Barbary Station

by R. E. Stearns

  A few steps from the ladder’s last rung, Adda’s boot caught on something heavy. Someone lay against the wall. One of his armored shoulders had snagged her toe. She bent to grab an arm, but she was already guiding Pel. The ZV man was too heavy to move one-handed. “Help!” she cried. People pushed past them.

  “Whoa, what’s wrong?” Pel clutched her elbow.

  “Someone’s hurt.” A drone skittered across the wall near her head. She swiped at it, but missed and ducked away from it. It exploded with a bang among the cables hanging from the ceiling.

  “Who?”

  She gritted her teeth and ran again. “I don’t know. We can’t stop.” Behind her, armor dragged on the wall. Captain Sloane had lifted the man by the arm and was hauling his limp form toward the docking bay.

  Then Iridian was in front of them, pressed flat to one wall, face hidden behind her helmet’s faceplate. Although they’d been talking on the pirates’ comms, seeing her in person was like taking a weight off Adda’s chest so she could breathe. Iridian held her open shield against the wall beside her so as not to block the way. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. Are you? There’s someone on the floor back there.” Adda pointed without stopping.

  “I’m good,” Iridian said. “Let’s go.”

  They burst out of the wall and ran after pirates streaming across the empty docking bay. The ship that had brought Iridian and Adda to the station was gone. The bay seemed even bigger with only humans and the two wrecks on the far side for scale.

  The decompression alarm swallowed their footsteps. AegiSKADA was opening the docking bay doors, like it did when they’d first arrived on station. Persistent by nature, the intelligence would’ve realized that letting the vacuum of space pull intruders out of the station could be a simple end to the intrusion. The human and cargo doors behind the two shipwrecks thundered shut. A piece of debris jammed into the nearest one designed for pedestrians kept that escape route open.

  Captain Sloane lowered the partially armored ZV to the floor near the hole in the docking bay wall and crouched beside the man. After several seconds’ examination, the captain rose and joined the rest of the pirates, leaving the motionless ZV behind. Sorrow, or perhaps despair, swept through Sloane’s body language, then disappeared beneath the captain’s usual confidence in the space between one step and the next.

  The pirates ran toward the open pedestrian exit to the bay, shoving their weapons into a locker next to the door as they passed. Chato stood by the locker, saying, “Clubs? Knives? Razors? Anything in your pockets?” A few paused to deposit small weapons. “Drop off anything sharp, long and thin, or big and round,” he told them. “AegiSKADA targets anything weapon-shaped, and now that we’re moving around the docking bay here, it’s going to be looking close.”

  “We don’t have anything,” Adda said. Iridian had stopped carrying knives around, and Adda’s weapons were all in her comp.

  The last of the pirates passed the locker with their palm weapons still strapped to their hands. Chato locked it, pulled a ZV jacket hood up over his head, and caught up with the three of them. “Why don’t those go in?” asked Iridian.

  “Palmers? AegiSKADA doesn’t recognize them,” Chato said. “That’s why we made ’em. Why the captain and Kaskade and Sturm made ’em, that is. One good shot kills people and spiderbots, but—”

  “It doesn’t match anything in AegiSKADA’s weapons profile!” Adda said. Iridian chuckled like the interruption both amused and surprised her, and Adda shrugged. “That’s clever. And Iridian’s shield doesn’t match the profile, either, since AegiSKADA didn’t . . .” Adda thought about what she was saying as she said it, which made the rest of her sentence emerge at half volume. “Hunt her down and eliminate her as a threat.”

  Iridian looked as horrified at that possibility as Adda felt. “When do I get one of those palmers?” Iridian asked.

  “When you stop bringing drones down on our asses,” said Sergeant Natani, the pirate with the scar on her temple. Iridian’s expression implied that she didn’t care or hadn’t heard. Failure was hell for her, though, and Adda knew she was more upset than she appeared. Sergeant Natani glared at them and then followed the other ZVs, palmer up and ready. “Move it, Chato!”

