“Sorry,” Adda said again. “I had a running process I had to check on, and the workspace . . . It works most efficiently with what’s already in my head.”
She could tell Iridian about AegiSKADA, now, while nobody’s lives were at stake. But the idea made her head hurt, a lot, after she’d just finished picking her way through the minefield that was AegiSKADA. She took two gulps of hot coffee, hoping that the caffeine would help. Iridian would tell her to shut it down. Iridian would throw away the one zombie intelligence at their disposal, and the weeks of development work Adda had put into it. And she’d do it because, in a completely different context, it had caused harm. AegiSKADA was a fantastically valuable tool. It’d be ridiculous to waste it.
If she didn’t tell Iridian about AegiSKADA, she’d have to . . . not lie, exactly; compartmentalize. Since she was already communicating, off and on, with three other intelligences, lying about one to the love of her life was an influence risk.
But she’d always acted differently around Iridian than she did around anybody else. She set down her mug, wrapped Iridian in her arms, and enjoyed Iridian’s pleased and surprised murmur and gentle kisses. Cuddling really shouldn’t have been a pleasant surprise for Iridian. Adda should remember to do it more often, like they had before they’d come to Vesta. The monitoring system would alert her if AegiSKADA did anything unwarranted. The point of the system was that the supervisor didn’t have to think about the intelligence twenty-four hours a day. That would work.
Just for now.
CHAPTER 20
Test 03 unsuccessful, will not repeat
When they had first arrived at Rheasilvia Station, Iridian had imagined spending every mission worrying about having Adda beside her, protecting her instead of doing whatever she’d been paid to do. Now that they were on separate ops, Iridian would miss Adda’s quiet presence and the certainty that whatever went wrong, Adda would find a way to make it right. Adda had kept up with every twist and turn that’d been thrown at them on these ops. She didn’t need as much protection as Iridian had thought, but she was also in her workspace for most of every day. After they had whatever Oxia was hiding in its datacenter, Iridian would talk to her about spending more time together.
Upon Adda’s suggestion, they’d switched the ships involved and rearranged the crew. That put Iridian, Sloane, and Tritheist aboard the Casey Mire Mire, spending two weeks catching up to the ship that carried Oxia’s secured servers. Adda would be assaulting a dangerous megacorporate facility with a small army and exclusively zombie AI copilots. As far as anyone could tell, the Apparition and the Coin would be sitting this op out in the Rheasilvia docks.
Somehow, Adda had managed to set up an assault on the Frei facility that’d actually be safer than what Iridian, Sloane, and Tritheist would be doing on Oxia’s datacenter ship. Aside from their in-person approach, the gods-damned awakened AI they’d be using to get there would be their only means of extraction after they had everything they could get on Oxia’s secret project.
Amazingly, Adda said that the Casey was going along with her plan. It must’ve agreed to use the fake ID she found for it, and submitted to an upgrade of its sensor-scrambling hull so it wouldn’t look like the ship returning Sloane to Vesta. That’d get it out of Rheasilvia stationspace with minimal notice, while a decoy sat in its usual dock. As an easily concealable ship with a lot more tech than anybody expected, it was a decent choice for Captain Sloane’s part of the op.
The Casey was leaving Rheasilvia before the Frei assault team, and it’d be flying slower. Its longer travel time would look more like average ship traffic, not the most famous pirate outfit in known space on its way to a new target. If Adda’s timing worked out the way she said it would, Captain Sloane’s team would hit the Oxia datacenter at about the same time Adda’s team hit Frei.
Weeks in isolation with an AI designed for copiloting and espionage support would be tricky enough. Weeks with two officers in the equivalent of a tiny apartment run by awakened AI would be . . . awkward. And Adda would be millions of klicks away. It was the farthest the two of them had been apart since they’d met.
On launch day, Iridian disguised herself for Oxia’s cams with long sleeves, gloves, and a wig a bit like Pel’s dark curly hair. This anonymous terminal’s cam would record somebody who didn’t look much like her. Captain Sloane and Oxia had bribed the Vestan ITA reps into impotence, but their cams were always watching. They’d figure out who she was if they looked closely enough. With luck, she, Sloane, and Tritheist would be well out of stationspace by that time.
