Barbary Station

by R. E. Stearns

  The ZV lowered the projection to a couple of centimeters in front of Adda’s O2 breather. Her sensor-riding pattern algorithms highlighted activity in the vicinity of the refugees’ docking bay. Heat and movement outside parameters. Unexpected small objects. Weapons outlines that refugees wouldn’t have. She’d have to patch into vid records to confirm it. The implications had her fighting off another wave of nausea.

  As the feed loaded, temperature, audio, and light sensor readings went wild. “That looks bad,” Natani said. Adda nodded her agreement.

  A nearby ZV asked, “What is it?” Zikri and the doctors ignored the projection, as did Chef, whom they’d recruited to assist.

  Sound and visuals came together in the same second of confusion. The middle and end of an explosion blasted through the comp’s speakers. Natani fumbled with her glove to turn down the volume.

  “Who is it?” Adda smiled a little at her ability to pronounce the words. Whatever the doctor had given her was wearing off. Wrong question, though. Her smile faded. Nothing in the projection could be a “who” anymore.

  Smoke obscured the visuals, so she subvocalized the command to switch to infrared. That was too bright to be helpful. The visual representation of motion and audio combined registered less than she hoped too, until two people rushed into view, screaming.

  She pulled back a bit, switched to the vid, and made out both figures through the smoke. One was the refugee who’d asked Adda to fix some things in the camp. The other was a stranger. More voices shouted from a dead sensor zone near the refugees’ docking bay. Above them, a drone hovered over a hole in the floor.

  Adda’s throat tightened, this time not because of infection. She propped herself against the wall to search out the other motion signatures. Iridian’s still proceeded slowly toward the security control room. As soon as she identified that Iridian’s was present, she switched to a view of the armed intruders so that she didn’t draw AegiSKADA’s attention to Iridian.

  There was something wrong with that conclusion. She took a cautious, deeper breath to clear her head, ready to exhale if the coughing started again. It did, but not before she got enough oxygen to her brain to note that no, AegiSKADA wouldn’t know what she was seeing at any given time. Symptom treatment wasn’t worth losing her ability to think straight, which she would’ve told Dr. Williams if she’d had an option.

  The larger armed contingent now stood between the refugees’ docking bay and the one with the passage to the pirates’ compound. They were on the second or third floor of the station, since the first didn’t have any wall-mounted turrets like the one they were shooting at. Enviro loss alerts from the area near the explosion appeared on her comp. Using the wall for support, she got to her knees, then her feet.

  Natani had been staring into space again, but now she focused on Adda. “What the hell is happening out there?” The question sounded like it was somehow Adda’s fault.

  “AegiSKADA is going after the refugees,” she said. Several pirates groaned. “I’m going into my workspace.” Natani watched her inch carefully along the wall toward the tank, then thrust an arm beneath Adda’s and around her waist to hold her up. Whatever Dr. Williams had injected her with made it a bit easier to breathe, but walking still made Adda light-headed and dizzy.

  On their way out they passed Chato dozing against a wall beside the door. Natani kicked his boot until he met her gaze. “Watch them.” She nodded at the doctors and Zikri. “I want to know what the hell she’s up to.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Chato swiped a hand over his eyes and stood, probably to reduce his chances of falling asleep again.

  The sergeant practically dropped Adda down the ladder and descended right after, but Adda had already crossed the tank to her table under her own power. Refugees had died in that blast, and nobody else seemed capable of seeing past their own dripping noses. She had to stop the attack herself.

  She shuffled her line of powder into a loose spiral with her measuring packet’s edge, watching Natani out of the corner of her eye. With all her conscious attention in a workspace, she’d be physically vulnerable. The temptation to hurt Adda or destroy her equipment might overwhelm whatever self-preservation or order-following instincts the unstable soldier still had.

  To get Natani out of the tank, Adda needed to know why she was there in the first place, which was . . . curiosity? “Um. I know you don’t like how we’ve approached the AegiSKADA problem.”

  “Damned right.”

