Like dying in your sleep. You’d never know what happened.
The room felt a lot colder and she dragged the hospital blankets closer. Doc had taken away her Insight tablet, so she was left with nothing but the insistent humming of the monitoring devices and Ivester’s visit to chew on. And a near-death experience, but now, right now, was too soon to dig into that.
She steered her thoughts back to Ivester’s half-formed proposal. She’d been a part of scrubbed projects before, seen the soul go out of the company, even if it saved the bottom line. Far Reaches was about to change. Ivester had said that the Golfball was about to get canned, which meant that any of the other exploration firms that caught wind were going to start “expert shopping” in very short order, if they hadn’t begun already. If she wanted to jump ship, go someplace safer, now was the time.
“Hey, how’s Doc treating you?” The door popped open again, this time admitting Keller and an insulated bag that smelled like heaven.
“I am not dead. That’s all I got for you today.”
The door swung shut behind Keller, and she caught a glimpse of the uniform.
“Why is that guard outside my door? It’s not like I can go anywhere hooked up to this damn thing.” Helen gestured at the mostly disassembled coffin parts stacked up between beeping medical machinery.
“Since Doc came back with the toxicology results, there’s been a warm body outside your door. Ivester read security the riot act. No one allowed in here except medical.”
“And you.” And Ivester, apparently.
“Well, I have a relationship with Lutipo out there. That’s why I recommended him.”
“So are you going to explain Lutipo?”
“First, lunch. Had to promise Ethan I’d bring you this.”
“Ethan? He’s sending you with home-cooked lunches now?”
“Exactly. Remember that pho I brought in last month? That was Ethan’s. Anyway he sent this over, so I’m bringing it in to share.”
“Um . . . Thanks.” Keller dragged the room’s tiny table over and unpacked the bag. Helen’s stomach reminded her, none too graciously, that she’d been eating through an IV for the past few days. Keller grinned and handed her a black neoprene-wrapped container.
“Here, that one’s yours. Just broth, no noodles.”
“Awww.”
“Eat that and I’m going to walk you through what happened when you were busy dying in your coffin.”
“Malfunction,” Helen corrected. She didn’t want to think too deeply about the alternative, even though between half-heard Hofstaeder rants and Ivester’s admission, she was well aware of reality.
“You were totally dying. Doc’s a fucking miracle worker.” Keller peeled both containers open and handed Helen a fat black straw. His own soup was far more interesting, with brightly colored protein cubes and long thick noodles.
“Fine,” Helen said firmly, using the force of her tone to push that feeling of panic back down so she didn’t have to think about it too closely.
“Someone tampered with your coffin right after the start of the mission. Introduced selenium into the coffin water. Over time it kept building up until, whammo.”
“Someone?”
“Someone. We don’t know who yet: the cameras in the Mortuary were compromised, no one was recorded coming in or out, but James clearly shows your coffin being tampered with, we just don’t have a record of who it was.”
Helen tried to get her head around that idea while Keller unlimbered a set of wooden chopsticks and fished a nest of noodles out of his own bowl. Helen popped the lid off hers and took a long sniff at the contents.
“Oh, you’re a lucky man, Keller.” She took a careful sip without the straw. “Pho’s a clear liquid, right?”
“Absolutely. So here’s the thing, and you did not get this from me, but Beauchamp’s gone. Vanished. Poof, gone.”
Helen threw him a skeptical glance. “What?”
“Gone. Her letter of resignation’s in the system. She just walked out.” His eyebrows put the lie to that sentence, and he stuffed his mouth with noodles before it could betray him too.
“That . . . That makes no sense. Beauchamp’s been trying to get onto the Line Drive team for weeks now. She went over your head, right to Dougal.”
“And failed, I might add.”
“Oh bullshit, you know she was going to be slotted in as soon as they took off the hold.”
