Iridian panted with the effort of pressing words through her compressed chest, because gravity was still crushing them into the passenger couches. Dr. Björn had craned vis neck to watch Iridian talk, and Adda caught herself smiling at her, just a little. Righteous fury looked damnably good on Iridian. It was worth her rant’s oversimplifications of NEU political strategy. Chi just shook her head in her couch while facing the ceiling.
“I didn’t mean to give a fucking speech,” Iridian grumbled. “That’s just the way it is out here.”
Out there. Outside the mesh of lies and legality Oxia had created, they still had one more bargaining chip that Dr. Björn may be interested in. “What if we helped you tell your side of this, after you signed?” Adda asked.
“What do you mean?” Dr. Björn sounded suitably suspicious, for anybody as intelligent as ver in this position.
“The contract probably includes terms to stop you from publicizing the circumstances surrounding your hiring, correct?” Adda asked. Iridian was giving her an extremely incredulous look, so she added, You’ll see over their personal comms. Iridian nodded.
“Of course,” Dr. Björn said bitterly.
“And we can’t say anything about it either, for similar reasons.” Mostly because it would make Sloane look like a typical megacorporate thug and reduce the captain’s chances of escaping Oxia’s contract alive. “But rumors leak. We’ll create something to publish anonymously, from a perspective that could be a third-party watchdog or a disgruntled Oxia employee.”
“Like us,” Iridian muttered, although that was clearly not an option, as Adda had just stated.
“Shortly before or after the announcement that you’ve accepted the Oxia position,” Adda continued, “we release that report in one of the megacorporate watchdog channels that viewer overlap with the University of Mars. Perhaps we can also use some dummy accounts to bring it to the attention of your more talkative students or coworkers?”
“I have plenty of those.” Dr. Björn sounded more positive now. “You can really do that? Get the truth out to everyone without implicating me?”
“If anybody can do it, Adda can,” Iridian said proudly. You fucking genius, she whispered through the earpiece.
No congratulations yet, Adda subvocalized. Ve hasn’t signed.
“And you think it’d make a difference? In Oxia’s business practices, I mean,” Dr. Björn said.
“Everybody secure?” the pilot asked over the intercom. “Reply if secured.”
Chi examined Dr. Björn’s position and glanced over Iridian’s and Adda’s before shouting, “We’re good.” Adda envied her ability to assert her expertise, even in stressful scenarios like this one.
The ship tilted sideways, rotating the passenger couches to put the passthrough door directly above their heads. It kept that orientation for a couple seconds, then flipped all the way over at gut-churning speed. It felt like a whole new engine lit somewhere below the passenger couches. Chi whooped like she was on an amusement park ride. Iridian was slipping into combat mode, intensity hardening her dark eyes and muscles coiled for sudden movement.
“Telling people the truth about how Oxia does things is probably the only way to make a difference,” Adda said in answer to Dr. Björn’s previous question. “Reputation seems important out here. But, um . . . Decide soon.” Adda’s mind was racing through too many possibilities to keep track of them all, and this was no time to make a mistake. She could narrow down her choices after Dr. Björn signed.
Dr. Björn sighed heavily, then maneuvered vis thumb over vis comp’s scanner. The scanner flashed beneath vis thumb, lighting the digit deep pink for a moment as its cam captured vis capillary configuration as well as vis thumbprint. “It’s done.” The contract transmitted itself to Adda’s comp. Copies would also go to Dr. Björn’s account and Oxia’s human resources department. They’d have the hiring process underway by the time the Mayhem reached the station.
Adda opened the operation channel. “Ve signed, so we can let ver off here.” The orders from Oxia made Sloane responsible for getting Dr. Björn to sign the contract, and that was all. Ve would have affairs to set in order on Mars, and three or more rats to pack into whatever one moved rats in. There was no reason to rush ver. If Oxia wanted ver on Vesta so badly, then they could arrange transportation.
