Barbary Station

by R. E. Stearns

  The alarms went silent. Adda stared straight ahead, lips twitching with words she didn’t need to say aloud. Iridian stalked over arrows on the surface serving as deck that pointed toward the ship’s primary passthrough, where Reis should’ve gone.

  Adda followed on autopilot. It was funny how much trust she put in her peripheral vision with that adorable purple-streaked red hair over her eyes. The steel rim of the nose piercing for her jack glinted in the overhead lights. “Ships,” she enunciated, and then to herself or whatever construct she created to represent her in the system, “To bridge.” Adda clomped ahead, ignoring the arrows on the deck.

  This time the bridge door admitted them without fuss. Adda was too busy staring wide-eyed at things that weren’t there to react to physical threats, so Iridian stepped past her into the tiny room and visually confirmed that nobody was at the pilot’s console or standing in any of the corners.

  “Want to see them?” Adda asked. That seemed like a question she’d direct at a human, not one of her constructs. She held out her comp, which had just finished syncing her stored data from the ship’s system.

  The projector in the back of Adda’s glove flicked on to display a starscape constructed from a compilation of the Dawn’s external cam feeds. Motion against the stars revealed three vessels cruising into the massive colony ship’s shadow. They maintained a close formation, taking advantage of the colony ship’s lack of weapons to minimize the number of cam feeds they appeared on. Any warship would fuse them into one big lump of slag in under ten seconds, but that’d be why pirates rarely targeted military ships.

  The smallest approaching ship, labeled Charon’s Coin, was heavily outlined in nonthreatening light blue. That auxiliary designation identified tugs. Two midsize ships labeled Apparition and Casey Mire Mire rounded out the rumored complement of Captain Sloane’s fleet. They, too, bore blue outlines, but neither was equipped with a tug’s buffering or hullhooks.

  That camouflage would work against the Dawn’s AI and the people Iridian had encountered on the ship so far. She grinned. Sloane’s crew hadn’t become the most successful pirates in the universe by being stupid.

  “Is that one docking?” She pointed at the Apparition, even though Adda was staring at a bulkhead and wouldn’t see her.

  “Yes.” Adda sounded as curious as Iridian felt about what kind of pirates would be coming out of that ship.

  “Did they say who’s boarding? How many?”

  “No.” Adda’s fingers tapped the back of her hand beside some text appearing as she subvocalized it. “Second message to Pel.”

  The bridge door slid open and Reis stepped through. He wiped a long knife along his uniform pant leg. When he stopped just inside the door, a trail of red droplets drifted past him. The Dawn was dead in space, and “down” an arbitrary label. “Skipped the airlocks, so they’re hooking up to the main gangway. It’s the only other place. Let’s go meet our new crew, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” said Iridian. Adda disconnected from the bridge console, frowning, and followed her. “What’s the matter?” Iridian murmured over the sound of their magnetic boots hitting steel.

  “ColonyHost is letting them dock. I don’t know why.”

  Iridian frowned. The Dawn’s AI was flying the damned ship. If ColonyHost was also doing other things that Adda didn’t understand, that made Iridian trust it even less than she did before. There was no need to put her nervousness on display, though. “When you’ve got ‘host’ in your name, aren’t you obligated to open doors for people?”

  “Hacked in from the outside,” Reis said, as if he knew. “They have real hackers. Not sure what they’re supposed to do with you.” He looked from Iridian to Adda and back, focused on their breasts and the way Adda stood about half a centimeter from Iridian even when the passageway was wide enough for them to stay multiple meters away from him. “Not the obvious, I reckon.”

  One of Iridian’s blades was sheathed ten centimeters from her palm. Visualizing putting it through his throat kept her from actually doing that. The bastard would still be useful if any of the Transorbital crew was left on the colony ship, and Pel would’ve told the pirates to watch for three people, not two. “Turn around,” she said slowly, “and start walking.” Sneering, he complied.

  A minute later, he stopped in the middle of the passageway. Iridian and Adda dodged to either side to avoid running into him. A rectangular metal box the size of a pilot sling-chair’s back support and covered with “less lethal” armaments floated toward them. Small but noisy jets angled behind it propelled it through micro-g.

