CHAPTER 7 Days until launch: 49
“Sissy,” Pel said in the prerecorded vid playing on Adda’s comp, “I swear these are the exact words: ‘We have Nassir and we’ll dock at 02:20 hours.’ That’s exactly what Major O.D. told me.”
Even with favorable orbital positions minimizing the distance between Ceres and Venus, the ZVs would still be covering over a million kilometers in a matter of hours to reach Adda on Ceres Station. It was a mind-boggling distance to cover so quickly. That speed couldn’t be comfortable for the passengers.
Pel was Adda’s only source of information on the ZV Group’s rescue operation. Nobody had interrupted the relay system she’d been using to communicate with Pel, passing messages through accounts on multiple ’jects to hide both their locations. It would be safer to keep using that system than to contact the mercenaries on her stolen comp. In addition to increasing chances of intercept, the stolen comp would’ve created digital evidence linking the ZVs to her and Iridian’s escapes, despite the encryption she’d applied to the content. The ZV Group wouldn’t appreciate that. This would be a terrible time to get on their bad side.
Adda sat up from her position huddled on a bench in a park where three-quarters of the plants were either projections or printed fakes. Once she’d assured herself that nobody was crossing the park to arrest her, she bent over her comp glove and replayed Pel’s message with the volume down to almost nothing. Iridian had told her that this position looked strange, but it was more comfortable than holding the comp against her ear like some people did, and the comp’s original owner hadn’t kept headphones with it. She’d have to continue to trust Pel’s updates, even though he was prone to unrealistic optimism.
Besides, she desperately wanted him to be correct. If the ZVs “had” Iridian, then Iridian was free from her ITA prison cell and on her way to Adda. Adda allowed herself to believe it, and she smiled as she recorded her reply: “Where should I meet them?” The morning sunsim looked warmer than it felt, but Iridian had confirmed that in space stations, there was no direct relationship between light and warmth.
A new message from Pel arrived. “Ah, damn it, I knew I forgot something.” Adda shut her eyes, willing herself to remain calm. “They’ll be docking after midnight, right? And there’s only the Ceres Station port module to dock in.” The Ceres port was the biggest one between Mars and Jupiter, with both an orbital section and one on Ceres’s surface. Adda clenched her hands and gave herself a few minutes to breathe before she replied in text, a less stressful communication medium than speech.
It’s all right. I’ll wait in the surface part of the port for them. And if she fixed her implants, she’d coordinate with Iridian to meet the ZVs at whichever dock they chose. She collected her spare shirt and followed signs pointing to the Ceres Station port module.
Her comp buzzed against her hand with another message from Pel: “The good news is, that gives me time to catch up with you!”
Oh no. Adda stopped walking to tap out a reply: No. Don’t do that. If the ITA had anyone sharp on her and Iridian’s cases, then an agent would be assigned to watch Pel as soon as Iridian escaped from their prison. They might even be listening in on his messages, although the encryption she’d taught him to use had always protected their comms before.
I need you to find us a place to stay on Yăo Station instead, Adda typed. Somewhere outside its port module, if you can. And find out what crews are operating around Jupiter. And the Ceres syndicate presence too. Adda’s information was months out of date.
Yăo Station, a former observatory and current haven of criminals, refugees, and those who valued independence over safety, maintained an awkward orbit inside Jupiter’s magnetosphere. When she’d selected it as their fallback destination if anything went wrong on Vesta, she’d planned to update her information on the other criminal groups in the area and reach out to the most successful one. She and Iridian could parlay their skills into whatever was needed.
The ITA avoided the station for the same reason the Jovian pirate crews did: they had better use for ships equipped to travel near Jupiter, and the living conditions were reportedly miserable. The locals had threatened the ITA on the few occasions they’d visited. And now that Casey was determined to influence Adda, the station’s orbit was its most protective factor. It stayed so close to the planet that Patchwork access was almost impossible. The awakened intelligences would lose a massive amount of their information and processing powers without the Patchwork, and Adda suspected that would keep them away from Yăo too.
Pel’s eventual reply was, “You need me for all that?” He sounded stunned. She was asking him to go to a dangerous place alone, to get a head start on making the bad friends he would make there sooner or later. “I mean, you do, you’re right,” he continued. “I’m surprised because . . .” Aside from his sex life, in which success was definitely mixed, when left to make his own decisions, he got himself into serious trouble. They both knew it.
