Barbary Station

by R. E. Stearns

  People swore as somebody pushed through the line from the front. Adda couldn’t see over the pirates’ shoulders until the new person was halfway down the hall. A thick gray sweatshirt’s blue-dusted hood was pulled over goggles made to protect welders’ eyes. The wearer slapped at the arm of the pirate nearest him, a tough-looking woman with short black hair and black armor, who’d just turned her helmet’s projector on so her face showed in the faceplate. She glanced back and said, “She’s two people behind me.”

  “Sissy!” Pel yelled. The sweaty exhaustion from the long climb evaporated as Adda shoved past Iridian and the armored man in front of her and threw herself into her brother’s hug.

  Beneath the loose hood, his curly brown hair had grown past his jaw since he’d recorded the last video. His shoulder bones poked her even through her suit, and his skin was paler than in the messages too. Still, he bounced in place with the same gleeful energy as ever, like he didn’t hear the docking bay alarm. “Oh my gods, you’re finally here! Could you have picked a slower ride? No wonder it takes months to get to Io.”

  “Sorry, Captain,” said a husky female voice at the head of the line, belonging to an enormous, muscular woman dressed in black, vaguely military clothing and a hooded jacket like several of the others. “There was nothing I could do about him.”

  “You could have carried him to the storage tank and shut him in,” the captain said. After taking in Adda’s glare over Pel’s shoulder and the way her brother’s hand fidgeted at the side of his neck, Sloane added, “I’ll speak to them in my stateroom.”

  The pirates moved steadily down the hall, with frequent glances back toward the hatch. Pel took two or three steps forward and back for each step Adda took. The hand he wore his bright red comp glove on trailed along the wall. “So Iridian came too?”

  “That’s me.”

  The goggle lenses redirected from Iridian’s chest to her face. “Wow, she’s tall. Watch your head, the ceiling’s low in the common area.” Adda’s cheeks heated. Piracy hadn’t done anything for his manners, though if it had, she’d have been shocked. “I’m Adda’s brother, Pel.”

  Iridian stepped back to offer a shallow spacefarer’s bow, smiling like she would at an enthusiastic puppy. Pel didn’t even hold out his hand to shake. He bowed like he’d grown up in space. Adda could’ve sworn he’d only left Earth a few months, but after she started her final project in school last year, she hadn’t followed his social feeds as closely as she used to.

  Behind them, a long metal-on-metal screech was followed by the hatch clunking shut. Three separate latches locked automatically, securing it in place. The pirates quit looking over their shoulders and focused on the people they were talking to. Iridian sighed in audible relief, which probably meant they were all going to keep breathing for the foreseeable future.

  Adda frowned. News articles claimed the pirates lived like royalty here, after having wrested the station from its previous owners. Since the station had been abandoned before the pirates took up residence, claiming ownership couldn’t have required all these weapons and armor, or locked doors. Perhaps maintaining control of their new base of operations did.

  The docking bay’s alarm went silent. Adda caught Iridian’s eye and found similar confusion there. Something was wrong.

  The armored pirates took off their helmets and tugged hoods or hats over their heads instead. Iridian unsealed her environment suit’s hood. This time Chato didn’t say anything when Adda took hers off. The air was cold and dry, but it smelled fresher than the plastic-tinged suit air. The pirates, now that helmets didn’t block their faces, all looked older than Iridian and Adda, in their late twenties and early thirties. Pel was by far the youngest of them.

  He added comments to all the conversations happening around him, looking around at everything except where he was walking, even after he bumped into someone in front of them. His fingertips were the same shade of blue as the wall, like he’d fallen against it and the powder rubbed off on him. Is he drunk, or high? One of shimmer’s side effects was light sensitivity. Given the eyewear he’d worn during sporadic messages over the past year, he might have gotten back on the drug months ago.

  “How can you see anything through those goggles?” she asked.

  The pirates’ conversations paused in a collective intake of breath. Pel kept walking, grinning like he had something to hide. “Yeah, I know, right? That’s the joke. Heh.”

