Barbary Station

by R. E. Stearns

  Iridian slowed for a few steps until Adda caught up. She brushed wisps of Adda’s apple-red hair out of her face, but they floated back a second later. “How’s the jack?”

  Adda twitched her nose, tilted her head, and assessed the rubbing, shifting sensations along the minuscule cabling and neural implants. “It could use a full calibration, but the irritation from my final project healed up.”

  “It should’ve! That was what, six weeks ago?”

  Adda glanced at her comp projection. “Six weeks, five days.”

  Iridian grimaced at the scraggly dark hair floating along behind Reis. Barbary Station had three floors, each several kilometers around. The station’s size was reportedly one part of why Captain Sloane had moved the crew’s base of operations there from Vesta. Putting some distance between themselves and Reis was just one more reason to get to Barbary Station as soon as they could.

  Adda plugged her cable into her own comp through the glove’s wrist jack. The comp made the catch and connected her to the Prosperity Dawn’s intranet. Unlike the lumbering sludge intermediary she had to use for wireless work, her own was so familiar that her brain put no shape to it. It was her intent made digital.

  With employee information ripped from Reis’s comp while her implant net was plugged into it, she channeled junk input into every sensor within three meters. The sensor scum might draw human attention, but the shipboard intelligence had to process it all before activating alarms announcing unauthorized personnel in employee areas. If the employee Reis was looking for called for help, the sensor scum would buy them time.

  Reis slammed open an employees-only door before it had a chance to retract into the wall on its own and shouted “Hyo! Man, you’ve got to help me.” The muscles in Adda’s neck and shoulders that had relaxed beneath the layer of anonymity coiled up again. Iridian stepped to one side of the door, out of sight of whoever was inside, and rested her hand on her knife. Adda stood near her and watched through the doorway while Reis charged into the room beyond.

  The narrow room held tables and chairs with slots and straps for eating in low gravity. The guy he called Hyo, a sturdy uniformed man with the parchment skin that spacefarers sometimes developed before old age, clutched the recycler lid while he fumbled an empty drinking pouch he was trying to deposit. The pouch bounced off the floor before splatting in a small orange puddle. “Um . . . I didn’t know you were still awake. Did you find out why we’re slowing down?”

  “Forget that, I got a message from home. My kid fell and hit his head. It’s bad. I’ve got to get into the bridge and call his mom.” Reis caught the surprised man’s arm to keep him from bouncing off a wall. Since Reis’s boots anchored him to the floor with each step, he easily maneuvered the drifting crewman past Iridian and Adda and down the hall.

  That’s not right. Reis couldn’t have received a message. Long-range communication in anything approaching real time would’ve required a buoy relay, which wasn’t on the Prosperity Dawn’s route. According to the cover story Reis told her he’d memorized, she and Iridian were the ones who were supposed to be sick passengers in need of medical care that the ship’s clinic couldn’t provide. And that would’ve just barely convinced a Prosperity Dawn crew member to give them access to the most secure section of the ship. But maybe Reis had more applicable experience than she did, and his new story would work better.

  “Why can’t you connect your comp? I mean, it’ll take the same amount of time no matter what. And who are—” Hyo twisted in Reis’s grip, gaze flicking from Adda to Iridian in mounting confusion. Adda affected her best nauseated hunched posture, which would’ve supported their cover if Reis had already explained that they were sick, which he hadn’t done. She didn’t know what else to do.

  Hyo’s uniform boots scraped the wall as his shoulder thumped into Reis’s. Her comp buzzed against her wrist to tell her that the banking turn she’d added to the Prosperity Dawn’s prescribed route was complete. The engines still running would slow them faster now, and the viral routine she’d created and Reis had installed during prelaunch preparations seven weeks ago had finished its work right on her schedule. The Prosperity Dawn would stop moving completely in under an hour.

