Chaos Vector

by Megan E O'Keefe

  Biran smiled tightly. “I feel there are many things I’m not seeing at the moment. Dangerous things.”

  “I would accuse you of being dramatic, but after your report regarding Keeper Hitton, I cannot disagree in good faith.”

  “Did you speak with her?”

  While no one approached them directly, Biran and Olver felt the eyes of the cameras and the guests press in on them. Olver adjusted his stance, leaning against the railing almost shoulder to shoulder with Biran, so that he could keep his voice low even while a kind smile lingered on his lips.

  “I did. And Sato, too. Hitton’s paranoia kept her from going into details, but in the scant time you have been away, I fear things have escalated. She talked of hearing the phantom guardcore, though our people have yet to find any evidence—even in the audio recordings.”

  “Hearing? She had mentioned sounds, but nothing specific.”

  “Words, now. Not so much voices as the computerized cant of the GC. Easy enough to fake.”

  “Do you think someone there is toying with her?”

  Olver started to sigh, shoulders rounding, then caught himself and put the smile back on. Cameras were always watching on Ada.

  “It’s possible, though I don’t know how the fleet would have missed it by now. Even if there are people impersonating the guardcore, they would be hard-pressed to hide their presence on a closed ecosystem like AST-4501. It is also possible that one of Hitton’s medications is no longer working properly, or throwing up unforeseen side effects.”

  “Medications? Is she ill?”

  Olver chuckled. “No, Speaker. She is old, as am I. Around a hundred and twenty, things need a little more upkeep, though you have a long time before you cross that bridge.”

  Biran watched the movements on the docks with studied intent. “What happens to a Keeper, when the diseases of age mount up?”

  “Ah, you know the answer to that as well as I do, though none of us like it. Disorders of the mind are a security risk.”

  Biran cleared his throat roughly. “Yes. But I do not believe Keeper Hitton is suffering from such a disease.”

  “Don’t fret. We’ll bring her back off that rock as soon as she scans her data in, then get this sorted out.”

  “So easy?”

  “No, Speaker. These things are never easy. That is not our lot. Not the path you and I and all the others of our cohorts have chosen. Tell me: For what do we Keep?”

  Biran hesitated, an incomplete answer dancing on the tip of his tongue, for there was something in the director’s inflection that warned him his question was not rhetorical, nor was it one to be answered by rote. His instinct, ingrained through long years of academy training, to spout off the virtues of keeping the Casimir Gate technology safe for the prosperity of humanity, died within him. This was not an essay question he should answer with textbook regurgitation.

  In asking in such a way—what instead of whom—Director Olver was implying that he did not know the answer himself. That, instead of speaking to Biran as a mentor to a student, he was speaking to him as a peer. Opening a conversation for conjecture. The thought momentarily stunned him into silence more than the realization that his education, in this facet, failed him.

  “The safety of tomorrow,” Biran said finally.

  “Posterity, that old saw. The human right to go forth and seed this barren universe with ourselves, since our cradle is dead and we have yet to find another suitable habitat.”

  “Life is rare.”

  “Are all rare things equally deserving of protection?”

  “What can we do, except provide for future generations? What is the point otherwise?”

  “I have yet to find a satisfactory answer to that question. Ah. Here comes our shipment now.”

  Despite the worries clinging to his mind, excitement spiked within Biran. The ships from Ordinal, carrying this latest batch of Casimir Gate construction bots, slid into the open space of hangar bay alpha. A ripple in the hab dome marked their passage as they curved toward the freshly painted dock. The ships themselves were unremarkable cargo haulers, if brand-new and polished to a high shine, but the fleet presence encircling them was anything but ordinary.

  Shielding drones swarmed around the cargo haulers, a buzzing cloud of protection that would follow the robots even after they were released. Gunships, models so new Biran hadn’t seen them before, slipped along beside their charge, poised to destroy any who would so much as linger too long near their wake. Wherever that caravan of gate-building bots went, their path could be tracked by the massive no-fly zone charted around them, the skies holding their breath while the strength of Prime carved its way toward an uncertain future.

