Gravity of a Distant Sun

by R. E. Stearns

  “And Casey will be looking for us on the way,” Iridian pointed out.

  “No matter where we go in this solar system, it’ll be waiting for us.” Adda drew in a long breath and stopped the exercise machine she’d barely been pedaling. “The best thing we can do is find a way onto Dr. Björn’s expedition across the interstellar bridge.”

  Iridian grabbed the treadmill arm for a few steps, her eyes wide with shock. The harness pulling her against the treadmill belt creaked. “Seriously? I heard you saying something about crossing the bridge, but I thought you were hallucinating.”

  “Maybe I was.” Adda had few clear memories from the weeks immediately after her overdose. “But that new solar system is the only place I can imagine going where the intelligences wouldn’t follow us, for the same reason that they’ll have ignored Yăo Station so far: they rely on our infrastructure, especially sensors connected to the Patchwork, to gather information and make decisions. Yăo Station must have some workarounds that would allow messages out. I’ve read some. But there’s nothing on the other side of the interstellar bridge.”

  “That means there’s no way for us to talk to anyone on this side.” Iridian’s machine hummed, and the pounding of her feet on the belt came faster. That disconnection from the rest of humanity would be hard on her. Unless she thought of a different way to escape the intelligences, she’d probably accept that separation, for a while. “There’s nothing making atmo or water out there either. Dr. Björn has to bring all of that along. They’ll set up a research station, I figure, but are you thinking you’ll set up another one for yourself?”

  “We could. They’ll have to set up a recycling system, and if we can recycle local rocks and gases into something we could print an airtight hab with . . .” If Adda had wanted to build a new hab, then she and Iridian would’ve joined one of the new colony ventures instead of Sloane’s crew. “But if we go out there, then we’ll have as much time as possible to study what the intelligences have done and find a way to stop them. Or even find a way to communicate with them safely.”

  “They haven’t said anything worth listening to so far.” After a few steps, Iridian said, “It’d be neat to see a whole new solar system, though. They’ve sent a lot of drones, but those pics aren’t the same as seeing it in person. So, how? Bribe somebody?”

  “With what?” Adda stretched her aching legs and grabbed the machine to keep from launching herself into the opposite wall. “We can afford food for two or three days on Yăo, I hope. After that, we’ll have to find some way to make money there, or we’ll be in trouble.”

  For the rest of their trip, when Adda wasn’t too sick to think about it, she was weighing options for how they’d access necessities on Yăo. She tried to send her message to Pel again. Neither copy made it off the Not for Sale. Adda relaxed as much as she could with her limbs drifting away from her in the low gravity. If she couldn’t send messages out, Casey probably couldn’t force its own poisonous messages into the ship. For the moment, they were safe.

  When Adda could bear to turn on a window, Ceres had disappeared into the star field behind them. They enjoyed two days of Earthlike gravity as they neared Yăo Station. Every window Adda opened filled the wall it was projected on with either darkness and the brightest stars, the rest dimmed in a pale glow of reflected sunlight at the projection’s edges, or the unimaginably huge bulk of Jupiter. Iridian pointed out some of the moons as they passed. Jupiter’s mesmerizing swirls of clouds grew incomprehensibly large as the ship approached. Even while they were hours away from Yăo Station’s orbit, it looked like the pilot was planning to land on the planet’s surface.

  Once, she’d turned the window projector on and startled at a huge black spot on Jupiter’s yellow and brown bands. When she’d called Iridian over to ask her about it, Iridian laughed at her alarm. “That’s Io. It’s between us and Jupiter right now.”

  After Io had finished its transit, Adda set about searching for the sun. Rheasilvia Station on Vesta had projected a fake sky onto the ceiling that made it Earth blue during the day with a very bright and present sun. They switched it to a live feed of stationspace at night.

  Adda wished the Not for Sale would’ve done that too, but Iridian said that wasn’t common practice for ships. She was getting very tired of the off-white ceiling. Looking at it too often made her feel like she’d taken about half an expired sharpsheet and she should sit down until the dizziness passed and the sensation of her tongue moving in her mouth stopped repulsing her.

