Barbary Station

by R. E. Stearns

  Three hard impacts shook the door. Iridian spun and raised her shield. Si Po cowered behind her, but the ZVs took up positions on either side. “Somebody make sure the docs don’t take off without us!” she said.

  “On it.” Six looped a portable O2 tank’s carrying strap over one broad shoulder on his way to where the doctors were cramming themselves into enviro suits. Frowning, Natani watched him go without calling him back.

  Whatever had slammed into the doors detonated. Three half-meter-square chunks of the door bulged inward. Iridian was used to blocking explosions that size with a much bigger shield. The door remained intact and shut. “At least Spacelink didn’t scrimp on the doors.”

  “They’re running!” Six shouted.

  “Oh, what the fuck now?” Iridian shouted back in exasperation. She and the pirates whirled to face him.

  The med team shoved aside a desk at the back of the room and vanished down another dark hallway. A rattling half-closed crate on wheels trailed after them. “Doesn’t want us to leave, doesn’t want us to leave!” one of them shrieked.

  Six vaulted a chunk of emergency bulkhead that had punched through this floor from the floor below and disappeared among the debris. If the med team hid somewhere in this labyrinth where AegiSKADA’s sensors were down, Adda would never find them.

  “Did they not just say they were coming with us?” Iridian charged after Six and the doctors rather than waiting for an answer. Each pirate grabbed O2 tanks as they ran past the cubicle stash.

  After a few turns, the passage that the med team had left through opened on the wider hallway they’d followed to get there. Minimal debris piled against one wall left the med team exposed. For such weak-looking civilians, they moved fast. Williams must’ve been a marathoner at some point, the way she carried herself. Or an ISV driver. Iridian’s old posture and stride came back to her as they barreled down the hallway.

  She caught up with Six as both of them passed a sign on the wall. She read it and shouted, “They’re heading for Docking Bay Two!” over her shoulder to the pirates. Grandpa Death’s breath rattled like his namesake around his cough. When Iridian next glanced back, she didn’t see the other pirates. The three-quick-ping alarm sounded again. Another drone was somewhere nearby, but she didn’t see that, either.

  Six and Iridian clambered over a collapsed interior wall that the docs had had to go around, with their wheeled crate. The bay doors stood open on the other side. The Charon’s Coin looked small on a landing pad designed for disabled freighters. Its hullhooks and heat fins lay folded against its sides, wavering slightly in the heat of its three massive engines idling. Tiwari and Williams raced toward an elevator to the observation room. The other two docs ran straight for the ship.

  “Get away from there!” Six pursued the couple approaching the Coin, but they didn’t even look back at him. Since he was on his way to retrieve that half of the med team, Iridian ran after Tiwari and Williams.

  A drone swooped down from the ceiling toward the docs who’d almost reached the elevator. In her peripheral vision, the ship’s passthrough opened, and the escaping med team members were much nearer than Six. The pilot must’ve overridden some safety measures to open the passthrough with the engines on.

  On her next step, Iridian dipped into a half crouch to reach a piece of an empty fifty-kilo fuel cartridge. She flung it at the doctors boarding the ship. The cartridge bounced off one of their heads and, with the extra force imparted by Iridian’s armor, knocked the doc flat on his or her face. The other one hauled the fallen doctor into the passthrough. The gangway shut before Six reached it.

  Almost immediately, the ship’s engines rumbled out of idling toward full power. The now-familiar imminent depressurization alarm whooped, flashing yellow light across the bay and revealing that Six was way, way too close to the ship’s engines. Instead of running, he kept trying to open its passthrough, like he didn’t realize he was in danger of being roasted. Iridian’s shout of “Six, back off!” apparently didn’t overcome the depressurization alarm and the engine noise.

  The engines’ heat and pressure would melt Iridian’s shield, though it’d block anything the drone threw at her, short of nukes. Adda was alone with dying criminals, and the med team could save them. Could save Adda. Iridian ran hard for the elevator to the observation deck, after the other half of the med team. Whatever happened, she had to get back to Adda.

