They’re good, Iridian subvocalized. We ever get any personal security, we want people like them.
Now was too early to be hiring bodyguards. Nobody did double takes or attempted extended eye contact with Adda on the way to the hospital, which proved that Vestans didn’t know her on sight. In the hospital, she was the sister of the patient in room 482, but the room number did cause pointed glances among hospital personnel. Sloane must’ve had connections there.
In Pel’s room, he caught her up on his online antics, hospital pranks (words she hoped to never hear together again), and the latest on the ZV Group soldiers and Martian refugees while she half listened to him and watched for Iridian. The restless speed of his conversation made her glad he was being discharged the next day.
“How are your eyes?” she asked him.
“Still hurt like twin sons of a bitch. The doctors turned the nerves way down and they’ll put them back up gradually, because . . . I don’t know, it’s complicated and involves smelly liquid and needles. Gross. But the HUD is fun!”
“They hooked up your HUD already?” said Iridian from the doorway. She stomped over to hug him, letting her footsteps tell him where she was. “Lucky devil. I want a permanent HUD without a visor over my face.”
“I know, right?” Pel grinned, which was not something Adda had been able to make him do. Then again, she hadn’t talked about anything cheerful. “It’s not the same as I remember seeing, but all the different features are awesome. I think they make little in-socket projectors for you visually limited people. Anyway, hi!”
Pel and Iridian started discussing Sloane’s security training regimen as compared to the ZVs’. In addition to the new developments with the intelligences, Adda was still turning over the Björn problem. Everything she’d read about Dr. Björn indicated that ve was happy in vis current position, although not everybody at the university approved of vis performance.
How long does it take to get to Mars from here? Adda asked Iridian subvocally.
The background conversation stalled. “Leaving now?” Iridian asked aloud. “Weeks, babe. Although I guess if you can afford healthy grav you could do it in one week. Last time I checked, ’ject positions were way off for a sunward trip to anyplace worth visiting. It’s not like crossing the street. Is this about Sloane’s next op?”
“What are you . . . Oh, your implants, right. When’re you gonna get me one of those telepathy hookups?” asked Pel. “Maybe you can make it go through my eyes? And where are you going?”
Adda’s face flushed hot. Her plan for the venture still needed a lot of review for mistakes and oversights before it was ready to share. Why did Iridian say everything that went through her head? “Mars, but I don’t have all the details together.”
Iridian raised an eyebrow. “And I think this is all the socializing some of us can handle for today. See you later, Pel.” She wrapped an arm around Adda’s waist and guided her out the door and into the sterile hallway, which was both embarrassing and deeply welcomed.
“Aw, you just got here!” Pel called after them. “Try sleeping some night, Sissy, you look really tired.”
One of the people they passed in the hall looked familiar. Know her? Adda waited until Iridian caught her eye, then glanced over at the woman.
One of Captain Sloane’s security people, Iridian said. One’s assigned to monitor all the cams in the hospital whenever Sloane’s crew is being treated there.
“Practical.” Even to her own ears, Adda sounded depressed. All the ways she’d come up with to approach Dr. Björn had too many contingencies that could fail and put ver in the hands of a torturer.
But Iridian laughed in the way that made the freckles on her cheeks look like they were floating up toward her beautiful brown eyes, and Adda couldn’t help smiling along with her. “When I heard the med team on Barbary Station saying one word every five minutes, I thought they’d lost their gods-damned minds,” Iridian said. “Now I see how that happens.” Outside the hospital doors, Iridian caught Adda’s chin between her finger and thumb. “You’ll figure it out, and I won’t let you kill yourself doing it.”
“I hope so,” Adda said.
“You will.” Iridian kissed her gently. “I’ve seen you do it a thousand times.”
Iridian waded into Rheasilvia Station’s near-constant pedestrian traffic, towing Adda along behind her by the hand. Station culture granted much less personal space than what Adda had been used to on Earth. The current trend of touch-responsive fashion meant that people’s jackets turned bright, annoying colors where she bumped into them. Each direction down the street looked as likely as the other, in terms of which way a tram stop might be. It was only a couple minutes from the hospital, but foot traffic blocked her view.
