Gravity of a Distant Sun

by R. E. Stearns

  “Something’s happening in stationspace.” The intensity in Iridian’s voice said it was something dangerous. Adda scanned the newsfeeds on her comp. She didn’t have access to Ficience’s cams yet. “Noor’s tracking . . .” Iridian paused to listen. “Oh hell, what’s its name?”

  “What’s what?” asked Pel, even though Iridian had directed her question at Noor.

  “A ship, and . . .” Iridian broke into a series of increasingly severe epithets. “It’s the Mayhem. The gods-damned Mayhem is here.”

  Adda and Pel gasped. Rio voiced her and Wiley’s shared confusion. “Who owns it?”

  “Captain Sloane, basically,” said Pel.

  “Shit,” said Rio.

  “Your old captain’s here?” Wiley looked around like Sloane’s troops were going to come around a corner any minute.

  “Maybe not,” Adda said. “The pilot could’ve sold the ship, or taken on a new client.”

  Iridian snorted. “The only reason a Kuiper native would sell his ship is if he couldn’t scrap it himself.” That left the possibility that the pilot, a Kuiper native named Gavran, was flying somebody other than Sloane’s crew. Gavran had helped Iridian, Adda, and Pel escape the captain’s allies on Vesta, which could’ve put Gavran out of a job as Sloane’s raid pilot.

  However, the captain went to expensive lengths to keep experts on the crew. After Adda had uncovered the fate of Gavran’s missing brother, the pilot had been repaying that debt when he flew her family off Vesta. The captain hated to lose crew members, so Sloane might’ve forgiven Gavran for that. If word of their run on Biometallic had gotten back to the captain somehow, maybe through Noor’s Ganymede contact, Sloane might’ve even come looking for Adda, Iridian, and Pel personally. “We can’t risk assuming it’s anyone else,” Adda said.

  “She’s right,” said Iridian. “If Sloane’s ops are still running the way they did a few months ago, there’ll be max five people on that ship, with blades, good armor, and less-lethals. Mostly techs, maybe a merc or two. The captain might not even be here.”

  “We can’t count on that,” Adda said. When she and Iridian had been on Sloane’s crew, the captain had come along on three of the crew’s four major ops.

  “Yeah, the worst case is Sloane’s with them. All right, who’s been telling the gods to go fuck themselves? All the devils in hell wouldn’t do us this way.” Iridian turned to Pel. “How far are we from the lab?”

  “Like, two minutes.”

  “Good. Let’s move.”

  Adda’s intermediary stepped through a wall and into the hallway in front of her, flickering as her attention cycled between its feedback and the rest of the information on her comp. If Iridian hadn’t liked her hands free in situations like this, Adda would’ve grabbed her armored glove. The intermediary was reporting that Ficience still had an open vulnerability that other intelligence experts had discovered last year, and its supervisors hadn’t installed the correction yet.

  The fact that Biometallic hadn’t secured their own station intelligence properly did not bode well for Adda’s efforts to convince them to update her implant firmware. Once she was in a workspace, she’d use Ficience’s vulnerability to keep the intelligence from telling its supervisor about her. It was disconcertingly similar to what Casey had done to Adda.

  Even though their mistake worked in Adda’s favor, such a simple oversight, or delay, was infuriating. This should’ve been one of Ficience’s supervisors’ highest priorities. Perhaps her use of their system would remind them of that.

  “Is there a workspace generator in the lab?” Adda asked Pel.

  “Uh, yeah,” Pel said, as if that should’ve been obvious. “They’re like nerds and coffeemakers. Every lab’s got them.” Thanks to his various fake internships, Pel had spent more time in professional, highly specialized labs than Adda had.

  He approached a wall with a room’s interior projected on it, imitating glass while blocking noise and offering privacy if someone cut the feed. Sure enough, eight workspace generators and a coffeemaker were visible inside. Adda’s intermediary located the projectors controlling the window, and she looped them the same way she’d looped the hallway cams.