“She was one of the top picks to bring on board, I’ll admit, but her ability to work with others had been on a downhill slide, complaints were starting to stack up. She got an offer from one of our competitors, Beyond Blue. Ironic that she took off the same day you got taken back out of action. If she’d held on two more days, we’d have been forced to put her in rotation.”
“That’s . . . that’s a little creepy, Keller. You don’t think she did this?” Helen tried to put two and two together. Beauchamp’s slip-ups in performance had raised a few eyebrows among Flight Ops, especially with her publicly stated goal of knocking Helen off the top spot. Still, the fact that Beauchamp had walked away from a fight when Helen had confronted her had been out of character as well. Maybe she had already received the offer. Maybe Ted’s death had affected the other OP more than Helen thought.
Maybe she jumped ship because she knew she was losing her edge. A stray, petty thought to be sure, but it didn’t ring true.
“I don’t, but Metro will make the call. Beauchamp was an excellent pilot, but I don’t know if she could have convinced the security system she wasn’t there. And like you said, she was an in for Line Drive, so there was no reason for her to take a stab at you literally. Unless there’s something more serious going on?” He raised an eyebrow. Helen shook her head. Whatever disagreements she might have with Beauchamp, she didn’t think they had reached the “murder you in your sleep” level of hostility. Helen took another big sip of soup, trying to stave off the chill that accompanied the idea. It helped.
“Also, if you get a call from Harcourt Tamlin, take it. He’s your union-appointed lawyer.”
“My what?”
“Lawyer. This whole thing . . .” he gestured with his chopsticks expressively, “. . . was not an accident. You didn’t get a bad chemical mix, there was no negligence, the coffin is in perfect condition. Even if you don’t decide to sue, Far Reaches is going to have to assume you’re going to. You can’t negotiate for shit. I’ve seen your employment contract.”
“Fuck. We don’t know who did this, right? How can that put Far Reaches at fault?”
“That’s not what it’s about. Metro’s handling the investigation for that. This is about Far Reaches covering their asses, so talk to the lawyer and do whatever he says. Okay?”
Helen took another careful sip of the soup, mind reeling.
“Aren’t they going to be pissed about you giving me the heads-up like this?”
“Heads-up? I’m just here on a mission of mercy.” He jabbed a chopstick at her. “You know how Doc’s idea of food involves protein slurry and ice water. Besides, she doesn’t permit any recordings from here. That particular camera . . .” another flip and expressive stab with the chopsticks, “. . . has a long-running history of catastrophic failures when it comes to recording just about anything. Doc uses this room for her particularly sensitive cases, when she doesn’t want things going on permanent record.”
Helen wondered if Ivester had known. “What about the Golfball?”
“The Golfball is still on the rails. We’ve got a meeting in half an hour. Since you’re off rotation again, I’ve got to scramble.”
“Ivester was just in here. He said it was being scrubbed.”
Keller slurped the last of the noodles and chased them down his throat with the remaining broth. “Dammit, that guy never tells me anything. Okay, that’s going to cause some problems. I gotta run.”
“Hey, keep me posted.”
“You bet.”
As soon as Keller packed up and left, the tightness in her chest increased. It felt a little like panic, but it was much more physical. The feeling had been building and she’d been able to ignore it because of the string of revelations she’d just been hit with, but now it had the upper hand. Dammit, not now. Helen took a big gulp of the soup to try and clear her throat, hoping the warmth would relax the tightness away. The resulting paroxysm sprayed pho all over the coverlet. She had to focus to breathe. Her lungs felt full and inhaling too deep just made it worse. The machines hooked into her suit started to react with lights and atonal sounds. Helen leaned forward, knees drawn up to her chest. She could breathe in short gasps, but it felt like she was operating on half a lung.
The door slammed open, framing Doc for a second before she strode into the space. “Looks like pulmonary edema,” Hofstaeder called over her shoulder before the doors swung shut. “And who the hell brought food in here?” Doc keyed in a code on the keypad beside the bed and immediately Helen felt herself relax, her lungs opening up.
