In most ports, docks were walled off from one another to provide privacy and security for whoever was well enough off to own or hire a ship. In Yăo Station’s port, rows and rows of small passthroughs stretched on as far as Iridian could see in either direction. The dim lights overhead made the docks far darker than an operating port mod should ever be. More light came from bright dots of multicolored LEDs stuck to passthroughs and the things people had arranged outside them. Chairs, stools, and benches occupied by people of all ages, shelves, flags from various colonies . . . “People live here,” said Iridian.
“In the docked ships?” Wiley asked.
“Or in the passthroughs,” Rio said grimly.
“There’s not always a better option.” Noor left unsaid the implication of what happened when an occupied passthrough’s internal sensors failed and a ship docked.
The port’s residents approached cautiously, coming into focus as Iridian’s eyes adjusted to the dimness. Skinny kids too young to be running around a working port alone stayed in the brighter area under a functioning bank of light. Bigger trouble slouched out of the shadows, lightly armored and armed with ship-safe less-lethals and knives. Apparently, arrivals were unusual enough to draw attention, even though Rio was the only new arrival who looked like she had money to spend.
Before the crew made it out of the space that would’ve been a terminal on any other station, a couple of teenage boys pushed their way through the onlookers and ran up to Rio and Iridian. The boys were as thin as the other kids and almost as short as Adda, with the curved spines of people who’d spent too long in low grav. The lighter-skinned one stared at Tash’s biohazard bag while the darker one asked Iridian, “How much for?” which her implant translated from what might’ve been Russian.
Seeing Rio’s quizzical expression in her helmet’s faceplate projector, he said something with the same number of syllables as the translation in heavily accented English. Even Adda, who could decipher all the strange ways Earthers spoke English, squinted at the Yăo kid like neither she nor her translator could interpret the question.
“Say again?” Iridian was fairly sure she got the gist, but she didn’t want to believe it. The lighter-skinned guy drew his hand back from Noor’s hip with a yelp. It was good to know that pickpocketing Noor wouldn’t be an easy task. Iridian’s hand settled on the newly printed knife in her belt.
The kids looked between the knife and each other a couple of times. “How much?” one finally asked. “Can pay eighty, you never see again.”
“Not happening,” said Wiley.
“What would you do with it?” Adda asked quietly. Iridian winced and glanced apologetically at Wiley, who just looked resigned.
“Never mind,” said the kid who’d done the talking so far. Both of them backed away several more steps, then turned and ran into the dim expanse of the port mod. Nobody else accosted Iridian’s crew, but a lot of eyes were on them.
The passthrough door shut. The text DEPARTING NOW: NOT FOR SALE flickered above the doorway. This was it. They were stuck here until Adda found a way to get the awakened AIs and their ITA minions off the crew’s backs without getting herself influenced again. There was nothing left to do but press on and find Pel.
“Is there an intranet here?” Iridian had expected this hab to be too old or too decrepit to maintain a local wireless network, but maybe the station AI considered it part of the hab’s enviro, and therefore worthy of preservation. It wouldn’t reach the Patchwork and the rest of the populated universe, but it’d facilitate a comms system if the group got separated.
“It’s giving me a ‘registered users only’ error, but have you seen how many people are looking at comps?” said Noor. “I’ll work on it.”
They followed deserted cargo hauler tracks across the port mod to where a full-size mod connector gave everybody plenty of space to move from the port to somewhere else. The huge archway’s closing assembly was supposed to slam down a bulkhead in an emergency. The lights that were supposed to have lined it were out, though. Iridian wouldn’t have been surprised if somebody had found a way up there to take them apart, and the closing assembly too.
An older woman sat beside the archway, and Iridian paused to ask, “Where can we honor the dead on this station?”
The woman took a moment to focus on her. “You’re the ones the Odin Razum talk about.” Her English was about as intelligible as the kid’s had been.
Iridian took an involuntary step back, forcing the others holding Tash to back away with her. “The who?”
