Persepolis Rising (Expanse 7)

From the way they talked, Holden could almost believe that they wouldn’t kill each other, given the chance. Almost, but not enough that he was sorry to be there. Maybe Katria really didn’t hold a grudge about the fight that Amos had started. And maybe Amos wasn’t spoiling to start another one. Or maybe the bomb was the most stable thing in the cart.

“I’ll think happy thoughts,” Holden said. “Butterflies. Rainbows.”

“What the fuck is a butterfly?” Katria said.

The cart ahead of them shifted, and they followed. It took fifteen minutes to get to the guards and then a minute and a half to get past them. Their cover story—Holden and Amos were applying for on-station work permits since their ship was locked down, and Katria was taking them to an on-site test—never even came up. Katria drove the cart to its queue, strapped the bomb to her back, and led them into the engineering decks, moving from handhold to handhold with the unremarked grace of someone who’d spent a good portion of their life on the float. Amos followed with the conduit wrench in his fist like a club.

Once the drum was well behind them, Holden pulled the earpiece out of his pocket and turned on the contact microphone.

“—is clear,” Clarissa said. “Can you confirm?”

“Yup,” Alex replied, his voice slow in the way that meant he was concentrating. “I’m moving my little pixies through now. Gimme just a … All right, I’m through.”

“Turning the recycler back on,” Clarissa said.

Clarissa and her team were in the drum, tapped into the environmental controls through a back door that, if they were found out, Saba would never be able to use again. Alex was back in the underground’s galley, flying the drones with his hand terminal and several layers of encryption. Naomi and Bobbie were, he assumed, loitering outside the secure server room, ready to force their way in. It was strange hearing their voices as if they were with him. It made him feel like he was back on the Rocinante.

The engineering decks of Medina were a lesson in the way ships learned and changed over time. If he squinted, he could still see the bones of the original, unmodified space, but years and mission drift had altered everything. Here, a section of floor had a slightly different color where a bulkhead had been taken out. There, a set of conduits had been rerouted with the three-point welding style that Martians favored. The pipes along the walls were labeled in half a dozen languages and safety-regulation styles. History made physical. Even where the walls were had changed over the years, added extra reinforcement from when the docks had been built or taken away when the new generation reactors had been put in place. Katria led the way down a side corridor, moving from handhold to foothold to handhold. Amos followed close behind her, only crowding her a little, and she seemed not to notice. Or at least not to care. Their little triumvirate. Katria to place the charge, Amos to keep an eye on her, and Holden to keep an eye on him.

A young woman floated past them, coming the other way. She had an electrician’s rig strapped to her arm, and her hair was the same texture Naomi’s had been when they’d first met. She passed Katria, then Amos. When she and Holden landed at the same handhold, she smiled an apology and pushed quickly off. He wondered whether they were about to kill her. Seemed possible. He hated the thought.

“Alex?” Bobbie said. “You’re awfully quiet there, buddy. Everything all right?”

“Yeah, sorry. Just … there’s a little lag. It’s not bad, but it makes me paranoid. Last thing I want is one of these charges to go off in a vent someplace. Take the whole group out.”

“That would be bad,” Bobbie agreed.

“Jim?” Naomi said. “Are you on yet?”

“We’re here,” he said softly. “Past the checkpoint. Not at the pressure tank yet.”

“There was a checkpoint?” Bobbie said.

Amos’ voice was calm. “Nothing we couldn’t handle, Babs.”

“I’m coming up on the last turn here,” Alex said.

“There’s a carbon dioxide scrubber intake,” Clarissa said. “Don’t get caught in the draft. I’m accessing it now.”

Katria started whistling between her teeth, a tuneless sound that her mic didn’t pick up. They reached an access panel with caution placards in a dozen languages and half the colors of the rainbow. CAUTION HIGH PRESSURE SYSTEM. Katria plucked a knife from her boot and pried the panel open as casually as if she did it every day.

“Make sure no one’s coming,” she said.

“You got it,” Amos replied, sailing on a little farther down the corridor and slipping to the center of the narrow space so that anyone coming the other way would have a hard time getting past him and his massive wrench. Katria pulled the bomb off her back and popped the case open. The workings inside didn’t look like much. A cone of carbon-silicate lace, the same as a ship’s plating. A hand terminal. A pair of standard wires. It didn’t look like enough to do much damage. Certainly not enough to blow out the side of the station. But of course, it wasn’t. That was all coming from the pressure tanks on the other side of the bulkhead. This was just the pin that popped that balloon.

“Okay,” Clarissa said. “You’re good to go.”

“Heading through,” Alex said. “And we’re past. The vent for the server room should be just ahead. Looks … looks a little higher grade than I was expecting.”

“Do we have a problem?” Bobbie asked. He could hear the tension in her voice. The electrical technician he’d bumped into intruded into his memory, and with it the faint and compromised hope that maybe it would all go wrong and they’d have to abort the mission.

“I think we’ll be fine,” Alex said. “My little pixies here are armed for bear. But I’m pulling five of them back around the corner here so they don’t get mussed up when the vent goes.”

Katria closed the case, set it in behind the access panel, squinted at it, shifted it fifteen degrees. What was it like, Holden wondered, being able to picture blast cones in your mind? What kind of life did you have to lead to have that come naturally? Katria rubbed her throat, and when she spoke, her voice had doubled, coming from the air they were breathing and through the earpiece. The reverb gave her words a weight.

“We’re done here. We’ll see you in the place.”

Meaning, the shelter. Where, when Naomi and Bobbie joined them, they could trigger the blast and wipe out the evidence.