“You. Lie back down.”
Doc pressed her palms to Helen’s shoulders, pushing her back. Helen resisted. “It’s a side effect of the selenium, you’ve still got fluid in your lungs and it’s going to take a time to clear that out.”
Helen felt like she was operating on half oxygen, her vision flickering around the edges. She laid flat for a second, then struggled back to a sitting position as it got harder to breathe.
“You weren’t supposed to have any visitors in here until we made the decision whether or not to transfer you to Metro General. The more you talk, the faster you overtax those lungs.” Doc punched the button to bring the bed into a more upright position.
“Didn’t.”
“Of course you did, there’s soup all over the place. I presume it was Keller. He’s the one who recommended Lutipo to guard the door. Did he at least have the sense to keep the noodles out of it?”
Wordlessly, Helen nodded.
“Well, at least he paid attention to the medical briefing.” More typing on the keypad. “I need you to stay here in this bed and be quiet until we finish. You’re lucky the coffin computer picked up on the problem at all. It started scrubbing your bloodstream almost as fast as the toxins could get into it, but since you’ve already got selenium supplements as part of your allowed chemical mix, it wasn’t as aggressive as it should have been. Someone just introduced a highly concentrated version of something you were already microdosing. We’ll get you clear soon enough—even the heavy metals you might have picked up as a kid will be gone.”
Helen nodded again. She still couldn’t breathe well enough to talk, and she had so many questions.
“What?” Helen managed to work the word into the exhale.
“What? You mean whom.” Hofstaeder’s lips compressed into a thin line that was about as angry as Helen had ever seen. “We don’t have an answer for that, but until we do, there’s a guard on the door. All these damn cameras,” she waved a hand at the same ones Ivester had hacked and Keller had dismissed, “have been hardened against interference, and I will be handling your recovery personally. I will not lose another member of Flight Ops to this cursed project.”
“How long?” Helen asked, Ivester’s request still weighing on her mind.
“Until you can go? Let’s see how long it takes to get your lungs clear. Lucky for you, bodies are much easier to fix than minds.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The lowest possible level of Far Reaches smelled of uncured concrete and hot machine oil. The sub-sub-basements had a checkered history, most likely invented by bored support staff. The flaking paint on the walls had a shimmer that meant the maintenance eenies were already working on the resurfacing. Given a week, the concrete walls would look and feel as professional as any other space in Far Reaches’ multi-story campus.
Ivester convinced the board to let him take the Golfball as a spin-off. The ultimate goal, on paper, was to develop it into something that could be sold off to recoup the costs. It also meant that “out of sight, out of mind” was the expression of the day. The Golfball project split off from Line Drive and hid underground, literally and figuratively.
Helen’s recovery time had taken longer than expected. Heavy metals from the selenium poisoning had bound to the connections that let her link to a waldo. As a result, some of those needed to be removed and redrawn. She’d been able to make a few upgrades, spread out the processing load, refine the level of control she’d have when piloting a waldo. It also meant her hands had developed a tremble that came and went. Hofstaeder had assured her it would go away in time, but Helen felt compelled to hide it.
She shifted the bag on her shoulder with shaking fingers and reached for the door handle. Helen had gone back and forth in her head about whether or not to accept Ivester’s offer. The only way to nail down what happened to Ted was to get back out to the half-eaten Golfball on its final approach to Otlyan23. So the decision was simple in the end.
The NFC chip in her wrist shook hands with the lock and allowed her in. The new lab space was still a work in progress, furnishings still wrapped in shrinkwrap, light fixtures still being extruded. The center of the space had already collected stacks of servers and touchscreens.
“Hey! You made it!” Dougal emerged from one of the office cubicles along the far wall. “Welcome to Recovr.” The analyst had narrowly dodged being let go along with the rest of the Golfball support team by approaching Ivester about joining Recovr as soon as the proverbial ink was dry. Helen was delighted that the team would be made up of familiar faces; it meant she could focus on the waldo.
