Persepolis Rising

Chapter Twenty-Two: Bobbie

“We can’t place a physical monitor on the data connection to the Laconian ship,” Holden said, just the way she’d told him to. Saba had chosen the people to be briefed, selecting them by some means Bobbie didn’t know and didn’t care to guess. They were watching Holden intently. It felt weird that the role of the great James Holden, come to lead them to glory, was being played by the Holden she knew. Apart from the coincidence of naming, the two didn’t have much in common. “We need to passively monitor incoming and outgoing signal without detection. Mirror the data.”

“For for?” a tall, stick figure of a man said. His name was Ramez and he was in Medina Station’s technical support department. According to Saba, he had the run of the ship, their insider on this mission. Bobbie didn’t like him. “Alles la thick with encrypt. Better off reading their coffee grounds.”

“Decrypting it is a later problem,” Holden said, not giving too many details of the plan away to any one person. Bobbie had a decent idea, but she was still working out the details of how to get the decryption codes. The fewer people knew the details, the less likely it was to get out before she was ready. “Right now we just want to get as much as we can so that we can decrypt it when the time comes. The important aspect right now is that we get the signal without anyone knowing it’s happening.”

“Gotta look inside the pipe without touching the pipe. Que pensa?”

“I’ve brought along my team leader and technical expert to explain the how of the thing,” Holden said, nodding to Bobbie and Clarissa. “Captain Draper?”

Bobbie gave him a wink only he could see. Say what you would about the man, he did take to the role of meaningless figurehead with panache.

Bobbie walked to the front of the room and pulled up a volumetric map of Medina on the wall display behind her.

“The Nauvoo was intended as a generation ship,” she started.

“Fuck is a ‘no view’?” a Belter woman asked. The others chuckled.

“Read some fucking history once,” Saba said to her, then nodded to Bobbie to continue.

“They knew she’d be picking up signals from farther away than anything had ever needed to before,” Bobbie said. She zoomed in on Medina’s comm array. “So the comm system is massively overpowered, and much more sensitive than anything on a commercial or military vessel.”

Ramez nodded and shrugged expansively with his long hands. “We don’t even use most of that shit. No one talking from far away in here.”

He meant inside the slow zone, and he was right. Nothing was ever more than half a million klicks from Medina. The physical boundaries of the space prohibited it.

“True, but the equipment is still there. And up on that comm array is a signal sniffer sensitive enough to track a single photon through a fiber bundle a meter thick,” Bobbie said, zooming in on the technical map behind her. “But we can’t just steal it. Claire?”

Clarissa pushed herself out of the corner she’d been hiding in and came to stand next to Bobbie. She wore a mechanic’s jumpsuit with the name TACHI on the back, and had her hair pulled into a tight bun. With her gaunt cheeks and sunken eyes, it made her look severe and impatient.

“Even though this array isn’t in use,” Clarissa said without preamble, “it’s still hooked to the primary comm system. If we start unplugging things, alarm bells are going to go off up in ops. So we need to put the circuits into a diagnostic shutdown before we physically yank the parts.”

“Fuckonians all over in ops now, ninita,” Ramez said. “Watching everything all the time, them.”

Clarissa nodded her agreement, then said, “And that’s where you come in. We need to get you onto the ops deck to shut down the panel long enough for us to do our work,” she said. “And also if you call me ‘little girl’ again, I will hurt you.”

“Is that right, ninita?” Ramez said, his grin turning condescending.

“No,” Bobbie said, stepping toward him. “No, that’s not right. Pulling that gear will be delicate work. I can’t risk her damaging her hands before we get out there.” Bobbie took another step into Ramez and stared down at him. “So I’ll hurt you. Mao’s my second on this. Don’t make me beat some respect into you, ninito.”

She glanced over at Holden. He looked shocked, and maybe a little sad. She wondered how he would have handled it, back before. It was so strange to be doing all this in the same room with each other.

Ramez threw a look to his buddies on the crates. No one stepped up to back him up. Saba was smiling and making a Let’s get on with it circular motion with his hand.

