After a second, Adda paired the familiar voice who’d commented on her and Iridian with the face in the largest armored suit. “Thank you,” she said to Rio. She’d probably spoken too softly to be heard above the engine noise, with her voice as choked up as it was. In the faceplate projection, Rio smiled like she got the message anyway. Adda and Iridian had finally, finally gotten back to each other, and Adda would do anything to make sure they were never separated again.
CHAPTER 8 Days until launch: 49
Instead of finding a tie-down station of her own, Iridian kept herself still while the ship left Ceres by looping her arms through the shoulder straps in Adda’s harness. The harness was too tight on Adda’s wide arms, but Iridian didn’t want to risk her slipping out of it during accel. Iridian had gotten paranoid about falls during the long haul in heavy grav between Venus and Ceres as the ZVs raced to get to Adda before the Ceresian ITA agents heard about Iridian’s escape and locked down the port. Grav during both accel and decel halves of the flight had been so high that hitting the deck without armor would’ve broken bones, knocked her out, or both.
Adda rested her head on Iridian’s shoulder, looking much more tired than the 19:00 sunsim on the ZVs’ ship made Iridian feel. At this point, Adda would’ve been awake for over twenty-four hours. Iridian pressed her lips to the point where Adda’s red and purple highlights used to come together, before ITA surveillance necessitated the change to orange and then brown. There was nowhere in the universe Iridian would rather be than here with Adda.
“ITA drones are following,” said Noor over ship comms.
The ZV Group had brought two pilots but nobody who ran digital defense, because Pel had assured them that Adda could do that. Major O.D., the commanding officer of this contingent of ZVs, said that taking that person off the crew was how Iridian and Adda had been able to afford the breakneck-and-damn-the-fuel-reserves flight from Venus. But ship defense wasn’t Adda’s or Noor’s area of expertise. Noor was doing his best while the pilot navigated out of the universe’s busiest stationspace as fast as possible.
“Fighter formation, not flocking,” Noor said. “Conscious control.”
A real live pilot was controlling the ITA’s drones. That confirmed that these weren’t persistent individuals from the group the ITA had shot at Adda earlier. It also made them more dangerous than they would’ve been relying on their own weak AI. The ZV Group soldiers strapped to the bulkheads on either side of Adda and Iridian glanced around. The windows were turned off to keep them from interfering with helmet heads-up displays. Aside from a few dings in their armor from getting into position during the high-speed docking maneuver, the ZVs’ infantry remained unscathed so far.
“The intelligences use fighter-style tactics too,” Adda said. “Remember the Coin doing that thing with its wings?”
The Charon’s Coin, the tugboat piloted by an awakened AI, had rocked its “wings” the way Earther pilots did, communicating acknowledgment. “Thermal fins, not wings,” Iridian said, “but of course I fucking remember. That’s how we figured out they were awakened.”
“A . . . really messed up warship is breaking formation with the ITA,” said the Not for Sale’s pilot. “If you haven’t already strapped in, do it now.”
Iridian’s knuckles went white where she gripped Adda’s harness. “Are you saying that’s the Barbary AIs doing this?”
Adda bit her lip and nodded. “That’s what we have to act on, anyway. If our countermeasures outmaneuver them, we’ll outmaneuver the ITA if they’re actually the ones controlling the drones.”
Grav was climbing with a heavy pull farther down the hallway rather than toward the floor. The pilot would only do that if they had to. The warship must’ve targeted them. “Then that’s the Apparition.” “Really messed up” would be an accurate description of its structure, inexpertly repaired on Barbary Station with pieces from very different ships. It’d left Vesta sometime before Iridian’s trial. Ceres Station was the nearest port large enough to hide it. And it was the only one of the three awakened intelligences with wartime drone combat experience and a missile launching system. “Damn, damn, damn,” Iridian muttered.
“Drones attaching.” Noor’s voice over the comms was now accompanied by an alert that blared on everybody’s comps, including the comp the ZVs had printed for Iridian. On her comp’s projection, the alert pointed to a map of the ship with four drone attachment points lit in red. “Engine mod,” Noor added to emphasize the most important one. His monotone suggested that he was on a concentration drug like the one Adda used.
