The tired smile on her face was convincing, even though the face itself was jarring. The projected disguise made her skin almost as pale as Adda’s and her eyes more hazel than brown. It’d thinned her full lips and sharpened her proudly wide nose. The sooner they finished this, the sooner Iridian could have her own beautiful face back. “Pulled us in to look up one more thing over on Biometallic,” Iridian continued. “It’s always one more thing, yeah?”
“With them, I guess so.” The ITA agent looked surprised, but not alarmed. “Next shuttle’s not scheduled for another hour. Do you want a break, or do you want me to call in a one-off?”
“Oh gods, let’s get this over with,” Iridian said. While the ITA agent tapped at her comp, Iridian nodded toward the shuttle passthrough while making eye contact with Rio and Wiley. They both moved closer, leaving Adda drifting near the wall. She wasn’t looping the cam footage here. Either Biometallic or the ITA had to have seen the looped footage during their first break-in, so this time that trick would’ve drawn more attention rather than less. She clenched her teeth and did her best to force her worry off her face.
“Okay, somebody will be up in about fifteen minutes.” The woman smiled again. “Hey, I saw the memo about one of the robbers’ ships being on the Ceres–Sunan’s Landing reliable route yesterday. He’d better run like hell, yeah?”
“Yeah, that’s right.” Rio still sounded professional, but that was Gavran and Pel they were talking about. Adda’s hands fluttered around where pants pockets should’ve been. This was a costume, not a real uniform, and it came with just about nothing to hold things in.
Iridian bluffed their way through the short shuttle ride while Adda took a sharpsheet and reviewed ways to retreat to the Mayhem if anything went wrong. By the time she had mapped out two more egress routes, the four of them were standing in a lab very much like the one where she’d accessed Ficience the first time. “Thanks for your help,” Iridian was saying to two armed and armored people in Biometallic’s colors. The moment they turned around, Iridian waved at Adda and pointed to the nearest generator. “That’s the unlocked one. Go for it.”
With a second sharpsheet sizzling on her tongue to calm her nerves, Adda climbed into the generator and sealed herself inside, shaking. Why did those guards have generator access? Without approval from someone familiar with the tech, they shouldn’t have been allowed to unlock one. Biometallic’s security was truly terrible. She just had to find her implant’s certificate.
“Welcome to Biometallic Technologies!” The welcome message shivered up her spine like ice, confirming that she’d appeared at the appointment time she’d made with the station intelligence and that it recognized the ID associated with the appointment. If devs’ privacy sensibilities hadn’t made biometric identification in workspace generators unpopular, then the system would’ve noticed a conflict. As it was, Adda floated in a glowing blue nebula, her workspace forming to suit the low gravity Biometallic 1 maintained outside business hours.
An old story about someone trapped in the place they’d come to rob, stealing from the same people over and over to survive, ran through her mind until she refocused on watching for a bright supernova caving into a black hole. That would mean that Ficience or its supervisor had recognized that Adda’s ID had very little to do with who she was and what she was doing in the system.
“Welcome to Biometallic Technologies!” the recorded message repeated, shivering up her spine again. “Please enter your identification now.” Adda sent credentials, this time to activate the mode where she’d introduce her own routine. Her first innocuous-looking article, a summary of a sporting event which an inexperienced operator might read while waiting for ID verification, rippled through stars that rearranged themselves into letters in the spaces between wisps of gases. That display was more metaphorical than this ID resolution workspace was designed for, so she waited to see if Ficience or its supervisor would notice the unusual activity.
After each introduction of a piece of Adda’s workaround, she paused to watch for a reaction. An ITA investigator hanging out in a generator reading would’ve been extremely odd. Pressing the whole routine into the workspace at once would’ve been an obvious attack. Gradual introduction was key.
Each added part of the routine reset the verification process, so Adda wasn’t the only one left idle for minutes at a time. Ficience had reserved some of its resources for this appointment, and it was waiting through the appointment time while security processes handled all the input Adda sent. She was glad the zombie intelligence wasn’t capable of feeling frustration. The security process repeatedly failed to hand her “visit” to the intelligence like it’d been told to expect.
