She stalked from the room, slamming the door behind her. Shun let out a thready laugh. “Well. I suppose now I have a deeper understanding of why the Protectorate never appealed to me.”
“They are good people,” Biran said. “They don’t…”
“Don’t understand that this may be our last play before slaughter,” Olver said. He ran a hand across the top of his head, shoulders stooping forward. As tired as Biran felt, Olver looked the part.
Vladsen cleared his throat. Biran flinched, having nearly forgotten that he hadn’t stormed out with the rest. “While I understand the misgivings of the others,” he said in a soft voice. Biran realized he hadn’t heard the man speak much since Lavaux’s death.
As the youngest member of the Protectorate before Biran, Vladsen had looked up to Lavaux as a kind of mentor—had even seemed to foster a friendship with him that extended beyond the usual political dance of the Protectorate. Whatever the man’s feelings on Lavaux’s betrayal, Biran had never asked. Vladsen had receded after that day, fading into the background of these meetings. Possibly to avoid drawing attention to himself and, thus, suspicion as a known associate of Lavaux, but looking at him now…
Lines creased the edges of Vladsen’s lips. His curly, bouncy hair lay flat against his skull, and shadows had taken up residence under his eyes. He’d been shaken that day. Hurt, and because the person he mourned was a traitor, he’d never been free to express any of that pain. To seek help. Dios, Biran could be so much up his own ass at times. He should have noticed. He knew what that pain was like. He could have helped.
“I agree that this secondary gate may be Ada’s best course of action to preserving peace with Icarion. If I can help, then I will be a champion for your cause.”
Olver looked pointedly at the wall. “I cannot see how this proposal could be brought to the High Protectorate through normal means at this point.”
“I see,” Biran said slowly. Director Olver wouldn’t oppose them, but neither could he be their channel to Okonkwo.
Shun opened her mouth and pointed at the asteroid image, preparing some convincing argument, but Biran caught her eye and shook his head. Her brow furrowed, but she put her hand back down.
“If you three will excuse me,” Olver said, standing with deliberate care. “I have other matters to see to. Biran, please continue… doing what you do best.”
“Understood, Director.”
When the door shut, Shun cut him a look. “What was that about?”
Biran sighed. “The director cannot be involved in, or be seen to endorse in any way, what I’m about to do next.”
“Which is?” Vladsen pressed.
Biran grinned lightly. “Why, I am the Speaker for the Keepers of Ada, and I am going to Speak, my fellow Keeper. Are you with me?”
“Oh.” Vladsen cracked a smile. “Oh yes.”
CHAPTER 24
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
EVERYBODY LIES ON JANUS
Sometime during introductions, Jules vanished. Maybe it was the drugs or the exhaustion that had made Tomas miss when she’d ducked out of the lab.
That he’d missed her leaving rankled, and he couldn’t quite pin down why that was, but he’d learned long ago that if anything raised his hackles, it was worth paying attention to. Like Jules staring at a corner of the ceiling, as if someone were watching them all from above.
He really should find his room to rest and recover. But now, when he was addled and new, was the best time to pretend to get “lost” in the station. The longer he was here, the clearer his head, the less oops-wrong-room moments he could get away with.
Tomas excused himself into the hallway and walked far enough to get out of the way of foot traffic, then leaned against the wall and brought up the station’s provided schematics. He found them to be an interesting fantasy.
Not only were entire station levels missing from the layout provided, but a few paths he’d already taken had vanished. He tried to flip over to the engineering side of the schematics—HVAC, wiring—and wasn’t so much rejected as completely ignored. The screen didn’t even flicker when he tried to flip it over.
He put in a request for those schematics, knowing it would be denied, but it’d be a perfectly natural thing for a man like Novak to want to have a look at. Engineers of all stripes were curious about how the stations they lived on operated. Especially the life-support systems.
Tomas reached for the menu that hid his secret suite of Nazca-made programs, and hesitated, finger hovering above the touch.
