Breach of Containment

by Elizabeth Bonesteel

  On the other hand . . . Bayandi had offered advice, and that alone might be telling.

  “Captain Bayandi, if you have a moment, I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on the tactical situation on Yakutsk.”

  If the PSI captain was surprised by the question, he betrayed nothing. “They’ve been fighting among themselves for a long time,” he said. “The terraformer project—its inception as much as its failure—has widened long-standing schisms. There is a great deal of anger there, and unkindness. It seems fixed in their culture. But it is not all of them. There are individuals . . .” Bayandi trailed off. “I think we must be very careful, Captain Foster,” he said at last. “I think we cannot underestimate the need of a subset of the population to feel a sense of control and organization. Yakutsk’s strategic importance is a double-edged sword. It brings them pride, but there are many people there who have killed for power, and will kill again. They are not the people who will help us, and I think attempting a dialogue with them is, at best . . . procrastination, shall we say?”

  “You think we need to start building civilian allies, rather than dealing with the government.”

  “The government on Yakutsk may have changed again before you arrive there. Negotiating with the government will accomplish nothing.”

  It was a different direction than Greg had been considering. It was also far less well defined, but he felt, for the first time, a glimmer of hope. “Thank you, Captain,” he said honestly. “I’ll discuss your thoughts with my colleagues.”

  “And I will contact Captain Taras immediately,” Bayandi promised. “I am sorry that we have worried her. You may rest assured, I will resolve the issue. Thank you, Captain Foster.” He ended with something curious: “I hope we will talk again.”

  Greg folded up the off-grid thoughtfully. Even if he had anticipated speaking with Bayandi . . . the man was not at all what Greg would have expected. Despite his age—reported by some as being north of ninety—he had been lucid and attentive, no waver or uncertainty in his voice. Had Greg not known Bayandi’s history, he would have seemed a typical PSI commander.

  Greg was missing something. But PSI being PSI, he was unlikely to ever learn what it was, even from Taras.

  The door chime went off, and Galileo flashed his visitor’s name before his eyes: Commander Lockwood. He shook off his thoughts on PSI. Those worries could wait until they had stabilized the situation on Yakutsk.

  “Good evening, Commander,” he said, when she walked in. “What can I do for you?”

  Jessica Lockwood stood, not precisely at attention, but with the same compact ease she did nearly everything. She was a small woman—very nearly too short for the Corps, and he had taken care never to confirm her recorded height—impeccably beautiful, and always assembled with flawless military precision. She had a head full of curly red hair that she managed to tame back into a symmetrical bun, and shrewd green eyes. Most people noticed only her round-cheeked beauty when they met her, and missed the deep intelligence in those eyes—and the set of stubbornness in her lips. She had been his second-in-command for two years now. He had argued with and raged at her as he had to no one else ever in his life, and he loved her unreservedly, as much as he loved his own sister. He did not think he could have found himself a better first officer anywhere in the Corps.

  “I’ve got some news on Yakutsk, sir,” she said. She did not look him in the eye.

  Greg knew what that meant.

  Before he had promoted her to commander—indeed, long before she had enlisted in the Corps—Jessica had been a dangerously skilled recreational hacker. Having taken an oath to obey Corps regulations, she was generally loath to use her skills in a way that might have been interpreted as illegal. But ever since they had begun secretly investigating Ellis Systems, he had told her to get her intelligence any way she could. He had not been explicit, and she had not been forthcoming; but he knew a great deal of what they had discovered was unlikely to have been obtained by official means. Including, apparently, whatever she needed to tell him now.

  “Off the record,” he assured her. “What’s up, Jess?”

  Immediately she relaxed, all of the military draining out of her. She began pacing the floor of his room. “It’s Baikul again, Greg,” she said, sounding exasperated. “Oarig, the perpetual amateur.”

