Breach of Containment

by Elizabeth Bonesteel

Elena was an expert at shouting. Greg thought the experience would be exponentially nicer than the dream he’d had. “We needed to know what it is, Bob. If it’s a weapon—” Elena was back from Cytheria. Oh, God. “How long have I been out?”

  “Two hours.”

  He pushed himself up again, ignoring Bob’s protests, and this time jumped to his feet, hand on his comm. “Jessica.”

  There was a pause, and then: “This is Commander Broadmoor, sir.”

  He frowned. What the hell is going on? “Commander, where’s Commander Lockwood?”

  “On the surface, sir, with two platoons. I can put you through to her if you like.”

  Two hours, and everything had unraveled. And they’d all been talking over comms, as they did with everything. “Not now, Commander. You can brief me in a minute. But right now—everybody on the ship gets a new comm. Immediately. Same for Commander Lockwood and her team. Understood?”

  “Okay. Yes, sir.” She sounded confused. “Captain?”

  “There’s a good possibility our comms system has been compromised,” he told her. “We need to start with nothing. No data. Let Galileo sync us up from scratch. Where’s the artifact I was testing?”

  Emily, as always, regrouped effortlessly. “It’s still on Leviathan, sir. Commander Shimada placed it behind extra shielding.”

  “Still comms-locked?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He closed his eyes. Everything in him wanted to put it off the ship . . . but if Jamyung had been murdered for it, the last thing he wanted to do was make it easier for Ellis to take it. “I want it secured,” he told her. “That comms lock comes off on command code only, understood? Lock the landing bay, and put a senior infantry soldier on duty there. Someone who can stand for eight hours without dropping their guard.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He terminated the transmission, and scraped the comm filament onto his fingernail. He glared down at Bob, who was still looking furious. “You too, Doctor.”

  Bob may have been angry, but he was a soldier, and he knew when his captain was serious. The doctor didn’t hesitate, just swept his hand behind his ear. “I have some blanks in the med closet,” he said. “Hang on, and I’ll bring you one.”

  Once Bob was gone, Greg closed his eyes again, reaching out one hand to lean against the wall. His knees still felt weak, and he thought he could conjure up that dream again and weep for days. How had the artifact knocked him out? Had it drugged him? Had it generated vid? How had it projected such a non-memory into his mind?

  He wanted to comm his father so badly his stomach hurt.

  Bob returned and held out to him the tiny, dark square, made up of hundreds of thin sheets of circuitry. Greg pressed it behind his ear over his temporal bone and let it sync up with Galileo’s comms system. He was still leaning against the wall; at Bob’s look, he pushed himself upright.

  But Bob, it seemed, was done shouting. “Why don’t you sit, at least,” he said, “and I’ll examine you.”

  Greg sat and let the man run the scanner over him. “Was I unconscious when they brought me in?” he asked.

  Bob did not look up from his task. “Leviathan did as you’d programmed it, and brought you back once you were overdue. Jessica didn’t touch anything, just had the med techs pull you out. She sealed up the shuttle.

  “And you weren’t unconscious,” he added, almost dismissively. “You were asleep.”

  Asleep? “How did that happen?”

  “You don’t get enough rest.”

  But Greg shook his head. “No. I was tired, sure, but no more than usual. There’s no reason. Was I drugged? Did it induce a dream somehow?”

  “No drugs in your system,” Bob told him. “And they got you here fast enough that even the ones that metabolize quickly would have still been detectable. As for it inducing a dream, I can’t say. The brain scanner revealed an ordinary REM cycle. You woke up right on schedule.”

  And right on schedule, Elena stormed into the room, towering over him in vibrating fury. “What the hell did you think you were doing?” she shouted.

  “Why does everyone yell in my infirmary?” Bob asked, but Greg didn’t think he really minded this time.

  Elena ignored the doctor. “You know what that thing did to me! You knew I wasn’t here, you knew I was hours away from being back, and you risk your life—”

  “It didn’t kill you, Elena. I had no reason to suspect—”

  “Do not start with me.” Her expression darkened further. “I am one person, Greg. This entire ship depends on you. I touched it because I was careless, and because I was a fucking stupid jackass. What is your fucking excuse?”

