Armored-ARC

by John Joseph Adams

  “—get you to shut up, which is the pity.” She dropped the lid on Arva.

  “What a mess,” Ruth sighed, and Polly let out a sorrowful bleat.

  Jacoba pocketed the data drive and made it halfway to the door before she saw David waiting.

  He was looking at her like he’d been watching for a long time, and she could guess how much he’d heard.

  He had his back to the wall—he always did—and his expression was furious, but she kept walking and halted facing him and didn’t make way.

  She looked him right in the eye until he said, a long time later, “The Captain wants to see you.”

  Captain Shahida owned the Coppelia flat-out, which had cost several years of tight profits and poor wages, but at least now they didn’t have to worry about red tape coming from anywhere but Alhambra.

  It also meant that when the Captain wanted something from you, nothing stopped her getting it.

  “What was it?” Shahida asked as soon as they came through the door to the bridge.

  David glanced at Jacoba’s right-hand pocket.

  In her meaner moments, from the bottom of a glass, Jacoba thought it was really no wonder he’d gotten caught.

  She handed it over. “Don’t know the damage.”

  Shahida plugged it in and watched on her monitor.

  Jacoba looked over the bridge, which she hardly saw—the downside of being a half-decent mechanic on a ship like this was spending most of your time inside circuit tubes, banging things with wrenches and hoping for the best, instead of operating from anywhere with a view.

  The ship was hovering, and Minerva’s southern ocean spread out under them, green cut by swathes of rust-red algae. It was lovely; she had a fondness for open spaces.

  Shahida pushed off from the console as if something had shorted out. “Goddammit.”

  Jacoba flinched.

  After a moment the Captain seemed to make up her mind, and said, “Go get Hyun and Ruth,” in a tone so grim it sent a chill down Jacoba’s spine.

  David cast one accusing look at Jacoba before he left to bring the others to the war room.

  At some point before it came to Shahida, Coppelia had been fitted for a military op. It had probably gone badly, given the state it was in when Jacoba came aboard. But even after several years of cannibalization there was still plenty of tech, and when they had all gathered in the pockmarked wreckage and Shahida put in the drive, the image sprang to life on a bay of monitors.

  “Wow,” said Hyun. “There are still four monitors Jacoba hasn’t torn up?”

  Ruth knocked him with her shoulder.

  Jacoba, standing along the back wall near David, didn’t answer—hardly cared.

  The video was black box footage, and she had recognized the government seal on the bridge.

  “That’s a Vestal ship,” Jacoba said.

  Vesta was a planet three months’ travel farther out from this system’s sun; there was no reasonable way this footage could exist, here.

  “Yeah,” said Shahida, and sighed.

  “Low orbit,” Ruth pointed out. “For a while—the hyperspace engineer’s almost asleep.”

  Onscreen a moment later, the door to the bridge slid open and the room swelled with a dozen people, armed and angry.

  Very quickly, Jacoba realized how this recording was going to end.

  Vestal ships were organic; if you tortured one it would give up its secrets, and if you damaged it enough it couldn’t bear witness against you.

  Jacoba’s stomach soured.

  “Well, shit,” she said.

  David gave her a sidelong look she couldn’t meet.

  Things unfolded as she’d feared: the bridge became a standoff, the captain and the first mate rose with their hands on their heads, there was a blur of motion, the lens whited out from muzzle flash and came back into focus with all of the bridge crew down.

  The intruders moved in, toeing the bodies aside and fanning out to man the bridge. One of the men approached and raised his arms—it must have been to tear out the camera, because a moment after his blurry forearm came into sight, the feed cut off.

  But that moment was long enough for Hyun to suck in a breath.

  Captain Shahida raised an eyebrow. “Someone you recognize?”

  “The tattoo,” Hyun said. “Under his sleeve.”

  He held out his right arm.

