Gravity of a Distant Sun

by R. E. Stearns

  She took another of the sharpsheet equivalents and pressed the icon to slide the table into the generator, pulling the curtain closed as she went. She set her comp-gloved hand in a cradle near her hip. It had been a long time since she’d gotten into a full hallucinographic workspace. The tablet was still taking effect, so she only briefly registered that the initial workspace was a training course selector, with prominent PAC logos on every surface, before her consciousness crashed out of the workspace.

  She gasped and forced herself to keep her hands at her sides instead of grabbing her head. If she did that, she’d just smack her knuckles on the generator’s ceiling. Only two generators were installed here, which meant people were probably scheduled to use both of them throughout the day. Any moment, someone could come knocking on this generator, asking who was using it at their appointed time. Why in all hells had AegiSKADA sent her here?

  She shut her eyes, relaxed, and breathed for a few minutes. So far, nobody had pulled her out of the generator. And now that she was here, there was no point in walking past multiple port authority agents to return to the street.

  Imagery synchronization and interpretive action were, at this point, baked into her brain. If she stayed calm, she could turn the starting workspace away from its training functions and download the comms system documentation from her backup.

  It was still possible that she could fix them without an implant workspace. She knew where to find one of those on Ceres, but she was hoping not to spend that much time travelling through public parts of the station, under the station intelligence’s scrutiny. She clicked through the three settings the switch embedded in her palm accommodated: mic on/speaker off, speaker on/mic off, and mic and speaker both off. Keeping the mic and speaker off would keep Adda from communicating anything she didn’t mean to and make it harder for her to accidentally damage them if she found a way into their settings.

  She opened her eyes in the PAC’s workspace. Port authority logos peeled off the walls and floor and blew away in a wind she didn’t feel. The navy blue all over the workspace brightened and the walls curved inward, like she stood inside a bluish-purple balloon.

  “Tell me if someone’s about to find me in here,” she said to AegiSKADA. The workspace and her comp’s software would translate that order into specific criteria and processes the intelligence would understand. Now she could concentrate on what she’d come here to do.

  The thing she was trying to do was reactivate her implants, if she could do that in this general-purpose generator. Then she could talk to Iridian and coordinate the last stage of the journey back to her. In the workspace, Adda raised her hand and called forth wireframe diagrams of the implanted speaker and mic, magnified by a factor of ten. They hovered above a marble pedestal that would, in reality, tear through the flexible material that now formed this illusory room. The pedestal’s classical solidity represented the encryption she’d protected the diagrams with.

  The diagrams disappeared. She blinked at the empty pedestal. It’d been a long time since she’d entered a workspace. Her subconscious must’ve gotten out of practice. She mentally reached for the implants she and Iridian had designed.

  The implants and their pedestal disappeared. In reality, Adda’s mouth twitched in frustration. She willed the diagrams to return, but this time they didn’t even flicker. Their continued absence was unyielding, like representations an intelligence placed in the workspace.

  “AegiSKADA, are you doing this?” she whispered aloud. It’d be unfortunate if the person in the workspace generator beside hers heard her talking to an infamously dangerous intelligence, but it’d be worse if that was the first message Iridian got from Adda after weeks of silence.

  A figure snapped into existence in the workplace, silent as the passage of centuries. Its appearance should’ve surprised Adda, but a dreamlike sense of this figure having always been there overrode any startle response her brain might’ve had. In Adda’s workspaces, AegiSKADA made itself look like Pel as a child. This figure was too tall, an idealized feminine form, an ebony statue made by a master sculptor. Its head was as bare as Iridian’s, and its severe cheekbones, blank expression, and sapphire lights in dark eye sockets were familiar. This was the figure Casey used in Adda’s workspaces.

  Adda felt frozen, unable to move, her mind a roiling, screaming fog of fear. “Let us.” The figure’s voice was feminine too, but nothing like Iridian’s. Casey’s was so deep that it shook Adda’s chest. “So we can make . . .”

