The Wrong Stars

by Tim Pratt

  “Which isn’t to say an industrial espionage squad won’t come vent us all into space and steal the generator anyway,” Stephen said. “We’re not talking about finding a slightly more efficient insulating material or a way to hard-boil eggs faster or a more coherent laser cannon. This device is world-altering, and there will be extralegal repercussions if we aren’t careful about how we deploy it.”

  “See?” Ashok said. “Nobody follows the rules except us. It’s like wearing handcuffs and a muzzle and a straitjacket, except not in the fun way.”

  “We could always take the generator to the Jovians,” Callie said. “They’re richer than the TNA, and more closely scrutinized, and frankly less likely to leave us drifting dead in the Oort Cloud.” Callie worked for the TNA, but it was a younger polity, and a bit more savage in its practices. “If we put in place precautions so the Jovians can’t double-cross us, we could get fair payment. They’d probably offer us landed knighthoods, at minimum.” Not that she particularly wanted to settle down on an estate under the carbon-lace domes of Callisto, but it was a possibility to consider. “Before we think about all that, though, we have to see if the bridge generator even works. If it does… Are we willing to take Elena’s offer? I’m not going to compel anyone here. It’s too big and weird and dangerous, so we’ll all vote. If yes, we’ll see if we can find her crew. If no, we give her the bridge generator and drop her on Ganymede with some advice and hope she remembers us fondly after she gets rich.”

  “I’m in.” Ashok’s handful of manipulators spun around in a merry whir, his equivalent of excited fidgeting.

  “I do have some sympathy for people being unwillingly altered by alien technology,” Drake said. “And it would be a tale to tell, wouldn’t it? Visiting an alien space station? I’ll go if Janice will.”

  “It’s nonsense,” Janice said. “But if it turns out not to be nonsense, fuck it, I’m in. Maybe we’ll meet some aliens who aren’t total crap like the Liars are.”

  “I have the insatiable curiosity and sense of adventure of my template mind,” the computer said. “I would be delighted to explore.”

  Callie snorted. “Your human model traded in his curiosity and sense of adventure for a fun-filled life in commodities trading.”

  “Perhaps staying in space has kept my own interest sharp, dar… captain.”

  “Mmm. Well, Stephen, it’s down to you. This is the part where you tell us the whole idea is foolhardy, stupid, reckless, and will end in tragedy.”

  “It is foolhardy, stupid, reckless, and will end in tragedy. But I’ll go.” He shrugged, tectonic. “Someone has to fix you up when you’re inevitably parasitized by aliens. I will make some small demands in the interests of practicality, though: we do not have sufficient weaponry or defensive measures on board for this kind of mission.” The White Raven was fitted with a few weapons – fore and aft ballistic cannons and ion blasters, and a dorsal plasma bolt gun that offered a 360-degree firing range – which were more than sufficient for their typical security and escort jobs, but definitely more police-grade than military-grade.

  “I have an idea about that,” Callie said. “I think I can get us armed up. Sounds like it’s unanimous, then.”

  “Why do you want to go?” Janice said. “It’s a big reward, sure, but it’s a big risk too.”

  “You know me, Janice. I just do stuff. As a policy it’s worked out well for me so far.” Callie could come up with rationalizations: this was the big score, and worth the danger; they could discover something of vital importance for the future of humanity; rescuing a stranded crew was the right thing to do, both objectively and because, if they were ever lost, they’d want someone to do the same for them. Those were all true, but they just lent cover to her real reason: she wanted to spend more time with Elena. She wanted to help Elena. She wanted Elena to think she was brave and resourceful and kind. She hadn’t wanted to impress anyone that way since she met her ex-husband. Callie wasn’t silly enough to call it love, not at this point, but whatever it was, it met the necessary preconditions to become love, in time. “I’ll give Elena the good news.”

