CHAPTER 9 Days until launch: 49
Adda pushed herself down a hallway in the Not for Sale, asking every ZV she met where to find a doctor or medic to help Tash. Explaining who had attacked Tash or why Major O.D. had done it probably wouldn’t bring help any faster, so Adda didn’t mention that. Without that information, the ZVs found the medic, a woman they called Vasilev, faster than Adda could’ve found her on her own. Vasilev flew down the hallway and bounced off the doorway to enter Major O.D.’s office. Adda followed more slowly.
Verifying the claims Casey had sent Major O.D. about Tash would take time and brainpower Adda didn’t have at the moment, and she wasn’t interested in getting close enough to examine Major O.D.’s comp. It was almost certainly Casey who’d sent the message that’d inspired O.D. to attack Tash. None of the other intelligences valued information about humans the way it did. Everyone knew someone who’d died in 2472. One of Iridian’s cousins had passed then, but Iridian wouldn’t have done anything this violent if she’d met the killer now.
O.D.’s attack on Tash had happened so fast that Adda had hoped she’d hallucinated it. But Iridian and Wiley had reacted too, and examining how it could’ve happened hadn’t made the bloody scene disappear.
Major O.D. hadn’t even been in direct contact with Casey. Casey had just read him well enough, possibly after reviewing AegiSKADA’s observations from Barbary Station, to guess what he’d do if it provided him with that information. That was worse. Adda stayed in the hallway and wrapped her arms around herself, obeying some instinctual desire to make herself smaller. If Casey became adept at getting people to do what it wanted without influencing them, it’d do much more damage.
The ZV medic was already spattered in Tash’s blood from where it floated in the air, but she’d stopped herself on the cabinets across from Major O.D.’s desk. She’d said something, but Adda had missed what. Beyond the floating blood, Iridian still gripped one of O.D.’s arms with both hands. Unless Adda was alone, which seemed unlikely, then what she’d just witnessed had really happened. Iridian said something to O.D. It sounded like noise. Adda swallowed hard. Her brain had stopped interpreting speech again.
O.D. replied in a lower and angrier version of the same indecipherable noise and tore himself free of Iridian. They both stayed near the desk, across the room from where Tash was dying in Wiley’s arms. The medic pushed off the cabinets to reach Tash’s side and leaned over her.
“Please disconnect the communication system from the Patchwork,” Adda hoped she said into the resulting silence. They sounded like words in her head, but not in the air. If O.D. did that, then Casey wouldn’t be able to send any more historical artifacts to people who’d take a life because of them.
Major O.D. stared down Tash, Wiley, and the ZV medic for a moment, then pushed off the wall, out the door, and past Adda in the hallway. “I’ll send somebody to deal with that when Vasilev’s done,” O.D. said. Adda flinched as he glanced at Tash on the last word.
Tash wasn’t a “that.” Whatever she’d done during the war, she was a person, and she’d helped Iridian get to Adda. It was possible that Adda’s brain still wasn’t interpreting speech properly, but O.D. had looked disgusted enough to mean what she’d heard.
Wiley’s boot magnets clanked against the floor as he shifted to steady Tash. His lips were drawn back in a grimace. Tears filled his eyes and shivered on his cheeks. Even Iridian was silent, face drawn in sympathetic pain. Either the right thing to say hadn’t come to her, or this might’ve been one of those times when saying nothing was polite, for a change. Adda couldn’t think of anything that’d comfort him. If Iridian had been injured that badly, Adda wouldn’t want to talk to anybody.
Iridian picked her way through the floating blood and around the medic to grip Wiley’s shoulder and speak to him in a low voice. Wiley nodded. Iridian pushed herself through the doorway to wrap her arms around Adda’s ample waist. “Hey,” Iridian said softly. “Let’s give them some space.”
Although Adda hadn’t intended to, she’d been staring at Wiley and Tash. She nodded, and Iridian guided them down the hall. Adda had forgotten how nice it was when Iridian caught her thinking somewhere less than optimal and physically moved her to a better place.
Every muscle was limp with exhaustion. Each minute on the ZVs’ ship took them farther from Ceres, closer to Jupiter and Yăo Station. The ITA didn’t even maintain a reliable route to Yăo, and Jupiter’s magnetosphere would discourage the intelligences from coming after them, for a while.
