Barbary Station

by R. E. Stearns

  The nearest big LFTR was less than a klick above her, powering one of Barbary Station’s engines to keep the grav on. With its liquid medium, it couldn’t melt down. Kilometers of station curved up and around on the right and left. Above and below, stars swirled and glittered through the lead cloud. Pale sunlight, most of which the lead cloud also blocked, shone somewhere behind the station.

  She gripped the handholds on either side of the airlock door. The gloves’ fingers pressed painfully on the tips of her fingernails. Worse, her comp projection was up the gauntlets from the armored window on the suit glove. Adda would’ve solved the problem before she left base. She’d also smile at Iridian’s crass speech, even though the cant Iridian swore in sounded like aggressive gibberish to nonspeakers.

  A solid fragment of something smacked into her faceplate, and she instinctively jerked her head back. The object was long past her. The impact set her ears ringing, but the faceplate stayed in one piece. Out of curiosity, she diverted farther from the edge and tipped her helmet back toward the hub again.

  The Prosperity Dawn hung stable while the station spun around it, dead in a cloud of debris. Whatever setup the station’s previous owners had for clearing floating junk was either inoperative or on a lengthy cleaning schedule. Rovers puttered over the colony ship’s surface, peeling up panels and collecting what drifted beneath. They’d stripped a third of the ship to a bare outline. Large chunks of material that could’ve been recycled still hung around the vessel.

  Something clicked inside her helmet. She froze.

  Then Adda’s voice called her name, muffled and indistinct but all Adda. “Can you hear me?” she asked.

  “I hear you,” Iridian said in a relieved whoosh of breath. That click hadn’t meant that her suit was about to spring a leak. “Can anybody else hear us?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past AegiSKADA. I can’t believe you did this.”

  Iridian laughed. Talking on this channel required access to the pirates’ primary console in the main part of the base. It took a girlfriend in mortal peril to drag Adda out of isolation. “Sorry, but I had to. Your tank’s wobbling too much. It’ll fall out from under you if I don’t get it secured. Besides, we’re sucking down atmo they can’t afford to lend us.” A jagged metal slab perpendicular to the station’s hull stood out against the long upward curve of the inner ring, the first pirate base module and Iridian’s current destination. “Can AegiSKADA understand what I’m saying?”

  “Possibly,” said Adda. “I sent an invitation for a chat in that sensor package, but AegiSKADA hasn’t responded. I can’t tell if it understands conversational speech.”

  “Now you want to chat with it?” That sounded like a disaster waiting to happen, but she’d already offered, and disconnecting station comms to stop AegiSKADA from taking her up on that offer was probably more trouble than it’d be worth. “Love you, babe, but I have to concentrate on something other than what a fucking dangerous idea that is.”

  “I love you, too.” The click sounded again, and Iridian was alone outside the station.

  Antenna clusters spiked the inner ring at half-klick intervals, silver with red flashing lights at the tips. The outer ring doubtless had more. Pushing and pulling signals to the Internet relay, commonly known this far from Earth as the Patchwork, would’ve taken a lot of focusing power. Then one faction or another took the buoys out, and that and the lead cloud sharing the station’s orbit made long-range comms impossible. She searched her suit controls for a cam, which must’ve been on her helmet’s missing HUD. She’d just have to tell Adda about these later.

  Among the nearest cluster, the base’s residential modules were embedded in the station’s outer hull. Some pirate had cut the hull with a tool smaller and cooler than Iridian would’ve chosen for the metal density. A chunk of ship bulkhead made up one or two of the base’s walls and stuck several meters up from the station. The outline was ragged against the starlight, notched where floating debris and micrometeoroids knocked pieces away.

  First she made the hallway above Adda’s tank as airtight as possible. Having done that, she belly crawled a meter under the module floor to secure the top of the tank and the hatch that connected it to the rest of the base. She checked her work twice, and then one more time for luck, before she moved on to the tasks on Sturm’s list.

