Barbary Station

by R. E. Stearns

  “Corps can ESE that.” His invitation for the corporations to involve themselves in the unfortunate cycle of edible material in closed habitats made Iridian chuckle. “I hear Sloane pays cash, or as close to it as you can get in the cold and the black.”

  The exchange took Iridian back to long nights with Adda curled beside her, wondering what would become of them after graduation. “You ever see an entry-level engineer’s contract?” she asked Reis. “Anything you design is theirs, whether you design it in the office or in the lodge on Earth’s Moon during the time off you get every three years. Anything. If I made a ring for Adda, they’d sell the pattern all across the galaxy, without giving me anything. Even five years down the line they might be taking my designs and selling them, because one word in the contract says that’s fine.”

  “It’s bullshit,” Reis said. “Transorbital does all that plus controls your every gods-damned breath. You go where they tell you, you say what they tell you to say, you sleep and eat and shit when they tell you. . . . Could’ve stayed in the army for that.”

  Iridian nodded. “Same. On Sloane’s crew we’ll have a chance of earning what we’re worth and having time to spend it.” That was what had started Adda and Iridian reading up on the best crew to join and saving to travel to whatever hab they called home, even before Pel told Adda about the golden opportunity on Barbary Station.

  “So, why didn’t you stay on the colony ship?” Reis asked. “Too far from civilization for my taste, but they say you can sit on your ass for a living wage on Io.”

  “That’s what they say about Barbary Station, too,” Iridian said. “Both places have to be more work than they sound, or they wouldn’t pay so well. Anyway, Jovian colonists tried to kill me for about two years straight. Neither of us are ready for me to move in next door.”

  Adda shifted against Iridian’s side to pull the projected display on her comp glove into view through the window in the back of the enviro suit’s glove. Iridian’s comp wasn’t downloading new information. The pirate ship apparently blocked transmissions in and out, though Adda’s always seemed to find a way through.

  She elbowed Iridian’s ribs. “Pel finally responded to my message. Want to watch?”

  Iridian maneuvered her enviro suit hood around so she could rest her head on Adda’s shoulder to get a better view. The man—boy, really, he was barely twenty—sat somewhere dark. The console backlighting shaded his pale skin blue. Something that sounded like copulating orangutans hooted outside cam range. He hunched over the cam in sunglasses with huge white frames. They may have actually been on his face, and not a goofy feature of his messaging software. A sweatshirt hood collected curling brown hair around his patchily stubbled face.

  Every other message from him started with a big grin and a bright “Hi, Sissy!” This time he kept glancing away from the cam, and his tone was much more subdued. “Hey, Sissy. I hope you get this before you leave. It’s . . . yeah. Important. And yeah, I know this is last minute.”

  He glanced over his shoulder toward the orangutan noises. “This isn’t a good time for you guys to come. We’re having some . . . problems. Don’t worry, I’m fine! Just, you know, see if you can get a ticket on another flight. Maybe in six months? Yeah, that’d be better; half a year and we’ll have everything sorted. Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner, but, you know, crazy busy makin’ money.” The last sentence devolved into an awkward rap rhythm.

  “Perfect timing,” Iridian drawled.

  “The fuck was that about?” asked Reis.

  Adda’s sigh fogged her faceplate for an instant. “Gods, I wish he’d waste his time, not mine. If he thinks about it, he’ll realize that if we don’t respond, we’re still coming.”

  “They did let us onboard,” Iridian said. “Now all they have to do is let us out at Barbary Station.” After a few moments of listening to herself breathe in her enviro suit, she asked, “What kind of a name is Barbary Station, anyway?”

  “It’s a reference to sea piracy around Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya,” said Adda. Iridian was halfway through looking up where those Earth countries might be before she remembered that even if her comp’s request made it out of the ship, the lead cloud would prevent it from going anywhere. She shuddered. That’d take some getting used to. “People called that area the Barbary Coast centuries ago,” Adda went on. “The implication is that Barbary Station is just as dangerous for legitimate shipping as that area was.” She frowned and gripped the straps securing her shoulders to the wall behind her, her gaze unfocused, her mind a million klicks away.

