Barbary Station

by R. E. Stearns

  * * *

  In the workspace, she stood at the side of a highway suspended over a volcanic black desert. Packets of AegiSKADA’s sensor data zoomed past in intricate multicolored blurs. Since her equipment struggled to keep up with the flow of information, she didn’t have the details she needed. AegiSKADA had top-of-the-line pseudo-organic hardware from just three years ago. She had a tent and a cable up her nose.

  She didn’t need a door labeled SECURITY CONTROL ROOM to locate it, and it was time she added its details to her map. The more she studied the system, the more right the pirates’ previous captain seemed about accessing the intelligence’s internal system physically. Over the network, it had all the advantages. A physical attack would only split its resources, not Adda’s. Iridian would be entering the control room, of course, but Adda needed to find an entrance point before Iridian could disable it.

  She sent forth her desire to rise above the data flow. An improbably large murder of crows soared cawing out of the ashen sky, grasped her clothes in their claws, and carried her into the air.

  From above, the traffic patterns on the workspace highway mapped the stations’ functioning sensor nodes. Two points caught her attention. A substantial amount of vibration data approached the only other random vibration center, on the opposite side of the station. And a vast array of data points lay far out on the ring, beyond the quantified signs of human life.

  She dispatched a crow, concentrating on her desire to contact Iridian in real time. The crow returned with a headset mic and a single earpiece, which she put on. “Good morning, Iri. Or, almost morning.”

  “That goodness is debatable.” Iridian groaned.

  “My filter for drones shows a lot hovering in your area. Do you see them?”

  “Shit. Stand by.” While Iridian scuffled around and informed others, Adda willed a new script into existence. This one would send and assemble sensor data within ten feet of the pattern she highlighted as human movement. Eyeless crows with bleeding sockets carried square projector frames to her in black talons. When they flew away, their feet remained in midair, holding up the frames.

  “We don’t see a thing,” Iridian reported.

  The drones were following Iridian’s group, but they were on a different floor. It was funny, the mistakes AegiSKADA made. Adda would give a lot for it to keep making them. “I’ll set an alarm here to ping you three times in a row, quickly, if one gets close.”

  “A proximity alarm using its own sensors? Babe, I love you so.”

  She blushed. A whole squad of pirates heard Iridian say that. She inhaled to tell Iridian she loved her too. Something bubbled in her throat, and she started coughing.

  “Are you all right?” The cam nearest Iridian, a few meters away and even with the top of her head, transmitted her frown. “Are you wearing your mask?”

  “I’m down in the tank all the time, so I didn’t think I needed one.” But being Pel’s big sister didn’t make her immune to his germs. Quite the opposite, actually.

  “Oh, babe.” Iridian’s sigh got lost in Adda’s coughing, bad enough that it dragged her out of the workspace. She curled into herself, imagining one clear breath, just one . . .

  It finally came. She crawled out of the generator and got a tug on the nose for forgetting to unplug. The alarms would notify her if drones attacked, and Iridian could track the enemy.

  She was alone in the tank. On the wall beside the ladder, at face height for Pel, a small disposable projector shone Back before macaroni in orange text. They’d left that message for each other as children, when that was their favorite premade meal and Dad worked too late to make dinner.

  In all the time she’d been on Barbary Station, he’d never left that message for her because he was always just around the corner, somewhere in the pirates’ compound. He’d leave a note if he was planning to change that.

  She raced up the ladder, down the hall, and across the main room. Pirates looked up in alarm as she passed. Halfway across the compound’s entryway, she inhaled and inhaled without bringing in any air. She leaned against one wall, then slid down it, wheezing. She tried to shout for help, but she had no breath left.

  Tabs stuck her head into the entryway from the main room. “Hey, how’d you get sunburned in here? We’re not having a radstorm, are we?” She took a closer look at Adda, swore, and ran back through the main room. “Medic! Zikri! Get the fuck over here, man, she’s choking or some shit!”

