Persepolis Rising (The Expanse, #7)

by James S.A. Corey

If they kill us all, Drummer thought, this will be why. Not their technology, not their strategy, not the invisible cycle of history. It’ll be our inability to do anything without five committee meetings to talk about it.

“Thank you all for coming,” Drummer said. “As you know, a ship originating in Laconia system has now made an unauthorized transit into Sol system. The union’s stance is unequivocal on this matter. The Laconian incursion is illegal. It is a violation of the union’s authority and the sovereignty of the Earth-Mars Coalition. We stand as one body in the defense of the Sol system and all its citizens.” Drummer paused. In the back of the group, Chrisjen Avasarala stood up from her wheelchair and dusted the pistachio bits off her sari. Her smile was visible even from here. “And the union,” Drummer said, “will dedicate all its resources to the defense effort.” Just like you told us to, you old bitch, she thought. She didn’t say it.

“One ship,” she said. “They sent one ship. They didn’t hold ground at Medina. They didn’t fortify. They didn’t build supply lines or prepare a flotilla. They sent one big-ass ship through by itself. Like a boast.”

Singh assumed there was a faith element to the risk that he was just missing. In his opinion, faith was generally for people who were bad at math.

“You will send a message, as the president of the new Laconian Congress of Worlds, to every planet in the network.”

The meal was the heavily spiced and deep-fried balls of bean paste that Belters called red kibble. On the side they had a few bits of dried fruit, and a thin seafood soup that tasted like the flavor came from having a fish swim through the broth.

“I wonder if the Laconians still eat Martian food,” Bobbie said. “We could ask.” Alex tossed his plate down onto their crate-table in disgust. “You know, I think what chaps my ass more than anything else about this shit? The guys who came out of the gate and started wreckin’ our shit and takin’ over aren’t some damn aliens. It’s fucking Martians. I bet there’re people on that Laconian ship I served with back in the day. Dollars to donuts, the top brass in the Marine detachment here are people you know, at least by name.”

The sad fact of the human species that High Consul Duarte understood so well was that you could never overcome tribalism and jingoism with an argument. Tribalism was an irrational position, and it was impossible to defeat an irrational position with a rational argument. And so, instead of presenting a logical plan for why humanity needed to give up the old national and cultural divides and become a single unified species, the high consul obeyed the old forms that everyone would understand, and went to war. Thankfully, a brief one.

The colonists on Freehold had made their choices. They’d broken the rules she and the people before her had set down. She’d felt justified when she sent the Rocinante. Now she wondered whether the colonists there had sat up in their beds in the night. Wondered how they would feed their children. Whether there was some way to finesse their way out of the future that was bearing down on them. Probably they had. Maybe this was the way the universe showed her the errors of her ways. Taking the evil that she’d committed so offhandedly and turning it around to point at her. Her and Santos-Baca. All the refugees of Independence. All of the void city’s dead. If it was, then the universe hadn’t embraced the idea of proportional response yet.

It was an eerie ship. The angles of it were like something cut from crystal, and the curves felt like something grown more than built. It was like looking at a venomous snake. She had a hard time pulling her eyes away.

On the display, the timer came to twelve seconds, and the Tempest fired. Not missiles, but the magnetic beam that Saba had reported. The thing that had stripped the defenses from the slow zone and burst gamma radiation out all the gates. Pallas Station vanished like a blown-out candle with eleven seconds to spare. They were roughly five light-minutes away, so it had happened … the two things had happened together in the Tempest’s frame of reference.

“The thing you have to understand is that the technology of the ring stations doesn’t break the speed of light,” Tur said, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a ball on a string. “The one thing we can absolutely say is that the protomolecule is bound by the speed of light. Everything they designed got around it with a different understanding of locality. That’s not the same thing at all.”

“If you look at it, the gates themselves are clearly bounded by lightspeed. The strategy the protomolecule employs is to send out bridge builders at subluminal speeds to environments where there are stable replicators to hijack and employ to … to poke holes into a different space. Going from Sol gate to Laconia or Ilus or wherever, we don’t accelerate ships past lightspeed, we just take a shortcut because the slow zone is a place outside locality where very different places in our reference can be very nearby in that frame.”

“That whatever the hell that was. With the hallucinations and the missing time. Was it a weapon? Can the Laconians turn us off like that anytime they want?”

“It was … it was associated with their weapon,” Tur said. “I mean it happened at the same time, but that’s the thing. Time doesn’t actually work like that. ‘The same time’ is a weird linguistic fantasy. It doesn’t exist. Simultaneity doesn’t act like this.”

