Breach of Containment

by Elizabeth Bonesteel

  She had asked Herrod how he’d obtained it. “They have people with Central,” he’d said to her, “and we have people with them.”

  “Trustworthy people?”

  “You’d better hope so, Chief.”

  Unlike most commercial shippers, it was stamped with the vendor’s name: Cesium Industries. Commissioned and built for the company, Herrod had said, and it made her wonder why nobody asked why a food distribution network would require—or could afford—proprietary shipping shuttles. Cesium, it seemed, had an exclusive contract with Ellis; it was part of what had led Herrod and the others to speculate on the location of the research station.

  “They had to know an external contractor would be a security risk,” she had pointed out. None of this seemed secure. “Why didn’t they just make space to produce their own food?”

  “Full food production isn’t so easy,” Herrod said. “Even PSI brings in supplies. And this is an elite station—they’re treating their people well. Fresh coffee is critical, never mind precision-brewed beer.”

  “How many people?” She had avoided the question for a long time.

  “One hundred and forty-three.”

  She shoved that knowledge aside. Collateral damage, of course. Most of them probably knew what they were doing, that they were engaged in activities that were killing people. Most of them. And they all had to know the risks. The risk that an infiltrator would show up and tear apart their walls and bulkheads and expose them to the vacuum of space. One hundred and forty-three people that she would be murdering.

  Worth the cost, to save millions on Earth, but that didn’t change the fact of it.

  Finished with her flyby, she maneuvered Antigone next to the clean white ship and aligned the doors. Once she had a seal she shut down the engines but left the generator running. She would need one more burst of power from the craft before she was finished.

  The lights came on as she entered the freight carrier, and with a quiet whoosh the room filled with both warmth and air. The cabin was large but crowded with shipping containers: stack after stack of crates labeled coffee, soy, beans, dried fruit. There was indeed beer, in two large vats wrapped in a coolant shielding, prominent seals on the latches. Even Cesium, it seemed, had to guard against pilfering by its employees.

  The whole thing reminded her too much of Budapest’s shuttle, now burned out on Yakutsk.

  She moved deeper into the freight ship and found the pilot’s cabin, small and squat. Not designed for comfort, then, and she frowned in disapproval; the pilot would almost always be flying alone, and for days at a time. Whoever was benefiting from this enterprise, it wasn’t the pilots of these bright, sterile little boxes.

  As Herrod had told her it would be, the uniform was folded on the ship’s seat, along with a change of underwear. Down to every detail, she thought grimly, and picked up the clothes. Making her way back to Antigone, she stripped off her borrowed clothes and put on the crisp white items from the other shuttle. Everything clean, everything flawless, although the uniform might have been laundered a hundred times. Crispness was obviously branding for this company.

  Elena frowned down at her artifact. It was not white, and it was not crisp, and she was not sure how she would explain it if asked. She slid it into one of the suit’s pockets and zipped it up. She would be unlikely to be allowed to keep it, she thought, but at least now she had some time before she would have to explain why it was with her. She wondered if they’d believe it as art; certainly some of the most expensive pieces in Jessica’s collection looked to Elena like nothing more than oddly painted storage materials. Then there would just be explaining why she felt she had to carry it everywhere she went, which somehow seemed easier than leaving it behind.

  She looked around the cabin, her last view of the Corps, making sure she hadn’t left anything she needed. She checked the time: easily on schedule. Five minutes ahead, even.

  She sat back down in the pilot’s seat and recorded a message.

  “Send it with delayed delivery,” she told Antigone when she was done.

  “Specify time frame.”

  Everything would be over in less than fourteen hours. “One day,” she said. Antigone winked acknowledgment and sent the message off.

  Then, climbing to her feet, she gave the ship one final order: “Thirty seconds after the other ship has cleared the blast radius, I want you to detonate all the weapons you have on board.” More destruction. She had grown numb to the thought.

  “Authorization required.”

