Persepolis Rising полностью

They weren’t alone. The crews of all the other ships and the citizens of the station all had the same dazed look to them, though at different intensities. People were still scrounging for quarters or camping on the inner face of the dome. The docks were still locked down, and that showed no sign of changing. Any normal hand terminals were still blocked from sending messages off Medina or gathering data that wasn’t locally stored and vetted. There was a way that being in Saba’s underground felt like being buried alive. And there was a way that being outside of it made being buried alive seem like not such a bad thing. It was cozy, anyway.

They stopped at a café two levels below the open air of the drum’s interior. He got a bulb of genuinely third-rate coffee—overroasted to hide the shitty beans in the taste of the char, and a chalky cream substitute—and Naomi got tea and a corn muffin that they could split. They sat at a little table as far away from the public passage as they could get and still have a good view of the foot traffic passing by. Two men, smoking pipes that looked like they’d been made of decking ceramic. A group of schoolchildren in matching gray-green uniforms. A busker with a marionette trying to amuse passersby with her antics. It could have been any station in human space. And as they watched, they talked about things that weren’t dangerous if anyone were to overhear.

In the public corridor, a security team walked past. Two figures in the blue power armor bristling with weapons. The carts and foot traffic moved around the pair like a stream flowing around rocks. Their presence wasn’t intimidating people as much now, or at least not in the same ways. On a screen across the corridor, Carrie Fisk of the newly renamed Laconian Congress of Worlds was being interviewed by a pretty young man with a military haircut. Holden wondered what she was saying, but the café had their system set to a light, friendly saidi list that shifted from one melody to the next without ever pausing in between. The same music, Holden guessed, that they’d played before Laconia came knocking.

It was all becoming normal. He could see it in the way the clerk served up the terrible, terrible coffee. He could hear it in the conversations at the nearby tables. It showed on the screens and in the gaits of the people walking by. Panic and alarm were exhausting. He was exhausted by them, and Medina was exhausted too. It was already shifting into its new routine. Checkpoints, yes. Armed security, yes. All the theater of dominance and control and nothing to undercut that narrative.

Just to look at it, you wouldn’t guess there’d been a bombing.

Saba hadn’t known it was coming either, and they’d only heard about it through him. A small explosion, but the unofficial reports said at least one Laconian had been killed. The official reports, apparently, were that it hadn’t happened at all. That was a change. The assassination attempt had been used to justify the crackdown. Now the crackdown was just another day, and highlighting the attacks on the structures of power wasn’t useful. Nothing had to be justified anymore. Governor Singh in his offices was trying to project a sense of normalcy and inevitability. And as far as Holden could tell, it was working.

“Kind of quiet,” he said, meaning They think they’re winning.

Naomi tugged her hair down over her eyes. “Right?” she said. It meant I think they’re winning too.

Back in the underground, Holden found Saba sitting at a dumb terminal. Even in full light, Saba’s hair and skin were nearly the same color. In the backsplash from the screen, he almost seemed like a cartoon of himself. He nodded at Holden and shifted a few centimeters on his bench to give him room. Holden sat.

“Checking on the Storm dump?” Holden asked, nodding toward the screen. The log entries spooled up. The information they were intercepting from the Laconians was encrypted on a variety of levels, and using more than one schema.

“Dui,” Saba said. “Everything between the station and the Storm is coming in, but until we get access to the server that decrypts it, it’s just noise. Plenty more irons in that fire, though. Medina comms got more compromised than we thought. Turns out Golden Bough bought a tech eighteen months ago, got a backdoor into the system we never noticed.”

“Really?” Holden said. “How’d you find it now?”

“Coyo told us,” Saba said, flashing a grin. “Patriotism is weird shit.”

Holden chuckled. “Whatever works, I guess.”

They sat for a moment in near silence. Saba scratched his arm and pointedly didn’t look at Holden when he spoke again. “Big coya seems like she’s got a little stone in her throat. Any trouble with your crew?”

“Nope,” Holden said. And then, “I mean, yeah, but nothing that’ll cause a problem.”

“Don’t guess you want to say what? Make me feel better to know.”