Nazca programs were standard procedure on all missions. An agent too busy or otherwise specialized to hack into the data they needed could rely upon the good developers of home base serving them up a plethora of programs robust enough to break most non-Keeper security systems.
But there was a catch. Accessing those programs in a controlled environment, where cameras were always watching, risked revealing their presence and blowing one’s cover. There were programs to access the cameras and edit that visual out, but they were useless if an intelligence was keeping watch real-time.
On Bero, he hadn’t touched a single program until the station Farion-X2.
He moved his finger away from the menu and turned the motion into a stretch. Not yet. Not until he could be sure. Then he’d crack this station, and all its secrets, like an egg.
With his hands in his pockets, he set off at a slow stroll, affecting a sway and stagger that would lend credence to anyone watching him that the tranq was still riding his system, which wasn’t entirely a farce. His wristpad vibrated once, indicating he should take a left turn to get to his room, but he kept on strolling, sticking to the central corridor. If anyone stopped him, then he’d say he was out stretching his legs.
As he walked, he pulled up the data he’d skimmed from introductions to his colleagues. None of their faces were known to him, none of them had any previous connection with either of the Lavauxs. If they’d had a connection with Jules, he didn’t know, because he hadn’t bothered to check.
That pissed him off. There had been nothing to indicate that the young woman had anything to do with Rainier. Nothing, except the dead Keeper at her feet. It had meant little to him at the time, he’d been too busy trying to wiggle their way out of SecureSite and Laguna’s clutches, but he hadn’t heard about the death of Keeper Nakata and that was unusual, wasn’t it? He hadn’t had a lot of time to pursue newsfeeds once he’d gotten off of Bero, but the death of Keeper Lavaux should have triggered comparisons in the media, and that he had definitely been watching.
There was a connection. Some thread between Jules, Rainier, Keeper Lavaux, and Keeper Nakata, and it had everything to do with this station.
“Mr. Novak.” Lt. Davis stepped out of a door in front of him, too close and too precise to be a coincidence. “Your rooms are in the other direction. Do you require an escort?”
“Just walking off the sedative,” he said, and extended a hand to shake. “Nice to meet you properly, Lt. Davis.”
Davis did not so much as glance at his hand. “You’d do better to sleep it off. Trust me. I know.”
“Bet you do,” he said, giving her a wink that went over about as well as flipping her off would have.
“Let me walk you.”
Her hand landed on his shoulder, and he let her steer him around, back the way he’d come, and couldn’t help but shiver as he caught the glint of a silver camera eye embedded in the ceiling.
Lt. Davis left him alone in his room, and though he couldn’t hear the lock to his door click over, he was certain she’d set an alert to notify her should he go wandering again. Tomas glanced at the corners of the room, not seeing any cameras, then brought up a program on his wristpad that any decent engineer or researcher spending time on a space station would have—a scan for hidden cameras. Hell, most normal people ran the scan checking into a hotel room. Doing so now wouldn’t make anyone suspicious of him, and failing to do so just might.
He hadn’t bothered o
n Bero, because that ship had cameras front and center everywhere he stepped, but here the makers of Janus had put some work into appearing normal to the researchers it hired on.
The program initialized slowly and made Tomas pace around the room holding up his wristpad to get full coverage. When he was done, the all clear lit up. Speakers and microphones abounded, but no cameras were watching him in this room.
Sitting on the edge of his narrow bed, he pulled up the suite of Nazca programs. He wasn’t ready to mess with the ship’s systems, but he had no trouble monkeying around with his own. Tomas selected the program that governed his implants and nudged a slider for alertness up.
A smooth cocktail of stimulants trickled into his system, chasing away the fog left over from Davis’s sedative. He pulled up the schematic of the amplifier the team was working on and looked at it with sharper eyes.
Tomas didn’t know much about nanites. Working on that scale was the purview of the Keepers, but he knew a lot about communications equipment. He’d been sent the “bare-bones” schematics for the amplifiers, and while they looked pretty on paper, they were missing a critical constraint.
