Mutiny at Vesta

by R. E. Stearns

  “Gotta get her heart rhythm back where it belongs. Then they’ll ice her to bring her temperature down. Although these pads are helping.” Chi paused in ticking off factors on her fingers to point out stick-on chemical cooling pads shining bright blue against Adda’s bare torso. “A benzo would reduce the freak-out and help if she seizes again, but she can get that anywhere . . . so, either emergency assessment where they decide she gets all of that, or straight to the unit where she gets all of that. Depends on who’s watching my feed.”

  “Why don’t you know?” Iridian demanded.

  Chi waved to take in the ambulance’s interior. “This is my job. I keep people going until I can hand them over to the docs, with their big toys and their pharmacy. That’s who fixes them. I get them there to be fixed.” A machine taking up all of one wall squawked and projected text at Chi’s eye level. “Good, skipping assessment.”

  Iridian checked her shield on her belt. “I’ll follow you and peel off if ITA tries to stop us.” She blinked. “Can you close an area of a hospital to stationsec?”

  Chi shrugged. “Somebody can. If there were a quarantine or contamination, say.”

  If there was one thing Iridian knew about safety regulations, it was that anything dangerous had to be labeled. She’d watch for promising signs. “Any recommendations on a contaminant bad enough to shut down a hallway but not a whole unit?”

  The vehicle slowed and Chi shifted to get nearer to Adda’s head on what Iridian now recognized as a collapsible gurney. “Growth lab. Dump a small container on the floor, and that area’s closed until a bot cleans it. Open the doors.”

  Iridian shoved the ambulance doors open and took an awkward, one-legged jump out of the way of whatever clanking and dragging action Chi was taking behind her. Pruden shouted something and Iridian startled when the translator whispered, Move! in her ear. Pruden ran around the other side of the vehicle, a rectangular light on the back of vis jumpsuit collar flashing orange every half second.

  They buzzed through hospital corridors in a white blur. Chi ran in front, shouting for people to clear a path, while Pruden kept the gurney on target at its highest speed. It apparently adjusted for corners automatically, which gave it one up on Iridian. She bounced off two walls while taking unexpected turns. Her knee was absolutely not ready for running.

  As she passed people, she checked faces and uniforms. None of them were on crew security. After defending HQ, most of the fighters would’ve gotten time off, but some had taken fire. They were likely in this hospital somewhere. Maybe the people watching over them were nearer their rooms.

  Along the way they picked up a doctor who seemed to nod at the right places during Chi’s explanation while reviewing color-coded text and diagrams projected over Adda’s body. The translator in Iridian’s implant didn’t translate medical jargon. She wished they’d stop displaying Adda’s breasts and belly all over the building. Adda would hate that.

  A flash of blue ITA uniform down one corridor made her skid to a stop. “Go, we got this,” Chi called as she, Pruden, the doc, and Adda disappeared into an elevator.

  Iridian limped toward the corridor with her arm pressed against the wall to avoid medical personnel speed-walking past her. She was almost near enough to hear the ITA agents talking to a projected figure at a reception desk. The doors in this area were unmarked until her approach triggered motion sensors and info placards appeared over them.

  One just said, KEEP DOOR CLOSED. DO NOT ENTER with an aggressive-looking orange symbol she had to look up on her comp. It meant “biohazard.” Iridian smiled slightly and stepped in front of the door, then pressed the panel beside it. It stayed shut. Security is all right here, Iridian subvocalized. You could open this. She hoped Adda would hear her, that the seizures hadn’t jammed implants into the wrong parts of her brain, that a thousand other things would go right during her treatment.

  “ITA authorization accepted,” said the figure at the desk down the hall. “I will use . . .”

  “Fucking finally,” one of the ITA agents spoke over the figure. “It’s like I keep telling you, everything gets progressively worse for each meter you go away from the ship.”

  “. . . transmit the footage to you directly,” the figure finished.

  “So, she sends all of the vid, not just the one with the pirates in it?” the other ITA man asked. Iridian stepped nearer to the hallway corner. She might be on vid right now.

