Mutiny at Vesta

by R. E. Stearns

  “Okay!” Pel was already reading something on his comp instead of looking at her, but that’d at least keep him in one place, she hoped.

  The workspace generator was nearby, but the most Iridian could get out of Adda was that she was “in the middle of something,” with enough annoyed bite to it to make Iridian leave her alone. Adda usually knew what she was doing in generators, and she’d definitely be mission-focused.

  Iridian stomped back to the docking bay. Nothing was working out as Adda had planned, and once again it was the fucking AI and Oxia at fault.

  Even the docking bay door was jammed. She waved at the motion sensor, then slammed the override icon next to the door. Nothing happened. Inside the bay, a roaring, whining sound rose rapidly in volume, and the projected label above the door lit with BAY SEALED—LAUNCH IN PROGRESS.

  Iridian pounded on the shut door. “Pel, are you in there?”

  “Fuck, I got sidetracked!” He sounded panicked and afraid on the op channel. “I found someone who can open the prototype’s door, but she doesn’t want to do it.”

  Iridian slammed her fist against the wall beside the door. Without armor, it hurt. She had to concentrate for a second to be sure she’d subvocalize when she said Babe, get out here, the prototype’s revving its gods-damned engines!

  CHAPTER 17

  “It told me to. It told me to. It told me to. She told me to.” Text repeated 312 times in a message to Mary and Estevan Verney from their son London. 1 kilobyte

  In Adda’s workspace, Verney’s formerly bronze skin paled as the pilot stood in the trough of growing stone waves with the prototype’s intelligence behind him. The figure solidified from mostly shadow to crystalline blue-white ice in a human shape. It was feminine, but not strongly so. Although proportional, it was about half again as big as the average woman. It stood behind the Oxia pilot, its willowy arms wrapped around his chest and its silver hair flowing over his shoulders and around his hips.

  Outlines of Verney’s neural implants glowed through his skull in that same silver, a physical impossibility. That must’ve been the route the prototype had taken into his mind. The intelligence had somehow convinced him that he had to plug his implant net directly into a shipboard console in order to gain supervisory authority over it.

  With unfettered access to his neural implants, it’d only take one or two simple errors on Verney’s part to allow the intelligence unsafe levels of access to his mind, putting him in a state technically referred to as “influenced.” Any zombie intelligence could create the condition by combining brain stimulation through the implants with convincing communications regarding what should’ve been happening as part of pilot acceptance instead of what actually was happening. Applied along the lines of whatever the intelligence determined was an effective motivator for the targeted individual, intelligences could make someone like Verney do just about anything.

  This prototype intelligence had identified those motivations in a matter of minutes. Adda had worked with intelligences in early stages of development, under laboratory conditions. None of them had picked up her motivations as quickly as this one had apparently identified Verney’s. Even AegiSKADA, which had been developed with uniquely effective analysis capabilities, had observed her for days on end before it found a form that had a hope of swaying her.

  Perhaps it’d been a mistake for Adda to trust Oxia’s choice of pilots and trick the prototype’s usual one into leaving the station. A two-pilot transfer of supervision would’ve required the real test pilot’s cooperation, which would’ve added days to the schedule and been either monetarily or morally costly. However, it would’ve taken the pressure off Verney.

  “You’re under the copilot AI’s influence,” Adda told Verney, slowly and clearly. “Unplug your implants. Leave the ship. We’ll find someone to help you deprogram.” That someone would be Adda or Gavran, since they had the most training in getting an intelligence’s influence out of a person’s mind. Not that they had a lot of it, or the months of isolation from AI that it’d take to cure Verney completely.

  If Verney had followed her instructions, he would’ve disappeared from the workspace, but his figure remained and soundlessly said, “The captain will kill me.” The prototype’s intelligence stroked a perfect crystal hand down his cheek.