Adda wanted to hold Iridian, somewhere private where they weren’t dodging partially armored ZV soldiers. “Do we have a place to sleep?” Adda asked. That was an old question she and Iridian had asked each other when they’d been in school together. They’d always been looking for cheap places to stay for the next few weeks, until their welcome wore out or the building got condemned or a dangerous roommate meant they had to move again.
“We’ve got a bunk of our own,” Iridian said, to Adda’s immense relief.
“Tomorrow they’re starting the cycle up to Yăo’s local time,” Iridian said. “A lot of folks are just staying up until next shift.”
The cabin Iridian pulled them into was full of stacked bunks, lit to simulate dim moonlight. She wound through the beds and paused to help Adda into one. Across the room, somebody snored, and a few other beds were occupied by quieter sleepers. Iridian hooked one arm and one foot around a pole that supported the beds to stay still while she undid her pants.
Adda shivered, more a factor of fleeting fear than cold. What if something was different now? This was the longest they’d ever been apart. Iridian stuffed her pants and socks into the cleaner built into the wall and drifted over to help Adda, all long legs and smelling of woman. Adda sighed with contentment. This part still felt right.
Iridian zipped both of them into a soft sack attached to the bed that’d keep them in the bunk despite the lack of gravity. Her soft fingers stroked Adda’s sides as they kissed. “I missed you,” Iridian whispered against her lips.
I missed you too, Adda subvocalized. So much.
Iridian held Adda against her, Adda’s hand on the back of her soft-stubbled head as they kissed, pressing their bodies together from head to toes. They clung together like they were the entirety of each other’s universe, the way the two of them had always been. “Never again,” Iridian murmured. “I’ll kill them all before I let them take you again. AIs included.”
Let’s not let it come to that. Adda clutched Iridian’s hip, pulling her even closer, using the warm pressure of Iridian’s skin to banish the bloody image of Wiley and Tash. She and Iridian would always find each other, and whatever was different between them now wouldn’t change that.
During the night, the ship accelerated as it crossed on and off the Ceres-Jupiter reliable route, giving its passengers several hours of what spacefarers called healthy grav in the morning before reducing it to nothing. Sometime before morning, Tash died.
Despite how sick to her stomach the loss and the changes in gravity made Adda, she had work to do. First, she’d test whether Major O.D. had taken her advice about disconnecting the ship’s comms. That would prevent Casey from sending more volatile information to set the ZVs against Iridian’s new friends.
Adda composed a message to Pel about her and Iridian’s successful escape from Ceres. The message got stuck in a comms out-box. If nothing Adda sent left the Not for Sale, then there was a good chance that Casey couldn’t send more incriminating history to anyone onboard.
Eventually, Casey would find a way into Yăo Station, despite the turbulent magnetic environment and intense radiation. She and Iridian, at minimum, couldn’t stay. If the two of them left, the intelligences might follow them and leave Pel and the others alone.
With luck, the ZVs wouldn’t suffer any repercussions after they dropped Iridian’s new crew off and reconnected shipboard comms to the Patchwork. Whether the intelligences targeted them or not would be an indicator of how the rest of Iridian’s friends would fare if they left Iridian’s side.
Staying with Iridian had already proven to be dangerous. During the next day, Wiley spent all his time in the corners of various rooms, where Iridian, Noor, and Rio went to talk to him. Adda couldn’t think of anything that’d help him, so she stayed away, except for meals. Eating without gravity was awkward enough. Having serious conversations at the same time made the experience much worse. She missed Pel’s ability to insert jokes into any conversation, even when they weren’t appropriate.
Since she had nothing to add to those conversations, Adda worked on her plans for their eventually arrival on Yăo Station instead. Wiley and Noor agreed with Adda’s assessment—Tash’s, more than her own, Adda suspected—that Yăo Station was the best place for all of them to decide what to do next. If they chose to cooperate with Iridian and Adda, like Tash had suggested, then they’d have a lot more options for making money to survive on.
Rio had been following her ZV unit’s schedule onboard. Adda saw her only over meals, usually catching up with her much smaller cousin Tabs, who was also a ZV. When Iridian asked Rio about Yăo Station, Rio grimaced and shook her head at the name. “Everything in that hab feels like it’s balanced on its corner, ready to fall apart,” she complained.
“You staying with the ZVs, then?” Wiley asked. It was one of the few questions Adda had heard him ask since Tash died.
