Persepolis Rising полностью

She pulled herself past the lockers, out to the lift, and up toward ops. Alex’s voice shifted from the comms to his actual voice as she got close.

“Well, good that we won’t be the first ones getting shot at. I mean, assuming anyone gets shot at all. Got to admit I’m a little bit hoping they try something.”

“You mean because Duarte and his people are a bunch of traitors to the republic who all deserve to hang for treason?”

“And theft. Don’t forget theft. And not warning anyone when the Free Navy was looking to kill a few billion people. I mean, I’m all for forgiveness and bygones being bygones, but it’s easier to stomach that after the assholes are all dead.”

Bobbie strapped herself into a crash couch. “This may not even be Duarte’s people. For all we know, he got stabbed in his bathtub fifteen years ago.”

“A man can hope,” Alex agreed. The dimness of the ops deck meant most of the light on his face was splashing up from the monitor. “I shifted the Roci back to a four-person-crew configuration.”

“It’s not enough,” Bobbie said. “We need more crew.”

“We did it this way for years before you and Claire joined up. It works better than you expect. Hey … Look, since there’s a chance that someone might be trying to poke holes through Medina Station, would you mind if I kept Holden and Naomi on the ship’s channel? Just in case?”

Bobbie hesitated. Part of her bridled at the prospect of having personnel who weren’t on the operation still be in the communications chain. But it was Holden and Naomi, and cutting them out also felt strange. Alex was waiting for an answer. She made a gesture as if she’d been thinking of something else.

“Of course not,” Bobbie said. “They’re family.” Alex’s faint smile meant he’d known she’d say it, and was glad she’d said it that way. She opened a connection to Amos and Clarissa. “Okay, everyone. Preflight checks. Let’s get ourselves into position.”

The slow zone—gates, Medina Station, and the alien hub station with the rail guns—was only tiny if compared to the vastness of normal space. The whole volume was smaller than the sun, and with the guesses she’d seen about how much energy it took to hold the gates open and stable, probably equally energetic, but controlled by forces they were still struggling to make sense of. And between the gates, a darkness that matter and energy slipped into, but from which nothing ever came back. The not-emptiness past the gates left her feeling a little claustrophobic, with only a sphere a million klicks across to move in.

Even that constrained, Medina Station would have been too small to see on her monitor if it had all been rendered to scale. Instead, she had a window with the full system—gates, stations, the Roci, the Tori Byron, the rail-gun emplacements—on one side of her monitor and three smaller displays showing tactical displays of the Roci in the needle-thin radar shadow of Medina, the Tori Byron, and Laconia gate respectively. A countdown timer marked the minutes and seconds until this Admiral Trejo said he’d be coming through. Her shoulders were tight. She felt like they were in the moment between throwing dice and seeing what numbers had come up. The gambler’s high. She didn’t like how much she liked it.

“Medina’s sensors are getting something,” Clarissa said from the engineering deck.

“Throw me the update, please,” Bobbie said, and the screen with Laconia gate on her monitor shifted to a live feed of the gate itself, enhanced in false color to make the darkness legible. The weird circle of the gate. The wavering stars beyond it, and a looming shadow coming through. Even just watching the stars go out behind it, Bobbie could tell it was a big ship. Maybe it was their Donnager-class battleship. And that in itself would be the Laconians making a statement.

Unless it was something else.

The ship that came through first looked wrong. It was something more than the weirdly organic shape of it. The way the false color struggled to make sense of its surface was like a graphical glitch or something out of a dream. She found herself looking for seams where its plating came together, and there was nothing. Her mind kept trying to see it as a ship, but defaulting to some kind of ancient sea creature from the deep trenches of Earth.

“That ain’t one of ours,” Alex said. “Shit. Where did they get that?”

“I don’t like this,” Clarissa said.

Me neither, little sister, Bobbie thought.