Adda’s eyes shut tight while she subvocalized to her comp and the AIs listening in. Iridian didn’t love combat maneuvering, but it made Adda sick. The g’s were too high for Iridian to look for a sick bag, so she’d just have to hope Adda didn’t feel too bad. In the main cabin, Pel’s joyous whoop suggested that he was enjoying the ride.
The Apparition is staying close to Ceres stationspace, Adda subvocalized. It hasn’t fired.
“How can you tell?” asked Iridian.
We’re still moving.
“You all right back there, Nassir?” Wiley asked.
Adda stopped talking while Iridian replied, “Yeah, I’ll catch you up after Gavran gets us the hell out of here.”
If it’d wanted to risk destroying the ship to keep us here, it would’ve done it by now, Adda said to Iridian. It’ll have better targeting capabilities than any other warship in existence, and we know how much trouble Gavran has with dodging missiles.
She and Iridian had learned that weakness of Gavran’s when they’d agreed to fly with him on missions for Sloane’s crew. And with the ITA docked, they’re not in a position to take a shot at us either, unless they want to risk damaging the station, Iridian thought at her. Grav was crushing her chest and making it hard to breathe, let alone speak.
I’d be surprised if they did, Adda agreed. Protecting stations is a significant part of their reason for existence. I’m setting some routines to try to keep better track of the Casey and the Apparition. I want to know where they are when they’re not with us, and they’re giving us some excellent examples of their ship behaviors to work with.
“Serves them right.” Iridian winced as Gavran poured on the speed, and the g’s crushed them into the bunk. “So what the fuck was the Apparition doing here?”
Adda’s eyelids were drooping. Breathe, babe, Iridian subvocalized. Like we practiced.
After a few seconds of focused, short breaths, Adda fought her way back to full consciousness. If the ITA had arrested us now, we couldn’t help the intelligences. If the ITA disabled the Mayhem, I think the Apparition would’ve offered to let us board it instead. It may have been trying to arrange that scenario.
“Great,” Iridian grumbled. Subvocally she added, They’re not taking you away from me again. Not the AIs, not the ITA, not any of them.
* * *
Gavran kept the Mayhem powering through space at much higher grav than was healthy for a couple of hours, during which Adda searched through the contents of the datacask she’d plugged into Biometallic’s library to hold copies of firmware. She read each set’s titles under her breath while she and Iridian were still strapped into the Mayhem’s bunk together.
“I hardly know what I’m looking for,” Adda said. “My coding class in college was just an overview. Intelligences maintain the workspace interpretation bases so we don’t have to. Nobody uses code anymore.”
Plenty of insults implied that the target manipulated code instead of using a workspace to make software changes, and was therefore a weird person with an unnaturally high tolerance for boredom and frustration. “When you find it, you’re sending it to the modder on Ceres, yeah?” Iridian asked.
“Yes.” Adda frowned. “That’ll cost us a lot.”
“To keep Casey out of your head, it’s worth it.” That also meant they’d have to put off getting Adda’s implant fixed until they could afford it. With any luck, this job would pay enough. Iridian would skip a few meals and delay building a new shield for some assurance that Adda couldn’t be influenced the same way twice.
Iridian switched the window views around until it showed Biometallic 1 and Ceres sinking into the star field behind them. On Ceres’s horizon, the domed cover that protected Ceres Station from space debris glittered with the reflected lights of buoys and the ships and bots that seemed to always populate its stationspace. In front of the ’ject, Biometallic 1’s three long mods gleamed as they rotated in both the sunlight and the light of seven ships. When Iridian turned on labeling, the window showed that four of them were privately owned vessels, highlighted white with directional markers pointing toward reliable routes or the orbital section of Ceres Station. They were getting out of the way.
The two highlighted in red were the ITA cruisers. Even in that crowd, the Apparition’s asymmetric hull loomed against the stars, as big as both the ITA vessels combined. Interestingly, the annotated display still outlined it in tug/technical blue. The outline would only confuse a machine or somebody who didn’t know a skiff from a longhauler. The Apparition looked like what it was: an unnaturally repaired and fully functional NEU warship.
