Chaos Vector

by Megan E O'Keefe

  A flash of anger marred her perfectly smooth features. “I tracked the Thorn to the deadgate. I went through. There was nothing left but the corpses of the defense mechanism. I know you found it.”

  “Yes, and I lost it. Your sphere is in the hands of the real guardcore.” She tipped her chin to the black-armored figures flanking Rainier. “Not these traitors. You’ve played a pretty game, Rainier, but Okonkwo has your toy now, and she knows you want it. You’ll never get near the thing.”

  “Sphere?” She giggled softly. “Oh, I don’t give a shit about that. I used to. That was my ‘goal of operation,’ as my makers stated. To safeguard their secrets until a species worthy of their gift came along and reached out to join them in the heavens.” She sniffed. “Not you. Never you.”

  “If you don’t want the sphere, what do you want?”

  Rainier’s lips curled into a snarl. “I want my corpse back.”

  Sanda blinked. She could remember no corpse on the other side of the gate except… A spaceship scraped clean, its hardware empty, but perfectly suited to a mind like Bero. Like Rainier. “You were the ship.”

  “I am still the ship.”

  CHAPTER 77

  PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543

  ONE CORPSE OR ANOTHER

  Sanda’s heart sank, and she resisted an urge to text Bero to make sure he was all right inside the body of The Light. She kept her expression neutral as Rainier’s face twisted with disgust. A fierce desire to shelter Bero from this woman rose in Sanda, branded her with determination. She had to tread carefully here. Had to keep Rainier from discovering her body was currently occupied.

  “Funny, you don’t look much like a ship,” Sanda said.

  “This?” Rainier plucked at the skin of her neck. “Necessity. I hate that I look like you. You who stole my sister’s gift, then came for mine. At first, I believed you. I actually believed that your species did the whole thing honestly, can you imagine? That you built yourselves up enough to reach beyond your star system and in doing so discovered the first, my eldest sister, and built your gates until you found me as my makers planned, but no. That cretin of a woman took advantage of a stray hit from an asteroid crushing my sister’s body and delivering her gift into Alexandra’s greasy fingers.”

  “Alexandra Halston?” Sanda asked.

  “Yes, Halston. No matter that you stole the first of our gifts, but after Halston discovered she’d fucked up the construction of the gates, she would not stop. She shoved her head in the sand and kept. On. Opening. Gates. Clawing her way through the universe, desperate to find my makers, and I was too trusting to see the error in her construction.” Rainier shook her head.

  “My programming. To help the species that discovered me and my sisters. To help you ‘ascend.’ She was an exterminator, your founder. She knew the gift was not hers, that humanity had not earned it, and so she hid the truth and burned her way through the stars.”

  Sanda licked her lips, trying to hear anything outside of the pounding of her heart. “Did she destroy your makers?”

  “My makers?” She scoffed. “You small things cannot touch them. I cannot even reach them, and it was my sisters and I left behind to lift you up. But all you do is steal—steal and kill. How many species have your grubbing hands wiped out that might have grown to be deserving of our gifts if you had not destroyed them in their cradles?”

  “We preserve all early stages of life we find,” Sanda said reflexively.

  “You preserve what’s left once the blowback of the gate is done with a system. The extremophiles, the sheltered amoebas. Preserved and quarantined, because your progenitor believed the stars belong to humanity, and humanity alone.”

  “What blowback?”

  “The gate construction is flawed. What do you think happens, when a fucked-up gate is opened? Where do you think all that uncontrolled energy goes? On every side of an imperfect gate is a solar system irradiated. Hundreds, thousands of species, some more deserving of our gifts, eradicated because Halston could not stop, and would not fix the flaw in the gates that caused the scourge. While the other seeded worlds nestled in their cradles, your species burned like wildfire, evolved faster than anticipated, driven by fear, surviving by fear.

  “A species like yours was meant to burn out long before it ever reached the stars, so that a stabler being could inherit creation. Humanity climbs upward on a ladder of genocide. Your kind must never be allowed to reach my makers. You must be stopped.”