  Adda willed the headache out of her skull, which would ease it in the workspace, for a while. “Captain Sloane absolutely will not. Verney,” she added as her thread coiled around a spool in her hand with his name on the end. “We need you.” Best practices indicated a recently controlled pilot should be physically separated from the controlling ship for around sixty days once freed. Maybe Gavran would let him fly the Mayhem, although Adda wouldn’t blame him if he didn’t. “We brought you because we need you. But we need you, not you with Ermine in your head. It’s an AI. Anything human about it is its attempt to control you. There is no backup pilot. Please leave the ship.”

  “Too hot,” the Oxia pilot mouthed. “I’m too hot. It’s so hot . . .” His face was going from white to red. Behind him and over his head, Ermine’s possessive smile made Adda shiver as the implant outlines in his skull flared. And was the temperature increase the pilot was describing real, or an illusion Ermine created in Verney’s mind?

  “Ermine!” Adda pressed a strong intentional command into the workspace, demanding that the intelligence speak with her. Now that it had a pilot under its control, she had nothing it wanted. It ignored her. That was better than it digging into her mind to influence her too, but to save Verney she had to get through to at least one of them.

  Adda let her mind fall out of the workspace, settling back in the soundproofed generator. She wobbled when she stood. After a few steps, she felt stable enough to run.

  Iridian, Captain Sloane, and Pel stood at the observation deck window, watching the prototype ship. The window projection flickered in rhythm with the prototype’s engines. Adda had seen pictures of it, but in person and turned on it looked even stranger than it had in a miniaturized projection. Four half domes made of interlocking nanofiber hexagons caught the eye first, two on each side, which schematics indicated supplemented both the power and comm systems. It was longer than any ship she’d seen in a docking bay, and most of it appeared to be engines. Anyway, Captain Sloane and Tritheist were the ship experts. They were counting on her to handle the AIs and personnel.

  Iridian was staring wide-eyed at status reports scrolling down the right side of the projection. The number beside the uppercase C for interior temperature caught Adda’s eye. “Fifty degrees? That can’t be right.”

  “It’s been rising for the past few minutes,” Iridian said.

  “The MO beside the temp control system stands for ‘manually overridden,’ ” Captain Sloane said. “The heater’s on, the engines are engaged, and . . .” The captain paused the status report feed by passing a finger through the projection. “The fins are retracted.”

  “Verney did that?” Adda asked.

  “So it appears,” said Sloane.

  “I tried to get the intelligence’s attention, but it’s satisfied with what it already has,” Adda said. “Is the EMP ready?”

  “Yeah,” said Pel. “I did everything you said to.”

  Adda glanced at Iridian. “Is this room shielded? Because we’re going to need a bigger pulse than I originally planned for.”

  “Should be. The maintenance records are pretty vague.”

  “And the docking bay’s the same?” Adda asked.

  “Yeah.”

  So activating the EMP wouldn’t shut the ship down while it was in the docking bay. “Is it actually leaving, or is it just using the engines to keep us away from it? How can we tell?”

  Iridian scrolled through the projected status reports. “Ah, come on, there’s a checklist for everything,” she muttered. If it were really fifty degrees Celsius inside the prototype’s cabin, then the Oxia pilot had a matter of minutes before heatstroke set in.

  “Gavran,” Captai
n Sloane said over the operations channel. “We need to determine whether our prototype is leaving the station or testing its engines, and Verney is unable to communicate that. Suggestions?”

  “Hard to say. Without a takeoff checklist I can’t tell.” Gavran sounded distressed that this was the best he could offer. If Adda had time to be upset, she’d probably feel the same herself. “Is thrust increasing, or is thrust stable?”

  “Stable,” said Captain Sloane.

  “Launch trajectory transmitted? Repeat—”

  “I heard you, I’m looking,” Iridian snapped. “Yeah, one was sent about three minutes ago. A stationspace buoy was in the way . . . and it sent an updated one sixteen seconds ago.”

  “My guess is that it’s taking off,” Gavran said. “Only a guess about the takeoff, though.” Iridian was wrong. Adda was never going to get used to that repetition.

