So everything they did on this ship was recorded. Damn that nosy AI.
But once again, the Casey was going out of its way to help them. Adda said it was difficult to tell why awakened AIs did anything, but the Casey had spent too many resources protecting them to let them die without a good reason. Unless the Casey was taken by the ITA, Iridian and Adda were probably not in imminent danger from it.
“He might turn over crew operations to Sloane.” Adda paused to struggle with her harness until Iridian reached over to help. “For the sake of efficiency, I mean.”
“He’s not that smart,” Tritheist grumbled.
“Rosehach. I’ve a counter offer for you. Reply at your convenience.” Sloane tapped several places on the console, which was blank instead of covered with icons like a normal ship’s would be, until the Sent notification appeared in the projection. “I trust you’ll remove the last moments of that recording.”
“Done,” Adda murmured.
The hair on the back of Iridian’s neck stood on end. The Casey had had several drones when Iridian had first encountered it, but they’d been destroyed in a fight on their way out of Barbary Station. When Casey had used one as a mouthpiece, it’d said things with as few words and emotion as possible. It’d sounded a lot like Adda just did.
Iridian reached to pat the first part of Adda she could reach, which was her knee. “Hey, how about you unplug for a while?”
“We’ll move faster if I don’t,” Adda said. “Plugging into a console would help. Do you think my cable would reach the console jack?”
Iridian shuddered. “The Casey’s already doing things a human pilot couldn’t, and keeping us more or less upright and conscious. What in all hells makes you think physically plugging your brain into an awakened AI is necessary?”
“I won’t have a brain if the Casey’s vid recognition can’t determine what the police vehicles are doing as fast as I can. If my choice is death or AI influence, I’ll go with the . . .” Adda watched the comp projection in the square stage on the back of her glove for several seconds. The hand in her glove clenched into a fist. “What’s happening?”
“Our pursuers seem to be returning to the station,” Captain Sloane said. The projected view of the retreating stationsec ships confirmed it. “Rosehach has accepted my proposal. If the Casey could deliver us to one of the mine docks, we’ll get this meeting over with.”
“So, we’re buying him out, Captain?” Iridian asked.
“Ideally,” Sloane said. “Unless he’s much improved his information-gathering capabilities since I’ve been gone, he’ll underestimate our ability to defend ourselves. I’m still not opposed to killing him if the opportunity arises.”
“Good,” said Tritheist.
Beyond them, lights out but occluding the stars, the Apparition’s asymmetrical silhouette hung still in stationspace. It could’ve blasted the cop-carriers to microscopic pieces. The Charon’s Coin had to be nearby too. Maneuvering around a megacorporate empire would be at least as difficult as fighting Barbary Station’s security AI, and just like on Barbary, the ships had done the absolute minimum to help. Two out of three were ignoring the crew’s current predicament. AIs couldn’t be trusted.
* * *
“Hell of a place to meet,” Pel shouted over the processing machinery crunching basalt all around them.
Tubes big enough to crawl through looped around one another through the depths of the mine beneath Rheasilvia Station. After a quick unloading at the mine’s terminal and a long elevator ride, they were half a klick from being the deepest into Vesta that any humans had ever stood. At unpredictable intervals, pressurized tubes hauled Vesta’s primary export out of the dark and dropped the chunks of basalt into sifting and crushing machines.
The noise masked the distinctive armor rattling that Iridian, Captain Sloane, and Tritheist made as they walked. Pel and Adda, protected more by the fighters’ presence than by their jackets with light armor mesh lining, stayed a few steps behind. At the front of the group, Iridian kept her head turning to watch for threats. The mine was full of movement and had plenty of places to hide.
Five or six third-shift workers managing the robots and machines practically knelt at Sloane’s feet, so far as grav allowed, to offer masks off their own faces. Even the masks bore Oxia’s three-bladed fan logo. The captain nodded gravely, but the atmo filters in Sloane’s helmet would be more effective than anything the miners had.
“Welcome back . . . Captain,” an older worker said. Her voice grated like the rock traveling through the tubes around them. The pause in her greeting suggested that she’d been acquainted with Sloane before the captain claimed that title.
