Persepolis Rising (Expanse 7)

“Yeah, just outside Medina ops. Did that thing hit the station? Not seeing any atmo-loss alerts here.”

“It shot the—” Alex started, then said, “It’s easier to show you. Take a look at this shit.”

“Just a minute.”

Holden slapped the wall panel, and the door slid open. He pulled himself inside the ops center.

The duty officer put up a hand. “You can’t come in here, sir. I mean, Captain Holden. Sir.”

“Who’s in charge right now?”

“Me?”

Holden had met her once before at a Transport Union function. Daphne Kohl. A competent technician. Somebody who’d done an engineering tour on Tycho. Perfect for noncombat ops duty on a station like Medina. Absolutely out of her depth now.

“Holden?” Alex said. “You still there?”

Holden turned his hand terminal so that the duty officer could see it too.

“Go ahead, Alex.”

On his hand-terminal screen, the massive Laconian ship was floating past the ring gate. It had a thick lozenge shape, not quite circular in cross-section, and with a variety of asymmetrical projections jutting out from the sides. More organic than constructed.

It came to a gentle stop just inside the ring gate. The Tori Byron, the Transport Union’s cruiser tasked with defending Medina Station, moved toward it. Holden couldn’t see or hear them, but he imagined the stream of hails and demands the Byron was throwing at the Laconian ship. Then, happening so fast it was like a glitch in the graphic, the Byron turned into a rapidly expanding cloud of superheated gas and metal fragments. In the playback, Bobbie was yelling, Fire, fire, fire, and the rail guns on the hub station opened up.

The image jittered, and the rail guns were ripped away from the hub and sent spinning off, fracturing into a cloud of ceramic shrapnel as they went.

“That’s what you felt,” Alex said. “The second time they fired that weapon, every ship in the zone shook, and half the electronics blew out.”

“What,” Holden said, “the fuck was that?”

Alex didn’t answer. His expression was as eloquent as a shrug.

“Okay, I assume Bobbie’s got you guys hiding in the station’s radar shadow still, since I’m talking to you and you’re not dead.”

“Yeah,” Alex said. “She seems pretty strongly in favor of not doing anything to make it mad.”

“Let me see what we can find out here, and I’ll call back.”

“Copy that,” Alex said. “Roci out.”

“It’s … magnetic?” Naomi said, her tone managing to be authoritative and astounded at the same time. This is what it is, but I don’t believe what I’m seeing. She’d floated across the ops center to one of the consoles and was working with the tech there. “It’s reading as an incredibly strong magnetic field focused down to a narrow beam.”

“Is that possible?” the duty officer said, her voice small and tight.

“Only if you define ‘possible’ as things that have already happened,” Naomi said, not turning to look at her.

“So anything made of metal is vulnerable,” another tech said.

“It isn’t just metal,” Holden replied, then pushed off to drift over to Naomi’s station and look at the data she was pulling up.

“Everything has a magnetic field,” Naomi added. “Usually it’s too weak to matter. But at the levels that beam is hitting, it could spaghettify hydrogen atoms. Anything it touches will be ripped apart.”

“There’s no way to defend against something like that,” Holden said, then went limp. In microgravity, it was not as satisfying as collapsing into a chair would have been.

“That’s what shook Medina,” Naomi added. “Just the beam passing near us. The maneuvering thrusters had to fire to hold us still.”

“Holden, this is Draper,” his terminal said.