Mutiny at Vesta

by R. E. Stearns

  “Stay where you are,” said one of the Oxia people, “and send your identification to—”

  When Iridian launched herself shield-first out of the passthrough, the Oxia people set off small chem mines arrayed around the passthrough door. A white cloud enveloped the passthrough, but her suit’s filters stopped whatever it was before she breathed it in. The interior passthrough door swept shut. She grinned at the Oxia security pukes scattering into stronger defensive positions around the bulkheads. This felt like the best parts of being a Shieldrunner during the war, although she missed having grav to orient herself. That was throwing her off more than she’d hoped.

  She pushed off a bulkhead and angled herself so that her shield crashed into two of the security pukes. They tumbled out of formation and arrested Iridian’s forward momentum. She tapped her boot on a bulkhead so she could twist and grip a third one’s helmet and slide a wrist-mounted short blade between the helmet and chestplate. It might pierce the mesh lining around their necks, but more importantly it let in whatever chem they’d released into the terminal. She swung around behind them, putting a hostage between herself and the remaining three security pukes.

  By the time they raised short-range weapons, Tritheist and Sloane had them covered with their own. “Slowly send those this way, lads and lasses,” Captain Sloane ordered the Oxia people.

  The one she was using as a human shield writhed in the unyielding grip of her locked suit joints for a few seconds, then went limp. She toggled her mic to connect to an unencrypted local channel. “Hope you’ve got an antidote for your buddy here,” she said. Oxia weapons sailed slowly past her. Sloane and Tritheist directed the weapons into the Casey’s passthrough, which promptly shut with the weapons inside. The Oxia security pukes glared at her instead of responding.

  Sloane’s crew locked the Oxia security people in a storage bay near the passenger terminal and proceeded through the ship, following Adda’s highlighted route on their map. There were two tank rooms, but Ogir suspected that the second room was too new to contain the Thrinacia project information. Adda’s recommended path to the older tank room led them down corridors lined with some plastic-looking composite that tried hard to look like a more stable hab than the ship really was. The datacenter seemed to have been designed with an executive presence in mind, although Ogir didn’t think that there was one onboard now.

  The older lab contained eight massive pseudo-organic tanks lit in Oxia’s particular shades of blue and green. It would’ve taken thousands of people and comps years of work to fill that kind of storage space, even if the data weren’t compressed all to hell. And Adda said that everything sent here was compressed. Iridian had known, intellectually, that it’d be a lot to steal and sort through. The sheer volume hadn’t sunk in until she saw it in person.

  Iridian started at the back of the room while Sloane watched the corridor outside. Tritheist plugged his canister of nanomachines in thick fluid medium into the tank nearest the door. The process took Iridian about twenty seconds per tank, which was an improvement over her practice times.

  When the nannite culture hit the pseudo-organics, it’d start organizing to systematically copy data to the Casey’s new solid-state storage units and erase the local record. Recovering or replacing the data would be a huge inconvenience to Oxia. If their backup procedures were poor, they might not be able to do it at all. In the meantime, Sloane’s crew would have as much time as they needed to search their haul for the megacorp’s secret project.

  A couple tanks had stricter acceptance settings than Adda’d expected when she set the time limit for this stage of the op. Babe, we’re running a little behind, she warned Adda over their link as she struggled through the cycle of position adjustment, attempted deployment, and readjustment of the insertion device.

  The tank pumps and atmo system filled the server room with a quiet hum. Aside from the docking bay greeters, there’d been no sign of other Oxia security personnel. There had to be more on the ship, watching through cams and deciding how best to approach.

  Sloane was braced in the server room doorway, boot against one side and shoulders and back against the other, with the other boot locked to the deck for balance. The captain’s helmet turned in constant, small motions between the corridors outside, Tritheist and Iridian injecting chaos into the server tanks, and the captain’s comp where a data copying progress report would appear once the nannite cultures did their thing.

  Something in Tritheist’s direction made a metal-on-metal clunk. Iridian looked up in time to catch part of the valve body as it sailed past her face. She finished her current installation and pushed herself over to Tritheist’s tank. “What happened?” she asked.

