Vladsen stammered, “I-impossible.”
Biran met his gaze again and felt a surge of power as the young-looking man shrunk back from him. “Far from it. And Lavaux was not alone in his search. There are others like him, others who know about these dark chips. Know that they contain hidden information. More like Kenwick.”
“And what information do you propose these chips are hiding?”
“I don’t know. But I intend to find out.”
“You won’t survive the next twenty-four hours, Greeve.”
Biran leaned forward and flipped the folder shut, then laced his hands across it and stared General Anford straight in the eye. “I’m the only one who can do this job, General. I’m the only one with the contacts, with the drive, with the position. This is a security threat the likes of which the Keepers have never seen. This goes beyond the Protectorate. This is your jurisdiction.”
She licked her lips. “And why are you the man for this job, Greeve?”
“My contacts—”
“No. Not politics. You. Why you?”
He leaned back, dragged his arms across the table and let them come to rest on the arms of his chair. Why him? Technically, he could hand this information over—had already done so—and Anford would pick up the thread. He had no doubt she could run a capable investigation.
But she believed in him, she just needed a push. Some confirmation of her instinct, and that couldn’t be his curriculum vitae. This wasn’t a job interview. It was a character assessment. She needed to know something real. Something… hard. Something true.
“I’m good at finding things,” he said. He just wasn’t very good at keeping them.
CHAPTER 81
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3541
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
IN A SYSTEM FAR, FAR AWAY
She awoke in light. Jules groaned, reached up to rub a hand across her face, and then jerked it away—expecting burns, expecting pain—but there was nothing. Just her skin, a little pink and puckered, peeking out at her from the long sleeve of a hospital shirt.
Hospital. That explained the white. Not the lab, then—she’d destroyed that—but she’d destroyed herself, too. Or had meant to. But if she were being honest with herself, a lot of the things she’d done over the course of her life had been with the buried intention to destroy herself. Those hadn’t worked, either, so why should an explosion?
She sat up. Someone had decked her out in pale green hospital garb. A faint breeze tickled her head, and she reached up to rub her—scalp? Her hair had been shaved off. She shook her head, struggling to make sense of what had happened, of where she was.
Because this definitely wasn’t a hospital. The walls were white, and the floor was the cheap composite that covered all government buildings, but the furniture was just… wrong. Her bed was something more like a cot, her room too small to allow a lot of medical staff in at once. Maybe it was a prison. But they wouldn’t have put her behind bars until she’d woken up. She was pretty sure there were laws about that kind of thing.
A screen flickered on the wall, turning on the second her eyes skimmed over its surface. Some newscast from another planetary system—Ada, was it? She’d heard that name. There’d been a war there, hadn’t there? The thing with Icarion.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed and paced the edge of the room, wary. No cameras that she could see—but that didn’t mean much—and the door was most definitely locked. A small window inset in the door gave her nothing: just more white hallway beyond.
“Hello?” she called out. No answer, naturally.
Jules turned her attention to the news broadcast and almost fell over her cot. The image cut away from the broadcaster to some sort of party, a fancy gala in a garden the likes of which Jules had never had the pleasure to visit. Dignitaries and obvious Keepers mingled together, all happy as starshine to be welcoming some woman named Sanda Maram Greeve home—a military type, she gathered. Lost in the war but found. Hurrah.
But that wasn’t what almost knocked her over. In the crowd, alongside some Keeper who looked like he spent more time at museums and parties than doing any Keeper work—what was their day-to-day job, anyway?—stood a whip-thin, pale woman. Her hair had been piled on top of her head, but it was the same woman. Jules would know her anywhere. The woman looked up, at the camera, as if she were staring straight into Jules’s eyes.
“Do you think my hair looks better like that?”
Jules almost jumped out of her skin. Through the plex window, Rainier stood, looking much the same as she had when Jules had thought she’d blown her up.
