Iridian and Pel froze, mid-bite in Pel’s case. When Adda used that tone, something serious was happening. Wiley and Rio just looked confused. “What’s the rush?” Rio asked.
“Mairie’s sent something to my Marsat ID. It’s saying an engine is failing. I don’t know what it expects me to do, but I’m sure whatever it wants starts with me becoming its supervisor.” Adda stood and paid their bills with the rusty paypad embedded in the table.
Iridian shuddered. Big-budget horror stories and dramas about hab damage made fortunes every year because more people lived off Earth every year, and every one of them knew how close they were to blood-boiling asphyxiation in the cold and the black. “Is this a trick, or is it serious?”
“I can’t tell,” Adda said. “I assume the engine’s really shutting down.” She paused. “And Casey would know I’d make that assumption. Mairie wouldn’t, but Casey would.”
“Damn Casey to all hells.” Iridian stood and collected the remains of her food and Adda’s. “I know two things about engines big enough to push a whole hab, and that’s their size and purpose. Anybody else know more?” Iridian looked around the table. Everyone shook their heads. “So. Not our problem.”
“Does Shingetsu know?” As Pel asked the question, he hit the edge of the box his food had been served in and launched noodles across the table. Despite the grunge ground into the tabletop, he piled the food back into the box. They couldn’t afford to waste it. “She knows everybody on the station. Maybe she can tell them about emergencies.”
“Let’s go make sure she does, and then get off the station,” said Iridian.
“Pel, get us packed up and out of that bug nest we’ve been sleeping in,” said Adda. “Iridian, can you talk to Shingetsu? I want to see what Gavran needs to get us moving.” Ceres was getting farther away from Jupiter and it’d take a while to get back to Biometallic 1, but they didn’t have to be fully stocked to get off a station that was about to fall into Jupiter.
“Sure.” Iridian felt as fuzzy as she had after Noor bounced her face off a wall. “Rio, go with her. Please. Wiley, you’re with me.” He just nodded, his expression unreadable.
“Don’t I get an escort?” Pel asked.
“You’re paying someone the rest of what we owe them and telling them we’re out of their tiny, dirty, makeshift rooms,” said Adda. “Without describing the rooms, please. And if you can think of a way to get in trouble doing that, don’t.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Pel. He, Adda, and Rio would be going the same way through the long hall of locked doors to the port. Iridian set off through the port mod with Wiley at her side.
After the second person Iridian shoved out of her way with more force than was required, Wiley asked, “You all right, Nassir?”
“Am I all right? What about you?” Wiley was the one who’d lost two friends since he joined Iridian on this venture.
“I’m not the one pushing civvies around.”
She should’ve learned to be more careful with her suit strength after what she’d done to Noor. Iridian ducked her head, embarrassed and ashamed. “This place will get worse fast,” she said. “Depending on how violent the failure is, the station could come apart. The other engine won’t be able to keep up even this much grav, and if the station AI pushes it, it’ll go out too. Then, who knows how long it’ll take the orbit to deteriorate, but it’ll happen.”
“Maybe the ITA will get somebody out here to fix it.” Wiley didn’t sound like he believed that.
“They’d sure as hell better,” said Iridian. The kids living in the elevators wouldn’t believe her if she told them what was happening. Even if they did, how the hell would they get away in time? If they had adults looking after them, those people were doing a shitty job.
Swearing, Iridian fought her way to the nearest elevator to the second level, which had been, of course, stripped for parts. She made her way back to where she’d seen the kids before and yelled into the empty elevator car, “If you kids feel the grav going, get somebody to take you off the station, yeah? An engine’s about to go. It’ll get real dangerous real quick. You want to come down and leave with my crew?”
“Go away, fuckface,” the older child’s voice shouted. The younger one started to say something and the older one shushed loudly.
“Damn it.” Iridian stalked past the clinic and through the entertainment and residential mods, until she finally found the way to the temple. Somebody in black-and-white clothes stood beside the temple entrance, watching the elevator and looking sincere. Iridian pushed past. Wiley said, “Sorry, prayer emergency” as he followed her in.
