The shipbreakers maintained admirable scrap collection procedures, because almost no debris floated in the shuttle interior. One small piece spiraled across her field of vision, black and . . . on legs.
She leaped backward, too hard for the rapidly shifting g’s, and slammed into the far bulkhead. That thing moved too mechanically to be an insect.
Clicking near her head made her jerk away toward the door. Now that she was looking, one or two crawling drones skittered over every bulkhead beneath the projected starscape. There were no sensor nodes, but the pirates who’d said AegiSKADA was blind here were completely wrong.
Little legs wiggled as spiderbots drifted away from the bulkheads. Iridian’s boots left the deck. She smashed one of the critters between her foot and a bulkhead, and another between a bulkhead and the sample container. Others still floated nearby.
One crawled over her O2 tank and latched on near the valve. “Oh, hell no.” She brushed the bot off before smashing it, then froze. It could’ve blown up in her face. One drifted toward her eye. She snapped her faceplate closed. The little drone scrabbled at the smooth plastic. Well, the last one didn’t blow up. She crushed it in her fist.
None of the little bastards had set off Adda’s drone alarm. Iridian had no idea how many were in the shuttle with her.
The central shuttle hub hung still as the station spun around it. Several large pieces had broken off and drifted away. “My luck, the head will be gone.” It’d been a while since she’d found a safe place to armor off. She disliked the idea of inserting a catheter she didn’t take out of the package herself, and of testing an unproven water reclamation system.
Opening her suit while spiderbots floated around with her also sounded nasty. She kept herself moving despite the roiling effect on her gut. The little bots’ propulsion relied on their feet having a solid grip on something, and they seemed to be waiting for that solid grip before they exploded. In motion, they’d have a tougher time making that something her. Had AegiSKADA calculated the probability that without atmo, blowing a hole in armor was as deadly as blowing a hole in a skull? She had to get out of the shuttle before the AI refined its tactics.
As the shuttle affixed itself to the hub’s passthrough and the shuttle and passthrough doors slid open, the cabin filled with fist-size explosions as multiple drones self-destructed at once.
She tumbled through the doors. Momentum carried her along the length of the terminal. One of the spiderbots detonated against the connecting mechanism between the shuttle and the hub, blasting the whole shuttle half a meter off the hub’s passthrough. The shuttle spun away from the hub, propelled by explosions and escaping atmo. The hub doors shut out a flicker of orange light as something in the shuttle tried to catch fire in the dwindling O2.
Fuck if Iridian hadn’t come as near to getting blown up on Barbary Station as she had in her last six months as a Shieldrunner. When her shoulder, elbow, and hip thumped into the shuttle door on the far side of the hub’s terminal, she hooked her feet through a couple of handholds there and let herself drift while she caught her breath. Her hands shook against the armored gloves.
The hub terminal seemed eerily normal and calm after the trip to get there. Like most hubs, two tunnels intersected in a small square lobby. Strap-in pads on the bulkheads kept people still as they waited for their rides, or for their opportunity to exit to the scaffolding around a trashed ship. Passengers should’ve glided around here and in the shuttle without suits, but enviro management was off now. Temp was too cold, and it was depressurized. So much for the head.
If AegiSKADA really did have a limited number of drones, it’d used up a hell of a lot of them in that shuttle. There might be fewer drones on the other side. With no humans on that side, what would AegiSKADA have to shoot at? Although if it’d been tracking her, it might’ve made a predictive model of where she’d go. It would’ve sent something the long way around to intercept her. Through the refugee docking bay.
Her stomach quit cooperating, and she had to test her helmet’s vacuuming function. She’d seldom been so thankful for her shaved scalp.
The shuttle would stay at one side for a preset amount of time to give folks entering and leaving the hub time to do so, then move on. Something had happened to the exterior cams, or the power. The bulkheads between the four passthrough doors had large blank spaces, but no projectors displayed the cold and the black. She shoved herself across the space and watched for the shuttle indicator to switch to green, since she couldn’t see the shuttle coming to take her to the other side of the station. Only one module separated the far side’s shuttle hub from AegiSKADA’s control room.