“That’s a recording,” Jules insisted, though the voice screaming in the back of her skull knew it wasn’t. “It’s old footage. You’re not… you can’t be…”
“In two places at once? I really can’t, you’re right, you know. Because there are more of me, and so I can’t ever just be in two places at once.”
“You’re insane.”
“Well, of course I am. I am only a fraction of what I once was, after all. How can a mind ever be sane if it’s been all broken up? There used to be so much more of me, glorious and whole. But that body was damaged and dying when my husband found me and saved me.”
“He should have left you to rot.” Jules backed into the cot, bracing her palms against the hard edge to stabilize herself.
“Oh, quite probably. But here I am—and there I am, and a few other places, too. It is nice, in some ways, to be distributed. The world is easier to understand when you can move through it, touch it, taste it, really experience it. But it takes so long for thoughts to pass from one body to the next. I don’t know how you humans do it. Doesn’t it get tedious?”
“What in the hell are you?” She breathed out the words, hands trembling as the Rainier Lavaux over her shoulder smiled brightly into the news cameras.
“How rude of me not to introduce myself properly! You’ve been healing so long, I can’t expect you to remember our little chats from before. My names,” she said, “are Rainier Lavaux. I am a ship. Or I was. I intend to be again, someday, you know. What do you intend to be?”
Jules couldn’t get her brain around that, so she asked the only thing she felt mattered, “Where’s Lolla?”
She blinked too-wide eyes at her. “Who?”
“The girl! The one at my crew’s nest. You didn’t kill her, so where is she?”
“Oh, the little one. She didn’t take as well to the upgrade as I’d hoped. You had done so well, I thought it might be something in your environment. An unfortunate failure.”
“Would you make sense!”
“The little one. She touched the agent. It didn’t like her very much.”
“What agent?” Jules paced the length of her tiny white cage to slam her palms against the door. “Who touched Lolla?”
“Why, the agent you brought to your nest, dear. Would you like to see her?”
Jules froze. She couldn’t breathe. Her vision swam for a second and then she put her forehead on the plex, feeling the cold seep into her skin.
“Lolla’s here?”
“Yes.”
“Take me to her!”
Rainier eyed her warily. “Only if you promise to behave yourself.”
Jules clenched her jaw. “Yes. Fine.” She held her hands up, palms out. “You took all my weapons, anyway, remember? I swear to you, if you can bring me to Lolla, I won’t try anything.”
“Hmm, I don’t believe you. But that’s okay, isn’t it? You really are no match for me. And besides, the walls here will shoot you if you try to hurt me. Keep that in mind, okay? Security here is quite advanced, and rather fond of this body of mine.”
Jules thought back to the voice in the speakers at Udon-Voodun and the wispy, familiar voice she’d tried to forget she’d heard the first time she entered the lab. If even a sliver of what this woman had to say was true, her consciousness might be connected to the electronic systems of the building.
Not that it w
ould mean anything, if Lolla was here.
“I understand,” she said. She kept her hands up and her posture slouched to show she wasn’t ready to fight. “Please. I just want to see her.”
The door slid open, disappearing into the wall. Jules stepped into the hall hesitantly, arms up, scanning the narrow passage for any hint of where she was. Camera eyes watched her from every angle, the lenses not bothering to be inconspicuous. The halls were lined in the same silvery-white tile as her cell, but if there were any other cells like hers she couldn’t tell, because not a single one of the other doors had a window.
The slippers she’d been given shuffled across the floor as she followed Rainier. She had to grip with her toes to keep them from sliding off, and the drawstring on the scrub pants they’d given her kept coming loose. She hated medical attire so much. Not just because it signaled vulnerability—you only wore this stuff if you were going in for something serious—but because it hamstrung her ability to move. What she wouldn’t give for her old boots and pants back, at the very least.
Rainier led her to a door and passed her hand over the lock scanner—no wristpad. That’s what’d struck her as strange about the woman at first that Jules couldn’t quite place. Though she wore a sleeveless dress, her arms were bare, no hint of a tan line where the pad would normally go. Jules’s own arm was pale as dry sandstone in a large rectangle where her wristpad once lived. Her connection to the world, severed. She hoped like hell that the authorities she’d lured to the lab had gotten enough data to track Rainier down.