“I trust you, Pel,” Adda said aloud, so he’d hear that she meant it. Adda trusted him to do the best he could for both of them and Iridian, without question or remorse, and he’d never turn them in to the ITA.
“I won’t let you down, Sissy. I’ll tell you as soon as I find a place.”
She stopped walking long enough to tap out another text reply. There’s no reliable Patchwork access. Tell me if you can, but if you can’t, just meet us in port.
“Yeah, I’ll watch for you. But tell me when the ZVs pick you up, okay?”
The longer she walked, the less convenient the text conversation became. She switched her side to audio again, activating the comp’s mic. “I will. Be careful. Do you understand why we’re going there?”
The station around her was waking up. It was interesting how the sunsim was effective enough to keep the majority of Ceres Station residents on a traditional schedule, despite how far they were from the sun and how artificial their environment was. Her comp buzzed again. “Because our . . .” Pel’s audio, or Pel himself, paused. “Former friends are looking for us. And it’ll be hard to find us on Yăo.”
Everyone should have a hard time finding them there, for a while. “Exactly,” Adda replied. It was best not to reference the intelligences by name. It was bad enough that he kept using his nickname for Adda, which was less common than her actual name. “Keep me informed.”
His next message downloaded quickly. “Yeah, yeah, I will.” He sounded less annoyed than he would’ve been before everything had gone wrong on Vesta.
Still bent over her comp to hide its projection from any cams she walked under, she activated a less than legal, outdated copy of some surveillance disruption software. Her hair fell in her face and startled her, now that it was almost the brown she’d been born with. She’d had the color and style changed earlier in the day by a sympathetic cosmetologic gene editor in need of the basic comp decontamination Adda had provided in exchange. The new shade was nothing like her usual red and purple. The length disguised her face on cams, but she preferred it too short to get in her way.
Adda kept walking and opened documentation for her comms implants. Finding a way to reactivate them would be a fine project to work on while she stayed out of sight until Iridian and the ZVs arrived.
Half an hour later, she walked past part of a sandwich at an “outdoor” restaurant table. The purchaser had abandoned it, but just as Adda reached for it, a bot rolled in front of her and swept everything off the table and into a bin in its front. She sighed and kept walking, despite her rumbling stomach. It was her sophomore year of college after the scholarship ran out all over again, although this was better fare than she’d snatched off tables then. That was why the restaurants she was passing now had enough bots to keep the tables clear. It was a well-off part of town.
Nobody seemed to notice public cams and mics going offline for the seconds in which Adda would’ve been in range. She’d still appear on out of range cams, but letting her hair fall across her face should make facial recognition harder. The awakened intelligences would be watching every recording on Ceres. She wasn’t ready to talk with them yet. Eventually, she’d have to. They still wanted something from her, and they were endlessly persistent.
Adda wouldn’t be able to avoid the ITA, let alone the other intelligences, without AegiSKADA’s guidance. She placed another blue tablet under her tongue and leaned against a wall. This far outside the pedestrian traffic, she might complete a message addressed to AegiSKADA without being overheard or having others’ conversations recorded and added to her own. The street rippled from her feet to the edge of her vision and the color washed away from her surroundings.
She unwound the cord hidden in her necklace. One end plugged into the jack in her nose and the other into her stolen comp. An intermediary shimmered into vibrating gray existence before her, a vaguely feminine figure that solidified as the karovoxin tablets took effect. The intermediary would communicate the intent of her message to AegiSKADA more effectively than words alone.
“Please find me a place that nobody is using and that nobody will mind me using that I can get to without . . .” Not just without her hurting anyone, as she’d been about to imply. “Without anyone being hurt, and that’s likely to remain unoccupied and available without violence until two in the morning tomorrow.” That should be sufficient for Iridian and the ZVs to reach Ceres and contact her, as long as Pel remembered to give them Adda’s new contact information.
The intermediary shuffled toward her without even disappearing after sending the request. AegiSKADA had been following her progress, or more likely her cam disruption, in close enough to real time that it had to have installed part of itself somewhere on Ceres. When the intermediary pressed its incorporeal hand through the back of hers, a map with a location selected appeared on her comp. She sent the intermediary away.
