Barbary Station

by R. E. Stearns

  Iridian took another hopping step and miraculously failed to explode. “I’m not throwing either of those away, babe. Give me something else to work with.” The drone hadn’t fired yet, maybe because it was running the same calculation she was: How much damage to the station did eliminating the threat justify?

  Adda’s exasperated sigh meant obviously, and didn’t Iridian remember that she hated to be rushed? Iridian leaped another meter to land right beneath the drone, forcing it to focus on her.

  Something crunched under her boot.

  The mine flung her at the stars. Both legs stayed attached to her body, although they were above her head at the moment. The suit integrity alarm remained silent. Her panicked inhale was the only sound for one long moment, and then she crash-landed. She pulled in her limbs in an awkward roll over the clearest patch of hull she found in a quarter-second glance.

  The edge of her shield slammed into her faceplate, and that set the integrity alarm off.

  CHAPTER 21

  Charges Accrued: Interference with Legally Contracted Military Operations

  Thank all that’s holy for vid-based search queries. While new gouts of station atmo erupted around Iridian’s prone form, Adda filled her workspace with helmets similar to the one on Iridian’s suit. Her heart hammered, but she couldn’t hear it over the horrifying hiss of air escaping Iridian’s helmet, transmitted across their audio feed.

  Beside the feed from the surface, an animated helmet cross section hung in the air, repeatedly demonstrating its pressure-retention emergency feature. “Iri, press on the sides of your helmet, around the temples. It should click.”

  Iridian’s arms rose like they weighed a hundred kilos. The animated helmet faceplate shivered as either the faceplate itself or something beneath it expanded at the edges to shut a crack in its center. The crack snapped open, and the animation repeated. Adda shut her workspace eyes as tight as her physical ones already were. “Iri?”

  “It closed,” Iridian groaned. The workspace magnified Adda’s relieved sigh into a whirlwind that spun the helmet faceplate animations away into a mist behind her vid feeds. “Thanks for saving my ass again, babe.”

  Once Iridian pushed herself to her feet and resumed her progress through the mine field, Adda refocused on the other feed projected on the workspace’s gray mist. Her visual perspective was about ten meters above Pel’s head, ninety-eight ticks north on the station map, at the best focus she could get from the intact sensor nodes.

  The refugees’ docking bay ceiling dripped with brown-red ooze that twitched and slithered with background processes analyzing AegiSKADA’s activity. Since nobody in the docking bay was looking up, the ooze might or might not have been a workspace artifact.

  The drone that attacked Iridian had probably gotten trapped outside the station. According to her tracker, the others were converging on Transorbital Voyages’ mercenaries.

  The intruders’ armor reflected the docking bay’s industrial overhead lights and glowed dimly on its own. The armor appeared well-maintained and thick enough to stop any particle beam or blade. They held their weapons ready but not pointed at anyone. They kept shifting in a loose formation to scan the fugee camp through dark helmet faceplates.

  And she was making so little progress because Pel was talking to them. Talking to everybody who came within range was self-rewarding to him, somehow. He’d been on his way out of the docking bay when they’d stopped him. He could have run.

  But how un-Pel-like it would be to run before being clever. “Hey, what am I going to do? I don’t even know what you look like.” The gray respirator mask muffled his voice and made it difficult to parse out of the murmuring refugees around him. It was considerate of him to keep wearing it, so he wouldn’t spread AegiSKADA’s custom plague to the refugees, but she wanted to know what he was saying. Suhaila’s redheaded partner stood right behind him. Adda sifted through available audio until she found the fugee news feed.

  “What are you in a hurry to go for, then?” asked the mercenary who seemed to be leading the rest. Volume and clarity improved now that the audio came from a mic hidden somewhere on the WFUG tech’s person.

  Everyone jumped and turned toward the entrance barrier as something large crashed and broke. “It’s dangerous out there, and you’re naked as a new babe,” the mercenary continued.

  “My sister’s out there.” Pel’s voice cracked on the second syllable, and he bent over, coughing. “Got to . . . get to her.”

