Persepolis Rising полностью

Hers.

Holden and Naomi had taken everything out already. The drawers were unlocked. The captain’s safe was open and scrubbed, waiting for a new access code. The double-sized crash couch—the one Holden and Naomi had shared for so long—gleamed, clean and polished. The slightly acrid smell of fresh gel told her that Naomi had replaced it all before she went. Clean sheets for the new tenant. Bobbie let herself drift into the space, stretching out her arms and legs. Eyes closed, she listened to the peculiar quietness of this cabin, how it was like the one she’d been using these last years. How it was different. When she reached out to take a handhold, the wall was still a half a meter away. A double-sized crew cabin, created so Naomi and Holden could share the space, had become the privilege of being the Rocinante’s captain. She smiled at the thought.

The safe waited for her passcode. She fed it the prints from her thumb and two index fingers, then typed in the password she’d chosen and spoke it out loud for the system to learn. Sixteen digits long, committed to her memory, and not associated with anything outside itself. The safe closed with a solid clack, magnetic locks falling into place where it would take a welding torch and a lot of time to force. She pulled up her partition on the wall screen, checking to see that everything was in place. The drive was quiet, the reactor shut down, the environmental systems well within the green. Everything just the way it should be on her ship. It was going to take a while, she figured, before that thought didn’t seem like she was playacting. Better that she got used to it, though. Her ship.

Four messages waited for her in the queue. The first two were automated messages, one confirming the docking agreement and fee structure for their present stay on Medina, the other showing the withdrawal from the group account of Holden and Naomi’s lump cash-out. The Rocinante already sending her the things it used to route to Holden. The third was from Medina traffic control, but the fourth was from the man himself. James Holden. She opened that one first.

His face appeared on the screen, floating in the same room she was in now, back when it had been his. He was smiling, and she felt herself smiling back.

“Hey, Bobbie,” he said, and his voice seemed loud in the quiet. “I just wanted to leave this here for you as a note. I’ve spent a lot of time on the Roci. My best moments are part of this boat. And a bunch of the worst ones. And most of the people I love. I can’t think of anyone else in thirteen hundred worlds I’d trust with it the way I trust you. Thank you for taking this cup from me. And if there’s ever anything I can do to help out down the line, just say so. I may not be part of the crew anymore, but we’re still family.”

The message ended, and she flagged it to be saved. She opened the one from traffic control. A young man with deeply black skin and close-cropped hair nodded into his camera at her.

“Captain Holden, I am Michael Simeon with Medina Station security. I am sending this to inform you that, in accordance with union policy, the Rocinante is being called to a mandatory security contract. Your presence is required at a briefing on the incoming ambassadorial contact from Laconia at the location and time embedded in this message. Please confirm that you or your representative will be attending.”

Bobbie tapped the reply, considered herself in the screen for a moment before she pulled her hair back into a bun, and scowled her reply.

“This is Captain Draper of the Rocinante,” she said. “I’ll be there.”

Ten minutes into the briefing, Bobbie thought, Oh. This is why he didn’t want the job anymore.

The room was in the drum section of the station, up near the nonrotating command decks. The desks were lined up in rows like the worst kind of classroom, with hard seats and built-in drink holders that didn’t quite fit the cheap ceramic mugs they’d given out. There were around forty people in the uncomfortable seats with her—representatives of all the ships presently in the slow zone—but she and the executive officer of the Tori Byron had places of honor. Front row, center. Where the smart kids sat. The Rocinante and the Tori Byron were, after all, the only gunships around Medina at the moment. All the rest were tugs and cargo haulers.

The man at the front of the room wasn’t the one who’d summoned her, but his boss. Onni Langstiver was the head of the security forces and so, for the length of her mandatory temporary contract, technically her boss. He wore a Medina Station uniform like it was a mech driver’s undersuit. Dandruff dotted his shoulders.

“The biggest thing is we don’t want to seem aggressive,” Langstiver said, “but we don’t want to look passive either.”