  “Yeah, they save all of their vid processing capacity for diagnoses or something, so we have to use our recognition software,” the first agent said. “It shouldn’t take long. Feed’s already coming through.”

  “We don’t have to leave her here, do we? The hurt one?” Iridian’s jaw clenched so tight it hurt.

  The first agent said, “Naw, orders are to pull her out while we can get her. She dies after we lock her up, well . . . Don’t help her along, but shit happens.”

  Heart pounding, Iridian turned back to the shut door with the biohazard symbol on it. Somehow the ITA already knew Adda was here. Iridian would have to close the whole floor to get rid of them. She limped back the way she came, watching the floor so cams couldn’t record her face, although she had a distinctive profile.

  She ducked into a stairwell and tapped at her comp. “Captain Sloane, I’m recording this, get back to me when you can, but . . .” She paused the recording to think, then summarized what’d happened so far. “I don’t know where Ogir is. Send backup. Please. We need to secure this hospital or get Adda to another facility.”

  After she sent the message, she sat on the lowest step and pulled her knife from its sheath. Captain Sloane was busy leveraging their victory against Oxia for all it was worth to draw support from other major powers, like the NEU. That had to be a full-time endeavor. It could be hours until Sloane could listen to her message.

  She’d killed enough people in her life. Killing ITA would attract more of them, and they’d care even less about Adda’s health. But she’d been lucky not to have to make decisions about strangers’ lives during the past few weeks. Hell, she was lucky the stairwell door had opened for her. No wonder Captain Sloane liked this hospital. Security here was almost as tight as it was in HQ.

  Her comps’ incoming stream alert echoed off the walls and she swore as she accepted it. In the projection, Captain Sloane looked grave and still tired. “Iridian.”

  Sloane said her name like bad news would follow. “Captain, can you help us? Anything would be better than what we’ve got. The ITA’s going up to arrest her any minute.”

  “The best solution for now,” Captain Sloane said slowly, “is to surrender peacefully.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Outside interference prioritizes physical safety concerns over recalibration efforts

  The captain must have misunderstood Iridian’s message. “They want to take Adda out of this hospital and lock her in a cell, now, not when she’s well enough to go. She could die.”

  Captain Sloane raised one perfectly shaped eyebrow in her comp’s projected vid. “I’ll put this another way: let them take you both, and we’ll sort it out afterward. Adda dying in their custody won’t get them as much as keeping her alive, so they’ll provide the care she needs. If the ITA thinks they’ve won something, that will keep them off of Vesta until I can finish establishing my control here. This is for the long-term good of the crew.”

  The fist in her comp glove clenched until her nails dug into her palm. So Adda’s death was a risk Sloane was willing to take to maintain control of Vesta. If it was just about Iridian’s safety, she’d be angry about it—Sloane could’ve just told her, days ago, what was on the table between the crew and the ITA—but she wouldn’t risk Adda for this. She wouldn’t risk Adda for anything.

  “Adda is not a peace offering, Captain.” Iridian cut the connection.

  She bowed her head, shut her eyes, and just breathed for a few seconds, until the panic and fury that’d built up during the conversation faded to manageable levels. She wa
s on her own. She’d refused a direct order. And she’d had to. It was the right thing to do, for Adda’s sake.

  She stood and eased into the hallway, shutting the stairwell door manually rather than letting it hiss and thump shut on its own. Don’t worry, babe. We can do this.

  Her comp buzzed and displayed Pel’s name and the dumb face he pulled for his comp ID, reminding her that she’d blocked him. She ignored the comm alert and limped after somebody in a doctor’s self-sterilizing suit, into the elevator Chi and Adda had taken. He took in her lack of scrubs, distinctive height, and stubbly shaved head. Recognition dawned. “You’re Iridian Nassir,” the doc said.

  Iridian smiled slightly. “Got it in one.”

  The doc offered her an awkward and overly shallow spacer’s bow. She bowed lower, at the depth a medical professional deserved, and he broke into a grin she more often saw on Pel and small children. “You . . . It’s . . . My boss sent something out about how residents will make about three times as much under a new contract, did you know? I mean, you would, wouldn’t you, one of Captain Sloane’s lieutenants for gods’ sakes . . . I honestly didn’t think you were this tall. Not that that’s a bad thing.”