They were wideband amps, the usual arrangement for boosting comms across an array of frequencies, and presumably when working in concert as a nanite swarm they’d push a hell of a lot of data at a high gain. But Prime communication devices, even something as simple as an amplifier, came with governors. Switches that could authenticate, or shut down, a signal at will. While this device had something that looked almost like a Prime governor, it wasn’t quite right.
He’d seen a lot of them as a spy. Chances were good the civilian scientists on Janus had seen few, and never in detail, and so this false governor would be enough to convince them they were working merrily away within the constraints of Prime’s rules.
Tomas pulled up his messaging and sent a quick e-mail to an account set up to be the ident of Leo Novak’s best friend from engineering school. The message he sent was basic, but encoded so that the handler monitoring the account—probably Sitta—could decipher his rough notes about the governor on the amps. Okonkwo had hired him for this mission, and hopefully she wouldn’t be too greedy with information if his handler asked about what that governor would let through.
Someone knocked on his door. Tomas swiped back to the schematics of the nanite amps and picked his head up, letting his eyes droop and his forehead wrinkle to mimic the exhaustion he should be feeling.
“Come in,” he called out.
The door dilated and Dal, one of the scientists he’d been introduced to at the lab, stepped into the room with a mug full of something steaming in one hand.
“Sorry to bother you,” Dal said, “but I thought you might like some hot tea. I know how… fuzzy… the first day’s introductions can leave you.”
Tomas raised his brows. “Don’t tell me Lt. Davis gives the same welcome to everyone who comes to work here.”
Dal rubbed his bicep and winced. “We all experienced rough arrivals of varying flavors. Here, please, while it’s hot.”
Tomas took the mug from him and made a show of sniffing the steam deeply, giving his metabolism implants time to detect if there was anything off about the brew. He didn’t get the usual wave of nausea that came with the detection of intoxicants, so he took a deep drink. Strong black tea, milk simulate, and sugar. He beamed up at Dal.
“Thanks for this, things don’t seem so friendly here as I’m used to.”
“Ah. The presence of the Prime charter means we are watched closely. It makes for a tense working environment, but the opportunity to see such fine contraptions up close is worth a little stress.”
“Seems weird, don’t it? That they drag us in to have a poke around at these when they’ve got their own people trained up.”
Dal tugged at one side of his mustache. “Not enough specialist Keepers to go around, I suppose.”
“Must be true,” Tomas said, letting himself sound unconvinced. “I mean, they’ve got that Valentine woman keeping an eye on us. Apologies if this isn’t true, but she didn’t strike me as the technical sort.”
“The technical side is what we’re for,” Dal said, and pointed at Tomas’s wristpad and the displayed schematic. “Have you looked at the receiver systems yet? We’re having trouble getting them to swarm.”
“Not yet. To be honest, I was curious about the governor. Maybe it’s interfering with the receivers. If I could get a schematic on that…”
Dal went very still. Tomas picked up his head to meet the man’s eye and found him pale through the cheeks. Dal pulled at his collar and forced a smile back on.
“Best not to ask about that. Keeper tech, and all. I’m sure you’ll puzzle out a workaround. Good night.”
Dal clapped him on the shoulder, almost making him spill his tea, and hurried out of the room. Maybe Tomas wasn’t the only one to note the off-ness of the system after all.
A message flashed in his inbox from his “school friend.” The bulk of it was banal pleasantries, but he picked out the hidden message quickly enough. With every word he deciphered, his stomach sank further and further.
Full access to gate-powering systems allowed. Rainier cannot be allowed to hostage control of the gates. Find out if this is the only location of these nanites and secure all instances. Stop these swarms, lest all of Prime be brought to its knees by the powering-off of the gates.
