Her muscles tensed for grav loss, though that was impossible as long as she stayed attached to the station. Bits of debris swirled with the stars. The ZVs kept their feet despite the atmo pouring through the open emergency bulkhead. Now they were wasting O2 standing around with the door open, because Adda had almost been right: the enviro was nowhere near healthy. Iridian stepped out toward the starry void.
The pirates recovered from the initial dizziness of watching the universe spin and joined her near the edge. “Yeah, that is not happening,” Sergeant Natani snapped over the local channel. “That’s way too far to fall.” The other ZVs grumbled agreement.
“Are you still there?” Adda’s voice was tense and soft, her usual reaction to being scared as hell. It’d show in her eyes, if Iridian could see them.
“Yeah, we’re fine.” Iridian kept most of her impatience out of her voice. “Close this door.” The door’s screech, curling and strange in the escaping atmo, ended in silence as it sealed.
“I said we’re not jumping over that!” Natani sounded outraged as she hunted for a way to open the emergency bulkhead from their side. Without whatever override Adda used, she’d be stuck outside, doing what Iridian told her to.
“Which of those floors across this gap looks safest?” Iridian asked Adda. Someone could climb their side of the wall and make the flying leap to the third, if it was more stable than the first. The second was well out of reach.
Adda muttered to herself. Iridian caught “No, not there,” and “Sensor node. Thorough.”
The meter on Iridian’s suit gave her plenty of atmo, but she felt cold already. Her boots were efficiently conducting heat away from her and into the station exterior. This suit would’ve been cool and light in a short dash through the cold and the black during combat boarding, but it wasn’t meant for standing around.
The pirates shifted on their feet as much as the exposed hallway floor allowed. Sergeant Natani gave up on the closed door and stepped around Si Po, glaring at Iridian as she approached.
“Cross on the first, then climb to the third floor before you come back in,” Adda said at last. “That’s best.”
Iridian eyed the few centimeters of the third floor’s emergency bulkhead visible through a hole in that floor farther along the module. The third-floor bulkhead was solidly sealed at the ceilings and walls. “Don’t open it yet. It’ll take a few minutes to get over there.”
She turned to the others. “Anybody have experience moving around in micro-g?”
Six waved at about shoulder level, which put his hand above everybody’s heads except Iridian’s. “I worked on a mining rig for a while. Still got a current Space Survival and Firefighting certificate.”
“Nice!” said Iridian, at the same time Natani said, “Gods damn it, Six, why do you have to be so helpful all the time?”
Perhaps if Iridian ignored Natani, she’d shut up eventually. At least they wouldn’t be 100 percent screwed if somebody made a mistake. “Do they keep safety lines at the bulkheads here?” Iridian asked Six.
He examined the emergency bulkhead on their side. Natani didn’t back up as far as she might have if, say, Chato were the one searching for something near her boots. After a moment, Six tapped his boot on a panel near the floor marked with a circle, the top half red and the bottom black. The panel popped open, with the line wound around a secure attachment point. “It’s only five meters long, though,” he read off the underside of the panel.
Iridian sighed. “Well, pull it out and let everybody get a hand on it. I don’t want to lose anyone. How do you feel about jumping this gap? We have to get up to the third floor eventually, but there’s no rush.”
Something struck the broken corridor floor a few steps in front of Iridian. It ripped a fist-size hole on its way into deeper space before she even identified it. If a chunk of debris caused this kind of damage, a high-tension cable from the shipbreaking scaffold could’ve easily torn through the station here.
“If we’re really doing this, let’s not stand around,” said Sergeant Natani.
“No hurling in your suits.” Iridian stared at Si Po until he nodded, since he was the only one still staring at the stars like he’d never seen them from this angle. If ignoring Natani wouldn’t work, Iridian would have to fall back on heroics. She just had to pick a solid-looking spot across the gap and release her boots’ magnetic grip on the floor. “I’ll give this a go first.”
