Williams’s glove clapped against the sleeve of Tiwari’s suit when she gripped his arm. Anything else Tiwari was thinking of saying stayed unsaid. After another few seconds of silence, Williams said, “Your docking bay is across.”
“Yeah.” Iridian was still wrapping her mind around the fact that somebody had chosen to put a missile right here, when there’d been three colony ships, an ITA cruiser, and a dozen small secessionist fighters all within a few thousand klicks of stationspace. “Who did this? Which side?” The docs just stared, then started walking toward the pirates’ docking bay.
The impact site was almost out of view around the curving walls when a soft scraping made Iridian glance over her shoulder. A single tile, poised at the hole’s edge since the war and undisturbed by the med team’s passage, slid over and clattered on a lower floor. The med team stopped walking as one, in time to catch the last two skittering steps of something in the dust and shadow behind them.
CHAPTER 9
Charges Accrued: Misprision of Felony
Adda’s comp was playing Iridian’s voice, volume up as loud as it would go so Adda wouldn’t miss it. “Adda, babe, pick up.”
She was curled over the table, wrist near her chest as if defending her glove from thieves. The mug by her elbow got nudged a few centimeters when she jumped, sloshing lukewarm coffee onto the table. The other people in the kitchen stared at her. Pel’s arm around her shoulders helped her ignore them. For once the hood hiding her face was convenient. “Where have you been?” she said into her comp’s mic. The comp’s clock showed that it’d been over two hours since Iridian had last checked in. “Are you hurt?”
“No, I’m good and I’m almost there. Just want to make sure the door opens, because something’s following me.”
A chill shivered down Adda’s arms and thighs. She should have known human activity on the station’s outer hull, near the compound, would draw unwanted attention from a security AI, despite Iridian’s minimal radio contact. “What kind of something?”
For a second only Iridian’s footsteps and her labored breath sounded through the comp’s speaker. The mic was close to her mouth. She must have kept her helmet on when she returned to station atmo. “It’s on little legs. Thought I lost it at the docking bay doors, but it’s still back there.”
“Spiderbot,” Pel said quietly. The others around them, who apparently had nothing better to do than listen in, swore in various languages. One ZV stood and left the room at a fast walk.
“Did you get that?” Adda said to her comp.
“No, what?”
Adda repeated Pel’s assessment. Breath carried over the mic for a moment; then Iridian huffed out the laugh she used to hide painful memories. “Attacos, they’re called,” Iridian said. “One hundred or two hundred series, since I can hear it. I like ‘spiderbots,’ though. Give me a minute to find the one following me.”
Adda drew a breath to argue, but stopped herself. AegiSKADA might not know what was in the wall passage, though the intelligence quantified the pirates’ travels through it. A tiny drone with a cam could follow Iridian through the hatch and map the compound to the millimeter, but that would be a highly creative approach for an unsupervised intelligence.
Unless somebody who knew both AegiSKADA’s abilities and the pirate compound’s layout was directing it after all. Somebody like the missing lieutenant. A partially supervised intelligence, one taking suggestions but not obeying every order, could do this with alarming efficiency. Whatever the spider drone and whoever was behind it were capable of, it’d be better if Iridian destroyed it.
Chato poked his head through the doorway. “Nils said Iridian found a spiderbot. Where?”
The other lieutenant could have told AegiSKADA that the passage between the hulls was too narrow for large drones. “I think it followed her into the hole in the docking bay wall,” Adda said.
Chato disappeared back into the hall and yelled, “Code Yellow, people! Pass it on and gear up!” Several ZV soldiers ran past, some in the direction of the bunkhouse and some toward the common room. The kitchen cleared of everyone but herself, Pel, and Chef.
Heavy footsteps preceded Chato in the bottom half of an armor suit. One glove covered his comp. In his other hand he carried one of the ZVs’ handheld weapons. “Down in the station, if you see a little one, you’ll be seeing big ones in a few minutes. We usually run back here when we see them, so this? This is bad.”