Adda had freed her comp hand from her harness and was struggling against the g’s they were pulling to hold it where she could see it over Iridian’s shoulder. “They’ll try incapacitating the ship this way first, but I think the Apparition may shoot at some part of the propulsion system if this fails,” Adda said. “It will value slowing our progress over keeping the ship intact. What kind of ship is this one we’re on? I’m looking for a diagram.”
“Some kind of passenger cruiser,” Iridian said. “You’ll have to check the intranet for the model.” Adda nodded.
Four tie-down stations over from Adda’s, Wiley met Iridian’s gaze through his helmet’s faceplate. The ZVs had found him armor that fit, so he was decked out in ZV black and yellow like almost everyone else in the corridor. Maybe it was just the exoskeleton support, but he stood taller in armor. “We going?”
The urgency in his voice suggested that this fight took him back to the same place it took Iridian. During the war, secessionists had used mobile drilling units to punch through vehicles’ drone attachment points, making sizable holes in the vehicle’s hull. It’d take a few minutes for them to do it, but even a small borer would get through.
“If Noor could’ve knocked those drones off with turrets, he’d have done that instead of telling us about them.” Somebody had to get rid of the drones, but maybe, for once, it didn’t have to be Iridian or Adda. Iridian had tightened her arms around Adda’s shoulders, relishing the warmth. Adda had been back in Iridian’s arms for mere minutes. Leaving her again, even with a good reason, would be hard as hell.
Letting the ITA or the awakened AIs carve their way into the ship carrying Adda wasn’t an option, though, and Adda’s contemplative frown suggested that she was working on a solution. Iridian’s comp had printed out already hooked into the ZVs’ comms. She activated its mic. “Major, I recommend sending a team.” The ZVs kept everything on the main ship channel, which Noor had said was insufficiently encrypted, but at least everybody got the same info as early as possible. If Major O.D. had sent a squad to deal with the drones, she’d have heard the order over comms.
“Can Karpe do anything with them?” the major asked through Iridian’s comp speaker. Stress made his colonial accent more jarring than usual.
Adda’s brown eyes met Iridian’s and a calm swept through her, despite everything. Adda was much more present and conscious than she’d been in the hospital on Ceres. It was like Iridian was seeing the real Adda again, for the first time since the overdose.
“Yes, sir,” Iridian said over the comms. To Adda, she asked, “What’s the plan?” Her voice came out lower and rougher than she’d meant it to be.
“I need to borrow your . . . um . . . that.” Adda pointed at the launcher on Iridian’s back. “And is there a workspace generator onboard?”
Iridian frowned. Adda had only been out of contact with AIs for a few months. That didn’t seem like enough time to clear an awakened AI’s influence out of a person’s brain. But Adda wasn’t most people. “What do you need a workspace for?”
Adda sighed, and yeah, Iridian had even missed her exasperation. “First, I can’t do much of anything without one. Second, I might be able to talk to the drones. If I can’t, it will be much easier to identify vulnerabilities with a workspace than with this comp.” She raised the hand wearing the pink comp glove, with such a disgusted expression that Iridian couldn’t help smiling at her. “You used
to trust me,” Adda said.
That wiped Iridian’s smile away. She wished they could’ve had this discussion somewhere safe, so they could find the gentlest way to say what had to be said. “You—we—made a mistake with the AIs,” Iridian said. “As bad a mistake as we could’ve made. I want to trust you, with our lives, with the AIs, with everything.” She held Adda’s gaze, wordlessly begging Adda to believe her. “And I’ll follow you anywhere.” Iridian’s eyes were full of tears she didn’t want to shed right now.
“We got a generator,” said Major O.D. over the comms. Iridian’s comp pinged with the location on a map of the ship. The Not for Sale took another hard turn, and Iridian had to hang on to keep from getting thrown into the bulkhead behind her. “Kick your hacker out of it when you get there.”
Adda straightened up as well as she could in the grav, and the look she gave Iridian was that impatient, confident one that meant she knew what she wanted to do and she wasn’t going to let little details get in her way. That used to be the most comforting expression she had, before all that determination and stubbornness let an awakened AI into her brain.
