Gravity of a Distant Sun

by R. E. Stearns

  “Got them!” Rio said. “Switch to channel five.”

  Iridian blinked at the suit, her head spinning with relief or O2 deprivation. The suit hood had no heads-up display to show data on the faceplate, let alone eye-control functionality. She had to fiddle with the controls built into the side of the hood until she switched its local comms channel to “Five,” as its ungendered voice announced through the speaker beside her ear.

  “Major, this is Iridian Nassir.” She used the rank Rio had used while she’d been running through local channels, trying to reach the ZVs. “We’re on the roof. See us?”

  “Couldn’t miss you if we tried, Nassir.” Major O.D.’s tone was focused and professional, but she heard him smiling. As she’d hoped, they’d sent the ZV unit that she’d met on Barbary Station. “Quit blowing up the ITA’s shit. We’re on our way.”

  CHAPTER 7 Days until launch: 49

  “Sissy,” Pel said in the prerecorded vid playing on Adda’s comp, “I swear these are the exact words: ‘We have Nassir and we’ll dock at 02:20 hours.’ That’s exactly what Major O.D. told me.”

  Even with favorable orbital positions minimizing the distance between Ceres and Venus, the ZVs would still be covering over a million kilometers in a matter of hours to reach Adda on Ceres Station. It was a mind-boggling distance to cover so quickly. That speed couldn’t be comfortable for the passengers.

  Pel was Adda’s only source of information on the ZV Group’s rescue operation. Nobody had interrupted the relay system she’d been using to communicate with Pel, passing messages through accounts on multiple ’jects to hide both their locations. It would be safer to keep using that system than to contact the mercenaries on her stolen comp. In addition to increasing chances of intercept, the stolen comp would’ve created digital evidence linking the ZVs to her and Iridian’s escapes, despite the encryption she’d applied to the content. The ZV Group wouldn’t appreciate that. This would be a terrible time to get on their bad side.

  Adda sat up from her position huddled on a bench in a park where three-quarters of the plants were either projections or printed fakes. Once she’d assured herself that nobody was crossing the park to arrest her, she bent over her comp glove and replayed Pel’s message with the volume down to almost nothing. Iridian had told her that this position looked strange, but it was more comfortable than holding the comp against her ear like some people did, and the comp’s original owner hadn’t kept headphones with it. She’d have to continue to trust Pel’s updates, even though he was prone to unrealistic optimism.

  Besides, she desperately wanted him to be correct. If the ZVs “had” Iridian, then Iridian was free from her ITA prison cell and on her way to Adda. Adda allowed herself to believe it, and she smiled as she recorded her reply: “Where should I meet them?” The morning sunsim looked warmer than it felt, but Iridian had confirmed that in space stations, there was no direct relationship between light and warmth.

  A new message from Pel arrived. “Ah, damn it, I knew I forgot something.” Adda shut her eyes, willing herself to remain calm. “They’ll be docking after midnight, right? And there’s only the Ceres Station port module to dock in.” The Ceres port was the biggest one between Mars and Jupiter, with both an orbital section and one on Ceres’s surface. Adda clenched her hands and gave herself a few minutes to breathe before she replied in text, a less stressful communication medium than speech.

  It’s all right. I’ll wait in the surface part of the port for them. And if she fixed her implants, she’d coordinate with Iridian to meet the ZVs at whichever dock they chose. She collected her spare shirt and followed signs pointing to the Ceres Station port module.

  Her comp buzzed against her hand with another message from Pel: “The good news is, that gives me time to catch up with you!”

  Oh no. Adda stopped walking to tap out a reply: No. Don’t do that. If the ITA had anyone sharp on her and Iridian’s cases, then an agent would be assigned to watch Pel as soon as Iridian escaped from their prison. They might even be listening in on his messages, although the encryption she’d taught him to use had always protected their comms before.

