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Mutiny at Vesta

Page 22

by R. E. Stearns


  Adda skimmed through a subthread of venom, mostly directed at the original poster’s assumed Earther status due to the metaphor of choice as well as “envy of the biggest success in the NEU and the asteroid belt.”

  She waved the figures away. “So Sloane’s crew’s back to the status it held when we first read about them. The captain will be committed to keeping that.”

  “It’s part of why Sloane’s trying so hard to break the contract legally, yeah,” Iridian said. “That, and alienating megacorporate clients would remove us from the hiring list when we don’t have a good target of our own. The same reason that the ZVs distanced themselves from us after Barbary. Oh, and that way we don’t give ITA, NEU, and ambitious colonies an extra reason to hunt us down.”

  “Evading consequences when megacorporations control the local laws and law enforcers would be much more difficult with a reputation for contract-breaking,” said Adda. “Sloane’s base of operations is nice, but it can’t withstand a siege, and . . . honestly, I don’t want to be involved in that kind of power struggle.” The station map with the target ship highlighted reappeared before them. “This is much more interesting. I just want to know how it all fits together.”

  Iridian shrugged. “In the meantime, the sensor array?”

  “EMP,” Adda reminded her. “So we’re going to need a second pilot, to avoid having to coerce the test pilot into flying the prototype ship to Sunan’s Landing.” The occasionally mobile Ceresmax freighter Sunan’s Landing would be a stopping point where the stolen ship would be disguised and anonymized before continuing to the destination of Oxia’s choosing. “I’m still deciding on the best way to get that pilot off the station. Once they’re gone, the prototype ship’s copilot will be unsupervised until our pilot takes control.”

  “Shit, will it?” Iridian yelped. As a spacefarer and a person with an abiding interest in tech, Adda must’ve expected Iridian to know that. But unlike Adda, Iridian only thought about AI so she could stay the hell away from it. “That can’t be safe. There’s some kind of maintenance mode, isn’t there?”

  “There is, but it takes time to put a copilot in maintenance, and time to take it out,” Adda said. “There’s no publicly available documentation on this particular copilot’s development cycle. I can’t even estimate how long it would take on this prototype ship.”

  “Could we shut it down and restart it, like we did with AegiSKADA?”

  AegiSKADA’s name made Adda open her eyes and focus on Iridian with a wary anxiety that made Iridian regret mentioning it. “That worked because AegiSKADA was in a pseudo-organic quantum comp. The prototype’s tank is pure pseudo-organics, like the other Barbary ships,” Adda said. “Also, we got lucky with AegiSKADA. Quantum computers don’t always decontaminate that effectively, and the intelligences involved don’t always recover undamaged. And, if you’ll recall, that also took at least thirty minutes. Swapping out the pilots is faster and more reliable.”

  “I hate this,” said Iridian. “AIs get awful ideas when they’re unsupervised.”

  “If it turns out that the prototype’s maintenance mode is well documented, well tested, and easy to take the copilot in and out of, then I’ll use it during the pilot transfer. I’m not counting on that, though.” Adda said it like she’d already dismissed that possibility, and would only be reexamining maintenance mode to humor Iridian.

  Usually Adda was a lot more optimistic about the effectiveness of AI safety procedures. Her acknowledgement that they were taking a big risk with this AI made Iridian’s skin crawl. Adda would be working with a minimally tested, unsupervised intelligence, and she didn’t even sound that worried about it. That just wasn’t right. Then again, anybody who made a career out of working with AIs was missing a thing or two from their self-preservation skill set.

  “Anyway,” Adda continued, “I want Chi available in case someone gets hurt, and you and I will go of course, but . . .” The station map around them dissolved and reassembled into a full-size blueprint of the target ship’s main cabin. “This ship’s copilot is based on last year’s intelligence development trends, which I’m still catching up on, and it’s prepared to do more on its own than any shipboard intelligence I’ve ever read about.”

  “It’s not awakened, though, yeah?”

