Okonkwo ended the call, and Hitton frowned. “Our Prime Director is exceptionally distracted, if she cannot spare the time to discuss the details of a gate-building.”
“Not distracted enough to skip dressing me down,” Biran muttered.
“You deserved it,” Vladsen said, throwing him a sly smirk. “You cannot stay here while the press waits on Ada, Speaker.”
“I promised you help, Hitton, and I’m not leaving until we’ve found out—”
“Enough.” She stood up sharply, a thundercloud passing behind her eyes. “You have been sent to Ada by your absolute commander. Go.”
“I—” Hitton glared him into silence and he shifted uncomfortably, glancing at his boots shamefaced. “I’ll leave some of my fleeties with you,” Biran said as she turned on her heel and strode to the door.
“Fine,” she said, lifting a hand in acknowledgment, then paused. “Take Sato back to Ada when you go.”
“Keeper—” Sato burst out.
“This is not a punishment. Be careful, all of you. I have spent my life spinning out moves ten steps ahead, and even I cannot guess what happens next.”
Sato stared at the door as it shut behind Hitton. Biran said, gently, “You had better go and pack your things. Meet us at the Taso, we leave within the hour.”
Sato nodded and hurried out of the room, leaving Biran and Vladsen alone with the robots working steadily away at uncovering the rich mineral history of this asteroid.
He should feel elated. The gate would be built. He could finally use the schematics on his chip, could finally pass on his sliver of Prime’s legacy to enrich future generations of humanity and, above all, stop a war that would end in the annihilation of Icarion.
Instead, a heaviness settled within him. Hitton was not a paranoid woman, prone to wild flights of imagination, but when she’d spoken of a potential saboteur, she had sounded genuinely unsettled. Possibly even scared. Sato may believe she was being punished for showing Biran the unused survey bots, but Biran didn’t. Every single thing Hitton had said during that exchange had been the truth as Hitton knew it. Hitton was sending Sato away to safer climes.
“You’ve been staring at that door for two minutes now,” Vladsen said.
Biran blinked and shook his head. “Hitton believes Sato may be in danger here.”
“Hitton’s beliefs remain an open question.”
“Tell me honestly, do you believe she’s succumbing to paranoia?”
Vladsen sighed. “No. Though it would be easier to assume she was. Let us pray this mystery person means only to discredit Hitton, and not to do real harm.”
CHAPTER 58
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
SARCASM IS A COPING MECHANISM
You okay, Commander?” Nox asked.
“Yeah. Just… startled.”
“You screamed.”
“I did not.”
“Squeaked a little.”
“No way.”
“You squeaked,” Conway’s voice crackled to her ears.
“Goddamnit, aren’t you under my command?”
“Sorry, Commander.”
“You’re not.”
They giggled, all of them, a little frantically, a little too wildly, as the pressure of the moment eased. The clatter of laughter in her helmet was enough that she couldn’t tell who was laughing at her, nor did she care. Her shoulders relaxed. She remembered Liao’s device and pulled it out to take a sample. Clear.
“Come on in, Nox, the water’s fine. We have gravity.”
“Not possible,” Knuth said over comms. “Nothing on that ship is spinning.”
“Tell it to my feet, Knuth. Demas, if Prime has a secret gravity-producing ship in the works, now would be a good time to tell us all about it.”
“It does not.”
“As I thought. Nox, come on. Everyone, focus.”
Snickering across the comms as the others realized Nox had hung back. Not that any of them would have been any braver under the same circumstances, but still. He grumbled something incomprehensible and stepped into the ship like he was dipping a toe into an arctic lake. Gravity dragged him down, just like it had her, and his fists clenched at his sides.
“That’s weird,” he said.
“Understatement of the century. Conway, see any status change with the ship? My HUD reads the atmo is adjusting to Earth standard.”
“No change, but your door’s gone.”
Sanda whipped around to look over Nox’s shoulder. Sure enough, the opening they’d come through had sealed up after them.
“This feels very much like stepping into the belly of a whale,” Nox said.
“A Moby Dick reference? From you?”
“Nah. Pinocchio. I like the cricket.”
“A connoisseur of ancient media.”
“I’m a man o’ mystery, Commander.” He tried to keep his voice light, but it was tight with barely restrained terror. At least talking kept him focused.
As they spoke, they crept through the passage. Despite the delicate appearance of the floor and walls, footing was stable. Sanda suspected that the density was changing to conform to their steps, giving them enough spring to move comfortably without either clomping along or squishing straight through. The thought wasn’t a comforting one. Liao’s talk of automated systems made her want to reach for her weapon, but she had the sinking feeling that even Prime’s most advanced blaster would be little more than a peashooter against this thing.
It was getting brighter. Sanda motioned for Nox to pause and brought up her HUD’s lumen display. Sure enough, the gauge was valiantly tracking upward despite the fact that Sanda could discern no obvious light source. She sent the data to Nox. He grunted.
“This ship is starting to piss me off,” Sanda said, but with little real anger in her voice. “Conway, are you sure there has been no status change? Because I’m looking at a ship coming online, and it should bleed heat, draw power, something.”