  I need you to find us a place to stay on Yăo Station instead, Adda typed. Somewhere outside its port module, if you can. And find out what crews are operating around Jupiter. And the Ceres syndicate presence too. Adda’s information was months out of date.

  Yăo Station, a former observatory and current haven of criminals, refugees, and those who valued independence over safety, maintained an awkward orbit inside Jupiter’s magnetosphere. When she’d selected it as their fallback destination if anything went wrong on Vesta, she’d planned to update her information on the other criminal groups in the area and reach out to the most successful one. She and Iridian could parlay their skills into whatever was needed.

  The ITA avoided the station for the same reason the Jovian pirate crews did: they had better use for ships equipped to travel near Jupiter, and the living conditions were reportedly miserable. The locals had threatened the ITA on the few occasions they’d visited. And now that Casey was determined to influence Adda, the station’s orbit was its most protective factor. It stayed so close to the planet that Patchwork access was almost impossible. The awakened intelligences would lose a massive amount of their information and processing powers without the Patchwork, and Adda suspected that would keep them away from Yăo too.

  Pel’s eventual reply was, “You need me for all that?” He sounded stunned. She was asking him to go to a dangerous place alone, to get a head start on making the bad friends he would make there sooner or later. “I mean, you do, you’re right,” he continued. “I’m surprised because . . .” Aside from his sex life, in which success was definitely mixed, when left to make his own decisions, he got himself into serious trouble. They both knew it.

  “I trust you, Pel,” Adda said aloud, so he’d hear that she meant it. Adda trusted him to do the best he could for both of them and Iridian, without question or remorse, and he’d never turn them in to the ITA.

  “I won’t let you down, Sissy. I’ll tell you as soon as I find a place.”

  She stopped walking long enough to tap out another text reply. There’s no reliable Patchwork access. Tell me if you can, but if you can’t, just meet us in port.

  “Yeah, I’ll watch for you. But tell me when the ZVs pick you up, okay?”

  The longer she walked, the less convenient the text conversation became. She switched her side to audio again, activating the comp’s mic. “I will. Be careful. Do you understand why we’re going there?”

  The station around her was waking up. It was interesting how the sunsim was effective enough to keep the majority of Ceres Station residents on a traditional schedule, despite how far they were from the sun and how artificial their environment was. Her comp buzzed again. “Because our . . .” Pel’s audio, or Pel himself, paused. “Former friends are looking for us. And it’ll be hard to find us on Yăo.”

  Everyone should have a hard time finding them there, for a while. “Exactly,” Adda replied. It was best not to reference the intelligences by name. It was bad enough that he kept using his nickname for Adda, which was less common than her actual name. “Keep me informed.”

  His next message downloaded quickly. “Yeah, yeah, I will.” He sounded less annoyed than he would’ve been before everything had gone wrong on Vesta.

  Still bent over her comp to hide its projection from any cams she walked under, she activated a less than legal, outdated copy of some surveillance disruption software. Her hair fell in her face and startled her, now that it was almost the brown she’d been born with. She’d had the color and style changed earlier in the day by a sympathetic cosmetologic gene editor in need of the basic comp decontamination Adda had provided in exchange. The new shade was nothing like her usual red and purple. The length disguised her face on cams, but she preferred it too short to get in her way.

  Adda kept walking and opened documentation for her comms implants. Finding a w
ay to reactivate them would be a fine project to work on while she stayed out of sight until Iridian and the ZVs arrived.

  * * *

  Half an hour later, she walked past part of a sandwich at an “outdoor” restaurant table. The purchaser had abandoned it, but just as Adda reached for it, a bot rolled in front of her and swept everything off the table and into a bin in its front. She sighed and kept walking, despite her rumbling stomach. It was her sophomore year of college after the scholarship ran out all over again, although this was better fare than she’d snatched off tables then. That was why the restaurants she was passing now had enough bots to keep the tables clear. It was a well-off part of town.

