“It might take some time to find it in this mess,” Dallas warned.
“Unless they removed the analyzer entirely,” she said, “it’s still probably a better bet than that bag of bolts you brought me.”
“Wasn’t just bolts, you know.”
“I’m sure it was full of rare and valuable puzzle pieces.” She looked around; the room was huge. “Where did he keep it?”
Dallas threaded through the clutter, and Jessica followed, her eyes falling on objects as she moved. It didn’t take her long to realize that this had been Jamyung’s treasure chest: unlike the piles of ordinary parts in the yard of his shop, nearly everything here was esoteric and valuable. And, in more than one case, broken. Jessica found herself wishing for Ted, who could have mended a lot of this with only the parts on hand. Or Lanie—Lanie could have constructed a pulse rifle, a comms jamming system, and a waffle maker in under five minutes.
Next to Jessica, a faint light flared, and she stopped. “What’s this?” she asked, squinting in the dim light.
Dallas glanced over. “Hardware scanner.”
Now she saw it. It was a portable unit, but a powerful one—probably necessary if Jamyung wanted to be specific about what he was selling. He would have wanted to make sure he knew what he was letting go of, that he was getting the proper price for it.
But she couldn’t imagine why the machine would have been left on.
She moved closer, brightening her light just a little, and looked at the console readout. Someone had pulled up a previous scan, and the content analysis was still listed at the bottom: 60% inert polymer 40% dellinium isotope 345.
Holy shit. With panicked fingers she queried her comm for the room’s environmentals, and found the radiation normal. She took a breath, calming her pounding heart, and looked back at the readout. It must have been an error, or perhaps Jamyung had been calibrating the machine. Apart from the fact that there were not, as far as Jessica knew, any existing labs maintaining dellinium of any kind, there was no inert polymer that could safely contain a dellinium isotope. The radiation from such a thing would have bled through this room, and the room above, and several surrounding blocks.
The readout had to be wrong, but she was still shaking.
She expanded the readout text to look at the rest of the data in the report. The object it had scanned was apparently small enough to fit in someone’s hand, and machined rather than hand-struck. A smooth surface—flawless, as far as the scanner could tell—and slightly warm for a polymer. Contradicting the inert bit, she thought. Almost certainly this scanner was malfunctioning, and the flaring light was a part of that.
She started to turn away, and it flared again.
Frowning, she scanned down to the end of the report. And there she froze, looking at a rendered three-dimensional image of the object that had been scanned.
Lanie’s artifact. Jamyung’s talking cube.
Chapter 28
Galileo
Pritchard was clearing up dinner when Shaw arrived at Jos’s door.
Jos had dined with Commander Ilyana. After their earlier meeting, Foster had assigned a polite, tenacious young officer named Hirano to guard her, and she had gone to Jos to ask how to deal with him.
“Is he bothering you?” Jos had asked her.
She had thought about that for some time. “No,” she told him at last. “But I am not sure what his purpose is.”
That seemed a curious question from the second-in-command of a PSI starship. “If you had a guest on Chryse,” he asked, “would you allow them to wander around unattended?”
She looked confused. “No, of course not. But that is not the same thing.”
In the end he had suggested to her that she treat the young man as a tour guide, and if his behavior became bad, she should let Jos know. “I don’t have real authority here,” he admitted, “but I can certainly talk to the captain about hospitality. I’m sure he doesn’t want you to feel unwelcome.”
Her eyes had lingered, briefly, on Hirano’s back. “Does he get to rest at all, do you suppose?”
At that, Jos had smiled. “I’m sure Captain Foster knows the limits of his soldier,” he said.
The meal had been spent discussing horticulture, about which Ilyana, as it turned out, knew a great deal. Jos had picked up enough on the job to hold an intelligent conversation—the Corps had done a good deal of research on renewable food supplies aboard Central starships—and the time had passed quickly. When they had finished, she had asked if he wanted to accompany her on a walk through the atrium.
