“All the tall one’s done is talk,” Sergeant Natani said. “Talks to Chef, talks to us, talks to everyone. And who knows what—Adda, did you call her?—does down there in that hole. Creepy, that’s what she is, and she led AegiSKADA right to us.”
Tritheist sighed. “The captain still thinks they can do something to get us out of here.”
“The second they can’t, I’ll throw them in the recycler myself.”
Oh. Adda swallowed hard and backed toward her tank, staying near the wall so the hollow space beneath the middle of the hall wouldn’t thump under her feet. The pirates didn’t trust them yet, she’d known that. But they also couldn’t see the progress she’d made with the biometrics monitoring system. Without that, they might think her interactions with AegiSKADA were causing more short-term harm than long-term good. These two, at least, were just waiting for clearance to execute her.
CHAPTER 8
Charges Accrued: Extravehicular Repair without a License
In the tank’s dim light, Iridian seethed as Adda reached the end of her account. Sure, the crew hadn’t asked for help until she and Adda landed in their docking bay, and even then only Captain Sloane had asked. This crew would follow their superior’s orders while disagreeing with them. But Adda and Iridian were approaching the AI problem in ways the pirates hadn’t even considered. Maybe they were scaring these people, who’d already survived so much. It would’ve been rational for the crew to support any attempt to free them, but fear was rarely rational.
From the stories they told, the pirates had tried every crazy escape route they could think of when they first crashed on the station. Dwindling numbers and the change in leadership must’ve made them unwilling to risk more people. So of course she and Adda had made enemies by taking risks they wouldn’t, pushing the AI until it pushed back. Perhaps that was why Sloane had given Adda and Iridian the assignment. The regular crew had done all they could.
Two influential officers plotting where they were bound to be overheard was a bad sign. Realities of station life offered plenty of “accidental” ways to die, even without a murderous AI in control. And pirates would rather ask forgiveness than permission. From what Adda had overheard, Sloane’s belief in her abilities was what was standing between her and one of those accidents.
Now Adda lay in the generator, frowning and blinking and squirming like she did when her consciousness kept slipping out of her workspace. The damned idiot officers had frightened her too much to do the job Captain Sloane had given her.
Whatever the pirates’ intentions, they’d have to go through Iridian. They’d learn not to charge a Shieldrunner. Her lips twitched up at how long it’d been since she’d put that old challenge into practice. What’s a Shieldrunner with no ISV and no room to run?
In the generator, Adda’s head thumped against the floor. Iridian pulled one of the opening flaps aside to check for signs of a seizure. Adda lay still, and the blush creeping up her neck suggested she’d just been frustrated enough to bang her head on something. Iridian smiled gently. “Energy consumption can be tricky to map, even in small systems. Want to talk it through?”
Adda raised one hand partway off the floor with her eyes still closed, which was Iridian’s invitation to crawl into the generator with her. “Competing theories,” Adda murmured.
“About power draw?”
Adda’s head twitched side to side. “AegiSKADA is so . . . AI-strange. Not human-strange.” Adda drew in a long breath and let it out just as slowly. For the moment, she was giving up on maintaining a workspace. “HarborMaster is unsupervised but doing exactly what you expect it to. So it’s safer to try to get into. All obvious protocol, its behavior. Few obvious protocols for AegiSKADA, but a lot of action. With extensive data collection, you’d expect more action.”
The drugs Adda took to help her concentrate would be running through her system and filling her conversation with non sequiturs for the next hour, but Iridian had found a comfortable position in the generator, so she might as well stay. It didn’t sound like this was about the threats Adda had overheard after all. “So HarborMaster’s normal, but AegiSKADA’s weird.”
“Weird for unsupervised AI.” Adda’s breathing slowed to a long, loud pull into her lungs. Since her face wasn’t turning blue, she was probably fine, but the drugs messed with her respiration. “We assume complete lack of supervision. What about partial?”
“How do you partially supervise an AI?”