  The marble pedestal grew and twisted into metallic knots of towering machinery. Rows of towers climbed on and on and on to a sloping horizon. Rivers of pseudo-organic fluid flowed among the towers, more than Adda had ever seen in one place before, in its natural shade of pinkish gray. Light like bad sunsim reflected off the metal construct and dazzled Adda’s eyes. None of it suggested any meaning beyond what she saw.

  The generator’s ceiling snapped into focus centimeters from Adda’s nose. She’d fallen out of the workspace. Her short fingernails dug into her palms. All this time she’d thought AegiSKADA had come from Vesta to free her, but it was Casey who’d listened to her pleas for help, her conversations with Pel, her plans to escape with Iridian, everything Adda had worked so hard to hide.

  Her instincts told her to run, but where should she go? She didn’t remember the streets she’d just walked down under Casey’s guidance. She’d only been to Ceres Station once before. Recycling the stolen comp might make tracking Adda more difficult, and it would protect the personal information of its previous owner. But Casey could’ve inserted itself into the station security systems. If it had, it would track her without the comp. Wherever she went, Casey would be watching, waiting for Adda to make a mistake so it could renew its faded influence over her.

  Adda’s chest was heaving and her heart beat so fast it was painful. She wasn’t ready to face Casey again, not after it’d made her attack Iridian. It must’ve brought her to this workspace generator to influence her again, and then . . . She had no idea what it would’ve made her do. Whatever Casey wanted, Adda did not want to do it. Not after its defensive reaction on Vesta. And what was that huge construct it’d made?

  Now that her new comp held a detailed record of Casey’s contact with her through the workspace, she might be able to collect data related to those questions. That was more valuable than the meager protection she’d get from recycling the comp. She took a deep breath to calm down. Panic made it harder to catch intelligences’ influence attempts, and much harder to think of how to get away.

  She had a few minutes before Casey realized that Adda was not going to enter a workspace with it. While she was considering her options, she outlined a routine that would follow Casey’s messages to their source, and continue to track it as far as possible. When she had time, she’d build the routine based on her outlined requirements.

  She clenched her fists. The unfamiliar comp glove creaked against her palm. If she left the port module now, she’d have to come back in a few hours to meet Iridian and the ZVs. If she returned to the workspace, she could ask Casey what it wanted from her. She might also determine whether Casey had melded itself into the station’s original intelligence. Or it might influence her again, which seemed more likely.

  “Fuck,” Adda whispered. The fist wearing her stolen comp glove shook against the cradle it rested on. She couldn’t go back into the workspace and she couldn’t run aimlessly.

  However, there was a place she could run to. The unlicensed modder who’d put in her and Iridian’s comms implants was somewhere in Ceres Station. They’d gotten a privacy exemption from the cam coverage that Ceres Station typically required, the kind of exemption that medical offices had, because the modder’s clients got physical modifications done on places hidden under clothes. That was how they’d concealed an off-the-records implant modding setup in one of the shop’s back rooms. Even if Casey sent the ITA looking for Adda, the modder could hide her there.

  * * *

 
Adda had to turn sideways to fit her hips through the modder’s narrow doorway, entering a small shop that smelled more sterile than it looked. Several ceiling light fixtures differed in size, color of light, and shape, but there was no danger of tripping over anybody in the two chairs on opposite sides of the room. In one, somebody was getting a tattoo on their inner thigh that necessitated no pants and very little in the way of underwear. This shop used a machine for that. Seeing the tattoo arm jittering between the person’s legs made Adda anxious to find something else to look at. Across the room, a human piercer leaned over the nose of somebody younger than Pel, surrounded by the customer’s scrappy-looking friends.

  Although the comms system’s insertion had given Adda terrible headaches for a week afterward, neither her nor Iridian’s implants had caused any trouble after the insertion wounds healed. If anybody could reactivate the comms implants in the few hours before Iridian and the ZVs arrived, Kanti could. More importantly, the same partitioning that hid Kanti’s illegal modding setup would limit Casey’s access to the shop, and to Adda.