  * * *

  By the time the thrusters reversed and lit, Iridian was getting jittery. Though the pirates could be watching them on shipboard cams, their real first impression arriving on the station might make the difference between being accepted or killed. If this ship were crewed by anyone beyond the pilot, they’d come out of their quarters then. Handing over a colony ship should allow Adda and Iridian to skip any tests or demonstrations a pirate crew might demand of those wishing to join. If it didn’t—if anything at all went wrong—they could die.

  Grav rose sharply and shifted to push Iridian flat against the bulkhead, which no longer felt like a wall to her now that grav was shifting. Reis had left the strap-down station sometime during the trip, and he bounced off a magnetized stack of crates, swearing and thrashing until he found a handhold. Docking processes thrummed and rumbled through the bulkhead as the ship affixed itself to something bigger.

  According to Adda’s research, Barbary Station’s spin generated hypergrav nearer 1.15 g than the standard 1. The old convention was supposed to minimize travelers’ low-grav bone loss. Scientists disproved hypergrav’s calcium-retaining benefits definitively and publicly after several megacorps and two government had already built hyper-g stations. Her body adopted slow head-swivel turns to keep her from getting dizzy in the first few days of hypergrav-induced inner-ear disorientation. That habit had saved her a lot of misery on long, fast flights during the war.

  Adda’s face went gray as the ship finished inserting itself into station grav and its engines powered down. Iridian squeezed her hand and helped her unstrap from the bulkhead. After years of daydreaming and planning and saving, they’d arrived. It was time to interview for a whole new life.

  The passthrough cycled open, admitting a gust of station atmo. When their suits’ readings indicated the passthrough’s enviro was healthy, Reis unsealed his faceplate and let the suit’s hood hang behind his neck. Iridian kept hers on, and it probably hadn’t occurred to Adda to take hers off. The doors in the corridor beyond the cargo area stayed shut. It was just them and the pilot onboard, then.

  “Let’s go, ladies.” Reis grinned and held out his arm, knife in hand. Iridian sheathed hers where he could see the action and take the hint. He sneered and entered the passthrough.

  “Drop the blade,” someone outside shouted.

  Iridian and Adda glanced at each other. “Better get out there and say hi to Pel,” Iridian said.

  Adda set her teeth in her bottom lip, eyeing the door sideways like she’d rather not look at all. “That wasn’t Pel.”

  Stepping into the passthrough revealed that the ship hadn’t docked to another passthrough. It was parked inside a massive industrial docking bay. The pad it rested on took up barely a third of the space, but the bay’s ceiling seemed too low for a vessel this size. Some overhead lights were out, casting large patches of shadow across the metal floor. Though the enviro suit sealed her away from it, the cooling engine would suffuse the atmo with ozone. After years of going to school on Earth, it’d be good to smell something like home.

  About a dozen people stood on the pad, some with faces shadowed beneath hoods and others in helmets with the facial projection feature turned off. They brandished metal bowls strapped to their palms at Reis and his stupid knife. Even though the light was bright enough to see Adda’s face through her suit hood, nobody in the bay acted like they recognized her.

&nb
sp; Gemmed rings and earrings reflected the bay’s gray-white light. Each helmet or hood and everyone’s shoulders were painted with blue highlights. None of them wore enviro suits or masks, though several in the front had solid-looking armor. They weren’t outfitted for the airborne chem or bioweaponry so common in shipboard combat.

  An alarm whooped, accompanied by rotating yellow lights mounted on the docking bay walls. How the fuck can a depressurization cycle start in an occupied docking bay? The pirates must’ve overridden the safeties. “Grab a handhold.” The suit’s comms carried Iridian’s words to the other Transorbital suits, but not to the pirates. Adda gripped a handhold in the passthrough wall. Out on the gangway, Reis kept waving his damned knife.

  “No time for fooling,” said the first voice. It belonged to someone taller than Iridian, with dark skin, a hooded duster that brushed the deck, and a long figure she couldn’t classify as male or female. “Drop it. Now.”

  Reis’s fist clenched on his knife hilt. “I’m not standing here while—”

  The shallow bowl in the speaker’s hand emitted a rising whir and a loud snap. Iridian held her breath, braced for the pain of impact. Or, gods, it could’ve hit Adda!