“Thank you,” he said, “but I have some work I need to catch up on. Perhaps tomorrow?”
She had smiled and left, her infantry in tow.
He had known Shaw would show up when Pritchard briefed him about the Olam Fleet. She was savvy enough to see things unraveling, even if she didn’t understand how. When she arrived, he waved her in, then turned to his aide. “You can leave that, Pritchard,” he said. “Take the evening. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She waited until Pritchard was gone. “Olam is going after Earth, aren’t they?”
He turned to the bar. “You don’t drink, do you?”
“Does Shadow Ops know they’re already in the First Sector?”
“Where did you get that?” He poured himself a finger of whiskey, then doubled it.
“I’ll take that as a yes. Why didn’t they say anything?”
“It’s hardly the first time a Fifth Sector colony has flexed its muscles.”
“You didn’t think it was relevant.”
“We didn’t think,” he corrected her, “that we had any reason to stop them. The last thing we needed them to believe is that we consider them a threat.”
“Are they?”
“Ordinarily, no. But this isn’t ordinary, is it, Chief?”
“You said I could help you.”
“Are you volunteering?”
She was silent, and he turned around to look at her. Civilian clothes, those absurd blue streaks in her hair; but she stood like a soldier. That was going to be the biggest problem, he realized: camouflage. He wondered if she would understand what he meant if he told her she needed to hide it.
“I don’t trust you,” she said at last.
“Good.” He sat, leaning back. “I’d be worried about you if you did.”
“Why me?”
“Because you’re Corps,” he told her, “and you’re not. And that’s what I need.”
She stood for a long time, and he sipped his drink, waiting.
At long last, she took a step forward and sat down at the table. “If I think it’s bullshit,” she warned, “I won’t do it.”
“Fair enough,” he agreed. “But before I start, Chief—what I’m going to say to you can’t leave this room. Is that clear?”
Her eyebrows crept up again. “Why would I agree to keep your secrets?”
Which meant she hadn’t yet told Foster about their first conversation. “You’re right.” He sipped again. “How about this? I’m telling you that in my judgment it’s better if nothing I’m going to say to you gets passed on to any third party. Not your friends, not your family, not your cat. If you hear me out and you disagree—fine. I have no authority over you; I’m sharing this because I trust your judgment. But if we get through this conversation and you think the others should know, I won’t try to stop you.” I couldn’t stop you. But he didn’t think he would have to. “Deal?”
Another pause. “What do you have?”
With that, he knew he had her. “We have the location of a station Ellis has been using for weapons development,” he told her. “Recent intel has told us they’re also directing starships through a modified FTL field. A faster one.”
“You mean the Olam Fleet.” She frowned. “Those raiders we found a few years back, where their telemetry was scrambled so we couldn’t tell where they really were. This is built from that, isn’t it?”
“That was a precursor,” he agreed. “Wh
at they have now, though, doesn’t just confuse the signals. It’s actually a faster field.”
She shook her head. “How is that possible? To go that much farther in less time—there are too many variants. Too much instability. People have been working on the problem my whole life, and nobody gets anywhere.”
“Ellis,” he told her, “has been working on it for longer than that. But it appears, Chief, that one of the ways they got it working was to offload the guidance systems to an external source.”
He watched her face as she put it together. “So if we take out that station,” she said, “we take out the signal.”
“And thus, the fleet.”
“They wouldn’t just drop out?”
“I’m not a mechanic,” he said. “But as I understand it, an uncontrolled drop-out is the best possible outcome. More likely they’d just . . . dissolve.”
He saw an involuntary shudder run through her. The thought should have horrified him as well. Those ships were staffed with real people, many of whom probably had no idea exactly how deeply Olam was working with Ellis. But he couldn’t believe they were all fools, and even in the Fifth Sector people were aware of how dangerous a military mission could become. On top of that—the attack on the First Sector had been planned for a long time, and whether or not they had sent the drone themselves, they had been complicit in the destruction of Athena Relay and the deaths of ten thousand people who had nothing to do with it at all.
