Barbary Station

by R. E. Stearns

  “What, he’s blaming us?” Pel sounded like he meant “us” unironically. “Does your uncle know where we are?”

  “I didn’t spell it out for him, but he suspects,” Iridian said. “Remember, to the rest of the galaxy we’re not trapped, we’re lazy.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” Chef said with satisfaction.

  Adda hadn’t received any messages from her father. That put her in the same position as everybody else on this forgotten station. Although if her family was too busy to notice newsfeed coverage of the Prosperity Dawn’s disappearance, they thought she was still hibernating.

  “Hey, isn’t Grandpa Death the one who did your tattoo?” Iridian asked Pel’s big friend, Rio. If this had been part of the earlier conversation, Adda missed the context. It also took her a second to connect the moniker “Grandpa Death” to the oldest ZV soldier. The “Grandpa” part was new, possibly, but she hadn’t paid much attention to how the others referred to each other.

  “Yeah.” Rio shoved the sleeve of her ZV shirt up her muscular arm to expose a black geometric design. The lines were a little like the static images Adda’s workspaces developed when her focus enhancers wore off. When Rio turned slightly to the side, skulls jumped out from the jagged black lines, three-dimensional and glaring in a circle around the crest of her shoulder.

  “It’s good work,” Iridian said. “Do you think he’d do one for Adda and me, to commemorate our first federal offenses?”

  Rio shrugged and let her sleeve fall over the morbid lines. “Don’t see why not. He’s bored a lot of the time.”

  Adda glanced around to confirm that the man in question was elsewhere. Grandpa Death wasn’t old enough for grandchildren to be assumed, but he was about twenty years older than the other ZVs. If Sturm’s contract with Sloane was separate from the ZV Group’s, then Grandpa Death was the only ZV with graying hair.

  “He’s been missing Xing and the others,” Rio said. “He was Baby Kimmy’s godfather.”

  “I heard. That’s really rough.” Iridian must have heard that when Adda was otherwise occupied. She spent time with the crew so Adda didn’t have to.

  Socializing wouldn’t keep her, Pel, and Iridian alive. “I’m going back down,” Adda announced. “Tell me about that tattoo design, okay?”

  Iridian looked hurt. Adda gave her a quick kiss before fleeing the room. That was the sort of thing Iridian thrived on, public commemoration of accomplishments she was proud of, and that other people would be proud of too. Adda was just curious what getting a tattoo was like.

  She practically felt a stranger’s hands on her, poking her with needles for aesthetic reasons. That kind of imagining would turn her workspace into something unpleasant. She focused on the metal rungs under her palms and the tank’s quiet creaking as she crossed to her supplies and dosed herself. She plugged her nasal jack into the generator and added the comp plug too, to install the new translator. With luck, the tank was receiving sufficient power to keep everything running.

  Once she had the new translator installed and configured, which took the better part of an hour, she dipped into a workspace. Climate-controlled warmth and soft, bland music washed over her. A neat, pre-generated lobby with gray carpeted floors and an unmanned receptionist desk had doors marked YOUR PERSPECTIVE, AEGISKADA’S PERSPECTIVE, HARBORMASTER’S PERSPECTIVE, and ADD NEW PERSPECTIVE.

  The HarborMaster door looked projected onto the marble wall, like it should be accessible but wasn’t. Though she saw room for interpretation, instinct told her that the processes she’d inserted into AegiSKADA’s system hadn’t penetrated HarborMaster’s. She had no chance of affecting it from here, without work that would take more time than she and the pirates had. Given enough time, AegiSKADA would find a way to kill all of them.

  In comparison to HarborMaster’s door, AegiSKADA’s looked like thoroughly solid steel, out of place in its imitation wood frame. Two long, dreamlike strides brought her within arm’s reach. A syringe needle stuck out where a doorknob might be. She sighed and pressed a fingertip to the sharp point.

  The needle expanded in a snap to a mouth like a Venus flytrap plant. It closed over her finger. A thousand tiny needles stabbed her, held her while she gasped and pulled to get free. Blood flowed down the plant’s stem, and the needles disappeared. The door slid open.