CHAPTER 19 Days until launch: 27 (holding for mechanical issues)
In the window projected on the Mayhem’s residential cabin wall, the Apparition and the other ships in Ceres stationspace shrank as the much smaller Mayhem pulled away. Beyond them, the tower of Ceres Station’s rapid refueling system reached out toward the saucer-shaped orbital port. At its base, the dome of Ceres Station’s surface construction reflected the light of hundreds of directional buoys. Its dome was suspended in its anchoring structure, hiding a massive sphere turning in Ceres’s underground ocean, heating ice into water the station used to supplement the internal recycling system.
When Gavran’s raucous music and the heavy gravity caused by high-speed acceleration finally let up, Adda’s stomach rebelled at the rapid changes and she nearly vomited on Iridian. At least the Mayhem’s air was well oxygenated, even cleaner than Biometallic 1 kept theirs. Kuiper natives were particular about their shipboard environment.
When Adda could stand to read again, she called up the monitoring routines she’d created to track the awakened intelligences. This new, up-close view of the Apparition had added a lot of data that her routines needed to incorporate. However, the material Casey had sent was even more intriguing. Adda set a reminder for herself to update the Apparition’s tracker later and pulled Casey’s data into her comp projection for review.
“How do you feel, babe?” Iridian had left their shared bed as soon as Gavran’s flying leveled out, but she must’ve come back to the guest cabin while Adda was reading.
Tired, Adda admitted. And if I get up, I’ll be sick. I’m reading through the stuff Casey sent me, though, and . . . Let’s talk about it, later. This is amazing.
Iridian bent down to kiss her. Gravity had nearly dropped to a healthy range that Adda would be willing to walk in, if she weren’t so nauseated. “Be careful.”
Adda would have to check everything Casey sent for tampering, so care was high on her priority list. I will.
In the main cabin, Wiley was saying, “. . . know anything about this guy?”
Iridian stepped through the guest cabin doorway. One step more brought her to the first of the four passenger couches. The couch was empty, but its sick bag drawer wasn’t. “Yeah, we know him,” Iridian told Wiley while she returned to Adda with the bag.
“Grav loss in ten minutes, repeat, grav loss in ten minutes, mark,” Gavran’s voice announced.
Iridian sat on one of the passenger couches to join Rio and Wiley, who had disconnected their helmets from their suits and were examining the rest of the armor. “Adda, Pel, and I flew some missions with this guy after Barbary,” Iridian said. “He saved our asses a few times. He’s good people.”
As promised, the artificial pull toward the floor faded quickly. Adda had to use the sick bag Iridian had just given her. Maintaining comfortable gravity through constant acceleration and deceleration was expensive, even on a ship as small as the Mayhem, so she didn’t blame Gavran for conserving fuel. She hadn’t wanted to interrupt him to ask where they were going, but she needed to find out eventually.
Before Adda’s stomach settled enough for her to consider getting out of bed, Iridian asked, “Anybody heard from Noor?” The other three in the main cabin shook their heads. Frowning, Iridian tapped at her comp to send Noor a message that also pinged in a text copy on Adda’s comp. Are you okay? Give us a status update when you can.
> “I feel bad about stranding Captain Sloane like that,” Rio confessed.
“Same,” said Pel, just as Iridian said, “Don’t.” After a second, she added, “The captain always finds a way out of shit like that. Hell, maybe the Apparition was there on Sloane’s orders. It’s followed the captain around before.”
Because of us, Adda subvocalized.
“How badly do you think he was hurt?” Wiley asked over Adda’s comment.
“The captain,” Iridian said, emphasizing Sloane’s preferred way to be referenced, “didn’t look too bad off to me. That armor was good stuff. It would’ve stopped the bleeding before we cleared stationspace.”
Adda was drifting off the bed and felt for the straps that would hold her down. Her inner ears were telling her that she was falling, the way they always did after ships stopped accelerating fast enough to generate gravity. She retched and vomited again. Iridian grimaced and dug through the couch’s drawers, hopefully for more sick bags.
By the time Adda was as comfortable as she was going to get, a message from Noor had appeared on her comp. Stuck on Ceres under an alias. Meet you somewhere?
“Somewhere, yeah,” Iridian muttered. She must’ve received the same message.
