“No signals get through the lead cloud,” Adda said. “I don’t understand how you got the first message to me.”
“Si Po helped,” Pel admitted. “He asked one of the ships to take it. She, the Casey I mean, she does that sometimes. Si Po helped a lot with getting you here, actually.” Iridian would have to find the pirate by that name later, and either thank him or punch him. At the moment, she felt more like hitting him.
Adda sighed. “Was this before or after what happened to your eyes?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Pel said so quickly that there had to be something left to say.
“Pel!” a deep voice shouted somewhere above. “Get your ass out here or we’ll divvy up without you.”
“Okay, I’m sorry.” Pel glanced between Adda and Iridian, looking appropriately guilty at last. “I’m really sorry. I should’ve told you everything in the first message. But now we’ve got to go get stuff, or all the good bits will get sent to the fugees.” Before Iridian could ask him what that was about, he dragged his hand along the curved wall to the ladder and clambered up.
Adda peered toward the far end of the tank, away from the trapdoor hatch and the light. “Does it lock?”
Iridian assumed she meant the door that led from the ladder to the rest of the base. “If it doesn’t now, I’ll make it. So are we really—”
“Could be miked,” Adda said quietly. “Later, after I’ve looked for them.”
“Fuck later. We might not have later.” Iridian set her hands on Adda’s hips and murmured, “What’s going on in your head?”
Adda’s soft arms curled around Iridian. She wasn’t shaking. That was good. “Can we do this? With all these . . . criminals?”
They hadn’t had this exact conversation before, but they’d danced around the topic often enough. “Nice people sign contracts and do what they’re told, babe. Criminals we can handle. Secessionists, too, come to that. It’s the AI I’m worried about.” She pressed a kiss to the top of Adda’s head where her purple highlights met. “We can always go find the refugees if the next surprise disaster is too bad.”
Barbary Station housed a whole community of refugees. She and Adda had listened to an episode or two of their newsfeed, with a fast-talking host named Suhaila. All the newsfeed told them about the station was that enviro was healthy, the refugees needed more supplies, and before the pirates arrived, a lot of refugees had died.
Suhaila had also talked about the station’s defense system shooting down ships that got too close, while providing instructions on launching supplies in cargo containers toward the station. The rest of humanity had assumed that the pirates were choosing the defense system’s targets. It was starting to look like most sources of information about Sloane’s crew that Adda had found got their information from the refugee feed, and some of that sounded like propaganda Sloane had made up. Claiming credit for a malfunctioning AI’s kills would certainly make the pirates look powerful.
“Seriously, Iri.”
Adda would create an escape plan if they needed one, but what would they do after that? Of all the habitats in the galaxy to be homeless, jobless, and broke, a station run by an out-of-control AI had to be the least survivable. Besides, Adda should at least assess the situation before they threw away their best chance at a good life.
Iridian nudged her forehead against Adda’s to turn her face up so they looked each other in the eyes, and so Adda saw the teasing smile just for her. “I’m good enough, what’s wrong with you?” Adda rolled her eyes and Iridian laughed. “Yeah, it’s crazy. It’s the kind of crazy that turns people into legends. We’ll be fantastically rich, babe.”
“Fatally rich, you mean. And don’t use that word.” Adda had nearly broken Iridian of the bad habit of calling things “crazy” when she meant “risky,” but it was harder to remember when she was around people who talked like soldiers. “Reis is dead,” Adda continued. “They may kill us too.”
Iridian put her hands on either side of Adda’s face, to hold her gaze. “Do you really think that?”
“No.” Adda sighed. “Otherwise I’d never have agreed to the captain’s proposal. I’m not sure that makes this a good idea.”
Iridian kissed her. The touch of tongue against her lower lip told her Adda was calming down, maybe ready to meet more of the crew. After all the hitches big and small in Adda’s plan, she was still determined to take what came and make it into something better. Gods, I love her. “It’s a great idea. Know the difference.”
