Breach of Containment

by Elizabeth Bonesteel

  It did not please Jessica, either. Better tech almost certainly meant Ellis.

  “But the other side of it,” he added, “is that it didn’t actually do anything.”

  Jessica raised her eyebrows. “What about Lanie’s message?”

  “It’s not a message.” He leaned across her and hit a panel on the desk. A waveform appeared in the air, and he reached his fingers into the image and pulled it apart. “It’s an audio amalgam of comms she’s received and sent. There’s nothing original in there at all.”

  Jessica got to her feet, walking around the waveform to stand at Ted’s side. “So it tapped into her comm and composed something from what it found.” She looked up at him. “Is it just me, or is that the opposite of not doing anything?”

  “Well, okay, it’s not nothing,” he allowed. “But it’s not sophisticated, Jess. It’s basically an audio compositor that uses emphasis based on frequency. It’s a parlor trick. It’s the shielding that’s more interesting, and it’s possible even that’s just a variant of the loopback virus we hit a while back.”

  She frowned. “I’d feel a lot better if I knew who was after it. Or how to use it.”

  “I’ve got one more test I want to try,” he told her, “but I’ve been waiting for you, just in case I pass out or something.”

  “You’re going to touch it.”

  “Only way, Jess.”

  “If it goes after you like it did Lanie—”

  “I swapped my comm out right before you got here,” he said. “If it’s doing what I think it’s doing, it’s going to give me nothing but our conversation. And of course some lovely words from you about how wonderful I am.” He grew more serious. “You with me on this?”

  She sighed and dropped her feet off the desk to stand. “I suppose I might as well watch the thing melt your brain.”

  At that, he shot her a grin. “I live to serve.”

  He led her to a small workroom. When he closed them into the space, she raised her eyebrows at him. He shrugged, looking sheepish. “It’s a paranoia thing,” he told her. “It commed Lanie when she touched it, but if it’s got an interface that gets activated on contact, I don’t want to give it access to Galileo. This room is comms-locked.”

  She looked around the small space. “What, always?”

  “Sometimes we need a space where things can go wrong without broadcasting to the whole ship.”

  The box containing the artifact was sitting on a table, next to a haphazard stack of spanners. “Is it safe to open?” she asked.

  “The one thing I know,” he told her, “is that if there’s anything radioactive in there, it’s contained by whatever shielding it’s got.” He gave her a look. “You want to wait outside?”

  She shook her head, and he opened the box.

  The artifact was, she thought, about as anticlimactic as it could be. It was a flattened cube with rounded edges and corners, done in a gray polymer. If it had been sitting in a corner of the ship, she wouldn’t even have noticed it. Easy to camouflage, she thought. Easy to make someone pick it up without thinking.

  Ted took a breath, extended a finger, and touched the cube.

  After a moment he lifted his hand and touched it again, then laid his palm on the surface. He took it out of the box and held it with both hands, threaded it between his fingers, tossed it into the air and caught it again. He looked across at Jessica. “Nothing.”

  “What do you mean, ‘nothing’?”

  “I mean,” he said patiently, “I’m not getting anything, comms or otherwise, and monitoring is showing no signal.” He placed it back into the box. “If I hadn’t looked at Lanie’s comm myself, I’d have guessed she just hit some kind of random interference.”

  Jessica frowned down at the artifact, suddenly ominous in its nondescriptness. “Is it possible that’s what happened?”

  “Sure. But if it’s not this thing that scrambled her comm, there’s something roaming out in the wild doing it. Besides, she said Jamyung heard it, too, remember?”

  She looked over at him. Something had occurred to her, but she didn’t want to share it yet. “Maybe it’s the comm,” she said. “Something Lanie’s and Jamyung’s had in common.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t like the new ones,” Ted mused. “I could put my old one on and try it again.”

  She shook her head. Regardless of the persistent inertness of the thing, risking Ted felt like an extreme response. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” she said. “There’s more we can find out without getting reckless. How thick is that inert polymer?”

  “About half a centimeter.” He caught on to her thoughts. “You want to shave it, see if we get something stronger?”

