Mutiny at Vesta (Volume 2) (Shieldrunner Pirates, Band 2) - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

R.E. Stearns is the author of Barbary Station and Mutiny at Vesta. She wrote her first story on an Apple IIe computer and still kind of misses green text on a black screen. She went on to annoy all of her teachers by reading books while they lectured. Eventually she read and wrote enough to earn a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction from the University of Central Florida. She is hoping for an honorary doctorate. When not writing or working, R.E. Stearns reads, plays PC games, and references internet memes in meatspace. She lives near Orlando, Florida, with her husband, a computer engineer, and a cat.

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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...