Mutiny at Vesta

Book : Shieldrunner Pirates

by R.E. Stearns

Genres: Action & Adventure; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

Adda and Iridian have survived the murderous AI that tried to kill them in Barbary Station...but now they'll need all of their ingenuity to escape the evil mega corporation that wants to own them, in this second space adventure in the Shieldrunner Pirates trilogy.

Adda Karpe and Iridian Nassir have escaped the murderous AI that was trapping them on Barbary Station and earned themselves a place on Captain Sloane's fabled pirate crew. And now that they've arrived at Vesta, Sloane's home base, they can finally start making a living stealing from well-off megacorporations. Unfortunately, the political situation has deteriorated in Captain Sloane's absence.

Adda and Iridian find themselves trapped in a contract with Oxia Corp., one of the very megacorporations they'd hoped to prey on, forced to rob and intimidate targets they'd never have chosen on their own. If they're ever going to have the independent life together that they've always wanted, they'll have to free themselves from Oxia Corp. first.

Meanwhile, the inhuman allies who followed Adda and Iridian from Barbary Station have plans of their own, which may be more dangerous than the humans involved could imagine. It will take not one but five heists, and every bit of ingenuity Adda and Iridian have to escape from Oxia and find the life they've always dreamed of — if they can survive.

Release date: October 16, 2018

Publisher: Gallery / Saga Press

Print pages: 480

Sample

Mutiny at Vesta

CHAPTER 1

Time integrated through digital intermediary: 1 hour 53 minutes

Adda Karpe disconnected her mind from the ship around her and sat beside Iridian Nassir on the surface currently serving as a floor. The ghostly intermediary figure connecting Adda and the ship’s AI vanished. Iridian wrapped her golden-brown arm around Adda’s waist without interrupting her story. “So I thought, ‘Pel’s dying around here somewhere, and what do I need two kidneys for anyway?’ and grabbed the bastard. This is what I got for it.”

Iridian raised one side of her shirt to her armpit. A tapered line of recently regrown flesh marred a tattoo of a flap of skin pulled up to reveal a skull and crossed rib bones drawn over realistic viscera beneath it. The other people in the Casey Mire Mire’s main cabin, a man just out of his teens with the same pale complexion as Adda’s, and a darker man with a beard like a stylized leaf, laughed and swore, respectively.

“Wish I could see it,” the younger one, Pel, said. Goggles with dark blue lenses hid his scarred eyes, reflecting the ceiling-wall seam lights from where he sat on the floor near Adda.

The Casey’s bedroom door slid up and open. Captain Sloane crossed the main cabin to the bridge console in two low-gravity strides, long coat and neatly braided black hair following after. “We’ll be in range of Vesta’s southern docking guides in five minutes. Are all of you ready?”

“Finally,” Pel said. “The Casey is so slow.”

“Hey, it’s about average.” Iridian glanced around, brows furrowed, like audibly insulting the ship was a bad idea. Perhaps it was. “We got here as fast as any ship could, without attracting the ITA’s attention, anyway.”

Sloane’s lieutenant, who shaped his beard like a stylized leaf and went by Tritheist as a name, stepped around Adda’s mesh bag of drone parts to stand beside the captain. “The newsfeeds still run daily Barbary Station updates. Vestan dock security will be expecting us. The ITA won’t, or if they are, the local bureaucrats will keep them from stopping us.”

“Good.” The captain smiled, a flash of white teeth against dark skin. “Welcome home, lads and lasses.” Sloane turned to Adda and Iridian. “The ship does intend to dock here, I assume?” The captain’s smile looked more forced now.

“The Casey’s letting us off here, yeah.” Iridian cast a suspicious look at a cam in a corner of the main cabin, which served as one of the Casey’s many eyes.

Adda and the Casey had discussed their destination after the Casey had docked with a fuel barge on the Mars-Ceres reliable route and decided to stay there for two days after it’d finished refueling. It’d picked its own time to leave for Vesta, too, despite all of Adda’s arguments to depart sooner. The delay had given Captain Sloane time to straighten out crew finances and pay for the fuel, but Iridian and Tritheist had taken shifts intimidating the barge crew into allowing them to stay.

