Breach of Containment

by Elizabeth Bonesteel

  Pritchard was frowning. “I understand that, Captain. That’s not what I need to talk to you about.” He relented, sitting in the chair, but he stayed stiff, as if he wanted to be sure he could run if he had to. “I . . . have been going through the admiral’s things, and I’ve run across something . . .” He broke off. “I am quite sure I shouldn’t be showing this to you, Captain. But it’s beyond anything I’m capable of handling, and I think you need to hear it. It relates to Athena Relay.”

  Herrod had said he knew nothing. He lied. Greg supposed, at this point, it was his own fault if he was surprised. “Wait a moment, please.” He commed Emily Broadmoor. “Commander, can you join me in my office? She’s my security chief,” he explained to Pritchard. “I want her to hear this, too.”

  Pritchard nodded, still uncomfortable, and Greg tried again to parse the expression on his unfamiliar face. Greg was beginning to see more anger there than grief.

  Emily arrived quickly, and Greg let her stay at attention in the back of the room. “Go ahead, Mr. Pritchard.”

  Pritchard turned so he could look between Greg and Emily as he spoke. “He doesn’t—didn’t have much with him,” Pritchard told them. “So it was mostly his documents, and his comms. His documents I know, because I generally wrote them up for his signature. But his comms—I expected his confidential messages to be locked, even bio-keyed. With his encryption skills . . .” He trailed off.

  “You didn’t think any of us would be able to read them,” Greg concluded, and Pritchard nodded.

  “But . . . he’d bio-keyed them, Captain. Just not with his bio key. He’d keyed them with mine, and when I accessed the list, they started playing.”

  You can’t do that with bio keys, Greg thought. But Herrod, of course, was not bound by the same rules as anyone else. Jessica, who was the most remarkable hacker Greg had ever seen, stood in awe at Herrod’s skills. He’d always thought she was just a bit starstruck, or happy to have someone to talk to who understood the intricacies of her field. I owe her an apology. “You said this was about Athena Relay,” he prompted. “What did you mean?”

  “I mean—” Pritchard swallowed. “They knew, Captain.”

  Greg became aware of Emily Broadmoor’s eyes on him, but he kept looking at Herrod’s aide. “Knew what?”

  “That it was going to be destroyed. They knew, and they didn’t warn anyone.”

  “Wait,” Greg said, his head spinning. “Who knew? How?”

  “Just listen.” Pritchard touched his comm, and a message started playing.

  “Request denied,” said the voice on the comm, and Greg knew her immediately: Admiral Ilona Waris, copiously decorated, highly placed in both the Admiralty and Shadow Ops itself. While she was capable of expansive generosity in public, Greg knew her to be cold and ruthless on a level he had rarely encountered in anyone else. “We talked about this before you left, Jos. We can’t afford to be clouded by sentiment, especially not now. If you send her before the relay is destroyed, she’s going to think she has time, and she’s going to figure out that she doesn’t need to destroy that station to stop the fleet. Which means all of the data that Ellis has on the Admiralty—which they’ve been holding over our heads all this time, Jos, and that means yours, too—is at risk of going public. And when that happens, how long do you think it’ll take before the colonies decide having their government in the Fifth Sector isn’t such a bad idea after all? You want your comfortable retirement here on Earth, Jos, you’d better remember what you’re doing out there. Waris out.”

  The Admiralty. Not Shadow Ops, Greg thought, cold radiating in his stomach, the Admiralty.

  All of them.

  “There’s one other,” Pritchard said, almost apologetically, and Greg nodded, unable to speak.

  On this one, Waris’s voice was less formal. Whatever Herrod’s response to her previous message, it had made her lose her temper. “Well, then, break those ties, Jos! We’ve been following her because she’s an independent agent. If she starts ingratiating herself with the Galileo crew again, you’re going to lose any leverage you’ve got over her at all. I don’t care what you have to do, or how many white lies you need to tell! Once that relay goes, everybody is going to know what Olam is up to. If you lose her, the fleet reaches Earth, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit here and wait for a pack of Fifth Sector usurpers to stage a firefight in my backyard. You wait for the relay to be destroyed, and you get her out. And if you have to shoot all of her friends to keep her isolated, you fucking do it. I hope it’s clear this time, Herrod.” No sign-off, just a terminated comm.

