Breach of Containment

by Elizabeth Bonesteel

  She wondered, then, if Shadow Ops wanted this plan to succeed at all.

  She heard Botkin’s steps at the end of the hall, moving back toward her, the opposite direction of everyone around him. She swept her hand through the fleet display, returning the panel to its previous state, and turned, tense, half expecting armed guards. Instead, she found Botkin in different clothes: he was dressed in an orange reflective env suit, which she recognized as both radiation- and fire-resistant. And under his arm, he carried another.

  “Put this on,” he told her.

  “It’s a fire alarm?” she asked.

  “Probably false,” he said. “But we don’t take any chances. It’s too small here, and too many of the labs are oxygen rich. Here.” He shook out the jacket for her, handing her the trousers, then turned back to the panel, quickly logging off.

  As he turned away, pulling a clear cloth hood from his pocket and shaking it out, Elena’s comm sounded. Her own voice echoed in her ear: I don’t ever want to leave you again.

  She must have looked puzzled, because Botkin stopped what he was doing to look at her. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I—yes. It’s my comm again. It’s—” The message repeated: I don’t ever want to leave you again. This time, though, it was not her voice, not precisely. It was modulated, flattened, like the message she had heard earlier.

  And a brief flare of heat hit her hip.

  But what do you mean? she wanted to shout. You’re not leaving me. You’re in my pocket, safe, and—

  This time, she heard Greg’s voice: Then don’t leave me.

  Reflexively her hand opened, and the trousers dropped to the ground. “Oh! I’m sorry.” She bent down to reach for them, and her companion bent next to her.

  “That’s all right,” he said, sweeping them up with one hand.

  Behind his back, Elena pulled the artifact out of her pocket and set it on the ground, shoving it against the wall. It should have stood out, square and gray and not flush; but as she released it the color changed, precisely matching the background. She blinked; it seemed to be growing flatter, or larger, or something, but it became hard for her to focus on it, and she had to look away. She wanted to keep watching it, see what it would do; but he stood up too quickly, blocking her view. He handed her the trousers.

  “Thank you,” she said, and pulled them on rapidly. He returned to fastening his hood, and he never looked toward the floor at all.

  “Come on,” Botkin said, as she started shrugging the jacket on. “We need to get out of here.” He ran up the hall and she dashed after him. The corridor was crowded, everyone moving in one direction. Urgency, she noted, but no panic. They trusted this place. They headed back down the hallway she had followed earlier, and she glanced down at the entrance to the data center. There was a guard there now, but only one, armed but as relaxed as the rest of the staff of this place. She would never have a better chance, but how to escape her rescuer?

  “This way,” he said, leading her back toward the cafeteria. “It’s fireproof in here.”

  The cafeteria was full of people—at least eighty, she thought, giving a quick count. More than half the station complement. Botkin began talking with some of them, demanding explanations, speculating about what was happening. She let herself drift backward, into the crowd; he caught her eye once, and she smiled at him.

  And then she was in the back of the room and out the door, and she was amazed to find herself free.

  She turned and ran back down the hallway. Someone passed her and shouted, “Where are you going?” She gestured vaguely ahead of her, and as she passed, she said, helpfully, “The others are in the cafeteria.” The person turned away from her and kept running.

  She reached the access panel, and as she approached, she saw the main interface appear, unlocked. But before she could reach it, a man appeared at the end of the corridor: a single guard, large and armed. Damn. She slipped her hand into her pocket to find another anesthetic patch. This guard was big and purposeful; she didn’t think he’d fall for apologetic incompetence.

  But she had to try something.

  “Excuse me,” she said, stepping into his path. “Shouldn’t you be in the cafeteria?”

  “No, ma’am,” he said formally. His hand, she noticed, rested on his rifle. “But you should.”

  He kept moving toward her. “But everyone’s there,” she said. “They’re trying to figure out the source of the alarm. Nobody seems to know what’s burning.”

