Breach of Containment

by Elizabeth Bonesteel

“Indus, run a comms diag. What’s the lag about?”

  Another pause. “Origin stimulus overload,” it said.

  What the fuck does that mean? Elena thought; but the man seemed relieved by the information. “Indus, verify that Wanderlust was the source of the comm sent to Olivia Taylor.”

  “Verified.”

  “But Wanderlust has no message?”

  “Correct.”

  He looked over at her, resigned. “It’s on your shuttle’s end, then,” he said. “You probably need an overhaul. When was your last maintenance check?”

  “I can’t remember,” she said, grateful for the opportunity for honesty.

  “Don’t put it off,” he advised her. “It starts in the comm system, but with those old eighteens you can end up with your field generator out of tune, and then the real trouble begins.”

  She wondered if she ought to tell him how many times she had rebuilt 18-series shuttles from their component parts. “I’ll bring it up when I get back,” she promised. “If they can fit it in the schedule.”

  He laughed at that. “The maintenance people are always too busy when it’s someone else’s life, aren’t they?” he said, and she felt that wave of guilt again. “Are you leaving soon?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t have to go for another couple of hours.” She might as well be consistent with her story.

  “Come on, then.” He turned and led her out of the small room. “There’s an access terminal around the corner—we can check on your shuttle from here, and then you can get back to . . . what were you doing?”

  She caught up, falling into step with him. It took no effort for her to look guilty. “I was looking for the cafeteria,” she said. “I think I got lost.”

  “Actually, you’re pretty close.” He rounded the corner and stopped in front of a translucent panel mounted into the wall. With a wave of his hand, the controls lit up: a simple lock interface, waiting for access. “Indus Station, this is Nikolai Botkin. Connect me with the shuttle Wanderlust on Level Five.”

  The screen went briefly blank, and then she saw a full schematic of her little shipping vessel. “What can we do from here?” she asked him.

  “Pretty much anything,” he told her. “Indus, run a comms diagnostic on that ship.” The schematic was bisected by a bright yellow line that divided, scanning slowly fore and aft. After a few seconds it completed, flashing green. Botkin looked over at Elena. “Must be an intermittent error,” he told her, and she realized she was lucky he’d overheard the message. “Let’s see if we can open it up a little, hm?”

  He chose hand controls this time, most likely to avoid using codes in front of her, and she watched his fingers. The schematic disappeared, and Botkin began to swipe through screen after screen of information, some of it simple renderings of ships or systems, some of it line after dense line of numbers. It took her a moment to recognize what she was looking at: this was a full-spectrum multilevel remoting system. And with the structure of the battery she had just sabotaged, she suspected it had more than enough power to run a continuous telemetry line into an FTL field.

  This was the system they were using to control the Olam Fleet. And if she could get access to it . . . she could disconnect them. All she would have to do is get through the top-level security, mock Botkin’s—or maybe even Mika’s—access, and flip one switch.

  She didn’t have to destroy the station at all. She didn’t have to kill anyone. She didn’t have to die.

  And Herrod must have known. With all the details S-O had on what kinds of experiments were happening on the station . . . he hadn’t sent her to destroy it to stop the Olam Fleet and save Earth. He had sent her for another reason. He had sent her to die, and he had lied to her about why.

  She looked over at Botkin. How do I get rid of him? Her hand went toward her pocket. There were too many people around for another anesthetic patch; she’d have no way to drop him without attracting attention. She was suddenly acutely aware of the time: ten minutes, easily, since she had sabotaged the battery. She’d have time to stop it, if she went back now. She might even beat the lax shift change . . . but how would she get into the system to stop the fleet? She needed the overload as a backup. She needed to stop the fleet first. She needed Botkin’s access, and she needed him out of the way.

  Another flash of warmth in her pocket. What? she thought at it. What do you want me to do?

  And as she opened her mouth to say something to Botkin—question, threat, flirtation, she had no idea—the lights dimmed, and a deafening klaxon filled the air around them.

