Chaos Vector

by Megan E O'Keefe

  The feed dropped.

  “Fuck. Bero, can you get me someone on-site? Director Olver has to be down there.”

  “I will try.”

  She dragged her hands through her hair.

  “Arden?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  The news anchor said, voice high with excitement, “Ah! They’re beginning proceedings. This practice is ceremonial, but—”

  Five Keepers stood on the platform before the unnamed gate. One by one, they lifted their hands, palms out, to place upon the readers stationed in front of them. Their hands were gloved, but the scanners picked up the signal from the ident chips. One by one, those lock panels switched from pale yellow to bright blue. Prime cyan.

  The Casimir Gate spun.

  For a fraction of a second she could see it moving through the drone footage. Not too close—that was never allowed—but close enough to make out the sinuous sheen of black metal glinting in the lights that adorned it.

  All went white.

  The brightness stung her eyes, but she would not blink. She stared that white screen down as if she could will it backward in time, undo the destruction. Make Rainier a liar. But she had never had reason to lie. For Rainier, the pieces were already in play. Everything else was waiting until they spun, inevitably, into place.

  Liao let out a soft sob. The sound anchored Sanda to that moment, made it real. Made the lead weight in her chest even heavier. She should sob. Scream. Break something. Instead, a numbness flowed through her veins—made her too heavy, dulled.

  How far? she wanted to demand. How far did Rainier’s sabotage spread? The Keeper platform? All the way to Ada, where her parents were? She pushed the fear away. She could not afford to be dull. She needed to be sharp. Sharp enough to flense the creature who had done this from the universe.

  “Bero.” Her voice hitched slightly. She pushed through it. “Set course for Ada, Keep Station. Stealth when you need to but we’re coming in visible. Find…” And here she faltered, because the hope she’d pinned her heart to was so very thin. “… Find any newsfeeds reporting on the damage and put them up.” Now for the hard part. “Find out which Keeper didn’t show up for the opening.”

  “Yes, Sanda.” Even his voice was subdued.

  “Commander,” Liao said softly. There was sympathy in that voice. Sanda knew what was coming next and didn’t want to hear it.

  “Don’t,” she snapped. “Arden. Don’t stop calling Biran. Don’t ever stop.”

  CHAPTER 79

  PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543

  MATTERS BIOLOGICAL

  Life became a lot smoother when you wore GC armor and piloted a GC ship. Guardcore ships flew themselves, talked to local control autonomously. If there were passwords or digital handshakes to be made, the ship did them all without Jules’s interference. She was already in Alexandria-Atrux, sliding into the private GC docks, when the blowback happened.

  She watched the news stations spin themselves into chaos. Watched them go dark again when the feed in from Ada was cut, the system that was Prime Inventive quarantining information until they could figure out what had gone wrong. Jules knew.

  She thumbed in one of the many ident numbers Rainier used and waited for her to pick up the call. It didn’t take long. The distribution of Rainier made her easy to get ahold of. One of her always had the time, even if it was short, to chat with her wayward creations.

  This Rainier sat on a plush sofa upholstered in synthetic furs in shades of grey and dusk. Jules wondered, briefly, what it would be like to live so many different lives. So far, she’d lived only two. She was about to live a third.

  “How nice of you to call,” Rainier purred into the camera. She crossed too-long legs and leaned back, draping her arms across the back of the sofa. “You have my ship, I see. I hope you haven’t dented it. Joyriding is unbecoming for someone your age, you know.”

  “Were you ever going to save Lolla?” Jules asked.

  The woman-thing sighed and dropped her head against the back of the sofa so that all Jules could see was the pearly stretch of her throat diving down into the yellow robe wrapped around her deceptively frail body.

  “Lolla, Lolla, Lolla. I liked the little one, before she went under. Sometimes I wish you two had been reversed. But this”—and she waved a hand, the same flippant gesture all her bodies made when speaking of humanity—“is merely temporary. I’ve told you. I have no interest in the biological.”