In the status display, the passthrough on the far side was yellow rather than white like the one she’d come from. She pulled herself nearer along the bulkhead with her foot, since her hands were full. The display said nothing more.
She clutched a handhold on the bulkhead beside the shuttle doorway. The doors slid open, and she peered through the shuttle’s broad cam-fed windows.
The spot on the station where the passthrough should’ve been swung by. Its docking apparatus was still there, but the passthrough floor, ceiling, and a wall were gone in a massive, burned gouge that widened as it went down two floors of the station, exposing a dimly lit docking bay in vacuum. The elevator shaft was nowhere to be seen.
“Big plasma torch, huh.” By now the torch that the med team had told her about would’ve fallen out of stationspace, on a very slow trip to nowhere. If she’d been in that area like Blackguardly Jack Oarman had when the med team last saw him, she’d have run like hell too.
Still, she had to get over there somehow, and that passthrough was in station grav. She could fall forever once she got off the damned hub, and crawling, exploding robots would fall with her. She backed away from the open doors and went looking for the other shuttle.
The crossways console showed the shuttle she’d just traveled in lit red, like the other shuttle’s icon. She edged up to the door and pressed herself against the bulkhead on first one side, then the other. Both shuttles were out of sight.
Spiderbots weren’t designed to float. If she had to be trapped in the hub, in a shuttle, or dangling from a wall on the far side, she’d rather stay in the hub. It had more space and stable micrograv. The doors slid closed.
Trapped. That sounded more real the more she thought it. It was too easy to imagine how this would end. She’d stick it out in the hub until hunger, thirst, or fear of AegiSKADA doing something horrendous to the pirates forced her into one of the remaining shuttles. And that’d be the end of her and the shuttle both, more than likely. Iridian swallowed hard.
It was too soon to start composing a farewell message for Adda, when she hadn’t even looked the whole hub over yet. An open doorway in a large pillar in the hub’s center led to a ladder perpendicular to the main tunnel. She secured the sample carrier to a pad on the bulkheads and picked a direction on the ladder. It opened on cold space after two meters, so she pulled herself along in the other direction instead. This module had more original structure intact, including a com console and a chair with a harness to keep someone from floating out of it.
Vids about stations that lost enviro always included a desiccated corpse in a chair like this one. Those people spent their final moments there because it was easier to maintain enviro in a small, enclosed space. The help they always called for came too late, if it came at all. And they, like Iridian, had a job to do. She strapped herself and her O2 tank into the seat. Her comp couldn’t get through to anybody, but the antenna might not have been blasted off the hub. Maybe she’d even get to talk to Adda.
If I survive, I swear to all gods I’ll ask her to marry me. Even though she was pretty sure Adda would say yes, it was still nerve-racking. After all, why hadn’t Adda asked her first? There had to be a reason, didn’t there?
She set everything to the widest possible range of signals and leaned in to touch her faceplate to the console above the mic. With luck
, the local channel in her suit would figure out how to make the hookup. “Adda? If you can hear me . . .” This module must’ve had speakers at some point. Either the aesthetically pleasing console hid them, or they’d been taken off with the top half of the module when the shipbreaking scaffolding came apart. “If you can hear me, say something on a very broad band with a strong signal.”
She waited through a long eight seconds of silence. “Anyone who can hear me, my name’s Iridian Nassir and I’m stuck in the shuttle hub. The shuttles are full of exploding spider drones, so if you have another way out, I’d appreciate it.” Another way out? She turned off the mic and laughed. If anybody on this hab had a way out, they’d have taken it long ago.
She could jump off the hub from the outside, timed very precisely to land on the broken passthrough. It’d be a long flight, but she had the O2 for that.
The problem was landing. She’d have to snag herself on something solid to insert her body into the station’s spin, and it’d hit her like a freighter leaving grav. Her armor was good, but not that good, and it was patched in a couple of places. The shuttles’ three-minute entry and exit pattern avoided that smashing shift in force.