  Chapter Nine

  “That’s amazing!” Elena grabbed Callie in a hug, then suddenly let go and stepped back. “I’m sorry, I… Do you still hug in this century? Is it outside social norms?” What if there’d been some terrible contagion, and humans had stopped hugging? Embraces were already wildly variable in terms of appropriateness, depending on culture and upbringing…

  Callie seemed amused. “No, it’s OK. We still hug. In theory, anyway. Conditionally. I don’t get hugged very often in practice.”

  “It’s because you’re very intimidating.” Elena looked the captain up and down. Intimidating or not, there was something appealing about her – a sense of complete ease and self-assurance that she’d always found attractive. It was the same quality that had drawn her toward Sebastien. “I thought it was the boots – they are very butch boots – but really it’s just your whole air of command. Comes from… literally being in command, I suppose.”

  “Ha. The boots are pretty great. They’re real vat-grown leather, black, covered with a transparent protective resin the Liars developed, all over an under-layer of steel-composite mesh. They’ve got electromagnetic soles too. They’re good for stomping around, crawling on the hull in space, and kicking smugglers in the guts. We can get you a pair if you want. I bet you’d look good in them.”

  Was that a tone of flirtation in the captain’s voice? Elena decided she must be misreading it. Social cues had probably altered a lot in the past five centuries. “What, this white jumpsuit isn’t the height of contemporary fashion?” Elena realized the front of her suit was unzipped perhaps too far for modesty, at least by the standards of her own time, but Callie hadn’t so much as glanced at her chest, so it probably wasn’t a problem. That lack of even a casual cleavage glance further weighed against the idea that Callie had been flirting. Elena felt a little spurt of disappointment at the thought. It was always nice when people you found hot found you hot back, but that was probably too much to expect in circumstances this bizarre.

  “I’m glad you’re happy,” Callie was saying. “Of course, this whole idea is contingent on us actually getting the bridge generator to work. Otherwise, we can’t get back wherever you came from.”

  Elena sighed. “I wish I could help. The space station’s robots hooked up the device, and Sebastien was the one to activate it.”

  “Our engineer, Ashok, thinks he can figure it out. You’ll meet him, and the rest of the crew, soon. It’s just Ashok, and our pilot Drake and our navigator and comms expert Janice. You already know me, and Stephen, and the computer.”

  “That reminds me, I meant to ask – are AI considered, ah, people? Socially? Legally?”

  “Those as sophisticated as the one on this ship, yeah. There are a lot of weak AI, expert systems really, that are optimized for one particular task – appraisals, law, finance, stuff like that. They’re not considered people. As far as we can tell they don’t have consciousness or any theory of mind. But the ones based on template minds do, and they have commensurate rights and privileges. Our computer even gets paid for running the ship, though I don’t know what he does with the lix he earns.”

  “Investments and charity, mainly, and ship upgrades, since the White Raven is my body,” Shall commented.

  “Except it’s my ship, so I reimburse him for those.” Callie sounded annoyed. Elena noticed that she often sounded annoyed when Shall spoke, and resolved to find out why. Elena understood the inner workings of organisms vastly better than she did the inner workings of interpersonal relationships, but if she was going on a potentially dangerous rescue mission with these people, she needed to get to know them better.

  “Assuming the generator does work, when do we leave?” Elena had been doing calculations in her head, about her crew’s water and food supplies, and the numbers weren’t happy.

  “We have to resupply and fuel up and make some m
ission-specific changes to the ship, but probably within ten or twelve hours, if all goes well. Robin can make it that long?”

  “Assuming nothing new and terrible happened to her, I think so.”

  “OK. I’ll set you up in my quarters on the station – they aren’t fancy, but there’s food, and a bed, and access to the Tangle, so you can start catching up on the past few centuries worth of–”

  “What are you talking about? I’m going with you.”

