Chaos Vector

by Megan E O'Keefe

  Inadequacy grew in his mind and threatened to sprout thorns. All his insecurities told him he was not ready for this. He could speak prettily about his sister and the virtues of protecting Prime and Icarion all day long, but this was something new. Olver should do this, but Olver could not do everything, and in picking Biran for this moment—no matter the political maneuvering that’d dragged him into his station—the director had endorsed his ability.

  Biran did not freeze in front of cameras. He did now.

  The guardcore behind him cleared their throat, gently, through the speakers on their armor. He couldn’t be sure, but there was a soft quality that made him think of the kind GC. He had gotten through the panic and the fear then by doing the work. This was no different.

  “Please,” he said, forcing his voice to project. The shouting calmed down, replaced by the rustle of reporters tapping as they cranked up their microphones. “I cannot in good faith ask you to be calm, but I must ask you to be patient. We will dig to the root of what happened at the asteroid. We will have answers for you soon. Shelter in place. The Ada system is on lockdown. Be safe. Take care of each other.”

  Biran walked away, wondering who would take care of Olver, and how they had failed so catastrophically in taking care of Hitton.

  CHAPTER 67

  PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543

  A LIGHT IN THE DARK

  The stealth ships of the Nazca weren’t the kind of technology available to the public. Prime had better—Prime always had better—but the Nazca kept their fleet of ships as close to the cutting edge as possible. You couldn’t see them unless you were expecting to. And no one was expecting Tomas.

  He cut the engines as, on the viewscreen, the blip that was the Thorn drifted closer.

  Time had slipped through his fingers. Easy enough to happen when you were off-planet and not adhering to circadian rhythm lights, but this was something else. Not true memory loss. No, this was grief, maybe, or something like depression. Tomas had crawled into this ship at the Ordinal stronghold, set course for Sanda’s gunship, and just… drifted.

  But he was awake now. The Thorn had come to a stop six hours’ flight outside of a gate that was supposed to be dead. Maybe the records were wrong. Maybe that gate had been spun up a long time ago, and his navigational database hadn’t picked up the update. It was a pretty thought, a lot prettier than the idea that Rainier had spun it up for her own purposes, but that was one path he could not take. Even a Nazca stealth ship wasn’t clever enough to lie its way through a Casimir Gate security check. Without proper clearance, he’d be slaughtered.

  His ship’s sensors weren’t picking up any comms chatter from the Thorn, and preliminary scans came back with heart-sinking reports of damage. He would have sent a tightbeam, if it weren’t for the guardcore ship lurking nearby.

  The airlock on the side of the Thorn opened. Slinking as close as he dared, Tomas focused the cameras on that lock. It had been damaged at some point, warped so that the internal door held but the exterior would have trouble mating with another ship.

  A man kicked out, suited in Prime armor, a pack slung over his shoulder, and angled his airjets for the GC ship. Tomas didn’t recognize him, but he took whatever footage he could get and fed it into a basic personnel search database. He didn’t dare touch anything Nazca until he was certain none of it could be used to trace his location. Nothing came back. According to the net, that man didn’t exist.

  As the guardcore ship turned to leave, the Thorn’s derelict beacon came on. Tomas waited the longest hour of his life for the GC ship to clear the area, ordering his ship to tag the bigger ship’s heading and track it as best as it could.

  When he was certain the GC ship was beyond visual recognition, Tomas approached the Thorn. For a second he considered not bothering to suit up, just to see how his body handled the vacuum, then realized he was an idiot. Lavaux had died in the emptiness, hadn’t he? It wasn’t a risk Tomas could take.

  He set the shuttle to alert him if the GC ship made it out of tracking range, and entered the Thorn.

  The ship was hollow. Oh, it was full of stuff, but as Tomas pulled himself through the echoing hallways, he got the sense that something had gone very wrong here, something he couldn’t see yet. There was no blood, no sign of gunfire, and yet the halls spoke of a violence in their raw emptiness.

