Iridian put her back against a wall to make room for Sloane’s relocating security forces and tuned into the command channel. “. . . police with small arms and a battering ram in three minutes,” Adda’s drug-dulled voice said.
“They’re not police, no matter what they call themselves,” Captain Sloane growled, “but we’re prepared.”
Chi shuffled sideways through the stairwell door, supporting a massive security guy whose helmet filter apparently hadn’t filtered out the smoke. “Hey Nassir, how many of those concentration enhancers has Adda had in the past hour? She sounds a million klicks away.” The lower half of Chi’s face was covered with a thick wraparound mask. The rows of small openings in its front pulled atmo over heavy-duty filters. Iridian hadn’t recognized the medic in her HUD’s low light display. She blinked on a personnel tracker to label everybody in sight.
“I don’t know.” Iridian frowned. “She’s usually great about tracking that herself. She says she’s overdone it before, but I’ve never seen her come close.”
“Ask, maybe.” Chi shrugged as well as she could with a very large person hanging off one shoulder. “Doesn’t hurt to have backup when what you’re taking can affect your ability to count what you’ve had so far.”
“I will.”
The residential mod’s atmo filters took a lot more smoke out of the atmo than the stairwell’s filters did, but a gray haze still drifted near the ceiling. A helmet-shaped icon glowed on Iridian’s HUD, telling her to keep the object pictured on her head. Using canned O2 now meant that she’d run out sooner, but she had some heavy lifting to do. “Everybody out?” she shouted into the stairwell. When nobody replied, she barricaded the door with furniture and broken stairs while Chi continued to work on her patients.
High-priority transmission detected, Adda whispered in Iridian’s ear. I’m trying to get Casey to decode it.
“Want to share with the rest of the class?” Iridian said into the command channel.
Adda’s face, the idealized workspace version rather than a live image, appeared on every one of Sloane’s crew’s comp projections. “An Oxia ground force is suited for vacuum in the next module over,” she said over the crew channel, startling everyone except Iridian. “I haven’t broken their communications decryption so far, but the broadcast source is moving toward you.”
“That shit belongs on the command channel,” Tritheist said on the same, voice raised to carry over discussions among the security personnel. “Keep it there.” Adda’s image disappeared from everybody’s comps.
Neat trick, Iridian commented to Adda. Over the command channel, she said, “They must’ve been expecting another missile strike.”
“They can’t fire,” Adda explained on the command channel. “The Coin is pushing any ships that target us into each other.” Iridian chuckled along with the officers.
Something in one of the elevator shafts clanged. Captain Sloane and Iridian shared a glance through their faceplates, confirming that they both heard the same sound. Tritheist returned to Sloane’s side. “We need to get you out of here, Captain.”
The captain met Tritheist’s eyes and said nothing in a way that felt like assent. If even Sloane was cutting and running, then it was time for Iridian to peel Adda out of her workspace generator. Before you start shutting things down, babe: What’s the situation outside?
Why would I shut things down? Ask Ogir.
Since the ITA took the docks, nobody had heard from Ogir’s team. Iridian let out a shaky breath, and kept watching the elevator shafts in case something or someone came out of them. Pretty sure Ogir didn’t make it, she subvocalized. And yeah, that was bad. Ogir, out of all of them, should’ve escaped this somehow.
Getting Adda out safely was more important than processing that loss. You won’t make it either if stationsec breaks through and you’re still in la-la land. Come on, aren’t there cams outside? Just beyond Iridian’s hearing range, Tritheist and Sloane were having their own intense conversation. After the explosion on the first floor, her hearing range was smaller than it used to be.
There’s too much, Adda whispered, without inflection to tell if she were panicking or pissed off. That pushed Iridian down the hall and away from the small arms fire already banging on the wall across from the elevator shafts. Putting her back to that felt wrong, but Adda would let the building collapse on her before she stopped defending it in a workspace.
“Nassir!” Tritheist shouted behind her. “Where the fuck are you going?”
“You get your partner out and let me get mine,” Iridian shouted over her shoulder. She broke into a run.