They’d planned to return to Yăo to decide what to do next. However, Gavran might not have enough fuel to reach Jupiter. Adda carefully pulled herself into the main cabin to ask him about it. Iridian must’ve thought of the fuel situation as well, because she disconnected her helmet from the rest of her suit and crossed the main cabin, avoiding Pel’s gesturing arms as he illustrated what sounded like a bad joke he was about to subject Rio and Wiley to. After a short pause, she knocked on the Mayhem’s bridge door.
When Gavran opened it, the barrel of his sidearm was about three centimeters from Iridian’s nose. Heart racing, Adda scrambled for something, anything, she could do to help Iridian, but she couldn’t think of anything. Rio and Wiley had stopped listening to Pel’s joke, but they floated as still as Iridian and Adda did.
Iridian’s helmet drifted away from her, trailing melted cables, as she raised her hands to shoulder height. She held herself in place with a foothold in the wall. “I just wanted to talk.”
Gavran watched her for a moment, then lowered the weapon. “That’s good. I want to talk too.” Adda let out a long breath, and then got sick again.
Although he wasn’t holding Iridian at gunpoint anymore, he hadn’t put the weapon away. “Something different since the last time we saw you?” Iridian asked.
“Upgraded the legs,” Gavran said. “Both legs have a few new features.”
He let go of the gun. It drifted for half a second, then snapped flat against what Adda had taken for a pocket on his thigh. The pant leg had been cut open and slightly melted around a gray patch of exposed pseudo-organics. As far as Adda knew, nothing below Gavran’s hips was fully organic.
“Nice.” Iridian grabbed her drifting helmet out of the air. “So, where are we headed?”
“Sunan’s Landing first, for refueling,” said Gavran. “After Sunan’s Landing, we’ll talk prices. Captain Sloane won’t pay up after this, so I’m going to need what you can afford.”
“Yeah,” Iridian said.
Captain Sloane’s original plan had probably called for refueling on Ceres. If they were only traveling between there and Sloane’s base on Vesta, and the ’jects were close together at the moment, then they might not have completely fueled up at either location. The Mayhem refueled quickly, but Adda had scheduled three hours for Noor to reenter and then leave Ceres Station. “We’re not going to make it back to meet Noor.” The Mayhem couldn’t refuel and return to meet Noor’s contact anywhere near Ceres stationspace without leaving him stuck under ITA scrutiny for hours. Sunan’s Landing, a small station built around a fuel barge in the asteroid belt, ran off people who spent that long there without buying food and drink that Adda hadn’t budgeted for, so waiting there wouldn’t be practical either, but Iridian would already know that.
“We’ll meet Noor at ‘home,’ ” Iridian said. “If he can’t make it there, we’ll figure something out when he tells us so. Before that: What made you leave Sloane to the ITA back there? The captain looked shocked as all hells.”
Gavran held his hand in front of him and stretched the fingers wide, and Iridian used the handhold to set herself drifting backward for about a meter. Cant speakers, of both the Kuiper and spacefarer varieties, seemed to use a similar vocabulary of hand signals which Adda hadn’t gotten around to learning. Iridian caught another handhold while Gavran crossed the main cabin to where Adda clung to the wall. “You’re looking a little green, Adda. You got a sick bag?”
She opened her mouth to answer, but the words weren’t there, in the same frustrating way they occasionally disappeared after the overdose. “Can’t,” she said, since that word was already on her mind. Gavran pulled a sick bag from a compartment under a passenger couch and handed it to her.
“You were telling us why we’re here instead of in an ITA cell,” Iridian reminded Gavran.
The pilot hooked one boot under the empty passenger couch, and his knee shifted oddly as the pseudo-organic joint adjusted his balance. Rio, Wiley, and Pel watched from the other couches. “Captain Sloane’s been different, with Tritheist and you three gone,” he said. “The captain’s been taking fewer jobs and playing more politics, with none of you there to ask if all the deals are worth cutting.”
“Like how Sloane tried to trade my sister for Vestan independence or whatever?” Pel’s voice was lower and rougher than it’d been since those terrible days after Adda’s overdose. He sat cross-legged on the passenger couch with his legs through the straps and his arms over his chest, scowling.
