Breach of Containment

by Elizabeth Bonesteel

  “I—”

  Well . . . fuck. I guess I should have talked to Emily sooner.

  “All right, Commander,” he said. “Give me your assessment.”

  Commander Broadmoor squared her shoulders, and Greg thought she looked mildly relieved. I wonder what she thought I would say to her? “As I see it, sir, we have three emergent situations at the moment. The first is Ellis Systems on Yakutsk, which Commander Lockwood is handling. The second is Commander Shaw’s mission to this station. That’s trickier, because we don’t know what kind of intel she was given, and our only source is not entirely trustworthy.”

  Greg found her description of Herrod overly polite.

  “Based on what we know, though,” she continued, “it would be my suggestion that we maintain her cover, and focus instead on obtaining the location of the station. Which is intelligence that Admiral Herrod has. Extracting it will be a challenge, but I don’t believe an impossibility.”

  “Why not?”

  At this, her expression softened just a little. “Admiral Herrod is career Corps as well, sir.”

  He was not so sure an appeal to duty would do it, but it was a legitimate place to start. “Go on.”

  “The third, and most urgent situation,” she said, “is the Olam Fleet attacking the First Sector.”

  “We’re too far away to stop them,” he pointed out. “Everyone is.”

  “Yes, sir. But people need to know what’s going on. They have a right.”

  He agreed with her, but it wasn’t his call. “I commed Admiral Chemeris,” he told her. “Either she’s ignoring me, or she’s too backed up. I can’t move unilaterally.”

  “Respectfully, sir, I think you have to.”

  At that, he raised his eyebrows at her. “Advocating insubordination, Commander?”

  “I think we’re beyond that here, sir,” she said. “The Admiralty on Earth is very likely to be under attack soon. We don’t know what we’ll find when all of this unravels. Olam is flying under the auspices of Ellis Systems and presumptive goodwill. Their deception isn’t going to stop if they hit Earth. The word needs to go out, and it needs to go out now. Worlds besides Earth may need to defend themselves, and it’s our duty to see that they aren’t left blind.”

  He had thought of that. He had thought of so much more. “The trouble is,” he told her, “not enough people are going to believe us. Ellis has been warm and generous and useful through all of this. The Corps has been reactive and slow. We don’t have the credibility to—” He stopped. “Except maybe we know someone who does.”

  He contacted Samaras, and within moments Captain Taras’s voice filled the room. “Captain Foster,” she said, “has something happened?”

  “A great deal has happened, yes,” he said. “I have a favor to ask.”

  He outlined the situation to her, and for once she reined in her outsized personality until he was finished. “PSI has more credibility in this sector than we do,” he concluded. “Possibly in the other sectors as well. If you can put this intel out on your network, I believe it’ll gain better traction than if we do it on our own.” He glanced at Emily Broadmoor; she still stood at attention, but he thought if she objected she would have said something by now.

  “And you will back up this information?”

  “We can release a statement at the same time if you like, Captain.”

  Taras took a moment to think. “Let us get the word out first,” she told him. “We will mention that we are with the Corps on this mission, but give it perhaps half an hour before you back us up.” Her voice grew more subdued. “When I have worried about war, Captain Foster,” she said, “I never saw it starting like this. Perhaps I should have.”

  “Perhaps we all should have, Captain Taras,” he told her. “But I am, in this situation, glad to know who my allies are.”

  When he disconnected, Emily was still standing at attention. “What I just did,” he told her, “isn’t going to go over well with the Admiralty.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  “It probably is insubordination, if you parse it out. Especially when you realize a lot of what I just told her could be considered classified.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You may want to distance yourself from this situation,” he said. “For career reasons.”

  “My career is Galileo, sir,” she said, and he felt an unexpected wave of affection for her.

  “What do you think,” he asked, “is the best way to approach Herrod?”