  “You got what you wanted. I held up my end of the deal. I made your scientists work for those damn amplifiers so you could burn a hole in Prime. I saw the footage. They worked.”

  Her chin snapped down and her lip curled. “Partially. A mistake I can correct.”

  “How many of the GC are you?”

  At that she grinned, letting all her too-perfect teeth shine. “Oh, you caught that, did you? How did you nose that one out? Even Lavaux wasn’t sure.”

  “I found your growing chambers on this ship. How many?”

  “Do you honestly care, Juliella?”

  No. She didn’t give a fuck what happened to the Keepers and all their cronies. Part of her wanted to know for curiosity’s sake, the other part wanted to know so she could be sure when she put a bullet in a helmet she was liquefying the right brain. Neither part would change her course of action.

  “You knew what Marya would do. You knew she’d show me what happened with Liao. Was that your engineered betrayal?”

  She twirled her finger through the air, stirring an invisible pot. “My view is much longer than that.”

  “And when does it end? When does Rainier stop hurting?”

  Her eyes narrowed, flashing catlike in the low light of the room. “It is not I who hurt.”

  “Maybe. Maybe you can’t feel pain like humanity can. I’m not even sure I can anymore. But I know how it feels to be given a task and fail because of the interference of others working only for their own benefit. I know that ache, that gnashing maw in the place where your heart should be. I know you’re lonely.”

  “You know nothing—”

  Jules held up a hand. Armored, carbon-black. “You were given a task. A directive. You think you’ve kept all your shit hidden from me, Rainier, but I’m not an idiot. I’m a Grotta rat, and Grotta kids learn to read subtext faster than any others. You say your gift was stolen. That humanity wasn’t the intended benefactor of the ascension-agent. I believe you. I also think your failure to deliver your gift to the right species has driven you fucking bonkers.”

  “My sisters and I—”

  “You’re not talking now, Rainier. I am. Here’s my truth: I don’t give a fuck how slighted you feel. I don’t care that your failure eats at you. I watched that gate destroy thousands of people and all I felt was… numbness. Maybe that’s the agent. Maybe that’s what I’ve always been becoming. I don’t know.

  “You can rage against this universe, the makers who left you behind, and the humans that abused your gift all you fucking like. Thrash and scream and tear the worlds down. I don’t care. I can’t even be sure I care about Lolla anymore, but I made a promise. I accepted a directive. I will wake her up.”

  Rainier sniffed. “Not even Lavaux with all his resources could figure out why the agent didn’t work uniformly on everyone.”

  Jules smiled. Just a little. “Thanks for confirming you engineered the error.”

  “It helps you not at all.”

  “No.” Her eyes glazed over slightly. Lolla was in the cargo hold. Waiting. “I need a bigger data set to find the error you introduced.”

  The first twinge of uncertainty Jules had ever seen marred the corner of Rainier’s lips, a tightening that pulled her mouth aside in a way that was not at all calculated. A thrill shot through Jules. Maybe she wasn’t completely dead inside yet.

  “What do you think you’re—?”

  “Goodbye, Rainier. I hope you find what heals you, but I fucking doubt it.”

  She cut the feed. They were toys, she and Rain
ier. Built by indifferent gods for incomprehensible purposes, then cast off. Left broken and forgotten.

  What could she do? Nox and Arden would never take her back. Not after Janus. They’d taken the scientists, and while the memory rollback was good, it wasn’t foolproof. They’d find out. Discover the monster she’d become. Maybe they’d forgive her, maybe they’d understand, and then…

  She let herself daydream, even as her body went through the motions of the work. They’d look into curing Lolla. Call up some doctor or another that Arden knew and let them have a shot at her, maybe even take samples from Jules to compare against Lolla. Find out the fundamental difference between them.

  Maybe the difference was that Jules was broken, and the agent repaired, and Lolla was a whole thing in no need of fixing. A revelation would come. Lolla would wake up, and…

  And that was a pretty, bullshit fairy tale.

