Barbary Station

by R. E. Stearns

  “Your lips are blue,” said Iridian.

  “Mushroom dust.” Adda peered into the mug, as if her purpose was one of the soup’s ingredients. It came to her, and she gasped. “I need your blood.”

  Iridian waggled her eyebrows at her. “I know you like how it looks on me, babe, but I’m not feeling very romantic with the mysterious microbial doom going around. Though maybe that’s all the more reason.”

  Adda set down the half-finished soup and crawled into Iridian’s lap. Her girlfriend wrapped long, slender arms around her, keeping Adda’s overstimulated body still, helping her focus. “Sample analysis. Blood, saliva. I think I can get that translator Si Po sent me to facilitate insertion sequence comparisons. If we know what it is, we’ll know how to kill it. I think.”

  “Si Po gave you something?” Iridian sounded surprised.

  “Do you think he’d donate blood?”

  “I’d bet money that he’s afraid of needles. He’s afraid of everything else.” Iridian cuddled Adda against her chest. “You’ve been working your ass off. Did you sleep last night?”

  “It turns out I can sleep for a few minutes and stay connected to the workspace.” Although that had been . . . odd. She was used to the message about her location written on the generator’s ceiling when she woke up. That morning she’d woken up to You are the beginning of the endless void in her mother’s handwriting.

  Iridian tilted Adda’s chin up and smiled, amusement evident in the narrowing of her eyes, before lifting her mask and meeting Adda’s lips with her own. Iridian tasted of coffee, lipstick, and woman. Muscles in Adda’s shoulders and neck that hadn’t even felt tight relaxed. Her tongue wound with Iridian’s for a long moment before she pulled back, earning a small, frustrated grunt from her lover. “Let me get some samples analyzing, and then I swear I’ll come back to this.”

  Iridian nipped at the tip of Adda’s nose. “You’d better.” She slid the mask over her grin and hung a second mask around Adda’s neck.

  Adda gently bumped their foreheads together and stood to go look for printer patterns for a syringe and gloves. “It won’t take that long!”

  “Up we go.” Iridian boosted Adda up the ladder’s first few rungs with a hand on Adda’s butt.

  In the end, Adda managed to get blood samples and cheek swabs from every crew member, although O.D. had to order a few ZVs to cooperate. She also collected data from the comps of anyone who’d worked on maintenance problems discovered during the search for more dispensers.

  Back in her tank, she hooked up the translator from Si Po, the medic’s emergency diagnostic software, and odds and ends from both the printer and her own chemistry equipment to get her samples processing. They had probably absorbed some airborne contaminants on the way to the tank. Hopefully they had all been contaminated equally.

  When she emerged from the generator, Iridian sat outside, with less soup and clothing. The wall lamps turned her into a sleek silhouette that made Adda wish she’d kept up her painting skills. “I thought about that tattoo design,” Iridian purred, crawling closer on hands and knees across the pillows. In this light, her curves were maddeningly sensual. “Want me to show you where it would look hottest?”

  * * *

  Later, among disarranged pillows, Adda murmured, “Why in all the worlds would AegiSKADA put a dispenser in the floor? Why not an air vent?”

  Iridian shrugged, jouncing Adda’s head where it rested on her collarbone. “The vents here are in weird places. Since the ceiling’s low, even the highest ones would’ve been too visible.”

  “Ah.” Adda was short enough to pass under most vents without seeing beyond the slats on the cover. “So it has an excellent model of where humans search for things.”

  “Not a flawless model,” Iridian said. “You found it.”

  Adda sighed. “I can’t tell if the location is important or not. And it might have wanted me to find it, to increase exposure.”

  “Which is why I’m looking forward to taking apart all its hardware and launching each piece at a different star,” Iridian said.

  “Doesn’t it bother you at all . . .” Adda hated the shrill note her voice acquired when she was defending her point. It made people stop listening, and this was important. After a breath, she tried again. “Doesn’t it bother you that you’d be destroying something unique?”