  Elena recited the sequence Admiral Herrod had taught her, and let Antigone reread her biometric information to confirm her authority. Another brief flash to green; the ship acknowledged the order. She turned and went through the door to the freight shuttle, and when the door slid shut, she did not look back.

  Moving to the tiny pilot’s cabin, she sat, then said the words Herrod had taught her: “Execute resequencing order B1829.”

  The designation number for the wormhole where Herrod had lost Andrew Kelso. She did not think the choice of program name was a coincidence.

  “Enter biometric data,” the ship said smoothly. An androgynous voice, like Galileo’s but with a flatter affect; cheaper AI, she thought.

  She let the control panel scan her palm, then waited as it tied in to her comm and read her data. After a moment, there was a benign chime. “Resequencing complete,” it said.

  “What are you called?” Elena asked the ship.

  “I am the commercial freighter Wanderlust,” it said, and she took a moment to wonder about the pilot who had named it. Was the pilot Herrod’s mole? Or had they been killed to obtain the cargo? Was wanderlust really what the pilot had felt in this small seat, in this tiny, claustrophobic cabin?

  She shook herself; none of it mattered. “What’s our travel time?” she asked.

  “One hour and fifty-eight minutes,” it said.

  “Very well, Wanderlust,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  The field spun up nearly silently, the blue glow closing around her, the stars one by one absorbed by the brightening light. And then, with a minute vibration, the window polarizers engaged, and they were in the field.

  Elena sat back to wait out her journey, eyes on the obscured windows, one hand absently covering the small, warm object in her pocket.

  Chapter 35

  Galileo

  When Jos’s door chimed nearly an hour later, he knew who it would be. Gilbert, his jailor, answered the door, and met the eyes of Lieutenant Hirano; and then he turned. “Admiral,” he said, with flawless politeness, “you have a visitor.”

  Jos saw Commander Ilyana peer shyly around the doorframe. Relaxing a little, he nodded. “It’s all right, Lieutenant,” he said, knowing Gilbert did not need his approval. “I’m happy to talk with Commander Ilyana.”

  Ilyana smiled, that hesitant expression that never quite reached her eyes, and slipped into the room. Hirano placed himself outside the open door, back to the room; Gilbert returned to his post in the corner, eyes never leaving Jos. Herrod knew he would listen to their conversation and report every word that was said. A steady officer. Herrod had always liked steady officers. Even in tight corners, they always did exactly what they’d been instructed to do—nothing more or less.

  “Can I offer you anything, Commander?” he asked her. “Something to drink? I think I’ve got some food in here somewhere, and I suppose they’d bring us something if I asked.”

  Her eyes always looked a little lost, a little bewildered. When she blinked, he had the sense she was clearing her head. “You are kind, Admiral. But I’m not hungry at the moment.” She turned and looked at Gilbert, massive and well-armed, and her eyebrows twitched together. “That seems like overkill,” she remarked. “Where would you run?”

  “I think the idea is to keep me from wandering through the halls and fomenting insurrection,” he said dryly.

  “But they don’t listen to you. How could you foment insurrection?” She frowned, and
he had forgotten how literally she took everything.

  “I almost certainly couldn’t,” he agreed, “unless they disagreed about how they were going to kill me.”

  Blink. She looked more sympathetic. “I have heard some of this in the hallways,” she said. “It’s why I’m here. They’re upset with you because you have sent their friend away.”

  “Yes.” He was rather upset himself. “They don’t see the necessity of it, at least not the same way I do. They think I had options, or could have sent someone else. They always think there’s someone else.”

  “That is a luxury.” Something in her voice had hardened; she was looking away from him, out the window where there was nothing but the stars, and he could not see her face. “Sometimes the answers are bad, but that doesn’t keep them from being the answers.”

  “You think like a campaigner,” he told her.

  She shook her head. “I think like a mother. That’s what Renate always says. It’s funny, since my own mother—” She broke off. “Where did you send her?”