  She rose from the station’s lowest floor through a sensor-created map of the pirates’ add-ons to Barbary Station’s hull. Moving human shapes traversed it, but still ones flickered in and out of existence. AegiSKADA must’ve constructed the map from vibration data.

  Something was highlighted in yellow, in the space beneath the common-room floor in the pirate compound. She focused on that area, floating toward it in the display. Nothing there explained why this was listed as AegiSKADA’s perspective, per se. It was surprisingly easy to work with, given that an unknowably clever AI made by an unknowably clever man at the head of a team of geniuses would view the world a lot differently from Adda. Either the translator or the system’s design was just that good.

  The yellow object was labeled, though not in words. It had a sense of “self,” like looking at her own toes or fingers. Some part of AegiSKADA still lurked in the compound from when they’d been chased out weeks ago.

  Adda left the workspace and stood without unplugging her face from the generator, earning a painful tug on the nose. She stuffed her cable into her necklace and climbed the ladder. The people she passed made eye contact and said things she ignored. In the common room she pushed a table away from the highlighted area, her eyes coloring it yellow even in reality. One floor panel was at a slightly different angle than the panels around it, and a thin streak of blue dust which crossed over the others went under that one.

  “What do you see?” asked Captain Sloane quietly, from a step behind her.

  “AegiSKADA left something here.” She pointed at the recently moved panel. “I need to open this.”

  “Someone does,” the captain said. “Not you. Bring me the major, please.”

  Major O.D. was sleeping in the bunkhouse, and she had to shake him awake. When she explained the situation, he woke quickly and loudly. “Rio, Vick, Zikri, get up.”

  In a nearby bed, Zikri grumbled, “I’m up, I’m . . . ugh,” and staggered into the narrow center aisle.

  “Rio’s already awake.” Adda had to look closer at the other bunks to determine that Vick wasn’t there. “And I’ll find Vick.” It made sense to have the medic along, and having two of the strongest soldiers nearby couldn’t hurt.

  She conveyed the major’s summons to Vick and Rio when she returned to the kitchen. Every other awake pirate followed them back to the main room, which felt suddenly and thoroughly crowded. Sturm found Rio a pry bar, and she pried up a tile.

  Underneath, a boxy device the size of the pirates’ palm weapons, but with a cylindrical canister emerging from its side at an angle, sat on the curving exterior hull in a puddle of gray-white sludge. For a second, everybody stared. Then the medic backed up into several other people and pulled his shirt collar over his mouth and nose. “That’s a fuckin’ microbe dispenser!”

  They fell back, cramming against the walls, the press of bodies against Adda’s making her shallow breaths drag through her throat. So that was AegiSKADA’s play. It predicted she’d find the dispenser after the better-armed ZVs felt safe in their stronghold again. Her investigation had raised the pirates’ threat profile. Now she’d helped the intelligence poison them all.

  CHAPTER 12

  Charges Accrued: Interference with Approved Microbiological Research

  Iridian strapped on a respirator mask printed so recently that its gummy surface stuck to her fingertips. Barbary Station used to decommission ships full of particulates and chemicals that flayed lungs. Patterns for heavy-duty masks were easy to find in the station’s database. Now everybody in Sloane’s crew had one.

  Dye was scarce, apparently. Between the black-and-gray masks and the blue-dusted black hoods, the
pirates could pass as cultists or a large necrobass band. Or habitat-based resistance fighters.

  Iridian cracked her knuckles and crouched next to Sloane, Tritheist, and Sturm. Despite the dye shortage, Captain Sloane wore a dark red mask. Adda was down in her tank again, plugged into her workspace generator to search the sensor data and station systems for relevant information. Iridian could be of more use here, with the physical device.

  They’d wrapped the dispenser in a transparent bag from the mess hall secured with a zip tie. Maybe it’d keep the atmo clean, but it was probably too late for that. Besides, small enough particles would power through the bag’s pores. Sturm’s comp lit it bright enough for a detailed examination. “Figure it’s got a fluidized bed feeder?” she asked him.

  “Most likely,” said Sturm. “Good steady distribution flow, from those.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” Tritheist snapped.