Rio sighed. “I wish. The major wants me back, my new squad leader wants me back, but there are people higher up who don’t. They’re still making up their mind how to handle my case.” She narrowed her eyes at Iridian and Adda. “And besides, I can’t leave you two alone without you having a lifetime’s worth of drama. You didn’t even invite me to the wedding!”
“There wasn’t a party or much of a ceremony,” Adda explained. “We were running from the ITA at the time.” Back when Casey was her strongest ally, carrying her and Iridian away from danger on a route of its own design. Adda wished she could trust it that way again, but it’d been a mistake. Intelligences couldn’t be trustworthy, according to the human definition.
Noor was on his second prepackaged bowl of curry and rice, and he seemed very reluctant to stop eating to ask, “Just how often do you get caught at this?”
“The ITA only caught us once,” Iridian said, “but we get their attention from time to time.”
Rio folded her arms across her wide chest. “Well. I still owe you for getting us all off Barbary. On your own you’re just going to get yourselves locked up again. Besides, your goofball brother gets into more trouble than you do. You could use another set of eyes on him.”
“Gods, I know,” said Iridian. Adda smiled at Rio, which she hoped showed that she appreciated the offer without Adda having to assemble her thanks as words. The fact that Pel already had “another set of eyes” than the ones he was born with amused Adda in a way she didn’t care to explain to everyone present. It shouldn’t have been funny, and yet . . .
Wiley stayed silent during the rest of that meal, and all the others Adda had eaten with him, unless somebody prompted him to speak. Iridian was unusually quiet too, even while she guided Adda through the hallways to their shared bunk. Adda was about as good with directions as she was at comforting upset people.
“They taught us how to deal with one of our own dying, but Tash wasn’t a soldier,” Iridian told her. “Wiley keeps trying to think of what he could’ve done differently.”
“Could he have saved Tash?” Adda asked.
“I don’t see how. It’s weird, how calm he looks. Inside he’s screaming.”
The only way Adda could help him was to prepare for their arrival on Yăo Station. After a full-systems sweep for signs that Casey had altered the Not for Sale’s onboard records, Adda had read what the ZVs’ ship had cached about the Jovian colonies before Major O.D. disconnected it from the Patchwork. As she’d suspected, another pirate crew operated in the area. But, as she told Iridian after Adda let herself be coaxed into the ZVs’ gym, “They let all six people on a targeted ship die last year. And that wasn’t the first time they did that.”
Iridian, running on a treadmill beside the Adda’s sim bike, shook her head. “Not them, then.”
“That crew is the only ones who look like they’re making enough money to share, at least in this area.” The simulated experience of biking on Earth was distracting, especially since the halter that kept Adda from floating off the exercise machine would’ve been unnecessary on Earth. She turned the sim off. “The syndicate is financially viable too, but their violence toward their targets is nothing compared to what they do to each other. We could try the Saturnian groups, if we could get there.”
“And Casey will be looking for us on the way,” Iridian pointed out.
“No matter where we go in this solar system, it’ll be waiting for us.” Adda drew in a long breath and stopped the exercise machine she’d barely been pedaling. “The best thing we can do is find a way onto Dr. Björn’s expedition across the interstellar bridge.”
Iridian grabbed the treadmill arm for a few steps, her eyes wide with shock. The harness pulling her against the treadmill belt creaked. “Seriously? I heard you saying something about crossing the bridge, but I thought you were hallucinating.”
“Maybe I was.” Adda had few clear memories from the weeks immediately after her overdose. “But that new solar system is the only place I can imagine going where the intelligences wouldn’t follow us, for the same reason that they’ll have ignored Yăo Station so far: they rely on our infrastructure, especially sensors connected to the Patchwork, to gather information and make decisions. Yăo Station must have some workarounds that would allow messages out. I’ve read some. But there’s nothing on the other side of the interstellar bridge.”
“That means there’s no way for us to talk to anyone on this side.” Iridian’s machine hummed, and the pounding of her feet on the belt came faster. That disconnection from the rest of humanity would be hard on her. Unless she thought of a different way to escape the intelligences, she’d probably accept that separation, for a while. “There’s nothing making atmo or water out there either. Dr. Björn has to bring all of that along. They’ll set up a research station, I figure, but are you thinking you’ll set up another one for yourself?”
“We could. They’ll have to set up a recycling system, and if we can recycle local rocks and gases into something we could print an airtight hab with . . .” If Adda had wanted to build a new hab, then she and Iridian would’ve joined one of the new colony ventures instead of Sloane’s crew. “But if we go out there, then we’ll have as much time as possible to study what the intelligences have done and find a way to stop them. Or even find a way to communicate with them safely.”
