Persepolis Rising полностью

Bobbie was yelling Fire, fire, fire on the Roci’s group channel, her voice coming out of his terminal loud, but not panicky. Commanding. On the screen, Alex was sending him the Roci’s tactical display. Three of the rail guns on the hub station fired at the massive Laconian ship. The shots all hit, tearing holes in the hull, but the breaches closed almost as fast as they were created. It didn’t look like damage-control systems. It looked like it was healing.

Holden had seen that sort of nearly instantaneous repair before. But not on human technologies. It took a really bad situation and made it a nightmare.

“Bobbie,” he yelled back at the terminal. “Keep the ship—”

He didn’t get to finish, because the screen flashed white and died. Medina actually shuddered. The entire station shook and rang like a bell.

“Jim,” Naomi said, and then couldn’t finish because she was still gasping for breath from their run. She made the Belter hand signal for emergency. Should we be looking for a shelter? It was a valid question. If the Laconians started poking holes in Medina, they’d want to be in a sealed emergency compartment with its own air supply.

“Go find one,” he said. “But I need to get up to command.”

“Why?”

Another valid question. Because I’ve fought in three major wars, he thought. Because the Belters running the station are the ones that didn’t join Marco’s Free Navy, so they’ve never been in this kind of fight. They’ll need my experience. All perfectly true and probably valid reasons. But he didn’t say them out loud, because he knew Naomi would see through them instantly to the truth. Because something terrible is happening, and I don’t know how not to be in the middle of it.

The doors finally opened, and the car recognized him as a captain with union clearances and gave him access to the overrides. As they went up, the feeling of gravity slowly turned into a lurching sideways motion and then disappeared. The lift opened onto corridors that Holden remembered fighting through under heavy fire, back when humans first found their way into the ring system. That astonishing moment in human history, passing through a stable wormhole into an alien-created network of interstellar gates, had just led to a whole bunch of people deciding to shoot each other. And now, a group of people who’d been isolated from humanity for decades were rejoining society just as things seemed to be going pretty well. And what did they do? Start shooting.

Holden’s terminal gave a gentle ping and then reconnected to the network. A moment later, Alex’s face appeared.

“You still there, Cap?”

“Yeah, just outside Medina ops. Did that thing hit the station? Not seeing any atmo-loss alerts here.”

“It shot the—” Alex started, then said, “It’s easier to show you. Take a look at this shit.”

“Just a minute.”

Holden slapped the wall panel, and the door slid open. He pulled himself inside the ops center.

The duty officer put up a hand. “You can’t come in here, sir. I mean, Captain Holden. Sir.”

“Who’s in charge right now?”

“Me?”

Holden had met her once before at a Transport Union function. Daphne Kohl. A competent technician. Somebody who’d done an engineering tour on Tycho. Perfect for noncombat ops duty on a station like Medina. Absolutely out of her depth now.

“Holden?” Alex said. “You still there?”

Holden turned his hand terminal so that the duty officer could see it too.

“Go ahead, Alex.”

On his hand-terminal screen, the massive Laconian ship was floating past the ring gate. It had a thick lozenge shape, not quite circular in cross-section, and with a variety of asymmetrical projections jutting out from the sides. More organic than constructed.

It came to a gentle stop just inside the ring gate. The Tori Byron, the Transport Union’s cruiser tasked with defending Medina Station, moved toward it. Holden couldn’t see or hear them, but he imagined the stream of hails and demands the Byron was throwing at the Laconian ship. Then, happening so fast it was like a glitch in the graphic, the Byron turned into a rapidly expanding cloud of superheated gas and metal fragments. In the playback, Bobbie was yelling, Fire, fire, fire, and the rail guns on the hub station opened up.

The image jittered, and the rail guns were ripped away from the hub and sent spinning off, fracturing into a cloud of ceramic shrapnel as they went.

“That’s what you felt,” Alex said. “The second time they fired that weapon, every ship in the zone shook, and half the electronics blew out.”

“What,” Holden said, “the fuck was that?”

Alex didn’t answer. His expression was as eloquent as a shrug.