Persepolis Rising (Expanse 7)

Whatever she chose, they would do the same. In the midst of the apocalypse, the military brass on Luna were still playing cover-your-ass. That seemed like the most optimistic thing about the whole report. They still thought they might have careers worth losing when this was over.

Drummer could remember living on Tycho Station. She could still walk through the corridors in her memory. The layout of the engineering decks the way they had been before the refit. The smell of the habitation ring. The office she’d inherited from Fred Johnson after his death. He’d had a personal cabinet there with a few things—an old book, a bottle of brandy, the physical copies of some of his personal initiatives that had foundered after he’d gone. She’d been the head of Tycho Station for three years before she’d cleared that out, and she still remembered how it had felt when she had. Like a widow finally selling off her dead husband’s suits.

When she looked at Pallas-Tycho Complex, she felt the same way again. She wanted a way to save it. She kept looking for the clever move that would put it out of the enemy’s hands, only there wasn’t one. It was already too late. She could hand it and any chance of freedom away, or she could see it destroyed. One or the other. And she had to choose.

“Vaughn?”

“Madam President?”

“We need to put out an emergency evacuation order for Pallas-Tycho. Everyone who doesn’t have their own craft, put on Tycho and break it away from the complex. No one is to be left in the Pallas structures, and the highest possible burn for all ships and Tycho Station is recommended.”

She looked over at him. His face was grayish. His eyes were dead as a shark’s. He didn’t argue, though. He only braced, turned, and left the room to carry out her order. Even if he disagreed with her, he was probably glad he hadn’t had to make the call. She would have been.

She set her system to Record, considered herself on the screen. Her eyes were sunken with exhaustion and despair, but not as badly as she’d thought they would be. Her skin had a waxy look in the bright light of her private office. She’d want to have the communications staff get her some powder and rouge before she made the public announcement. God, there would have to be a public announcement. But that was later. That was next.

She keyed in the reply code, and the high-security link to Luna showed Ready. She coughed and looked into the camera.

“Admiral Hu, I have given the evacuation order to Pallas-Tycho,” she said. “Even if we can’t save the station, we can make it harder for the Tempest to kill the population there. And seeing whether they feel the civilian targets are worth hunting down may also give us greater insight into the character and aims of the enemy. I advise the EMC forces to refrain from any premature engagement with the enemy at this time.

“It is my opinion that attempting to save Pallas Station would have been an error,” she said. “It would be better to prepare the forces we have at our disposal for a full, coordinated, and unrestrained engagement under circumstances more nearly in our control and to our advantage. And with the modified torpedoes and munitions available to all ships. Whatever gives us the best chance in that battle is worth the sacrifice.”

She paused. She was thinking this all through as she said it. The implications of the choice she’d made and the future of the war.

“We only have one shot at this,” she said. “There isn’t room for half measures. We’re going for the kill.”

Chapter Thirty-Two: Holden

The electric cart they rode on seemed almost as old as the station. The magnetic wheels gripped the ramp and kept them on track even as the spin gravity of the drum fell slowly away. If Medina Station had followed its intended path, it would have been well away from Earth by now, gone into the vast depths between the stars where spare carts were pretty hard to come by. The Mormons had built everything about the ship to last for generations, to grow and renew itself, to recycle with the least possible loss. Medina Station would outlive them all.

Except that he was going to blow a hole in it.

Amos rode shotgun, his hands splayed wide on his knees, his head freshly shaved. From his place in the backseat, Holden mostly saw the back of the big man’s neck—white skin flecked with age spots but still muscular and hard. He didn’t need to see the amiable smile to know it was there, and how little it meant. A massive conduit wrench clanked at Amos’ feet. Katria drove with the studied boredom of someone who knew the consequences of drawing the attention of station security. Her hair was already in a tight bun, prepped for the null g of engineering. She tapped her palm against the side of the cart as if she were listening to music, so maybe she already had her earpiece in. Holden tried to lean back against the seat, but in the lower g, it just scooted him forward. The bomb rested on the bench beside him like a fourth person.

It wasn’t big. A square box, safety orange with scratches at the edges and corners, the marks of long use. He didn’t know exactly what was inside it, only that Katria was certain it would blow the right kind of hole into the pressure tanks and that the ruptured pressure tanks would blow the right part of the station apart. She also said that, in its present form, it was both hard for securi

ty to detect and stable enough to play football with if you didn’t mind a square ball. Still, Holden didn’t rest his elbow on it.

They were nearly at the top of the ramp when a line of carts stopped them, all heading the same direction as they were and all stuck waiting. At the entrance to the transfer point, three Laconian Marines in power armor were talking to a dark-skinned woman in a green jumpsuit.

“Checkpoint,” Holden said.

“Inconvenient,” Katria said. She sounded like it was an annoyance more than an immediate threat to all their lives and the safety of everyone in the underground who was counting on them. He really did admire the way she did that.

The raid had come two shifts before, when Holden had been in his sleep cycle. Between the time he’d curled up in the bunk and put his head on the thin pillow and when he’d opened his eyes again, a quarter of Saba’s people had been snatched up and a man named Overstreet was on all the screens in the station telling the rest of Medina about it. And the Typhoon was already past its flip-and-burn, braking now toward the other side of the Laconia gate. They weren’t saying exactly when it was supposed to arrive, but their data placed it at around ten days. And the news from Sol looked grim, even correcting for the fact that it was all coming through the state-run newsfeed.

The noose was drawing tight. And in order to have any chance of escaping it, they were about to at least risk the lives of, and most probably kill, a bunch of people who were on the engineering decks at the wrong time.

“Holden. Do you have to do that?” Katria asked.

“Do what?”

“Grunt.”

“Was I grunting?”

“Cap does that when he’s thinking about something he don’t like,” Amos said.

“He has a wide variety to choose from,” Katria said.