticed she was getting cold until suddenly she wasn’t anymore. Saba led them out to the kitchen, and then they slipped through the steam and into the civilian world two by two until she and Clarissa were all that remained.

They sat at the counter and watched people go by. The fish was unremarkable, but the curry and mushroom rice actually were good. Across the corridor, a monitor spooled out the newsfeed until it repeated. Clarissa ate, drank tea, talked about everything and nothing. Naomi almost didn’t notice the tremble in the other woman’s hand or the way her eyes jittered sometimes. If she thinks she can do it, she can do it, Naomi told herself.

The man arrived, sliding into the chair beside them. Dark, handsome eyes and a bright, excited smile with a crooked nose between them. “Namnae na Jordao,” he said. “Seen you both back at home, yeah?”

“I remember,” Clarissa said.

“Katria, she sent me,” he said, then leaned forward. “So what is it we’re going to do?”

Chapter Forty-One: Singh

He had trained on ships back home, as anyone at his rank would. He’d spent weeks sleeping in a tight cabin and eating elbow to elbow with his fellow officers, but at the end of training, he went home, back to Laconia and Natalia and the monster. The weekends after a training run had been some of the best he’d ever had, waking up late with Natalia beside him. Before the monster came, they’d had quarters with a bedroom on the third story and a folding wall that they could pull back to get fresh air and the view. He remembered lying in that bed, looking out over the city as twilight fell. Vast clouds turning gold and violet on the horizon, and the alien construction platforms glittering among the stars.

He’d laid his head against Natalia’s as-yet-unoccupied belly and thought about the ships being made up above the planet’s atmosphere. How one day, he might command one. It had seemed glorious at the time.

He’d known without checking the dates when his exile on Medina Station had lasted as long as a full training tour. Something in the back of his mind had been anticipating the end of low ceilings and false skies. Each day, he found himself growing more anxious, and it wasn’t only the threat from local terrorists or the mounting pressure he felt to reopen the traffic through the gates. It was his flesh itself, grown accustomed to these long isolations having an end, expecting relief and not getting it. Wanting his wife and his child and their sky, even as his conscious mind knew the first two would come much later, and the last … perhaps never.

It was possible that he would live his whole life and die as the governor of Medina Station and never see a real cloud again. He’d known that from the moment he’d met with the high consul, all those months ago. It hadn’t started chafing until just now.

The draft of his monthly report was open on his monitor, his personal journal inset in a smaller window. Everyone above him in the chain of command could see his journal if they chose to, but his report gave him the chance to summarize his experiences. To say what, from his perspective, was important. His fingers hovered over his keyboard, where they had been since the memory of Natalia and their old bedroom and the clouds had intruded on his thoughts. He wished he could pause longer.

Many of the locals persist in referring to the transfer of control in Sol system as a war. This kind of rhetoric has emboldened dissident factions on Medina Station. Given the escalating violence employed by the dissidents, I have elected to maintain the closed-gate policy until the arrival of the Typhoon. Ships coming in from colonial systems have too great a potential to smuggle in relief supplies and reinforcements for the recalcitrant elements here.

He paused again. A small, angry voice in the back of his mind said, In the event of another large-scale attack on the station, I recommend pulling Laconian forces back to the Storm and venting Medina Station. He pushed the thought away without writing it down. It wasn’t only that it was immoral, though that should have been enough. It was also a statement of weakness. An admission that he could not cut the rot out of this tree without burning it all. And still, the elegance of it made it hard to turn away.

If Holden and his allies had been held to truly Laconian standards, they would be dead. It was that simple. If Singh treated them with the respect and dignity with which Duarte treated him—to which Singh held himself—removing them all from the equation would just be proper discipline. But he had grown to understand that they weren’t Laconian. Not yet. They hadn’t had time to understand the necessity of the empire. Holden’s arguments were more than proof of that.

He had to be patient with them. Firm, but patient. He had to keep them from hurting themselves or others until the ripples of this admittedly vast change had calmed. Until the new patterns of life had become normal for them.

While I am certain that James Holden knows more of the local dissident factions than he is presently admitting, he is not our only resource on that matter. His experience and expertise in the anomaly that Admiral Trejo reported make him a genuinely unique asset on that issue. For that reason, I have chosen to break off his interrogation here and remove him immediately to Laconia for debriefing in whatever context the high consul considers most appropriate.

Meaning that the terrorist figurehead would see Laconia before he did. Might even come across Natalia and the monster before they came out to Medina, if the high consul chose to treat him gently. Holden would smell the rain. See the sunrise. And Singh would be here, in this spinning can in an eerie non-space that didn’t even have stars to make it feel like home. It was a deep irony that being a prisoner and being in power could be so mismatched.

“Damn it,” he said to his empty office, then leaned back, running one hand across his scalp. There was so much more to put into the report. The preparations he’d made—was making—for the stationing of the Typhoon and the additional personnel that it was bringing to Medina. The victories he’d had in rooting out the bombers and repairing the damage they had done. His schedule for coordinating and controlling the traffic between the worlds. The empire would succeed or fail on the back of its logistical planning, and his implementation of the high consul’s vision was actually quite detailed. Only just now, something itched in his soul, and he couldn’t concentrate.

He wondered whether Duarte ever suffered the same base animal distractions. It seemed he would have, but Singh couldn’t imagine it. He closed the draft report, opened his personal journal wide enough to edit, and then closed it too. The walls themselves seemed to push the air at him. It was like an optical illusion of something falling that never quite fell.

“Damn it,” he said again, less forcefully this time.

The reports coming in from Sol were distracting too. Trejo’s private reports tracked through the Gathering Storm, but they were meant for Duarte. Singh wished he could read them himself. There were so many questions—whether the Tempest had taken any lasting damage in its first foray against the enemy. Whether anything had changed with the anomaly that had appeared after Pallas. When Trejo anticipated the next battle would come. And if he believed it would be the last one.

There were the public feeds, of course. The positions of the combined navies were, for the most part, a known thing. The larger cruisers were impossible to hide, and the massive union ships they called void cities. But there might be stealth ships lying in wait or fields of torpedoes launched into a quiet orbit, counting on the vastness of space to conceal them until they burned to life. Just looking at the declassified tactical map made Singh’s flesh crawl. The vast cloud of the enemy shifting through the gravity-bent space of inner planets, like a swarm of insects with a single, hated enemy. And the Tempest alone in its simple course. Trejo wouldn’t evade and he wouldn?

?t retreat. He had his orders, and he would follow them.