Adda’s cut elbow was beginning to ache. Her investigation had already cost lives. It would be irrational to expect herself to emerge unscathed. Pel returned with a red box with a white cross on the lid, trailed by Chef, wiping her hands on a dish towel, before Adda could be expected to respond to the ZV who’d spoken.
As usual, Iridian had a response ready, and didn’t wait for Adda to finish musing to deliver it. “With people like you watching our backs, what do we have to worry about?” Even with Iridian’s smile, her tone was too sharp for anyone to take the statement as a joke. She might have gotten over leaving the sensor node intact, but she was still angry.
Sergeant Natani stood from the crate she’d been using as a stool. The oldest ZV soldier (who went by Death as a name), Chato, a pushy white ZV Pel had said was named Vick, a big ZV wearing a cap, and another scowling ZV female all stood with the sergeant. Iridian stalked forward to meet them. Pel froze halfway through handing the first aid kit to Adda.
“If you people don’t know what you’re doing with that AI, maybe you shouldn’t get good folks killed doing it,” said Vick from just behind Natani.
“And if you people didn’t know what you were doing with an AI, maybe you shouldn’t have let it fight your battles for you. You want to call it in to fight me too? I’ve been on a gods-damned colony ship for weeks. I need to get my station muscle back.” Iridian’s shield still hung collapsed between her shoulder blades. With her knees slightly bent and her arms raised in a loose boxer’s guard, she looked too skilled with her fists to need it. But Natani and Vick carried the same palm weapons that had killed Reis.
Adda slowly reached out to relieve Pel of the first aid kit. Once he was out of harm’s way, she’d try to calm Iridian down. Even during AegiSKADA’s attack on the bunkhouse, he hadn’t looked this frightened.
When she took the kit, he inhaled like he was waking from a nightmare. He brushed past Iridian and bounced off a ZV’s chest. The big man righted him and he ran, bumping into tables he’d avoided earlier with ease. Everyone in the main room watched him go.
Iridian slowly straightened out of her combat stance. For a second her hands curled like talons, until her fists completely unclenched. “I figure we all have something to run from,” she said. Adda relaxed, a little. Iridian was thinking again, which meant that she wouldn’t release the pressure she was under through violence.
The ZVs looked from Pel’s path of retreat to Iridian. Several of them nodded in grim agreement and drifted back to their former positions in the main room. When even Vick stopped watching for a brawl, Natani followed her supporters, muttering in spacefarer cant. In the middle of the sergeant’s muffled tirade, Adda caught the phrase “Yeah, NEU, you’ll run too.”
Pel might appreciate thanks for defusing the situation, unintentional as that had been. Or maybe he’d be embarrassed for having run away. The best thing Adda could do for him was keep him alive, whatever AegiSKADA’s intent. Although she’d never be able to concentrate while Iridian was antagonizing armed pirates. “What’ll you do now, Iri?”
Iridian frowned at the blood on Adda’s arm. “Get that cleaned up, first. Then I’ll see what Sturm’s working on, or what Tabs and Rio are up to. There’s gotta be something worth doing around here.” That sounded safe enough.
After Iridian disinfected and bandaged Adda’s arm, she crossed the main room to Sturm’s workshop while Adda returned to the empty water tank. Descending the ladder hurt her cut elbow, as did every step of her preparations to enter the generator. By the time she set her timer, drugged herself, and achieved the level of calm and concentration required to stabilize a workspace, AegiSKADA’s sensor data was waiting for her.
It worked.
She had so little information on the system that she wouldn’t have been surprised if AegiSKADA had defended itself from her code insertion. Not only was her comp displaying the biometrics data stream, it was copying from AegiSKADA’s system as the intelligence received it, with almost no delay. That was good, since she and the pirates lacked the intelligence’s storage capacity.
Now, for the best part: unwrapping the data through analysis, to see what new methods she might have to affect the intelligence’s behavior. And since her inserted code copied information as it passed instead of intercepting it, AegiSKADA shouldn’t notice what she was doing. It’d have no new reasons to attack Sloane’s crew.