“It’s possible our sensors were damaged during the EMP,” Conway said with all the professional courtesy of someone who didn’t believe a word of what they’d just said.
“There.” Nox tapped her shoulder and pointed. “Look, at the… fibers? Maybe they’re fiber-optic.”
Sanda approached the wall and pressed her helmet close. The fine threads that made up the whole of the ship were emitting a soft, pleasant glow, getting steadily brighter. It was the kind of gentle lighting CamCast AIs ran complicated algorithms to get right.
Sanda pulled up the rough map they’d made of the ship while safely ensconced in the Thorn. Conway had put them down on the starboard side, toward the center, in the approximate place most non-spun ships had an airlock. She had absolutely no delusions that the… people?… who built this ship had any of the same proclivities her people did, but she had to start somewhere. She did the same damn thing she’d done on Bero what felt like aeons ago now. She turned down the passageway and walked in the direction that seemed likely to have a command deck.
The ship was all too willing to accommodate. Somehow extrapolating her directorial intention, the passageway she’d been thinking of as “central” shifted, shivering for a breath as multiple pathways sprawled out and forward in the direction she’d intended to go, unfurling and lighting up like the tip of a fern uncoiling.
It was Sanda’s turn to freeze. Nox had his hand on his sidearm, and she didn’t see a single reason to tell him to stand down.
Feeling fantastically foolish, Sanda flicked over to open comms and broadcast into the passageway. “We’re coming to your command deck. We are not hostile.”
Nox moved his hand away from his weapon, but not too far.
Over the private connection, she said, “Please tell me there’s been a status change.”
“I cannot tell you that,” Conway said.
She consciously took control of one leg, then the other, pressing her steps into the distressingly firm floor with intention. Sanda followed the fern-path to the farthes
t tip of the ship, what she would think of as the “nose” but was undoubtedly something else in this changeable vessel. Maybe it was whatever she wanted it to be. What had Arden said about AI and data sets? She’d have to ask them again later. They were probably salivating to get their hands on this ship right now.
Something caught the corner of her eye. She stopped her determined march to the deck and dropped to one knee, peering into a slight darkness in the otherwise uniform mesh of silvery threads. The light didn’t extend that far. She slipped her hand into the opening and pressed down, gently, as if nudging aside a fragile antique curtain. The ship obliged. The gap deepened, and as she trained her helmet light into the opening, the ship’s self-illumination came up.
“That looks almost sane,” Nox said.
Except that it didn’t. An ache started in the back of her head and she clenched her jaw, flexing the tendons to ease the pain as she’d taught herself to do over the last few weeks. There was wiring in the mysterious walls of this ship. Nothing like Prime used, and set in the context of the neuron-like filaments, she had almost overlooked the familiarity to what she had seen on Bero. Almost.
“You getting this on video, Knuth?”
“Yessir,” Knuth said, his voice pitched with excitement. “That looks like cabling, of a sort. I can work with that.”
His relief was palpable. She hated to have to shatter it.
“So can I,” she said. “The wiring on Bero looked like this.”
“That is not possible,” Demas said stiffly.
“Tell it to the wires,” Sanda said.
“How could Icarion have access to… to this technology?” Demas asked.
Sanda shrugged as she stood up. Lavaux must have known that this ship, or something like it, existed and then fed that information to Icarion to help them technologically leapfrog over Prime. Was this what that nascent intelligence Arden had found was for? Piloting another weapon for Icarion? She wished she could ask Bero what he thought, then pushed the thought aside to keep it from hurting.
“Ask Icarion. I’m sure they’d be happy to tell you all about it.”
She started back to the “front,” but the path changed, shifted, angling her off-center. She glared at the ship under the cover of her visor and decided, fuck it. The ship had been accommodating enough so far. Least she could do was look at whatever it wanted to show her.
“Sanda,” Nox said, a soft warning in his voice as she started down the new path.
“Yeah. I know, but thanks for the warning.”
She stepped into an impossible space. The passageway opened up, sprawled out like a river delta, and transformed into a round room that Sanda could have sworn was too large by half to exist in this part of the ship. Conway didn’t report any change, so she didn’t bother asking.
In the center, caught between two pillars of the filaments reaching down to one another as if grasping hands, was a small sphere, no larger than Sanda’s fists pressed together. She licked her lips and stepped forward. Nox put a hand on her arm, holding her back.
“What is it?” she asked in a low whisper, not knowing why she felt the need to drop her voice.
“I don’t know. Seems odd, right? Like it’s leading us to this… thing. We got no idea what it is. Could be a weapon.”
“Nothing on board has attacked us.”
“Yet.”
“Fair enough. Cover me.”
She heard him unholster his blaster as she resumed her slow march to the sphere and felt ridiculous. Unsettling as the ship was, nothing on board had been hostile. The shield defense system couldn’t be ignored, but as Liao had said, that had been automated, and the system itself looked clumsy to her compared to the craftsmanship of this vessel.
