Sloane even had kind words about the baby, who’d been “the happiest little child I’ve ever held in my arms.” A few other crew members stood up to add what they remembered, and by the end tears were rolling down Iridian’s face, and it was Adda, putting her disconnection from the rest of humanity to use, who comforted her. Iridian would never get the chance to know these incredible members of her future crew.
Once the last of the crew spoke, fugees stood to say a few words. Captain Sloane said something to the bartender, and a dance song pumped through the speakers. After a negotiation between the bartender and Kyr and an exchange of cords and comps, the WFUG music replaced the dance song. The party atmosphere returned.
Iridian couldn’t help smiling at the way Adda, hidden in dim light and too-loud music and moving bodies, finally relaxed and actually danced. Even then, though, she looked over the crowd every few minutes. When Iridian caught her eye after one such check, she stood on tiptoes to reach Iridian’s ear. “Tell me if you see anyone doing a lot of comp work near here.” Iridian nodded too vigorously, and Adda laughed at her before going back to dancing.
Eventually Adda’s time-consciousness kicked in, and she dragged Iridian off the dance floor at ten after midnight. With the excuse of creating a cover story, Iridian squeezed Adda’s ass and winked at anybody who asked where they were going.
A third of the lights in the docking bay were off, generating an artificial twilight among the tarp tents and shipping containers. Perhaps the initial bright lighting had been a result of the additional drone activity, and not the usual procedure. The spaces between the containers were as packed as the bar, for meters and meters beyond it.
The crowd thinned at the wide corridor separating the last row of nonbuildings from the passthroughs to the Voorspoed. The guard tower stood in the corridor’s center, dark now that the man who’d been stationed there a few hours ago had abandoned his post to attend the festivities. A human-shaped shadow stood stiffly at the tower’s base. Adda walked toward the figure. “There’s our contact.”
As they approached, the figure resolved into a dark-haired, light-skinned man with the kind of well-worn jacket favored by motorcyclists and war reporters. It’d be lined with panels of light armor plating. A cig’s yellow glow lit his thick stubble, and its bitter-smelling vapor clouded his features before disappearing into the dry station atmo.
“Out of the light.” He stepped deeper into the shadow himself.
Without a working HUD, light to spot potential threats by was safer. Iridian pursed her lips, but followed. “Who are you, and what do you want?”
“Call me a concerned citizen,” he said, voice low.
Two teenage boys sharing a cup with FLOOR TWO printed on the side staggered out of the wake crowd and into the guard tower’s shadow. “Oh, sorry, Mr. Oarman!” One stared at Iridian and Adda for a couple of seconds before staggering away with the other boy, giggling. Iridian tried not to join in, but the alcohol was against her.
Oarman rubbed the bridge of his nose with the hand not holding the cig and muttered a laughably vicious spacefarer curse. After Iridian got her amusement under control, he grumbled, “They’re in my drone defense classes. Nothing I can do to stop the bots, but I can tell the kids what to do when they see ’em, and it ain’t always ‘Run.’ ” He took another drag. “So you’re Sloane’s new recruits.”
“Recruit’s a strong word.” Iridian shrugged broadly. “We’re looking for something better than entry-level chip techs, is all.”
Oarman raised one eyebrow. “That does give it a new trajectory.”
“Earthers’d say it puts a new spin on the thing, yeah?” Iridian asked Adda, who nodded confirmation of the translation. Iridian liked him. It was about time they found another rational spacefarer to talk to, even if he was a shifty one.
He sighed, staring out toward the docking bay exit and AegiSKADA’s domain beyond. “Sloane won’t allow you on the crew, such as it is.”
That sounded like wannabe posturing to Iridian, but Adda’s eyes focused on the man’s face for the first time since she met him. “Why not?” she asked.
Oarman looked her over, shook his head once, and returned his gaze to the exit. “Sloane and Foster never needed permanent members. The crew sometimes looks permanent, and a lot of them sure as hell think they’re permanent because captains have their favorites, but it’s not, see? There are some who just wait around to raid, like Kaskade and the one with the beard shaped like a frickin’ leaf or some shit.”