  Every goddamned time. “My fucking excuse,” he shouted in return, “is that this is my ship, and I needed to know what that thing was. You asked me to examine it!”

  “I asked Ted to examine it!”

  “So it would have been all right with you if Ted had had his brain scrambled?”

  “It knocked you out, Greg!”

  “It did nothing of the sort. It made me fall asleep.”

  “How is that in any way better?”

  That, of all things, made Bob intercede. “Okay, okay,” he said. He stepped between them, back to Greg, a hand on Elena’s arm, and Greg was annoyed all over again. “I think he gets it, Elena,” Bob said gently. “He’s all right. I did a full brain scan while he was out.”

  Over Bob’s shoulder, Greg saw Elena close her eyes. She had cleaned up, he realized: changed her clothes and rinsed the grime out of her hair. With her eyes closed she looked worn-out, the way she used to look when she’d worked too many shifts in a row, and he wondered when she’d last slept. He reminded himself that it wasn’t his responsibility to look after her anymore, and took a moment to wonder why she seemed to feel it was hers to look after him.

  Feeling his anger drain, he switched to a safer subject. “How’s Ilyana?”

  Elena opened her eyes and looked at Bob. Greg couldn’t see Bob’s expression, but he could see hers: a flash of worry, and something hollow and sad that passed too quickly for him to identify. Bob patted her arm and retreated to his med console in the corner, and when she met Greg’s eyes, she was again the calm professional he’d worked with for so many years. “Redlaw is looking at her,” Elena told him. “She’d overdosed on something on the shuttle, but she came with me under her own steam, and she was awake the whole trip home. She says,” she concluded, “that she has a message for us. You and me.”

  Greg frowned. You and me. That might explain why the distress call had come to the two of them. Perhaps the magnetic echo was a coincidence, and the comm had nothing to do with the artifact at all. “Bayandi didn’t mention a message,” he said.

  “He didn’t when they talked, either, but he knew I was listening.”

  The implication being that they had something to hide. “Did you tell her about the artifact?” he asked Elena. When she shook her head, he added, “Don’t.”

  “You think she knows something about it?”

  “I don’t know. Probably not. It’s probably just—” He shut his eyes, saw the beach, opened them up again. He looked up at her, and he saw understanding on her face.

  “Better to assume until we know otherwise,” she said, and nodded. Then her lips set, and she looked away. “Nobody can ever tell you shit, can they?”

  A year. They had been apart for a year, and here they were, back to the familiar. “Why do you think I like being in charge?”

  “Idiot.” But she was smiling.

  “You’re right,” he admitted. “It was a poorly considered move. But . . .” He waited until she looked at him again. “That thing. What it does. I’ve never experienced anything like that before.”

  And in that moment, looking into her dark eyes, he thought she knew exactly what he meant.

  After one final perfunctory scan Bob released Greg, and he followed Elena into the next room to greet Commander Ilyana.

  She was on her feet, standing
next to Admiral Herrod, who had apparently filled Greg’s traditional role and given her a proper welcome. She was a short woman, dwarfed next to Herrod’s sturdy bulk, but she was thick-limbed and solid, radiating a sort of relaxed competence. She looked up when they entered and gave a hesitant smile that steadied when she spotted Elena. For her part, Elena smiled back, reassuring and welcoming, and Greg didn’t think anyone but him noticed the very brief look of dislike she threw Herrod.

  “You look better,” Elena said.

  “I am told that my electrolytes have been stabilized,” Ilyana responded. And then, still smiling: “If you are all present, I have a message I am tasked with delivering.”

  Elena met Greg’s eyes, and he knew what she was thinking: Ilyana’s not treating it like a secret, so why didn’t Bayandi tell us? “We’ll set up in my office,” he said. “Admiral Herrod, if you could escort the commander, we’ll join you in a few minutes.”

  Herrod, who apparently had training as a host as well as a diplomat, turned to Commander Ilyana with a smile that was positively friendly, and gestured for her to precede him out of the room.