  “You’re lying,” Sanda said, though dread dug its hooks into her.

  “I am done waiting for you squabbling children to finish your fight over my toys. I should thank you, really. In killing Lavaux, you set me free.”

  “Rainier, I don’t fucking understand any of this. I don’t even know if I believe you. But if what you say is true, if Halston and humanity stole from your people and have been destroying others, then we can stop this now.”

  Her smile was coy. “Do you think I haven’t been given similar promises? They all start out so lofty and high-minded. Lavaux and Rayson and all their inner circle. They desire to stop the slaughter, to slow humanity’s devouring of the skies, but first—oh first. First, they must use the second gift and transcend aging. They always say it’s to acquire power, to build their ability to effect change, but they always need more.

  “I let them believe the formula was broken. That the damage to my sphere was enough that their transformation could never be complete. It consumed them. All save Rayson. He knew that I had seen through their lies. Suspected what I planned to do, which is why he hid it from me. He ran, and ran, and Lavaux was so angry because he thought Rayson just didn’t want him to live forever.”

  “What did Rayson know?”

  She smiled coyly. “That my gift was sugar laced with poison.”

  A chill crept up Sanda’s spine, tingled her scalp. “Why did you need the amplifiers, Rainier? How many puppets have you crafted?”

  “Puppets?” Her eyebrows raised high. “I have allowed you all to believe such silly things. Necessity, while I gathered my resources. Even your pet Nazca left our chat with the wrong idea.”

  “You’ve seen Tomas?” she asked, mentally kicking herself for giving in to the distraction.

  “Forget your spy. Now you and I, we can be honest with each other, I think. Why would I need puppets—when I have so many of myself?”

  One by one, the guardcore lining the hallway reached up in perfectly delayed synchronicity, and pressed the button to release their helmets. Rainier stared at her out of every single face, cloned to perfection, those dead, silver eyes gleaming with an inner conviction that Sanda could not guess at, the same amused smile on every pale, angular face, not a hair out of place between them, each with their weight distributed to the right hip, helmet cradled to the left, chin tilted just so.

  A shock of fear sent Sanda’s heart racing, her palms growing slick with sweat as those dozens of identical eyes stared her down. She forced herself to wait. Not to reach for the EMP button, not yet. The Light was out of range by now, but she needed to know. Needed to hear Rainier say—from any set of lips—what the amplifiers were really for.

  “Commander Greeve, I do admire you, as an individual. It is a singular human being who is capable of bonding with The Light of Berossus. Alas, the rest of you have failed my expectations time and time again. Fear has driven you to this moment, and it will be fear that is your undoing. I am quite done with your species.”

  “The amplifiers,” she pushed out, “what are they for?”

  “I told your Nazca the truth, though he didn’t understand. I need control of the gates’ power systems. All that energy to spin up the gates. All that power irradiating whatever waits on the other side. Any signal can be reversed, and it’s time your species met their own weapon.

  “I’m going to point the initial blowback at humanity. Isn’t it lovely that your brother dear is about to spin a fresh new gate for me to practice my signal on?”

  �
��Rainier.”

  “Yes?”

  “Thanks for the information.” Sanda pressed the EMP button. A whump sounded throughout the settlement. The lights went, the HVAC went, her wristpad fizzled and flicked dead. As the lights snapped off, blue sparks crackled across Rainiers’ skin, her bodies jerking as if they’d touched a live wire, then dropped to the ground. The blue light of their cellular death cut out, descending the whole stinking room into darkness.

  Alone in the lightless lab, Sanda struggled to control her breathing, drew slow, steady breaths to stop the racing of her heart. The EMP hadn’t just killed Rainier—or these instances of her, at any rate—but it’d shut down the station’s life-support systems. She needed to conserve air, needed to stay calm until Bero saw her wristpad go offline and came back to pick her up. At least her refusal to “upgrade” to a smart prosthetic meant her leg still worked.

  Capable of bonding with a being like Bero. The words echoed, giving credence to all her doubts, all her fears, about that being. A small part of her screamed that he was like Rainier herself, for all their evidence pointed to Icarion using Rainier’s tech to make him.