Iridian led her by the hand she wore her comp on, so she was already looking that direction when it buzzed against her skin to notify her of a new message. The first words flashed over the projection square in red text that clashed with her glove: AegiSKADA is assembling in this server tank. It will look for you as its supervisor when it can.
Iridian tugged her arm, because Adda had stopped walking. Adda stepped after her mechanically. Somebody thumped her arm with an elbow, which flared bright green in her peripheral vision. “Iri,” Adda said, but she spoke too quietly to be heard on the crowded street.
Not long after she and Iridian had discovered that the Casey Mira Mira’s AI copilot was awakened, an emergency had forced Iridian to make a deal with Casey: one trip across a space station for one copy of AegiSKADA’s code, including its development records to date. Giving an awakened intelligence the essence of a zombie one that’d held people captive on Barbary Station for years had been a difficult choice, but it was that or stay trapped themselves. Iridian had provided Casey with the full record of AegiSKADA’s development. That was the last they’d heard from Casey about it, until now.
“You can read that sitting down too,” said Iridian. Adda looked up from her comp to find that she’d followed Iridian onto one of the public trams and was standing in front of the seats on one end. A woman with a baby on her lap sat at the other end of the compartment, which had room for four to six people. Adda sat where Iridian indicated, and Iridian’s lovely smile faded to worry when she saw Adda’s expression. “What’s wrong?”
Adda tilted her gloved hand so that Iridian could read the projected message. Iridian’s whole body went rigid against Adda’s and she grabbed the metal pole at the corner of their seat like she wanted to break it off the tram and use it as a weapon. By the time Iridian was finished swearing at a higher than usual pitch and volume, the woman with the baby was anxiously watching the tram’s projection count down seconds until the next stop.
Iridian’s reaction was an improvement over the one from her last unpleasant revelation about AegiSKADA. This was just another of many dangerous situations involving AI that she and Adda had been in proximity to recently, and it wasn’t even as bad as the first one. This time, AegiSKADA was unarmed.
“Okay.” Iridian shut her eyes tight for a moment, and when she opened them her expression was a little calmer. “We can handle this. We’re much better equipped now. How do we disable it this time?”
“When it contacts me, it will tell me where it is, and I’ll deactivate it,” Adda said, making the decision as she spoke. Fascinating as AegiSKADA was, its design was too flawed to split her attention between supervising it, watching the awakened intelligences, and planning crew operations. Her divided attention could cause mistakes that’d get somebody hurt.
After she shut it down, she’d have to devote a large part of somebody’s automated resources to scanning for newly installed copies across all of the crew tanks. Casey could always install it elsewhere, and could have ever since Iridian gave it a copy of AegiSKADA’s code. That was the risk they’d taken when they upheld their end of the deal. The company that owned AegiSKADA’s original learning algorithm would have installed other versions of it in other stations and habitats too.
Adda felt responsible for the version that might have records of all that it had gotten away with on Barbary Station.
“It’ll just let you shut it down?” Iridian asked, too loud for the small tramcar. “People died doing that.” The baby made a mewling noise, probably because its mother was holding it to her so tightly.
AegiSKADA, while unsupervised, had killed well over a hundred people, including Iridian’s friend Si Po. And those were just the deaths Adda had evidence of. It still amazed her how often people forgot that they were surrounded by safer intelligences of varying strengths every day, unnoticed due to proper supervision. An intelligence was almost certainly coordinating the tram system they sat in, and Iridian, who hated cooperating with AIs, hadn’t hesitated to step inside.
Adda switched to subvocalization in an effort to calm their fellow tram passengers. When it killed Si Po, I wasn’t its supervisor. I could’ve deactivated it before we left, if we’d had any interest in leaving it in an unsupervised state if it got reactivated. We’d have had a much harder time getting off of Barbary Station without it. And while we’re on this subject, without Casey the ITA would’ve arrested us on Barbary. After I became AegiSKADA’s supervisor, exactly how did it hurt any of us?