AegiSKADA would have to send electrocution drones to get to her here. Bots would have the same trouble getting in and out of the station’s spin as she would. Maybe one would take the shuttle. The image of a black drone hovering in front of the shuttle passthrough doors, patiently waiting for its ride, made her laugh aloud.
A shadow fell over the console and swept across her. She ducked in case the drone had fired already. When she deployed her shield and searched for the machine, one of the ships hovered above her instead. It dwarfed the shuttle hub. Iridian felt like an ant beneath a boot that was on its way down.
The Charon’s Coin was a tugboat, basically a small computer with big-ass engines and hullhooks. Even if she hadn’t recently seen the Coin much closer than she had ever wanted to see it again, tugs had been common at the military stations where Iridian grew up. The ship above her looked nothing like them, and it also lacked the Apparition’s missile launchers and hardened thermal fins. That made this the Casey Mire Mire, the ship Oarman said was most likely to accept passengers wanting to leave the station.
Of course, Oarman had said that under the logical, blissfully ignorant assumption that the Casey had a human pilot. Captain Sloane and Si Po would’ve awakened the Casey’s AI copilot as a desperate attempt to escape AegiSKADA after Foster’s team blew themselves up in the security control room. Oarman’s outdated intel wasn’t worth much now.
Still, Iridian had to get off the hub somehow. Adda was counting on her. “Hey! Hi! Wait one minute.” Since Iridian couldn’t be sure the ship picked up her local channel, she raised her hand in a stop gesture, then held just her index finger up in case either of those signals meant something to the ship’s AI. She unstrapped herself from the seat and dove for the hub’s ladder.
When she came back with the container, the Casey still hung there. Its passthrough door yawned open, tilted sideways to the one it’d use to let passengers disembark on a hab or another ship. The whole ship floated at an angle to Barbary Station that a grav-conscious human would never have approached from.
Iridian had passed extravehicular safety sims during Shieldrunner training, but falling untethered gave her goose bumps. One mistake and she’d fall until she ran out of O2 or her water purifier stopped or a micrometeoroid punched through her suit. She breathed in, aimed for the center of the open passthrough, and leaped.
As Iridian sailed through the passthrough door, she caught movement in her peripheral vision. Something hovered in the shadow at the back of the passthrough. The hand nearest the bulkhead wrapped around her O2 tank. With the one holding the smaller sample container, she could catch herself against the closed interior doors. All she could do was twist around to put her back to the drone. If she were lucky, the collapsed shield would stop the drone from blowing her up.
She hit the closed doors and turned, releasing the sample container to slap around the bulkhead for a handhold. She didn’t find one and the container was drifting away, so she grabbed it again and let herself drift too. A light flickered on and the exterior door shut. In the improved lighting, the menacing profile solidified into a blocky rover from the hijacking. Its cam lens glinted on its stalk as the aperture narrowed. It maintained its position at the far end of the ship’s passthrough, and it didn’t lob explosives at her.
“And now I’m inside an awakened AI,” she muttered. “Great.”
The passthrough’s closed exterior door approached her slowly, which meant the ship was moving away from the shuttle hub while she, floating in micrograv, stayed where she was. The passthrough’s exterior door thumped into her hands as the ship accelerated at a surprisingly human-safe speed. The Apparition hadn’t bothered with that when it brought her, Adda, and Reis back from the hijacked Transorbital Voyages colony ship. An automated pressurization cycle was in progress, according to the passthrough readout by the interior door.
The Casey decelerated, dropping Iridian face-first onto the passthrough’s interior door. Her armor absorbed the impact, and she heard it clank against the metal door. The suit sensors reported a healthy enviro in the passthrough. When the ship stilled and grav faded away again, the inner door opened. A few pieces of detritus gusted past Iridian as she floated into the ship.