  On the projected observation window, the ship swiveled its engines to face the landing pad and lifted off of it. It sailed smoothly out of the bay, engines that were too bright to look at swiveling to keep it from running into the rotating station on its way out.

  The captain asked, “Are you out of range, Gavran?” over the operation channel.

  This was why Adda had talked Gavran into accepting enough operational details to make decisions in an emergency. “Yeah, fire away!” he said over the operation channel.

  Adda subvocalized the comp command to trigger an incredible amount of electronics damage, as well as stopping the prototype.

  “Uh, did you send it, Sissy?” Pel’s brightly colored eyes searched the room and the empty docking bay for a reaction.

  Iridian smiled grimly and gripped one of those handholds built so neatly into the wall that Adda would’ve overlooked it. “Give it a minute.”

  Something crackled loudly somewhere in the station below them. The lights went out. Even if the electronics in the docking bay and observation deck weren’t fried, the generator powering them would’ve shut down. The silence was startling.

  It was a bigger pulse than she’d originally planned for, all right. And it was a bigger pulse than they’d needed. If it was as big as she thought, it would’ve wiped out most of the major systems on the station, and possibly the Apparition and Mayhem as well. At least it almost certainly hit the prototype ship they were after. “Pel,” she said, and he flinched even though Adda was doing her best to remain calm instead of getting angry at him. “Could you show Iridian the station schematics and point out where you planted the EMP mine?”

  He shrugged and showed Iridian on his comp. Iridian’s loud and mostly non-English response translated into something nasty about turtle eggs and pubic hair. Captain Sloane peered over Pel’s shoulder at the comp and scowled. “I believe we’ve knocked the station’s engines offline.” The station management AI, if it’d survived, wouldn’t be able to correct the station’s spin. It’d eventually start wobbling and slowing down, which would cause havoc with the contents and people inside.

  Iridian gave a sharp and angry nod. “If I were them I’d call for ITA help, now, on whatever comps and buoys survived.”

  “They already sent a message about the environmental emergency,” said Adda. “ITA’s on its way.”

  “I thought it was the right place!” Pel said. “I mean, where I put it looks exactly the same as the right place.”

  Adda quickly sifted through signal and comm monitors on her comp, looking for the thread of constant signals that had been coming from the station control room. If the station management intelligence were still operating, then there should’ve been a spike in control signal volume in response to the EMP damage. Her control signal tracker was listening, but there were no signals to overhear. “Is anybody getting anything on the feeds that suggest that the station intelligence is still operational?”

  After a few seconds of silence while everybody failed to find evidence of active station management on their comps, Captain Sloane said, “From here on we’re losing healthy atmo, lads and lasses.”

  The station was now accumulating carbon dioxide instead of filtering it. Environmental conditions would deteriorate until the whole station was unlivable. Although Adda had a timetable that accounted for this eventuality, the EMP shouldn’t have taken out the station’s intelligence. She set a calculation running to estimate whether the breathable air was likely to run out before either the local nannite cultures restored essential equipment or the ITA rescue ship arrived.

  “The Apparition’s ship-to-ship boarding capabilities rival the Mayhem’s,” Captain Sloane said.

  That was Adda’s assessment as well, but she had other intelligences to worry about. “The lab with the workspace generator should have been shielded too. If the Apparition stayed far enough away from the station to avoid the EMP, then I’ll ask from there.”

  The workspace generator had a battery too. The new workspace was unsettlingly similar to the Mayhem’s main cabin, but with the colors all turned ultra bright and her vision blurring at the edges. The cabin seemed to extend itself when she wasn’t looking, and contracted to its normal size when she focused on a particular part of it.

  The Apparition appeared in a ragged hole in the not-Mayhem’s ceiling as soon as she thought of it. Even in her workspace, the Apparition’s intelligence presented itself as a ship. The workspace figure was a newer version of itself, with all of its original parts and a bright white scannable designator on its side where she’d never seen one before. It was still the same type that the intelligence flew in reality.

  Was that her construction, or did it choose that itself? She would’ve had to look up what the NEU would print on its warships, and she didn’t recall doing that, but she also had no evidence that what was printed on the workspace version of the Apparition was correct.

