Gravity of a Distant Sun

by R. E. Stearns

  The major’s comp pinged, and he glanced at it. “I’m sure you’re busy.” Iridian used a bulkhead handhold to pull herself toward the doorway and made a shooing motion at the other four. “We’ll get out of your way.”

  “Hold it.” Major O.D.’s voice was louder and harder than it’d been a moment before. All five of them stopped where they were except for Adda, who had to stop herself on the bulkhead by the door. “Which of you is Tash Otto . . . Ottal . . .” O.D. frowned between the comp and the people in his office.

  Tash drifted forward from her position by the door, and Wiley followed her. “Ottonwald.”

  O.D. pulled a knife from his belt. “You were on Ceres in February of ’72?” Wiley took a heavy step forward that put him between Tash and O.D., but she pushed herself to the side with a hand on his armored shoulder.

  “Hey, whoa, what’s happening?” asked Iridian. Adda was in the corridor, drifting near the overhead, which was rude but out of easy knife range. That let Iridian keep her eyes on O.D. Whatever he’d just read about Tash made him angrier than Iridian had ever seen him.

  “A lot of people were on Ceres then,” Tash said warily. She met Iridian’s eyes and something seemed to click. “Oh, those fucking AIs.”

  O.D. threw the knife and followed it, pushing himself off the desk bolted to the deck. His mass barreled through Wiley’s off-balance grab at his arm, and he slammed Tash into the bulkhead. “My da was on the Ybarra.” He said that a couple more times while Wiley and Iridian tried to pull him back, and he ignored Wiley yelling, “Get off! Get off her!” right next to his head. The major had gotten his knife back. The blade trailed red orbs of blood while he fought to get his arm out of Iridian’s grip.

  The force it took to pull O.D. away sent Tash thudding back into the wall. Iridian and O.D. hurtled across the office in the opposite direction. Iridian’s arm ended up behind O.D. when the two of them hit the wall, and she swore at the heavy impact. It didn’t hurt yet, but it would.

  Blood soaked Tash’s clothes, oozing from her lips and wounds in her chest and stomach. She was choking. Blood clung to her face and shirt and drifted in combining red orbs all around them. Iridian hooked her boot into a foothold and braced herself. Even that wasn’t enough to hold O.D. back until Wiley came to help. Wiley was grimacing like he was torn between strangling O.D. with the arm he had around the major’s neck and going to Tash. Iridian wedged herself between the desk and the bulkhead for more leverage, but the major had stopped fighting them.

  Iridian shoved Wiley toward Tash. “Don’t make this worse,” she told him. He went.

  O.D. drifted in Iridian’s grip on his arm until he stabilized himself against the bulkhead. He hadn’t taken his eyes off Tash. “Sir, what did the AIs send you?” Iridian’s voice shook a little. After Adda’s brush with Casey in the Ceres workspace, this was the closest the awakened intelligences had come to her and Adda since Adda’s overdose.

  O.D. just raised his comp hand so Iridian could see its projection. A brief record of a ship, the Akira Martel Ybarra, showed no survivors after an NEU infiltration team sabotaged its enviro. It’d been an NEU civilian vessel before secessionists commandeered it and made it a legitimate military target. Whichever side O.D.’s da had been on, he must not’ve made it off the ship. Given O.D.’s secessionist history, Iridian doubted his da had been among the infiltrators.

  Below the Ybarra summary was a profile of a woman with Tash’s first name and a physical description that listed most of her tattoos. The document also described her as an NEU military intelligence officer from Venus’s civilian hab. A long list of wartime engagements followed. Location and date combinations associated some of the ops with memorable events during the war, but Iridian had never heard of most of them.

  Several engagements on the list carried dramatic names with terms like “assassination” and “massacre,” so it must not have come from a government source. A sealed human rights investigation, maybe. If this document were publicly accessible, Major O.D. would’ve known Tash’s name before now. But Casey had sent Tash’s role in the NEU sabotage op that’d killed the Ybarra, and apparently O.D.’s father, to his personal comp.