She caught herself staring at the Casey’s fake name above the terminal airlock with dread tying her stomach muscles in knots, and distracted herself by squeezing Adda into a tighter hug. “Oof,” Adda said. She smiled the warm, open-lipped smile that Iridian loved. “I really think it’s going to be fine,” said Adda. “I can’t think of any more potential problems. There are some things that are out of our control, but . . .” Adda shrugged as much as Iridian’s arm around her shoulders allowed.
“Of course it’ll be fine.” Iridian was definitely not trying to convince herself of that. She returned her gaze to the Casey’s passthrough door.
Adda looked around the terminal and subvocalized, I got some pings on my comp that suggest there are listening devices in here. Sloane’s dock security could have missed mics in this terminal too.
Or they’re Captain Sloane’s mics, Iridian thought at her.
Adda stepped away from Iridian and hid her hands behind her. “Go on. Don’t keep people waiting.” The captain and Tritheist, also disguised as Karpe relatives Adda and Pel might conceivably have been hosting, had already boarded.
Iridian’s shield had dug calluses into the knuckles on her thumb, which rasped slightly against Adda’s soft cheek under Iridian’s caress. “I love you.”
“I love you too.” Adda met Iridian’s eyes when she said it, possibly the first time all morning that she’d looked up from her comp, and damn, she was lovely. It’d been a while since they’d just looked at each other that way, and Iridian couldn’t help but tilt Adda’s chin up to kiss her, cam footage be damned.
“Go on now.” Adda sounded a bit breathless. “You have to be out of the dock by 06:40, or you’ll have to wait until that freighter and its escort come in.” Adda had a schedule to keep, and a reason for everything. Iridian walked through the Casey’s passthrough grinning.
The ship took off before she was strapped in for the ride, well before Adda’s 06:40 launch time, like it had a schedule of its own. Iridian would be carrying those bruises for a while. In the engine room beneath the main cabin, the extra solid state storage unit she’d helped Tritheist and a well-paid dock systems tech install clanked once as it resettled, and then stayed as still as they’d hoped it’d stay.
Iridian would spend as much of this trip as possible practicing for her part of the op. The Oxia installation ran in micrograv and the Casey would maintain the lower end of healthy grav, so she wanted to be extra sure she had the muscle memory when she needed it in the datacenter. When she caught herself obsessing about Adda’s safety, she did extra reps of what she was training on.
* * *
The first night out, Captain Sloane caught Iridian idly staring at the door to the Casey’s single residential cabin from her position at console as the nominal pilot. The captain grinned. “You could join us.” Captain Sloane’s appraising gaze seemed to reassess every centimeter of her while her eyes widened in a way that couldn’t possibly have been attractive. “We’d make you much more comfortable than the pilot’s chair can.”
That image warmed her in several embarrassing places. Sloane had none of the voluptuous curves Iridian preferred in her partners, and nothing about the captain or Tritheist created the put-your-hands-on-that urge she felt around Adda. But the pirate hero of populated space was asking her to bed. She could find a way to make that work. And from the sounds everyone had heard coming from the captain’s stateroom on Barbary,
Sloane could make it work for Iridian, too.
Iridian’s message asking Adda how she’d feel about that was half composed for asynchronous transmission when Tritheist appeared in the cabin doorway. His leaf-shaped beard, the same length as the black hair behind his receding hairline, perfectly framed his frown. He met her eyes, gritted his teeth, and fought for an apathetic expression that he didn’t really manage.
If Tritheist was enjoying being Sloane’s one and only, Iridian wouldn’t mess that up just for fun. She was already watching out for backstabbing AI. She didn’t need to watch for a backstabbing officer too. Besides, she felt sorry for the guy. “I’m flattered, but no thanks, Captain,” Iridian said as politely as she knew how. “Just married and all.” She twisted the ring on her finger for emphasis. It was months ago, come to that, but it still felt like a new experience.
“Of course.” Captain Sloane’s smile looked genuine, although the frustrated narrowing of the eyes made Iridian wonder what the captain had been hoping to do in addition to making the trip more interesting. Sex with officers was rarely just sex. “The door’s unlocked, if you change your mind.”