  A door opened and closed and the medic barreled in next, wearing only a mask and pants, and dropped to his knees next to her. “You are damned lucky I found this.” He uncapped an inhaler. As she raised an eyebrow because inhalation was clearly problematic, he stuffed the open end into her mouth and depressed the plunger. Sour liquid spritzed down her throat twice as he repeated the maneuver.

  She was surprised to find herself able to swallow, at least. “Okay, look at me.” Above the mask his red-rimmed eyes shone a mossy green in pockmarked teak skin that made her wish she looked people in the face more often. The pupils were blown wide, despite the bright lighting. “In about five seconds your airway’s gonna open up. Keep looking at me. Two . . . one . . .”

  Even though it was probably a placebo effect, the clenched hand around her lungs loosened right on cue. She sounded half-drowned, but she was breathing.

  The applause startled her. Sturm, Rio, Chef, and San Miguel had crowded into the entryway. They cheered and thumped Zikri on the shoulders and back. He winked at Adda over the mask. Rio pulled the medic right off the floor while raising his arm above his head in a victory pose. Adda ducked her head to ruffle the blue dust out of her hair and hide her rapidly warming face. These people do not have enough to do.

  The ZVs’ cheers devolved into deep coughs. “All right, everybody who’s sick put your ass on some furniture,” Major O.D. shouted from the main room. “And somebody help the hacker up.”

  Rio dropped Zikri, encircled Adda’s ample waist with one arm, and set her on her feet. “You good now?”

  “Where is Pel?” Adda wheezed.

  “That boy . . .” Rio shook her head. “He’s gone to bargain with the fugees for medicine. I don’t know what he has to offer, but he’s determined. The major tried to stop him. Pel told him he wasn’t a ZV Group soldier and he didn’t have to do a thing Major O.D. said.”

  Adda smiled sadly. “You have to lock him down or tie him up to stop him, sometimes. But why didn’t anybody go after him?”

  “Major O.D. said if any of us went out, he wouldn’t let us back in.”

  Pel couldn’t even see where he was walking. Adda wavered on her feet, then walked toward the ladder to the docking bay. As she gripped the hatch, her comp alarm buzzed against her hand. She subvocalized an adjustment to the display, but the volume of scrolling information overwhelmed her little projector.

  “Could you put that on the wall in the computer room?” The captain’s voice was an octave lower than usual, but there was no mistaking it. Sloane watched her from the main room, face pale and sweaty but a vigilance about the eyes that alarmed Adda more than the alert on her comp. The clothes Sloane wore were the most comfortable-looking she’d ever seen the captain in, though they still looked like they cost a semester’s tuition. But the captain was standing, walking, and talking, and that was a massive improvement.

  “Captain, are you feeling better?” Adda asked as they crossed the main room.

  “For now.” Sloane smiled slightly. “Steroids are wonderful for certain applications.” So the captain’s improved condition was probably temporary.

  The map projected on the wall was alive with activity. Iridian’s group appeared almost opposite the pirate compound on the station’s ring. A lot of human activity registered in the fugee camp too. Adda hadn’t observed them long enough to tell if that was normal. What was odd was the additional activity in the docking bay below the pirates’ compound.

  She expanded that area. “What are we looking at?” Captain Sloane asked.

>   “That’s what I’ve classified as human movement. I thought it was Pel, but there’s more than one.” She stared at the readout for a moment, swallowed hard, and glanced over for Sloane’s reaction. The captain looked between her and the display, like Adda’s efficient, rational visualization was in a code only she could decipher.

  Maybe it is. It is based on how I think. “Look at all of this. Humans here, across the station from us. That’s Iridian. But humans here, too. And then there’s this.” She walked as close to the wall she could without taking her hand off the console’s comp cradle to point out motion, energy expenditure, and encrypted digital directives progressing toward the refugees’ docking bay. “That’s not human. All of that is AegiSKADA’s drones.”

  In the distance, something exploded. The heat sensors in the docking bay flickered on her display, drawing Sloane’s gaze. “What in all hells is going on down there?” the captain asked.

  Every sensor on that floor reported movement and sound. She projected video feeds from the docking bay, but they only showed movement and smoke. “I have no idea.” Adda hoped Pel had gotten himself somewhere relatively safe. Sick as she was, she’d never survive long enough to reach him in person. She’d have to find him with AegiSKADA’s sensors instead.