“Tritheist,” Iridian chuckled.
“And even those two were contracted by the job like everyone else, see? They were selected for the job Captain Foster and Lieutenant Sloane came here to pull. As soon as Sloane’s off this floating junkyard, the job ends like the jobs did under Foster: everyone gets paid and cut loose. No point in you backing that slimy fekker. The captain might never select you two for another job.”
Iridian stared and must’ve looked as shocked as she felt. Adda’s expression was blank, like it always was when she was processing a lot of new information at once, but the way she shifted sideways until her arm pressed against Iridian’s armor betrayed her anxiety.
This was their one chance at making enough money to live well on together. They’d sacrificed all the money they had, their clean criminal records, their academic connections, hell, maybe even their Near Earth Union citizenship, for this. They’d gotten trapped on a crumbling station in the middle of nowhere with a psychotic AI for this. And if Oarman was telling the truth, there wasn’t even a crew to join.
He had to be mistaken. After a long, steadying breath, Iridian asked, “How do you know all that?”
Adda squinted at Oarman, then gasped. “You!”
He glanced sharply at her and reached for something in his pocket. Iridian stepped in fast, shield expanding in a flick of her aching wrist. Oarman froze, then slowly withdrew his hand, empty. She let the shield sink to her side but kept it deployed.
“You’re Blackguardly Jack,” said Adda.
Oarman scowled. “Lieutenant Blackguardly Jack. And I’ll thank you not to mention me to Sloane.”
“The one from the vid clip,” said Iridian. He’d aged about a decade since a cam recorded him running out of AegiSKADA’s control room, but he was the same height and build. And apparently he’d been avoiding Sloane’s crew all of this time.
For some reason, Adda looked disappointed. “You’re not directing AegiSKADA against the pirates. The nodes you could access secretly from here are broken. And I’ve seen or fixed almost every machine here. This camp doesn’t have the connection or the hardware to do it.”
“Directing it?” Oarman’s outrage confirmed Adda’s conclusion. “Did I tell the fucking AI to kill off families with kids? Did I tell it to kill off half the ZV boys when we landed? Did I tell it to melt my armor through my fucking spine?” His gaze fell on Iridian’s shield, like he might reach for whatever he kept in his jacket even though she was ready to knock him down if he did. In Iridian’s peripheral vision, Adda took a step back.
After several long seconds, Oarman shifted his weight away from the two of them, dragging hard on his cig. The NEU insignia glowed in soft blue and green on its side while he inhaled. Iridian’s grip on her shield relaxed a bit. “I have insider knowledge of the situation. That’s all. I liked Xing and Alexov and Kaskade and the rest. Liefeld, not so much.” He sighed, expelling sour breath. “Anyway, I’m saying you don’t owe Sloane.”
“No,” Adda said quietly, “but Captain Sloane may owe us after we stop AegiSKADA long enough to escape.” Oarman stared wide-eyed at Adda, but she just stepped forward with her comp glove out, showing a station map with a room highlighted in red. “Is this the security control room where AegiSKADA’s tanks are?”
He scowled down at the map. “Back it out a bit.” Iridian appreciated him keeping his hands to himself instead of trying to adjust the image projected onto Adda’s skin. Adda muttered inaudibly at her comp, and the
map shrank to display more of the station through the glove’s projection window. “Yeah, you got it. Great place to get yourselves killed or maimed for life. Nobody’s going to stop that monster AI. That control room explosion that did my back in should’ve killed it if anything would, and it’s still out there.”
“What exploded?” Iridian asked. “I wouldn’t expect anything explosive in a quantum computing lab.”
“We sure as hell didn’t.” Oarman inhaled through the glowing cig and expelled another sour breath. “And I couldn’t fucking tell you. We took one of those little automated shuttles through the hub in the center of the station, shot a few drones getting off, and everything was fucking normal until . . .” Oarman stared past Iridian, the cig forgotten in his hand. “Lee stepped on something, maybe, or knocked into something. . . . It was all fire, after that.” Oarman refocused on Iridian and Adda. “Don’t fucking go to AegiSKADA’s fucking control room. You’ve got alternatives.”