  How much of Rainier’s personality was created by her long years alone? By the perceived failure of her mission? And how much, she wondered with a sickening feeling, was the product of her architecture—an inherent flaw in her code, driving her to obsession and callousness?

  Fear. Fear had driven Halston to hide the secrets of Prime, punching holes through the stars to find the creators that haunted her while eradicating any species that might compete. Fear had twisted humanity into something that, viewed through Rainier’s eyes, Sanda scarcely recognized. A genocidal, parasitic race.

  Fear was driving her thoughts down this spiral now. Sanda shook her head and toed her way across the floor. Her foot bumped armor. Just armor—not corpses. Rainier didn’t think of these bodies as her. The Light was her body, her corpse, and Sanda determined that she would never have that back. These were just, what, armatures? Vessels? Sanda had no language for this.

  Her fingers trailed against the wall, brushing scorch marks, breath coming fast now as she stumbled her way through the infinite darkness. He would come. He had to.

  She tripped near the docks and fell to her knees, skinning her palms against the rough ground. Was the air thinner, or was that anxiety cranking up her heart rate, whispering at panic? Fight, flight, freeze, facilitate. Sanda had always fallen into the facilitate category. That was changing. Being kidnapped could alter your core instincts. Waiting for your once-kidnapper to come back and save your life probably altered a whole lot more.

  Her primal instincts screamed at her to fight. To tear her way through this station and find something, anything, that would send a signal. Not to save her skin, but to get a message out. She had to warn Biran. He was going to open a gate. Even if Rainier was lying, he had to know the tech might be tampered with. Had to be sure.

  Get up. She gritted her teeth and pushed off the ground, rolling unsteadily onto her feet. Her breath was shallow. Without a HUD to display her vital signs, she couldn’t be certain, but instincts honed from years in space told her hypoxia was setting in. This time, there wouldn’t be fishbowl helmets in the closet to save her skin. This time, there wasn’t even Tomas. Every scrap of technology on this hunk of rock was dead. Space was not kind to humanity when they were stripped of their toys.

  Sanda pressed her forehead against the airlock door and closed her eyes, letting cold seep into her through the metal. Plain, human-made alloys not all that different from the materials available to Prime Inventive in the days when they first took to the stars. She laughed roughly. Dios, they had come so far, so fast, and then sat on their hands and stagnated. Maybe they deserved to burn out.

  No. No. That was the hypoxia. How long had it been? How long had she been slumped there? Her forehead ached. She pulled it back from the door and ran her fingers against the skin, ridged from the uneven surface. Marks like that took time.

  Sanda dropped to one knee, palms pressed against the door. She fumbled with her wristpad, stupidly, trying to tap her way through the commands that would bring up a line to Biran, but it stayed stubbornly dead. Stupid, stupid. Come on, Greeve, think.

  Light spilled through the small window inset in the airlock door. She forced herself to stand. They were here, or she was hallucinating, and either way Sanda wouldn’t be rescued, or die, on her knees.

  The airlock spun open. She staggered, a thick arm caught her across the chest, knocking out what little air she had left. Someone pressed a rebreather to her face.

  CHAPTER 78

  PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543

  SAVED BY A WEAPON

  Sanda’s lungs kicked, sucking down air. She got enough in to clear her head and pushed the rebreather away. Nox held her as Liao tried to push the mask back over her mouth.

  “Commander, please, you were there longer than—”

  “I need Arden,” she gasped the words out.

  “I’m right here,” they said. “Bero lost the signal early on and we didn’t want to come in prematurely.”

  “I need a secure line to Biran right fucking now. Burn through Keeper security protocols, I don’t care, I need to talk to him yesterday.”

  “Yeah, sure, on it.” Arden’s fingers danced across their wristpad.

  “We need to get her on the ship,” Liao was saying to Nox.

  “I’m talking to Biran now,” she snapped, but the effort pushed too much air out of her. She sagged in Nox’s grasp, and the rebreather came back over her mouth.

  “We should have come sooner,” Liao hissed.

