Breach of Containment

by Elizabeth Bonesteel

  Dallas missed Martine. She had been stupid as hell, and far too sanguine about the idea of spending her life sorting through debris on the surface of a moon. But she had understood the draw of the moon’s surface, the headiness of walking in light gravity, the red dust, fine and soft and familiar, that got into everything no matter how hard you tried to keep it out. She had been a good scavenging partner, and good company, and a cheerful loser, even when playing the games she loved the most. And she had been too damn young to die over some piece of scrap that didn’t mean anything.

  At least the object was gone now. That freighter woman, Shaw, had taken it away, and Martine’s killers had no reason to come after any more of Dallas’s friends. They might go after Shaw, but she was clearly ex-Corps, and Dallas thought the strangers might be taking on more than they anticipated if they tried to get the object back from her. They’d certainly get more fight than they’d had from Martine.

  Stupid kid. Despite the tepid afternoon air, Dallas shivered and walked faster.

  The police had come about Jamyung—or rather, the goons that followed Villipova around had showed up—and explained to Dallas that the governor was not responsible for the trader’s death. Dallas had done the usual: shrug, nod, be unconcerned and unmoved. But their efforts had been pointless. Dallas already knew Jamyung had been killed by strangers. Anyone who had lived in Smolensk for more than three weeks could tell strangers from up a goddamned city block just by the way they moved. Which did make Dallas wonder why Villipova had been so intent on convincing Jamyung’s friends that she hadn’t been a part of this one.

  Obviously she’s hiding something, Dallas thought.

  Then: It doesn’t matter.

  That wasn’t despair, it was just fact: there was nothing Dallas could do. Finding out who had killed Jamyung would not resurrect him. There were other traders who would buy Dallas’s salvage, and maybe even pay a higher price for it. Jamyung’s death was wrong, but no more wrong than the usual wrongness that plagued Smolensk. Yakutsk was Yakutsk. Dallas could have left at any time. Surely staying so long was some kind of tacit acceptance of the order of things.

  None of your business, Dallas. Villipova’s been hiding things your whole life.

  Martine was twenty-three years old.

  Dallas ignored the first explosion, far off, away from the pub and Dallas’s flat and Jamyung’s parts yard. Occasional explosions were not unknown in Smolensk, and generally by the time Dallas made it home, all the details were out on the stream and the perpetrators long gone. But the second blast was far closer—near Villipova’s offices. Dallas began to walk faster, looking around. There were people running, and shouts in the distance, and far off the sound of plasma rifles.

  Fuck. Another coup attempt.

  Dallas stopped someone running across the road. “Who is it?”

  “Gillanders, I think,” she said. “The whole family this time, not just the sisters. But Villipova brought Corps infantry into it. They killed someone.”

  And at that, Dallas’s stomach dropped. More outsiders? What kind of bullshit is this? “Where?”

  The woman scowled. “The fuck do I care?” she snapped, and ran off.

  Dallas picked up the pace and ran toward the governor’s office. This turned out to be upstream; most people were running the other way. “They’re shooting at us!” a vaguely familiar voice shouted in Dallas’s direction. Dallas kept moving, and turned a corner to find the remains of a building façade piled haphazardly in the alley behind the governor’s office. Instinctively, Dallas pressed against the alley wall, waiting, listening for the whistle of an incoming grenade or the whirr of a pulse rifle powering up. There was silence, and Dallas counted: ten seconds, twenty . . . after forty, Dallas moved into the alley to assess the damage.

  And found a body.

  A Corps soldier, although shorter than the other ones Dallas had met. A woman, slim but curvy, skin pale under the gray dust of the rubble, and hair a shade of red Dallas had only seen in vids. The strap of her pulse rifle was looped over her shoulder, but the gun was lying behind her back, and her hands were open. She had not been holding it when the building hit her.

  Gingerly, Dallas knelt next to her and held two fingers to her neck. A pulse. At the touch, she moved, and made a quiet sound. Dallas stood. The hospital was close, and she looked small enough. She wouldn’t be too heavy for the short distance.

