Persepolis Rising полностью

“No shit?” Alex said, then whooped. “Holy crap, you took a prize? Looks like you got yourself a ship after all, Captain Draper.”

Naomi’s voice cut in, clipping into Alex’s last syllables. “I’m coming out.”

“All right,” Alex said. “Two to pick up, and then we can get in the flight queue out of this dump.”

“One,” Naomi said. “One to pick up. We ran into a problem. Clarissa went down fighting. I wouldn’t have made it out without her. None of us would.”

Bobbie’s throat went tight. She looked over at Amos, and he smiled his usual amiable smile, shrugged. Just for a moment, she saw something underneath the expression. Pain and loss and sorrow and rage, and then he was just himself again.

“Damn,” Alex said. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Okay,” Houston said. “I have you on the scope. We’ll slide over and get you.”

“Naomi,” Bobbie said. “When you get on the Roci, I’ll need you to find a safe place for the Storm in the escape queue.”

“I’m on it,” Naomi said. Now that Bobbie knew to listen, she heard the exhaustion in her voice. The weariness of grief. She turned off her mic, turned toward Amos, but he was pulling himself back toward the lift. She followed him, a little trickle of adrenaline coming in. Waiting to see what was coming next.

At the lift, Amos stopped and scratched his nose. “I was thinking I should probably get a few of the new kids. Go through the ship. Just make sure we don’t have anyone on board we didn’t mean to have on the ride.”

For a moment, she thought about letting it go. Letting Amos fall back into his usual self. It would be easier. It would feel more respectful.

It was what Holden would have done.

“I need to know if you’re okay,” she said.

“I don’t really—”

She pulled herself in close, almost nose to nose. She wasn’t smiling and he wasn’t either. “I didn’t ask if you wanted to talk. I said, I need to know. Whatever ship I’m the captain of, if you’re on it, that means you and I have clear, open, and honest conversations about your mental health. This isn’t friendship. This isn’t nurturing. This is me telling you how it goes. We both know what happens when you’re off the rails, and I’m not going to pretend that you’re anything more or less than what you are. So when I say I need to know if you’re okay, it’s an order. Are we clear?”

Amos’ jaw clenched and his eyes went flat. She didn’t back away. When he smiled, it wasn’t the empty, amiable expression he usually reached for. It wasn’t a version of him she’d seen before.

“I’m sad, Babs. I’m angry. But I’m okay. Going down fighting was a good way for her to go too. I can live with it.”

Bobbie let herself drift back. Her heart was going a little faster than she liked, but she kept it off her face. “All right, then. Take your team and go through the ship. I’ll warn you when we’re going on the burn.”

“I’m on it,” Amos said. And a moment later, “You know, you’re gonna be good at this captain thing.”

“This is exactly the kind of recklessness that has been underlying the Transport Union since its inception,” Carrie Fisk said. Her face was flushed, her gestures sharp, and her voice had the buzz of rage behind every word. Her blouse was tan with black, and she wore the green armband that had come to symbolize antiterrorist solidarity among those loyal to Laconia and High Consul Duarte. “The union claimed that stability and safety were their primary mandate. That was the whole point of letting it administrate ring space! But the minute—the minute—someone arrives with the power to question that? Bombings. Theft. Murder. The hypocrisy is mind-boggling. It’s unreal.”

The interviewer was a young man apparently well known in Sol system and on Medina. Singh watched the man nod and stroke his chin like an ancient sage considering a deep mystical truth. His seriousness made Fisk look even more formidable.

“And would you say the situation is stabilized now?” he asked.

“We can hope it is,” Fisk said as she shook her head no. “When I look at the patience that the present administration has shown to us and the violence with which it was answered, it leaves me … not angry, even. Embarrassed. We called ourselves a civilization, and this thuggery is all we have to offer. I can only hope that the people who were fooled into thinking any of this could be justified are embarrassed too.”

It was a sentence Singh had written himself and delivered to Fisk. She repeated it now as if it were an off-the-cuff thought, and she made it sound mostly convincing.

Of all the things he had done since he’d come to Medina, Fisk and the Laconian Congress of Worlds was by far the most successful. Everything else—moving up the timetable for the Tempest’s transit to Sol system, flushing out the underground, managing Medina Station—was tainted.