“If you want to trust me, then do it. I don’t know of another way to work on this problem. And who’s the ‘hacker’?” Adda’s pink lips pursed in deeply familiar distaste around the term “hacker.” As cute as that was, it was also a relief to see Adda together enough to decipher Major O.D.’s slang and express her dislike for the inaccuracy.
Iridian could be cautious and get arrested again, or trust Adda to know her limits in a workspace while she dealt with the drones attacking the hull. In that context, the choice was as easy as Adda made it sound.
“That’s Noor Beck. A new friend.” Chuckling in a way that sounded a bit unhinged, Iridian dug the heel of her hand into her eyes to wipe her tears away, then helped Adda out of the tie-down harness. The ship had assumed a steady speed and direction, which dropped grav to null. Adda’s face was tinged gray, but she wasn’t quite sick enough to throw up. Grav changes had always been hard on her.
Iridian hadn’t introduced Adda to anybody. “Speaking of friends, that’s Zayd Wiley, Shieldrunner.” Wiley, who was in the process of getting out of his own harness, nodded. “And that lovely lady down the way is Tash. Ah, first name? Last name?”
“All of them.” Tash was out of her harness, hanging on to it and braced in a foothold that curved toward the deck to keep herself steady in micrograv. The ends of the pink ribbons that laced through the piercings and over her stomach drifted up from her hips. The ZVs had offered her armor, but she’d said she was better without it.
“Natani,” Major O.D.’s voice said from speakers up and down the corridor, “We lost cam coverage in the engine mod. Check it out.”
Down the corridor, eight ZVs were releasing themselves from their harnesses too. This squad’s leader, Natani, had been a grudging ally on Barbary Station. Iridian would’ve rather trusted the drones in the engine mod to Rio and Rio’s cousin Tabs, the petite ZV strapped to the wall next to her. They were in somebody else’s squad now.
After the ZVs pulled Iridian, Rio, Wiley, and Tash off Sorenson ITAS, Iridian and Natani hadn’t had time for more than stiff greetings before everyone armored up and spent most of a day slammed flat in bunks for the high-speed trip to Ceres. During every moment of the journey, Natani’s helmet displayed a resigned frown on her bronze face, washed out and green-tinged by the faceplate projection, that communicated how little she wanted to be involved in the endeavor. But Iridian was paying and Major O.D. gave the orders, and they’d all remained civil on the comms channel Iridian was on. Iridian was willing to ignore how Natani had nearly shot her in the face for as long as Natani ignored the losses the ZVs had taken while Adda was saving their asses. They only had to keep it together for the duration of one op.
“Your squad’s got the engine mod covered without Wiley and me, yeah?” Iridian asked Natani. “I want to escort Adda to Systems.”
“Obviously.” According to what info Natani’s armored suit made available over the ship’s intranet, the stocky ZV was a staff sergeant now. As Natani turned to face Iridian, the ZVs’ slogan, When your big problem needs a small army, scrolled across Natani’s helmet faceplate over her full lips. Behind the text, she didn’t quite smile, but it was a close thing.
Iridian grinned at the tacky display of a function designed for emergency, mission-critical messages. The last time she’d seen Natani on duty, the sergeant had led four civilians and most of her squad back to base in one piece despite AI opposition, and she’d restrained herself from taking a shot at Iridian when she’d really wanted to. Natani would be an asset if the drones punched through the ship’s hull, and she’d keep her squad in line.
“On our way,” Natani said over the comms, and pushed herself down the corridor with her squad close behind her.
Iridian set out toward what the ship’s map identified as the systems cabin. It was far enough from the bridge that anything nasty that happened to the hardware in one might not affect the other. Wiley, Tash, and Adda followed her. “You can stay back if you want,” Iridian suggested to Tash. With no ship-safe weapons, no armor, and no combat training Iridian was aware of, that’d be safer for everyone.