  Oarig, governor of Baikul, had only had the job for two weeks, having obtained it by summarily ejecting his predecessor and her cabinet from the office—a move widely anticipated after the terraformer failure. While this was not an atypical method for Yakutsk to change governing bodies, Oarig’s qualifications were difficult to understand. He was short-tempered, entitled, and inclined to violence. Greg was not entirely sure how he had amassed enough dedicated followers to kill for him.

  “They’ve got wind of a food drop at Smolensk,” Jessica told him, “and they’re threatening to steal it.”

  He rubbed his eyes. “Oarig, of course, having no trust in the fact that the supplies are going to be shared.” Which was not entirely unreasonable of him, despite his hair trigger—Villipova, the governor of Smolensk, was not above denying Baikul resources she had previously agreed to distribute evenly.

  Jessica shrugged. “Hard to say. He’s paranoid, sure; but really, Greg, I think he’s just been planning a coup for so long he doesn’t know what else to do with himself.”

  Which, Greg thought, made a succinct summation of Oarig’s personality. “Budapest dropped the cargo yesterday, didn’t they? So we need to figure out how to alert Villipova without—”

  “Actually, sir,” Jessica interrupted, “Budapest is still there.”

  Well, hell.

  He turned away from her. Most of his crew considered him stoic, even cold; but Jessica could read him too well. She would know what he was thinking. He didn’t need her to see it in his eyes as well. “They should have been out of there ten hours ago.”

  “They got delayed,” she told him. “They did airlift assist at Govi. There were . . . complications.”

  “Anybody get hurt?”

  “Not those kinds of complications.”

  He knew instantly what had happened. Airlift assist meant hands-off recon. Civilian freighters often served that purpose during an evac, using pilots of various experience levels to scan a colony’s surface for people in distress. The protocol was to notify the lead airlift ship when a group was found, and move on.

  But Elena would never have left anyone in trouble.

  “We’ve got to tell Savosky.” He headed through the inner door to his office, Jessica at his heels. “He needs to abort that cargo drop.”

  He heard her step behind him. “I talked to Yuri a few minutes ago. They’re already down on the surface. Import is arguing with them about where they want the cargo delivered.”

  “The correct answer,” Greg said, “is they leave it where it is and let Smolensk sort it out.” Civilians. Dammit. He hit his internal comm. “Samaras, get me Budapest.”

  But Jessica wasn’t finished. “You’re not going to talk them out of it,” she said. “I tried. If the import office doesn’t certify receipt, they don’t get paid.”

  “And they’re willing to risk their lives for that?”

  “Apparently so.”

  Shit. “Belay that last order, Samaras,” he said, and instead commed Emily Broadmoor, his security chief. “Emily, I need a shuttle and a security detail.” He met Jessica’s eyes. “How far are we out?”

  “Twenty minutes,” she told him.

  “Twenty minutes,” he said to Emily. When she acknowledged, he turned back to Jessica. “I’m going to get Herrod. Might as well at least maintain the fiction of having diplomacy on the table. You—” He stopped. “Contact Savosky. Tell him we’re sending backup.”

  “Yes, sir. Greg—”

  He met her eyes. “No time for that now, Jess,” he said, and after a moment she nodded.

  “I’ll alert Savosky, sir.” She turned and left.

  Greg left t
he office and headed back to the gym, putting all the pieces together in his head. Savosky had dropped cargo in some pretty ugly places in the past, and he was well aware of the political situation on Yakutsk. If he was moving forward despite Jessica’s warning, then the payoff must be genuinely impressive. Savosky was not naive, and he was not helpless.

  And he had at least one pilot who wasn’t a civilian at all.

  Past is past, Greg told himself.

  But it wasn’t, and he knew it.

  Chapter 5

  Yakutsk

  Bear’s nose wrinkled. “Elena, what the hell am I smelling?”

  Elena looked down at herself. Her once pristine env suit was covered in the red-gray dust of Yakutsk’s exposed surface, and her arms were caked up to her elbows with muck from the heap of organic material through which she had been digging for the last ten minutes. Her own nose had stopped working shortly after she started, and she was grateful; she didn’t think she could otherwise have done the job without getting sick.