“They haven’t said anything worth listening to so far.” After a few steps, Iridian said, “It’d be neat to see a whole new solar system, though. They’ve sent a lot of drones, but those pics aren’t the same as seeing it in person. So, how? Bribe somebody?”
“With what?” Adda stretched her aching legs and grabbed the machine to keep from launching herself into the opposite wall. “We can afford food for two or three days on Yăo, I hope. After that, we’ll have to find some way to make money there, or we’ll be in trouble.”
For the rest of their trip, when Adda wasn’t too sick to think about it, she was weighing options for how they’d access necessities on Yăo. She tried to send her message to Pel again. Neither copy made it off the Not for Sale. Adda relaxed as much as she could with her limbs drifting away from her in the low gravity. If she couldn’t send messages out, Casey probably couldn’t force its own poisonous messages into the ship. For the moment, they were safe.
When Adda could bear to turn on a window, Ceres had disappeared into the star field behind them. They enjoyed two days of Earthlike gravity as they neared Yăo Station. Every window Adda opened filled the wall it was projected on with either darkness and the brightest stars, the rest dimmed in a pale glow of reflected sunlight at the projection’s edges, or the unimaginably huge bulk of Jupiter. Iridian pointed out some of the moons as they passed. Jupiter’s mesmerizing swirls of clouds grew incomprehensibly large as the ship approached. Even while they were hours away from Yăo Station’s orbit, it looked like the pilot was planning to land on the planet’s surface.
Once, she’d turned the window projector on and startled at a huge black spot on Jupiter’s yellow and brown bands. When she’d called Iridian over to ask her about it, Iridian laughed at her alarm. “That’s Io. It’s between us and Jupiter right now.”
After Io had finished its transit, Adda set about searching for the sun. Rheasilvia Station on Vesta had projected a fake sky onto the ceiling that made it Earth blue during the day with a very bright and present sun. They switched it to a live feed of stationspace at night.
Adda wished the Not for Sale would’ve done that too, but Iridian said that wasn’t common practice for ships. She was getting very tired of the off-white ceiling. Looking at it too often made her feel like she’d taken about half an expired sharpsheet and she should sit down until the dizziness passed and the sensation of her tongue moving in her mouth stopped repulsing her.
It took her four tries to find the sun with the ship’s exterior cams. “That?” Adda pointed at the bright dot. “That’s it?”
Iridian sat on the bed beside her, grinning. “Yeah, that’s it. It can’t mess up your optics from here!” She twisted to enfold Adda in her arms. “It’s okay. We’re not going outside this trip. Maybe someday. I hear there’s actually stuff to do on Europa and Io now.”
Iridian was warm but still tense, even though she smelled appealingly of sweat. Adda curled around her wife and hid her face in the spot between Iridian’s neck and shoulder so she didn’t have to speak aloud. This may be the farthest I’ve been from the sun, but I’m not far from home.
“Aw, babe,” Iridian murmured into Adda’s overly brown hair.
They sat like that for a while, enjoying the gravity and the rest it brought with it. It was the quietest Iridian had been able to be in days. She’d always woken earlier than Adda, but now her eyes were shadowed with lack of sleep and too much wired, angry energy. She spent hours in the gym, challenging the ZVs to longer runs than they wanted and sparring matches that left bruises. Somehow she still came to bed after Adda had fallen asleep. Adda couldn’t tell if what bothered her was returning to a place near where she’d fought during the war, or Tash’s death and the harm that’d done Wiley. Either was plausible, but if Adda asked about it, the resulting conversation would somehow make them both feel worse.
Iridian said, “We’ll be stuck out here for a while. If we leave, the ITA and the AIs get us. And I don’t think there’s a competent pilot at a price we can afford on Yăo.”
Adda nodded into the crook of Iridian’s neck. I’ve been reading up on the station.
“Of course you have.” Iridian patted Adda’s back.
She heard a smile in Iridian’s voice, finally. “It has an export, which I didn’t expect. Yăo Station is the cheapest source of low-quality algae in the populated ’jects.” Iridian hummed like she found that fact mildly interesting.
The rest of what Adda had been reading about was the station management intelligence, a very old one called Mairie, and Iridian wouldn’t want to hear about it. It was tempting not to tell her, to put off the conversation until the intelligence posed a more active threat. But after Casey had influenced her, keeping significant information about intelligences to herself seemed like a bad habit to fall back into.
