Captain Sloane’s expression stayed formal and blank, but the rest of the crew looked as appalled as Adda felt. So their choices were to be turned over to the ITA, get killed on the spot, or sign a corporate contract binding the crew’s services and everyone in it to Oxia.
If they signed a megacorporate contract and then broke it, they’d be pariahs among major organizations, both legal and semilegal, throughout populated space. The break would be on record. Any potential employer would learn about it, even the ones who didn’t register their own agreements in the public databases. And although she had no intention of looking for employment outside Sloane’s crew, she preferred to have an escape route that could keep her and Iridian together. The alternative was some megacorp contracting them separately, in different parts of the solar system.
Megacorporate contracts were an efficient means of losing decades of your life to make money for someone else. Adda and Iridian had hijacked a colony ship, fought a station’s worth of AI-controlled robots, and traveled 250 million kilometers to avoid that fate. Pel had practically sold himself into slavery to avoid it. Gods only knew what Sloane and Tritheist had done.
“May I assume it’s worth my time to continue, Captain Sloane?” Liu Kong said.
Sloane gritted “Proceed” like the word itself was the signature.
“We may start with this,” Liu Kong said. “Are you familiar with the Rentronix PR800i printer?”
Adda shook her head minutely and subvocalized the query to her comp while Iridian said, “Don’t they print the organic and inorganic parts of pseudo-organic tech simultaneously?”
“Oh, that. I heard it prints people parts,” said Pel. “Like, add-on bits and prosthetics that play nice with pseudo-organics.” He was serious about replacing his scarred eyes with pseudo-organic ones; he’d actually read about how they were made. Adda was impressed.
Captain Sloane raised an eyebrow at him, then turned back to Liu Kong. “They’re massively expensive. Outside your budget, I presume?”
Liu Kong’s face twisted with disgust for a moment, then returned to the bland superiority he’d been addressing them with so far. “N’gobe-Marvin Minerals just equipped their new Kuiper longhauler with one that would suit our needs. Its flyby refueling from Ceres is scheduled for next week.”
“A longhauler?” Tritheist huffed a disgusted laugh. “Those lock up like a Doomsday vault.”
Adda really needed to finish the software package for the implanted throat mic she and Iridian were working on. That would have let her share the information directly, but now she had to speak. While Sloane, Tritheist, and Iridian exchanged meaningful glances, Adda asked, “How much will you pay up front?”
Gods, she hated it when she said something that made people stare at her. Maybe the rest of the crew was still deciding whether they should work on the problem, but Adda could either search for a solution or weep, and tears were just biological procrastination.
Sometimes the fastest way to get more information was to walk people through the obvious details, until they gave her the rest to shut her up. “Infiltrating the longhauler is all about timing, correct? The target ship’s going a long way, on a very specific route. Where we intercept the ship to steal the printer will depend on how much fuel we’ll have to get there and back, and that depends on our funds before we leave.” One of the large diameter pipes overhead shook as a controlled avalanche of small rocks rattled toward Vesta’s surface.
Sloane’s face was a confusing mask of chagrin and what might’ve been admiration. “My operations strategist, Adda Karpe,” the captain explained to Liu Kong once the noise level decreased again. It was a good title, even if this was the first time she’d heard it. “If the task is at all feasible we can, of course, discuss terms at a later date.”
Liu Kong gestured from the man physically standing in front of them with the cam lens toward Adda. The lens focused on her. The projected CEO was looking at her the way he might have observed a particularly clever spider before he crushed it. “It will have to be feasible, Captain. You assembled a talented group of unscrupulous persons on this ’ject. I would prefer to retain your name recognition and well-documented successes, but someone else could be found. Someone with a comprehensive grasp of . . . feasibility.”
He smiled at Adda, curse all the luck of ages. Why did people keep acting like she wanted to lead Sloane’s crew? She shifted her weight toward Iridian’s comforting presence. All she’d ever wanted was to solve interesting problems, mostly with AI. She had no interest in solving problems about people, or worse, megacorporations.
