The ZVs shouted questions. “What’s happening, Captain?” “Is AegiSKADA done for?” “Are you all right, Captain?”
“Later, lads and lasses.” Sloane’s voice still sounded hoarse. The captain waved, then turned away from the door after Adda came through. “Must keep up morale,” said Sloane quietly. “Mine could use encouragement, in all honesty. You have good news?”
“AegiSKADA is draining resources tracking a lot of things at once. For the first time since I’ve been here, I think an offensive strike would do some actual good.”
“Do you.” Sloane frowned, for some reason. This should have been the requested good news.
“So Iridian’s almost at the core now.” She used their dramatic terminology without wincing. Iridian would be proud. Core. AegiSKADA is not an apple. And Iridian would laugh. . . . “She’s in the same module as it is, in fact.”
“Good.” The captain’s tone suggested more information was desired.
“But AegiSKADA will start drawing forces back in to defend itself once it identifies her intention. Right now she’s less of a threat than all the armed people Transorbital Voyages sent.” Sloane raised an eyebrow, like this was the first the captain had heard of them. Perhaps it was. She’d lost track of who she’d told what.
“As soon as she gets into the same room as the core, it’s going to target her.” She swallowed and talked fast to avoid the image gaining hold in her mind. “If the ZV Group engages Transorbital’s mercenaries, that should hit almost all of AegiSKADA’s threat criteria. It will prioritize that conflict over Iridian’s presence, which should give her time to reset it.”
Sloane still frowned toward the door. The captain couldn’t have misunderstood. She had explained clearly, and Sloane had started out in piracy as an engineer.
“They don’t much like you,” Sloane said.
How does that relate to the plan? “Well . . .” Sloane said it for a reason.
“And they won’t follow someone they don’t like.”
“I don’t . . . I wasn’t planning to be out there with them.” Adda waved her hands in front of her like she could wipe the idea out of the air. “I just know where to place people. If I tell you where people should go, you can get them there. If you agree, I mean.” Which the captain damned well should, because of Volikov’s focus on a system’s primary functions.
The captain gave her a toothy grin. “Good leaders lead from the front, which is why I will be placing the fireteams, in person.”
“That’s . . . fine.” Oh. Captain Sloane had assumed she was trying to take command of the crew by giving the orders during the battle ahead. The captain had been listing the reasons that would be a bad idea. No wonder the conversation had taken a turn for the weird. “So I’ll show you where Transorbital Voyages’ soldiers will be. I think the refugees will point them in the right direction—toward us—any second now. If we hold AegiSKADA’s attention, Iridian will do her part.”
“Show me,” the captain said. Adda fired up the projector, and the station’s map lit the wall as Tritheist returned to Sloane’s side.
Half an hour later, Adda and Tritheist were still looking at the map. She used both her comp and the console to track movement. “Go to the third level. Most of the sensor nodes are still intact there. We need AegiSKADA to see you.” That distance apart put them out of reception range, but she’d discussed the resulting lack of spoken communication with Sloane. The pirates would watch for closed bulkheads, because she was almost positive she’d found a way to shut them despite AegiSKADA’s efforts to lock her out of the system. All those cables dangling in the passage behind the wall were being put to use.
She breathed deeply, reinforcing her fading stims with oxygen. With jittery hand-muscle micromovements, she set a recurring request for output from nodes around the Transorbital Voyages mercenaries, and those near Sloane’s crew, about eight thousand times per second.
Outside her workspace, she couldn’t see the security system falling back on its programmed priorities. The smile forming on her lips felt cold, as detached from her fear as her mind was from her body in a workspace. Volikov’s team had taught AegiSKADA to stop armed intruders, even at the cost of moderate infrastructure damage and civilian lives. The intelligence, therefore, would focus on Sloane’s ZVs and the Transorbital Voyages mercenaries because Iridian and the refugees weren’t armed. With luck it would spend processing cycles deciding whether to deploy more drones against the mercs or the pirates, and leave Iridian alone.