  He had both boots hooked under the tank where it secured to the deck while he examined his armored suit glove. “The damned thing broke off in my hand. The armor’s okay, though.”

  Iridian accepted his injector and pulled herself into the position he vacated in front of the tank. The op clock counted steadily in the corner of her HUD. Her palms sweated in her gloves. She pulled tank’s diagram labels to the center of her helmet faceplate, because she couldn’t match the bent injector up with what she knew ought to be there.

  “You forced it.” Iridian pointed to the problem spot. “This won’t go on without a lot of work now.” She peered at his darkened faceplate around the labels projected on her own. “Can you fix it faster than I can? I’m not done over there.”

  Tritheist glared at her and quit clutching his hand. “I won’t know until you get out of my way so I can start.”

  When Iridian had inserted all of her injectors she floated back around the server tanks to Sloane. “Data is coming through.” Though the captain’s faceplate projector was still off, Iridian heard the captain’s grin. “I’m looking for the Thrinacia project information. That’s almost certainly the project name. The ship has a separate designation. We’ll time our departure to coincide with the XK group’s exit, but I’d rather not leave without knowing that we have the data we came here for.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  How late are you? We’re on schedule so far, Adda said in Iridian’s ear. We almost had a disaster with docking, but Pel saved the day. I’m so proud. Tell me when you expect to leave the ship. I’d like the Oxia fleet to leave dramatically at about the same time, to make sure that Oxia is looking our way, not yours.

  Iridian pushed off with a toe to drift toward where Tritheist was still working on the last pseudo-organic tank. Sloane said, “V4V to XK. An update, please,” over the op channel.

  We haven’t found the project info yet, but we might already have it. Give us another fifteen minutes, at least, Iridian subvocalized to Adda. And Sloane just requested a report. It’d be interesting to see which of their messages reached Adda first. They should be simultaneous.

  Tritheist met them at the doorway. “The tanks are all contaminated with the nannite culture. It looks like we have, what, ten minutes left before XK is supposed to leave the Frei facility?”

  Sloane nodded. “Iridian, monitor the feed and the corridor, please. Tritheist and I will index and search. No matter what else we have, I want to make certain that we leave with the Thrinacia project information.”

  The captain and Iridian switched places while Tritheist anchored his boots to a bulkhead and paired his comp to his HUD by holding his wrist to his temple for a moment. “Adda told us they might have updated the encryption after Ogir cased the place.” Iridian gripped the side of the doorframe and held herself in place while she watched the corridor outside. The datacenter’s doors opened deck to overhead, which suggested long periods of low-to-no grav.

  Iridian mentally settled in to watch an empty corridor until the scheduled departure. All three of them had their armor testing the atmo every few seconds. Iridian was already conditioned to drop everything and seal her suit when a chem alarm whined in her ears. Still, that wasn’t the only kind of surprise the ship’s guards could call down on intruders. “Do th
ey know where we are?”

  “They’ll suspect,” Sloane said.

  Iridian pulled the cam feeds up on her comp and maneuvered into a crouch against one of the tanks across from the doorway, parallel to the deck, boots locked and braced in case she had to launch herself into the corridor in a hurry. Adda would set the comp to alert her about problems so Iridian could focus on overwatch, but then Adda could describe every problem in words that comps understood. Iridian just knew how to confirm that a comp was listening when she needed it to.

  Tritheist chuckled somewhere behind them, apparently at something on his comp. “Looks like Liu Kong had Frei send a squad of their people to steal the same printer we took off the Sabina,” he said. “Frei never came up with a plan that Oxia accepted. The rejected ones could be good blackmail.”

  “Our original plan to take the printer wouldn’t have worked either, as it turned out.” Captain Sloane sounded pleased, if a bit chagrined. “Now Oxia has the plan and the planner.”

  “Thus the Martian gig.” Iridian let her voice show her disgust with that op.