  For all their internal posturing, this was where the power of Prime came into full effect. This was the moment, the reason Biran and all Keepers had trained for so very long. They may not understand the information hidden in their skulls, but they could gift that data to the robots who did.

  Within days of arriving in orbit around the asteroid, those cargo ships would disgorge their enlightened cargo, and a new gate would be built—opening up the worlds of Prime to a star system yet unseen, possibly uncharted. Despite all their long history, their algorithms, there was no guessing where a new gate would lead. Humanity, despite its interstellar presence, was still discovering the stars.

  Tears pricked behind Biran’s eyes, and though he sensed the cameras watching his every twitch, he did not care. He thought himself, in that moment, a very lucky man to be able to see the physical presence of all his hopes and passions made manifest. He searched briefly for Vladsen, but could not find him in the crowd.

  The gunships came in first, sliding into a dock. They stood ready, always, fingers poised over red triggers should anything at all strike them as out of place. The guardcore ships stayed airborne, adjusting their position so that they hovered somewhat behind and above the precious cargo hauler. As threatening as the gunships looked, it was the GC ships packing real power. They would rip this station back to its constituent particles rather than allow gate technology to fall into unauthorized hands.

  But even their shadow, and all the questions that came with them, could not stop the swell of raw joy in Biran’s chest.

  “Are you ready, Speaker?” Olver asked.

  The hauler came to a stop, a gangway extending from beneath a wide airlock door to touch, gently, the dock that had once led the way into Bero’s cargo bay. The external doors slid open—the internal would not open until all the expected Keepers had swiped their idents inside the airlock chamber. Guardcore broke from the crowd and came to stand along the gangway. Biran liked to think one of them must be the one he “knew” and trusted.

  “Can I ever be?” Biran said, almost laughing, and was relieved to see the answering smile split Olver’s face.

  Shoulder to shoulder they approached the gangway, other Keepers approaching their small group with every step. Eleven Keepers of Ada had been chosen to add their secret knowledge to the second gate. The twelfth would be Hitton, scanned in when the hauler passed her asteroid, and though Biran understood the reasons, he wished dearly that she could be here. She had earned that much.

  Vladsen stepped into place alongside Biran, Singh and Garcia flanking Olver. Junior Keepers fell into place behind them. They held to silence with deep-seated reverence. The cameras rolled on, recording every step even though they would not be allowed any closer than a side view of the gangway, the people of Ada and Prime watching, if they so desired, as the first real step of constructing another gate was taken here in this hangar that had been the harbor of so much pain.

  Callie had peeled herself away from her research long enough to join the crowd, and flashed him a dazzling grin and wave when she caught him looking. If this had been any other event, any other moment, he might have grinned back, but this walk had been rehearsed far too many times for his muscle memory to allow deviation.

  They passed the outer door of the airlock, one by one swipi
ng their wrists over the identification pad, as if it were any other door. The cameras could not see them here, especially not after the outer door closed so that the inner could open, but the group did not drop ranks nor give in to discussion.

  The inner airlock opened. A dark sea of guardcore flanked the edges of the room, Prime’s last line of defense should an intruder get this far, their hands on weapons so new in make that Biran had not seen them before. How much of Prime was outside of his scope of knowledge? He was Keeper, Speaker, Protectorate member. Though Ada was a backwater, its political importance in the starscape of Prime could not be denied. And yet, despite all of that, he knew so very little about what went on in the united worlds outside of his personal bubble.

  What stood on the dais in the center of the room, he was all too familiar with. The Keeper-specific MRI machines grew from the center of the floor. In memory of their lost human cradle, all twelve machines were clad in veneers of real wood, each one different.

