The chains around her legs and stomach were gone. The Mayhem must have returned to what Iridian would call “healthy” acceleration, where Adda could pretend that she was on something large enough and stable enough to produce its own gravity just by existing in the right orbit at the right speed.
* * *
Days later and less than an hour after the Mayhem docked at Rheasilvia Station, Sloane, Adda, and Tritheist stood in crew headquarters before the projected figure of Oxia CEO Liu Kong. Iridian and Chi had escaped this meeting by being insufficiently involved in the operation’s leadership and planning, and they were now off somewhere disposing of part of their pay for the job.
Adda would’ve rather been assuring herself that AegiSKADA was staying within the limited server space she set for it. To use that as an excuse to miss this meeting, though, she’d have to tell Iridian and Captain Sloane about AegiSKADA’s current state of existence. She could put those arguments off for a little longer without hurting anyone, because she was going to deactivate it, when she had time to do it the right way.
Beside Liu Kong’s figure on Captain Sloane’s projector stage, a viral text post about Dr. Björn’s hiring experience with Oxia accrued quantifiable public attention across social and newsfeeds as they watched. Dr. Björn’s most talkative students and coworkers had responded admirably when Adda sent them news of what’d happened to ver using a fake University of Mars account.
Sloane’s lips twitched at the corners, without actually smiling. “Isn’t the saying that there is no such thing as bad press?”
The viral post’s negative response statistics glowed in prominent red beside Liu Kong’s clenched jaw. “If I find that your crew had anything to do with this . . .”
“What you’ll find is that my crew were meticulous about protecting Oxia’s interests in every aspect of this affair.” Somehow Captain Sloane managed not to look at Adda while saying that. “The University of Mars has a great deal of political influence through its famous graduates, as I’m sure you’re aware, and Blaer Björn was both a high profile and a high-value target. The risk to my crew and your organization was exceedingly high. I trust that Dr. Björn’s work will be worth that.”
Liu Kong seemed to be turning what Captain Sloane had said over in his mind. “Of course. The risk analysis came out in Dr. Björn’s favor.” He may have meant that Oxia would be better off having Dr. Björn onboard, or that Sloane’s crew was a price Oxia was willing to pay for the astronomer. Probably both.
The moment the projector notified them that Liu Kong had terminated the connection, Sloane grinned in vicious glee. “My gods, that was glorious. I doubt we’ll be able to get away with that level of public notoriety in the future, Adda, but what a use of the opportunity!”
“It barely hung together, but it hung,” said Tritheist. “Are we still on the hook for Jiménez?”
“I rolled his fee into Oxia’s budget for the job, but get the man antidepressants and cognitive recalibration on us, would you?” Sloane sighed. “He’s a useful tool, but he requires a great deal of maintenance.”
“Have you had any more luck with the contract, Captain?” Tritheist followed Sloane out of the meeting room and toward the imitation-lake lobby. Adda went with them to hear the captain’s answer.
Sloane’s pace slowed. “We’re evaluating potential Oxia breaches of the section on how the operations are selected and planned. That’s also where Liu Kong seems touchy, so I’m hopeful. In the meantime, I expect we’ll be assigned another job as soon as Liu Kong finds one worthy of us.”
Where are you? Adda subvocalized while she bowed farewell to Sloane and Tritheist at the elevators.
Sloane’s club, where else? Iridian’s subvocalized words arrived at a slightly slower pace than Adda had gotten used to. Washing that fucking op out of my mouth. Some of the crew’s fans are being nasty on their social feeds over the connections they see between Oxia’s acquisition of Sloane and our visit to the Deimos campus. Bitter about Sloane lying to them about being stuck on Barbary, never mind the drama. You’d think they’d love it. . . . See you soon.
Adda rolled her eyes and downloaded the past few hours’ record of AegiSKADA’s activities. It’d duplicated the entirety of the headquarters building’s intruder detection and personnel monitoring system in its own station security context. That was convenient and in line with its development priorities. However, it shouldn’t have done that without asking her.
