That led to a different flurry of activity. Sturm turned to Iridian and Adda. “Are you two on a team yet?”
“Team?” Iridian asked.
“Repair crew. We don’t seal this place tight before we apply radiation shielding, there’s no point.” Sturm pointed at Si Po, also emerging from the bunkhouse hallway. “You go with him, his welds are terrible. You . . .” He peered at Adda. “What can you do with hab repairs?”
“Um . . . read meters?” Adda suggested.
“You’re with Pel.” Sturm strode off to coordinate the others.
Iridian kissed Adda on the cheek. “You’ll be fine, just follow his lead.”
Adda nodded, and Iridian secured her girlfriend’s hood over her head. Defeating the AI was a long game to play. If she and Adda didn’t make some gains with the crew soon, they couldn’t count on support from them later. Sergeant Natani would argue against them whenever they weren’t in the room. Preventing radiation poisoning seemed as good a place to gain regard as any. It was about time they came up against a problem Iridian could do something about.
Si Po smiled cautiously and waited for Iridian to reach him. “We’re zone three,” he said, as if that meant something to her.
“Hey, what pronouns do you use when you’re talking about Captain Sloane?”
Si Po shot an incredulous look at her from beneath his veil of hair. “Captain.”
“Fair enough.”
They went back around to the room with the wall projector, printer, and console. It was the other room most likely to share a wall with the destroyed bunkhouse. The way these modules fit together, she’d have to walk back and forth between the two rooms a few times to confirm that.
A couple of ZV guys, one called Vick and a shorter guy with pale blond hair whose name Iridian didn’t know, were already inside. They directed mocking grins at Si Po. “ ‘Oy, where were you hiding this time?” Vick asked him. Si Po crossed to the console and methodically checked it for damage while the ZVs closed in on him.
“What are we supposed to be doing here?” Iridian snapped.
Both ZVs focused on her. “We check the seams on the walls and corners. Then we do the same thing in the bunkhouse,” said Vick.
“Great. I’ll take this wall.” Iridian approached one and tilted her head to track the source of a faint whistling. It could’ve been a compressor in the wall, or in her imagination. But that was what stupid spacefarers said right before they asphyxiated. In her peripheral vision, the other two looked the wall over as well. Vick held a comp glove palm up to the wall, diagnostics flickering across the back of his hand.
This wall’s variable density and slight bend were less pronounced than the wall that the window was projected on, but both were beyond what the average architect would select. More detailed inspection revealed the wall to be another salvaged ship’s bulkhead.
“Ah, shit, this corner is coming up again,” said the quieter ZV.
Iridian and the others stood behind Vick to see his comp glove readout while he scanned it. “Of course it is,” said Iridian. “Look at that joint. You’ve got to reseal that.”
The ZVs and Si Po gaped at her like she had said it in spacefarer cant. She knew she hadn’t, because cant had more specific terms for shoddy construction. “What joint?” Si Po asked.
Iridian pointed, assessed one blank stare after another, and crouched to point at where the wall and floor met. “Right here.” She laid her finger on the floor near the source of the whistling. It felt several degrees cooler than room temperature. “And it’s not insulated. Who’s got the insulation?” More blank expressions. “Get Sturm. Please.”
Vick shoved Si Po toward the door. “And some sealant!” Iridian called after him. Sturm should’ve split the ground pounders between multiple repair teams. Judging from the crew’s speech patterns and accents, there weren’t many spacefarers among them. Right before the whole base was enveloped in radioactive waste was a shit time to fix maintenance issues that they should’ve been searching out daily. They sure as hell had the time for it.
Yet another muscle-bound white guy with yet another ZV shirt walked in. This one wore a hat with a brim in a vaguely military style instead of the hooded jackets the other ZVs favored. The cap helped her recognize him as one of the ZVs who hung around Sergeant Natani. As Iridian understood it from Chato, this guy was the only member of Natani’s squad who spent a lot of time with her and wasn’t in her fireteam, the subgroup squads broke into when tactics required units of three or four soldiers instead of the full squad complement.