  The Ybarra op appeared in the middle of Tash’s record. More ops preceded the NEU push through the Martian secessionists, and some of them preceded the war itself. A dozen more on Ganymede followed. No wonder Tash had known people on run-down habs like Yăo. To pull off so much of the prep work that let the NEU fleet crush the secession’s stronghold on Ganymede, she would’ve made friends and enemies in every hab between Venus and Jupiter. And in the end, Tash had been locked up close to home.

  Babe, find a medic, Iridian subvocalized. It wouldn’t be right for Tash to die this far from the ’jects she’d fought for. A mass of blood was rising from Tash’s abdomen and filling the space around it. It clung to Wiley’s arm where he held her. Most of the people Iridian had seen with that much blood around them had been dead already.

  Selfish as it was to think it now, Tash was this crew’s best chance of clearing the nannite cultures out of their bodies and making connections on Yăo Station. Pel was there doing his best, but Pel’s best wasn’t anywhere near what an experienced NEU operative could’ve done.

  CHAPTER 9 Days until launch: 49

  Adda pushed herself down a hallway in the Not for Sale, asking every ZV she met where to find a doctor or medic to help Tash. Explaining who had attacked Tash or why Major O.D. had done it probably wouldn’t bring help any faster, so Adda didn’t mention that. Without that information, the ZVs found the medic, a woman they called Vasilev, faster than Adda could’ve found her on her own. Vasilev flew down the hallway and bounced off the doorway to enter Major O.D.’s office. Adda followed more slowly.

  Verifying the claims Casey had sent Major O.D. about Tash would take time and brainpower Adda didn’t have at the moment, and she wasn’t interested in getting close enough to examine Major O.D.’s comp. It was almost certainly Casey who’d sent the message that’d inspired O.D. to attack Tash. None of the other intelligences valued information about humans the way it did. Everyone knew someone who’d died in 2472. One of Iridian’s cousins had passed then, but Iridian wouldn’t have done anything this violent if she’d met the killer now.

  O.D.’s attack on Tash had happened so fast that Adda had hoped she’d hallucinated it. But Iridian and Wiley had reacted too, and examining how it could’ve happened hadn’t made the bloody scene disappear.

  Major O.D. hadn’t even been in direct contact with Casey. Casey had just read him well enough, possibly after reviewing AegiSKADA’s observations from Barbary Station, to guess what he’d do if it provided him with that information. That was worse. Adda stayed in the hallway and wrapped her arms around herself, obeying some instinctual desire to make herself smaller. If Casey became adept at getting people to do what it wanted without influencing them, it’d do much more damage.

  The ZV medic was already spattered in Tash’s blood from where it floated in the air, but she’d stopped herself on the cabinets across from Major O.D.’s desk. She’d said something, but Adda had missed what. Beyond the floating blood, Iridian still gripped one of O.D.’s arms with both hands. Unless Adda was alone, which seemed unlikely, then what she’d just witnessed had really happened. Iridian said something to O.D. It sounded like noise. Adda swallowed hard. Her brain had stopped interpreting speech again.

  O.D. replied in a lower and angrier version of the same indecipherable noise and tore himself free of Iridian. They both stayed near the desk, across the room from where Tash was dying in Wiley’s arms. The medic pushed off the cabinets to reach Tash’s side and leaned over her.

  “Please disconnect the communication system from the Patchwork,” Adda hoped she said into the resulting silence. They sounded like words in her head, but not in the air. If O.D. did that, then Casey wouldn’t be able to send any more historical artifacts to people who’d take a life because of them.

  Major O.D. stared down Tash, Wi
ley, and the ZV medic for a moment, then pushed off the wall, out the door, and past Adda in the hallway. “I’ll send somebody to deal with that when Vasilev’s done,” O.D. said. Adda flinched as he glanced at Tash on the last word.

  Tash wasn’t a “that.” Whatever she’d done during the war, she was a person, and she’d helped Iridian get to Adda. It was possible that Adda’s brain still wasn’t interpreting speech properly, but O.D. had looked disgusted enough to mean what she’d heard.

  Wiley’s boot magnets clanked against the floor as he shifted to steady Tash. His lips were drawn back in a grimace. Tears filled his eyes and shivered on his cheeks. Even Iridian was silent, face drawn in sympathetic pain. Either the right thing to say hadn’t come to her, or this might’ve been one of those times when saying nothing was polite, for a change. Adda couldn’t think of anything that’d comfort him. If Iridian had been injured that badly, Adda wouldn’t want to talk to anybody.