  “Precisely,” Captain Sloane said with enough distaste to make Iridian relax a little. The captain hated it too. “Liu Kong learned that lesson, but he continues to make other mistakes that will eventually put an end to his ambition.”

  The atmo contaminant alarm whined up through its attention-catching pitches. Before it hit its upper-level shriek Iridian had her faceplate sealed, her suit pumps on, and was visually inspecting the seams along her arms and legs in case a broken sensor missed a leak. Something nasty was in the atmo, and she sure as hell didn’t want it in her suit.

  After she confirmed that her armor was solid and nobody was coming down the corridors for them, she glanced over at the others. They’d both sealed their suits, although Sloane was hunched over. “You okay, Captain?” Iridian asked.

  “I’ll be fine.” Sloane’s voice sounded strained. The captain must’ve inhaled something before the armor sealed. “My suit’s reporting a high concentration of GKC-2. Can you confirm?”

  “Yeah, it’s GKC-2, Captain,” said Tritheist. “They could’ve put down eight or ten of us with this much. If we got out of our suits we’d overdose in about three seconds.”

  Iridian swallowed hard to combat her throat’s automatic reaction to close. The amount of the chemical—she couldn’t remember what medium it came in, but it might’ve been deployed in ultrafine particulate—that made it into her suit wasn’t enough to hurt her. She alternated between skimming through the server tank statuses on her comp and watching the empty corridors. “Can one of you check the tanks? That stuff can’t be good for the goop.”

  “It isn’t,” Tritheist said. “The tank’s atmo system shut before they hit us. Good thing we got the nannite cultures in before then.”

  “The medium starts dying in about ten minutes,” Iridian said. “Total organic loss in twenty.”

  “Naw, the good stuff can last thirty without fresh O2,” said Tritheist.

  “We’ll have company much sooner,” Captain Sloane said. “The monitoring feeds are looped. Either they think they’ve incapacitated us, or they know that they don’t know our status. I expect them to come to collect us shortly.”

  The op channel notification lit on Iridian’s HUD. “SK is bugging out. We got what we came for.” Pel snickered. “I always wanted to say that. Oh my gods, Sissy, okay. I’m supposed to say we’ve got a lot of outer ’ject defense analyses that Frei was involved in for Oxia, and nothing looks basic. Back to basics, whatever, Sissy. You going to let me do this, or not?” The audible sibling scuffle for the mic made Iridian grin. “Anyway,” said Pel, who apparently won, “we’re leaving, and Ogir says we’re still . . . Oh, fine. Gods, you people are—” The transmission ended.

  “Never a-fucking-gain,” Tritheist growled. “That dumb shit should’ve died on Barbary. If he loses us anything on that run, do you know how fucked we are?”

  “He’s got to learn sometime, doesn’t he?” Iridian said more harshly than she meant to. Pel was clever when he paid attention, and all he really wanted to do was help his big sister succeed. But he sure as hell didn’t pay attention often enough. “We don’t do milk runs, including that prototype ship job, by the way. That was a pain in the ass you should be glad you missed.”

  “We take the tough jobs because everybody on Sloane’s crew already knows their business,” Tritheist snapped. “That little shit can learn on some other crew. We’ll take him if he survives a few of some other crew’s ops.”

  “It’s not just himself he’s risking,” Sloane said more quietly. The captain’s voice still strained from the inhaled GKC-2. “We’ll discuss this later. It’s time to start back, if we want to match the XK group’s exit schedule.”

  Tritheist nodded at Sloane, not Iridian. The captain was already cruising toward the corridor that’d take them back to the Casey. Adda’s program, or the Casey, would have to pull what they could get into the Casey’s copious storage space before Oxia regained control of the tanks.

  Iridian switched off the magnets in her boots and coasted into the corridor. She stopped herself with a heavy thump against the bulkhead across from the server room, watching the direction Sloane was moving away from. If Oxia had the same audio and vibration monitoring that the high security stations had, they’d know where she was, and maybe how armored, too. She shook her shield open and felt the reassuring thud against her armored palm as it locked in place.

