“Adda, you really need to come out,” said Rio’s husky voice. “The meeting’s in the bunkhouse. Even the people too sick to get up need to hear what the captain has to say.”
“There’s too much going on!” The panic in Adda’s voice was a little embarrassing, but the only thing she could think of that might be more important than what she was already doing was getting out of the way of a large scale-structural collapse.
“Captain’s orders,” Rio said.
Adda sighed sharply, psyching herself up to leave her current task undone. The alerts set on various data states would still send her a message on her comp if anything went wrong in the ways she could account for. She unplugged, crawled out of the generator, and swiped at her nose and lips to remove the residue from her concentration mix. A cloud of blue dust fell from the ceiling just as she opened the trapdoor. She tugged her hood up over her blue-specked face before emerging into the hallway’s orange light.
Rio blocked most of the hall and the light, a half smile on her wide face. “I thought you were in trouble in there. Nobody’s seen you for hours. How do you feel?”
“Headache, lung ache, and I’d be tired except I’m on a lot of stims.” Adda had plenty of energy, but exhausted numbness hung behind her eyes and in her limbs. “The cough’s not bad yet.”
Rio frowned as she started walking. “You should take care of yourself. Pel orbits you like his personal sun, you know.”
Adda snorted. “A Pel year is half again as long as a standard one.”
Even with only about a dozen members of Sloane’s crew still in the compound, not everyone fit in the bunkhouse. The beds were all occupied, even the one Nils died on. Tritheist wasn’t there, which meant he was indisposed in the captain’s quarters. The captain was present, though, leaning against the bunks at the far end of the room but standing and looking alert.
“Lads and lasses, here we are,” Captain Sloane croaked. “I can’t speak long. For those of you who missed the WFUG news bulletin, a mercenary force has infiltrated the station and is at this moment fighting drones.”
“Anyone we know?” asked Chato.
“No visual yet, and they brought their own encrypted comms,” Major O.D. said. “Shut up and pay attention.”
Amid murmurs of shock and well wishes to the mercenaries in their fight against AegiSKADA’s drone, Adda checked her comp. She had set proximity alerts in concentric circles originating at Iridian’s position, Pel’s, and the pirate compound. None of those had been tripped. Perhaps that was why the pirates were more worried about the refugees than themselves, but they wouldn’t have the same information she did.
“Adda, what do you have on them?” the captain asked.
When she looked up, everyone in the room was staring at her. Even San Miguel’s little boy, drawing gurgling breaths from the bed beside his ill mother, looked Adda’s way.
“I’m guessing, based on the sensor data and some reports from the refugees,” she said nervously. A few eyes turned away, but that was more depressing than helpful. Now they wouldn’t believe the few things she could prove. “Transorbital Voyages hired them. They got in through our docking bay. There’s an open shipping container in there that wasn’t there before. I think they were launched in that from a ship outside the turrets’ range, and one of the station ships brought it in, but they could have timed the launch without a ship’s help if they had another way to open the docking bay from the outside.”
The Charon’s Coin, as long as she was guessing, had probably been the ship to bring the container in. She had no explanation for why it would do that. Its programming might require it to recover loose cargo, but bringing the container into the station suggested a more conscious choice. Awakened intelligences tended to stray from their original programming anyway. And it should’ve been able to use its sensors and a few logical inferences to determine what was inside.
“As soon as the mercenaries boarded, AegiSKADA registered weapons,” Adda continued. “It’s been hunting them ever since. They moved . . .” She searched her comp for notes on station directional terminology. “Downtick, past us. If they keep moving at this pace, they’ll reach the refugees in about fifteen minutes.”
Everybody was still looking at her. She shifted her weight to one side, putting herself behind Rio’s broad shoulder. No wonder Pel stayed close to Rio. The big woman looked capable of defending against anything.
“Well, we have more information than the fugees, for once,” Captain Sloane said, to some laughter from the crew. “We’ll defend the compound if the mercenaries come this way, but I’m not sending anyone into the station while the AI is on a killing spree. We’re in more danger from it than anyone else.”
