by C. Gockel
Voice very level, Noa said, “Maybe you’d feel better if you took those out of our airlock to check them?”
James would feel better if they did. He needed to give the scanner’s ethernet channel to Ghost—the programmer might be able to change the life sign readings.
Craning his neck to look at Noa, the man still holding stunner rifle near James’s face said, “Shut up!”
The woman said, “No, that’s a good idea. We don’t want to shoot them if they’re legit. Don’t want a bad reputation.”
Another guard said, “Zara’s right. Wheel it out of here, let Adam himself check it.”
One of them wheeled the pallet backward and the rest began backing out. “Don’t put your hands down!” said the man with the shaking muzzle trained on James. James tried to look beyond them, but all he could see was a wall of thick, semi-opaque plastic. The guards were standing on a platform of some kind. More plastic slid between the Ark and the guards, and Noa said, “Shut the door.”
As the Ark's seals slid tight, Noa’s voice rang in his ears and over the ship’s cipher. “Ghost, they had a life signs scanner—ether-linked. I need you to—”
Ghost’s thoughts cut her off. “I saw it through the cameras, already got into it, trying to change the read-outs.”
James inhaled sharply. How had Ghost hacked into the device so quickly with a computer as ancient as the Ark’s? James’s hand trembled. How had he himself managed it?
“I need at least a hundred heavily armed bodies aboard!” Noa said sharply.
“Aye, Commander,” Ghost replied. “Working …”
Noa spoke across the ether to the engineering students. “They had CO2 converter masks on. Find some for us,” and got a chorus of ‘ayes.’
Gunny was frowning. “Those men were too on edge, Commander. Sure, inspectors in places like this get hassled a lot, but that was extreme. Seemed like they were expecting more than just fake S-rations.”
Noa’s body was still visibly tense, worry in her drawn brows. He was worried too, but winked at her with confidence he didn’t feel, pulled out his half-eaten S-ration, and bit off a hunk. It was mostly fat and protein with the tang of artificially added vitamins.
It earned him a grim smile. “Hungry desperate people are dangerous,” Noa said. “You guessed it, James.”
Waggling his eyebrows, he licked his lips and raised an eyebrow.
Noa’s shoulders unloosened a fraction.
A beep came over the Ark’s ether—Ghost was running all channels from the station through a proxy server to catch viruses. “They’re paging us,” Noa said, touching her neural interface. Aloud and over the ether she said, “Commander Sato here.”
“Commander Sato,” a solicitous male voice responded over the public channel. “You and your crew are most welcome to disembark and go about your business here.”
“Who am I speaking to?” Noa asked.
“Adam Selles,” said the man. “I am the Director here at Adam’s Station.”
To the room at large, Noa muttered, “Ten to one that he makes jokes about them naming the Adam’s Belt after him.”
Adam continued, “They named the belt after me!”
James’s eyebrows hiked to his hairline. Gunny and Manuel groaned and Noa rolled her eyes as the director laughed. Voice going abruptly somber, Adam said, “Actually, it was named by my great-great grandfather. I'll have to give you a tour.”
“Really, how interesting ... and a tour would be very helpful,” Noa said, in a smooth, professional voice, but at the same time her voice exploded over James's personal channel in their Genji cipher. “That clump of blue-green mud from the bottom of a garden pond! We don't need a tour. I don't like it, it's a trick of some kind.” The Heian equivalent of blue-green algae, the difference between what she shared with the group and what she shared with him, both made James want to laugh, despite the danger her words implied and everything else. He also found it oddly ... touching ... in a way that made his nanos and neurons dance.
“Thank you for sharing that with me.” He let an avatar respond with a smirk, but he meant the words.
In real life, Noa's eyes narrowed and slid to him. She gave him a tiny nod and he saw the hint of a smile. Over the general channel she said crisply, “Thank you, Adam.”
Carl Sagan gave a hiss at her feet. Bending over, she scooped up the animal. “Not you, werfle.” Carl Sagan gave an indignant squeak.
There was a thunk outside the hull. Gunny, closest to the door, didn’t open it. “I don’t like it, Commander. A director of a station this big doesn’t have time to greet every ship personally.”