“No thanks.” Tash moved more confidently in micrograv than Iridian did, and Iridian had passed training metrics on that. “You’re good at getting out of the way of bad news, and I want to see how this little group operates. If we can all play nicely together, I know a gal on Yăo who will give us as much paying work as we want.”
* * *
When Iridian floated into the systems cabin, Noor glanced up from his position in the workspace generator, surprised and smelling faintly of vomit. His pupils were blown wide, the way Adda’s got when she was using a generator. Either the small fridge or the cabinet in the corner must’ve contained the drugs Noor used to get into his workspace. The generator itself was permanently installed. The fixture orientation and sunsim put the room’s usual “up” to Iridian’s right. Tash had already reoriented herself to float with her feet toward the deck. Iridian and the others followed suit, although it took Adda a moment to do so.
Iridian pushed herself to the generator and held on to it with one hand while she knocked on its frame with the other. Inside the generator, Noor had refocused on whatever he was doing. “Noor, you can get out now. We brought somebody to relieve you.”
Noor stuck his head through the transparent noise-canceling curtain that covered the generator’s door. A gray cable ran from the jack near his temple to the generator. The cable would’ve pulled taut if the generator’s tie-down harness hadn’t stopped him first. His hair was cut to hide the jack when it wasn’t plastered flat with sweat like it was now.
“You’re Adda?” he asked in his drugged monotone. Adda nodded. “Good fucking luck with these. I was pushing so much through my implant that it heated up. Gotta recalibrate.”
“Can you do what you’re doing from your comp?” Iridian asked him. “Adda needs to plug in.”
“Does it look like I can?” Noor unplugged his cable, undid the fasteners on his harness, and pushed himself past Iridian toward the cabinet. “I’m leaving a record of what I did in there,” Noor said. “Gods, it was good to be back in a workspace. How’re you planning to shake off these drones?” He glanced at Iridian’s launcher. She was in the wrong part of the ship to shoot any drones that’d broken through the hull.
Adda squeezed her belly and wide hips around the people and fixtures between her and the generator. “I want to try making them leave on their own. Something in this ammunition does that, correct?”
“Yeah.” It took Iridian a second to translate “PPO culture” to civvy speak. “This launches a pellet-packed offensive nannite culture. The pellets burst on impact. In healthy enviro, the nannites physically dig into whatever they’re loaded for. ITA, NEU military, and Ceres stationsec drones, in this batch. Assuming their schematics are up to date and everything else goes the way it’s supp
osed to, they hit the drones’ pseudo-organic fluid and create a high-priority target inside the handler. That’s why the drones turn around when they’re infected. This batch is one for one so far.”
Adda nodded and grasped the large silver necklace that was alternating between almost hitting her face and bouncing off her chest. Wiley and Noor were both eyeing the launcher with fascinated admiration. “If we’d had those on Titan—”
“Yeah, I know,” Iridian said, to stop Wiley from naming the people it would’ve saved. “Try not to think about it. It goes nowhere good.”
Adda put something that looked like a sharpsheet into her mouth before she unwound the cable hidden in the necklace. “Where did those come from?” Iridian asked her. “And what makes them safe?” Adda never took risks with her concentration meds.
“They’re prescription-grade, which means I’m confident about the dosage,” Adda said, apparently answering both questions. “Toss me a bag, just in case?” Adda missed the sick bag Noor threw at her, and Iridian chased it down before it drifted into the corridor. Adda never threw up in workspaces, even though she often got motion sick in reality.
Adda paused for a second, then strapped into the generator and plugged one end of her cable into the jack in her nose and the other end into the generator. She smiled at Iridian, and Iridian smiled too. “This feels right,” Adda said. “Hand me that launcher thing? Oh, and ask the pilot to give me rights to talk to the copilot, please.”
Iridian handed over her weapon much more readily than she reached for the comms. Putting Adda in touch with a new AI seemed terribly dangerous, even though Adda would also get permissions and safety measures that created layers of protection between her and the AI. Then again, there was a lot Iridian didn’t understand about AI influence, and Adda was an expert, in theory and in practice. “Major, can you hook Adda up with rights to the copilot AI?” Iridian asked over the shipboard comms. “She wants it to do something for her.”
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