Persepolis Rising полностью

“Whether the enemy anticipated it or not, I can’t say.”

“That’s fair,” Drummer said. The first pricks of regret were forming at the back of her mind. She shouldn’t have yelled at him.

“And I can’t say whether they suffered the same effect … but I would guess they did. If I’m right about the mechanism, there isn’t any sort of shielding against it. You can’t block something that’s already there. That’s what nonpropagating means. It doesn’t come from anyplace. Everywhere it is, that’s where it came from.”

Drummer leaned back. That, at least, was interesting. If the Laconians had to go through the same things she had every time they fired their big gun, it would make a gap when automated systems might be able to penetrate their defenses.

“We’re also seeing the increased quantum creations and annihilations much more broadly,” Tur was saying somewhere nearby. “Like system-wide broadly. And there’s early suggestion that some experiments on Neptune and Luna that were working with controlled entanglement structures collapsed. So maybe—”

Drummer leaned back in her chair, folding her hands together. Her eyelids fell to half-mast. She knew—they all knew—that this was the first time one of the Laconian ships had left its home system. This wasn’t only an invasion, it was also a shakedown cruise. And nothing ever went completely as expected on a shakedown. The question was whether the Laconians knew what had happened. Whether they’d been anticipating it. If they’d been taken by surprise as well, they might not risk using the magnetic beam again.

Tur wouldn’t be able to tell her that. Or Vaughn or Lafflin. Admiral Trejo could say it, but not to her. Which meant there was only one plausible way for her to find out.

Her heart leaped at the idea, and she waited for the joy to fade before she risked thinking about it again. It was always dangerous when the universe fell down in a pattern where the thing you wanted and the wise path were the same.

Somewhere, Tur was still talking. He might as well have been on another ship. Drummer’s mind pressed through the possibilities, the dangers, the possible profits, and the certain loss. Each time, she found herself at the same conclusion.

She thanked Tur, using the social conventions of conversation to signal him it was time for him to go. She even shook his hand to make up a little for losing her temper before. As she walked him to the door, he was still talking about locality and signal loss. She closed the door behind him and went back to her desk.

Vaughn answered the connection request like his finger had been hovering over the button.

“Ma’am?”

“The Tempest is going to make a report. It may go back to Medina, or route through Medina back to Laconia,” she said. “We’re going to find out what it says.”

“Yes, ma’am. And how are we going to do that?”

“Saba,” she said. “The risk is worth it now. We’re reopening communications with Medina.”

“An improvised explosive device punctured a liquid-oxygen storage tank on deck four of the engineering section,” Overstreet said. He was reading from a report that scrolled by on the monitor wrapped around his thick forearm. “We’ve recovered very little of the device itself, but what few pieces we have indicate it was made with material common to this facility. It’ll be difficult if not impossible to track the exact source.”

Singh sat and listened to the report and tried to look present and thoughtful. But the truth was, his mind was bouncing around like a tiny animal trying to escape a predator. He found he only processed about half of what Overstreet was saying. His hands were shaking so badly that he didn’t trust himself to pick up the glass of water on the desk in front of him. He kept them under the desk, where Overstreet wouldn’t see them. The sense that he was in immediate danger was inescapable because it was true.

“The damage to that deck was significant. Total loss of the primary liox storage. The thrust from the breach caused the station’s maneuvering thrusters to fire, and the shaking knocked down several structures in the habitat cylinder. The network-traffic station for the Storm was completely destroyed. A backup environmental-systems plant was significantly damaged, and will probably not be repairable.”

“The Storm,” Singh said. My first command. The symbol of Laconian power at Medina.

“This is preliminary, of course,” Overstreet replied, flicking one finger to skip down the report on his arm. “It does seem like that might have been the target of this attack, so minor hull damage and the loss of one sensor array feels like we got off light.”

Singh’s hands felt like they were shaking hard enough to be visible, even under the desk, so he gripped his thighs with both hands and held on tight.

“Preliminary casualty reports?”