Breach of Containment

by Elizabeth Bonesteel

  “Yep.” Her host turned back to the stove. “Almost took you to the hospital, but then I saw your uniform.”

  “Your hospital doesn’t take soldiers?”

  The shrug told her many things. “Crossed my mind you might not want the publicity, given the circumstances.”

  “What circumstances would those be?”

  Those eyes turned on her again. Still bright, but with a hint of sharpness that made her think she wouldn’t have much luck if she tried lying. “One of our people got shot in that fight.”

  Fucking Gladkoff. “I know. I saw.”

  “By a Corps weapon.”

  “Bullshit.” The word came out more forcefully than she’d intended, and her head started throbbing again. “It was . . . damn. I didn’t get a close enough look at the thing. But I didn’t know he had it until after he shot, and he wasn’t one of my people.”

  After a moment, her host nodded. “Maybe not. But that’s not what people are saying.”

  “So I’m safer here than at the hospital.”

  That shrug again.

  “Thank you,” she said, and meant it. “Do you have a name?”

  “Dallas.”

  And what are the odds of that? “Would you be the scavenger who worked for Jamyung?”

  Dallas opened a cabinet and removed two bowls. “I work for myself. But yeah, I sold to Jamyung now and then. You knew him?”

  Jessica watched as Dallas scooped the contents of the saucepan into the bowls. “No. But you and I may have another mutual acquaintance. Elena Shaw.”

  She saw the look of recognition cross her host’s face. Carrying the food, Dallas moved to the table, setting one dish in front of Jessica. She leaned over it, inhaling the spices, and picked up the spoon. “She helped me bring him home,” Dallas said, and Jessica thought Elena was right: the scavenger was genuinely grieving. “Is she all right?”

  Jessica nodded. “No thanks to some friendly colonists who shot her supply ship down.”

  Dallas’s jaw set; apparently it was a sensitive point. “Not my friends.”

  “Maybe not,” she said, “but nobody’s wearing name tags around here. And if your friends think the Corps has been shooting at them . . .” Shit. She wasn’t thinking. “Do you have a comm system?”

  “You want something outside an official link?”

  “Just in case,” she said. Dallas catches on quickly.

  A moment later Dallas handed her a small, short-range handheld comm. It took her a moment to contact Bristol, who sounded genuinely relieved.

  “Ma’am, where are you? We went back afterward, and none of the hospitals—”

  “I’m safe.” There would be time for details later, when she was more comfortable with who might or might not be listening in. “What happened to the others?”

  “Villipova’s people retook the governor’s office. She’s back there. Nobody’s been lobbing grenades at us, ma’am, but people are unhappy. Turns out Gladkoff’s weapon was standard Corps manufacture.”

  A good bet that’s deliberate, she thought, frustrated. “Tell them we didn’t do the shooting,” she said. “Say it once. Say we couldn’t prevent it, and we’re sorry about that. But don’t yell, and don’t get into a debate. And for fuck’s sake, make sure nobody else gets shot.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  There was something else in his voice. “What is it, Bristol?”

  “Well, ma’am,” he said, uncharacteristically hesitant, “I’m just wondering, since I don’t know where you’ve been . . . have you heard about the First Sector?”

  Her stomach contracted. She could feel Dallas’s eyes on her. “Could you be more specific, Lieutenant?”

  “Nobody can get through. We’re suspecting a glitch at Athena Relay, but there’s nothing in their last telemetry broadcast to suggest a malfunction.”

  “How long?”

  “It’s been down about an hour now.”

  She swore again. Athena was the oldest relay in the galaxy, and glitches weren’t unknown, but something at this level was unprecedented. People would be getting nervous. “Focus on the mission, Lieutenant,” she said, knowing she was only saying what he already knew. “Keep your people calm. If you can help pick up after those explosions, reconstruct, rescue people, that kind of thing—absolutely do so. We need Villipova alive, but after that, your priority is making nice with the locals, understand? Gladkoff’s stunt fucked things up, but if we’re consistent and helpful, maybe we can mitigate some of that.”