  Sanda’s crew had been here, recently, and then they were not, and there was no explanation that Tomas could draw up that put those two threads together peacefully.

  There was nothing for him to go on. He searched every room for a hint of who that man boarding the GC ship had been. Every room, except hers. He couldn’t do it. Not yet.

  “Exceeding tracking envelope,” his ship said through his helmet.

  Tomas sighed. He never had enough time. He pulled himself hand over hand down the hall, opened Sanda’s door with a practiced flick of the wrist that belied the sick, hot dread that was curdling in his belly. Maybe he could shut that feeling down, but he didn’t want to.

  Grippy looked up at him over Sanda’s desk. He let out a soft sob, then felt like an idiot. Grippy’s presence meant nothing, could mean anything. She would never leave the robot behind, he was sure of that, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t coming back.

  “Losing tracking,” the ship said.

  “Goddamnit,” he hissed.

  Tomas kicked across the room and, briefly, considered taking the robot with him. He couldn’t leave him here, all alone, drifting derelict by a deadgate that no one would bother passing by. But taking the bot meant Sanda wasn’t coming back for it.

  He reached into a pocket on the side of his mag boot and pulled out a small tracking device. It was Sanda’s tracker, the kind her dad used to track cargo on his hauler. He’d found it in his boot at the safe house and pretended not to notice until he was clear of Atrux and on his way to Janus. It soothed him that she had needed to know where he was.

  Tomas needed all the soothing he could get right now.

  The activation switch clicked beneath his thumb and he slid the tracker underneath the maintenance panel on Grippy’s belly. He made sure the connection was secure and working before he closed it back up. Tomas hesitated, then patted the robot on the head.

  “Find her for me, okay?”

  Beep beep.

  The bot didn’t understand, not really, but Tomas grinned fiercely anyway. He snatched her tablet off the desk to data mine for clues later and kicked back toward the airlock.

  He’d find the GC ship and squeeze that man for information. As soon as he was certain Sanda was safe… Then he would hunt the man in grey.

  CHAPTER 68

  PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543

  OLD FRIENDS

  The reborn Light of Berossus passed through the Casimir Gate without so much as a warning light going off. While all ships had their power throttled, their systems taken over for the brief but monumental passing, this new ship slid through as unnoticed as a shark in dark waters. Made for each other, the gate and the ship, Sanda thought, and again wondered if the instructions scribed on the sphere were the secret hidden in every Keeper’s skull.

  Her own cranial secret was done, spent. She’d thought she’d want it removed once the location was found—if that were even possible. Carved out and incinerated once she knew definitively what it meant. But that pinpoint in space, another dot on the map, had become a part of her. She no more wanted the chip out than she wanted to lose another limb.

  Bero had rearranged the command deck to look more like what the mere humans riding his body were comfortable with. The metallic surface of the forward bulkhead displayed video in the same way a viewscreen would, and the tall podiums had been replaced with seats and desk-spaces resembling consoles, with readouts and status reports streaming by. He even gave them buttons to push.

  Both Sanda and Conway squirmed in their seats occasionally. There was nothing for them to do. Silently, they both hated it.

  “I have locked onto the Thorn�
�s position,” Bero said.

  “Show me,” Sanda said.

  Instead of the usual graphical rendering of the nearby space, Bero provided perfectly crisp video of the ship, zoomed in tight.

  “Is this real time?” Sanda asked.

  “Yes. These cameras are a considerable upgrade.”

  That should be a good thing, but Sanda couldn’t help remembering what lies Bero could weave when he had access to decent video-rendering systems. A soft, yellow light blinking toward the nose of the Thorn caught her eye.

  “Is that the derelict beacon?”

  “It is. Demas has logged the ship as too damaged to fly. All scans taken of the Thorn report no life on board.”

  “He had a getaway driver waiting for him,” Nox said.

  “Not surprising,” Sanda said, though the admission ached. “Bero, can you check the local flight logs? See what ships recently passed through the area.”

  “None but the Thorn.”