“Such as?” asked Iridian.
“Sloane’s ships can go to and from the station as they please, can’t they?”
“So far as we can tell.”
Oarman glanced around, then whispered, “You get whatever pilots Sloane dug up to let you into those ships, maybe we get off this wreck before we have a major hull breach or AegiSKADA kills us all.”
“Why not both?” Iridian asked. “It’s been free with explosives in a gods-damned sealed habitat.” Just another thing about life on Barbary Station to laugh at, or despair.
“The pirates say that boarding the ships is impossible,” Adda said. “The pilots won’t let them, and we don’t have a common language to communicate with. Otherwise they’d have done what you’re proposing months ago.”
“You’re thinking you’ll ‘stop’ AegiSKADA, but boarding ships is impossible.” Oarman laughed and took another drag on his cig. “Sloane gave up on the ships too soon. Between you and Si Po—he’s still alive, isn’t he?” Iridian nodded, so Oarman went on. “Rumor is Si Po has a way with the pilots. You and he together can break into any ship that sits on a pad long enough, and the ZVs can take down any pilot once their ship is grounded. I’d guess the Casey Mire Mire is the one to try for. That pilot’s supposed to be the chattiest. Get onboard and one of you computer types can choose an emergency destination.”
Iridian nodded as she caught on. “Someplace the ship’ll go whether it’s piloted or not.”
“Yeah. You get all that done, reply to the message I sent. At least some of us should get off this rotating shithole.”
“Some of us?” Iridian asked.
“Those that’ll fit.” Oarman snorted. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but a tugboat, a flying missile launcher, and whatever the hell the Casey is don’t have much passenger space. Can’t get the whole crew on them, let alone all these fugees. Start looking out for yourselves, ladies. Nobody’s going to do it for you.”
CHAPTER 11
Charges Accrued: Desertion, Draft Dodging
After Iridian and Adda returned to the wake, they joined the pirates sleeping off alcohol in a gutted room in the fugees’ colony ship. In what passed for the following afternoon, when they were mostly awake again, Sloane led the hungover crew back toward the compound.
The crew shuffled along at a much slower pace than they’d arrived at the fugee docking bay, allowing Adda to register the faint rush of water through pipes along most of their route. The sound came from the water processing facility depicted on her comp’s map. The pipes in the walls must’ve provided extra support that kept the first floor clear while the floors above came apart.
The dark passages were still half-clogged with debris. Plastic shards from broken lights crunched under their boots. Watching where she was going was a welcome distraction for Adda’s conscious mind, while her unconscious pondered Oarman’s discouraging news about the impermanent nature of Sloane’s crew.
The way Oarman’s lips twitched down when he said Sloane’s name was more than a matter of rivalry. That was bitterness held inside by willpower alone, the same expression Iridian developed when she saw a ZV’s secessionist tattoos. That NEU cig might mean he had ideological or political biases against the crew, too, since Captain Sloane and the majority of the crew hailed from colonies. Human input, above all other data, was most accurately interpreted in context.
Adda tripped over a broken floor tile and had to walk a few paces before her train of thought returned. Whether or not there was a crew to join—and she fully intended to learn more about that before taking the word of a man she’d just met—Sloane paid engineers real money for real work, and let them go free without strings attached. Everything she’d read about Sloane and heard from the crew supported this. And everyone who knew anything about pirate crews called Sloane’s the most successful in known space.
If she could get AegiSKADA to let Sloane’s crew off the station, she and Iridian would make enough money to live together for as long as Sloane found them useful. Their lives and livelihoods were on the line. It’d be reckless to discard her plans for the unproven possibility of boarding ships on which Pel had mysteriously gone blind and flying to an emergency destination, which would almost certainly be an ITA-controlled port.
