Breach of Containment

by Elizabeth Bonesteel

  Elena palmed the anesthetic, touching the patch to Mika’s neck. The stocky woman slid to the ground in oblivious silence.

  Elena pulled Mika’s simple spanner kit off of her upper arm, tucking it into her pocket next to the artifact. She rolled the woman over, looking for her comm; but Mika didn’t have an ordinary dermal comm filament. The comm behind Mika’s ear was embedded, grown into her flesh like a parasite. Even if Elena had the medical knowledge, she would be unable to remove it without killing the woman.

  You’re killing her anyway, she thought.

  But even if she could extract the comm, she had no way to tap into it. She’d knocked someone out, risked revealing herself, and for nothing. “Shit,” she said aloud.

  And instantly, a map of the station appeared before her eyes.

  She blinked once, then waved her hand through it, dismissing it. “Map,” she said this time, and it reappeared.

  She looked down at the bulge in her pocket. “What else did you get me?”

  A chaotic amalgam of video and audio began streaming through her comm, and she shut it off as quickly as she could. “Quite a bit, then,” she said. Calling up the map again, she began scanning for the main data access points.

  She had not been sure, when she saw the station, that it would be configured the way a typical station was configured, but there it was: one primary data carrier, and right next to it, the main power source. Indus was run by one large, very hot battery settled at the bottom of the station, using the vacuum outside to help it cool. A simple, reliable system, powerful enough to provide energy for the station as it grew, and only a single point to be secured.

  Elena couldn’t help but think that any decent mechanic would have balked at a single point of failure.

  Elena dragged Mika into the corner where she wouldn’t be seen from the doorway, then she let the door close behind her as she left to make her way down to the power station.

  She wasn’t sure if this area was more crowded than the one she had walked through with Mika, or if she was just more aware of being a stranger. She kept walking like she knew where she was going; most of them ignored her. A few nodded, and some smiled, cheerful and professional. Strangers are not unknown, then. They all seemed so ordinary, going through the day, fulfilling all of the small, mundane duties that were necessary to keep a place like this running. How many of them knew about the experiments? How many of them knew what Ellis was really up to? Were there any innocents here? How many of them was she going to kill?

  Stop it.

  She strode casually past the power station access hallway, her eyes flickering to the end as she passed. Unattended. She frowned. Were they so certain of their security?

  Did she have to go in blind?

  “Do I have a shift schedule?” she asked.

  Silently, a list of names and times appeared before her eyes. “Just for the power station,” she said, and most of the names disappeared. She zeroed in on the current time, and noted the overlap. Shift change. Someone was slacking off. An opportunity, but undoubtedly a very, very brief one.

  She turned back, walking as slowly as she could without being conspicuous, waiting until she could dash undetected down the corridor. The power station room itself was open—no door at all, she noted. Easier to defend, perhaps; or maybe only easier to access. How much did they prepare for infiltrators? How much did they assume their preemptive exterior defenses would be sufficient?

  It doesn’t matter as long as you can blow it up.

  She crept inside, pressing herself against the wall, taking in the setup. The battery was fully exposed, contained by radiation shielding; even so, her comm obligingly warned her about long-term radiation exposure. Sloppy. She supposed the station crew got inoculations, but surely it’d be easier to just contain the battery properly. All they would need for something like this was some liquid shielding, or even just a stronger gravity field. It might even be spun as a cost efficiency, if that was what they were worrying about. She could probably even work with the radiation shielding they had, bumping up the strength without tapping the battery too badly. It wouldn’t take her half an hour.

  Exactly the opposite of what you’re here for, Elena.

  Detonating a stellar battery wasn’t the easiest thing in the world, but once set up, the process was effectively destructive. The batteries were not particularly incendiary in and of themselves. The connections, filters, and amplifiers that tended to surround them were far more volatile, but even those needed a decent trigger. Centuries of hideous accidents had made designers cautious. She was not, given the materials at hand, going to be able to cause an abrupt explosion.

  But it would be a simple enough task to remove the shielding, and let the radiation from the battery itself eat through the connectors. It would take nearly three hours for the system to destabilize enough to attract attention, and by then it would be too late to stop the chain reaction. It might even credibly look like an accident.

  Not her priority, but the thought of it gave her an unexpected sense of professional satisfaction.

  “Live and die a mechanic, Elena,” she said aloud, crouching down to access the battery from below. The field controls were live and on the surface, but locked. Elena pulled a spanner out of Mika’s kit and tuned it to the narrowest setting, working slowly, alert for any alarms. None came, and in a few minutes, the lock assembly disengaged, and the controls were activated.

  The battery output was calibrated to the station’s demands, in constant but moderate flux. There were three fail-safes, designed to shut down the battery if the radiation output became too great; those she disabled with little trouble. And then she mocked up the station’s inputs, slowly increasing the power demand. The radiation shielding would prevent the overload from triggering external alarms for at least three hours; even if the battery assembly began complaining before that, nobody would perceive it as an emergency.

  Three hours. If she could keep her work undetected for three hours, there would be no way to reverse it.