  Pel pressed his palm to a pad, which flashed red through his hand and opened the lab door. He, Adda, and Iridian went in while Wiley and Rio stayed outside. This lab was at a T intersection in the hallway, and they probably had a lot of area to watch.

  That was their problem. Adda needed a workspace generator she could use. “Credentials?” she asked Pel.

  “Oh yeah, the last one on the first row is unlocked already.”

  “Gods, why?” For a place that specialized in firmware, some of which was inside Adda’s head, that was miserable security.

  Pel grinned and tugged at his rumpled shirt. “Sissy, I’m very persuasive.”

  While Iridian laughed at him, Adda let herself into the workspace generator. It was one of the common horizontal, permanently installed models. Inside, the generator’s bed was padded as thoroughly as a ship’s passenger couch, designed for equally long periods of use.

  She paused for a minute with her earbuds streaming pink noise, holding the cord that’d connect her to the workspace generator. The cord was the only way her implant, vulnerability still intact, could be exposed to the digital landscape where Casey dwelled. The last three times she’d been in a hallucinographic workspace with an intelligence had all been disasters. She’d attacked Iridian, nearly fallen victim to Casey’s influence a second time, and then let the ancient intelligence on Yăo Station do the same thing. She wasn’t ready to enter a workspace with another one.

  But the workspace was the safest and surest way to locate the firmware, along with everything they’d need to sell to survive until Dr. Björn’s expedition launched. Adda had to go in and deal with this intelligence, or they would’ve left the relative safety of Yăo Station for nothing. At least she’d had time to study this intelligence.

  Before she thought of any more excuses or threats to scare herself with, she plugged the cord into her nasal jack and her comp, which was also connected to the generator. The others’ voices faded to silence. The last physical thing she saw was the datacask’s pseudo-organic contents draining into the generator’s reservoir, deploying the backdoor and emptying itself to receive whatever Adda copied out.

  The initial entry was a bright lobby with a softly strumming guitar and vague B shapes floating everywhere. The ugly design wasn’t worth changing. Once she reached the intelligence, it, her brain, and the software would do what they wanted with the space. Her intermediary was still operating, and she sent it through the lobby wall. Find Ficience.

  The response was so quick that the whole lobby dropped away around her, falling into darkness while she hovered in place, utterly still. Her workspace figure was standing, even though she was physically lying on her back, which wasn’t unusual. The air around her shimmered and went metallic blue before it resolved into the upper level of a station she’d never seen before.

  Smooth walls curved oddly around her, signifying a number of imperfect connections to the intelligence. The walls expanded and contracted, sending ripples through the walkway she stood on as her intermediary resolved the connection issues. The walkway’s grid floor, only a meter or two wide, moved with the wall it followed. A metal railing separated Adda from a one- or two-story drop to a spacious hall that extended as far as she could see in either direction, parallel to the walkway. The stream of people under her alternated from second to second between dashing past in fast motion and slowly stepping forward. She had to wait until that speed stabilized before she started her search, or she might get lost in whatever processing slowdown the workspace was demonstrating.

  Below, the crowd of people stopped and looked up at her. Adda laid a hand on the smooth walls and smiled as the whole workspace expanded and contracted. This was why working with intelligences was so rewarding. She could never have put together such a surreal interface on her own. Fic
ience was its own weird and powerful entity. Even while it was supervised, Adda could do a lot with this one. “Hello, Ficience.”

  Short sounds like partial breaths echoed around her. There were more people in this station than the intelligence usually hosted, especially at this time of day. Its intent focus on maintaining a pristine environment wherever these people went was evidence of admirably human-friendly design.

  In the workspace, Adda created two small drones and sent them skimming down the infinite walkway in either direction. With luck the search routines they represented would locate an opening in the “walls” of permission settings that they could get through and copy the firmware, and something else salable, from the library.