  Iridian smiled a bit more. The improved contract possibilities were news to her, but it was good news, for a change. “Most habs are designed for people a few centimeters shorter.” This guy was just waiting to be shown a way to help her out. “So, Adda’s around here somewhere.”

  The elevator doors opened and she followed him into the hall. There weren’t any crew security people on this floor either, and their absence was becoming worrisome. They’d had good coverage on the elevators when she’d visited Pel after his eye surgery.

  The doc looked around like Adda would be standing outside the elevator, then put some more pieces together. “Not the overdose that came in . . .” He looked back to Iridian. “Oh. I’m sorry. Geez, Adda Karpe, here in this hospital . . . You’re here to see her, aren’t you?”

  “It’s complicated,” Iridian admitted. “See, the ITA’s here too.”

  Anybody who’d watched five minutes of a story set beyond Earth’s Moon knew how well the ITA and pirates got along. “Oh.” His mouth formed the same letter, in some kind of horrified caricature. Some other night, Iridian might’ve found that funny. “Okay. I’m running late on my rounds, but, um . . .”

  “I just need a way to keep them on the first floor, instead of coming up here. Someone mentioned some growing stuff on the first floor that might get spilled, if somebody ended up in the room by accident?” Iridian’s attempt at a light tone was coming off as manic, but Adda was sick and in danger somewhere in this damned building.

  The doc smiled like he’d play along. “You mean the growth lab!” He tapped at his comp, then held it out to synch with hers. Her comp pinged her to notify her of a new document: “Medical and biological courier. Needs access to growth lab for pickup,” it read.

  “Choose a small one, though,” the doc said. “The lab bots will grow a replacement faster that way. Oh. Gloves.” The doc rummaged through pockets for a moment, then shrugged. “Ask a nurse for gloves, or use the wall dispensers.”

  Iridian grinned. “Yeah, that sounds like exactly what I need. Thank you.”

  “For Sloane’s crew? Anytime!” The doc grinned back, then looked a bit alarmed. “Well, okay, not anytime, I’m late. Good meeting you!”

  Iridian’s grin fell away as soon as he rushed around the corner and out of sight. She downloaded a hospital map, got the authorization for her palm from the automated security station on the second floor, and made it back to the growth lab on the first floor without seeing the ITA.

  She could still kill them, if they made her. But enough people had died while she and Adda fought for a life that couldn’t be destroyed with a contract. She didn’t want to add more deaths to that price.

  This time when she approached the door, the cover over the pad beside it popped open and she pressed her palm to it. The door slid up and thunked at its highest point in the ceiling. A cold blast of antiseptic atmo hit her in the face as she stepped inside.

  The growth lab looked a bit like a roomful of passenger pods, except that the passengers were bizarre shapes and smaller than adult humans. The pods clicked and hummed softly. Iridian skimmed their descriptors as she limped down one row of five on a specialized rack, but they were labeled in abbreviations and no options looked like, “List the contents of this container.” The abbreviations would be informative to someone, just not to her.

  The growth machines had a lot of small moving parts, and one even seemed to be . . . breathing? The more moving parts and status displays, Iridian guessed, the more the tissue inside needed a simulation of being in a living human body. She wanted a small one, anyway. The ones with thicker lids, no discernable movement, and a long list of precautionary steps and protective equipment on their label seemed promising.

  She found a box of gloves hung on the wall, applied a pair, and opened a small, inert, and thoroughly labeled container at arm’s length. A grayish mound of fleshy gunk writhed beneath thick beige fluid. She could’ve sworn it was writhing toward her gloved hand. She swore and almost dropped the damned thing.

  Its smell, a mix of blood and chemicals and fresh pseudo-organics, swept over her a second later. Printing this shit would be a hell of a lot less creepy than the growth lab’s nannite culture setup, but there was some reason they did it this way. Would the quarantine be required because of the organic content, or the nannite culture? Most likely it’d be the latter.