“Only give it feedback some of the time. Or sometimes it accepts your suggestion, sometimes not. So in certain conditions the intelligence takes more action than in others.” Adda’s volume faded as she established another workspace. “This should show spikes in sensor activation and power draws to drone bays. Now, who? Who can, who would? Wait, let me put you in.”
It’d take Adda a few seconds to create a version of Iridian in the workspace that’d correspond to Iridian’s real voice beside her. Iridian lacked the implanted hardware to see a workspace the way Adda did, but an avatar of Iridian in the virtual environment helped Adda multitask. Without the avatar, talking out loud could pull Adda out of her workspace, and whatever hallucinographic experiences she had in there tended to make her lose track of real-world conversations.
After a few seconds of silence, Iridian said, “Are we really asking if someone is making AegiSKADA do this to people?”
“Do some things, to some people,” said Adda. “The medical team and pilots have no reason to. Same with the pirates. We saw them after the attack. If one of them had any responsibility for it, they’d have . . . reacted noticeably. I think. I did.”
“Blame the enemy, not yourself.” Iridian held her tighter, even though Adda had calmed down enough to lie still. That was good, in terms of her ability to stay connected to a workspace. But pushing somebody toward a hull breech was a pretty fucking noticeable reaction. “You could blame Sergeant Natani, too.”
“Natani lacks the expertise, and she has personal reasons to hate us.” Adda sounded confident about both assessments. “One of the refugees may have the knowledge, software, and hardware required to communicate with AegiSKADA like its supervisor did. Or the lieutenant might know how.”
“Tritheist?”
“No. Map first.”
Iridian crawled out of the generator. Although she couldn’t help Adda wrestle her subconscious into mapping the station’s energy consumption, Iridian could protect her against physical threats. Or she could if she had more information.
In the mess hall, Iridian leaned one shoulder on a rounded chunk of emergency bulkhead that half hid the cupboard and waited until Chef noticed her standing there. Chef moved like a spacefarer. It was hard to tell which side she might’ve backed during the war, but she’d understand the problem, at least. “Hey, Chef, I need your help with something.”
“Sure, what?”
“The sergeant with the short hair and the tight ZV shirt . . .” Iridian drew her fingers across the side of her head, pantomiming Natani’s recognizable scar. “She’s treating Adda and me like a stand-in for the whole NEU. Can you tell me anything that’d help me get her to back off? Maybe something she needs done that I could do? We don’t have to like each other, but we don’t have to stab each other either.”
“Okay, no.” Chef set a package of noodles on the counter/bar and turned sideways, creating room for Iridian to stand in the narrow space. Iridian turned her shoulders to parallel Chef’s, accepting the offered half meter so they could converse quietly while Chef worked. Iridian had spent too much time communicating in the precise body language of spacefarers in confined habitats to forget it after a few years on Earth. “I’ll tell you what I told Pel when he talked about messing with Sergeant Natani,” said Chef. “When we first crashed here, she beat a guy half to death for singing the NEU anthem after his Earther buddy was killed. You just being here is pissing her off, and you do not want to do that.”
“No, you’re right, I don’t,” Iridian said. “What I wa
nt is for her to let me and Adda work so we can all get off this damned station together. Adda’s making good progress, and I don’t want to worry about her every time I don’t know where the sergeant is. Since we can’t leave base, what can we do?”
“So you’re already on her shit list.” Chef tilted her face toward the ceiling, like somebody up there might have extra patience to loan her. “Sergeant Natani’s killed enough people that when something’s wrong, murder is the first fix she comes up with.”
“What’s wrong is the gods-damned AI out there.” Iridian pointed diagonally down toward the rest of the station, just short of jamming her finger into a burner on the stove. “If she wants to kill AegiSKADA, sign me up. I came here to make money, not to sit around this little base fighting battles we all fought years ago.”
She heaved an aggravated sigh and visualized her anger blowing away with it. Any soldier would feel the same way in this situation, once they recognized it for what it was. Maybe all she had to do was show Natani that.
Before Iridian left to track the sergeant down and deliver an explanation, Adda walked into the mess hall. Her eyes were slightly out of focus, and her hood hung in a lump against the back of her neck. Blue flecks speckled her head and chest. “Where is the lieutenant?”