“No, I got it,” Six said quickly, more to Natani than Iridian. Iridian looked between the two of them and grinned. She’d been right. There really was something between them. The ZVs would’ve been a high-testosterone group even before getting trapped in tight quarters together. Now she was curious about how the others paired off, and if they stuck to pairs. Hell, this isn’t the army. They’re allowed to get off with whoever they want. I can just ask.
Six stepped around Chato, but as he passed Iridian, something smacked into his faceplate. It cracked and he shouted in wordless panic over the local channel. Whatever hit it was too small for Iridian to track against the backdrop of spinning stars. He staggered into Chato and clutched the safety line with one flailing hand.
Iridian snapped open the compartment on her chest plate and held the small case inside in front of Six’s face. The flashing red HUD alerts in the faceplate lit his eyes briefly, bulging but not from vacuum. “Hey! This is a patch kit. Sturm packed it, so you know it’s good.” She tapped the faceplate with the patch kit’s corner and Six startled away, then nodded. She grabbed his wrist and slapped the kit into his palm.
“You’re giving him your kit?” The sheer incredulity in Sergeant Natani’s question made Iridian smile, but she kept her gaze on Six’s projected eyes in his faceplate. Once his breathing slowed, suggesting that what she’d said had penetrated his adrenaline haze, she turned, picked a spot to look at on the scarred first-floor emergency bulkhead across the gap, and leaped.
For a second there was nothing beneath her; endless, mind-numbing nothing with occasional stars.
The big red bulkhead slammed into her faceplate and hands. The impact jarred her teeth together with her tongue in the middle. She tasted blood, but her boots hit the floor. She concentrated on breathing while the void she’d crossed swelled behind her eyes.
Once she caught her breath, she waved to the ZVs. “I stuck the landing.” She winced at the movement of her bitten tongue, but when Six threw the safety line, she caught it. “Come on over.”
CHAPTER 17
Charges Accrued: Use of a Controlled Substance without a Prescription
When Adda woke, her father’s voice echoed outside her workspace generator. The You are in a water tank message on the ceiling had seldom been more essential. She was still plugged into the generator. Did I fall asleep?
Pel crouched beneath the push lights on the wall beside the ladder, chin tucked to his chest, listening to his comp. Their father was saying, “Pirates do terrible things. It’s not like the movies or those games you and Adda used to play.” An enormous sigh, Dad’s trademarkable expression of exasperation with all things Pel. “I just hope you haven’t done something you’ll regret for the rest of your life.”
The tank thumped under Adda’s boots, and Pel’s head rose. She sat next to him and wrapped her arm around his shoulders. They still felt too bony.
“Funny he sent this to me, not you.” He smiled, but the humor in his voice was unusually dark.
“He’s too angry to speak to me yet.” Or he would be, if he’d heard about the Prosperity Dawn and drawn the correct conclusions. She tightened her hold on Pel, and he laid his head on her shoulder. In only a few weeks they’d fallen back into the same patterns they had always had with each other. Pel made trouble, Adda helped him cope with the consequences, or shared them when letting him do it alone would hurt either of them too much.
“Yeah, and it’ll be speaking, too. He never yells at you.”
“Sure he does,” she said. “He just doesn’t do it while you�
��re around.”
“He doesn’t realize you’re a spy for the enemy. You tell me everything.”
On a cognitive level she understood fights between Pel and Da were temporary, but her body always reacted like the disagreement would separate them forever. She felt like crying, although she wouldn’t allow herself such a silly reaction when Pel needed her. “We’re not enemies, any of us. He loves you and doesn’t know how to love someone so different from him.”
“But he always said I was just like Mom.”
“Mom was very different from him too,” Adda said. As they always did, their mother’s words as she walked out their door for the last time returned: Look after Pel. Adda had only been intended to do that on the way to the bus stop. Pel could be counted on to find the rustiest trash to play with in the muddiest puddles. While Adda and Pel were in school that day, secessionist sympathizers, or Near Earth Union ones who thought the workers supported secession, blew up their mother’s factory with her inside.