Of course, Jos had been complicit as well. But he, at least, was trying to do something about it.
“You have to tell people about this,” she insisted. “Olam is dangerous. People need to be warned.”
“If the fleet is already in the First Sector,” he told her, “what do we accomplish by telling everyone?”
“We can defend them! We can—”
“Even if we could coordinate, we can’t get there in time. We’d panic the entire galaxy, Chief, and for no reason. It’s too late to intercept the Olam Fleet. And given what Ellis has been doing, who do you think is going to believe they’re behind any of this?” He sat back. “Besides, there’s a better answer.”
“Your incredible scheme, that depends on spying and secrecy.” She sounded derisive. “Why not just take out the station?”
“We tried,” he told her. “We sent a recon ship in with a cover story we thought was pretty good. It was vaporized. We got one last telemetry transmission, and then the ship was gone.”
She was shaking her head. “So they know you’re coming for them.”
“Chief.” He leaned forward, both hands around his drink. The strength it gave him was purely psychological, he knew; but right now he needed whatever he could get. “We’ve been working on a counter-weapon based on the small amount of information we got from that attack. We are months away from anything practical, and most of what’s been built—both the hardware and the blueprints—is inside the First Sector right now. We don’t have time to start over with any of it. Olam is headed for Earth, and there’s only one way we can stop them.”
“And what’s that? We can’t attack the station again, and their defenses are on high alert because they know we’re looking for them. They may be cocky, given that they just blew the hell out of a—what was the recon ship?”
“An AS-9950 armored cruiser,” he told her.
Her eyebrows went up. “Shit,” she said under her breath. “So they blew up a 9950, and they know we’re scared, but they also figure we’ll come back after them. Because we have to, don’t we? We know what they’re doing. We can’t just sit back. Is that why they hit the First Sector now? Because they know that’s where we’ve been building our counterattack?”
We. That was a victory. “It’s a reasonable guess.”
“So how does that work, when we’ve completely tipped our hand?”
He sat forward. “Not completely, Chief. We’re pretty sure they don’t know they’ve tipped their hand on the accelerated field system.”
She threw up her hands. “Even if they did, we couldn’t catch them. In a field like that, we’ve no way to bump them out. We can’t stop them in-field, we can’t launch an attack on the station, so how—” He saw her work it out. “Infiltration. You’ve got a way in.”
Smart kid, he thought, and shoved aside a wave of overwhelming sadness. “We think so, yes,” he told her.
“So you do have a source.”
He nodded. “The station imports most of their food, and one of their vendors is based on Io Station. One of the owners goes back a ways with Admiral Waris.”
“Waris didn’t tell them what was really going on, did she?”
“A coffee vendor? Of course not. She said the station’s stealing government secrets and marketing them as their own innovations. Making money off the backs of the people, that sort of thing.” He had been impressed by Waris’s subterfuge, and glad the company she approached was based in the First Sector. In the wider galaxy—maybe even outside the solar system—it would not have been so easy to find someone whose sympathies lay more with Central Gov than a terraformer company.
“Can’t you use them to ship in something that could take out the station?”
His eyebrows went up. “Like what? Explosive hot chocolate? Radioactive beer? They’ve got safeguards there, and the whole station is built with a system of fail-safes.”
“But you know the security systems.”
He lifted a shoulder. “Most of them.”
“Clearly you have a plan, so why don’t you spit it out?”
Here, at last, it was all down to what he had learned about Shaw. If he was right, there was hope, however frail.
If he was wrong, they were all doomed.
“Here’s where I go back to my original statement, Chief. I don’t think I need to tell you how desperate all of this has become. We knew they’d come after us. But we didn’t know they’d do it on the scale they have. And we didn’t have Ilyana’s data. Ellis is much further along than we thought.” Stupid, in hindsight, to have ignored PSI so long, to have allowed them to wander with so much freedom without trying to acquire some of what they had learned. “We have one shot at this. If infiltration goes wrong, they’ll lock down completely, and that’ll be the end of it. They’ll have triggers on God knows how many thousands of pieces of hardware, and they’ll have the First Sector wherever they want it. They can play nice and be the benevolent providers, or they can just flat-out tell us to do as we’re told or they’ll kill us all. We’ll have nothing on them at all anymore.”
