Sanda undid her harness and laced tense, cramped fingers together to stretch them out in front of her. “Let’s go ask for a cup of sugar.”
Nox grinned fiercely, but it was Demas she watched out of the corner of her eye. He may have been quick to patch up the ship, but she couldn’t help but be wary of him now that he knew her secret. Didn’t help that he was GC, legit or not. He frowned, a line appearing between his brows.
“Our communications off-board are down, correct?” Demas asked Knuth.
The thin man shrugged, the bony points of his shoulders came almost to his ears. “We got our transponder ticking away to let anyone who’s listening know we’re coming, but that’s it. We won’t be talking to anyone until I dig down into the guts of this thing and replace what fried. I can’t even guarantee we’ve got all the replacement parts we need on board. The Thorn flies, friends, but she does not speak.”
“Then we don’t have a choice,” Demas said.
That made Sanda frown. They had choices. Few, granted, but ones that her superiors would almost definitely prefer she take. Demas wanted on that ship, and he wanted on now. More than likely Okonkwo had either known or suspected what might be here and had given him orders.
“Conway, find us something that looks like an airlock and attach the inflatable. We’ll confirm the safety of the environment with a forward scouting party of myself and Nox. Once the ship is secured, I expect all of you suited up and ready to follow us.”
“Leave the Thorn alone, Commander?” Knuth asked, eyes wide.
“She needs the rest.” Sanda patted her ceiling and pushed off, angling toward her room where her preferred lifepack and helmet waited. As she drifted out the door, she half spun, looking back at the deck behind her. “And seriously, do any of you want to miss this?”
Sanda suited up in record time, but was unsurprised to find Nox already lingering by the airlock that Conway had extended to kiss the unknown ship. His helmet was on, so she couldn’t read his expression, but everything about his body language radiated excitement.
“Seal check,” Sanda ordered through the helmet comms, watching Nox’s name flash in small caps as the connection went live. “And don’t rush it, soldier. That thing’s not going anywhere.”
They made quick work of the check, each movement exaggerated to make it clear to the other that, despite their rush, they weren’t leaving a single thing to chance. Sanda had her hand on the airlock open pad when Liao came barreling down the passageway toward them.
“Excuse me,” she said, her rich voice filling their helmets with the same flavor of stiff rebuke Sanda had gotten from disappointed professors in school. “Are you really boarding an unknown vessel while armed?”
Sanda and Nox glanced down at their sidearms, then back at each other. They couldn’t see each other through the mirror tint of the helmet visors, but Nox made a slight gesture of his chin to indicate he hadn’t even thought about it.
Neither had she. Sanda closed her eyes behind the shield of the visor and resisted a sigh. “Doctor,” she said over open comms, “we don’t know what’s waiting for us. That is the point of a forward exploration team. We need to be certain that ship is secure.”
“And if it registers your weapons and determines that you’re hostile?”
“We won’t walk in guns out, they’ll stay nose-down until we feel we need them. And the damn thing hardly has room to judge us for being wary. It almost destroyed our ship, if you remember.”
She sniffed. “An automated system.”
“And there might be more automated systems on board. No chances. Now please, move away from the airlock and get your gear on. We’ll invite you over for the welcome party soon enough.”
“Take this,” she said so quickly Sanda barely caught the words.
Liao shoved a device into her hands about the size of her palm, coated in the white enamel surface that medis used for everything because it was easy to clean and kept pathogens at bay. It had a small screen about the size of her thumb, a series of buttons, and some sort of prod sticking out of what Sanda nominally deemed the “top.”
“What is this?”
“On a very base level, a pathogen detector. It will periodically sample the air around it for known contaminants, and report if it discovers anything untoward. Or anything it doesn’t recognize.”
“Thanks,” Sanda said, “but no one’s taking their helmets off on this little expedition. We’re not morons.”
“No, but it’s good data to have.”