  Everything Pel knew about rolling his eyes he’d learned from Adda. “Awakening an intelligence is not like flipping a switch. You’d have to break down the limiters first, and there’s no guide to doing that, since it’s illegal. Then you’d spend hours leading the intelligence down a path to sentience, with somebody watching development readouts and somebody else watching you, ready to pull you out of the workspace when it looks like you’re getting influenced, which will happen if you don’t take turns with at least one other developer. And if you get influenced you’re off the project, because your team can’t stop development for months while you recover. Oh, and there’s no standard development path, so you’d have to test even more frequently than usual to make sure you’re doing what you think you’re doing. I don’t know how Si Po, Kaskade, and Captain Sloane awakened the Barbary intelligences without ten kinds of disasters. And two of them are . . .”

  Adda stopped herself, but the sentence finished itself in Iridian’s head anyway. “Dead, yeah, I know that.”

  “Didn’t you . . .” Adda’s pause and frustrated grimace meant that she was looking for a way to say what she wanted to say without insulting Iridian. That was sweet of her. “Didn’t you find it interesting,” Adda said, “that the person AegiSKADA expended that single Attaco drone on was Kaskade? It could’ve killed any one of us with that drone, including me, and I had just proved that I wanted to modify its behavior. Instead it chose her. And then, when it could’ve attacked you on the station’s surface, it chose Si Po as its primary target instead.”

  “I found it fucking terrifying.” Iridian rolled from her side to her back. The workspace generator bowed out where her shoulder pressed into it, distorting the projections. “Wait. None of those three had left base for months when we got there, except for a few unplanned trips to the docking bay.”

  Adda nodded, staring at something Iridian couldn’t see. “AegiSKADA interpreted awakening the copilot intelligences as a very dangerous act, yes.”

  “That put Kaskade and Si Po at the top of AegiSKADA’s hit list. Gods-damn it, I hate AIs.” Iridian sat up and immediately hunched over to keep from pulling on the generator and the cord attaching it to Adda’s nasal jack.

  “It would never have seen something like them before,” Adda said quietly. “Awakened intelligences are that rare. And they could have awakened with much more . . . aggressive priorities.”

  “All right, all right,” Iridian said. “I have enough bad memories from Barbary without thinking about what would’ve happened if the AIs awakened wrong. Let’s keep the Barbary AIs the hell away from the prototype’s copilot. The last thing we need is a clone of the Coin, or worse.”

  “Agreed,” said Adda. Her hand found Iridian’s in the dim generator and held on, a warm and grounding defense against the chilling reminder of what they’d gone through on Barbary.

  The Barbary intelligences still hadn’t told anyone why the Coin had followed the crew to Mars. The intelligences had put themselves in danger and expended time and fuel helping the only person who’d awakened them and lived to tell the tale, Captain Sloane. They seemed to understand that Iridian and Adda worked for Sloane, so Adda’s current hypothesis was that they were helping them to help Sloane, in exchange for putting the captain’s name on whatever maintenance, docking, and upgrades they wanted. None of the intelligences had responded to Adda’s queries regarding what needs they were meeting that way, so she had a routine running to find every use of a crewmember’s name which could be one of the Barbary AIs instead.

  For now, Adda seemed content to let her subconscious work that problem over, and keep her conscious attention on the crew’s current task. “Before I convince the prototype ship’s i
ntelligence that we’re not actually stealing it, I could really use an infiltrator to make some progress first. Get us the access credentials we need, deliver a cover story so we’re expected . . . And having someone there early means we can hold off on the EMP until we’re in a good position to recover the ship.”

  “EMP is fucking terrible for ships,” Iridian said. “All of the electronics are vulnerable if they’re not shielded. Have you got a list of what’s accessible from the bridge console?” Adda found one and projected that too. Iridian’s gaze traveled down the list of subsystem monitors. “I don’t see anything specifically shielding propulsion, or the pseudo-organic tank. Pseudo-organics die from overheating or accept weird input from fried tech.”

  “How long would it take to restore basic functions if the ship were hit by an EMP?” Adda’s line of questioning suggested that she wanted to EMP Jōju Station without affecting the prototype, but she always made contingency plans.