  When they were out of earshot, Elena turned to Redlaw. “How is she really?”

  Redlaw, an easygoing man of about fifty, leaned back against the now-empty examining table. “Tell me again what she said about the drugs,” he said.

  Greg watched Elena frown, concentrating. “Nothing, I think,” she told him. “Just . . . when I woke her up, she said she hadn’t expected anyone to find her. Do you think she was suicidal?”

  “If she was, she didn’t know her dosage very well.” He looked thoughtful. “At the rate she was taking it, it would have killed her awfully slowly. She probably would have died of starvation first.”

  “Is she an addict?” Greg asked.

  Redlaw hedged. “I did a toxicology backtrack. Her usage goes back four or five months, but until recently it was low-level—not the sort of use that should have triggered addiction. About five weeks ago she started slowly increasing her dose, and she’s been OD’ing for the last week or so. But other than that, she’s in remarkably good shape. Good nutrition, good muscle tone. She probably wouldn’t have passed out if she hadn’t stopped eating regularly.”

  Five weeks. That would have been when Cytheria left Chryse. “She was very relaxed during the trip here,” Elena said. “Cheerful, even. Did you get any psych readout at all?”

  “Her brain shows the same signs of trauma as any soldier’s,” he said. “But without a baseline reading, I can’t say how bad it is. Something happened recently, though. I can’t say what, or how severe it was, but her cortisol responses are pretty damn suspect.”

  Greg frowned. “Are you saying she’s unreliable?”

  “I’m saying, sir,” Redlaw told him, “that there’s a lot going on with that woman, and if she were part of our crew, I’d send her to Petra for a proper psych eval before I let her work a shift.”

  Elena met Greg’s eyes again. “We need to ask Bayandi,” she said, and he nodded.

  “I’ll comm him after we talk with Ilyana,” he said. “Redlaw, see if you can get Petra to talk to her. Just to get her current condition on the record. There may be no reason to mistrust her, but I want to understand where she’s coming from.”

  He turned, and Elena fell easily into step with him. Before they could leave, though, Redlaw spoke up.

  “You know,” the nurse said, “it wouldn’t hurt either one of you to chat with Petra for a bit, either.”

  Greg did not look at Elena, but neither one of them slowed down as they left the infirmary.

  Chapter 17

  Yakutsk

  Zinaida Villipova was a grim, square-faced woman with prematurely white hair, thin hands, and bushy, expressive eyebrows. Jessica had never before dealt with her personally, but she’d heard Elena, who knew many of the traders in Smolensk, repeat various unflattering—and often obscene—stories about her. The general consensus was that she was corrupt and corrupting, coldly mercenary, and efficient. Graft and bribery were the norm in Smolensk, but for the most part she made sure enough people kept enough money. Unlike Oarig’s predecessor, and the predecessors in Baikul before him, she had held on to power, despite some close calls. She was not without political enemies, but they only turned up dead when threats of a takeover became too severe for her to ignore.

  In short: she was a murderer and a dictator, but scrupulously pragmatic about it.

  Villipova was seated behind a nondescript desk, hands folded. She did not look up when Jessica entered, but the man seated in a soft chair in the corner of the room stood and crossed the office to stand between Jessica and the governor. He wore a crisp civilian suit that appeared to have never been touched by Smolensk’s red dust, and wore his hair combed back severely to hang in a long plait down his back. He smiled an entirely artificial smile and held his hand out to Jessica. “Commander Lockwood. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  He was taller than she was as well, although not nearly as tall as Greg, and clearly expected her to shrink from him. Instead she crossed her arms, ignoring his hand. “We can’t meet,” she said smoothly, “until you tell me who you are.”

  That smile widened, and his eyes twinkled. Dark eyes, dark hair. Pale skin, almost pale enough to be off of Tengri; but no one on Tengri looked so feral, so aggressive. Jessica thought she might have been romanticizing her home colony a little, but whoever this man was, he was intensely off-putting. “Of course. I can’t expect you to have heard of me, the way I’ve heard of you.”

