Chi settled back into her seat and touched the inner corner of her eyebrow to project some text in front of her eyes. “Pilots. Who knows why they do anything.” Not many soldiers would get implants that near their brains. Maybe it was different for field medics, who might be able to fix something that broke inside them. Or maybe Chi was just a bit crazy.
She seemed content to leave the topic alone, but Jiménez was watching Adda with an intensity that made Iridian want to distract him before he engaged her in some creepy old-guy conversation. “Hey, Jiménez.” The man turned his eyes toward her without moving his head. “What’ll you do once we hit healthy grav? It’s a long fucking trip, and you’re not spending it staring at my wife.”
“Your . . . oh.” Jiménez focused on his boots, looking more sad than fearful. Chi snorted and scrolled text over her eyes.
Adda still wore the twisted wire ring that Iridian had made for her. Even on her left hand, that could be a mixed message. Iridian was asking around to find a well-regarded Vestan artist to replace her own ring with a subcutaneous glowing tattoo. Maybe Adda’d go for that too, although she hadn’t take Iridian up on any of her tattoo ideas so far. There were other ways of broadcasting one’s relationship status than wearing jewelry, anyway. Some people had HUDs for that.
Iridian inhaled to hammer her point through Jiménez’s deranged skull, but Adda subvocalized, Could you please leave him alone? You’re distracting me.
“What are you working on?” she asked Adda instead.
“Following up on something I read.”
Iridian took her own turn staring at Adda, whose lips had turned down into a cute pout of concentration. Usually she had a lot more to say about her projects. Chi was grinning at something only she could see, and Jiménez hadn’t moved. You’re not worried about what they think of whatever you’re studying, are you? Chi won’t care, and Jiménez’s opinion is worthless.
“ ‘Blaer’ is probably derived from ‘Blær,’ with the ligature between the A and the E, one of the first Icelandic genderless names. If Dr. Björn grew up in the Earth version of that culture, that’d make vis reactions easier to predict in some ways.”
What a thing to worry about discussing in front of a medic and a monster. Adda could be painfully self-conscious. “Maybe so, maybe not,” Iridian said. “Names are catching out here. You get one pop love story about someone named Asia, suddenly two hundred thousand babies are named Asia and half of them won’t see the place on a map outside of history class.”
“I saw a vid about that,” Chi said. “Got two neighbor kids in my mod named Asia.”
“Hmm,” said Adda. It wasn’t her “here’s why I thought that” noise, or “here’s where you’re wrong” or “I thought of five potential solutions while you were finishing that sentence.” Perhaps her search for AegiSKADA was going poorly, or perhaps she was anxious about something else.
She was running her first op on her own, Tritheist notwithstanding, while a persistent killer tugboat followed them around. That was enough to worry anyone.
CHAPTER 11
Direct system processes relay established between the NEU Free and Clear and rescue tug WS Charon’s Coin
“Adda, get Chi,” Iridian yelled from the Mayhem’s bathroom. She sounded like she did when she was hurt, but not too badly. What she could’ve done to herself in the bathroom took Adda longer to list than it took her to find the medic in the main cabin.
Chi grabbed a small backpack from her bunk in the residential cabin and followed Iridian’s voice to the ship’s only bathroom. She stopped in the doorway, looking at the floor. “Ah, shit. Help me roll him onto his side. What’s his blood type?”
“No,” Jiménez murmured. “Don’t.”
“Great, you’re breathing. Now shut up.” Chi crouched in the doorway and applied thin, disposable gloves, giving Adda a clear glimpse over her and Iridian to where Jiménez lay against the shower wall in a puddle of vomit and blood.
“Tried again?” Tritheist peered over Adda’s shoulder and into the bathroom. “Damn. Captain Sloane said we had a week or two before this started, and he only made it two days. I didn’t really want to win this bet.”
“He did that to himself?” Adda asked. Chi affixed a device over Jiménez’s mouth while Iridian held him still.