“So why all the secrecy? Nobody in the Corps is going to sabotage a plan like that.”
“Maybe not. But what I don’t want to do is watch hundreds of thousands of people die because we fuck up this shot.”
“Who the hell could I tell who would be that kind of a security risk?”
He glared at her. “Don’t be disingenuous. Everyone is that kind of a security risk, no matter how circumspect they think they are. You tell someone completely reliable, and they tell their spouse or their doctor, or they mention it to their kid, or just let something slip when they’re in the gym. Doesn’t even have to be the whole thing; just a germ that someone picks up. I’m the one who came up with this plan, Chief. Not even Admiral Waris knows all the details, and she is the only person who knew I was planning to take all of this to you. And it’s not because there’s no one else I trust. It’s because I’ve seen what a single, well-intentioned remark can do, and there is too much at stake here for me to watch that happen again.” He sat back. “So you tell me now, Chief. Can you promise me you’ll tell no one?”
But she had latched on to something. “You said watch that happen again. What did you see happen before?”
“That’s not important.”
“Beg to differ, sir. You’re asking me for a pretty big commitment here. I think I have a right to know why you think it’s so important to isolate me from everyone I love and trust.” She paused, and when he did not answer, she said, “Has i
t happened before? Was there some confidence that you all took advantage of, some leak that caused disaster?”
They’d had a massive fight about it before Andy had left on what turned out to be his last mission. God, Jos, you don’t trust anyone, do you? Not even me. What the hell do I have to do to make you believe I’d never betray you? He’d told Andy it had nothing to do with his feelings or his commitment. It was his job, his career, the oaths he had sworn. Andy had left, irritable. Jos had not known he was going to his death. But ever since, he’d had to live with the possibility that he might have prevented it.
“The report you filed on the wormhole two years ago,” he said. “Do you remember it?”
“Word for word, Admiral.”
When he had first received his copy of her report, he had waited until he was alone to replay the attendant data she had submitted. That short, broken, low-quality snippet of audio, holes bored into it by a deliberately applied EMP, as if Andy was holding out his hand and snatching it away again, even from the grave. “Captain Kelso referred to sending someone a message,” he said. “That message was intercepted.”
“They can’t do that,” she said automatically. “Even Shadow Ops can’t do that. They can’t trap an officer’s messages, not unless it’s on the record, and it wasn’t.”
“They didn’t trap Captain Kelso’s messages,” he told her. “They trapped mine.”
Shadow Ops had suspected what Andy’s ship would find, but they’d had no idea of the scale of it, of all the horrific possibilities. And Andy—stunned, exhausted, saddened, and absurdly hopeful—had told Jos all of it, including how he was going to see it all destroyed. Andy’s need to reach out had given Jos’s colleagues all the proof they needed to know where to focus their efforts. And his betrayal had given them something powerful to hold over Jos’s head.
He watched her face as she put it together: puzzlement, incredulity, and then a flash of sympathy that struck something raw in Jos’s heart. Andrew Kelso’s famous last words to his husband, stolen by cold and heartless fingers, used to manipulate Jos when everything inside of him was ash. When the grief began to wear off, when he began to feel things again, hatred was the first emotion he recognized. These people were fools, and Andy had been right about all of it, and damned if Jos was going to let them traipse along financing weapons manufacturers and starting wars of attrition. Shadow Ops had been fragmented before that, but when Jos began speaking up, the idea of peaceful solutions began to get far more traction. He learned to argue, to persuade. He learned when to lose gracefully, and which concessions would gain him allies. He learned about politics and the roundabout nature of winning.
Breach of Containment Page 21