Iridian intoned “Spooky,” with several extra o’s. “And how do we know they found the core?” She winked at Adda, which Adda interpreted as Yes, I know that’s not the right word.
“The lieutenant got shot but didn’t die,” Pel said.
“Did you not just say everybody died?” Iridian asked, laughing.
“Fine, practically everybody. The lieutenant crawled to the fugee camp and told them everything. People say he survived, but if he did, he stays away from us.”
“Captain Sloane is the other lieutenant?” asked Adda.
Pel sat back in his chair, his head turned almost, but not exactly, toward her. “How’d you know?”
“You said Foster brought ‘a’ lieutenant with her to AegiSKADA’s control center, which suggests that there was more than one,” Adda said. “The captain’s the only person I’d expect everyone to follow.” Major O.D. made an agreeing sort of grunt, and the unspoken as opposed to Tritheist had everyone glancing around to see if the current lieutenant was in earshot. Nobody spoke up to defend Tritheist’s leadership capabilities. Sloane must have promoted him sometime after Captain Foster’s death.
“Yeah, it makes sense when you put it like that,” Pel said. “Anyway, we already asked the pilots to take us to Atlantis and drop us off, and they won’t. Then some ZVs tried to make them take us, and got blown up with a missile, so we gave up on that. One guy built his own escape pod. That went boom as soon as it got into turret range. And nobody can sign into AegiSKADA’s control systems.”
“Haven’t the fugees tried to get away on their own?” asked Iridian.
“What, you mean after their ship got so shot up during launch that they just docked it again?” Pel shrugged. “Far as I know, they haven’t tried since.”
“I heard a group of fugees took off in jumpsuits, back when they first came here and a lot of them were dying.” Major O.D. shook his head. “Turret range starts about thirty meters off the hull, and the floating debris is bad out there. They were aiming for the near edge of the lead cloud, but none of them made it out.”
Pel tossed a small packet of something that bounced off Adda’s chest. Iridian handed it to her. “Oatmeal in a bag. It’s great to have breakfast food for breakfast again. We had tuna twice a day for a while there.”
After she ate and Pel and the major argued amiably about what cuisine was appropriate before noon, she asked, “Pel, can I speak with you in private somewhere?” She glanced at Iridian to see if she’d come too, but Iridian was miming a character in some vid game she played, while Chato laughed and described how the crew played it.
Adda led Pel back to her empty water tank. They settled on a couple of pillows she’d commandeered for the purpose, under the push lights on the wall near the ladder. “What happened to you? Why didn’t you ask me for help instead of offering me a job? And why haven’t you gotten your eyes fixed?”
“I forgot that ‘talk to you in private’ means yell at me,” Pel huffed.
“I’m not yelling.” That did sound a bit confrontational, so she said at a lower volume, “I’m just asking.”
“Gods, that’s a lot of stuff to ask.” Behind the dark glasses, he looked guilty. “I don’t know. I mean, the last thing I saw was the inside of the Apparition. And I didn’t ask you to come right away because you were busy with school and it takes a miracle to get messages out.”
“Isn’t there a doctor here, or a surgery unit?”
“There’s Zikri. He’s kind of a doctor. And there’s a medical team somewhere, but they’re . . . weird. They couldn’t do anything about my eyes. But, um, I wanted to ask: Is Dad still mad about all this?”
“He’s . . . yes.” Adda sighed. “We had a huge blowout about it when we got your message, and again when we got your money. He liked telling people you had a solid, legal, real working job when you were at the factory. It’s not that he doesn’t appreciate the money, because he does need it, but . . .”
“He wishes I got it some other way.”
She might’ve been able to explain Pel’s work in a way that would satisfy their dad. Fighting made both men miserable, and it took them weeks to reconcile on their own. It’d help if she could prove Pel earned his pay, instead of stealing it. “What do you do around here, exactly?”
