Iridian stood and slammed her fist on the control panel beside the passthrough. The passthrough’s inner door shut with a low hiss. Her bare head and hands bled red droplets that drifted toward the floor. “I hate getting blown up. Let’s go.”
Adda pulled a coiled cable from its hiding place in her heavy silver necklace. One end plugged into her comp glove, and she threaded the other into her pinkie-finger-size nasal jack. The chrome jack connected her neural implant net directly into her comp glove’s system, which let her work faster than she could have with external inputs alone.
She subvocalized a command to her comp to re-create her gray intermediary, which appeared in the main cabin. Only she could see it. Today its humanlike figure had Captain Sloane’s broad shoulders and long, flowing hair, which whisked around the figure in the still cabin air as she directed it to interface with the Casey’s intelligence.
Iridian stomped across the ship in her magnetic boots, bleeding and scowling and beautiful and terrible. Adda stood in mute admiration until Iridian pressed her back into her harness. It had, perhaps, been too long a trip in the company of Adda’s employer and little brother. The lack of a honeymoon to go with her wedding was surprisingly distracting.
Iridian barely got Pel and herself strapped in before the ship lurched backward—forward, except behind them? Gods, there was no right way to describe ship motion without math—and disconnected its passthrough from the dock.
From the pilot’s rotating seat at the bridge console, Sloane called, “Adda, comm interference would be convenient.”
“On it,” Adda said. The Casey was capable of handling that itself, but it hadn’t so far. “Are you listening? Flash lights once for yes,” Adda murmured. She startled when the whole cabin went dark for a second.
“What the fuck was that?” Tritheist shouted.
“Roll call,” Adda said so quietly that only Pel and Iridian reacted, Pel with a nervous laugh and Iridian with the frown she wore every time they discussed AI.
The Casey’s transmitters were occupied with a long-range comm already in progress, and it stopped Adda from reallocating any of its comm capabilities to interfere with law enforcement broadcasts. None of the human occupants’ comps were connected to the system as far as Adda could tell through her intermediary. The Casey was communicating with parties unknown. Adda settled for a comp-based program, which triggered other transmitters as they came in range to create radiating signal waves. It was the best she could do, for now.
With gravity pulling on her harder than ever at the speed the Casey was flying, taking one of the thumbprint-size purple squares from her sharpsheet case was tricky. Adda laid the premeasured dose on her tongue and activated systems interface programs on her comp while the sharpsheet sizzled and dissolved.
The window projected across the passthrough door, and the wall opposite Adda displayed Rheasilvia Station’s metallic latticework whizzing by so close to the Casey’s hull cams that Adda flinched. Some spaces between beams looked large enough for the Casey to fly through, although Adda fervently hoped it wouldn’t.
They rocketed over the lip of the crater, revealing a horizon much closer than Adda’s Earth upbringing had led her to expect. Then the Casey dove back into the maze of Rheasilvia’s industrial installations, which branched toward acres of solar panels surrounding the station.
The floor in front of the doors to the bedroom and bathroom lit up with a projection of two small wedge-shaped ships. Piercingly bright red and blue lights lit the Oxia Corporation logo on the ships’ sides. It wasn’t the ITA’s insignia, at least. The ships’ outlines were highlighted in a dashed red and blue line, a visual code that law enforcement vessels throughout populated space used to identify themselves. The sharpsheets’ effects shivered through her mind and begged for a focus. Adda closed her eyes to concentrate on finding and scrambling their pursuers’ comm frequency.
A few minutes later, a jolt and a horrifyingly loud scraping sound from the ceiling made her eyes open wide. The ceiling currently felt like more of a side than up or down. The wall behind her shook. The cam projecting above her head showed metal tubes that curved up on either edge of the view. Something crunched and the ceiling turned into a black void for several seconds, until the Casey shut off the projector.
“We didn’t break off something important, did we?”