A smoke bomb went off in the hallway, filling the area around the elevators with thick, green-gray smoke and particulate that someone with the right filter for their helmet cam would see through. Oxia’s assault force would have that filter. Everybody else was blind.
“Lieutenant, go with her,” Sloane shouted from inside the smoke. “You’ll need her help if they’ve located the back door. I’ll be right behind you.” The captain switched to the command channel and said, “Adda, find the filter for this.”
“She won’t have time,” Iridian muttered.
“Oxia’s assault force is coming down the gods-damned elevator shafts any second.” Tritheist caught up with her, already scowling and speaking on the local channel. “She’ll make time while you carry her ass, if she has to.”
Iridian palmed the panel by the door. The flash beneath her hand and the click of the lock seemed to take minutes instead of seconds. Something near the elevators exploded, not massively enough to indicate a second bombardment. Probably antipersonnel. Heavy objects rumbled and thudded overhead while the door opened. In the suite, Adda lay still in her permanently installed workspace generator. Iridian didn’t bother turning off the portable one before she collapsed it.
What . . . I’m using that! Adda whispered over their implanted comms.
“Babe, we have to go.” Iridian eased into the workspace generator and reached for the emergency cutoff switch, but Adda swatted her hand away.
“The hell is wrong with her?” Tritheist asked from the doorway.
Iridian frowned, but gently held Adda’s wrist in one hand while she shut down the generator with the other. “She’s pretending to be an AI instead of a human who’ll get shot or crushed if she doesn’t get up right now.”
They can’t, Adda whispered over their comms. They need me. Her eyes stared round and unseeing at the generator roof. She was most likely talking about the Barbary AIs again. For once, Iridian didn’t care what they could or couldn’t do.
“Use your outside words, babe, and try picking some that make sense.” Iridian lifted the wadded-up portable generator. “Come on, you can fold this up the right way while we’re leaving.”
“Iri!” Adda sat up to grab the clear plastic generator tent out of Iridian’s hands, grimacing in comical disgust at the way Iridian had folded it. Nothing in the generator felt broken, but it wouldn’t fit in Adda’s go bag the way it was now. Iridian looped the bag over Adda’s shoulder, switched her grip from Adda’s wrist to the waist of her pants, and led her past Tritheist and into the hallway. Once they were through the doorway, Iridian deployed her shield.
Bermudez and three other crew security people in cracked armor coughed and groaned outside the suite with their weapons pointed down the hall toward the elevators. The whole universe slowed around Iridian until she confirmed that nobody was coming after them. Smoke crept toward them from the elevator shafts and the fight at the other end of the hallway.
Behind her, Tritheist snapped, “Come with us” at the security people by the door.
“Yes, sir,” Bermudez groaned. She’d lost her helmet somewhere. Blood beneath her black hair dripped down her neck and reflected the flickering overhead light.
“They didn’t send you here to back us up,” Iridian said for confirmation. They walked toward the emergency exit as fast as Adda and the security guy with the limp, Phan, could g
o. They could see the wall as long as they stayed next to it, but not much else. Adda stared at her comp projection instead of where she was going, subvocalizing fast beneath her implanted mic’s threshold.
“We were getting out of the way,” Bermudez panted. “We were in front of the elevator when they blew the doors off. Wright’s still over there. It was too hot to move him, but he . . . It wouldn’t matter if we did.” Bermudez shook her head angrily, then groaned again.
“Sorry,” said Iridian. It was pointless and inadequate and nobody had time to think about it, but somebody had to say it.
Near the end of the hall, Tritheist kicked a palm-size trigger panel in the faux-wood baseboard. The wall’s center panel shifted in and slid sideways to open a doorway. Behind it, wall sconces lit to reveal a metal scaffolding lift just a step inside the doorway. Bermudez stumbled to a halt, followed the metal-lined shaft up with her eyes, and sighed.
“Babe, can you tell if that’s blocked at the top?” Iridian asked.
Not blocked, Adda subvocalized.