  Jules had taken a great deal from Marya’s station before she slagged it. A great deal indeed. The canister tucked under her arm weighed nothing at all. Drowning in the chaos of the blowback, the officials of Atrux saw nothing strange in a lone guardcore unit descending into the bowels of dome maintenance. Her credentials let her pass all doors and locks without the slightest hesitation. All she had to do was keep walking, keep carrying herself deeper under the rock that had been her home.

  HVAC central command was down to a skeleton crew. They skittered aside as she approached, didn’t so much as blink as she bypassed their security and stepped alone into a small, innocuous chamber. The fittings between the canister and the additive tank were rough, but nothing a little SealFoam—Prime invented—couldn’t fix.

  Marya’s friends had done good work. They’d isolated the agent from the fluid stolen from Lolla’s stasis chamber. Jules hadn’t even needed to add more drops once she’d hit upon the idea to merge it with the self-replication instructions they’d used for the amplifiers. The equipment on the guardcore ship had done all the heavy lifting for her there. Thank you, Rainier.

  Jules peeled away from the dock before the first “ascended” human fell, unconscious, to the floor in a dumpling shop that kept their fans on high, recycling air and steam faster than most buildings. Some would survive, most would fall, and those differences would be studied by the finest minds Prime Inventive had to offer. Prime would be forced to discover a cure for Lolla.

  Maybe Rainier didn’t care about the biological. Jules was pretty certain humanity did.

  CHAPTER 80

  PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543

  COMING HOME

  Ada went dark. Bero could find no mention of the missing Keeper’s name, and though he stood the best chance of scanning all news outlets, Sanda was dimly aware of Liao tapping away at her pad, fixated on finding some kernel of information that meant Sanda’s brother hadn’t been on that platform. She wouldn’t admonish the woman—the doctor meant well—but every single tap was a scratch of irritation against Sanda’s nerves.

  The last news broadcast from the system was a simple report that Ada, Icarion, and Keep Station had survived what they were calling “the event,” but any further communication would come only after the system was sure the lines in and out were secure. There would be no travel through the Atrux–Ada gate. All ships had their permissions revoked.

  The Light didn’t need permissions.

  “Bero,” Sanda said, her voice soft from lack of food and water and sleep and everything else. “Disengage stealth as we pass through the gate.”

  “Are you sure? They may view us as hostile.”

  “I will not approach my people in shadow. Anford knows this ship. It’s time the rest do, too.”

  “Understood.”

  With Bero pushing the ship to the edge of his newfound limits, it took The Light a mere day to make it to Ada. Hours crossing to the Ordinal–Atrux gate, then more hours wasted evading patrols to get into position to cross the Atrux–Ada gate. Impossibly fast by the standard of Prime ships, but not fast enough for Sanda. What fresh hell could Rainier cause in that time? What damage had been done?

  Why didn’t Biran pick up? Why didn’t anyone pick up?

  “Commander,” Nox said when The Light entered the gate. “I know we don’t want to go in guns blazing, but we should armor up. There’s no telling what’s waiting for us on the other side.”

  Her stomach twisted at the thought of walking into a Prime station ready to be fired at, but practicality won out. As much as she hated it, Nox was right. She’d shirked her position in the fleet, and Anford was wary of her. There was no guarantee that Anford wouldn’t come out swinging as soon as she saw The Light. Sanda could only hope that Anford was governed by a sense of honor that overrode all other impulses. Impulses like shooting down an alien ship with unknown armaments.

  “Agreed. Gear up, personal sidearms only.”

  “Aye,” Nox, Conway, and Knuth chorused.

  Liao shifted on her seat. “Even me?”

  “Yes. You too, Arden.”

  “I’m just going to try this one thing—”

  “Now.”

  They grimaced, but stood and ran off, making quick work of suiting up. It took Sanda a little longer. She was so tired, so heavy. By the time she was back on deck, Bero was preparing to exit gate space.

  “Awaiting your authorization,” he said, when she glanced up at a nonexistent camera and arched a brow in question.

  “Pass through,” she ordered.