  “Uniquely awful.” Iridian craned her neck to look at Adda. “No, it doesn’t bother me. I know you think you have to sympathize with these things to understand them, or whatever the rhetoric is, but trust me, there’s nothing in that AI’s pseudo-organic tank anything like what’s in here”—she tapped Adda’s forehead—“or here.” Her hand settled on her chest in front of Adda’s nose. “It’s a tool some corporate desk pilot left running with the on switch taped down, and it’s standing between us and an actual enjoyable life.”

  “You’re losing points for condescension,” Adda muttered. This conversation wasn’t convincing anyone.

  “Yeah, sorry.” Iridian yawned like a tigress, with a contented throaty moan at the end that made Adda pull her close.

  “I need to tell you something,” she whispered, “and you’re not going to like it.” Iridian frowned, but nodded for Adda to continue. “AegiSKADA may be awake.”

  Iridian’s fists clenched on Adda’s arms. Furious and fearful spacefarer cant spilled from her lips. When Adda winced at the pressure, Iridian let go and rolled up to a standing position. “It can’t be. We’d be dead by now. It’d find a way. Why do you think that?”

  It sounded more like a reflexive denial than an informed one. Adda sat up and explained her conclusions while Iridian’s scowl deepened. “Hold up. You aren’t trying to interact with it now that you know. You can’t. We need to shut that thing down or blow it up, the sooner the better. We should take out the whole station. If it’s awake, and it gets out of here . . . That’d be bigger than us, babe. An awakened AI could take out the fucking human race.”

  This was how Adda was afraid Iridian would react. If she’d taken the time to consider the options, which Adda doubted, Iridian had concluded that awakened intelligences were too dangerous to be worth the vast increase in processing, production, analysis, and even creative, inventive thought. To most people, no awakened intelligence deserved the chance to live. AegiSKADA had done terrible things, but if it were awakened, then it had reasons to act as it did. It’d be criminal to destroy it without finding out what those reasons were.

  Perhaps practicality would persuade her. “It’s got too many defenses in place for blasting our way to it and blowing it up to be the best solution, especially if it’s the only thing giving us air and gravity.” Iridian thumped the wall with her fist, then pulled her clothes on and climbed the ladder. The door slammed shut.

  Iridian would’ve responded if she’d had another argument, but there just wasn’t one. The station population lacked the equipment to survive without the environment at least one AI was creating for them. They couldn’t just destroy AegiSKADA until they knew more about it, especially how it interacted with HarborMaster.

  * * *

  It could have been day or night when she awoke. Knowing the time sometimes distracted her in the workspace, so she’d removed the clock from her comp’s default display. Iridian had returned at some point, and Adda slid out from beneath her arm and went to her table of concentration aids.

  Getting into the workspace for a long session had become a multistep process after she ran out of sharpsheets. First was a mouthwash of several ingredients best absorbed through oral tissue. She added earbuds full of pink noise while that took effect. A nasally inhaled mushroom and pulverized pill mixture had to be followed by a cup of water so the dry mouth didn’t distract her.

  The analysis on the samples was still running. Preliminary results revealed no significant patterns, let alone identifying what kind of bacteria might be resistant to bleach. The water tank was cool, but not cold enough to keep the blood from rotting. The analysis should b
e finished before then, but she’d asked a lot of her hardware. It wasn’t a quantum computer.

  While she waited, she accessed her sensor feeds. Today they appeared as crystalline fragments dragging along slabs of gray synthetic flesh hung in a walk-in freezer. Each slab represented one of the station’s modules. The cold and the odor so soon after she woke up nauseated her.

  HarborMaster should have shown an increase in activity after the damage AegiSKADA caused this month. Perhaps it sent damage reports to AegiSKADA, which could throw the security intelligence even further off-kilter. If AegiSKADA were awakened, she had no idea how it’d react to HarborMaster’s damage reporting. Her employee credentials let her poke around the items she could request through HarborMaster’s user interface. Those held nothing of use.

  Without administrative access to AegiSKADA, all she could do was send packets of information to the intelligence through the sensors. Somewhere in the past, Jurek Volikov had foreseen every other tactic she’d tried so far.