Without luck, Volikov had let the intelligence think its survival was more important than the station’s nonthreatening human occupants. Gods, we are due some luck.
Sloane led, with Major O.D. a step behind and six ZVs following him, including Vick stumbling along at the end of the line. Even accounting for the casualties the Transorbital Voyages mercenaries had sustained, they outgunned the pirates.
On the map, mercenaries streamed out of the refugees’ docking bay, pursued by tiny drone IDs. At least the spiderbots weren’t being drawn back to the control room. Some of the big ones assumed trajectories intersecting the refugees. Adda switched on the vid feed from the entrance. Near the barricade, a stiff figure crouched with a glowing yellow cig between his lips.
Tritheist drew in a breath. “Blackguardly Jack. The bastard survived after all.” The former lieutenant was behind a chunk of collapsed wall next to the mercenary leader.
“Zoom in on them,” demanded Tritheist.
“Can’t.” Imaging limitations aside, Adda had to figure out how to keep Sloane on the route most likely to draw AegiSKADA’s attention. She didn’t have time to determine what Oarman was doing with the mercenaries.
Sloane stood at an intersection, looking around like the way forward was less than obvious. If Sloane and the ZVs continued straight down the hallway, they could drop down to the second floor, closer to their destination. In a subvocalized command that her nerves made almost audible, she sent false hull breech signals to the sensor nodes at an emergency bulkhead in the hallway she wanted them to ignore. It slammed shut. The crew got moving again.
If Iridian had any chance at all of resetting AegiSKADA, this would be it.
CHAPTER 26
Charges Accrued: Misuse of Radioactive Material
Iridian backed up as far as the narrow closet would let her. She almost stepped through the hole she’d busted in the wall behind her. Chuckling at what Adda’s face would do if she saw this, she ran shoulder-first at the next wall. This time she crashed through, into AegiSKADA’s control room. Time seemed to slow as the wall panel fell toward an antipersonnel mine like the ones on the station’s surface. She dropped everything to catch the panel before it hit the mined floor in the next room. Only after she’d hauled it into the closet with her did she register the hiss from inside her suit.
Structural damage from bombardment during the war had depressurized this module years ago. Chunks of debris kept the emergency bulkheads from closing anywhere on her path here from the passthrough, and also necessitated the additional structural damage she was causing now, to the station and her armor. She got her helmet light on and snapped open a pocket, fingers scrabbling for the patch kit. The gloves scraped over an empty compartment. She searched two pockets more before she remembered pressing the kit into Six’s hand.
Fuck. Fuck! The armor joints over the first knuckles released a tiny but continuous jet of atmo from the seam. The leak was small, but she had so little O2 left. . . .
She had a job to do. Adda was counting on her. She tore her gaze away from the leak and shouldered the broken panel away from the new hole in the wall.
The control room must’ve housed a console designed for human use once, but AegiSKADA had been busy since it’d taken over that duty for itself. Shelves of sealed, aerated, and heated pseudo-organic tanks lined the walls. Their viscous solution still glowed dimly from beneath in tones of blue and green. They were bolted down so that even if the station stopped spinning, they’d fu
nction. The overhead light fixtures had disintegrated into sand scattered across the high-friction flooring, which made perfect substrate for AegiSKADA’s thick cables and mines.
She had a hard time appreciating the configuration when it was pretty damned obvious that at least one person had stepped on a mine. The walls bore dark brown stains flecked with sooty crust. Blackened bone fragments littered the AI’s hardware. An intact skull, half a rib cage, and an arm leaned in the corner beside the closed door to the corridor. Twenty centimeters of spine trailed through another dark stain. Iridian hoped the person had just fallen that way, instead of having dragged themselves there to die.
Adda’s drone alarm was still silent, but it’d pay to plan for company. Besides, this was the first thing since she’d boarded the damned station that resembled her childhood fantasies of space piracy. She might as well make the best of it, if she could avoid getting blown up. She forced a grin onto her face and willed it to stay there until she felt the faint glow of optimism to match.