Tritheist walked a couple meters into the main cabin and Adda followed. The medical device probably did something gross and messy anyway. “Yeah, he always finds a way. Sloane won’t even let him work a job unless he brings a gun that’ll lock up when he points it at himself, and then somebody has to watch him all the time.”
“That’s horrible,” said Adda.
Tritheist grinned unpleasantly and tapped something into his comp. “The universe would be better off without him. But Sloane paid him, Sloane wants him here, and Sloane wants him to keep breathing, so we’re going to make that happen.” A new message alert buzzed against Adda’s hand. “That doesn’t mean I’m going to feel sorry for the bastard.” Jiménez retched, and Tritheist turned back toward the bathroom. “Aku-Chavez, is he going to make it three more days till we can hit a station clinic?”
“I think so, sir,” Chi called back. “We should get him to the clinic first thing, though.”
Adda’s comp buzzed against her skin a second time, notifying her of a message from Tritheist. It opened a time-lapsed vid with the time and date ticking away in white text in the corner. Restrained at a table, the naked person whom Jiménez was talking to looked like a teenager, even from the back and above due to the cam’s position. Jiménez talked and paced for a while and then walked out under the cam, touching something on the wall on the way out that raised the light level and made the kid at the table flinch.
He came back at different times of day and night, paced around and talked for maybe fifteen minutes, then left. Sometimes he brought food. Twice he walked in and beat the kid with a baton of some kind, with alarming vigor, for minutes on end. After four days of that, the kid said something that made Jiménez smile, an exceptionally fleeting experience on the time-lapsed vid. He left, and other people came to free and clean up the victim. When the vid ended, Adda breathed a relieved sigh.
In the bathroom behind her, Jiménez groaned and coughed.
Perhaps he’d become trapped in a situation in which he was good at what he did, in a universe that manipulated him into doing it again and again. It happened to experts all the time. But he could have refused as soon as he saw the kid at the table, or earlier, when his employers told him what they wanted done. Even if he’d been forced into it himself, he should have said no. There were worse things to die for.
But maybe that’s what he’d just been trying to do. He was mentally unstable, and he’d have to be, to do what he did. Perhaps this was the only refusal he thought would work. Adda couldn’t entirely despise him for that. But she was more committed than ever to making sure that he was never alone with Dr. Björn.
* * *
Adda spent the rest of the trip the way she’d spent the first two days: in her portable workspace generator, tracking the Barbary intelligences. She was following four of them now. Despite what she’d implied to Iridian during hushed conversations in their cabin in the Mayhem, she had yet to shut AegiSKADA down.
It’d contacted her a few days before they left Rheasilvia Station, with a source address of a pseudo-organic tank inside Captain Sloane’s headquarters. It’d also offered her a way to bloodlessly prove to Dr. Björn that vis future lay with Oxia, not with the University of Mars. Using AegiSKADA’s connections to various records and justice databases allowed her to create believable false accusations of the kind that’d make Dr. Björn’s continued on-campus presence intolerable, for the professor and vis departmental leadership.
Adda had done most of the preparatory work, and the technical aspects were finished in hours with AegiSKADA’s assistance. Using her digital intermediary, she ordered the intelligence to run all of its decisions and processes past her. Only limited an
d well-camouflaged messages from it would exit Sloane’s headquarters building.
Most important, AegiSKADA had passed every test she’d ever heard of for confirming that it was still in its zombie state. An awakened intelligence could learn to pass them, but she’d found no evidence of AegiSKADA breaking the boundaries she’d set for it. And she had essentially infinite applications for a zombie intelligence that had already adapted to work with her.
She hadn’t told Iridian yet. The massive fight that would cause would make for a deeply unpleasant trip in close quarters with coworkers for most of a week. So AegiSKADA, Casey, and the Apparition were still on Vesta, AegiSKADA in a partitioned-off section of Sloane’s crew servers, the other two in their ships, and Iridian only knew about the two awakened ones. The Coin sent no response to her questions about why it had followed the Mayhem to Mars.