  CHAPTER 18

  Charges Accrued: Murder

  After half an hour’s tense silence since Adda’s announcement of strange activity near base, Adda’s voice in Iridian’s helmet just about gave her a heart attack. “Nils is dead.”

  “Aw, shit.” Iridian shut off her mic—in Nils’s helmet, damn everything—and halted the winding procession through a debris-choked corridor to tell the others. Grandpa Death swore vociferously while the rest of the pirates on the med team retrieval mission breathed through their loss. “What happened?” she asked, hoping that whatever it was wouldn’t have been prevented if Nils had the armor she was wearing now.

  “He started coughing, and then he just . . . drowned.” Fear shook Adda’s voice, which made Iridian want to punch something, but there was nothing to hit. That was the way Captain Sloane would go too, if they couldn’t get the med team back to base in time. “Zikri tried to help him, but nothing he did worked. The lung tissue tore and there was internal bleeding.” Adda drew in a breath and said more urgently, “They’re right in front of you.”

  Iridian stepped into a solid forward block stance and deployed her shield at chest height. Six pairs of footsteps stuttered to a halt behind her. “What are right in front of us?” she asked aloud for the pirates’ benefit.

  “The doctors.” Iridian sighed in annoyance at Adda’s lack of specificity and lowered her shield. Adda continued, “There’s enviro on both sides of the emergency bulkhead, but they locked it shut. I’m unlocking it.”

  Out of sight around a corner, something metallic clanged. Adda was getting faster at opening locked doors. Iridian carried the shield deployed at her side as she led the others through.

  Haphazardly abandoned office furniture littered a long, dark room beyond the door. Something bounced off her faceplate, making her flinch and bring her shield up before she registered that the armor integrity readout in the corner of her HUD hadn’t changed at all. An empty box of algae-based meal replacement mix hit the floor and clattered into the deep shadows outside the hallway’s emergency lighting.

  “Hey! Stop that,” she shouted into the dark. “Remember me? Iridian Nassir, the one who got zapped by a drone out on the hull.” Four heads popped up, one after the other, from behind an overturned desk. Williams and Tiwari were out of enviro suits this time, accompanied by a white man and woman Iridian had never seen before. “That’s all of them, yeah?” she asked the ZVs and Si Po.

  “Yeah,” Sergeant Natani said. “About time we had some good luck.”

  Wide, hollow eyes stared out of prominent facial bones, which made the med team look more desperate than the fugees. Their open white coats reflected the light from the hallway, more like plastic than cloth, and revealed several layers of clothing beneath. Williams wore her thick black hair coiled into a style Iridian could’ve sworn she’d seen on the love interest in a vid. It’d been under a helmet when Iridian had last seen her, on the station’s exterior hull.

  “Close it!” Williams shouted at the ZVs. Beside her, Tiwari nodded emphatically.

  Iridian waved the others inside while Grandpa Death shone his helmet’s light around the room. Dim images of microorganisms were projected across the walls and ceiling. Natani, Six, Nitro, and Chato followed Grandpa Death in. Beneath the last unbroken overhead light in the hallway, Si Po turned slowly in place, trying to watch everywhere at once.

  “Come on, they’re not hurting anyone.” Iridian looked between the four wide-eyed faces. “Are you?”

  “Of course not,” said the white guy.

  “Close it,” Tiwari repeated.

  The white woman rolled her eyes. “Doesn’t matter. No bots.”

  “Close it!” Tiwari shouted. The two males stared at each other with the peculiar intensity the med team had displayed on the station’s surface.

  Iridian had to ask. “Are you people psychic or something? What’s with the eye fucking?” All four of them turned to her, stared some more, then laughed so loudly that Iridian winced.

  Whatever the hell that was about, it’d be good to put another emergency bulkhead between her and hard vac, and between her and any drones AegiSKADA sent. “Come on, Si Po. The AI’s trying a lot harder to kill you than these docs are.”

