Gravity of a Distant Sun

by R. E. Stearns

  “I will.”

  Noor was in the generator, plugged in via the jack in his temple, with his lips pressed together and his eyes squeezed shut. Bandages were wrapped haphazardly around both hands, dingy white where blood hadn’t soaked through. A couple of centimeters separated the generator’s heavy door from where it should’ve latched closed. Iridian had broken the door when she’d pulled Adda out of the generator the first time they’d come here.

  “There’s the little bastard,” Rio said, almost fondly, but with an edge of real anger underneath. “Now, how are we going to get him out?”

  Rio’s performance in the hallway outside had given Adda an idea. “Mairie, I’m here, but the person in the generator is in my way. Disconnect with him so I can use it.” I won’t, she added subvocally to Iridian.

  In the workspace generator, Noor’s anxious expression crumbled into despair. He clawed the cable out of the jack in his skull and slammed the generator’s door open. The ragged edge caught a bandage and pulled it off his hand. Blood welled beneath. His frantic eyes focused on Adda. “What did you do?” he howled.

  “You’re influenced,” Adda said quickly. “You need to—”

  “I have to talk to her! Fix it!” Noor grabbed Adda’s throat with both hands. Adda clawed at him, but her nails were blunt, and oh gods, she couldn’t breathe. She was going to die like this. “Fix it now!” Panic switched Adda’s brain off and she flailed against Noor’s arms. He squeezed harder. Her heartbeat thudded in the veins of her neck. She still couldn’t breathe.

  An armored hand grasped Noor’s head and slammed it into the side of the workspace generator. His temple caught the edge of the broken door and the cracks widened. His hands loosened around Adda’s neck but still clutched at her. Iridian slammed his head into the generator again, this time with a metallic clack and a thick crunch. Noor’s hands fell away from Adda and he collapsed at her feet, convulsing. Blood sheeted over the side of his face and welled around the jack in his temple. The jack dug deep into his skin on one side, too crushed for a cable to fit into it. His limbs thumped against the generator.

  “Shit.” Iridian fell onto her knees in a clatter of armor, and Rio dragged Noor to the hallway, where there were fewer things for his arms and legs to slam into. Adda was bent over with her lungs sucking in oxygen to make up for what they’d missed while Noor was choking her. His convulsions spread blood over the hall floor.

  The convulsions stopped. His eyes were still half-open. One hand spasmed like it still longed to crush Adda’s throat. “Shit,” Iridian said again, more quietly. Her bloodied hands hung at her sides, and she stared at Noor’s unmoving form and grimaced with horror or pain.

  Rio stared at him. “Is he dead?”

  Adda’s mind conjured images of Noor sitting up and reaching for her, bloody and enraged, to close his hands around her throat again. “I don’t know.”

  “I just wanted to knock him out for a minute.” Iridian’s voice quavered with shock. “I didn’t mean to hit the jack. Oh, shit.”

  CHAPTER 24 Days until launch: 21

  “Adda’s still working out how to get the certificate.” Iridian had to concentrate to put together the words she wanted while she and Rio brought Pel up to speed in the clinic’s waiting room. The docs were still working on Wiley and Gavran, and Iridian was too tired to make herself sound confident about this plan. “It’s in Biometallic 1. Again. She’s sure now. She’s looking for ways to do it remotely. From the Mayhem. By herself, but I’ll help her. And after Kanti fixes the vulnerability . . . Ah, hell.” Iridian shut her eyes.

  According to Adda, the records of Noor’s communications with Casey were too securely encrypted to read. The worst-case scenario was that Noor had told Casey about Adda’s plan to secure her implant against its influence. That hardly mattered anymore, though. Noor had been the only one who knew how to use the backdoor into Biometallic’s library, and he was dead because Iridian had been careless with the jack attached to his fucking brain.

  Despite that, Adda still wanted to confront the AIs once they couldn’t influence her so readily. That was not a conversation Iridian wanted to have right now. Gods, it would’ve been nice to get the fuck out of Casey’s reach on Björn’s expedition. She and Adda had no way to make Björn agree to let them join by the launch date, but Iridian was counting down the days anyway.