She would probably have said yes, but now she’d have to talk to it to determine what she’d said or didn’t say that made the duplication justifiable to it. It was possible that AegiSKADA had asked permission of her at some point during their efforts to capture Dr. Björn, and Adda had answered it while she was distracted. Supervising intelligences was a full-time job for a reason, and this was the longest she’d ever been responsible for one. As long as it was active and under her supervision, she had to expect and prepare to recover from errors on her part. She set a sharpsheet on her tongue and headed for their suite to find the mistake she’d made.
Sorry, I was trying to talk to you and ended up talking to everybody, Iridian said. Come here! People keep handing us drinks and drugs, everybody wants to dance, and I miss you. It’d all be better with you, babe.
It’d take hours to shut AegiSKADA down properly, and it wasn’t exactly an emergency situation. Other than the duplicate security feed, which didn’t even affect the one already active in the building, AegiSKADA was staying within the parameters she’d set for it. Iridian would be disappointed if Adda didn’t join her. The two modified synthcapsin canisters sat on the kitchen counter in her and Iridian’s suite. She put a bag over each one and gingerly carried them to the cupboard, so she or Iridian wouldn’t knock them onto the floor when they came back to the suite drunk.
Adda sighed, smiled, and fished out a Vestan-fashionable bioluminescing skirt and tight shirt, which were getting a surprising amount of wear. The sharpsheet made her spend much more time evaluating each piece of clothing than she needed to. Fortunately, sharpsheets combined well with alcohol, as long as she didn’t have too much. College had given her ample opportunities to test those limits. She’d shut AegiSKADA down later.
Adda stepped off the elevator and into a thunderous beat overlaid with rhythmic sirens. It sounded like club music even though, or because, it shouldn’t have. The sharpsheet intensified the music’s energy so that she could almost feel the sound sliding over her skin.
As she walked around the edge of the dance floor, a bronze-skinned, bright-haired hetero couple swept up to her. “Adda Karpe, yeah?” the man asked.
“Of course it’s her, I said it was. Eran, Sylbirin.” The woman pointed to the man first, then herself. “We heard about the Oxia hiring exposé, and hell, that was amazing. Had to be you, of course. Wasn’t it amazing?” she asked the Vestan apparently called Eran, who was too busy staring at Adda’s chest to respond.
It was interesting that Oxia had let that part of the news cycle penetrate the local media. Vestans were more likely than anyone to note that Captain Sloane had arrived just weeks before this major embarassment for the megacorporation. Unlike Oxia, the Vestans didn’t need proof of Sloane’s involvement. And also unlike Oxia, there was nothing that Vestans could do about it. They were all under contract to Oxia themselves, one way or another.
Adda tried to step around Eran and Sylbirin, but they arranged themselves on either side of her and walked the same direction she was walking, grinning at everybody they passed as much as they stared at her. “Knew you people weren’t really trapped on Barbary, that’s too dumb a mistake for Captain Sloane.” Since Sloane hadn’t made any announcements regarding Barbary Station since the crew escaped, public opinion on what really happened there seemed to be skewing toward the truth. Apparently Eran was only interested in repeating the more flattering lie. “Gods, you look good in that,” he added, too close to her ear.
Iridian swooped in to wrap an arm around her waist and swing he
r across a corner of the dance floor in a move calculated to get people out of their way. “Sorry, hangers on. That’s a thing. Ask Pel. Although, you ask me, he’s spent more time hanging than having people hang on him, you know what I mean?”
Iridian’s kiss tasted like wine, which was a new experience. It even felt like wine, red and smooth and bittersweet. “Who’s been buying you drinks?” Adda asked.
“Chi started it,” Iridian said loudly enough to be heard over the music, and dipped her chin down to kiss Adda again. Chi’s dark brown arm waved from the end of the large public bar at the back of the dance floor.
Adda had been hoping to hide out in the VIP bar, but as soon as people looked around to see who Chi was waving at, hiding became unlikely. Somebody shoved a beer into Adda’s hand.
As they reached a spot at the bar beside Chi, the medic snatched the beer away and dropped a plastic stick into it. A yellow dot lit at the stick’s submerged end and slowly rose toward the part still above the beer. “Give that a minute.” Chi covered the cup with her hand and gazed into Adda’s eyes with drunken sincerity. “There are pervs in this bar. Tried to perv up my wine twice already, but I’m too old for that shit.”