The mercenaries had already walked right past the entry to the path between the hulls. Unless they brought more sophisticated tech they hadn’t employed so far, they wouldn’t find the compound without the refugees’ willing, or unwilling, assistance.
Captain Sloane paused for muted acknowledgment from the pirates. Adda stayed quiet. AegiSKADA was killing innocent people while she sat in a meeting. But she’d run through everything she could do to help without a hard reset of AegiSKADA.
“The rest of the bad news . . .” Coughing interrupted the captain’s speech. “The rest is that the liquid recycler broke today. We have water for two more days, if we ration it.”
CHAPTER 20
Charges Accrued: Theft of Radioactive Material
“Is your radiation alarm going off?” Iridian asked Si Po as they made their way through the power plant. “Because mine is.”
He froze a few steps behind her, eyes wide behind the enviro suit’s transparent faceplate. “No.”
Somewhere inside this plant was an arm-length canister designed to hold a sample of radioactive liquid thorium. It’d be designed to travel in a radiation-proof outer container, which she hoped would be both nearby and light enough to haul around. Enviro was too far off for her to remove her helmet, even if her armor’s radiation protection wasn’t overloading. Her O2 alarm had already gone off, and she now carried all her breathable air in the portable tank.
“Adda? Something in here’s bleeding neutrons. Don’t we have any explosives? We could blow the damned pseudo-organic tanks.” She didn’t love the idea of carrying armed antipersonnel mines one-handed, so it’d be nice if there was something she could assemble on-site. Besides, if AegiSKADA had planted them, it’d find a way to blast her and Si Po to tiny pieces with them. Gods, she hated AI.
“Even if we did, I don’t know who would get them there and set them,” said Adda.
“Back out,” Iridian told Si Po.
He took the shortest route, racing up half a flight of stairs and vaulting over a pile of fallen paneling from the mine explosions. When he landed, metal snapped and clanged. He dropped from view, but red emergency lighting made it hard to see anything other than the exit.
She scrambled over the rubble toward him. Whatever she was supposed to be thinking, she didn’t want to be alone out here. “Hey! Are you all right?”
“I found a crawl space,” he groaned.
Several floor panels had collapsed. The ones under Iridian held the wall’s weight along with hers. She edged around the fallen section before reaching to give him a hand up.
“Nobody’s got anything that might crack an AI case without a lot of collateral damage,” Adda said over Iridian’s comms.
She relayed the bad news to Si Po. The ships were gods knew where, and the turrets weighed too much to move. Anything explosive would attract more drones than were already coming. Carrying something radioactive would be unpleasant, but once they got it to AegiSKADA’s pseudo-organics, it’d disrupt the AI’s qubit superpositions and prompt a system reset without Iridian breaking into the internal case. High-end quantum computers powerful enough to host AI came in cases you could drop down an elevator shaft without denting.
“The mercenaries are in the refugees’ docking bay,” said Adda. “I think t
hey shot someone. I can’t tell because everybody’s standing in the way, but that’s what WFUG is saying.”
“Damn them.” Iridian leaned against the power plant’s outside wall. Something in it creaked, and she stepped away before it fell on her or Si Po. “Damn whoever built this cheap station, damn Transorbital Voyages. . . .”
She stopped herself from pacing because that seemed like a painful way to locate an unexploded mine. With her mic muted, she growled at the stars. If the company told the mercs they’d lose profits for civilian casualties, they wouldn’t discharge weapons near the fugees. But they didn’t, because Transorbital Voyages didn’t give a fuck about civilians. Transorbital deserved to have their expensive colony ship stolen out from under them, and she was proud to have been the one to do it.
When she focused on her immediate surroundings, Si Po was staring at her like she’d decoupled her relays. She keyed her mic. “How can you live here without being pissed off every gods-damned second of your gods-damned existence? I’ve never seen a better argument for piracy in my life.”