The karovoxin tablet’s effects took longer to fade than a sharpsheet would’ve. Even after the dry streets stopped splashing underfoot, the world remained gray and muted as Adda reentered pedestrian traffic. Ceres Station’s public transit was free, but if one of the cams outside her blocking routine identified her, she’d rather not be trapped in a vehicle while ITA agents closed in.
She turned a corner, following the directions AegiSKADA gave to lead her to the safe place it’d found for her to hide in until Iridian and the ZVs arrived. Since the directions were still taking her toward the port module, she had her comp tell her everything it could find about the Ceres Station port management intelligence. Her comp fed the audio to the implant in her ear. The comms function was off, but the speaker and mic still worked.
Unfortunately, the intelligence running the port module ran the whole station. More specialized intelligences were also more distractible. She only had one practiced trick that’d get an overall station management intelligence’s attention. Creating a fake environmental emergency would shut down the docks, though. That wouldn’t help Iridian and the ZVs reach her. It might be more practical to wait until she interacted with this one, at which point she’d know which of its features she could make available.
She’d entered a part of town where the people wore older clothes made of cheaper fabrics, and their comp projections flickered. The map kept her walking. Eventually, the gateway separating the port module and the rest of the station came into view.
Adda must’ve seen the entrance to Ceres Station’s grav acclimation tunnel before, either when she’d visited Ceres with Iridian to get their comms implants installed or when Iridian, Adda, and Pel had arrived while Adda was ill. But when she and Iridian traveled together, Adda counted on her to navigate. If Adda had been paying attention the last time she’d been here, she would’ve remembered it.
Two wide metal pillars rose on either side of the road, with flat sides and an uneven arch between them for the road to pass beneath. It looked more like an ancient keyhole than a place to hang a door or gate. A feed of stationspace played behind and around the arch, projected more intensely, somehow, than the stationspace feed projected on the ceiling throughout Ceres Station. The ships docked at the orbital station hung still while lights blinked against the stars. Each pillar looked hundreds of meters tall rather than the three- or four-story maximum that the station’s structure should’ve allowed.
Adda didn’t want to make herself memorable by asking passersby how much of the gateway was real, to determine how much she was hallucinating. She walked between the pillars and into the grav acclimation tunnel, joining the people and bots going to the port module.
The other pedestrians looked much less nauseated than she felt when she emerged into the extremely low gravity of Ceres’s surface. A railing built into a wall helped her navigate around pedestrians, bots, and public transit to a recycling chute. She threw up as quietly as she could. There hadn’t been much in her stomach to begin with.
She only had to follow the map for a few more meters. When she did, her comp gave her the green arrived icon to show that the steel door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY in front of her was the one she wanted. According to the map, a workspace generator she could use to check out her comms implants was somewhere behind that door.
As she approached the door, it opened. A stocky woman stepped through, wearing a tired, serious expression Adda had seen on ZV Group soldiers. A taller man with a similar expression followed her. Both wore vests that read PAC, probably for Port Authority of Ceres. This area met no definition of “unoccupied” she’d ever heard of.
If Iridian were here, she’d know what to say, or she’d incapacitate these people somehow, but Adda was alone. She’d read about what a professional security tester had done in a situation like this, though. It was the only solution Adda could think of that might get her into the building without being arrested first.
She stepped back with her hand raised as if she’d been about to open the door herself. She frowned in theatrical anger at the two people who were about to run her over. The description she’d read suggested that she stand where she’d ended up after dodging the door instead of backing up to let them pass. She resisted all the instincts telling her to move out of these people’s personal space. In the scenario she was creating, they were in her way. The eye contact, and the surprise evident on their faces, made her weight shift toward her toes like she could physically run away from this interaction. Common courtesy felt like a very flimsy barrier between her and imminent arrest.
The man held the door open with an arm through the doorway, allowing her to step in unopposed while the woman said, “Sorry, ma’am.” Even though she wasn’t wearing a uniform, the technique had worked just like she’d read it would. Thrilling at the execution of a new trick for getting somewhere she didn’t belong, she accepted their invitation.
Inside, Adda wiped her sweating palms on her pant legs while she walked down a short hallway lit with bright overhead lights. After spending so much time in artificial environments, she missed the sunsim most buildings used indoors as well as outside. She had to squint to identify a door at the end of the hall and a door on either side. The one on the left opened to a row of five sockets for janitorial bots, with tanks of yellow fluid too thin to be pseudo-organic atop each bot.