  It took her four tries to find the sun with the ship’s exterior cams. “That?” Adda pointed at the bright dot. “That’s it?”

  Iridian sat on the bed beside her, grinning. “Yeah, that’s it. It can’t mess up your optics from here!” She twisted to enfold Adda in her arms. “It’s okay. We’re not going outside this trip. Maybe someday. I hear there’s actually stuff to do on Europa and Io now.”

  Iridian was warm but still tense, even though she smelled appealingly of sweat. Adda curled around her wife and hid her face in the spot between Iridian’s neck and shoulder so she didn’t have to speak aloud. This may be the farthest I’ve been from the sun, but I’m not far from home.

  “Aw, babe,” Iridian murmured into Adda’s overly brown hair.

  They sat like that for a while, enjoying the gravity and the rest it brought with it. It was the quietest Iridian had been able to be in days. She’d always woken earlier than Adda, but now her eyes were shadowed with lack of sleep and too much wired, angry energy. She spent hours in the gym, challenging the ZVs to longer runs than they wanted and sparring matches that left bruises. Somehow she still came to bed after Adda had fallen asleep. Adda couldn’t tell if what bothered her was returning to a place near where she’d fought during the war, or Tash’s death and the harm that’d done Wiley. Either was plausible, but if Adda asked about it, the resulting conversation would somehow make them both feel worse.

  Iridian said, “We’ll be stuck out here for a while. If we leave, the ITA and the AIs get us. And I don’t think there’s a competent pilot at a price we can afford on Yăo.”

  Adda nodded into the crook of Iridian’s neck. I’ve been reading up on the station.

  “Of course you have.” Iridian patted Adda’s back.

  She heard a smile in Iridian’s voice, finally. “It has an export, which I didn’t expect. Yăo Station is the cheapest source of low-quality algae in the populated ’jects.” Iridian hummed like she found that fact mildly interesting.

  The rest of what Adda had been reading about was the station management intelligence, a very old one called Mairie, and Iridian wouldn’t want to hear about it. It was tempting not to tell her, to put off the conversation until the intelligence posed a more active threat. But after Casey had influenced her, keeping significant information about intelligences to herself seemed like a bad habit to fall back into.

  “It’s got one general station management intelligence,” Adda said. “Nothing I’ve read suggests that it’s supervised.” Iridian shuddered against her. “It’s operating on its own, like HarborMaster on Barbary Station, but it has less to manage than HarborMaster did. Humans even run the port. Apparently the radiation and magnetic fields mess with the automated systems that other stations use. This is just what I’m seeing from the outside, though.” What people wrote and said about a place would never be the whole truth, even when she trusted the information sources, and she trusted very few of the sources documenting Yăo Station.

  “AegiSKADA was unsupervised too. It was a fucking monster.”

  Adda took a moment to formulate a truthful reply that wouldn’t upset Iridian any more than she already was. Her recent experience with unsupervised intelligence behavior had given her a much more nuanced perspective than she’d had when she’d first encountered that intelligence. “AegiSKADA was specifically developed to eliminate and mitigate human threats. HarborMaster and Yăo Station’s intelligence focus on equipment and maintaining environmental factors such
that the station residents are comfortable and safe. These intelligences aren’t armed. Their security protocols are limited to locking systems and doors. All intelligences should be supervised, because their judgment errors accumulate and multiply without someone to redirect them, but these shouldn’t have any priorities that would allow them to hurt people.”

  AegiSKADA had been a flawed intelligence. It should never have been allowed to hurt her brother, and it should never have been allowed to kill while it was unsupervised. What it was doing for Vesta now proved that under supervision, it could be magnificent. The leader of its development team had given it too much leeway to act on its own. What’d happened on Barbary was that team leader’s fault.

  “So, do you figure Casey knows we’re going there?” Iridian was striving for a casual tone, and she would’ve fooled a stranger. Adda heard the deep anxiety behind the question.