  Reis staggered and made a gurgling, retching noise. His head swung sluggishly toward Iridian, his nose and mouth gleaming red with blood. He dropped to his knees, then fell forward. Something in his face crunched when it hit the floor.

  CHAPTER 3

  Charges Accrued: Conspiracy to Sabotage Artificial Intelligence

  Weapons shaped like handheld satellite dishes swung toward Iridian’s chest. Reis wasn’t breathing. Iridian could be next.

  Her fists were up and her head was down. Shadows and yellow warning lights from the docking bay walls flickered over her scowling face. Adda put her hands up as quickly as she dared and stepped forward. “Captain Sloane?” The docking bay’s alarm was so loud she had to shout. The pirates’ eyes and several of their weapons refocused on her.

  The man—woman? neither?—who’d shot Reis nodded, so she said as fast as she could, “My name is Adda Karpe. I’m Pel’s sister. I’ve got a comp glove, but I’m not armed. Iridian Nassir is going to put down some knives. We’re here to join your crew.”

  Iridian raised an eyebrow at her, like she’d forgotten that Adda could speak up when she had to. Adda’s announcement shocked Iridian far enough out of combat mode to set a large knife and her shield on the ramp. She opened her environment suit at the shin to relinquish her boot knife. A holdout blade still rested against her lower back, out of sight under the suit. The open suit leg flapped in a rising breeze.

  Not a single other weapon was lowered, but that would have been foolish of the pirates. Adda took a long, slow breath. Reis was dead. She’d been talking to him just seconds ago, and now he was dead. But nobody else died.

  An armored pirate with a hood obscuring his face approached them. Adda clenched her teeth and braced for whatever came, but he just crouched beside Reis’s body to collect Iridian’s knives and shield.

  “This conversation will be taking place elsewhere.” Captain Sloane turned on a fashionably booted heel and walked toward a corner of the docking bay, away from the landing pad. A man and a woman carrying those bowl-shaped weapons jogged ahead, two steps to each whoop of the alarm.

  The ship Iridian and Adda had arrived on wasn’t the only one in the docking bay. One sat half on, half off a second landing pad. Its cockpit was smashed in. The other lay on its side nearby, bent at angles around two enormous breaches in its hull. Both wrecks had been exposed to air long enough to rust.

  Her gaze skittered away from the body in front on the ramp. Reis was the first dead person she’d seen just lying at her feet, not on a projector stage or in a coffin. Although she’d disliked and distrusted Reis, she and Iridian would never have reached Barbary Station without him. She hadn’t planned for this.

  Loud buzzing from behind warned her to get off the ship’s ramp. Ten rovers rolled around Reis and down the ramp on wheels, dragging pallets of crates behind them that shoved his body onto the landing pad. They followed the captain as well. Apparently the pilot still had work to do onboard, because no one else disembarked.

  Iridian beckoned for Adda to get moving, then jogged after the pirates and rovers. When she passed the man holding her equipment, she said, “You damage that shield, you’re a dead man.”

  She left him no time to respond before running on. This group of pirates included five or six women. One was so muscular that by comparison Iridian was as classically attractive as an advertising persona. It couldn’t be Iridian’s gender that surprised him, so maybe his stunned expression was a result of expecting her to act more like Adda.

  When Adda ran after them, her stomach churned in protest of combining anxiety and extra gravity. She unsealed her environment suit hood before she could throw up in it and let it dangle behind her neck. Hard plastic bumped the tops of her shoulder blades with each step. Dry docking-bay air chilled her lungs, full of ozone and oil. Without the hood, the alarm was louder. The station’s gravity rearranged her internal organs and plastered her sleep-tangled hair against her head despite the wind.

  “You want to keep that hood on.” A big man with a wide, flattened nose behind a cracked helmet faceplate kept pace beside her. His voice was accented like he’d spoken Spanish well before he learned English. “This place is losing atmo, if you can’t feel it.”

  Adda’s eyes widened. That’s right, stations aren’t supposed to have wind. “Thanks.” She hid her face beneath the hood, hoping the pirates were headed somewhere protected by an airtight door.