He sprang up and started climbing out. “Let me show you. Come on!” And she followed him, because being blind on a space station under the control of an aggressive intelligence was bad enough without his sister ignoring him.
They walked to the main room, past a petite female ZV slumped against a table watching the others race vehicles around a lunar racetrack projected on one wall. If it were possible to look more dejected in the middle of shouting, armed gamers, she’d probably have managed it.
Pel approached a tall rectangular patch on a wall. He banged on it a few times, then slid a whole panel up in a rattle of interconnected slats. Before he did that, it looked like one solid piece. Impressive design.
“Hey, Sturm, have you met my big sister?” asked Pel.
Bright overhead lights that could have lit a garage or docking bay took up most of the closet-size space’s headroom. Cold air reeking of chemicals and metal hit her eyes and made her squint as they stepped inside. Tools, scraps, and small machines Iridian would know by name and function lined the floor and walls, along with pieces of armor.
At a workbench along the room’s back wall, a small old man with a short, round kufi cap brandished a handsaw. “Boy, Tabs will keep on moping and picking fights until her chest plate is repaired. Go bother Chef.”
The unhappy ZV who was probably Tabs had looked up when the workshop door opened, but returned to the racing game when her armor didn’t emerge with Pel and Adda. Tabs’s short and curly hair was the same dark brown as the large ZV woman who gave Pel’s arm a couple of hearty pats when he walked by. Now that Adda was looking, the women had the same beautiful brown eyes. Perhaps they were related, despite their extreme differences in build.
“Lots of one-syllable names,” Adda said, following Pel around the corner to the hallway that led to the kitchen and her water tank.
“They like their nicknames. I didn’t even have to tell them about Pel Mel, they figured it out all on their own.”
“Is this what you do all day?” she asked. “Bother people while they work?”
“I provide entertainment!” he huffed. “This court needs a jester. Oh, where’s Kaskade?”
He asked loudly enough that the woman in question poked her head around the corner. “Hi!” Kaskade’s volume and cheer hurt Adda’s brain this early in the morning. Even the streaks in her hair, which were a different shade than the blue that coated the walls, were overly bright just now. “I’ve got enough until I’m done working on the HUD in Tabs’s armor. Ask me later, okay?” Adda couldn’t connect each letter of the acronym to a word, but Kaskade was probably referring to a helmet’s interior faceplate display. If it required Kaskade’s expertise, it was a software problem rather than a hardware one. The whole crew was either fixing the broken armor or distracting Tabs from being stuck in the compound. Despite Iridian’s qualifications in both areas and Adda’s interest in digital systems, nobody asked for their help.
“So, you run errands.” That was the most positive way she could describe his activities.
“One of the many things I do around here.” Pel was talking fast, inundating her with information to stop her from reaching inevitable conclusions. “Kaskade doesn’t like Zikri, but she does like the crud he cooks from the fugees’ med relief shipments. Somebody’s gotta pick product up from Zikri when it’s ready to use, and she doesn’t want to deal with him, so I do. I like Zikri, personally. Oh, you haven’t met him yet.”
The rapid-fire introductions made Adda cringe. “These people need a way off the station. There has to be a way you can help with that.”
“Doing what?” He waggled his dark glasses up and down his forehead, exposing, then hiding his scarred eyes. “If I walked in
to the station by myself, I’d be great drone bait.”
Adda stalked toward her water tank and her workspace generator. Hearing him talk about himself like that made her heart hurt. Ordinarily she’d keep her observations to herself. Pel’s life was his own, and he deserved autonomy to take responsibility for it.
Today, she’d tell him something he needed to hear. “I’m sure somebody needs something useful you can do. Ask around while I see how hard it’s going to be to get us out of here. Which reminds me . . .” She turned, and he was still two steps behind her, trailing one hand along the wall. “Why haven’t you sent one of the pilots out with a message to the Interplanetary Transit Authority? At least in prison they don’t kill you on purpose.”
