Persepolis Rising

Chapter Twenty-One: Holden

Rather than leave them sneaking into and out of the refugee camps in the drum or Laconian-assigned quarters, Saba gave Holden and the crew access to a smuggler’s cabin: a six-rack berth his people had carved out of a service tunnel where the station records were out of date and missing. It was a tight fit, and Alex snored a little, but it was better than the alternatives.

The room where they spent most of their time had been meant for midlevel storage. Not the deep pockets of the generation ship traveling through the vast abyss between the stars. Not the immediate, day-to-day pantry of the men and women whose lives would begin and end in the journey without seeing either end. Built-in yellow guides marked where crates of tools and imperishable rations would have been stacked along the deck and walls. History hadn’t taken the room that way.

Cushions of gel and fabric covered the floor around a half-dismantled holographic display that acted as a low table. The air recyclers were set to minimum to keep the usage footprint of the space as low as it could be, and a battery-driven fan moved the thick air. Lengths of printed textile—Holden couldn’t tell if it was cloth or plastic or carbon mesh—draped the walls and rustled in the little breeze. He didn’t know if those were functional somehow, or if the impulse to decorate interiors just outlived all political circumstances. Mostly, it reminded Holden of a Moroccan restaurant he used to go to on Iapetus, back when he’d been hauling ice for Pur ’n’ Kleen.

Saba and four people Holden assumed were his lieutenants sat across from him and the crew and refilled their cups with a smoky tea whenever they got low. In addition to being captain of a supply ship called the Malaclypse that was stuck in dock just like the Roci, Saba was married to Drummer. At first, Holden had been worried that what he’d done with Freehold was going to haunt him, but when he brought it up, Saba had waved it away. It happened in a dream, Saba said, which was a little confusing until Naomi told him it was an old-timey Belter idiom for Don’t worry about it.

Even after a long life spent outside Earth’s gravity well, Holden was impressed by all the things he didn’t know.

“Perdón,” a Belter woman said, squeezing her way past the guard at the door. “Saba? Are you ready for food yet?”

Saba mostly managed to keep his smile polite. “No, Karo. Bist bien.”

The woman bobbed her hands, nodding like a Belter. She swept her gaze over the rest of them, but paused a little bit at the Rocinante’s crew—Holden, Naomi, Bobbie, Alex, Amos, and Clarissa. “Any of you? We’ve got mushroom bacon.”

Bobbie cracked her knuckles meditatively. Holden was pretty sure that was a sign of annoyance.

“That’s fine,” he said. “We’re good. Thank you.”

The woman bobbed her hands again and squeezed back out. It was the third interruption of the morning. That was a little strange, but Holden put it down to a level of general anxiety for everyone. With the occupying force settled in, the freedom Saba’s underground had to operate was thin as a razor blade, but everyone still wanted to be doing something.

“I’m sorry,” Holden said, shifting which leg was folded under him. If he was always going to have one leg asleep, better to alternate them, he figured. “You were saying?”

Saba leaned forward. It didn’t seem like sitting on the cushions made his legs go to sleep, but he was younger than Holden by a decade or two. “We need to find the balance, sa sa? The more of our own that we build, the more there is for us to use. But the more there is for them to find.”

One of Saba’s lieutenants, who’d spent the morning arguing for building a fully separate comm system by threading hair-thin cables through the water system, cleared her throat.

“The way I see it, we serve three masters: making space for ourselves, making tools for ourselves, and keeping space and tools from the inners. We have three percent of Medina now set where security can’t see it. We have support from the crew. We have transmission out to and back from Sol gate. Have to look at the margin of what we risk against what we’d get from it. All I’m saying.”

“Well, sure,” Holden said, and Saba tilted his head. In his peripheral vision, Bobbie leaned in. When he looked over at her, her expression was empty, but he had years of experience to tell him she was evaluating something. A threat, maybe, except that she was looking at him.

Holden shifted his legs again. “It’s just that anything we do, we have to assume it’s temporary, right?”

“Can’t build on stone out here,” Saba said with a grin, but Holden was pretty sure he hadn’t understood the point he was getting at.

“Medina is our station,” Holden said. “We know it better. All the niches and passages, all the undocumented features. All the tricks and doors and corners. And that’s going to be true right up until it isn’t. These people aren’t dumb. They’re busy right now, and maybe they’ll stay that way for a while. But sooner or later, they are going to get to know the station. Our advantage only lasts for as long as it takes them to learn. So whatever we do here, it shouldn’t be planning for the long term. We don’t have a long term. We’ve got a short term, and maybe a medium term. Like, maybe?”

Saba shifted, sipped his tea, and nodded. “Good point, coyo,” he said. “Maybe also, we start looking at evacuation plans. How not to spend a long life in a jail cell or a short one in an airlock.”