  She nodded. “Slowly. We see anything, any kind of a spike, and we stop right away.”

  Ted pulled on safety gloves and removed the artifact again, clamping it securely against the tabletop. He could have used a hand spanner, but instead he mounted a mechanical one, setting it over one of the artifact’s narrow sides. “This will dig a micron at a time,” he told her. “As soon as it hits a variation in any reading at all, it’ll stop.”

  And it was this exercise that gained them a result. The mechanical spanner stopped at 350 microns. “Anomaly detected,” it said, and projected what it had found. Jessica recognized it instantly.

  Dim, incomplete, and fading: it was the magnetic shadow of a comm signal.

  This was Jessica’s field. “I need an amplifier,” she told Ted, “and something that’ll extrapolate for me.”

  “Extrapolation is awfully inexact.”

  “Less inexact than just hacking it in half,” she pointed out, and he left to find the tools.

  She spent the better part of an hour on the shadow, focusing on the smallest fragments she could find, telling Galileo what she did and did not want the ship to consider important. Galileo might have made entirely different choices, if Jessica had left it to the automated systems. None of this was precise, and it irked her cryptographic mind to be analyzing a potential weapon with what were basically guesses.

  In the end, what she had was a muddled mess, but if she listened to it in just the right way, she could believe it was fragments of someone speaking. “Or dogs barking,” she said aloud, disgusted with herself. “Or maybe bats. Shit, Ted, this is meaningless.”

  “Probably,” he agreed. “But see what you get from the extrapolator.”

  They had to give the tool parameters. Yes, they thought it was human speech. Yes, they thought it was a known language. Yes, they thought it was recent. Yes, they thought it was a comm signal. She sat back and listened to the iterations. The extrapolator was focusing on the rhythm of it, the rise and fall of the tone; they had said speech, and the extrapolator was finding words.

  “This is a chicken-egg thing, Ted,” she protested. “Nothing we hear will—”

  Cytheria, the extrapolator said.

  So much for doubts. She turned to Ted. “Did you hear that?”

  He nodded. “Let it iterate a few more times.”

  But having heard it, she couldn’t unhear it. Cytheria. And then, a few iterations later, a second word emerged, further down the stream: Chryse.

  “What the hell?” Ted said, frowning.

  But Jessica hit her comm to look for Greg. “Captain?”

  He answered immediately. “What’s the matter, Commander?”

  “Nothing. Everything’s—well. We’ve maybe got something on this . . . thing of Elena’s, sir. Do you still have the comm of the distress call you received on Yakutsk?”

  “Of course. Hang on.” There was a pause, and the message played over her comm: This is an automated distress call. This is Cytheria, off of the PSI starship Chryse. We are in need of retrieval. Repeating. We are in need of retrieval.

  “Galileo,” Jessica asked, “what are the odds that’s the message we’re trying to reconstitute?”

  “Rhythmic and tonal match eighty-five percent certainty,” the ship said.

  “Gr
eg,” she said into her comm, “you should probably come down here.”

  Chapter 12

  Cytheria

  Elena left Galileo wrapped in the familiarity of a shuttle she had flown a hundred times. The hum of the engine, the responsiveness of the controls, the curve of the front window with the tactical display overlaying her view of the stars—it was at once soothing and heartbreaking. Nightingale didn’t sound like Galileo, but Elena knew the shuttle’s music nearly as well, and she wanted nothing more than to stay where she was, eyes closed, and listening to the engines, possibly for the rest of her life.

  Galileo’s melodies had not changed. Elena hadn’t even noticed until she realized what she was missing: that low-level awareness of an unfamiliar rhythm. During the six-week run from Earth, she had not had time to internalize Budapest’s sounds. Yuri was always patient with her questions—as an experienced mechanic himself, he knew how important it was to be tuned in to the ship—but she had always felt vaguely out of sync. She had stepped onto Galileo, and something inside of her had stilled, as if she had stopped worrying a wound.

  And for that, if nothing else, she was grateful to Arin. Worrying about him had allowed her to avoid the fact that she was just going to have to leave again.