Sanda smiled. Despite everything that had happened to her, Liao was still driven by her passions. She should be desperate for revenge. A part of her was, but it hadn’t drowned out the part of her that was hungry for information to help her solve the universe’s myriad mysteries. There was reassurance in that. Stability. Sanda looked into Liao’s eyes and wondered if a similar fire ever burned in her, and what it might have burned for.
She’d wanted to protect her brother. Now… Now things were all fucked up. She was still his protector, would be as long as she drew breath, but at an oblique angle. Dios, she’d wanted to captain ships and fire the big guns. She’d never wanted the responsibility of the hidden secrets of the universe at her feet, tangling up her ankles every step she took.
Sanda didn’t want this. Didn’t want her command, or the mystery hunk of unidentified bullshit waiting for her on the other side of that airlock. She wanted to go home, had known that want deeply and intimately since the moment she woke up on Bero and was told everything she’d ever thought of as home was so much dust.
Her grip tightened around the sampling device. But someone had put a chip in her head. A chip with these coordinates, and until she knew why, until she knew what this was, there would never be a home for her. Some secrets had claws, and this one wasn’t letting her go. Bero had known that. Had understood that his existence, and hers, were two halves of a poisonous apple.
One step at a time. Work the problem.
“Thank you,” she told Liao.
The doctor nodded and pushed away, back down the passage. Sanda pressed her gloved palm against the opening mechanism for the airlock and stepped inside. As the door shut, she couldn’t help but flick her gaze to the gasket that sealed them in as the systems cycled and the pressure adjusted. Not a scratch on it, naturally. Green LEDs flashed the all clear and she opened the opposite side.
Nox went first. They hadn’t arranged it, and there was definitely a protocol that said when a fleet unit enters an unknown ship in peace the ranking member should go first as a sign of good faith, but fuck it, she’d already thrown the rule book away today. Might as well set it on fire, too.
Maybe Nox wanted the dubious honor of being the first to step foot on that ship, but she doubted it. He was meat-shielding her, and while the thought was strangely flattering, it meant that he felt the same unease she did. They should be excited, jubilant. If this ship was as alien as it looked, this was the discovery of a lifetime.
Instead, they paced across the inflated passageway with small, tense steps. Deep down in their bones, neither one of them believed they’d survive long enough to be the celebrated heroes of discovering extraterrestrial evidence. If this was extraterrestrial. Just because she’d seen nothing like it before didn’t mean it hadn’t been made by human hands. Bero had been new. But this… She pushed down speculation and focused on the task at hand.
“What have we got?” she asked, as Nox stopped short at the other end.
Conway had placed the end of the inflatable on her best guess of what looked like an entrance, but claimed the whole thing was so homogeneous that her best guess was worthless.
“Metal,” Nox said. He extended a hand and ran it across the fine filaments that comprised the body of the ship. “I think. Conway’s right, it all looks the same, but the tube got purchase.”
Sanda flicked her gaze to the seal mating the inflatable tube to the unknown craft. “They always get purchase. That’s what they’re for. Torches.
”
She imagined Liao having a conniption over this most aggressive of behaviors, but the longer Sanda spent near this thing the more her skin crawled. She wanted to get in and get out and pretend she’d never seen it.
They pulled micro-plasma torches from their kits and lit up. Despite Nox’s defensive behavior, Sanda sidled in alongside him and, shoulder to shoulder, they reached to touch the flames to the ship.
The metal parted.
Sanda froze, the cone of her flame centimeters from where the hull had been. The fibrous tendrils peeled away from one another, and though she couldn’t hear through her helmet, she got the feeling that they were whispering against each other, a soft sound in a language she could never know.
A breeze brushed against the thin but strong skin of her jumpsuit as the pressure between the tunnel and the ship equalized, the slit in the weave expanding until it was wide enough for Nox to pass through. Sanda had plenty of room.
All beyond, darkness.
“Well,” she said, annoyed by the shake in her voice. “Torches down, lights up.”