“Whatever goals we pick,” Holden said. “I just don’t think we should spend the extra effort to make it something that’s going to last a decade when we’re probably looking at less than eight or ten weeks of freedom.”

The way he said it, it sounded like an apology. Saba rubbed his palm across his chin. The room had gone so quiet, Holden could hear the hush of the man’s stubble against his hand even over the whir of the fan. Eight or ten weeks of freedom. It was the first time anyone in the meetings had guessed at the time frame. Whatever little apocalypse took out the underground, Holden expected it would be less than a springtime back on Earth.

“Is fair point,” Saba said as a noise came from the corridor. Voices. A thin-faced man with a scar over his left eye leaned into the room, looked around, and nodded.

“New reports from upstairs if you want them,” Scar-eye said. “Doesn’t look like much of anything new. Checkpoints still on the move, and they put some stupid coyo in their public prison for being out after curfew, is all.”

“I don’t think—” Saba began.

Bobbie interrupted him. “Maybe you should. We could take a break. Right, Holden?”

“Um,” Holden said. “Sure.”

Saba shrugged with his hands. “Bien á. Maybe bring in some lunch, yeah?”

The meeting shifted. It was all the same people in the same space, but the motion of it changed. Holden leaned in and kissed Naomi gently on the cheek. She leaned her head against his as if it were only affection.

“What the fuck is going on?” Holden whispered. “Did I do something to piss Bobbie off? Because I really try not to do that unintentionally.”

Naomi shook her head so slightly, he only felt it. “You’ll have to ask her what’s up,” Naomi said. “But you’re not wrong. It’s something.”

The conversations in the room rose and shifted, swirling like birds. A word or phrase that passed between Amos and Clarissa got overheard by one of Saba’s people, shifted what he was saying, and soon Saba mentioned it to Alex. Controlling people is usually having stuff they want. Don’t want nothing, and they’re pretty much just down to hitting you until you do what they say became Was easier with the inners because they wanted to get rich and make rich-people toys became What do these Laconia coyos want, anyway? What do they think they do it for, yeah? Everyone in conversation with everyone else, whether they were aware of it or not.

Holden watched it, listening and waiting for Bobbie to come over. If humanity ever developed a hive mind, it wouldn’t be psychic brain links that welded it together. It’d be gossip and cocktail parties.

“Hey, Holden,” Bobbie said, touching his shoulder. “Can I borrow you for a minute?”

“You bet,” he said, hauling himself up from the floor. Bobbie slouched out toward the corridor, and he followed. The air outside the room was cooler and seemed less like it had just come out of someone else’s lungs. The lighting was strung maintenance LEDs, harsh and bright. The walls were painted in a dozen different colors, guides to the pipes and conduits behind them. The map and the territory both.

Bobbie paused at the junction of a service crawl with the main corridor. Voices murmured behind them, too distant to make out, but present. As tight as the spaces were, she could have leaned against both corridors’ walls at the same time, one with each shoulder. She flexed her hands like a fighter about to go into the ring. There had been a time, when they’d first met, that he’d found Bobbie’s physicality intimidating. Over the years, she’d grown in his mind into a place where she was only herself. Every now and again, he’d be reminded that she was a professional warrior and well trained in violence.

Her expression was intense, focused. She could have been thinking her way through a hard problem or restraining herself from a killing rage. The two looked similar with her.

“Hey,” Holden said. “What’s on your mind?”

Her focus shifted to him, and she nodded like he’d said something worth agreeing to. “So are you here to help this or hinder it?”

“Well,” Holden said. “I would have said help until you asked me that, but now it’s feeling like a trick question. Am I missing something?”

Bobbie put out her hand palm first, like she was telling someone to slow down, but it seemed intended as much for herself as for him. “I’m thinking this through while I’m saying it, so just …”

“Got it,” Holden said. “Whatever it is, take a swing at it. We’ll work it out.”

“Other people? People like me? We can show up and maybe not have an effect. That’s not how it is with you. Either you’re helping or you’re holding things back. There’s no middle setting.”

A little discomfort tugged at him, and he crossed his arms. “Is this … Bobbie, is this about you being the captain of the Roci? Because that hasn’t changed. Naomi and I—”

“Yes,” Bobbie said. “It’s exactly like that. Look, you’ve seen all those people who keep interrupting the meetings, right? They’re all just swinging by to be in the room for a minute, even if it’s something they could have done on hand terminals. Or not done at all.”

“I know the ones you mean,” Holden said. “But that’s not me.”

“That’s absolutely you. James Holden, who led the fight against the Free Navy. And stopped Protogen from killing Mars. And captained the first ship through the ring gates. Brought people together on Ilus in the face of fifty different kinds of shit falling apart. You’re in the center of everything just by walking into the room.”