Without the threats, the barge crew would’ve summoned the Interplanetary Transit Authority to arrest Sloane’s crew on a variety of piracy-related charges. Sloane hadn’t required the crew on the Casey to sign anything, but traveling with the captain was suspicious enough. Besides, Adda and Iridian had made their own share of trouble.

The ITA wouldn’t enforce the Near Earth Union military draft, which Adda and Iridian were currently avoiding. They’d mete out the consequences they felt her and Iridian’s colony ship hijacking warranted, and then turn them over to the NEU.

While Iridian and Tritheist had kept the barge crew out of the Casey, Adda and Pel had watched the ship’s console so they’d all have some warning when it was ready to leave. It’d been Adda’s last chance to confirm that Pel really wanted to stay with her. She and Iridian had fought long and hard to earn a place with Sloane’s core pool of crewmembers, but Pel could’ve begged passage to another station. “I’ve got money coming, and I’ve got to live somewhere,” he’d said. “Might as well stick with you!”

The ITA had almost caught them at Barbary Station, and everyone knew that Vesta was Captain Sloane’s base of operations. All the ITA had to determine was which direction the crew would come from and which vessel they’d travel in. Upon Adda’s suggestion, the Casey had left the fuel barge on a long detour off the Mars-Vesta reliable route. The trip across unpatrolled space had paid off. They hadn’t seen the ITA since Barbary.

Adda had never found out why the Casey had stopped at the fuel barge, or what made it decide to leave. Traveling with an awakened intelligence was as unsettling as Adda’s degree in AI development had led her to expect.

“I can’t tell if the Casey is planning to stay at Rheasilvia Station,” Adda said.

“She’s got her own fleet now.” Pel still referred to the ship as “she,” like the rest of Sloane’s crew did. The Casey’s AI copilot was conscious enough to develop preferences, but it had ignored Adda’s questions about its gender. “Three ships is a fleet, right?” Pel continued. “What does she need to hang out with a bunch of humans for?”

“Maintenance, obviously,” said Tritheist. “Otherwise she’d have left Barbary Station years ago.”

Awakened artificial intelligence held different priorities and assessed more potential future actions than any human could. Even after Adda and Iridian fixed the Casey’s internal communications system, the ship’s intelligence hadn’t spoken aloud. Two other ships with awakened intelligences, the Charon’s Coin and the Apparition, followed at a distance. Neither of them had ever communicated directly with Sloane’s crew. Their silence could mean anything.

According to Iridian, most ships’ windows projected whatever the ship was approaching above the bridge console, perpendicular to the floor, even though the ship was moving up from the passengers’ perspective. That kept passengers who were accustomed to Earthlike gravity comfortable. Vesta’s gray pockmarked surface was approaching on the Casey’s ceiling, recorded by a hull cam above their heads.

The Casey approached Vesta as the minor planet’s southern docking guides indicated, the path lit in a corner of its bridge console. Adda couldn’t quite map the path above the console to the view projected above her. The massive asteroid looked utterly isolated in the starfield around it.

Flecks of red light representing buoys glinted between Vesta and the Casey, and the Casey stayed well away from them. Rheasilvia Station was a white web of human construction that spanned nearly 100 kilometers of a 500-kilometer wide, 13-kilometer-deep crater in Vesta’s otherwise barren surface. A ship that must’ve been ten times the Casey’s size blocked most of the station from view as it descended into the crater and angled toward the docks.

The Casey could’ve left the window projectors off. Its intelligence chose to accommodate them.

On the console beneath the display, a comms connection between the Casey and the Rheasilvia Station docks activated. “On behalf of Oxia Corporation, welcome to Rheasilvia Station,” a voice announced over the Casey’s cabin speakers, making Adda jump.

Captain Sloane belted into the pilot’s seat, frowned at the information projected on the wall in front of the bridge console, and muttered, “She already submitted it.” The Casey could travel to its destinations without human assistance, but it’d only be allowed to dock if it appeared to have a human pilot. A scan configured to detect implants would show that Captain Sloane lacked the neural ones required to fly a ship, but everything she’d read indicated that most stations didn’t use such intrusive scans.