The lamps on their helmets pierced the darkness in unison. A long passageway stretched before them, walls and floor made of the same fibrous, entwined metal as the exterior of the ship. The temperature read 15C, pressure was neutral, and according to her HUD, the air mix was adjusting slowly toward human standard.
Nox hesitated, one hand clutching a side handle of the inflatable transfer tube. She couldn’t blame him.
Sanda pushed herself into the enclosure of the ship, and nearly screamed as gravity sucked her down to stand, shakily, upright, in a ship that wasn’t moving, in a space where no such forces should exist.
CHAPTER 57
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
THE PEACE OF ALL
When Hitton entered the warehouse with Keeper Sato at her side, Biran had expected her to be furious. He hadn’t expected the expression of sad resignation on her wan features, the slump to her usually proud shoulders. Hitton did not let her body language slip. Either she meant for them to see her defeated, or the feeling was so intense she lacked the strength to hide it. Either way chilled him more than whispers of false GC ever could.
“Ah yes,” she said, surveying the landscape of unpacking bots Biran had ordered brought from the Taso to prepare the survey bots. “I suppose this was inevitable from the moment I allowed you to land. Natsu, I presume you showed them the way?”
The young Keeper’s eyes bulged. “Keeper Hitton, I—”
Hitton waved her off. “No need, child, please. As I said, this conclusion was inevitable from the moment of their arrival. Part of me is glad you sped matters up. I would rather get this disaster over with.”
“Forgive me,” Biran said, “we do not want to override your process here, but you understand that the situation is tense. Matters must be shown to progress, otherwise all of this will have been for nothing.”
Her smile was tight. “I won’t fight you on this, Speaker. Do what you must.”
Vladsen cleared his throat. “If you have no objections, then why have you not already sent the survey bots out?”
“Oh, I have plenty of objections.” Hitton sat down on one of the unopened crates, back perfectly straight, hands resting on her knees. “But they will not be listened to.”
“We’d like to hear them,” Biran said gently. He gestured to the unpacking bots to emphasize that they hadn’t started yet.
She cocked her head to the side. “Sato has told you of the shadow in our midst?”
“She has. If it is true, then it stands to reason that one person cannot change the results provided by so many bots at once. Whatever bad data comes back will be weeded out for the anomaly it is.”
“The solution really is that obvious, isn’t it?”
Biran shifted his weight. “I do not mean to insult your methods.”
Her smile was razor-sharp, and he felt himself back on firmer footing. “You do. And you would not be incorrect. The truth of the matter is that I have been paralyzed here, unable to see the correct path.”
“That is… not like you,” Biran said.
“I know. Do you know my age, either of you?”
Biran exchanged a confused glance with Vladsen. “No, Keeper. It’s none of our business.”
“One hundred and thirty. Pushing the edge a bit, aren’t I?”
“Modern advancements allow for a healthy life well into the one eighties,” Biran said, baffled by this admission. The members of Ada’s Protectorate were scattered across the age spectrum, with Vladsen and Biran holding up the younger end. It wasn’t something he ever thought about. But while he was confused, he heard Vladsen suck air through his teeth. That man knew something Biran didn’t, and it grated. He hated being nescient.
“Indeed, indeed. I hope you will respect the depth of my experience, Keepers, when I say I do not know what is wrong here, but something is very wrong.”
“I read the reports of the human surveyors. Their findings match up with what the initial bots brought back. If there’s a discrepancy—”
“There isn’t.” She closed her eyes briefly. “The data lines up. The asteroid is perfect.”
“That’s… wonderful?” Biran said.
She laughed and shook her head. “Yes. It’s all so lovely. The data is clean and this hunk of rock features minerals the gate-builder bots need, and no fault lines disastrous enough to upset a future settlement. And yet. And yet. Someone stayed behind with the shipment of survey bots. Someone I can hear at times, catch a smear of on thermal, but I can’t find.”
“If there’s a saboteur,” Biran said, “they’re a poor one. The initial data is ideal and, as you said, matches what the human surveyors found. There’s been no tampering.”