More than one drone like whatever AegiSKADA had sent to blow up the bunkhouse and Xing’s family would be a major problem. Suddenly every movement in Adda’s peripheral vision looked like spiderbots heralding another attack. When she focused on the motion, it was the ZVs arming themselves for battle.
“I’m getting the major,” said Chato.
He left past Captain Sloane. The captain carried a palm weapon and wore a full black-and-gold armored suit like something in a comic. The open faceplate looked like the only vulnerable part. “Adda, you’ll join me. Pel, please stay here with Chef.” The captain handed the woman another palm weapon.
“Don’t worry.” Pel gave Adda a quick hug. Even though he was taller than her, in her arms he was still the boy she’d grown up with. “The ZVs will stop the drones before they get within crawling distance of us.” Although Pel never prioritized safety as highly as he should, he did have a point with the number of potential targets between the drones and him. Adda followed the captain out of the kitchen.
“Will he be all right in there?” she asked Captain Sloane. They stood close to the wall in the common room. Armed people in pieces of ZV armored suits ran past in the direction of the entryway, some carrying armor pieces they hadn’t put on yet.
“Chef is an excellent shot. We had time and resources for target practice, when these were first designed. And if the machines make their way here, we have a surprise for them.” The captain pointed upward and grinned.
The indicated section of blue ceiling looked exactly like the rest of the compound’s patchwork covering. “What’s up there?”
“That would ruin the surprise.”
The entrance hatch banged open and shut several times. Whirring and sharp snapping noises echoed up from below each time the door opened. Adda gasped. “I should be watching this.”
Captain Sloane looked her over. “You’re unarmed, with no armor, my dear.”
“No, I mean from my workspace, to see what’s going through the sensor network and over the air while AegiSKADA’s mobilizing drones. The more I have, the more I’ll know what to look for next time, and about how it coordinates with other systems.”
If it damaged the station, HarborMaster might take an interest. Any intercepted messages that sounded human would support her theory that someone like the former lieutenant was guiding one or both intelligences. She needed more data. “Have you got an antenna hooked up to your big comp?”
The captain waved the weaponless hand toward the appropriate hallway. “If you can, convince Si Po to help you. It’d be good for him.”
In the hall, Adda skidded past straggling ZV soldiers tugging on armor as they jogged the opposite direction. Si Po huddled in the corner of the comp room, arms wrapped around his head. “Hey,” Adda said softly. He clutched his head tighter. “Hey, I need your antenna.” She winced at the innuendo Pel would’ve added on to that request. Si Po seemed to be holding his breath.
Last time she watched Si Po log in to the console, she had captured his credentials. It wasn’t polite of her, but he could have been more careful. When she plugged her nasal jack into the console, her comp displayed antenna controls on her hand. With her back to him, he might miss the details of how she’d logged in.
AegiSKADA encrypted its communications to its drones, but it couldn’t hide its activity among the sensor nodes she’d mapped. It was actively processing feeds from the docking bay and the exterior hull. She labeled the unmapped nodes and added question marks where the nodes’ locations and functionality were tentative, not proven.
Now she had a good idea of where the intelligence’s functioning sensors were.
Hell and hybridization. Iridian was surrounded by active nodes, so AegiSKADA knew exactly where to send the larger drones after the spiderbots. Gods, if anything happened to her . . .
Once Adda unplugged from the console, she ran to the empty water tank housing her generator to construct a larger-scale data visualization in the workspace. The tank stayed still as she crossed from the ladder to the generator, so Iridian must’ve done something to secure it. This time her brain cooperated, or AegiSKADA’s influence was absent, and she entered the workspace quickly. It was made of a simple three-dimensional grid in green and black with the station map overlaid.
She stood in its center, darting effortlessly between active nodes to study sections in more detail without changing her physical position. The new map incorporated her energy consumption map, the pirates’ annotated one, and the map the station administrators had made available for visitors. She overlaid the new sensor node data and burst commands from elsewhere in the station, probably directed at drones.