  “Well, sir,” she said, and he could tell she had been thinking about it, “if what we know of him is accurate, his advocacy with Shadow Ops has leaned more toward peace than war. Given the potential downside of Chief Shaw’s mission failing—which is a possibility, with her on her own—I would think he’d—”

  This time it was Commander Broadmoor’s comm who interrupted them, and she frowned. At Greg’s nod, she connected. “Lieutenant Gilbert?” she asked.

  “Ma’am.” Gilbert was breathless, flustered; Greg straightened in his chair. “Ma’am, there’s been an incident.”

  Greg got to his feet. “Report, Lieutenant,” he snapped, and Gilbert regrouped.

  “Sir. It’s Admiral Herrod, sir. Commander Ilyana—she shot him, sir. She came to visit him, and she had a weapon, and she shot him. There was nothing we could do for him, sir; she was too close. He’s dead.”

  Chapter 37

  Yakutsk

  “What do you mean, it’s cracked?”

  “It’s cracked.” Dallas set the part down on the table in front of Villipova’s goon. “See that line? That’s four millimeters deep. Thing is useless.”

  Jessica stood next to Dallas, trying to look disinterested, trying not to stare at the weapon Villipova’s guard was carrying. She was not entirely convinced that this strategy would work, but when she had told Dallas she might need as much as an hour to hack into the env comms system without having her tap detected, her host had said only, “Okay,” and told her to follow. Jessica had expected Dallas to come up with some shaggy dog story about a system that needed extra vetting, or even to call the guards over to look at something.

  Accusing the Ellis representative of trying to pass off crap seemed less low-profile than Jessica had been hoping.

  “Can’t you fix it?” the guard asked irritably.

  “Not a mechanic,” Dallas replied, equally irritable. “I’m not here to fix this stuff. I’m here to validate it for the governor. No way I’m signing off on this part. Your guy needs to replace it.”

  “Won’t they be able to find out you did this?” Jessica had asked, after Dallas casually swept a narrow spanner blade through the molded polymer surface.

  “You got scanners on your starship that can date damage like this?”

  “I—” That was a question for Ted. “I don’t know.”

  “Possible,” Dallas told her, “that they’d be able to see what’s clinging to the inner surfaces of the crack I just put there. Possible they could date something on a molecular level. Possible they’ve got equipment that sensitive in the pockets of those nice suits they’re wearing. Really, really unlikely, though, that they’d even check. At least in any time frame we care about.”

  Jessica wasn’t sure what would happen to Dallas if Villipova found out later on that they’d deliberately damaged a piece of the dome environmental system. When this is finished, she thought, I’m going to offer Dallas a place on Galileo. She was sure she could convince Greg.

  Villipova’s guard picked up the part and squinted at the crack. Then he sighed, shot Dallas a look of resignation, and said, “Fine. I’ll tell Villipova.”

  Dallas nodded. “I’m double-checking everything we looked at yesterday.” Jessica had never heard Dallas sound so decisive. “Carefully. Tell her that, too. I don’t want to live in a dome if the fucking air handler is going to reverse and suffocate me in my sleep.”

  The guard looked vaguely alarmed at that, and Jessica had to hide a smile. That was the
advantage of working with someone who knew a place: Dallas, born and raised in the domes, knew exactly which fears they all shared. What surprised her, a little, was how reflexively easy it seemed to be for Dallas to lie. From her angle, it was easy to tell when Dallas was doing it; but she wasn’t so sure she’d be as aware if those shrewd, dark eyes were turned on her instead.

  The guard stalked off, part in hand, and Dallas turned back to Jessica. “If he comes back, I’ll handle it.” They walked together back toward the line of equipment. “Do what you have to do. You’ve seen his level of knowledge.”

  “What if he brings someone back with him? Gladkoff? He’d know what I was doing.”

  Dallas thought for a moment. “Code word. Something I wouldn’t say.”

  “Sunrise?” Jessica suggested, and Dallas grinned.

  “Sunrise. I say sunrise, you move on to . . .” Dallas’s eyes scanned the room. “That one, back there. Big-ass redundant viral detection system. Even Gladkoff would believe you’d be hours checking that out.”