“Thank you,” the captain said loudly enough for the console to pick it up and transmit it. “You should receive my ID and flight plan momentarily.”

Iridian tied the mesh bag of drone parts to the base of the ship’s pseudo-organic tank. The tank’s 150 liters of viscous fluid were almost, but not completely, still. Like most pseudo-organic tanks, the liquid seemed to swirl slowly at its center, although ripples never reached the edge of the pinkish-gray goo. Most tanks were lit from within to turn the pseudo-organic fluid a less disturbing color, but the Casey’s tank lights had only ever been white. Nobody had worked up the nerve to reach in and replace the bulbs.

While Adda collected small items that might be flung through the air at high speeds during a docking maneuver, Pel asked, “What does Oxia Corporation do?”

“Mining, infrastructure, and transport, predominantly, although they have other interests. They’ve been nosing around Vesta for years, but . . .” Captain Sloane frowned. “They didn’t always greet arriving ships.”

Iridian helped Adda and Pel secure themselves against the wall alongside the empty wall-mounted docks for the ship’s destroyed rover drones. “Welcome back, Captain Sloane,” said the voice over the Casey’s speakers. The Oxia representative’s voice was scratchier than it had been the first time, like the first greeting had been a recording and this one was in real time. “I. Um.” She sounded like she was about to cough or cry. “We’re sending your docking route now, Captain. Local time is 02:43.”

“Hey, we’re only four hours behind.” Iridian, demonstrating more flexibility in a safety harness than Adda had believed possible, stretched to plant a kiss on the corner of Adda’s mouth. The flash from a passing beacon touched Iridian’s face and her freckles stood out dark and lovely in the light. “Here we go, babe. This is the kind of reception big-time pirates are supposed to get out here. We just jumped that silicate hauler to the front of the line.” Iridian nodded toward the much larger ship out the projected window.

Adda squeezed her eyes shut. Beginnings and endings of space flight, with gravity changing directions and objects outside the windows at strange angles, made her nauseous. “That’s unusual?”

“They’re serious about first-come, first-serve docking on habs this far out, unless somebody’s ship is in trouble,” said Iridian. “Fuel’s expensive, and nobody likes to float in micro-grav so near a hab with healthy grav. So yeah, docking ahead of a ship that was here first is a perk.”

Adda’s comp glove buzzed with new message alerts, which was worth opening her eyes for. Projected message headers scrolled over the back of her hand, formatted to fit in the silver-bordered square opening in her dark purple fingerless glove.

Pel’s red comp glove erupted in a cacophony of cheerful alerts. “We’re online!” He whooped. “Thank all the gods and devils, we have internet.”

Although Adda could’ve corrected him that they’d been able to access it for the majority of the trip, and only the high-volume, nonemergency content was newly available, he looked too happy to care about the distinction. He freed both arms, though he left his torso and legs strapped to the wall, to get his comp reading the alerts aloud. His comp should’ve picked up the entertainment content from the buoy network hours ago—Adda’s had—so the Casey must’ve been limiting their access until the ship was assigned a station dock. Tritheist passed by on his way to strap into the chair at the secondary console beside the bathroom door.

Adda was more interested in her bank balance than her messages. She checked the balance almost hourly, to confirm that the massive sum was still there. Piracy, even the nontraditional sort, paid as well as Pel had assured her it would. She encrypted and forwarded the account information through two proxy connections before it hit the buoy relay for the long trip through additional proxies to her father on Earth.

A deep sigh pressed Adda’s chest against her harness. She and Iridian could pay up on their student loans and stop the collection agents from hassling their families, who had debts of their own. If working for Captain Sloane continued to pay this well, they, their parents, and most of their siblings could be out of debt in a matter of months. It was good to be part of the best pirate crew in populated space.

“Whoa, look at how far they’ve built down,” said Iridian. “And up!”