  Whatever the reason for its appearance, she had work for it to do. “Please let us board. We need you to take us to the ship drifting near the station.”

  The Apparition hung still in the space above the Mayhem’s cabin. She couldn’t tell how this representation of it related to the ship’s physical location or movement.

  Maybe it hadn’t understood her. She formed her intention around docking. The details of the process built around her, so far as she understood them, and so far as they applied to her aim of getting Sloane’s crew onboard. The intelligence should grasp this intuitively.

  “How many?” The agendered voice boomed through the Mayhem’s cabin. The walls bulged and shook with it. The passenger couches rattled.

  Adda frowned. “Allow all of Sloane’s crew in Jōju Station . . .” Here she paused to generate images of each of them in the workspace. “Allow all of us onboard.”

  “You. And Iridian Nassir.”

  It’d carried more people during their attack on the Ann Sabina, and it’d refused to carry anyone but her and Iridian on Barbary Station. She wasn’t seeing the pattern in who it decided to bring where when, and the Oxia pilot wouldn’t survive through a debate. He’d also be in no condition to fight them once they boarded, should the prototype’s intelligence convince him to try. “Fine. Please dock here. Carefully. There are people in jumpsuits floating outside the station.” She sent it the docking bay designation in both numbers and ticks from station north. Perhaps it would recognize the ticks from its time on Barbary, which was also a ring station.

  She slid out of the generator and used her station map to find the prototype’s docking bay, which turned out to be next door to the lab. While she walked, she addressed Captain Sloane and the others on the operation channel. “The Apparition only wants to accept me and Iridian.”

  Sloane sighed. “Back to this, are we? We’ll board the Mayhem and meet later.”

  “Acknowledged, Captain, on my way in,” said Gavran. “Expecting to dock in ten minutes, ten minutes mark.”

  “Wait, how is that fair?” Pel demanded. “Adda and Iridian had to deal with the last messed-up AI by themselves too. Why should they have to do it again?”

&n
bsp; Adda turned a corner and nearly ran into Captain Sloane, leading the rest of the crew away from the prototype’s docking bay. She hurried to Iridian’s side. “It specifically asked for us,” Adda said. “If we wait, the Oxia pilot could die.”

  “See you later, Pel Mel.” Iridian sort of patted and grabbed his shoulder at the same time as she passed him, heading toward a different corridor than Adda would have picked to get to the Apparition’s dock.

  Adda hurried after Iridian. “We’ll be on comms,” she reminded Pel over her shoulder.

  The terminal outside the Apparition’s dock was empty, and they raced through it to the hallway beyond Apparition’s missile bay. Iridian walked through it shield-first like she expected something to jump out at her. When nothing did, she collapsed the shield and said, “Let’s get stabilized in here. I’m not counting on the Apparition waiting long before it takes off.”

  The light from their comps illuminated the open bridge door down the long hallway from the missile bay. The other time Adda had been in the Apparition, the bridge door had been locked. “I need to plug in, but the bridge may be too small for both of us.”

  “Why do you need to plug in?” Iridian asked while she examined the wall beside the bridge door. “Your intermediary won’t have time to protect you from it if the connection’s that fast, yeah? The Apparition knows its business.”

  “I want to see if I can get it to talk to the prototype on the way. Getting it to solve its own temperature problem before we get there could save the pilot, and it’ll make things easier for us if we do have to board.”

  Iridian turned to give Adda a confused and alarmed frown. “I thought we weren’t introducing the awakened gods-damned intelligences to the prototype’s copilot.”

  Adda raised an eyebrow at her. “First, if the Apparition wants to talk to it, then they’re already talking. We can’t stop an awakened intelligence from doing anything for long. Second, if the prototype’s intelligence won’t listen to me, it may listen to the Apparition. Intelligence communication hygiene is not worth Verney’s life, correct?” She didn’t need confirmation on that point, but she’d feel more confident if Iridian reached the same conclusion Adda had.