Adda and Fugee News had been quiet for almost an hour. At first Iridian had panicked, imagining all the things that could’ve gone wrong at the base. The tops of its tacked-on rooms still cast shadows among the antennas above them, across the station’s inner ring and half hidden by the hub. They hadn’t blown up or collapsed. The AI had caused the comms blackout, though. That had to be the conclusion Adda was coming to, before her feed went out.
To beat back the silence, Iridian said, “Someone told me Casey Mire Mire isn’t her real name. I thought the pilot named her, but now I’m guessing that was you?”
Si Po’s laughter wheezed in her ears. “She picked it. Creepy, right?” Iridian nodded. It really was. “The other two had names when we found them, but the Casey was VS491-121. After we woke her up, she got one of her rovers to paint Casey Mire Mire on her flank. Like that Lunawood vid series. No idea why she chose that, but she brought us all the episodes and she made sure I saw the name on cam. Never answered to the designation again.” Not just volition, but preference. Adda would love that. Iridian would have nightmares.
The drone tracker Adda made lit up and pinged halfway to the security control room. “Trouble incoming,” Iridian said. Si Po trudged on like he hadn’t heard her.
This drone didn’t launch anything explosive, and that scared her. It hovered well out of range of anything she could throw. The mine field was behind them, answering her earlier question about whether the whole hull was mined. Everything around here was metal, and it’d conduct a drone’s electrical discharge right into her suit. The armor she’d worn to repair the base hadn’t been sufficiently insulated to protect her. Si Po only wore an enviro suit.
A few meters away, a satellite dish, useless since the Battle of Waypoint Station thanks to the lead cloud, rose from the otherwise metallic hull. It’d have a lot of plastic components. “Hang on to that handle, Si Po, we’ve got to move.”
“I . . .” If he said anything more, she couldn’t hear it.
She hoisted Si Po—O2 tank, sample case, and all—on the shoulder not holding her own O2. The plastic components in the satellite dish’s base and exterior might just be enough to protect Si Po from the electricity this drone had hit Iridian with the last time she was on the station’s surface. She just had to get him into the dish before the drone struck. She shifted his weight, ignored his miserable moan, and ran for the dish.
The rim of the dish was less than a meter away when a shock tore through her heel and up her leg. Her comp glove flashed white. She heaved Si Po over into the dish, then leaped over herself. Both of them slid down to the dish’s center, which was too small for two people and that much gear. She lay still beside him, staring at the sweep of stars around the solid frame of her transparent shield and sucking plastic-tasting water from her armor’s reservoir.
“How are you doing?” she asked. She drew a few more labored breaths in the silence, then turned her helmeted head toward him. Centimeter by centimeter, he shoved the carrying case away from her. “Don’t worry about that,” she said. “We won’t—”
The drone floated silently over the dish. The composite plastic surface beneath her made for good footing. Iridian rolled forward through a low crouch to lunge up the side of the dish and swipe at the drone with her shield. The edge connected, though it wasn’t a solid blow. She wanted to smash whatever passed for its head.
It was enough to slam the thing down next to her. She threw herself on the bot before it took off and smashed it over and over against the dish. Its motor shook its whole frame as it tried to get away. A fractured part of the housing scraped the length of her arm and her breath hitched. If it broke through the armor . . . No pressure alarms went off. She kept on smashing until the drone quit moving.
Exhausted, she slid down to the center of the dish. Crushed components skidded soundlessly along with her. “Got it.”
Si Po sprawled on his back beside the sample container, panting, skin pallid and dry through the enviro suit faceplate. They hadn’t brought spare water, and she’d left base too angry to ask Sturm how well her armor’s reclamation system worked.
He breathed faster and shallower. “Hey, take it easy,” she said. “We’re not far now, and that’s the first drone we’ve seen in a while. Maybe there won’t be any more.”
“I’m . . . done,” he rasped.
“That’s fine, I can carry that stuff now.” Iridian was speaking too quickly. “You did your good deed for the century, trust me.”
“I like it . . . here,” he said. “I like . . . the stars.”