  Chapter 49

  Galileo

  “Are you certain,” Captain Taras asked at last, something hollow in her voice, “that no one is left?”

  Greg wanted to tell her he had been wrong, that there was some hope. “I walked the whole ship, Captain,” he said. “And I took a look at the environmental readouts myself.”

  She whispered quietly to herself. He thought, at first, that she was swearing, but then he recognized the words: not Standard, not dialect, but an ancient liturgy for the dead. “Bayandi should have told us,” she said.

  “I don’t think he could,” Greg told her. “Beyond whatever this compulsion is from Yakutsk, he’s been damaged. He can’t even articulate how.”

  She sniffed something that might have been a laugh. “This explains a great many things,” she said. “I find I’m rather pleased to find out he is a malfunctioning machine. I was beginning to worry for my own sanity.” She grew quiet. “We will be at Yakutsk within the hour, Captain Foster. How are you planning to handle this?”

  He had thought, long and hard, about the best way to proceed. “Strategically, I want to find out why Chryse is being brought to Yakutsk, and I can’t do that if Bayandi is disabled.” And I don’t want to kill him. “But if he becomes a direct threat . . . it’s our mission, you understand, to protect the colony.”

  “No less ours,” Taras said, and sounded tired. “I shall trust your judgment, Captain, and PSI will hold no grudge against Central if you deem Chryse too dangerous to survive. Bloody hell.” The swearing went on, more familiar to Greg than the prayer, and in far more languages. “Forgive me, Captain, but I need to tell my crew. We will be some time mourning this loss, I think.” She heaved a sigh. “I envy Bayandi. On days such as this, I wish very much I was a machine.”

  Greg did not think Taras understood the sort of machine Bayandi was, but he did not correct her.

  In the end, Bayandi was able to drop more than eighteen hours off of Elena’s time-delayed message. “I must apologize, Captain Foster,” Bayandi said. “Altering the time skew meant I had to directly access the message. I am afraid I have intruded.”

  “You haven’t,” Greg told him. “You’ve helped me. Please don’t worry about it.”

  He had stopped, he realized, asking himself why he was speaking to a machine as if it were human.

  He watched the message in his office. It had occurred to him he might want a more private space, somewhere he would feel free to react; but all of his instincts gravitated toward his desk, where he took all of his professional correspondence, where he and Elena had had hundreds of discussions and arguments, military and nonmilitary alike. Privacy was unnecessary. Falling apart was not an option.

  Still, he was unprepared for his own reaction to seeing Elena again, so few hours after he had let himself drown in her. Antigone’s cabin was behind her, absent any kind of personalization from either her or Herrod before her. She was sitting in the pilot’s seat—of course—and had found something to pull back her hair. Her clothes were white and not black—whatever fictional uniform Herrod had found her. But it was still her, those dark eyes, the angles of her cheekbones, her beautiful lips, her skin, colorless in Antigone’s cold blue light, making his fingers tingle from the memory of touching her. He clenched his hands into fists, and promised himself to listen all the way through before he lost his temper.

  “I imagine you’re pretty pissed off ri
ght now,” she said, without introduction.

  Right in one, he thought.

  “But there are some things I need to say to you. There are things I should have said to you a long time ago, and there’s no time now. I’m sorry about that. I meant it, you know. That I didn’t want to leave you.”

  Her eyes closed and she took a breath, and despite himself he thought she was telling the truth.

  “By the time you get this, you’ll know why I had to do it. Or maybe you won’t. If it goes as planned, maybe nobody will know for certain. But we’ll have them. It’ll be down to you, and I’m not afraid of that. I know who you are, Greg, and I know what you can do. I wouldn’t have done it this way if I thought there was another answer, you know. But it had to be now, and it had to be me, and I hate it, but here we are.