Jules followed Rainier through the door. A round room awaited her, the ceiling inset with pale white and blue lights, giving the room a frosty, cold feeling even though the temperature was the same as it had been in her cell. Jules shivered and rubbed her bare arms, shuffling forward as Rainier stepped aside. In the center of the room, on a dais meant to support a NutriBath, rested a clear-lidded preservation pod. Jules’s heart lurched.
She knew what must be in that pod. Knew, too, that she didn’t want to look. That every second her sinking feeling went without confirmation was another second Lolla was not in there. But the dais drew her forward, as if its mass were great enough to exert gravity upon her.
Lolla. Pale—paler than Jules had ever seen her—her fan of light brown hair spread like a spider’s web in the gel medium of the pod. Her eyes had been closed—they didn’t need to be, she knew, some went in staring—and her arms crossed over her chest. Based on the lack of tension in her face, the neutral set to her lips, Jules guessed that the girl had been asleep when she’d been put under. Good. No one should have to experience coming in or out of stasis conscious. She pressed her palm against the plex, trailing her gaze over the display inset in the top of the pod like a crown for Lolla. Her vitals were good, if elevated for sedation.
“What happened?” she asked, not daring to take her eyes from the girl lest she vanish in a blink again.
“Her body fights the agent. Not like yours. Your cells lapped it up like a sponge.”
A silent sob wracked Jules’s body as pieces clicked into place in her mind. Things she’d ignored—tried so hard to ignore—flooded her thoughts. The blaster wound. Her lack of need for food and sleep. Her body was changing, had been ever since she’d touched the wraith mother. But it hadn’t been wraith mother at all. It’d been something else—this agent—meant for Keepers, or other beings. Not Grotta scum like her. Like… Like Lolla.
“Why? Why is my body accepting it when hers isn’t?”
“Haven’t a clue, but I mean to find out. Do you want to help her, Juliella?” Rainier’s cold hand alighted upon her shoulder. “Do you want to save your little one?”
“Yes. Please. Yes.”
“Then you and I, we have a lot of work to do.”
“Anything,” Jules said with more feeling than she’d mustered in ages. “Anything.”
CHAPTER 82
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
ANY DAY’S A GOOD DAY IF YOU WAKE UP ALIVE
Sanda woke screaming. She thrashed, arms ramming into the hard enamel of the NutriBath cocoon, leg jerking and kicking as she struggled to gain purchase against the slick bottom. She heaved forward, folded over herself and hacked lumps of gel into the pool still draining from around her lap.
“Hey, lass,” Graham said softly. A hand, rough and familiar, closed around her upper arm and held her steady while she retched. “Slowly now, my brave girl. We’re taking you out earlier than we should be, but you’re stable. Wouldn’t do to break an arm flailing around like that, now would it?”
“How long?” she demanded and wiped gel from her eyes, scrubbing at her lids with the backs of her hands.
“Six hours. We’re through the gate. The vacuum really chewed you up.”
Blinking the rest of the goo clear, she opened her eyes. The room lacked the antiseptic charm of Bero’s medibay. Bare metal walls hemmed in a dingy storage room, mag pallets that had seen better days heaped high with haphazard boxes held in place with thick straps. Yellowish light gave the room a warm feeling, though she was shivering so hard she feared she’d bite her tongue in half. Again.
“Through the gate… We’re in the Atrux system?”
“That’s the place.” Graham handed her a microcleanse rag, and she wiped herself down, then took the robe he offered. She was weak, but she had a much easier time dragging herself out of the cocoon this time around. At least this time she knew what to expect from her missing leg.
Graham gave her a hand and, when her foot was on solid ground, folded her into a hug so tight it took her breath away. She may have been weak, but she wasn’t so worn out she couldn’t hug him back just as hard. Sanda buried her face in his chest and tried not to cry. Luckily, she was severely dehydrated.