Outside the window, a massive metal latticework rose around them. The intricate web of buildings and support infrastructure that kept the station interior spinning left only glimpses of the large crater in which Rheasilvia Station was built. Intersections between modules shone with white industrial lights much brighter than the distant sun. Rheasilvia’s sister station, Albana, was on the opposite side of the asteroid, making Rheasilvia seem even more remote than it was, clinging to the crater wall and the bare Vestan soil.

The Casey rotated to a new angle relative to the station. What Adda felt as “down” shifted to a 45-degree angle from where her brain told her it should be. She shut her eyes again.

Pel’s comp stopped reading message subject headers and started playing a news broadcast. “. . . return to Khiri Sekibo with the latest on the last Martian refugees repatriating from Barbary Station. Khiri?”

“Hi, I’m here with Suhaila Al-Mudari, spokesperson for the refugees who were trapped for three years by Barbary Station’s aggressive artificial intelligence security system, known as AegiSKADA. Ms. Al-Mudari, what does it feel like to—”

“Forget the fugees, what about us?” Pel asked over the newscaster.

“Don’t you want to hear how they’re doing?” Iridian asked.

“They’re fine,” Pel said. “Wasn’t the station swarming with ITA right after we left? They don’t leave people they rescue stuck out in space. And anyway, I’ve got a hundred messages from them I haven’t listened to yet, so I’ll get all the juicy details. I want to hear what people are saying about the roguish pirates that made this all possible.”

“I’ve minimized our involvement,” Captain Sloane said. “Vestan media has always been suggestible. When I’ve reestablished my position here, I may grant an interview personally.”

Pel looked disappointed for about a quarter of a second, then asked, “What does Suhaila look like again?”

“She looks . . . normal?” Iridian said. “Stylish, for sure.”

“You’re no help.”

“I’ve got your sister to look at. Why should I check out other ladies?”

Pel groaned. “I do not need to hear about you making heart eyes at my sister!”

“We’re married,” Iridian said in tones of real triumph and mock menace. That’d been another accomplishment made on the trip to Vesta. The captain had been thoroughly amused to be asked to officiate. “I’ll be making heart eyes at her forever.”

Between the two of them, the newscaster, and the ship changing course and orientation, Adda needed a distraction before she threw up. According to the summary projected on the back of her hand through the comp glove’s square window, Rheasilvia Station was home to 300,000 people. That made it the largest off-Earth habitat she’d been to, and the safest place in the universe for Sloane’s crew, thanks to the local political ties the captain maintained.

When she refocused on Pel and Iridian’s conversation, Iridian was saying, “All our eyes are a little fucked up. The cold and the black’ll do that to you.”

“Yeah, but even the fugee kids used to ask why I didn’t just get them fixed,” said Pel. “I need help walking so I don’t run into things. And they hurt, still. It’s annoying, and it’s annoying to talk about all the time.” A station the size of Rheasilvia had to have surgeons and regrowth clinics that could fix Pel’s eyes. “Anyway, who says I want my old eyes back?” he continued. “I can afford great pseudo-organics now. No reason to keep what I was born with just because.”

At the bridge console, Sloane’s voice changed from casual to casual covering emotion. “We’re carrying passengers tonight, yes. Didn’t you receive our permit code?”

Adda subvocalized the terms to her comp and scanned the Interplanetary Transit Authority’s passenger vessel requirements. The small ITA contingent in Rheasilvia’s docks should’ve stopped and inspected passenger ships that lacked a permit and special insurance. The bribes Sloane’s crew paid should protect the Casey and its crew, but Adda didn’t want to risk putting the ITA agents in that position.

Apparently the captain didn’t either. Sloane had been off Vesta for a long time. Things might’ve changed.

To keep herself occupied during the trip from Barbary Station, Adda had scoped out the ITA’s databanks. After careful trial and one or two frightening errors, she’d exploited a backdoor entry into several corners of the ITA’s internal system. As the newest systems infiltrator on a pirate crew, she expected to get good use out of that access to humanity’s largest semiofficial law enforcement organization. She hadn’t planned to use it this soon, but it was the best solution she saw to the problem at hand.