The door on the right opened into a room with two workspace generators. Both were permanently installed supine models big enough for a person half a meter taller than Adda to lie on a padded bed that slid into the enclosed generating chamber. They were less than ten years old. Although supine models were a bit of a squeeze for Adda’s wide hips, she’d know her way around once she got in. She took an eager step toward them, but the in use message projected on the closest one froze her in place.
She’d asked for a place that wouldn’t be in use. Maybe it hadn’t been when AegiSKADA had selected it, or she hadn’t been clear enough. That was a risk when using intermediaries to talk to intelligences outside a workspace. Perhaps she should’ve gone straight to the Ceresian modder who put in her implants instead of tackling the problem herself, but that shop had made her uncomfortable when Iridian was there with her. Even if she’d wanted to go alone, it was far from the port, and expert services cost money she didn’t have.
Besides, Adda might be able to reactivate the comms implants herself. That was a more interesting way to spend her time than coping with the modder’s shop. She could ask AegiSKADA to alert her if conditions changed and she needed to leave before Iridian arrived.
Adda glanced down at her comp. A new message from the intelligence, or at least one with no sender information, said, Second generator.
The second generator was empty. Her shoes’ flimsy soles, which had her feet aching from the long walk, were perfect for moving quietly here, as she stepped around the occupied generator to the open one. She slid its padded table out far enough to let her climb on and lie down on her back. Installed generators were more comfortable than the mobile one she used to carry with her on every job. This would hide her, assuming nobody asked for her identification. Since AegiSKADA had been so specific about coming to this location and using this machine, she was counting on it to provide her access rights too.
She took another of the sharpsheet equivalents and pressed the icon to slide the table into the generator, pulling the curtain closed as she went. She set her comp-gloved hand in a cradle near her hip. It had been a long time since she’d gotten into a full hallucinographic workspace. The tablet was still taking effect, so she only briefly registered that the initial workspace was a training course selector, with prominent PAC logos on every surface, before her consciousness crashed out of the workspace.
She gasped and forced herself to keep her hands at her sides instead of grabbing her head. If she did that, she’d just smack her knuckles on the generator’s ceiling. Only two generators were installed here, which meant people were probably scheduled to use both of them throughout the day. Any moment, someone could come knocking on this generator, asking who was using it at their appointed time. Why in all hells had AegiSKADA sent her here?
She shut her eyes, relaxed, and breathed for a few minutes. So far, nobody had pulled her out of the generator. And now that she was here, there was no point in walking past multiple port authority agents to return to the street.
Imagery synchronization and interpretive action were, at this point, baked into her brain. If she stayed calm, she could turn the starting workspace away from its training functions and download the comms system documentation from her backup.
It was still possible that she could fix them without an implant workspace. She knew where to find one of those on Ceres, but she was hoping not to spend that much time travelling through public parts of the station, under the station intelligence’s scrutiny. She clicked through the three settings the switch embedded in her palm accommodated: mic on/speaker off, speaker on/mic off, and mic and speaker both off. Keeping the mic and speaker off would keep Adda from communicating anything she didn’t mean to and make it harder for her to accidentally damage them if she found a way into their settings.
She opened her eyes in the PAC’s workspace. Port authority logos peeled off the walls and floor and blew away in a wind she didn’t feel. The navy blue all over the workspace brightened and the walls curved inward, like she stood inside a bluish-purple balloon.
“Tell me if someone’s about to find me in here,” she said to AegiSKADA. The workspace and her comp’s software would translate that order into specific criteria and processes the intelligence would understand. Now she could concentrate on what she’d come here to do.
The thing she was trying to do was reactivate her implants, if she could do that in this general-purpose generator. Then she could talk to Iridian and coordinate the last stage of the journey back to her. In the workspace, Adda raised her hand and called forth wireframe diagrams of the implanted speaker and mic, magnified by a factor of ten. They hovered above a marble pedestal that would, in reality, tear through the flexible material that now formed this illusory room. The pedestal’s classical solidity represented the encryption she’d protected the diagrams with.
The diagrams disappeared. She blinked at the empty pedestal. It’d been a long time since she’d entered a workspace. Her subconscious must’ve gotten out of practice. She mentally reached for the implants she and Iridian had designed.
The implants and their pedestal disappeared. In reality, Adda’s mouth twitched in frustration. She willed the diagrams to return, but this time they didn’t even flicker. Their continued absence was unyielding, like representations an intelligence placed in the workspace.
