Gravity of a Distant Sun

by R. E. Stearns

  “Sure thing,” said O.D.

  Adda stuck down the two semitransparent flaps on the generator that let Iridian check on her without interrupting her. Noor, still hyperfocused because of his own sharpsheet dose, was absorbed with something on his comp. Iridian held on to a bulkhead handhold and turned to face Wiley, Tash, and the corridor, where drones might appear if they broke through the hull and escaped Natani’s squad.

  Iridian grinned at her new crew. “This is what Adda does. We’ll be free and clear in fifteen minutes, tops.”

  “Don’t you see where she’s going with this?” asked Noor without looking up from his comp. “If she can pull it off, I bet she does it in five.”

  Iridian raised an eyebrow. He hadn’t been on Sloane’s crew, but the captain had always been betting on something with Tritheist, the crew’s lieutenant. Now that Tritheist was dead and Captain Sloane had bet against Iridian and Adda, it was time to take that pastime back from her old crew. “You’re on, for a beer or whatever they’ve got in the mess.”

  “I got ten,” said Tash.

  Wiley looked back and forth among them. “Hell, doesn’t twenty seem—”

  A loud chime over the ship speakers was followed by Major O.D.’s colonial accent. “Well, there they go. We’re clear. Thanks, Karpe. Natani, stand down.”

  Tash swore, Noor grinned at his comp, and Iridian was smiling so wide her face hurt. “She’s amazing, isn’t she?”

  “The copilot intelligence already had a drone redirection routine kind of like the one in your launcher thing,” Adda grumbled without opening the generator. “Once it saw the example from the launcher and understood what I was asking, it just deployed the routine where I told it to. What’s amazing is that the copilot isn’t allowed to do that on its own. This is three- or four-year-old tech. It’s not like it’s untested.”

  “Brace for evasion,” the pilot’s voice blared out of every comp. Iridian found one handhold and braced herself against the workspace generator. Adda was strapped down inside.

  Before Iridian could check on anybody else, grav yanked her toward the opposite side of the room as the ship powered through a rushed turn. Her improvised brace position held her steady. Out of the corner of her eye Iridian confirmed that Tash had both hands and both feet in hand- and footholds. Wiley hung on with one hand in a handhold and the other wrapped around Noor’s arm. Noor dangled over a two-meter drop to the current deck, dark eyes wide.

  The breath-stealing heavy grav couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds, but it felt longer. The ship banked and accelerated in a short burst, creating grav that pulled toward the surface designed to serve as a deck this time. After another five seconds, weightlessness returned. Iridian hauled in a deep breath. The ship must’ve made it outside the ideal range of whatever was shooting at them.

  While everybody was catching their breath and Noor was rubbing the bruise blooming on his arm, Major O.D.’s voice came over the comms. “Well, folks, we’re gonna live this time.” A cheer muffled by many faceplates rose from the hallway outside. “I’m disappointed to report that the Apparition tagged us.” Muffled boos and curses followed that announcement. Adda had been right to expect that the awakened AIs were involved. Iridian hadn’t even felt an impact, let alone an explosion. The hit must not’ve done much damage. “I know, it was on our side on Barbary and I thought it’d back us up here, too. But we’re going to make it to port. The ITA’s a lot more pissed at the Apparition for shooting at us from Ceres stationspace than it is at us and our clients. So we are clear, repeat, clear.”

  Everyone breathed sighs of relief, except for Adda in the generator. “You all right in there, babe?” Iridian asked.

  “Yes,” Adda replied in a voice as monotonous as Noor’s had been a few minutes before. “Tired. The copilot and I aren’t used to each other.”

  Iridian released her death grip on the generator so she could look through the flaps over its entrance. Drops of sweat rolled down Adda’s neck from beneath her hair, but she looked fine otherwise. “Did you just get us out of the Apparition’s line of fire?” This wouldn’t be the first time Adda had helped AI copilots avoid ship-to-ship fire. When Adda nodded, Iridian grinned at her. “Good fucking work, babe.” Adda smiled back while she disconnected her comp from the generator.

  “All the good gods,” said Wiley.