Noa looked upward. The weak LED lights in the airlock gave her skin an unearthly blue cast. Gunny crossed his arms. “If they get hostile, we could threaten to self-destruct—”
James's vision went black.
Noa nodded. “Let’s save that for the last possible option.”
… and James could see again. Bo emerged from the inner door, and began handing out masks.
Adam’s voice rang over the ether. “Commander?”
“We’ll be right down,” Noa replied.
James slipped his mask over his head and let it hang around his neck. With a strange certainty that seemed to permeate every nano and neuron in his body, he knew he didn’t need it, and knew he didn’t want the fact generally known … just like he didn’t want it known that he’d somehow accessed the scanner’s ethernet channel. His eyes went to Noa, slipping her own mask around her neck. Her words replayed in his head, “It doesn’t matter what you are.” He could tell her about those abilities, and he would tell her. But not now.
Gunny pressed a button, and the outer airlock door slid open.
* * *
Noa stepped out of the Ark onto the plastitube-encircled lift platform with her team, feeling her body lighten in the slighter gravity. Behind her, she heard an angry squeak from Carl Sagan, a “no you don’t,” from the engineering student, and then the outer seal of the Ark swished shut with a whoosh.
The Ark was parked in an “air locker,” a sort of stall for a singular spaceship, in the ring that encircled the asteroid. It was impressive, and a bit odd that the asteroid would have a locker large enough for the Ark. It was also lucky. A locker could be pressurized, unlike a regular berth, and they wouldn’t have to wear bulky space suits to do their repairs … if the ship weren’t overrun by Adam’s people, first. She had no idea if Adam was a democratically-elected head of the station or virtual king. In places like this, it could be either. She felt tension settling between her shoulder blades.
With a jerk, the lift started to descend. Her eyes slid to James, standing at her left. He was dragging a hand down the tube wall. “This wall is flexible …” He touched a ten-centi junction band, and said, “And what is this?”
Gunny answered. “The plastitubing is flexible so that in the event a ship leaves in an unauthorized fashion, the tube collapses with the force of the vacuum and the junction seals tighten.”
“They wind up hanging out of the locker looking like a used prophylactic in space,” Manuel said, a tiny smile on his lips. He projected an image of a collapsed plastitube wagging in the solar breeze. James raised an eyebrow and his jaw shifted, Gunny snorted softly, and Noa felt the moment of levity returning her equilibrium.
The lift reached bottom, and a portion of the bottom segment of plastitube opened with an ear-popping change in pressure.
A short, squat, balding man stood before them in an impeccably tailored dark blue jacket and cream trousers that screamed expense. The neural interface in his temple was nearly the same hue as the suit and glowed blue. Noa assumed he was Adam. He was shadowed by a tall, thin woman with straight black hair. She was wearing a tight mini dress in the same shade of dark blue. She had a neural interface that had a diamond cover on it. But what really stood out were a pair of slowly fluttering silver fairy wings with tiny multi-colored lights along the veins. The wings weren’t large enough to be functiona
l; they were just an expensive cybernetic accessory.
The scanner tech stood next to the pair. Lined up behind them were at least twenty guards. The short fat man came forward, smiling like a shark.
“Commander Sato, I’m Adam!” he said in an oily voice, and Noa practically expected him to lick his lips.
Noa held out a hand in anticipation of the handshake, but the scanner tech straightened, as though he’d been hit with an electric shock and Adam jerked back as though he’d been yanked by a leash. His eyes went to a point past her shoulder. Both had apparently just received ether news of something. The guards began to fan out around him and Noa’s team, their rifles rising. Stunners and phasers, Noa noted.
Fixing her gaze straight ahead, Noa tried to keep her expression neutral. She wanted to reach out to Ghost, to see what was going on—but as if reading her thoughts, one of the guards, wearing rank insignia ribbons the like of which Noa had never seen before, shouted, “No ether to your ship!”
A few of his men shifted on their feet, and Noa resisted the urge to throw up her hands. Instead, she fastened them behind her back and tried to look merely annoyed instead of scared. Beside her, James whispered, “They’ve just realized that we have two hundred able-bodied men aboard the Ark.”
“Silence!” said one of the guards.