The man’s wide shoulders, combined with the pressurized tank and hose strapped to his back and the gas mask he wore, seemed to take up most of the small room. “Putting on another layer of blue,” he said in a surprisingly soft voice. He sprayed a strip of the wall they had inspected with the same blue dust that fell off the ceiling. The freshly applied stuff stuck to the wall like paint.
“Whoa, wait, we have to repair that.” Iridian backed away with her hand over her mouth and nose.
The other two ZVs put themselves between her and the one with the spray, like she was about to rush him. The one in the mask stood calmly where he was and said, “Got it. You done the bunkhouse yet?”
“No, so don’t spray that either, please,” she said. “Pel said that blue stuff deflects radiation?”
The big guy nodded, which waved the canister on the front of the gas mask up and down. “It’s a lead compound. The blue turns brown when it wears out. We don’t have primer for it, so it falls off before then. I’m Six, by the way. That’s my name.” He took off his hat and thwacked the fabric against his thigh, creating a small cloud of blue dust. As he put it back on his head he gave her a shallow bow, which she managed to return without too wide a smile.
“Six?” she couldn’t help asking.
The big guy shrugged. “Mom had five kids and ran out of ideas.” He grinned at the other pirates’ laughter at the explanation, although this couldn’t have been the first time they’d heard it. “Later.” So, there were reasonable and competent people on the crew after all. Good.
Iridian’s team locked the wall joint in place and flagged it with a disposable projector before moving on. The projector lit the uninsulated area red, so Sturm couldn’t miss it. Now that Iridian had proved she could tell when the ZVs didn’t know how to do a job right, they left her to work and gave Si Po a hard time instead.
By the time she’d finished the computer room and started on the bunkhouse, Vick and the other ZV, Nils, were bored enough to fetch her tools and supplies. Six followed them, spraying down what they shored up. The ceiling and external walls got a second coat of blue stuff.
She met Sturm in the common room. “We’re set.” She walked him back to the resealed wall joint and a couple of other spots in the bunkhouse. Even though his lips pulled down at the corners, she got the impression that was his smile. “Not bad, not bad. Come with me to look at the others.”
Tritheist’s repair team had left only one area vulnerable. Sturm and Iridian corrected the missed damage. After they finished with the third team of Adda, Pel, and the captain (no errors from the captain’s team, thank all the gods), Sturm let her do the inspections requiring crawling, crouching, and climbing on things, which were most of them.
“Sir, could you take a look at Adda’s tank?” Iridian asked. Judging by the rest of the base, Sturm wasn’t exactly a perfectionist. Still, another set of informed eyes on the structure couldn’t hurt. “The enviro’s okay, but it moves when you walk around in there.”
Sturm made eye contact with the captain and received an approving nod. “Sure.”
“This little installation has taught me so much about space structural design,” he said. Adda scuttled ahead of them, escaping the larger group. “It is pressurized armor, but bigger. You know, we only have atmo for about twenty. Or we did have, before the bunkhouse went. Hard to say how much is left now, and we’re not siphoning much from the station. Sorry about you
r friend, but Sloane put him down to save atmo for people we want to live with.”
If atmo had been the only concern, Captain Sloane would’ve just sent Reis to the fugee camp, which was what’d happen to Adda and Iridian unless they stayed useful. Reis’s death almost certainly had more to do with Sloane defending the crew, either by killing someone dumb enough to threaten them with a knife or by reducing the number of people who’d seen the crew’s sorry state on the station. The incredulity showed on Iridian’s face, but all she said was, “Reis wasn’t our friend. Just a business partner.”
She resisted the unnecessarily deep breaths atmo consciousness could cause. When Pel finally told Sloane they were on their way, he hadn’t talked Reis’s skills up to Captain Sloane the way he had Adda’s and Iridian’s. So Reis was dead, and Iridian and Adda were as close to safe as they were likely to get on Barbary Station.