  Emily broke into Greg’s jumbled thoughts. “Sir.”

  “Yes, Commander?”

  “Does that mean they sent the chief under false pretenses, sir?”

  She sounded stiff and stilted, as if she were fighting to control her own temper, and Greg met her eyes. This time, it seemed, she was the one who needed him to be steady. “I think,” he said, keeping his voice calm, “only partially. They did send her to stop the fleet.”

  “And to cover their asses. Sir.”

  Emily’s fists were clenched, and Greg stood, instinctively, to walk over to her. “It looks that way, Commander.”

  Emily looked up at him, and close up, he could see the rage growing in her eyes. “All those people, sir, because they didn’t want to give up power?”

  “It sounds like it.”

  Emily Broadmoor swore, and out of the corner of his eye, Greg saw Pritchard flinch. “They knew it was going to happen. Before they sent us out here. Before they sent him out here.” And he saw her digest the knowledge that her chain of command may have deliberately allowed ten thousand people to be murdered. “Captain, we’ve got to get Commander Shaw that information.”

  “I’ve got Galileo tracking her down,” he told Emily, with more confidence than he felt. “But in the meantime, we’ve got these messages as proof.” He turned to Pritchard. “Don’t we?”

  Pritchard had stood. “I’ll give them to you, Captain. But there’s one thing.”

  Isn’t there always? “What?”

  The man inhaled and exhaled, and Greg realized he was shaking. “I didn’t know Admiral Herrod for long, Captain,” he said. “I have no illusions about the kind of man he was. And to go along with this . . . scheme was unconscionable. If he was going to share these messages, it would have been better to do it before he died. But he did share them.”

  “You want me to acknowledge his great altruism?” Greg couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of his voice.

  “I don’t expect that. But . . . as I see it, he might not have been able to stop the destruction of the relay anyway. He’s left us with concrete evidence of Admiralty involvement. He didn’t have to do that.”

  He didn’t have to send Elena to die, either. But Greg thought, for now, he could keep his lack of generosity to himself. “I understand, Mr. Pritchard,” he said, and tried to keep his voice calm. “I appreciate your coming forward with all of this.”

  When Pritchard left, Greg turned back to Emily. “I’ve got to head out,” he said. “I’ve got to get to Chryse and find out what’s going on. But I want you on this, Commander. Two audio comms is a start, but we need corroborating data. Times that Herrod was talking to people, off-grid traces, anything. Whether Elena succeeds or fails, we’re going to need our own evidence.”

  “Are we going public with this, sir?”

  Ten thousand people. Ten thousand people, and Elena, all for politics. Everything he had known, his career, his command—none of it was what he had thought it was. “I don’t know what we should do with it yet,” he said. “But we need to focus on why we’re here. Our mission is still a good one, no matter what the Admiralty has done. I need you to keep your people focused on protecting this colony, is that clear? We’ll deal with the Admiralty bullshit when we’ve figured out what’s going on with Chryse.”

  She nodded, and looked steadier. “If you find the chief, sir,” she said, “will you be able to get
her the intel? Will you have time to stop her?”

  I have never had time to stop her. But all he said was, “I hope so.”

  Chapter 40

  Yakutsk

  “I’m sorry about your friend,” Dallas said.

  “He wasn’t my friend.”

  They were standing outside the equipment room with the others, Ellis delivery people and colonists together, on a de facto meal break. Dallas had offered her a sandwich, and she had refused. She had no idea why Herrod’s death was hitting her so hard. Surely she should be more worried about Elena, running off to save the galaxy with no weapons and no backup, or Greg, still believing on some level that he could save her, regardless of the fact that he never had been able to save her before. Not that Elena ever wanted anyone to save her anyway.

  Everything Herrod knew, Jessica thought. He could have decoded this signal with his eyes closed. I never asked him. I never asked him anything.

