Mutiny at Vesta

by R. E. Stearns

  “Yeah.” With an effort, Iridian kept the sarcasm out of her voice. Most people worked in healthy enviro that somebody had invited them to be in. “That’s exactly when we’d fucking need it. And the batteries, ammo, and patch kits . . . Best to have all that if we need it, too.”

  “Acknowledged, routing,” said something on the command channel. The space between its words sounded wrong. A human would’ve put those concepts together as one idea, but each word was isolated in this entity’s “mind.” Yet another AI.

  It took Iridian a few seconds to remember what it was responding to. Captain Sloane had requested more ships. Either the AI had had to wait for permission, or it was communicating over a hell of a long distance. And Oxia was sending them three more ships, routed from Ceres if they would arrive in time to help.

  The civvy still stood in the crew quarters’ doorway, fiddling with backpack straps, so Iridian caught his elbow and dragged him down the corridor in long bounds. Once he shook himself free and looked oriented to the current grav, she slapped both of their helmet visors shut.

  They were in front of the passthrough’s inner door when an unholy bang stopped them all midstep. Iridian choked down a reflexive shout for help. It was just the emergency airlock extension deploying to seal the exterior door around the hole the missile had made on its way to a nonexistent target far beyond the Sabina. She didn’t care how many hulls the Sabina had, as long as the Apparition had punched through all of them, and they didn’t have to take the time getting past a longhauler’s passthrough security. The Sabina’s crew might’ve already lit an emergency beacon calling the ITA for help.

  The Apparition’s inner airlock door opened. Tritheist took up his rear-guard position. “Nice, the missile did its job,” Iridian said to Danail, who was gaping at the passthrough like he couldn’t tell. She shook her shield open. The thump through her forearm of semitransparent mech-ex graphene deploying in front of her vital organs reassured her that all was right with the universe. “Stay out of the way until we find the printer,” she added to Danail. “Then we’ll stay out of yours.” Once they’d cleared a path and Danail got the printer ready to move, the loading team in the Oxia cargo hauler could board and move the thing.

  “Go,” Tritheist bellowed behind her in the nearest thing to a real command voice she’d ever heard out of him. She ran through the Apparition’s passthrough, over the inflated extension, through the clean sheer of a close range missile impact, and onto the Sabina. It felt good to be in a ship with a human pilot. Adda’s estimated ten minutes for the assessment and clearing stage of the op appeared as a green countdown on the side of Iridian’s helmet faceplate.

  The Apparition hadn’t precisely matched the Sabina’s orientation, so when Iridian first stepped onboard, the right end of the corridor felt higher than the left until she got her bearings. Where the Apparition’s interior was dark, industrial, and built to minimize missile launch backdraft on its crew, the Sabina’s bright orange and white sterility implied aggressively productive scientific inquiry.

  Marigold, whispered Adda through Iridian’s ear implant. That’s the orange you’re looking at.

  Great.

  The highlighted handholds on the stretch of hall they emerged in reminded Iridian of a cheap amber lager, but Adda, Earther that she was, would think of flowers. Also, that meant she’d gotten into the Sabina’s cams and she could see Iridian’s location, which could be useful.

  Loading the copy/wipe protocol, Adda subvocalized to Iridian, as soon as I get the Ann Sabina intelligence’s attention. I’m jamming its crew comm channel, so that should do it.

  Adda’s protocol would use encrypted location beacons in Sloane’s crew’s suits to track cam and audio recordings to their source, copy anything in there onto the Casey’s pseudo-organics, and then delete the Sabina’s data. The Sabina’s and escort ships’ crew would describe them in detail, though, and assure that Sloane’s crew got credit for the op without implicating Oxia.

  The lack of hard digital evidence would weaken the ITA’s and NEU’s inevitable extradition attempts, as would whatever deal Oxia had struck with Vesta’s contingent of the ITA. For the trick to work, the crew would have to be gone before the ITA arrived on the scene. In-person ITA agent observation trumped all other evidence.