  Everything she read about operating in stationary ships emphasized handholds and magnetic anchoring points for controlled movement without gravity. Hyo writhing while Reis held him in place illustrated the pitiable alternative. “Hey, stop!” Hyo said. “I can’t let you into the bridge.” Whatever sympathy Reis had engendered with the injured child story didn’t show in Hyo’s suspicious expression. “How did you even get the message?” Hyo asked.

  Exactly. If Reis had stuck to the cover story Adda had constructed, which didn’t involve an impossible real-time message, it would’ve explained her and Iridian’s presence and they wouldn’t be having this conversation. Her aggravation traveled through her digital intermediary and manifested in her comp’s sensor scum as a burst of white noise. The others glanced apprehensively at wall-mounted speakers hidden in the blue designs behind the handholds.

  The bridge door appeared on their left around a sculpted bend in the hallway. Reis pinned Hyo against it with a hand around the unfortunate crew member’s neck. “They’ll put me on manual labor when we get to the colony.” Hyo choked. “I don’t—I can’t—”

  That could be the three of us, if we make too many mistakes.

  Reis hit him in the stomach. The blow slammed him back against the closed bridge door. Adda flinched as Reis punched him again, harder. Tears beaded at the corners of Hyo’s eyes as he whimpered and gasped.

  Iridian calmly glanced up and down the hallway while she stretched weeks of disuse out of her limbs, but the beating made Adda’s own stomach ache in sympathy. She examined the ceiling, searching for sensor nodes, and found three. The shipboard artificial intelligence would almost certainly recognize physical violence against its crew. As a pirate, she’d have to get used to violent solutions, but she could engage in exposure therapy sometime when she wasn’t distracting a suspicious artificial intelligence with extraneous sensor input to process.

  “All right,” Hyo wheezed. “All right, just stop.” He presented his comp to the bridge door’s reader. The door slid open.

  The console inside the small, dim bridge became Adda’s sole focus. Its few external user interfaces surrounded a prominent jack, designed for someone with a neural implant net like hers to strap into the grav-adjusting chair and plug in. The pilot had to be awake somewhere else on the ship, because pilots were designated supervisors for the AI copilot. Outside of emergencies, it was dangerous and illegal to leave intelligences unsupervised, especially with so many people onboard.

  Wide metal slats of a closed airlock covered the wall across from the door. Ships’ bridges had to be easily accessed in emergencies, which also made them easy to vent into space. Trusting Iridian to find her an environment suit if Adda made a mistake that would necessitate one, she squeezed into the chair and connected her nasal jack to the console. Time to do what she’d come millions of kilometers to do: access and circumvent her first starship AI.

  Her comp documented her intention’s path through the ship’s system. In case bringing the Prosperity Dawn to Barbary Station was too commonplace an act to impress Captain Sloane, she’d also map the custom operating system’s structure and vulnerabilities. Sloane’s crew could use her map to manipulate similar operating systems in the future, saving them a huge amount of risk and time during an assault. The map would occupy all the spare storage space on her comp, but it’d be priceless to ship thieves.

  Hyo asked a question, but she was too busy easing her hijacking program through administrative overrides to listen. For the first time since she’d woken from hibernation, she really breathed, really thought, came fully awake. The sharpsheet she had taken earlier enhanced the natural norepinephrine effects of pressing her own will through a hostile system so carefully that the intelligence didn’t even raise its defenses. The microgravity na
usea faded away. Her heart staggered through another irregular triplet beat.

  The custom intelligence that ran the Prosperity Dawn only monitored her, for now. But this many anomalous sensor readings and unplanned changes in preprogrammed travel scripts would soon force it to act.

  “Can you . . .” She dragged her mind halfway out of the ship’s systems to concentrate on the human problem. Reis seemed capable of any misdeed, and Iridian was in combat mode. How could Adda ask this in a way that didn’t get the crewman killed? “Hyo, please tell the ship’s AI that everything is fine.”

  Hyo took a breath and yelled, “Securit—”

  A flurry of movement around Adda froze her in place. Reis’s punch to Hyo’s mouth jolted the crewman’s head to one side. Iridian’s hit to his throat drove him choking into the wall. The ship’s intelligence drew the inevitable conclusion. Adda concentrated on tamping down alarms. But while the intelligence woke the remaining crew, she knocked it out of the navigation and propulsion controls.