  “Rover,” Iridian explained to Adda, who looked both confused and delighted. “Spying out the route for somebody else.” She addressed the bot and the operator watching its progress. “We’re here. Now what?”

  A camera stalk whirred to stick out perpendicular to its frame and rotated to focus on her. “I represent Sloane’s crew.”  The recorded masculine voice was flat in the rover’s speakers. “Abandon ship. Atmosphere will be discharged in three minutes.”

  “Well, shit!” Iridian grabbed Adda’s arm and hauled her past the rover at a fast walk, ignoring the wistful way she peered over her shoulder at the bot.

  Reis clomped along behind them. “They didn’t give you much time. Does this brother of yours like you?” Adda sighed. From what she’d told Iridian, forgetting to mention something so minor as en route atmo loss was exactly the kind of thing Pel would do.

  By the time they reached the main gangway, a huge, bright room decorated with colony propaganda to inspire passengers, escaping atmo rushed along with them. Wind shrieked out three open passthroughs with no ships attached and blustered through the passthrough connecting the Prosperity Dawn to the pirate ship. Looking into the cold and black without a suit made Iridian’s breath catch.

  The departing atmo scraped a hard piece of debris over her shaved scalp. She flinched as a spray of red trailed it out an empty passthrough. Did Captain Sloane know that she and Adda had evacuated the Dawn before they arrived at the coordinates? Newsfeeds said Sloane’s crew killed next to no civilians, but three minutes would barely have been enough time to wake the Dawn’s passengers and crew. Surely Adda’s brother wasn’t that careless. Could he be that cruel?

  Reis gripped a locker door handle and waited while it registered his crew ID. The wind slammed the door open. Iridian ran to grab two enviro suits before he did something stupid like throw them. Halfway through slipping hers on, she caught Adda turning the other suit over in her hands. The determined frown on her girlfriend’s face was usually directed at demon-level logic puzzles.

  “Start at the back. Remember, it’s designed for spacefarers. It has to be ass-backwards from what an Earther expects, or we wouldn’t wear it,” Iridian added, repeating the well-worn spacefarer gag to show that approaching spacefarer problems from an incorrect, Earthbound perspective was a common mistake that Adda shouldn’t feel too embarrassed about.

  Iridian retrieved her shield, collapsed in a rectangular mass of folded metal pieces, from its hook between her shoulder blades and clipped it onto her suit’s belt beside a knife, then sealed her hood. As she’d hoped, she hadn’t needed it to get into or out of the Dawn’s bridge, but she was still glad she’d gotten Reis to stash it in the shipboard locker with the rest of her gear. It might come in handy while introducing herself to pirates hyped up for a colony ship raid.

  The suit’s canned atmo odor settled Iridian into a calm watchfulness developed during hundreds of practice drills. After she eased Adda’s silver necklace over Adda’s suit helmet, she sealed her girlfriend’s suit for her.

  “Sorry,” Adda said. “Tracking emergency reports. The passthroughs and other airlocks are venting too.” How the pirates had convinced the ship’s AI to open all those doors was a question for Adda. Neat trick, if you don’t mind suffocating anybody left onboard.

  The suit blocked the wind, but the narrow faceplate meant that seeing anything to her left and right required turnin
g her whole torso sideways. Transorbital must’ve bought the last double-discounted suits with rigid faceplates, outlawed after more flexible fiber-reinforced ones were proven safer. Iridian snorted, simultaneously amused and disgusted by Transorbital’s budget-based recklessness. The ship’s owners held a few thousand lives in their care. No need to increase expenditures just for that.

  Reis impatiently waved her and Adda over to the occupied passthrough and entered as another rover jetted out of the pirate ship. The wide white passthrough bulkheads with the Transorbital Voyages logo narrowed at the attachment point to the pirate ship’s stark passthrough, though not enough to make humans worry about heads and elbows. Someone had scorched off whatever insignia had once adorned the pirate ship’s passthrough, leaving a large dark patch on the bare metal.