  Nobody seemed to notice public cams and mics going offline for the seconds in which Adda would’ve been in range. She’d still appear on out of range cams, but letting her hair fall across her face should make facial recognition harder. The awakened intelligences would be watching every recording on Ceres. She wasn’t ready to talk with them yet. Eventually, she’d have to. They still wanted something from her, and they were endlessly persistent.

  Adda wouldn’t be able to avoid the ITA, let alone the other intelligences, without AegiSKADA’s guidance. She placed another blue tablet under her tongue and leaned against a wall. This far outside the pedestrian traffic, she might complete a message addressed to AegiSKADA without being overheard or having others’ conversations recorded and added to her own. The street rippled from her feet to the edge of her vision and the color washed away from her surroundings.

  She unwound the cord hidden in her necklace. One end plugged into the jack in her nose and the other into her stolen comp. An intermediary shimmered into vibrating gray existence before her, a vaguely feminine figure that solidified as the karovoxin tablets took effect. The intermediary would communicate the intent of her message to AegiSKADA more effectively than words alone.

  “Please find me a place that nobody is using and that nobody will mind me using that I can get to without . . .” Not just without her hurting anyone, as she’d been about to imply. “Without anyone being hurt, and that’s likely to remain unoccupied and available without violence until two in the morning tomorrow.” That should be sufficient for Iridian and the ZVs to reach Ceres and contact her, as long as Pel remembered to give them Adda’s new contact information.

  The intermediary shuffled toward her without even disappearing after sending the request. AegiSKADA had been following her progress, or more likely her cam disruption, in close enough to real time that it had to have installed part of itself somewhere on Ceres. When the intermediary pressed its incorporeal hand through the back of hers, a map with a location selected appeared on her comp. She sent the intermediary away.

  The karovoxin tablet’s effects took longer to fade than a sharpsheet would’ve. Even after the dry streets stopped splashing underfoot, the world remained gray and muted as Adda reentered pedestrian traffic. Ceres Station’s public transit was free, but if one of the cams outside her blocking routine identified her, she’d rather not be trapped in a vehicle while ITA agents closed in.

  She turned a corner, following the directions AegiSKADA gave to lead her to the safe place it’d found for her to hide in until Iridian and the ZVs arrived. Since the directions were still taking her toward the port module, she had her comp tell her everything it could find about the Ceres Station port management intelligence. Her comp fed the audio to the implant in her ear. The comms function was off, but the speaker and mic still worked.

  Unfortunately, the intelligence running the port module ran the whole station. More specialized intelligences were also more distractible. She only had one practiced trick that’d get an overall station management intelligence’s attention. Creating a fake environmental emergency would shut down the docks, though. That wouldn’t help Iridian and the ZVs reach her. It might be more practical to wait until she interacted with this one, at which point she’d know which of its features she could make available.

  She’d entered a part of town where the people wore older clothes made of cheaper fabrics, and their comp projections flickered. The map kept her walking. Eventually, the gateway separating the port module and the rest of the station came into view.

  Adda must’ve seen the entrance to Ceres Station’s grav acclimation tunnel before, either when she’d visited Ceres with Iridian to get their comms implants installed or when Iridian, Adda, and Pel had arrived while Adda was ill. But when she and Iridian traveled together, Adda counted on her to navigate. If Adda had been paying attention the last time she’d been here, she would’ve remembered it.

  Two wide metal pillars rose on either side of the road, with flat sides and an uneven arch between them for the road to pass beneath. It looked more like an ancient keyhole than a place to hang a door or gate. A feed of stationspace played behind and around the arch, projected more intensely, somehow, than the stationspace feed projected on the ceiling throughout Ceres Station. The ships docked at the orbital station hung still while lights blinked against the stars. Each pillar looked hundreds of meters tall rather than the three- or four-story maximum that the station’s structure should’ve allowed.

  Adda didn’t want to make herself memorable by asking passersby how much of the gateway was real, to determine how much she was hallucinating. She walked between the pillars and into the grav acclimation tunnel, joining the people and bots going to the port module.