In the window projected over the closed door to the bridge, Mars appeared as an orange dot. It swelled to an almost alarming size in comparison with Vesta, as the Mayhem approached and angled toward the orbiting docks. Mangala Station looked like a metal pinecone hovering upside down above the dry expanse of orange sand and rock on the planet below, with ships adhered to almost every part of the station’s surface. Blue and green lights glinted all around the station, marking guidance buoys that helped ships dock. Even though Adda was physically closer to Earth than she’d been in over a year, the view made her birthplace feel farther away than ever.
When the Mayhem docked at Mars’s orbiting station, the Coin did too. It stayed there while the humans rode a shuttle from Mangala Station to Deimos. Adda sent her intermediary to it with the message to “Stay away from the Mayhem’s intelligence.” The digital intermediary had been in use more often than not, lately, because with all of these intelligences in and out of her systems, influence was a real threat.
The Coin sent no reply.
* * *
“Holy hell, were the freshmen always this young?” Iridian held Adda’s hand and looked at University of Mars students in colorful, dust-resistant clothes and goggles like the ones she, Adda, and Tritheist wore. Dust billowed up with each step on the Deimos campus’s magnetized path across a gently sloping commons area between buildings. Most students ignored the metal and glided across the open ground in long, slow leaps ending in small dust fountains when they landed.
It hadn’t been that long since she and Iridian had been on a college campus together, but a lot had happened to them since then. Between the goggles and the anti-dust jackets, it was hard for Adda to tell students’ ages.
“Let’s find your guy and get out of here,” Tritheist said. “We’re on a lot of cams and mics right now.” Only the three of them would be, since Chi was on the Mayhem to stop Jiménez from another attempt on his own life. He was feeling well enough to refuse a hospital visit, or at least he was an hour ago when Adda had left the ship.
The Deimos astronomy and astrophysics campus of the University of Mars was under a large, but not enormous, atmosphere containment bubble. The transparent dome had a comprehensive system for clearing dust off its surface, but it was worth the expense to contain pressure and shield occupants from radiation, space debris, and EMP damage from malfunctioning ships approaching Mars’s orbital station for repair.
Only a few lab buildings and the observatory, Adda’s current destination, were maintained in atmosphere. The university didn’t generate Earthlike gravity on Deimos, so nobody stayed there long. Low gravity increased the novelty value for students. Adda was enjoying the dim natural light, after months spent far from the sun.
“Dr. Wakefield is supposed to meet us in his office,” she said. “I’m not sure where that is from here.”
The meeting was at his request, because he had that kind of leverage in their arrangement. Nobody else was positioned and motivated to deliver the evidence against Dr. Björn the way he was, and he knew it. She didn’t doubt his willingness to help make Dr. Björn’s professional life miserable, although she had concerns about his abilities. It was still less damaging than Jiménez’s method.
She’d downloaded a map of the campus before they left Vesta, but the departmental labels on it didn’t match the ones discussed in more recent documents about the place, which meant it was out of date. Finding Dr. Wakefield’s office would be particularly difficult if moving around continued to be such a struggle. When she jumped she came down eventually, but in the meantime she got in the way of people walking the metal paths in magnetized boots and people who knew how to get around in barely there gravity.
Iridian was among the latter. She somehow managed to stay near the ground most of the time without turning her boots’ magnets on. “What’s Wakefield a doctor of?” she asked.
“Astronomy, same as Dr. Björn.” Adda carefully rotated on her toes to look around. The four buildings had no signs.
Iridian followed her gaze and laughed. “Oh wow, Pel would kick all our asses here once his new eyes are calibrated. I think all the signage is digital. We’re supposed to connect our goggles to the local network.”
I expected them to connect automatically. Adda flagged down four haggard-looking older students bounding over the moon’s gray-brown surface, got instructions for signing into the network as a guest so she didn’t have to waste time breaking in, and set off again. Gods, I hope that’s the only mistake I made.