  She reached the docs near the elevator seconds after the drone launched two small projectiles. She got the shield up to face height, deflecting the weapons from their intended landing spot between Williams and Tiwari. The projectiles exploded as the elevator doors opened, tumbling all three humans inside.

  Across the docking bay, the Coin’s engine roared to liftoff power. Heat flowed into the elevator. Though the two docs screamed right next to Iridian’s external helmet mic, multiple xenon engines igniting drowned out everything else.

  If the engines didn’t kill Six, he’d wish they had.

  Fuck.

  The decompression cycle would have locked the other pirates out of the docking bay. They had no idea what’d happened inside. “Drone in the docking bay,” Iridian panted over the op channel, although the bot would’ve had to fly damned fast to avoid the engine outflow and being swept into the cold and the black with the docking bay’s atmo . . . and Six. Once the bay’s enviro met criteria, the doors would open. The drone would know just where to find the pirates. They should be ready too.

  “Understood,” Sergeant Natani said over the team channel. “We’ll come in when the doors open.”

  The elevator deposited Iridian and the doctors on the docking bay’s observation deck. Since this docking bay focused on distribution shipments, the cams feeding the projected windows provided a good view of the stars spinning over what was currently “up,” above the station’s outer ring. The Coin was pacing the station outside, staying within cam range.

  “You saved our lives.” Williams’s deliberate enunciation grated on Iridian’s brain. “Thank you.”

  That was too much. Iridian whirled away from the window to face the docs. “Why the fuck did you run off like that?” she screamed at them. “AegiSKADA doesn’t try to kill you.”

  The docs backed away from her. “It wanted you to go. It would’ve done anything to make you.” Tiwari’s French accent got thicker when he was scared, apparently, and he wasn’t making sense. “Would’ve locked us in for days, would’ve stopped the atmo. . . . Drones don’t always move for us.”

  “And we’ve always thought maybe, if we could get on a ship, we’d have a chance to get away from this place,” Williams said meekly, but still with exquisitely precise pronunciation. “We could go home.”

  So the med team wasn’t as safe from AegiSKADA as the pirates thought they were. Iridian nodded and turned away so she wouldn’t have to look at their terrified, pitiful faces. A sensor node on the wall caught her eye. The cam lens crushed beneath her fist. The doctors jumped back. She kept pounding, ignoring vague concerns about the armored glove’s integrity.

  Six had been more than a dumb grunt. He’d had to know what’d happen if he stayed there. Maybe he thought he was too near the engines to get away clean. Besides, he’d been kind to Adda and Pel. He didn’t deserve to die that way.

  The Coin extricated itself from the station’s spin and leveled out. The ship was upside down from her perspective. For some reason, the pilot still kept pace in front of the cam feeding the observation projection.

  The Coin’s outer passthrough door opened. A silent jet of atmo vented into the vacuum, then two small human figures. The docs next to Iridian gasped. One figure was already still. The other floundered, struggling to seal his or her suit. In a few seconds, it too stilled. The ship rolled fractionally back and forth, a quick, purposeless maneuver that made the red lights on the station’s antenna towers glint off its thermal fins. It slowed until the station’s cam swung away.

  What had the pilot been thinking? All it would�
�ve taken to stop the docs was to keep the damned passthrough doors closed. Why in all hells did the pilot feel the need to kill them? Did they even see Six? The AI copilot should’ve warned the pilot about a human’s proximity, and then any rational human being wouldn’t have taken off.

  Iridian drew a long breath and keyed her mic on a signal Barbary Station’s public address system would pick up. “Did anybody else see that?”

  “What’s happening?” Natani’s voice was all business, but she and Six were close. Telling her would hurt them both.

  “I saw,” Adda croaked like she’d swallowed something vile.

  Short “Saw what?” messages came in over top of each other from other pirates, and even Suhaila from the fugee camp. A better question was how Suhaila had gotten on that channel.

  Iridian adjusted her signal band to only include Adda and the op frequency coordinated on Natani’s comp. “Si Po is locked out of the docking bay, so who told that pilot to vent the passthrough?”

  “Not me.” Adda sounded distant. Whatever realization she’d recently come to took more of her attention than the conversation did.