  “Yes, ma’am. We’ll take care of it.” His voice sounded steadier.

  When she disconnected, she looked back at Dallas. “I don’t suppose you have anything that can reach a starship?”

  Wordlessly, Dallas opened a cabinet underneath the cooktop and pulled out a small, round, clear piece of polymer, about the size of a plate. “I’ll need to code it in,” Dallas said. “It’s not going to look like it’s from you, though.”

  She didn’t think that would matter.

  Her relief when she heard Greg’s voice was nearly overwhelming. “I take off for a couple of hours,” she snapped, “and you lose the entire First Sector. What the fuck, sir?”

  “Nice to hear your voice, too, Jess,” he said, and the gentle humor in his tone eased her anxiety a little. “Why don’t you give me your report first?”

  Ah, yes. There were more important things than climbing the walls over things she could not change. “Ellis Systems is here, sir.”

  All of his humor vanished. “Explain.”

  She told him about Gladkoff, and their escape from Villipova’s office. “And apparently,” she added, when he was done cursing about the dead colonist, “Gladkoff’s weapon is the same design as the ones issued to the Corps.”

  “You reaching out to the citizens?”

  “Bristol’s on it.”

  “What about Dallas?”

  Dallas, who was leaning against the kitchen counter watching her, gave another noncommittal shrug. “Dallas has helped me already,” she said. “Beyond digging me out of the rubble, though? Can’t say.”

  “I’m a pacifist,” Dallas said.

  “We’re all pacifists,” Greg replied. When Dallas snorted, he clarified. “Your skepticism is understandable. But Galileo was sent here both to help you recover from the terraformer failure, and to keep you from killing each other.”

  “Seems to me,” Dallas said, “standing troops are maybe not the best way to send that message.”

  “What would you suggest?” Dallas was silent, and Greg went on. “My standing troops are there because your current government requested physical protection from the government on Baikul. Are you telling me protecting your governor pits us against the general population?”

  Dallas looked at Jessica, and she began to realize exactly how sticky the situation was. “I think that pretty much covers it, sir,” she said wearily. “Most of the attacks on Villipova over the years haven’t been from Baikul. She’s grown very skilled at deflecting them.”

  “So why,” Dallas asked, “did she ask you to come down here?”

  “That’s a very good question,” Greg said. “Do you have any insights on that?”

  Dallas shrugged again, and Jessica found herself wishing for vid. Greg was much better at reading body language than she was. “Big difference now,” Dallas said, “is Gladkoff.”

  “At face value,” Jessica put in, “his explanation makes sense. Ellis’s terraformers fucked up, and they’re trying to make amends. With any other corporation, I’d buy it without question.” She looked back at Dallas. “Why aren’t they just replacing the terraformers?” she asked.

  “The real reason? I don’t know. But nobody in Smolensk is weeping over that.”

  “Why not?” Greg asked.

  “We’ve been here five hundred years,” Dallas said reasonably. “Why did we suddenly need to move out of the domes? Half of our living is out there. We turn it into crops and housing developments, we’re nothing but another gen
eric parts depot.”

  Patriotism, Jessica realized, and of a sort that might actually be useful. “So why do it at all?” she asked, and got nothing but that shrug.

  “So Gladkoff’s making amends for the failure of something nobody—or at least nobody in Smolensk—wanted in the first place,” Greg concluded. “Jess, are you all right? Physically? Can you stay down there?”

  “My doctor seems to think I’ll survive,” she said, and she thought she caught Dallas hiding a smile.

  “Does your doctor think you could go incognito?”

  Dallas’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t know. That hair.”

  “I can dye it,” Jessica pointed out.

  “Also, she walks like Corps.”

  “Of course I do,” Jessica said, unaccountably irritable. “I spent years learning how to do it.”

  “I suggest you unlearn it, Commander,” Greg said decisively. “Dallas—can we count on you to help us here?”

  Dallas shifted against the countertop, and she caught the long fingers tightening against the edge. “I’m Yakutsk,” Dallas said. “Not Corps.”

