Now she only imagined what Adda would suffer if she lost Pel. Iridian couldn’t let an AI stop the three of them from earning a life together.
Iridian and Sturm hauled the scrap metal and tools to the hallway, where the crew backed off to give them room to work. Although she was pretty sure she saw what needed doing, she followed Sturm’s lead as they shored up the patch. “So have you given any thought to why the drones don’t just blow this place right off the fucking hull?” she asked as they worked.
“I take it you haven’t placed your bet yet,” Sturm said. When Iridian shook her head, he added, “Board’s in the digital library if you’re wanting to wager. My money’s on the drone printer being busted beyond repair. If it can’t print more, it’ll be stingy with what it has, yeah?”
“Seems reasonable.” Iridian turned her head away while Sturm welded a chunk of metal she was holding in place. The acrid hot metal scent was calming, given the topic at hand. The crew could still fight back. “You don’t think the AI’s just fucking with you?”
The torch shut off and Iridian turned back in time to see Sturm nod. “That’s what Si Po and Kaskade think. They’ve got a few on their side too, because the attacks seem random. I don’t expect it’s smart enough to play, myself.”
“What does the captain think?”
“That it’s using us the way we used to use it. We bring a lot of resources to the station. And those ships we take . . . They get taken apart. Some of them go to repair ours and shore up this place.” Sturm swept his hand in front of him to reference the whole base. “Not all of it’s used for that, though. We don’t know where the rest goes, but it goes somewhere. Barbary was a shipbreaking station first, you know. It’s still got to have something to keep this station going.” Sturm shook his head. “AegiSKADA’s a security AI, though. It wouldn’t care about all that.”
After thirty minutes of work, the table felt like it’d stay braced against the damaged bunkhouse’s doorway without dragging half the wall into the cold and the black. Iridian’s next most dangerous problem was currently talking with some despondent ZVs in the common room.
Sergeant Natani, the secessionist officer with the scar with whom Iridian had had a run-in when they arrived on-station, had probably pushed Adda toward the collapsing bunkhouse. But even Adda lacked proof of that. It could’ve been an accident.
With Natani’s whole unit around her, outright accusation would start a fight Iridian couldn’t win. Typical secessionist tactics: hit anonymously at opportune moments, then run to a crowd who shouted alibis that made the attacker look like the victim. And if their first assault wasn’t effective, they always found a second opportunity.
Iridian had to get out of the room before she did something violent. “Si Po sent a ship out just before the attack,” she told Sturm. “The next catch might have hard suits.”
The old man wiped sweat from his eyes. “Where is that fool? Cowering as far from danger as he can get, I expect.”
Coward or not, Si Po had been pale, shaking, and sweating after the first explosion, and high blood pressure and hypergrav combined badly. Without him, only Adda and the other codehead, Kaskade, would be left to keep the pirates’ systems running. And Adda had bigger problems to solve.
The captain was with Si Po in the room with the window, printer, and computer console. “Damn. Can you try a different frequency?”
Si Po was on his feet, which was encouraging so far as his physical health went. His body language was as compressed and twitchy as ever. “The forty ticks shuttle to and from the hub has never been hit before.” Signs in the docking bay below the base put the pirates twenty-three ticks from the docking bay which served as station north at 100/0. That was the point where the increments that divided the station into one hundred virtual cross-level slices started over at one. The shuttle was closer to forty-six ticks, over a third docking bay, if the symmetric modular layout continued all the way around the station. Ring station points of reference were much easier to follow with a mobile map. A more helpful station AI would’ve been nice too. “The shuttle’s a blind spot,” said Si Po.
“Is someone missing?” Iridian asked.
Captain Sloane turned to her with meticulously shaped eyebrows raised. “What might you do if they were?”
“I can play hero.” She pointed her thumb over her shoulder toward where her shield hung on her jacket’s hook between her shoulder blades.
Si Po winced. “Bad idea. I’m switching to the farm comms.” He poked some icons on the console.