  “Well, AegiSKADA is focused on the mercenaries now, but as soon as it finishes with them, it will refocus on us. So once Iridian shuts it down, I have to get control of it, while it’s distracted.”

  Natani frowned, more unhappy than angry. “You got us into this shit by messing with the AI, and now we’re supposed to thank you for getting us out. At least you sound like you know what the fuck you’re doing.”

  Adda nodded and waited for Natani to go away. All she’d needed help with was getting to the tank. She certainly didn’t need help getting into a workspace. “So, that’s why you’re helping me?”

  Natani’s sigh echoed slightly in the tank, hollow and sad. “We’ve lost too many people to that fucking AI. It’s torn up too many people who are still alive. It has to stop.”

  “I agree,” said Adda. The spiral of powder, an unpleasant gray-blue-brown in the push lights‘ yellow light, still lay on the table. “I’m going to take this stuff to help me concentrate and then start a virtual workspace where I can interact with the station’s sensor network and find out where everyone is.” A vast oversimplification of her efforts, but that was the most easily understood part. Natani nodded and made no move to leave.

  Well, Adda could indulge the sergeant’s curiosity about this as well. The slightly moistened powder still rasped over Adda’s nasal tissue as she inhaled it. She’d get nosebleeds soon. That would either drag her out of the workspace, short out her nasal hardware (the least likely), or create more unpleasant imagery. Before she let that distract or dissuade her, she crawled into the workspace generator and plugged in.

  The generator dropped her into the middle of a silent conflagration outside the refugee docking bay. She swept aside the smoke and debris, leaving her in a superheated empty hallway. “All right, Jurek. What did you do? What are your gods-damned targeting parameters, and why the explosives?”

  The analysis had crunched away while she was gone. It had a good sample of AegiSKADA taking offensive action in response to minor similarities to weaponry. Long rows of printed monochromatic models of various weapons lined industrial shelves. She lifted one item, an old-style projectile rifle. Behind it on the infinitely deep shelf sat more printed copies of the rifle, tilted at every possible angle.

  “I knew this,” Adda muttered. When she put the rifle back on the shelf, the whole shelving display vanished.

  The range of generalization in shape and size, and the encyclopedic list of weapons, was part of the problem. But Jurek trusted AegiSKADA to make high-level decisions, with weapons that were unconscionable on space-based facilities. If the explosion she had witnessed were a little stronger, or closer to the first floor, it could have created a catastrophic hull breach. That was assuming it was AegiSKADA’s work, not the mercenaries’, but AegiSKADA had already demonstrated its willingness to blow up parts of the station to reach intruders.

  She huffed out an aggravated sigh. The first step in stopping it from attacking the refugees was blinding the sensors. That would stop AegiSKADA from incorrectly labeling handheld objects as weapons, and also limit its targeting capabilities. It’d be hard work to find a delivery method that didn’t require sending a signal much farther than she could yell. AegiSKADA had silenced her.

  As her subconscious and the workspace interacted, a pattern she had showed interest in previously reemerged. She stood next to a group of Transorbital Voyages mercenaries. The visual display detailed every fleck of blood flying through the air as two mercenaries’ helmets exploded from the inside. Ae
giSKADA used explosives wherever it was impractical to place the larger drones armed with electroshock weaponry.

  To avoid attracting spiderbots or encountering mines, the safest route might actually be through the corridors. And to avoid both, one would need to stay near open corridors without actually walking through them.

  Adda summoned her largest station map. It appeared with the ideal route from Iridian’s last known position already marked in a glowing blue fungal trail, responding to Adda’s intent, although not in a method she would’ve consciously chosen. Her heart rate climbed. How am I going to get this to Iridian? Nobody she sent along the path Iridian took would get there in time, assuming AegiSKADA didn’t kill them on the way. Comp messaging was down. Her contact with the sensor nodes had been severed.

  She recorded the directions verbally, then stared at the waveform visualization of it jittering in the workspace around her. How . . .