  “Nobody told it,” Si Po said over the squad’s local channel. What’d he mean, “it”? The cold seeping in through the suit settled in her bones.

  “Shut your gods-damned mouth,” Natani snarled.

  “No, we can’t keep—” Something impacted an enviro suit and Si Po yelped. The sergeant must’ve hit him.

  Seconds later a door slammed open, admitting the pirates into the now-pressurized docking bay. Grandpa Death turned toward the dark spot on the pad and asked, “Ugh, what got cooked down here?”

  Muffled snaps from one of the pirates’ palmers indicated that Major O.D.’s order to go unarmed hadn’t applied to everyone. No wonder Natani stayed behind me the whole way here. Iridian crossed to the bay side of the observation room in time to see the drone crash on the landing pad the Coin had recently vacated.

  The Coin’s rapid half-roll movement . . . Fighter pilots and piloted drones did that. Humans used the maneuver to say hello, good-bye, or that a communication had been received. Some inhuman thing trying to communicate with people would pull exactly that sort of shit. Something one referred to as “it.”

  Her fist clenched on her shield, pulling it into a tight forward block, like that’d do her any good at all. “You awakened the gods-damned AI copilots.” The accusation hung in radio silence for long beats. “You’re not even going to deny it, are you?”

  Even cant didn’t have a word for how gods-damned stupid intentionally awakening an AI was. No wonder the crew invented three skittish pilots who spoke an untranslatable language, pilots who were also inexplicably unhelpful to humans trapped on Barbary Station. That fiction was a hell of a lot less terrifying than the truth.

  The remaining two med team docs were staring at each other again. Sergeant Natani swore like a Jovian prisoner of war, to Iridian’s grim amusement. And what could she do but laugh now? The ships’ AI could’ve killed them at any time, in any number of ways.

  It was almost more horrific that the station population was still breathing. What were three ship AIs doing with all these humans when they could go anywhere else in the universe, given time and fuel? It couldn’t be good. Hell, she and Adda had been in an awakened gods-damned AI, the Apparition, during the whole trip from the hijacked colony ship to Barbary Station.

  “We had to do it.” Si Po spoke fast as he followed the ZVs across the bay, like he was getting something out before Natani hit him again. “The pilots were gone. We thought the ships’ AI would help us with AegiSKADA, or at least get us water, since the reservoirs and tanks were drying up and we didn’t have the recycler yet. We’d have been dead months ago without them.”

  “The Coin’s AI killed Six taking off and then spaced two of the med team,” Iridian said. She grimaced, both at the way she’d said it and the silence that followed. She could handle wailing or violence in the face of death. Shock and quiet rage was as dangerous to allies as enemies.

  “No wonder they don’t use the ships as transport.” Adda gasped.

  “Oh, gods damn it.” Iridian had hoped to phrase the discovery in a way that wouldn’t elicit Adda’s misplaced sympathies, but Adda would’ve figured out what’d happened even sooner than Iridian did. The pirates got close enough to the elevator door in the docking bay to disappear under the lower edge of the observation room’s cam feed.

  “That’s why I didn’t find the AI on the Apparition when it picked us up from the colony ship!” Adda’s voice trembled, in awe if Iridian had to guess. “It hid itself perfectly, and it shouldn’t have been able to do that. It must’ve . . . That’s amazing.”

  Scary as shit, more like. But they could rehash that old argument after the last two docs on the med team got back to base and started saving people’s lives. That was the important thing. Without that goal to focus on, Iridian would’ve been a lot more pissed off than she was, but surviving the trip back would be hard enough without obsessing about awakened AI outside the station.

  The elevator door opened and Sergeant Natani quickly scanned the room, palmer raised, before she and the remaining ZVs entered. Si Po was still in the elevator when the doors started to close and had to hit the open button before joining them in the observation room.

  Written on Natani’s face was the fact that even if she’d never treated Six like an equal, they’d had something deeper than just getting along. And he and Chato were together too often to be anything less than good friends.

  “He was right next to the ship when it took off,” said Iridian.

  Natani’s voice was low and rough and tore through the ZVs’ stunned silence. “And where the fuck were you?”