The fear in Pel’s voice persuaded Adda to sacrifice accuracy for comfort. “Whatever it was didn’t slow us down.” She had to yell over the continuous dragging scrape, which now came from both above and below them. It stopped abruptly. The projection by the doors showed the opposite direction of the one they were going in (gods, how did spacefarers define that?) and displayed a passage between two loops of metal that looked too narrow for a human to stand in.
The comm traffic her comp projected across the back of her hand indicated that the passage was giving the station security vehicles pause. Adda closed her eyes, relying on subvocalized commands to redirect her comm interference efforts as needed.
“Captain, how many of the evasion maneuvers are up to you?” Iridian asked, referring to preprogrammed ones that pilots could activate at will, according to stories Adda had read.
“None,” Sloane said. “The bridge console appears to be disconnected from maneuvering controls.”
Iridian squirmed against the wall beside Adda. Adda risked a glance at her, and mostly saw her knuckles whitening around the straps at her shoulder before nausea forced Adda’s eyes closed again. “Casey,” said Iridian, “don’t get us killed.”
CHAPTER 2
Full integration with individual crew comms achieved 051877 0416
Tied to a bulkhead while an AI self-destructs around you is no way to die. The thought kept going through Iridian’s head. She had nothing else to think about while the gods-damned Casey flung itself through stationspace above Vesta’s largest hab, running from smaller and more nimble pursuers who’d have no trouble finding the only passenger transport within an AU that was flying like an enforcer drone.
“We can’t keep this up,” Tritheist said.
It always felt wrong when she and Sloane’s lieutenant agreed on something, but he’d spoken the truth. “The Casey’s got EMP shielding, but it doesn’t have guns,” she pointed out. “Where’s the Apparition? And was that the Oxia Corp logo on those cop carriers?”
“Good questions,” Adda said almost too quietly to hear. Her eyes snapped open. “We need to find the Apparition. That’s where we’re going.”
“Should’ve known the Casey wouldn’t run at random.”
“AIs rarely randomize something this important,” Adda said.
Iridian snorted a laugh. On the bridge projector, klicks of intertwined station mechanisms and ship maintenance apparatuses retreated behind them at unsettling speed. Stationsec hadn’t shot at them so far. The Casey was using the station’s architecture as cover.
“Adda thinks the Casey’s meeting up with the Apparition to scrape those people off its hull,” Iridian said. “If we’re betting, my money’s on the warship.”
“Mine too,” Tritheist growled over the local comm channel.
“My money would be on the Apparition as well, but violence is not my first choice. I’m interested in reclaiming my position, not obliterating it.” Whether or not the Casey was listening in on the conversation, it maintained its speed and direction. Iridian clenched her teeth and tamped down panic. Strong AIs could do a lot on their own and it made them damned unpredictable, even when they weren’t awakened like the Casey’s copilot.
The captain tapped the console and replaced the retreating station exterior on the bridge projection with newsfeed headlines and messages about the crewmember who’d been in charge of Vesta in Sloane’s absence. “Send us that feed?” Adda asked.
“What feed?” said Pel.
While Sloane shared the projected documents with Adda, Adda explained the news to Pel, and the Casey made several sharp turns, Iridian read. “So your crew’s bee
n ransacking the locals as well as the NEU ships, Captain?”
Iridian wished she could’ve sounded less angry. Sloane had done everything possible to control crew resources from Barbary Station, but intermittent communication opportunities had made that impossible for years. And sure, all megacorporations were technically NEU because their headquarters were on Earth, Mars, Mercury, or Venus, but it wasn’t like the crew had been blowing apart NEU ships full of civilians like the secessionists had during the war. The problem was that megacorps could afford a few raids. The Vestans couldn’t.
Neither Sloane nor Tritheist looked up from the newsfeed, so she activated the eye-highlight function of her helmet’s comms software. It drew a moving, humming border around the vid clip she was looking at: a Vestan microcorp’s cargo carrier wreck engulfed in a blue orb of chemical flame. Behind the burning wreck was a piece of the weblike station architecture the Casey had just flown over. The headline read “Twenty-three dead,” and Sloane’s crew was implicated in the first line.