She slipped an arm under his shoulders. “We can’t stay. Once one of those drones knows where we are, more’ll come.”
He slapped weakly at her arm. His nose bled over his lips. “No. It hurts . . . too . . .” His breathing stopped. His eyes bulged and he looked around like he didn’t remember what he was doing there, or why he couldn’t inhale.
“No, shit, come on, I don’t know how to do CPR in these suits.” Military emergency training for nonmedics began with Move the soldier to survivable environmental conditions. That wasn’t a fucking option.
She tapped at her comp glove through the suit’s window to find more useful instructions. The projector didn’t project. This was the second time the comp had received a shock courtesy of drones outside the station. She should’ve listened to Adda’s repeated suggestions that she set up subvocalized commands. If Iridian made it back, she was in for a big I told you so eye roll.
The map she remembered put the nearest airlock almost a klick away from the reactor. With luck she might get him there in seven minutes. He’d never last that long.
She lowered him to the satellite dish and gripped his hand hard enough to be transmitted through his suit. Tears pooled at the junction of her helmet and the armor’s torso assembly, hot against her throat. “You were great, Si Po,” she said over the local channel. “Thank you for doing this for . . . all of us.”
He convulsed for a few moments, then lay still.
“Si Po?” His eyes were open wide, staring up past the far side of the station to the stars. Her radiation alarm light switched from yellow to red. Her whole body shook as she let go of his hand. The enviro suit glove shifted a piece of the drone aside when his hand thumped onto the hull.
She hurled the mangled electronics out of the dish, screaming and hating what a pointless use of O2 that was, hating too that she had to fuck around with O2 consumption in a world so advanced it produced machines like the one that’d almost killed her. It’d wasted so much of their time that Si Po didn’t have a chance.
When the Shieldrunner next to you went down, you spread your shields wider to fill the hole, because they fell with a job to do. She couldn’t carry both O2 tanks and the cooling liquid salt sample. She left his tank, picked up the sample container, and hauled herself up the satellite dish’s sloping side.
She came up facing the pirate base. Smoke or atmo spewed from one module, down toward Iridian from her perspective. She dropped over the side of the dish and took a few steps toward the base before she stopped herself. Even with emergency management plans, a leak so bad she saw it from klicks away would have consequences.
All those people, so focused on AegiSKADA and its damned biological weaponry, so busy fighting to breathe. It wasn’t fair that their home was coming apart too. “You idiot,” she muttered to herself. “Why didn’t you tell Sturm the duct system was in such bad shape?” She’d noted the poor air flow and broken fans while she was searching the base for AegiSKADA’s microbe dispensers.
Instead, she’d gotten angry at AegiSKADA. Now the whole damned crew was vulnerable to an enviro control failure that’d kill them as dead as a drone-launched explosive would. Sturm was too old to take on the AI, but he wasn’t too old to keep the enviro healthy. If she’d taken five seconds then to say, “Sturm, check the air flow, it’s shit,” he could’ve repaired them, or printed more powerful fans. Probably. If nothing else had gone wrong, and if he were still health
y himself.
She could never undo that mistake, like she could never find the argument to convince Si Po to share the radiation exposure. Letting regret paralyze her would be yet another mistake. She turned her back on the base and walked toward the security control room.
CHAPTER 23
Charges Accrued: Child Endangerment
Just sitting and breathing felt almost impossible, but when Pel’s hoarse voice rose in the pirate compound’s main room, Adda crawled out of the computer room to reach him. Chemical lights shone pale green and blue from the worktables, enough to keep people from running into things. Zikri, Chef, and Tabs still stood, by force of will. The rest of the group was on their backs in various sections of the compound.
“What’s up with the kitchen? There are way too many greasy packaged rations stinking up the air in here,” Pel said once he peeled himself out of Adda’s awkward embrace, then Tabs’s, while Adda ceased coughing.
“Atmo leak,” Tabs said. “We had to close it off.” It was the nearest room to the bunkhouse AegiSKADA had destroyed. Some destabilization was to be expected. The next nearest was her water tank, but there was nowhere to move her generator to, so she saw no point in worrying about it.
