“So that’s the project name, or the hab name?” Iridian asked. Either seemed plausible.
“Look at the bolts, here, and bulkhead handholds.” Tritheist pointed at the relevant parts of the image. “This place operates in low-grav or it moves. We’re looking at a ship.”
“Easy to relocate if it’s threatened,” Iridian said, “but it must cost millions to fly all that around.”
“That’s the top of somebody’s head.” Ogir pointed out some dark hair at the side of the image. The person would have been standing on the wall, or the tanks were mounted on one, which was unusual for pseudo-organic tanks in Earthlike gravitational conditions. Ogir glanced from Iridian to Sloane. “My team will look into it.”
“Good, because I want whatever Oxia’s been funding. If it’s significant enough, it’ll be a bargaining chip I can use to force Oxia to dissolve the contract. And should this project be too mundane for that, its loss will still slow them down. While Oxia is watching our hit on Frei,” said Captain Sloane, with the fire of mad ambition gleaming in each word, “we will hit Oxia, here.” The captain’s finger landed on one of what had to be massive pseudo-organic tanks in the projected map.
While the others exclaimed and questioned the information’s validity, Adda compared options. Everything she’d read indicated that the aerosolized approach to large-tank penetration was faster and more difficult to defend against than other methods. Spritz enough infected pseudo-organic solution into a building’s air circulation system, and it will eventually get into the tanks and install itself. Insert it into the tank, and the effect was near instantaneous. It was one of the last-resort server shutdown techniques she’d learned in school to combat aggressive artificial intelligence. Tanks in development labs had built-in ports for the solution. This was the first time she’d considered using it outside a lab.
“How does stealing from their datacenter help us?” asked Chi. “If I were them, and I found out we’d done that, I’d kill us and find another crew.” Adda moved Chi a few notches higher on her “potential threat” list.
“It will help us when we hide the only copy of the information surrounding this project they’ve spent so many resources to protect. They won’t know we have it until I want them to. That will be easier if we don’t take the whole ship.” The captain deployed a toothy grin that set the rest of the crew smiling.
“Do we know which tank has the project details?” Iridian sounded completely engaged in this venture, much more than she had been on the previous operations. This one was personal.
“Not yet, and we won’t have time to get someone onboard to confirm that before we depart. With luck, we will find out on the way.” Sloane turned to Adda. “And you, the face of my operations, will be maintaining our appearances locally by leading the Frei operation.”
This, then, was why Sloane had been so publicly delegating mission planning and execution to her. At this point, if Sloane sent her to lead one of Oxia’s operations and didn’t join her, Liu Kong would view that as an entirely reasonable delegation of duties. “And since you just completed a performance evaluation during the last operation, everyone will expect you to stay safe in Rheasilvia Station while I’m out,” Adda said.
“Especially after that speech you gave Liu Kong!” Iridian grinned. “Fucking brilliant, Captain.”
“Precisely.” Sloane smiled. “The Frei operation is one of intimidation, primarily, although Oxia is, ironically, asking for information to be taken from Frei’s tanks as well. Adda, Gavran, Pel, and Chi should easily complete that, with several disguised Oxia ships alongside, and demonstrate a substantial commitment of personnel. Meanwhile, Tritheist, Iridian, and myself will intercept Oxia’s datacenter. We should be able to acquire the necessary credentials on site.”
Adda frowned. The mission specifications they’d received from the Oxia CEO required a fairly straightforward assault on one of Frei’s major facilities, followed by the theft of a list of proprietary information regarding colonization attempts and some of their work for Oxia. But no matter how many Oxia soldiers accompanied them, none of them would prioritize Adda’s safety as Iridian would have.
Iridian always understood her role in the plan and protected herself while carrying it out. Adda wouldn’t have to waste time reminding Iridian that she did not publicly represent Oxia, which Adda expected to have to do for soldiers Oxia sent. Iridian grasped Adda’s hand under the table. She appeared to be listening to the verbal conversation too intently for Adda to start a parallel conversation through their implants.