“Sabe,” Ramez said, looking to the side the way abashed primates had since the Pleistocene. “Just for fooling, que?”

“Sa sa,” Bobbie replied, then switched the screen from the volumetric map over to her mission plan. “Here’s the rundown, including precise times for each thing to happen. Mao and I will be on the outside of the station for most of this, and we can’t afford to do any broadcasting out there, because the Laconian sniffers will almost certainly pick it up.”

“I’ll be calling up to ops using an unlocked hand terminal that Ramez here will get for me,” Holden said, nodding at the man as an invitation for him to nod back. “We’re picking a time when Daphne Kohl is the duty officer. She knows me now, and I’m thinking she’ll understand what we’re trying to do without me having to explain it. Comm discipline is in full effect, the assumption is everything is heard by everyone.”

“So that call between Kohl and Holden is what we’re all listening to,” Bobbie said. “We’ll pass out a list of code words Holden will use during the call as signals. This is our only method of coordinating the action, and there’s no way for us to signal an abort or call for help. Our backup plan is everyone does this right the first time so we don’t need a backup plan. Understood?”

“Lot of risk for a dump of gibberish we can’t make sense of,” Ramez said.

Bobbie felt a little flush of annoyance at the man. “The more we have, the more likely we find what we need in it when the encryption problem gets fixed,” she said. “We start where we can, and that’s this. Are we all clear?”

A murmur of dui and sabe and sa sa rippled through the room.

“Outstanding,” Bobbie said. “Let’s get to work.”

The slow zone or the ring space or the gate network. No matter what you called it, it was fucking weird.

Bobbie and Clarissa exited the drum section of Medina Station using an old maintenance airlock that Saba swore wasn’t monitored from ops. They were wearing emergency vac suits, the so-thin-they’re-barely-there type whose only purpose was keeping the wearer from dying of asphyxia before help could arrive. They were bright orange and yellow to make the wearer easy to find in smoke or against the black of space. They had large flashing lights on the helmet and shoulders to aid rescue workers, but Bobbie had smashed those with a wrench before they put them on. Bad enough to be a brightly colored blob climbing up the outside of the station. No reason to flash a distress signal too. Under normal circumstances, going outside a ship or station wearing the emergency suits was asking to be cooked by radiation. The cheap throw-away suits had almost no shielding to them.

But the slow zone was fucking weird.

There was literally no radiation in the ring space that humans didn’t bring in with them. No background radiation, no solar wind, nothing. Just a massive, unnaturally black void all around, defined only by the distant and faintly glowing rings equally spaced around it and the blue sphere of the alien station at the center where they’d had the rail-gun emplacements.

Bobbie and Clarissa rode the outside of the massive, spinning drum section of Medina inside the old airlock. The indicator of their motion being the occasional distant ring moving past the black window of the outer airlock door, and the fact that something kept trying to shove them out the door at a third of a g. Bobbie had them both tethered to a clip inside the airlock so they wouldn’t be hurled into the strange non-space outside.

A large rectangular structure whipped past the outer airlock door. Bobbie pressed her helmet to Clarissa’s and yelled so that sound would conduct directly. “That’s one of the exterior elevators. We go for the next one.”

Clarissa nodded, wide-eyed, and braced for the jump. Outside of the drum section of Medina, two structures ran the entire length of the ship from the engineering deck aft of the drum to the ops deck in the bow. They housed machinery, conduit, and a pair of elevators for moving from one zero-g section to the other without passing through the drum itself. Bobbie and Clarissa planned to use one of them to climb the station up to the comm array on the nose, and back down to the Laconian ship docked at the stern.

Bobbie opened the mesh bag at her hip, checking again that she had everything the same way she had a dozen times before. Spare air bottles for herself and Clarissa. They’d be outside for hours making the long climbs. A magnetic grappling gun with high-tensile cable and a winch. And finally, a fat black recoilless handgun that one of the Belters had managed to hide from the Laconian weapon sweeps. If they actually needed to use it, the mission was fucked anyway, but there was a dignity in going down fighting that appealed to Bobbie’s romantic notions.