  She closed her eyes briefly. Guardcore ships were required to file their flight plans with the fleet and Keepers, but requirements didn’t mean compliance. If Demas wanted to get in and out, they’d come in dark. The disappearance of the Thorn’s crew was, it seemed, supposed to remain a mystery to the public.

  “Bring us in to the Thorn. We’ll salvage what we can of the supplies. And Grippy’s on there.”

  He better be. If Demas took off with her robot, then she’d find the fucker come hell or high water.

  Bero’s new body didn’t have a passage to mate between the airlocks, so they pulled helmets and lifepacks on to prepare for vacuum. Sanda would have ordered it anyway. She didn’t trust Demas not to leave a nasty surprise behind on the ship.

  She took Knuth and went through with Nox at her side. She’d been tempted to bring Conway, but they had only two guns to share between them and they’d have enough trouble making sure Knuth was properly covered while he checked over what remained of the Thorn.

  Sanda half expected the locks to have been overridden so that her ident wouldn’t let them through, and had brought torches just in case, but Demas had left her clearances intact. It’d be harder to sell whatever story he’d cooked up about their mysterious demise if all the security systems had been changed to answer only to him.

  The airlock opened, and Sanda pushed herself inside, blaster out and ready, though she genuinely didn’t think she’d need it. The Thorn, her home for a brief time and seat of tenuous command, felt empty.

  It wasn’t the lack of people, not really. Something essential to the ship had been carved out when it had been commandeered, a violation she couldn’t unsee, or unfeel. A captain’s ship was supposed to be an extension of themselves, another appendage in which they worked in concert. Sanda knew what it was to lose a limb, and this was that feeling all over again. Even if they moved back into the broken vessel, it wouldn’t quite be the same.

  “Clear,” Nox said from down the hall. He’d opened all the doors to private quarters, and seeing them stand open drove home that this place was not theirs anymore.

  Sanda poked her head into her room to find that her tablet was gone, but Grippy was still there. He lifted his head up from behind her desk, the green LED between his “eyes” blinking in recognition.

  “Come on, Grippy,” she said, “there’s someone who I think you want to see.”

  The bot’s systems weren’t sophisticated enough to parse all of that, but it understood its name and come on and so trundled into the hall, magnetic treads clicking in concert with their mag boots as they checked every nook and cranny of the ship. Demas had bugged out, and taken the sphere with him.

  On the command deck, she said, “Knuth, can you get us enough power for me to make a priority call?”

  “I don’t know, honestly. The EMP fried the comms system and even if I got a good chunk up and running, I can’t guarantee how secure a line would be.”

  “Understood. Nox, go with him and scavenge what you can for us. All the food, the NutriSystem extruder, everything that might make life on Bero a little more comfortable for humans. Blankets, even. And we’ll need all the extra clothes, weapons, and armor. Bring the others over to help, if you need it.”

  “Sure, Commander, but what are you going to do?”

  She tapped the side of her wristpad. “I need to call my commanding officer.”

  Nox grimaced, gave her a mock salute, and ushered Knuth out of the command deck as quick as he could.

  Sanda approached her captain’s seat from the side, let her hand rest on the back a moment before she sat down, and after a pause in which she lined up what she needed to say, turned her wristpad to face herself and typed in the code to call General Anford on a priority line.

  It took a few minutes, but the general answered. Nothing had changed about her, so far as Sanda could tell. Same stern face, strong jaw, unflinching gaze. She was somewhere in the Cannery, Sanda guessed, but those grey walls behind her could have been anywhere in Prime.

  “Greeve, I was under the impression you’d decided to take your orders directly from Prime Director Okonkwo now.”

  The barb didn’t hurt her as it once would have. “Okonkwo arranged to have me, and all my crew, slaughtered. As you can see, the attempt didn’t take.”

  Anford narrowed her eyes. “Have you suffered a traumatic brain injury? If Okonkwo wanted you dead, she would have had you court-martialed and executed. Whatever you experienced, it was not an assassination attempt by the Prime Director.”