  The other pedestrians looked much less nauseated than she felt when she emerged into the extremely low gravity of Ceres’s surface. A railing built into a wall helped her navigate around pedestrians, bots, and public transit to a recycling chute. She threw up as quietly as she could. There hadn’t been much in her stomach to begin with.

  She only had to follow the map for a few more meters. When she did, her comp gave her the green arrived icon to show that the steel door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY in front of her was the one she wanted. According to the map, a workspace generator she could use to check out her comms implants was somewhere behind that door.

  As she approached the door, it opened. A stocky woman stepped through, wearing a tired, serious expression Adda had seen on ZV Group soldiers. A taller man with a similar expression followed her. Both wore vests that read PAC, probably for Port Authority of Ceres. This area met no definition of “unoccupied” she’d ever heard of.

  If Iridian were here, she’d know what to say, or she’d incapacitate these people somehow, but Adda was alone. She’d read about what a professional security tester had done in a situation like this, though. It was the only solution Adda could think of that might get her into the building without being arrested first.

  She stepped back with her hand raised as if she’d been about to open the door herself. She frowned in theatrical anger at the two people who were about to run her over. The description she’d read suggested that she stand where she’d ended up after dodging the door instead of backing up to let them pass. She resisted all the instincts telling her to move out of these people’s personal space. In the scenario she was creating, they were in her way. The eye contact, and the surprise evident on their faces, made her weight shift toward her toes like she could physically run away from this interaction. Common courtesy felt like a very flimsy barrier between her and imminent arrest.

  The man held the door open with an arm through the doorway, allowing her to step in unopposed while the woman said, “Sorry, ma’am.” Even though she wasn’t wearing a uniform, the technique had worked just like she’d read it would. Thrilling at the execution of a new trick for getting somewhere she didn’t belong, she accepted their invitation.

  Inside, Adda wiped her sweating palms on her pant legs while she walked down a short hallway lit with bright overhead lights. After spending so much time in artificial environments, she missed the sunsim most buildings used indoors as well as outside. She had to squint to identify a door at the end of the hall and a door on either side. The one on the left opened to a row of five sockets for janitorial bot
s, with tanks of yellow fluid too thin to be pseudo-organic atop each bot.

  The door on the right opened into a room with two workspace generators. Both were permanently installed supine models big enough for a person half a meter taller than Adda to lie on a padded bed that slid into the enclosed generating chamber. They were less than ten years old. Although supine models were a bit of a squeeze for Adda’s wide hips, she’d know her way around once she got in. She took an eager step toward them, but the in use message projected on the closest one froze her in place.

  She’d asked for a place that wouldn’t be in use. Maybe it hadn’t been when AegiSKADA had selected it, or she hadn’t been clear enough. That was a risk when using intermediaries to talk to intelligences outside a workspace. Perhaps she should’ve gone straight to the Ceresian modder who put in her implants instead of tackling the problem herself, but that shop had made her uncomfortable when Iridian was there with her. Even if she’d wanted to go alone, it was far from the port, and expert services cost money she didn’t have.

  Besides, Adda might be able to reactivate the comms implants herself. That was a more interesting way to spend her time than coping with the modder’s shop. She could ask AegiSKADA to alert her if conditions changed and she needed to leave before Iridian arrived.

  Adda glanced down at her comp. A new message from the intelligence, or at least one with no sender information, said, Second generator.

  The second generator was empty. Her shoes’ flimsy soles, which had her feet aching from the long walk, were perfect for moving quietly here, as she stepped around the occupied generator to the open one. She slid its padded table out far enough to let her climb on and lie down on her back. Installed generators were more comfortable than the mobile one she used to carry with her on every job. This would hide her, assuming nobody asked for her identification. Since AegiSKADA had been so specific about coming to this location and using this machine, she was counting on it to provide her access rights too.