  “Understood,” Greg said. “Right now, I believe our interests are aligned. As soon as you feel they’re not, you do what you need to do.”

  Jessica studied her host. Dallas’s face, she was learning, was subtly expressive, conveying thoughtfulness and concentration around the corners of those dark eyes, displeasure with a gentle clenching of the jaw. Right now, she did not think the scavenger was weighing whether or not Greg was worth trusting. Everybody trusted Greg; it was a power he had, a weird force of will that annoyed Jessica as often as she was grateful for it. No, she thought Dallas’s dilemma had more to do with how much a career scavenger wanted to get involved in what was likely to become a far more volatile political situation than the colony was used to weathering.

  After a moment, Dallas pushed off the counter. “Villipova’s opportunistic, but paranoid,” the scavenger said. “She’ll take systems from Gladkoff, but she’ll want local mechs to validate them. I’ve worked for her before. She’d probably let me in again.” Those dark eyes met Jessica’s. “Could probably bring an assistant without much fuss.”

  Jessica grinned. “I think we’re good here, sir,” she told her captain.

  Chapter 22

  Galileo

  Late to the game again. You never learn, do you, Jos?

  Admiral Josiah Herrod, retired, did what he always did when a crisis hit: he watched. Right now he was watching Greg Foster, calm and professional, talking with his crew in the pub, reminding them of exactly what they could and could not control, keeping their duties as unchanged as he could. Jos felt the palpable nervousness in the room ease a little, watched soldiers straighten and look more composed. They would not panic until they saw their captain falter, and Greg Foster was not going to falter. If the Admiralty had learned nothing else about him, Jos reflected, they’d learned that no matter how recalcitrant he was willing to behave behind the scenes, in front of his crew he would remain the consummate officer.

  Shaw had surprised him. After her outbursts during the PSI spy’s presentation, he would have expected her to go for his throat. Instead she had excused herself to Budapest to look after her crewmates there. Her own ideal of service, he supposed. Whatever her reasons for leaving the Corps—and he had his own theories on that—she would always do the duty she was assigned.

  He was counting on it. They all were.

  “We’re not getting any environmental data yet,” Foster told his crew. “The closest station we’ve got is a little less than three hours out, so we’ll hear something soon. In the meantime—at your stations, on alert. And if anyone hears anything, rumor or otherwise, tell myself, Commander Broadmoor, or Lieutenant Samaras. Keep it off comms, and do not spread rumors. We need to set an example.”

  Three hours. Without Athena, the other relays would suffer time lags of various lengths as they synced up to compensate for the shortfall. Jos felt, suddenly, the tremendous distance between himself and the home he knew, all that was familiar, all that had tangled itself into the fabric of his life.

  You’re such a landlubber, Jos, said Andy’s voice in his head. It’s amazing you can even climb a flight of stairs. Andy had meant it as a joke, even a fond one; but he had not been wrong.

  Commander Ilyana sat on the opposite side of the pub from Jos—as far away from the windows as she could get, he noticed, or perhaps she only wanted her back to the wall. She was not what he had been led to expect at all. For thirty years the Admiralty had called her a spy, never mind that neither Central nor any of its departments had many secrets Jos considered worth stealing. Jos suspected, if he asked her captain, he’d be told she was simply an expert on Central Gov, the equivalent of the dozens of officers the Corps assigned to keep up to date on what PSI was doing. But she was certainly making no secret of her curiosity, of soaking up every bit she could of what was going on around her. Her disingenuousness might have been performance, but if it was, she was an extraordinary actress.

  There was a point in my life when I knew who the enemy was. Today, that thought seemed laughable.

  As Foster approached, Jos carefully tucked away his own concerns. Reacting now would do him no good. Letting Foster know what he knew would only make things worse. Best to emulate the captain and keep his fears to himself, and not think about the path to which they were now committed.