  “She saved us,” said Dr. Tiwari. “The drone—”

  “You saved them, not Six?” By Chato’s expression, Iridian might as well have stabbed him in the stomach with something rusty while she was at it.

  She clenched her teeth. “It was the best decision at the time. Doesn’t mean it was a good one. Maybe I could’ve saved all of them, but I was there and I don’t see how.”

  Natani’s hand swept up, holding the palmer she’d downed the drone with. The other hand trembled in a fist at her side. Nitro, Chato, and Grandpa Death backed away, exclaiming things Iridian ignored. Si Po and the docs stood statue-still.

  Shit. Iridian still held her deployed shield, and she shifted her weight to a better brace position even though it wasn’t covering her yet. Maybe she could raise it in time. Aloud, she said “Sergeant,” counting on the rank to remind Natani of a time when she didn’t attack allies, “it was Six or Adda.”

  Natani’s finger stayed still on the trigger. “What the hell are you talking about? That creepy cunt isn’t even here. Six is dead.”

  The dish of a cobbled-together directed energy weapon like Natani’s was the last thing Reis saw too. Iridian looked past it, to Natani’s face. “If we lost the whole med team, there’d be nobody left to save Adda and the rest of the sick people on base,” Iridian said. Natani drew a ragged breath but stayed quiet. “I was here and I made the only call I could.”

  “Well, you fucked up.” Natani’s voice was choked with emotion.

  At least with the observation windows projected on the walls, Iridian could die with a view of the stars. “It’s Adda,” she said. “I love her. That’s why you’d have gone after Six, yeah?” Chato swore softly. Natani’s squad should’ve figured out why a soldier from someone else’s fireteam spent so much time in the sergeant’s personal space. Iridian couldn’t tell how surprised the other two were, because that’d mean looking away from the weapon in Natani’s hand.

  “Don’t tell me what I would’ve done,” Natani shouted, voice cracking with sorrow as well as anger.

  Iridian winced, but she was still breathing. “Even when the docs get there, AegiSKADA’s still going to get her eventually. Matter of time. And . . . you know I can’t just let it. Give me a chance to take the AI down,
for all of us. For her. For Six. Please. So nobody else has to lose someone they love.”

  Captain Sloane’s hoarse voice spoke in their helmets, startling everyone. “Adda’s readings indicate that you are still in the docking bay.” The captain was well enough to talk, and to catch up on what the rest of the crew was doing. Fine timing, too.

  Natani drew a long breath and exhaled as slowly. The palmer still pointed at Iridian’s chest. “Yes, Captain. We’re moving out soon.”

  Iridian would be safer alone with AegiSKADA than with Sergeant Natani grieving and hating Iridian every step of the way back. Maybe Natani’s squad would get over Iridian’s decision, maybe they wouldn’t. Now the AI threatened Iridian’s life, livelihood, and girlfriend. She was looking forward to taking it on personally.

  “I can do it. I can take a lot of firepower on this.” Iridian hefted her shield, finally putting it between her and Natani.

  Natani glanced between Iridian’s face and the shield, then finally returned the palmer to its holster. “Don’t come back until you do.”

  According to Blackguardly Jack, AegiSKADA’s control room was about sixty ticks north. On either side were nuclear power generators. The step-by-step of disabling it was a hell of a thing to have to figure out alone, but somebody had to.

  She’d taken two steps in that direction when Si Po said, “Wait! I’m going with you.”

  “The fuck you are.” Nitro was striking out at him with an armored fist when Iridian turned around. He’d already started running and made it out of range. He blew right past Iridian.

  “Let the ladder down when we come back through the wall.” She ran after Si Po, praying to anything that would listen that when Natani returned to base, she’d remember what losing someone close felt like. That she wouldn’t be inclined toward revenge while Iridian wasn’t there to protect Adda.

  As Iridian ran through an open emergency bulkhead, she keyed her mic on the channel to Adda. “Lock this behind me, babe?” The floor trembled as the bulkhead thudded closed. It sealed in a short, sharp hiss of expelled atmo. “When Natani’s squad comes back with the docs, stick with Tabs and Rio like I told you to, yeah?”