“I’ll send the code again,” Captain Sloane said more loudly. “Our copilot caught a virus, you see . . .”

A string of letters and numbers appeared on Adda’s comp. She gasped and Iridian said something. Adda’s hands shook while she inserted the code and the Casey’s ID into the ITA’s system.

“Apology accepted,” Sloane said in the direction of the bridge console’s mic. “We’ll proceed.”

“Fucking unnecessary,” Tritheist grumbled.

“Babe, talk to me.” Iridian shook Adda by the shoulder. “Are you okay?”

Adda nodded slowly. “The Casey got into my comp again.” The awakened intelligence had broken through her new defenses around her data, and she didn’t even know when it’d happened. Her motion sickness returned at full strength. Strange sensations in her neural implant net could be a side effect of extended periods in close contact with awakened intelligences. As far as she knew, she was the first person ever to have spent this much time with one. That was the terrifying, exciting beauty of traveling with them. She should take more notes.

Beside her, Iridian swore and muttered, “That invasive, invisible, parasitic—”

“It also helped us create a passenger transport permit so we wouldn’t be stopped.” That meant that the Casey had been listening to what they said in the cabin, watching Adda’s comp activity, and drawing accurate conclusions about what Adda was doing. And then it’d created an unused ID in the correct format, which might’ve taken Adda more time than she’d had.

Even though the Casey’s intelligence crawling through her personal hardware was a violation, she felt obligated to defend it. The Casey’s intelligence, and those of the other two ships from Barbary Station, were likely the only awakened intelligences in the universe. She refused to put them at risk of deactivation by anyone, even her wife.

Footsteps approached from the bridge. Captain Sloane clutched recessed handholds in the wall to maintain balance in the shifting g-forces the Casey generated as it flew toward their designated dock. While Adda had been concentrating on her comp, the captain had donned a full suit of gold and black armor, covered with the long coat Adda associated with captaincy. Like Tritheist, the captain’s helmet faceplate was raised to communicate without a comms system. Equipment and supplies clanked and thumped belowdeck.

“We’ll dock shortly, but I’ve recommended to the Casey that she depart afterward,” Captain Sloane said. “We should leave the docks and enter the main part of the station quickly as well.”

“Something up, sir?” Iridian was still working on shaking her military habit of calling everyone “sir” unless they looked significantly feminine. Captain Sloane looked solidly nonbinary. “I don’t love flying around in a ship that could break all our brains if it tried hard enough, but it’s the only one we have.”

“As I’ve been unable to confirm that port authorities have been suitably compensated for our convenience,” the captain said—Adda interpreted “compensated” as “bribed”—”there’s some possibility that we’ll receive a well-armed welcome from one or more local interests. We have nothing to gain by waiting for a firefight, but I’d rather the Casey not sustain damage and retaliate against us or the station.” That was one of many possible reactions, all equally likely and difficult to predict. The Casey didn’t have guns of its own as far as Adda knew, but its awakened AI didn’t need weapons to cause damage.

“You’re assuming it will stay or go because I ask it to,” Adda said. Captain Sloane gave her an incredulous look, and she shrugged. She wished she had a better answer, but she was as worried as the captain probably was about what the Casey would do. She had a lot of experience with normal AIs. There were no experts on awakened ones.

“Who’s suicidal enough to shoot at us?” Tritheist gripped the handle of a chem canister launcher at his hip. He scowled toward the interior door to the passthrough, the half-a-hallway structure that connected to a dock’s half-a-hallway to create an airlock, like he expected someone to break in. “This is your dock, on your station.”

Sloane shrugged, the casual gesture magnified in the armored suit and at odds with the way the captain watched the bridge console, where threats would be projected on a simplified map. “It’s been two years since I was in a position to supervise crew assets personally, and I’ve had difficulty reconnecting with my usual information sources. People become . . . ambitious.” Captain Sloane pointedly looked from Adda to Iridian. “I’ve not yet risked contacting my headquarters since we left Barbary.” The lead cloud surrounding Barbary Station would’ve made Sloane’s contact with whoever was left in charge of the crew’s headquarters sporadic at best. It would’ve been impossible without the Casey, who had occasionally carried messages out to the rest of the universe.