“AegiSKADA, are you doing this?” she whispered aloud. It’d be unfortunate if the person in the workspace generator beside hers heard her talking to an infamously dangerous intelligence, but it’d be worse if that was the first message Iridian got from Adda after weeks of silence.
A figure snapped into existence in the workplace, silent as the passage of centuries. Its appearance should’ve surprised Adda, but a dreamlike sense of this figure having always been there overrode any startle response her brain might’ve had. In Adda’s workspaces, AegiSKADA made itself look like Pel as a child. This figure was too tall, an idealized feminine form, an ebony statue made by a master sculptor. Its head was as bare as Iridian’s, and its severe cheekbones, blank expression, and sapphire lights in dark eye sockets were familiar. This was the figure Casey used in Adda’s workspaces.
Adda felt frozen, unable to move, her mind a roiling, screaming fog of fear. “Let us.” The figure’s voice was feminine too, but nothing like Iridian’s. Casey’s was so deep that it shook Adda’s chest. “So we can make . . .”
The marble pedestal grew and twisted into metallic knots of towering machinery. Rows of towers climbed on and on and on to a sloping horizon. Rivers of pseudo-organic fluid flowed among the towers, more than Adda had ever seen in one place before, in its natural shade of pinkish gray. Light like bad sunsim reflected off the metal construct and dazzled Adda’s eyes. None of it suggested any meaning beyond what she saw.
The generator’s ceiling snapped into focus centimeters from Adda’s nose. She’d fallen out of the workspace. Her short fingernails dug into her palms. All this time she’d thought AegiSKADA had come from Vesta to free her, but it was Casey who’d listened to her pleas for help, her conversations with Pel, her plans to escape with Iridian, everything Adda had worked so hard to hide.
Her instincts told her to run, but where should she go? She didn’t remember the streets she’d just walked down under Casey’s guidance. She’d only been to Ceres Station once before. Recycling the stolen comp might make tracking Adda more difficult, and it would protect the personal information of its previous owner. But Casey could’ve inserted itself into the station security systems. If it had, it would track her without the comp. Wherever she went, Casey would be watching, waiting for Adda to make a mistake so it could renew its faded influence over her.
Adda’s chest was heaving and her heart beat so fast it was painful. She wasn’t ready to face Casey again, not after it’d made her attack Iridian. It must’ve brought her to this workspace generator to influence her again, and then . . . She had no idea what it would’ve made her do. Whatever Casey wanted, Adda did not want to do it. Not after its defensive reaction on Vesta. And what was that huge construct it’d made?
Now that her new comp held a detailed record of Casey’s contact with her through the workspace, she might be able to collect data related to those questions. That was more valuable than the meager protection she’d get from recycling the comp. She took a deep breath to calm down. Panic made it harder to catch intelligences’ influence attempts, and much harder to think of how to get away.
She had a few minutes before Casey realized that Adda was not going to enter a workspace with it. While she was considering her options, she outlined a routine that would follow Casey’s messages to their source, and continue to track it as far as possible. When she had time, she’d build the routine based on her outlined requirements.
She clenched her fists. The unfamiliar comp glove creaked against her palm. If she left the port module now, she’d have to come back in a few hours to meet Iridian and the ZVs. If she returned to the workspace, she could ask Casey what it wanted from her. She might also determine whether Casey had melded itself into the station’s original intelligence. Or it might influence her again, which seemed more likely.
“Fuck,” Adda whispered. The fist wearing her stolen comp glove shook against the cradle it rested on. She couldn’t go back into the workspace and she couldn’t run aimlessly.
However, there was a place she could run to. The unlicensed modder who’d put in her and Iridian’s comms implants was somewhere in Ceres Station. They’d gotten a privacy exemption from the cam coverage that Ceres Station typically required, the kind of exemption that medical offices had, because the modder’s clients got physical modifications done on places hidden under clothes. That was how they’d concealed an off-the-records implant modding setup in one of the shop’s back rooms. Even if Casey sent the ITA looking for Adda, the modder could hide her there.
Adda had to turn sideways to fit her hips through the modder’s narrow doorway, entering a small shop that smelled more sterile than it looked. Several ceiling light fixtures differed in size, color of light, and shape, but there was no danger of tripping over anybody in the two chairs on opposite sides of the room. In one, somebody was getting a tattoo on their inner thigh that necessitated no pants and very little in the way of underwear. This shop used a machine for that. Seeing the tattoo arm jittering between the person’s legs made Adda anxious to find something else to look at. Across the room, a human piercer leaned over the nose of somebody younger than Pel, surrounded by the customer’s scrappy-looking friends.