  Sturm’s checklist was on her comp. The projection was readable when she raised her elbow and pressed her temple to her forearm, and she could just barely scroll it by making the right micromovements in her hand and arm. It was frustrating without the tactile input from touching the projection with her other hand, but she wasn’t about to take her suit glove off.

  She climbed over a giant half sphere above the common room to check the sealant on magnetic strips along one side of a relatively straight wall. This section was made of sturdy ship hull. With luck, any more trash the station spun her into would hit the strips first and stick.

  Half an hour later she’d secured the modules, patched some leaks, and replaced a small antenna as Sturm had requested. Few of the other items on the list appeared to apply to the awkward construction before her. Perhaps Sturm had never been out here. He seemed like too much of a realist to build a hab like this and then live in it.

  A shock zapped from her fingers to her elbow. She yanked her hand back from the panel she was working under. She was messing with support struts, not live wires. When a second shock jolted her knee numb, she started looking for an attacker.

  An old-style drone just big enough to carry an engine and a weapons payload hovered behind her. Debris fragments scattered across the station hull beneath it, like it scared even dust and grit away. Her head twisted inside her helmet as she searched for someplace safer. Everything nearby was conductive. She flattened out on the hull to give the bot a smaller profile to aim for. If it got one good shock into the hull near her—

  Her vision flashed white.

  * * *

  She lay on her stomach. Each noisy breath tasted of plastic and industrial grade cleaner. Persistent buzzing kept her awake, and she was still tired as hell. The buzzing resolved into a woman saying, with very precise enunciation, “. . . nothing fractured. More active brain waves. Good patterns.” More buzzing.

  * * *

  Her eyes opened, squinting against a headache growing worse by the moment. Two suited forms stood around her, beside something she couldn’t focus on. It was camouflaged. Only an organization with too big a budget would camouflage a box when they could just label it “grid squares” or something.

  A male voice with some kind of Earth accent said, “If you can hear me, thumb to the stars.” The buzz returned, but she wriggled her armored hand out from under her hip and raised her thumb. “This is the channel you hear?” Someone crouched beside her. An unfamiliar face was projected onto his helmet faceplate, the holographic depiction of his head and neck against a dark background eerie against the cold and the black. Under the enviro suit the man wore something bright red against his olive skin, not a black ZV shirt. “Speak. You should have a mic.”

  “I’m awake,” she said.

  “We saw you electrocuted,” the woman said in the voice and precise pronunciation Iridian last heard when Captain Sloane checked on the med team after AegiSKADA bombed the crew’s base. She was pretty sure Si Po had called the woman Dr. Williams. Her faceplate’s projector showed a rich brown complexion in three flickering dimensions. “On our way. Come inside.”

  “Um. On your way where?” Williams turned toward the other doc instead of answering. Iridian felt more nauseated by the second. It helped to focus her eyes anywhere other than at the camouflaged case while stars wheeled overhead. The suited members of the med team stared into each other’s faceplates without speaking. “Where’s the drone, and the rest of you?” Iridian asked. If she was remembering right, Captain Sloane had said there were four of them.

  “Chased the drone away. When we come, they go,” the male doc said. “So long as it doesn’t
use them to keep us in a place. For our safety.” The docs laughed so uproariously that they maxed out their mics, causing a grating digital buzz. Iridian winced at the noise’s effect on her headache. “It” had to be AegiSKADA, and apparently these docs weren’t worried about the rest of their team’s safety.

  Speaking of which, they were exposed and vulnerable to everything AegiSKADA had in its arsenal out on the station’s hull, not to mention the unknown ambient radiation level. “Have you got a safer way out of here than through the docking bay airlock?” she asked over the laughing doctors, formally putting her life in crazy people’s hands.

  The docs stopped laughing like someone toggled a laugh switch to off. “Undoubtedly,” the man said.

  He helped her up and accepted Iridian’s thanks without reply. The woman picked up the camouflaged box, and they led the way toward the edge of the station’s inner ring. Iridian followed, breathing much harder than the exertion should’ve required. Sweat prickled on her skin and made her heels slide in the armored boots. Gods, she didn’t want to puke in the suit. It wasn’t even hers.