Alcohol and sharpsheets combined well, but other drug interactions could be dangerous. “Why are they buying us drinks?” Adda shouted.
Pel appeared at her elbow, half guided and half held upright by a pair of sturdy-looking and possibly related club boys. The medication cocktail supporting his new eyes probably mixed poorly with alcohol, but his wide smile and clumsy hug suggested that he hadn’t made himself sick yet. “Vestans don’t know the full story on the job. They just know you and Iridian did something as part of Sloane’s crew that ended up riling U of M against Oxia, which is all kinds of popular. And Captain Sloane’s scary shit. But here we are.” Pel wiggled his eyebrows at the club boys, who laughed.
“You told somebody something about the operation, didn’t you,” Adda shouted at Pel. “We don’t tell anybody off Vesta anything about that. Do you understand me?” Pel could expose her involvement in the leak about the circumstances of Dr. Bjorn’s hiring. That could easily break the balance Sloane was striking between meeting Oxia’s demands and escaping them, and land the whole crew in ITA prison cells. Adda rested a hand on Iridian’s thigh, grounding her anxiety with her wife’s solid presence at her side.
Pel and the club boys exchanged glances. The club boys looked much more alarmed than Pel. “Let’s go over our cover story, then,” he said through a big grin. The club boys’ faces lit up like they’d won a lottery, and Iridian gave Pel a disgusted shove the club boys had to help him recover from. They staggered off with Pel saying something into one club boy’s ear while the other palmed his ass. Adda texted the word “protection” to his comp, since she had no hope of yelling it at a volume he’d pay attention to.
Chi assessed the drink analyzer’s glowing green tip, then shoved the beer into Adda’s hand hard enough to slop some over her fingers. Chi threw the analyzer over the bar, through the projected bartender figure behind it. Adda was glad her beer passed the test, because she needed a drink.
After they left Deimos, she’d confirmed that the university community had been aware of Oxia’s interest in Dr. Björn before Sloane’s crew arrived in Martian space. On Vesta, it was common knowledge that Sloane’s crew was working for Oxia. Oxia had not wanted its coercive hiring tactics to become widely known, though, let alone its association with pirates. If the Vestan public connected Sloane’s crew to the leaked information so easily, then Oxia would come to the same conclusion eventually.
“So they’re really talking about us?” Adda settled herself onto a stool, which by all rights should not have been available in a bar this crowded. Someone must have vacated it for her. Yes, she was beginning to like this notoriety thing.
“Oh yeah,” Chi said. “I mean, not just your brother and his boy toys, every Vestan and a bunch of those wacko social feeds that follow Sloane’s ops. People say you know what the fuck you’re doing, feeding Oxia some shit for a change. Better than Sloane ever did, they’re saying.” She peered at Adda over a glass of something unaccountably orange. “Do you know? What the fuck you’re doing?”
That should have been a question for Captain Sloane, not Adda. The captain chose to pursue the operations. She just wanted to do them effectively, and with minimal damage.
Her comp buzzed against her hand. The text read Tritheist: Next job’s basic ship thievery. Not even sure why they need us. Milk run.
“Aw, he had to say that.” Iridian huffed out a boozy sigh over Adda’s shoulder and wrapped both arms around her waist. “Now we’re fucked. We just don’t know how yet.”
CHAPTER 14
Test 02 case selected
The ZAR-560Q prototype longhaul ship was smaller than most longhaulers Iridian had seen. It’d be a tight fit in a standard docking bay, but it’d be able to land on a pad instead of having to hook up via passthroughs. In the indistinct cam stills Tritheist sent them, it looked a bit like a metal beetle with four big, segmented dome eyes where legs should be.
Which was kind of funny, since Adda’s research said it’d fly farther than any other longhauler was guaranteed for, largely without active supervision if the AI was being developed the way Adda thought it was. It’d skip multiple refueling points on its way to the Kuiper colonies. In spacefarer terminology, it had long legs.