  Hyun’s forearm tattoo was an owl perched on a sword. Jacoba had seen it, but it wasn’t a prison tattoo, and she hadn’t thought much else about it. He had four visible; other than this one being ugliest, it was unremarkable.

  “Minervan Armed Forces,” Hyun said, sounding embarrassed. “Special Ops.”

  David went so tense Jacoba thought for a moment that he was actually going to run for it.

  She didn’t move to stop him—sometimes there was nothing you could do but run.

  “Discharged after one tour,” Hyun explained, “but I made it through boot.”

  When he rolled down his sleeve, Jacoba caught the tightness in his jaw, and wondered what he had done that was so awful they’d gotten rid of him. Probably thought for himself at the wrong moment, she thought. The Armed Forces weren’t thrilled about that kind of thing.

  Ruth shook her head. “So that was the Army?”

  “Hyun’s not,” said David. “No knowing if they still are. Could be ex.”

  “What kind of ship is it?” Jacoba asked. “Was this a smuggling bust or did they shoot a bunch of diplomats?”

  Shahida spread her hands. “There’s been nothing over the transom.”

  Ruth said, “So we don’t know who else knows?”

  “There was a Minervan ship trailing us,” David argued. “Somebody knows.”

  “Maybe that’s unrelated,” said Ruth.

  “Maybe this is a frame job,” said David.

  “Maybe somebody had an attack of conscience,” Jacoba said.

  “Yeah,” David said, “a lot of people have those at inappropriate times.”

  Jacoba looked over, but didn’t apologize. The air in the room was changing, and she didn’t dare back down and apologize for having found it.

  “So the question is,” said Shahida, “whether they know we found it.”

  The room went quiet as they considered what would happen if they broke atmosphere and the Minervans thought they were running with evidence.

  Shit.

  “That Minervan ship’s still in range,” said Hyun.

  Ruth frowned. “So what are they waiting for?”

  Jacoba knew this one.

  “For us,” she said. “To run and look guilty.”

  “Goddammit,” David said, turning to her, “why couldn’t you fucking have left it alone!”

  “If this is footage of an attack on a Vestal ship,” Hyun said, reluctantly, “and the Minervans want it, that’s pretty suspicious.”

  “But it’s none of our business!” David swept an arm to encompass them. “We’re suppliers, we belong to no planet—we should stay out of it. It’s suicide otherwise.”

  “This is important information,” Jacoba said. “Someone needs to know.”

  “So who the hell do we show it to?” David asked, sounding a little strained.

  “No one,” Ruth snapped. “Why would you want to get caught in the middle of someone else’s trouble?”

  A little late for that, Jacoba thought.

  “If this can bring someone to justice,” she said, “we have an obligation.”

  Ruth looked over as if only the width of the room kept her from striking out. “An obligation to who? This is out of our hands! You think we can just—”

  The Captain cleared her throat.

  The room fell silent, waiting, as she looked at the monitors, at the floor, at the ceiling. Finally she said, “We go to port as scheduled. Jacoba, a moment.”

  Jacoba followed the Captain out to the bridge.

  Shahida turned and folded her arms. Jacoba was reminded sharply of the moment seven years
ago when she’d shown up on the docks, in dirty clothes and hair still prison-buzzed, and asked for work.

  Shahida had looked at her the same way then, like she was a bad bet.

  “I can’t have this on my ship. You tell me whether I toss it into the water, or leave you in port with it.”

  Jacoba reeled. She’d been bracing for a punch; she’d still prefer a punch to an ultimatum.

  “Now,” the Captain said.

  Her voice brooked no argument—it never did—but still Jacoba’s stomach sank.

  She could drop it in the water and forget it. It was what someone with an ounce of sense would do.

  But Jacoba never knew how to back down if she thought she was right; it was a bad habit she recognized by now.

  “Then I’ll go pack,” she said.

  It was what she’d chosen, but it still sounded like a punishment, and even the Captain’s shoulders went tight, like she’d hoped it would go some other way.