  “You two shouldn’t have to do all that alone.” Pel’s bloodstained shirt was the only evidence of his injury, now that the clinic staff had closed the wound. “I’ll go to Ceres with you.”

  “Me too,” said Rio. Absorbed in whatever she was reading on her comp, Adda didn’t even look up.

  Although the medical care cost less than the clinic could’ve charged for it, it wasn’t free like it would’ve been in a hab where people paid taxes. Staying in securable rooms cost them too. Every bit of cash Adda had transferred, saved, or scavenged was now reserved for keeping the five of them—damn it, they were down to five—hydrated, fed, and behind a locked door on Yăo Station while their injuries healed.

  A few of the pieces of firmware they’d stolen the first time around were still in the Mayhem’s pseudo-organics. Adda hadn’t wanted to sell them because they posed too much potential for abuse, but they owed Gavran for the damage Noor had done to the Mayhem, in addition to the trip to Ceres, if he’d carry them. To get that kind of money, she’d have to sell the dangerous pieces of their haul.

  Wiley walked slowly into the clinic’s waiting room, watching the floor, looking at no one. Iridian heaved herself out of her chair to meet him. “Wiley, did they . . .” Gods, this hurt to ask. “Did they tell you about Noor?”

  Wiley pressed his hand over his mouth, hard, and nodded. “They said you brought him in in bad shape. Thank you for bringing him here.”

  The docs hadn’t been able to do anything for Noor. Iridian, Rio, and Adda had brought him to the clinic as fast as they’d been able to. Dragging him out of the water treatment plant was grim enough to merit inclusion in Iridian’s rotation of blood-drenched nightmares. The way he’d seized up after that second hit . . . Gods, it was too easy to see Adda twisted on the floor like that. Noor’s implant had been almost identical to hers. It was how Casey had influenced him so fast.

  Iridian’s mind replayed the sense memory of his bones compressing under her glove. She hadn’t even felt the metal on metal impact when she’d slammed the jack into the edge of the generator. “Don’t thank me. I’m the one who killed him.”

  “The AIs killed him. Thank you,” Wiley said again, slowly, “for trying to help a friend.” Iridian stepped forward to hug him and his arms closed around her, bare fingers braced behind the joints in her armor plating. Her suit’s weak haptic feedback transmitted his shudder through her gloves. It still seemed like it would’ve been healthier if he’d just fucking cry, but she wouldn’t tell somebody else how to grieve.

  Noor’s death had been a stupid mistake. Brains were delicate and Noor had never worn armor in the whole time she’d known him. Even a concussion could’ve fucked up his neural implant net, and she’d damaged the damned jack. Hell, she’d spent more time worrying about the little implant in her own brain than the one that covered most of his.

  Even so, she couldn’t quite make herself regret that second hit. She’d taken nineteen lives during the course of her own, but there’d always been a reason for it. This one was no different. Noor had almost strangled Adda. Iridian would take out anybody who laid an unwanted hand on her wife.

  After they helped Gavran back to the Mayhem to rest, they carried Noor to the temple’s memorial room. Everyone else said their good-byes. Iridian could only say, “You helped us when you could have gone it alone, so, thanks.”

  A short, aching walk later, they got to what passed for the shopping mod. Wiley winced slightly at a wrong step, and Rio offered her arm for balance. “You were still a threat with a knife in your leg back there,” she said. “Badass.”

  Wiley smiled, a small but good sign
as far as Iridian was concerned. “It hurt less then than it does now.”

  “I’ve seen people go into shock with less damage,” said Rio. “Not you. I’m impressed.”

  “Thanks.” Wiley walked a bit taller after that.

  They found an empty table in a group of several that were surrounded by sellers of dubiously edible algae products. Settling there took a moment as they worked around their injuries until they could hunch over meager dinners and bad beer. Iridian forced herself to look forward, not back. If Casey hadn’t influenced Noor, he’d still be alive. That was what they had to protect Adda from, by getting her implant fixed. “We’re still on target to get back to Biometallic 1 and get your firmware’s certificate, yeah?” Iridian asked Adda.