  Iridian picked her way through the floating blood and around the medic to grip Wiley’s shoulder and speak to him in a low voice. Wiley nodded. Iridian pushed herself through the doorway to wrap her arms around Adda’s ample waist. “Hey,” Iridian said softly. “Let’s give them some space.”

  Although Adda hadn’t intended to, she’d been staring at Wiley and Tash. She nodded, and Iridian guided them down the hall. Adda had forgotten how nice it was when Iridian caught her thinking somewhere less than optimal and physically moved her to a better place.

  Every muscle was limp with exhaustion. Each minute on the ZVs’ ship took them farther from Ceres, closer to Jupiter and Yăo Station. The ITA didn’t even maintain a reliable route to Yăo, and Jupiter’s magnetosphere would discourage the intelligences from coming after them, for a while.

  Adda wanted to hold Iridian, somewhere private where they weren’t dodging partially armored ZV soldiers. “Do we have a place to sleep?” Adda asked. That was an old question she and Iridian had asked each other when they’d been in school together. They’d always been looking for cheap places to stay for the next few weeks, until their welcome wore out or the building got condemned or a dangerous roommate meant they had to move again.

  “We’ve got a bunk of our own,” Iridian said, to Adda’s immense relief.

  “Tomorrow they’re starting the cycle up to Yăo’s local time,” Iridian said. “A lot of folks are just staying up until next shift.”

  The cabin Iridian pulled them into was full of stacked bunks, lit to simulate dim moonlight. She wound through the beds and paused to help Adda into one. Across the room, somebody snored, and a few other beds were occupied by quieter sleepers. Iridian hooked one arm and one foot around a pole that supported the beds to stay still while she undid her pants.

  Adda shivered, more a factor of fleeting fear than cold. What if something was different now? This was the longest they’d ever been apart. Iridian stuffed her pants and socks into the cleaner built into the wall and drifted over to help Adda, all long legs and smelling of woman. Adda sighed with contentment. This part still felt right.

  Iridian zipped both of them into a soft sack attached to the bed that’d keep them in the bunk despite the lack of gravity. Her soft fingers stroked Adda’s sides as they kissed. “I missed you,” Iridian whispered against her lips.

  I missed you too, Adda subvocalized. So much.

  Iridian held Adda against her, Adda’s hand on the back of her soft-stubbled head as they kissed, pressing their bodies together from head to toes. They clung together like they were the entirety of each other’s universe, the way the two of them had always been. “Never again,” Iridian murmured. “I’ll kill them all before I let them take you again. AIs included.”

  Let’s not let it come to that. Adda clutched Iridian’s hip, pulling her even closer, using the warm pressure of Iridian’s skin to banish the bloody image of Wiley and Tash. She and Iridian would always find each other, and whatever was different between them now wouldn’t change that.

  * * *

  During the night, the ship accelerated as it crossed on and off the Ceres-Jupiter reliable route, giving its passengers several hours of what spacefarers called healthy grav in the morning before reducing it to nothing. Sometime before morning, Tash died.

  Despite how sick to her stomach the loss and the changes in gravity made Adda, she had work to do. First, she’d test whether Major O.D. had taken her advice about disconnecting the ship’s comms. That would prevent Casey from sending more volatile information to set the ZVs against Iridian’s new friends.

  Adda composed a message to Pel about her and Iridian’s successful escape from Ceres. The message got stuck in a comms out-box. If nothing Adda sent left the Not for Sale, then there was a good chance that Casey couldn’t send more incriminating history to anyone onboard.

  Eventually, Casey would find a way into Yăo Station, despite the turbulent magnetic environment and intense radiation. She and Iridian, at minimum, couldn’t stay. If the two of them left, the intelligences might follow them and leave Pel and the others alone.

  With luck, the ZVs wouldn’t suffer any repercussions after they dropped Iridian’s new crew off and reconnected shipboard comms to the Patchwork. Whether the intelligences targeted them or not would be an indicator of how the rest of Iridian’s friends would fare if they left Iridian’s side.