  “You’re Spacelink’s medics, yeah?” she asked to distract herself. “I’m Iridian Nassir, with Sloane’s crew. What were you doing out here?”

  “Can’t travel inside,” said Williams.

  “Not the whole way,” the man agreed. “Broken floors. Broken walls. Machines.”

  Just before the med team reached the edge of the inner ring, they dropped from sight. Iridian shuffled after them, looking around for the drone as she went. Was it hiding over the edge, waiting for them?

  The spot where the med team disappeared turned out to be the opening of a nearly vertical tube big enough around to accommodate a human. It curved about a meter down and under the hull. She eased herself in. When she let go of the rim, she hit the tube’s side and slid to the bottom. Her boots went out from under her and spilled her onto her rescuers’ feet. Something at the top slammed and creaked, like an outer airlock door sealing.

  The room she slid into was certainly small enough to be an airlock. The female doc put the camouflaged case down again to help the man pick Iridian back up. “Thanks. Dr. Williams, yeah?” When the woman nodded, Iridian turned toward the other one, who was standing so close to her that her helmet clacked against his. He’d turned his projector off, so his polarized faceplate just reflected Iridian’s projected face back at her. The projector in her helmet was flashing and distorting her image, but at least it’d turned itself on sometime between leaving the pirate base and now. “Sorry. I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Tiwari.”

  Neither of the docs backed up to avoid constantly bumping into each other. As Iridian leaned away from them, a small overhead illuminated, revealing a labeled panel like the one in the docking bay airlock. Tiwari touched a button, retracting the tube’s curved portion into the ceiling. That gave them all more room, and Iridian took a long step back from them. The docs were way too comfortable in each other’s personal space.

  The Spacelink med team had said some strange things in their conversation with Captain Sloane, but . . . Gods, they’re a mess. The docs were still staring at each other. “Private comms channel, huh?” Iridian asked. The docs turned to face her for a second, then went back to staring at each other. Williams cued the airlock pressurization cycle without looking at her comp.

  “Never would have!” Williams shouted. Iridian jumped.

  “Should!” said Tiwari.

  “No.” Williams turned to Iridian, like that concluded the unnecessarily shouted conversation. “Please. Armor off.”

  “Um . . . I’m not wearing much under this.” And Iridian had no evidence of healthy enviro, since the airlock had been open to the cold and black a minute ago and the med team still wore their suits. Iridian looked from one faceplate to the other. “Why do I need to?”

  “Burns expected,” said Williams.

  “I’d notice burns.” Everything ached, but wherever Iridian had been shocked didn’t hurt any more than the rest of her did. Her hands moved as well as the tight gloves allowed. “I’m good.”

  The airlock chimed to signal that its pressurization cycle was complete. “Leave,” the med team said in unison.

  Iridian would hear the medics through the suits as well as through the radio, if she took off her helmet, but taking her helmet off still seemed like a bad idea. “Sure, just point me back toward the docking bay. I have it from there.”

  “You can’t,” said Williams. “It won’t let you.”

  “It never,” said Tiwari.

  “It has.” Was Williams reversing her position for the sake of argument? The conversation was making less sense by the second. “We’ll take you.” She picked up the camouflaged case again and walked into the station through a gust of incoming atmo. The airlock hadn’t completely pressurized after all. Iridian was glad she’d kept her helmet on.

  She sighed, but followed. The drone patrolling the station’s surface would kill her if she encountered it with no way to ground her suit and nobody to chase the thing away, however the med team had managed that. The best thing she could do now was get back to base and report what she’d found.

  And follow up on one of Adda’s many questions about the state of the station. “Hey, have you two seen a pirate with dark hair, medium-size white guy, calls himself Blackguardly Jack?” The physicians stared at each other, then at Iridian. Perhaps she needed to back up a bit. “So, you know Captain Sloane, and the pirates.”

  “Surprised us, very surprised, when they came to Docking Bay Three, with AegiSKADA already keeping all the others away,” said Tiwari. “Thought the Martians would be the last, but then Sloane came.”