Sloane had been looking over the workers’ heads, watching for trouble the way Tritheist and Iridian were, but the captain refocused on the worker who’d spoken. “How does Oxia treat you?”
“New contracts. Longer hours, minimum pay.” The worker’s sigh rattled in a way that made Iridian want to take the woman’s mask and replace its filters. “Oxia wants everything Vesta’s got, underground and over it, and the station councils do whatever they say. Easy to keep a woman on a ’ject she can’t afford to leave, even without the damned contract.”
Sloane frowned sympathetically and waved a hand at the machinery around them. “New equipment as well?”
The worker nodded. “Recycling the old stuff and installing new means they got more right to the ground under it. So says the newsfeeds and the council and ITA and the gods themselves, seems like. Feeds say the new machines will shake the ’ject apart too, though, so who knows, yeah? Oxia’s fancy new diggers don’t fix their own troubles any better than the old ones. Dust crowds out the nannites. But now . . .” The worker raised her eyes to meet Sloane’s. “We’re counting on you.” She backed off toward the elevator with the others.
The workers offered Adda a mask too, but she held up her hands, palms out. Once the worker stepped away, she murmured, “They breathe and sweat in those.” She still sounded distant, like she’d spent hours in a workspace instead of strapped down in a ship. “Who knows what’s sitting on your side of the filters, waiting to be pulled into your lungs? I’d rather breathe some dust.”
“Aw, yuck,” said Pel. “Is it too late to give mine back?”
Iridian’s glance around the complex did not reveal the worker who’d given Pel his mask, or the one who offered one to her despite her armor, for that matter. “Yeah. It looks like everybody cleared out.”
The maze of densely woven machinery mirrored the way Vesta’s two stations shuffled spacefaring humanity and cargo too mundane or dangerous for Ceres through the asteroid belt. And the surface’s fractal latticework separated the two.
Captain Sloane caught her looking over the mining setup and said, “We’re currently out of range of almost all the station’s monitoring hardware. Useful, for our sort.”
At their last port of call, their lives had depended on knowing which modules had active sensor nodes, so Iridian could appreciate that. The mine must’ve been miserable for Pel, though. It’d be hard to hear anyone coming over the machinery.
“So glad you could join us,” said the spacefarer-accented male voice they’d last heard over the Casey’s speakers.
Iridian swore and spun to face the newcomer, shield deploying before her in a satisfying thump she felt through her wrist and arm. It pushed her into a staggered backward step in the low grav. The flame-shaped implants above Rosehach’s eyes cast shadows over them. The bumps on the backs of his hands might’ve been projectors for a comp, and he was sure to have other additions buried deeper or under clothes.
The short-handled machete hanging against his thigh was her current concern. It wouldn’t crack her armor, but it’d cut Adda’s and Pel’s unprotected throats. The “us” referred to the two bodyguards flanking Rosehach. The little one had a body like a burlesque dancer’s beneath flexible light armor, and carried enough blades to stick everyone in the mine and still have one left over for
cleaning under her nails. The magnets in her boots were either off or on low power, and she looked so light on her feet she was practically levitating.
The big one carried an armor buster that Iridian couldn’t recall the name of. It’d overload or melt through her suit, and it looked tiny in a hand that’d cover a quarter of Iridian’s shield if she let him—her?—get that close. They’d been ambushed, and Iridian swore at herself under her breath for not having seen it coming.
Sloane always seemed to be facing the right direction before trouble arrived, and the captain’s smile looked more menacing than the bodyguards’ serious frowns. Tritheist stepped toward them, but Captain Sloane stopped him with a hand on his chest plate. “What do you want, Rosehach?”
Rosehach laughed, a rasping, delighted sound likely fueled by chems. It raked over Iridian’s rapidly fraying nerves. “I want you to get back on that taxi you rode in on and fly sunward until you light up,” Rosehach said. “But that doesn’t seem likely, does it?”
“It does not,” said Captain Sloane. “Your former position is no longer available, of course, but I could be persuaded not to have you fed into one of these machines, if you have something else to offer.”
