Persepolis Rising полностью

Holden leaned forward. The logs spooled past, storage filling with traffic that might be everything to them. Or nothing. Bobbie wasn’t something he’d talked about before. He wasn’t sure he wanted to start now, but he was living in Saba’s rooms, eating the man’s food, coordinating on his operations.

“It’s not exactly my crew,” Holden said. “I had some trouble with the union before all this happened.”

Saba’s grin came again. “You’re forgetting whose man I am, que no? Drummer spends a little time talking about you behind your back, and that means to me.”

“Right, so … I was in the process of retiring when all this came down. Dropping off the Freehold guy was my last mission. Was going to be. The crew is really Bobbie’s, only then history got in the way, and now I’m sort of back in charge and sort of not. It’s awkward.”

“Savvy,” Saba said. “I’m there too.”

“Something wrong between you and Bobbie?”

“No, no, no. Only that Medina’s my home port, but the Malaclypse is my home. This came down, and I got put at the front because of my spouse and her job and the union. Plenty enough around here don’t like that. Do their own thing because it’s their own.”

“Like the bombing,” Holden said.

“Like that trap, yeah. Like the trying for the governor. Like a bunch of assholes I stopped who were looking to steal Laconian uniforms, beat up some of our own so they could start shit between, yeah?”

“That doesn’t seem productive,” Holden said.

“Not about productive,” Saba said. “About reaching for what can get done. Plenty of old OPA on Medina. When the Alliance turned into the union, it didn’t erase all the old factions. There’s Ochoa OPA and there’s Johnson OPA even when there’s no Ochoa or Johnson. Voltaire Collective set that bomb like they’d just been waiting for the chance, and maybe they were. Oldsters going at it like they were young again. Young ones trying to live up to the stories of the bad old days. Like pumping oxygen into a fire.”

Holden shook his head. “If we’re going to manage anything, we have to—”

The dumb terminal chirped, and one of the entries came up highlighted. Saba pulled the interface pad closer and scrolled back to the flagged entry. He cross-checked and opened the file. All the things a real system would have done for him automatically, if they could risk using one.

Saba clicked his tongue against his teeth.

“What’ve we got?” Holden asked.

“Traffic control plan update,” Saba said. “Got something slated as coming in through Laconia gate, but not right away.”

“How far out?”

“Forty-two days?” Saba said. He moved through the data as carefully as he could, checking the distribution stamps and time codes. It didn’t take him long to find the name and transit specs for the ship. The Typhoon. And from the mass and energy profile, it was huge. On a hunch, Holden had Saba match it with Laconia’s first transit. The two were the same. The Typhoon was another Tempest. Holden felt a tightness under his rib cage wondering how many more like it there were.

Saba cursed under his breath. A man’s voice came from behind them, somewhere in the warren of hidden corridors. A woman answered. The bulkheads, the exposed conduits and industrial decking, the thick air and the darkness. All of it was just the same as it had been when Holden sat down, except that now it seemed fragile.

Another warship from Laconia with more soldiers. The beginning of the permanent occupation. Not just the beginning of the end. The end.

Saba cracked his knuckles and smiled ruefully at Holden. “Well,” he said. “Leaves me wishing I could tell Drummer and the union. Kind of thing she’d want to know.”

“Yeah,” Holden said, trying to gather his wits. There was more than a little of him jumping around behind his own eyes like a panicked monkey, but this wasn’t the time for it. “All right. We still have some time. Whatever we decide to do, our obstacles are the Gathering Storm outside the station and something like two hundred, maybe two hundred and fifty power-armor-wearing Marines inside it.”

“And loose-cannon OPA factions firing off without warning,” Saba said. “When they hear about this, they’ll get worse. Complicate everything if they won’t coordinate.”

“So that too,” Holden agreed. His brain felt like it was stuffed with cotton ticking. He wanted to get all his people onto the Rocinante and run away. If there was anyplace that the Laconians wouldn’t just follow them and shoot them down. If there was anyplace in thirteen hundred systems that would be safe anymore. For them, or for anyone.

“Okay,” he said. “All right. Whatever goals we decide on, we have to take those three things into account. And we have to do it in the next forty-two days.”

“Because after that,” Saba said, “no more us, yeah?”