  She gathered the waveform in her arms, shoving it into her comp’s local storage. The water tank seemed much darker than it had been when she entered the workspace, but she crossed it without stumbling much.

  Natani was sitting against the wall beside Chato when Adda crossed the main room, but she stood when she saw Adda. “Where are you going now?”

  “I need to print something,” said Adda. Natani followed her to the room with the computer console and the printer.

  The printer had just one pattern for a small comp with speakers, and she almost fidgeted out of her skin waiting for it to finish printing, cooling, and assembling the parts. She had to spend another fifteen minutes with Sturm in his workroom adjusting it until it worked well enough for her to install software. Between the doctors’ activity and everyone else’s exhaustion and illness, only Natani seemed to care what Adda did.

  In the docking bay, with Natani a few steps away resolutely watching for drones, Adda set the newly printed comp down near but not too near one of the landing pads, transferred the recording, and hit play. Her own voice, tinny but audible, started the first repetition. “Casey Mire Mire, Charon’s Coin, and Apparition. It’s in all our best interest that you get this message to Iridian Nassir, the woman who came to the station with me. Iridian: the safest way is through the rooms parallel to the main corridors. Break down the walls if you have to.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Charges Accrued: Hiding, Protecting, or Directing Prohibited Artificial Intelligence

  Iridian inflicted an electrolyte solution on her disinterested stomach using her helmet’s nutrient dispenser. At least that functioned, or she’d dehydrate before she reached the damned security control room. Blowing up half a mine field and tackling killer robots worked up a sweat.

  The pirates called the shuttle terminal at forty-six ticks north a blind spot where nobody’d been attacked and AegiSKADA’s sensors didn’t reach. Si Po had called it that, actually. She ran toward it as fast as she could manage, while still watching for mines on the hull. Running helped her focus on the present. This was no time to mourn.

  Among the trash generated in the disassembly of the Prosperity Dawn, the central shuttle terminal in the hub was relatively intact. Pressurization was too much to hope for. Leaning over the edge of the inner ring to confirm her position, she found herself almost on top of the terminal’s passthrough where it stuck out from the station. Its eye-grabbing chipped yellow paint still met regulation standards for passthroughs between vehicles and stations.

  She might be able to climb onto it, but unless she could open it, she was fucked. Adda might figure out where she was, but she had other problems, like continuing to breathe. Each clank of the emptying O2 tank against Iridian’s armored hip rattled through her brain.

  Her map marked roof accesses for the third floor as a blue icon near her own red one. Hauling radioactive material around with her should cause an automatic lockout, but she had to try anyway.

  When she reached the roof airlock, she held her comp to its reader and tapped out the signal Adda had opened the previous airlock with.

  The outer door hissed open without a single warning or notification of, say, radiation levels.

  Iridian stared at the doorway for a second. “Those cheap corporate shits.” Though she couldn’t complain much. Just now, their cheapness worked in her favor.

  She stepped inside and hit the icon to pressurize the airlock. Security policies might reasonably forgo ID checks at maintenance airlocks. HarborMaster and AegiSKADA would both be alerted when anybody used one. Besides, all but the most soulless organizations allowed humans in from the cold and the black.

  But a Geiger counter, this near the power plant? That was common fucking sense. Without that, she resigned herself for a long wait before finding a decontamination chamber. That was a shame, because her armor was a radioactive mess.

  The interior door opened and she darted out, scanning visually for drones even though Adda’s tracker would pick them up. The pressurized airlock didn’t vent atmo violently into the hangar beyond, so she risked closing her O2 valve and opening her faceplate. She’d hate to run out of air before she got back to Adda.

  The hallways here were better labeled and less dilapidated than the ones she’d traversed to reach the med team. After two detours to avoid drones Adda’s tracker had detected, she reached the shuttle terminal. A plain industrial display in black and white confirmed that one of the station’s shuttles was docked at the hub in the center of the ring.