The whatever-the-hell-it-had-been hadn’t just happened in Drummer’s meeting room, or on People’s Home. It had been spread throughout the system—Earth and Mars, Saturn’s moons and Jupiter’s. Even the science stations on moons around Neptune and Uranus, and the deep labs in the Kuiper Belt. The reports were startlingly similar—hallucinations and lost time that began uniformly at the moment the Tempest had fired its magnetic weapon at Pallas Station. Or, more accurately, the moment in the Tempest’s frame of reference. Tur seemed very specific about that. Like it was important.

“What? Oh, no, we don’t know. The ring space and the station there and the gates, we don’t know what their relationship is with normal space. The rules of physics may be different. I mean, it’s clearly an active system, and the energy output from the magnetic weapon there was smaller than the gamma bursts that came from it, so it was tapping into an energy supply that didn’t have anything to do with the Tempest per se. But the thing is I’m not sure that was a propagating event. If it wasn’t a propagating event, then maybe it didn’t violate lightspeed.”

“Well, I mean when you drop a pebble in a pond, there are ripples. They propagate, and all propagation is limited by lightspeed. But instead of a pebble, imagine you dropped a sheet of plating. So that the surface of the plating hit the surface of the pond everywhere at once. It doesn’t matter that the trigger that dropped the plate was in one place, because it happened everywhere. Not a point location, but a nonlocalized location.”

“Everyone would experience it as if the effect began exactly with them and then propagated away in every direction at the speed of light, but in reality—”

“They just demonstrated a weapon that at its minimum ripped Pallas Station down to hyperaccelerated dust. I am preparing to lead thousands of soldiers on hundreds of ships into battle against this thing. You need to tell me was that a glitch in consciousness because of their attack, or can they make that happen again anytime they want? Did they know it was going to happen? Did they suffer all the same high weirdness that we did? Because if they can turn our brains off for a few minutes at will, I’m going to need some very different strategies.”

“I … that is …” Tur took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “I feel comfortable saying that the glitch, if that’s what we’re calling it, was associated with Tempest’s attack on Pallas. Given that it didn’t happen in the slow zone, I can’t say whether it was a controlled effect or an artifact of the weapon with some quality of local space around Sol.” “All right,” Drummer said. “Whether the enemy anticipated it or not, I can’t say.”

“And I can’t say whether they suffered the same effect … but I would guess they did. If I’m right about the mechanism, there isn’t any sort of shielding against it. You can’t block something that’s already there. That’s what nonpropagating means. It doesn’t come from anyplace. Everywhere it is, that’s where it came from.”

“We’re also seeing the increased quantum creations and annihilations much more broadly,” Tur was saying somewhere nearby. “Like system-wide broadly. And there’s early suggestion that some experiments on Neptune and Luna that were working with controlled entanglement structures collapsed. So maybe—”

“Insurgencies are historically nearly impossible to eradicate, for a few very simple reasons. The insurgents don’t wear uniforms. They look just like the innocent populace. And, they’re the friends and family of that populace. This means that every insurgent killed tends to increase recruiting for the insurgency. So unless you are willing to rack up a sizable civilian casualty count, we can’t just shoot everyone we suspect. If we take the strongest possible response, we stop calling it counterinsurgency and start calling it genocide.”

Trejo’s face blurred into motion, and his expression became one of puzzlement, and maybe even fear. “Sonny. Something’s happened, and we have no idea what it is or what to do about it. We need some help.” He paused, and something like dread took root in his expression. “It seems we’ve taken on a passenger of sorts.”

The object—there really wasn’t any other word to describe it—was a floating sphere of light and darkness hovering about three feet off the deck in a corridor on the Heart of the Tempest. Just looking at a recording of it on the monitor’s small screen made his head hurt. Someone passed a length of pipe through it and back again on the recording. The pipe did not seem to interact with the object at all. And in fact Singh had the sense that he saw both the pipe and the object at the same time with equal clarity even when that should be impossible. It made his head hurt even worse.

“As you can see, the anomaly doesn’t seem to exist as a physical object. It doesn’t appear to radiate on any wavelength, except for visible-spectrum photons. Not one sensing device we’ve aimed at it can even tell that it’s there, but we can record it and see it just fine. Being in the same room with it, looking at it, it’s quite disorienting and causes double vision and severe headaches.”

As if in response to this, four sailors set up a curtain around it using poles and blankets. While they worked, Trejo continued. “It’s moving with us. With the ship, because we’re still under thrust and it hasn’t moved a millimeter since it first appeared. I’ve tried making some minor course adjustments, but it keeps us as its frame of reference. I’ve included all the data we’ve collected on this file, but I can tell you that its first appearance almost exactly matches the moment when we destroyed Pallas Station. It also includes a nearly three-minute blackout shared by every single person on this ship.”