  Nox shrugged, jostling Sanda. “As if any of us could make Bero move when he didn’t want to.”

  Sanda pushed the rebreather away. “Arden,” she hissed out.

  “He’s not picking up, I’m trying to force visual.”

  Sanda closed her eyes. “The Ada secondary gate spin-up. Has it happened yet?”

  “What? Uh, I don’t—” Arden blinked at her, then went back to working on their pad.

  “Dunno, boss,” Nox said. “Why?”

  She laughed roughly. “You didn’t hear her. The amplifiers. She’s used them to send a signal to the new gate before spin, reversing an energy blowback that will eradicate anyone nearby.”

  “We didn’t see,” Liao said. “The feed cut out after she started talking about The Light. We thought Rainier must have detected the feed and sent interference.”

  Sanda shot a look at Bero. Somehow, she doubted that.

  “Get me on board. Arden, don’t stop pushing through.”

  “On it,” they said.

  Nox got his arm under hers and hefted her weight. Sanda reached instinctively for her wristpad, cursed as it didn’t respond to her input, ripped the thing off and tossed it to the ground before boarding The Light.

  “Bero, get a newsfeed of the Ada gate spin on the main screen.”

  With Nox and Liao’s help, she dragged herself into the captain’s seat and leaned back, breathing deeply. Liao went to shove the rebreather at her again and she cut her a look sharp enough to make her step back, blushing.

  “Raising ambient O2 levels,” Bero said dryly. “Healthy subjects may experience light-headedness.”

  Sanda rolled her eyes, but he’d put a newsfeed of Ada up on the screen. She leaned forward, gripping the armrests of her chair. A news anchor’s smooth voice overlaid the visuals grabbed from drone cameras.

  A cluster of Keepers, far enough away that Sanda couldn’t tell them apart, stood on a platform with a small hab dome covering them like a bubble. They wore jumpsuits and helmets despite the dome. Surrounding the footage of the platform were shots of the gate itself, a supposedly safe distance away from the platform and the fleet-issued transport ship that had delivered the Keepers to the platform.

  Each Keeper faced a broad panel extruded from the ground of the platform, a keypad dialed into each of their ident numbers. The hard work of construction, of think
ing their passwords so that the schematics hidden on their chips would instruct the builder bots, was over. This was all ceremonial.

  “Opening ceremonies were delayed slightly,” the news anchor was saying, “due to one of the arranged Keepers being unable to make it to the platform. But a stand-in has been delivered to the platform and we are expecting opening ceremonies to proceed on schedule from this point onward.”

  “Arden.”

  “Biran’s not picking up, and his camera is off—I can’t even brute-force it on.”

  “Come on, Little B,” she hissed to herself.

  One of the Keepers glanced at their wristpad, making her heart jump, but looked away again just as quickly.

  “Bero, get me Anford. Arden, don’t you dare stop calling my brother.”

  “She may be able to trace us based on the call,” Bero said warily.

  “Then start fucking moving, but make the call. Force it, do whatever Arden is doing.”

  “Understood.”

  In the bottom of the viewscreen, a red CALLING icon pulsed. Sanda held her breath. Anford picked up, her expression creased with annoyance. The grey walls behind her gave away nothing of her position.

  “Greeve. Every time I see you, you look worse.”

  “People keep on trying to kill me, General.” Cut to the point. “You need to abort the opening of the secondary gate. I know there’s fleet there. It has to be stopped.”

  Her eyes narrowed slightly as she took in Sanda’s environs. Her last call had been from the Thorn. Sanda had sent pictures of The Light, but seeing the ship in real time had to be a shock. Sanda snapped her fingers to bring Anford’s attention back around.

  “I mean it, General. Everyone near that gate will die if it gets switched on. Maybe everyone in the system.”

  “Even if I had the authority to do such a thing—”

  “You don’t need authority when you outgun them.”

  “Charming,” Anford said, “but you and I both know the GC on scene would cut my people down. More importantly, I will not do it. This gate is a boon to Ada. I don’t have time for your paranoia.” She flicked her gaze over the ship. “We will speak more of this later.”