She sank into the workspace. Once, she’d visited a morgue with dingy white walls and floors like these. The water tank’s cold air translated into the workspace. A faint odor of formaldehyde permeated the hallucinographic laboratory.
None of the processes whipping through the hallucinographic air around her indicated a direct response to unexpected information dispersal. AegiSKADA really couldn’t tell that she was watching, which was wonderful, but she had to organize the data before she could analyze it.
Her subconscious added insects pinned to an infinitely long row of black velvet pads that sat on an infinitely long steel table along one tiled wall of the room. Rectangular windows stretched the infinite length of the room above the pinned bugs. Even though the windows looked like glass, she cast no reflection in them, just like the projected ones in space habitats. In the gray-purple mist on the other side of the not-glass, a dark shape moved. It was larger than a human, but too far from the white overhead lights to identify.
Weirder imagery was to be expected when using expired sharpsheets. Her sharpsheets’ expiration date had passed weeks ago, and now she was stuck in space with no deliveries.
Since she couldn’t order more sharpsheets, she’d have to make the equivalent herself later. Breaking out her chemistry kit on the station of the richest pirates in the galaxy was not part of her original plan, but it was time to plant the psilocybin spores she’d brought as backup. She’d need fresh ingredients to stay in the workspace generator long enough and think quickly enough to outmaneuver an AI.
For now, she had to make the best use of the expired sharpsheets she had and focus on what was happening in the workspace. Ideally the insects, not the odor or the mist beyond the windows, represented her data. She approached the first display board. A white lab coat’s hem swished around her thighs. It felt nice not to have a sweatshirt hood overheating her head and pressing on her ears. After they left this blasted station, she’d never wear another hood or hat.
The insects’ wings twitched once, in unison. It happened so fast she could have imagined it, if she weren’t watching for oddities.
When her fingertips brushed the cool stainless-steel table on which the display boards sat, the insects tore free from their pins. Fragments of chitin littered the velvet. A writhing, living ball of them hovered over the table. She stepped back to avoid its edges, nose wrinkling at their sour, earthy scent. A picture—no, vid projection, it moved—formed in the cloud of tiny insects. Shapes stuttered in and out of view, some representing humans, or parts of them, nothing she could interpret. It was projected from within, since she had no comp glove at the moment, only bright pink latex ones.
She concentrated hard on her goal. I need to see.
The records scrolling over the flying insects were biometrics data she’d intercepted. Useful for determining what AegiSKADA knew about them, but none led to an administrative log-in, and she needed to rule that out first. Why waste time trying to trick or destroy an intelligence when I could just tell it what to do?
The bugs rained down over their pins, dead again. Another display of insects roiled to life farther down the table. She walked to it, brushing at a crawling sensation on her arm that turned out to be the raggedly-cut bandage.
Thousands of gnats swirled around one another above the second velvet-covered board. They flitted in an illusion of random motion. Due to the workspace generator’s nature, their movement maintained some underlying order. They also served as surfaces for projecting an old-style log-in screen. This time a projector somewhere behind Adda lit the swarm with a stark white square of light, which
undulated in ways a projection on a flat surface definitely wouldn’t.
A blinking line marked where text would appear when users spoke, in the center of the white box as design standards had called for. Dark blue text invited the user, Adda in this case, to log in to “HarborMaster,” not AegiSKADA.
That sounded like a separate control system. If AegiSKADA’s designers had predicted someone sending their own intentions through the sensors, Adda would never have gotten this far in. Was HarborMaster the station’s native control system, overwritten or supplanted by AegiSKADA? It might be easier to confirm this system’s connection to AegiSKADA if she reduced the workspace’s surreality and examined the numbers.