“Tritheist is in the captain’s room,” Chef said. “Wouldn’t interrupt them.”
“Not him, the one from before,” said Adda. “The one from when you first crashed.”
“Oh, Blackguardly Jack, you mean.” Chef went back to opening packaged food.
Adda focused on Chef, opened her mouth, blinked a few times, and closed it. That fish face was Iridian’s signal to assemble the facts for Adda’s perusal. “Who’s Blackguardly Jack?”
“The lieutenant before Tritheist, like she said.” Chef set a large pan on the stovetop. “Used to be Jack and Lieutenant Sloane under Captain Foster’s command. Sloane hired me. Hiring’s always been part of the lieutenant job, I hear. Dunno the rest. I had to let ’em half starve on emergency rations before they started treating me like crew.”
“I think Blackguardly Jack’s alive.” Adda spoke to Iridian and flicked a shy glance at Chef. There was no point in encouraging Adda to talk to others while she had workspace brain. “My comp is still connecting the vid clips, but it’s got a couple of seconds of . . . Well, look.”
She held out her glove and activated its projector. Chef leaned over her prep area on the counter to watch. The clip was less than a second long. The glove’s tiny speaker emitted a crackling blast that overwhelmed the mics that recorded it. In the vid, a man took a running step out of a doorway. The back of his armor trailed molten metal composite.
“That’s the missing LT? He’s two seconds away from serious spinal damage.” Iridian pointed at the disintegrating armor. “How do you figure he survived?”
“I can’t say for sure.” Adda bit her lip and stared at the projection. “Nobody else exited the control room, which means he knows more about it than anybody here. Maybe the first captain just led him there to smash things, or maybe they were pursuing an option we haven’t discovered. He might even be . . . Well, I wouldn’t say controlling it, but—”
“He’s what?” From Chef’s expression, Adda could’ve just said he was a vampire using mind control on the AI. “You mean he’s talking to AegiSKADA and telling it to come after us? And it’s doing what he says?”
“No, she doesn’t mean that,” said Iridian. Adda flinched. “Wait, do you?”
Adda inhaled a long breath and said in a rush, “Sloane’s some kind of software specialist, from what I’ve read, and Tritheist’s expertise seems to be mechanical. It follows that as the first captain’s lieutenant, Blackguardly Jack had a technical specialty too. Correct?”
“Something about shipboard security. All the crew who aren’t ZVs were hired on for that. Well, except me and Sturm.” Chef shrugged. “Sounded technical, sure.”
“So he might’ve had the know-how to guide an AI without being its supervisor.” Iridian looked back to Adda. “Partial supervision like you said, yeah? But is he talking to AegiSKADA directly, without an interface? He’d have to hate the crew to take that big a risk sending an AI after us. And he’d have had to start talking to it when the crew first crashed here, since it killing people was why he left base.”
“It did take a few souls when we arrived, but it picked up the pace after that.” Chef hummed thoughtfully at the repeating vid on Adda’s comp. “He didn’t want to go with Captain Foster to hit AegiSKADA’s core. Said that’d be suicide. Captain Foster said she’d kill him slow if he didn’t follow her orders, and Sloane backed her up. Fast.”
“AegiSKADA wasn’t always so single-mindedly against the pirates that it almost ignores the refugees,” said Adda. “I listened to the archived refugee newsfeed. Three years ago, when the refugees first arrived, AegiSKADA attacked them regularly, sometimes more than once a day. A lot of them died.” Chef nodded confirmation.
“But now all those refugees live in a docking bay AegiSKADA controls,” Iridian pointed out.
“Because the docking bays are associated with security protocols to allow travelers . . .” Adda trailed off, staring at the freeze-frame of Blackguardly Jack. “There would be fewer decision points making the pirates preferential targets if someone with a grudge against Captain Sloane has been providing AegiSKADA with targeting priorities for the past year.”