“The fugees tried. ITA won’t come. Even NGOs just launch boxes of crap at us from a safe distance and hope somebody catches them. After the war, nobody wants to risk their fleet going up against station turrets.” The Near Earth Union and the secessionists had both declared victory when the war ended. It would have been more accurate to say they both lost. Pel grinned. “Captain Sloane told Fugee News to say that the turrets firing at other ships was the crew defending crew territory in Barbary’s stationspace. Which, I mean, the crew really did shoot down some ships in stationspace back on Vesta! I guess it’s hard to hold on to their Vestan base, so they have to keep looking tough even when they’re stuck here.”
That fiction had been propagated through a number of reliable sources Adda had consulted in preparation for coming here. She sighed. She’d done all the research she’d had time to do, but she was still stuck on Barbary Station, and already tired of it. The faster she circumvented the station’s security intelligence, the faster they could all leave.
* * *
In her water tank, Adda shook blue dust out of her hair. Since the tank was suspended underneath the pirate compound, beneath the station’s double hull, Iridian proclaimed it safe enough without the blue antiradiation coating. Adda kept forgetting to pull her hood over her head when she left the tank, and the blue stuff that covered the rest of the compound’s ceiling and walls fell into her hair and shirt.
She piled pillows inside her workspace’s noise-canceling canopy. Though the sides were transparent beneath a thick grid of black tracer lines, it did resemble a tent. Once she’d plugged her nasal implant jack and her comp into the main unit, she triggered the comp’s countdown timer. If she spent five hours in a workspace, Iridian usually checked on her. When both of them forgot, Adda had headaches and nightmares. She placed a thin purple sharpsheet square on her tongue. While it dissolved, she inserted earbuds, which hissed pink noise and canceled out everything else.
Time to find out what I’m up against. As one of her professors used to say, Zombie AI can’t develop their own priorities, so give them yours. If she got the intelligence to interact with her, she could ask it to stop. The pirates didn’t have a workspace generator, so they couldn’t have tried that.
She lay on her back and sealed the sound-resistant generator tent. After several seconds, the sharpsheet took effect and the generator’s software accessed her neural implant net to draw her into a workspace. Her parents’ house in Virginia, before the bombing, assembled around her.
The comp glove could render small parts of the programs she worked with, but interacting with the fragments limited her view of the system as a whole. The workspace software converted the concepts and commands into visual metaphors her brain processed quickly, naturally, and more effectively with the sharpsheets’ help.
Sunlight patterned down through a large, high window. All six shelves of the bookshelf beside it were full of ancient paper books, many more than the tiny collection of books that her mother had maintained. Each book represented information on the station intranet’s public front. Station administrators would be remarkably careless to leave a manual on the station’s security intelligence sitting out on unprotected intranet, but she had to check. A spiral-bound stack of paper labeled Employee Policies might be helpful.
An orange glow with ragged gray-blurred edges swam over a plain black book’s spine. The glow shrank into the words Criminals and Criminology. With dreamlike slowness, Adda pulled it from its shelf, blew the ensuing dust cloud away from her nose, and placed the book beside her bare feet.
Despite the carpet, the book landed with a sound like a massive gong struck with a hammer. Adda stilled, her hand hovering over the book. She hadn’t set any alarms like that, so who had?
When she turned back to the bookshelf, a yellow eye stared out from its back panel, in the space where the book had been.
“Hello.” She breathed slowly to keep her field of vision, already gently twisting left and right, from starting to spin in response to her excitement. It wasn’t clear how well her biological functions carried through the workspace to the intelligence. Heart rates told a lot about humans. What conclusions AegiSKADA drew from hers was something else again.
“I’m looking for your occupant monitoring archives. I’m a friend. Everyone near me is too.” She concentrated on the concept of a group of nonthreatening individuals with similar objectives and priorities. “We don’t attack friends.”