“Not because I like it,” Holden said.

“When you showed up, Amos and I were getting ready to fight our way into all this. But then there you were, and you got recognized, and now we’re all sitting in the absolute center of the conspiracy. Even if I’d pushed my way into this, there would have been days, maybe weeks, of proving to Saba and his people that they could trust me. You got that for free, and the rest of us drafted off you. I came in as the captain of the Rocinante, and it wasn’t enough to be taken as seriously as you got for free.”

Holden wanted to object. He could feel the denials welling up in his chest, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to say them out loud. Bobbie was right.

“I have an idea how we gather intelligence on the Laconians,” Bobbie said. “It’s the first step that we need. But we have to move quickly. Saba and his people? They think this is like going back to before there were gates. No matter what they say, they think this is going to sustain and become a way of life for them the way it used to be. Did you notice how they’ve started calling the Laconians ‘inners’?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“But you were right in there. We’re looking at a really small window. So if we’re going to do what I think we really need to do? It has to be your idea.”

“Okay, little lost here. Which idea of mine are we talking about?”

“I’m talking about you taking the operation I have in mind, waltzing back in there, and presenting it like you just came up with it yourself.”

Holden didn’t know whether to laugh or scowl, so he did a little bit of both.

“No, I’m not going to do that,” Holden said. “You say what you need to say, and I’ll back you. But I’m not going to start taking credit for your proposals.”

“If it’s my idea, it’ll be like when we showed up,” Bobbie said. “I’ll have to fight to prove it. If you do it, they’ll just listen. Coming from you will give it weight that just being the right damn thing won’t.”

A clank came from behind them, a hatch being opened or a tool being dropped. He didn’t turn to look. The unease he’d felt before shifted, changed its nature, but it didn’t go away.

“I don’t like that,” Holden said. “I hate the idea that you’re being treated as anything less than me. It’s bullshit. I’ll tell Saba that—”

“You remember the last time we went out to karaoke with Giselle? Right before Alex and she called it quits?”

Holden blinked at the non sequitur. “Yeah, of course. That was a terrible night.”

“You remember the song she sang? ‘Rapid Heartbeats’?”

“Sure,” Holden said.

“Who was the singer? On the original, I mean. Who sings that one?”

“Um,” Holden said. “The band is Kurtadam. The singer’s Peter something? The guy with the one steel eye.”

“Pítr Vukcevich,” Bobbie said, nodding. “Now, who plays bass?”

Holden laughed, and then a moment later, sobered.

“Right?” Bobbie said.

“Yeah, okay. I got it. I don’t like it, though. I’m not more significant than anyone else. Acting like everything important has to go through me or else it’s not legitimate … I don’t know. It feels like I’m being an asshole.”

Bobbie put a hand on his shoulder. Her eyes were calm, and her smile was a straight line. “If it helps at all, I’m thinking about all of this as me using you as a tool to achieve my own ends. It makes me less angry that way.”

They talked for another twenty minutes, Bobbie laying out her plan in enough detail that he could introduce it. He asked a few questions, but he didn’t need many. The sense of working together with her had a weird nostalgia. As if the gap between arriving at Medina and now had been years instead of days.

Large, sudden events did that. They changed the way time passed. Not technically, maybe, but as a measure of who he and Bobbie were to each other. And to themselves. A month before, Laconia had been one background issue among thousands. Now it was the environment. A truth as profound as the EMC or the union. More, maybe.

Back in the meeting room, the food had arrived. Recycled wheatpaper bowls filled with rice noodles and chopped mushroom bacon and fish sauce. It smelled better than it should have. Bobbie went to sit by Alex and Clarissa, folding herself gracefully down beside them. Holden felt the impulse to go sit there too, to be part of the family again. And he could have, except he also sort of couldn’t. Would he be doing it to help or to hinder? Because he couldn’t do both. For the first time, he felt what stepping back from the Roci had cost him.

And still, he couldn’t regret it.

“All well?” Naomi asked, snaking her arm around his waist. “You look thoughtful. Are there thoughts?”

“There were a few, yeah,” he said. “Mostly that I’m a tool, but in a useful way.”

Naomi sat with that for a moment. Saba caught sight of them and waved them over. Two bowls with forks and bottles of beer were waiting on the low table for them.

“Should I be offended on your behalf?” Naomi said.

“Nope,” Holden said. “You should come eat.”

Saba leaned forward as Holden sat. “This is good. One thing we can say about Medina, the ingredients are always fresh.”

“True,” Holden said. “But they’re usually still fungus and yeast. Vat-grown bacon is … well, it’s just its own thing. So, Saba, I had an idea I want to talk to you about …”