Persepolis Rising полностью

“The Ontario is hit. Reporting reactor breach and dumping core. We are seeing impacts on the Severin, the Talwar, and the Odachi, but no system confirmation yet. Rounds arrived thirty seconds earlier than the model anticipated.”

“Fuckers,” Avasarala said. “That’s why they took out the missile. Throw a changeup and let us think it was their fastball.”

“Whatever they’re using for predictive algorithms, it’s really good,” Hu said, awe in her voice. “That’s almost a third of our attack group down. And if … Oh.”

For a moment, Drummer didn’t understand what she was seeing. Independence, the second void city to launch, the home to hundreds of thousands, seemed to bloom like a flower. Long petals of carbon lace and titanium peeled back, turning as they did. Something terrible and bright happened in the center of the city, but Drummer couldn’t guess what it was. What she knew, what mattered, was that between one breath and the next, Independence was dead.

“We’re counting eight simultaneous impacts on the void city,” an analyst said from somewhere farther away than the control room. “They seem to have been placed to exploit resonance. We’re seeing some structural breakdown.”

Emily Santos-Baca was on Independence, Drummer thought, and she’d been dead already for over an hour. It didn’t matter how much adrenaline was pumping through Drummer’s veins, how tightly she gripped her bulb of old tea. She could shout the retreat order if she wanted to, but anyone in a position to hear her was dead already, or would be by the time her words could reach them.

The PDCs along the Tempest’s side fluttered again. Another group of EMC torpedoes died, faster this time because it was a smaller attack. The Tempest seemed to pause, floating in the distant nothingness as if inviting the EMC ships to take their best shots. Taunting them.

An hour and twenty-three minutes before, the EMC ships shifted, lit their Epstein drives as hard as they’d go, and turned to whatever vector got them away from the theater of battle as quickly as they could. The Tempest didn’t react. No new blooms from their rail guns. No more torpedoes. Drummer didn’t believe for a second that the enemy’s supplies had been exhausted. Trejo wasn’t killing the other ships because he didn’t need or want to. That was all.

Drummer put her tea on the little side table next to Hu’s, turned, and walked out. She was aware in a vague, distant way of Vaughn behind her, calling her name. It wasn’t something that mattered enough to attend to.

The decking of People’s Home felt fragile under her feet, as if her footsteps might be enough to break them and spin her and everyone else in the city flying out into the vacuum. She passed her security detail, distantly aware of the men and women assigned to make sure she was safe in any circumstances scrambling to follow her.

It didn’t matter. Because they didn’t matter. Not when a whole city could die in a heartbeat.

She was in the lobby of the union’s executive offices, sitting in an uncomfortable couch with her eyes locked on nothing in particular when Avasarala found her. The old woman steered her wheelchair across from Drummer like they were in someone’s private quarters or a back porch back on Earth. There was no one else in the lobby. That was Vaughn’s doing, more likely than not. In her imagination, the decking beneath her and Avasarala bucked and split open. What had Santos-Baca thought when it happened? Had she had time to think about it at all? She was trying to understand that she would never see the younger woman again, but the thought wouldn’t take. She dreaded what came after it did.

“I’m sorry,” Avasarala said.

Drummer shook her head.

“It won’t help you,” the old woman said, “but they all knew the risks going in. The chances that we would turn the Tempest back the first time we tried? Always thin.”

“We should have waited,” Drummer said. “We should have pulled them all back. Gathered everyone together and had every goddamn ship we have attack that fucking monstrosity at the same time. Wipe it out.”

Her voice broke. She was crying, but it didn’t feel like it was her doing it. Avasarala handed her a cloth. “You’re mistaken, Camina. The cost was higher than we wanted. Higher than we’d thought. But we did what we came here to do.”

“Die? Badly?”

“Learn,” Avasarala said. “How quickly the deck healed itself? That’s something we needed to know. But the places where a rail-gun round hit their PDCs, the weapons system there didn’t grow right back into place? We needed those too, and we didn’t even know to look for them. Maybe the ship can’t fix more complex mechanisms. We have a map of the armaments now. Where the PDCs are. Where the rail guns are. Where the torpedoes launch from. Next time, you can target those specifically. Degrade its attacking power, push it in ways we couldn’t this time because we just didn’t know.”

“All right,” Drummer said.

“They didn’t die for nothing,” Avasarala said.