  “Yeah . . . Okay . . . Here we go.” Iridian carefully unplugged the pod’s power cord, which activated a battery backup, and carried the whole beeping, stinking thing toward the elevator, ignoring a couple of staring people in hospital uniforms. She stepped into the elevator, leaned out, and dumped the pod in an arc from left to right. Fluid and the partially formed human organ splattered over the tile floor. Even the elevator had an alarm sequence for that.

  “Hey!” The younger ITA agent from the lobby stomped toward her, hand on his weapon. “Who are you and what—”

  The older guy just put a hand on his arm and pointed at what Iridian had spilled as the elevator door slid shut. “Send somebody down here with two enviro suits,” he ordered the figure projected at the desk. “Hurry up. You’ve already got our IDs, what more do you—”

  Iridian put her shoulder between the elevator doors to hold them open while she pulled one of the modified synthcapsin canisters from its bag. It was a surprisingly good fit for her palm. She flung it, hard, at the floor in front of the ITA agents’ feet. The canister split open with a bang. The elevator door shut on the men’s screams.

  The elevator blared alarms and emergency instructions as the hospital went into quarantine from the first floor all the way up to Adda’s floor. Those two agents would be begging for their own medical treatment instead of enviro suits for as long as it took a biomedical printer to make enough neutralizing agent. If she had the support among the docs that she seemed to have, it’d be a while before that neutralizer finished printing.

  She leaned back against the elevator wall, shoved her hands into her pockets to stop them shaking, and visualized how she’d defend herself if ITA agents were waiting for her when the doors opened. She deployed her shield, just in case.

  Nobody waited for her outside the elevator. She collapsed the shield and asked around until she found Adda’s room, which the marriage thing made surprisingly easy. Adda was the only one in it, not counting copious monitoring software watching her and helping her breathe. She looked flushed and feverish, with her skin covered in sweat and her eyes screwed shut even though the nurse had said she was asleep.

  Hey, babe. I’m here. Sorry I took so long. Iridian pulled the room’s only chair over to the bed and sat. None of the furniture had tie-down straps. The grav was stable here. What should we do now?

  Iridian expected the quiet this time. Maybe that was cowardly, being too afraid to hope, l
ike that’d keep her from being disappointed. She was running low on a lot of things. Courage was apparently one of them. I’ll be right beside you when you wake up. Not a hallucination, okay? It’ll really be me.

  She squeezed Adda’s hand and watched the readouts projected above the machines. Their configurations remained steady, oscillations within a range that didn’t set off any alarms. Several graphs described Adda’s heartbeat. The one with O2 in it must’ve had to do with her breathing. The numbers shifted every so often, and the lines rose and fell rhythmically. Iridian’s overused, healing knee ached. It’d swollen so much that her pant leg felt tight over it. The night felt like a long, slow, bad dream.

  We can find that prototype. Oxia wanted it for its ridiculously long reach, yeah? Iridian thought at Adda after a while. Find that interstellar bridge, get the fuck out of the whole solar system. What do you think? Want to go exploring? Adda would definitely have an opinion on that. She’d be curious, but would she be curious enough to go for it?

  Iridian leaned over until she could rest her forehead on the bed beside Adda’s shoulder. There didn’t seem to be a way for her to hurt Adda there. Spilling that organ stuff on the first floor had only bought Adda a little time. If the ITA was in Sloane’s preferred hospital, then they would’ve found their way into her and Adda’s temporary apartment as well. Even if Iridian had time to get there and back before the agents on the first floor found their way upstairs, going back to get her armor would just get her arrested. She needed more options.

  Still holding Adda’s hand, she twisted her wrist to activate her comp projector against her knee. Her first comm invitation, to Captain Sloane, went unanswered. Chi’s did too, and so did Ogir’s. Any one of them could be in the middle of something delicate that’d take priority over a message from Iridian.

  There was always one person who’d accept a comm invitation no matter the circumstances. “Iridian, hey!” Pel activated the vid on his comp, showing him in a public tram seat. “How’s Adda?”