  Dallas thought of what the woman in the street had said: They killed someone. What would a Smolensk doctor do for a Corps soldier?

  Dallas pulled the strap of the pulse rifle off the woman’s shoulder and picked up the weapon. A heavy gun for such a small person, but if she was Corps, she would be trained to handle it. Dallas lengthened the strap and shouldered the rifle, then leaned over, grasping the woman’s arms. Despite the not-infrequent political purges in Smolensk, Dallas had not hauled many bodies—and none in the full Earth-level gravity inside the domes—but the principle was simple enough. The woman, small as she was, fit easily over Dallas’s shoulder; uncomfortably, with her diaphragm compressed against Dallas’s sharp bones. But her legs were short enough to stay out of the way of Dallas’s brisk stride, and with a furtive glance down the main street, the scavenger carried her back home.

  Chapter 20

  Budapest

  Elena borrowed Nightingale again to head back to Budapest.

  At some point, she knew, the full import of what had happened would hit her, and she would have to deal with fear and worry. In the meantime, she fell back on duty, and right now, her duty was on Budapest. Nai’s lecture notwithstanding, they would not have been through anything like this. They would likely be unsettled and worried, even Chiedza, despite her background. Naina would be thinking of her family, and impatiently checking the comms systems for news. Or, Elena supposed, she might have done what Elena had: set up a private comms alert for any message from home.

  Her worry, at this point, was less about her family back on Earth than the reason for the failure. She had no doubt it was deliberate and, despite a dearth of evidence, no doubt that Ellis was somehow behind it all. A few years back, Galileo had been hit with a comms loopback virus, effectively isolating the ship; the pattern of this new outage, with Athena’s telemetry dropping with no warning, felt familiar. The effects on Galileo had been temporary, but the more complex the system, the longer it took for the virus to unravel.

  There were ways around the virus, and there were ships in the Second Sector who were already headed to Athena to help, including three science ships from Jessica’s home planet of Tengri. This outage was an irritant, and a distraction, and Elena was not happy waiting for the other shoe to drop. Waiting made her worry about things she could not change, and people she could not help.

  I haven’t spoken to my mother since I left Earth six weeks ago.

  She settled the shuttle in the landing bay and made her way through Budapest’s corridors. Budapest wasn’t a bad ship, overall; for a freighter she was positively cheerful, well-lit and adapted with extra temperature zones, allowing for the crew to customize their own comfort. Bear had been flying the same ship for decades, and he’d taken care of her. Working as her mechanic, Elena had enjoyed the solid, comfortable, old-fashioned machinery running alongside the newer tech. There was a familiarity about her, and even though she wasn’t Galileo, Elena had found some pleasure in the work.

  But duty notwithstanding, Budapest would never be home.

  She climbed the stairs into the ship’s main area, and immediately heard shouting. As she grew closer she realized it was only a single voice, and not speaking Standard. Chiedza, then, which made sense: Naina never shouted like that, even when she was angry.

  She walked into the kitchen and was completely ignored. Chiedza was pacing and yelling. Naina stood in a corner, jaw set and teeth clenched, arms tensed as if she wanted to hit her crewmate. Elena had noticed nobody on the crew, not even Chi, ever crossed Nai.

  Elena focused on the accountant, who shru
gged and rolled her eyes. If she was frightened about the First Sector, she was hiding it well.

  “Enough,” Elena said. When Chi kept cursing, she said it again: “ENOUGH!”

  Chi stopped and glared at her. “Who do you think you are? This is none of your fucking business.”

  “Fuck you, Chi,” she snapped. “How exactly do you think this helps anyone?”

  “Who the fuck is there to help? The whole First Sector is dead!”

  At that Naina straightened up. “Stop it, Chi. If you know something we don’t, tell us. Otherwise you’re as much in the dark as any of us, and you can shut up and panic on your own time.”

  To Elena’s surprise, Chiedza fell silent. She dropped into a chair, staring resentfully at her hands.

  Naina looked at Elena. “How is Arin?”