Stealing the ZAR-560Q prototype was apparently a job for Sloane’s crew because the security protecting this ship was impenetrable, according to thieves who would’ve been interested otherwise. Iridian and Adda spent the whole next day, and the substantially less alcoholic evening, sorting through the station’s tech specs and despairing.
“Well, they’re a Daimler subsidiary’s R&D station, so I guess we should expect this kind of security, but look at this.” Iridian pointed at the biosensor array near the entrance to the docking bay where the longhauler prototype was kept. They’d both squeezed into Adda’s workspace generator to visualize the problem more effectively. Iridian’s lack of a direct physical connection meant that she looked at the salient points projected onto the generator’s ceiling while Adda manipulated it in the workspace.
She’d helped Adda create a starry observatory workspace setting when they started this session. The viewpoint moved like they were in micrograv, but Iridian still felt Rheasilvia Station’s one g. The disconnect was slightly nauseating.
Among the stars, a biosensor array grew huge beneath Iridian’s pointer finger, with model numbers, ranges, and other known features in tiny text all around the devices themselves, filling in as the program used Adda’s mental focus on the subject to search for names and specs. “I don’t see us getting around this, and it’s practically the second thing we have to deal with.”
“We should EMP the whole station, or maybe just the bay where the prototype ship is stored. The testing team locks themselves down as best they can, then we send them running for the exits with some false alarms.” Adda had a lot of experience convincing hab management AIs to generate false alarms. “I wonder why Oxia needs all this stuff, and needs it off their semipublic record. The internal records must be in their primary datacenter, wherever that is.”
Iridian frowned. “It’s that project they’re funding with the hidden money Captain Sloane pointed out, yeah? I mean, otherwise they’d just adjust their budget and buy stuff the usual way.”
“Oxia Corporation does infrastructure projects, some mining; it’s got an extensive shipping line to support those . . . So what does it need with the latest pseudo-organic printer, the smallest and most self-reliant longhauler I’ve ever read about, and an astronomer who didn’t want to work for them in the first place? Sloane may be trapped in their contract, but even supplying the crew doesn’t come cheap, and we’re getting paid on top of that.”
“Competition, yeah?” Iridian shifted against Adda and Adda breathed in deep, like the movement knocked her out of the workspace. She si
ghed and Iridian rolled to pull her nearer, fighting the drugs and implants that tugged Adda’s mind back toward the workspace. Adda’d been weighing her sharpsheet doses before she took them lately, pinching off the ends sometimes and stashing them in an empty case to supplement a full sheet when she wanted more. “I can’t keep looking at that stuff,” Iridian said. “Makes my head hurt. How can you do this for hours?”
When Adda subvocalized, minute movements of her lips and throat were all Iridian could see of it, even when she was lying right next to her. Competition. Right. With whom?
“Companies like them?” Iridian shrugged and used her comp to retrieve a social feed they’d referenced heavily while researching crews to join. “Like we’re competing against other crews? And winning, by the way. The Oxia link is common knowledge in Rheasilvia Station, maybe Albana Station on the other side of Vesta too. That info hasn’t really made it off the ’ject yet because Oxia owns the local info traffic, and stationsec. So the other crews think . . . oh, here’s a link.” She sent a feed to Adda’s comp and, with an effort, refocused on the projected window into Adda’s workspace.
Adda’d expanded the feed’s avatars into full figures, which spoke in text bubbles and stilted digital voices. She was apparently curating the conversation as she absorbed it, because it proceeded more linearly in the workspace than it had on the feed. “. . . back, for sure. The crew was doing nothing but stupid thug shit on Vesta while Captain Sloane was on Barbary Station. Guess he thought he had to come back and deal with it in person.”
Other shadowy figures appeared and stuttered through “. . . andro,” “not a he,” and nonsensical insults until Adda found another section she was interested in. “ITA and Martian LE are going to tear them in half fighting over their carcass the second Sloane fucks something up. This hero worship bullshit is going to end, you sad fucks are all going to come here crying about it, and I’ll laugh my ass off.”
Mutiny at Vesta Page 21