The answer came too quickly for Adda to have looked very hard. “Is anybody waiting at the exit?” Judging by the distance and direction they’d walked, Iridian expected the lift to open under one of the tram stops farther down in the module from Sloane’s HQ.
Can’t look now.
The security people watched Iridian’s one-sided exchange with confused frowns, and Tritheist looked thoroughly disgusted. “I’m not taking the captain out that way until I’m sure it’s clear.” He stomped over to Adda and shook her by the shoulder. “Is it, or isn’t it?” he shouted at her.
“She doesn’t know.” Iridian stepped between them, breaking his grip on Adda and propelling him toward the door to the lift without shoving him like she wanted to. “You touch her again, sir, and you’ll have a different set of problems.” He regained his balance, glared, and hit the button to raise the lift.
Cams studded the shaft walls as far up as she could see. Its upper exit should’ve had cams, too, and it should’ve taken a fraction of Adda’s comp’s processing power to check their feeds. Maybe the cams were broken, or something worse required Adda’s attention. Anyway, Tritheist was right. Shoving valuable noncombatants through the door at the top of the lift was a bad plan, at least until they knew what they were going into.
Iridian gripped Bermudez’s upper arm to make sure the other woman was listening. “You got my direct channel?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Anybody makes it out of the smoke who isn’t ours, drop them. You miss or they soak it, call me. If you get pinned down, send Adda up and hold the door shut behind her. Got it?” If Oxia’s assault element leader was smart, they’d take out the rest of Sloane’s crew from visual cover in the smoke, since they had the right faceplate filters. Still, the crew might get lucky.
After Bermudez nodded, Iridian pressed Adda’s back to the wall beside the exit door. “Babe, how many sharpsheets have you had in the past hour?”
Adda whispered something to her comp. A schedule with doses timestamped to a tenth of a second appeared on Iridian’s comp. It looked like Adda rigged something to record every time she opened her sharpsheet case, so she only had to document the amount she took. She’d taken four full doses in the past hour, which was more than usual but less than her overdose limit. “Good. Stay here unless something happens to these people. Then you call the lift and come tell me about it, okay?”
Adda kept staring at her comp with her iris-size pupils, but she stayed where Iridian put her. If a grenade killed the squad surrounding her, she might not notice. Iridian cursed herself for not talking Adda into wearing heavier armor. “Have we got atmo outside HQ?” she asked Adda.
Yes, Adda subvocalized. Thin atmo. We’re patching leaks.
Iridian huffed out a sharp sigh. “Okay.” “We” would be an AI, but she had no idea which one would know or care about repairing station infrastructure. Adda was keeping the atmo outside healthy. It was Iridian’s job to get them up there and breathing it without making them targets. She kissed Adda’s hairline where her purple highlights came together, then turned to Bermudez. “Get somebody to find her an enviro suit.” When Bermudez nodded her assent, Iridian hit the call button for the lift.
She caught up with Tritheist in a narrow enclosed space at the top of the lift. The wall lights were off, and very little light filtered up the shaft from the functioning ones below. Tritheist stopped her with a hand out, palm facing her, then flung something small at the door. It stuck, and he tapped something on his comp. “Not picking up human-shaped heat or audio patterns outside. Atmo’s not perfect, but it’ll do.” He met Iridian’s eyes, with something desperate in his grim smile. “You’re the one with the shield.”
“Yes, sir.” This time, she meant the “sir.” She raised her shield to a solid position that covered her from head to waist when she hunched over a little, then kicked the exterior door up and open.
Pressurization klaxons set her teeth on edge. Smoke from fires lit during the missile impact had overwhelmed the atmo filters, filling the module with a thick haze. Several deserted streets and the tramline ended abruptly a few blocks away from Sloane’s HQ at massive bulkheads that sealed the ravaged module off from the rest of Rheasilvia Station. The nannite culture repairing the breach swarmed over the ceiling so densely that it glinted in the remaining buildings’ emergency lights. Chunks of the broken ceiling, or damaged buildings near HQ, crunched under her boots. Most of the sky projectors were off. If Iridian got claustrophobic then that close, dark ceiling would do her in for sure, but, thank all the gods and devils, that wasn’t one of her problems.