“Many trades that bad, and a few arrangements that were worse than that, forgive me for saying. Setting up puppet station councils costs a lot. The captain’s dumping money and time to keep station councilors in line. We left port twice in the past eight weeks. I don’t like to stay weeks in any hab, when I could be”—Gavran sighed—“getting paid to fly.”
“You want to go home.” Everybody turned to look at Adda. She rarely discussed her take on people’s motives since she was so frequently wrong, but Gavran’s seemed obvious. The only reason Gavran had left the Kuiper colonies was to look for his brother, and Adda had found his brother’s death records on Vesta.
“It’s time,” Gavran agreed. “I’d have gone home before now if I could, but Kondakova’s a long, expensive way from here. I can’t make the money that trip costs in a hab. Can’t earn the cash and keep it, anyway.”
“Too much to spend it on, yeah,” said Pel. He and Gavran both had expensive recreational chemical habits, and the Mayhem had no room for a pharmaceutical printer.
“Serves the captain right, then,” said Rio.
Pel had tangled his legs in the passenger couch straps and was tugging at them like he thought he could free himself without anybody noticing. In the low gravity, the rest of him bounced all over the couch. “It’s not like the ITA can hold the captain anyway. If Sloane even gets arrested, I’ll be shocked.”
“Yeah,” said Iridian. “And speaking of shocks, thanks for explaining why you let us board, Gavran. Not to say that we’re not grateful, because we are, but we were as surprised as Sloane was.”
Gavran grinned. “I’m always glad to dodge the ITA. The Authority eating my exhaust feels closer to home than farther.”
“Not just the ITA, unfortunately,” said Iridian. “We might’ve pissed off the awakened AIs.” Gavran gave her a curious, tell-me-more look, which was not the level of surprise appropriate to learning that multiple intelligences had been uplifted from their zombie state and were now running amok in populated space. “So you knew about them already?”
“Port mod bar rumors talk about them, and you don’t trust port mod bar rumors about anything. Sloane’s crew tells more informed tales, and you do trust Sloane’s crew. Combine those often enough, put the right pros and the ri
ght drinks together . . .” Gavran shrugged broadly. “Rheasilvia Station’s haunted, or the awakened AIs are real, and I’ve seen more AIs than I’ve seen ghosts.”
“Well, as long as the AIs are ahead,” said Pel, which got a laugh out of Iridian and Rio. As usual, Adda didn’t see what was funny about that.
“It does feel like being hunted by ghosts, sometimes,” Iridian admitted. “Or demons, with the influence and all.”
“Ghosts,” said Rio firmly. “Whatever you did to piss them off, they didn’t start out this way.”
“They did.” Adda waited to see if she was going to be sick again, and when she wasn’t, she continued. “On Barbary, they weren’t as good at manipulating us. They’ve learned a lot since then, like how to move us out of a location where they don’t want us.”
Iridian drifted closer to Rio, then tugged on the wall handhold to pull herself out to a polite distance. “But we’re not where they want us now, yeah? Are we even on a reliable route?”
“The reliable route to Sunan’s Landing, yeah,” said Gavran. “The route’s between Ceres and the belt’s next biggest refueling hub, so it’s a quiet one.”
Iridian looked around at the others gathered in the Mayhem’s main cabin. “So, what’s next?”
“I need to see what we picked up from Biometallic’s firmware library,” said Adda. “I got my and Noor’s implant firmware source, but I grabbed other things to sell and I want to make sure . . . Well, I want to sell the least dangerous ones first.” She clenched her hands in her pant legs against another wave of nausea. “As soon as we meet up with Noor, I can get his help finding the vulnerability, using a workspace. If he’s been alone with Casey all this time, it may already be”—she realized what she was saying and paused, horrified—“too late to prevent him from getting influenced.”
Iridian had said that the reason Noor left Sorenson ITAS was to get away from people who wanted to change how he saw the universe. Now Casey must be reshaping his mind, in essence doing what the ITA would’ve done to him if he’d stayed in prison. Besides that, Adda had told him all her plans to secure their neural implant nets against Casey’s intrusion, and he could tell Casey.
Gravity of a Distant Sun Page 27