  She shot Dallas a look. “I said hour, not hours.” And she got that grin again.

  Dallas took the unit closest to the door and began doing, as far as Jessica could tell, exactly what they’d explained to the guard: rechecking each part, slowly and methodically. She wondered if Dallas ever got bored, and if not, what sorts of thoughts wandered through a scavenger’s head. Elena had often told Jessica that rote work was relaxing and inspiring; her mind could go anywhere, trusting her hands to take care of what needed doing.

  Jessica’s task, of course, required a lot more mental focus than a safety check.

  The interface to Jamyung’s comms tracer was clumsy, despite all the work Dallas had done overnight to try to give it some finesse, and it took Jessica nearly ten minutes to figure out how to gesture clearly enough for it to understand. But once she had established detente with the machine, hooking it into the odd comms system was not as difficult as she feared. The Ellis equipment did appear to be a basic long-range comms setup, without any embellishments, which suggested to Jessica that any subterfuge and encryption would be attached to the source and destination signals. Before she activated the trap, she took some time to write some code to shadow the incoming and outgoing signals. It was a simple trick—take a copy and trap that, and leave the original alone—but it was delicate to implement. She only knew one other hacker who had done it, and for a moment she wished for Admiral Herrod’s company and expertise, never mind his divided loyalties. She had been breaking into systems since she was a little girl, but she never got past the butterflies of worrying about getting caught.

  It took her nearly the full hour she had claimed, and then she leaned back. “Done,” she told Dallas, and wiped the back of her hand against her face. Damn, that had been as tense as a marathon run.

  “Close it up and get off it,” Dallas said. “They’re coming back.”

  She tried to affect casual swiftness as she closed up the comms system, verifying through her own comm that she was trapping the signals. There was something coming through: encrypted, of course, but she was getting a clear shadow.

  Before she could look closely at it, though, Gladkoff came in, guard in tow. He looked more frazzled than before, she thought, turning to a different environmental unit. She turned her back to him, bending over a cooling unit, cracking open the lid and opening it as she had seen Dallas do earlier.

  But Gladkoff wasn’t interested in her at all. “This wasn’t broken when we installed it,” he snapped at Dallas.

  Dallas, slighter than Gladkoff and far shorter, did not back down. “Not my problem when it broke. It’s broken now, and we can’t use it. Aftermarket parts.”

  “Our aftermarket parts are fully vetted!” Gladkoff yelled.

  Jessica tuned out the argument, touching the comm behind her ear. “Bristol,” she said quietly, “get me a line to Galileo.”

  “Ma’am.”

  A moment later, a low tone sounded in her ear, and she was connected to the ship. She fed in the shadow signal, and waited. It took the ship less than thirty seconds to perform a preliminary analysis.

  “Fully encrypted signal,” Galileo said. “Unable to decode.”

  She hadn’t expected the ship to be able to untangle it immediately. “Can you get any shape on it?”

  “Specify reference point.”

  Jessica frowned. “Is it exporting diagnostic data from this environmental array?”

  “Probability 19.2 percent.”

  Not impossible. “What’s more likely?”

  “Define parameters.”

  Someday, Jessica thought wistfully, someone will invent an AI that actually understands what the fuck I want it to do. “Is it a personal message? Natural speech?”

  “Probability 1.3 percent.”

  So not machine data, and not speech. “Some kind of hardware signal?”

  “Probability 83.4 percent.”

  That was more like it. “What kind of hardware signal?”

  “Six thousand, four hundred and twelve possibilities.”

  “Okay, okay.” She thought. “Can you narrow that down?”

  “Analysis will take four hours, twelve minutes.”

  She sighed. “Yeah, okay, do that.” Then she paused. She always forgot to ask the simple questions. “Galileo, you can’t tell what it is, right?”

  “No.”

  “Can you tell where it’s going?”