  Their natural colors had been polished to a warm glow with rags coated in beeswax. The warm scent reminded him of Vladsen’s hair. Each machine was a pillar unto itself, an incongruous tree trunk in the middle of that otherwise sterile place, their technological connections hidden in facades of root and branch spread between the ground and nominal ceiling.

  Those roots disappeared into the floor of the ship, hardwired into the minds of the gate-building bots waiting with machine patience for their instructions to be delivered. None of the Keepers stepping into those small booths knew if the data in their chip was the data that would be used in creation. They had their suspicions, an organization as long-lived and whispered about as theirs did not escape rumor and conjecture, and they, better than all, were positioned to intuit certain truths they could never admit to knowing.

  Twelve was the bare minimum scanned in for a build. Many believed that meant six Keepers were required, with one redundancy each, and some claimed as little as three or two, but no one really knew. Biran’s own conspiracies vacillated between six and two, but at this moment he wanted to believe that all twelve were necessary. Hitton’s last-minute scan included.

  He entered his booth and placed his hand on the wooden controls. There was no history here, worn into the wood. While each Keeper had a personal scanner at home to do the occasional—and private—security check on the integrity of their password, these scanners were a one-use affair.

  After the builder bots were activated, their first task would be to dismantle and destroy the ship that had brought them there—breaking down its constituent parts and all the supplies hidden within into the materials the bots would use to build the gate. These trees had been cultivated on some distant world for this singular use. Only Biran would ever see the whorls of walnut-dark grain swirling through the smooth controls. He tried to appreciate that, to seal the moment in his mind, before the system warmed to his touch and welcomed him.

  The gentle robotic voice said, “Biran Aventure Greeve, Speaker for the Protectorate of Ada Prime. Welcome. Please image password now to initiate gate construction protocols.”

  This was it. This was what he was for. A human encryption envelope, wrapped around a precious jewel of data that was, most likely, only a fraction of the knowledge Prime Inventive used to expand humanity.

  He thought he’d be nervous. Sometimes, Keepers took a long time to image their password for actual construction, no matter how many times they practiced at home. The knowledge that this was real, that this counted, was prone to throw up a great deal of mental static. Biran expected his palms to sweat. They did not, because he’d chosen his personal password well.

  While the scientists of splinter nations theorized about the actual construction of the gates, most laypeople of Prime wondered what the passwords were. A Keeper thought their password, their brain lit up in the right way, and the MRI recorded it, using the neural map created as a key. Biran knew the speculation—words, feelings, numbers, strings of seemingly meaningless characters. Many people even got close to the truth. It was different for every Keeper, but it was never something that could be written down. He still wondered how Sanda had accessed hers. He’d never had the chance to ask in person, and that wasn’t a conversation that could be had over any digital channel.

  Biran closed his eyes to shut out the clutter of visual input and thought of family. Not his family—that was too specific an idea, too changeable—but it included his family. It wasn’t the units of the family that mattered—not the role of a parent or child or sibling—but slotting into a close-knit community in which you truly belonged. Biran’s idea of family was not born of blood and generational ties, it was nebulous. Friends counted. Anyone could be a family, if they loved hard enough.

  The gentle chime of acceptance made him open his eyes. On the small screen, a cube spun on an offset axis, the visual representation of the data hidden in his brain stem. He affirmed the upload, then stepped out of the booth when the intelligence inside bade him thank you and farewell.

  That was it. That was what he had trained all his life to do. Oh, there were other responsibilities, but that upload was the sole purpose of the Keepers, a ritual unchanged since the days of Alexandra Halston. Giddiness vibrated his skin, and as Vladsen stepped out they shared a brief, triumphant grin.

  “First ones,” Olver said as he emerged from his booth. “Usually the young ones are last.”

  “Have you done many of these?” Biran asked.

  Olver glanced over his shoulder at the ash-pale wooden trunk that had been his booth. They were all soundproof—their conversation would not disturb those trying to image their own passwords. “A few,” he said.