  Targeting lights painted the ship the second they broke through to the other side. Bero halted, as preordered by Sanda, standing still as a statue to keep from presenting as a threat. An incoming tightbeam request popped up on the screen.

  “Put it through,” Sanda said.

  Anford’s face filled the screen. “I don’t know how in the hell you crossed that gate, Greeve, but there’s a quarantine on here.”

  “Where is my brother?”

  She blinked, realization wiping the angry scowl from her expression until she looked just plain tired. “Here. Safe. He was not among the lost.”

  If Sanda had been standing, she might have collapsed in that moment. The tension of not knowing had done a great deal toward keeping her upright. “Thank you. Is it true that the planets and station were unharmed?”

  “Yes. Now get the fuck out of here before I have to blow that ship of yours out of the black.”

  “No. You need me. I didn’t just come here to check on my brother. I told you what would happen, remember?”

  Her lips thinned. “And how did you know?”

  “Rainier Lavaux told me she was going to do it.”

  “Rainier?” She cocked her head, tapped something quickly onto her wristpad. “You better have some ironclad proof, Greeve.”

  “I do.” The warning system for the targeting lights went dark. Sanda let out a small breath.

  “Bring it to me. I assume that absurd ship of yours can dock at the station?”

  “I can, though I would prefer you keep the magnetic clamps to yourself this time,” Bero said.

  Anford’s eyes narrowed. “Is that…?”

  “It’s a long story,” Sanda said, “but yes. Bero’s intelligence has been installed on this ship. We’re calling the ship The Light to differentiate from the being that is Bero.”

  “Christ, you have to make things complicated, don’t you? Bring her—him—in, then. And be quick about it. No clamps, you have my word.”

  “Thank you,” Bero said.

  Sanda waved the feed closed.

  “You know they’ll think you did it, since you predicted it happening,” Nox said dryly.

  “I know. But we have the partial recording of Rainier, and Liao’s knowledge of the amplifier construction. Once they comb the area for that nanite network, they’ll have physical proof.”

  “If there’s any left.”

  Sanda’s expression darkened. “Rainier would not have deployed them in only one location.”

  “Fuck,” Conway said.

  “The gat
es are compromised,” Sanda said. “We have to convince what’s left of the Ada Protectorate of that fact, otherwise more people will die. This ship alone can pass through unaffected.”

  The thought hadn’t occurred to her crew yet; they’d been too wrapped up in the immediate tragedy. She could see the cold dawn of knowledge on all their faces, a slow drawing in, a haunted look about the eyes. Prime lived and died by those gates. Easy transfer of food and materials through the gates from one system to the next had allowed them to spread so far, so fast. That supply chain had just been severed, but the people didn’t know it yet.

  Liao stared at her hands. “I did this. This is all my fault.”

  “No. This is Rainier’s fault. No other’s.”

  Bero descended through the station’s docking dome and slid into place in hangar alpha. Sanda smiled to herself and gently patted the chair on which she sat as if clapping a colleague on the back. In returning to the exact place of his confinement, he’d sent a clear message: He feared no chains, because this new body could not be leashed.

  Sanda hoped the armor cladding her underfed and tired body would give some gravitas to her presence as she stepped onto the dock, her crew filing out behind her. She’d expected an armed escort. What she got was Biran and Anford, a wary group of GC and fleet soldiers standing a little behind them. Her heart almost leapt out of her chest.

  “B,” she said, and then he was hugging her, cheek pressed to cheek, and if they were both a little gaunt and bruised in each other’s arms, at least they were still there.

  “I thought you were gone,” she said.

  He laughed roughly. “I know that feeling.”

  “Dads?” she asked.

  “Fine, if driving themselves mad with worry.”

  “I hate to rush matters,” Anford cut in smoothly, “but the situation is currently fucked. You’re required in the war room, Commander.”

  Reluctantly, she broke contact with Biran, trying not to see the shadows under his eyes, the red patches on his jawline where he’d scratched his stubble from stress.