  Sanda smiled tightly. “Technically, it was her pet GC who made the attempt. And while my brain is well enough, he did shoot me in the stomach.”

  “He? Greeve, are you certain you’re well?”

  She sighed. “General, there is no way to explain matters that would make you believe me, I think. You and I are creatures of Prime, aren’t we? Loyal to a fault. The system always works as intended. Et cetera.”

  There was a brief flash of tension in the corner of Anford’s eyes. Sanda pressed on. “I don’t blame you. I actually like you, General Anford, though I’m sure that means piss-all in the grand scheme of things.”

  “Report, Major. The Prime Director was thin on the details when she so kindly informed me she’d given you orders, and at the moment I am too busy for your bullshit.”

  That should have stung, should have shamed her. It didn’t.

  “Gladly. At Monte Station, we came under fire from a host of enemy ships seeking to capture the scientists rescued from Janus. They flew guardcore ships, and wore GC armor, but according to my brother and as was later confirmed by Okonkwo, they were not in fact GC.”

  “How—”

  “It gets stranger. My brother, realizing that we were soon to be under attack by unknown entities, hailed for help. Okonkwo’s personal ship was the only one in shouting distance, and she arrived and pulled our asses out of the fire. She then informed me she knew of the false GC and had for quite a while.” Sanda paused a moment to let that sink in.

  “I have seen no report.” Anford scowled, but there was a nervous twitch at the corner of her lips, quite unlike her.

  “You have, it seems. But I’m guessing what you don’t know is that the Prime Director claims to be an ex-member of a secret cabal of Keepers who call themselves the Acolytes. Their goal, she says, is to stay under the proverbial political radar—hence her exit from their order upon her election to Prime Director—and operate in secret to maintain the status quo of Prime society.”

  “I would know of such an organization.”

  “Even if you did, how could I be certain you’d cop to knowing about it? No, I believe you, actually. It’s just that I’ve been lied to a lot lately. If this order even exists, and I do believe it does—Keeper Nakata of Atrux was reportedly among their number—then their goal is not to police Prime’s safety, but to prevent upheaval within the social-political system.”

  Her lips pursed. “Spies and espionage.”

  “Yes. According to Okonkwo, they have been see
king the root cause of the false GC for quite some time. That is, allegedly, the reason Nakata was killed.”

  “You keep hedging your words, Greeve. Do you believe Okonkwo’s assertions, or not?”

  “I don’t have a fucking clue, begging your pardon, General. Okonkwo asked after my present mission, and at mention of the coordinates Lavaux was trying to reach, she damn near lit up. She gave us a GC out of uniform—his name’s Demas, he’s an asshole—and the override commands to spin the deadgate. Once we arrived, we were attacked by an automated defense system. I engaged the system and was forced to use an EMP. The Thorn was damaged. Once the battle was concluded, we sighted an unknown vessel a short distance from the gate.”

  “Unknown?”

  “Sir, I… After boarding, it became clear no human made this vessel.”

  “Humanity has been an interstellar species for thousands of years. In that time, we have found no other.”

  “Times are changing.” She grimaced at her own word choice for such a historic moment. “I already sound like a cracked pot, believe me, I know, and you’re about to think I’ve gone even further down the conspiracy rabbit hole because I swear to you, General, Demas knew what that ship was.

  “There was something in it that Okonkwo had sent him to fetch. A sphere, embedded in a pedestal in the center of the ship. It had etchings on it we believe to be binary, but we lacked cameras with the resolution to read them well at such a small scale. Shortly after the discovery of the sphere, Demas shot me in the stomach, evaded my crew, and commandeered the Thorn. Presumably, he believed we couldn’t revive the engines on the ali—new—ship. They seemed dead at the time.”

  “He shot you? And you appear to be on board the Thorn right now.”

  “He did, and I am. Mx. Wyke got the ship online and saved my life. We pursued Demas through the gate to find the Thorn abandoned, broadcasting a derelict beacon. I can only assume he arranged for another of the GC or Okonkwo’s inner circle to pick him up.”