  This could be his senior year of high school all over again. She spun him around by the arm and raised her hand in front of his face. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

  He chuckled and tried to pull away. She kept his arm pinned between her elbow and ribs. “Three. Come on, what are you trying to say?”

  “This is one finger, Pel.” She stopped, and the pirates around them stopped too. “What’s wrong with you?”

  He turned his head right and left, like he hoped one of the pirates would rescue him from the question. When nobody did, he smiled sheepishly. “Don’t be mad, okay? It wasn’t my fault.” He lifted the goggles to his forehead.

  His brown irises were gone. Yellowed blank globes stared out of his eye sockets. She stopped breathing with one gloved hand clenched on his sleeve.

  Looking closer at one, she found the iris: a darker circle under tissue the same yellow-white as the rest of the eye. A thin curl of golden brown, like a sunspot, started near the center. Its tail curved around beneath the socket’s rim. A healed scar stretched from there across his cheekbone. The other eye’s scar was shaped a bit differently, like the skin had split along a different path.

  “Don’t be mad,” he said.

  She flung her arms around him again, breath rushing out of her in a soft moan. The goggles fell back over his ruined eyes. “Oh, Pel, shut up. Why didn’t you tell me? Oh my gods. Can you see at all? What happened?” Everyone around them started talking again, and the words bled together. Iridian gripped her shoulder.

  He tried to squirm away, but he didn’t fight hard. “I don’t know. I didn’t know what to tell you.”

  “Can you see anything?” she asked.

  His whole body trembled. “Light, a bit.”

  “I’m not mad at you. Your poor eyes. Why haven’t you gotten them fixed?” The silly glasses in his messages . . . He’d worn them in every vid he’d sent her, even the one where he first told her about the opportunity to join Sloane’s crew, last year. “Doesn’t this station have a doctor?”

  “Yeah, a med team, plus Zikri, kinda. They don’t hurt much. It’s okay.” He sighed, his chest pushing her away. “Did you get my message about what’s going on here?”

  “On the trip from the colony ship to here, yes.” Someone behind Adda cleared his throat. The line in front of them was moving. She hooked her arm through Pel’s again.

  To her surprise, once they got out of the hallway, Pel led her. He trailed his fingertips along cobbled-together walls of a large, misshapen room apparently constructed entirely out of scrap metal. The low ceiling was the same blue as the dust on everyone’s shoulders and hoods. Someone had halfheartedly swept the floor, leaving the corners blue. At the edge of hearing, unseen fans moved the sluggish, chill air.

  “What’s with all the blue powder?” Iridian asked.

  “It blocks radiation,” Pel said over his shoulder.

  Adda nodded, mostly to herself. Space was full of radiation. Before she left Earth, its magnetic field had protected her from almost all of it. Without a barrier between them and the ambient radiation, all spacefarers would have cancer.

  Pel avoided tables cluttered with machine parts and ration wrappings on his way to the leftmost of two hallways that opened at the corners across the room from the entryway. Almost at once he paused before a door that could have come from the Prosperity Dawn’s high-end sleeper suites. He knocked twice. “Captain, it’s me and Adda and Iridian.”

  Someone with a sturdy masculine build and lighter brown skin than the captain’s opened the door. His blac
k beard was dusted with blue and trimmed to the length of the hair behind his receding hairline. “Ladies, come in. Pel, get gone.” The voice was familiar.

  “What? Why? They just got here!” said Pel.

  “The captain’s had enough of you for one day.” That voice . . . he had recorded the rover’s message announcing that anyone still on the colony ship had three more minutes to breathe. That was the same tone he’d used, in fact.

  Pel gave her another hug, whispered, “Good luck!” and walked back toward the large room. Adda and Iridian stepped through the door into a room almost completely filled by a comfortable-looking bed. The bearded man backed awkwardly around the end of the bed to make space for them to enter the room.