* * *
Over the next twenty minutes Pel helped them select the most essential pieces for their share of the colony ship haul. The data casks from the drones’ nets on the Prosperity Dawn were nowhere to be seen, but the workbenches in the common room were now covered with labeled crates of other odds and ends from the colony ship. Jewelry and tech were piled next to the crates, and the crew formed a winding, disordered line through the workbenches. Most of the people in the room wore black sweatshirts and jackets with the yellow ZV design somewhere on them. Captain Sloane and Tritheist, who’d apparently already perused what was available, leaned against the far wall, watching. Tritheist muttered at the comp in his iridescent black comp glove every time somebody claimed an object from the table.
“These things cost future money,” Pel explained. “Like, nothing now, but some totaled-up price when we get to our bank accounts again. Anyway, data gets ripped to the crew drive, so you get that for free. You want to grab physical necessities, because I bet you didn’t bring much. Are there pillows?”
The crew selected similar essentials and shouted versions of “Good timing,” and “Finally, after all these months!” over the dance music playing from somebody’s comp. Some of the crew must’ve had everything they needed already, because they somehow found space to dance to the music among all the crates and people. Now that Iridian was looking, she saw that the pirates had kept a lot of scars. Perhaps that wasn’t an aesthetic choice.
For anything needed but not present, the crew traded units of their share for boxes labeled in 3-D printer codes. Printers needed the spools of metal and plastic inside to make all the inorganic objects people used every day, from toothbrushes and plates to machine parts and fittings. Considering what the pirates hauled out of the Dawn, they didn’t count on their printer to produce textiles reliably. Fortunately, there were about ten crates labeled “Pillows.”
Adda’s research indicated that Captain Sloane’s crew netted one colony ship every twelve to fifteen months. Their success rate here was why the rest of humanity had quit calling the place Waypoint Station and started calling it Barbary, even before the captain “moved the crew’s headquarters” to it last year. None of the newsfeeds where she and Adda had heard that phrase suggested that the move had been unintentional, although it certainly looked that way now. The twenty pirates crowded into the common room should’ve had more than enough supplies, medical and otherwise.
They must’ve arrived with more people. Adda had never gotten a good read on crew size before she and Iridian arrived on-station, other than that the crew was big enough to do plenty of damage when Captain Sloane ordered it to.
While Pel and Adda caught each other up on family stuff, Iridian turned to see who was in line behind her. A muscular guy a couple of decades her senior, whose ancestors had lived in East Asia on Earth, was watching them. She bowed as far as space allowed and introduced herself. “Major Ken Oonishi,” he said, at the same time Pel shouted, “Major O.D.!” which the pirates laughed at and repeated.
“Organ donor, not overdose,” the major said in the tone of someone performing a rehearsed explanation. Iridian was still reconciling a major taking orders from Captain Sloane. The NEU standardized its military ranks for a reason. “Welcome. Heard you and the ships brought back a colony ship on your own. Truth?”
Iridian grinned. “Truth.”
“And you came here with a shield.”
“Personal protection, sir, that’s all.” Irid
ian couldn’t tell which colony O.D.’s accent was from, but she hadn’t heard any accents like it on Earth. Half the pirates in the room spoke with one variety of colonial inflection or other. The crew composition surprised her, although she probably should’ve expected it, since the crew’s original base of operations was on Vesta in the asteroid belt.
Not everybody in habs beyond Mars supported secession from the NEU, but secessionists liked to present themselves as regular people until you let your guard down. She shifted her weight away from the major, making space to draw one of her blades if she needed to. It was a shame the backwater inbreds couldn’t get an education as specialized as the kind offered on Earth. That should never have been a deficit to start a war over. A person who’d kill over that would kill over, say, the side one had fought for in a war that’d already ended. Years on Earth had almost convinced her that humanity had become better than that.