Iridian checked the room Shingetsu had put them in to talk over the drone recovery op, and then headed for the sanctuary. Wiley caught her arm and slowed her down, since she wouldn’t let him stop her entirely. “If she’s preaching or something, don’t interrupt her.”
“The gods-damned station is about to break up,” said Iridian. “That’ll be a hell of an interruption.” A woman wearing clothes that covered her from the top of her head to the tops of her feet shook her head firmly in Iridian’s direction.
“She won’t listen if you interrupt her,” Wiley insisted. “I grew up with people like these. She’ll act like you’re sick in the head, which, you know, look around.” Sure enough, somebody was sitting on the floor a few meters down the hall, muttering to themselves while chewing dirty fingernails and smelling like three homeless people put together. “Just send her a message. Let’s go see if Pel’s back at the Mayhem yet.”
Nothing was going the way Iridian wanted. She felt helpless, hopeless, and still responsible for it all. And maybe it was Noor’s fault too, but Noor was dead and Iridian had killed him. Rather than spend a second longer thinking that through, she turned and headed for the port mod, tapping out a message to Shingetsu on her comp. The only reason she didn’t run was that she didn’t want to draw any more attention to her crew’s only way off the station.
* * *
Between the promise of payment and Yăo Station’s failing engine, Gavran agreed to flying them back to the belt. Before the Shieldrunners left the dock for the last time, Adda sent a second message to Shingetsu, and Iridian talked to the Apostolovs and the clinic personnel. When they entered Patchwork range, Gavran would notify the ITA. They’d even told the kid who’d exchanged their Yăo money for a chip that’d supposedly connect to an account with the equivalent in NEU money.
The ITA had to know that children lived on the station. Gavran would remind them too. A disaster this big would force the ITA to send rescue ships to Yăo. It was about damned time.
Gavran pulled away from the station fast, grumbling in cant about terrible fates that should befall people who sabotaged engines, if Iridian was interpreting it correctly. The translator Adda had put in their comms was not equipped to handle the vicious application of Kuiper cant. When the Mayhem was far enough away from Yăo for the failing engine to rotate into its windows, a gray plume of something pressurized spewing out of it proved how bad the situation was. One way or another, Casey had made sure Adda and Iridian would never go back to this hab. Jupiter looked massive behind the station, a pale monster poised to swallow it whole.
Adda had started reading in one of the residential cabin bunks before Gavran finished disengaging from the dock, her brow knit with worry. She’d hate being rushed off the station with so many of her plans incomplete. The Odin Razum were still under Mairie’s control, Adda’s implant was still vulnerable, and Casey was still trying to make her do something for it. Their break from Yăo Station was about as rough as it could get. Iridian and Adda were out of places to hide from Casey, but fear of discovery was easier to bear outside Yăo Station’s bad enviro and its conniving AI.
Once grav stabilized for the accel stage of the trip to Ceres, Iridian went to work on the residential cabin door. Although Gavran had cleaned Noor’s blood off it, he hadn’t finished replacing the pieces Noor had removed, bare-handed and in near silence according to Ga
vran and Pel, after he’d kicked through the interlocking slats on the interior side. It’d been a careful kick too. A boot-size hole all the way through might’ve distracted Adda from whatever she’d been reading while Noor broke out. By the time he was done with the door, he hadn’t needed to punch through the lock digitally. He’d just taken out some key components, and torn up his hands in the process.
Everything else about the day might’ve been the worst kind of shit, but Adda had found a way onto Biometallic 1 and she was working on an idea for how to take the certificate that Kanti needed to protect her implant from Casey. No matter what else was wrong, Adda wasn’t letting any of it stop her. Not even Iridian killing the crew member who would’ve made this op possible.
“The intelligences have been busy.” Adda showed Iridian a report on her comp.
“What am I looking at?” Iridian asked.
