Persepolis Rising (Expanse 7)

“Que, Nanda?” Saba asked.

“Found someone,” the girl said. “Look.”

And from behind the girl, Holden and Naomi came into the room, squinting at the ugly light.

“Hey!” Holden said, and then “Bobbie. This is great. I wasn’t sure how we were going to find you.”

Saba whistled low. “James fucking Holden. You’ll no believe how much I’ve heard about you.”

“All good, I hope?” Holden said, walking forward, oblivious to the tension in the room. Or maybe choosing to ignore it. It was always hard to tell with him. “You’ve met my old crew already?”

“You crew?” Saba said, then looked at Bobbie as if seeing her for the first time. He laughed. “Savvy I did. Well, then. Welcome to the underground.”

She smiled, but something ugly plucked at her guts. James fucking Holden, Bobbie thought. Three magic words, and just like that, someone else was in charge.

Chapter Nineteen: Drummer

The image was grainy, the sound almost as much noise as signal. Half a dozen encryption layers poured on and then stripped back out left their artifacts in the flattened audio and near-false colors. Drummer’s heart softened all the same, because there in the middle of it—unmistakably—was Saba. His eyes had the little puff at the lower lid that he got when he was tired, but his smile was luminous.

“No savvy you how good it was to get your message, Cami,” he said. “Heart outside my body, you are. And no one better than us two to be where we’re sitting.”

“I love you too,” she told the screen, but only because no one else was in her office.

Avasarala’s covert contacts had come through faster than Drummer had hoped. That they’d come through at all was something of a shock. She had been willing to believe the old woman was overstating her powers, claiming a level of influence that retirement and age had long since taken from her. But here was evidence that, whatever else she was, Chrisjen Avasarala wasn’t completely full of shit. Saba had burrowed deep into Medina Station like a tick, making connections with as many union operatives as he safely could. And by union, more often than not, he meant OPA.

She listened and took notes by hand as he went through his full report. Writing it out helped her to remember. Sixty-eight people on Medina Station broken into independent cells that went from three to eight. The amateur, botched assassination and the crackdown that followed. Saba didn’t have to say that he was using it to recruit more for his effort. That was obvious. The focus moving forward was intelligence gathering and infrastructure. Avasarala’s network was all well and good, but having multiple backups, blind zones in the station where the Laconian security couldn’t reach, and opening backdoors into the communications of the enemy were how to prepare for the next wave. And find out what the next wave was going to be.

Drummer found herself nodding with his words, thinking through their implications. The Laconians were routing their comms through a destroyer-sized ship docked on Medina with heavy encryption and an off-ship decrypt local to the station to physically isolate the two. No good way to gather intelligence there, and no chance of breaking into the enemy’s system. She’d need to find the firmware code for the antennas and repeaters. Maybe Avasarala’s henchmen in the Earth-Mars Coalition had some exploits they’d been sitting on that she could pass on to Saba. The Laconian checkpoints were tying up a third of their ground force. That kept the soldiers busy in the known and public corridors, and gave Saba’s people more time to create bolt holes and blind zones. If the crackdown slacked off, they’d want to do something provocative to keep the enemy busy with identity checks and traffic control. Trivial security theater, while the underground dug more tunnels into the body of the station. It was possible that all the updated plans for Medina were in Laconian hands. Any known holes, they had to assume were known to all the players, but making new ones wouldn’t be hard for Saba. He understood smuggling as well as she ever had, and maybe better.

The message ended with Saba’s impish grin.

“You watch you, m’dil,” he said, and blew a kiss to the camera. “Live like you’re dead.”

Drummer touched the screen as if it were his cheek, but it was cold and hard. Live like you’re dead. There was a phrase she hadn’t heard in a long time. Once, it had been the motto of the Voltaire Collective. A call to courage with a fatalistic bravado that angry adolescents found romantic. She’d found it romantic once too.

She checked the time. Saba’s message had run almost twenty minutes. Part of her found it hard to believe it had been that long. She could have drunk in the sound of his voice for another hour and still been thirsty. From her screen after screen after screen of written notes, it was astounding that he’d fit so much information into so short a time.

She went through all she’d written again, committing it to memory, then wiped her notes. Information couldn’t be compromised if it didn’t exist. She put in a comm request for Vaughn. He answered immediately.

“Where do we stand with the military attaché?” she asked.

“Waiting on word from you, ma’am,” Vaughn said.

“Have them in the conference room in ten minutes.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Vaughn said. There was a surreptitious pleasure in his voice. The diplomats and coordinators from the Earth-Mars Coalition had been flooding into People’s Home since the fall of Medina, and Vaughn enjoyed telling them what to do. It was probably a vice, but she didn’t mind indulging it.

Drummer rose from her desk and stretched. Her spine popped once between her shoulders, loudly. She yawned, but not from fatigue. It was the kind of yawn that a runner made before a race. The deep inhalation of someone anticipating great effort. If she’d been keeping a normal schedule, her watch would almost be over. That wasn’t how she lived anymore. Now she was awake when she needed to be awake, and asleep when she could. Sin ritma they’d called that lifestyle back when she’d been younger. It was harder on her body now, and it took an extra bulb of coffee to sharpen her mind sometimes, but it also left her smiling in a way she didn’t wholly understand.

Benedito Lafflin, the EMC liaison, was waiting for her twenty minutes later. His fist was closed around a bulb of soda water that was already half collapsed. His wide, toadlike face looked less smug than usual. “Madam President,” he said, standing.

Drummer waved him back down. As she sat, Vaughn brought her a bulb of tea. She took a sip. Hot, but not scalding. Vaughn drifted back to the wall like he was part of the ship’s machinery.

“What are we looking at?” Drummer said.

Lafflin cleared his throat. “Candidly? I think you’re going to be quite happy with the plan.”

“Are you giving me direct control over your fleets?”