Almost as if the drone shield had been added after the fact and wasn’t a part of the ship’s original design. A dangerous assumption to make, but she’d been living on her gut for a while now, and the fact that she was still living, despite the odds, was good enough for her. Something had to be good enough.
She came within arm’s reach of the sphere and stopped. The device Liao had given her didn’t pick up anything virulent in the air around the orb, or anywhere else along her walk through the too-large room. Which should have taken her more time to cross than it had, especially at her slow march, but if she stopped to think about that too much she might lose her damn mind here and now.
“No change,” she said, because she felt like she had to say something. “The surface is smooth… Wait, no.”
Using the limited magnifying properties of her helmet, she zoomed in on a portion of the sphere where she thought she’d seen a scratch.
She had. Sanda’s heart hammered as she panned the camera across the object. The scratch wasn’t a wanton artifact of the sphere’s production or transport. It was intentional, deliberate. Not a scratch at all, but a numerical number one, perfectly straight, with another right beside it. Her helmet was having a hard time with the resolution, the scratchings were so small, but she’d bet her life that was a zero next to those first two ones.
“It’s binary,” she said, scarcely believing herself. “This was meant to be read.”
“Commander,” Arden said, their voice shaking. “Begging your pardon, but I’m boarding that ship right fucking now.”
She blinked, remembering the subtle threat in Demas’s lack of complaint about her breaking protocol. “Very well. Everyone board at once, stay together. Nox and I will continue exploring this room until you arrive. I have a feeling our new friend the ship won’t have any trouble guiding you to us.”
“Weapons?” Demas asked.
Again, a chill of warning tickled at the small of her back. “No. Nox and I are armed, though I hardly think even that precaution is necessary at this point.”
“Very well,” Demas said, and she wondered if maybe she should have strapped up her whole crew with firepower. She liked the idea of Demas with a weapon less than she liked the idea of her crew being unarmed. She and Nox would have to be enough if things went sideways.
She wished she could get a better read on what Demas was thinking. Though he was trained to hide behind his armor, that stoic mask extended deep within him. Demas wouldn’t let her see his true self unless it served him.
“Sanda,” Nox said through a private line, “you said this was meant to be read.”
“Yes. Binary is about as universal a language as we’ve got.”
“Okay. But who wants us to read it?”
She gazed into the shiny metal sphere. “I have absolutely no idea.”
CHAPTER 59
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
ACCESS DENIED
The ship proved just as polite to its new guests as it had to Nox and Sanda, and soon the motley crew of the Thorn was standing in a nervous half ring around the sphere room. Except for Arden. They were right up against the thing, practically pressing their faceplate to the metal.
“Refrain from kissing it, Mx. Wyke,” Sanda said.
“I don’t know how you even saw something was there,” they said. “My helmet can barely pick up the numbers. We need something higher-powered. Liao, you got any equipment with you?”
“If you’re asking whether I thought to steal a tachyon microscope before abandoning Janus Station, Mx. Wyke, I can assure you that I did not.”
“Nothing that can’t be figured out once we get back to civilization,” Demas said.
Sanda frowned. “Define civilization? Where in the hell do you even take something like this?”
“There are protocols,” Demas said, and Sanda noted the sardonic note to his voice. “But most of those are beyond us now. Outside of calling in the fleet, as we should have done, but cannot do, we will have to deliver the object to them.”
Arden pulled back. “You want to take it out of its… uh, thing?”
“Presumably those tendrils cover parts of the binary data. To see the whole picture, it will have to be removed. Okonkwo can direct what’s done with it from
there.”
“I want—”
“Not over—”
Arden and Liao spoke over one another. They cut themselves off at the same time.
Liao took a long breath and said, “Demas, handing this into Keeper care would be to never see it again. I have all respect for our Keepers, naturally, but they are known for limiting civilian scientific access. Mx. Wyke and I, by right of discovery, should have that self-same access.”
“Major Greeve discovered the object,” Demas said. “If we’re playing finders keepers, it’s hers. But that’s not how these things work, Doctor. You know that.”
A private comm request from Arden flashed in Sanda’s HUD. She accepted.
“Hey, uh, so you should know that from what I’m reading here, this sphere is carrying a set of instructions.”
She did not turn to look at Arden, as was her instinct. “Instructions for what? If you tell me they’re a treasure map, I swear—”
“No, no, I mean they’re like a recipe, almost. I can’t read most of it, but what little I was able to scan in and make sense of seems to be focused on the creation of a metal alloy using some basic elemental building blocks. If it is a recipe, then it’s busted down to the absolute bare bones—this thing starts from atomic scratch—and I… Well, I got to thinking about secret, uh, recipes.”
It took every ounce of will she had not to wince. “The gates? You think this sphere contains instructions for building a Casimir Gate?”
“I have no fucking idea, but if it does and our GC friend has any inkling that might be the case, we’re all already dead. GC protect the Keepers, but only because of the chips in their heads. It’s the data they’re really guarding, not the people.”
Her stomach dropped. Arden was absolutely correct. Demas was arguing with Liao over the group link, and Sanda forced herself to pay attention.
“If we remove only the top half of—” Demas was saying.
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