Something wet and heavy splatted against the window. She took an involuntary step back. The slab of—flesh? What the actual fuck?—was raw, red, and dripping. Black text tattooed on its surface listed attributions for active access points on the station’s power grid, with no time stamps older than half a second. Adda’s intrusion programs were accessing data streams well beyond biometrics records. Power, life to machines, like blood . . . Still, the imagery raised goose bumps on her arms. As soon as she finished here, she’d plant new spores.
When sorted by resources consumed, HarborMaster topped the list. It utilized more subprograms than AegiSKADA. Everything not listed among HarborMaster’s subprocesses was attributed to the security system.
The gnats, too, collapsed onto the black velvet display pads. Another insect swarm a few meters away buzzed viciously with new information, which her subconscious and the workspace’s translator identified as part of the answer to her question.
The projection enveloping a thick cloud of black flies depicted humans, not data. Seven of them, in armor with ZV printed just above their armpits, lined up against a wall beside a door. Something about the way the armor shimmered in the flickering hallway lights nauseated and unsettled her, even on vid. In person it would have other repellent characteristics as part of whatever camouflage they used, but that would work only on other humans.
This was not in between the inner and outer hull, or anywhere in the pirates’ compound. The gray and bare-metal industrial fixtures were similar to those in the docking bay. It had to be somewhere in the station.
The group’s leader wore bloodred lipstick and two rudimentary versions of the ZVs’ palm weapons. She tapped the boot of the person behind her. The person’s shield was much easier to focus on than the armor. The leader stomped a small switch, and an explosion blew the door in. The blast was loud and hot on Adda’s skin.
The ZV soldier with the shield dashed around the leader in a second, slamming its lower edge on the floor a step inside. The soldier with the shield crouched behind it as the others swept in. Adda concentrated her desire to follow their progress, and the vid switched to a 3-D feed from inside the room.
Iridian claimed to have seen a military quantum computer the size of a train car. This one filled a transparent cooling vat as big as Adda’s water tank. Cables snaked down seemingly at random to the structure and apparatuses on the walls, indistinct through the smoke. Even the university hadn’t owned a rig this huge.
Seven pirates entered the small room and targeted the vat with beam weapons. Something on the floor flashed, and with a rising whine, the transmission whited out. Heat rolled over Adda and she covered her face with her arms. Screams and sounds like the flesh thing slapping the window cut off when the mics melted.
She’d just witnessed the previous captain’s final moments.
It was terrifyingly easy to imagine that happening to Iridian, so she focused on the AI problem instead. HarborMaster monitored station power, so it would’ve registered the draw a weapon that size produced. The intelligence might define current events in terms of equipment and energy expenditure.
And since HarborMaster wasn’t in charge of the station’s security, it was more likely to be vulnerable to intrusion than AegiSKADA. Now that Adda was able to review so much of the station infrastructure data, she might have already inserted her code into its system even though she’d targeted AegiSKADA.
If she controlled HarborMaster, she could physically disable AegiSKADA with the station’s environmental controls, even if she couldn’t reduce its aggression through administrative commands. At minimum, HarborMaster’s infrastructure monitoring functions could map AegiSKADA’s activity in the station, which might give the pirates a crucial few minutes of warning during the next attack.
The problem now was lack of access. Eavesdropping on HarborMaster’s station status assessments was one thing, but getting it to listen to her was another. Her best chance of controlling this intelligence lay in sending commands on a channel through which it was designed to accept administrative input. Station designers wouldn’t place human access points to the station management intelligence inside a wall or out in space.
Although ships handled space just fine . . .
The pilots might be able to shed light on this, and she couldn’t communicate with them from inside the workspace. To leave the workspace slowly and without stressing her brain, Adda concentrated on Iridian’s laugh, the warm touch of her hand, the way she said Adda’s name. A moment later red letters in her own handwriting proclaimed You are in a water tank from the workspace generator’s ceiling. If she moved too fast, the whole tank would shift beneath her. Combined with gravity higher than Earth’s, she might throw up, pass out, and go into cardiac arrest.