Just minutes after Pel’s arrival, banging from the entryway hatch made everyone look in that direction. Tabs, palmer in hand and comp projector lighting her way, waved the others back. “Let me get that.”
When she opened the door, Sergeant Natani and a second female ZV, Nitro, spilled through. “Get them up, let’s go, let’s go!” Natani called toward the wall passage.
Two strangers climbed through, followed by Grandpa Death, who coughed wetly. He threw two boxes of bioprinter material and a machine Adda didn’t recognize through the hatch, then hauled himself through and slammed it shut. According to Iridian, those were all the crew members who would be returning to the compound now. Si Po was with her, and the awakened intelligence in the Charon’s Coin had killed Six.
Zikri appeared to count the new arrivals more than once from beneath his drooping eyelids. “These all the docs you got to come?”
“The other two are dead.” Sergeant Natani shoved the male member of the med team into the main room and hauled the woman through behind her, dragging her by the arm.
Zikri watched Grandpa Death and Nitro collect the medical supplies strewn across the entryway floor, beside the locked hatch. “Where’s Six?”
“Not coming,” said Natani. Zikri started swearing in English and proceeded through Spanish, Chinese, and one or more spacefarer cants.
The female physician wrinkled her nose. “Smells. Also, which of you listens to the sensors?”
Adda wasn’t just staring at Dr. Williams with her mouth open because the doctor maintained her clean, dark skin and hair beautifully, even in the station’s miserable conditions. How had Dr. Williams found out about Adda’s sensor feed? Adda had minimized direct references to it where AegiSKADA might overhear, and she certainly hadn’t broadcast it anywhere. If a human could draw conclusions about her sensor monitoring without analytics, then an AI had enough information to create an accurate behavioral model. No wonder AegiSKADA had been able to draw her into the space between the hulls and place her close enough to a bioweapon dispenser to get her infected.
Belatedly, she realized she hadn’t replied to the question and raised her hand to wave, then dropped it back to her side because that was a ridiculous way to identify herself. Dr. Williams nodded briskly. “Keep listening.”
“Drs. Tiwari and Williams.” The male member of the medical team pointed to himself first and Dr. Williams second. “All sick?”
Chef said, “My immune system’s tough as hell, but everybody else is.”
“Don’t jinx yourself,” wheezed Grandpa Death.
Each member of the medical team had brought a sack of supplies, medical printer material, and specialty components from their own printer. Tritheist, Captain Sloane, and Major O.D. were all too sick to oversee the proceedings. Sergeant Natani stood against one wall of the entryway, staring at the blank wall opposite her. Unlike the other ZVs who had gone with Iridian, she still wore all her armor.
Adda sat against the main room’s wall and croaked, “Let me know what you need, if you need it.” Both doctors eyed her the way they might a talking spider with an extra leg. The image set her quietly giggling until coughing made laughter unfeasible. When was the last time she had really slept?
The ZVs who weren’t staring at nothing followed the doctors from room to room. Eventually the physicians met in the main one. “Virus,” said Dr. Williams.
“I’m fairly certain it’s bacterial,” Adda said.
The doctor cocked an eyebrow at her. “Solution. Will print. Been designing since you sent imagery. Why we needed our printer material.”
“Tell us how or you’re not doing it,” said Sergeant Natani. “We have enough organic printed crap in our atmo already.”
“Bacteriophage.” Dr. Williams pronounced each syllable slowly and clearly.
“A virus that destroys bacteria,” Adda explained to the still-puzzled crew. “But how do you know it will work on what we have?”
“We introduce them.” Dr. Tiwari smiled. “The resemblance to Pseudomonas is impossible to miss.”
“Oh, of course.” Adda had to get a handle on her snark. The shadows flickering at the corners of her vision weren’t real. She didn’t have to take her annoyance at them out on the doctors.
“You introduce,” Dr. Williams said to Tiwari, as if oblivious to the sarcasm. “Triage.”
“Yes. Ask about blue dust.” Dr. Tiwari released the hatch locks and climbed back down the entrance ladder while Dr. Williams joined Zikri in treating the sickest pirates’ symptoms. The ZV medic explained the blue radiation-deflecting dust, which was not a cause of their malady but might affect it.