  She followed instructions to summon it, then put the sample case in front of the shuttle passthrough’s thick double doors and took several long steps back. Unlike the pirate ships, these little crafts wouldn’t have AI of their own. Either HarborMaster ran them, or they operated on a very simple preconstructed program. Even better, Adda’s drone alarm was silent. Iridian could probably sit on one of the metal benches built into the wall without getting zapped.

  Her stomach churned whether she was moving or not. Juggling the O2 tank and the sample container made the nausea harder to bear. I should’ve asked Pel how long those D-MOG tablets last.

  Adda’s drone finder flashed, this time from her comp and not the faceplate. On, off, once per second. Either there was more than one drone nearby, or the alert communication created for her suit’s HUD was not working as expected on her comp. She shook her head to make herself stop staring and search for the threat. Nothing moved among the racks of stacked exterior and interior repair supplies across the small terminal from the benches. That didn’t make her safe. Spiderbots used cover.

  She returned to the terminal door and took her shield off her back. For now, she left it collapsed. Fast movement might attract drones. That was another thing about bots, and all strengths of AI: they followed implacable rules. They didn’t hesitate. You could predict their actions if you knew the rules they operated under. If you didn’t . . .

  The upper half of a drone chassis rose between two industrial-size bottles of rust remover. It was one of the bigger ones, like the first she’d seen on the surface while repairing the base. Now Iridian snapped the shield up. The passthrough display showed the shuttle over halfway to her. And it was a shuttle passthrough, which meant it was built onto the station, not onto the vehicle the way a ship’s passthrough would be. The shuttle would still have to match the station’s spin and link up to the station’s passthrough before she could board. Then she’d be in an AI blind spot. She could hardly fucking wait.

  A projectile slammed into her shield simultaneous with a loud pop from one of the shield’s weakening panels. The impact rocked her back into a more solid stance. She caught the second one without putting as much stress on her sore wrists. She braced for an explosion.

  A ricochet smacked into a thick roll of flooring and bounced away. She couldn’t help laughing a little. AegiSKADA’s designer was ahead of whoever put the station itself together. Nonlethal bullets immobilized humans without puncturing the hull.

  The shuttle tracking display pinged and the double doors swished apart behind her. She backed
into the passthrough with the O2 tank under her arm and most of her body covered by the shield. As she crouched to grab the nuclear material container, another shot pounded her shin. The armor bounced the bullet into a corner, but she’d check that armor panel for cracks before going outside again. Those bullets might be nonlethal, but they’d leave a hell of a bruise on unprotected flesh.

  She stayed braced until the shuttle’s double doors closed. “Shit.” The deployed shield’s edge thumped the deck as she pounded the second of two destinations on the shuttle controls. “Please choose a stability station. The shuttle is departing,” said a disembodied, ungendered voice from an overhead speaker.

  Iridian activated the magnetic locks on her boots and ignored the shuttle’s rows of passenger strap-down stations. The small, rectangular craft had places for only six people, three along each bulkhead, or fewer if they wanted to secure their gear instead of holding it. The shuttle jolted into motion and she staggered, but kept her balance. Once it cleared the station’s passthrough, she gripped the top edge of the door and braced with both feet. The little vessel surged in a massive engine burn, visible only in bluish-white cones above and below the door. The shuttle rose and accelerated out of Barbary Station’s spin.

  “Please choose a stability station.”

  She collapsed her shield and hung it on her back so she could grip the O2 tank and the sample container. Dwindling grav as the shuttle freed itself from the station did no favors for her stomach. Why radiation poisoning hit there first when she hadn’t even swallowed the stuff was a mystery. She’d seen enough rad safety vids to know better than to look the reason up when she already felt queasy, even if her comp could access the Casey Mire Mire’s Internet snap.

  Instead she scanned the bulkheads, overhead, and deck for sensor nodes. Aside from the working projectors and strap-down stations, the shuttle’s tiny cabin was empty. The shuttle’s projections of views from exterior cams on all six sides made for an entertaining trip, short as it’d be. And her O2 tank, sample container, and armor were about to be a lot lighter.