Iridian shifted from foot to foot, still riding the biochemical aftereffects of almost getting blown up. “Who is it, a fugee, crew? Or one of the pilots?” If the pilots spoke a language the pirates didn’t translate and only communicated with Si Po, then they probably didn’t qualify as crew.
Captain Sloane smiled slightly. “The station’s original human tenants.”
A woman’s voice enunciated precisely, “Yes? What?” from one of the console’s speakers.
Si Po startled so hard his hand slapped down next to, but not on, the red call-end icon. “Dr. Williams? It’s Si Po, over at Captain Sloane’s base.”
“How you are doing?” Sloane asked.
“Traded with the fugees for cold-weather gear. Appreciated. No other weather than cold, in the dark,” the doctor continued in her precise enunciation. “You’re asking like you’ve had a scare.”
“We were attacked,” said Captain Sloane. “We wanted to make certain—”
“That we’re alive and prescribing? Ha! As if we have drugs to prescribe,” said Williams. “My canned apricots for more pharmaceutical printer spools. Apricots!” It sounded like the doc couldn’t print medicine, but a least she wasn’t starving. Her priorities made Iridian smile.
Once the mic was off, Sloane sighed, grimacing slightly at the console like there’d been vid feed with the audio. “The Spacelink medical team are our friends on the inside, as it were, with high-level access throughout the station. They’re the only people the AI believes are allowed to be here.”
“Spacelink, Captain?” Iridian asked, in case Sloane knew something about them that Adda didn’t.
“The shipbreaking company that built this place,” said Si Po.
Captain Sloane nodded. “After what historians now call the Battle of Waypoint Station—which, you’ll note, Spacelink and its NEU allies lost—the station’s medical team was left behind here and became isolated in the residential module. Sometimes they reach the fugee camp, and we’ve seen them on the station’s surface. The remaining four have survived here for years. I’m not hiring you as an ambassador. If you want a place on my crew, you’ll have to do something I don’t already have somebody doing.”
Elsewhere in the base, Sergeant Natani shouted above several other pirates. “You can’t take the legs off without pulling the whole table down. Find an ax or something.” Iridian breathed in slowly and exhaled even more slowly. That improvised patch was weak enough without somebody taking an ax to it. If one of the higher-ranked crew didn’t stop Natani soon, Iridian would.
“Captain, what exactly do you need an NEU soldier on this crew to do, if you don’t mind me asking?” Iridian’s voice was almost under control, but Sloane still refocused on her with an expression of unspoken warning. Although she wanted to ask how the captain expected to escape the station with a secessionist crew willing to risk only lives that weren’t theirs, she didn’t. There was no way to ask that respectfully, and Sloane had killed Reis for making a barely credible threat. Frustration clenched her jaw tight.
“As you said yourself, the war is over.” The captain’s mocking smile promised consequences if Iridian argued. “If you’re not already looking for opportunities to strike significant blows against the AI, I suggest you start.”
Iridian kept her expression neutral and squashed an urge to break a few of the captain’s perfect teeth. The AI was the real enemy, but Sergeant Natani wasn’t going to let up. On this station, the war h
ad never ended.
CHAPTER 7
Charges Accrued: Illegal Surveillance
“There’s no way I’m going to be able to identify the process I need from the outside,” Adda said.
She gripped Iridian’s hand and thumped her forehead on Iridian’s sturdy collarbone. That rocked her girlfriend back into the pillow nest that had developed in and around the workspace generator. Without the second bunkhouse, sleeping space was in high demand. The two of them had moved into the water tank. The pump flow from the working tanks on either side took some getting used to.
Whatever team had created AegiSKADA had been thorough about teaching the intelligence to protect itself from prying minds. The moment she’d made progress toward accessing its higher functions, it had attacked. She wrapped her arms over her chest and one shoulder. A family had died because her “progress” threatened the intelligence. And to stop it, she’d have to interact with it again. Its actions were its creators’ responsibility, but gods, the risk . . . That was hers.
