Mutiny at Vesta

by R. E. Stearns

  Captain Sloane’s was doing something with the comp on one hand while the other held a trigger for a small explosive Tritheist was painstakingly planting at the end of the corridor. The datacenter ship wasn’t theirs, and their suits’ O2 tanks were full. Once the Casey came back—if it came back—they’d blow the terminal off the damned ship.

  Tritheist launched himself into the terminal and slammed into the bulkhead beside the closed passthrough. He bounced off but caught himself with his boots and one glove before he started tumbling. He left the boots locked while he struggled to pull himself out of the armor that was electrocuting him at the thigh and neck where pellets stuck. Neither set of joints moved.

  Blowing up the terminal entrance while he was out of his suit would be damned unhealthy. Iridian watched the terminal doorway with her shield facing the corridor while she frantically scraped the live pellet off her boot. A whole squad of Oxia’s datacenter guards would be here soon. “Casey, I know you can hear this,” she snarled into the V4V channel. “Get the fuck back here.”

  Panting through the fading electric burn from her foot to her hip, she visualized what she’d’ve done in her ISV if she’d been hit with something like Tritheist’s ammo. The electricity fucked with his coordination, so she hauled him to an industrial outlet in the bulkhead. “Where’s your hardline?”

  He pulled the line free from its spool at the small of his back and handed her the end of it. She plugged it into the outlet. Lights in the terminal and hallway died with an almighty snap. Their helmets’ low-light lamps clicked on while she helped Tritheist scrape the pellets off his armor.

  The bottom of Iridian’s foot was still twitching and her toes convulsively curled in. She sucked water from her suit’s reservoir and listened for their pursuers. Their helmets muffled their voices too much for her implant to translate. The slap of their armored gloves on the corridor handholds was getting louder.

  The terminal’s passthrough pinged and the projection changed to AT PASSTHROUGH, followed by a jumble of letters and symbols. It had to be the Casey. No other vessels were within a hundred million klicks of Oxia’s datacenter.

  Tritheist unplugged his suit and shouted, “Move!” at Iridian. She’d already pushed off the bulkhead toward the opening passthrough door.

  She careened through the Casey’s passthrough and hit the main cabin’s bulkhead so hard that armor integrity warnings flickered on her HUD. Captain Sloane landed in a graceful crouch against the bulkhead, nearer the bridge, and Tritheist cracked her glove with his knee when he hit the bulkhead on her other side. Once he stabilized, he pulled a second launcher and shot a chem canister into the terminal. It popped and filled the terminal with synthcapsin haze.

  “We’re in! Go!” she shouted at the Casey. The Kuiper cant she added about the ship’s shoddy construction, the worthless factory that made it, and its unreliability in times of need was mostly to combat her fear of being stranded in an enemy’s hab.

  The passthrough cycled behind her. She had to strap down, fast, because the Casey wasn’t very sympathetic to the soft meatbags she carried. Sloane strapped into the pilot’s seat. Iridian secured herself to the bulkhead between the bridge and Tritheist as the ship lurched up and, from her perspective, backward. In her helmet, the armor integrity alarm blared and flashed red.

  The Casey’s projector habits meant that Iridian, strapped to the bulkhead across from the passthrough, got a high-definition view of the datacenter they were leaving. Captain Sloane must’ve ignited the explosive on the homeward side of the terminal, because a cloud of debris glittered around the datacenter’s closed passthrough.

  The Casey rotated away from the datacenter ship. The stars wheeled in the window across from her, and the sun looked as distant as it’d feel if she were out in the cold and the black.

  Without turning her head and risking her neck at the g’s they were pulling, she asked, “Captain, did we get what we came for?”

  “We have enough for now. Whether the project data is among the rest remains to be seen.”

  The ship accelerated and jerked Iridian against her restraints as it made another fast turn. Her vision went red at the edges and her face swelled as g’s pushed blood into it.

  “What the fuck is she doing?” Tritheist shouted. His arm was pinned against the desk console at an awkward angle.

  Captain Sloane examined the projection above the bridge console. “Avoiding a missile.”

