Barbary Station

by R. E. Stearns

  “It’s getting through,” Si Po said. “The ratty, overeducated hullhumpers are ignoring us.”

  Iridian stiffened against Adda’s arm, and Adda laid a hand on her girlfriend’s hip. The difference in education opportunities between NEU and the colonies beyond Mars had been a major point of contention during the war. “Overeducated” was a weightier term than it used to be. But, as Iridian frequently told herself aloud for everyone’s benefit, the war was over.

  “Lad and lasses, I’d like to connect my comp to the antenna array around us,” said Captain Sloane. “How might we arrange that?”

  Adda and Iridian glanced at each other, then examined the console and the comp glove. Iridian spent more time with the console, while Adda focused on the comp. “Cable, wire cutters, and solder?” she asked Iridian.

  “Or plugs that fit,” said Iridian. Si Po nodded and left in the direction of the main room and Sturm’s armory workshop. “Trying to get their attention with a more important caller, sir?” Adda kicked Iridian’s shin for incorrect pronoun usage. “Sorry, Captain,” said Iridian.

  “They know better than to anger me,” the captain said.

  “I think there’s an easier way to do that.” Sloane’s mouth twitched up, and Adda clarified, “Tell them it’s you calling, I mean. Could somebody get Si Po back?” Once she had as much information as she could get, she coerced the console into sending messages in the captain’s name. That extended the captain’s personal communication range to the entirety of the station and a bit beyond, if Iridian had described the antennas accurately. “I can guarantee the audio. Vid should work too, but . . .” Adda shrugged. Cams and vid optimization didn’t interest her.

  “Doctors,” the captain intoned, “this is Captain Sloane. We’re experiencing an emergency medical situation. I’m waiting on your response.” After the mic was off, Sloane smiled at Adda. “I like this. Will it stay this way? Must I always be in this room?”

  “It’s trivial to collect that information and add it in for you every time.” She shut her mouth. This was the captain she was talking to, not Iridian or some classmate at school, and she didn’t need to emphasize the simplicity of the task when Sloane hadn’t thought of setting that arrangement up before now.

  A pinging alert drew their attention to the projection on the wall, where the cam light came on to show that it was filming them. In the message projection, a face appeared so close to the medical team’s cam lens that the person’s brown eyes seemed inordinately large. Barbary Station’s spinning starscape flickered at the edge of the frame, in a projected window, Adda hoped.

  Iridian waved at the console’s cam. “That’s Dr. Tiwari.” He and another member of the med team had rescued Iridian from AegiSKADA’s drone on the station’s exterior.

  The physician half a centimeter from the lens nodded briefly to Iridian, then said, “Yes, Captain?” His accent might have been French.

  Facing the console’s mic and cam, Sloane said, “We’ve had a medical emergency in our little abode. AegiSKADA deployed some sort of microbial dispenser, which is—”

  “Making everybody sick, like Si Po?” An olive-toned pointing finger replaced Dr. Tiwari’s face in the vid, aimed over Adda’s shoulder. “He’s experiencing respiratory distress.”

  They all turned to look at the oily-haired pirate. Si Po’s narrow chest and stomach strained with his wheezing inhales and exhales. The effect was like a panic attack Adda once had in an exceptionally disturbing workspace. She didn’t know how to help. Iridian patted his back like he was choking, which threw off his balance. He smiled as best he could and waved her off. Beneath his labored breath, footsteps approached the medical team’s mic.

  “We need a short-term treatment and a long-term cure.” The captain watched Si Po with a deep frown. The doctor’s eyes rose to stare at something behind his cam. The stomping footsteps drew nearer. “We’ve completed some—”

  “Medicine cabinet?” interrupted a woman out of sight, thanks to the doctor in front of the cam. She pronounced each syllable with exquisite care, although she sounded out of breath.

  “That’s Dr. Williams,” Iridian muttered for Adda’s benefit. “She talked like that after she chased off that drone on the surface, too.”