“Quite a feat for my crew, while most of my operatives were occupied elsewhere and I never gave that order,” said Sloane. The captain and Tritheist scowled and braced in their harnesses as the Casey shifted directions fast enough to black everyone out for a second.
“Contacting your headquarters would put us at additional risk of ITA exposure,” Adda said, apropos of nothing and sounding sick as all hells from the grav shifts.
“My secure line should still be in place.” Captain Sloane was apparently on the same track as Adda.
The Casey dropped straight toward Vesta’s surface for several endless seconds. Iridian braced against her harness and swore. Adda was mumbling to herself, or her comp. Every time she said something almost intelligible and paused for breath, the Casey zigged or zagged. The overhead cam was still out, but Iridian could’ve picked out individual grains of dirt on the deck cam, which was actually projected on the deck for a change, if the ship weren’t screaming over it like an atmo-escape launch. “What are you doing, babe?”
“Exterior processing.” They all jerked to the right in their restraints and a fountain of gray dirt bloomed at the edge of the projection on the bulkhead across from them. “Busy.”
“The message is sent,” Captain Sloane said.
A ten-centimeter fragment of whatever had blown up against Iridian’s shield in the station terminal clattered around the main cabin, where Pel and Adda were unarmored and had their arms strapped down. Iridian freed one of hers and missed the fragment twice as it flew by. It finally slapped into her gloved palm as the whole ship lurched. Vesta’s cratered surface filled the bridge projection for a long moment before the stars and horizon appeared on the deck projection.
“What’d stationsec hit us with?” she asked.
“Maneuvering system virus, primarily,” Adda muttered.
Sloane had no chance of hearing Adda when she talked that quietly, and spoke over her. “Projectile ammo with very minimal impact. It may have been targeting stabilizers or aft altitude control.” The captain pressed and dragged a few spots on the bridge console. When nothing in the ship or out of it changed, Sloane sighed and gripped the pilot chair’s armrests.
“It’s AI-built, but it was a zombie AI,” said Adda. Zombie AIs were just AIs to most people. They all should’ve had physical and programmed limitations to prevent the development of volition. AI was never supposed to be awakened. “The Casey’s removing it now.”
“In the meantime, how likely are we to crash land in the airless desert below?” Captain Sloane asked with remarkable calm.
“Can’t tell.” Adda went back to subvocalizing to her comp.
The speakers near the bridge console chimed a standard signal for an asynch comm. Sloane opened it and a new voice said, “Hello, boss” around an audible sneer.
The man was older than Iridian and Adda put together, late sixties or early seventies. His light skin clashed with his hair’s shade of blue. Subdermal flame-shaped implants jutted out from his face where he should’ve had eyebrows, and they were too big to be decorative. They’d have some other function as well.
Captain Sloane said, “Rosehach,” anger mostly hidden except for a stillness the captain rarely demonstrated, even when dead calm.
The man on the monitor lounged at a desk someplace with healthy enviro, judging by his lack of an enviro suit. “Waiting for your bought cops to call off the chase?”
Sloane’s chin jerked downward relative to the pilot’s seat rather than Vesta, since the Casey was almost perpendicular to the asteroid’s surface. “The ones behind us will be destroyed if they persist.”
“Oxia Corp won’t miss them. Even stationsec disappear on this ’ject, some nights. And it won’t come back on my crew.”
Iridian’s lips pulled away from her teeth in a sympathetic grimace. From the way Rosehach addressed the captain, this was a former member of Sloane’s crew. Now he was claiming Sloane’s position of power on Vesta. Pel and Tritheist swore.
Adda glanced at Iridian and asked, “ ’Ject’ as in ‘astronomical object’?”
“Yeah, but nobody says that,” Iridian replied. Adda nodded and returned her attention to her comp.
The captain said, “I see.”
Rosehach grinned, self-satisfied and wanting more. “You know why stationsec’s chasing you? The station councils don’t move the stars and planets for you anymore, is why. You kept them waiting, what, two years? For somebody to tell them what to do. Last year Oxia stepped up and told them Sloane’s crew was the only muscle that made its cut when the corp took Vesta over, not counting the stationsec contracts. They made me sign one too. So, since you took a long vacay and left it lying around, I own the crew now.”