  “What?” Iridian heard what the captain said but she didn’t want to believe it. Modern missiles had deadly accurate homing functions. The conversation dropped while everyone waited to find out if the Casey’s AI was better.

  The Oxia datacenter had turned in relation to the Casey, or the Casey had reoriented. They looked perpendicular to each other, with the Casey facing it to present the smallest possible target of its sloped bridge module.

  “Intruder with the well-secured autopilot,” somebody said over the Casey’s cabin speaker, “return and surrender, or the next missile goes right up your ass.”

  Tritheist snorted. “If they couldn’t do it the first time, what makes them think they’ll do it when we’re farther away?” In another bone-crushing banking maneuver, the Casey turned its deck toward the datacenter and accelerated hard. The red faded from Iridian’s vision. It took everyone a minute to catch their breath. Grav dropped to a comfortable level, pulling toward the deck.

  Iridian shook her head to get her blood flowing. “Oh, shit, I need to tell Adda.” She toggled the op channel on. “Babe, V4V’s out. Well, almost out.”

  “Another missile just launched,” Sloane reported. Iridian hoped she cut her mic before Adda heard that. There was nothing Adda could do about it.

  Tritheist grimaced and tightened his safety harness. “That’s some cold shit.”

  Iridian gripped her harness’s shoulder straps and switched to breathing like she’d need to do to stay conscious during a high-speed evasion maneuver. The missile wasn’t visible in the projected windows yet. If they were very lucky, they might see it in the second before impact.

  Except grav pulled hard, then fell to nothing. The datacenter stopped retreating in the window projected on the overhead. The Casey was just hanging there in the cold and the black. At least given the tiny size the datacenter ship had shrunk to, they had a minute or two before they exploded.

  “Casey, what the hell are you waiting for?” Iridian asked. Tritheist glared at Iridian like its inaction was her fault.

  At the bridge console, the captain methodically scanned projected readouts. “She knows it’s out there.” Sloane wasn’t a damned pilot. Even if the captain were, who knew how much the Casey would let a human do with its console?

  Iridian’s heart was pounding. In her ISV the impact warnings would’ve been howling if she were this close to getting hit. The Casey hadn’t activated any, but Iridian heard them in a corner of her brain anyway. Sloane tapped something on the bridge console, tapped something else harder, and swore. The ship stayed still. They couldn’t have much time now.

  “Ah, fuck this!” Iridian reached for the release on her harness. In her peripheral vision, Tritheist did the same. “If the damned AI won’t save itself, then let’s take it apart,” she said. “There has to be an override—”

  Iridian had the top third of her harness off when the Casey blasted something out of its radio transmitters that half deafened her while it flung itself sideways. The harness hit her ribs and hips hard.

  * * *

  A headache woke Iridian up. The Casey’s bulkhead strap-down station held her firmly around the arms, legs, and chest, thank all the gods. The window across the main cabin from her showed a starscape free of pursuing missiles. “We’re alive.” Ringing in the ear with her earpiece kept her from hearing her own muttering.

  “Indeed we are.” Captain Sloane sounded like Iridian felt, which was aching, tired, and relieved. “Lieutenant?”

  “Burned a bit, but I can still fight, Captain,” Tritheist r
eported.

  A low electromechanical hum reverberated through the ship as all of its fins extended to bring down its temperature. Iridian’s armor hadn’t registered the heat in the main cabin, but some part of the ship had gotten hot enough to drop functionality below where the Casey preferred it.

  “Soon we’ll be cool and quiet enough to be a difficult target,” Captain Sloane said. “But your enthusiasm is appreciated, Lieutenant.” Iridian had never heard that phrase delivered so damned intimately. She scrutinized the retreating datacenter in the projected window rather than looking at either of them.

  Several minutes later, Adda’s voice came over the op channel. “We’re out too. See you all in a few days.”

  Iridian laughed. “That we will,” she said, although she didn’t put her mic on the op channel to do it. Gods, she couldn’t wait to hold Adda in her arms again.

  “We’re not going back at full speed, I’m afraid,” Captain Sloane said.