  “I’ll tell the others,” Shahida said. “They can join you if they want—I don’t conscript.”

  Jacoba smiled tightly and nodded.

  She left through the bridge. She didn’t want to see Hyun and Ruth.

  She already knew what David’s expression would be—what his decision would be—and that was bad enough.

  Arva, crouching on hands and feet in the cargo bay, was a welcome sight.

  (Other welcome sights: the sky, the transport that carried her out of prison, money, the dive bar in Baxter, the hull of the Coppelia every time she came home again.)

  Jacoba climbed into the pit and leaned back against the communication grid in the headrest that had started out serviceable, then gotten so uncomfortable she couldn’t use it, and then had come back around to feeling like a second skin. She didn’t slide on the limb controls; she liked to give Arva freedom if they weren’t working.

  If she stayed in port with the data drive—if she abandoned ship—Arva would be someone else’s.

  That stung. That was the hardest thing to imagine. She’d hand Arva over to David, maybe. David respected limits. To some stranger—it would be harder to bear.

  Arva was still trembling, like she was cold.

  “Did you look at the drive?” Jacoba asked.

  Yes.

  There was no reason to connect the drive to Arva’s shaking. There was no way for Arva to be thinking about it. She was only AI; she made a thousand tiny decisions when they went gathering, but those were a series of Yes and No decision points, that was all. The clip could have no meaning beyond whether the faces were in her databanks, and if there was anything Jacoba wanted stolen.

  Still, Jacoba asked, “What is your analysis?”

  No.

  Jacoba couldn’t blame her.

  “I have to take this,” Jacoba said, wondering why it was hard to explain. She was getting sappy in her old age. “I found it, and it might be important, so I’ll be trying to find the right person to give it to. You’ll have a new pilot in the next port.”

  No, came back through the connection point, and then faster, overlapping on itself until for one heartbeat, Jacoba felt fear—gut fear—that wasn’t hers.

  She wrenched her head away from the seat and scrambled out of the pit so fast that she missed a foothold.

  Jacoba looked up at Arva and decided she couldn’t go up and try to say goodbye—not now. It was too sad, and she had too many questions about that wrench of fear. She had enough tough things coming up, and she knew where curiosity got you.

  Instead, she said, “It’s all right.”

  It was meant for all of them—Chollima had taken a step towards them, and even Polly had turned, the glass of her pilot pit gleaming like the front of an old scuba suit.

  Jacoba had fixed the antique radio transmitter into Polly’s console, back when she was a pile of scrap and there was no brain to put in her. Jacoba had always suspected that Shahida asking her to build Polly had been a test.

  The first three years, it had been Hyun in Chollima and Jacoba in Polly, humming along with top hits as she dug around the water for lichen, knowing she was free.

  “As you were,” she said, more sharply than she meant, and walked out without looking back.

  There were only a few hours until landfall, and she had to pack her things.

  David was sitting, hands on his bent knees, in the V of the corridor so he could see in both directions.

  It meant he saw her coming as soon as she turned down the long, empty hallway that led to her room.

  Because he was who he was, he waited until she was nearly at her door before he stood up, and he moved no closer.

  David could be a bastard, but some limits he never pushed.

  “Don’t tell me you’re going ashore,” she said.

  “What possessed you to go after it?”

  His voice was quiet—he didn’t like to draw attention, unless he was angry—and it made her feel even sharper at the edges.

  She left her door open, which meant it was all right for him to follow. She didn’t turn to see if he had; she had her pride. Instead she yanked her bag from the cupboard and started reaching for her things.

  There wasn’t much: two suits of clothes, and Arva.

  He slid the door shut behind him.

  “I’d thought you were smarter than this,” he said to the door, “after where you’ve been.”

  Sometimes she could barely understand him.

  Sometimes they were so similar she might as well have spent the three years of her sentence sharing his cell.

