Gravity of a Distant Sun

by R. E. Stearns

  “That’s enough of that,” muttered Iridian. She shoved past Rio to reach for Adda again. “Come on, babe. Let Noor take a look. It sounds like he knows what—”

  Noor returned from the hallway. “That looks like everybody who met us out front. Can one of you get out there and help? I’m . . . uh . . .” He trailed off and stood up straight, turning around the room like he was looking for something.

  A workspace generator. There should’ve been one in this room or near it, to coordinate with the station intelligence. Adda looked around too, but she didn’t see it.

  “Coming.” Rio’s heavy boots thudded into the hall. There, against the wall she’d been standing in front of, was a generator.

  When Iridian’s hand closed on Adda’s arm, Adda turned toward her. “There’s a workspace generator,” Noor said unnecessarily, his eyes going wide as he spoke.

  He had to be seeing the same potential Adda did. If Mairie wanted a supervisor, why shouldn’t it be one of them? It was a risk, but they were in danger already. As Mairie’s supervisor, Adda could release all those influenced Odin Razum people. She and Mairie would do so much to improve life on this station. Raising gravity was just a start. They’d set a regular, free schedule for drone trips to the Patchwork. They’d use all the drones for Patchwork access and station repair, and hide the increased data traffic from Casey. They’d filter more carbon dioxide out of the air. They could even—

  “Hell no.” Iridian pulled Adda’s arm toward the door. Adda wedged herself against a console, and she had a lot more leverage than Iridian did. Noor was walking toward the generator as if in a daze. That was no state in which to assume intelligence supervision. Adda had studied and supervised intelligences, and furthermore she respected them. Noor had no experience with them at all. Maybe Iridian agreed, because she reached for him too.

  Perhaps she’d missed the tactical advantage. “I can send those people away.” Adda twisted out of Iridian’s grasp. As if in slow motion, Adda gripped the door to the reclining workspace generator built into the wall.

  “Leave that alone.” Iridian shoved Noor across the room, hard enough to thump his back into the wall. He staggered toward the generator again. Iridian blocked his path with her body. “You don’t even know if that generator’s compatible with your implant,” Iridian said, “and if it was, would Mairie even listen to you?”

  There was an easy way to answer both of those questions. Adda pulled the heavy generator door open. “Babe, please.” Iridian’s voice shook, like Adda’s proximity to the generator was physically hurting her. “We know how this ends.”

  With Mairie’s help, Adda would solve most of the problems on this station. Then Iridian wouldn’t have anything to be afraid of. “I can do so much more from there,” Adda told her. “I’ll be careful.” When Adda lay down on the generator’s bed, it was an immense relief.

  It was only after Adda had shut the workspace generator’s door that she realized she didn’t have the details she needed to contact Mairie. Her neural implant net was causing an ache deep in her skull. It needed recalibrating, but there was no time to do that now.

  In the generator, she took another of her dwindling stock of prescription sharpsheets and dragged the lock icon to keep the door closed. Using a packet of dry sanitizing pads, she wiped off the cable and her nasal jack. Then she plugged in. Mairie was looking for someone like her, so it’d make itself easy to find. Whether she had qualifications it recognized, she’d soon find out. All she had to do . . .

  That was a worrisome phrase. It suggested she had oversimplified the problem she was attempting to solve. The rattling and banging on the outside of the generator was becoming an annoying distraction. The noise pulled her out of the workspace before it finished loading, and she had to start the process over. Her head felt fuzzy, like she’d taken an expired sharpsheet. As she considered the challenges inherent in taking over supervision of this intelligence, a new workspace loaded.

  A riot of color swirled around her, oil paint on canvas on air that clicked and whirred and resisted coming together into usable information. She, Mairie, and the workspace’s mindless software were combining to bring meaning to the chaos. A sun flared and died. One of the participants had crashed a connection attempt. Black and white squares formed under her feet, then blew away, leaving her with meaningless vertigo. None of it made any sense.