  Iridian resettled in her safety harness, her surprise hidden behind her helmet’s inactive faceplate projector. Grav leveled out at practically nothing as the Casey stabilized in direction and speed. It wasn’t that Iridian distrusted the captain. All officers asked their subordinates to take risks they wouldn’t. She wanted to be ready for whatever came her way.

  “We left as required to use Adda’s exit as cover,” the captain said, “but I’m not returning to Vesta until I see this Thrinacia project.”

  Iridian sighed. “Fair enough. Point me at a stack of stuff to look through.” Adda had tweaked the settings on Iridian’s comp, so she was prepared to read a lot of data, anyway.

  * * *

  Four hours later, while the Casey maintained a holding pattern of turns that unnecessarily rearranged the bulkheads, deck, and overhead every few minutes, Iridian felt less confident. “Where is this thing?” Tritheist glared through the semitransparent desk projection. Captain Sloane shrugged without looking away from the bridge console.

  Maybe we left too soon. Or Captain Sloane could be wrong, and the project wasn’t there, or it never existed . . . There was a scary thought, which Iridian confirmed that she hadn’t just sent it to Adda. The prisoners from the Oxia vid stream had been beaten and then forgotten in cells without healthy enviro, and those were the ones Oxia kept alive. If Sloane’s crew hadn’t gotten what they came for, they could be in some serious shit.

  CHAPTER 21

  Massive data influx, encrypted, content unknown. Probable source: Oxia Corp.

  “They didn’t get the goods?”

  “You don’t have to scream,” Adda snapped at Pel. “We’re all right here. They just haven’t found it yet.” The Mayhem’s main cabin was larger than the Casey’s, but Adda wouldn’t describe a room on any ship as “large.” They’d only left the Frei facility a couple hours ago, and the main cabin felt crowded. Judging from Chi’s and Gavran’s expressions, they all felt like screaming.

  Pel’s new eyes, which were shades of gold at the moment, looked like they might pop out of his skull. “But we . . . they . . . We did everything right!”

  That had been quite a struggle for Pel. He’d originally been scheduled to return to Vesta with Ogir’s team the day before, but instead Ogir had sent her a terse message describing where in the docking module Pel would be hiding. Her brother’s order-following behavior hadn’t improved since the message Adda had sent Iridian about it. Apparently he’d drawn a lot of attention Ogir’s team hadn’t wanted. Ogir had found him a place to wait where he wouldn’t look overly suspicious, then left for Vesta without him.

  By the time Adda arrived at the Frei facility and found Pel, he’d been on the verge of a panic attack and he’d been awake for more than sixty hours. She’d installed monitoring software in his comp, and it told her that he’d slept about nine hours total during the days the Mayhem had been traveling away from Vesta. If he didn’t calm down soon, she’d ask Chi to tranquilize him.

  “Sometimes everyone does everything right, and it all goes to shit anyway,” Chi told him firmly. “It doesn’t mean somebody fucked up.” The look she directed at Adda meant something to the effect of “But it might, and it might’ve been you.”

  Adda had expected the data that the V4V team had grabbed to be more organized from an external perspective, which would’ve made it easier to locate Oxia’s secret project among everything else that’d been in the tanks. “There’s no point in guessing now when we can know what they have in just a few hours. All they said was that they haven’t confirmed the secret project is described in the information they’re searching through now.”

  Pel was staring at a blank wall with his teeth set in his lower lip. Adda said his name quietly, twice, and his eyes focused on her so fast she imagined the sound of mechanical lens whirring. “Huh? Yeah? What’d I miss?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “You just looked uncomfortable.”

  Pel sighed and refocused his eyes on his hands. “I hate thinking about . . . all of it. Did we bring any booze?” The bright smile that grew into the last sentence was only partially attributable to his resilience and good humor. The rest was his remaining shreds of willpower, a failed attempt to keep her from worrying about him. The way he zoned out into anxious nowhere whenever he stopped talking gave him away.