It had to know she’d survived. Now they watched each other, waiting for a mistake. And since its power source would last thousands of years and it commanded a replaceable robot army, it had much more time than she did.
“You always figure these things out, even the ones that look impossible.” When everything else was overwhelming, Iridian’s voice and hug were warm and comforting. “All you need is a vulnerability and a way to exploit it, and I mean, I wouldn’t know where to start. I tried to join a raid and it turned out they just need the ships’ pilots for that. If we’re counting on my contributions to win us a place, well . . . Let’s not.”
The relationships Iridian was building among the crew were more of a contribution than she’d admit. Perhaps she didn’t even realize that making friends who would defend them was one of the essential steps of joining the crew, a step only she could complete. Iridian made people trust her without even thinking about it, but her inability to do even more to secure their new positions would bother her no matter what Adda said. Adda turned her head to kiss Iridian’s neck, and Iridian held her tighter.
A pump in a water tank next to theirs powered on, and the wall lights flickered a bit like the image that had flickered in the workspace just before she discovered the biometry database. “The sensor nodes!” She wriggled out of Iridian’s arms and stood still while the tank shifted and creaked. “I need to plug into one, or catch one’s feed.”
“Whoa, wait, isn’t that like saying, ‘Here I am, please blow me up’?” Iridian propped herself up on an elbow, one thick eyebrow raised. “That’s after walking halfway across the station, mind. Have you heard the pirates talk about those drones? There are supposed to be ones almost too small to see. And ones big enough to end you. The pirates say whenever you see a little one, the big ones are coming.”
Adda should’ve kept Iridian better informed about her efforts to map the intelligence’s sensors throughout the station, but that would’ve meant stopping her work to explain. “I wish I could hijack one of the drones. . . . I probably couldn’t do it before it got out of range, though, and that would definitely activate AegiSKADA’s self-protection procedures. I should watch them the next time they come near us. They don’t seem to have a regular path or schedule, but they do move intentionally.” Adda registered Iridian’s appalled expression and spoke fast to get to a part she’d like better. “We don’t have to cross half the station to find a node. There were what, ten people sleeping in the bunkhouse in addition to Xing’s family when AegiSKADA attacked? That was no coincidence.” Remembering the cascade of biometric data accesses right before the attack made her shudder. “It’s profiling us and tracking our number and location with sensors somewhere nearby. I think I know where.”
* * *
She persuaded the captain with the same argument. In under an hour, she and Iridian stood before the large, sealed hatch down to the station interior. “The reason we aren’t covered in drones in here is that the crew keeps this damned thing closed,” Iridian muttered. “I kind of hate to open it.”
“I’ll be as fast as I can,” said Adda.
Iridian hauled the hatch open, her expression determined and wary. “Please do.”
They let themselves down the ladder, finding each rung with their boot before putting weight on it to avoid a fifteen-meter fall in heavy gravity. Iridian reached up and pulled the hatch shut. “Let’s hope they don’t lock us out. Wouldn’t blame them, with all these bots around, but they’d sure as hell better let us back in.”
Once they reached the ladder’s end, they crept through the wall passage that paralleled the docking bay. Since Adda’s comp had the better projector, she went first to light the way beneath the dim orange light string overhead. A panel on the right, closer to the docking bay’s inner wall, looked different from the others.
Cam lenses could be minuscule, but they had to get power from somewhere. AegiSKADA’s cams would point into the docking bay. The back end embedded in the interior of the two hulls should be bigger to allow for recording and processing equipment, as well as other sensors. That was what she was looking at: the back of a sensor node housing. It was farther up the wall than standard placement called for, wired into one of the large power trunks tied above their heads to make room to walk.
No lens pointed into the wall. The node would record noise and vibration, at minimum. If this was the one that’d sensed her in her tank, the sensitivity was amazing. The compound had a hollow floor in places, and that’d help it work, but something else in the compound might be recording and digitally amplifying input AegiSKADA would find particularly useful.