  “Yes.” Iridian’s shoulders slumped, and Adda hurried to say, “When the Apparition shot at us, all it would’ve had to do was watch the nearest ports that weren’t Ceres. There aren’t many between Ceres and Jupiter, so it would’ve guessed our destination. The intelligences won’t want to go as deep into Jupiter’s magnetosphere as we’re going, though. They need the Patchwork.”

  “What will Casey do if it can’t get to us directly?” Iridian asked. “Give up and go bother somebody else?”

  Adda smiled because she hoped Iridian meant that as a joke. “Even on Barbary, as soon as they started cooperating with us, they focused on what we were doing to the exclusion of everybody else.”

  “Everybody else was afraid to interact with them,” Iridian said. “With good reason.”

  Adda turned her head to look out the window again. Jupiter’s colored stripes moved, supposedly. This far away they looked still. “Maybe you’re right. But if Casey is still focused on us, then it will have already started looking for a way into Yăo Station. It will find one sooner or later. I just . . . It was on Ceres, in a manner of speaking.”

  Iridian had been gazing out the window at the approaching planet, but she turned back to Adda fast. “It was?”

  She told Iridian about her encounter with Casey on Ceres. “I can’t believe you got AegiSKADA involved first,” Iridian said. “That could’ve gone so fucking wrong even before the awakened fucking AIs found out what was happening.”

  “What else could I have done?” Adda asked. “I had no other way to leave the building, and we didn’t have any other way to get me out of there. Besides, AegiSKADA wasn’t the intelligence that let me out. That was Casey.”

  “That’s worse, damn it.”

  “What should I have done, then? Sit around while ITA agents lined up around the clinic to keep me in and you out, while all the doors were stuck open? Really, what should I have done, while coordinating two operations through Pel, with my brain blanking out every other day? I couldn’t even leave my own bedroom for most of the time I was there.”

  Iridian stared at her a moment, her face twisted with emotions that she tried to hide from everyone, even Adda. “It worked, but . . .” Iridian shut her eyes for a moment, then opened them, looking a little calmer. “When we can talk about these plans, and I know we couldn’t before, but when we can: we need to talk about the AI involvement too. Please, babe. Casey almost took us both out on Vesta, and we can’t let it do that again.”

  “I know that,” Adda said, “and we will talk about plans, when there’s enough of a plan to talk about.” Iridian’s vague we can’t, we have to statements didn’t take this situation’s unique factors into account. But if Iridian could acknowledge that the plan had worked despite Casey’s involvement, if not because of it, then they could move on to another important part of Adda’s latest interaction with the intelligence. “I think Casey let me out so it could show me that huge machine it constructed in the workspace,” Adda said. “It felt like a graphically relevant representation. I think Casey is really building something like that, or it wants to build something.”

  “Something awful, I bet,” said Iridian. “You won’t be a part of it.”

  “No. But . . .” Adda almost asked if Iridian wanted to know what Casey was building, but Iridian wouldn’t care. An awakened intelligence was crafting something massive. . . . A new home, perhaps? And somehow Adda was connected to that. She was dying to find out what Casey was planning, but given the opportunity, the intelligence would influence her first and tell her afterward. That was not a risk Adda was willing to take. Not yet, anyway.

  Iridian gathered her into her arms. “Whatever it’s doing, it can do it by itself.” Which begged the currently unanswerable question of what it wanted Adda’s help with.

  She counted out fifteen seconds of companionable silence. That was how long it took before she could change a conversation’s subject without implying a significant relationship between the new subject and the old one. “Well, before Casey finds a way into Yăo Station to try to influence me again, we have to acquire the resources to join Dr. Björn’s expedition.”

  “Do we have to go all the way out of the solar system to get away from it?” Iridian asked, proving that Adda’s conversation topic separation interval was still reliable. “What about the Kuiper colonies?”

  “The Kuiper colonies all maintain a comms connection with other habs the intelligences have access to.” Adda covered Iridian’s hands with hers and pulled Iridian’s embrace a little tighter around her. “To get all the way out of the intelligences’ reach, we need to get out of populated space, away from every internet node and Patchwork buoy.”