  The run against Frei Interplanetary had been their most profitable yet, in terms of monetary compensation for risks inherent to the task. Her disguised Oxia fleet with the Apparition at their head had sent the corporation and the local media into a frenzy, and they’d overwhelmed the Frei station defenses on schedule and as planned. They came away with all of the data Oxia wanted, on an identical solid-state storage unit to the one aboard the Casey. Oxia would never realize that the Apparition only carried one unit. There hadn’t been room for it on the Mayhem.

  She’d offered the Apparition the chance to sort through the Frei data itself, but it left what she’d put in its pseudo-organics alone. It was also stopping her from deleting that data, even in the process of moving it to a different tank. Her best guess was that it was bringing it to the Casey Mire Mire.

  “Well, I’m going to go find Chi and ask what she brought.” Pel got off his bunk, which felt like a small win, overall, and headed out into the main cabin. “Or no, Gavran! Hey, Gavran, what have you got for a guy who needs a break from his brain?”

  * * *

  Much as Adda wanted to meet Iridian sooner rather than later, she hadn’t come up with a way to do it with the Oxia fleet in formation around the Mayhem. After Captain Sloane’s assault on the Oxia datacenter, separating from the fleet before they all returned to Vesta would appear suspicious. If her timing estimates were accurate, the Casey would be docked at Rheasilvia Station by the time the Mayhem, the Apparition, and the Oxia fleet arrived.

  The information they’d copied from Frei was exactly what Oxia had asked for. Now all that remained was to use goodwill, and a hint of doubt as to Sloane’s guilt in the Oxia datacenter raid, to buy them time. It was impossible to estimate how long it’d take to confirm whether the secret project was among the data the V4V group stole from Oxia. If they had it, they’d have to decide how best to use it as leverage to get Sloane out of the Oxia contract. If they didn’t accomplish all of that by the time Oxia discovered their involvement in the datacenter raid, they’d risk causing more trouble to Oxia than they were worth.

  The captain’s waiting for us, Iridian subvocalized.

  It was comforting to have her in real time communication distance again, although their implanted comms still didn’t convey tone. Adda’s comp had reminded her that today was Recognition Day, when the NEU officially recognized the colonial governments’ sovereignty, and the holiday made Iridian short-tempered. Why? Adda asked her.

  Sloane’s always debriefed with Liu Kong and us.

  Adda blanched. Oxia’s CEO usually waited until they docked. I wrote up everything that happened. Captain Sloane read it, correct? Because Captain Sloane also does all the talking at these . . . debrief
ings. We shouldn’t be necessary.

  The captain doesn’t want to break any patterns until we’re sure we have leverage against Oxia, Iridian said.

  But we’re not safe yet. Even without saying that aloud, it sounded like a weak excuse. They’d only be safe as the sole possessors of the Thrinacia Project details, and even that safety would be temporary. If Adda wanted it found on her current plan’s schedule, then she’d apparently have to find it herself. Can I have an hour?

  If they were together or on vid, Iridian would give her that charming, eyebrow-raised incredulous expression she had. We spent days looking through this shit. What makes you think you’ll find it in sixty minutes?

  The Mayhem was banking, resulting in a minor change in gravity’s pull. In the main cabin, Chi and Pel were exaggerating the change’s effects on them to kid Gavran about it. Adda held on to her harness while the falling sensation dissipated. I want to do it in the workspace, she told Iridian, so it won’t be exactly the same method you used.

  The Casey wasn’t much help with sorting through it all. And it had plenty of opportunity. Why bother asking it to help now? The implanted comms flattened Iridian’s inflection. Based on what she’d said about Casey’s behavior during their escape from the datacenter, she was probably more annoyed with the intelligence than usual.

  I won’t know until I try, said Adda. Please talk to Captain Sloane about it for me.

  * * *

  Adda settled into the mobile workspace generator in her residential cabin aboard the Mayhem. It took one full sharpsheet and most of a second one to get herself into a compatible mindstate. It’d taken two sharpsheets to get her into the workspace last time, so her body’s resistance to them had diminished a little. Spending the majority of this operation in reality meant that the drugs would do a better job of keeping her in the workspace now.