She hooked the emergency cable on her suit to a loop at Clarissa’s waist, then unhooked herself from the airlock. The station tried to throw her out the door, but she grabbed the lip of the outer airlock with one hand and held on. In the other hand, she held the grapple gun. Behind her, Clarissa had one hand on her shoulder, and one hand on the bulkhead.

“Three, two, one, go!” Bobbie shouted, hoping enough sound would travel up Clarissa’s arm. She launched herself out the outer airlock door by releasing her grip on it, and was shooting off into the void at 3.3 meters per second.

The massive rectangular structure of the maintenance shaft rushed toward her, and she fired the magnetic grapple into it as she passed. If the grapple failed to connect, they’d keep flying off into the empty space of the slow zone until they ran out of air and their lifeless bodies eventually flew into the eerie curtain of black at the edge of the alien space. Dangerous, but no more so than a challenging free climb back on Mars. She didn’t even think about it. Her eye spotted the place she wanted the grapple to go, her hand and arm did the rest. The grapple landed less than half a meter from the spot she was aiming for. Like riding a bike.

The grappling line and the leash that connected the grappling gun to her suit snapped taut and pulled her in a fast arc around the maintenance shaft, dragging Clarissa helplessly behind. Bobbie started up the winch, pulling them closer as the speed of their arc increased. Just before impact, she bent her knees and activated her mag boots. The landing was going to hurt a bit.

She hit the metal surface of the maintenance shaft like the tip of a whip being cracked, and let the impact fold her knees up into her abdomen. Clarissa slammed into her back, and it felt like someone dropping a bag of cement on her from a couple stories up. Bobbie rolled with it, slapping the decking with her hands to activate the glove magnets, and hung on.

A few punishing seconds later, they were on the side of the maintenance shaft, all the violence of their motion gone, having been converted into lightly sprained knees and a collection of bruises.

“Ouch,” Bobbie said, and floated motionless for a few seconds, tethered to the shaft by only one gloved hand.

“Yeah,” Clarissa replied, faintly, through the helmet she had against Bobbie’s back.

Bobbie pushed her helmet against Clarissa’s. “It’s a long climb, but at least there’s no gravity to fight. You up for this?”

Clarissa answered by unhooking the tether, and pulling herself up the flat gray wall of the shaft.

“Alrighty, then,” Bobbie said, and followed.

Two hours and an O₂ bottle change later, they floated near the massive Medina comm array. A bewildering cluster of antennae, dishes, and radio broadcast towers, and at its heart sat a laser powerful enough to send messages back to Earth from a hundred light-years away. It had never been used.

“I remember when that almost ended all human life,” Clarissa said, pressing her faceplate to Bobbie’s. “It doesn’t look so scary now.”

“I’ve heard that story,” Bobbie replied. “Wish I’d been here to back you guys up in that fight.”

Clarissa shrugged. “The story’s more fun than the actual experience was. You didn’t miss much.”

Clarissa pulled herself over the rigging of the comm array, coming to a stop next to an oversized receiver dish. She pointed at an access panel below it, then flashed the Belter sign for This one.

Bobbie nodded with one hand, then tapped the side of her helmet. Now we wait for word from Holden. She turned on the small emergency radio in her suit, already tuned to the channel Holden would be using to call Daphne Kohl up in station ops, and waited. Clarissa stared at her across the vacuum between them, motionless and patient as a hunting cat.

The minutes dragged. When her radio crackled to life, Bobbie found herself grinning. “Medina control, this is workcrew kilo alpha, do you copy?”

Bobbie could only hear Holden’s side of the conversation, so there was a long pause and then his voice again. “Copy that. Can I get Chief Kohl on the line? Gotta route some repairs though her office.”

Office was their code that meant Ramez was outside of ops, waiting for permission to enter, so the plan was proceeding, and waiting only on Kohl’s cooperation.

“Hey, Chief. Good to hear your voice again,” Holden said, hitting the words hard. He hadn’t identified himself by name, and he wouldn’t. If Daphne Kohl didn’t pick up on what was going on, they’d scrub the mission. If she raised the alarm … Well, that would be an interesting problem. “Working with Saba down here in electrochemical. Tracking a grid problem that Laconian death ray caused, and we’d love to pull a panel up there to really nail it down.”