  Foster sat across from Jos, body language casual, still playing to his audience. But Jos knew Greg Foster well, and he could see the tenseness in his jaw, the annoyance in his eyes. Those extraordinary eyes were always what he noticed first about Greg Foster. Jos remembered the first time he had met the man, when Foster had been a first-year Academy student, twenty-two years old and already described as a leader. Jos had been prepared to find him lazy and entitled—how do you walk through life with that face and not relax into having everything handed to you?—but Foster had surprised him. He had been focused, hardworking, and utterly humorless, and Jos thought he would have easily made Admiral someday.

  But he had learned, monitoring Foster’s years at the Academy and then his early, exemplary career, that Foster had one thing that disqualified him from the life within the bureaucracy: he believed. Jos had been skeptical at first, but over and over again, no matter how messy the assignment, no matter what horrific loss he had to face, Foster got up and fought again. No matter how much evidence he saw with his own eyes that they were fighting a losing battle, that there was no way to win, he kept going.

  Jos told himself that was the only way Foster reminded him of Andy.

  “Admiral,” Foster said, “do you have any intelligence on what’s going on here?”

  Polite, Jos reflected, if only for his crew. Shaw would have eviscerated Jos publicly, never mind the audience. She might even have done it while she was still Corps, despite his rank.

  “I know what you know, Captain,” he said. It was only a small lie.

  Foster’s lips thinned. The expression would give him lines someday, but his skin was still flawless, even at nearly forty. “I’ll ignore the patent bullshit of that statement and ask in a different way: Is this the same loopback that hit Galileo a few years back?”

  Jos wanted to say yes. He wanted it to be true. A part of him, not so old and cynical, the part that had once been young and facing his future with fearlessness, still held on to a thread of hope that it was the loopback, that the enemy had considered that enough, that they could get through all of this with nothing worse than some tangled logic cores. “I don’t know,” he said. Then: “Are the symptoms the same?”

  Foster, apparently deciding to believe Jos for the moment, sat back. “Impossible to tell,” he said, some of his frustration leaking into his voice. “We’ve got nobody by the border. The chatter on the stream suggests there may be some Syndicate raiders closer than our people, but God knows if they’ll give us any intel. It seems, for the moment, we have to wait and see.”

  �
��We could head back,” Jos suggested, just to see what Foster would say.

  But the captain scoffed. “We’re six weeks off from picking up anything at all, never mind anything from Earth.” He rubbed his eyes. “How did people survive like this?”

  “They didn’t leave the solar system,” Jos said.

  Foster shot him a typically humorless look. “I’ve sent a message to Admiral Chemeris in the Second Sector,” he said, “but she’s inundated at the moment. I don’t expect to hear back unless she’s got specific orders. But there’s nobody else out here from the Admiralty.”

  Jos wondered how long military cohesiveness would last. He let his eyes sweep the room; these people would follow their captain without question. Probably Lockwood as well. She had lost so much of the hesitance he had noticed when he first met her. “So for now,” Jos surmised, “we stay on point, yes? We’re here for Yakutsk.”

  Foster nodded. “And things down there are getting a little heated.” He told Jos that Villipova’s office had been attacked, and that Lockwood was staying down there to keep an eye on the situation. “So we may not have any trouble keeping busy.”

  Yakutsk, Jos reflected, was unlikely to be fazed by bad news from the First Sector. Like many of the colonies this far out, they saw the First Sector more as a remnant of history than an ally. But he saw something else on Foster’s face. “What is it, Captain?”

  Foster regarded him for a moment, and Jos realized he was deciding whether or not to say anything. It was an interesting sensation, seeing this man who’d had to obey his orders for so many years choose whether or not to answer a question. “Ellis is on Yakutsk, sir,” Foster said at last.

  Even Jos couldn’t conceal his surprise at that. “Are you sure?”

  Foster had straightened. “We haven’t verified the representative’s ident yet, but we’re as sure as we can be,” he said.

  Ellis on Yakutsk. Jos had no doubt they’d been responsible for Yakutsk’s terraformer failure, but . . . why are they back? This was not part of what had been discussed. “That makes no sense,” he said aloud.