“I don’t care what they say,” the woman muttered, possibly to herself. “The temple,” she said more loudly. She pointed along the hallway outside. “Up the elevator. The working one.”
“Yeah, thanks.” The woman held out her hand and its threadbare comp glove. Iridian frowned and looked over her shoulder at the others. She and Adda had paid the ZVs every scrap of savings they and Pel could access. “Anybody got anything in their accounts they can share without bringing the ITA down on us?”
Everybody shook their heads. We can’t reach our accounts here, Adda reminded her in a whisper through their implants. Nobody wants to buy and fuel shielded Patchwork buoys out here. That’s why we’ll have to make money some other way.
The radiation and magnetic field issues that made Patchwork buoys so expensive also helped keep the awakened intelligences off the station. “Sorry,” Iridian said. With no home and no money, Iridian wasn’t much better off than the woman on the floor. The woman withdrew her hand, scowling. “If we make any money here, we’ll come back.”
As they moved carefully away in the low grav, Wiley spoke. “Tash said nobody can use accounts connected to the Patchwork on Yăo. They use their own currency.”
Adda nodded. “It’s water-based, but at least it’s digital.”
“Great.” Iridian sounded more disgusted than she’d meant to, partially because she had a headache. The atmo carried too much CO2. It might improve outside the port mod, which should never have had that many people in it for as long as they stayed. Worse, basing a currency on water meant that water was scarce, maybe even more so than was typical in an isolated hab.
“Actually, Tash mentioned that temple, too,” said Wiley. “She said it’s safe. Never said why, though.” And now she never would.
“I’m more worried about what the fuck an Odin Razum is,” said Iridian. “Tash’s contact here, maybe?”
Everybody shook their heads except for Adda, who looked thoughtful. “One mind? I think that’s the translation from Russian. It could be the name of a group.” Iridian’s translator was leaving it untranslated because they were saying it like a name rather than regular language. Maybe Adda had updated her settings, or her Russian, on the flight from Ceres.
“Better and better.” Iridian frowned. “And the station AI’s still running?”
“Yes.” Adda paused in her 360-degree turn, probably still trying to spot Pel. “I didn’t find anything indicating that somebody here was supervising it, so I’m assuming the worst.”
Unsupervised AIs used to terrify Iridian and Adda. Iridian still thought it was criminally reckless to allow them to go on like that, but she’d seen the real worst-case scenario, and this wasn’t it. Maybe that was why Adda talked about this AI like it was only slightly more dangerous than the poorly mixed atmo. The atmo was also criminally bad, but it didn’t make decisions with Iridian’s and Adda’s lives in the balance.
“Will it try to kill us?” Rio asked, before Iridian could ask something similar.
“It hasn’t so far.” Wiley shifted his grip on Tash’s bag, like he was getting ready to react the moment the AI tried something.
“I think it’s like HarborMaster on Barbary,” Adda said.
Rio blinked at her. “Like what?”
“While AegiSKADA was trying to kill us, HarborMaster kept the atmo and grav on,” said Iridian. “They were both unsupervised, but HarborMaster kept its shit together and left everybody alone.�
� If that was the AI Adda was comparing Mairie to, then she thought Mairie was as safe as AIs got. Iridian would have to keep an eye on Adda to make sure she didn’t get too friendly with something that could lock them in a room and shut all the atmo vents.
“Huh,” said Rio. “I didn’t even know it was there.”
Adda sighed. “Everything I learned in school was about supervised, modern intelligences. I can’t predict how one as old as Mairie—that’s Yăo Station’s intelligence—has responded to being unsupervised. But if the intelligence was a major threat, then somebody would’ve said so, power-hungry pirate captains aside. Covering up dangerous unsupervised intelligences takes effort. I don’t think it’s armed. This was a research station.”
Noor looked around like he expected drones to swoop down on him any second. “So what’s it going to do?”
“My best guess based on one similar intelligence I observed while it was unsupervised is that Mairie will continue to do what it’s been doing,” Adda said, “which is keeping the lights and air and all the rest of the environmental factors within a livable range.”