And here’s where the most dangerous part of the plan happened. It wasn’t flying through space on a tether, or climbing up the outside of a massive station wearing the thinnest and crappiest vacuum suits. It wasn’t even going to be later, when they climbed down to the Laconian ship to hook in their signal sniffer, hoping no one was watching the outside of the dock. It was here, where Holden was counting on his voice, Saba’s name, and the mention of Laconians to signal Kohl that they were up to no good and needed her help.

And more than that, counting on her Belter pride being stronger than her fear of execution by their Laconian masters. Because if any of those things weren’t true, Kohl could refuse them, and that was the end of the plan. Or worse.

Bobbie waited a very tense minute of radio silence, and then Holden said, “That’s great. I’ve got a tech heading to ops to pull that panel, if you can let him in. He’ll take a gander at our glitch and get out of your hair.”

Gander. Code for Go in five.

“Copy that, Chief. We appreciate the patience while we sort this out.”

Bobbie gave Clarissa a thumbs-up, then flashed her five fingers. Clarissa nodded with her fist, then started pulling tools out of the mesh bag at her hip.

First thing down, Bobbie thought. Just a two-kilometer climb aft and planting a bug on a Laconian destroyer without getting caught left to go.

With Medina Station functionally motionless in the slow zone, it was less of a climb than a mag-booted shuffle down the two-kilometer length of the maintenance shaft. Bobbie pulled the blocky module containing the field-strength sensor on a short leash behind her. It didn’t have much mass, but she’d taken it without conversation when she’d looked through Clarissa’s visor and seen the technician’s complexion going a sickly gray. Other than jumping out of a rotating airlock, they hadn’t done anything particularly taxing, but it was pretty clear that Claire was already running on fumes.

As they got closer to the engineering-and-docking-bay section of Medina, the Laconian ship came into view around the curve of the station. Bobbie couldn’t help but whistle her appreciation of the beauty of the thing. Say what you would about Laconian authoritarianism, their engineering included a lot of aesthetic beauty in its design.

The destroyer—Holden had called it the Gathering Storm—looked like a natural crystal formation that someone had chipped into a knife. The colors were all translucent pinks and blues, faceted like a gem. She spotted something at the tail that probably served as the ship’s drive cone but didn’t look anything like the UN or Martian designs she was familiar with. The nose of the ship ended in a pair of sharp projections, like a dagger point with a channel cut down the center that left her almost certain it was a rail gun. If the ship had torpedo launchers or PDCs, she couldn’t see them.

The ship was so strange, so unlike anything humans had ever designed or flown before, that if it had docked and green three-eyed aliens had walked off, it would have felt more appropriate than the humans that actually flew her.

Clarissa stopped and turned, so Bobbie yanked the sensor array to a stop on its leash, then pushed their two helmets together.

“There,” Clarissa said, pointing to a maintenance access hatch that looked exactly like a hundred they’d already passed. “That’s the router that feeds from the dock into the station network.”

“You’re sure?” Bobbie said, looking around at all the other hatches.

Clarissa didn’t answer, just rolled her eyes and took the leash. She pulled the sensor array down and attached it to the hull, right next to the hatch. She pulled a few leads from the box and plugged them into slots inside the hatch, then stuck a hand terminal on the side of the array and spent several minutes going through what looked like menus. Bobbie replaced both of their air bottles while she worked.

A few minutes later, Clarissa stood up and gave her the thumbs-up. Bobbie looked over at the massive blade of the Laconian destroyer. If anyone on it had seen them working, the ship itself gave no hint. Clarissa walked over holding her hand terminal and touched it to the side of Bobbie’s helmet. Her HUD snapped on, and a wall of text rolled past. The signal traffic between the destroyer and the local decrypt facility, complete with routing flags and timestamps. It was still locked behind military encryptions, but everything that the Gathering Storm sent down to Medina and everything it got back was here, and the underground was skimming a copy of all of it.

“Huh,” Bobbie said to no one. “I honestly thought that would be harder.”