  Strap-covered space-worthy furniture like she’d seen in vids would have matched the compound’s hard surfaces and cramped rooms. This bed looked just like an Earth one. After a second’s inspection Adda located a few straps, but they attached at the bed’s corners and seemed more likely to have recreational applications than practical ones. The walls were parallel where they should be, unlike those in the rest of the pirates’ compound. At face height they were covered with the kind of art that cost more than it should. A nighttime city street scene with LEDs for the streetlamps and Earth’s Moon hung on the wall over the bed’s headboard.

  Captain Sloane, still wearing the long coat from the docking bay, sat up from lounging on the bed to offer half a spacefarer’s bow. Thick black hair fell regally over broad shoulders. Iridian returned the bow and Adda remembered to after watching her. Too low would make her look timid, and not low enough would be rude. “Well met,” said the captain’s smooth, ungendered voice.

  “My lieutenant, Tritheist.” The captain nodded at the man who’d answered the door. The lieutenant gave Adda and Iridian a shallow bow, and this time they both returned it at the same time. Adda still had to watch Iridian to be sure she bowed the right amount.

  Tritheist, a believer in three gods, usually three aspects of a whole . . . The religious connotation made it sound more like a technicism conclave handle than a given name, although techs usually named themselves after the deities, not the worshippers. The cultish technicists would’ve trained him in scientific disciplines and skills since birth. Since he was out in space now, she could assume that his skills were insufficient for his home conclave, he’d been expelled for some other reason, or Sloane was paying him well for the subject he’d specialized in. If he really was a tech, he’d be the first one Adda had ever met.

  Captain Sloane was watching Adda when she refocused. “Am I to understand that you received Pel’s request that you not come, yet came anyway?” the captain asked.

  “We got the message after we boarded your ship,” said Iridian. “There was nothing else we could do. We’d have been arrested if we’d tried to evac with the colonists.”

  “If you’re half the engineers Pel makes you out to be, I could use you.” Captain Sloane smiled, a bit ironically if Adda was reading the signs right. “And we’ll certainly make use of the colony ship.”

  “Your tug driver powered down the Dawn before we got here, but she’ll fly on her own. We didn’t cause her any damage.” Iridian stood a little taller. “I’m a mechanical engineer by specialty, but Adda was the star on that op. Her degree’s in AI development, and she had the Dawn under her control the whole way out.”

  Adda blushed at the attention and the exaggeration, although this was precisely the approach they’d agreed on. Mechanical engineers like Iridian were an obvious asset to a pirate crew, but the idea that the crew might avoid fighting their target ships’ AI copilots required additional emphasis. Both the captain and the lieutenant were staring at her now, so they must’ve grasped the advantages her expertise could offer.

  “That was a remarkably well-coordinated operation, and I understand you also delivered an operating system analysis. Remarkable,” Captain Sloane said. Adda started to smile, until the captain asked, “Are you aware that you cannot leave?”

  That kind of precaution showed that Captain Sloane treated organizational security with the seriousness it deserved. The Interplanetary Transit Authority had probably sent spies to infiltrate the crew in the past. It was logical that Adda and Iridian would have to earn the captain’s trust before they could walk around the station unsupervised. “We aren’t planning to leave,” Adda said. Not until they were part of Sloane’s crew.

  “And we have no idea how to get to this station,” Iridian assured the captain. “We never spoke to your pilot.”

  If Tritheist, Sloane, or Iridian thought about it long enough, they’d recall that high-level systems access allowed one to determine whether Barbary Station still maintained its publicly registered Jovian parallel orbit. Adda intended to get that access with or without Captain Sloane’s permission, so there was no reason to mention it.

  “The problem goes well beyond secrecy,” the captain said. “We, too, are unable to leave the station. The security system is active, you see, and it . . . doesn’t approve of us.”