  She reached out and her hand closed on binoculars that, when she looked through them, showed a person lying in another workspace generator, face creased with worry and hands frantically twitching. In addition to the good design, Ficience had an attentive supervisor. The intelligence was much more concerned with what its supervisor was asking for than what Adda was doing, but the lack of resources devoted to Adda’s efforts was causing the inconsistencies she was experiencing in the workspace. She wasn’t in danger of falling out of the workspace entirely, but she wanted to make sure she’d have access to complete firmware sources when she found them.

  Barely audible deep rumbling above her head sounded a bit like ship engines, but no ships were visible in the workspace. Something was happening in the port mod, and Adda requested its records for the past few minutes. They flew to her as a small newsfeed cam drone, which dissolved into a vid of the Mayhem docking. A dark figure strode out of the passthrough.

  The captain wore the same long coat she’d always seen Sloane in, over gold-and-black armor. The helmet wasn’t projecting a face, but the coat, the height, and the captain’s confident walk would’ve been sufficient confirmation even without Sloane’s unique armor. Two other people disembarked behind the captain, one in heavier armor, and one in Sloane’s preferred red-and-black standard for subordinates. Adda packaged the footage and passed it to Iridian via an intense wildflower scent, which represented her comp’s messaging function in this workspace, for a reason that made sense to her subconscious. The scent faded as her comp transmitted the message to Iridian’s.

  Ficience and its supervisor were focusing on the unannounced guests and largely ignoring the expected ones. That was how Adda was using its vulnerability to interact with the intelligence without alarming its supervisor. However, neither she nor the intermediary had found any openings into the firmware library. Perhaps Pel hadn’t understood that just opening the hardware for anybody’s use didn’t simultaneously open all the connected areas of the server.

  For now, Captain Sloane was Iridian’s problem. Adda separated her comp’s comms from the workspace. A wall rose from the hallway below her, perpendicular to her walkway. It stopped moving when it was even with the walkway. She climbed over the railing and crossed to a second walkway that’d formed on the other side of the hall, where the outer walls were still.

  Damn. Iridian must’ve read the message. Did you get the source for the firmware?

  Adda peered up and down the infinite walkway over the people, who were now arming themselves and marching in the direction of Captain Sloane’s passthrough. No. How long until the ITA arrives? Ficience’s supervisor was as intent on Sloane’s progress as the intelligence was, and the supervisor would’ve called for help.

  The Yăo pilot’s voice broke in as a speaker emerged from the still wall beside Adda’s head. “My ITA alerts are all going off, gals. You get back here in five or I’m leaving without you.”

  Never mind, Adda said to Iridian.

  This might be her only opportunity to interact with Ficience. After Pel’s subterfuge and a visit from a notorious pirate captain who had almost certainly not gotten docking clearance first, security would tighten. She presented the intelligence with a sequence of carefully worded queries as bright beams of light from her hands. The gist of her intent was “What can you tell me about my implant’s firmware?”

  A wave of water formed on one side of the hallway and washed toward her, filling the space from floor to rounded ceiling, roaring as it came. The search routine/drone that’d flown in that direction to find opportunities to copy firmware on its own sent her a massive burst of information, then disappeared in a flash of blue light. While her comp was recording it, Adda braced herself and let the wave sweep over it. It represented an automated security sweep.

  Babe, did you hear the nice pilot? Iridian subvocalized in Adda’s ear. We need to— Adda shut off the subvocal comms. The firmware was almost certainly the source of the vulnerability that allowed Casey to influence her so fast, and she had to find out everything Biometallic developers had written about it.

  Her comp was struggling to keep up with the information pouring into it in a combined response from one of her two search routines and her specific query. The comp passed everything it received to the pseudo-organic fluid filling the attached datacask. Routines on her comp found most of that information published where Adda could’ve located it on her own, or in documents she’d already read. The water around her turned oily black with her disappointment, becoming a visual and tactile signifier of information she didn’t need from Ficience.