Instead of answering the rhetorical question, Iridian put her arms around Adda and pulled her against her chest, so hard that Adda’s shoulder must’ve been digging into Iridian’s collarbone. “What in all hells did the Casey do this for?”
The message disappeared from Adda’s hand. A new one read These can help you with AegiSKADA. A long string of associated vids and articles followed. It would take hours for Adda to process them all individually, or most of one to get the gist of all of them at once in a workspace.
“We don’t need your . . . its . . . help!” Iridian said. The tram arrived at the next stop and the woman with the baby ran out without looking back.
Reactivating AegiSKADA was an odd thing for Casey to do. Presuming that Casey stayed near Sloane’s crew to keep them safe, after the fashion that made sense to it. The only change in their level of safety that Adda was aware of was their assignment to coerce Dr. Björn into signing an Oxia contract. There could be other dangers that Casey chose not to make Adda aware of, but at the moment it wasn’t obvious how a station defense intelligence would help convince an astronomer to change employers.
If Adda asked Casey the right way, it might tell her its reasoning, but she wouldn’t count on it explaining at all, or in a way that she understood. Very few awakened intelligences had ever been asked to explain themselves to humans. She and Casey communicated better than all the literature on the subject led her to expect, unsettling and unpredictable though those communications were. It was exhilarating, but Adda wouldn’t claim to understand it.
“It’ll take a while for AegiSKADA to assemble itself,” Adda said. “Hours. There’s no point in looking for it before then.”
Iridian still held her tight, and rested her chin on Adda’s head. “Tell me when you’re going in after it. I want to be there to help.”
“I’ll be in a workspace generator,” Adda reminded her.
“Then I want to stand outside and make sure you don’t go into shock or something,” said Iridian. “You can’t trust anything with these AIs.”
CHAPTER 10
Albana and Rheasilvia systems integrated: 120
Three days later, Adda still hadn’t heard from AegiSKADA, and another dangerous guest was arriving. Iridian wore her new armored enviro suit to escort the welcoming committee into Captain Sloane’s terminal. The new suit sealed against just about anything, and it’d been hand-assembled by an actual human armorer. Its segmented solid polymer matrix composite was matte black, matching Sloane’s aesthetic, with red articulated plating over the knuckles and one red cable wound through the mass of cabling that connected the helmet to the suit’s exoskeletal structure.
The armor fit so well that just standing around on guard duty in Sloane’s terminal made Iridian jittery. She wanted to run, or throw crates up to the cargo bots rolling along their ceiling tracks in the window projection a terminal down from Sloane’s. When Iridian started pacing in long, low-grav strides, Tritheist glared in his faceplate’s projection from the other side of the homeward door to Sloane’s terminal at the docks. Captain Sloane had insisted on their being armed with less lethal weaponry as they had been on the Sabina, and Iridian had opted for a short-range stun gun while Tritheist carried a chemical irritant. Both kept their weapons in easy reach.
The captain and Adda stood between the middle pair of decorative columns. The light at Adda’s heels indicated that her boots’ magnets were on to stabilize her in Vesta’s natural grav, outside the spinning station interior. The dock designator projected over the terminal passthrough read ARRIVAL AT 15:40: KATJA DEMETRIA.
“Your contract still looks solid, correct?” Adda asked.
“It does.” Captain Sloane had never sounded so tired. “And Oxia is watching for missteps. Don’t accept compensation from any source other than me, by the way; that’s a breach we just identified yesterday. They must have expected to catch us with that clause, if no other. To the ITA and the megacorporations, all contract breaches are the same severity.”
“All right,” said Adda.
“If this endeavor goes well, we’ll enjoy a degree of flexibility. Liu Kong has to trust me to some extent, or I wouldn’t be able to do what he needs done.”
“And we’ll be run off the station if we fail?” Iridian asked.