  “Compost,” she said. “Also, cat excrement. I think.”

  “There some big reason we’re all going to have to sit with that on the way back to Budapest?”

  She reached into her pocket and pulled out the container she had found buried in the garbage. “Jamyung’s dead,” she told him. “And this is what he left me.”

  “He left it to you buried in cat shit?”

  She tucked it back into her pocket. “It’s a long story,” she said. “What’s going on here?”

  She had heard him shouting as she came up the road, his bellowing punctuated by barely audible, utterly unconcerned responses from the import official. When she arrived, the official was walking out the back door, the office itself dark.

  Bear grew serious. “We’ve got two problems,” he told her. “First, they want the cargo dropped at the cultivation dome. Second, the Corps has intel suggesting Baikul wants to steal the cargo. I’ll leave the exercise of which is more important to the pilot.”

  She raised her eyebrows. Since the population had moved back into the domes, everything on the surface was disputed territory. The cultivation dome itself was jointly held, but they would have to fly over a substantial amount of open landscape to get there, which would expose them to any ground-to-air fire Baikul chose to throw at them. Worse, the cultivation dome had no established infrastructure or procedures for docking a large-scale cargo ship. They would have to unload cargo without any environmental controls, doing all the work in env suits. They would be almost completely defenseless.

  She felt a tingle in her spine. She had been trained for this.

  “Let me fly it alone, Bear,” she said. When he looked away, she pressed her argument. “Out in the natural gravity, the size of those cargo crates isn’t going to bother me at all. I’ve got the training to fly this kind of mission.”

  “Chiedza’s flown combat,” he said.

  “Not like this.” Elena didn’t think the combat Chiedza had flown would have involved much defense. “There’s no reason to put everyone through this. Pull the extraneous crap from one shuttle, pack all the cargo on it, and I’ll take it out and be back within the hour.”

  He was still frowning, but she could see it on his face: he knew this was his best choice. Curtly, he nodded. “No risks, though,” he added, unable to resist one last admonishment. “And no detours. You drop that fucking cargo and you get the fuck out. Understood?”

  “Understood.” And for the first time in a year, she felt like she had a real purpose.

  She hauled the extra seating out of one of Budapest’s two shuttles as Bear and Chiedza shifted their half of the cargo into her ship. It was snug, but they were able to fit it all in. She squeezed between the massive bins of grain and parked herself in the pilot’s seat, pulling on her env hood. When she landed, the fastest way to offload the cargo would be to vent the cabin and repressurize later, and she wanted to spend the briefest possible time on the surface.

  She flew the great circle route over what passed for a pole, and was treated to an aborted sunrise as she maneuvered toward the side of the moon sheltered by the gas giant. The shuttle’s sensors swept as widely as they could, looking for movement and potential attackers. The mechanism had less scope than she was used to, but she comforted herself by realizing that the darkness on the dead surface would make it nearly impossible for a large group of people to conceal any guidance lighting.

  Assuming, of course, that they needed lighting after a lifetime exploring the moon’s surface.

  As she understood it, there were generally no more than five people living in the cultivation dome at one time: a botanical expert and a chemist, a single medic, and one or two horticulturalists, all ensuring the safety and nutritional value of what was being grown in the limited space. They would, she had been told, be expecting her, although she was anticipating they’d be nervous. Purges had been nearly nonexistent during the terraformer experiment; for the ordinary citizens, who had been just beginning to relax into a new life, this would be a jarring return to an uneasy past they had hoped to leave behind. Those were the people she thought of at times like this—not the dome officials, pointing fingers at each other, so caught up in paranoia that they would kill their own without a thought. Most of the people wanted nothing more than their old, comfortable lives back.

  She thought of Jamyung, and tugged the container out of her pocket. It was vacuum-sealed, designed to freeze whatever was inside into inertness. Such an environment could wreak havoc on machine parts, but whatever this thing was, it had survived the moon’s surface, and the cold shielding would have made it more difficult to find using conventional scanners. Almost absently, she touched the opening mechanism and the lid lifted, revealing exactly what he had described: a cuboid, gray and smooth with rounded corners, its proportions squat and pleasing.