And if Dr. Björn wanted to take this opportunity to flee to the Kuiper Belt or some other place too remote to enforce an NEU megacorporate contract, Adda was glad to give ver the chance, now that ve’d signed. “Lieutenant, are you ready to leave?” she asked on the operation channel.
“Ah, fucking timing . . .” The operations channel transmitted scuffling sounds and a yelp from someone who might’ve been male. “Yeah, sure,” Tritheist said. “You at the dock now?”
“Gavran, how long?” Adda asked.
“Thirteen minutes, repeat, thirteen minutes to dock.”
Adda frowned. His voice sounded higher pitched and reedier than it had during previous conversations, and his words rolled together so thoroughly that the repetition became a necessity. “It takes at least fifteen minutes to go through arrival procedures.”
“Not the way I’m doing it! I’m taking the fast way in,” Gavran said.
“Just tell us if we’re jumping out an airlock or meeting you at a passthrough,” said Tritheist. Another pause and more scuffling followed. His voice sounded strained. “We’ll be ready.”
Adda closed the operational channel. “It doesn’t sound like things with Jiménez are going well.”
“He’s a mess,” Chi agreed. “Was before Tritheist took him on that—” she glanced over at Dr. Björn “—field trip.”
Dr. Björn swallowed audibly. “Will you let me go once we reach the station? My arm is starting to hurt again.”
“Maybe,” Iridian said before Adda could respond. Adda would have said yes, since that’s what she planned to do. Iridian caught Adda’s eyes and said, “If we can. I’m not sure what’s going on out there.”
“Evading EMP gennies!” The pilot laughed as he delivered this information in a shout through the partially open bridge door. “Launched EMP generators incoming, but I’m evading them.”
“Thanks for the warning,” Iridian muttered. Everyone reached for their comps to tap backup functions, except for Adda, who subvocalized the instruction to hers.
“What about my ship?” Dr. Björn asked. “I really like that little rig.”
Adda grimaced. “I forgot about the Coin.” Iridian looked as alarmed as Adda felt. With an effort, she reached for her safety harness.
“Whoa, bad idea!” Iridian said. “We’re moving too fast to go for a walk.”
But I don’t know what it’s doing, and it doesn’t know what we’re doing. Adda subvocalized the message to avoid ascribing more agency than Dr. Björn would’ve expected a ship to have.
Just send it some text, then! Iridian’s expression turned the subvocalized proposal from a statement to an exclamation, which was kind of interesting from a linguistics perspective.
Adda kept working on her harness. This is too complex for text, and too important for misunderstandings.
If Martian law enforcement disabled the Coin, the ship would probably find a way to look like a common tugboat with faulty software, but Adda would rather not let it find itself in that position. And although Casey monitored every action Adda took with her comp, it might not relay messages to the Coin or the Apparition. She had no way to tell whether those ships’ awakened autopilots were listening in on her comp as well.
Perhaps later she should create an open intermediary connection with all the intelligences, to avoid this particular inconvenience in the future. The intermediary wasn’t designed for multiple connections, but it wasn’t designed to work with awakened intelligence, either. Nothing was.
Her couch swung on its axle until the surface that had formerly served as the floor was about ten centimeters above the end of her nose. This ship’s pseudo-organic tank rotat
ed the same way the passenger couches did, which explained the tank’s oval design. Even as she watched, though, the ship rotated around her. She shut her eyes against the resulting motion sickness.
Dr. Björn had broken vis arm when the Coin slowed the ship from a smaller difference in speed and direction than Adda would experience crossing the Mayhem’s cabin. Assuming she could even climb out of her passenger couch, Adda would be thrown around the cabin if Gavran did anything fancy while docking. The Coin only had to be on its own for fifteen minutes. It might already be listening in on their communications and watching the Mayhem’s progress. Adda returned her arm to the passenger couch’s insistent grip.