  “Given that I spoke with Governor Villipova not half an hour ago,” she said, “I’m not in the least surprised you’ve heard of me.” He opened his mouth to speak again, but she took a step past him to talk to Villipova. “Governor. Are you all right?”

  Villipova’s eyebrows arched, ever so slightly; she knew better than to think Jessica was genuinely concerned for her. “Perfectly, Commander. Where are your people?”

  “Outside,” Jessica told her.

  “How many?”

  “How about you tell me who your goon is first?”

  The governor’s lips thinned, and it took Jessica a moment to recognize she was smiling. “Did you hear that, Gladkii?” she said to the man standing behind Jessica. “You’ve been upgraded to goon. They’ll surely promote you now.” She stood and came around the desk. “Commander Lockwood, this is Anatole Gladkoff. A business associate.”

  Jessica turned, and this time she accepted the handshake. He shook firmly but briefly, and she noted that he was a fast learner. “And what business are you in, Gladkoff?”

  “I’m in sales,” he told her.

  She tilted her head to one side. “That I could tell,” she said. “Who are you selling for?”

  And at that his eyes shifted, just for an instant, so quickly she almost missed it. “At the moment,” he said, “I’m not selling at all. I’m here on a . . . diplomatic mission.” His expression recovered. “Our terraformers proved to be insufficient for Yakutsk’s needs, and I’m here to shore up their dome environments in any way necessary while they decide whether to proceed with replacing the surface units.”

  And that explained the studied smarminess. “You work for Ellis Systems,” Jessica said. She suddenly wanted to scrub her hands.

  “Our dome environmental systems have been allowed to age,” Villipova put in. “This was mainly due to our plans to move out onto the surface. Gladkii is trying to convince me he can improve our lives within the dome while we evaluate what to do next.”

  That was the second time Villipova had used the diminutive of Gladkoff’s name, and Jessica began to wonder if the woman was trying to annoy him. For his part, Gladkoff seemed unfazed, and Jessica had to admit she might be inclined to try to needle him herself. “Does Oarig know about this?” Jessica asked.

  “Baikul will be upgraded as well.” Villipova sounded less pleased by that.

  “And you didn’t think to tell us?”

  “This is not
any of your business.”

  Jessica’s eyes narrowed, and she took a step toward the governor. “I have no doubt, Governor Villipova,” she said, allowing her voice to grow icy, “that you know all of the history Central Gov shares with Ellis Systems. Your assertion that Gladkoff’s presence here is none of our business is . . . disingenuous, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I think what Governor Villipova is saying,” Gladkoff put in smoothly, “is that the Corps doesn’t have the authority or the ability to interfere with what we’re doing here. And why would you need to? We’re here to help.”

  Jessica did not take her eyes off Villipova. The older woman had let her lashes drop, making her expression more difficult to read. Jessica, on the other hand, wanted hers to be entirely transparent. “Do you really believe they’re here to help, Governor?” she asked.

  Villipova took a moment to study Jessica’s face. “I trust their motives just as I do yours, Commander Lockwood.”

  Well, Jessica thought, that’s something, at least.

  The rumble was low, building slowly, and Jessica almost mistook it for a ship taking off before she realized how far they were from the spaceport. “Get down!” she shouted, and dove for the floor. Villipova was already there, having recognized what she was hearing. Gladkoff was last, panicking almost comically, throwing himself over Villipova’s desk to curl up between the chair and the wall.

  Jessica hit her comm. “Bristol, report!”

  “Grenade strikes, ma’am,” he said unnecessarily. “Three surrounding the building. About a block off. Long-range launchers by the sound of them.”

  Shit. “Move to disarm them,” she ordered. “Send me two officers to—” She glanced at Villipova.

  “There is an exit in the rear,” the governor told her.

  “The back of the building,” Jessica finished. “We’re coming out. Top priority is to protect the governor.”

  She had no doubt Gladkoff noted her omission.

  “And Bristol—do not engage. Defend if you must, but do not engage beyond getting those launchers off-line. We are not at war with these people. We protect Villipova, and that’s it. If they want to occupy this building, let them do it, but no civilians die. Am I very clear, Lieutenant?”