  “That’s exactly what I can’t tell people,” he pointed out.

  “But this place she is going. This mission. It will hurt them, Ellis?”

  It is our only hope. “Yes,” he said, “I believe it will.”

  “Fatally?”

  “That’s probably up to the people dealing with the consequences.”

  “So this is a first step.”

  He supposed her curiosity was based in wanting to know that he knew what he was doing, but her questions were growing oddly specific. He hoped she wouldn’t push the point on the location. “Yes,” he said, “but I think it’s a good one. We’ll be able to fight.”

  “We must all fight them.” When he said nothing, she looked at him, and he noticed, for the first time, that her dark eyes could be something other than misty and unfocused. They could be sharp and clever and angry. “What happens if Chief Shaw fails?”

  He spread his hands at her. “I can’t say. Earth may have enough defenses to defeat Olam. If they do—we are where we are today.”

  She frowned and turned away. “That is not acceptable.” She shook her head. “He’s going to keep asking you, you know.”

  “Who?”

  “Captain Foster. He’s going to keep asking you where you’ve sent her. He loves her, and you don’t let go of the people you love. You don’t let them get ripped away from you, either. You kill for that.”

  Was she worried for him? “Captain Foster isn’t going to kill me,” he assured her. “He’s disillusioned, and all of this is going to disillusion him further. But he’s a soldier, still, and beyond that he is moral.” It was a failing, sometimes, Jos reflected; but in this case it would save his life. “He may disagree with my duty, but he’s not going to kill me for doing it.”

  “No, he won’t kill you,” Ilyana agreed. “But you do know where she is.”

  “If I tell him that, the whole mission falls apart. He knows that.”

  “He doesn’t, really. He thinks he can do it instead of her. He’d go after her, and they’d find out he was coming, and she would fail. You would fail.”

  “And that’s exactly why I won’t tell him.” Herrod was puzzled. “What’s troubling you, Commander? Is there something I can help you with?”

  She sagged a little then. She was still turned away from him, but he could see part of her profile, and he thought he saw her lower lip tremble a little. “You know where she is,” she repeated. “And they can’t know. Not ever. It’s too important.”

  And she turned back, and she shot him.

  It was an astonishing sensation, being shot. He found himself most curious about where she had hidden the weapon. She would have been searched when she came on board, so she’d stolen it from somewhere. Foster would have heads for that oversight. It hurt, being shot, more than anything else he had ever felt, but somehow his mind moved sideways, and he could feel all of it but he was not actually in his body. He opened his mouth to say something to her, to reassure her again that he wasn’t going to tell, but she had shot him and that was over and it was the past and time didn’t work like that. Gilbert was moving, and Hirano behind him; one of them clamped his arms around Ilyana, who dropped the weapon and did not resist. Her face. Her face. She was weeping, and her eyes were black with bottomless rage and grief, and he wanted to tell her it was all right, it would be all right, he understood now, it made sense, I’m sorry, Ilyana, Ana, I’m sorry, I’m sorry Andy I’m sorry I’m—

  Chapter 36

  Greg strode back to his office, Emily Broadmoor at his heels. He was nearly incoherent with rage, but whether he was angrier with Herrod or Elena, he couldn’t say.

  “Galileo,” he barked, as soon as he got through his office door, “status of those unidented ships.”

  “Seventeen responses,” Galileo told him.

  “Any of them Antigone?”

  “No.”

  Of course not. She wasn’t going to answer. This was futile. “How many outstanding?”

  “Three hundred and twelve.”

  Too many. How was he going to unravel anything from three hundred and twelve ships? He took a breath. “We took specs on Antigone when Herrod came aboard, didn’t we? I want you to filter the data on those three hundred and twelve ships to exclude anything that couldn’t be Herrod’s shuttle.”

  “Data is inexact. Precision will be impossible.”