While Adda and Iridian had been working on their final projects to earn their degrees, Sloane’s crew had been in a fight to the death with an armed AI. Iridian shuddered. “So Blackguardly Jack was hired on for skills that’d help him point the killer AI at the crew who got him hurt. And now, what, he also hits the fugees every once in a while to hide what he’s up to? That’s fucking disgusting.”
“It’s possible, with the correct equipment and privacy, for him to communicate with AegiSKADA without anyone discovering him. And isolated attacks on the refugee camp would disguise his true intent.” Adda looked guiltily over at Chef, then back to Iridian.
Iridian shrugged. “We won’t know until we ask him.”
Chef shook her head like Adda and everything that came out of her mouth was confounding. A surly white ZV guy named Vick came in with Nitro, the other woman on Sergeant Natani’s squad, to get food. Iridian led Adda out.
ZV black and yellow surrounded Natani in the common room. If Iridian could convince her that they were at least an equal threat to each other, and that they shared the goal of getting rid of AegiSKADA and leaving the station, maybe that’d stop hostilities before they got worse. The sergeant’s eyes met Iridian’s from under her black hood, and whatever the pirates had been saying before got a lot less funny, judging by the look on her face.
The wall beside Iridian split open, and it took her a long, breathless moment to remember that it was supposed to. Sturm shoved the concealed workshop door farther open as he came through. “Radiation surge,” he bellowed loudly enough to carry throughout the small base. “Generator Four is venting again. D-MOG tabs, everyone!”
The people in the common room started collecting their things, ending conversations, and popping pills while Sturm shouted the same message into the galley and down the hall toward the head. It wasn’t quite an emergency, but the ZVs moved with purpose. Sergeant Natani broke her glare at Iridian to prepare with the others. Iridian turned away too, looking for someone friendly who’d share their D-MOG tablets. It was as civil as she and the sergeant were likely to get, for the moment.
“What about the water?” a ZV guy asked.
“The storage tanks should soak up the worst of it, but do you want to risk your dick for ‘should?’ ” Major O.D. shouted at the ZV. “Shore up.” Sturm headed for the captain’s quarters.
Pel emerged from the other bunkhouse, yawning. “What’s the ruckus?”
“Generator Four’s venting again,” said a ZV heading for the bunkhouse.
Pel turned his head from side to side. “Where’s Adda?�
��
“Here,” she called loudly enough to carry over the noise. Iridian grasped Pel’s wrist when he came in range, and he let her guide him to Adda.
After patting down his pockets, he extracted a small case from one. He shook three bright yellow tablets into his hand. His fingertips poked Iridian in the boob when he held them out. “Oops, sorry. But take one. Doesn’t stop you getting sick, but it does make you feel better faster once you’re clear. Hell, take the pack.” He dropped the case on the pills in his palm and Iridian pocketed it. “I’ll get another from Zikri.”
As they dry-swallowed the pills, Sturm reappeared with a meter strapped to the side of his comp glove. Captain Sloane and one of the ZVs, Tabs, walked behind him, and Tabs was still pulling her shirt on. The captain really did like to keep people guessing. Whatever works for . . . them? She’d have to ask about preferred pronouns. Tabs winked at Iridian as she walked past to join the soldiers congregating in the common room near the entryway.
“I thought this place spun on LFTRs.” Iridian pronounced the acronym like more than one lifter, and smiled at Adda’s disapproving frown over the unnecessary abbreviation. Properly applied nuclear power generation was worth some good cheer too. Iridian loved it when designers selected safer, low-waste systems over those easily explained to investors.
“The older liquid thorium reactors vent into space in worst-case scenarios,” Adda said. “There’s not supposed to be anybody out here.”
“And the hull’s plenty of shielding for a little radioactive salt, except we’re on top of the gods-damned hull.” Iridian ran her hand over the fuzz of hair growing on her scalp. She’d forgotten to track down a razor, and there didn’t seem to be any chemical components among the crew’s printer parts and material.
“No evacuation,” Captain Sloane announced. “We repair, insulate, and decontaminate.” If the choice was between that and an unstable station full of AI-directed killer robots, Iridian would risk the radiation exposure any day.
Barbary Station Page 12