Something impacted the station’s hull from inside the plant, and they both jumped. “I walled off the source for now and set down soakers,” Adda said. “It might be okay in a few hours, but it’s still going to be hot. Did you find something to carry the thorium sample in?”
Si Po and Iridian exchanged glances, and his expression conveyed the same negative answer as hers. “My suit’s better shielded,” she said.
“Under a minute, please!” said Adda.
Iridian’s instinct was to hold her breath, even though that’d have no particle-blocking effect. She raced through the front door and stopped to examine the entryway. Nothing there was dense enough to protect someone from a radiation source. The next floor up was also empty, although a third of it was behind a lead barrier.
“Crawl space,” she muttered. Seconds ticking away in time to her suit radiation alarm, she rushed back to where Si Po had fallen.
A thick cylindrical tube with handles reflected her headlamp’s light from where it was crammed into the far corner. It lay beneath a hinged door covered by slabs of a collapsed wall. She breathed out hard, psyching herself up to crawl in. The bulky armor or the O2 tank could trap her and get her a lethal dose before she ran out of atmo.
“You’re still in the contaminated building, Iri,” Adda said quietly.
Snarling and swearing, Iridian scooted backward out of the crawl space. She stormed out of the power plant and startled Si Po from his seated position against the exterior wall. “Found one stored by somebody afraid of large spaces.” She explained the situation.
“Agoraphobic doesn’t mean you like small spaces,” he said.
“Wondering how many of my eggs are fried messes with my logical inferences.” She huffed something between a frustrated sigh and a laugh. “If the mercs are in the fugee camp and armed, it won’t be long before AegiSKADA follows them in. People will die. People I like.”
The power plant’s door sat crooked on its sliding track after her stunt with the mines, with poison and darkness beyond. Decontaminating from that much radiation would require a rad unit. A shipbreaking station had to have one. That’d mean another hike through the area infested with drones, but she’d done that several times now.
Even if she’d only be carrying rapidly cooling liquid thorium, it’d still be radiating the whole way to the control room. Hell, it’d be right next to her O2. She shuddered. She’d die badly and leave Adda alone with her blind baby brother among pirates. Yeah, they’d survive, but Adda was counting on Iridian to watch her back. And for other things. The fugees were decent, and it wasn’t fair that mercs were coming down on them after all they’d suffered. That was partially her fault, but . . . She loved Adda.
“It’s too hot,” she said. At least Si Po, of all people, would agree. “Unless we blow ourselves off the station by stepping on one of those mines, we’ll get to the other reactor in a couple of hours. Maybe its radiation levels are lower.” Though AegiSKADA’s drones would almost certainly find them before they reached it. One had found Iridian after less than an hour on the surface, the first time she went out. But she and Si Po could fight bots, or hide from them. They couldn’t fight ionizing radiation.
“Where’s the carrier?”
Iridian spun around to stare at Si Po. “What?”
He wore a sad smile behind his oily hair. “I’m fucked anyway. Have been since we left the med team and the ZV Group. Have been since we crashed into this mess. I’m always right where whatever’s keeping the atmo in is going out. The whole station’s coming apart. And which of the ZVs are going to give me their air? Then I panic and make it worse, and I’d rather get poisoned than asphyxiate or explode, you know?”
She wanted to shake him, tell him how much slower death by radiation sickness would be. They were catching rads just standing on the hull, let alone standing next to a damaged reactor.
Other people took care of the fugees. Nobody else in the whole universe was looking out for Adda but Iridian. And AegiSKADA was after all of them, so it had to be shut down. But Iridian didn’t have to be the martyr who made it happen. Not yet, anyway. “You know where you fell through the floor? Go there and crawl left about two meters. You’ll see it. Then follow the instructions I’m sending you to get the sample.” She felt like she’d corrected somebody’s blade placement so they’d hit their own vein. Still smiling, he walked back into the generator.