  Adda felt for the cord that would connect her comp to the generator. She’d have to take the cord out of her nasal jack to rearrange them, but unlike this ancient generator, the comp had software that she’d tested with her neural implant net. The rattling outside had changed to more ignorable scratching and rhythmic tapping. Her subconscious incorporated the noise into the generator’s soothing hum. Once she was back in reality again, her hand closed on the cord. She incorporated her comp into the system, and moments later she was in a new, colorful, unintelligible workspace.

  This time, white lines of light pierced the chaos and persisted. Now she could use some of the workspace functions. A math problem formed in the air. Solving it was a backup method of pairing her implant and her digital intermediary. Darkness formed behind the numbers as she concentrated. The intermediary would clear away the color storm.

  The generator’s door cracked. Light and hands fell on her. The cable came out of her nasal jack at the wrong angle and the pain took her breath away. The storm was gone.

  Iridian’s face, scowling somewhere between anger and concentration, hovered above her. “Help me,” she told somebody outside Adda’s field of vision. Strong hands lifted her out of the generator and held her in place, despite her body’s efforts to bounce off the floor and escape. She reached for the generator. The broken door’s jagged edge cut her fingertips.

  Iridian’s hand closed around hers and gently pulled it against her chest, away from the generator and next to Iridian’s heart. “No, babe. We don’t need it. We’ll find another way.”

  “To do . . . what?” Adda asked. Everyday monitoring could be accomplished through a comp, but the initial handoff should really happen in a hallucinographic workspace. There was too much at stake to risk miscommunication between the intelligence and the supervisor.

  “What the hell’s wrong with her?” Noor’s voice was edged with panic.

  Iridian squeezed Adda’s hand and frowned. Adda’s blood oozed over her fingers. We’re here to get drones for Shingetsu so she’ll trade us water and hook us up with someone who can clean the nannites out of us, Iridian subvocalized. And so you can tell somebody to fix your implant’s vulnerability. Then we can make some money and get away from Casey.

  It startled Adda how close they were, and how Iridian hadn’t said that aloud. Iridian liked to talk with her whole voice. Maybe she was ashamed. Iridian wanted to keep the others from knowing that Adda had forgotten why they were there. Before the overdose, before whatever had happened in that room with the generator, Adda would never have forgotten something so important. She felt compelled to press her point, even as it was slipping from her mental grasp. But Mairie—

  “It’s fucking with your head, gods damn it,” Iridian snapped, aloud this time. “If you can’t fight it, then I’ll take that generator apart and recycle the pieces. Just tell me if I should, babe. I’ll do it with my bare gods-damned hands.”

  “I’ll help,” Wiley’s clenched fists made it look like he had been waiting for something to dismantle.

  Adda stilled. If she’d been as deeply influenced as Iridian thought she was, Adda would’ve panicked at the idea of recycling the generator. It was frustrating that nobody was listening to her, but she didn’t need to be in communication with Mairie.

  But something was wrong. Her implant shouldn’t be causing this kind of headache, even if it needed to recalibrate. “That’d be a waste,” she said faintly. That was true. That was important. She couldn’t remember why. “We don’t know of another working generator on this station. Let’s just leave. The drones aren’t here.”

  �
�They’re not, are they.” Iridian let go of Adda’s hand and turned so fast that she had to catch herself on the wall to stop her spin. “Where’s that damned guide?”

  Rio waved the Odin Razum man’s hand by raising and lowering the arm she held him by. Even though he was pulling away with his full weight, she maintained her grip with no apparent difficulty. “You mean this guide?”

  “Thanks, Rio.” Iridian stalked to the doorway. “That trick won’t work again,” Iridian told their Odin Razum guide. “Take us to the drones, now, and I won’t cut your balls off and feed them to you.”

  The man glanced between Rio and Iridian. “The console. It’s how we get to them, this one and another one across the mod. I don’t know where they are the rest of the time. I don’t know, I swear I don’t know! I’ve never been there.”

  Iridian sighed. “I don’t like this console. Is the other console also in a room with a gods-damned workspace generator?” The man shook his head. “Then take us to that one. And tell all those people to back the fuck off, or we’ll come back here with something explosive.”