  “Understood.” Even if Galileo could eliminate one, it would be better than none. “And keep requesting idents. Get threatening if you have to.” Elena wouldn’t respond to threats, but others might, and anything that cut down the list was a help.

  “Sir.”

  He looked up; to his surprise, Emily Broadmoor was still standing there, at attention. He bit down on annoyance. She wasn’t Jessica. She wouldn’t understand how very much he needed to be on his own right now, how hard he was working to untangle his duty from the knots of fury and anguish in his head. “I’m sorry, Commander,” he said. “I don’t need anything right now. You’re dismissed.”

  But Commander Broadmoor, perennially compliant and dutiful, just straightened, at attention, her eyes on the back wall. “No, sir.”

  Greg was too astonished to be angry, but instinct kicked in. “You want to restate that, Commander?” he asked, keeping his voice cool.

  “Sir. With Commander Lockwood on Yakutsk, I am effectively first officer. It’s my duty, sir, to assess your state of mind, and to behave in a way commensurate with ensuring you are in the best possible position to perform your duties.”

  He was pretty sure that was a precise quote from the regulation job description. “You think my state of mind requires company at the moment, Commander?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He paused, then, and took a good look at her. Emily Broadmoor was close to sixty, her hair iron-gray and straight, cropped so close to her head it stood up straight on top. She had a sturdy build and a sturdy face, as if designed from birth to be a career soldier. He had been worried, when she had been assigned to him, that she would be bothered reporting to someone so much younger; but he had learned that his actions were all she needed. He did not think it would matter to her if she liked him or not, and in fact he had no idea what her personal feelings were. For her to stand there like this . . . he owed it to her to take her seriously.

  He sat back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. “I’m all right, Commander,” he told her. “I just need to untangle this mess.”

  “If you’ll forgive me, sir, I don’t see much of a tangle.”

  He very nearly laughed at her. “If you can see all of this clearly, please, lay it out for me.”

  Commander Broadmoor was silent for a moment, and he realized abruptly she was trying to figure out how to be tactful. “Assuming we can take Admiral Herrod at his word, sir,” she said, “it seems to me the mission Chief Shaw has taken is a fairly routine one.”

  “Come on, Emily. She’s a civilian.”

  “Per
mission to speak candidly, sir.”

  He could count on one hand the number of times Emily Broadmoor had said those words to him. “Of course.”

  “Admiral Herrod is wrong about a lot of things,” she said. “But he’s right about that. I know she resigned her commission, but she’s not a civilian. I don’t think she knows how to be one. And you, Captain, are not seeing this clearly. You’re not seeing her clearly.”

  “You want to be more specific, Commander?”

  “Sir, what’s the point of tracking her shuttle?”

  “Do I need a reason, beyond stopping this insane suicide mission?”

  “Captain, if Herrod is telling the truth about that station, her mission isn’t insane. I understand how you feel about the predicted outcome—”

  And that pissed him off. “Do not presume you know how I feel, Commander,” he warned her.

  But Emily, as it turned out, had a temper of her own. “Sir, do you know how old soldiers get to be old?”

  And where is this going? “Sure. They survive.”

  “That’s only one part of it, sir. We get to be old soldiers because we see all the shit, and the bureaucracy, and the futility and the failure, and we stay anyway. You think I don’t know how you feel? What do you know about my life, what I’ve seen, had, lost? I’ve known Elena Shaw nearly as long as I’ve known you, sir. I know what kind of a soldier she is, and I know she wouldn’t have taken this mission if she did not believe, with her intellect as well as her heart, that it was the best possible choice she had.”

  Of course she believed it. Elena always thought she could fix everything. And he believed in her, too . . . didn’t he? “She doesn’t have all the facts,” he tried.

  “Possibly not, sir. But neither do we. And if you don’t mind my saying so, sir, I think you need to stop thinking like a man worrying about someone he loves, and start thinking like a commander with an operative in the field who may need help.”