  Herrod might not have had to decode the signal, she told herself. If he was in it hip-deep with Ellis—or even just Shadow Ops, whoever’s side they were on this week—he might have already known what it was saying. She would never make sense of it. She would never learn anything from him, about S-O or Ellis or hacking. He was dead, full stop, and nobody was ever going to learn anything from him again.

  Dallas was just looking at her, expression neutral, leaning against the alley wall. Keeping her company. No hovering, no proffered handkerchief. “Everybody hated him,” Jessica said. “But I couldn’t, not really. He never patronized me. Never pretended I didn’t know what I knew.”

  “He respected you.”

  She nodded. “I don’t know that he was a good person, you know? But this.”

  “Death is an extreme punishment for being a jerk,” Dallas agreed, and Jessica had to stop herself from laughing. Stress, she thought. Too much, all at once.

  “He might have been worse than a jerk,” she confessed. “But . . . that wasn’t all there was to him.” She shook her head. “I don’t have time for this.”

  “Doesn’t always matter,” Dallas said.

  “It does, though.” She pushed herself off the wall. “Ted’s going to be getting in touch at some point. I’ve got to keep him in the loop. I need to find out what that damn signal is.”

  Dallas pushed off the wall with her. “Thinking we should just shut it down.”

  “We do that,” she pointed out, “they just turn it back on, and Villipova shuts us out completely—or gets some of the usual suspects to toss us out on the surface. We need to find out what’s in that signal, and what Chryse’s involvement is.”

  “Your captain is on that, isn’t he?”

  She looked up at Dallas. No fool, she thought. But Dallas was a native, and had never been off Yakutsk. And of course Dallas would have had no experience with the unrelenting stubbornness and absurd, persistent optimism of Greg Foster. “You sell to PSI, don’t you?”

  “We sell to everyone.”

  “How much do you think they’d tell you about their operations if you knocked on their door and asked?”

  Dallas’s dark eyes gleamed for a moment in comprehension. “This signal is the bird in the hand.”

  She nodded. “And the best chance we have at finding out what the fuck is going on here is if we can find out what that fucking bird is saying.”

  She waited as Dallas vanished for nearly ten minutes, returning with what appeared to be an ordinary handheld scanner. Only when she turned it over in her hand did she see what it really was: a camouflaged signal analyzer, and a fairly powerful one. “The interface is pressure-sensitive,” Dallas told her, almost apologetically. “That was the only way to keep the parts small enough to fit.”

  “It’s amazing,” she said, and was treated to a smile.

  Back in the environmental room, Dallas began a back-and-forth discussion with some of Gladkoff’s suppliers about what kind of materials they could use to fill in for the damaged part until something new could be acquired. For someone who didn’t talk much, she realized, Dallas was pretty good at drawing out an argument, but she wasn’t going to take any risks with her time. She leaned over the signal and began pulling it apart, thread by thread, nanobit by nanobit. Separate into component parts, look for patterns. Reconstruct, hypothesize, reject what doesn’t fit. Slow, methodical, repetitive. Pleasantly familiar. This was something she could do, she was certain; she just wasn’t sure she could do it in any kind of a useful time frame.

  She had been less than ten minutes separating the bits of the shadow signal when she hit a block.

  Frowning, she backed up the scanner and picked up the same thread again, following it more carefully. There it traveled, paralleling the live signal, pulsing in the pattern that she was beginning to recognize. The same signal, over and over again, complicated and encrypted, but repeated. And—

  There it was again. The live signal continued, streaming out into the ether, into the FTL comms field, to the PSI ship. And her shadow signal was dragged off parallel and terminated.

  Shadow tracking had its drawbacks, but she had never seen abrupt termination like this anywhere outside of a lab. There was something else in this comms system, something already linked in parallel, something blocking her from shadowing the signal.