  “And here’s the thing, Greg. I know who you are, and I need to tell you something, which is this: you matter. Not Captain Greg Foster of Galileo, the hero, the man who can do anything. Not the iconic Corps officer who works miracles. Not Kate’s child, following in his mother’s footsteps, doing everything she never had time to do, fulfilling the destiny she was denied.” She smiled a little. “You know, nobody ever talks about your dad? He’s done a few things with his life, too. But you’re not Tom’s child, either. You are yourself. You make a difference. You have made a difference in my life, just by being my friend, listening to me, letting me see who you are. I’ve been a stronger person because I’ve had you. I’m strong enough now because I’ve had you. You matter, Greg. And it’s not just to me, and it’s not just because you’re the boss. It’s because you are brave and faithful and you do everything with your whole heart. Fuck the Corps, Greg. You matter. Don’t forget that.

  “I’ve always loved you. I don’t know if it’s what you thought it was, or wanted it to be, or if it was ever the right kind of love for you, or enough of it. But I love you and I’m pissed off that I’m leaving, and if I could change it I would. But never forget that. No matter what you think of me, never forget it.”

  And she disappeared.

  He stared at the space above his desk for a long moment. He had been so ready to be angry with her, to rail at her pale self-justifications, to use her words to find a way to hate her, to let her go.

  Fuck the Corps, Greg. You matter.

  “I am sorry for intruding, Captain,” Bayandi said gently, and Greg thought, for a machine, he was pretty perceptive.

  “That’s all right,” he said. It was. Somehow he felt better knowing someone else had seen the message. “It’s—” Not what I wanted, he was going to say. And it wasn’t. It told him nothing. It told him everything.

  “I’m not always good with subtext, Captain,” Bayandi said, “but—have you mislaid her?”

  What an odd way of putting it. “She’s left on a mission she doesn’t expect to return from,” he explained. “I have no way of finding out where she’s gone.”

  “But that’s not true,” Bayandi said, and he sounded relieved. “I can tell you exactly where she is, Captain Foster, because Chief Shaw is with me.”

  Ted Shimada was fascinated. Emily Broadmoor looked vaguely alarmed.

  “He called it a lifeboat,” Greg told them, pacing behind his desk. “He said it was launched automatically after Ellis attacked Chryse. Destroyed them.”

  “So it’s, what, a backup?” Ted asked. “No. Too small. A comms interface? Some kind of remote?”

  “He couldn’t really explain it to me,” Greg said. He was familiar with that from Bayandi now, and he wondered if he would ever know if it was damage Ellis had done, or if Bayandi’s programming had been so altered throughout the centuries that facts had been genuinely lost.

  “Is it dangerous?” Emily asked.

  Leave it to my security chief. “I don’t know,” Greg said honestly. “He couldn’t tell me.”

  “Or wouldn’t.”

  “If you’re asking me if Bayandi is a threat,” Greg said, “I will tell you yes, absolutely. And I say that believing he has no intention of harming anyone. But he’s under compulsion right now, and he doesn’t know what they’re going to ask him to do, and I need the two of you here working with Jessica to figure out what’s happening before more people are hurt. That means,” he told them, shoving aside his visceral reluctance, “if Chryse becomes threatening, you take her out, no questions asked.”

  When he had dismissed them, he sat back down and straightened his jacket, fingering his collar, and connected to his comms center. “Samaras,” he said, “get me Admiral Chemeris. And don’t take any she’s too busy bullshit this time. This is a priority call.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Samaras must have been uncharacteristically persistent, because Admiral Chemeris sounded positively irritable when she came on the line. “Captain Foster,” she said shortly, “unless this is about the First Sector, you are wasting my time.”

  “It is, ma’am. It’s about the Olam Fleet headed toward Earth.”

  “That,” she said decisively, “is a hysterical rumor being spread by PSI. Although don’t think I don’t see your fingerprints on this, Captain Foster. None of us have time for your petty vendetta against Ellis Systems right now.”

  He wondered, then, if she was deflecting because she was protecting herself, or if some of them genuinely didn’t know what was happening. “Admiral Herrod is dead,” he told her.

  And at that, she grew quiet. “How?” she asked at last.