The Casey’s main cabin was big enough that one of the station’s shuttles would fit inside with room to spare, lengthwise at least. A sleek, backlit bridge console cast light from the left. A tank rack was secured to the bulkhead across from the passthrough, and a couple of doors in the right bulkhead were closed. Iridian gripped a handhold by the passthrough and slapped the cabin light panel. The ship’s sunlight sim lit the cabin like early morning or late evening on Earth. Purple-tinged light glowed from the seams where bulkheads met deck and overhead.
The pseudo-organic solution in the ship’s scum-encrusted tanks was thicker than looked healthy. The culture was circulating, not too opaque, and the normal shade of pinkish gray. The colored lighting designed to make the tanks more decorative than alien were off or burned out. The culture needed the same atmo as a human, so that explained the cabin’s healthy enviro.
She shut off the O2 pump and gently released the O2 tank and container without giving either of them enough momentum to drift away from her. Now that she had her hands free again, she unsealed her helmet. The dry air was around five Celsius, faintly acrid from the poorly maintained pseudo-organics, but breathable.
It was suddenly vitally important that she dig the D-MOG tablets out of her suit, now. She resisted the impulse to take more than one. This was a bad time to risk an overdose.
“Hello.” The voice was agender, slightly digitized, and practically on top of her.
Iridian whirled and tangled herself in the O2 tank’s hose. The tank thumped the back of her newly bared head. The rover, its cam still trained on her, darted in from the passthrough before the interior doors closed and used short bursts of its air jets to stop itself in the center of the cabin, about a meter off the deck.
“Damn.” She rubbed the sore spot on her head. That rover had speakers, which it’d used to transmit Tritheist’s recorded warning during the Prosperity Dawn hijacking. Now it was speaking for something else. “Hi to you, too . . . Casey?” Si Po had talked to the ships all the time, but he never said anything about them talking back. She could still be carrying on a conversation with recorded messages. In fact, that was the best-case scenario.
A projector on the pseudo-organic rack clicked on to project a window on the bulkhead by the passthrough. The shuttle she had ridden to get there had apparently docked on the station, because the hub was empty. Another window above the bridge console showed Barbary Station spinning away before unmoving stars. The Casey was still relative to both.
The rover puffed little jets of compressed air out of its sides at intervals to remain in place. Iridian activat
ed her magnetic boots and clanked to the floor. “So . . . ,” she said. “Are we heading to the other side?”
“No,” said the bot. She tensed. “Can you upload AegiSKADA’s code?” Aside from the mispronunciation of “SKADA” with “ah” sounds and the uniform space between words, the rover’s—the Casey’s—voice might’ve belonged to a genderless human. Because that had to be a sentient response from the AI. No human would fucking record that.
“Um . . . I don’t have it.” Why the hell would she? She’d wipe AegiSKADA’s pseudo-organic tanks when she found them, no matter what Adda said. There was no way she’d let this monster reboot to kill again.
“Can you download it from the supervisory station in the control room?”
“I’d have to get there first.” Iridian smiled slightly at the rover, which seemed to act as the Casey’s eyes and ears.
“If you comply, I will take you to the shuttle passthrough.”
Iridian’s eyes rolling might not communicate anything to an AI, but it amused her to do something it was incapable of. “It’s still a hell of a drop to where it’s supposed to be on the map. If I fall straight through the damned station, then nobody gets what they want. Get me farther in or no deal.”
Any recalculation required was over faster than a human breathed. “Climb down Elevator Thirty-One to Floor Two. Go south two hundred meters. Enter the security manager’s office. Break through the right wall fifty-five centimeters from the door. Travel parallel to the main corridors to avoid security activation. Break through the next walls at the same position.”
It must have the station mapped to every panel and bolt. “Simple as that, huh?” But it had said . . . “Wait, if I comply with what?”
The rover hovered toward her with a hiss of compressed air. If the thing wanted to interact, she’d prefer to have the ability to get away if she had to. She gathered her various effects. The rover stopped within arm’s reach and a panel opened on its back. A datacask the length of her thumb slid out. The design was older, but it was full of healthy-looking brownish-blue pseudo-organic fluid.
Barbary Station Page 34