  “Two out of four of them,” Si Po said. “Not bad.” When Iridian communicated her confusion with a raised eyebrow, he added “There are four docs out there, but we never catch all of them on cam at once.” It was interesting that Dr. Williams had picked up on the conversation’s topic. The way she was breathing suggested that she’d come from far enough away that she should have been out of hearing range.

  “Pel, would you ask Zikri what medications he has at his disposal, please?” Captain Sloane said.

  “Yeah, sure, Captain.” Pel dragged his hand along the blue-dusted wall on his way into the main room, where he yelled, “Hey, where’s Zikri?” loud enough that he might as well have stayed in the room to do it.

  “Zikri. That hack. Pill pusher. Pill seller.” Dr. Tiwari looked off cam as he spoke, like he might if he was talking to himself.

  “Symptoms?” demanded Dr. Williams from off cam in the opposite direction from where Dr. Tiwari was looking.

  “A great deal of coughing,” said Captain Sloane. “And everybody who’s having breathing difficulty has a headache as well. Our antibiotics have had no effect.”

  After a few seconds of silence that made Adda wonder if they’d lost the comms feed, Dr. Tiwari said, “Yes. Bacteria or virus?”

  Adda actually had the answer to that. “Bacteria. I ran tests.”

  “Which?” asked Dr. Williams.

  “I can send you what I’ve got so far,” Adda said, “or show you here, and—”

  “Send,” said Dr. Tiwari, whose face still took up the entirety of the vid screen.

  Pel and Zikri arrived while Adda was setting up the data transfer. “All right, you want the rundown on my stock?” Zikri’s spine straightened, his chest puffed out as if he liked being the person everybody listened to.

  “Inarguably,” said Dr. Williams.

  Zikri looked miffed until he met the captain’s eyes. Sloane watched him unblinking, with fingers steepled over the V of the shirt beneath the captain’s jacket. “We had light and heavy antibio before, but I used up all the light stuff and most of the heavy. We got a lot of painkiller. It comes on the fugee care packages, and I trade for it. You know they don’t need it. They’re safe as houses so long as they don’t pick up anything gun, blade, or bludgeon shaped.” He glanced around as if waiting for an argument. Considering the pirates’ recent death toll, Adda was disinclined to challenge his assumption. “Now they have most of the antihistamines—kids, allergies, you know—and there’s the sanitizers. We mixed up a lot of wipes and sprays, but this shit grows like mold. Hey, it’s not mold, is it?” he asked hopefully.

  “Not,” pronounced the woman off-screen. “Airivine? Corsiprex? Dilaflo?”

  “What?” Zikri gaped at the console’s cam. “You get hit in the head or something?”

  To a combat medic, all psychologically atypical behavior must have looked like symptoms of head injury. “Those sound like medication names,” Adda said.

  “Huh . . .” Zikri scratched his jaw for a couple of seconds. “Are they steroids?”

  “Inhaled steroids, yes, inarguably,” said Dr. Williams.

  “Not,” Dr. Tiwari said in a tone suggesting that this was a point in an often-repeated argument.

  “What else?” Dr. Williams demanded, and before anybody in Captain Sloane’s base could come up with a response, he continued, “Requires more.” The intensity and opacity of their conversational back-and-forth was worrisome. How could these people cure the infection if they couldn’t communicate clearly enough to ask and answer complete questions?

  “Inhalers with steroid cartridges, do you have them?” Dr. Tiwari asked. This question appeared to be directed at the cam.

  “Well, I do have an inhaler or two,” Zikri sai
d doubtfully. “Nobody here’s asthmatic, so I’ve been trading those to the fugees. They got asthmatic kids, with nobody to fix their lungs up here.”

  “Can’t,” said Dr. Williams.

  “I know, I know, no equipment.” Zikri smirked at Iridian and Adda. “You should have been here when Six needed his gall bladder out. That was frickin’ messy.” Six was the large, quiet ZV with the cadet cap, Adda was fairly certain.

  Iridian wrinkled her nose. “I didn’t know you could live without a gall bladder.”

  “You can when it makes you vomit up everything you eat,” Zikri said. “I’ll go look for inhalers and see what’s in ’em. Hey, what can we use aside from bleach? Bleach ain’t killing shit.”