  “He’s all right,” she said. “The doctor says he ought to stay a bit longer. If the two of you want to go over, there’s room. They’ve already set Bear and Yuri up with quarters. Yuri was talking about coming back here in a couple of hours to check on the ship.”

  “None of that matters,” Chiedza said, more quietly. “This is all we have left.”

  “You don’t know that,” Elena told her. “You—”

  “Don’t stand there,” she interrupted, “telling me what I know. We all know what you are. We all know you’re still in contact with those people. This is some Central military bullshit, and you know what it is.”

  The absurdity of that brought her up short. “Why would Central isolate the First Sector?”

  “Who the fuck knows?” Chi leaned back, letting her hands drop into her lap. “Gov thinks they know what’s best for all of us. Tariffs and rules and bullshit, and if you don’t obey, send in the starships and shoot at people until they listen to you.”

  Elena opened her mouth to argue, then closed it again. She knew people who thought that way—her cousin Matthew’s daughter had railed at her the last time she was on Earth—and there was little she could say to shift someone’s belief in conspiracy theories. It didn’t help that there were conspiracies within Central Gov; they just weren’t nearly as organized as people seemed to think they were. She wondered if somehow people wanted to believe their government had to be more unified than it was, that the inevitable failures were somehow deliberate rather than gaps in a system that had never been better than absurdly fragile.

  “I’ll tell you what I know,” she said, as calmly as she could. She felt Nai’s eyes on her. “Whatever hit the First Sector looks a lot like a comms virus Galileo ran into a few years ago. And that wasn’t Central tech,” she added, at Chi’s stare. “The original virus came out of Ellis Systems.”

  “Ellis?” Chiedza scoffed. “Pencil pushers. Environmental technologists. They don’t make viruses.”

  But Nai did not look surprised. “The company took them off our approved vendor list a year ago. I wondered why.”

  Interesting, Elena thought, that we actually managed to hit their commercial reputation. “Regardless of their public image, most of what Ellis does is stealth weapons research. And their methods tend to be unethical, at the very least.” Chi looked skeptical, but at least she was listening. “There’s some evidence that the kinds of catastrophes we’ve been seeing are not coincidence, but coordinated attacks.”

  “Do you have proof of this?” Chi asked.

  “More than you’ve got against Central,” Elena retorted. “But Ellis has been able to hand-wave it away so far. PSI just brought us some intel that may give us more traction. The point is,” she went on, before the inevitable protest, “evidence isn’t what’s important at the moment. Right now we’ve got to figure out what’s going on in the First Sector and what we can do to help.”

  “We can go back,” Nai suggested.

  “We’re six weeks out. It doesn’t make sense for us to move yet.”

  “But—”

  This time it was Chiedza who interrupted Naina. “If we all rush back,” she said, her voice finally calm, “we leave everyone out here vulnerable. Which may be the whole point.”

  Elena felt a wave of relief. Chi believed her, or at least believed enough of what she said to consider it. “Exactly. Unless and until Ellis makes a statement of intent,” she said, “we need to focus on what we’re out here to do. We came to Yakutsk for a reason. They’re still vulnerable. And with this happening, we don’t know who else out here is vulnerable, either.”

  Chiedza’s eyes were still full of resentment, but most of her anger seemed to have dissipated. “Fine. But don’t tell me we’re helpless. What can we do?”

  “Funny you should ask.” Elena dropped into a chair across from Chi. “Tengri’s closest, and they sent a couple of ships with some repair crews to see if they can help at Athena. It occurred to me you might have some contacts in that vicinity as well.”

  “And who the hell would I know?”

  Naina pushed herself off the wall and approached the table. “Chi—” she began, but Elena held up her hand to stop her.

  “I don’t know what you think I’m thinking, Chi,” Elena said seriously, “but I’ve known some Syndicate raiders in my time. I know their actions aren’t always black and white. And I have a small idea what it must have taken for you to leave them.” Chi was silent, and Elena knew her guess about the woman’s background had been correct. “I don’t care who you keep in touch with, and I don’t care why. I’ve worked with you here, and I have no reason whatsoever not to trust you. You accuse me of being Corps on some level? Yeah, I am. I always will be. It’s just occurred to me that regardless of your choices, you may feel the same sorts of ties I do.”