The overlay wouldn’t help her stop the attacks, but with sufficient computing power and display fidelity, she could tell where the drones were. With a bit more intentionality coding, her system would extrapolate where they were going. Xing’s family was the first to die from a drone strike to the base itself, so tracking the drones in the station would save, if she understood the pirates’ reported experience, about one ZV life every three months. Somebody would have to watch the drone-tracking overlay while others were traveling in the station, but that was better than dreading the moment when spiderbots would appear. She smiled so widely that her physical lips twitched up at the corners. This felt like progress.
She’d read about that sensor spread, or listened to a lecture about it. One of her computer science professor’s virtual presentations started up behind her. When she turned around, she stood at the top of an empty lecture hall with stadium seating for hundreds of students. Professors walked across the stage from right to left, speaking on different topics simultaneously. Some appeared to be present in person, some flickered from hidden projectors. All disappeared at the end of the stage when their topics failed to include the unique sensor spread Adda was looking for.
She needed information on sensor nets for artificial intelligence in buildings and vessels. The professors crossed the stage faster. Some faded from the line. In her peripheral vision, the green-and-black grid filled in new sensor nodes and lines of flow. Background processes borrowed a little of her attention to help analyze the data.
One professor stopped in front of a podium, halting and quieting the others in the procession. This one spoke about Jurek Volikov, last generation’s prodigy AI developer. Volikov designed systems for major corporations and governments. Intelligent security systems, with the kind of sensor spread that Adda had described for this search. And the intelligence that was the topic of this lecture was optimized for isolated, large habitats like Waypoint Station.
Light-headedness forced Adda to sit down hard in the last row of auditorium seats. Jurek Volikov. Star of the artificial intelligence galaxy, or perhaps the black hole around which it spun, Volikov created extraordinarily effective designs and midwifed developing intelligences with a team of the world’s next best AI experts. Every design corporation tried to copy his techniques, and few succeeded.
Adda had watched two of his development visualization recordings on repeat for hours, and she recognized one or two extremely basic techniques of his in her own workspaces. Her brain had recognized more, a distinctive pattern of development common between Volikov’s recorded example and the intelligence killing people on Barbary Station. The sensor placement and activation pattern were based on his development process.
He would’ve been the top AI developer in the universe four years ago, the time period when trends in AegiSKADA’s design indicated it had been developed. An unconventional application of the SCADA development path, like using it to create a security intelligence instead of one that just ran factories or utilities, was exactly the kind of innovation that made Volikov so successful. AegiSKADA would’ve been finished and installed in what would become Barbary Station shortly before Volikov killed himself, for reasons unknown.
Under a well-trained supervisor using the guidance methods he invented, his security systems were ruthless and impregnable . . . like Barbary Station’s. And even if Blackguardly Jack was giving AegiSKADA hints and tips, the intelligence wasn’t fully supervised.
Adda’s hands fisted in the pillow nest. In the workspace the motion translated to squeezing a yellow stress ball with an inane smiling face. She was nowhere near the developer Volikov was in grade school. He might have developed AegiSKADA in his prime, with as many as seven team members in theirs. She had no hope of taking on one of his intelligences.
The podium at which the professor was speaking rocketed across the stage and into a wall, where it shattered with a resounding crash. The professor kept talking, but Pel shouted over the lecture, “Sissy! Come on! Everybody’s freaking out up here. We have to go!”
“Okay.” Dazed, she set her analyzers to continue collecting data and applying it to the tracking overlay, saving as they went. Once everything was backing up, she crawled out of the generator.
A square of light from the door to the rest of the compound framed Pel’s silhouette on the floor. “Come on, come on, come on.” He hung on the last N until she was halfway up the ladder. The moment she closed the trapdoor behind her, he laid a hand on the wall and started walking toward the kitchen. She followed, pulling her hood over her head to keep the blue dust out of her hair.