Tritheist looked at the floor, teeth still clenched. If Iridian wanted wider variety in bed, she’d’ve discussed that with Adda before asking around. After this op, when more than a cabin door separated her from the officers, she’d talk to Adda about variety. She didn’t want to see Tritheist’s expression on Adda’s face, ever. Now that she was thinking about romantic guests, Chi and Ogir and several of Sloane’s HQ security personnel were attractive in their own ways . . .
Iridian slept in the pilot’s seat, strapped in loosely to avoid touching any of the Casey’s console controls. The officers were only inordinately loud on the first night. Iridian printed earplugs anyway. She had enough reminders of what she was missing when she and Adda were apart.
* * *
Five days after the Casey left Vesta, and after Iridian had gotten used to sleeping upright and only woke to the muffled whine of thermal fins raising and lowering to regulate internal temperature, Adda’s team launched toward Frei Interplanetary’s AI development facility. Pel was shadowing Ogir for this op, and the two of them had left for the Frei facility the previous week. A few of Ogir’s drones had checked out the Oxia datacenter as well, too far away for their scouting to look intentional.
Instead of a single op channel, this mission required two. The one she, Sloane, and Tritheist used was called V4V on her channel list. “Vesta for Vestans,” Captain Sloane explained. “To remind us that we’re not the only ones benefiting by freeing Vesta from Oxia.” Adda’s team would go by XK on the comms. The captain hadn’t offered an explanation of that one, but Tritheist had chuckled like it meant something to him.
Iridian had nodded and kept her mouth shut. Her next message to Adda included a question about the names, which she sent in text over a private channel: “Were Vestans really better off when Sloane’s crew was running the ’ject?” Once she got the comp’s send confirmation, she switched to a game that’d keep her busy during the wait for Adda’s reply. The distance between the two of them meant that it’d be a while before she heard back.
Almost twenty minutes later, Adda’s recorded audio response was, “Yes. I read up on it. Economy was stronger, the contracts were fairer to workers, and it was safer and less expensive to travel through a Vestan port than the Ceres one. There were more complicated aspects, of course. Under Sloane’s rule there was . . . street fascism. If you caused trouble, especially with life-sustaining systems, kids, or crew operations, you ended up dead. Very publicly dead, though, not like Oxia ‘disappearing’ people who get in their way. And the crew records were public too, so everyone on the station knew why, when, where, and how it happened, and the evidence against the . . . victim. Most of the killers weren’t even crew, they were just citizens with the right information. And since the records were public, people always had the option to leave when their names came up.
“Now it’s much harder to explain missing people. Gavran’s brother’s dead, by the way. I found the execution record while I was releasing those Oxia prison vids. Gavran’s . . . happy about knowing, actually. Is that weird? It seems weird.”
Iridian smiled at the resigned expression Adda got while asking for confirmation about human behavior. It was better to know a missing person’s fate. When Iridian didn’t know, it was too easy to imagine the missing one holding out for help that’d never come, or dying slowly in some hospital bed, unidentified and alone.
Gods, poor Gavran. He’d crossed the unfathomably huge gulf between his Kuiper colony and Vesta looking for his brother, and this was where his search ended. At least his brother hadn’t suffered in Oxia’s prisons the way the people in those leaked vids had.
The recorded message went on without pause, and Iridian refocused on what Adda was saying. “Pel’s causing Ogir problems.” Adda sounded untroubled by switching topics from a dead brother to her brother. “His eyes notify him of things he didn’t consciously . . . see? That sounds strange; I’m going to have to read up on this later. But he hasn’t taken the time to learn the settings, and he doesn’t always pass everything on, or send it in the format Ogir wants. Partly it’s just Pel, partly it’s the fact that Pel’s always looking over his shoulder, now that he can. I don’t expect Ogir to want to work with him again.”
* * *
A day away from Oxia’s datacenter ship and out of the early morning nowhere, Captain Sloane said, “Frei Interplanetary was part of Oxia’s supposed back-to-basics shareholder reassurance effort.” Whatever was on the captain’s comp must’ve prompted the comment. Sloane was still looking at it when Iridian had switched mental gears from the game she’d been playing on her own comp to figuring out what the captain was talking about. “Between our latest discoveries in the financial records and the news coverage,” Captain Sloane continued, “that doesn’t match any of Oxia’s priorities now.”