“Awright.” If Major O.D. was waiting to jump her, he was a damned fine actor as well as an officer. She’d had trainers like that. “The only people who use shields are soldiers and SWAT, and if you’re a cop, you weren’t documented in the last Internet scrape. When Pel Mel finally told us you were coming, Kaskade looked you up.” He nodded toward a woman with blue-streaked hair and the not-quite-there look of systems engineers like Adda. Iridian smiled slightly, because that was also exactly what Adda would’ve done. “Not that we’re connected to the net out here. The scrape we got might not have had your records anyway.” Major O.D. looked mournfully down at his black comp glove.
“Me and Adda aren’t cops or soldiers. She was never in, and me . . . I’m done with that.”
Major O.D. nodded and checked on the progress of the line, apparently content to let the topic pass without asking which side she’d fought for. She let out the breath she’d been holding, mentally repeating, I’m done, I’m done, I’m done, damn everything. She wasn’t just going to have to work with these people, she was going to have to trust them. Maybe the other colonial crew members weren’t as resentful about their losses as the sergeant she’d met. The major had talked more rationally than Iridian had, so far. Hell, he’d probably seen how defensive she was and hadn’t said a thing about it.
The dance music playing from someone’s comp faded to a feminine voice Iridian recognized, attributing the song and adding, “Breaking in for breaking news! Sloane’s crew snagged a colony ship, people! Intact, no damage, no passengers. Yes, I’m serious.” The pirates cheered. “Captain, we hope to see you soon.” A new song started and conversation and dancing resumed.
“Was that Suhaila? From the refugees’ feed?” Iridian asked.
“Fugee News,” said Major O.D. without looking up from the label on a box of printer material. News broadcasts were a good description of the fugee feed episodes that Iridian and Adda had listened to, but those hadn’t included music. “The fugees have a good feed, and we send them all the music we get so they keep things bouncing. I don’t know how they hear about things so quick, but they always do.”
“Fugees?” She’d been looking for a chance to ask about that term.
“Yeah, a few thousand people left Mars in a hurry after the secessionists took over. Somebody thought it’d be smart to put the fugees up here, ’cause no habs would take them. Station was just about empty then. We figure that’s what drove AegiSKADA mad, all these strangers coming in, some of them armed, no doubt. Nobody’s been able to come get them, and their pilot got killed trying to leave to pick up more fugees. I still don’t know how the Martians got their ship back here, without the pilot. AegiSKADA’s turrets blew a big hole in the bridge.”
“The Martian habs surrendered in 2473.” Iridian heard the horror in her voice, and it was damned justified. “The fugees have been here all this time?”
“Yep.” The major took a deep slug of the concoction in his cup. “Three years they been here. AegiSKADA won’t let them leave.”
Adda’s voice cut through the nightmare Iridian’s brain was lining up based on that unenviable experience. “If AegiSKADA allows your ships to come and go, why haven’t you asked your pilots to take you and the refugees off the station to somewhere safer? I don’t think the ITA is waiting outside the lead cloud to arrest you when you leave. We would’ve seen them on our way here.”
O.D. was tall enough to have to tip his head down to focus on her, and he looked back to his drink almost at once. “The pilots won’t take anybody anywhere, most of the time. We were surprised the Apparition picked you up. The pilots and the station’s original medical team, the people who’ve been here since the owners evacuated . . . Being here shook something loose in their brains. None of them think right anymore.”
Iridian shifted until Adda’s body heat warmed her arm. Being trapped on a station with an AI out for blood might make a person do anything. Anything at all. The ITA remapped the reliable routes when Spacelink, Barbary Station’s former corporate owners, gave up the station. No rescue was coming. Barbary Station was abandoned, rolling in the cold and the black with a mad, inhuman thing at its helm.
Iridian bit the inside of her cheek to ground herself in the pain. It didn’t help much. How could two humans in the middle of nowhere defeat an entity that had imprisoned so many people for years?