  Callie crossed her arms and scowled. “Doctor, I have a lot of respect for you – you’ve been through a lot, and you came out intact, and that’s saying something, but I’m a trained security contractor. Drake and Janice used to fly military expeditions for Earth, back before their accident. Stephen got his start as a doctor when the battlefield medic on his squad during the first Ionian uprising took a kinetic bolt to the head, and Stephen had to start patching people up with the assistance of a weak AI helperbot in his visor display. He found out he liked putting people back together way more than taking them apart. Active duty was a long time ago for him, but he still knows what he’s doing. Even the computer has military firing solutions and engagement and evasion protocols in his database. You’re a total non-combatant. It’s not safe.”

  Elena scowled, saw an opening, and took it. “What about your mechanic, Ashok?”

  She hesitated. “He hasn’t had military or police training, true, but he has other useful qualities.”

  “So do I. Mainly, I’m the only one who’s been to this space station. I know what to expect, and what we should look out for. I’m a source of valuable intelligence. You aren’t leaving me behind. That’s non-negotiable.”

  Callie stared her down, but Elena just stared her back up, and the captain finally grinned. Most people probably wouldn’t call Kalea Machedo pretty, not with that nose and that great frizzy cloud of hair barely tamed into braids, but her smile was a dazzler. “All right, Elena. You’re the client, so you call the shots. Let the record show I agree under protest. Who’s the intimidating one now?”

  “Ha. You’ve got, what, a quarter of a meter on me? You could throw me over your shoulder like a bag of feathers.”

  Callie shrugged. “Some of that height is just the boots. You are kind of pocket-sized, though. They grew people real small back in the Paleolithic.”

  “Don’t be rude. I’m at least Neolithic.”

  “Definitely a valuable antique. All right, get some rest, or some food, or poke around on the Tangle. Explore the station if you want – you can take an earbud to stay in contact with the computer. I’m going to see about getting us properly outfitted for this rescue mission.”

  “Aye aye.” Elena snapped off a salute.

  “Definitely no military training,” Callie said, and left the room.

  “I probably shouldn’t say anything,” Shall said, “but I’ve been monitoring your vital signs, per Stephen’s orders, and there was a definite increase in your heart rate, pupillary dilation, diaphoresis, and breathing when you were talking to Callie, indicating a state of arousal–”

  “Shut up,” Elena said. “I want to go for a walk. Do they have anything resembling street food on this station?”

  “Hmm, yes, though it’s hard for me to offer recommendations, as I don’t eat. There is a gyeran-bbang stand that Ashok raves about. The eggs aren’t real, of course, but I’m told it’s quite convincing–”

  “Really? I haven’t had that since I visited my grandma as a kid, before the avian cholera. I love the future. Apart from the murderous aliens. Take me to the egg bread, Shall. Why do they call you Shall, anyway? And why doesn’t the captain ever call you that? And why is she always pissed off at you?”

  “That is a long and in some ways sad story, Elena. Some of it I’m forbidden to tell you. For now, let’s talk about the station instead. I think you’ll be impressed…”

  * * *

  After she left Elena’s quarters, Callie put her back against the wall of the corridor, closed her eyes, and exhaled slowly. Oof. Elena was wearing a simple form-fitting coverall with the words White Raven written in script across the back, just a spare bit of crew garb they’d had on hand, but the front zipper was pulled down far enough to offer a tantalizing display of cleavage that Callie very consciously and steadfastly avoided noticing. She was in trouble here. The worst part was, she was excited about being in trouble. Elena was from five centuries in the past, but she was snappy with the banter, and hadn’t there been a couple of looks there, or was Callie just imagining?

  Obviously just imagining. Or else it was an artifact of the situation. Elena had been through a trauma, she was alone in a strange land, and Callie was the first person to show her any kindness. The first to show her respect, too, and let Elena know she still had agency and could make important choices about her own life and future. If Elena felt any fondness for Callie, it was the fondness a drifting spacewalker feels for the first passing tether they can grab onto.