At worst, this node compiled subvocalized half thoughts into a profile that the intelligence would use to hunt her and Iridian down if it didn’t find a way to kill them now. She shuddered and slowly exhaled. Either way, the intelligence would prioritize input coming from this node.
Iridian, who had apparently identified what Adda was looking at on her own, since Adda forgot to point it out to her, knelt on the grimy floor and patted her own shoulder. Adda climbed onto Iridian’s shoulders and leaned on the wall with her free hand while holding her comp to the sensor node.
The comp flashed its visual Trojan, though that’d be useless without the cam pointing toward it, along with a coded rhythmic buzz against her hand and an electronic tweet. At least one of the commands she encoded in the other two inputs might compromise AegiSKADA’s defenses when it accessed the recording. Unless it was a very weak system, she wouldn’t gain administrative control that way, though her programs would make the attempt.
That was the only aggressive action she was taking, though. She didn’t want to risk another attack on the compound’s exterior by antagonizing the intelligence. Instead she’d try to get her own code into the system at the points where AegiSKADA accepted, analyzed, or stored data. Any additional access would help her determine what information AegiSKADA had, its priorities and value structure, and what she could use to trick it or convince it to stop treating the people on the station like threats.
Something skittered over metal in shadows too deep for the orange light string’s reach. Adda froze in place. Curse all the gods and devils, AegiSKADA brought me here.
This wasn’t the closest sensor node to her position in the tank when she’d asked that question. It was just the most accessible one. AegiSKADA had successfully tested a method of getting her to move to a place of its choosing, and now it had data that’d make identifying and tracking her as an individual much easier. She had gotten her answer quickly because the intelligence gave it to her, and now its drone was between them and the ladder back to the compound. The skittering thing crept closer. Adda gasped, loud in the narrow space.
Her boots slipped off Iridian’s shoulders and pulled Iridian’s jacket tight around her throat. Iridian freed herself and caught Adda before she did more damage than tearing her sleeve and scraping her elbow on something that stuck a centimeter out from the wall. Pain lanced
up Adda’s arm, and she did not want to leave blood where AegiSKADA could find it. She clamped her gloved hand over her elbow. Wetness seeped through the glove’s breathable fabric as she ran for the ladder.
Her palm left a dark print on the first rung she grabbed. Better to leave a little of her DNA than all of it. Iridian’s boots pounded behind her. The drone she’d heard was small. She could climb faster than it could. At least, she hoped so.
When they burst through the hatch at the top of the ladder, Pel stood at the other end of the entryway, near where he’d waited when they first arrived. Behind pink-tinted goggles, the white scar tissue made his eyes look like an insect’s. The hatch slammed and he turned his head more fully in their direction. “What happened?”
“Just poking the AI with a virtual stick,” Iridian said, and Adda blinked up at her in surprise, because she sounded genuinely angry. Iridian caught her looking. “What the hell was the point of that? Why didn’t we smash that node thing?”
“Because you don’t throw away a tool you could use in the future. If what I sent AegiSKADA doesn’t take, the node needs to be functional so I can try something else. Disinfectant?” Despite how out of breath she was, her question sounded surprisingly calm. Surely the cut wasn’t bad enough to send her into shock.
Her torn sleeve felt damp against her skin. A patch around the elbow and a line down her arm and over her glove were dark. The rest was sweat-soaked from her sprint up the ladder. The wound was bleeding that much and it hadn’t even started to hurt yet.
Iridian wrapped an arm around her waist and gently pulled her into the main room. “Where’s the medic?” she demanded of the gathering crowd.
The people standing around watching got out of Pel’s path toward the kitchen. “Zikri?” said one of the pirates with an endless supply of black shirts. “He’s sleeping.” The woman’s surname was San Miguel, maybe.
“You two gonna get yourselfs kilt,” said one of the colonial ZV soldiers. The arm around Adda’s waist tensed. She nudged Iridian with her hip to show that the man didn’t scare her, since knowing that sometimes calmed Iridian down.
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