“If this is some new weapon of the inner planets, we need to understand it and now. Blacking out a crew for three minutes, the right three minutes, would create a serious tactical advantage for them. I need you to pass along this information to Laconia through our most secure channels. Get me answers fast, Sonny. I’m about to engage with the combined might of the inner planets’ navies, and this is the first thing that’s made me wonder if I can win.”

Holden sipped his coffee. “That’s the thing. The people you’re controlling don’t have a voice in how you control them. As long as everyone’s on the same page, things may be great, but when there’s a question, you win. Right?” “There has to be a way to come to a final decision.” “No, there doesn’t. Every time someone starts talking about final anythings in politics, that means the atrocities are warming up. Humanity has done amazing things by just muddling through, arguing and complaining and fighting and negotiating. It’s messy and undignified, but it’s when we’re at our best, because everyone gets to have a voice in it. Even if everyone else is trying to shout it down. Whenever there’s just one voice that matters, something terrible comes out of it.”

“Yeah, the bullet,” Holden said. “It was the thing that turned everything off again. Deactivated the protomolecule.”

“The guy I used to know? The dead one? He was a detective, and it was using him to look for where to report in. Only he—the reconstructed version of him—noticed that there was this place that killed off protomolecule activity. He said it was like a bullet that someone had fired to kill off the … the civilization … that … Bring that where I can see it better?”

“No. The one here. The station that controls the ring space. The first time anyone came through the ring, that same dead guy took me to the station. It was part of how the rings turned on. But I saw things there. Like a record of the old civilization? My friend, the dead guy, was looking through it for something, and because he was using me to do it, I saw it all too. Whatever made this? All of this? They were wiped out a long time before you and me got here. Billions of years, maybe. I saw whole systems going dark. I saw them trying to stop it by burning away entire solar systems. And it didn’t work. Whatever they tried to do, it failed, and they were all just wiped away with just their roads and their old machines left for us to stumble across. That thing that showed up on your ship? That’s them. The other them. That’s the thing that killed everything before Earth and Mars were part of the gate network.”

“Look,” Holden said. “You and me? We’re not friends. We aren’t going to be friends. I will oppose you and your empire to my dying breath. But right now, none of that matters. Whatever built the gates and the protomolecule and all these ruins we’re living in? They were wiped out. And the thing that wiped them out just took a shot at you.”

Singh had always known that the history of Laconia and the history of Sol system were connected. He’d never felt those common roots more deeply than now. The sense that his world and Holden’s were part of a single, much vaster story. The makers of the protomolecule were also a part of that larger frame. The things that had killed them, and then vanished. The things that had returned.

Many of the locals persist in referring to the transfer of control in Sol system as a war. This kind of rhetoric has emboldened dissident factions on Medina Station. Given the escalating violence employed by the dissidents, I have elected to maintain the closed-gate policy until the arrival of the Typhoon. Ships coming in from colonial systems have too great a potential to smuggle in relief supplies and reinforcements for the recalcitrant elements here.

The one thing he’d said that stuck with her was, I am a human being. Anything that happens to human beings could happen to me. One time and another in the years since, she’d taken comfort from that. Or warning. People fall in love, so maybe I will too. People get jobs, so maybe I will too. And people get sick. People have accidents. And now, she supposed, people are divided from their families by war and history. And so that could happen to me too. Even when they won, would it mean she would wake up beside Saba again? There were so many variations of victory and loss.

The whole sphere of battle was less than three light-seconds across. Eight hundred and fifty thousand kilometers from the two most distant ships in the EMC fleet, a balloon holding three hundred quadrillion cubic kilometers of nothing, with a few hundred ships dotting its skin. If she’d been in a vac suit, the drive plumes of the navy would have been invisible among the stars. It was the most tightly formed major battle in decades—maybe ever—and she wouldn’t have been able to see her nearest ally with her naked eye.

“Ma’am, that ship stripped Pallas Station down to something less than atoms. It shut down consciousness throughout the system in a way that I don’t have the structural language to explain, and it seems pretty fucking unimpressed by the idea of locality. It’s affecting the nature of vacuum through the whole solar system. If you didn’t know we were punching above our weight here, I’m not sure what I could have said to clarify that.”

Some sins carried their own punishment. Sometimes redemption meant carrying the past with you forever. She’d gotten used to that over the years, but it was still pretty fucking inconvenient.

“Standing orders I received from Colonel Tanaka when I accepted this position. So ultimately from Admiral Trejo. You see, sir, the high consul made it very clear to Admiral Trejo that the rule of the empire is permanent. And if history shows us anything, it’s that people hold grudges for generations. Whole societies have lived and died because of their antipathy born out of events that happened generations before. Or maybe things that got so mythologized, they were just pissed off about stories of things that never happened in the first place. The admiral was adamant that we hold ourselves to a higher standard. As we always have.”