  Tash hooked her foot into a foothold in the corridor and gripped a handhold over her head, making a distracting display of her well-proportioned and heavily modified body. Iridian purposely turned her attention to the fixtures. This ship’s toe- and handholds were shaped like inverted U’s to emphasize the agreed-upon directions in micrograv. “So, we’re going to a port where we can fix the damage,” said Tash, “and then . . . Jupiter, you said?”

  “Yeah, I meant to ask about that,” said Wiley. “Why not Vesta? It’s closer.”

  Adda swept one of the flaps open and stuck it to the generator’s side. “Anonymity and no Patchwork. We’re minor celebrities in the asteroid belt.”

  “Vesta’s supposed to be a lot safer since Captain Sloane took over,” said Wiley. “Not for you two, maybe.” Vesta’s lower crime rates had been making newsfeeds. The feeds didn’t acknowledge that Captain Sloane, the biggest criminal of the bunch, was running the place with an AI that nobody ought to trust with multiple habs. Intrusive surveillance was the least harmful way it might be dropping those crime rates.

  “Another question,” said Tash. “What don’t you like about the Patchwork?”

  That, Iridian could answer. “The AIs are on it too.”

  “What AIs?” asked Noor, and that brought out the whole tale of three awakened ship copilots that’d been following Iridian and Adda, or maybe just Adda, ever since they’d left Barbary Station.

  “As a reminder,” Adda said toward the end of it, “without AIs we’d all be stuck in habs with hard-to-control environments, resources, and supplies.”

  “Well, yeah,” said Wiley a bit desperately, and Iridian empathized. Strong AIs made life in the cold and the black possible, but nobody wanted AI copilots having ideas and influencing people to attack loved ones.

  The others’ attentive silence dissolved into understandable swearing panic at the revelation that not only were there three awakened AIs in the universe, those AIs were following them. They’d been following Adda and Iridian for a lot longer. Adda still talked like she understood the risks that came with the AIs’ attention, even after what’d happened in Rheasilvia Station’s port.

  Now Iridian doubted that either of them did or ever could. She couldn’t be angry at Adda for putting herself in danger to do something she thought was important, because Iridian had sure as hell done that a time or eight. On the other hand, this was Adda, and Iridian didn’t want to think about a life without her in it. She would’ve been so damned happy to go back to jumping into all the fires while Adda stayed outside and told Iridian how to climb out again, like they’d done on Sloane’s crew. But that’d been when the real trouble had started. If only Adda were fascinated by something safe . . .

  Then they’d be broke and millions of klicks apart, working corporate contracts. Awakened AIs and the ITA were after them and they were still broke, but they were together and they’d paid off some family debts before they’d emptied their bank accounts. A corp wouldn’t have paid enough to do that. Whatever else went wrong, Adda’s fascination with AIs had gotten them this far. The two of them together would figure something out.

  Wiley, Tash, and Noor had passed through the loud exclamation phase of the awakened AI revelation and entered the quiet horror phase. “I’ll ask Major O.D. to watch out for the Casey and the rest of them when things calm down,” Iridian said. “The ZVs already lost at least two soldiers to these things. They won’t want to lose another one.”

  Adda tilted her pink comp glove so Iridian could read it. A message to Adda with no sender listed said, Return to Ceres. We will protect you. We need your help, in the unmissable red text Adda alw
ays designated for messages from the Casey.

  “Oh gods.” Iridian used the generator’s casing to pull herself closer to Adda. “How are the AIs even sending you messages? Do they know where we are?”

  Adda gripped her hand and held it without looking away from the Casey’s words. “Not exactly. On Ceres I used this comp in a workspace generator. Casey knows this machine.”

  Iridian breathed out in a hard and shaky sound, like she’d gotten a real gut punch instead of bad news. “Oh gods.”

  They hadn’t gotten out fast enough. Hours crushed by the most g’s Iridian had pulled in years tearing across the cold and the black between Venus and Ceres, and they still hadn’t gotten to Adda fast enough. The way Adda kept talking about the Casey’s AI like it was a person made the situation even more upsetting, but she had a point. No ship would be this obsessive on its own.

