Persepolis Rising, Page 26

  “Copy that,” Overstreet replied. There was a hint of skepticism in his tone.

  Singh stopped. Overstreet turned to face him, a puzzled look on his broad face.

  “Something troubling you, Major?”

  “I didn’t intend any disrespect, sir.”

  “Our mandate from High Consul Duarte is to win over the population of this station, as a first step in winning over the population of the colony worlds. We do that by entangling our interests. By teaching them that what they think of as ‘informing’ is actually just good citizenship. This is just a first step in building what will hopefully be a network of cooperators to help us.”

  “Understood,” Overstreet said. “Marines make terrible police, sir. We’re not trained for this sort of job. If we could build up a security force made up of local cooperators and Marine elements, it would help a lot.”

  “Good. Make that part of your mandate going forward. You have full authority to offer amnesty to people you think might be useful.”

  “I’ll pass it down the ranks,” Overstreet said. He began gently pushing Singh back up the corridor toward their little convoy of carts.

  “The other thing,” Singh said. “I think it would be appropriate to make a complete audit of the security protocols. Call it a supplemental security review.”

  “I can do that if you’d like, sir,” Overstreet said. “Can I ask what function the review would fill?”

  He meant Am I being called on the carpet? This was also the fallout of letting Tanaka go. There would be a period where his people trusted him less. Suspected that he would blame them for failures in the system. Punish them for things that weren’t their fault.

  “We need—” he began, then caught himself. “I need to look over the complete system of security we have. Things are going to change simply because we are here, with these people, and not in a classroom at the academy. I don’t know how yet, but I think it’s inevitable. I am trusting you to tell me not only what we do but why. And whether you think it should be altered.”

  “Comprehensive, then,” Overstreet said, but he sounded more pleased by the implied trust than put out by the extra work. “I’ll see to it. Back to the office, sir?”

  Singh almost said yes, but a thought stopped him.

  “No,” Singh said. “No, take me to Carrie Fisk’s office. And notify her we’re coming.”

  On the ride to the Association of Worlds’ offices, Singh thought back to his letter home. The idea that being able to hold the ring space meant they’d won the war was optimistic. Or simplistic, at least. Laconia could absolutely control access to the worlds through the gates, but every single world could decide this didn’t mean they were conquered. And even if they placed a Laconian governor on every world, and a Laconian naval ship in orbit and Marines patrolling the streets, every individual might decide they personally had not been conquered. Establishing the empire was an endless series of microscopic magnifications into greater and greater granularity, and every grain was a potential renegade. Medina was just a microcosm of the problem they’d be running into everywhere. Political opposition considered as fractal geometry.

  He had been sent as a governor, and the more he saw, the more he came to understand what that assignment actually was. Not just a bureaucrat to oversee the smooth functioning of the station and the traffic it controlled. He was creating the template for making every other human world into a new Laconia. Seven Belters had decided that killing a single low-level officer was worth risking all their own lives. That wasn’t a rational position. An enemy that bad at basic math might do anything. The colony worlds might decide that throwing a few hundred people with rifles onto a transport ship and trying a suicide attack on Medina made sense. He only needed to hold the station for a few more weeks until the Typhoon arrived and rendered any such foolhardy attack plan irrelevant. Carrie Fisk could help to carry the message that would dissuade any such error before it could happen.

  The office complex occupied by the Association of Worlds sat inside the drum section of Medina, surrounded by farmland. It consisted of three blocky structures of prefab fiberglass sheets, painted a gentle off-white, and sporting the interlocking honeycomb banner of their organization. Singh suspected the design was intended to symbolize the interconnected rings of the gate network. For the headquarters of an organization whose goal was the centralized governance of thirteen hundred worlds, it looked cheap, shabby, and hastily erected. Nothing like the massive stone structures Laconia built to house the future government of mankind.

  Carrie Fisk occupied an office on the third floor of the largest of the three buildings. She had a lot of empty space, a single desk with four chairs, and flaking light-green paint on her fiberglass walls. He wondered what their first meeting would have been like if he’d come to her office instead of bringing her to his. Seeing all of this, he might have recommended against working with her at all.

  “Madam President,” Singh said as he entered, taking her hand in his own. “I’m glad you could take the time to meet with me on such short notice. This is Major Overstreet, the Marine commander on Medina.”

  Carrie shook his hand, and gave Overstreet a baffled nod. “Of course, Governor, anytime,” she said, and gestured to her chairs. Singh sat, Overstreet did not. “Tea?”

  Singh declined with a wave of his hand. “I’m afraid I don’t have much time to socialize. I have an important message for you to send to the association worlds, and to the local governments on those worlds that have at this point elected not to officially join you.”

  “Okay,” Carrie said. She really was a frightened little mouse of a person, Singh decided. He found himself wondering how such a person could become the leader of anything, much less the nascent government for a galaxy-spanning republic. But she’d had a following before he came, so maybe there was more to her than he saw. Failing that, she could be made into the sort of person he needed.

  “It occurs to me that while the Heart of the Tempest is engaged with the fleets in the Sol system, and additional Laconian forces have not yet arrived to secure Medina Station, some ill-informed members of your association or other prospective members who haven’t officially joined you yet might view this as a moment of weakness for our occupation.”

  “I don’t—” Carrie started.

  “But it’s important that everyone understand that such a view is both inaccurate, and dangerous,” Singh continued over the top of her. “You will send a message, as the president of the new Laconian Congress of Worlds, to every planet in the network.”

  “The what?”