  “Whoa, you’re sick?” A mercenary took a big step back from him, sending several refugees scrambling out of his way.

  A lot of cams tracked Pel, even ones that just roved back and forth when he walked out of range. She couldn’t control them all yet. AegiSKADA was watching him of its own accord. There wasn’t any obvious reason for it to follow one blind intruder with such attentiveness, when there were so many other dangerous, unapproved people onboard doing all kinds of potentially threatening things. It lacked supervision and it was oversensitive to weapons, but it was reasoning as its designers intended. It had to have singled out Pel for some purpose.

  “Now, you can’t help your sister like that.” The leader spoke louder than necessary for his proximity, like Pel heard as well as he saw. “Stay here and shut up, would you?”

  “Sir, we don’t want to get sick,” another mercenary said.

  In the black-walled workspace room, Adda stepped away from the reproduction of the refugee camp. The air shimmered into a list of sensor readouts. Against her fingers they thrummed hot for atmo, tingling for power usage, and a few others were too foreign or abstract to assign tactile feedback to.

  She focused her intent. Far away, the fan in her generator clicked on. Threads of sensor data shook apart from one another, leaving only the one she chose. The process itself wasn’t showing up in her workspace, although it was running somewhere.

  Red lights and the contaminant alarms she activated lit the tarp-covered hovels in the docking bay. Adda willed the sound away and concentrated on getting through to the voice of WFUG. Debris and broken lines kept blocking her signal. AegiSKADA’s intensive use of the same system and a rough firewall slowed her, but she pushed through.

  Eventually, Suhaila’s voice said, “Captain Sloane? Is that alarm your idea? It isn’t heavy-metal contamination. We moved that out of here the first year.”

  Adda glanced over her shoulder, where the docking bay cam compilation reassembled in the air. The mercs were demanding an explanation of the alarm from clueless refugees. The boy Pel had danced with the night of the wake caught his hand. Heads ducked and temples touching, they headed for the exit.

  “False alarm,” she said. Suhaila started to ask something else, but Adda talked over her. “If you can scare the mercs out without scaring the rest of your people out too . . .”

  “Maybe. Gotta go.” Suhaila disconnected.

  Adda had spent her whole life observing Pel at a distance. He loved to be near her, but he didn’t stay anywhere long. Even though she was watching him closer than she had for months, she was still watching from a distance, trying to get him out of whatever he’d gotten himself into.

  Now he paused facing an unbroken wall node outside the docking bay, in one of the station corridors. The perspective was only half a meter above his head. His friend wasn’t on cam, but human movement traveled along the path the pirates had taken to the refugee bay.

  “Thanks for the distraction, Sissy.” Though Pel’s hood shadowed his face, he wore none of his collection of glasses or goggles. White scar tissue glinted in the low light, before he started coughing and the hood fell lower.

  Scar tissue. Extra material, built up beyond its initial purpose. Like the extra information that followed Pel around the station. She skimmed drones’ projected positions to confirm that none were near humans, then constructed a process to summarize tracking data on Pel.

  He moved slowly and he never carried a weapon into the station. He should have been one of the least threat
ening people onboard. If any intelligence should pay him extra attention, it should be HarborMaster. It’d need an accessibility package to care for Spacelink workers’ families, and it might’ve registered Pel’s visual impairment when he entered the station.

  “Sissy, are you still spying on me?” The sensor node closest to Pel was now the one on the wall right behind his head. He stood at a first-floor intersection Adda had never seen before. Signs pointed toward waste disposal and water management, with additional arrows toward an elevator to residential habitats.

  He coughed again, the deep, lung-wrenching sound of AegiSKADA’s custom plague. “If you can see me, could you give me a hint on which way to go? Gilad sent me down this hall, but it’s not the one I thought it was.”

  The station map faded into focus on the workspace walls, ceiling, and floor. He’d made good time out of the refugee camp . . . in the wrong direction. She willed a blue trail into being, showing his best route back to the pirate compound.