Although the comms system’s insertion had given Adda terrible headaches for a week afterward, neither her nor Iridian’s implants had caused any trouble after the insertion wounds healed. If anybody could reactivate the comms implants in the few hours before Iridian and the ZVs arrived, Kanti could. More importantly, the same partitioning that hid Kanti’s illegal modding setup would limit Casey’s access to the shop, and to Adda.
Someone much larger than Kanti stepped out of the shadows beside the door. Adda swallowed hard. “Hello. I need to talk to Kanti.”
The big person leaned forward a little, which made Adda take a step back and almost out the door. “Who’s asking?”
“Adda Karpe,” she said. “They’ve done work for me before.” Like Adda, Kanti had grown up on Earth, where “they” was a more common gender-neutral pronoun than “ve.” It was easy to translate among the myriad of languages spoken there.
The big person winced and glanced at the people surrounding the piercer’s chair. “Keep it the fuck down.” The person gave Adda an incredulous look. “Nobody would use that name around here if it didn’t belong to them, I guess. And you know how Kanti likes people to talk about them. Come on.”
Adda followed the person past the crowd around the piercer. Her guide paused to check on the person getting the tattoo, who appeared to be fine. The door in the back didn’t open on its own. The large person unlocked it and pulled it outward. Adda took a deep breath and followed the person into a storeroom, through a path that weaved around stacked crates and broken furniture, to two more doors in the back wall.
The big person opened one of those with a hand on a wall-mounted scanner. The room beyond was just barely long enough for a padded piercing table, which the big person effortlessly moved aside. Music made from voices saying nonsense words on a wavering beat swelled as a third door opened automatically on a hospital-clean space with an implant workspace generator.
“Kanti,” the big person rumbled. “Customer for you.”
Kanti’s bare brown feet wiggled on the workspace generator’s bed, and they slid the curtain open. When Kanti focused on Adda, they smiled big and got out of the generator to hug her instead of bowing. Adda grimaced. “The custom comms packages!” said Kanti. “Yeah, yeah, how you doing? Having any trouble with them?”
“Yes, actually.” Adda backed up until Kanti had to let go or fall over. That tendency to grab and touch instead of just looking was her main problem with Kanti. “Somebody turned the transmitter off. I need it turned back on, and then I’d really like to stay here for a while.”
Although Kanti’s face had twisted into a scowl, conversational context suggested that it wasn’t Adda they were angry with. “The bastards are up to their fuckery again, are they?” It was unclear which bastards Kanti was referring to. It might’ve been a general reference to people in positions of authority. Kanti’s speech patterns always confused her. When she and Iridian had gotten their implants installed, they’d chosen Kanti because of the modder’s reputation for skill and secrecy. Adda had hoped never to have to come back to this shop. “Well, I’ll show them,” Kanti said. “I’ll get those comms humming like they did when I first put them in.”
That was the best choice Adda had, but she felt obligated to clarify, “I don’t think I can pay you.”
Kanti placed a flash cleaner on the chair beside the generator and started pulling equipment from cupboards. “Don’t even think about it,” Kanti said. “It’s us against the bastards, and we can’t go bringing money into that.”
The sunsim had been on its night setting for hours by the time Adda returned to the Ceres Station streets. Kanti’s work on her implants had taken a while, and then she’d lost an hour thinking she was still on Sloane’s crew and had missed the Casey Mire Mire leaving Ceres for Vesta. It was shorter than most of her past episodes, but it’d kept her in Kanti’s shop when she should’ve been on her way to the port mod.
The doctors had warned her that her recovery wouldn’t be a linear process. Expecting setbacks didn’t make them any less frustrating. Iridian would be landing soon, and Adda had no patience for her brain tripping over itself.
She repeated the long walk back to the port module. This time she didn’t throw up after the grav acclimation tunnel. Iri, Adda subvocalized, thrilling at the fact that she could just talk to Iridian again, whenever she wanted. I’m in the port. Do you have a dock yet?
Babe, I love you, you did it, we’re almost there, Terminal Twenty-Nine, I love you, whispered over the implanted comms, as fast as Adda could process the words. It was so good to hear Iridian’s husky whisper again. Adda grinned and started looking for the designated terminal.