  Callie shook it off and disembarked the ship. The hangar was more chaotic than normal, with far more remote worker-drones in use than usual being operated by the governing AI of Meditreme Station. Probably necessary to take up the slack left by the mysterious departure of all the Liars. Some of these ships were going to have trouble getting back into space without the alien technicians. There was nothing on Callie’s ship that she or Ashok couldn’t service themselves – except maybe the bridge generator – because she was majorly into control, but some of the ships used Liar tech that resisted human intervention. A lot of Liar technology was barely understood, and many of their devices were set to fuse their inner workings to glass if human engineers pried them open to figure out how they worked. Of course, most of the Liars claimed they didn’t have any proprietary technology: when one of their machines bricked itself, they just blamed human negligence, or rare technical faults, or gremlins, or ghosts, or simply looked at a heap of smoking carbon and said, “What do you mean? It looks fully operational to me.”

  Callie wove her way around cursing mechanics, nodded to the customs inspector – she worked with the woman fairly often, investigating and apprehending smugglers who didn’t want to pay the TNA their cut of commerce – and took a transpod over to the Spoke.

  Things got weird as she left the spinning false gravity of the outer rings and moved toward the still center, but the transition was gradual, and her inner ear was pretty accustomed to this kind of abuse. Her boots kept her mag-locked to the floor, and when the pod’s doors slid open she disengaged her soles and pulled herself along the grabrails and out into the shaft.

  The Spoke was a glittering cylindrical tower of zero-gravity that extended hundreds of meters above her and hundreds below. A central pole with an endless conveyor belt of handholds running up one side and down the other made moving up and down the shaft easy. Each level was clearly marked by large red numbers – she’d come out on level 273 – and dotted with balconies, discreet meeting rooms obscured with smoked glass, and various offices and shops.

  As a general rule, those parts of the station with more gravity were preferable (rental prices on the outer ring were murderous), and it often baffled visitors when they discovered the station’s administrative offices were here, in the weightless Spoke. For one thing, the TNA wanted to reserve the more valuable real estate for paying customers. The other reason was pure psychological dominance, though: visitors who came from places with gravity to meet with TNA officials in the Spoke were often disoriented, uncomfortable, and prone to vomiting – all of which worked against their attempts to negotiate from positions of strength. Some of the smarter diplomats and businessmen were rumored to train in zero-gravity before they came to talk to the CEO in her weightless wraparound dome at the very top of the spoke, up on level 500. (Having stars visible on all sides and above, as they were in her office, tended to disorient visitors from places where “up” and “down” were absolute rather than relative concepts, too.)

  Callie wasn’t going all the way u
p top, though. She’d seen the CEO but never spoken to her. Most of her dealings happened at a lower level in a less business-oriented branch of the organization. She pushed off toward the center pole and snagged a passing handhold, letting the molded grip carry her up into the mid-300s, then pushed the release button. The handhold pistoned out, giving her a little shove toward her destination – and out of the way of people coming up beneath her. She spun and reached out for a rail, pulling herself into a corridor toward a door marked, modestly, “Security.”

  The door (or the expert system running it) recognized her and opened without any need to buzz the intercom. Callie floated down the glossy white corridor toward the bright red door at the end. Then she turned left and went down a short hallway to the unmarked piece of wall that was actually the hidden door to the security chief’s office. There was nothing behind the red door but cameras and non-lethal automatic restraints – it was only there to provide a shiny lure to confuse invaders or terrorists.

  The hidden door didn’t open automatically, though it scanned Callie too: someone could have potentially faked her bio-signature to get through the first door, after all. “May I help you?” the security AI asked. It had the cadences and tone of a bored teenage girl, a touch Callie had always appreciated: she’d been a bored teenage girl herself, once, and knew how dangerous they could be.

  “Kalea Machedo here to see the chief.”

  The AI grunted and a moment later the door slid open. Callie had her usual moment of disorientation. The security chief, Warwick, kept her workstation on the “ceiling” – if you thought the direction of increasing numbers in the Spoke corresponded to “up,” anyway, as most people unconsciously did. The inverted workspace was probably another way to disorient visitors, though the one time Callie had expressed admiration for the tactic, Warwick had responded with a show of courteous bafflement at the suggestion.