  Chato shrugged at Adda and Iridian as if apologizing on the woman’s behalf. “Not everyone thinks that. When we get the right printer material and the time for Sturm to build one, you’ll get one. If there was any of the right material on the colony ship, the captain or the lieutenant snapped it up and kept quiet about it.”

  “Why didn’t you build something to stop the drones instead?” asked Adda.

  “None of the officers’ code gets through,” Chato said. “And the guy who knew how to do the fancy EMP and laser things got his head exploded. Besides, we don’t usually see drones on base. We drill on defense scenarios sometimes, because what else can we do? But this is the first time spiderbots came all the way in.”

  After the enormous docking bay, the station hallways designed primarily for humans felt safer, illusory though that safety was. The industrial flooring was the same as the docking bay’s, though the cracked ceiling was higher than in the Prosperity Dawn’s corridors. The smooth wall panels were a lighter metallic color with occasional rectangular black frames built in, where a projector might’ve shown an exterior view or artwork.

  Tracks for magnetized cargo carriers paralleled mostly broken ceiling light strips, although Adda had yet to pass beneath one of the robots. AegiSKADA might have dismantled cargo carriers to maintain its drones. One stretch of track had been twisted off the ceiling, so that the pirates had to duck around. Part of the track lay in a tangled pile against a wall. Labels on the doors referenced various stages of water and waste recycling.

  They ran down the corridor over red arrows on the floor that Iridian had said pointed toward station north, following them over a stalled people-moving walkway. At the end of it, several pirates crouched in a circle facing outward, pointing palmers down the hallway in both directions. Si Po dove into the circle’s center, where the rest of the pirates congregated.

  Chato gave Adda a gentle shove toward the center of the group. “Something’s following us.”

  Kaskade bent over with her hands on her knees, breathing as hard as Adda. “Damn. Can’t believe we made—”

  A small pop made everyone jump. Kaskade sprawled forward on the floor. Blood streamed from the back of her head. White shards of skull shone beneath her red-matted hair.

  Pel’s fingers dug into Adda’s arm. His voice shook when he asked, “What part of her did the spiderbot blow up?”

  CHAPTER 10

  Charges Accrued: Destruction of Property (Vandalism, First Count)

  Amazingly, the pirates had protocols. Iridian must’ve had the ZV Group to thank for that. They sectioned off the corridor into quadrants assigned to squads and searched the place for more spiderbots as the group moved on at a faster pace. They were thorough and relatively calm, even while Kaskade’s blood pooled behind them. No more drones appeared, but Iridian kept watching for them.

  Kaskade had given Pel errands to run to make him feel like part of the crew. And she had way too much in common with Adda: same systems orientation, similar level of intelligence, hell, same love of unnatural hair colors, though her blue streaks had been less striking than Adda’s purple and red. Kaskade’s loss had given all the pirates a hollow look about the eyes.

  Iridian updated her map as they traversed a long, winding route through the station, since Adda would want to plot secondary escape routes later. The occasional undamaged marks on the floor put them about ninety ticks north on their way to one hundred. That made the next docking bay station north. Like the rest of the station’s docking bays, the map depicted the northern one taking up the first two floors of its modules, with the top reserved for a small observation room and a shuttle hookup to move people to and from the hub in the center of the ring.

  Sloane directed them to sw
itch levels at unpredictable intervals, once by elevator, once by elevator shaft, twice via cables hanging through holes in the floor. The second and third floors must’ve been damaged during the Battle of Waypoint Station. In the years since, walls had collapsed and strewn themselves over walkways designed for more mobile, lower weights.

  Stopping every few meters to clear a path, confirm that what she was looking at wasn’t a bomb, check for spiderbots, or answer “What was that sound?” was irritating as hell, though the caution was warranted. Including herself, Adda, and the boy in San Miguel’s arms, only twenty-one of them had made it this far. Captain Sloane’s crew had arrived on station with fewer than a hundred, including the ZVs, but certainly more than this.

  They stalked the corridors in near silence. When Iridian got tired of listening to breathing and footsteps and asked, “Where are we going?” Chato just said, “Following protocol.” Both of them went back to listening for spiderbots, or bigger drones that they might actually hear over twenty pairs of boots tramping through a scrap-cluttered corridor.