“Pel,” Adda said quietly. “When are you going to tell me what happened to your eyes?”
“I don’t know.” He answered immediately, deflecting the question before it reached his brain. His head left her shoulder and he subvocalized at his comp, flicking between projections without listening to more than two words of their content. “When it doesn’t freak me out so much.”
“And when will that be?”
“I don’t know.”
“So, never.”
“That’s not what I said!” He folded one arm over his chest and the other over his stomach. “Well, I’m thinking about it now, and I won’t be able to stop thinking about it, and somebody got sick in the shower, which isn’t a real shower because there’s not enough gods-damned water for a real shower, so now I’m stuck. Thanks for that.”
“So tell me.”
His breath shook as he inhaled. “I told you I got a station-to-station courier job a few months ago?”
She nodded, although he wouldn’t see the gesture. It was more like a year ago, but she was unwilling to say anything that might stop him from talking. Something like, I knew you weren’t telling me the whole truth, you lying brat.
“Well, it wasn’t legal, the stuff I was carrying. Drugs, you know.” He shrugged, now conversing with his boots instead of Adda. “I had friends who were doing well with it, so I felt like hey, I’ll do this while I decide what I really want to do, make some money so I can stop mooching off Da like you were, no offense.”
He tilted an ear toward her, then turned to the darker end of the tank, probably imagining her scowl. She pressed her lips closed on a shout of I was a student, you ass! I was going to make all of that money back! I still will!
“So I hauled that stuff around awhile, and I felt like I was good at it, so maybe they ought to promote me, or at least give me more money. I asked my boss about it, maybe oversold myself a little, but whatever. So he says sure, come on and meet us, here’s the address. And I did, and maybe I wasn’t as respectful as he expected.”
“What did you say?” Adda separated each word to make sure they came out at a low volume. He knew where his big mouth got him, and it wasn’t always somewhere fun.
“I told him he should pay me more because then his son would feel better about dating me. And maybe I didn’t say ‘date.’ ”
“Oh my gods, you did not say that to a drug dealer, Pel!” Her shout splatted on the opposite wall like spit. “Why do you say things when you know all it does is piss people off?”
“Some people have a sense of humor! Anyway, the worst he’d do was ask his goons to beat on me a bit and throw me out, and that’d be a hell of a story to tell friends at a bar later.” He laughed, a brittle, ragged sound. “That was the real mistake, thinking that was the worst he’d do.”
She laid her hand on his arm and he twitched under the sweatshirt sleeve, though he didn’t pull away. “Well, first, it was sort of like, ‘If you want to work for us so much, we’ll give you something to do,’ and that was working in the processing plant. We had masks, like these but bigger.” He extended his hands from his mask like he was tracing two tusks. “They helped, but there was a lot of caustic shit in that place, and the robots didn’t do exactly the things the bosses wanted done, so we had to help them. And then the bosses wouldn’t let me walk out. Or pay me.”
“Oh.” Nothing that came to Adda’s mind was worth saying.
“Yeah, that’s what I said.” Pel chuckled, a toneless rattle that shook him beneath her hand. “So that went on for . . . not sure how long. And then one of the enforcer types—Zabeth was some kind of middle manager, I guess, she bossed some others around—she offered to take me away from all that, and sure she had hair on her upper lip and I prefer clean-shaven faces, but beggars and choosers, you know. So she went to her boss, who used to be my boss so that was convenient, and he gave me to her. Which was wonderful for maybe five minutes, and then I found out she was into some . . . She got off on . . .”
He swallowed whatever he’d almost said. Quick breaths whined eerily through his teeth on each intake. He was beyond frightened, and it sounded like he was succumbing to AegiSKADA’s custom bacteria. Adda squeezed his arm. When he jumped, he banged his elbow on the wall.