“You won’t find any discrepancies. What do you think I’ve been doing all this time, while I stalled with the reports? I’ve been hunting, Speaker Greeve. This quarry and their real intentions cannot be found, and that should be enough to scrap the whole thing. But it’s too perfect. Prime cannot ignore a gift like this. And if my concerns are ever raised, they will say the isolation was too much. I am an old woman, after all.”
“I will say no such thing,” Biran said with force.
“Forgive me,” Vladsen said, placing a hand against Biran’s arm. Biran’s shoulder relaxed at the touch, and Vladsen took his hand away. “What if the saboteur is here not to damage the gate-build process, but to discredit you, Keeper Hitton?”
“I’m listening,” she said warily.
“Well, if the data is clean, but you’re filing reports about a phantom saboteur—all apologies—it would be a simple thing to throw your mental stability into question. Do you have enemies, Hitton?”
Hitton smiled tightly. “I am an elder member of Ada’s Protectorate, Keeper Vladsen. I have lost count of the enemies I’ve stirred up along the way.”
“Then it’s possible.”
She sighed. “I suppose so, but I still fear for this gate’s construction.”
“Keeper Hitton, we have our disagreements,” Biran said, “but I respect the hell out of you. If there’s something wrong with this station, then we will root it out. We don’t disbelieve you, but we have to try with the survey bots. One enemy agent could not have tampered with so many. And Icarion…”
Hitton glanced up sharply. “Icarion thinks we’re stalling.”
Biran inclined his head. “I’m sorry. It’s not something that could escape their notice. There’s historical record for how long these surveys take. Once Prime has a site in mind, we move as quickly as possible. This doesn’t line up.”
She stroked her chin, considering. “Then perhaps… Perhaps the saboteur seeks not to discredit me, but to stoke the embers of war by delaying construction. It would take no great leap of insight to realize I would stall the build if I suspected a saboteur on-site. Icarion, as you say, would not fail to notice.”
“We cannot ignore the possibility,” Biran said.
Unprompted, Hitton punched something into her wristpad. The unpacking bots stirred to life, swarming over the crates. Biran flinched at the crack of metal as a lid slid to the ground.
“Keeper Hitton,” Sato said, “are you sure?”
“Not at all,” she said, “but I won’t be goaded into war.” She met Biran’s gaze, and the wariness had not faded from her eyes. “You’re not the only one who doesn’t want blood on their hands.”
“Thank you.” He bowed his head to her.
She waved him off. “I’ll send the preliminary results to Okonkwo now. That should speed things up, she’s been breathing down my neck since I landed.”
“If you want to wait—” Biran started to say.
“It’s already done. It should not be long until—Ah, here she is.” Hitton held up her wristpad for him to see. A priority call from the Prime Director flashed at them. The weariness in Hitton’s body washed away as she lifted her chin, centered her focus, and accepted the call.
“Hitton, these results are incredible. Is this only the first wave?”
“Prime Director, it is. If it pleases you, I have Keepers Greeve and Vladsen here with me.”
“Ah.” Okonkwo focused her attention on Biran and Vladsen as Hitton turned her arm around to get them all in the shot. “Based on these preliminary findings, I will authorize the encoding and release of the gate-builder swarm. Keepers Vladsen and Greeve, I expect you to return to Ada Station with all haste to scan your part of the diagnostics. Hitton, please remain on-site to continue your investigation and scan in the final piece upon arrival of the construction system. I will contact Anford to arrange the fleet escort.”
“Understood,” the three Keepers said in unison.
“Prime Director,” Biran said, “may we talk in private?”
“I will contact you later, after you are underway. Do not delay. The sooner Ada becomes a two-gate system, the sooner we can all breathe a little easier.”
“Vladsen and I could stay here for scanning so that the others won’t have to wait for our return.”
“Greeve, this is a new gate. It is a press event, and no civilians are getting anywhere near that asteroid until the gate is established, let alone reporters. Get your ass back to Ada, where it belongs, and smile for those cameras, Speaker. Hitton, particulars later.”
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