  Iridian frowned at the list of subsystem monitors. “Hours, assuming I have all the right parts and equipment and guides. What if we go a little smaller and just hit the station’s sensor array? That’ll stop them from targeting the ship when we move it, and they couldn’t track it once we’re gone. They’ll have a shielded backup, radar maybe, but that’s a lot easier to mess with.”

  “We could shield the whole ship, couldn’t we?” Adda backed the visuals out of the ship to hover above it, in a small docking bay.

  “Yeah, the bay locks down somehow. Each module should have its own lockdown function. But we need somebody to set that up before we zap the rest of the station.”

  “Somebody on the inside,” Adda said. “Well, Captain Sloane must know an infiltrator. Maybe the surveillance person from Deimos?”

  * * *

  “Ogir?” Captain Sloane asked, when Adda and Iridian presented the idea in the VIP lounge in the club, where Sloane conducted most crew business. “No. He’s excellent among large populations and with any surveillance system you care to name, but he relies on disappearing into a crowd and changing places with team members when he’s spotted. This station won’t provide him with enough cover.”

  “The permanent population never gets above a hundred, as far as I can tell,” said Adda. Iridian settled back in her chair to let Adda run the conversation, since she was in the mood to speak up today.

  “Hmm.” Sloane scrolled through a list on Tritheist’s comp, while Tritheist patiently held it out for Sloane’s view. The captain’s comp was already occupied with something else. “Luwum’s in prison, and so is Cheng, and Masipag’s in rehab again so she’s useless until she stabilizes one way or the other. Ocampo’s on a long assignment. Wichmann . . .”

  “In the Kuiper Belt,” Tritheist said. “By the time ve gets here, the op will be over.”

  “Angel?”

  “Blew up over Tethys a few months ago.”

  “Pity. I liked her.” Sloane sighed. “Well, Liu Kong’s been badgering me to send one of his people on these assignments. He thinks he’ll learn to replicate our success without our personnel. He can’t, of course. So we could ask Liu Kong to recommend an infiltrator. Alternatively, we could keep looking for somebody we trust to complete the groundwork, and take one of Oxia’s pilots to quiet Liu Kong.”

  That suggestion surprised Adda into maintaining eye contact with the captain. “Both of those would be essential personnel on this operation.”

  Sloane nodded in unconcerned contemplation. “They’ll be surrounded by people we trust. And it’s easier to come by a good pilot than a good infiltrator these days. The war was hard on human intelligence experts.” Rumors were still surfacing about all the spy versus spy that’d gone on. It wouldn’t surprise Iridian if the survivors had gotten out of the business afterward.

  Tritheist gently retrieved his wrist from Sloane’s grip. “I’ll make Oxia give us the best pilot they have.” The warm look Sloane gave him didn’t even require a smile to show what the captain thought of that response. Iridian didn’t see anything attractive about the lieutenant, but apparently competence fit the captain’s tastes well.

  Looking at Adda as she and Iridian crossed the dance floor, Iridian thought she and Sloane might have that in common. Adda was keeping up with everything Sloane threw at her. She spent more time than ever reading on her comp, in a workspace, or staring sightlessly in their suite with her mind a million klicks away. She’d let Iridian put whatever she wanted on their suite’s walls, change all the colors on the furnishings. Hell, she’d only noticed the rearranged furniture when she tripped over a table that’d been in a different place when she left her workspace generator than when she went in.

  And from the current faraway look in her eyes, Iridian didn’t even bother offering a romantic dinner. Adda would either stare at her food while thinking about something else, or decline and disappear into her workspace generator again. Iridian kissed Adda on the temple and reached for her running shoes. Now that they finally lived somewhere with a real gym, she’d worried that Adda would feel left out, but Adda never took her up on an offer to come along.

  * * *

  During Iridian’s evening run around the security personnel’s training gym track, in-house like so many of Sloane’s facilities were, Pel appeared in the doorway. She hadn’t been able to talk any of Sloane’s off-duty security people into another training run, so she could stop early. She finished her lap and stepped out of the sim track to stretch. “What’s up?”