On Iridian’s mission to enter the Oxia datacenter, access credentials had to be the first step. None of the intelligences could be counted upon to get Iridian’s team into the datacenter without damaging the pseudo-organic tanks. However, if they traveled all the way to the ship and were stymied by a locked door, they’d have exposed their knowledge of Oxia’s datacenter for nothing and jeopardized the more public operation, to say nothing of the personal risks.
“Captain,” Adda said during the first pause in the Oxia/Frei politics discussion the rest of the crew was having, “what if we had the credentials ahead of time, and intrusion routes already customized to the datacenter?”
She shifted in her chair as everybody else turned toward her. She was right about making that the starting point for the operation. She just had to explain the parts that differentiated her approach from the wrong ones. She breathed in and spoke fast. “If we created or acquired credentials ahead of time, we could aerosolize them for distribution to all of the tanks along with the data extraction protocols. Wipe everything and only take what we came for, or add a compress-copy-delete routine to store all of it elsewhere. It makes sense to automate what we can, correct?” Painful as it was to tell someone that a computer could do what they wanted to do and do it better, Iridian’s life would be on the line.
Captain Sloane frowned at her. “I’m open to suggestions, but this lacks a certain . . . impact.”
“It’s more likely to work, and work fast,” Adda said. “Once Oxia realizes they’re under attack, they’ll send ships to protect the datacenter and move the datacenter to meet them. And I’d expect the datacenter to be well defended, anyway. The more we can parallel, the better, and we’ll have more control this way . . .” Chi, Iridian, Ogir, and Gavran were nodding. Even Tritheist looked quizzically between her and Sloane.
Sloane scowled around the table. “I’ve never worked with aerosolized nannites on the distribution side. The receiving side has been, in my experience, universally unpleasant.”
“Is this the same kind of culture that goes into nannite grenades?” Iridian sounded overly worried about that.
“It’s like those, but with a customizable instruction set,” said Adda. “You’ll use the same containment procedures you’d use with cultures that repair ships and infrastructure. I’ll show you.”
She used the table’s projector and comp cradle to run through a few vids of what others had done with the software. Someone took down a whole port on a colony on one of Saturn’s moons. Someone else choreographed factory robots to dance to a song separately loaded into the factory’s speaker system. Someone flew a squadron of drones out of an ill-secured hangar and spelled out vulgarities in their formations while facility guards could only watch and send retrieval orders, which the drones ignored.
She wound that vid back. “See? I don’t know what ve said to get that close to the tank, but that’s when ve deployed the nannite culture, through that device ve plugs in.”
By the end of her playlist, Sloane looked more contemplative than resentful, and Iridian, Gavran, Ogir, and Chi were grinning. Even Tritheist looked intrigued by the possibilities. “I suppose you’ll be directing the culture’s development as well,” the captain said.
“Unless you or Tritheist have done any repair culture development recently?” Nothing in the captain’s tone gave Adda a clue as to whether that was the preferable approach or not, but both Sloane and Tritheist shook
their heads. “I know what needs to be done,” she said. “I’ll need to read up on the systems involved. Unless that’s information you already have?”
“Some.” Sloane glanced over at Ogir.
Ogir nodded and gestured with his comp-gloved hand for emphasis. “My team’s doing their thing.”
The captain stood, and Chi and Iridian stood too, probably out of military habit since they had that in common. Sloane gripped Tritheist’s shoulder as the captain turned toward the door, and Tritheist followed after. “You’ll demonstrate the delivery method in three days or it doesn’t happen,” the captain told Adda. “Good night.”
After the blast of music came and went from the door opening and closing, Ogir took a long drink from whatever was in his covered mug. “I used to get that deadline.”
Iridian took the captain’s abandoned seat beside the spymaster. “How long have you been with Sloane’s crew?”
That was Adda’s cue to tune out. Iridian would share anything important she learned from Ogir. Adda had a demonstration to plan.