  The Sabina’s rapid pressure-loss klaxon rattled Iridian’s teeth until she clenched them so tightly her jaw ached. Even in an armored suit, it was hard as hell to walk toward the klaxon instead of away from it. The atmo lost before the Apparition’s passthrough sealed over the missile hole dulled the noise, but she couldn’t ignore it. The klaxon would’ve made her stomach sink into her feet if it’d gone off in her own hab. But her armor would protect her. Light at the ceiling and floor joints flashed in alternating yellow-white and red as she, Tritheist, Danail, and Chi stepped from the hallway into the wreckage of a minerology lab.

  Across the room, a door was shut against the recent vacuum. Any atmo the door kept in was sucked out through the two-meter hole in the wall beside it, opposite the hull breach they’d entered through. Brown and gray smears of recently dehydrated gunk streaked the white walls. Broken equipment crunched underfoot as Iridian led the way through the hole in the interior wall and out into another hallway. For the Sabina crew’s sake, the ship was maintaining a healthy speed.

  “The Apparition is EMP-shielded, isn’t it?” Danail asked nervously.

  All of the Barbary intelligences are, Adda whispered in Iridian’s ear. Iridian conveyed the message to Danail, but she was too busy watching for members of the Sabina’s crew to listen to his response.

  Now that Sloane’s crew was armed with high-end less-lethals, Iridian had no misgivings about shooting first. She dropped a Sabina crewmember peering through a doorway between two modules with a numbing agent pac shot at his legs. One knee collapsed under him, but he kept flailing his arms around.

  Before she could shoot again, a door between modules slammed down with force her boots communicated to her through tactile feedback. A small green lock icon glowed in the door’s center. She walked up to it, shield and weapon raised. It might as well have been welded shut. She glanced down at the pac launcher in disgust. The numbing agent caused less damage than a knife would’ve, but it hadn’t immobilized the target. If he were bleeding all over himself, he might’ve been scared enough to stay still.

  Adda could’ve opened the door if it were just shut against vacuum, but the fallen Sabina crewmember on the other side had manually engaged a lock. Iridian sighed and half turned from the door to ask Tritheist, Chi, and Danail, “That was the way we were supposed to go, yeah?”

  Tritheist swore. “The lab with the printer is twenty meters that way.”

  Iridian banged on the door a few times, then headed the other direction down the hallway. Can you open that? she thought/asked Adda.

  We’re keeping the ship on course, Adda whispered, with no explanation of who the hell “we” might mean besides herself, or how she was doing that to which ship. An AI was helping her, but Iridian couldn’t tell which fucking one. The Ann Sabina’s intelligence wants to retreat and I can’t tell where it’d go, Adda continued. ITA inbound, five hours. Which would’ve been plenty of time, if all they had to do was clear a hallway, pick up a very large printer, and haul it to the Apparition. Plan A was done in by a damned locked door.

  A lower-pitched alarm less urgent than the pressure-loss klaxon whooped once, almost overhead. Someone—Adda, probably—silenced it before it repeated itself. If the escort ships got between Sloane’s fleet and the Apparition, or launched a homing weapon they couldn’t jam, then they’d miss their first chance at handing the printer off to the Oxia rep receiving it outside stationspace. And that’d be the least of their problems.

  Their armor was designed for the vac, but they had limited O2. Once it ran out, they’d have to rely on whatever they found on the Sabina. Iridian walked faster, toward where the missile had punched through the wall.

  “We could
use another ship to divert ITA, you know,” Captain Sloane said conversationally on the widest available channel.

  Somebody on an Oxia fighter muttered “Seriously?” and followed the word with a sharp intake of breath, like they hadn’t meant to say that on the op channel.

  Iridian plowed on along the missile’s trail of destruction, clambering through perforated walls and gritting her teeth against the depressurization klaxon that her brain refused to ignore even though she was safe in her suit. It was getting louder, so the Sabina was creating or redistributing atmo to replace what was lost during the Apparition’s attack. She startled when a repair drone, a small mobile mass of tanks, canisters, compartments, and expandable tools, buzzed past centimeters from her faceplate on its way to fix the hole where the missile exited out the other side of the ship.