  Staying with Iridian had already proven to be dangerous. During the next day, Wiley spent all his time in the corners of various rooms, where Iridian, Noor, and Rio went to talk to him. Adda couldn’t think of anything that’d help him, so she stayed away, except for meals. Eating without gravity was awkward enough. Having serious conversations at the same time made the experience much worse. She missed Pel’s ability to insert jokes into any conversation, even when they weren’t appropriate.

  Since she had nothing to add to those conversations, Adda worked on her plans for their eventually arrival on Yăo Station instead. Wiley and Noor agreed with Adda’s assessment—Tash’s, more than her own, Adda suspected—that Yăo Station was the best place for all of them to decide what to do next. If they chose to cooperate with Iridian and Adda, like Tash had suggested, then they’d have a lot more options for making money to survive on.

  Rio had been following her ZV unit’s schedule onboard. Adda saw her only over meals, usually catching up with her much smaller cousin Tabs, who was also a ZV. When Iridian asked Rio about Yăo Station, Rio grimaced and shook her head at the name. “Everything in that hab feels like it’s balanced on its corner, ready to fall apart,” she complained.

  “You staying with the ZVs, then?” Wiley asked. It was one of the few questions Adda had heard him ask since Tash died.

  Rio sighed. “I wish. The major wants me back, my new squad leader wants me back, but there are people higher up who don’t. They’re still making up their mind how to handle my case.” She narrowed her eyes at Iridian and Adda. “And besides, I can’t leave you two alone without you having a lifetime’s worth of drama. You didn’t even invite me to the wedding!”

  “There wasn’t a party or much of a ceremony,” Adda explained. “We were running from the ITA at the time.” Back when Casey was her strongest ally, carrying her and Iridian away from danger on a route of its own design. Adda wished she could trust it that way again, but it’d been a mistake. Intelligences couldn’t be trustworthy, according to the human definition.

  Noor was on his second prepackaged bowl of curry and rice, and he seemed very reluctant to stop eating to ask, “Just how often do you get caught at this?”

  “The ITA only caught us once,” Iridian said, “but we get their attention from time to time.”

  Rio folded her arms across her wide chest. “Well. I still owe you for getting us all off Barbary. On your own you’re just going to get yourselves locked up again. Besides, your goofball brother gets into more trouble than you do. You could use another set of eyes on him.”

  “Gods, I know,” said Iridian. Adda smiled at Rio, which she hoped showed that she appreciat
ed the offer without Adda having to assemble her thanks as words. The fact that Pel already had “another set of eyes” than the ones he was born with amused Adda in a way she didn’t care to explain to everyone present. It shouldn’t have been funny, and yet . . .

  Wiley stayed silent during the rest of that meal, and all the others Adda had eaten with him, unless somebody prompted him to speak. Iridian was unusually quiet too, even while she guided Adda through the hallways to their shared bunk. Adda was about as good with directions as she was at comforting upset people.

  “They taught us how to deal with one of our own dying, but Tash wasn’t a soldier,” Iridian told her. “Wiley keeps trying to think of what he could’ve done differently.”

  “Could he have saved Tash?” Adda asked.

  “I don’t see how. It’s weird, how calm he looks. Inside he’s screaming.”

  The only way Adda could help him was to prepare for their arrival on Yăo Station. After a full-systems sweep for signs that Casey had altered the Not for Sale’s onboard records, Adda had read what the ZVs’ ship had cached about the Jovian colonies before Major O.D. disconnected it from the Patchwork. As she’d suspected, another pirate crew operated in the area. But, as she told Iridian after Adda let herself be coaxed into the ZVs’ gym, “They let all six people on a targeted ship die last year. And that wasn’t the first time they did that.”

  Iridian, running on a treadmill beside the Adda’s sim bike, shook her head. “Not them, then.”

  “That crew is the only ones who look like they’re making enough money to share, at least in this area.” The simulated experience of biking on Earth was distracting, especially since the halter that kept Adda from floating off the exercise machine would’ve been unnecessary on Earth. She turned the sim off. “The syndicate is financially viable too, but their violence toward their targets is nothing compared to what they do to each other. We could try the Saturnian groups, if we could get there.”