“Sorry,” Pel said. She should have been telling him that, not him telling her. “Zabeth, um, hit me. A lot. By the end, I couldn’t even focus on her until she was right in front of my face. The rest of the time she was this . . . moving, evil blob. Heh, this is why I don’t like to think about it.”
“So it wasn’t one of the pilots who did this to you,” Adda said.
Pel kept laughing at things she didn’t find amusing, even more so than usual. “No, the Apparition saved my life.” So the pilots did interact with other people sometimes. She would ask more about that, later, and find a way to thank the Apparition’s. “We took a trip, Zabeth’s vacation maybe, and Captain Sloane set a trap for her yacht.”
“On purpose?” Adda couldn’t remember reading about Sloane’s crew attacking any vessels that small.
Pel shrugged. “It was a nice ship in the wrong place at the wrong time, I guess. By the time she realized what was happening, it was too late to get the yacht away. So she put on a jumpsuit and she just . . . left me.” He seemed to stare into the shadows outside the light they sat in, scarred eyes hidden beneath his sweatshirt hood. “I . . . She . . . Oh, damn it, I can’t,” he moaned.
Adda wrapped both arms around him, and he curled down until he fit like he had when they were both a lot younger. “I’m so sorry,” Adda said. Sorry it happened, sorry she made him tell her, sorry she let him drop out of college, sorry she still didn’t have enough information to completely understand what happened to him. “Just stop if you—”
“No, no, this is the good part.” He took another deep, shaky breath with an infected wheeze at the end. “The Apparition’s pilot didn’t release the yacht’s atmo like she usually does. One of the bots flew into my room and saw me—like I was—and the bot just hovered there, looking at me with its cam. Then she hauled the whole yacht back. It took a while, and my eyes got worse on the way. By the time Rio and Tabs came onboard and found me, I couldn’t even tell what they looked like.”
“They have medium-brown skin and dark brown hair,” Adda whispered. “And beautiful brown eyes shot through with amber. They must be related. I’ve never seen eyes like theirs.” Chef had said that Pel saw fine when the ZVs found him, but the Apparition’s pilot was his actual rescuer. Surely if the pilot had done something to make his eyes worse, he’d remember it. What happened to make his eyesight even worse on the way to Barbary Station?
Pel smiled. “Rio and Tabs are cousins, but they got their irises done together after they left the NEU navy. Or army, or whatever. You still like eyes, huh? Sorry mine are such a mess.”
“Don’t.”
“Sorry. What are Iridian’s like?”
“She hasn’t had hers touched up. They’re black as the void when you
first meet her. In the right light, they’re dark brown. She once held a glass of stout—beer that smells like burned bread—up to her face, and I swear to all gods her eyes were the same color. Then she drank it.” Adda laughed weakly. And she’d thought that was weird. “She says she likes beer that kicks her in the teeth on the way down.”
“Oh, I knew I liked her.” His laughter broke into wet coughing that made Adda want to hold him tighter. That wouldn’t help him breathe.
“I should get some coffee and find out how she’s doing.” She checked the time on her comp. “She should be less than a kilometer from the doctors’ part of the station, accounting for all the changing floors they’ve done.”
Pel bit his lip, an anxiety response Adda felt on her own face sometimes. “Can I stay down here for a while?”
“Of course.” She left off the reminder to be quiet while she worked. For now he could be however he wanted. He came so close to not being at all.
Death was too easy for this Zabeth person. Adda would destroy her for what she had done to her baby brother. But first Adda had to get him to a real doctor, not the half-crazed physicians Iridian was off to find. And she should thank Captain Sloane for taking Pel in, even though he would’ve had little to offer the crew when he first arrived on the station.
The coffee warmed her throat. A couple of ZVs asked about something their comps were or weren’t doing with the network. While she answered, she visualized what AegiSKADA might do if Zabeth ended up at Barbary Station with a weapon jammed somewhere sensitive. Adda went back to the tank with orange juice for Pel.
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