  “Can it track us?” Noor asked. When neither Adda nor Iridian answered immediately, he said, “Look, if Adda hadn’t done her thing in the generator they would’ve drilled this ship full of holes, wouldn’t they? In our very best-case scenario, we would’ve been disabled outside stationspace. Do we need to tell the pilot to get off the reliable routes, or what? What’s the play here?”

  While Noor was asking, Iridian asked, And what were you doing in a workspace, babe?

  Adda answered her first. Trying to fix the comms implants myself.

  In response to Noor’s questions, Adda’s eyes focused on something other than her comp for the first time since she’d gotten Casey’s message. “We should be off the Ceres-Jupiter reliable route, yes. Like I said, I don’t think they know our coordinates to the meter. Although I’m not clear on ship speeds, the Apparition’s targeting range extended to at least a thousand kilometers before its copilot awakened.” Iridian shuddered. “But the reliable routes leaving Ceres would be a logical place to begin searching for us. As to the rest . . .” Adda closed her eyes for a moment, and it killed Iridian to see her so frightened. “This is why we need to get to Yăo Station. It’s inside Jupiter’s magnetosphere. It will take a long time for them to find a way into it, and they’ll avoid it if they can. Docking there would mean giving up too many of their tools and information sources.”

  “Doesn’t yăo mean ‘demon’?” asked Wiley. The translator in Iridian’s ear whispered, “Demon” at the same time as Wiley.

  “When you say it that way it does.” Adda was staring at Casey’s message again. Clarifying pronunciation wouldn’t require her full attention. “Yăo is ‘dark and quiet.’ People started with the Russian version of its original name, the Jovian Astronomical Observatory, and they had a lot of options. The name that warned everyone about the station’s difficult Patchwork access won out, I suppose.”

  “There sure as hell isn’t any ITA there,” said Tash. “Rumor is they’re not even allowed to dock. But our nannites will give us away during any port scan the ship goes through. Once we get to Yăo, I’ll contact someone who can neutralize them for us.”

  “Yeah?” Iridian grinned at her. “That’s . . . better than I could’ve hoped for, honestly.”

  Tash shrugged, smiling, and Wiley wrapped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her against his side. “It’s my kind of place,” said Tash.

  Noor looked up from his comp. “So, it’s not a hellhole full of mutants and radiation?”

  “You just have to watch where you’re going. Some of the radiation protection’s great. And as for the ‘hellhole full of mutants’ part, well, like I said”—Tash actually winked at him—“my kind of place.”

  Tash’s comfort with a hab like that disturbed Iridian, even though it’d be a hell of an asset on Yăo Station. “What were you in for, again?”

  “Mixing bad drinks, remember?” Tash draped herself more thoroughly over Wiley, and Iridian glanced down to see if Adda wouldn’t rather find someplace private for the two of them.

  Adda undid her harness and slowly drifted toward the side of the generator until Iridian helped her out. “Well. The ITA won’t go to Yăo Station, and neither will Captain Sloane,” said Adda. “The intelligences will find a way to reach it eventually, but that’ll take time. It’s exactly the place we need to plan our next move. I’m going to confirm that arrangement with Major O.D.”

  Her plan was rational, and its first step wasn’t Ask a sketchy AI to solve all our problems. Gods, Iridian had missed Adda’s mind as much as the rest of her. Iridian steadied her as Adda pushed herself into the corridor, which was filling with ZV soldiers in various stages of armor removal. Having Adda at Iridian’s side again felt so good, so right, that Iridian was grinning at everyone she passed.

  Since the next destination was relevant to all of them, Wiley, Tash, and Noor went with Adda and Iridian to talk to the major. The heavy curve to the bulkheads and the juncture of the overhead and deck suggested that the Not for Sale was designed to spend more time in unhealthy grav than not. They hugged the corridor’s right side in single file to let armored ZVs pass in small groups, laughing and talking. Their gloves clacked in the handholds built into the bulkheads.

  Behind Iridian, Wiley had adjusted well to the low grav. “What’re you thinking about all this?” she asked him. “You haven’t had much to say.”