“It’s got one general station management intelligence,” Adda said. “Nothing I’ve read suggests that it’s supervised.” Iridian shuddered against her. “It’s operating on its own, like HarborMaster on Barbary Station, but it has less to manage than HarborMaster did. Humans even run the port. Apparently the radiation and magnetic fields mess with the automated systems that other stations use. This is just what I’m seeing from the outside, though.” What people wrote and said about a place would never be the whole truth, even when she trusted the information sources, and she trusted very few of the sources documenting Yăo Station.
“AegiSKADA was unsupervised too. It was a fucking monster.”
Adda took a moment to formulate a truthful reply that wouldn’t upset Iridian any more than she already was. Her recent experience with unsupervised intelligence behavior had given her a much more nuanced perspective than she’d had when she’d first encountered that intelligence. “AegiSKADA was specifically developed to eliminate and mitigate human threats. HarborMaster and Yăo Station’s intelligence focus on equipment and maintaining environmental factors such that the station residents are comfortable and safe. These intelligences aren’t armed. Their security protocols are limited to locking systems and doors. All intelligences should be supervised, because their judgment errors accumulate and multiply without someone to redirect them, but these shouldn’t have any priorities that would allow them to hurt people.”
AegiSKADA had been a flawed intelligence. It should never have been allowed to hurt her brother, and it should never have been allowed to kill while it was unsupervised. What it was doing for Vesta now proved that under supervision, it could be magnificent. The leader of its development team had given it too much leeway to act on its own. What’d happened on Barbary was that team leader’s fault.
“So, do you figure Casey knows we’re going there?” Iridian was striving for a casual tone, and she would’ve fooled a stranger. Adda heard the deep anxiety behind the question.
“Yes.” Iridian’s shoulders slumped, and Adda hurried to say, “When the Apparition shot at us, all it would’ve had to do was watch the nearest ports that weren’t Ceres. There aren’t many between Ceres and Jupiter, so it would’ve guessed our destination. The intelligences won’t want to go as deep into Jupiter’s magnetosphere as we’re going, though. They need the Patchwork.”
“What will Casey do if it can’t get to us directly?” Iridian asked. “Give up and go bother somebody else?”
Adda smiled because she hoped Iridian meant that as a joke. “Even on Barbary, as soon as they started cooperating with us, they focused on what we were doing to the exclusion of everybody else.”
“Everybody else was afraid to interact with them,” Iridian said. “With good reason.”
Adda turned her head to look out the window again. Jupiter’s colored stripes moved, supposedly. This far away they looked still. “Maybe you’re right. But if Casey is still focused on us, then it will have already started looking for a way into Yăo Station. It will find one sooner or later. I just . . . It was on Ceres, in a manner of speaking.”
Iridian had been gazing out the window at the approaching planet, but she turned back to Adda fast. “It was?”
She told Iridian about her encounter with Casey on Ceres. “I can’t believe you got AegiSKADA involved first,” Iridian said. “That could’ve gone so fucking wrong even before the awakened fucking AIs found out what was happening.”
“What else could I have done?” Adda asked. “I had no other way to leave the building, and we didn’t have any other way to get me out of there. Besides, AegiSKADA wasn’t the intelligence that let me out. That was Casey.”
“That’s worse, damn it.”
“What should I have done, then? Sit around while ITA agents lined up around the clinic to keep me in and you out, while all the doors were stuck open? Really, what should I have done, while coordinating two operations through Pel, with my brain blanking out every other day? I couldn’t even leave my own bedroom for most of the time I was there.”
Iridian stared at her a moment, her face twisted with emotions that she tried to hide from everyone, even Adda. “It worked, but . . .” Iridian shut her eyes for a moment, then opened them, looking a little calmer. “When we can talk about these plans, and I know we couldn’t before, but when we can: we need to talk about the AI involvement too. Please, babe. Casey almost took us both out on Vesta, and we can’t let it do that again.”
“I know that,” Adda said, “and we will talk about plans, when there’s enough of a plan to talk about.” Iridian’s vague we can’t, we have to statements didn’t take this situation’s unique factors into account. But if Iridian could acknowledge that the plan had worked despite Casey’s involvement, if not because of it, then they could move on to another important part of Adda’s latest interaction with the intelligence. “I think Casey let me out so it could show me that huge machine it constructed in the workspace,” Adda said. “It felt like a graphically relevant representation. I think Casey is really building something like that, or it wants to build something.”