  “Just get back to the cafeteria, ma’am,” he said, and she saw his fingers tightening on the barrel of his weapon.

  “I’m only asking—” she began; and then she rushed at him, as quickly as she could, her hand out; and he lifted the barrel of his rifle and said, “Stop!” and then, for no visible reason, his eyes squinted shut and he doubled over, as if he were in pain; and she slapped her palm on the back of his neck. He gestured once with his hand before he dropped, senseless, to the ground.

  She leaned over, taking his pulse rifle. “Was that you?” she asked.

  I don’t ever want to leave you again, said her comm.

  “Thanks,” she said. Then she added, “Do you think maybe you could pick a different identifying phrase?”

  After a moment, her comm said, Galileo . . . Galileo . . . Galileo.

  “That’ll do nicely,” she said, and turned back to the panel on the wall. “Indus,” she said, “show me the Olam Fleet.”

  She studied the schematic, and found herself grudgingly impressed. However they had made the ultra-fast field work, it was the guidance system that was true genius. The ships themselves had required very little modification, because all of the spatial calculations were done externally. All of Indus’s logic core power could be devoted to this problem.

  Origin stimulus overload. All of Indus’s logic core power was being devoted to this problem.

  One of the targets on the schematic was a different color, and she realized it was decoupled from the system. Emerging, and probably over Earth. The others were still in transit. Time’s up. She swept her hand through the controls, looking for a guidance switch, attempting to shut it off; and then a map came up, with the winking lights of the fleet indicators within it.

  They would be close behind the leader. She had no time for subtlety. No time for regrets. No time for wondering how many people must have been on those five ships, whether they were trained soldiers or civilians, if they had understood the risks. With a simple swipe, she redirected the targets to the far side of the galaxy, past the Sixth Sector, into territory they had only just begun to map.

  As far as she knew, there was no technology allowing for changes of direction in-stream.

  One by one, each of the lights faltered and disappeared.

  “I don’t like killing people,” she said, half to herself.

  The sound was gentle in her ear: Galileo . . . Galileo . . . Galileo.

  “Thanks,” she said quietly.

  And then another alarm went off, very different from the klaxon that had proclaimed the fire. This one was higher, and louder, and was accompanied by an announcement. “Intruder on Indus Station. All hands, report. All registered visitors, report.”

  Damn. She still had to repair her sabotage of the station. She turned and took a moment to scoop up the prone guard’s plasma rifle. The power station shift change would have happened by now, and she wouldn’t have the luxury of finessing her way past a guard at this point. She desperately did not want to kill anyone else, but one more was better than letting all 143 on the station die for no reason. She broke into a run. She was sure she remembered the corridor, it was just ahead, there was plenty of time—

  “Stop where you are!”

  She stopped and turned. It was another guard, twin to the first, down to his very large, very activated plasma rifle.

  Chapter 51

  Galileo

  Greg had worried that Savosky would take some convincing, but he had, before Greg had finish
ed explaining the situation, volunteered.

  “Budapest is a freighter,” Savosky said, getting out of the chair next to Arin’s infirmary bed. Arin himself was sitting up, legs hanging over the side of the bed, eyes following Savosky around the room. Greg thought he knew what the kid was thinking. “They won’t fire on us out of hand—if they nuked every commercial ship that skulked around them, they would have been long exposed by now. We’ve got a shot at getting in close, taking out their defenses. Maybe even taking them out ourselves.”

  “Or getting some people off the station,” Arin said.

  Savosky shot him a look. “Why do you think you’re coming?”

  But something must have changed between them. Arin just grinned, and pushed himself to his feet. Behind him, the orange tabby cat that had been haunting his bed stalked gingerly toward the pillow, ignoring the human chatter in favor of positioning herself for a nap. She caught Greg’s eye and froze for a moment, then twisted her neck and began licking her shoulder. “You need hands, Bear,” Arin said. “And you know I’m fit enough.”