  Iridian held Adda’s hand all the way to the next console. Ordinarily Adda loved holding hands with her, but after what’d happened in the workspace generator, it made her want to cry with frustration and embarrassment. Working with or around intelligences used to be her most useful skill. When they’d left Earth together, it’d been what she’d counted on contributing to a pirate crew.

  Now her experience with intelligences was her biggest liability, even though she knew she could use Mairie to find and move the drones, and help all those influenced people who still followed them through the hallways. Now nobody even wanted her near a generator. Worse, she’d broken her promise to Iridian and confirmed that her fears were justified. Iridian was holding her hand to keep her from running back to the generator and climbing in.

  While her implant twitched minutely inside her skull and nasal passage, returning to the position that best fit Adda’s body, she reviewed the moments before she’d entered the generator. Noor had reported a “transmission spike.” What had that been? After the signal, getting into the generator had seemed like the only possible solution to their problems.

  She could use the generator to take control of the drones, and then she’d use it to . . . what? To make the crew a reputation, to get more jobs, to get more money to buy their way onto Dr. Björn’s expedition, away from Casey and the other awakened intelligences. There. She had the whole picture now. When Adda glanced over at Noor, he was shaking his head slightly and grimacing. Maybe he was recalibrating his implant too.

  Iri, it did something to our implants.

  Iridian glanced over at her. “Did you figure out what happened back there?”

  “That signal spike activated something in our neural implants.” Adda had no idea how, but it was the most likely explanation, given the vulnerability in them.

  “It would’ve had to have been in the sound. Did you hear a high-pitched sound?” Noor asked. “Mine doesn’t do anything wireless. Are you saying . . . Oh, sweet fuck.”

  “That’s why you two were the only people affected.” Iridian still sounded angry about that.

  “I thought I could’ve solved every problem we had if Iridian hadn’t pushed me away from that generator,” said Noor.

  “Me too.” Adda’s focus on the actual problems they faced was fracturing, letting her feel all the fear she’d been blocking out.

  Iridian swore expansively and gripped Adda’s hand tighter. “If anybody’s comp finds another signal spike, tell us.”

  “Will do,” said Wiley, and the others agreed too.

  Except for the guide, the Odin Razum had backed off. The whispering that echoed from the treatment plant was probably an auditory hallucination. Adda still heard wind chimes in places with no wind. Finding physical things in her environment to focus on helped silence them, sometimes. Adda’s gaze settled on the back of their Odin Razum guide’s head. He’d shaved it so that the whirls of lines and short hair pointed toward the jack near the base of his neck.

  “How are you doing?” Iridian asked her, too gently.

  “Not about to start shuffling around the treatment plant with these people, if that’s what you’re asking,” said Adda. Iridian’s face fell. Of course that wasn’t the scenario playing out in Iridian’s head. Iridian was afraid Adda would steal her knife and stab her with it, which was almost exactly what Adda had done the last time she’d been influenced. “Sorry. I’m not in communication with the intelligence. You can check my comp if you want.”

  “No, that’s okay.” Iridian squeezed Adda’s hand. “Good. Thanks.”

  It shouldn’t have been that simple. Adda had lied to Iridian about AegiSKADA’s continued existence and then nearly killed her under Casey’s influence. Adda’s promise to reject Mairie’s invitation to supervise it hadn’t even lasted an hour. But here Iridian was, letting Adda walk around with her comp. Even if Adda handed it over, there were ways she could’ve hidden a conversation with Mairie. Adda’s neural implant net, and by extension Adda herself, were as vulnerable as ever. And still, Iridian trusted her enough not to look at her comp.

  It isn’t really okay, Adda said subvocally.

  Iridian turned to face her and let the others walk past, holding Adda by the shoulders for a moment before pulling her into a hug. “If you get influenced again, we’ll get you free again, some safer way than last time,” Iridian murmured. “But I’m not afraid of you, babe. Casey’s terrifying. Casey’s the enemy, and Mairie too, after all this. It’s not you.”

  “This looks like the place, Nassir,” Wiley called down the hallway.

  Iridian let Adda go, and her smile looked more forced than natural. “Let’s see if we can find the drones this time.”