The pirates stood around staring and frowning at Dr. Williams, or coughing and wheezing. “Isn’t anyone going with Dr. Tiwari?” asked Adda.
“Chato? Tabs?” Natani glanced between the two. “Who wants to babysit?”
The smallest ZV, Tabs, said, “I’ll go, Sergeant. Chato looks dead already.”
“Oh, muchas gracias,” he grumbled, though he smiled tiredly.
A tugging on Adda’s sleeve drew her attention to Dr. Williams. A surgical mask now covered most of the doctor’s face. “Sick. Come.”
“I can’t.” Adda held up her comp, the projection flashing yellow to indicate several alerts.
The doctor snatched Adda’s sleeve with one hand and poked her comp glove arm with an injector just above her wrist, first numbing the area and then forcing something through her skin without breaking it. Adda yelped and tried to pull away, but Dr. Williams’s grip brooked no argument.
“Wha was tha?” Adda’s tongue got in the way when she spoke. Sergeant Natani smirked, and Adda was suddenly very sorry that Tabs was out of the room.
“Bacteriophage will be slow to print. Slow to work. Your symptoms are severe. You have heard, can solve this the easy way or the hard way?” Dr. Williams smiled, and Natani and Chef laughed.
“Whi’ way iz thiz?” Adda asked as Dr. Williams led her to an unoccupied patch of floor in the main room.
“Easy way,” said the doctor, which made Zikri laugh, and a couple of the more alert people lying nearby joined him. Well, if she couldn’t entertain like Pel, it was good to be funny somehow. A quick scan of the room showed that Pel had gone elsewhere. He was probably tired too.
It was time to settle in for whatever unpleasantness occurred when the drug Dr. Williams had injected started interacting with Adda’s homemade concentration concoction. Her eyelids kept sliding closed. “Somebuzzy wash thiz.” She let the back of her head thump on the floor, but waved her comp above her for emphasis. “Ge’ the feeg.” Her lungs were filling with gunk, and she swallowed so she wouldn’t vomit while she coughed.
The room smelled like others had been less conscientious. Dr. Williams slapped a porta
ble O2 breather the width of three fingers over Adda’s nose and mouth and patted her head. Dr. Tiwari came in from the entrance with a pack on his back and Tabs following him. He and Dr. Williams stared at each other, nodded, and moved on to the ZV next to Adda.
Sergeant Natani lowered herself to one knee within arm’s reach of Adda. The blank expression on her face was unnerving. Natani was about the last person in the universe Adda would trust with watching her sensor feeds, particularly if the sergeant was in shock or something similar, but Iridian’s success was in all the pirates’ best interests. Adda had read somewhere that asking someone to do you a favor made them like you more. “Sergeant . . . wash thiz feeg? It’z impordant.”
Natani stared for a long moment, then held out the hand with her black-and-yellow comp glove. Adda directed the feed to her. The sergeant nodded when her comp made the connection, then sat a few steps away, grimly watching the projection.
That accomplished, Adda raised her voice to interrupt the doctors for clarification on all of their staring. “You subvulcalize through implanz?”
Dr. Williams smiled, Dr. Tiwari nodded, and they both ignored her enormous grin as they returned to their patients. So they shared subvocalization commands on a local comm channel using implants, probably near the base of their throats, to facilitate nearly silent speech without suits. If the implants had their own speakers and didn’t rely on earbuds or suit comms, it would look like telepathy. Iridian would love it.
Time lurched. Faces gibbered from the floor by her head. A second or an hour later, Dr. Tiwari said “suit contamination.” Iridian crossing the station while her armor infected her . . . Adda’s eyes squeezed shut. And Pel gone, lost, how would she ever find him? He laughed, somewhere nearby, she hoped. Either his absence or his presence had to be a hallucination. She’d been using a lot of homemade sharpsheets lately. Time staggered past.
“Shit,” said Sergeant Natani. Adda forced open one eye, then the other, to process Natani’s distressed frown at the feed Adda had asked her to watch. “Shit, what does this mean?”
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