  For a second she stood and listened to the blank void in the interface where the AI, any AI, should be in a ship’s systems. Now there was nothing but her. Not even pilots experienced this echoing solitude, this single point of power she had created. Five thousand people and a cargo hold full of supplies waited for one unauthorized human to tell them where to go.

  She startled, which jarred the cable in her nasal jack and sent her implant net through a tingling calibration sequence. The sharpsheet’s effects made it difficult to tell how long she’d stood there. If she hadn’t selected a particularly empty stretch of the reliable route for this stage of her plan, they could have plowed into another ship by now. “It’s ours,” she said belatedly for Iridian and Reis’s benefit.

  Iridian would be smiling when Adda turned around, though she kept her distracting hands and voice to herself. Closer to the bridge door, Reis bellowed something in a combination of Spanish or Portuguese and spacefarer cant. It sounded positive, so Adda tuned him out before her brain’s attempt to identify words it understood dropped her out of the ship’s system.

  Navigation accepted her coordinates and vector for the pirates’ prearranged meeting point. For a few seconds the wall and the floor seemed to switch positions as the ship accelerated along a new course. She shut her eyes as her stomach flopped and gravity rose. “We’re going to be broadcasting all the way to the rendezvous as soon as everyone’s wake cycle stabilizes.”

  “We weren’t about to back out.” Iridian grinned.

  The Prosperity Dawn’s intelligence repeatedly queried the navigation system, but Adda’s lockout held. “Barbary Station or bust.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Charges Accrued: Trespassing

  This Reis person was a shitbag, but he’d followed Adda’s plan this far. Until he tried something, Iridian would leave him to it.

  She shifted her grip on Hyo’s arm. Even with his hands zipped behind him and the improvised hand towel gag from the break room, pain and fear might make him to do something unfortunate. She watched him until Adda murmured, “Lead cloud in five.”

  “On it.” Once they entered the lead cloud surrounding Barbary Station, weeks might pass before they got a chance to send messages into the Near Earth Union. The battle that’d created the cloud was the secessionists’ biggest win of the war, and it’d taken place so close to the station that people called it the Battle of Waypoint Station, referencing Barbary’s original name. Given the lead levels in the NEU colony ships that the secessionists destroyed, it would’ve been better for everyone if more ships had escaped intact. The cloud had made Barbary Station unusable as a shipbreaking and refueling port, and now it separated Sloane’s crew from the rest of humanity by shredding comm signals.

  Adda and Iridian had already updated their social feed about becoming Io colonists for friends and family to read and congratulate them over. Those’d keep for a week or so, until the fate of the Prosperity Dawn hit the newsfeeds. By then, the two of them would have much more awesome news to report. The encrypted messages to family that Iridian was sending now told a story nearer the truth: something will happen, and it’ll sound bad. Don’t worry, you’ll hear from us soon.

  An hour out from the rendezvous, Adda sank into a drug-induced trance to reverse the remaining engines. That’d bring the enormous vessel to a full stop. Except for Reis ignoring their cover story and her little brother Pel’s failure to answer her message, her plan was proceeding smoothly from its first phase to its second.

  Reis pressed his palm to the bridge console and held it there while the scanner flashed beneath it, turning his hand red for an instant. Since the AI had declared a state of emergency, his security role on the Prosperity Dawn’s crew gave him a wider range of access to the system. He nodded to Adda. Her lips formed half words. An alarm blared red and repetitive through the tomb-quiet colony ship.

  “Engine failure, repeat, engine failure, engine ejection failure, emergency shutdown on Engines One and Three, retro on Two, leads start deep-space evac checklist,” Reis announced in the direction of the console’s mic. EVAC COMMAND lit up in red on the console. That’d get the crew moving fast enough that they probably wouldn’t notice all engines working at full capacity to slow the ship down.