  She walked out front, since the fully armored ZVs stayed at the rear to deal with pursuit. The position should’ve earned her more info than that. She kept the shield up and a little to the side, leaving her shoulder and hip exposed to cover some of Adda too. As the spiderbot on the people mover taught them, death could come from any direction.

  The one that killed Kaskade had been silent. An atmo system fan might’ve spun up around then, but Iridian couldn’t be sure. Even if they were moving quietly, they still might’ve missed it.

  Ahead of their current position on the lowest floor, the one with the docking bay’s main entrance and exit, a stranger shouted, “Movement!” The repetitive organic noise accompanying the voice was a dog barking. A big one, not one of the spacefaring terriers people in habs kept.

  The pirates halted. Debris blocked most of the curving corridor ahead, though light from the other side shone through the cracks. The ceiling from at least one floor above had crushed two industrial-size water processors and shoved them into the corridor through one of its walls.

  The biggest beam of light shining from behind the wreckage silhouetted a human on the pile of debris. “Is this any way to welcome neighbors?” Sloane shouted at the figure.

  “Captain Sloane?” The person clapped a hand to her thigh, activating a large LED in her comp glove’s palm. Rather than shining it in the captain’s eyes to prove identity, she lit the floor ahead of them. “Come on in. Follow the yellow brick road.”

  Is this person the same kind of crazy as the people who saved my life outside? Iridian wondered. The LED revealed a strip of yellow reflective tape that zigged and zagged across the arrows on the floor pointing to station north, and Iridian relaxed a bit. That made sense. Captain Sloane took over Iridian’s position at the front of the group, and the pirates formed a line behind her to advance toward the unseen barking dog.

  Something clattered in the wreckage behind them. Iridian and the ZVs spun and searched for the source. “Keep moving, lads and lasses,” the captain said in a conversational tone from the other side of the rubble barrier. Just being followed by an invisible enemy, nothing to shout about.

  Iridian pushed Adda and Pel toward the barrier. When she reached the patch of light pouring through the low gap in the metal and concrete where they’d disappeared, she tracked the yellow tape into a knee-high tunnel at the barrier’s base. The deployed shield was too wide to fit through the gap. She had no idea what Adda and Pel were crawling toward, and the shield could protect the people behind her. Letting them stand around exposed when she had a perfectly good shield felt wrong, especially given the condition of the armor on those who had it.

  After a long breath, she gave the shield to Chato behind her. She was joining their crew. She had to start trusting them sometime. “Keep passing this back as people come through. I’ll return and collapse it once everyone’s in.” After she confirmed that Pel and Adda were really safe on the other side. Chato accepted her shield, still watching the corridor behind them more closely than the path ahead, and she crawled after Pel and Adda.

  Iridian emerged into a cleared area just before the corridor opened onto the docking bay that served as station north. The “zero ticks” designator must’ve been under the rubble that almost closed the corridor off. The cleared area extended several meters to a red line on the docking bay floor, past which was a more deliberate line of barriers, a watchtower, and rows of shipping containers draped with colorful tarps.

  A step to the side of the yellow tape line, Pel held Adda’s arm while she looked at her comp. The crew members who crawled through the barrier after Iridian relaxed like they were watching for friends, not trouble. Pel’s big ZV friend, Rio, patted him on the head as she passed, smiling as she walked toward the human activity stirring among the shipping containers.

  The bronze-complexioned woman who’d greeted them stood beside Captain Sloane, a few steps from the crawlway through the barrier. She wore civilian clothes beneath a thin slab of metal strapped over her chest. Even with the green binder of flexible mesh beneath it flattening her breasts against her ribs, she had a lot of chest to cover. The binder might’ve been armored too. “Sorry about that,” she said to the captain. “We lost four people right outside the barrier when a drone snuck up on us by moving about a centimeter every hour, up against the left wall. We’ve started taking freeze frames of the approach every few minutes and comparing them on Kigen’s comp.”

  “Of course, of course.”

  The woman’s eyes narrowed. “Are those things following you?”