“I see we have some recovery of our own to finish up first.” Helen picked her way through the room-in-progress.
Dougal laughed. “Oh, this is just the cosmetics. Ivester made sure they got your coffin hooked up before we did anything else.” He spread his arms wide to encompass the rest of the space, the smattering of overhead lights making pale patterns on pale skin. “This room will be dedicated to support and development, when they get all the walls in anyway. Over there are the offices.” Another wave of the hand. “Ivester’s already using one. We’re going to trick one out as your ready room.” He deftly avoided tripping over one of the conduits that crisscrossed the floor like a snake in the sunlight.
“Okay. What else you got?” Helen took a few steps over to the “ready room” and dropped her bag by the door.
Dougal rubbed his hands together. “Oh, wait ’til you see where we got the coffin set up.”
Helen wasn’t entirely sure what she expected, given the half-finished state of the rest of the space. The next set of doors opened up onto a room that might have started as a fair copy of the Far Reaches Fishbowl upstairs. A single, solitary coffin was bolted into a wall rack meant to hold at least half a dozen operators. The touchscreen wall was covered in images and frames filled with numbers. It looked like Ivester was working on several bits of the coffin software almost simultaneously, jumping from screen to screen as he went.
“You’ve been busy,” Helen commented.
Ivester turned away from the control panels, a broad grin working against the tired lines behind his glasses.
He looks like he needs another week off.
“Like it? We’ve got a limited window to take advantage of, so we needed to get the entanglement gear up and running first.” Ivester closed up whatever he was working on and came to join Helen by the coffin.
Helen took her time, checking over the equipment. Not brand new, but certainly on par with the rest of Far Reaches’ gear. The conduits in this room all descended along the walls from the floor above, leaving the rubberized mats clear under their feet. There was no real separation between the coffin racks and the controls, no observation theater. One team, one room. Cozy.
�
�Are these the CAT23 pods we replaced two years ago?” she asked as she cycled the coffin open and stuck her head inside. The interior had been re-kitted, new gel pads, new touch panels. It even had that new pod smell. Helen was impressed. Ivester wasn’t fooling around. “Looks pretty. Has anyone taken it for a test drive yet?”
“Not yet. We needed our damn operator to show up for that.” Another familiar voice rang out.
Helen turned, delighted to find Keller approaching from the far end of the space.
“Well, since I was only poisoned this time, Doc cleared me pretty damn quick,” Helen said, and gave him a hug in greeting. Keller had been spared the axe, since he oversaw Flight Operations. Recovr was officially tucked into his queue just like any other mission set. As an R&D project, they’d have less oversight than income-generating missions or even exploratory projects like Line Drive. Helen felt a bit less uneasy. Having Keller on the team gave it a feeling of legitimacy, like they had a shot at succeeding.
“Now that you’re here, we need to get the gear calibrated. I presume you heard about Beauchamp and Beyond Blue?” Keller shooed Ivester aside and began flipping switches and poking screens.
Helen grimaced. “Yeah, here’s hoping she’s a better team leader than she was a follower.”
“She’ll do fine. Did Dougal show you the ready room?”
“You mean the closet with aspirations?” Helen cast a glance over her shoulder at the half-repurposed office. “At least it’s got a door.”
“And it’s all yours. Go get your supersuit on and we can get started with calibrating the coffin to your Insight. I’ve got the list of upgrades—I forgot you never rolled back to the GEN2 interface like most of the OPs so I had to make some changes.”
“GEN3’s faster, cleaner.” Helen headed for the ready room. “I don’t suppose you managed to get a shower installed in here?”
“It’s on the list.”
“Ugh, that means we’re using the evaporative gel?” The layer of conductive gel excreted by the supersuits had to go somewhere when you changed back into your clothes. A hot shower usually did the trick, since the stuff broke up easily in water. The in-orbit labs, where showers were a luxury, had come up with a gel you squeegeed off like an all-over body sanitizer.
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