  The evac order would also tell the intelligence to wake every colonist passenger aboard. Based on what Adda had read about Transorbital emergency procedures, ensuring passenger safety should keep the crew too occupied to interfere with Reis, who was supposedly doing his job. Adda would have to find a way to coordinate with the pirates without getting evacuated herself. She had some ideas, but Captain Sloane might’ve come up with something independently. Adda and Iridian would figure something out. They always did.

  Adda’s head came up, and she brushed her eye-length bangs away. “Sensors are reporting a catastrophic fuel containment failure. The intelligence will resolve the discrepancies in fifteen minutes, if its processors aren’t locked down too hard. I deactivated the automated ITA call for help. Jumpsuit beacons will be the first they hear about us.”

  The solar system was short on armed fleets these days, and only the Interplanetary Transit Authority rescued spacefarers for free. If the ITA came, newsbots would follow. The publicity would’ve been fun, but Adda refused to risk the ITA getting close enough to catch them. The billionaires funding the ITA treated all pirates like they were killers, too. Either way, the alarms would wake the colonists and crew and trick them into abandoning ship before Sloane’s crew arrived.

  Footsteps clomped down the passageway outside the bridge. The Transorbital crewman’s chest pressed against Iridian’s arm as he drew in breath to shout through the gag. She slammed his head into the bulkhead behind him with force enough to shut him up.

  Reis spun and growled a curse Iridian hadn’t heard before, and she’d heard just about all of them. The Transorbital crewman slumped against her side in the decreasing grav. “He needed a nap,” Iridian said. She pressed two fingers on the pulse under Hyo’s jaw to confirm it’d keep pumping. Reis settled back into his crouch beside the door.

  “Untie him,” murmured Adda, still too far in her head to speak loud enough for Reis to hear. “Say he’s radiation poisoned.”

  Iridian pulled her boot knife to cut the Transorbital employee’s zip ties. Knives were the only weapons Reis had been able to get past Transorbital’s security, since it was damned difficult to part spacefarers from their blades. If anyone else wandered into the bridge, the radiation poisoning story might convince them that all was under control. Otherwise, Iridian’s knife was sharp, sturdy, human-powered, and weaker than the exterior hull plating. A perfect weapon for the cold and the black, even when she just had to knock someone out with the hilt.

  She grabbed a handful of Hyo’s uniform to keep him from floating into Reis or Adda. In terms of interplanetary travel speed, the Dawn was nearly stationary. In a few minutes they’d lose an external definition of “down” as the ship stopped accelerating toward the overhead. This
part of the reliable route was a long way from any grav well.

  Reis stood. “They’re gonna expect me to help with the evacuation.”

  As soon as he left, Iridian shoved the unconscious Transorbital employee aside and wrapped an arm around Adda’s shoulders. “Time to move out.”

  Much as she admired her girlfriend’s skill at navigating the digital world, the aftereffects made it hard for Adda to come back to the deck. She followed Iridian out of the bridge in a daze, staring at the spacesick passengers floating around the corridors.

  Even passengers drifting into her while struggling into bulky jumpsuits didn’t focus her eyes. “These people completely ignored the safety briefing,” Iridian said. Adda nodded without looking at her.

  To speed things along, Iridian parked her dazed girlfriend against a bulkhead and shooed people into airlocks that’d launch them far enough away from the ship to give them a chance at survival. A few jumpsuited crew members cast incredulous looks at her and lifted their go bags pointedly as they passed. It was kind of them to remind her that customer service shouldn’t involve getting blown up on the customers’ behalf.

  She roused Adda enough to help her haul Hyo from the bridge, wrestle him into a jumpsuit, and throw him into an airlock full of people about to disembark. The hatch shut on the passengers’ questions. Using the launch system to leave a moving ship was a scary safety procedure that every spacefarer read about and nobody thought they’d ever have to follow, but there’d been a uniformed crew member among the passengers in the airlock to show them what to do and help their unconscious crewmate. The helmeted jumpsuits would keep them all breathing until an ITA ship came to collect them.