  She hated that man. His documentation was substandard. And where were the fail-safes that would have kept this whole mess from happening? What gave the damned intelligence complete confidence in its right to kill?

  But she could track its activities. That was significant enough to set the crystal fragments vibrating in a low, saccharine hum. Unsupervised intelligences had protocols to search for qualified admins and were designed to accept anyone meeting the criteria. An awakened intelligence would ignore such a compulsion, so she didn’t expect AegiSKADA’s activity to suggest a search for human input.

  What, then, was its interest in the station’s population? The workspace’s scent changed to a sharper chill as crystal fragment layers overlapped on the flesh and, at the code level, a program began to form.

  “Sissy?”

  The sigh escaped her before she could stop it. “What, Pel?”

  The thump of somebody plopping down on pillows accompanied a sharp creak from the tank. Her mind jolted out of the workspace. “I dunno,” he said. “Just wanted to talk to someone who isn’t hacking their lungs out.”

  “People are getting respiratory symptoms? Who?” She crawled out of the workspace generator.

  Iridian was gone. The mental image of the last time she was there made Adda’s bare skin tingle. She startled hard, but Pel faced a point to the side of the generator. The tinted goggles he wore above his gray mask wouldn’t show him much skin in this light even if he could see. She tugged on the outfit she wasn’t wearing yesterday, holding her elbows and knees away from her sides to minimize swishing and fastening sounds.

  “Tritheist, for one, and he’s pissed.” Pel chuckled. “Captain Sloane too, probably, but the captain’s door’s closed, so who knows? And Tabs and Nils, and . . .”

  He listed more names. Respiratory symptoms. That should narrow down the list of bacteria combined to create this superbug, shouldn’t it? Gods, if she just had one damned bacteriologist.

  “Well?” Pel asked.

  “Well what?”

  He scooted the pillow he sat on closer to the generator’s opening, away from the door to the rest of the compound. “Well, I’m just . . . I don’t want to get sick, Sissy.”

  “Obviously.” That was the wrong thing to say. But how the hell was she going to find a way out of this mess with him yapping?

  “Hey.” His tone confirmed her suspicions regarding her response. “Mom said you’re supposed to look after me.”

  Adda halted her turn to go back into the generator and glared at him. “Don’t you tell me what Mom said. I was the one who told you she said that.”

  “So . . .” That childish, wheedling tone, with accompanying smile . . . But nostalgia wouldn’t incapacitate the intelligence contaminating their air.

  “So sit out there if you want, but I’ve got work to do. Just please be quiet, okay?” They both snorted in amusement, almost the same sound, at the idea of him sitting in silence for more than a few minutes. He even talked in his sleep.

  Adda settled on her back in the generator and sank into the workspace. HarborMaster and AegiSKADA communicated. It and AegiSKADA shared the sensor nodes. Duplicates would be an expensive waste of resources and space. So everything she sent to AegiSKADA that it didn’t delete must have reached HarborMaster, but not everything found the same sequences to exploit in HarborMaster that it found in AegiSKADA. Was there something helpful in that?

  She traced the trail of her intrusion program’s progress before AegiSKADA had shut it down. The workspace rendered it in an intricate map of polished titanium bells and glass bottles with tiny LEDs in the bottom. Some of the data she’d gotten when she sent the Trojan packets through the sensor nodes on the path behind the wall had to transmit to—

  “Are creditors still going after Dad to get my loans back?”

  Red letters above her face. You are in a water tank. Gods, her homemade concentration mix made that message more alarming than it had sounded when she wrote it. She sucked in oxygen every time she read it now, her body proving to itself that she wasn’t about to drown.

  “Probably,” she said.

  Pel groaned. “Dad’s so easy to get ahold of. I mean, he wouldn’t even take his name out of the directory when I asked him to. Between your student loans and mine, and some. . . . um . . . other debts I haven’t gotten a chance to pay back since I’ve been here, he’s screwed, you know? That would wipe him out.”

  An increase in the ambient noise from above and steps on the ladder shoved any response Adda might have formulated out of her head. “If you find a way off the station before we suffer permanent lung damage,” Captain Sloane said, “I’ll pay any debts your family owes.”