  “But why the hell would Björn take us with ver?”

  “I’m working on that,” said Adda. “If we ask ver now, won’t ve say no?”

  “I would.”

  “Well, Oxia Corporation isn’t offering the expedition the unlimited funding they’d talked about before Captain Sloane reclaimed Vesta. I suppose they can’t afford to. After we get to Yăo Station, I want to see how much money we can save. If we make a significant funding contribution, or maybe pay a lawyer to get Dr. Björn’s contract and the expedition turned over to the University of Mars. The university began the project, and Dr. Björn’s departure can’t have been the only illegal leverage Oxia used to take it over. That might be enough to convince Dr. Björn to let us come along.”

  Iridian smiled and kissed Adda’s cheek. “I was thinking we could threaten to blow up some Oxia facilities and make them force Björn to take us, but I like your way better.”

  Adda turned to look Iridian in the eyes. “I don’t want to force Dr. Björn to do anything. Can you imagine being stuck in a small hab with ver for years when our spots could’ve gone to somebody ve actually wanted along?”

  “Yeah,” Iridian said. “But I’d rather deal with Björn than three awakened AIs when they’ve found a way into Yăo and we have nowhere left to run.”

  * * *

  Every time Adda turned on a window, Jupiter filled it. Iridian had to point out the dark dot near its equator, which grew into a rough oval as they approached. Yăo Station was darker than any station Adda had seen before. No buoys were lit to guide ships into the port module.

  “We saw ships bigger than that in Rheasilvia stationspace, didn’t we?” Adda asked. “Not counting all that stuff sticking off it.” Those had been scientific instruments at some point, although now they were just junk crashing into more junk that floated around the station. Only a few small ships were latched onto the port module, and they were almost as old and battered as the broken instruments.

  “Yeah, most longhaulers are bigger than this hab.” Iridian sighed. “There won’t be a lot of healthy grav on a station that size. It looks like it’s rolling, so we’ll have something.”

  As they’d been talking, the ZVs’ ship had been tilting so that the head of their bed felt higher than the foot. Iridian balanced Adda as she tipped toward the edge. Something in another room clattered against something else as it settled into the new “down.” “Let’s strap in,
” Iridian said.

  They were about half an hour from the docking time the pilot had given them. By the time they’d gotten the straps on the bunk sorted out, loud bangs on the floor and walls announced that they’d entered the debris field that orbited Jupiter in Yăo stationspace, and the beds were more vertical than horizontal. A few other ZVs, including Rio, pulled themselves up the steep incline to their own bunks, using the bed frames as leverage. Rio had kicked another ZV out of the bunk next to Adda and Iridian’s.

  Iridian grinned over Adda at Rio. “Still coming with us?”

  Rio twisted her wrist, as thick around as Adda’s arm, to display an ITA alert for the recapture of all six former prisoners. Two weeks after their escape, the story was still on all the major newsfeeds. “While this is going on, yeah, I’m coming with you,” Rio said. “Like I said, I owe you, and you’re gonna need me. You’re on your way to more trouble than you can handle.”

  CHAPTER 10 Days until launch: 33

  Iridian’s new crew walked out of the Not for Sale’s passthrough and onto Yăo Station at the same unhealthily light grav that the ZVs’ ship had been maintaining for the past couple of days. Although .8 g was tolerable, they’d still be in for some bone and muscle loss. Iridian, Wiley, and Rio carried Tash’s body between them in a sealed biohazard bag. With her ZV armor, which wouldn’t fit anybody else, Rio was hauling most of the weight. It wouldn’t have been right to leave Tash with her murderer.

  Major O.D. didn’t want to have to document her death for his superiors anyway. When Iridian had dropped by his office to say good-bye, he’d looked like he hadn’t slept since Ceres. His farewell had been gruff and brief.

  Aside from Tash, they didn’t have much else to carry. The ZVs had let Iridian and her friends keep the black-and-yellow comp gloves and the newly printed comps inside, but the ZV Group had gotten a contract on Ganymede. Rio was the only ZV disembarking on Yăo Station.