She wasn’t watching a countdown on her comp, since it was too hard to get to get her comp in front of her face at their current gravity level. Eventually Gavran shouted, “We’ll be at ES dock three in five, repeating, ES dock three in five!” through the bridge door. Gavran had turned off the main cabin windows, which was fine with Adda. She didn’t want to see Mangala Station approaching as fast as it felt like it was.
“Minutes?” Adda shouted over the engine noise.
“Yeah, minutes, minutes, what else?”
The ship did something unsettlingly like falling bridge-first for several long seconds and then jounced upward and thumped Adda’s tailbone and heels into the firm back of the passenger couch beneath the foam padding. The engine rumble shook the whole cabin and made a low roaring noise over which it was hard to hear. Iridian shouted the dock information and arrival time to Tritheist on the operation channel. Dr. Björn prayed under vis breath.
“ES dock?” Adda asked.
Chi laughed and shouted, “Emergency services! Ambulances and firefighters and tugs come and go through those. They have their own arrival and departure routes. As long as Gavran picked one that’s not occupied or about to be, that’s the fast way in, all right!”
Colliding with an ambulance was not on Adda’s list of contingency plans. To stop herself from worrying about the Coin, or any of the other things slightly off about their current escape plan, she thought through several ways to work around vehicular accidents. There wasn’t much she could do to affect the impact, but she could plan ahead to deal with the people involved so that none of Sloane’s crew got arrested as a result. If Sloane considered this pilot a member of the crew, she’d have to trust that the captain chose someone skilled enough to succeed in an approach like this one.
Gavran put the Mayhem through a maneuver that put the ceiling overhead again, and this time Adda had to utilize the sick bag Iridian insisted she keep with her. Vomiting was, amazingly, even more unpleasant in high gravity. Switching to weightlessness before she finished absolutely did not help.
Iridian reached over to rub her shoulder while the ship docked. “We’re leaving a lot like we came, but you’re doing great.”
The passthrough cycled open. Jiménez sailed over the prone passengers and thumped shoulder-first against the wall across from it. Adda winced in sympathy. Tritheist clomped into the main cabin on magnetized boots and looked down at Dr. Björn. “This is your stop. Get out.”
“Sir, are you trying to kill them?” Chi freed herself from her harness and wrestled Jiménez into the couch in her place. His knuckles were ragged red wounds and he flinched like fastening the harness in place hurt him.
“I’m trying to get off this fucking station,” Tritheist growled. “Better company on Barbary, and I’m including that damned AI.” Iridian pulled herself out of her passenger couch to help the newly lightweight astronomer out through the passthrough.
“Where is ve going?” Jiménez asked plaintively. “I haven’t—”
“No, you damned well haven’t, and you won’t.” Tritheist stomped to the residential cabin not occupied by a large, floating workspace generator and pounded the wall switch to shut the door behind him. Jiménez’s eyes flooded with tears before he hid them behind his hands.
Iridian called, “Good luck, Dr. Björn” out the passthrough, and shut it before their kidnapping victim could formulate a response. “You know, I expected some sour academic type. Ve was all right.” She sounded vaguely horrified.
Rather than dwelling on that, Adda took advantage of the ship’s momentary stillness to retrieve her workspace generator. Since she had failed to lock the couch in place before climbing out of it, she bruised her chin on the floor. Iridian stabilized her and helped her wobble through the air toward the open residential cabin.
She unplugged the workspace generator and tugged it back to the couches in the main cabin. Iridian watched her, floating near the floor with her fingertips curled into one of the wall handholds. “Get in,” Iridian said. “I’ll set you up.” While Adda climbed into the now-locked passenger couch, Iridian wound cables around the couch’s base.
Once Adda was strapped in, she put a purple sharpsheet on her tongue and breathed in through the sizzling tingle as it dissolved. The artificial spice-and-herb scent put her in a workspace mind-set before the drug even kicked in. She uncoiled a cable from her silver necklace and threaded the smaller end into her nasal jack. The other end she handed down to Iridian, who carefully threaded it into the cable arrangement holding the workspace generator in a position where she could set it over where Adda lay on the couch.