  He died for this. Or believed he had.

  Curious, she tugged off her glove and held her palm over it. She could not tell how warm it was, but after a vacuum seal, it should have radiated at least a little bit of cold. She frowned at it, and then, on impulse, she brushed one finger along the surface. It was warm, like skin, smooth and unyielding, and she wondered what kind of polymer it was. Something sophisticated, certainly, that could withstand such extreme temperatures. Or perhaps the polymer was encasing something, although Jamyung hadn’t mentioned that. He would have had it under a scanner, she was sure. Odd that he hadn’t—

  Without warning, a signal came over her comm, a deafening jumble of sounds. Words, music, shouting, white noise, machines; she could not sort any of it out. There was a rhythm beneath it all, and it built, taking on melody, creeping into her mind, singing one word, over and over again: Galileo . . . Galileo . . . Galileo . . . louder and louder and—

  There was a lurch, and an alarm, and she reached back to the controls, cursing. She should at least have put the damn ship on autopilot. She wrenched the shuttle back to level and heard her cargo slide, the crates knocking into each other.

  And then someone said, “Ow!”

  She turned, reaching instinctively for her nonexistent weapon. “Who the fuck is there?” she snapped.

  “It’s only me,” Arin said. He crawled out from between two crates, rubbing his head. “Do you have to fly so rough?”

  Shit. “Arin, what are you doing here? Did you have some fugue where you missed the bit where Bear told you to stay on Budapest?” At least, she observed, he’d had the brains to pull on an env suit.

  “I’m here to help,” he insisted. “And don’t tell me you couldn’t use the extra hands.”

  No, no, no. This was wrong. “No, Arin, I could not use the extra hands. Fuck.” She turned her back to him. The box had fallen to the floor. Hastily tugging her glove back on, she picked up the box and closed it, slipping it back into her pocket. “I need to do this alone so I don’t have to divide my concentration making sure you stay in one fucking piece!”

  She caught sight of another energy signature a
nd turned again. Behind her, she heard him stumble. “Well I’m here now,” he said. “What can I do to help?”

  She should never have befriended him. She should never have befriended any of them. Fuck. “Get in a fucking seat,” she told him between gritted teeth, “and strap yourself down. You’ll do me no good if you fly into my head while I’m trying to land.”

  Arin pulled himself into the copilot’s seat, fastening his harness, and her anxiety eased a little. At least he wouldn’t break his neck on the way down. She was fairly certain, though, she would break it for him once they got back to Budapest.

  Right before Bear broke hers.

  “What’s the plan?” he asked her.

  “The plan is we get fifty meters from the cultivation dome,” she told him, “we drop the cargo, and we get the fuck out.”

  “No verifying pickup?”

  If she had been alone, she might have scanned for ships, set a beacon, commed them to make sure they knew where to look. “The import official agreed. We drop the cargo and we leave.” She shot him a glare; he was still grinning. Dammit, he wasn’t bothered at all. A Corps ensign would have had the brains to stop smiling and restrict all his responses to “Yes, ma’am” for the next six or seven years of his career.

  Beneath them, she caught the distant lights of the cultivation dome—along with a much stronger energy indicator. Before she could dodge into the moon’s shadow again, the shuttle sounded a quiet alarm and said, “We are being targeted.”

  Big fucking surprise. “Evasive!” she shouted, and keyed in a command to the ship’s autopilot. The energy pulse swept past them silently.

  Beside her, Arin began unstrapping himself. “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “I’ll get the cargo ready for the drop.”

  “Arin—”

  “I’m here, Elena. Let me help.”

  Stupid. Damn kid. “You hook yourself onto the wall,” she told him, “and you keep your head away from the open door, do you understand? They will be firing on us. This isn’t make-believe. This is fucking war.”