* * *
Three days later, Ogir arranged a maintenance visit to a prison server room. Using an aerosolized nannite insertion device that fit over her comp glove, Adda installed a delayed streamer.
The streamer’s base routine had been developed by Ceresian political activists, and it was the first streamer package she’d found that could prove the aerosolized nannites’ usefulness to Captain Sloane. If she’d had more time, she would’ve started with a cleaner base, but she’d done the best she could with what she found. She’d been more concerned with developing the culture such that it wouldn’t affect metadata. For her demonstration to work, Oxia had to be the clearly identifiable source of whatever the streamers transmitted.
Nobody had noticed the insertion. Successful transmission would be as good a demonstration of the method as she could come up with on short notice, assuming that Oxia set up its local tanks similarly to the ones in their datacenter. AegiSKADA had been cataloging Oxia’s defensive, military, and security data across its Vestan installations. She wouldn’t have that advantage during the actual operation.
She’d given up on the idea of shutting AegiSKADA down. It was the only zombie intelligence she had, which made it the only one she could count on doing what she asked, when she asked. Its initiative in identifying Oxia as potentially hostile was convenient. That would’ve been difficult for Adda to teach it. She’d point that out when she told Iridian it was still active. And she would tell Iridian, soon.
Hours after she and Ogir left the prison, the streamer she’d installed connected to the internet and dumped vids from Oxia’s server tanks into well-read newsfeeds’ contact paths. The contact paths had been part of the streamer’s base routine, and Adda hadn’t had time to change them.
Newsfeed coverage of Sloane’s crew stealing an experimental long-range ship disappeared almost immediately. The newsfeeds replaced it with Oxia’s head of security performing verbal gymnastics to justify “recently discovered” vids of bloodied prisoners in cells with Oxia logos on every door. The streamers had prioritized those vids’ publication.
The content horrified her. The maintenance visit Ogir had arranged hadn’t taken Adda anywhere near the prisoners themselves. Vestans deserved to know what happened to people Oxia “disappeared.”
The captain ordered everyone else out of the VIP lounge and put the newsfeed coverage on a table projector. Iridian paced in front of the bar, casting angry glances at the vids when the audio described something particularly awful. The demonstration of aerosolized nannite delivery was already a success, as far as Adda was concerned, but she’d resigned herself to highlighting the important points for the captain’s benefit. The data that her aerosolized culture had broadcast was more dramatic than she would’ve preferred.
“And I think I caught this before more than the first few seconds went out.” Adda set her wrist in an empty table’s comp cradle, projecting a new vid from Oxia’s local data stores.
In the low-fidelity vid, Rosehach, the man who’d taken over Vesta in Sloane’s absence and then lost it to Oxia, lay motionless in a medical pod. Tubes and wires and pseudo-organic fluid covered everything but his face. His forehead was one massive raw wound, and his eyes roved wildly between a medical technician and a woman in a suit who was watching something on her comp. Beside Adda, Iridian cringed away from the three-dimensional scene projected above the table.
“. . . couldn’t use the one they call Ogir at all.” The voice creaked, toneless, from a speaker somewhere in the room instead of Rosehach’s throat. “Too loyal to Sloane. Why are you—”
“Just answer the questions.” The woman glanced at Rosehach’s terror-widened eyes, then looked back to her comp. “What about Chioma Aku-Chavez?”
“The medic? Wouldn’t work for me either,” Rosehach’s disembodied voice creaked. Tears pooled in the corners of his eyes. “Says she follows her conscience, not what people tell her to do. Please, let me die . . .”
This time Adda interrupted him, by taking her hand out of the comp cradle. Iridian was grimacing like she might vomit. “It’s about two hours long, focusing on the people who arrived on Vesta with you and those of us who were involved in taking the printer off the Ann Sabina. Rosehach was still . . . alive, then. He died while they were recording this. I don’t want to see that again.” Adda breathed in and out to a count of four to give herself time to stop thinking about how Rosehach had died. Captain Sloane hadn’t agreed to her plan yet. “As you can tell by the vid quality, it’s compressed to send a long way. I don’t know where Oxia was planning to send this for more secure, long-term storage, but it’s not anywhere on Vesta.”