“You do what I ask, when I ask it. Show your face, take the jobs I say, skip the jobs I say. You won’t have everything you want, but . . .” Rosehach’s semiprofessional demeanor dissolved into a vicious smile Iridian longed to put her fist through. “Everyone will think you do. Just like on Barbary. Oh, I heard your little announcements taking credit for this and that, but some of the Martians you left with tell a different tale.” There’d been too many Martian refugees stranded on Barbary Station to expect all of them to support Captain Sloane’s fictitious claim of living in luxury there, especially after the ITA rescued and questioned them.
Captain Sloane smiled with humorless eyes slightly narrowed, the way Adda’s looked while she sorted through options. Adda herself was staring at her comp glove’s readout on the back of her hand, which could mean anything. Her other hand gripped her strangely silent brother’s wrist. They were unarmed, but that wouldn’t stop a man like Rosehach from having them killed where they stood.
“Your alternative,” Rosehach continued, “is to calmly—oh-so calmly—deliver yourselves into the benevolent hands of station security. The ITA will be fascinated to hear your statement. After Oxia’s CEO has his say, of course.”
Beside the captain, Tritheist’s face twisted in fury and he panted against Sloane’s hand, which, hidden from Rosehach’s sight by the angle of Sloane’s body, was clenched on the edge of Tritheist’s chest plate.
Even Rosehach’s bodyguards were smirking. Somehow that was more than Iridian’s held-in temper would tolerate. Barbary Station had been a nightmare. They’d come halfway across the solar system, to what should’ve been Sloane’s territory, where Adda and Pel should’ve been safe, and found this snickering, self-serving slimeball in charge. And now he was trying to get them arrested or enslaved.
Both bodyguards tensed and focused on the palmer in her hand as she raised it, but by then she’d already fired once. When the charged particles struck the little one, her body jolted so hard that knives popped out of their sheathes. By the time the first blade bounced off the floor, Iridian had fired a second blast and the big guard staggered and dropped like it’d burst her—his?— heart. Sixteen, seventeen.
The palmer snapped again. One of the flame-shaped implants in Rosehach’s forehead detonated, leaving a ragged wound that exposed several centimeters of splintered skull and launched him at the floor at an awful angle. Eighteen. In the low grav, the bodyguards and two more of the little one’s knives hit the floor after he did.
The big one’s face screwed up in fury and pain and the armor buster twitched toward Iridian. She planted her boot on a wrist as thick around as her forearm, pressing the arm across the guard’s chest to keep the weapon well away from the crew. The big bodyguard gagged and writhed to throw her off, but her armor and her balance kept her boot in place.
The big bodyguard’s eyes widened as they lost focus. The arm under Iridian’s boot went limp and the armor buster slid to the floor. The little bodyguard didn’t grab for any of her knives.
Something in the palmer was overheating. Its smoking electronics overpowered the odor of cooked flesh. Nobody’d designed a holster for the palmers, so she just held it away from her leg so it wouldn’t scorch her armor.
The crew stared at her, Captain Sloane with something like delight, the others just surprised. Tritheist raised his own palmer from his side without pointing it directly at her, ready in case she turned on him. Adda’s eyes were the widest. Iridian had taken eighteen lives over the course of her own, but this was the first time Adda had watched her do it.
And yeah, that required an explanation. “The fight was coming no matter what. It was safer this way.” Iridian glanced over her shoulder at Rosehach. “And we’re not getting arrested for a wannabe like him.”
Ten or twelve much better armed and armored individuals stepped out from behind the nearest rock-crushing machine, weapons trained on Sloane’s crew. The large barrels suggested low-penetration projectiles, the kind that’d fill an unruly crowd with a nerve-damaging nanomachine culture. Full armor would filter out the worst of it, but Adda and Pel would be fucked.
In the new arrivals’ center, projected above a small and expensive-looking stage drone that countered Vestan grav with spinning rotors, stood an older man in spotless business attire. “Don’t worry about Rosehach.” The projected man’s smile was even oilier than the dead man’s. “You’ll find that others are willing to send you to prison.”