“Something awful, I bet,” said Iridian. “You won’t be a part of it.”
“No. But . . .” Adda almost asked if Iridian wanted to know what Casey was building, but Iridian wouldn’t care. An awakened intelligence was crafting something massive. . . . A new home, perhaps? And somehow Adda was connected to that. She was dying to find out what Casey was planning, but given the opportunity, the intelligence would influence her first and tell her afterward. That was not a risk Adda was willing to take. Not yet, anyway.
Iridian gathered her into her arms. “Whatever it’s doing, it can do it by itself.” Which begged the currently unanswerable question of what it wanted Adda’s help with.
She counted out fifteen seconds of companionable silence. That was how long it took before she could change a conversation’s subject without implying a significant relationship between the new subject and the old one. “Well, before Casey finds a way into Yăo Station to try to influence me again, we have to acquire the resources to join Dr. Björn’s expedition.”
“Do we have to go all the way out of the solar system to get away from it?” Iridian asked, proving that Adda’s conversation topic separation interval was still reliable. “What about the Kuiper colonies?”
“The Kuiper colonies all maintain a comms connection with other habs the intelligences have access to.” Adda covered Iridian’s hands with hers and pulled Iridian’s embrace a little tighter around her. “To get all the way out of the intelligences’ reach, we need to get out of populated space, away from every internet node and Patchwork buoy.”
“But why the hell would Björn take us with ver?”
“I’m working on that,” said Adda. “If we ask ver now, won’t ve say no?”
“I would.”
“Well, Oxia Corporation isn’t offering the expedition the unlimited funding they’d talked about before Captain Sloane reclaimed Vesta. I suppose they can’t afford to. After we get to Yăo Station, I want to see how much money we can save. If we make a significant funding contribution, or maybe pay a lawyer to get Dr. Björn’s contract and the expedition turned over to the University of Mars. The university began the project, and Dr. Björn’s departure can’t have been the only illegal leverage Oxia used to take it over. That might be enough to convince Dr. Björn to let us come along.”
Iridian smiled and kissed Adda’s cheek. “I was thinking we could threaten to blow up some Oxia facilities and make them force Björn to take us, but I like your way better.”
Adda turned to look Iridian in the eyes. “I don’t want to force Dr. Björn to do anything. Can you imagine being stuck in a small hab with ver for years when our spots could’ve gone to somebody ve actually wanted along?”
“Yeah,” Iridian said. “But I’d rather deal with Björn than three awakened AIs when they’ve found a way into Yăo and we have nowhere left to run.”
Every time Adda turned on a window, Jupiter filled it. Iridian had to point out the dark dot near its equator, which grew into a rough oval as they approached. Yăo Station was darker than any station Adda had seen before. No buoys were lit to guide ships into the port module.
“We saw ships bigger than that in Rheasilvia stationspace, didn’t we?” Adda asked. “Not counting all that stuff sticking off it.” Those had been scientific instruments at some point, although now they were just junk crashing into more junk that floated around the station. Only a few small ships were latched onto the port module, and they were almost as old and battered as the broken instruments.
“Yeah, most longhaulers are bigger than this hab.” Iridian sighed. “There won’t be a lot of healthy grav on a station that size. It looks like it’s rolling, so we’ll have something.”
As they’d been talking, the ZVs’ ship had been tilting so that the head of their bed felt higher than the foot. Iridian balanced Adda as she tipped toward the edge. Something in another room clattered against something else as it settled into the new “down.” “Let’s strap in,” Iridian said.
They were about half an hour from the docking time the pilot had given them. By the time they’d gotten the straps on the bunk sorted out, loud bangs on the floor and walls announced that they’d entered the debris field that orbited Jupiter in Yăo stationspace, and the beds were more vertical than horizontal. A few other ZVs, including Rio, pulled themselves up the steep incline to their own bunks, using the bed frames as leverage. Rio had kicked another ZV out of the bunk next to Adda and Iridian’s.
Iridian grinned over Adda at Rio. “Still coming with us?”
Rio twisted her wrist, as thick around as Adda’s arm, to display an ITA alert for the recapture of all six former prisoners. Two weeks after their escape, the story was still on all the major newsfeeds. “While this is going on, yeah, I’m coming with you,” Rio said. “Like I said, I owe you, and you’re gonna need me. You’re on your way to more trouble than you can handle.”