  “I’m still working on that plan,” Adda said. “Noor never told me how to activate that backdoor into Biometallic’s system. The clinic gave me his comp, but it’s still encrypted. Systems security has almost nothing in common with intelligence development.”

  They all chewed in silence for a minute as that thought sank in. Iridian managed not to curse herself out aloud. “Okay. So, we’ve got transport to the asteroid belt, armor that probably won’t get us murdered, and, what, a few more nights’ worth of Yăo money?” she asked.

  “Two more nights, after we paid the clinic,” Adda said quietly. “Unless you want to talk some more out of the Odin Razum.”

  “I’d rather use that to pay for Gavran’s fuel to fly us off this hunk of junk,” said Iridian.

  Rio’s shoulders and head drooped in sadness or exhaustion. Either way, Iridian empathized. “We can’t stay here, and out there the AIs are waiting for us somewhere sunward.”

  Iridian pushed her plate toward Adda. She’d lost her appetite, but the food shouldn’t go to waste. “Maybe Casey knows everything Noor knew.” Wiley hung his head too. He and Noor had been friends in the ITA’s prison. Now Noor and Tash were both gone. Wiley had lost a lot to Casey.

  Casey was obsessed with influencing Adda, and Iridian couldn’t sit still and let it. “If Casey went after Noor, it could go after any of us. And if it can’t influence us, it’d sure as hell be happy to have us all crawling with ITA nannites again, so it can put us where it wants, when it wants.” And if Adda got arrested again, Casey could free her just as easily as it did the first time. “Whatever passes for ‘happy’ in its pseudo-organic tanks, it’d be that.” Adda was ignoring both her food and Iridian’s and reading something on her comp. Iridian took her free hand. “Babe, we can’t go with Björn and we can’t just fly into Biometallic 1, not without somebody to get us in. What else can we do?”

  “Wait, you’re not sailing away from it all on Dr. Björn’s ship?” asked Pel.

  “I can’t see a way for us to convince ver to let us go, and I don’t want to force ver to take us,” Adda said. “It’s not right and it might just get us arrested again. When people threaten ver, ve resists.”

  “Thank gods,” said Pel. “The Thrinacia solar system is just too far away. You’d never pay me back from out there.” Nothing Pel did suggested that he cared about the money. He’d miss his big sister and the safety net she offered when he got in trouble. “But I mean, what will you do after that?”

  “Casey’s not going to give up, but I’m sure it can do a better job of communicating with us than it’s been doing so far. At some point . . .” Adda looked to Iridian.

  Iridian was too tired to argue about this. “Go on, tell him.”

  “If Casey can’t influence me so quickly, I want to try just talking to it again,” Adda said. “It wants help with something and I want to understand what that is.”

  Rio nodded. “Yeah, you should.”

  Iridian and Pel said, “What?” at approximately the same time and volume. Wiley’s gaze returned from the middle distance to refocus on the people at the table.

  “She should!” Rio repeated. “The Casey worked with us for a long time on Barbary without any of this manipulation crap. Something’s up. Talk it out. That’s how you solve—”

  “Human problems,” said Iridian. “It’s not human.”

  “Seriously,” said Pel. “The awakened AIs who got you two arrested and almost killed are a lot scarier than humans.”

  “The intelligences will not stop trying to get what they want, and we don’t even understand what that is,” Adda said. “After my implant’s vulnerability is closed, I can talk to them and find out what it would take to get them to stop.”

  Pel groaned. “Everything has to be so fucking complicated.”

  “That’s life,” said Adda. “Please cope.” She looked up from her comp. “Anyway, I’ve been thinking—”

  “Always a good sign,” said Pel.

  “—about how we can get the certificate Biometallic used to sign my implant firmware. They still haven’t fixed the firmware vulnerability, or acknowledged anything I’ve sent them about it. But from what I’ve read, they’ve got to have a copy of it in the Ceres orbital station.”

  “Which’ll be locked down like a gods-damned fortress after the last op,” Iridian said.

  “Why not just ask the station AI to send it to you?” Wiley asked.

  “Ficience isn’t unsupervised like Mairie,” said Adda. “A competent supervisor will notice if an intelligence is sending out anything strange and lock it down, and everything I saw the last time we were there suggests that the supervisors are pretty good. After we left, they’d have found records of my requests to the intelligence and told it not to listen to anything that person says again.”