Captain Sloane glowered at the closed dockside door. “Nobody will run me off Vesta.” Iridian and Tritheist exchanged something almost like a smile. They’d back the captain up, but it’d be a shitshow. Oxia’s fleet and contracted army were big enough to crush anybody without similar numbers. Sloane’s new security hires and a lot of tech might hold HQ long enough to evac to a safer location, at least.
The projection above the passthrough door changed to ARRIVING NOW: KATJA DEMETRIA. Tritheist abandoned the homeward door to the main terminal and the rest of the station and approached the sealed passthrough. Iridian tugged on her gun and shield. They’d come free if she needed them. The big barrel required for the weapon’s less lethal ammo could catch on her suit’s hip joint, and she hadn’t practiced the modified draw action enough. It felt awkward as all hells.
Captain Sloane turned to Adda. “We have a very limited window, a week at most, in which our guest will operate in top form, so logistics must take that time frame into account. I’d be interested in your ideas on how we might keep him under control until he’s needed.”
Iridian tensed at the rising rumble and tremble in the floor as the ship docked outside. The only things Sloane had said so far about the new man was that he could be violent, was usually armed, and needed watching. “How dangerous is he?”
“To himself, very.”
The designator above the door updated to AT PASSTHROUGH: KATJA DEMETRIA. Iridian removed the shield from its hook between her shoulder blades. She was, possibly, falling in love with the new armor.
The passthrough door opened to admit a man who might have been in his sixties, judging by his steady stride and solid build, or his eighties, judging by the deep creases in his brown, life-worn face set in a stoic frown. His silver hair still bore a few streaks of black and he wore no armor, although his coat was cut in a vaguely military style. One sleeve bore an NEU insignia with circles that symbolized Earth in blue, its moon in white, and its three nearest planets in brown, orange, and red.
The man drew a very small plastic pistol from his coat pocket, without taking his eyes off Captain Sloane.
“Hello, Jiménez.” Tritheist’s voice was surprisingly soft, for him. His short-range chemical spray was pointed directly at the new arrival’s eyes.
Jiménez flinched and swept the pistol up to aim at Tritheist’s chest. The side of the passthrough must’ve hidden Tritheist from Jiménez’s view. Jiménez’s hand shook so badly that if he fired, he might mis
s a target a meter away.
A bullet that small could ricochet, either off Tritheist’s armor or the steel wall. Dock hulls were tough, but Adda and Captain Sloane were in light armor that left their arms and heads exposed. Iridian approached with steps as quiet and slow as the armor and grav allowed. Her shield’d make a snapping sound and a big visual effect if she deployed it. That might surprise him enough to fire. She left it collapsed in her hand.
“Thank you for coming,” Captain Sloane said. “I wouldn’t have called you if anyone else could have done it.”
Jiménez looked from Tritheist to Iridian to Sloane. He pocketed his weapon. Iridian deployed her shield, just in case, and he startled at the sound before refocusing on Sloane. “I didn’t want to come.”
“I know.” Captain Sloane held out one hand in the direction of the main terminal doorway. “We have a place prepared as you prefer for tonight. Our target is required to arrive on Vesta within the month, so you’ll be traveling to meet ver on Deimos, in the morning.”
“And until then?” Jiménez’s accent pegged him as NEU, but his utility-focused clothing, at least some of which would seal against vac, was pure spacefarer. He sounded a bit desperate, and the lost look in his eyes was growing more pronounced.
“Try to relax.” Tritheist walked beside Jiménez at an angle where he could blast the man in the face with whatever chemicals were in his gun without hitting Sloane, Adda, or Iridian.
Jiménez shook his head. “I don’t deserve to.”
“We also have several of your preferred chems in your room, of course.” Captain Sloane opened the tram door. “Which will be well guarded.”
“Thank you,” Jiménez said humbly.
* * *
In the elevated bar at the club in HQ, Iridian stated the obvious. “That’s not the psychopath you mentioned when you were discussing options for getting Björn to sign.”
“It’s the other one,” Tritheist grumbled over a beer. “The martyr.”
Mutiny at Vesta Page 14