  “I’m Chato,” the one next to her said. “Pel has a lot to say about you.”

  Something small flew past her head toward the slowly widening square of open space above and behind the pirate ship. Escaping air misted over the stars. It looked like a hole in the universe.

  She shut her eyes for a second. Barbary Station’s original owners had been shipbreakers. Plenty of malfunctions and leaks would be easier to contain when not surrounded by flammable gases, and the wide door made it easy to move wrecked ships in and out. At the rate it was going, it looked like it’d take a few minutes to open that far, and the air in the docking bay would be gone well before then. That didn’t make the gradual disappearance of the one barrier between her and a perfect vacuum less alarming to watch, so she overcame the instinctual panic and turned her back on the opening airlock.

  The pirates stopped at a vertical tear in the closest exterior wall, along which the rovers lined up crates and nets from the colony ship. A cross-section of the wall showed multiple layers of metal composites forming a room or hallway beyond the tear. Power cables as big around as Adda’s upper arm covered its floor and the wall around the opening. Someone had wound the cables up over one another to make room to enter.

  A woman small enough to slip through the gap in the wall and between the cables easily did so. Wind from air escaping out the docking bay door strengthened until Adda had to lean into it to keep her balance. The woman stuck her head out through the gap a few moments later. “Nothing walking in there, Captain. I’m going.” She vanished into the wall again.

  “Double hull.” Iridian must have seen Adda’s puzzled frown. She sealed her environment suit’s hood, and Adda did too. One of Iridian’s first rules of life in space was “Do what I do.” Since she’d spent almost as much time in space as Adda had spent on Earth, that seemed wise.

  “Will the double hull retain pressure?” Since the docking bay’s alarm was still blaring, Adda certainly hoped it would. The grit blowing out through the gap and eddying around her legs wasn’t encouraging. Iridian shook her head.

  “Safer this way,” Chato said loudly enough to carry through his helmet and her suit’s hood.

  “No talking in the wall,” said one of the others. Despite her suit’s insulation, she shivered. Hard vacuum was a handbreadth away on the other side of the exterior hull, and growing behind her in the docking
bay too. Iridian entered first and Adda followed, with Chato a step behind.

  Adda was short enough to stand straight. Iridian’s hood dragged along a hanging cable and knocked into dangling LEDs casting orange light on their path. The LEDs might have been designed as holiday decorations. Beneath the docking bay’s alarm, arrhythmic ticking and a low electronic buzz permeated the narrow space along with the tramp of booted feet. Adda was too wide in the hips to walk straight through, so she shuffled sideways behind Iridian.

  The pirates came to a gradual halt at the end of the last string of orange lights. The center of the metal floor was clear of grit and cables, as if many feet walked there. Something clunked above them. Adda startled backward into Chato and reached for Iridian’s hand. After a perfunctory squeeze, Iridian let go. In combat mode, Iridian needed her hands free.

  They started moving. After a meter, Iridian’s back shifted up instead of forward and a ladder appeared in front of Adda. The climb felt endless. Everyone would hear her panting and judge her for her lack of fitness. What if her suit didn’t have enough oxygen? Was she going to suffocate, to rot in the walls like a dead roach?

  She had a plan to carry out. If the pirate captain would only talk terms at the top of an unreasonably long ladder, she’d climb it. Besides, Pel had to be up there somewhere. The whooping alarm faded slightly as she ascended.

  An interminable time later, Iridian’s boots disappeared from above Adda’s white-gloved fingers. The ladder ended in a hatchway. She pulled herself over its edge, and Iridian helped her into a hallway with oddly angled walls. It widened slightly the farther forward she looked. In comparison to the hull passage, it was spacious.

  Ahead, pirates broke into raucous chatter punctuated by appraising glances toward her and Iridian. More strings of decorative orange LEDs hung from the walls. The ceiling and walls were a solid, unnatural shade of blue that could only have been created in a chemistry lab or a digital art studio. The floor was a duller version of it. When she scuffed her boot, it scraped through a layer of blue dust. More filtered down from the ceiling. Under the dust, the tiles were unpainted metal.