CHAPTER 25
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
WHO YOU KNOW
Jules jerked awake with a pounding headache and a Rorschach collection of bruises across her arms and chest that she didn’t remember receiving. What did she last remember? Novak. Bringing him to the scientists. Then a message from Rainier, a summons to speak with her, then back to this room. She checked the time and found it’d been only “overnight” since her talk with Rainier. Jules breathed out, slowly.
The bruises were old, fading to yellow around the edges. She must have dreamed a memory to trigger the headache. She knew what that meant, and did her best not to think about it, because it would only make matters worse.
She swung her legs to the ground and stretched, shaking off the lingering memory and the aches that came with it. No reason to walk around like a battered plum. She concentrated on the bruises, thinking about the pain fading away, and in seconds the sharpness had passed, reduced to a dull ache that soon receded into nothing.
Lolla. Panic shot through her and she dragged up the stats on her wristpad. Still stable, still in the shuttle. She let out an anxious laugh and sank down into a crouch.
An impulse struck, and she brought up Marya’s log on the station. The other woman had left sometime the day before, and was registered as en route to Janus, but it would be a few hours before she returned. Jules had some time before the researchers would be up and working, so she set an alert on her pad to tell her if Marya came back early and went to that woman’s room.
The door opened when she swiped her ident over the lock. Jules smirked, satisfied. She’d never had free run of any place before, not even Harlan’s hideout. Everyone’s cubbies had been keyed to them and them alone. Jules had always suspected Harlan had a way in despite his posturing of privacy, but she’d never confirmed it.
Clothes ate most of Marya’s space, thrown across her narrow cot, trunk, desk, and chair, most of them nonstandard Prime jumpsuits, nothing Jules had ever seen her wear. The coconut scent of her hair oil hung in the air, cloyingly sweet to Jules’s nose.
She kicked a few stray shirts aside and clipped her toe on the edge of a tablet, the corner poking out from under the cot. They did most of their work with their wristpads, but maybe Marya had something about her friends or family or whatever on there. Something to explain the connection that Rainier kept her around for.
It lit up at her touch. Even though Marya had password protected it, the tablet was connected to the overall network of the station. Jules had no problem accessing it as an administrator. She smiled tightly to herself. Lolla w
ould have been proud.
There was no contacts list, just a series of folders. She nudged a metallic jacket aside and sat on the edge of the bed. Pictures of a smooth, carbon-black object filled the screen, a thumbnail gallery that, when seen all at once like this, sent a crawling sensation up the back of her neck. Jules had never seen a Casimir Gate up close—few had—but the subtly curving shape was familiar to her all the same, burned into her psyche from an early age as the crowning achievement of Prime. Of humanity.
Although Rainier had never outright said that the gates weren’t human tech, she’d said that they’d come from the same source as the ascension-agent. That race of beings Rainier referred to only in vague passing. The Waiting, she called them, and had refused to elaborate when Jules pressed her for more information.
Secretly, Jules believed Rainier no longer remembered anything about her makers. That she’d been too long in a human body, and no matter how many she puppeted, humanity had sunk into her bones. The nebulous being that was “her” conformed to the boundaries of her body, the shape of humanity.
Jules knew little about Marya’s upbringing, or her family, except for what Jules had gleaned from the girl’s obvious sense of self-importance. Who the fuck was she? Where did Rainier dig up this woman who craved the transformation of the agent and could get pictures of the gates far closer than any civilian?
Jules dropped the tablet back on the ground and leaned over, dragging her hands through her hair. She laced her fingers behind her head and gripped, squeezing. She’d told herself that whatever else Rainier was up to didn’t matter. That she would use the woman—the intelligence—only so long as it took her to get Lolla back.
But she couldn’t guarantee Rainier would continue to allow the scientists to work on the ascension-agent problem. If her mood changed, Rainier could redirect all their efforts in an instant. Jules swiped up her wristpad, pulled up the latest specs on the amplifiers. Rainier had promised her the amplifiers would allow her to send a signal to Lolla that would wake her up, get her cells out of stasis and moving and breathing and living again.
Chaos Vector Page 18