  Pocketing the spanner, she crept back to the doorway and out into the hall. She began walking again, and someone rounded the corner, absorbed in what he was reading, oblivious to her. When she passed, he did not react at all, and she began to breathe again. She wondered if she could make it back to Wanderlust after all, if she might overcome the landing bay lock, if she might in fact escape before the explosion; but she needed to be careful until her scheme hit the point of no return. There could be no alerts, no security alarms, nothing that might make them check their systems early. She would need to blend, as she had been blending, just a little while longer.

  She nearly jumped when her comm chimed. “Incoming message from shuttle Wanderlust,” it said, in a light baritone, loud and echoing against the walls of the corridor. Was that the voice of the station?

  Why is the shuttle comming me? “Can you play it?” she asked.

  “Command code required.”

  What? She had no command code. And . . . there was something odd in the station’s tone. “Repeat, please,” she said, listening closely.

  “Command code required.”

  It sounded different that time, lower, flatter, less expressive. She thought of the long, convoluted command code Herrod had given her, and wondered if she ought to start reciting it. Was this something he had forgotten to tell her? Was this something he had left out deliberately?

  “Excuse me,” said a voice behind her, “but I don’t think you’re supposed to be here.”

  And she was discovered.

  Chapter 44

  Chryse

  Chryse had dropped out of the field at Greg’s approach, and for several tense moments, Greg kept his hands over Leviathan’s weapons controls.

  But Chryse’s weapons were registering cool, and the ship made no threatening moves, just drifted at a leisurely sublight speed on its course toward Yakutsk.

  The ship was, in many ways, a typical PSI configuration: a boxy core of indeterminate
age, with graceful extensions of wings and branches built up over time. Overall, Chryse had a modern look, sleek and avian, and Greg thought she had been rehulled, at the very least, within the last few years. Chryse’s shape still gave him that alien feeling he always got from PSI generation ships, as if she had grown from an entirely separate evolutionary branch from Galileo; but there was nothing about her that was alarming, or even remarkable.

  “Welcome to Chryse, Captain Foster.” Captain Bayandi again. Always Bayandi, Greg realized. Never anyone else. “I trust your trip was uneventful.”

  “Yes, thank you.” He could manage politeness, at least. Whatever else was going on, he would learn soon enough, and then he would know what to do.

  “I think you will find our port-side landing bay to be the most convenient for your ship. Will you be able to land yourself? I am afraid our autopilot is not working.”

  Greg frowned. Uniqueness of PSI ships aside, an autopilot was generally part of a starship’s autonomic function. He wondered how serious Chryse’s hardware issues really were. “I shouldn’t have a problem,” he said. “Is your gravity working?”

  “Yes. We keep it slightly lighter than you may be used to, however; about .98 Earth normal.”

  Enough to notice, but not enough to make a difference. “That should be fine, Captain.”

  He flew around to Chryse’s port side, and found the landing bay wide open, waiting for him. It wasn’t until he grew close enough for his eyes to take over from his sensors that he noticed there was anything wrong. For one thing, there were no other ships in the bay. For another, the whole place, floor to ceiling, was covered in fine, crystalized ice. With a shiver, he realized the landing bay wasn’t sealed: despite the ordinary lighting and the gravity, it was exposed to the vacuum, and probably had been for some time.

  He flew Leviathan close to the interior wall, then set it down gently, turning off the shuttle’s artificial gravity. His stomach gave a mild lurch as he adjusted.

  “I apologize,” Bayandi said, contrite. “I am afraid I have no one available to meet you.”

  “That’s all right,” Greg said. “I can come to you, if it’s easier.”

  “That would be ideal, Captain. Thank you.” Bayandi paused. “But you will need your environmental suit.”

  Greg tensed again. “Why?”

  “The interior areas between you and me are uninhabitable.” Bayandi said it easily, casually, as if Greg should have known.

  Greg unstrapped himself and stood, retrieving his environmental suit from the rear of the shuttle. It was probably only vacuum and not contamination, but he took no chances, testing and retesting the seals at his ankles and wrists, double-checking the readouts in his hood. “Repressurize after I leave,” he told Leviathan, and opened the door. With a quiet whoosh, the small amount of air he had brought with him osmosed into the shuttle bay, and he stepped onto the floor.

  The layer of ice was thin, and his feet left a slight depression, but the crystals were dry and not slick. He checked his suit: the temperature in the bay was 2.7 kelvin. Vacuum temperature. Apparently the ship’s systems weren’t generating enough ambient heat to warm anything. He took a moment to check the bay for casualties before he realized anyone who had been exposed had probably been vented outside. He shivered again, and walked up to the inner door to open it.

  The interior corridor was crystalized as well, but this time, there were people.

  Across from the doorway lay a man, his short hair golden and straight, eyes staring upward, his face forever confused. He had slumped to the floor, but his elbows were still braced; he had died semiconscious, Greg suspected, when his blood sublimated and froze. Thirty to ninety seconds, they had all been taught. Greg dealt with the remains of people who had died in vacuum, but he had never seen it happen.