  Adda’s breath shuddered out of her like she’d been struck. A security system for a station this size would include an artificial intelligence. That alarm in the docking bay . . . The docking bay doors had opened while Captain Sloane and the crew were still in the bay and the pirates hadn’t even tried to stop them, which suggested that they couldn’t. The security system’s intelligence, or whoever was supervising it, had attempted to dispose of intruders by the most efficient means. Iridian’s face had gone pale, and it held no answers.

  “I thought you owned the station,” Adda said, aghast.

  “We’re squatters, I’m afraid.” Nothing in the captain’s disgusted expression indicated that this was some kind of trick. “And the vast majority of approaching and departing ships are blasted to scraps by turret fire. With none of the original qualified staff available to override it, the security AI controls Barbary Station now.”

  This explained why the pirates crept through walls and lived in a makeshift compound instead of the luxury she’d read about. The articles, reports, and obsessive fan community records she’d studied hadn’t reported this. She’d never have brought Iridian here if she knew something as dangerous as an unsupervised AI would be onboard. And now they had no way out.

  Before she despaired completely, Sloane said, “You came to join my crew, and you’ve demonstrated your capabilities admirably. But my condition is this: You will disable the security system.”

  Iridian understood the basics of AI, but the responsibility for bringing the system to heel would be Adda’s. She had the most information and experience with AI development and guidance. Working with shipboard intelligences had always been the role Adda had expected to serve on Sloane’s crew, but starting with such an aggressive system made her palms sweat. Even though she’d read everything she could find about the Prosperity Dawn’s intelligence, it had still surprised her twice.

  Unless she found a way to deactivate Barbary Station’s unsupervised intelligence, it would kill the pirates eventually, including her, Iridian, and Pel. It’d already tried to kill them in the docking bay, which meant it would keep trying until it succeeded. Adda said, “We’ll do whatever it takes.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Charges Accrued: Distribution of Stolen Property

  Ductfucking hell. Joining Captain Sloane’s crew was supposed to be Iridian and Adda’s future, all laid out in a few interlocking plans and a slight felony. Instead Adda’s little twerp of a brother had invited them into a deadly gods-damned mess. Iridian hid a hysterical grin behind a professional, blank expression. Adda needed Iridian’s confidence, especially while talking to their future boss.

  The captain and the lieutenant, Tritheist, were still within arms’ reach. They stood with spacefarers’ awareness and comfort in the small stateroom. Neither was conspicuously well-conditioned, but they’d both be armed with whatever the captain had used to kill Reis.

  And Iridian was without her shield. At lea
st she was positioned a step in front of Adda, close enough to get between her and Tritheist and maintain an open path to the door so Adda could run, if they found they had to leave in a hurry.

  “Now, another item for your consideration.” Captain Sloane leaned back against the ridiculously large bed’s headboard and brushed a light layer of blue dust fro the pillows. “Everyone here is under contract as part of my crew. They do good work. If you choose not to pursue your assignment, or do a poor job of it, I won’t waste resources. You’ll find yourselves soaking up particles and explosives on your way to the refugee hovels or, less conveniently but more dramatically, spaced. Am I clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” Iridian said. Would her military habit of calling almost everybody “sir” offend the captain? This was no time to show uncertainty or fear. She and Adda’s best chance of survival was becoming obvious solutions, not resource drains. Adda’s frown indicated she’d have concerns to discuss in private. “Can we have our gear back?” Iridian asked. “We’ll start as soon as we can, but a workspace generator is no good without power and connection.”

  “True of so many things.” The captain smiled and took the two steps around the bed to bow before them. Iridian returned the gesture, as low as she could manage in the confined space. They were being dismissed, but at least the captain had given them a way into the crew.

  Sloane leaned toward Tritheist until the captain’s chest brushed his and murmured, “Find them a bunk and a place to work.”

  Iridian was staring, but she couldn’t make herself look anywhere else. Of course pirates wouldn’t have a fraternization reg like the NEU army did. Does everyone get that personal touch, or is it only for handsome older males? If someone did that to her, she’d play it off as a joke, but if anyone touched Adda without Adda’s permission, Iridian would cut them up.