A one-meter by one-meter lead box was silhouetted against the room-size tank, protecting the AI’s pseudo-organic quantum components from what she was about to expose them to. The enormous curved cooling tank filled the far wall. The tank had been transparent before someone or something had patched it with hundreds of thumbnail-size pieces of metal. Only a crooked corner of the bottom third revealed the liquid inside. The pieces covered the coolant tank like scales. A discolored patch spread over the floor beneath it.
The net of microtubule transfers above and around the structure hung at heights and lengths that would’ve made accessing the control system hazardous for humans, even without the mines. The live cables and tubes of sensitive pseudo-organic solution were much nearer the coolant system than looked safe for anything involved.
It was almost like camouflage. Is AegiSKADA awake after all?
Walking across the room would be suicide. With the O2 tank and the sample container, her hands were full and her balance was off, so she was bound to step on something explosive. But crossing the room twice wouldn’t take much air, since AegiSKADA’s primary tank filled most of the space. She unhooked the O2 tank. Alarms blared in her helmet, and she blinked in the pattern that silenced them through the helmet’s interface. She was already plenty alarmed.
She leaned out of the wall and gave the nearest pseudo-organic rack a gentle shove. It gave a little, but its base stayed still. The silenced alarms left her nothing to listen to in the depressurized room but her own breath and heartbeat. She pushed harder. The joints gave more, but the rack stayed on the floor. One tank slopped goop over its side, and the light underneath flickered yellow before changing back to blue-green. So far so good.
Before she could change her mind, she grasped the rack’s top edge and stepped onto the lowest shelf. The shelf sagged under her boot and she shut her eyes, but it held. She shifted her hand along the top of the rack and got her other foot on.
The racks stopped before she reached AegiSKADA’s lead-encased central computer, but so did the mines. “Didn’t think I’d get this far, did you, you glorified garbage disposal?” Speaking aloud invited disaster, but Iridian practically had the thing.
Once she stood beside the case, sample container in hand, she saw the lock. It taunted her in the dull light of the screen beside it, plastic lit from behind instead of a projection, calmly demanding credentials. Unless she could get the radioactive material near enough to the actual drive to disrupt its operations, she couldn’t cause AegiSKADA any damage it couldn’t repair.
That was why the AI felt safe mining the place, after all. Pseudo-organic tanks could be replaced, and from the looks of the main tank, it’d already done that once. And who knew how long it’d take to do that, or whether the drones would continue killing on whatever orders they were following now? The pirates might not even make it out of the base, let alone get the fugees off the station somehow. Captain Sloane had spent enough effort provisioning the fugees and using their media to spread crew propaganda that getting the fugees out alive should be at least a secondary priority.
If Iridian didn’t find a way into the case, Si Po would’ve sacrificed himself for nothing because sooner or later, AegiSKADA would come back.
There was a reason modern ship design didn’t include physical windows, and Iridian wore armored gloves. Modern hulls and armor were harder than just about anything. She stiffened the fingers in the glove that didn’t leak into a passable knife hand from close combat training and slammed it into the screen.
The first impact rocked the whole case. A jumble of heavy microtubes tumbled over Iridian’s shoulders. Even though she hadn’t seen one in years, her brain screamed, Snakes! She flailed to throw them off her, then froze. Half a step away lay live mines that’d blow her ass off. She gripped the edges of AegiSKADA’s case, gulping and gasping her precious O2. Long seconds later, her adrenaline dropped enough for her to carefully unwrap herself from the cables.
She hit the case’s plastic display again and hissed as her fingertips bruised against her armor. The gloves kept her from feeling any damage she did to the case. The next strike cracked the screen. She hit it again, harder, because she didn’t have O2 for a sparring match with plastic.