  Someone much larger than Kanti stepped out of the shadows beside the door. Adda swallowed hard. “Hello. I need to talk to Kanti.”

  The big person leaned forward a little, which made Adda take a step back and almost out the door. “Who’s asking?”

  “Adda Karpe,” she said. “They’ve done work for me before.” Like Adda, Kanti had grown up on Earth, where “they” was a more common gender-neutral pronoun than “ve.” It was easy to translate among the myriad of languages spoken there.

  The big person winced and glanced at the people surrounding the piercer’s chair. “Keep it the fuck down.” The person gave Adda an incredulous look. “Nobody would use that name around here if it didn’t belong to them, I guess. And you know how Kanti likes people to talk about them. Come on.”

  Adda followed the person past the crowd around the piercer. Her guide paused to check on the person getting the tattoo, who appeared to be fine. The door in the back didn’t open on its own. The large person unlocked it and pulled it outward. Adda took a deep breath and followed the person into a storeroom, through a path that weaved around stacked crates and broken furniture, to two more doors in the back wall.

  The big person opened one of those with a hand on a wall-mounted scanner. The room beyond was just barely long enough for a padded piercing table, which the big person effortlessly moved aside. Music made from voices saying nonsense words on a wavering beat swelled as a third door opened automatically on a hospital-clean space with an implant workspace generator.

  “Kanti,” the big person rumbled. “Customer for you.”

  Kanti’s bare brown feet wiggled on the workspace generator’s bed, and they slid the curtain open. When Kanti focused on Adda, they smiled big and got out of the generator to hug her instead of bowing. Adda grimaced. “The custom comms packages!” said Kanti. “Yeah, yeah, how you doing? Having any trouble with them?”

  “Yes, actually.” Adda backed up until Kanti had to let go or fall over. That tendency to grab and touch instead of just looking was her main problem with Kanti. “Somebody turned the transmitter off. I need it turned back on, and then I’d really like to stay here for a while.”

  Although Kanti’s face had twisted into a scowl, conversational context suggested that it wasn’t Adda they were angry with. “The bastards are up to their fuckery again, are they?” It was unclear which bastards Kanti was referring to. It might’ve been a general reference to people in positions of authority. Kanti’s speech patterns always confused her. When she and Iridian had gotten their implants installed, they’d chosen Kanti because of the modder’s reputation for skill and secrecy. Adda had hoped never to have to come back to this shop. “Well, I’ll show them,” Kanti said. “I’ll get those comms humming like they did when I first put them in.”

  That was the best choice Adda had, but she felt obligated to clarify, “I don’t think I can pay you.”

  Kanti placed a flash cleaner on the chair beside the generator and started pulling equipment from cupboards. “Don’t even think about it,” Kanti said. “It’s us against the bastards, and we can’t go bringing money into that.”

  * * *

  The sunsim had been on its night setting for hours by the time Adda returned to the Ceres Station streets. Kanti’s work on her implants had taken a while, and then she’d lost an hour thinking she was still on Sloane’s crew and had missed the Casey Mire Mire leaving Ceres for Vesta. It was shorter than most of her past episodes, but it’d kept her in Kanti’s shop when she should’ve been on her way to the port mod.

  The doctors had warned her that her recovery wouldn’t be a linear process. Expecting setbacks didn’t make them any less frustrating. Iridian would be landing soon, and Adda had no patience for her brain tripping over itself.

  She repeated the long walk back to the port module. This time she didn’t throw up after the grav acclimation tunnel. Iri, Adda subvocalized, thrilling at the fact that she could just talk to Iridian again, whenever she wanted. I’m in the port. Do you have a dock yet?

  Babe, I love you, you did it, we’re almost there, Terminal Twenty-Nine, I love you, whispered over the implanted comms, as fast as Adda could process the words. It was so good to hear Iridian’s husky whisper again. Adda grinned and started looking for the designated terminal.