Two hundred armed men? Aboard the Ark? Ghost had overdone his bit of scanner reprogramming wizardry. She blinked. How did James know that number? She hadn’t heard it. She gave her head a tiny shake. Of course, he had augmented hearing.
Trying to get a lay of the land if this all went solar cores, she let her eyes wander around the dock. They were in the lower part of the artificial ring that surrounded the asteroid. This level was about five stories tall—newer than she expected. Plastitubes, some pulled up to the ceiling, and some dropped to the floor, were interspersed throughout the large bay. The space below the Ark’s locker was cleared, but the rest of the floor was packed with smaller vessels: ticks and other ships too small to require their own private berths. The asteroid was barely a planetoid, and the horizon where the ceiling met the floor was disorientingly close. Just before the ceiling curved out of her view, she saw a large pair of sliding doors in the ceiling with a pair of up and down arrows—the symbol for the entrance-exit lock that the smaller vessels used. Cold radiated from the walls and ceiling of the dock. Probably not radiation shielded very well; that did not concern her so much … what did concern her was that the pallet of S-rations they’d paid with had already been stripped bare.
There were a lot of rough-looking dockhands just outside the circle cleared by Adam and his men. Wearing worn, threadbare clothing, unshaven, they were leaning on crates, looking at her team. She was comforted by the sight of neural interfaces in their temples. She didn’t see any ports with polyscrews jammed into them—the favorite “treatment” for ethernet access among the Luddeccean Guard, and she didn’t see hair combed over to disguise them either. It wasn’t so comforting to see them eating S-rations directly from the package—noticeably with more difficulty than James had. The whispers of “dirty throwbacks” weren’t reassuring, either.
The guard who’d warned her not to use the ether strode forward, and James took a step toward him, cutting off the angle of his phaser rifle. James’s sleeves were rolled up, exposing ink black tattoos, his hands balled into fists.
“Lieutenant,” said the heretofore silent woman. “I’m sure there’s no need to frighten our guests.”
Noa’s eyes darted to the woman walking past Adam, his eyes glazed, his mind obviously in the ether. As she came forward, Noa noticed the woman’s shins were too long in proportion to her thighs, her feet looked like they’d been shortened in a parody of Chinese footbinding and lifted at the heel. The wings might be functional after all—they helped the plasti-surgeried woman stay upright. The woman’s face had undergone as much plasti-surgery as her body. Her eyes were pulled back in an exaggerated monolid, her lips were plasti-filled, her nose looked like it had been cheaply reconstructed, and her black hair showed lighter roots. Noa didn’t think she looked human anymore. She could admit that opinion was highly influenced by her Luddeccean upbringing; but in this case, Noa thought the fundamentalists were right.
The woman held out a hand and said, “I’m Clara, Assistant Director of this station.” Noa eyed the sharp points of Clara’s long green-lacquered nails and kept her own hands behind her back. The woman tilted her head, narrowed her eyes, and smiled. “Suspect Crenalin-D, do you? Suspicious … I like that.”
Noa held the woman’s gaze but didn’t dignify that with a response. James edged closer to her, and Clara’s eyes shifted. The smile dropped, and her tongue darted between her lips.
Adam strode forward abruptly, and Clara stepped aside, wings buzzing. “Commander Noa Sato,” said Adam. “As in Commander Noa Sato of the Galactic Fleet, Commander Sato? First Officer of the Sugihara?”
“The same,” Noa said with a tight smile.
“Errr ...” said Adam. He stood straighter and gathered some of his former decorum. “Just what are you doing in Luddeccean space, Commander?” He looked beyond her toward the Ark and grimaced. “Aboard that … Are you transporting refugees, perhaps?” The scowl between his brows vanished, his eyes widened, and Noa saw the ghost of a smile.
That was what he wanted to hear, obviously. Noa took a deep breath. “Well, in a sense …”
Adam’s eyes darted to the lieutenant. The lieutenant nodded, a tiny curve appearing at the corner of his own lips. Noa plowed on with the first bit of gibberish that came to mind. “… the nonsense on Luddeccea broke out just when members of my squadron and my sergeant’s platoon …” she inclined her head toward Gunny, “... and some of our other veteran buddies got together for a System Six Luddeccea Veterans Reunion.”
