Barbary Station

by R. E. Stearns

  However, one of the two youngest members of the crew wanted something else. “Ma,” the little guy said loudly while holding on to Iridian’s pants at the knee to stay upright. Jalal looked four or five months older than the other ZV child, Xing’s baby, Kimmy. Their parents must’ve been on chemical birth control instead of the implanted kind when they got stranded on the station. Every soldier Iridian knew, herself included, used chemical methods, even though they were less effective. Combat tended to illustrate the nasty ways implants could go wrong.

  And the ways parenthood could go wrong, come to that. Maybe some of the ZVs thought they were stuck here for good, but Barbary Station was a hell of a place to start a family. She hoped Adda would find a way to get the crew off-station and safe from AegiSKADA before anything happened to these kids.

  This boy’s mother, grenadier Miria San Miguel, was doing push-ups with other ZV Group members. As Iridian pointed at San Miguel to redirect the kid, she spotted one other crew anomaly. The short, weedy man walked quickly across the common room, skirting the exercising ZVs. He brushed oily black hair beneath his hood away from his eyes. It fell back over them.

  Iridian frowned. She’d been trying to talk to Si Po ever since Pel mentioned that he’d helped organize the crew’s end of the Prosperity Dawn hijacking, but Si Po had been avoiding her. It didn’t seem to be personal. He avoided everybody. None of the squads and small groups of friends among the crew made space for him to stand with them when he walked by, and he never stopped to push in.

  Since he wore a dark blue one-sleeved, high-collared shirt instead of the ZV Group’s black and yellow, he probably wasn’t part of the private military company serving as the crew’s muscle on their last operation. She had yet to see a ZV without a scrap of black or yellow on them, if only because of their company-issued comp gloves. Si Po must’ve been selected for a noncombat skill. His bare arm displayed no muscle definition, although it was covered in an intricate tattoo sleeve which could’ve camouflaged implants.

  Iridian disengaged her pant leg from the toddler’s fist and followed Si Po. The ZVs worked out two or three times a day, and she had yet to ask Si Po if he had any jobs that’d fit her. “Hey, where are you off to?”

  He spun all the way around to face her, looking wary and in need of a nose-hair trimmer. “I . . . it’s time to send the ships out. The rovers took the fugees their supplies, so we’re light again.”

  “Sign me up.” AI was unpredictable, to Iridian if not to Adda, but Iridian could hold her own in a raid or a boarding party. That might be the kind of contribution Sloane’s crew needed.

  He smiled slightly and started walking again, close enough to the wall that he blocked the projections’ multicolored lights. She took the offered space and fell into step beside him. “You can watch, I guess,” he said.

  She couldn’t blame him for distrusting a new face. “Couldn’t you use an extra pair of boots on deck?” With luck, Sloane’s reputation for next to no body count was accurate. Iridian was willing and able to shield fellow crew members, but killing was something else. It was another reason she liked knives—they intimidated while being difficult to use by accident.

  At a door across the hall from the lockside bunkhouse, he stopped to face her again. “I’m not getting on the ship. Nobody is.”

  “Say again?”

  Si Po opened the door with his comp pressed to the ID pad beside it. Inside, an industrial 3-D printer, its thick semitransparent case stained and scored by use and lax cleaning, took up most of a small room. On the far wall, which slanted away from the door more on the right side than the left, a projector created a wide window to the cold and the black. The stars arched across the projection like whirling ice crystals in pure O2, flickering as pieces of lead in the cloud passed between them and the station. Nothing shone exactly like stars.

  “Where’s the cam?” Iridian asked softly.

  “Over Docking Bay Three. That’s the one you came into.” He tapped a mic symbol on the console. Above it, a red LED lit. “Apparition, it’s Si Po. We need cargo.”

  He hit the mic button again, and the red light shut off. “Now I compress and encrypt it,” he said. “If I don’t, AegiSKADA intercepts, changes things, sometimes . . .” While Iridian shuddered at that possibility, he tapped the console. “And broadcasts it right into the hangar.”