Her HUD didn’t highlight any drones or people on street level and within firing range. Small drones hovered a block away in all directions, two broadcasting newsfeed IDs and six with no IDs. Those could’ve been scouting for newsfeeds, Oxia, Ogir, ITA, NEU, Adda, or players Iridian had yet to meet. Her helmet isolated and filtered out their buzzing rotors so she could focus on more relevant sounds.
Nobody shot at her, which made her feel like she was missing something. She kept her shield raised and stepped toward the cover of what was left of Sloane’s tram. The missile strike had thrown it down the track from HQ’s front entrance, but it was armored and mostly intact. She moved slowly enough to let Tritheist stay behind her.
Something snapped past the edge of Iridian’s shield. Tritheist grunted. Turning to check on him would’ve pulled her shield out of position, so she grabbed for him. Her glove closed around his forearm plate, and she dragged him behind the overturned tram. “Babe, there’s an armed drone or a sniper up here,” she said over the op channel. That was too wide a band for the warning, but it’d reach everyone near HQ. “Figure out where. Please.”
With her shield raised to cover Tritheist’s head and hers, Iridian crouched beside him. In the flashing orange of a rotating warning light, he fought to breathe. Her HUD described thin but breathable atmo in the module, so she twisted his helmet off. “Armor cracker,” he wheezed. “Still running.”
She found the transmitter stuck to his suit’s torso, brushed it off, and crushed it against the street. If his suit’s internal defenses fought off the armor cracker, it couldn’t reinstall itself now. Without the helmet, Tritheist couldn’t know which systems the armor cracker had hijacked. He was still gasping like he couldn’t breathe. “I thought it cut off your O2,” Iridian said. “Did it do something else, sir?”
“Painkiller . . .” Tritheist’s eyelids drooped.
Iridian swallowed hard. She’d seen this during the war, and it was why she never filled her suit’s reservoir. “Injectable,” Tritheist said. “It’s dumping it all.”
“Into you.” Iridian shut her eyes for as long as she dared. “Shit.” Babe, I really need you to find that sniper, she subvocalized. Tritheist’s in trouble and we need Chi up here, but not if she’ll get her suit jacked. Far down the street to her left, somebody screamed. She shifted herself and Tritheist toward
the thickest part of the overturned tram, allowing her to settle into an easier crouching stance. Tritheist’s face was turning blue. Babe, are you okay?
Busy.
One of the drones buzzed low over their position, then rose toward the low ceiling. Iridian peered through her shield, but she only saw dark shapes through the mech-ex graphene. What the hell is more important right now? she asked Adda. Tritheist got overdosed on the meds in his suit. If I drag him back to the lift it might kill him, and I might get shot doing it.
Don’t, Adda said immediately. Chi’s coming. There’s an automated. Um. Turret? On the building across from ours. With the sniper or . . . spotter. Six people in Oxia uniform are moving toward you from the other side of the tramway. Casey reverse-engineered their channel switch algorithm, so we’re listening in on their comms. I’m working on the turret. Gavran’s coming.
Something tiny and fast slapped Iridian’s shield. The impact jolted her arm out of position. She couldn’t yank it back in time to stop a second impact on her thigh, but her brace position was strong enough to keep the hit from knocking her on her ass. She scraped the second armor cracker off her thigh and stomped on it, but it’d already transmitted its payload. One stuck to her shield where it hit, transmitting at too short a range to threaten her suit.
Her HUD’s “out of painkiller” alert lit, but nothing hurt. She gulped. “Please just trigger the overdose, please, please, please.” Since she’d taken the drugs out of her suit, the armor cracker was harmless if that was all it was designed to do.
Snaps, whines, and crashes of weapons fire and explosives echoed out of HQ’s back door, along with a thin curl of smoke. She squashed the instinct to run back into the building. The shield was too small to protect her from toe to helmet, and whoever was watching them was a good shot.
Mutiny at Vesta Page 37
