Persepolis Rising полностью

“Maybe they didn’t notice,” one of the others said.

Or maybe they’re waiting for more troops to get on board, Bobbie thought, and the Gathering Storm surged out to the black, snapping the nylon bands taut.

They were on maneuvering thrusters. Fifteen meters down from them, a blast of superheated steam vented, pushing the destroyer into a fast rotation. It didn’t seem to come from anyplace, as if the thruster were hidden under the weird not-metal of the hull until they wanted it. Good thing they hadn’t set up their camp there or at least one of them would probably have been blasted off the ship and cooked to death already.

The Storm lurched. The rumble of the thrusters translated itself up her legs. Medina fell away like someone had dropped it. The drive plume of the Storm’s main drive flared, and the ship jumped forward. Only about a quarter of a g. They weren’t going to risk melting Medina to slag. Still, it was a little eerie seeing her shadow stretched long ahead of her on the body of the ship. A reminder that if she fell, she’d die in fire.

“Amos,” she said. “Make us a hole.”

“I see you coming after me,” Alex shout-sang. “You ain’t catching the Roci, friend. We’re just too damned pretty for you.”

“Alex, get off this channel,” she yelled, then remembered that her signal was intentionally too weak to carry. She shook her head and hoped he wouldn’t be too distracting.

Amos had the welding kit out, power supply strapped to his side. With two broken ribs, she figured the rig had to hurt like hell, but nothing about his movement betrayed the pain. Her own cracked tailbone wasn’t making it any more comfortable either. They’d done themselves a lot of damage getting this far. She had to make sure it didn’t make a difference. Pain was just her body telling her something. She could choose to ignore it. Amos held the torch to the hull, and everything went bright. Sparks seemed to stream away behind them, curving down and vanishing against the hull like gravity was pulling them and not just the turning of the ship.

“Weapons ready,” she barked, and the others acknowledged. If the destroyer had the double-hulled design that all Martian ships had, cutting their way through here would only be the first step. But it was a critical one. There was damage they could do there, but it was also difficult to defend, and with none of the Storm’s crew there, tactics like flooding it with hydrogen and oxygen could take out her whole team without risk to the enemy. Tempting as it was, she had to get into the ship proper, and—

“Ah, Babs? This is weird as shit.”

Amos stood braced. The cut from the welding torch was a line of brightness in the hull half a meter long. Half a meter long and shrinking fast.

“What have we got?”

“Remember how it looked like the hull could repair itself? It’s doing it now too.”

“That going to be a problem?”

“Yeah,” Amos said. “I’d say that’ll make this hard.”

The Storm lurched under them. The drive plume brightened below them, and the Storm gathered speed. The acceleration pulled the straps taut as the thrust gravity made the nuclear-powered flames of the plume more definitively down. The bow-most of Bobbie’s magnetic locks flickered amber and slid a few centimeters before it went red again and stopped. The little moment of give shot adrenaline through her body. Her heart was thudding in her ears. Her voice was so calm it sounded like someone else.

“Got any bright ideas?”

“Lemme try something,” he said, and hunkered down.

He cut again, but in a tight curve, not making a hole they could breach through, but something smaller. When he got around it, he punched in, pushing the little core of hull material into the space within the ship. The circle he’d made instantly began closing, but Amos was carving slivers off its edge. He pared the hole wider and wider, even as it fought to narrow. His motions were fast and efficient. He didn’t slow down even as the ship bucked and turned under them, the proof of a lifetime’s physical labor made into elegance. Bobbie knew that if she’d tried this, she’d never have been able to keep up, but with Amos, the hole grew wider.

“Edges are going to be toasty,” Amos said. “Nothing I can do about that.”

Saba’s voice murmured in Bobbie’s ear. Marine fire teams have reached the detention cells. Time to turn our little friends off.

“Sooner would be better than later,” Bobbie said.

“You ain’t wrong about that,” Amos said. He started whistling tunelessly between his teeth. “I’m not going to be able to stop this while folks go through.”

“Fuck that,” one of the others said. “Not winding up half in and half out, me.”