  “Apply multiple times,” said Dr. Tiwari. Zikri rolled his eyes.

  “Data received,” said Dr. Williams. A flash of Adda’s analysis results crossed the edge of the cam’s view, on a table projector. “Synthesized biofilm, pseudo-organic construction but . . . not.” Dr. Tiwari left the cam range to examine the projection, exposing a small, poorly lit room with a large projected window and some overturned office furniture.

  It was gratifying to hear physicians support Adda’s assessment that the microbes were not naturally occurring. She still couldn’t believe the creativity evident in the bioweaponry deployment. This almost certainly hadn’t been a scenario in Volikov’s intelligence development regimen. How much resourcefulness had he trained AegiSKADA for? Or, a more troubling question: Just how much had it figured out on its own?

  CHAPTER 14

  Charges Accrued: Slander

  Iridian banged her head on the way out of the ceiling duct in the mess hall. The curse she spat made Chef laugh while Iridian slammed the vent’s cover into place. “Haven’t heard that one in a while,” Chef said. “Since I worked at Arabia Terra Station.”

  Iridian felt Chef’s gaze on her as she tightened the screws on the ceiling vent and moved on to the one in the wall. AT Station was a Near Earth Union military base, before the war. Secessionists took it during their initial sweep of the red planet. The NEU blasted it from orbit until the new craters looked as natural as the old ones. “Yeah, I hear they had some choice terms. Nothing else to do on Mars.”

  “You weren’t ever stationed there?” Chef asked.

  Iridian squeezed her head and arm into the wall duct and reached for the fan pumping in stolen station atmo. That would’ve been a likely hiding place for a microbe dispenser, especially if AegiSKADA tracked movement and cataloged people who entered this room.

  Nothing inside resembled the dispenser in the common room. What she did find was a respectable decontaminant filter that had been included in the pattern used to print the fan. The contraption sprayed a low-grade disinfectant, which explained the sour, tangy taste in her mouth. She’d gotten a faceful of it, and she must’ve absorbed some of it through her skin. She hoped that was what happened, anyway. If her mask had let so much aerosolized disinfectant pass through its substrate that she could taste the stuff, then it’d be useless against AegiSKADA’s bioweapon.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” Chef huffed.

  “Sorry. Mars was over for infantry by the time I came off the Jovian front. I never ran there.”

  Chef wiped down a cup and tossed it into the recycling bin to be melted, purified, and printed into another cup later. “Ran? Is that what they call it now?”

  “I was a Shieldrunner. ISVs use kinetic backup power, so we literally ran everywhere. The vehicles just have longer legs than we do.”

  Neither of the ducts contained dispensers, or dormant drones, or anything that didn’t look like it was there when Iridian and Adda arrived. Two air inlets per room seemed to be the pirates’ construction limit. From a security perspective it made a certain kind of sense, since that resulted in fewer ingress points for spiderbots. Iridian waved good-bye to Chef on her way to borrow a light from Sturm. Headlamp strapped in place on her forehead, she stepped quietly into the packed bunkhouse.

  By standing on a lower bunk and ducking under the one above it, she determined that the fan in the single duct leading to this room was off. Vick growled at her from the lower one, but she wouldn’t rush on his account.

  This vent was too small for her to crawl through. By crushing her chest against the wall and jamming the edge of the vent into her armpit, she reached the still fan. Its blades moved freely when she pushed them with her fingertips. Either it wasn’t getting power or the motor was shot.

  It was the third broken or underpowered one she’d found so far. The compound was probably losing atmo through these things. Sturm might know about it already, but then again he might not. There wasn’t time to disassemble the wall to fix it, anyway.

  If people got trapped in the bunkhouse, they could suffocate. And it’d be other people, because she’d invite Pel to sleep down in the tank with her and Adda after this discovery. At least the CO2 scrubber appeared to be working. The readouts matched the ideal ones for that model on her comp. Everything here was bigger and more complicated than the equipment that had kept her alive in her ISV cabin during the war.