  A rover bounced by trailing a net full of jewelry, personal pseudo-organic datacasks (no datacasks bigger than one hundred fifty milliliters, according to the ship’s rule book), and a sock. These weren’t low-grade government bots or even midgrade military models. A corporation with a budget surplus had designed them to both explore and impress. She could sell one and pay off a year of her student loans.

  Her mouth twisted into a self-mocking smile. It was habit, comparing every nice thing to the money she owed. Joking about stealing from their only likely source of lucrative employment would earn her Adda’s best Really? look. After dodging more pricey robots, they reached the door to the ship itself. It was open wide enough for three rovers to zip in and out at once.

  “We just walking in?” Reis’s voice was tinny over a long-wave, low-bandwidth, suit-to-suit broadcast.

  Iridian cocked her head, which bumped her temple against the inside of her suit’s hood. Until they had Captain Sloane’s official approval, it’d be dumb to trust the pirates. This would be a perfect time for them to take the Dawn and shove her, Adda, and Reis out an airlock to join the colonists. Better not to tempt them. “Yeah. Tactically.”

  She and Reis drew knives from their belts. While she deployed her shield, he strode into the ship. Based on today’s observation, he cleared rooms by walking straight in and swiveling right, then left, while moving forward. He did it the same way every time, too fast to see much. And he kept going first, even though she had the shield and the training to use it. At least she’d spot whoever was in there while they lined up a shot on him.

  The passthrough dumped them into a long, narrow cargo bay. Lines of golden light interrupted by stacked crates showed the way to the passthrough and a red-and-white PASSTHROUGH OPEN message projected on the bulkhead. The room was loaded with personal property and fixtures from the Dawn, stacked with programmed precision in front of longer containers racked on the bulkheads. Walking space was disappearing beneath stolen cargo. Soon humans would have to disengage their boot magnets to maneuver. Nobody was waiting for them among the containers.

  Another rover zoomed past with a magnet-sealed crate. It dropped the crate on the others before blasting down the passthrough at hip height from the surface her boots were sealed to. The atmo continued blowing out of the pirate ship toward the three passthroughs open to the cold and the black.

  “There’s nobody here.” Reis kicked an incoming rover. The boot stuck until the bot wrenched free and escaped through a doorway at the other end of the cargo area, deeper into the pirate ship. “No atmo or pressure generators. Or sunlight sim.” That was Earther thinking, as if air, light, humidity, temperature, pressure, and gravity were unrelated forces outside human control. It would’ve been enough to say the enviro wasn’t healthy.

  People who grew up in naturally healthy enviro took engineers of all specialties for granted. Only one in ten of her graduating class would get a job in their preferred field. New engineers should be grateful for what scraps they got. She and Adda would be part of the 10 percent who made it, though not in the way their professors expected.

  “Nobody’s here?” Adda asked. “Not even Pel?”

  “If I meant nobody but your brother, I’d have said that,” Reis growled.

  “I need to plug in,” muttered Adda.

  Running a crewed ship without atmo was damned odd, but it could be a security feature. Only somebody in an enviro suit with plenty of O2—Iridian checked her meter and found herself in that category—would be a threat to the crew. Maybe all this suspicion was what made Captain Sloane’s crew so successful. So long as Adda had sufficient suit enviro too, they’d stick to her plan.

  But what kind of pirates hid in their own ship? Now she really wanted to meet these people. Iridian crossed the threshold of a surprisingly thick cargo-hold door and walked down the passageway after the fleeing robot. She angled her shield to keep it from dragging along the bulkheads. Semitransparent mech-ex graphene stretched over the metal frame and glimmered in the low light, an oily steel glint she’d come to love. “Who’d’ve thought we’d need a damned flashlight? I feel like a tunnel rat.”

  Reis snorted at the idea of someone Iridian’s height crawling through ductwork and sewers to lay mines. “Figured you for an ISV driver.” Real tough guess, given her freakish lack of body fat and hair. Her years piloting an Infantry Shield Vehicle had been formative, and she’d kept running after she left the service for school, although she cut her distance a bit. In college she hadn’t been eating enough to run as far as members of her Shieldrunners unit had to when their vehicle’s battery died.