  “And stayed,” said Williams. “After so many drones. And so many accidents. AegiSKADA tried many ways to make them go.”

  “They didn’t all die!” said Tiwari. Iridian still couldn’t see his face, but his hands rose a little and turned palms up, as if to add, Can you imagine?

  “Drones and accidents, yeah.” The corridor outside the airlock looked about the same as it had the last time Iridian checked over her shoulder. They’d been out here long enough to attract any patrolling bot’s attention. “You’re docs, so maybe you heard about the guy with the melted spine?”

  “Last year.” Tiwari tripped over a piece of what looked like the hose and lower half of a fire-suppression bot’s chassis, which lay in a doorway nearby. As Iridian caught his arm to keep him upright, she looked for the rest of the bot, but it’d probably been dismantled in the dark room beyond the doorway. She kept moving. It’d be dumb as hell to go in there, effectively alone. “The plasma torch came loose,” Tiwari continued. “Big, big installed thing for cutting pieces off ships. Impacted recycling module exterior, lit for . . . five seconds?”

  Williams stared at Tiwari for a moment, then said, “Avoid fifty ticks to seventy-six ticks. Hard vacuum there now.” That was on the other side of station north from Captain Sloane’s base. The fugee camp was in the docking bay which served as station north, at 100/0 ticks.

  Iridian frowned. This wasn’t the information she’d been hoping for. “And Blackguardly Jack was there?”

  “Severe spinal trauma, poorly healed,” Tiwari said. “Ran from there. Survived.”

  So Blackguardly Jack wasn’t with the docs. The med team would see him more than once if he were in the station’s farm, which the docs must’ve relied on to supplement whatever shelf-stable food they had. And he sure as hell didn’t steal from Sloane’s crew. She hadn’t heard of anywhere else on the station with food and water. If he was still alive, he’d be near the fugee camp.

  They turned a corner and Iridian stopped midstep. The doctors were climbing around a debris-strewn twenty-meter-wide hole that obliterated a stretch of corridor and parts of the rooms on either side. A single red sign pointing back to the airlock lit their path. Maybe the docs were afraid to use their headlamps, but Iridian would rather draw attention by turning her helmet’s light on than
trip over something and fall through the floor. Tiles and cables dangled over the hole’s rim and hung in a motionless cascade toward the floors below.

  Nothing moved beneath the thick shroud of dust over the wreckage. A couple of broken devices looked like bombs and froze Iridian in place for long seconds until she identified them as exposed parts of the HVAC system that kept atmo moving through the station. A bright yellow inflatable hull patch gleamed from the visible part of the first floor. The damage to this module was evidence that the Battle of Waypoint Station had involved a heavy and accurate assault on the station itself.

  The missile punched through there and detonated in the gods-damned residential module. She hoped the station had been evacuated before then. “No wonder Spacelink abandoned this place. Testament to the architects that it’s even holding together, spinning this fast. Where were you two when this happened?”

  Tiwari and Williams reached the far side of the hole and stared at each other while Iridian made her way to them. Judging by the docs’ sober expressions, it’d been as bad a day as the structural damage made it look. “Clinic,” said Williams finally. “Spacelink launched their last shipment of reusable and recycled parts sunward. Families already left. Workers were packing to leave, if management saw a moment. Comms went dark.”

  “We watched, from the windows.” Tiwari pointed at a blank stretch of wall, presumably where windows used to be projected. “Such enormous ships. And so close, we thought casualties would be brought to us.”

  Williams pointed at the hole in the module with a trembling hand. “Not accidental.”

  “No,” Iridian agreed. The weapon had penetrated too precisely in the module’s center, and it’d take precision timing to blow the explosives while the missile was still inside the station, at the speed it would’ve been moving. “So the workers weren’t evacuated like Spacelink told the newsfeeds.”

  “Transport never arrived.” Tiwari shrugged. “Space battle. Many ships lost. The station closed off the broken places. Then . . . AegiSKADA.”