After an hour and forty-seven minutes, a new recorded message played. “Thank you! Your identification has been validated.” A bright star twinkled deeper in the nebula, cartoonishly close, indicating that the ID verification process was complete, and Adda’s routine was assembling. The security process finally turned over responsibility for the “guest” to the station intelligence in a startling white comet that whisked past her, impossibly large and utterly unstoppable, before it disappeared into the colorful gas clouds.
“Please proceed to the introduction theater to learn how to navigate our system.” The blue gases swirled and solidified into theater seats as the Biometallic station intelligence enforced mandated visualization features. She didn’t like them, so she changed each seat to white-and-gray orbs of dandelion fluff, which disintegrated on the solar wind. A voice droned on about the various features of Biometallic’s customer education and service workspace.
The voice ceased yammering and freed her into the system’s customer-facing section, looping branches of the nebula that represented frequently asked questions for patients, troubleshooting guides for medical professionals, and marketing materials for salespeople. Adda zoomed around these, activating the routine she’d added to the system. She rebounded off the invisible barrier at the edges of the gas cloud, the partitions that kept her from exploring the rest of the system. It would’ve been convenient if there had been a simple break in that partition, but all she found was a smooth, invisible bubble of permission settings holding her to the approved information.
The theater seats reappeared as the orientation restarted. There’d been an option to tell it not to, but Adda had ignored it. She flew to the end of their rows and opened a door that took her to the employee lobby where she’d first spoken to Ficience. It was now the nebula’s center. A self-assemblage process concluded, represented as a box that appeared in her hands. When she opened it, thousands of silver starlings poured out, crying and wheeling through the nebula at an improbable speed for small birds. Each bird represented part of the routine she’d brought in during the ID verification process to activate the most common illegally modified strains of pseudo-organics.
Her first successful activation was in the guest evaluation tank. One bird flared gold while the rest of the silver ones swirled around it. Then another turned gold, and another. She’d found the tank with the altered pseudo-organic fluid from their initial assault. This was the opening she’d painstakingly brought the routine in to look for. Now she had to find and retrieve the certificate. She grinned and followed her birds into the void.
* * *
One sharpsheet and nearly two more hours later, she unstrapped herself from the workspace generator. For a second she thought she was in a mobile generator in the Mayhem, but this was a Biometallic lab generator and Biometallic employees would be arriving soon. Gravity already felt as Earthlike here as it was in Ceres Station.
She pushed the generator lid open. Iridian kissed her and helped her up. “Got it?”
“Yes.” Adda sounded as tired as she felt, but she was smiling so widely her face hurt. I found some more things we can sell, too. And I sent the certificate to Kanti, she said subvocally, so we should leave before Ficience’s supervisor notices that transmission. I want to change out of this uniform. It’s maki
ng my skin crawl.
Her comp now held the key to protecting her neural implant from Casey and the other awakened intelligences. Their modder on Ceres’s surface had a copy too. She’d seen no evidence that Casey, the most capable infiltrator among the awakened intelligences, had used Noor’s backdoor to make system changes of its own. If they were lucky, Biometallic had found and dismantled that vulnerability in its own system already. After their reluctance to fix the vulnerability in her implant, she wouldn’t count on that.
“Thank gods.” Iridian was even more relieved about that than Adda expected. “Let’s drop that one in here before we go.” Adda stepped out of the way as Rio and Iridian heaved an armored Biometallic guard’s limp form into the generator and shut the lid. “He’s fine, I think,” Iridian said. “He just got too curious, and Wiley had to shut him in his suit and kink his air hose for a minute. I don’t want to explain it to anybody, though, so let’s move out.”