Thank all the gods Captain Sloane had decided the crew could use two new engineers, not just one. The maintenance issues, collapsing station infrastructure, and lack of a nanorepair culture to fix things without human assistance were points in Iridian’s favor. While Adda made progress against the AI, Iridian would keep looking for opportunities to ensure the crew’s continued safety. But first, Adda needed a safe place to work.
Sturm followed Adda down the ladder to the tank. The push lights illuminated the man’s frown. “The air here . . .”
“Not a lot of pull through the holes, I know,” Iridian said. Adda stood next to one of the lamps on the wall, subvocalizing to her comp. She was listening, most likely, even though she pretended not to.
“Something else . . .” He stilled between each step, like he was waiting for something to give way. When the whole structure swayed and creaked, he pressed back against the wall with her and Adda. “I’d find out how this is secured, if I were you.”
Iridian nodded, her breath picking up with low-grade panic. If Sturm thought this place was dangerous, the situation was worse than she’d thought. “How loose would you say it is?”
Sturm shrugged. “Would’ve been fine if we left it empty. This amount of walking around, though . . .” He looked Iridian over, scratching his stubbled jaw with two fingers. “Sorry about the rush with the radiation. We’ve got enough water circulating through this installation to shield us from anything short of a whole generator going up, combined with that spray-on lining. A bit of panic’s the only way to get these ZV people to pitch in on repairs without fuss. Captain Sloane’s idea. Come to the workshop. I believe I have something you’ll like.”
“Babe, we could set you up in the room with the comp console,” Iridian said. In the comp room Adda would be closer to everybody else, and Iridian could keep better track of how she was handling her workspaces. Also, the comp room couldn’t fall multiple stories into an AI-infested station.
“No, I like it here. It’s quiet.” Structural insecurity bothered Adda less than social insecurity. The way she preferred to be alone in silence was beyond comprehension. Five minutes of that made Iridian feel like the atmo pumps had stalled and she was suffocating.
In Sturm’s workshop, the air moved better. Pieces of armor in various states of repair hung neatly around the walls, alongside diagnostic and repair tools. The workshop was as compact and consolidated as any spacefarer could wish for, although the enormous overhead light was overkill. “So you’re not the handyman around here, you’re the armorer,” Iridian said.
“That I am. The ZV Group keeps me well occupied. Here.” He pointed out an armored suit hanging on the wall. Iridian hefted it by the shoulders while Sturm plugged in a tester. The exoskeleton actuators moved like they’d been restored to practically new condition. The rest of the suit bore the dents, scuffs, and scorch marks of combat.
“Are you trained in pressurized armor, by chance?” Sturm asked. When Iridian nodded, he said, “I haven’t tested it since I finished working on it, but it pressurizes at about ninety percent optimal. The ZV Group brought me enough pieces to put this one together, but we haven’t salvaged any working suits whole. Our luck, the AI dragged them off to wherever it takes the dead. We keep hoping the fugees will go looking, but they value their lives more than that.”
“The ZVs do too, yeah?” Iridian asked quietly. Nobody in the common room reacted, so they must not have heard.
Sturm snorted. “Outside their contract, they say. A few of them who aren’t armored now are wishing they were, but the major doesn’t think it’s urgent. He’s holding out for me or Tritheist to risk our lungs on it. Captain Sloane doesn’t think it’s urgent either, or one of us would have orders to deal with it.”
The boots were small enough to leave blisters, but big enough to cram her feet in. She met Sturm’s eyes and grinned. Finally, her kind of job, and something useful for her to do while Adda worked. “I’ll test it for you while I secure Adda’s tank, if the rad shielding’s good and you have a patch kit.”
“The shielding is good.” He nodded gravely and handed her a pocket-size patch kit, still sealed. “If you’re going out to the surface, I have a list of things to check, but watch yourself. We’ve lost people out there.”
And Iridian wouldn’t lose Adda to Sloane’s crew’s shoddy maintenance. In a makeshift hab like this, that was suicidal. “Sure, give me the list and the tools. There’s got to be something stopping AegiSKADA from blowing you all up, or it would’ve done it already. Maybe I’ll find that out too.” That’d give Adda insight into what AegiSKADA was after, if not the death of every pirate it could reach. And it’d highlight the benefits of having a fit, fearless engineer like herself onboard.