  “How long does it take the pilots to launch your ships?” she asked

  Si Po’s mischievous grin was nothing like the embarrassed smiles she’d surprised on him up to now. “Those aren’t our ships. They were all either in stationspace or docked when we got shot down. I think they were supposed to have been broken down before the Battle of Waypoint, but that didn’t happen, obviously. They have nanorepair, and the bots do the heavy lifting. We help some, mostly approving dock activities in the system, since we’re trying to keep AegiSKADA’s attention off them as much as we can. In exchange, we taught them to catch other ships. Well, I did.” He tilted his head back a little and his smile widened, deservedly proud of turning civilian pilots into ship-jacking pirates.

  “And you haven’t sampled their nanorepair cultures to fix up this place?”

  Si Po shrugged. “How? Sturm tried once, but it didn’t take, and we didn’t see the ships for a couple of weeks, after. It wasn’t worth it when we can do most of the work ourselves. Here we go.” He pointed to the exterior cam view of the starscape she’d been admiring.

  Even though the Apparition had been out in the cold and the black when Si Po sent the recording, the pilot must’ve gotten his message. The Apparition sailed out from above the cam and into its range, filling the projected window. The only time Iridian had seen the Apparition’s exterior was when they’d arrived at Barbary Station. With the decompression alarms blaring, she hadn’t had time for a thorough examination. After the long, narrow interior she, Adda, and Reis had ridden in, she’d imagined the Apparition as a lean gunship.

  The ship outside the window looked like a gunship had collided with a tug and stuck. The Apparition was asymmetrical, with jagged angles and a haphazard scattering of missile launchers. Its precise, economical movements suggested a talented human pilot partnered with decent AI. The pilot even kept up with the cam’s position, without any wavering or wobbling.

  One side of the wall projection filled with a blast of data. The Apparition disappeared into the stars on the other half, vanishing as the cam spun away from it.

  “That’s it!” said Si Po. “She may call one of the other two for help if she catches something big. After they break into the databases to get ships’ routes, they spoof ITA inspection signals to get them to stop long enough to disable them. At least, that’s what I taught them to do. They don’t give me any details when they come back.” He adjusted something else on the console. Iridian had last seen that console in the foreground of Pel’s messages to Adda.

  Much as it made Iridian’s skin crawl, Adda would love pilots who flew in such tight tandem with AI. It’d be fun to introduce her. “So who are these people doing the grunt work?”

  Si Po stopped tapping and flicked his fingers to sweep his last couple of inputs off the backlit screen that formed the angled top of the console. “Earther pilots,” he said. “From Russio-China. Very bad English, and we don’t have translation software that handles combo languages.”

  If combo language translators were a low priority, then everybody making the software decisions was a spacefarer. Earthers were happy to mix any language into English or Chinese, and treated English like the mutt language it was. The existence of combined languages didn’t appear to disgust him, so he didn’t hail from too far into the colonies.

  “The pilots any good, usually?” Iridian asked. “The one who flew the Apparition here spun us like tops when she undocked from the Prosperity Dawn.”

  “Of course they’re good.” Her suggestion left Si Po looking half-scandalized, half-amused. “Only the best on this crew.”

  “And you’re the best at what, co
nning people into saving pirates from killer AI?” Iridian grinned as he literally backed away from her. “I’m trying not to hold it against you, but you’ve got to admit, it’s not working out well for me and Adda so far.”

  “I just . . .” Si Po peered at her face for a moment, then nodded like he was satisfied with whatever he saw there. “Pel kept talking about how great his sister would be against the AI, and Captain Sloane and I couldn’t even slow AegiSKADA down. All Foster tapped me to do was crack a megacorp subsidiary bank account once we got some info off the target ship. This AI stuff is way over my head. Pel said Adda would fix it. He’d do the talking, if I could get his messages to you and send the ships where he said to.” Si Po had the good grace to look ashamed. “I believed him. I had to believe something.”

  A muffled whump followed by a much louder crash reverberated through the base. Si Po shrieked and belly flopped into the corner where the sloping ceiling met the floor.

  “What was that?” Iridian demanded.