  “It’s too loud in here to think.” He grinned, a bit sheepishly. The four Sorenson ITAS escapees who’d been in longer than Iridian had all commented on the noise level aboard the Not for Sale. Iridian hadn’t noticed it, but the prison staff had enforced a quiet environment. That’d make for less to replicate in the sim. “But getting out of there . . . ,” Wiley continued. “That felt good. Getting your wife out of her institution felt good.” He searched for words while Iridian pointed Adda down the right corridor to reach the major’s office. “Noor could find us some fake IDs so we could all start over, I guess. But we don’t know what those awakened AIs will do if we do that. Could be bad news. And it’d be a shame to break up a team like this, you know? We could really make some progress if we stick together.”

  “Fuck progress.” From behind Wiley, Tash grinned and added, “Together, we could make a whole lot of Yăo money.”

  * * *

  Major O.D., given name Ken Oonishi, tilted his face toward the overhead and shook his head slowly as Iridian reviewed the basics of their plan in the major’s tiny office. His chin was covered in thin stubble and he’d added yellow stripes to his black hair at the temples. He’d obviously gotten more gym time and nutritious food since Barbary Station, where Iridian had last seen him. It’d be interesting to see what the major did with an enviro he had control over.

  Now that the ship had a head start on anybody the ITA sent after them from Ceres, O.D. had taken the ship’s sunsim down to the night setting that’d let the ZVs sleep. The blank walls and bland fixtures, here and throughout the ship, suggested that the ZVs were just renting the Not for Sale. Not every op needed enough Galilean shielding to travel near Jupiter. If the ZVs had owned the ship, there’d have been a lot more yellow and black than just O.D.’s suit in the armor rack on the bulkhead.

  “Not sure what kind of welcome you’ll get on Yăo,” said Major O.D., “but those people won’t talk about you while you’re there. We been deployed there twice and we hated it both times. Lost a guy in one of the bars, the second trip. Just disappeared one night. Our armor transmitters, that’s comms and cams, cut out before we docked, see. Nobody knew anything and there weren’t any gods-damned working cams in the hab either. They probably recycled the poor bastard’s corpse before we even left stationspace.”

  Tash and Noor listened calmly as if that kind of thing wasn’t news, and Wiley glowered in the righteous indignation that had always given him the energy to keep running when everything else in the universe said Stop. Adda’s face was the sweaty shade of grayish pink it got before she threw up. The combination of that story, the micrograv, and the fading sharpsheets was too much. Iridian pulled a sick bag out of Adda’s pocket and handed it to her just as she needed to use
it.

  “Sorry to hear that,” Iridian said over Adda’s retching. “But it’s the only place we can keep the Barbary AIs off us, and that’s something we have to do. They want something from Adda, and I won’t let them have it.”

  “Sure.” O.D. looked down and met her eyes again, with that expression officers wore when they’d caught her in some kind of trap. Iridian’s shoulders stiffened. All she could do now was listen to him explain just how she’d fucked up. “And now you’re gonna tell me we have to leave the reliable routes and get our hull dented up worse than the drones and the Apparition did to us so we can get you there fast.”

  Iridian blinked at him, falling into specialist-talking-to-a-gods-damned-major wariness like she’d traveled four years back in time. “Sir, I wouldn’t tell you that, but I was thinking of asking.” Wiley huffed a quiet laugh, and she wished she could surreptitiously kick him without sending herself tumbling to the opposite corner of the office, since he had magnetic boots and she didn’t. “It’s not just a speed issue. The Apparition will be looking for us.”

  O.D. grinned. The worst thing an officer could do in a casual conversation was decide to amuse themselves. Iridian had basically been a lieutenant in Sloane’s crew, and she’d never pulled that power-play shit with Sloane’s security personnel. “Naw,” said O.D., “whatever the newsfeeds say about the ’jects being so close, we would’ve had to cut across the reliable routes to make it without refueling anyway. Although that means we’re going to have to buy at Jovian prices.” O.D. sighed. “Good thing we like you ladies.”

  Iridian chose not to remind him, yet, that in addition to Iridian paying the price he quoted, he owed them. Blowing up the AI that’d trapped them on Barbary Station with its own fucking bombs should’ve covered fuel, especially since they’d be spending the rest of the trip to Jupiter in unhealthy grav. If any of his budget complaints put Adda’s life in danger, Iridian sure as hell would remind him about that debt.