  Biran wanted to press, but the others were coming out now. Regrouping, they reversed the procedure back into the hangar bay. The expected flurry of cameras met them, but the tone was all wrong. Biran’s skin prickled, instincts sensing that something was amiss long before his mind caught up and understood what was being shouted at him.

  The cordon around the public tightened, nervous fleeties holding them back against a new storm. The people reached for the Keepers, stretching their arms to the limit to get the small group in shot of their wristpads. Somebody had ordered the news drones to ground. The air was strangely empty.

  “What…?” Biran looked to Olver for guidance and found the man’s face a phantom of himself. Director Olver stared at his wristpad, shoulders hunched, his expression kept neutral only through sheer force of will, though there was nothing training could do for the paleness sapping the life from his cheeks. Biran couldn’t see the image clearly, but he caught hints of burnt concrete foams, twisted sheets of metal.

  He did not want to check his own wristpad. It vibrated at him, insistent. A priority message coming in that he must answer.

  Anford’s drawn face stared up at him out of the wristpad.

  “There’s been an incident at the asteroid,” she said.

  The muted echo of her words on all the Keeper wristpads around him sounded like the murmuring of ghosts. Biran swallowed, and did not ask, because this message was to them all, and she already knew what she must say next.

  “We lost contact shortly before the gate ships arrived. Hitton ordered her people off station. This is what’s left.”

  The asteroid station was a crater. There was no other word Biran could dredge up to describe the widespread destruction. Every spacefaring human had intimate knowledge of all the ways a hab or station or ship could go wrong: decompression, power loss, drive overloading. None of those things caused damage like this. This was the kind of wreckage encountered in Sanda’s world, where words like bombardment and artillery were more common. Not at a survey site. Not at a Keeper hab, even a far-flung one.

  Olver said, voice firmer than it had any right to be, “Survivors?”

  “Those shipped off before the incident.”

  Not Hitton. A wave of dizziness threatened to topple Biran, but he stood firm, bent his knees slightly to ground himself. Concentrated on the
unshakable footing provided by mag boots.

  A word blazed bright in everyone’s minds, but it was Singh who asked, her voice sharp, “Icarion?”

  “No. We’re still investigating. Drones have arrived on-site and the evacuated are being brought home now.”

  She blew it up. Anford wouldn’t say it, not yet, but that damage could be caused by a self-destruct sequence. Without the asteroid to capture the gate’s orbit, it couldn’t be built. Prime built self-destruct commands into all their stations, should they ever risk being overrun by enemy forces and the data hidden within captured. All Keepers knew the protocols. None ever expected to use them.

  “Lockdown,” Olver said, “effective immediately. Guardcore, the build ships are alpha priority. They’re every priority straight through zeta. Anford, get me Okonkwo, I want the whole High Protectorate on my screen the second I step into the war room, and Bollar waiting in the wings.”

  “Yes, sir,” the mixed chorus said through Director Olver’s wristpad.

  Olver closed the channel, dropped his arm to his side, and surveyed the frantic crowd of civs with focused but unreadable eyes. The shift in his posture from one second to the next humbled Biran. It was so very easy to think of him as a father figure—he encouraged the comparison—but in those scant seconds, going from knowing his dear friend was dead to taking control of the situation, Biran felt a void of inadequacy open up in the depths of his soul. Ada was very lucky to have him as director.

  “Cannery,” he said to the dazed Keepers crowded around him. “Now.”

  Biran took a step to follow the group, a gaggle of lost ducklings stumbling after their director, but Olver cut him off with a look. Right. Speaker: Speak.

  Vladsen reached out. Impulsively, stupidly, that dark-eyed man squeezed Biran’s wrist, and then he was hurried off, corralled to the Cannery with the rest. Biran stood alone save a single GC who lingered, their rifle pointed at the ground but ready, their gloved finger resting against the trigger guard.