“May I ask what your orders are?” “I’m to set an example, sir. Restore confidence in the safety of Medina and the gate network, and display what Laconian civilization stands for. Including that we who have accepted the burden of government hold ourselves and each other to the highest possible standard.” Singh stood. His legs felt weak. This wasn’t possible. This wasn’t happening. “But I was loyal,” he said. “I’ve obeyed.” “You’ve given me an order to kill Laconian citizens who have not been found guilty of a crime.”

“For what it’s worth, I don’t disagree with you. These people are scum. They don’t deserve or understand what we’ve brought them. For me, I think they never will. But their children might. Their grandchildren or their great-grandchildren. The story of Medina will be that Governor Singh mismanaged the station, lost his ship to a band of malcontents, lost his perspective. And when he let his wounded pride exceed the mandates of the high consul’s directives, he was removed for the protection of the everyday citizens in his care. You see the difference? If you kill an insurgent, you’re the enemy of all their friends. All their family. And then there’s an expectation. Precedent. Enemies for generations. Forever. If you kill your own—even the highest among your own—to protect someone powerless, they remember that too. It sows gratitude. It sows trust. Generations from now your sacrifice will lead to the peace, prosperity, and fellow feeling among all humanity.”

“Plus, it’ll put Governor Song on notice,” Overstreet said. He stood. “I’m very sorry about this, but it could be worse. You could be going to the Pen.” He lifted the gun. “Wait!” Singh said. “Wait. Do you believe all that? About what killing me is supposed to achieve?” “I am an officer of the Laconian Empire, Governor Singh. I believe what I’m told to believe.”

“This is like the colonies, isn’t it?” she said. Trejo lifted his eyebrows, answering her question with a wordless one of his own. “You’re shifting everything to Laconia,” she said. “Not just ships or money. The culture.” Trejo smiled. “Earth will always be the home from which humanity sprang, but yes. The high consul thinks that … fetishizing Earth is bad for the long-term future of the species. We will also put in place an accelerated repopulation scheme. Try to adjust the balance so that Sol system isn’t such an overwhelming majority of the population either.” “You can’t put billions of people through the ring gates,” Drummer said. “It won’t work.” “Not in our lifetimes,” Trejo said. “We’re talking about the work of generations. But … well, I was Martian before I was Laconian. Thinking for the long term doesn’t intimidate me.”

“I’m an old lady who spent her life trying to make peace between Earth and Mars. All this shit? It’s like I missed a day at school, and everyone else learned to speak Mandarin while I was gone. I don’t understand any of this.” “Yeah,” Drummer said. “I can see that.” “It’s the reward of old age,” Avasarala said. “You live long enough, and you can watch everything you worked for become irrelevant.” “You’re not selling it,” Drummer said. “Fuck you, then. Die young. See if I care.”

“President Drummer?” Her podium identified the woman. Monica Stuart. “Is the Transport Union cooperating in the transfer of control?” No, it is not. No, I am not. No, we have been conquered, but we will fight to the last breath because living with someone else’s hand on our necks is intolerable, has always been intolerable, will always be intolerable. Not because of Laconia, not because of the union, not because of any of the authorities through all of history that have made rules and then dared people to break them. Because we’re human, and humans are mean, independent monkeys that reached their greatness by killing every other species of hominid that looked at us funny. We will not be controlled for long. Not even by ourselves. Any other plan is a pipe dream.

Bobbie’s improvised crew of Belters were with her on a little moon circling one of Freehold’s three gas giants, tucked in an ancient lava tube and showing no signs of mutiny. Bobbie as captain and Amos as acting XO would, Naomi thought, be more than enough to ensure discipline.

The Storm was slow to give up its secrets, not because of the internal security—though that was an issue—as much as the profound unfamiliarity of some of its technology. Its reliance on calcium, for instance, was an order of magnitude more than Naomi had ever seen, and the vacuum channels it used instead of wiring still made her head ache a little if she thought about them too much. With enough time, though, she was certain they’d come to understand the ship. On her good days, she thought they’d be ready, even if she wasn’t sure yet what they were getting ready for.

Naomi looked up at the little slice of stars. The galactic disk looked the same as it had in Sol system, but the constellations not quite like her own. Parallax, she knew, was how they’d started mapping which systems were on the other sides of the gates. She’d seen a map once—the splash of systems that the gates connected. Thirteen hundred stars in a galaxy with three hundred billion of them. They’d been clumped together, the gate-network stars. The two farthest systems were hardly more than a thousand light-years apart. A little more than one percent of the galaxy, and still unthinkably vast.