  Turning off the scanner, she rubbed her eyes, then looked back down at the hardware. There was the comms system, ordinary and blind, receiving and transmitting just as it should, agnostic about content. There was the conduit connecting the comms system with the power source. It wouldn’t draw much power, not for a machine instruction signal like this; vid used far more power. Voice would need a bigger boost, but not by a lot. A machine telemetry system would need nothing but a small stellar battery and the occasional charge.

  Her eyes swept the room. The units were all connected, all of them powered by the same central system. Except this comms setup.

  She could hear Gladkoff’s excuse now: The comms system should have its own power source. It needs to be available even if everything else goes down. Redundancy was not a bad idea, of course, and if she took the design at face value, it made an excellent excuse.

  With one glance over her shoulder at Dallas and their argumentative friends, she drew her spanner over the comms conduit and opened up the power source.

  And there, sequenced into the system, were five squat, unobtrusive, pocket-sized nuclear bombs.

  She needed Ted. Jessica had some hardware background, but this kind of subtle wiring called for an engineer, someone who knew how to take this stuff apart as well as put it together. She had no idea what the trigger was, or how to discover it, never mind how to defuse it. For all she knew, she had started some sort of countdown just by discovering the things.

  The time for subterfuge was over. “Dallas,” she said, and looked over her shoulder.

  But Dallas wasn’t there, nor were Villipova’s guards. The only person there was Gladkoff, that same Corps-manufactured weapon in his hand, this time pointed at her. “I think you’ve tinkered enough, Commander Lockwood,” he said, and gave her a cheerful grin.

  Chapter 41

  Interstitial

  Greg took Leviathan, divested of its comms-locked cargo, mostly for its speed. He could make it to Chryse within sixty minutes, roughly half the time it would take Chryse to reach Yakutsk. He had never paid much attention, but Chryse seemed to be slow for a PSI ship. He remembered Elena’s description of Ilyana’s shuttle: old, constructed from disparate bits of hardware. He wondered if Chryse’s engines were similarly constructed. They would have been better off, he reflected, having traded up by now.

  Traded up. Of course. God, he had forgotten he knew her.

  “Galileo,” he said, maneuvering Leviathan away from the ship in preparation for taking the shuttle into the field, “I need you to narrow that search for unidented ships. Prioritize ships that emerged from the field in an isolated location, but with another ship or structure within reasonable sublight distance.”

&nb
sp; Elena, no matter Herrod’s manipulation, would never have been foolish enough to agree to infiltrate an Ellis-owned station in Herrod’s own shuttle. Antigone might be a civilian craft, but she was fully idented and traceable, and not even Herrod’s formidable skill would have been enough to completely camouflage her. With the cover Herrod had provided, Elena would be as close to untraceable as a person could get—as long as she indeed remained unrecognized. Even her Corps ident chip was long gone, decommissioned. In any official capacity, she was invisible. Shadow Ops would have built her a new identity that would withstand the scrutiny of a place like Ellis.

  And they would have found her a new ship to go with it.

  He waited, impatient, as Galileo sorted through the data, and then she came back. “One ship matching those criteria.”

  Got you, he thought, and he was half furious and half elated. “Where is it?”

  “Last received telemetry at 349.001.224.”

  “What’s near it?”

  “Unidentified. Parameters match multiple civilian cruiser classes.”

  “How fast?”

  “Matching civilian cruisers range from .5 to .82 of Antigone’s FTL speeds.”

  Slower than Leviathan. There was still a chance he might catch her.

  He checked Chryse’s position; the detour was going to delay him, but not by much. He would still reach Chryse well before the ship made it to Yakutsk. He keyed the course into Leviathan, and sent one last signal to his ship to let Emily Broadmoor know he was taking a detour.

  Greg was hanging most of his hope on the theory that Elena would have left him clues.

  She did not, after all, trust Herrod any more than he did. She would not have accepted this mission unless she believed it was the right thing, yes; but she would have held on to her skepticism, doubted Herrod’s words, taken everything as suspicious. He wondered if that was why she had taken the artifact with her; perhaps she thought it was part of the whole scheme. Perhaps Herrod had said something to her about it. Perhaps Herrod knew enough about Ellis to know what it was.