“Good enough,” said Rio.
“Not for me it isn’t,” said Iridian. If Adda was communicating the uncertainties in her predictions out loud, to people she hadn’t married, then she felt very uncertain. Besides, after what Casey had done to Tash on the Not for Sale, Iridian wasn’t about to trust a new AI. “Eyes up, Shieldrunners.” Wiley gave her the hint of a smile at that. They’d heard that reminder at the start of missions in drone-charted territory. You went in with the intel you got, but your eyes and your vehicle sensors would give you the info you needed to stay alive.
“Does anybody see Pel?” Adda asked.
When nobody replied, Iridian said, “Look for a goofy guy with curly brown hair and colorful eyes. He’ll turn up.”
“Anybody want intranet access?” Noor read off instructions for connecting their comps to make a team channel they could count on. Iridian still wasn’t used to seeing the big black ZV glove on her hand.
As soon as Noor got the ZV Group comps connected, which was apparently difficult due to some built-in security, everybody’s comp pinged with a local data transfer. “The station map,” Adda said.
Noor held the elevator door while everyone crowded inside. “How’d you get it?”
“It’s the first thing I look for when we’re going somewhere new.” Adda found a position in the elevator car beside Iridian and not touching anybody else. “I’ve had this one for months. I was waiting to see if there was an updated version in the station intranet, but there’s not. There’s barely an intranet at all. This is the only map I have.”
The elevator opened on an observation walkway above the docks. A physical window built into the wall shielded it from the rest of the port. The plastic was splintered in several places. Where normal habs sometimes put port admin offices, an empty doorway had the word “Worship” physically written above it, in English, Russian, Hindi, and several other languages. Outside the temple door, shielding his eyes like the bare wall was too bright, stood a familiar figure with curly brown hair. He waved broadly.
“Pel!” Adda walked forward fast, considering her comfort level with low grav, and hugged him.
Pel shut his eyes while he hugged her back. “Hey, Sissy. We can catch up inside. Come on.”
In Iridian’s opinion, Adda was always too easy on her little brother, but he had coordinated the op that got her and Adda out of ITA custody. “You could’ve sent us a message before you hit the magnetosphere, you jerk,” Iridian said.
“The whatosphere?” asked Pel.
“The part of the cold and the black that Jupiter’s magnetic field messes with,” said Iridian. “That and the radiation are what’s fucking up signals in and out of Yăo too much to extend the Patchwork out here. You could’ve sent a message while you were still in Patchwork range.”
“Yeah, well, I forgot, okay?” Pel kept his pseudo-organic eyes squeezed closed.
Adda frowned at him as the rest of the crew caught up with her. “What’s wrong?”
“They put up a lot of high-priority labels around the door.” He pointed toward the doorway, but Iridian only saw the physically printed text.
Noor peered at the doorway with interest. “Digital?”
“Yeah.” Pel cracked one eyelid for as long as it took to go through the open doorway without running into it. “High priority is bright. They didn’t need to do that.”
“What do the labels say?” Adda asked.
“Times and service descriptions and holy book quotes, the ones I can read, anyway. Lots I can’t read. Aren’t they blowing up your comp?”
“I block things like that,” said Adda.
“I thought it was your heathen ways making all the gods angry,” Rio said. She eased Tash’s bag through the door and ruffled Pel’s curling mess of dark hair with her free hand.
Pel batted Rio’s armored glove away and bowed a shallow and friendly greeting. He’d probably been corresponding with her since they both left Barbary Station. Iridian read social feeds when she got bored, but Pel stayed up to date on the lives of everyone he’d ever met. “Not all gods say having a good time’s a sin, you know,” he said while Rio bowed in return. “Some of them are all right.” He looked at the bag Rio, Wiley, and Iridian carried. “What’s that?”
“Somebody who died helping us get out of Ceres stationspace,” Iridian said.
“Oh gods,” said Pel. “Sorry.”