The Casey jolted, grav spiked, and Iridian’s vision went black.
* * *
When Iridian next opened her eyes, Tritheist was shouting, “. . . kill everyone he’s ever met, and choke him on their ashes,” from his seat at the desk across from the Casey’s bridge. The stranger who’d claimed Sloane’s crew as his own was gone from the console’s projection stage, although that hadn’t stopped Tritheist from yelling at him. She’d only been out for a minute, probably. Her head throbbed in time with her heartbeat.
“Are you okay?” Adda stood on the overhead, from Iridian’s perspective, although Iridian couldn’t tell if the magnets in Adda’s boots were activated or not. What grav Vesta had was pulling all the blood into Iridian’s head.
“Yeah. Did we land?” Iridian asked.
“If you mean ‘stopped moving while upside down in a ditch,’ then yeah, we landed.” Pel drifted back and forth across the Casey’s main cabin, pushing off the bulkheads with his outstretched hands and bouncing off the deck with his toes instead of landing. Iridian reoriented to “down” being the former overhead, which made magnetic boots unnecessary.
Adda steadied Iridian while she let herself down from the bulkhead. “It’s a very large ditch.”
Sloane tore free of the pilot’s seat harness and stood, gripping the underside of the bridge console to stabilize in Vesta’s low grav. The sudden movement stilled everyone, Tritheist included. “Rosehach dies for this.” The captain’s words were spaced wide and spoken slowly, like an oath. “But he’s less important than freeing the crew from Oxia Corporation.”
Iridian clenched her teeth against disappointment and the pain in her head. The crew was trapped again. After they’d just fought their way out of a gods-damned hellhole of a station, to this one where life should’ve gotten a whole lot better. Good people had died getting the five of them to Vesta. The reality of the new situation reverberated through her like she’d hit the ground after a long fall. The crew was supposed to be choosing their own objectives, making profits and threats that’d keep them free of megacorps like Oxia. Instead they’d lost that battle before the first shot was fired, because this Rosehach person had sold the crew out from under them.
Tritheist finished a slow forward flip that straighten
ed out his twisted harness. “We should kill him now, Captain. He’ll only make things harder for us if we don’t.”
Rosehach sure as hell had that coming. “Hate to agree with the LT,” Iridian said, “but he’s—”
The Casey’s bridge projection replaced the gray wall of the ditch it had put itself down in with energy readouts, model descriptions of ships that didn’t match its type at all, a countdown, and a vid in the corner of three cop-carriers flying low over Vesta’s surface.
“Did it add the visuals?” Adda stared at her comp, which she was still plugged into via her nasal jack. “We disagreed on their importance.”
After the awkward two days the Casey had spent stuck to a fuel barge after it’d finished refueling, Iridian expected the Casey to do what it wanted, when it wanted. That didn’t mean anybody liked it when the damned ship got confused, or willful, or whatever its problem was.
“Yeah, visuals are up in the bridge,” said Iridian. Adda could’ve looked up from her comp and seen them, if she weren’t busy pretending she was in an invisible workspace generator. “Stationsec’s coming this way?” Adda nodded. “Then strap in again. We need someplace to hide.”
“Perhaps Rosehach will provide us with a location,” said Captain Sloane.
Iridian stopped halfway through climbing into her harness. “Say again?” Her question was accompanied by Pel’s, “We’re asking him?” and Tritheist asking, “But . . . why?”
If the smile on Sloane’s face were directed at her, she would’ve deployed her shield and taken cover. “Once he learns how easily I escaped his trap, he’ll realize that he needs me. Or that he needs to trap me in person.”
“Captain, stationsec is almost on top of us.” Iridian pointed at the map with moving icons for approaching ships.
Sloane turned back to the bridge console. “Then he’ll need to reach that realization quickly. Casey—or Adda, whoever is listening—put me back in contact with Rosehach. I assume my methods are on record.”
Mutiny at Vesta Page 3