  She would have to speak with Jessica, too. During their conversations over the last year, Jessica had volunteered information on Greg, knowing Elena would never ask; but Elena had realized almost as soon as she had seen him that Jessica had left out some important things.

  Elena knew Greg had been seeing Andriya Vassily, captain of the Third Sector starship CCSS Cassia, and that Jessica didn’t entirely approve, worried that Greg had fallen back into the patterns of his failed long-distance marriage. Of course, he also had other lovers, including a journalist for the streamers whom Jessica openly disliked. Elena had seen the woman’s reporting, and she could understand why Greg might like her: she came across as quick and good-humored, and she was stunningly, vid-ready beautiful. Jessica had ranted, but Elena had found herself oddly pleased. After the marriage he had escaped, he deserved beautiful women. He deserved legions of them fighting over him. Sometimes, when she thought of him, she imagined just that.

  But she had seen it in his eyes as he sat in the infirmary offering her absolution: he was lonely. He had always been lonely, as long as she had known him, but that was supposed to have changed. Over the last eighteen months, Elena had been jealous of his blossoming friendship with Jessica, the professional and personal relationship she was closed out of. She had been happy for them both, and bitterly sorry for herself. But apparently, despite their easy camaraderie, their relationship had changed nothing for Greg at all: he was still by himself in all the ways that mattered.

  As long as she had known him, he had lived behind a wall. He would tell her, if she asked, that it was necessary, that he was the captain, that distance was critical. But she had seen it in him from the start, from the first time she met him, when she was an ensign looking for a transfer and he was the captain she wanted to impress. All these years she thought he had done it on purpose, kept himself away from everyone. She wondered, sitting in Galileo’s shuttle, if the truth was he had no idea how to let anybody in.

  She had a moment of self-awareness at the thought, and nearly smiled. Always easier to psychoanalyze other people than to understand yourself, right?

  “Nightingale, what’s our travel time?” she asked.

  “Two hours, forty-seven minutes,” the shuttle responded.

  “Wake me up in two hours and seventeen minutes,” she said. Unfastening her harness, she stood up from the pilot’s seat and wandered into the back of the little ship. She stripped off her filthy env suit and tucked it into a corner, then turned on the shuttle’s utilitarian sink and sponged off, dipping her head under the faucet to wash the dome dust out of her hair. When she finished she pulled on one of the regulation Corps env suits folded neatly in a storage drawer. She had no comb, but she ran her fingers through her long hair, working out the tangles, and weaved it into her usual loose braid.

  Nightingale wasn’t a troop ship, but she could hold a dozen soldiers in addition to a pilot and copilot. The benches on either side of the cabin were padded and long enough to hold six seated upright. If she lay down, Elena’s feet wouldn’t even hang over the edge.

  She pulled the jacket of another env suit out of the drawer and rolled it up. Almost as an afterthought, she pulled the plasma rifle Greg had provided off the wall rack and laid it on the floor next to the bench. Whatever she was facing, she didn’t think it would be a mistake to have her weapon close. Stretching out on the bench, she tucked the extra jacket under her ear and closed her eyes. Nightingale’s familiar rhythms seeped into her mind, and she fell asleep.

  Nightingale woke her at the appointed hour, and she sat up, feeling more refreshed than she had in some time, despite the unusually eventful day. She took a moment to splash some water on her face, then retrieved the plasma rifle and returned to the pilot’s seat, checking the shuttle’s status. They were exactly where they were supposed to be, closing in on the location of Chryse’s shuttle.

  “Has it changed course?” she asked.

  “No,” Nightingale told her. “Speed and trajectory are unchanged.”

  “Are you detecting any targeting systems?”

  “No.”

  “Ident?”

  “Ident verifies that the shuttle is Cytheria, off of the PSI ship Chryse.”

  It could all be falsified, of course. For all she knew, she would be coming out of the field on top of a dozen Syndicate raiders, or one black box Shadow Ops fighter ship. Nothing they had found so far had that level of sophistication, but she had long since learned never to underestimate what either Ellis Systems or her government’s own special research branch could do.