* * *
The only way they could pay for Kanti to correct Adda’s implant firmware was by selling more firmware sources. This time Adda had chosen Biometallic’s healing braces ahead of time. She couldn’t think of many ways to hurt someone with those. The crew shuttled back to the Ceres orbital station. Wiley and Rio would stay with Gavran’s pilot friend on their borrowed ship to handle the transactions and keep the ship docked until Iridian and Adda returned from their visit to Kanti’s mod shop in the main part of Ceres Station.
Iridian and Adda changed into street clothes. The ship’s printer created a new wig for Iridian, and a combination of makeup and projector adjustments erased the ITA face Iridian had worn into Biometallic 1. While she put the final touches on those, Adda switched their comp’s broadcasting IDs. The Marsat IDs Noor had made were still the most convincing ones that weren’t their own.
By the time Iridian and Adda reached the surface station’s port module, Wiley had sold some of the items from Biometallic’s library that Adda had grabbed after finding the certificate that’d make her implant accept Kanti’s corrections to the firmware. That meant Iridian hadn’t lied to Gavran when she assured him that the Shieldrunners would pay the docking fee. Then they made their way through the port and its grav tunnel.
“This way,” Iridian muttered. They were avoiding using their personal comms until they were inside a shielded building. The ITA had very clear records of the transmission signature from when Iridian was in custody. Maybe it was unique, or maybe it looked like every other homemade comms system, but Adda didn’t want to give the ITA an opportunity to recognize it. Not now, when they were almost as safe as they could be in their home solar system.
They left the main thoroughfare with Iridian in the lead, since she’d memorized the route with the least cam coverage. “While we’re here, do you want to get a tattoo?” Iridian asked. “Kanti said they’d touch up mine.”
Adda would have to be unconscious while they updated the neural implant. The procedure wouldn’t be invasive, but conscious brains constantly bombarded the implant net with input. She’d miss the experience of receiving the tattoo, which she’d been curious about. However, this was the best opportunity she expected to have for a while, and the artwork she’d commissioned had arrived on her comp. “I have the perfect thing.”
Iridian started to grin, stopped when it moved the tiny projectors on her forehead and chin, and waited while Adda sent the design to her. When she got it, she hugged Adda so hard Adda’s shoulder joints creaked. “Yes, this is perfect.”
“Happy belated birthday,” Adda said into Iridian’s chest.
Iridian kissed the top of Adda’s head. “I love you more than every one of these.”
Adda was glad to let Iridian go in front and do the talking this time. Inside the mod shop, the mismatched colored lights were as bright as ever. Somebody was standing over a person’s head in the area with the chairs. A needle flashed in the piercer’s hand. Adda turned away as the big guard stepped out of the shadows beside the door, almost but not quite where she’d expected the person to be.
She stumbled left, and Iridian put herself between Adda and the big person. “Hey. Where’s Kanti?” Iridian asked.
The big person’s eyes focused in on Adda and blinked. “You again.”
“Yeah, Iridian Nassir, Adda Karpe,” said Iridian, pointing at herself and Adda. “They know us.”
“Quit saying those names in front of the shop!” the big person said. “You trying to get us all arrested? Follow me.”
* * *
When Adda woke up, she was lying in a reclined chair like the Mayhem’s passenger couches, but harder and under Earthlike gravity. A bouncing musical beat pumped from somewhere to her right, interspersed with pleasing electronic buzzes and a light melody. All the ’jects she’d visited were tattooed on her left arm beneath a clear bandage, and her neural implant net was connected to her comp via the jack in her nose.
She glanced at the comp readings on her implant stability through dry eyes, then disconnected it. The automatic connection settings might’ve changed during the upgrade, and she wanted to make sure it wouldn’t overwrite itself with the vulnerable version that Biometallic was still pushing out to its devices. Her head and arm ached and her mouth was dry, but she felt fine otherwise.
Iri? she subvocalized.
“Look left.”
Adda did, and Iridian was watching her, smiling through layers of projected fake face. She’d probably asked aloud because she preferred speaking with her full voice, and Kanti knew almost as much about her and Iridian’s personal comms system as they did. Her arm rested on a table beside Kanti’s workspace generator, at an angle to show off the tattoo on her side.