  He wrapped his arms around his head and yammered in Kuiper Belt spacefarer cant. She ducked into the lockside bunkhouse across the hall for her shield, then sprinted toward the common room.

  An ungainly half spin kept her from running into Tritheist and Captain Sloane as they emerged from the captain’s stateroom. Sloane was pulling on a gold-colored shirt that somehow appeared more regal than garish, while Tritheist did up his pants. “Damage check, right gods-damned now!” the lieutenant bellowed. Another concussive blow shook the base beneath their feet and loosed a cloud of blue dust from the ceiling.

  Captain Sloane watched Iridian through it. The bright white smile the captain flashed showed far too many teeth. “Your lion roars. Will you hunt it?”

  “Uh, yes, sir.” Figuring out what roaring thing Captain Sloane was talking about was less important than finding whatever had blown up. With luck the loud noise was what made her ears pop, because the alternative was pressure and atmo loss. She pushed her way through a crowd of shouting pirates in front of the homeward bunkhouse to get to Adda’s empty water tank.

  Adda’s head and shoulders were already through its trapdoor. “AegiSKADA. It sent something here. I thought it was using hallucinographics to scare me off, but it sent something real.” The off-kilter monotone voice meant that Adda still had twenty or thirty minutes before her last dose of concentration drugs wore off.

  Iridian finally remembered what a lion was: a predator so big that it ate anything it laid eyes on. “The AI blew something up. You still got all your pieces?” Adda nodded shakily. “Go back down and grab the enviro suits.” Once Adda handed them up, Iridian helped her into the hall. The whole place rumbled. “Get into yours, but don’t seal it.” They’d yet to find a refilling station, so the suits’ O2 tanks were nearing empty.

  Blue dust drifted off the walls and ceiling, dark beneath the orange lights strung along the walls. Iridian’s breath drew it, dry and gritty, up her nose, over her tongue, and down her throat. At least the particles felt too big to get into her bloodstream through lung tissue. She tugged her jacket hood farther over her eyes.

  The dust stopped falling straight down and drifted into the homeward bunkhouse. Cold calm swept over her, even as her heart beat faster. A subaudible rumble continued after the initial shaking ended. The sound alone could shake bolts free and put them in a worse situation than what the air current meant: atmo leak.

  The yelling from the crowd around the bunkhouse resolved into, “Xing, Alexov, get out of there, get out!”

  “Sir, which way is the front line from here?” Iridian shouted at Major O.D., the first person she saw who looked like he might know.

  The major smiled in a mix of incredulity and admiration. “Outside.” He pointed up. “And we don’t have combat-ready walking clothes anymore. Nothing we can do unless it punches through.”

  Adda’s and Iridian’s enviro suits would pressurize, but they weren’t armored. “Great,” Iridian muttered. Another explosion jolted the hallway. It was weaker than the first, maybe farther from base. She pressed through the crowd toward the bunkhouse, avoiding several bare blades and armored elbows. If the bunkhouse was the site of the first explosion, then it sure as hell wasn’t safe to stand around in. “Xing, come on, get out of there!” she shouted.

  Two voices, one male, one female, screamed something back. She hoped the repetitive screeching in the background wasn’t Xing’s baby crying.

  Another blast shook the base. Wind dragged at her, like a huge hole had been torn in the bunkhouse. Everybody in the hallway lurched and staggered. The white towel over the door tore off and vanished into the dark beyond the bunkhouse doorway. The voices inside disappeared beneath the roar of escaping atmo.

  The air was clear of blue dust, except for a thin stream drawn through the doorway. Kaskade and Chato were already on the floor. Between the press of the crowd and the high wind, someone was bound to fall into the bunkhouse. And at this rate of atmo loss, there wasn’t much out there to land on.

  As the wind shoved Iridian in that direction too, she deployed her shield. The wind caught it and pulled her toward the bunkhouse even harder. The shield’s matte gray frame trembled but locked open. She turned it sideways to slam it across the bottom half of the door and dropped to one knee. The shield jammed her arm hard into her shoulder joint, but her weight kept the frame in place. If that didn’t stop someone from falling through, she could catch them from there.