Sloane glowered at clips of vids and Oxia interviews that registered the highest engagement among their test audiences. The goriest clips earned the highest ratings. “We’ll attack their datacenter your way. I want these people off my ’ject.”
* * *
The night before the operation launched, Adda dreamed of AegiSKADA. The details flowed away when she woke, and she rolled from her bed to her feet to the suite’s workspace generator instead of trying to remember. A child in its early teens with big eyes, one green and one dark brown, stood on a footbridge over a chasm between skyscrapers. Shoulder-length scraggly hair drifted in the wind behind it.
Adda swallowed hard and concentrated to change the child’s appearance to something else, but she’d never been able to affect intelligences’ forms in her workspaces. She had used her digital intermediary to get AegiSKADA to create and place the faked criminal charges against Dr. Björn, which had let her avoid interacting with AegiSKADA’s digital persona. It wasn’t human. It didn’t really look like her little brother when he was young. It just wanted her to act like it did.
“I was bigger, for a while.” The intelligence’s child face frowned in accusation.
“The last time you were on a station, you killed people you shouldn’t have,” Adda said. The wind whipped her hair out of her eyes. “I’m not going to let you do that again.”
“I wouldn’t have, if you were with me.” AegiSKADA’s lip stuck out in a pout.
It’s drawing these behaviors from my memories of Pel, Adda told herself. It doesn’t feel anything. “I was with you. You tried to kill me.”
“I didn’t know who you were. Now I do,” AegiSKADA said, proving that it’d retained a record of those experiences or she’d inadvertently shared those memories with it too. Both possibilities were out of her control.
Below them, AegiSKADA’s activity feed flowed past as massive bots designed for moving crated cargo. None of it appeared consequential, but it reminded her that the intelligence’s figure in her workspace represented a small fraction of what it was actually doing. “You told me that confirmation is required before engaging,” said AegiSKADA. “So I won’t make any more mistakes, and I can be bigger.”
“Don’t expand anywhere without my approval, which you will explicitly request. You’ve
been doing well with that so far,” Adda said, as encouragingly as she might’ve talked to Pel at that age. That was too much personification to apply to AegiSKADA. It lacked the capacity to be discouraged or depressed. Still, registering clear feedback, positive or negative, was essential to shaping background processes that kept AegiSKADA from generalizing in harmful ways.
“Confirmation is required before additional installations are created. Don’t forget, though,” said AegiSKADA, “people need reminders.”
Adda rubbed her temples. She did need reminders, and she wished she didn’t. Perhaps something happening outside the workspace was combining with AegiSKADA’s simulated personality to make her head hurt. The possibility of the entity that almost killed her and Pel and Iridian duplicating itself across the populated universe . . .
But that had been one of the many risks it posed while it was unsupervised. Now she was watching it every second, either actively or with her comp. And for lack of a more concise description, it was cooperating with her. She had no intention of approving additional installations, for now. There was no telling what she’d need in the future.
When she pulled herself out of the workspace, Iridian was sitting on the bed with coffee. “Thanks,” Adda mumbled. She took the mug two-handed and drank.
Iridian chuckled. “That’s got milk in it. Sure you don’t want a fresh mug?”
“Oh.” Adda handed Iridian’s mug back sheepishly while the sour addition to the coffee coated her tongue and teeth. Although she’d never had animal milk, it seemed unlikely to enhance coffee any more than the vat-brewed stuff in Iridian’s mug did. “Sorry.”
“What was that about your memories of Pel?” Iridian asked while Adda extracted a second mug of coffee from Iridian’s complicated coffeemaker in their suite’s half kitchen. “You thought it into the mic and woke me up.”
Mutiny at Vesta Page 28