The eye didn’t blink. Its pupil was a splotch of black liquid, asymmetrical and fraying into digital static at its edges. Adda reached into the bookshelf and pressed her fingertips to the top of the panel, above the eye. The titles on the other books’ spines swam, cycling through numeric codes and names. The eye refocused on them. The human-to-AI translation software in her comp was hard at work.
“Look at me.” She concentrated on how delighted she was to meet a new intelligence. The eye’s gaze flicked from one mental construct of household objects to the next, checking each one for signs of her. It was possible that no one had spoken to it in the four years since the station had been abandoned. If it understood what she’d said, it didn’t agree with her.
AI played games with human minds. Her translator should protect her, but depending on what direction this intelligence’s development took, the translator might be outmatched.
The risk raised her heart rate. The room rocked like a boat on stormy seas. The eye focused on her, confirming its access to biometric sensors. How many had the station’s designers planted, recording every cardiac rhythm of humans within range? And where was the one recording hers, alone in an empty water tank?
She shut her eyes against the swinging room and concentrated on the second question. The rocking sloshed the contents of her stomach. Whispers in static too soft to interpret brushed across her arms and thighs. She thought she heard her name, and Pel’s.
When she opened her eyes, a dark image flickered in and out of existence below the eye on the book spine. Orange specks of light near the top were probably the string of lights in the passage between the hulls.
Adda grinned. It was so satisfying to create an answer through the intensity of her question. The nearest sensor node was in the hull passage that led to the pirate compound. She didn’t know what to do about that yet, but she’d think of something.
A cardinal peeped triumphantly outside the high window. The whispers faded to silence, and a hard, squared-off edge formed against her palm. She drew a paper book out of the bookshelf with the intelligence’s eye in the center of the cover. The image of the space between the hulls flickered out.
Behind the workspace’s hallucinations, her translator had convinced AegiSKADA that she was a temporary systems maintenance technician. That granted her the most basic levels of personal security aboard the station. Leaving so much of her identity open to the intelligence made her vulnerable, but she now claimed enough clearance to review its biometric database.
Millions of records swirled around her as dust motes in sunlight, with no archival procedure. AegiSKADA had recorded over a year of the pirates’ heart rates, respiration, gait, words, and images, every move the pirates had made since they’d crashed in the docking bay below. As she watched, the intelligence accessed record after r
ecord that hadn’t been significant enough for the workspace to render before. The workspace depicted each shining mote of information for only an instant, and then the eye on the book absorbed them.
The intelligence hadn’t been accessing those records when she first applied the translator. Adda could only imagine AegiSKADA accessing the pirates’ data this way in order to select targets for investigation or attack. If she had time to think, more reasons might occur to her. It was appalling that the intelligence had so much biometric data so readily available. None of the utilization scenarios she was coming up with had positive outcomes for Sloane’s crew.
AI rarely gave humans enough time to develop viable plans of attack, and she couldn’t just watch it work. Adda slammed her hand down over the eye to stop the transfer to its active memory. The home around her flickered, with red nothing behind it, as her software struggled to block AegiSKADA from records it was already accessing.
The eye widened and widened beneath her hand. It expanded past the borders of the book representing her software barriers between the intelligence and her personal system. The eye swelled to the width of the bookshelf, then the room, before Adda could draw her hand away. And it was focused on her.
The overwhelmed translator didn’t interpret the angry digital buzz filling the workspace, but something was hunting her, had caught her scent in the red beyond the workspace’s world. It was coming, and she had to get out.
CHAPTER 6
Charges Accrued: Unlicensed Use of Military-Grade Shielding
The bunkhouse arrangement reminded Iridian of her army days, except then she’d had a schedule to follow and tasks to accomplish starting the moment she woke up. On Barbary Station, once Adda dragged herself out of bed and into her workspace generator, Iridian had to figure out what the hell this crew needed done and whether or not she could do it herself. The ZVs were working out in the common room when she wandered in. It’d feel good to put her muscles to use.
Barbary Station Page 8