CHAPTER 3
Long-term docking permits created by unregistered admin, level account: 3
On the back of Adda’s hand, the words Should I engage? could’ve looked incidental, unimportant. They scrolled by in a list of several other snippets from messages that had arrived in the past few hours. They were red because one of the universe’s very few nonhuman intelligences sent them, and Adda wanted to know everything it said.
And now it was asking her if it ought to attack people in a mine almost two kilometers below a city-size space station. A mine that she, Iridian, and Pel were also standing in.
Iridian covered as much of Pel and Adda with her shield as she could, leaving half her own torso exposed. The shield would block weapon-fire from the front, but the newcomer had brought enough armed people to encircle them. The figure on the mobile projection stage, whose heavy-lidded eyes and skin slightly darker than Iridian’s shivered slightly in the projector’s light, was still talking to Captain Sloane. If Adda spent too long watching the situation develop before she accepted the Casey’s offered help, it might be too late for even an awakened intelligence to save them.
Two armed people stepped forward and rolled Rosehach’s body onto its back. One placed a thick mask over the body’s nose, mouth, and throat, ignoring the awful wound in the forehead. Another affixed a device to the side of the neck and cut open the dead man’s shirt to press another device between the strangely protruding ribs of his chest. The second one slapped down on the chest device and Rosehach’s body convulsed. Both soldiers, she supposed they were, raised their weapons and stepped away while Rosehach drifted a few centimeters off the floor and then collapsed onto it again.
“Liu Kong, I presume.” Captain Sloane addressed one of the other armed people, focusing on a prominent cam lens on the man’s helmet. “So Oxia Corporation has claimed Vesta from its core to its stationspace.” Sloane lowered one of the bowl-shaped pirate weapons that the captain, Tritheist, and Iridian all carried. “It’s an unusual approach.”
A subvocalized search and a glance at Adda’s comp indicated that the man on the mobile projection stage was the head of the multiplanetary megacorporation that owned or contracted all of Vesta’s mining, shipping, and infrastructure. She activated her comp’s mic, muted its speaker, and opened a live audio connection to the Casey. One of the a
rmed people was watching her and shifted a weapon to cover Adda, so she must not have kept her lips as still as she had meant to.
The woman didn’t shoot her, so Adda finished her instructions to the Casey in subvocalization to text. She didn’t even need to put it in her messaging software, since the Casey seemed to be monitoring her comp activity. We may need help getting out of here. Please work up scenarios. Do not engage. Without a workspace or intermediary to translate her intentions to the Casey, she had no guarantee that the message would be interpreted the way she wanted. Even if the Casey understood her meaning, it’d still make its own decision about whether or not Adda needed rescuing.
“The usual approach would have been much less . . . certain.” The man Sloane had addressed as Liu Kong gave each syllable the same weight and stress. He frowned at Rosehach and the dead bodyguards sprawled on the floor. “Unusual approaches carry different risks.”
“Which is why we’re speaking now.” Sloane’s voice betrayed the captain’s tension. Iridian’s thick black eyebrows were drawn down and her shield was still raised. Apparently there was still a good chance they’d all be shot or captured within the next few minutes. What, Adda wondered with equal parts eager curiosity and dread, might the Casey do to save us?
After a short pause, Liu Kong said, “I still have work for your crew. And the power struggles playing out in your absence, perpetuated by your supposed choice to remain on Barbary Station, have wasted time. My time.”
A muscle in Sloane’s jaw twitched. The captain’s gaze flicked over the array of weapons aimed at them. Somehow the way Captain Sloane stood straighter looked like an admission of defeat. “I’ll need to refresh myself on the crew’s activities to date, but I expect our key personnel to be available for the job.” Each word sounded heavy, as if the captain expended great effort to say that instead of something easier. “Depending on what is required.”
“I don’t need your services for the duration of ‘a job,’ ” Liu Kong said over the captain’s last few words. Either something was going wrong with their communications equipment, or Liu Kong was a very long way away from them. “If that’s all you’re willing to offer, the ITA keeps a cell reserved for you. I’m sure we could make room for your crew.”
Mutiny at Vesta Page 4