  Adda tumbled to the floor next to her a moment later, lips moving behind her enviro suit hood’s faceplate as she subvocalized to her comp. “What’re you doing?” Iridian yelled over the wind.

  “Somebody pushed me,” shouted Adda. A glimpse of very short black hair in the crowd behind her told Iridian that the somebody was the secessionist sergeant.

  A string of orange lights ripped off the ceiling and blew into the bunkhouse, leaving the hallway in shadow. Several people carried the palm weapons the welcoming party had held when she and Adda had arrived on-station. According to Chato, their cobbled-together “palmers” required a battery for power and overheated easily, but they didn’t punch holes in the hull. All she had to watch out for was getting shot in the back.

  Captain Sloane and a large male ZV ran out of the mess hall, carrying a table between them. The additions to the crowded hallway made Kaskade, who’d almost gained her footing, fall against the shield on the other side of Iridian from Adda. As the captain approached, Iridian shoved Adda and Kaskade back into the crowd, then threw herself to one side and took the shield with her. The metal table Sloane and the ZV carried clanged into place vertically over the bunkhouse doorway.

  The wind died. Blue dust drifted straight down over Sloane’s crew. Chef stood in the mess hall doorway and sobbed. The ZVs stared, stunned, at the upturned table.

  Captain Sloane straightened the gold shirt, now streaked with blue dust, and surveyed the miserable crew. “Sturm, Iridian, get a torch and some scrap and weld this on.”

  “What about Xing and Alexov and Kimmy?” Pel asked from the common room, his voice a higher pitch than usual.

  Adda stood, but before she could make her way through the crowd to him, Rio, the biggest spacefarer Iridian had ever seen, enveloped him in her massive muscled arms and pulled him against her ZV shirt in a sympathetic embrace. “They’re gone, Pel Mel. They’re gone.” Rio’s voice broke over the last word.

  Iridian rotated her arm front to back, elbow bent to minimize the chances of breaking a nose in the crowded hall. Now that her adrenaline level was dropping, her shoulder hurt. This was why the military put shields on twenty-one-ton mechanized Infantry Shield Vehicles instead of relying on human joints.

  She twisted her wrist to collapse the shield, grateful for all the design time she’d spent on the frame. The lowest-bid model given to government infantry everywhere was impossible to deploy and stow quickly. Cheapness got people killed, but her mech-ex graphene design had saved Adda and Kaskade today. Iridian ought to have earned some points
with the crew for that.

  “Gods . . .” What else could she say?

  The pirates around her nodded. “At least there weren’t any spiderbots,” the ZV medic, Zikri, said. “We’d have been real well fucked then.”

  She’d never expected this to be a safe job, but she did expect more warning before shit went down. Whatever surveillance system the crew had in place should’ve seen this coming, so clearly she couldn’t count on it. Perched in this ramshackle base on the outside of the station, the pirates were exposed and unprepared. She followed Sturm to the common room and his workshop.

  Pel had claimed that they were safe from drones on base. “Does this happen often?” she asked Sturm.

  He shook his head. “They stay in the station. Never had a drone hit the base before.”

  “So it was definitely one of AegiSKADA’s drones?” Iridian asked.

  “If we had ordinance that could do that, or anything else volatile, for that matter, we wouldn’t store it where people sleep.” Emotion roughened Sturm’s voice as he answered, and he didn’t say any more.

  Sturm stacked pieces of scrap metal into Iridian’s arms, adding rhythm to enraged screaming from the corridor. The screamer’s masculine voice was deeper than Pel’s. Several pirates loudly lamented the loss. After spending so long in such tight quarters, people made close friends. And losing an infant, one of only two children this crew had with them . . . She couldn’t imagine that pain.

  After that kind of loss, she expected to feel inspired to protect the pirates, the way she had when her convoys passed habitats on mined roads. Those people didn’t deserve to be trapped in their habs, afraid to cross the street because part of it might explode. The Shieldrunners disarmed the bombs so military vehicles could pass safely, but knowing the locals could move without fear confirmed that Iridian’s unit was in the right place, doing the right thing. She’d loved that.