While Iridian helped Adda and Pel free themselves from the wall, Sloane murmured something in Tritheist’s ear, knocked two knuckles against the lieutenant’s armored chest, and returned to the bridge console. “First thing’s a station sec scan,” Tritheist announced, as if the three people he was lecturing weren’t a meter or two away from his face. “Most of the weapons are in a shielded compartment and that should be all the illegals we’re carrying, but we’ve never scanned the Casey ourselves so we don’t know what she’s got hidden. Stay calm, keep your hands visible, move slow.”

“Yes, sir.” Iridian’s hint of sarcasm was too small for Tritheist to call her out for it, but if even Adda identified it then it also couldn’t be missed.

The whole ship felt as if it had turned abruptly on its side, and sickening weightlessness returned as the Casey slowed to a near stop. Adda’s hair, which fell over her eyes in Earthlike gravity, drifted up and out of her way. Iridian’s shaved scalp kept her looking as powerful and confident as usual.

Tritheist kept talking. Iridian would tell Adda anything she needed to know later. If there were any hidden compartments in the Casey’s main cabin, they were well hidden from Adda’s perspective. The ship’s comprehensive communications suite and the manacles installed on the bathroom wall suggested that the Casey was designed for espionage. Three awakened shipboard intelligences had left Barbary Station with Sloane’s crew, but only this copilot intelligence had changed its own name. The Casey smuggling a previous owner’s contraband was a real possibility.

“Scanning now,” Sloane said. “It doesn’t affect their work, but they prefer that we stay relatively still.”

As soon as Sloane and Tritheist looked back to the bridge console, Pel waved his arms above his head. Adda yanked the one she could reach down to his side. “Grow up!” she whispered.

“Never!”

“We should have been cleared by now, Captain,” Tritheist grumbled.

“Formalities must be addressed,” said Captain Sloane. “Particularly if my influence on dock security has diminished.”

“Dock sec should be keeping the ITA pricks occupied like they fucking used to. Where do they think their pay comes from? It’s sure as hell not ITA; that’s the point of joint stationspace control. All they have to do is get us through the damned docks. Useless.” Tritheist lapsed into spacefarer cant, which was multilingual gibberish to Adda.

The window projected onto the wall replaced the view of the dock passthrough’s exterior wall slowly moving past them with route records. This route had taken them through most of the Near Earth Union, with a stopover on Mars before exiting NEU territory en route to Vesta, one of several populated asteroids in the asteroid belt. That trip would’ve been much longer than their actual route, which had cut across the reliable routes between Vesta and Barbary Station.

Adda hadn’t told the Casey to do that either. She subvocalized to her virtual intermediary to see if it could find any indications as to how and why the Casey was making those decisions. AI were frequently incomprehensible even when they wanted to be understood, but it was worth trying.

The bridge console pinged three times in quick succession. Captain Sloane looked at Tritheist, who skimmed through some text projected in the center of his black comp glove. “That’s ‘cleared to engage passthrough locks,’ Captain.” The Casey was completing the docking maneuver on its own, but Sloane still had to act like a pilot to avoid raising suspicions among the Rheasilvia Station dock personnel.

Captain Sloane nodded, once. “So the ITA are satisfied. My people have done the minimum required to facilitate our arrival. Now I wonder who might be waiting in the terminal.”

Sloane stepped through the Casey’s open interior door and stopped on one side of the passthrough’s exterior door, which was still closed. Tritheist stood on the other side, skimming a map on his comp glove. “This isn’t our dock, is it?” The lieutenant’s question sounded more like a grim acknowledgement than an effort to clarify.

Sloane’s shoulders slumped slightly, matching the captain’s resigned frown. “It is not.”

Iridian stepped into the passthrough with them, although three was the maximum number of people the ship’s airlock could comfortably hold. “How can you tell?”

“This is my home,” said Captain Sloane. “I know how the route to my terminal feels.”

“We’ve been off Barbary Station long enough for news to make it here,” Iridian said.

“Unlike the ITA st