  Giving in to caution, she dropped out early, adding an extra ten minutes to her trip. As she grew closer, both her eyes and Sparrow’s sensors told her the same thing: a single ship, running normally at sublight speed, no alarms beyond the automated distress call sent on a narrow, targeted beam.

  To me. And to Greg.

  But as she grew closer and began to make out details, she found herself surprised. She had expected damage, possibly weapons fire, but the shuttle appeared unscathed. The unexpected thing was not its condition, but its design.

  It was old.

  PSI had a reputation for recycling whatever parts they could find, often to elegant effect, but her image of Chryse had been augmented by the fact that everything that ship did seemed to be somehow flashy and modern: automated drops, to-the-second schedules, quick response times, small landing crews with precisely the right set of talents. Flawlessly organized. But this shuttle was older than some of the ones Elena had worked on with her uncle as a child—forty or fifty years by the look of her, in need of a complete hull refit at the very least. Elena could see immediately what had happened: the engine casing had begun to separate from the flimsy hull. Assuming it was designed the same as her familiar Central ships, it would have dropped out of the field and adjusted to automatic mode. It would have been a rough ride, but with environmentals intact, it should not have been dangerous.

  Elena sent a general comm. “Cytheria, this is the shuttle Nightingale, off of CCSS Galileo.” Automatic, identifying herself as part of Galileo. “Are you in need of assistance?”

  Silence.

  She circled around the ship, looking for other damage, and found nothing. After a moment, she signaled Chryse, half expecting the PSI ship to ignore her comm.

  But Bayandi picked up almost immediately. “Chief Shaw,” he said, his voice anxious. “Have you found her?”

  She was not sure why she felt so skeptical that his concern was genuine. “I’ve found the shuttle,” she said, and told him about the damage.

  “But the cabin is intact,” he pressed.

  “As far as I can tell by visual inspection, yes. And all her env systems are functioning.” Bayandi would know that; he
could read the same telemetry she could. “But if it was a rough drop-out, it’s possible Commander Ilyana was injured.” She didn’t state the worst possibility. “Captain—” She found she could not resist asking. “Cytheria appears to be fairly old. Are all your shuttles of this vintage?”

  “You have an educated eye, Chief Shaw,” Bayandi said. “And no, many of our shuttles are new. But Cytheria has longer-range batteries than the others, and she is outfitted more robustly for difficult environmental situations. Given that Ilyana was going alone,” and here his voice became concerned again, “I felt Cytheria made the most sense.”

  Elena had an abrupt mental picture of Bayandi: frowning, worried, wondering if his attempt at protecting his officer had led to her harm—or even her death. There’s been a lot of that today, she thought. “As long as her docking mechanism is standard,” Elena said, trying to sound brisk and self-assured, “I shouldn’t have any trouble getting in.” She thought of telling him not to be concerned, but if he was as old as people suspected, he would know that for a platitude. “I’ll let you know as soon as I find her.”

  “Thank you, Chief,” said the subdued PSI captain, and she realized it was far too late to correct him about her title.

  Cytheria was outfitted with a locking door on the top. Elena maneuvered Nightingale onto her side, linking up the two doors, waiting for the lights to go green. Securing the hood of her env suit, she shrugged on the plasma rifle and settled it comfortably between her shoulder blades. She took a deep breath, opened Nightingale’s hatch, and slid open Cytheria’s door.

  She was greeted with a dim glow: the ship’s emergency lights. With some care she slipped through the opening, reorienting to the other ship’s gravity, and dropped as quietly as she could to the floor of the cabin. She was standing in a narrow corridor, with storage doors on either side of her. Behind her, the space was unlit, but before her the corridor brightened, turning warmer. She could hear a muffled voice, too quiet for her to make out words or language. It was high, possibly feminine, and the tone seemed leisurely and unconcerned. As she stood still, listening, she heard no other voice replying or interrupting, and after a few moments she thought she heard the rhythm of the speech repeat. A recording? A recitation? Slinging her rifle off of her shoulder, she kept one hand firmly on the grip and pressed herself against the corridor wall, creeping forward.