  “No one’s asking you to do anything,” she said, shoved a sweater in her bag. It was Hyun’s, left behind after an ice-water dive when she’d had frostbite, but if he hadn’t missed it by now, it was hers. She’d need it—Minerva’s southern hemisphere was freezing in the winter.

  “Fucking right,” David said. “I’m not about to go back for withholding information.”

  He was pressed back against the far wall, hands fisted in his pockets.

  Something she’d never doubted—he’d had a rougher time of it than she had.

  If you killed a man in a bar fight and went in for manslaughter, you made your peace, or not, and you tried not to get on the wrong side of anyone who could have you stabbed in the mess, and you got used to not sleeping.

  When you were out, you caught an interstellar ship that gave you something to do, and had a view of the ocean or the sky, and you never again saw the planet where you’d killed someone, and you managed.

  But he’d gone in for accessory to something ugly, and at some point, the cops had convinced him to turn on the others and give up what he knew.

  The cooperation had shortened his sentence by years, but Jacoba suspected it was mostly because they couldn’t keep him alive in there for any longer. The one time they’d slept together properly enough to take all their clothes off, there had been a mess of white scars on his back like someone was marking days, and a knot of burned flesh on one kneecap, and sickly yellow patches near his ribs where the breaks had never healed.

  “Snitch” was a nickname that followed you home and sent people with grudges through your windows at night. That name kept you locked up tight the rest of your life.

  “Someone took this out for a reason,” she said.

  “And it’s your responsibility to find out why?” He was frowning now, his gaze halfway between her and the floor. “This was a mistake, not a calling. It’s a piece of metal in an ocean, that’s all. That’s all. This is none of our business.”

  She ran her hand along her peach-fuzz hair. Prison habit—made you harder to pin in a fight.

  The thing Jacoba had never told David about prison was that she hadn’t been tracked down.

  After she’d killed the man, she’d stayed in the bar until the cops came, because she hadn’t meant to do it, but the fight had still happened and the man was still dead.

  She thought about it in her weaker moments, when she couldn’t sleep and she felt like saying i
t out loud would help. (Never did.)

  But even though there were some things David would understand—she’d erased the name of the man she killed until he was just “the man”—the idea that she could have run and hadn’t, he’d never forgive.

  She leaned against the bulkhead, folded her arms, and looked at him.

  Then she said, “You should know the importance of information like this.”

  He set his jaw and didn’t answer for a long time.

  “You don’t even know who to show it to.”

  “Well, then I’ll have a hobby once I’m landbound, I guess.”

  “And what other decent ships hire ex-cons? Jacoba, come on.”

  He was trying to sound practical, but his voice gave him away, every time.

  “What we saw is a problem,” she said. “I’ll make it my problem, if that gets it to the right people.”

  She nearly added “I’m not afraid,” but she wasn’t in the habit of lying and didn’t want to start during their last conversation.

  “You’re a decent mechanic,” he said. “A passable diver. You’re not equipped for this. This could mean war, if you guess right about who should see it. If not—” he didn’t finish. There must not be a glut of optimistic sentiments for her future.

  She forced a smile. “Wrong,” she said. “I’m a great mechanic.”

  He smiled back—reflex—but it faded.

  “Someone alone with this kind of information doesn’t stand a chance,” he said. “Not you, not anybody.”

  That wasn’t a worried ex-con talking, now. That was the voice of experience, and she had no answer.

  He had pushed off from the wall; her cabin was so small that if he moved any closer, they’d be touching.

  The hair on her arms stood up.

  She watched his face. He was watching her, too, deciding.

  Then Jacoba heard a far-off click, and the first chords of a symphony, off-key and thin.

  Fear and recognition stabbed her.

  “Polly,” Jacoba said, and ran.

  When she reached the cargo bay, the mechs were standing where she’d left them, and she wondered if she was imagining things.

  Then she saw that two of Arva’s fingers were pointing to the algae tank, which read 75 kilos over regulation.