  “You’ll get it all in my report,” he told her. “But right now, I need you to listen. Before he died, he told us about the Ellis Systems research station that you—that Shadow Ops—had tried unsuccessfully to destroy. He sent a single officer to infiltrate and deal with the situation, which is, in my opinion, a woefully inadequate plan. And as we now have the location of the research station—”

  Admiral Chemeris interrupted. “How did you—”

  Got you, he thought. “How we obtained the data is not relevant, Admiral.” Now that he knew she was Shadow Ops, he had no compunction about protecting Bayandi from her. “I’m comming you to request permission to assist in the mission that Herrod began.”

  She regrouped quickly. “Captain Foster,” she said, “if you’re aware of the subtleties of the situation, you’re aware that we chose infiltration for very specific reasons. Galileo is a fine ship, but the defenses on that station are like nothing we’ve seen. Unless you can camouflage your starship, there is no realistic way for you to assist.”

  “We’ve been working with a commercial freighter here on Yakutsk. Request permission to accompany that ship on an assist mission.”

  “Absolutely not, Captain Foster. If your freighter friends want to risk their lives, that’s their business. But you are an officer of the Corps, and possibly one of the only ones we’ve got left. You are absolutely not to accompany any ship, civilian or otherwise, to that station. Is that clear, Captain?”

  He straightened in his chair. Be precise, he thought. “To be specific, Admiral: you are forbidding me from going after this Ellis research station.”

  “I am forbidding any member of the Corps under my command from doing so, Captain. And if you try to split hairs on that, I promise you, I’m not going to be shy about making a loud, severe example of your ship and everyone on board, never mind what’s happening in the First Sector.”

  He wanted to tell her he knew she was an imposter. He wanted to tell her he knew she was a murderer, that they were all killers, that he had the evidence tying them to Athena Relay. But now was not the time. Now he needed to protect his ship, and his crew. Justice could wait.

  For a little while.

  “You don’t need to be concerned about the crew of Galileo,” he told her truthfully. “My people know their duty, and they know who is in command.”

  “Excellent.” The admiral paused. “At what time was the mission initiated, Captain?”

  He swallowed a bitter retort. “0423,” he told her.

  She sighed. “Then it’ll
be over soon, and we can talk again. There’s a great deal to do, Captain Foster.” And she disconnected.

  Greg took a moment in the silence. His office, the space where he had spent nearly every day for the last nine years: desk, shelves, alcove where that bottle of scotch had whispered to him, his inanimate safety net. Decisions made here. Messages sent and received. Realizations. He looked out the window: Yakutsk floated below, lovely from this height, gray and smooth, the bright light of Smolensk looking up like one wide eye.

  Galileo. His ship. His command.

  Fuck the Corps, Greg. You matter.

  He stood and took off his uniform jacket, draping it carefully over the back of his chair. And then he commed the landing bay, and told them to ready Leviathan.

  Chapter 50

  Indus Station

  Botkin had gone rigid. “Wait here,” he told her tersely, and hurried up the hallway.

  She stared at the wall. The panel was still open, Botkin’s access still active. Around her, people were running past, paying more attention to the alarm than one woman standing alone. They wouldn’t be able to hear her in the chaos. “Indus Station,” she whispered, “show me the Olam Fleet.”

  The display went blank for a moment, and then she saw a familiar FTL field telemetry reading: six ships, in loose formation, traveling far faster than any field she’d ever seen. Her mind immediately leapt to the implementation details: How are they generating the extra power needed? How are they keeping the field stable? Off loading guidance only saves them ten, maybe fifteen percent—what else are they using here?

  None of that mattered. “Indus Station,” she said, “terminate telemetry to the Olam Fleet.”

  The interface winked blandly at her. “Authorization required.”

  Of course. It wouldn’t be that easy. She thought of all the cryptographic lessons she’d had, all of the unauthorized things Jessica had taught her—or tried to teach her. If this was all they wanted, she realized, they would have sent Jess.