“That won’t be necessary.” Captain Sloane’s expression definitely conveyed annoyance now, some of which was directed at Adda. “I accept. Please send me the details, along with whatever Rosehach knew that was necessary to the endeavor, since he’s no longer available to ask.”
“Oh, I think he’ll manage an answer or two,” said Liu Kong. “I have other questions to ask him.”
“But . . .” Pel gulped audibly. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
Liu Kong turned his projection stage robot and hovered unhurriedly through the path his enforcers made for it. After a meter of stately retreat, he said, “Death is rarely so instantaneous,” and his projected figure disappeared from the mobile stage.
The man with the cam on his helmet said, “Bring Rosehach. Clean up the rest.”
Iridian frowned at the enforcers who shoved the bodyguards’ corpses aside to make room for an inflating stretcher for Rosehach. “Can you save her too?” she asked one of the soldiers preparing Rosehach’s body to be moved.
The man glanced at the knife-wielding bodyguard sliding down the sloping floor, deeper into the mine, and shrugged. “Ten minutes ago, maybe. Now she’s meat and H2O.” Iridian’s swearing just made him smile nastily and return to his work.
“Back up and go,” said the man wearing Liu Kong’s cam on his helmet.
Captain Sloane turned on a booted heel, coat flowing dramatically in the low gravity. “Move out,” Tritheist ordered on the captain’s behalf. Adda hooked an arm through Pel’s to lead him away without stepping on any bodies. Iridian kept her shield between them and the Oxia guns.
* * *
“So,” Pel said as soon as the Casey’s exterior passthrough door closed behind Iridian. “When do we run, and where are we going?”
“Where indeed?” Sloane chuckled, a hollow, bitter sound. The captain sank into the pilot’s seat, slowly, to account for Vesta’s surface gravity. A tiny plastic alignment tool which had escaped Iridian’s set during their arrival skittered across the cabin in front of Tritheist’s boot as he joined Sloane at the console. “I haven’t been to headquarters in two years,” Sloane said. “I’m dying to see how the place has kept in my absence.”
The word “dying” carried more emphasis than Adda would have put on it. The majority of Sloane’s resources would be under Oxia Corporation’s control now, but the crew had worked with almost nothing before. There had to be somewhere less dangerous to base their operations. Sloane hadn’t legally committed to anything yet, but the captain’s mind sounded made up. “Why are we staying?”
“We’re what?” Pel gripped Adda’s arm as the Casey sailed out of the mine’s loading dock. Gravity pulled people and clutter sideways for a second before it oriented toward the floor.
“We’re staying,” Sloane said slowly, “because when I left Vesta, Rheasilvia Station was ours and Albana Station was as good as. Why else would I have spent so much effort convincing the station councils that I remained on Barbary by choice, poor choice though it would’ve been? And since we are not in a position to storm Oxia’s main campus, first because it is nowhere near here and second because I’m not sure of my crew’s complement at the moment, I will be playing the role of Oxia’s minion while engineering an opportunity to regain my position here.”
“So the Vestan station councils are a joke?” Iridian looked horrified. Adda didn’t have a problem with the stations’
two governing bodies doing as little as possible, which seemed to be the case with Rheasilvia Station’s twelve-member council and Albana Station’s eight-member one. Governments with too much power started wars. “Who coordinates infrastructure safety?” Iridian asked.
“Station councils pick somebody. In the past, the crew’s kept watch on them,” said Captain Sloane. “A practice I intend to continue.”
People just didn’t write or record themselves talking about some things at the level of detail Adda preferred. Much as she hated the process, it was worth asking about those topics. “Who else is powerful and interested enough to affect Vestan politics?”
Tritheist huffed a quiet laugh. “Here we go.” The ship rolled slowly to one side, then rolled back. They’d already reached a top speed, as far as Adda could tell by the barely there gravity.
Captain Sloane smiled. “It pays to stay on top of these things. It’s all about fuel, as you might expect, although exports of rebuilding materials are still strong. The main players are the NEU, the ITA, and the Ceres syndicate. Colonies try to influence things when orbital positions put us between them and a major hab, but they lack the resources to cause trouble.”