A metal plate had supported the display and protected against radiation the way mere plastic wouldn’t. It fell into the case, followed by a shower of plastic shards. Iridian crammed her faceplate up to the hole and twisted her neck until her headlamp shone in. The side of an industrial-size quantum computer nestled in a custom-built shelf inside. Cooling fans, nutrient sprayers for the pseudo-organics, and heat sinks surrounded it. A green light glowed in the case’s depths to indicate that the quantum processor was up and running.
“Now I’ve got you, you son of a bitch.”
The formerly molten thorium salt had sealed itself into the container, and of course the opening jammed against the hole where the digital display had been instead of going in. She looped cables over the container until she took her hands off and it stayed in place.
She wished she could hear the telltale whine of a hard shutdown, especially since that’d mean there was atmo to carry it. She also wished she could get farther away from the exposed radioactive salt, but radiation poisoning was curable. Explosive decapitation wasn’t. With all the cables twining through the room, any move might set off a mine.
The way Adda described them, AI were only as smart as the pseudo-organics available. Without a quantum computer, it would be forced to think at the same speed and with the same amount of information as the lower-end shipboard AI. And by disrupting the essential strength of a quantum computer, setting its electrons to a single state instead of many at once by slamming a bunch of radioactive particles into the system, all it could do was shut down and wait for the end of its decontamination and reset cycle.
Adda’s eyes would light up like suns when all her sensor data went silent. That could only mean one thing.
“Oh, shit.” The sensors.
Iridian got a falling sensation for about a quarter of a second, like her inner ear adjusting to a slowing spin. HarborMaster, if it still existed as a separate entity, used the sensors to maintain healthy enviro. And if it didn’t exist, only one other entity could do that. The pirate base had been leaking for hours now. What if she had just killed everybody not in a suit?
As long as gamma rays from the radioactive sample were bombarding AegiSKADA’s core, there was no way for the reset cycle to begin reentangling the qubits and restarting the comp. Suddenly all she wanted to do was restart the homicidal AI, now, before Adda suffocated or froze.
She grabbed the sample container and shoved its lid closed. There was no projector nearby, no feedback indicating whether the damned thing was decontaminating or not. Maybe the radiation source was too close by, even covered.
The floor vibrated beneath the armored soles of her boots. She swung her headlamp around the room, sucking down her limited O2 in quick breaths. Near the locked and we
lded entrance, something moved. An uneven bulge protruded inward from the door’s center in rapid, small increments. She couldn’t think of any tool that made dents like that. Standing in front of it seemed unhealthy.
She knelt to find a place to plug in the Casey Mire Mire’s datacask, and paused. If she copied this monstrosity and it killed more people, those deaths would be on her. She and Adda used to have long discussions about this very trade-off in college, and no AI had ever seemed worth the lives it cost.
Adda had never agreed with her on that. If there were a chance AegiSKADA could be preserved, she’d want it done. Developers everywhere could learn from it. Someday somebody might be able to correct its homicidal behavior. Before modern medicine, governments threw people with mental disorders in prison. Not that she’d choose the awakened fucking AI to guard another AI until someone came along and rehabilitated both of them.
But Adda would just love that scenario. Iridian could practically her hear ask, Who better? in that soft voice she used when she knew she was right, and she didn’t want to imply that Iridian was missing the obvious, but of course she was.
Also, the Casey might do literally anything if Iridian didn’t keep her word. Of the two extremely dangerous AIs near her, one was about to lose any autonomy it might’ve had. That made the Casey the biggest threat. While she finished inserting the datacask, Iridian pictured Adda smiling when she heard how it all went down.
Sparks showered Iridian, and pieces of plastic and severed cable fell across her back. Over her shoulder, a red glow expanded to the size of her fist in the center of the door in centimeter bursts, eerie in the silent vacuum. A drill that went through planetary bedrock could warp steel that much, but what would it be doing out here? Some reckless fuck was shooting their way in. And a weapon that could punch through a door that thick would shatter her shield.
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