  Adda whispered Left in Iridian’s implant.

  As Iridian took the left at a T-intersection, an emergency bulkhead opened and atmo sent scraps of lightweight debris tumbling past her. She checked corners for lurking enemies and proceeded cautiously through. The nonhuman voice repeating its initial statement identically, “Acknowledged, routing,” in response to Captain Sloane’s request for an ITA diversion made her jump.

  Behind her Tritheist swore and fired down the hallway in the opposite direction, so she pulled the printer tech past her and through the door to put her shield between him and whatever drew Tritheist’s fire. Chi had her weapon raised in a two-handed shooting stance. She, Iridian, and Tritheist knocked four more Sabina crewmembers on their asses.

  “Designated Scimitar, en route to target,” the new ship’s comm operator announced in some variant of an Earther drawl. The new ship must’ve been a long way away for Oxia’s launch order to take minutes reaching it and the ship’s reply to take minutes coming back.

  “What are we up to now, eight?” asked Chi, the medic. Iridian shrugged. Sloane and Adda were monitoring the Oxia fighters’ attempts to incapacitate the escort ships, and they’d know how many of the nearby ships were Sloane’s. Iridian’s job was on the Sabina. If drones were operating inside it, then the four of them might be on cams and mics that were still out of Adda’s control. Announcing their fleet strength would be an unnecessary risk, even on an encrypted channel.

  “Ah . . . Iridian?” said Danail.

  “Yeah, we’re good over here. What is it?”

  “Come see this.”

  Tritheist had almost backed up to the doorway, so Iridian joined the tech and the medic in a room with bleak white lights and bare metal surfaces near the doorway Adda identified. The ceiling sloped up on her right and down on her left, and following the higher end of it she sized up a printer as tall as her old ISV and almost twice as wide. It was two stories tall at minimum.

  She’d seen the projected rendering Adda found, or created, of the printer. This was why they’d gone to all the trouble to make a path for the people who would disassemble and move it under Danail’s instructions. It was big. It was supposed to be big.

  It was not supposed to be midway through a massive job, with glowing hot metal oozing from an extruder nozzle at the top to be pressed at mind-bendingly fast intervals into a strange shape rising off its base.

  “That,” said Danail, “is going to take a while to clear.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Time in direct contact via workspace: 1 hour 14 minutes

  “How long?” was Adda’s principal question, with ITA on its way and ship crews fighting for their lives in the space around the Ann Sabina. With a disappointed frown, she stopped the infiltration phase countdown she’d had running.

  In her drug-stabilized hallucinographic workspace, her delay time lines drifted in a yellow haze around her as impossibly large castle spires curled upward on all sides, sprouting bridges between them and physical, crystalline windows. She’d seen the castle in a story or an art gallery somewhere. She was part of the marble that built them, and the bridges would lead the insertion team to the printer and away on a new schedule, once she and her software settled on the most efficient course.

  “Well, the cooling system’s good,” said a voice she identified, after long seconds, as the printer tech’s. “But assuming it cancels the job neatly, I’d expect . . .”

  When people trailed off like that, Adda counted out eight seconds in her head before asking for more information. Iridian found an appropriate interval around three. “Expect what?” Iridian’s worried speculation continued in Adda’s ear through the first words of his reply: An explosion? Molten metal burning through the deck? What?

  “To have to haul the partial off the platform, but . . . What’s it making?”

  Adda had originally planned for Danail’s work crew to disassemble the printer and move it into the Oxia ship through passthroughs. The Ann Sabina’s escort ships were too aggressive to bring the cargo ship any closer, though, and even if she could get it close to the target ship she was no longer sure she could open a passthrough. Now they couldn’t disassemble it without exposing the infiltration team to toxic superheated printing material.

  She reached out and sank her hand into the oil-smooth swath of swirling vid feeds from cams throughout Sloane’s growing fleet. She’d been shocked that Sloane had waited to request extra ships until they’d already engaged the Sabina, but now she suspected that the captain was testing the limits of Oxia’s asset mobility. Judging by the automated responses, the captain’s requests thus far hadn’t even approached that limit.