“I’ve been tracking where their ships are,” Adda said. “Well, the Apparition and the Casey Mire Mire, anyway. I’m not sure what happened to the Coin. It’s not as fast as the other two. They might’ve—”
Iridian interrupted Adda by laughing in delight. “Oh gods, you know where they are? Physically?” When Adda nodded, Iridian said, “Have you told Gavran? Keeping the Mayhem away from them is part of what we’re paying him for.” If Adda’s monitoring routine highlighted where each ship was in the Mayhem’s nav systems, then the Apparition wouldn’t sneak up on them again. Maybe Gavran could keep them out of the Casey’s comms range too.
Adda blinked. “No. I hadn’t thought of that.”
“I’ll tell him after I’m finished with the door. Where have they been?”
“They each have these long patterns that take them between a point on the Ceres-Jupiter reliable route—” Adda paused at a sharp slap of something bouncing off the hull. That’d happen a lot more often outside the reliable routes. “And Vesta.”
“Vesta? You’d think they’d stay the hell away from there, after the ITA went looking for them. What are they doing there?”
Adda shrugged. “I don’t know. There are a number of things that might draw them there: Captain Sloane’s presence, Dr. Björn’s expedition, AegiSKADA, the last safe place they docked . . . Maybe they’re planning to build their new home on an asteroid. Anyway, I don’t like that they’re spending so much time in the asteroid belt. They’re too close to Biometallic 1.”
“Hmm.” Iridian had tried to act optimistic, but she didn’t have much hope for a second successful hit on Biometallic 1. Adda’s new plan was built on assumptions, and her implant would still be vulnerable during the op. If Casey intercepted them on their way to Ceres, they’d be screwed. And they were flying right back into the ITA’s hullhooks. None of it looked good for her crew, but it was the best chance Adda had.
The ship’s light vibration as it powered out of Jupiter’s grav well eased slightly when it entered the Jupiter-Uranus reliable route. Since it was in the opposite direction of everything Adda was interested in, Casey was unlikely to be watching that route. They’d follow it until Gavran found a piece of the cold and the black he didn’t mind cutting through to reach a reliable route to Ceres. The nearly subsonic engine rumble was accompanied by the whine of extending thermal fins and the hushed whoosh of the atmo system kicking up a level. That was lazy power management on Gavran’s part, but it was a familiar sound. It gave Iridian something to think about other than gut-twisting anguish over the people they left behind.
Adda wouldn’t understand any of that, and she’d feel sorry for Iridian if she did. “Heard anything from the ITA about Yăo, babe?” Iridian asked.
“Gavran didn’t send them a message in a way that would allow them to reply to either of us personally.” Adda climbed out of the bunk to kiss Iridian, jolting her mind out of Yăo Station’s dark hallways. Hey, Adda subvocalized. We’re alone in here. Wiley, Rio, and Pel were strapped into the passenger couches in the main cabin.
Iridian tapped the panel by the door a couple of times, watching the lock slide shut and open while she put away her tools. There wasn’t much she could do about the hole Noor had kicked in their side of it. Gavran would have to fix that in port. “The door locks.” In terms of sound dampening, it hardly mattered whether the typical cabin door was closed or not, on a craft this small. Iridian didn’t care, and as long as she didn’t mention it, Adda wouldn’t care either. Iridian desperately needed to do something other than think right now.
Adda’s smile went softer and sadder, somehow. Lock it.
CHAPTER 25 Days until launch: 13
The only good thing about Adda’s second attack on Biometallic was that Sunan’s Landing had patterns and material for everything the crew needed and Yăo Station lacked. They’d have cloth ITA uniforms, since repainting armor would’ve been too expensive. Before the Mayhem got anywhere near Ceres stationspace, they’d apply and conceal small projectors to disguise their faces.
Even with the disguises, Adda’s plan had huge drawbacks: They had to enter the Ceres orbital station, second only to the port on Ceres’s surface in terms of ITA presence, while broadcasting unprofessionally forged ITA IDs. Then they’d have to bluff their way into a hab that was still on alert from the crew’s last assault.
Adda hoped that Biometallic’s certificate library was better defended than the firmware library. For security purposes, the certificate was at least as important as the source material.