  Si Po gingerly stepped through the doorway and Iridian keyed her mic on the wider band. “Shut that door again, please, babe.” The door banged closed from the floor to the ceiling less than a step behind Si Po. He shrieked at a higher pitch than she could’ve managed. All four physicians ducked behind the table again.

  In the fear-laden silence that followed, Nitro asked, “What is wrong with them?”

  “They worked for Spacelink,” said Natani. “They got left behind during evac. Or there never was one.” She glanced at Iridian like she was suspicious that Iridian had lied when she’d told them that the evac never reached the station during the battle. “The fugees didn’t get here for another year, so the med team was trapped with AegiSKADA, in a half-wrecked hab with no Internet. That’d break my brain.”

  “Depends on who you were trapped with, ma’am.” Despite Grandpa Death’s worsening cough, he elbowed Six in the ribs and grinned at Sergeant Natani, whose narrowed eyes glared coldly enough to flash-freeze her faceplate. Iridian wasn’t the only one on the station hanging on to her sense of humor with both hands.

  “Shut it, you damned artifact,” said Natani. Grandpa Death smiled like the round had gone to him, and Natani scowled like he was right. Six ducked his head inside his helmet and walked away a few paces to check their exits. So Natani and Six didn’t talk about whatever relationship they had going on. Iridian was glad she’d never bought it up to Six, and it was one more reason to avoid Natani.

  Time to get everybody focused. “We need your help,” Iridian said to the doctors. “People are sick back at base, and nothing our medic tried has cured the stuff.”

  “Antibiotic resistant,” said the white female physician, in a tone that implied an unspoken you idiot.

  “We didn’t have many antibiotics to begin with,” Iridian said. “Now, do you have enough suits for all of you?” She mentally projected urgency and a need to vacate the premises, the way Adda talked about communicating with AI.

  “Can’t leave. Equipment here,” said Tiwari.

  So much for telepathy. “Our people are drowning in their own blood. We need you there to save them,” Iridian said. “Besides, our medic has some equipment, and we can bring your smaller stuff.” Not that she looked forward to hauling it under fire, if it came to that. Nothing heavy would make the jump across the broken section of hallway that they’d made on the way here. “Bring any patterns you need on a datacask. You people could use some company anyway, don’t you think?” Donning
her least threatening smile, she envisioned carrying them back tied up. It’d be faster.

  “Won’t,” said the woman who’d argued that closing the emergency door was unnecessary.

  “Won’t,” the man she’d been staring at agreed.

  A high-pitched beep in Iridian’s helmet speaker repeated three times and startled all the pirates, who must’ve heard it in theirs, too. Adda’s drone alarm was telling them they had incoming. The pirates had stayed in one place long enough, and in close enough proximity to the station’s only protected residents, to draw AegiSKADA’s attention. “We need to leave, people,” Iridian said.

  “It’s the right thing to do.” Dr. Williams stepped around the overturned table and gave Iridian a passable spacefarer bow. “Maya Lorde Williams. I will go with you.”

  “And I,” said Dr. Tiwari. “We have suits. Also oxygen.”

  “How much O2?” asked Natani.

  The white woman pointed to tanks lined up in an office cubicle, stacked to the top of its low walls. Nice to know they stood next to so much pressurized flammable gas.

  “I won’t walk all the way back on the outside just counting on our suits’ O2,” Natani said. “We’ll have to carry the tanks. That’ll limit mobility.”

  For once, Iridian agreed with her. “I’m not trading my shield for one. Can we make it part of the way?”

  “The Charon’s Coin docks near here,” Si Po said. “At the distribution docking bay. We could walk the hull until there, then go inside for the rest of the way around.”

  “Show,” demanded the woman who wanted to stay. Si Po projected the map from his comp glove onto the wall. The dark room let the tiny projector outline the map’s major features. The labels were unreadable blurs.

  Something slammed into the emergency door from the outside. The drone that Adda’s alarm had warned them about had apparently arrived. The door jerked open several centimeters, then thumped shut again. The med team abandoned Si Po’s map and ran to lockers propped haphazardly against one wall. The doctors pulled enviro suits from them and started sealing themselves inside.