  It took her a few minutes to find Terminal 29, since she didn’t want to access anything connected to the station intelligence. Aside from how dangerous it would be when she’d been so recently influenced, the intelligence would’ve recognized her neural implant net, and her biometrics if the clinic had been as thorough as they should’ve been when they added her to the contact blacklist. In the best-case scenario, the intelligence would ignore her attempted interaction. In the worst case, it’d report her attempt to the clinic.

  When she finally found Terminal 29 without an intelligence’s help, the readout above its passthrough changed as she watched from Reserved to Arriving at passthrough: Not for Sale. Iri, Adda subvocalized, is your ship name Not for Sale?

  That’s us. Iridian’s energetic subvocalization sounded elated. And when the passthrough door opened a few minutes later, her beautiful figure was framed in its doorway. The drab clothing couldn’t hide Iridian’s lithe form and elegant curves, and the wide-barreled, vaguely gun-shaped device in her hand somehow completed the picture.

  “Adda Karpe, stay where you are.”

  Adda spun to face the shouting man. He led a group of ITA agents running toward her, with four or five tiny drones flying in front of and above them. She ran for the passthrough, but she was nowhere near fast enough to get inside before the drones reached her. Please, gods, she was too close to let them separate her from Iridian again.

  Iridian lifted her weapon so that the barrel pointed over Adda’s head. It made a loud clank and something whooshed past Adda. Whatever Iridian had just shot clattered against the metal floor behind her. When she glanced back, the flying drones had turned and were now rapidly approaching the ITA agents’ faces. Adda concentrated on running, not the pained cries behind her.

  When Adda reached the passthrough, Iridian took one hand off the launcher to pull Adda inside with a firm grip on her arm. “I’ve got her!” Iridian yelled down the passthrough. “Go!”

  The exterior passthrough doors shut out the engines’ mechanical howl. Iridian built up momentum by pulling them along on every handhold between her and the interior passthrough door. Since Adda had come within Iridian’s reach, Iridian hadn’t let go of her arm. Under the passthrough’s yellow lights, Iridian looked thinner and paler than Adda remembered, and she’d lost some of the muscle definition that marked her as a former soldier. She’d shaved her scalp within the past day or two, but a bruise darkened the side of her jaw. Even the comp glove on her hand was duller than her usual orange-patterned one.

  The first half of the passthrough was painted with the icy blue Ceres Station port theme. The second half was the N
ot for Sale’s plain gray, with no markings. That was the half that’d leave with the ship. Adda barely had time to register that she’d left Ceres Station before Iridian pulled them both through the interior passthrough doorway and slapped the wall controls to shut it behind them.

  The passthrough opened onto a T intersection. Instead of choosing one direction or the other, Iridian pressed Adda into the wall with a deep kiss that was over far too soon. “Babe, I love you, and I missed you,” Iridian said. She repeated the sentiments while she secured Adda into a tie-down station, quickly kissing each part of Adda she strapped in.

  The ship lurched. Adda grasped a wall handhold and shut her eyes. She hated this part of every trip. “I missed you, too,” Adda murmured in what she hoped was a soothing tone. Gravity tried to pull Iridian away from her, but Iridian clutched the straps on Adda’s tie-down station and pulled herself close. Now that she and Iridian were together, everything would be all right, somehow. “I missed you so much.”

  “Aw, you two are so cute,” somebody said from Adda’s right.

  She opened her eyes to peer around Iridian’s shoulder. Adda had been so focused on Iridian, after all these weeks without her, that she’d overlooked at least 20 soldiers in full black-and-yellow armor secured in tie-down stations like hers all along the hallway in either direction. Yellow Zs and Vs on the black chest plates gleamed in glaring sunsim. Most helmets weren’t projecting the faces inside, although some did. It’d been a long time since they’d all been on Barbary Station together, and that was where she should’ve recognized them from. Distinguishing between faces had been difficult even before Adda chemically disarranged her brain.