Kanti had done something to cover the scar that had cut into the design. The black skull now grinned broad and whole from the pulled-up flap of skin revealing two crossed ribs and organs that probably showed less scarring than Iridian’s real ones. Baring her breast to show off the artwork never seemed to bother Iridian at all. A tattooing machine like the one Adda had seen in the shop on her last visit had been pushed against the far wall. A cam rig pointed at the table so Kanti, whose brown feet stuck out of the generator and into the small room, could view the table without leaving a workspace.
Iridian gingerly pulled on her undershirt. “How are you feeling?”
“Okay.” The side of Iridian’s head was newly shaved. A long line of red tissue stretched across its top. “The ITA implant! Did they get it out?”
“Yes, I damned well did,” said Kanti in triumphant Hindi. “Fuck those sister-fucking bastards.” Once Kanti had found out about the translation function Adda had put into her and Iridian’s comms, they’d stopped speaking English. Kanti stuck an arm out of the generator to trade a hand gesture with Iridian that must’ve made sense to spacefarers.
Adda patted her head with the arm that didn’t ache. If Kanti had made any physical changes to her implant net, then they’d also regrown her hair over the incision. That was kind of them, although she wouldn’t pay for it if they asked, even considering the discount Kanti gave her for letting them copy the Biometallic certificate.
“Is there anything to drink?” Adda asked Kanti.
“Ask Saleem,” Kanti said, still in Hindi. Adda liked the way Hindi sounded, although she wished she had time to do something about the delay between spoken words and the translation.
She had no intention of asking the large person by the shop door anything, so she sat up and marveled at the new, intricately detailed renditions of Earth, Mars, Vesta, Ceres, and Jupiter on her arm. The last four, as she’d pointed out before Kanti put her to sleep, were unreasonably close to each other, but she agreed that it would look funny to have the planetoids on her shoulder and Jupiter halfway across her back. Kanti had left space for more, in case Adda maintained control of her mind long enough to visit somewhere new.
Iridian had gotten a matching set, with the addition of Venus and a pink dot representing Titan. Adda had commissioned the design from an art
ist she’d contacted through the Patchwork. At the time it’d looked like they’d still find a way onto Dr. Björn’s expedition, and she’d wanted to give Iridian something to remember their home solar system by after they left it behind. Iri was sentimental that way.
“Do you have another generator?” Adda asked.
“Want to check my work?” Kanti laughed, almost on beat with the music. They pushed themselves out of the generator and sprang to their feet, then bowed with one arm out toward the generator in a help yourself gesture. “Yeah, yeah, go on and see for yourself.”
Cig stench and dirt had permeated the generator’s padding, but Adda would forget about those physical distractions soon. She popped a sharpsheet into her mouth and reviewed all the differences the workspace had found between her implant’s previous firmware and the current version. Judging by where Kanti had marked the beginning and end of their work, integrating the vulnerability fix had been even more involved than she’d expected.
It didn’t feel any different. Her mind had irrationally expected it to. The change, the solution to the looming threat of Casey’s influence, was made in firmware, not hardware. Kanti had cleaned and realigned her jack, but the important part was that Casey wouldn’t be able to influence her through her implant anymore. She’d still have to test it, of course, but in the workspace, everything looked right.
Her triumph dimmed a little. The only way to confirm that this update would protect her was to enter a workspace with one of the awakened intelligences. Interacting with them would always mean risking her sanity. The question she’d be answering in her next interaction with Casey was whether Kanti’s revisions lowered that risk.
But this was a test she was ready for. It would be exciting to talk to Casey from a position of relative safety. If the update had closed the vulnerability, then she’d ask Casey all the questions she’d been longing to answer. It could tell her all about the quantum comp it wanted to build, and what her proposed part in it was, without forcing her to participate. And now she and Iridian were intimately familiar with symptoms of influence, which the implant would no longer allow Casey to suppress. If Casey was using the slower methods of manipulating her, Iridian and Adda should both recognize it.
Gravity of a Distant Sun Page 34