  Her HUD lit with icons showing enemy activity around the corner. “Incoming,” Iridian muttered on the local channel, grateful for Adda’s improved encryption. “I’ve got a drone, can’t tell what kind yet. Four people in suits. Rifles and knives.”

  After a long second, Sloane ordered them to pull back with calm intensity.

  Iridian followed Sloane and Tritheist, staying near the bulkhead and tapping its handholds as she went, to control her speed and trajectory. “We’ll stop within tracking range to confirm that we have the project data,” Sloane said. “They’ll move the ship after this, but we should have enough fuel to catch up with it.” Iridian groaned. This trip had been tricky enough when Oxia hadn’t been prepared for it. It’d be tougher if the datacenter’s crew were looking for the Casey.

  Tritheist turned the corner at the end of the corridor and stabilized himself against the bulkhead, weapon raised to cover her retreat. This was the kind of situation that made her glad she hadn’t taken Sloane up on the offer of a shared bed aboard the Casey. It’d be easy for Tritheist to take a second too long to tell her someone was aiming at her back.

  Tell me when you’re out, Adda said in her ear.

  “Drone,” said Tritheist.

  Iridian tapped the overhead to spin and put her shield between herself and their pursuers while she floated backward down the corridor toward the Casey, without losing speed. The drone was just big enough for a cam lens, sensor array, and an antenna. A scout, then, in front of a group that’d stay around the corner, out of her and Tritheist’s line of fire.

  That didn’t stop Tritheist from firing at the drone. Tiny charge-carrying metal projectiles, his hab-safe ammo of choice for this op, zipped past her shoulder. They’d hurt like a live wire and maybe short out something in her suit if they hit her. They made ping-snap sounds when they bounced off the bulkheads. The drone might track and dodge those, but the datacenter crew around the corner would have a hell of a time doing the same.

  Tritheist fired two more blasts as Iridian approached his position. While the drone squealed digital static and crashed into a wall, he grabbed Iridian by the arm and, with a grunt and the kind of smooth, wide motion that employed his body weight against hers and only the briefest contact with a bulkhead, converted her momentum to a 90-degree turn that sent her down the shorter corridor to the terminals. That confirms the rumors about him knowing some kind of spacefarer judo, Iridian thought. He came around the corner right behind her and skimmed past using the opposite bulkhead’s handholds.
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  “Thanks,” Iridian said on the local channel.

  A nearly subsonic thump echoed down the corridor, followed by a whole lot of increasingly louder ping-snaps. “Shit, they shot them back at us!” The scout drone was too small to have been armed with anything powerful enough to do that. Oxia’s people were close behind.

  Tritheist swore and pushed himself along the wall faster. Iridian gave herself a good shove to cross the corridor and put her shield between the projectiles and Sloane’s crew. She forced herself to concentrate on maintaining the perfect shield angle, rather than on what those pellets would do to her comms implants.

  Some hit the shield with sharp snap-clicks and arched away. The rest clattered off the overhead and deck. One hit the bottom of her boot and stuck. Iridian shrieked and swore as it channeled the electricity it had left through the sole of her foot. Behind her, Tritheist’s swearing grew harsher. The ones that hit him must’ve had a lot more charge left. Her HUD reported that her armor’s painkiller reservoir was empty, since she’d taken the drugs out of it after the Ann Sabina raid.

  Another pellet stuck to her elbow, and she scraped it off on the bulkhead before it froze the suit joint. Her right boot’s magnetic lock wouldn’t engage. She twisted around to slow herself for the next turn by strobing her left boot’s lock. She spun around the corner, scattering projectiles off the shield. Tritheist was already pulling himself into the dark terminal, so she wasn’t putting him in much more danger by getting the projectiles mobile again.

  The terminal passthrough door was shut, and DOCK OPEN was projected in plain white text on the dark gray wall. The Casey hadn’t waited for them like it was supposed to. Iridian dragged an armored glove along the wall. The resulting screeching scrape matched how she felt about that while the friction slowed her speed. “Fucking AI.”