  “Possibly,” said Sloane. “I just EMP’d our abode.”

  “So that was the surprise.” Adda fiddled with her comp glove, muttered at it, and gave a relieved-sounding sigh. When she glanced up at Iridian’s confused half smile, she added, “I wish I could keep following the sensor data, but my comp just isn’t up to it. The EMP was . . . dramatic. Don’t worry, the essentials are compressed and backed up on here.”

  Iridian shook her head. “I hope the base light fixtures have built-in Faraday shields. People always forget to protect the gods-damned lights.”

  San Miguel came through with her child, and the little boy wriggled out of her arms. Jalal dashed, squealing, right past the captain, toward a growing crowd gathering just over the red line on the floor. Other kids shouting excitedly over one another ran out of the crowd to meet him. A big brown-and-black dog trotted beside the children and watched the newcomers.

  Si Po had clearly figured out how to collapse the shield, since he crawled through the barrier with it in its carrying configuration. He gave Iridian a small smile when he handed it to her. “Welcome to Fugee HQ.”

  Something whizzed by Iridian’s face as he passed. She deployed the shield mid-dive to get between the kids and a fast-moving black dot the size of her thumbnail. The thing arched down and detonated against her shield, slamming Iridian, Si Po, and the kids to the deck.

  She coughed and tried to regain the breath the floor took when she landed. Ah, yes. Falling in hyper-g hurts. Beneath the high whine in her ears, people were yelling. Adda dropped to her knees next to Iridian, leaving Pel standing alone. He said something Iridian couldn’t lip-read, while people ran past and around him. All she heard was a high-pitched ringing.

  “I’m good.” She barely heard her own voice. Her wrists hurt like hell, but she’d be all right once her diaphragm started doing its job again. The Shieldrunner training officer would’ve done her more damage than this for catching the explosion in a weak brace position.

  She rolled her head back along the curve of her helmet to see the kids upside down. One fugee girl bled from the nose, but they were all sitting up and breathing well enough to cry. Adults swooped out of the fugee crowd to hug them. San Miguel shoved Tritheist out of her path as she dashed to Jalal. The fugees’ big dog ran in from the other side to stand, barking, between the children and Sloane’s crew. Si Po peered around a wall of a
larmed ZV soldiers, watching for another attack.

  Adda said something. Iridian shook her head. “Zikri’s coming,” Adda shouted. “Stay still.” No problem there. Adda sank her teeth into her lower lip, face scrunched in an anxious frown.

  Pel found Adda’s shoulder with his hand and crouched next to her, grinning his big goofy grin. “You make a hell of an entrance.” Someone must’ve caught him up, and had Iridian blacked out for a minute? She didn’t remember him leaving base in glasses dark enough to watch solar eclipses from Earth. Local time put this well after nightfall in healthy enviro, but bright docking bay overhead lights reflected in the lenses. The fugees were smart to keep the place lit. It’d be harder to spot drones in the dark.

  Zikri, the ZV Group medic, pulled green disposable gloves over teak-brown hands as he took a knee on the opposite side of Iridian from Adda and Pel. “Only one spiderbot,” Iridian read on his lips. He said something else, then tried again more loudly when Iridian just frowned at him. “How do your head and chest feel?”

  “Chest is better now,” Iridian said. “Head’s not bad. Padding in this helmet is great.”

  “Turn your O2 up in there,” Zikri suggested.

  “Can’t, HUD’s down.” Iridian collapsed the shield and winced at the wrist movement required.

  Zikri made a lifting motion with both hands. “. . . helmet off,” Iridian lip-read. Breath came easier without the helmet. If they ever got a break, Sturm would have to take another look at the air flow in this suit.

  After staring into Iridian’s eyes for an uncomfortable ten or fifteen seconds, Zikri asked, “Breathing comfortably? No wheezing?” Speech sounded clearer with the helmet off too. Iridian took a couple of deep breaths and nodded. “Pregnant?” She shook her head vigorously, which made Zikri laugh. “Yeah, you’re good enough, then. Come find me if you have trouble.” Then he went to the children, conducting a similar inspection on each of them.