  Greg raised his eyebrows in question, and Savosky shrugged grudgingly. “Hastings said I could take him home. Wasn’t counting on taking him home to stage a raid.”

  Arin took the opening. “If we really have a chance of keeping the fleet away from Earth,” he pressed, “I am going to help. Besides.” He grew somber. “She’d come after me.”

  She was right about this kid, Greg thought. “Regardless of what needs to be done to stop the Olam Fleet, we know Shadow Ops is trying to hide information by lighting the place up. Even if we have to do that, we need to take a shot at sucking every bit of data off of that station that we can.” He looked at Arin. “You hack as good as you fly?”

  “No, sir,” Arin said, and Greg didn’t correct him this time. “But I’m a fast learner.”

  For a moment, Savosky looked furious; but then his expression faded into simple annoyance. “Not going to listen to me anyway, are you?” he said.

  “No, Captain.” Arin was grinning.

  “Then I might as well keep an eye on you.” His eyes went to the cat, still bathing herself, radiating calculated disinterest. “I think Hastings just inherited himself a pet.”

  Greg let Arin pilot Leviathan back to Budapest, and commed Taras during the brief journey. “I don’t know that a PSI ship would be any safer than a Central starship,” he confessed, after telling her the plan. “But given everything, maybe you could hang behind us, stay in the field, just in case. If we fail, I’d like someone there who can at least witness what happened.”

  “Of course,” Taras said. “And with Chryse having a contact on the station, we may be able to approach more closely anyway.” She paused. “Captain Foster, are you sure about this?”

  He was, strangely enough. His plan was rash, impulsive, based on few facts and substantive speculation. And he could not remember the last time in his life he had been so sure he was on the right side of the fight. “I believe,” he said to Taras, “that we have an obligation to help Elena succeed in this mission, especially since she’s out there without all the facts.”

  “You can’t come back from this, you know.”

  “I know.” In his heart, it was already done, and he could not bring himself to feel regret.

  “Very well, then,” she said. “We will make our way to the station coordinates. As to where we will come out of the field—I will leave that decision until we are there. As should you, Captain. You may find you do not have an opening at all.”

  He would have, if he’d had to, taken Leviathan on his own to go after Elena. He might not be able to save her—and hadn’t she run away often enough for him to stop trying?—but he could help. He could stand by her in this fight that they both believed in, in this war that they had been fighting long before they even knew they were on the battlefield. She had said it to him, once: We never get it wrong until we forget that none of this is about us. And that’s what gave him certainty: he was not fighting for Elena, or even for himself. He was fighting for what he believed, and for the first time, he was doing it without rules or constraints. The right thing, at last.

  Even if it killed him.

  “I’ll be careful, Captain,” he promised.

  “You know,” she said, before she disconnected, “you have alternatives here. I know one part of your course of action is already decided. But . . . you and I have always worked well together, Captain Foster. Should you so choose, I would be pleased to continue that relationship.”

  He understood. He knew of only one Corps officer who had left to join PSI, and the political rumbles had never settled down. Still, not a terrible option, he thought. Assuming I survive.

  “Thank you, Captain Taras,” he said. “I’ll consider it.”

  They reached Budapest. Yuri, Chiedza, and Naina were still on Galileo, but Savosky had no trouble handling the ship on his own. “Rest of the crew is just for company,” he said with a grin. “Foster, stay on weapons. Arin, get our data systems ready to grab whatever we can get.”

  The journey to Ellis’s research station would take less than an hour. Greg found the timing frustratingly long, but it was not nearly long enough for him to do what he needed to do before they arrived. The official comm would be easy, he thought; he had already composed it in his head. Chemeris would ignore it, deliberately or otherwise, for as long as she could, but that would make it no less regulation.

  Telling Jessica was going to be a far different experience.

  With her presence on Yakutsk exposed, he was able to comm her directly. “What’s your status there, Commander?” he asked, reluctant to get to the point.

  “Well, nobody’s murdered Gladkoff yet, if that’s what you’re asking,” she told him. “All of our readings are the same. Chryse is still fifty minutes out.”