  “What about dropping a corruption culture on the lab, so the local nannite culture would open the up hull for us?” asked Rio.

  “Okay, that sounds awesome,” said Pel.

  “Too expensive, unfortunately,” said Adda.

  “We could use regular demolition material,” Wiley suggested.

  “That would work if we could afford it, but we can’t.” Adda sighed. “The trick is getting to Ficience’s supervisor before somebody sounds an alarm, or getting around Ficience’s public presentation. The rational response to our last visit would be that as soon as anything looks like a potential break-in, the supervisors will now use emergency security procedures to keep strangers like us from accessing the intelligence.”

  “Nobody’s talking about our break-in, by the way,” said Pel. “And Captain Sloane was ‘escorted off the station’ by the ITA, but they didn’t press charges. Dumb move.”

  “Our break-in wasn’t that long ago,” said Wiley. “Isn’t the ITA or whatever agency they have on Ceres still investigating?”

  Adda blinked. “Yes. The ITA might still be visiting occasionally.”

  “We’ll be watching out for them,” Iridian said. “We always are. And what are the chances that they’ll be there at the same time we are?”

  “We weren’t expecting Captain Sloane to target the same station we did at the same time either,” said Adda. “But the point is, costume-quality ITA uniforms are much less expensive than explosives.”

  “You want to walk in there dressed up as the gods-damned ITA?” Pel stared with a slowly widening grin. “Oh my gods, Sissy. I didn’t think you had it in you.” Adda smiled at him, which meant he’d interpreted her intention correctly.

  Iridian looked her over, and she seemed to be sober and present. For some reason, Adda really thought this was a viable plan. It sounded like a one-way ticket back to Venus, but they didn’t have money for equipment to infiltrate the station faster. With the ITA and the intelligences looking for them, there was no time for the recon it’d take to find a safer way in.

  Wiley smiled wistfully. “Tash could’ve given you all disguise lessons. The things she said she did with makeup and pins . . .”

  If this was really the best plan Adda had, then Iridian would back her play. “Nobody’s expecting this, that’s for gods-damned sure. But the ship’s going to be a problem. The Mayhem doesn’t look anything like an ITA cruiser.”

  “True,” said Ad
da. “Do you think Gavran will be able to fly us there, after . . . ?”

  “He’s a Kuiper colonist,” Iridian said. “If he can sit up, he can fly. Although, I wonder if he wants to. We’ll ask.”

  “All right,” said Adda, “What if we got a shuttle from the Ceres Station orbital port?”

  “Those are free,” said Rio. “I’d believe an ITA squad would take one of those.”

  “Do they run in squads?” Iridian asked.

  “I’ll find out on the way,” Adda said. “We’ll need to find somewhere to print the costumes too. And find a halfway decent textile pattern, not one that’s projected over your regular clothes.”

  “Oh my gods, this is awesome,” said Pel. “There’s a textile printer in the entertainment mod. They have some real dancers and they like to change their outfits a lot. I’ll ask them if they ever dress up as ITA agents.”

  “I guess uniforms with tear-off pants are better than nothing,” Rio said doubtfully.

  Adda was reading something on her comp, so Iridian took over the briefing, such as it was. “We gave Biometallic a chance to do this right. Now let’s get it done ourselves.”

  “So we get this certificate thing to go with the firmware we got last time,” said Wiley. “How does it get into Adda’s head?”

  “We’ve got options,” said Iridian. “If we have to update the firmware ourselves, we need an implant ward in a hospital. I don’t want to do it ourselves, because it’s in Adda’s head and she’s the one with experience modifying implant software.” The sense memory of slamming Noor’s jack into the generator resurfaced. Iridian reached for Adda’s hand again and forced herself not to squeeze too hard. “So we’ll take it to a modder we know on Ceres.”

  Pel whined, “We have really bad luck on Ceres.”

  “We have mixed luck,” said Iridian. “I got Adda off the ’ject with practically no trouble.”

  “Casey helped.” Adda glanced around the table. “We need to leave.”