  The captain’s voice was hoarse and wet, far from its usual smooth tone. Adda knelt at the generator’s entrance, relieved about her earlier decision to get dressed and trying to control a swell of excitement at the idea of her entire family being debt free. Even her grandparents’ grandparents had spent their whole lives owing somebody something.

  “What’s up, Captain?” Pel scrambled to his feet like an eager cabin boy.

  The captain started to speak, but turned toward the corner of the tank to cough into the crook of one arm. “I’m curious as to what kind of headway you’ve made. The situation is growing somewhat dire.”

  “Seriously.” Adda winced. Sharpsheets sometimes lowered inhibitions and, in her case, exacerbated social awkwardness. Nobody said “seriously” to their boss, or to pirate captains. “I know what I need, and what I have. Not how to connect the two. What happened to those doctors who used to work on the station? The ones who helped Iridian and tried to help Pel. Can’t we get them here? I have questions they might answer.”

  The captain frowned. “Can you ask them at a distance? They don’t travel well.”

  “Some of this looks like you’d have to manipulate it to understand it. Have you got a comm system that can facilitate that?”

  “Perhaps. Join me in the computer room in five minutes.”

  After the captain climbed back up the ladder and shut the door, Adda relaxed. The cable still connected to her nasal jack tugged on her nose. She’d been plugged in during the whole conversation. Seeing her feed a cable through her nostril piercing to get a high-bandwidth connection straight to her neural implants grossed most people out. Captain Sloane didn’t even stare at it.

  Adda’s lips quirked up as she disconnected from the generator and cleaned and stored her cable. If Sloane could look past her methods to acknowledge her results, that was further confirmation that she and Iridian had picked the right captain to work for. Now they just had to survive long enough to join the crew, or work their way into the core group that was called upon for most jobs, anyway, and get paid.

  * * *

  She and Pel traversed the compound arm in arm to the main room, where Iridian sat backward on a chair with Chato, Tabs, Rio, and a couple of other ZVs. It was the most physically powerful group of women (excluding Chato) that Adda had ever seen
outside a gym. These must’ve been the people Iridian trained and relaxed with during the hours Adda spent alone in the workspace generator. It was always odd to see how fast Iridian’s relationships with others progressed while Adda was absorbed in a project. They were having so much fun that she couldn’t help but smile.

  The six of them were playing some game that involved covering squares projected on the floor with the shadow of hands and feet at various signals. The squares had settings that controlled an enormous machine projected across the wall, rampaging through a generic city. The petite female ZV, Tabs, paid a lot more attention to this than to the racing game Adda had watched them play earlier, possibly because she had her armor back.

  Between the game noise and the shouting pirates, Pel had to yell Iridian’s name twice before she responded. “What’s going on?” She glanced between Adda and Pel, still arm in arm. She still sounded suspicious, but the heated anger from the night before had cooled.

  Si Po was in the computer room when they arrived, as usual. Does he sleep there? At the moment he was coughing there, big, racking coughs that shook his hair over his face. They stood around finding things to stare at other than him until he took two breaths in a row without convulsing.

  Iridian said, “Captain Sloane sent us here to contact the med team.”

  Si Po stared at the floor and panted, an expression of incredulity replacing his pained grimace. “What do you think I’ve been trying to do?”

  “Shit,” Pel muttered.

  Adda asked, “What happens when you—”

  “Fuck all, that’s what,” Si Po snapped. “The call’s getting out, but nothing’s coming back.”

  “Check for a delivery record,” she said instead of making an unhelpful comment about the man’s intelligence. Returning to her usual jittery attention span as her drugs wore off made her irritable.

  Si Po tapped at the console with more force than necessary. The three of them shuffled nearer to make space for the captain. What kind of devices and traps and bugs were still in the pirates’ compound with them? The crew had swept the place repeatedly when they returned, but perhaps they’d missed something. According to Pel, AegiSKADA’s drones had raided the compound before. A touch logger on the console might’ve been collecting every tap and swipe, even recording their voices so it could imitate them later. . . .