  “No luck breaking Gladkoff’s lock?”

  “I’m not sure it’s his,” she confessed. “It’s him on the nukes, for sure. But the data signal? I’m not even sure Gladkoff knows what it’s doing. Based on his comms, sir, I don’t think his own people trust him very much. They don’t think he’s a traitor, but they seem to think he’s kind of . . . unimaginative.”

  Greg thought of all the times he’d used the term writing evaluations for his own crew. It was almost always a euphemism, and he tried to leave it out unless he felt it was irretrievably true. Gladkoff’s superiors, apparently, thought he was not very bright. “I’ve cleared it with Taras,” he told her. “If Chryse goes rogue, Galileo is going to take her out. You should be all right there. Focus on those damn nukes.”

  “You’re getting sentimental in your old age, sir.”

  “It’s not just that.” He took a breath. “It’s that your ship is going to need you.”

  “She needs all of us, sir.”

  He said nothing. And Jessica being Jessica, she figured it out.

  “Greg. You can’t.”

  “I have to, Jess.” It was not just his heart. It was the only practical solution, the only thing that would keep his crew and his ship safe and strong and able to continue doing the work they so critically needed to do. “I have to do this, and it has to be me. If I don’t resign, either the whole ship goes AWOL and every one of them gets court-martialed, or we risk Olam reaching Earth. Elena believes this mission is worth giving up her life, and I trust her judgment. That means I back her up, and that means I cut ties to the Corps so my crew stays safe.”

  “You don’t even know what this mission is!”

  “If we live through this, I might.” How can I explain this to you? “I could go AWOL all on my own and have them throw me in jail, but this seems more honest. And less likely to result in prison. And it leaves you and Galileo and the crew indisputably in the clear.”

  But she hadn’t had as long to think about the decision. “There has to be another way,” she said desperately. “Chemeris doesn’t understand the whole situation. You need to explain to her that—”

  “Do you kn
ow,” he interrupted, “that I always had an idea Galileo would be yours someday?”

  “I do not want her to be mine!”

  “That’s exactly why I thought she would be,” he told her. “You never wanted the job, because you could see, much better than I ever could, everything that has to go into it. You see every corner of the workings of that ship. And you’ve already been in command of her, Jess. You’ve commanded her through boredom and battle. The crew will stand up and die for you, just as they would me. And I need you to take care of them. I need you to take care of her.” Damn, he thought. I always seem to be giving people field promotions. “By the book, Jessica. Okay?”

  She swore.

  “Commander Jessica Lockwood,” he said, “you are hereby promoted to the rank of captain, said promotion to be effective immediately, pursuant to regulations. Do you accept this promotion?”

  She swore again. “Yes, sir.”

  “Thank you, Captain Lockwood.” He steadied himself. “And I hereby resign my commission as a Central Corps officer, and my command of the CCSS Galileo. Do you acknowledge this change in command?”

  “Yes, sir.” He wondered if she was crying.

  “I’m not sir anymore, Jessie,” he said. He was smiling. He was not sure why. He thought his heart might be broken, but he was not sure how he would know. “Now. As far as this mission goes, I’m going to hand any intelligence we get over to you as well as Meridia. As a Corps officer, you’ll of course do whatever you need with it; but I’m guessing Taras is going to make it all public.”

  “And what if she gets blown to bits with you?”

  Jessica was angry. She always got angry when the people she loved were at risk. “Then you keep fighting, Captain,” he told her. He could not give her orders, not anymore; but he could give her advice. “Every day. One mission at a time. You know how to do all of this, Jess, and you have the best soldiers in the fucking fleet. Don’t forget it.”

  “I’m not filing this resignation until you get back, Greg.”

  The official message would be routed through Commander Broadmoor, now acting second-in-command; Jessica’s objections would make no difference. “Do what you need, Jess.” He took a shuddering breath. “It’s been an honor working with you, Captain.”