The ceiling in the small room through the door couldn’t have been as tall as it looked. Iridian wanted to climb a pillar and feel for where the real room ended and the projected one began. It seemed to tower above them, glowing with intense colors to match the iconography and too bright after the morning sunsim in the hallway outside. Two doorways hung with beaded cords led to darkness on each side of the entryway, cuts in the riot of color among shrines lining the walls. Projected on either side of the doorways, and beside a dark hallway in front of Iridian, were narrow windows to stationspace. Jupiter occupied most of the windows, and some pointed out to the stars. Soft chimes played from an overhead speaker. For people who found their spiritual experiences in temples, this one seemed like it’d do the trick.
As curious as Iridian was about what Pel, who’d never struck her as religious, was doing here, she had to take care of Tash first. Iridian spoke to the first person she saw dressed like they worked there, an elderly woman with a bent back beneath a red robe that exposed one arm the color of burnished brass and covered the other arm entirely. “Hi. Is there a place here where we can say good-bye to our friend?” Iridian lifted the bag for emphasis.
The woman’s gaze leaped from the bag to Iridian’s bare scalp. Since Iridian was walking around with a corpse in a bag and the older woman dressed like some kind of religious devotee, it was obvious that they’d each shaved their hair off for different reasons. “There’s a memorial sanctuary that way.” The woman pointed down the hall that led further into the temple with the arm the robe left uncovered. “The last room on the right.” Iridian would have to get used to that Jovian accent. It was how the majority of voices she’d heard on this hab sounded.
People in ragged clothes stood or sat in the hall and made no move to get out of the way as Iridian’s group walked past. Here the incense was overwhelmed by the body odor of people who might never have washed in water. Religious art on the walls muffled everybody’s feet except Rio’s, whose armored boots thudded with each step and sounded out of place in the peaceful temple.
Iridian passed three more doorways on the right side of the hall, two with doors still on their tracks and closed. The last doorway on the right led to a black-and-white room, sedate as compared to the rest of the temple, with a slab for a body that’d slide into a chamber behind it. Whether the body would get burned or sent to the station’s industrial recycler wasn’t clear. Since the place had been a research outpost for years before the company pulled out and the outcasts moved i
n, Iridian would bet on recycling.
The woman in the red robe had followed them. “What were your friend’s beliefs?”
Iridian looked to Wiley and Noor. Wiley shook his head. Noor said, “I never heard Tash talk about any of the gods like she cared what they thought.”
The woman startled at the name. “Tash, did you say?”
“Maybe,” said Wiley. “Did you know her?”
“If she owed you money, we can’t pay it back,” Iridian said. Funerals had to be expensive too, but nobody wanted the dead just lying around.
The woman nodded. “For now, no need.”
“And I don’t want to be in anyone’s debt,” Iridian clarified.
The woman gave both her and Wiley a disappointed and uncomfortably intense frown. She must’ve known Tash, though Iridian couldn’t tell whether she’d liked her. “Come to me afterward. We must speak of debts.” Iridian watched her go, then found a curtain to pull across the open doorway.
Two rows of chairs were bolted to the floor, and cushions lined the front row. Everybody stood around the slab instead of sitting. Once they’d set Tash’s bag on it, Noor reached for the bag’s latch. Wiley put his hand over it. “She won’t be in a good state,” he said. The ZVs had frozen the body, but it would’ve started thawing on the trip through the port mod. “Let’s remember her like she was.”
Wiley, Noor, and Rio did, but Iridian couldn’t focus on the stories they told about their friend. She missed being able to walk away from the bodies, either knowing they’d be attended to or not caring how they were handled. And what debts had Tash left them with?
CHAPTER 11 Days until launch: 33
After Tash’s body disappeared into the rusty duct behind the sanctuary that Adda assumed led to a recycling center, Adda and Pel followed Iridian out of the room to give Rio, Wiley, and Noor, time alone. They’d known Tash longer than Iridian had, and Pel had never met her. In the colorful vestibule, Pel directed them to a smaller side room with curving walls and pillows and benches to sit on. Pel sat and Adda and Iridian joined him.
Gravity of a Distant Sun Page 16