“Thought I’d lost you again,” Graham said into her hair.
“I just keep getting harder to kill.” She laughed, then fell into a rasping cough. “What in the hell happened? Did I really hear Tomas earlier?”
“Aye, the lad’s here.” Graham nudged her away from him, held her by the shoulders at arm’s length while he took a visual inventory of any injuries she might have remaining. The NutriBath had done its job. She wasn’t back to full health, but he nodded to himself.
It’d only been two years, but he looked older to her in the same way Biran had. He was still a mountain of a man, standing five inches taller than her, his skin taut around ropey muscles he’d gained from hauling cargo. He always was too impatient to wait for the hand trucks to warm up. Wrinkles mapped his face, leading the way to his fully grey hair. It did a number on your body, thinking your loved ones were dead. She should know.
Graham scrunched up his nose. “When Ilan and I came up for what we were calling your coronation, we knew something was funny. We’re no strangers to Keep Station, all the guards know us, but we were getting waylaid at every step. Couldn’t even grease the usual palms. Your brother sent a reporter down to tell us what was up.
“Ilan kept them busy while I slipped around and got to the dock where we keep this old thing. The ship was loaded, ready for a run out to one of the moons in Atrux, so I had good reason to be checking her out—and no one minded much, as I was far away from the party.
“While I was trying to find a way to Biran’s place from the docks, I saw your man—Cepko—poking around Biran’s cruiser. Thought he was going to steal it. Nearly bashed his head in before he was able to explain who he was.” Graham grinned. “Your old dad’s still got some moves.
“So I let him go and asked what he thinks he’s doing, leaving you behind if things are so dire, then some bloke’s voice I don’t know comes over the speaker and addresses us by name—tells us we got, oh, five minutes to get over by the big hangar or you’re going to be spaced. We took the cargo hauler, ’cause neither one of us understood all that fancy shit in your brother’s cruiser, and were shocked as all hell to see you blown out the back of that big ship.”
The storage room door burst open as Tom
as barged in, looking rough around the edges. A purple-red bruise marred the side of his face, his broken arm hastily put back in a sling that was just dirty enough for Sanda to be convinced Graham rummaged it from somewhere on his ship. His color was pale, his brows knotted with worry.
“You’re awake?”
“I really hope so.”
“What’s the rush, Cepko?” Graham asked.
“Bero’s moving. You’d both better come see this.”
Sanda put her arm around Graham’s shoulders and let herself be half carried to the communications deck. The ship was an older model, one of Graham and Ilan’s first acquisitions, from a time when they disliked having any human quarters outside of spin-grav. She found that affectation pretty annoying right now.
The deck sported a captain’s chair, a second’s chair, and a nav chair, all pointed straight at a smartscreen covering the entire forward bulkhead. On the screen, Bero loomed, a news ticker running beneath the image detailing the stand-off between Prime and Icarion’s rogue ship. They didn’t have the details; the reporter was babbling on about the Icarion ship wandering too close to the station and damaging the docks, but it was enough. Bero had spent the last few hours hovering just close enough to Ada Prime’s planet, station, and gate to make taking any shots at him tricky. And now, he was moving.
“What do you think he’s doing?” Tomas asked.
Graham got her settled in the second’s chair while Tomas hovered at the nav podium, checking streams of data she couldn’t make out.
“No idea. We didn’t exactly have time to chat.”
The newscaster’s satellite camera followed Bero as he swung around, slowly, pointing his engines—and by proxy his weapons system—back somewhere closer to the star even while he pointed his nose out to empty space.
“What’s he aiming at?” she asked.
“Running that now,” Tomas said.
She gripped the armrests until her fingers trembled, watching the little glints of Ada Prime’s gunners swoop in close to Bero. He was a big ship. It’d take them a long time to knock him down if they decided it was worth the risk to fire.
Velocity Weapon Page 50