It took her a few minutes to find Terminal 29, since she didn’t want to access anything connected to the station intelligence. Aside from how dangerous it would be when she’d been so recently influenced, the intelligence would’ve recognized her neural implant net, and her biometrics if the clinic had been as thorough as they should’ve been when they added her to the contact blacklist. In the best-case scenario, the intelligence would ignore her attempted interaction. In the worst case, it’d report her attempt to the clinic.
When she finally found Terminal 29 without an intelligence’s help, the readout above its passthrough changed as she watched from Reserved to Arriving at passthrough: Not for Sale. Iri, Adda subvocalized, is your ship name Not for Sale?
That’s us. Iridian’s energetic subvocalization sounded elated. And when the passthrough door opened a few minutes later, her beautiful figure was framed in its doorway. The drab clothing couldn’t hide Iridian’s lithe form and elegant curves, and the wide-barreled, vaguely gun-shaped device in her hand somehow completed the picture.
“Adda Karpe, stay where you are.”
Adda spun to face the shouting man. He led a group of ITA agents running toward her, with four or five tiny drones flying in front of and above them. She ran for the passthrough, but she was nowhere near fast enough to get inside before the drones reached her. Please, gods, she was too close to let them separate her from Iridian again.
Iridian lifted her weapon so that the barrel pointed over Adda’s head. It made a loud clank and something whooshed past Adda. Whatever Iridian had just shot clattered against the metal floor behind her. When she glanced back, the flying drones had turned and were now rapidly approaching the ITA agents’ faces. Adda concentrated on running, not the pained cries behind her.
When Adda reached the passthrough, Iridian took one hand off the launcher to pull Adda inside with a firm grip on her arm. “I’ve got her!” Iridian yelled down the passthrough. “Go!”
The exterior passthrough doors shut out the engines’ mechanical howl. Iridian built up momentum by pulling them along on every handhold between her and the interior passthrough door. Since Adda had come within Iridian’s reach, Iridian hadn’t let go of her arm. Under the passthrough’s yellow lights, Iridian looked thinner and paler than Adda remembered, and she’d lost some of the muscle definition that marked her as a former soldier. She’d shaved her scalp within the past day or two, but a bruise darkened the side of her jaw. Even the comp glove on her hand was duller than her usual orange-patterned one.
The first half of the passthrough was painted with the icy blue Ceres Station port theme. The second half was the Not for Sale’s plain gray, with no markings. That was the half that’d leave with the ship. Adda barely had time to register that she’d left Ceres Station before Iridian pulled them both through the interior passthrough doorway and slapped the wall controls to shut it behind them.
The passthrough opened onto a T intersection. Instead of choosing one direction or the other, Iridian pressed Adda into the wall with a deep kiss that was over far too soon. “Babe, I love you, and I missed you,” Iridian said. She repeated the sentiments while she secured Adda into a tie-down station, quickly kissing each part of Adda she strapped in.
The ship lurched. Adda grasped a wall handhold and shut her eyes. She hated this part of every trip. “I missed you, too,” Adda murmured in what she hoped was a soothing tone. Gravity tried to pull Iridian away from her, but Iridian clutched the straps on Adda’s tie-down station and pulled herself close. Now that she and Iridian were together, everything would be all right, somehow. “I missed you so much.”
“Aw, you two are so cute,” somebody said from Adda’s right.
She opened her eyes to peer around Iridian’s shoulder. Adda had been so focused on Iridian, after all these weeks without her, that she’d overlooked at least 20 soldiers in full black-and-yellow armor secured in tie-down stations like hers all along the hallway in either direction. Yellow Zs and Vs on the black chest plates gleamed in glaring sunsim. Most helmets weren’t projecting the faces inside, although some did. It’d been a long time since they’d all been on Barbary Station together, and that was where she should’ve recognized them from. Distinguishing between faces had been difficult even before Adda chemically disarranged her brain.
After a second, Adda paired the familiar voice who’d commented on her and Iridian with the face in the largest armored suit. “Thank you,” she said to Rio. She’d probably spoken too softly to be heard above the engine noise, with her voice as choked up as it was. In the faceplate projection, Rio smiled like she got the message anyway. Adda and Iridian had finally, finally gotten back to each other, and Adda would do anything to make sure they were never separated again.