  People were damned ignorant of how near to death they were in this little outpost. If a wall collapsed, or another bomb struck (and why hadn’t it?), everybody’d die in about a minute. Unconscious after only fifteen seconds, though, so there was that.

  In the hallway, Grandpa Death waved a wrench the way normal people might wave their hand in greeting. Iridian grinned. She didn’t hold with normal. “How goes?” she asked him.

  “Could be a lot worse. I checked the captain’s cabin and the computer room. You got the rest?”

  “I didn’t get the entrance yet. Actually, I wouldn’t mind backup.” If anywhere hid drones looking to pick off stragglers, the three-story space between the hulls would be it. People descending the ladder would be particularly vulnerable, since it forced them to travel feetfirst with their hands occupied while facing a wall.

  “Sure.” Grandpa Death led the way through the common room, and they combed the entrance hall in silence. This area didn’t even have a vent.

  She cut a look over at the ZV while they worked. A few turns of phrase that had come out of his mouth over the past few weeks had a distinct Neptunian feel to them. If he hadn’t fought for the secessionists, he’d spent years in the area. Maybe he’d even grown up out there.

  Still, he respected her and Adda and even Pel, when he deserved it. That was more than a lot of the other pirates did. And when she expressed her outrage over the broken fan in the bunkhouse, he responded, “That’s damned foolish. Somebody’ll be sorry about that before all this is over.” So he understood that much about life in the cold and the black, though he wasn’t a spacefarer himself. Although after this long without dirt beneath their boots, nobody’d argue the definition of true spacefarers with residents of Barbary Station.

  When they met up in the far corner after examining the walls, floor, and ceiling, he opened the hatch and sighed. “Down we go.”

  Iridian went first, her headlamp playing over the walls and the ladder itself on the way down while Grandpa Death watched for drones with a palmer in hand. They searched the area between hulls, but the pirates kept the walkway clear, and most of the thick cables were bound and far enough out of reach that she’d have to come back with scaffolding to look them all over in detail. Grandpa Death spent as much time looking over his shoulder and toward the hole in the wall leading to the docking bay as searching for dispensers, anyway, and he walked right behind Iridian when she headed for the ladder back to base.

  Halfway through reaching for the first rung, another air intake grate caught her attention. Because of the way its frame was embedded in the wall, it would’ve been impossible to see from any other angle. Her headlamp lit it like a spotlight. “Did we check that?” she asked quietly.

  “Don’t think so.”

  She knelt and peered into the opening. Dim white light from the docking bay filtered in through another grate on
that side. “Do you know how many of these we’ve got?”

  “Sorry. Matherly would’ve known, he designed the place. But he got his head blown off before we finished construction. I know there’s some on the third floor, but that place is a death trap. Maybe Sturm knows them all.”

  She had trouble imagining Sturm bending and crawling around in the possibly toxic ship dust down here. She sighed. If she turned her shoulders the right way, she’d fit. Since she could, she felt compelled to confirm that it was as clear as the others. “I’m going in. Please tell me if AegiSKADA’s about to send a drone up my ass.”

  “Not sure I’d know if it was, but I’ll do my best.” He doubtless took the opportunity to check out said ass as she twisted and wriggled into the duct. She’d come out covered in grit and get a laugh out of Adda before she wiped it off. That woman would go mad if she didn’t laugh at least once a day.

  The air duct narrowed. Every time she inhaled, her ribs pressed up against unyielding metal. She slowed her breathing. If she panicked and got stuck or passed out, Grandpa Death would never reach her.

  When she finally got her head into the bottom of the long vertical section of the duct, she jammed her shoulder blades into its base and looked up. Her headlamp lit dust particles dragged spaceward by the fan in one of the two vents in the common room, judging by how far she’d crawled from the opening in the passage between the hulls. At the top of the second floor or the base of the third, something cast a long, strange shadow up the wall on one side. “Ah, shit.”

  “How you doing?” Grandpa Death asked from the direction of her feet.

  “There’s another dispenser up there.” Her voice echoed less than it should’ve, given how long the damned shaft was. They’d hear her up in the base.