  Now, how to signal to him? He stood with one hand on the wall, talking intermittently. “I hope you can hear me. There’s no safe place on the station, but some places have trailing live wires. Those kinda scare me.”

  HarborMaster controlled the lights and speaker system, and she still hadn’t found a way into it despite the fact that AegiSKADA definitely had. She couldn’t tell him where he should go, so she’d tell him where he shouldn’t. The emergency bulkhead across the intersection from him slammed as she fed sensors data indicating a nearby explosive decompression.

  Pel spun toward the intersection’s other wrong direction, which she blocked off as well. “Is that you?”

  Adda had forgotten all about her own comp communication. She should have been talking to him that way the whole time. Too much time looking at the station from AegiSKADA’s viewpoint was affecting her thought patterns. Her own viewpoint was valuable too. She dropped out of the workspace to physically activate her comp mic. “Yes, Pel, I hear you, it’s me,” she said.

  “Oh, thank gods.”

  “I’m going to lead you out, but it’s really hard to talk while I’m in the workspace. I’ll close off the pathways it’s not safe for you to follow, and you can follow the open hallways all the way back. Got it?”

  “Yeah, okay! I think I can do that.”

  Adda drifted back into her workspace. Thinking of the comp set its missed contact alert flashing in both his position and Iridian’s probable position. Gods, she hated to be rushed, and no drones were active near Iridian. Before she did anything else, she wanted Pel back in the compound. Still, Iridian was in danger too. “What?” she said into the comp’s open mic, to eliminate the missed contact alerts. The workspace presented the mic as an ankle bone suspended in midair.

  “Are you listening to Fugee News?” Iridian asked. “They’re talking about a broadcast they intercepted from some reporters who set up a buoy relay through the lead cloud.”

  Adda had more important things to think about, especially since she had no access to the relay herself. “So?”

  “So,” Iridian dragged the word out in exasperation, “they’re reporting live on a mercenary deployment. Fugee News is streaming their transmission. Some whistleblower in Transorbital Voyages leaked the deployment information, and—”

  “They’re reporting on Barbary Station?” Adda wavered on her hallucinographic feet. The workspace flickered around her.

  “Yeah, what else would they be doing out here?” Iridian said.

  “Shit.” Adda scanned her readouts and the rising activity levels. “When?”

  “The special bulletin on Fugee News just started.”

  “When to the second, damn it? AegiSKADA’s going to overhear all that, and I don’t know what it’ll do!” If AegiSKADA classified the journalists as reinforcements to the existing invasion force, any incoming messages from them would look like a threat it should stop. It might even find a way to disrupt the buoy network they’d created through the lead cloud. Adda began coughing and muted her mic.

  “About ten seconds before I started talking to you. What the hell can AegiSKADA do about—” Iridian’s voice cut off. Pel’s nervous background chatter ceased.

  “Iri!”

  She didn’t respond. Adda sent the fake decompression input to a sensor node near Pel. The nearby emergency bulkheads stayed open. AegiSKADA’s network activity appeared in the air. A prominent spike coincided with Iridian’s interrupted message. AegiSKADA had silenced the journalists, and the entirety of the station along with them. Adda’s mind dropped her out of the workspace with a speed that made her head spin.

  She was hyperventilating. Combined with her congestion, it felt like drowning. The push lights on the wall pulsed with her heartbeat, though long clawed fingers reached to cover them up. Panicking and wheezing, she dosed herself and returned to the workspace.

  The map, including composite sensor data on Pel and Iridian, spread across the walls and ceiling of the square room her mind created. AegiSKADA wouldn’t deafen itself to silence the journalists, so the sensor data was all still available. But neither Pel nor Iridian responded when she called their names over her comp.

  Her lungs strained taut without dragging in enough oxygen. That slammed her out of the workspace again. She stumbled to the tank’s ladder, past the grasping fingers reaching over the lights. Her palms slid on the rungs until she clenched her hands as hard as her chest clenched around her lungs that would not work.