  Today his new eyes were dark blue, with silver flecks in the iris. He could change them in seconds, and frequently did. The perfect and occasionally unnatural coloring, and the surfaces which appeared harder or more reflective than Iridian’s brain expected, were the only signs that the eyes had pseudo-organic components. She was still getting used to him looking directly at her when he spoke.

  Judging by the long pause while she bent at the waist to stretch her calves, he wasn’t used to looking at her, either. “I want to go on your next op,” he finally said.

  Iridian couldn’t blame him for that. An actual ship heist, like the stories all glamorized? Who wouldn’t want in? And she’d’ve been bored as hell sitting around a station for weeks. She finished the stretch while she formed an answer. “What would you do?”

  Pel shrugged. “I mean, I can be a good lookout now. And if you need in-flight entertainment?” He shrugged again. “I dunno, what do you need done?”

  “Something we have motion sensing cams for,” Iridian said as kindly as she could.

  There was a reason Pel came to her about this, and not Adda. As far as Iridian was concerned, keeping him happy took priority over keeping him safe. Adda had to feel the same way, or he would’ve left Barbary Station with the refugees, but she also worried about him too much. She’d’ve said no before she actually thought it over. After what’d happened to their mother, Iridian couldn’t blame her. Everybody the war had touched came away with a few idiosyncrasies, or they were psychopaths with a few idiosyncrasies to begin with.

  This op already required one new person: the second pilot. Iridian was working on Adda to get her to switch out Gavran as their primary pilot too. His ship was fine, but it’d be nice to fly with a pilot who’d use the regular mental enhancers formulated for pilots, instead of whatever Gavran had been on during the last op.

  Pel was . . . possibly not the best choice for the infiltrator the op still needed. He’d have a hell of a time fitting in on a station full of astronautical engineers, more because of his personality than his pseudo-organics. But he was already frowning down at the track like she’d told him that, and, damn it, everybody needed a first chance. “Okay, how about this: We need somebody to get into the station to plant an EMP mine, and also scope out the docking bay and make sure it’s shielded, or at least that it can be. I’ll get with one of Ogir’s people and teach you, just once. If you can walk me and Adda through it without help before you’d need to leave, and if Captain Sloane signs off on you, you’re in.”

 
; Pel grinned. “I can do that! Besides, I’m my own cheat sheet.” He shut his eyes for a second, and when he opened them bright yellow bloomed over dark blue irises while the previous color sank into the pupil.

  “I assume you’re seeing text now?” Iridian asked.

  “Transcript of what you just said.” He tapped his temple. “Just because it’s pretty doesn’t mean it’s all for show!”

  “All right,” Iridian had to admit, “that’s pretty cool.”

  * * *

  Two nights before his cutoff date for launch, he recited all the steps to placing and activating the EMP mine and sending Iridian an in-depth visual tour of the docking bay. If anything unexpected happened she’d troubleshoot remotely but, as she told Adda, “That shouldn’t be a problem. I’ve learned a lot about their setup, teaching it to Pel. He’ll need an ID, though.”

  “I’m getting him an internship.” Adda still sounded worried. “You know how he is. Once he starts talking he’s not going to stop. And all he’s going to talk about is that one corner of the docking bay management system.”

  “I mean, yeah, that’s a concern.” Iridian paced around their suite. “But tell him to act like he’s really good at finding and preventing electromagnetic interference generally, and that could actually fly, although it’d be . . . weird. If he wants to stay on Sloane’s payroll—”

  “Why should he?” Adda asked. “I can pay his way.”

  “You know he doesn’t want that,” Iridian said. “Let’s see what he can do. If nothing else, it’ll be nice to have someone along who cares about what happens to us beyond professional interest.”

  “Chi cares,” said Adda.

  “Hard to say,” Iridian said. “What do we really know about her? Not that I’m asking you to find dirt on her,” she said quickly, although Adda would’ve started searching the second Iridian suggested that Chi might not be trustworthy. “But right now, we’re just squad members who don’t piss her off. She’s been through a hell of a lot of those in her lifetime. They come and go. You don’t get attached to all of them, because then you miss them when they go. But you’re sending Pel on this op, yeah?”

 

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