  “The change of name will more closely join your group with the empire. It’s important that they recognize you as a legitimate and trusted representative of Laconia. You will tell them that any hostile action taken through one of the ring gates, be that a ship full of soldiers or an angrily thrown rock, will result in the total sterilization of the inhabited planet on the other side of that ring.”

  Carrie went still for a moment. “Jesus Christ. Are you serious?”

  “It’s come to my attention that many of the social organizations of the old human power structures show a shocking inability to do risk analysis. They may foolishly attempt a doomed assault, thinking all they’re risking is their own lives. Reason doesn’t work with this kind of person. I need you to make them understand, on an emotional level, the price for such an attack. I will kill every single person on their planet. I assume even former OPA radicals have family members they care about, and whose lives they are less willing to risk on a romantic notion of a hero’s death.”

  Overstreet’s bright-blue eyes were on him. Singh felt the man evaluating him.

  “I can’t be part of something like that,” Carrie said.

  “You can,” Singh insisted. “Because I’m making that the rule of engagement for our occupation here, whether you warn people or not. I think it’s best if everyone understands that before they do anything with such a terrible price. Don’t you agree?”
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br />   Singh stood up, and Overstreet opened the door for him. Carrie Fisk stared at him from behind her desk. Singh didn’t see the fear he expected on her face. More a sort of simpleminded confusion.

  “Please get the announcement out before the end of the day,” he said. “I leave the wording to you, as long as all the details I laid out are included. Good day, Madam President.”

  He left the room with Fisk still reeling from the shock. Overstreet fell easily into stride behind him.

  “Permission, sir?” Overstreet said, his tone reserved and formal. Distant, almost.

  Singh felt a moment’s chagrin. He should have called Overstreet by his given name. He’d forgotten that, and it seemed late to change their habits now. He needed to be more careful about that. “Proceed, Major.”

  “Are we going to order those attacks?”

  “Only if we have to,” Singh said.

  Overstreet didn’t reply at once, and when he did, his tone was flat. “Understood,” he said.

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Holden

  Holden shifted in his bunk. If he lay on his side with one arm raised and his head resting on it like a pillow, he could block that ear, then put a hand over the ear that was pointed up at the bunk above him. It was almost enough to block out Alex’s snoring. But it also made his shoulder ache after a while, and his hand fell asleep before he did. He could track down a set of earplugs, but that meant getting out of bed. Half-awake as he was, that seemed like a lot of trouble. Anyway, no one else in the bunks seemed to be bothered. He also knew—half knew—that if he woke up enough to fix the problem, he’d be too awake to sleep again. Admitting that age and anxiety had turned him into a light sleeper felt vaguely shameful in a way that probably wouldn’t have stood the scrutiny of a fully conscious mind. Years of living with his crew had built habits and norms that they were violating in these new circumstances, and it was weird.

  Clarissa made an uncomfortable sound halfway between a whine and a growl. In the bunk across from him, Naomi shifted. By the dim orange glow of the safety light, he could just make out the curve of her shoulder, the shape of her hair spilling out over her pillow.

  Which meant his eyes were open.

  Which meant he was awake.

  He tried closing his eyes again, willing himself back down to sleep, but Alex coughed above him, and Holden shifted his arm. The pins and needles started in his fingers. The last wisps of dream and oblivion thinned and vanished out of his brain. As quietly as he could, he rolled to the edge of the bunk, let himself down to the deck, and slipped out the door, leaving the others to get the rest he couldn’t.

  The web of unmonitored space that Saba and his people had carved out of the flesh of the station was tighter than living on any ship Holden had crewed. Keeping the power low enough to avoid detection meant thick air and rationed water. The murmur of voices speaking in musical Belter Creole was as present as the hum of the air recyclers. Holden made his way to the head—an emergency cut-in to the processing system with a seat about the right size for a five-year-old. He had to wait for the woman already there to finish. By the time he stepped back into the access hall, he was fully awake, hungry, and a little grumpy.

  Naomi slouched down the hall toward him. Her undershirt was stained with sleep sweat and use. The top of her half-undone jumpsuit gathered at her hips like humanity’s worst bustle. Her hair and face still had the shape of her pillow to them.

  She was beautiful. She made everything better than it would have been without her.

  “You’re up,” she said.

  “I am.”

  “Me too.”

  “Sucks, right?”

  “Oh yeah,” she said, then gestured toward the head. He shifted out of her way.

  “Want to risk breakfast out in the world?” she asked as she passed him.

  Holden let the question sit in his chest while he was alone in the corridor. When they were in the secret passageways of the underground, they were safe in that they were unmonitored. The Laconian-controlled station was dangerous, but it was also open. Fresh air, better food, and as far as Holden knew, they still weren’t on security’s shit list.

  And there were things they could learn by being there that they’d never get if they only ever stayed where it was safe.

  When Naomi emerged, he took her arm like they were stepping out to a formal affair, and together they walked to one of the security hatches, and from there into Medina Station. The transition points were the most dangerous. Moving from the unmonitored spaces into public without seeming to pop into existence out of nowhere meant timing their passage in places that were only intermittently watched, or else getting secondary entrances into showers, locker rooms, and toilets, where privacy gave them cover.

  When they reached the open sections of the station, it was moving from one kind of oppressive environment into another. The halls were bright and open, the air fresh and if anything a little cool. Screens and monitors showed the locally produced Laconia-approved news: propaganda about the stability and security of the station mixed with whatever pop-culture feeds from outside the slow zone made it past their censors. Holden and Naomi walked through it like refugees at a shopping complex, trying not to blink into the too-bright lights.

  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 attem
pt 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.”