Persepolis Rising полностью

A rope defined the line to the ships. Two and a half, maybe three hundred people, each with their fist on it, went the length of the dock and switched back twice. Men and women in the jumpsuits of dozens of different companies jostled in place in the dock’s microgravity, inching forward along the line as if registering their silent impatience would make the whole operation move faster. Laconian guards floated along the perimeter, rifles drawn and ready for violence. If it came to that, Bobbie thought, it wouldn’t be surgical. Not in a mob like this. If anyone started anything, the air recyclers would be spitting out blood clots for months. She hoped everyone else knew that too. She hoped they cared.

Every now and then, a team of Laconian military escorts came, took the people from the moored end of the line, checked their authorization, screened them for weapons, and led them off to their ship. Everyone on the rope would pull a little forward, grabbing on another half meter closer to their turn, feeling the weave of the strands, the grease from all the palms before their own. The unmoored end floated free, waiting for the next hapless crew to join the waiting horde.

They were lucky, Bobbie told herself. Most of the ships had full crews of twenty or thirty people. The Roci just had the four of them. They could all go aboard at once. Small blessings indeed. Almost too small to see.

The guards led away another group. They moved down the rope again, that much closer.

“How you holding together, Claire?” Bobbie asked.

Clarissa took a long, shuddering breath and nodded. When she spoke, the words came just a little too fast, and all the consonants had sharp edges. Like she was trying to rein them in and couldn’t. “It would be very nice to get to the med bay. But right now, it’s just euphoria and nausea. Nothing I can’t handle.”

“That changes,” Amos said, “you let me know.”

“Will,” she said. Bobbie wasn’t sure she liked the sound of that. There weren’t many actions Amos could take that would make the situation better. If putting their heads down and enduring wasn’t enough to get Clarissa to her medications, the options got bad fast.

“Anyone else think it’s cold in here?” Alex said.

“It is,” Clarissa said. “I think the pressure’s a little low too. The environmental systems are all off.”

“That doesn’t sound like a good thing,” Alex said.

“Belters,” Bobbie said. “We trained for this.”

“You trained for low air pressure?” Amos asked. He sounded amused. That was better than sounding frustrated.

“We trained for occupying Belter stations. One of the base tactics that Belters used was throwing environmental stasis off just enough that we’d have to keep bumping it up our priority queue. Someone somewhere on the station is trying to make it harder for these folks.”

“Huh,” Amos said. “That’s pretty ballsy.”

“It only works if the occupying force isn’t willing to just kill everyone and start over. So yeah. There’s an element of playing chicken.”

The group in front them on the rope wore gray-black jumpsuits with CHARLES BOYLE GAS TRANSPORT logos in green on the back. The one floating nearest them looked back over his shoulder, catching Bobbie’s eye almost shyly. She nodded, and the man nodded back, hesitated, tilted his head a centimeter forward.

“Perdó,” he said, nodding toward Clarissa. “La hija la? She’s sick?”

Bobbie felt herself tense. It wasn’t a threat. It wasn’t an insult. It was just someone who wasn’t part of her crew putting themselves into her business. But maybe she was feeling as tense as Amos. She took a little breath and nodded.

The man tapped his compatriot ahead of him on the rope. They spoke for a moment in Belter cant so thick and fast, Bobbie couldn’t follow it, then they all released the rope and gestured Bobbie forward. Giving up their place in line so that Clarissa could get to the Roci a few minutes sooner. It was a tiny thing. A gesture. It shouldn’t have hit her as hard as it did.

“Thank you,” Bobbie said, and ushered the others forward. “Thank you very much.”

“Is is,” the man said, waving her thanks away. It wasn’t an idiom she’d heard before, but his expression explained it. We do what we can for each other.

The Laconians were efficient. The line moved quickly. Even with as many people as were waiting, the Roci crew reached the head of the line in only a couple of hours. An escort of four Marines checked her authorizations, scanned them all for weapons. Apart from a momentary hit of panic when they were looking at Clarissa’s scan—would her modifications keep them from letting her on? —everything went smoothly. And after all, her mods had been designed to get past security unnoticed. Good to know they were still doing their jobs, even while they killed her.