  In the hallway, another coughing fit left her on her knees on the cold floor. Nobody stood outside the kitchen, so this wasn’t the period in which all three ZV shifts were awake at once. She started the long crawl toward the main room. After two choked attempts, she managed to wheeze Zikri’s name louder than a whisper.

  Footsteps pounded the floor from the direction of the main room. The medic skidded as he stopped himself by grabbing the corner where the hallway met the main room’s wall. He threw an inhaler at her and watched her pick it up and breathe from it. The second she drew a full breath, he said, “Give me that back when you take three deep breaths in a row. We’re hacking together a ventilator.” He ran off.

  After Adda took her requisite breaths, she got moving again. Coughing and miserable pirates filled the main room. They hunched over the workbenches and followed measurements and assembly instructions Zikri read off his comp. He closed his fingers over her inhaler without looking up from the projection. If he was still sick, he’d thoroughly medicated his symptoms.

  Tritheist lay on his side on the computer room floor, beside the printer. The wall displayed a map and an inventory of medical supplies. “What do you want?” he croaked.

  “I need to check the comm ports.” Adda’s trackers showed AegiSKADA directing its drones despite everyone else’s inability to receive messages. By blocking ports set aside for message software, it had stopped communication traffic without the loss looking like a malfunction to HarborMaster, which probably maintained connectivity as part of the station environment. But it had to be using an open port for the drones. The pirates could use it too, if they could find it.

  “No point checking anything.” The lieutenant inhaled to say something else and coughed, deep and wrenching. He laid his forehead on one arm, both hands clenched into fists. “Anything that even looks like comp message traffic is blocked.”

  There was always a point in confirming facts, and Adda despised the idea of this man claiming authority over her without accepting that. She leaned on the doorway, subvocalizing to her comp ping each port without her having to watch it.

  After a few moments, Tritheist asked, “Where’s your brother?”

  Now that the port tester was active, that was what she was looking up. Pel was in a dead zone where the sensors had been destroyed. “On his way back. I can’t talk to him while AegiSKADA is blocking the communication ports.”

  “Dead,” said Tritheist. “Condolences.”

  “He’s fine.”

  “Think what you like.” Trithe
ist’s breath rattled on his inhalation. “Good news is, you’re next of kin. You get his share. Captain felt sorry for him. It’s a bigger share than the fucker deserved.” This time blood spattered his lips when he coughed. “Though we’ve got water for two days and meds for less, so I wouldn’t bet on spending it.” Tritheist gagged and coughed, his fist pounding the floor in pain.

  Adda leaned out the doorway and shouted, “Zikri?” He didn’t come. She stared at the lieutenant, searching for something she could do to help. She really, truly disliked him, but she didn’t want to watch him die.

  Before she thought of anything helpful to do, his breathing quieted. Since his death no longer looked imminent, she said, “I’m going back to my workspace.”

  “Pel already made enough to set you and your woman up for years.” Tritheist rolled onto his back to glare at her, chest heaving, lips pulled back from his teeth in a bloody grimace. “You let him rest in peace and concentrate on the AI, you can have part of my share too. If you get us out of here.” It sounded less like a threat than a prayer.

  The overhead light flickered and died.

  CHAPTER 22

  Charges Accrued: Destruction of Property

  Si Po looked horrible, but he still had a chance. Iridian repeated that in her head during the long walk between the power plant and the probable location of AegiSKADA’s control room. She talked him through the steps of vacuuming puke out of his helmet, lifted him off the hull, called his name when he wandered in the wrong direction.

  The last was most frequent. Whenever he caught her walking near the sample container, he said, “Back off, Nassir. Let me do one gods-damned thing right,” and swerved away.

  They’d both turned off the sound on their radiation alarms. Now he ignored his comp entirely. According to the meter that sporadically flickered to life in her HUD, she’d absorbed a gray and a half. The HUD reporting in grays meant she’d caught enough rads to matter, though not enough to kill her yet. She refused to estimate how many grays Si Po had absorbed. She also refused to give up on him.