  It would be convenient to have the trade journal and other more technical coverage consolidated. Thin streams of fresh water formed in the muck to show her new information that her routines weren’t finding in any publication, but none of it met alert criteria she’d set for her firmware source. She looked in the other direction, the one the wave had been traveling in. Her second routine searching for the source, framed differently than the first and represented by another drone, hadn’t returned.

  Three deep thumps sent ripples through the rushing water and shook Adda along with it. The workspace generator itself reported in via a wall projection that repelled the oil water, warning that its door mechanism was strained to the point of damage. Adda sighed and reactivated her comms to Iridian, filling the water with muffled renditions of Iridian’s favorite profanities.

  Ficience offered her a cam feed of Iridian pounding on the workspace generator door, and Adda would’ve appreciated that clever anticipation of her needs if she’d expected the cams to be sending the intelligence a live feed. Ficience’s supervisor must have realized that something untoward was happening in the lab. The oil water disappeared from the workspace like it’d never been there. Her second drone flared, sent its blast of data, and died.

  She sent out a heavily prioritized query based on what the first two had found and reeled in her neural implant net’s firmware source in a yellow-and-red spiral so bright it hurt her eyes. Confirmation on what she had came with an equally bright giddiness that made her laugh beneath the thumps of Iridian’s fists hitting the workspace generator door. If she made it off the station with this in the datacask, she’d have a very good chance of keeping Casey out of her mind.

  A second, similar query requested a range of injector firmware, since that was the first Biometallic product she thought of that she’d be willing to sell a source for. If they didn’t make enough, then Noor would use the backdoor he designed to return for more some other time. Next time, they might not even have to be on the station to do it.

  All right, she said to Iridian. I have the source. I’m coming out.

  The workspace drained into the generator ceiling as she unplugged her nasal jack. As soon as the door opened, Iridian hauled her out and barely gave her time to retrieve the datacask containing the copied firmware. Iridian said, “Move out” into her helmet mic loudly enough to carry through the helmet to Pel and Adda without its outside speaker turning on.

  They retraced their steps into the hallway, but almost immediately Iridian stopped, bringing the others to a halt with her. “Noor says there’s a fuckoff huge warship coming in opposite the ITA ship,” she said. “And our pilot’s bugging out. We’re on our own.”

>   CHAPTER 18 Days until launch: 27 (holding for mechanical issues)

  It was easy to imagine that Iridian and Adda shared the telepathic connection that their comms implants imitated. Iridian was already opening the station map while Adda asked, “Where’s the passenger entrance . . .” Adda squinted and bit her lip. After leaving a workspace, she usually took a few minutes to catch up with reality.

  “Terminal?” Iridian asked.

  “Yes, that, for the port module. Not the cargo area where we came in.”

  “This way.” Iridian took off in the opposite direction from the cargo bay, grateful that everyone in armor had filled their suit reservoirs while Adda was messing with the AI. After the stale Yăo stuff they’d been drinking, this station’s water tasted fantastic. The healthier grav was a relief too, even if running down a hallway tired her out more than it should’ve. Behind her, Wiley and Rio thundered down the hallway in full armor and Adda’s and Pel’s nice shoes tapped after them.

  “What’s the new plan?” Wiley asked over the local channel.

  “We can’t stay here and we can’t take the ship we came in on,” said Iridian. “The shuttles are short-range vessels. There’s only one long-range vessel docked. Noor, you getting all this?”

  “What do you think?” Something fell, with two distinct impacts typical in low grav. Noor paused to call it a fire hazard in cant. “If you get me arrested, you’d better hope we never meet up again. Otherwise, see you back home.” Noor had made his own travel plans getting here, so he ought to be able to find his own way back to Yăo Station.

  How would you feel about hijacking the Mayhem? Adda whispered in Iridian’s ear.

  Not great, Iridian replied. She liked Gavran, and some of Sloane’s crew. She’d take no pleasure in hurting them, or in stranding them on the station to get hauled off to ITA holding. But they have a pilot and we don’t have time for you to make friends with any new AI copilots.