“That figures.” Iridian’s expectations for independent colonial viability were invariably low, although most of them had sustained themselves for the past thirteen years without the NEU’s support during wartime and peace.
And now Adda had more useful keywords to search for. “The NEU is making more and more trips into colonial space, and the ITA keeps the reliable routes clear of garbage and micrometeoroids no matter who uses them. I can see why they’d care about a stop along the way. But aside from relative proximity, what’s the Ceres syndicate’s interest?”
To her surprise, Iridian answered, “They’re the bigger, older hab in a similar orbit to Vesta’s, and their port services are a hell of a lot pricier than Rheasilvia’s or Albana’s. More comprehensive and bigger, but pricier. They want to keep traffic flowing their way, yeah?”
“Indeed,” said Captain Sloane. The ship reconfigured itself to the same physical position it’d docked in before, so Adda assumed they were nearly to the terminal. The captain turned an intense gaze on her. “What do you have so far?”
“Well, our approach to intercepting the longhauler carrying the printer still depends on the resources available.” She skimmed search results on her comp projection. “Fuel prices have been rising fast enough to make the news.”
Tritheist laughed. When she looked up from her comp to determine why in all hells he found that funny, both Sloane and Tritheist were grinning. Even Pel had caught onto the joke before her, although that was typical of him. “Say money is not one of our constraints,” Captain Sloane suggested.
“It’d better not be,” muttered Iridian.
Crew funding was apparently laughably sufficient to cover any intercept trajectory Adda could plot. She and Iridian had expected that when they set out on this adventure, but so little else had gone according to plan that Adda had discarded her previous assumptions. Now she had more options. “So margins for error on that long a voyage away from the sun have to be small. It’s the literal edge of civilization.”
“Kuiper colonies aren’t what I’d call civilized, but sure.” Iridian had never visited the farthest reaches of human habitation herself, but she claimed every spacefarer knew somebody who’d been out there. Usually that somebody returned to describe the distant colonies’ archaic existences in unflattering phrases of the colonists’ own cant. “If that’s where the longhauler’s headed, there’s a lot of no-go in their go/no-go before they hit their last stop hab.”
“Which depends on orbital positions along their route, correct?” Adda asked. Iridian smiled at Adda’s demonstration that she’d been listening to Iridian’s introduction to orbital mechanics during the trip to Vesta. “We need the route, and the company procedures.”
“And we’ll need to observe the ship,” Captain Sloane said sternly. “The majority of the crew is in hibernation, but two pilots, at minimum, will be awake. Procedures vary, not all crews follow procedure, and the degree to which they do or don’t will be essential intelligence.” Humans were unlike AIs that way. “I have an asset in mind.”
Tritheist grunted and set the hand wearing his black comp glove in the bridge console’s cradle. The Casey’s pseudo-organics weren’t dyed or lit, and the gel pad beneath Tritheist’s wrist was a dull pink. Annotated ship schematics projected in white and blue across the wall above the console. Cyrillic labels hovered around it at various points. Adda would get them translated later.
Sloane brushed one long finger over the projection’s forward edge, setting it spinning slowly in place. “Big one. And it will be all but empty, which will help us in some ways and hinder in others. No weapons, so she has an escort.” Sloane settled more firmly into the captain’s seat as the Casey docked in a new berth. “Ah,” said the captain softly. “Home at last.”
The passenger terminal Sloane led them through this time was lit warmly, and its Roman columns and intricately tiled floors spoke of very intentional design. The columns helped Adda stop herself when the long strides Vesta’s low gravity necessitated sent her drifting toward a wall. Tritheist and Pel laughed at her, and Iridian turned her amusement into an unconvincing coughing fit when she came to help. “It’s fine, you need the practice,” Iridian said. “And we won’t be in this grav for long.”