  Adda followed her down the immaculate hallway to the door Wiley and Rio stood beside. She’d never seen a drone bay before, but she would’ve at least expected drones in one. This, then, was another control room. “Noor’s in there messing with the console,” said Rio.

  “Good.” Iridian looked over her shoulder at Adda and subvocalized, Stay out here with Rio, please. Give your brain a break.

  This time Adda was almost certain that Iridian was speaking subvocally to hide how messed up Adda’s brain had become. She had no idea what the others would do if they knew, but she trusted Iridian’s assessment of what would keep other people calm. She watched from the doorway with Wiley and Rio while Iridian kept an eye on their guide and Noor pulled the cord the ZVs had given him from his pocket to plug the jack in his temple into the console.

  After a minute of Adda envying Noor’s more detailed look at the local system, Rio tapped Adda’s shoulder and pointed down the hall the way they’d come. A man and a woman stood at a bend in the hallway, watching with blank expressions. Another man joined them. There were people at the other end of the hallway too, all with the ragged jumpsuits that most of the Odin Razum wore, bearing the Marsat corporate logo. Adda didn’t recognize any of them, but they might’ve been the same people they’d seen before.

  The Odin Razum are back, Adda told Iridian. Mairie might not want to hurt them, but being watched and outnumbered by tools of Mairie’s influence still felt like a threat.

  CHAPTER 14 Days until launch: 30

  “How many are there?” Iridian asked.

  Wiley’s head whipped toward the room with the console. The question would’ve been a surprise, since Iridian was still in the room and she couldn’t see the gathering Odin Razum in the hall from where she stood. Maybe she’d tell the rest of them about her and Adda’s comms at some point, but this wasn’t the time. “Six so far,” Wiley said.

  “Can you do what you’re doing any faster?” asked Rio.

  “Yeah, sure, I was just looking at all the pretty pictures first,” Noor said sarcastically.

  Iridian returned to the hall, dragging their influenced guide behind her. She pointed at the Odin Razum gathering nearby. “All right, guy, what’s th
is about?”

  The man twisted in Iridian’s grasp to look at Adda. “We need you.”

  “No you fucking don’t.” Iridian slammed the man face-first into the wall and pinned him there with her forearm across his shoulder blades. “You can’t have her. Back off.”

  “It’s your duty.” The man’s voice gurgled slightly. Blood ran from his mouth and nose and splattered the clean wall when he spoke. “You agreed—”

  “I’ve got them,” Noor shouted from the room with the console. “Oh shit, I’ve got all of them! They’re coming around to the port mod. Want an airlock number?”

  “If you can move them all, do it and send me that airlock number in a message,” Iridian said. “A few extras won’t hurt.”

  “Just how the hell are we getting them back into the station?” asked Wiley.

  “I doubt we need to,” said Iridian. “Noor, get Pel or Shingetsu on the comms and tell them to get to that airlock. Talk and walk.” She leaned on their guide, who she still had pinned to the wall. “Get us out of here. I don’t want to waste your people, but I sure as hell will if they’re between us and the port.”

  The influenced gang, which looked much more like a gang now than it had a few moments before, closed in on them from both ends of the hallway. “You agreed, the same as the rest of us, but none of us can,” their guide said.

  The man grunted as Iridian yanked him off the wall and held him between herself and the people at one end of the hall. Slowly, to accommodate whatever the hell Mairie was doing with his brain, Iridian asked, “What are you talking about?”

  “When you joined Marsat, you agreed to additional duties as required.” Iridian’s training kept her conscious of quick ways to immobilize the guide if he fought back, but he was just standing there. “We’re not Marsat. We can’t do everything Mairie wants.”

  “You want her alive,” Rio shouted. Iridian looked over her shoulder to see what the fuck Rio was talking about, and she almost lost her grip on the Odin Razum guy. Rio’s huge hand was wrapped around Adda’s throat. “You want her alive, but that ain’t happening right now,” Rio shouted at the Odin Razum. “You don’t let us out of here, I’ll kill her and you don’t get her at all, ever. You want that?”