  There was a pause, and Jessica felt a glimmer of hope. Not that it mattered; it was likely going to Gladkoff’s shuttle, or some random Ellis lab somewhere. It would be foolish to send an open comm signal like this to anything nefarious or proprietary. Ellis was arrogant, but rarely foolish.

  Galileo returned. “The signal is calibrated and tuned to a ship currently in the field.”

  Which would muck up the location data. Jessica’s hope disappeared. “Any ident on that ship?” she asked.

  “Yes. The signal is contacting the PSI starship Chryse.”

  Jessica stilled, no longer worried that Gladkoff might overhear what she was saying. She touched her comm and brought in Bristol again. “Lieutenant,” she said, “I need you to connect me with Captain Foster.

  “Right fucking now.”

  Part III

  Chapter 38

  Indus Station

  “Indus Station,” Elena said, “this is Wanderlust, requesting docking privileges on Level Five.”

  She waited.

  There were not a lot of possibilities. They could, of course, just ignore her; but she thought that was vanishingly unlikely. Out here, in the middle of nowhere, a field-shielded station wouldn’t be approached by a random shuttle. If they didn’t identify her as one of their own, she would be deemed a threat, and all her worries would be over in a flash of laser fire and vacuum.

  And yet she couldn’t quite convince herself they’d open their loving arms and let her in, either.

  The reply came at last. “Wanderlust, Indus. What have you got for us this time?”

  His voice was deep and mildly disinterested. He was undoubtedly in the middle of checking her ident, and despite the lack of indicators on her dashboard, she was sure she was already being scanned. “Vending supplies,” she said, trying to sound equally bored. “Coffee, mostly.”

  “We’re not out of coffee,” the voice said, beginning to sound suspicious.

  There was a freedom, she was discovering, in knowing she was going to die anyway. She let out all of her exhaustion and irritation in her reply. “What the hell do I care if you’re out of coffee?” she snapped. “They sent me with the damn shipment, and I’ve been flying for sixteen straight hours with this shit. You want me to drop it, or you want me to space it? Because I don’t care, as long as I can tell them I made the damn delivery.”

  There was one moment of tense silence, and then the man laughed.

  “Relax, Wanderlust. Nobody’s giving up coffee today.” A light flashed on her dashboard. “Docking privileges granted. P
roceed to Level Five.”

  Well. Step Two completed. Somewhat surprised, she nudged the ship forward and connected with the station’s autopilot. While she was being pulled into Level Five, she stood and checked her cargo one last time. Seventeen cases of coffee, three of dried nuts, and the beer. She should have mentioned the beer. Greg would have thought to mention the beer.

  She suspected they’d be happy enough to see it anyway.

  She turned back to the window, and watched Indus Station grow larger and larger.

  It was an inelegant structure, blocky and asymmetrical, made up of what had to be radiation-graded shipping crates connected by narrow corridors. It seemed to have been constructed for a purely utilitarian purpose, with no sense of home or personality. Not made for humans. There were windows here and there, but not many, and it occurred to her that she might be seeing the stars for the last time in her life.

  She switched the viewer to the rear of the ship, and watched the stars get swallowed by the hangar while she landed.

  Wanderlust’s feet touched the floor, and Elena took one last look in the mirror by the rear door to make sure her uniform and ident badge were tidy. She had the door open before the ship was powered down, and did her best to move easily, casually, with confidence and little care. Don’t be a soldier, she told herself. Efficiency, but not precision. You’re a delivery person. You do this all the time. You belong here.

  She hit the decking with a bounce in her step, and, without looking at the white-uniformed duo approaching her ship, she walked around to the back and opened the cargo hatch. “Have you got a lift?” she called to the couple, without turning around.

  “We need your shipping number.”

  She looked up, the irritability on her face completely genuine. “Fine. But can one of you get a lift?”

  She hit her comm to pull up her documentation, and one of them, a bored-looking man with rather fine eyes, tugged it away from her. The other, a stocky woman with a cheerful smile, said, “I’ll start unloading,” and headed to the other side of the hangar to pick up a lift.