“I used to have a girlfriend.” His voice shook over the comm channel. Talking helped distract oneself from fear, sometimes. “Well, girlfriends, zefriends, boyfriends, but my last one. She was just beautiful, you know? We used to sit together in front of our projector stage—one of the nice ones, not one of those first gens that gave people motion sickness—and she watched anything, so long as I kept her draped in jewels while she did. Which, you know, I could. We had some big hauls back in the day.”
Iridian caught motion in her periphery, just over the station’s rounded inner edge. Although she stared at the spot for several seconds, there wasn’t any more. She deployed her shield and shifted it to the hand nearest where she’d seen whatever it was.
“. . . left me last year, and you know what she took?” Si Po was saying. The heavy thump of the safety door slamming open vibrated through Iridian’s boots again. “The fucking projector stage.” He laughed, voice pitched high in terror, but he stayed in the plant. She had to admire him for that. “She sent me a vid of it going out my apartment door. The Casey brought the vid to me two weeks later.” And why the hell had an awakened AI like the Casey’s decided to bring him a vid like that? Iridian shuddered. He continued after a few moments, “What the hell is a home without a projector stage and a partner, anyway?”
“That’s low, man,” Iridian said on the local channel.
The proximity alarm Adda had made to warn of approaching drones pinged and flashed orange, which was new. She’d spot an enemy between her and the stars, but the shadow from the far side of the ring kept moving. Between the dim red glow of the antenna tips and the shuttle hub’s faint white exterior lights from the ring’s center, there were a lot of changing light conditions to track.
The fist-size machine flew out of an antenna cluster’s shadow. Iridian crouched in her lowest shield stance. The thing could still zap her through the hull. Maybe this suit was less conductive than the one she’d worn on the base repair job.
“Ah . . . I drew the liquid stuff into the sampling tank, and I’ve got the container hooked in and filled, but I don’t see how to get it out. Can you ask Adda to look that up?”
Even with the enemy poised to attack, Iridian felt compelled to construct a mental model of the device. “Have you tried twisting it until it unslots?” Something hit her shield hard on the upper edge, rocking her backward. Her low stance and magnetized boots kept her upright.
“Oh, no, I was pulling straight—”
The projectile she blocked exploded on the hull in front
of her. She jolted but held her stance as her shield caught the blast. Debris cracked against her armor, and a lone mine’s secondary explosion threw more pieces of the station into the cold and the black. A jet of atmo erupted at her feet. White mist obscured the drone.
“I’m coming out, what’s—”
“Watch for a small flying drone. If you see it, run. Carefully,” because there were still a hell of a lot of live mines. The bot had to be nearby. Not being able to hear its buzzing motor was maddening. She scanned the area over her head first, wishing yet again for a modern heads-up display.
Si Po came out of the power plant, yelped, and started running past it, in the opposite direction of Iridian. She slung the deployed shield onto the hook between her shoulder blades so it covered the back of her head to her hips and sprinted after him. “Where’s the drone?” Labored breathing over the open mic was his only reply. “Gods damn it, you code-coated fuck, if you don’t tell me where it is, I can’t do anything about it. And watch where you’re going!” If he stepped on a mine after all that . . .
She almost did it herself. She extended her stride and threw her arms out to catch her balance without stepping back or falling forward. “Stop!” she bellowed over the local channel. He did, still a long way ahead, and turned slowly toward her. “Stay right there. We’re back in the mine field.”
The drone swooped toward him, spinning to put the rest of its payload in optimal firing position. Enough of that thing’s grenades exploding on impact would blow more holes in the station’s hull, never mind what it’d do to Si Po.
Iridian drew a heavily oxygenated breath and pushed it out through pursed lips. Holding her shield low to protect her torso and thighs from explosions, she picked out a path to him. “Adda, there’s a drone targeting us. Can you tell why?”
“Oxygen tanks or sample container,” she replied in her workspace monotone.
Barbary Station Page 30