The captain had shared valuable resources and trusted them with a project too challenging for anyone else on the station. The Apparition’s pilot didn’t even give them air to breathe during their trip. Captain Sloane was still their best chance at success, in both the short and the long term. That made a breakthrough against AegiSKADA even more essential.
The crew talked quietly as they walked, still vigilant but not as on edge as they’d been during the flight from the compound. If the raunchy details Pel told Chef whenever Adda fell a few steps behind were true, he drank for the duration of the night and he didn’t sleep much. His volume kept rising after the first few words, and Adda resorted to muttering prime numbers to keep from piecing the story together.
Iridian’s full lips were set in a stoic frown. Adda had had a drink or two and then paid attention to her own body’s pleas to switch to water, guaranteeing she’d be hangover nurse in the morning. At least Iridian had no hair to hold back when she vomited.
“Why are we walking, anyway?” Adda asked after one ZV threw up and Iridian and two others responded messily to the noise.
“As opposed to what?” croaked Chato, straightening up and wiping his mouth.
“You have three space-worthy ships AegiSKADA ignores, at least one of which can maintain enviro for hours.” Unless Adda phrased this line of inquiry carefully, it’d sound like she was questioning Sloane’s orders to focus on defeating AegiSKADA, in favor of an escape route she and the captain had already ruled out. She didn’t expect Sloane to appreciate her getting sidetracked from the objective set for her, but she had to ask. “The refugees live in a docking bay. Why didn’t Si Po call one of the pilots in to pick us up?”
“Aside from the fact that their colony ship is taking up all the passthroughs in the bay, that isn’t a good way to avoid AegiSKADA’s notice,” said Sloane. Adda grimaced and focused on picking her way through the rubble-strewn passage. The captain had stealthily dropped back from the front to listen in. She hadn’t phrased the question the way she would if she were addressing her future boss. “It’s unclear how AegiSKADA and the ships work together. They are all aware of each other, but how AegiSKADA interprets the others’ behavior is a mystery. The last thing we want to do is bring its processing power to bear on the fugees. Between limited medical technology, AegiSKADA’s drones, and the station’s deteriorating state, they lose enough people to injury and disease as things are. They’re unprepared for further attacks, and we’re not in a position to defend them.”
The captain’s concern for the refugees surprised her, at first. But having a safe place to run during times of trouble was valuable. She got the impression that everything Sloane did paid somehow. Also, the captain made a good point. With HarborMaster in the mix as well, there were
a lot of unpredictable interactions to contend with.
Si Po walked on the other side of Iridian, fiddling with his comp. “The ships are all out right now, anyway. Casey will be back later today with a new snap of the net. Charon’s Coin and Apparition are gone, though.”
“Doing what?” Adda asked. “After the colony ship we brought, shouldn’t you have everything you need?”
“Everything we need,” said Captain Sloane, “but not everything we want.”
* * *
During the night, drones had taken the ZV soldier who died just outside the compound to the station’s recycling facilities, presumably, although no one followed the drones to see what was done with the dead. Iridian and the ZVs deposited nine unexploded spiderbots from around the compound in a docking bay refuse chute, and fled an onslaught of more coming to claim them. After that, the days blurred. The occasional disassembled ship debris smacking against the compound’s exterior walls didn’t even startle Adda, after a while.
She spent hours in the workspace generator, poring over observations and studying Jurek Volikov’s workmanship. Even with Oarman’s help, the fugees hadn’t been able to maintain essential systems like printers and enviro controls. They certainly couldn’t put together equipment necessary to guide or direct AegiSKADA. And the medical team lacked both equipment and expertise. AegiSKADA was still behaving unlike any intelligence she’d studied before, though. There had to be something in her observations or the parts of its system she could access that would explain what that difference was.
Iridian and Pel delivered food and pouches of water, and occasionally dragged her out of the tank for destinations other than the restroom. More ZVs waved or smiled as they passed each time Iridian led Adda out of her tank, so Iridian must’ve been being sociable. Adda didn’t want to break her train of thought to ask. After a week, she had to stop working to synthesize more sharpsheet powder.
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