  Here, it seemed, it had happened to a great many people.

  “If you will turn right, Captain Foster,” Bayandi said pleasantly, “you will find me two levels up in the bow of the ship.”

  Greg turned, taking in all of the people he passed. A couple, clutching each other, collapsed in the middle of the floor. A small child, curled in a corner. One person, sprawled in agony against the wall, a shaggy, long-haired dog draped protectively over their stomach. Belatedly, Greg began to count: twelve, twenty, forty. By the time he reached the stairwell at the end of the corridor, he had counted nearly eighty.

  “How much of the ship is like this?” he asked Bayandi.

  “There is a small area in Chryse’s nose,” Bayandi said. “Forty square meters. Enough living space for Commander Ilyana. Still, it is not perfect. Even here . . . it is cold, sometimes. I haven’t been able to properly repair our heating systems.”

  Greg climbed the stairs. Eighty-two, eighty-three, eighty-four . . . “What happened?” he asked.

  “Sudden depressurization and temperature reversal,” Bayandi told him conversationally. “It was over before I knew it was happening.”

  “Couldn’t Chryse compensate?”

  There was a pause, and then Greg knew. “It was over before I knew it was happening,” Bayandi repeated.

  Greg climbed two levels and headed once again toward the fore of the ship. At one point he saw a wide opening to his left, and he stopped, looking into the cavernous room. It was a nursery, a line of cribs in one corner, pens throughout the room, a larger table, and a play area for older children. He took a step inside, meaning to count; instead, he found himself drawn to the cribs. They were occupied, all of them, nearly two dozen. Two contained twins in matching fuzzy onesies, feet futilely bundled in green and yellow felt. He turned away, only to be confronted by the pens, toddlers lying next to blocks and stuffed animals, boards and art toys. The older children all lay in one group. Up against the wall, Greg saw a soccer ball.

  And then he could not see anything anymore.

  He stumbled out of the room, horrifically conscious of where his feet were falling, and leaned against the wall next to the door, unable to look back inside. “How many children do you have?” he asked.

  “They are all my children,” Bayandi said simply. “But if you are speaking of those that are not fully grown . . . one hundred and eighty-five.”

  Which meant he had not even seen all of them. “How much farther are you?” he asked.

  “Twenty meters,” Bayandi said, and Greg heard gentleness in his voice. He had realized, perhaps, that Greg was not indifferent. “I am at the end of the hall.”

  Greg did not look at any more bodies in the corridor as he made his way to the closed doorway. “Is it airlocked?” he asked.

  “No,” Bayandi said. “But I can rapidly repressurize this small space. Be quick and you will cause no trouble.”

  Greg opened the door and stepped through, and the door slid closed behind him. The room before him was entirely different from the ship he had walked through. The walls were free of ice, and were colored a cool cerulean blue, calming and welcoming. The floor was dark, and made of some soft, springy polymer that was kind to his feet. There was another door opposite where he was standing; Ilyana’s quarters, he supposed.

  And in the center of the room was Bayandi.

  The console resembled what stood in Galileo’s engine room, a control center allowing easy access to all of the core capabilities of the ship’s systems. But the main display was far simpler: no readouts at all, just a row of six green lights. As Greg watched, one winked out, and then another; they came back a moment later.

  “Is this you?” Greg asked, feeling foolish.

  “As much as anything is,” Bayandi told him, his voice still coming through Greg’s comm. “I do not really understand the self in the same way that you do. I have tried, for quite some time, but no one has been able to adequately explain it to me. I suppose we are all limited.”

  “You’re a machine, then?”

  “That is the closest correct description, yes.”

  “How old are you?”

  “I don’t know.” Bayandi so
unded regretful. “When I was made, I knew very little. I could not measure time properly. I could not communicate well. My children taught me eventually, but I cannot explain how long I was here before that.”

  “How long have you been able to measure time?”

  “Seven hundred and forty-nine years.”

  Good Lord. Central had known Chryse was old, but this was beyond their understanding. “Who made you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know that, either,” Bayandi said. “I believe I did, at one point. But in order to learn to speak with my children, I had to forget other things. Does that make sense?”

  No. “When was Chryse attacked, Bayandi?” he asked.

  “One hundred and forty days ago,” Bayandi replied.

  “Right around the time the disasters began to happen.”

  “This cycle of disasters, yes.”

  “That can’t be a coincidence.”

  Bayandi was silent for a moment. “It was not,” he said. “They knew of me, Ellis Systems. I believed I was prepared for any attack they made, but I was mistaken. They accessed Chryse via an environmental component obtained six years ago from an unregistered trader. It would have occurred to none of us to check its provenance.”

  “It was probably designed to hide,” Greg said.

  Bayandi paused again. “I am, as I have said, a machine, Captain Foster. But I find that explanation . . . insufficient. It is my purpose to protect my children. I have failed. That I was outsmarted by another piece of machinery makes it no better.”

  “You protected Ilyana.”

  “Ana was not here,” Bayandi said. “She was returning from a supply drop. I was temporarily incapacitated when we were hit. I could not warn her. She came home to this.”