Iridian grunted in disgust and rocked the chair at the Casey’s console in her effort to sit up straighter. If the captain wanted to bounce some ideas off her while Tritheist was asleep, the least she could do was show she was paying attention. “Unless their business was kidnapping and stealing from research institutions—which is pretty low, by the way—they’re spending a hell of a lot of resources on something that’s not basic services.”
What they’d done to Björn made her sick. Oxia had moved Björn to Vesta and set up a lab in Rheasilvia Station. Rumor had it that the astronomer had settled into whatever project Oxia had ver working on, but when Iridian had visited the lab, ve’d still looked a bit lost. Björn had recognized Iridian and threw hot coffee at her face. She’d left fast.
A small army of confused research assistants had watched that exchange, and the equipment looked newer and more expensive than Björn’s and Wakefield’s old offices at the University of Mars’s Deimos campus. Still, that hadn’t made ver a willing participant. When Iridian had tried to talk to Adda about it, she’d barely listened after the first three words.
* * *
As the Casey approached Oxia’s datacenter and grav fell away, Iridian finished sealing her armor and sank into the eerie premission calm she sometimes lucked into. She knew what she had to do. She’d practiced until she could do it while watching over her shoulder for potential threats. If she were running right now, she’d pick up the pace and increase the incline. She could take it. She could take anything, for a while. She was ready.
The Casey’s passthrough creaked as the Casey twisted during its approach to the datacenter ship. Iridian held herself still with her boots locked on a bulkhead beside the interior door and her armor bracing her, muscles singing with energy. With Captain Sloane behind her and Tritheist on her right, focused up and as tense as she was, she could sense that silent understanding among the three of them, among all of Sloane’s crew. Millions of klicks away, Adda and her group were making their run on Frei Interplanetary, and they were counting on Sloane’s team
to do their part.
Sloane was counting on Iridian to do hers. She was part of something bigger, something badder, and they all fit into one big “fuck you” for Frei first, then Oxia. It felt good, and she hadn’t even shot up with combat drugs first.
Out the projected windows alongside the passthrough door, Oxia’s datacenter loomed over them, three or four times the size of the Casey. It rolled away from the smaller ship approaching to dock. In the passthrough, Iridian, Sloane, and Tritheist gripped wall handholds. The Casey didn’t even have to raise its fins to keep up with the larger ship.
Captain Sloane released one of the handholds to view a comp readout. “Turret fire. The Casey seems to be misdirecting it.” Tritheist raised an eyebrow, probably at how calm the captain sounded. Iridian grinned wider. It wouldn’t be fun if some asshole weren’t shooting at them. Captain Sloane looked at the overhead. “Well done, Casey. IDs and projectors off, all.”
Iridian blinked her ID broadcaster and helmet’s projector off. Sloane’s and Tritheist’s faces faded from their helmet faceplates. While she was at it, she activated an atmo analysis readout along the lower edge of her HUD. The Oxia datacenter’s chemical defenses were frightening for a supposedly civilian organization.
The Frei Interplanetary op had even more stationsec to overcome, for which Captain Sloane had co-opted a small fleet of Oxia ships painted in Sloane’s black, red, and gold. Adda’d never have gone for that kind of flash, but Iridian imagined her looking glorious on the Mayhem’s bridge with all those ships at her back. Snippets of their fleet channel chatter scrolling across Sloane’s comp indicated that there was a lot of sensor jamming and AI versus AI attempts to wrest control of various ship and station systems from pilots and techs.
On the Oxia datacenter ship, the Casey’s passthrough finished locking itself to the datacenter’s and opened. Sloane and Tritheist waited in position for Iridian to go through first with her shield. The ship’s passenger terminal was small, furnished with strap-down stations against the walls that converted to benches comfortable enough to suit a visiting VP, as long as the VP wasn’t planning to stay long. Six people in light armor with Oxia logos on the chestplates floated in front of the doorway to the rest of the ship. Their helmet faceplates projected petrified but determined faces.
Mutiny at Vesta Page 29