CHAPTER 5
Charges Accrued: Unauthorized Access to Nonpublic Computers
When Adda climbed down from the bunk, long after Iridian got up, pirates still slept in half the other beds in the dim room. She’d been up late checking the water tank for mics, moving her and Iridian’s packs and environment suits down from the bunk room, assembling her workspace generator, and exploring the station’s intranet. The minimal monitoring features she found on the pirates’ own intranet were part of their server’s initial installation. Either the pirates could handle whatever came at them, or knowing what was coming wouldn’t save them.
She shuffled to the communal excretion area, as she called it to aggravate Iridian, then to the kitchen. The big woman who worked there, wearing what appeared to be an armored apron, watched her paw at the coffee urns for a few seconds before showing her how to coerce them into dispensing their treasure.
Iridian waved her over to a table where she, Pel, and a couple of men huddled over mugs. The one with the epicanthic folds at the corners of his eyes was Major O.D., though the insignia on his T-shirt was a Z and a V. The major and Chato wore the same black shirts and jackets with hoods up. The four of them were talking like they’d known one another for months instead of hours.
To get to them, Adda edged past a woman in a ZV shirt, the one from the hallway with the scar on her temple. Rather than moving out of Adda’s way, the woman scowled while Adda inched around her table toward Iridian.
When Adda bumped the woman’s elbow, the woman slammed a mug down on the table beside her. Adda startled away, thumping into another table and bruising her hip. “Watch it, NEU.” Iridian’s gaze hardened into a warning. The hostile woman didn’t move out of the way, but she didn’t follow Adda to Iridian’s table.
Iridian broke her glare to give Adda a quick kiss and pat the chair beside hers. She’d found herself a black hooded jacket, which had one gray sleeve and one black one, to combat the blue dust drifting off the ceiling. To Pel, she said, “Start from the beginning, and make some sense this time.”
His coffee appeared black but contained a tablespoon of sugar, if he took it the way he did at home. “Okay. So this happened over a year ago, when the crew got stuck here. Captain Sloane wasn’t captain then, it was, um . . .”
“Captain Foster,” the major said.
“Yeah, that was it. So Captain Foster lured this ship to the station so AegiSKADA would ding it up a bit and the crew could clear it easy. That part worked, but then AegiSKADA shot down both of them.” Then the two wrecks in the docking bay would be the first pirate ship and its target.
“They used to trick ships into flying through Barbary’s turret range all the time,” said Chato. “But you only have
to fuck it up once.”
They, not we. “Aren’t you on the crew too?” Adda asked.
“We work for the ZV Group.” Major O.D. pointed to the corresponding letters on his shirt. Even his comp glove was black with the same yellow letters on the middle two knuckles. “Captain Foster contracted for our services clearing out the ship she lured here, but the ZV Group pays us. Private military company.”
“Hired guns,” Iridian translated.
“Only on leave.” The major smiled with half his mouth. Chato, Iridian, and Pel chuckled the way they did at crude jokes, although Adda didn’t get what was funny about that. She gulped coffee in hopes of catching up.
“And the ZV Group left you in the cold and the black?” Iridian asked.
O.D. shrugged. “They’re still paying us. Same excuse as Sloane’s allies and the government militaries: no way they’re putting their fleet up against AegiSKADA’s turrets for the likes of us.”
“Anyway, Captain Foster decided to fix the fuckup,” Pel said. “So she took a lieutenant, two squads of ZV soldiers, and all the big guns, and went to find AegiSKADA’s core.”
What might “core” mean? The core, or center, of a space station’s security system . . . He must have meant its supervisory station, where administration controls were accessible, or where its pseudo-organic tanks were kept.
“They knew where they were going when they left, so the only thing they had to find was a path around the blocked hallways,” Chato said. “The security control center’s on the station map.”
“Learn to tell a story or shut your head,” said Pel. Chato simultaneously grinned and rolled his eyes in the expression everyone developed within ten minutes of meeting her brother. “But yeah, they found it all right. They got shot all to hell. Completely dead.” He leaned across the table. Dark wraparound lenses reflected Adda’s greasy red, purple, and blue-streaked hair. “They say Foster’s still in there, screaming eternally at AegiSKADA for killing her.”
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