In the corner of the workshop hidden from the common room, Iridian stripped off her sweatshirt, shirt, and pants. Sturm held the armor while she squeezed into it piece by piece, without oil, thank all the gods. The helmet’s antiseptic odor wrinkled her nose, so the air filter was clean enough. No heads-up display. She sighed. The tool compartments opened and locked, at least, so she wouldn’t have to haul Sturm’s equipment around in a box.
As she stepped out of the workspace, the rattling door interrupted Pel and the ZVs sorting repair tools from the different teams. “Who’s that in the suit?” asked Pel. He inclined his head, like something in the sound would explain.
“It’s Iridian.” She raised her voice to let the pirates hear who was about to do them a big-ass favor, since the helmet’s face projector wasn’t working. The suit chafed her armpits and ankles. “Fixing some things outside for Sturm and testing the seals on this armor. Let Adda know where I am if she’s looking, yeah?” Using sight words around Pel felt awkward, although not as awkward as the argument with Adda she’d have to wade through if Iridian told her what she was doing before she left. Iridian could win the argument, or she could be out and back before Adda came out of her tank.
“Be careful.” Pel seemed too stunned by the idea of going outside to be insulted by colloquialisms.
“Yeah, we don’t have much of that armor left,” said a ZV.
Sturm led her to the path through the wall and all the way to the docking bay. Once they emerged from the corner exit into the bay, they kept near the wall. Sturm paused and examined the suit again. “You’re not carrying any weapons, are you?”
“Not at the moment,” said Iridian. “Knives don’t hurt bots.”
“Truth.” Sturm walked toward the docking bay’s exit, and Iridian hurried to keep up. “AegiSKADA will track you down fast if you carry anything sharp out of the bay.”
Reis’s body no longer lay on the landing pad. The pirates claimed that bodies that didn’t get dragged off somewhere were often booby-trapped with explosives, and they usually left the dead where they fell. The fugees never ventured this far out of their own territory. AegiSKADA must’ve done something with him. The inoperative faceplate projector in Iridian’s helmet hid her grimace. What an AI might do with a dead man was a question for Adda, but Iridian didn’t intend to ask. Adda had bigger problems to solve, and Iridian had enough nightmar
es without that particular question’s answer.
Sturm stopped at a large, closed hatch marked MAINTENANCE AIRLOCK. He held his comp glove to the door and the lock lit green. The red had apparently burned out. “You all right coming back on your own?”
“Sure, it’s a straight line and a ladder. Is that thing going to open for my comp?”
Sturm prodded his for a moment, held it up to the door again, and then waved between Iridian’s comp glove and the door to get her to do the same. The green light came back on. “It will now,” said Sturm. Iridian shook her head in mute amazement that he hadn’t thought of that before she mentioned it.
The docking bay depressurization lights lit and an alarm whooped. She and Sturm barely jumped at all. Now that she was listening for them, the base’s vents slamming shut became one less thing to worry about. Funny, the shit you got used to.
He smiled, the biggest show of emotion she’d seen from the man since she arrived. “I can’t tell you how glad I am that the exterior work is getting done.” He headed back to the path between the walls, turning his head left and right every other step in search of drones.
Iridian entered the airlock and started its cycle, which also activated the elevator that’d take her up to the station’s inner ring, level with the pirates’ base. Shieldrunner training included a sim on extravehicular repair in vac, but she’d never done it for real. Meticulously labeled controls and monitors lined the wall beside the door, and the airlock itself had space for about two people or a person and a mobile tool chest. Consequences of a mistake could be nasty, but it was still exciting to apply what she’d learned. “The crew’ll damn well appreciate having us around after this,” she muttered. The airlock finished cycling, and she stepped out.
The windowless base made her forget just how fast Barbary Station moved. The airlock opened near the edge of the inner ring. The station spun her around a floating module in its center at over two hundred meters per second, creating the hypergrav that secured her to the hull more firmly than most other stations she’d been on.
Barbary Station Page 13