Adam raised an eyebrow. “System Six … veterans?” he said.
Gunny cleared his throat, sounding distinctly uneasy. Noa felt a bite of panic. Were there even 200 veterans of Six on Luddeccea? She doubted it.
Gunny gulped. “It’s … errr … a thing … we do … every so often …”
Noa didn’t wince at his stutter. Instead, she gave him a tight nod. “And some veterans of Six who aren’t from Luddeccea show up …” Noa said quickly. “For the good food.”
Adam’s lips pursed. “Well, that’s true. Luddies are loonie, but they got great food and nice beaches.”
“Right?” said Noa. “There we were though, roasting hamburgers and tandoori skewers, comparing all our old Betsys …”
“Old Betsys?” said Clara, raising a sculpted eyebrow, wings buzzing.
One of his guards leaned close and whispered, “Slang for favorite weapons. Luddies have loose regulations on that sort of thing.”
“Favorite … Ahhh …” said Adam, smiling weakly.
Noa straightened. “... on the South Province when everything went crazy. Warrants were put out for the arrest of the hyper-augments among us.”
“Hyper-augments?” said Adam, his voice wavering slightly.
“... and the Local Guard arrived,” Noa continued. “There was a bit of a squabble, and long story short, a company’s worth of Fleet veterans that’s been to Six doesn’t take long to overcome a battalion of Luddeccean Guard.” She sniffed, remembering the Guard anticipating her team’s demise on Manuel’s roof. “Unprofessional. But we were right next door to this big ol’ hunk of Third Family space relic and we decided it was time to bring it back into commission, obviously taking on the whole army would have been another matter …” She looked at Gunny, and prompted, “But we would have given it a go.”
Standing tall, Gunny barked, “Yes, Sir!”
Adam blinked. “You’ve got a whole company aboard that … relic?”
Noa shook her head. “Itching to get out for a little R&R, but I wasn’t sure if you could handle our kind of R&R.”
“Well …” Adam’s brows drew together and Noa could see potential profits versus potential property
damage warring in his mind.
“I thought the Third Family vessels were all destroyed upon arrival at Luddeccea,” said the guard standing closest to Adam.
Noa’s mind called up her Luddeccean history, and solar cores, he was right. She contained a wince and tried to recapture the authoritative, playful tone she’d had a moment ago, but she could feel her heart beating in her throat, and no words came into her head. Manuel gulped. Gunny’s eyes flitted around the dock.
In a smooth, professorial voice, James said, “Lieutenant Manuel here is an engineer by trade. Third family vessels are an obsession with him. He’s been rehabilitating the Nina for decades.”
Noa’s breath caught. That was a damn good lie. Almost too good. Her thumb went to the stumps of her fingers.
“Oh,” said Adam, eyes darting to the engineer. Manuel didn’t speak, bless him. He just stood straighter as though genuinely proud.
“But,” Noa continued, pushing aside her unease at the smoothness of James’s lie, “we had a little trouble with an old time band, associated charge dispersers, and the toilet goop—”
“How do you have trouble with toilet goop?” said Clara. Her mouth fell open and her eyes widened. “You’re not going to dump it in our locker?”
“No, we already ejected it,” said Noa. “In Luddeccean space, during our escape.”
Adam stared at her, slightly slack-jawed.
“Why?” said the woman, flitting her wings and stepping back as though some of said goop might be ejected onto her.
“For thrust,” Noa responded weakly, resisting the urge to bang her head against something hard. Who used toilet goop for thrust? Way to inspire fear and respect.
Clearing his throat, looking both worried and dubious, Adam said, “I’d like to confer with my team. Hosting a ship with as many aboard as yours poses unique challenges especially during these difficult times.”
“Of course,” said Noa, giving her head what she hoped was a sympathetic tilt.
“It will be just a moment!” said Adam.
Adam stepped away with his lieutenant and Clara. As they stood in a silent ethernet circle, Noa reached out to the Ark. No one interrupted this time, but she used the cipher to be safe. “Ghost, can you start working on infiltrating Adam’s and Clara’s ethernet channels?”
