Persepolis Rising полностью

“They have him, they’ll have us. Not talking him down, but these people were Mars before they were this. Ask anyone in the OPA from the old days. Martian interrogation, it’s a question of how long until the break. Never if. Better that he’d died.”

“We can move,” Bobbie said. “Do you have any holes that Holden didn’t know about?”

“Few,” Saba said, reluctantly. “But fewer now. My people are moving now. Still room for you and yours, but there won’t be. Not for long. And …”

He shook his head.

“And what,” Bobbie said. “If there’s something more, I need to know.”

Saba shrugged and nodded at the screen. “When it comes, if it comes, the one system we can’t go to? Sol. Anyplace else, I can try for. Anyplace else, I can go. But no matter where it is, she won’t be there. Wasn’t so bad when the repeater still was, but with it gone, it feels …”

A tear tracked down Saba’s brown cheek. Bobbie looked away.

It was so easy to forget all the others. Not just Saba, but all of them. The crews of all the ships trapped in the dock beside the Roci. The children in Medina’s schoolrooms, the medical staff in the clinics. The artists playing music live outside the cafés out of love of doing it. Medina Station had been the nearest thing to a void city before the void cities were built. It was a home for a generation of people, and every one of them was carrying something now that made their days harder. She thought of the prisoners in the public jail, the angry man who’d come to watch them. Who had he lost back on Sol? What was keeping him awake in the nights?

There were so many families, so many crews, parents and children, lovers and friends, whose lives had been changed past recognition since Laconia gate had opened. It wasn’t just her and the Roci crew. It wasn’t just Saba. Everyone was dancing on this same landslide, and no one knew how to make it end well.

She wanted to say something comforting, but she couldn’t bring herself to lie. The best she could think of was to change the subject.

“When we get out,” she said. “Not if. When. We’re going to need a plan. If every ship just bolts off on its own, we’ll lose contact. They shouldn’t know where we went, but we should. At the very least, we should have a record of who went where. This every-man-for-himself-and-God-against-all shit’s romantic, but we have to plan for something past just this.”

Saba nodded. In the distance, voices and footsteps.

“Not just encrypted but in code,” Saba said. “Something where only we know what it means.”

“We?”

“Ou y mé,” Saba said. “Leaders of the underground, us. First among dissidents.”

Bobbie chuckled. “Well, there’s a fucking job title.”

The footsteps came faster now, and coming closer. Saba looked up like an animal smelling smoke. Fuck, Bobbie thought. Not something else. It’s too much already. We can’t carry something else.

The woman who appeared in Saba’s doorway was older, white hair pulled back in a tight braid. Her body was long and thin, her head a little too large for her shoulders. The classic build of someone who’d grown up without gravity to hold her down. She even had the split circle of the OPA tattooed on her arm. She should have looked ancient, but the brightness in her eyes belonged on a woman a third her age. She looked from Saba to Bobbie and back with something like triumph in her eyes.

“Maha?” Saba said. “Que?” And then to Bobbie, “Maha one of our best communications techs. Had her hands in the codes since before I was born, yeah?”

“And I know all their secrets,” she said in a weirdly accented voice. She held out a dumb terminal that wasn’t connected to Medina’s system. “The new decryption run turned over some stones. And look you what was squirming under one.”

Bobbie was closer. She took the handheld terminal and flipped through the file there. It was titled MEDINA STATION SUPPLEMENTARY SECURITY REVIEW AS REQUESTED BY GOVERNOR SANTIAGO SINGH. The file’s creator was listed as Major Lester Overstreet. She checked the file length and whistled.

“Que?” Saba said.

“This is way too long to just be an incident report,” Bobbie said. “It’s …”

The section headings were Materials, Procedures, Personnel, Protocols, Audit Summary, Recommendations. She recognized the style of paragraph marking from when she’d trained back on Olympus Mons. It looked like an MMC security report, but twice as long. Maybe three times. She shifted through one after another, her head starting to swim a little.

“I think … Saba, I think this is everything,” she said.