  At least he was checking the doors off the passageway instead of watching her. None of them opened at his approach. “Hey! We’re here,” Iridian shouted. No response. “Ping Pel again,” she told Adda.

  The cargo area behind her was large, but if the locked doors led to standard quarters, they would’ve housed maybe a dozen crew. If the pirates were in there now, they were keeping quiet. Adda rested her hand on Iridian’s hip as she eased past her toward the door at the end of the passageway. In this light, Adda’s skin was even paler than when she’d woken from the long sleep.

  Adda threaded the cable hidden in her necklace through a port in the enviro suit’s sleeve to reach the comp in her glove, then plugged the other end into a panel beside the door. Before the glove’s projector even turned on, she yanked the plug out of the door panel. “Nothing there.”

  “Like hell there isn’t,” said Reis. “You can’t fly without humans or AI. There’s gotta at least be AI.”

  Ten rovers flew into the cargo hold, dragging nets full of random objects. The colony ship’s passthrough door slammed, followed by the pirate ship’s, soundless since the atmo had drained away.

  The pirate ship lurched. Iridian caught Adda’s elbow to keep her upright as grav made the surface beneath them a much less arbitrarily assigned deck. It shook hard enough that Iridian could’ve sworn she heard the engines power up.

  Adda stowed her cable so fast it disappeared like a magic trick. “That’s not me.”

  Before Reis tried looming over Adda to get better results, Iridian stepped between them. She had several centimeters on him. “Can you tell where we’re going?” she asked Adda.

  Adda shook her head. “It was . . . too blank. The pilot’s locked everything out.”

  “What good are you, then?” Reis took in Iridian’s stance and backed off. He clutched one door frame after the next as he retreated down the passageway toward the cargo area, fighting the pirate ship’s abrupt course corrections that pushed and pulled its occupants around. After the massive colony ship flown smoothly by at least one conscientious pilot, it was hard to ignore this pilot’s lack of consideration, or perhaps sobriety.

  Iridian wrapped her arm around Adda’s waist and waited until her girlfriend’s nervous brown eyes met Iridian’s through the faceplates. “You ready for this, babe?”

  The corners of Adda’s mouth wobbled when she smiled, but firmed up after Iridian gave her a squeeze. “It’s not like we have another option.”

  “We could work on different planets, trying to raise corporate stock numbers by a hundredth of a percent. Just im
agine, a whole hundredth of a percent. And I might get to see you every other year. What a deal!”

  “Ugh.”

  Iridian scanned the industrial fittings in the cargo area for someplace to strap down. The rovers had already clamped themselves into slots in the bulkheads. A few places to secure crew members were installed across from several pipes big enough to crawl into. The pipes were partially embedded in the hull, connected to . . . a rack of missiles. That explained the thick gods-damned door between this section and the crew quarters.

  Once she got over the shock, she pointed them out to Adda. “That might be why they travel without atmo and with everyone in their quarters. Those are loud as hell when they launch.”

  Adda looked as alarmed as Iridian felt. “Is that likely to happen while we’re in here?”

  With this configuration, the pilot might flip the ship around to fire if there wasn’t time to bank. The ladders on the bulkheads attested to that. Hanging off ladders during violent grav shifts sounded like a way to break arms, though. “Better not. I think I appreciate you delaying ITA involvement.” That earned her one of Adda’s sweet, proud smiles.

  After strapping Adda in, Iridian turned off the power to their magnetic boots and strapped in next to her. Reis kept staggering from door to locked door in the passageway as grav increased and changed direction with the ship. He hadn’t mentioned hacking or cracking skills when they discussed partnering up.

  The main thing he had that Adda and Iridian lacked was crew status on the Prosperity Dawn. To take the ship with minimal violence, it had to be an inside job, so his presence had been critical to Adda’s plan. Apparently he didn’t care about losing crew status himself, since Adda had found him in a darknet community of contract breakers and people plotting to escape wage slavery. Iridian didn’t have to like him to hold up her and Adda’s end of the deal and get him to Barbary Station.

  Eventually he got tired of fighting the shifting grav and strapped in nearby, looking disgusted. “As long as we don’t have to sign a corporate contract to join the crew, they can be as scarce as they like, yeah?” said Iridian.