“You’ll get pulled all over the place, because this thing won’t be able to turn while you’re in it.” Iridian already sounded far away, even though she was right beside Adda’s couch. When Adda closed her eyes, Iridian would barely be there at all.
“Lifting off, we’re lifting off,” announced Gavran. His voice had degenerated into a reedy screech, but he still sounded like he was smiling. At least somebody was having a good time.
Iridian strapped into another passenger couch in the main cabin, and then the whole ship tilted and took on gravity fast. Adda applied an earbud full of white noise to the ear without a comm line to Iridian and shut her eyes.
The roaring engines meshed with the white noise to become a whirling tunnel of wind and sound in which her workspace existed in the center of a vortex. She reached for a chain flailing through the maelstrom and caught it with both hands. It went taut. “Charon’s Coin. It’s Adda. Please respond.”
The chain stayed taut. She’d sent several messages through her comm system and intermediary to the Coin while they were traveling to Mangala Station, but she’d never received confirmation of a functional comm connection, let alone a sign that it understood what she’d said. It’d certainly never responded before. But now, according to her comp and the workspace generator attached to it, the comm connection was solid. The Coin heard her.
“I need you to leave Dr. Björn’s ship somewhere safe and retrievable, and in the best condition you can manage.” Adda envisioned Dr. Björn’s ship, or at least the model she’d studied in preparation for this operation, drifting in a peaceful section of space, with other ships passing by well away from it. She focused on the image so clearly that it emerged from the maelstrom wall in front of her in the proportions she’d studied.
The maelstrom’s center abruptly shifted, and one side swept over her. The chain wound around her chest, rib cage, hips, and legs and dug in. For a second Adda felt the wide harness straps on the Mayhem’s passenger couch, but shoved that impression out of her head. If she got distracted, she might send mixed messages to the Coin.
Virtual wind blew her hair over her eyes. Through it she glimpsed something massive drifting in the dark vortex wall. It was the same size as the Coin in reality, dark and solid and metallic as well. Not remotely humanoid. Its shape could have been five thick links of spiked chain, each link as big as the representation of Dr. Björn’s skiff that the massive figure was coiled around.
The triangular end of its final link reminded Adda of a viper’s skull, with the second link bent under it like a lower jaw, and a thousand spiked fangs in the space between. The viper skull developed eye socket ridges and focused on her. Someone had clearly not gone to much trouble to social
ize the Coin’s copilot intelligence, when that had been all that it was. It really was as uncaring about the humans around it as Iridian claimed. Adda had thought it was just poorly prepared for communication at the level she preferred, and that was part of it, but it was also not interested in her, as an outside force with designs on it, however small and powerless she may be in comparison.
Adda inhaled slowly, breathing in thin Deimos dust over her tongue and down her throat. The coughing dumped her out of the workspace and into the passenger couch covered by her portable workspace generator. The Mayhem’s cabin was clear of dust. She was struggling to breathe against the heaviest gravity she’d ever felt.
“In and out fast. Then wait a few seconds. Then in and out fast,” Iridian shouted over the engine noise, apparently breathing the same way she was describing. It was part of the g-tolerance training that she’d been offering Adda whenever Iridian remembered that complicated space travel was still new to her.
The other part of the training, Adda now recalled, was tightening her leg and stomach muscles. She no longer felt like she was about to black out, at least. She shut her eyes and sank into the whirlwind workspace.
Dr. Björn’s skiff floated just beyond the vortex’s inner edge, alone. The Coin was gone.
She swept up whirling orbs of red and blue light and incorporated the law enforcement comms band into the wind noise. They’d located the skiff and were confirming that nobody was onboard. They’d also located Dr. Björn on the station. They were still searching for the Coin and the Mayhem, but nobody seemed to have a good description of where those ships were. The orbs were slowly shrinking as the Mayhem left their relatively short-band range.
Mutiny at Vesta Page 20