  “Damage control and safety of moving the thing,” said Iridian. “If the contents are under pressure, we can’t just yank it off of there and throw it out an airlock. Might blow up in somebody’s face. And that’s assuming it’s not booby-trapped with more conventional explosives, which we haven’t proven yet.”

  Tritheist backed away from the device. Iridian grimly held her ground. “Are there more?” Captain Sloane asked.

  “Adda’s looking for more now, sir. Captain.” Not sir, damn you, get it right. Iridian tapped out a message. If Adda were in a workspace, she’d have turned off her comp’s alerts. She’d update Iridian when she had something useful, or when Iridian went down to feed and water her. “Bleach might kill it,” Iridian said. It was the “cut off its head” move in microbe combat, if Iridian remembered her college biology class correctly. “Do we have any?”

  Tritheist stood up fast. “Chef has some.” Sturm snorted as the lieutenant walked quickly to the mess hall, about two steps short of a run.

  “Maybe Adda can set up a comp to search for more by shape, or output, or something.” Iridian caught the captain’s eye and waited for a nod of approval before she headed for the empty water tank.

  She lived in the tank too, but the place was really Adda’s. The accoutrements of the workspace generator—pillows, blankets hung from hooks stuck to the ceiling to muffle sound, pans sprouting mushrooms, and mugs of brown, metallic-smelling sludge Adda swore was necessary—covered half the floor space now. Adda’s generator had been near the tank’s center, but she’d moved it against the wall farthest from the ladder.

  “Hey,” Iridian whispered, so as not to startle her. “I need you to do me a favor, babe.”

  “Busy.” The word was bitten off from within the workspace generator tent, its echoes smothered by the hanging blankets.

  Iridian managed not to expel her equally irritated sigh. “Me too. I’m trying to keep our future employers alive by finding out if AegiSKADA planted more dispensers. Can you set my comp up to locate them?”

  A pale hand thrust imperiously through the tent flaps. Iridian peeled off her comp glove and placed it in the palm, which withdrew into the workspace generator. While Iridian waited, she examined the tank itself, in case some enterprising bot had affixed a dispenser there. She didn’t see one.

  Her glove reappeared outside the tent. “Thanks, babe.” Iridian tried and failed to mask her annoyance. Adda didn’t respond. In a few hours Iridian would drag her out to hydrate her.

  When Iridian stuck her head out of the trapdoor, Si Po almost stepped on it. “I was looking for more of those dispensers, and I noticed a high concentration of CO2 in the bunkhouse,” he said. “I think we have a filtration problem.”

  Iridian groaned. “Show me.”

  The harder the pirates looked, the more problems they found. Something beneath the mess hall had been eating through the struts that held it onto the hull. How the hell did that stay airtight? She couldn’t just leave them to fix the problems, because they were the ones who’d let the base get in that state.

  While she scanned the area, Rio asked Pel, “Have you heard that clanking sound over by the water recycler?”

  “It’s not by the water recycler, it’s in the water recycler,” he said.

  “Rio, take the casing off and get Sturm,” Iridian yelled over her shoulder. “Please.”

  “Ears like a bat, that one.” Rio’s heavy footfalls retreated from the mess hall.

  Pel avoided a table apparently by memory on his way to Iridian’s side. Without the usual goggles or dark glasses covering his eyes, their yellowish tint and apparent lack of pupils unsettled her. “Is another one of those dispenser things in here?” he asked.

  She sighed, frustrated and aching from bending to examine inconvenient corners. “Not that I can tell.”

  “Good,” he said. “I’m starving.”

  “As if anything that’d make you sick would be in my kitchen,” Chef huffed.

  “Well, I’m just glad Iridian’s here to make sure, that’s all.” Pel raised an eyebrow in Iridian’s general direction. “I’m really glad.”

  That boy had a lot of Adda in him, and the results of Adda’s fend-for-yourself style of affection, too. In some ways it made him self-sufficient. He also had clingy little behaviors designed to keep people near. Was he like that before he lost his sight?