  A curved surface rose through the vid feeds and pressed against her palm. When she raised her hand, that feed came with it as a dark green orb, affixed to her palm and trailing tiny links to related articles represented as droplets of mercury. She flicked her wrist to free and expand the metallic orb into . . . something. She’d have to wait until it was finished expanding to identify the scene.

  “Thanks,” she said, or thought she said, to the Casey’s intelligence. The jet-black human figure that haunted shadowy corners might’ve been the Casey inserting itself into the virtual space, or a repeated manifestation from her own brain that merely represented the Casey. Her brain would assign a consistent image to the intelligence, and it rarely repeated task facilitation imagery by accident. Also, she could usually change how her mind represented concepts, but nothing she did affected this figure.

  The Casey had never tried to harm her, which was more than she could say of the last intelligence she’d invited to her workspace. She decided to politely appreciate the fact that an entity that could do just about anything else with its time was watching Adda work. There would be plenty of opportunities to experiment with defensive measures once Iridian was back on the Apparition and the PR800i printer was in an Oxia cargo hold.

  Three cams in the printer room formed a warped projection of Iridian, the medic, and the printer tech staring at the printer on the Ann Sabina. Tritheist stood in the lab’s doorway, weapon half raised. They staggered a step as the missile the Apparition had fired through the Sabina to create their ingress point reached its fictitious target and detonated, its shockwave expanding for kilometers around it in all directions. It served as a show of force for the escort ships’ benefit, as well as a safe way to dispose of a missile near a reliable route.

  Her calculations indicated that the resulting radiation-contaminated debris wouldn’t affect the crew on the Ann Sabina, or whatever the printer was producing. The printer’s finished project would be large and primarily metallic, judging by the wide, ovoid shape rising half a meter from the platform.

  One of the things she liked most about the implanted comm system was that she was no longer obligated to use the crew’s radio channels to talk to Iridian while they were apart. Console, she subvocalized. Can you?

  “Can I . . . Oh,” Iridian said aloud. She walked to the console and prodded at its flat surface with two fingers. A large lock icon lit beneath them. “Nope.”

  “Who is she talking to?” the printer tech asked the medic, without looking away from Iridi
an. The medic shrugged.

  Iridian tapped her helmet and grinned. “Private channel to the woman who’s getting us and that printer out of this mess.” Adda and Iridian had agreed on the helmet-based private channel conceit to conceal the location and extent of their modifications. Who wouldn’t want a secret encrypted language?

  Remotely breaking into a strange ship’s console when Adda had only days to learn its custom operating system and its AI’s priorities had been daunting, but she’d learned enough to get to this point. It’d been a rushed, barely functional job, made more stressful by knowing that if she were willing to risk it, she could access the potentially networked processing might of three awakened artificial intelligences. She hadn’t psyched herself up to try that, but it would probably work. If she could trust even one to help her, without trying to influence her while it did so . . .

  Babe, please don’t. The muted whisper of Iridian’s voice indicated that she was actually subvocalizing this time. And so was Adda, apparently. She really did set the implants’ transmission threshold too low, and she’d need an implant-specific workspace to fix it. Awakened AIs are probably better at influencing people than regular ones, Iridian subvocalized.

  We’ll discuss options after the printer’s ours, Adda told her. I’m closing our connection now.

  In reality, on her back inside the workspace generator tent, her stiff fingers felt heavy as she curled them to stop the transmission. An ITA cruiser was coming, the Oxia ships were taking damage from the Ann Sabina’s escort ships, and what Oxia would do to Sloane’s crew if they left without the printer didn’t bear thinking about. She and Iridian had no time to debate whether to utilize the incredibly powerful resource that was literally all around Adda.

  Adda sent an invitation along the lines connecting her mind, through several layers of machines and software, to the Casey’s intelligence. She summarized the situation in a combination of vid clips and her nonverbal expectations of the problems they represented. These manifested as large, dark purple bats flapping across the workspace and around the vid clips. The workspace would translate the bats into something that made sense to the Casey, so the intelligence could help her get the printer off the Ann Sabina as quickly and safely as possible.