You fixed it in two minutes like you always do, Iridian said over their connection. We always figure it out.
The building they needed wasn’t the observatory itself, but the one next to it. “He’s not even important enough to get an office in his own department’s building?” Iridian asked as they entered the building’s airlock. A sign projected onto the airlock’s interior wall had a picture of university-branded goggles and said, KEEP GOGGLES ON UNTIL AIRLOCK CYCLE IS COMPLETE in English, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and Hindi.
“Ooh, dust vac!” Iridian said. “I love these.”
After the outer doors closed, large vacuums roared to life. Adda jumped, both at the noise and at the sense of being at the center of a small tornado. Even the grated airlock floor pulled air from beneath her, which helped Adda stay upright in the low gravity. Iridian shouted over the vacuums, “These suck particulates out of the atmo before the hab filters have to deal with them. Great design.” The dust explained why enough people wore goggles that a goggles-only signage system made sense.
Adda clicked her magnetized boots to a higher strength. They really were mostly free of Deimos’s brownish-gray dust. Iridian adjusted her own generally downward drift by pushing off the low ceiling with her fingertips.
The vacuums turned off and the inner door opened on a maze of twisty beige passages, all alike. Door numbers were printed into the doors themselves, each one sticking out a few centimeters on small pegs and backlit with LEDs. The doors nearest the airlock were 101 and 102, but down the hall and around a corner beyond them lay 401 and 403, with no sign of 402. A hallway branched off in another direction with numbers in the six hundreds. Dr. Wakefield’s office was 305. “Oh, honestly.” Adda sighed.
While Iridian and Tritheist tried to watch all of the hallways simultaneously, Adda found, bought, downloaded, and cleaned grayware off a program to connect her comp’s cam to the college’s network. When she entered the building and room numbers and pointed the cam in front of her, a bright blue line appeared in the goggles’ display. The line followed the hallway and turned at one of the intersections.
“I wonder,” Adda said as they walked along the blue line in her goggles, “if the intelligences are personally interested in one of us?”
“Or they know us well enough to manipulate us better than they can manipulate the rest of humanity,” Iridian said.
“Still on mics,” Tritheist grumbled. He pointed at one of the small black-cased cam nodes near the ceiling, which definitely had room for a mic or two.
“Yep, those AIs you’re developing sure are interesting.” Iridian’s louder-than-normal voic
e bounced around the hallway full of closed doors. The nearest was numbered in the 300s.
A door down the hallway opened to reveal a man around Adda’s age and Iridian’s stature. He wore a shirt with SPACE POTATO in simplified Chinese beneath a picture of Mars’s other moon, Phobos. The moon on the shirt rotated, pausing in positions in which it most resembled a root vegetable. “Hey, could you keep it down? The AI lab isn’t even at this campus, so if you’re looking for that, you’re way off.”
The open door behind him was numbered 305. “Dr. Wakefield?” Adda accidentally communicated her incredulity with the question. Iridian huffed a quiet laugh.
“Naw.” The student dragged his olive-toned hand through one of the three sections that his black hair was separated into. The swath of it he’d just combed with his fingers stood straight out from his head. “He’s here, though. Hang on.” The student disappeared into the room. Tritheist pushed past Iridian and Adda to go after him.
Rude. Adda took off her goggles and put them in a jacket pocket. Iridian just shrugged and followed the men, so Adda went in as well.
A high desk and one of the older ergonomic stool/chairs that propped one up while standing were the center of a freeze-frame explosion of charts and colorized images of astronomical phenomena projected onto or above every flat surface. The lights above the doorway were on, but the rest of the room’s lights were off, making the projected images more vivid.
A houseplant in a pot bolted to the wall dangled limp vines over the edge of a pseudo-organic tank bigger than the Casey’s, lit from its interior in a red and blue-green spiral. The comp that thing was attached to probably did excellent analysis work. The stale coffee stench permeating the room was so strong Adda was surprised she hadn’t smelled it in the hall.
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