Which was a frustrating turn of events, really. She and Iridian had spent years planning and saving and reaching for a position like the one they had now, on Sloane’s crew. It’d all been harder than they’d expected. And now that they’d reached Vesta, the seat of Sloane’s power in populated space, they’d have no time to enjoy what they’d earned. Instead they’d plunged into another desperate struggle, albeit with more resources than they’d ever had at their disposal. If they failed to meet what the Oxia CEO saw as their end of the deal, Sloane would suffer the consequences first, and she and Iridian wouldn’t get far without the captain. So they’d solve this problem together, just like they’d solved every problem they’d encountered since they left Earth.
It was unfortunate they couldn’t take time to appreciate their new home, because even Rheasilvia Station’s main terminal in the docks suggested that there’d be a lot to see. Despite the very early local time, cargo-carrying robots lined the ceiling track, moving delicate shipments with comp-readable labels from Mercury farther into the station and to places she’d never heard of, probably in the Kuiper Belt. The terminal’s utilitarian architecture and prominent cams emphasized how Earth-influenced Sloane’s personal terminal was. The crew passed customs with barely a nod from the captain to the station security officer on duty there.
“Grav acclimation coming.” Iridian pointed at a sign showing an animated side view of a genderless person walking into a tube. “Some people really don’t like this part.”
Adda gripped the hand Iridian didn’t have a weapon strapped to as they followed more signs toward a tunnel entrance. “Why do we have to acclimate, exactly?”
“Rheasilvia Station maintains a steady one-g on the interior.” The quiet pride in Captain Sloane’s voice made her smile. Despite traveling in space for more than a year now, she still wasn’t used to the fact that Earthlike gravity was something to be proud of. “Constant motion is required to do that, so we will need to quite literally be brought up to speed.”
“Oh shit, those things are wild,” Pel said over his comp’s audio description of a newer comp model, one for which he could probably afford a printer pattern. “Always cams in there, though.”
As an alternative to speculating about what illegal and/or sexual activity would make observation in a rotating tunnel problematic for her brother, Adda concentrated on not vomiting as they entered the segmented tunnel. She hadn’t noticed how puffy everybody’s faces had become in the low gravity until they returned to normal over the twenty-minute walk through the tunnel. The acclimation proces
s thoroughly confused her inner ear about whether she was turning, moving sideways, or moving forward. Her stomach roiled as her insides sank into the positions they held under gravity. “We’re staying for a while, yes?”
“For as long as it takes to prepare our intercept operation.” Sloane looked entirely comfortable as gravity slowly pulled the captain’s coat and braided hair down toward booted feet. “Which I’m expecting will be under a week. Oxia relinquished our resources, such as Rosehach left them. I’ll dispatch my surveillance team today. We’ll adjust plans accordingly. This has to go well, you know. Aside from Oxia’s implications that we’ll be disposed of upon failure, I intend to make this operation my announcement that I have returned, and I still lead my crew.”
The captain said most of that while watching Adda. Now she really did feel sick, although she was excited too. If the captain were leaving the first operation’s orchestration up to her, then she’d damned well do it right.
* * *
Adda held Iridian’s hand and followed her through Rheasilvia Station’s port module without paying much attention to the pedestrian, robotic, and vehicular traffic. They entered a small vehicle the size of a train car, which ran on the same lines as the public trams. Inside it was arranged more like a limousine. Sloane and Tritheist settled in one corner, scrolling through something on their comps and speaking in low, urgent voices. Pel felt his way to the seat nearest the door while his comp read somebody’s social feed aloud. Adda and Iridian settled across from him, and Iridian, doubtless lulled by the quiet as the door shut out the traffic noise, dropped her head onto Adda’s shoulder and closed her eyes.
The tram traveled on a track that ran through the center of the streets. The sunsim overhead lighting, set to imitate sunlight on Earth at the station’s local time of around four in the morning, was still low. It brightened as they traveled from the port module through a business district, then to an area with buildings that glowed with their own bright and multicolored light. Adda filed the differences away for when she’d inevitably get lost in this station. At least she’d have the map in her comp.
Mutiny at Vesta Page 5