  He hovered nearby, crunching on peanuts that Iridian refused. Additional dust might contaminate her comp’s readings. Hopefully the analysis was ignoring all the blue stuff from the spray-on radiation reflectant.

  “I’d help,” he said quietly. “Maybe I could . . . carry something? But my eyes are killing me today.” He shrugged, head turned away so not even his ear pointed in her direction. “Can’t see where it’s light and dark. I usually can, a bit. Not today.”

  Iridian’s heart sort of cracked and resettled into a new, horrified position. “I’m sorry.”

  She wandered into the hallway, watching her comp’s readings. He followed her, trailing his hand along the wall. “You’d have done well when everyone was out raiding. They were always pulling crazy shit. And engineers make the same cut as people who go on the ships to kick its crew off, whether they go or not, so that would’ve worked well for Adda.”

  Iridian’s brow furrowed as she refocused on him. “You talk like you weren’t with Sloane then.”

  He gulped, scarred eyes wide. “Oh,” he said too loudly for his current proximity. “Well, you know, it’s complicated.”

  Iridian couldn’t help smiling at just how badly the kid lied. That audacity probably got him out of half the trouble he got into. “You were there then, or you weren’t. Which is it?”

  Si Po passed Pel with a pat on his arm to warn him of his presence. Pel startled anyway. “We have a problem,” Si Po said. “Bleach isn’t killing this stuff.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Charges Accrued: Violation of Human Medical Testing Protocol

  Adda could not, for the life of her, match the pattern on the left to the pattern on the right.

  The new software compared images of the magnified microbes from AegiSKADA’s dispenser with images of known microbes from an Internet scrape. When it found a known microbe that could be the same as the one in AegiSKADA’s dispenser, it presented the paired images in the workspace for review. All she’d been able to determine was that AegiSKADA had deployed some kind of bacteria. None of the close matches she reviewed were close enough to know how to deactivate whatever was in the dispenser.

  The starscape behind the images was distracting, especially during the deep purple supernovas that exploded whenever the software found a new promising match. Red ones would explode if AegiSKADA sent drones toward the pirate compound.

  Perhaps the pilots could be persuaded to raid some university libraries. Which institutions would be most vulnerable? Which would be the most useful? Her eyes flickered open. Red letters on the generator’s ceiling swam before them, until she forced her mind back into the workspace.

  The remnants of another purple supernova pulsed be
hind zoomed-in images of the most likely microbes drifting around her head. She sighed. Anywhere outside the lead cloud, she’d find a bacteriologist to ask.

  The ZV medic (whose name also started with a Z . . .) called a sedation shot he administered to another ZV a “bar-bich-you-et.” The word had two Rs, and an overdose could kill. She hoped she’d never get an injection from someone who couldn’t pronounce what he was injecting. She wouldn’t ask him for epidemiological advice.

  She focused on the swimming images, and they aligned themselves in her field of vision. None matched the bacteria she was looking at, but it had aspects of all of them. Some were round diplococcus bacteria, some were short, wide coccobacilli. Surely they wouldn’t combine and share traits in nature.

  And that suggested conscious intervention. But what’s an artificially created bacteria doing on a shipbreaking station? Did it come in with a military wreck disassembled here? Did AegiSKADA make it? The former seemed more likely, but she’d hate to incorrectly assume that the AI couldn’t make more.

  Somebody above and down the hall was banging around in the kitchen, dragging her out of her workspace. How can I accomplish anything if they keep that up?

  She unplugged from the generator and crawled out of the tent. Iridian sat outside, watching her. “Hi,” Adda whispered.

  “Hey.” The gray mask over Iridian’s nose and mouth emphasized her dark eyes. She held up a mug wafting tomato and basil steam. “Lunch? Or more like dinner.” Adda’s stomach rumbled. The crinkles around those gorgeous eyes implied Iridian’s smile.

  Adda drank half the soup in long gulps. Going to the main part of the pirate compound seemed important for reasons other than noise reduction. That main room would be full of people, who stayed out of her water tank because it was creaky and creepy, and Iridian probably kept them out so Adda could work. . . . None of that enticed her to return to the compound, so why was her brain still hooked on that idea?