  And then she waited.

  “I have some friends,” Chi said at last. “They’ve got a fair amount of comms knowledge.”

  “Will they help?” Elena asked her.

  “Athena Relay is as neutral as territory gets,” Chi pointed out. “They use it as much as anyone else. They’re not going to exploit this as a business opportunity.”

  Business. The business of Syndicate raiders was theft, but now was not, Elena knew, the time to get into a philosophical argument. “Would they be willing to give information directly to Galileo, or will they prefer going through you?”

  “They’re not going to talk to the Corps.”

  Inconvenient, but not a deal-breaker. She stood. “I’ll put you in touch with Samaras. He’s Galileo’s comms officer. He’s the one who worked out how to get around the virus last time, and you can pass that on to them. It’s not a cure, but it’ll be faster than trying to build a temporary relay.”

  “Assuming,” Nai put in, “your loopback virus is at fault.”

  Elena didn’t want to think about what else it could be. “I think the two of you should consider staying on Galileo until this blows over.”

  “Safety in numbers?” Naina sounded amused, but Chi looked outraged.

  “You’re telling us Central is going to protect us?” she said, incredulous.

  Elena leveled a look at her. “I’m not talking about official sanctuary,” she replied. “I’m talking about Galileo. And before you say no, think about how much firepower Galileo is carrying, and where you might feel safest.”

  “We’ve all got to be communicating,” Naina added. “It’ll be easier if we’re all in the same place. Come on, Chi. I’ll stay here for now and wait for Yuri. We can take shifts to look after the ship until Bear comes back.”

  Chi still looked deeply unhappy. She stood, heading out of the galley, and Elena called after her. “Is that a no?”

  Chi stopped and turned. “I’ll come with you,” she said wearily. “But if Arin’s going to be stuck on Galileo, we need to bring him his fucking cat.”

  Chapter 21

  Yakutsk

  Strange bed, was Jessica’s first thought.

  Then: Another concussion. Bob is going to kill me.

  She let her senses explore her surroundings. The bed itself was softer than she was used to, but not unpleasantly so
, and a good deal wider than her bunk on Galileo. She was under some kind of cloth blanket, lightweight but warm, the nap of the fabric soothing to her skin. Her cheek pressed against a pillow soft enough to mold itself to her face; but she was lying on her ear at a bad angle, and it was starting to irritate her. She was going to have to move soon.

  As her perceptions widened, she noticed the way the room smelled: food. Heat and oil, although not heavy; the peaty scent of root vegetables; the bite of toasted nuts and herbs. Pleasant. That must be the sound she was hearing as well: the white-noise sizzle of something cooking. Suddenly she was starving, and she opened her eyes.

  She was on a bed set against the wall in a single-room flat. Before her was a table, and across from it a single hard chair, well worn, but curved and attractive, nearly a work of art on its own. Beyond the chair was a counter and cooktop, with a window exposing nothing but the wall of the next building. And before the cooktop stood a figure, slim and slight, pushing at something in a high-sided saucepan and apparently not at all panicked by the recent explosions in the city.

  She wondered how long she had been out.

  She pushed herself up on one elbow, and her head gave an alarming throb. She cursed, squeezing her eyes shut against the pain, and when she opened them again the figure had turned. Brown hair, brown eyes, light brown skin; fine cheekbones over a straight, square jaw, even and perfect, more nondescript than beautiful. But those eyes looked bright, as if their owner spent a lot of time smiling. Non-threatening, she thought, then noticed her pulse rifle lying on the countertop next to the stove, entirely out of her reach.

  “How do you feel?” her host asked. The voice was mid-range, slightly musical, oddly calming. Nature or nurture? she wondered.

  “Like I got blown up,” she said honestly. She wanted to lie down again; instead, she swung her legs off the bed and sat up. “Did you find me?”