At Sunan’s Landing, which had decorated for every holiday in the month with multicolored symbols projected all over the interior, Adda, Pel, Iridian, Rio, and Wiley had pooled all the money they had access to. They just barely paid Gavran enough to let him refuel and justify him flying them around. Soon, he’d have to take a job that made him a profit. For now, he split what they’d paid him with another pilot who he claimed “hadn’t been arrested in decades” to do a passenger transfer near the Ceres-Sunan’s Landing reliable route. If the Mayhem entered Ceres stationspace, it would ping every ITA agent on the ’ject.
Rather than squads, Adda’s research indicated that the most common configuration for a small group of ITA agents was two sets of partners. She and Iridian would be one, and Rio and Wiley would be the second. Pel was disappointed to be stuck in the Mayhem, but he’d be safer that way, and they didn’t have to pay the second pilot to carry him.
The passenger transfer went off as well as attaching two passthroughs in the middle of nowhere could go, which only made it a little nerve-wracking. They waited until they were within an hour of the Ceres orbital station to change into their newly printed ITA uniforms. Adda had been too busy mocking up ID broadcasts to remind everyone else to change and disguise themselves earlier. The new IDs should fool humans, but they wouldn’t fool an intelligence.
Once she was inside Biometallic 1, she’d swap her ID with Rio’s, since Ficience had never encountered Rio before. She’d made an appointment for “Rio” to go through some standard orientation material in a generator, which an ITA agent might do to familiarize themselves with Adda’s first theft. The appointment would let her introduce her own routines during ID validation to search for openings in the orientation. With luck, Adda would use the first opening she found to breach the certificate library.
It was a much less efficient arrangement than a specially designed backdoor would’ve been. Adda’s method would probably take hours. In their current circumstances, it was the only approach likely to get her into the target section of Biometallic’s systems.
The crew was arriving on Ceres’s orbital station at three thirty in the morning, Ceres local time. Gavran had asked the new pilot to set the sunsim cycle to make it about ten in the morning aboard their ship. The crew would feel awake and ready for the new day, and both Ficience’s supervisor and Biometallic’s security force should be at their least attentive.
Before they entered the orbital station, Iridian sent Gavran a message. “You sure you don’t want Adda to look for your implant’s certificate too?”
“No, thanks
but no,” he replied. “I have pilot implants. Multiple pieces, multiple locations, not like you devs and your nets. Even if mine had the same vulnerability as a neural implant net, I don’t know your modder and I don’t know their credentials. I don’t let unlicensed strangers touch anything under my skin.”
Signs advised travelers not to spend more than four hours at a time on Ceres’s orbital station due to the lack of gravity. Its narrow hallways and terminals had low ceilings that made it hard for inexperienced travelers to get stuck in the center of them, unable to reach a surface to push off. Projected figures on the walls with their feet pointing toward the arbitrary floor communicated “up” and “down” conventions. Interspersed between the directional figures were wide windows that showed Ceres and the massive ships docked on the orbital station, too large to descend to the surface port.
As they entered the path between terminals and followed signs toward the shuttles, Adda straightened her back and kept half a meter’s distance between herself and Iridian. For Adda, crossing the orbital station was one of the toughest parts of the job. ITA agents had expert training and years of experience navigating in microgravity. If Adda had to stop herself from tumbling off in the wrong direction by grabbing a wall handhold, everybody who saw would remember it, and by extension, her. The four of them kept their pace slow and she stayed a bit behind Iridian, watching her for cues on when to push on what to move forward naturally.
There were so many ways Adda’s plan could go wrong, and she was right in the middle of them. But, amazingly, they made it to the shuttle terminals without her crashing into anything. Due to the early hour, there weren’t many people to run into.
One blue-uniformed ITA agent hovered near the terminal that served privately owned orbital stations. The agent, a woman with dark hair and light skin, smiled at them. “Hey there! Just in from the colonies?”
“You got it.” Iridian’s consonant sounds were shorter, and something about her speech rhythm had changed. Whatever accent it was sounded more like the ITA agent’s speech than Iridian’s usual spacefarer English.
Gravity of a Distant Sun Page 33