The formerly uniform blue walls and floor now bore blackened scars where something small and explosive had detonated inside the compound. One of the floor tiles was missing, filled instead with a bright yellow inflatable hull patch with the Transorbital Voyages logo half exposed through the hole. The patch must have been part of the haul the rovers had collected on the colony ship. If the pirates hadn’t selected space-grade material for the exterior walls, they’d have been in serious trouble.
She blinked. She’d have been in serious trouble. Those explosions could’ve hurt her. Between her earbuds and her sharpsheets, she hadn’t even heard them.
Someone in the main room shouted, “Pick it up, ZVs, we got minutes before the big ones get here!” Adda’s breath quickened, and she almost stepped on Pel’s heels in her effort to stay close to him.
In the kitchen, chairs and tables were overturned. Targeted particle fire had disintegrated parts of several into the consistency of sand. “Found her! Let’s go,” Pel called.
Chef’s head popped up from behind the counter at the far side of the cramped room. Once she saw Adda, she ducked back down behind the counter, then emerged from her small refuge running. “One came out of the vent!” Chef pointed at the vent near the ceiling.
Adda looked around at the mess. “One?”
“She missed a few times,” said Pel. “And then it blew up, over there.” In the direction he pointed, the floor was scorched black beneath the remnants of a chair.
A pop followed immediately by crashing and cursing emanated from somewhere down the hall. “Have you collected the observations you require?” Captain Sloane called from the same direction.
“Still collecting, but it’s automated now,” Adda called back.
“Shut it down. I need to deliver the surprise,” said the captain.
Adda ran back to her tank to transfer essential processes from her workspace generator to her comp glove and end the rest, then packed the generator into its shielded mesh bag. It sounded like Sloane was going to set off an electromagnetic pulse. The pirates’ digital library didn’t have a printer pattern for a workspace generator. If this one got fried, she’d have a hard time printing a new one. The glove was supposed to protect her comp from similar damage, but she’d never tested it. At least the pirates’ library would have a bas
ic comp pattern to print, if anything happened to hers.
When she climbed out of the tank again, Pel grabbed her sleeve at the shoulder and pulled her down the hall at a run, with his free hand trailing along the wall. In the main room, Chef beckoned them to hurry. The door to Sturm’s workroom was dented, along with part of the wall next to it, and beneath Sloane’s braided hair, the back of the black armor bore a deep crack and a dull scorch mark.
“Comps off, please,” the captain said. They all reached for glove switches except for Chef, who touched a spot between her breasts. A comp bra? Adda would have to ask Iridian to ask her about that later. Something small and black scuttled across the floor. This time she saw it explode, in a small burst of bright white. Chef yelped. Blood flowed down her calf as she reached the entryway.
Instead of the entryway, Captain Sloane ran into the other hallway. Adda watched from the main room as the captain entered the stateroom and moved the picture of a nighttime city street to the floor. A metal square jutted out from the newly exposed wall, as covered in blue dust as the rest of the compound. Sloane pressed the square and a sharp whine rose from the main room’s ceiling. Captain Sloane’s grin was a little too wild to be entirely sane. “The surprise is deployed. Follow me!”
They ran to the open hatch in the entryway. Chef was approaching the opening at the top of the ladder from different angles before she fit her broad hips through. “Everybody out, now, now, now!” Tritheist roared to those farther down the passage between the walls. Another loud pop startled Adda. One of the ZVs stumbled and swore.
“I thought we weren’t ever going to evacuate,” Adda panted to Pel on the way down the long ladder.
“That’s for rad contamination. This is a fucking invasion. It’s just little ones now, but if we don’t get out before the big ones come, we’re all dead.”
“I thought we were safe in the compound,” said Adda.
“Not safe anywhere,” said the ZV below Adda. “We can usually keep the spiderbots out with the door, though. You see the spiderbots in the corridors out there, that’s how you know the big ones are coming to fucking zap your ass dead. So when we see the little ones, we fucking move no matter where we see ’em.”
Barbary Station Page 15