Iridian swore no ships maintained hypergravity. Adda couldn’t wait to get off this station.
Iridian lay beside her in the workspace generator, one arm draped over Adda’s waist. When Adda sat up, Iridian murmured something about gate valves in spacefarer cant. Adda slipped out from under her lover’s arm and climbed out of the tank to find Pel.
He was asleep, and she retraced her steps toward her tank. Her comp informed her that the local time was two o’clock in the morning. As she glanced up from it, the big ZV soldier who’d hugged Pel after AegiSKADA’s attack walked out of the small kitchen. The soldier held a cup of applesauce with a straw sticking out of it.
Now that Adda was walking around, sleep sounded pleasant, but she wanted her questions answered more than she wanted rest. “Can you . . . um . . . help me with something?” Oh, for Iridian’s casual, friendly voice, which did not remind listeners of children or rodents.
The muscle-bound woman sipped her applesauce and seemed to be maintaining an unusually blank expression. “If it won’t bring any more heat down on the base, maybe.”
“I need to compare some recordings with what other systems recorded at the same time. I want to ask your pilots about—”
The woman’s frown was so discouraging that Adda didn’t bother to finish the sentence. “No good. Can’t help.”
“But . . .” The pilots communicated with AegiSKADA or HarborMaster somehow, whether they realized it or not. It would explain why they stayed on the station without helping the other residents. AegiSKADA chose not to fire on them, and HarborMaster opened the docking bay doors when they wanted to land. If the pilots could coordinate with the intelligences that way, then Adda could too. Wasn’t it obvious she had to talk to them?
The woman was already thudding down the hall on enormous booted feet. Adda sighed. Someone was around at all times of day and night. The lighting never changed, like it would if environment controls were hooked up. Lights in the compound were either on and too bright, on and still impossible to see by, or off, so the time hardly mattered.
In her walk around the compound, she hadn’t seen anybody else she could ask about the pilots and be sure of not making them angry at her or wasting her time, so she returned to her tank and her bed. When she lay down, Iridian slung an arm over her stomach without opening her eyes. Maybe more amenable people would be awake later.
* * *
After a few hours of sleep in the tank, Adda dragged herself out to find other reliable candidates to ask. Chato and Kaskade had similar reactions when Adda asked
them. Chef finally sat Adda down in the kitchen over steaming mugs of reconstituted coffee to explain. “Listen, I don’t know another way to say it, so I’m saying it like it is: your brother was a mess after the Apparition brought him through the lead cloud. Now, I can’t say what happened,” she said as Adda opened her mouth to ask. “But the ZV Group found him with his face covered in blood, and it wasn’t that old. He was alone on the Apparition, understand? Something real bad happened to that boy, and I can’t say what or when.”
The Apparition’s pilot remained on the station with the other two as the only oversight for five AI, intelligences that lay in wait in the airless void until humans had crash-landed and woken them. Adda’s skin prickled. Anything might seem logical after being exposed to just one unsupervised intelligence for so long. The pilots had to deal with AegiSKADA and HarborMaster, while maintaining control of their AI copilots as well.
Adda waited a full sixty seconds to see if Chef had anything else to say, but she started cleaning the coffee machine instead. Adda stood to leave. “Thank you for telling me.”
“Good luck,” said Chef. “We’re counting on you.”
Adda used that reminder to refocus herself on the problems at hand. Neither her sensor net eavesdroppers nor the ships would get her into HarborMaster. She padded back toward the tank, glaring at the floor two steps in front of her. Why was everybody so mysterious about Pel’s eyes?
Low voices behind her, in the main room, drew her attention. One was Tritheist’s, and the other belonged to the secessionist officer who Iridian had gotten into a fight with soon after they arrived on station. One of them had said Adda’s name. Apparently the officer, Natani, Adda thought her name was, and Tritheist were on better terms than Iridian’s report indicated. That, or the sergeant didn’t take it personally when Tritheist aimed a weapon at her.
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