Nucleation

by Kimberly Unger

  “That is accurate,” Helen replied again.

  “And at the time you were unaware that there was an existing relationship between Catherine Beauchamp and Dougal Monroe.”

  Helen hesitated. She knew that Beauchamp had tried to go over Keller’s head to get assigned to the Golfball recovery mission, that she had contacted Dougal directly. She didn’t know if that counted as an “existing relationship.”

  Her advocate gave her the nod and she collected her thoughts. “I knew there was a working relationship.”

  “But nothing further?”

  “Nothing that I was aware of.”

  “This was the incident that prompted the decommission of the Golfball component of Line Drive.” It wasn’t a question, so Helen gave no reply. “Catherine Beauchamp was believed to be at least partly responsible for that incident, is that correct?”

  “As I understand it, yes.”

  “And now it is understood that Dougal may have assisted her in that task?”

  “I don’t know.” The line of questioning had shifted, Helen saw it. A quick glance at her advocate suggested he saw it too, but he nodded for her to continue on.

  “Don’t know? But the video and data logs show a very similar set of circumstances taking place before the accident that brought you here.”

  “I haven’t seen either the video or the logs,” Helen answered truthfully.

  “But you’re the one who suggested that those logs held the truth.”

  “I suggested you check because I had just regained consciousness. I didn’t want to give you bad information.”

  “So you directed us at the logs to keep us on track.”

  “A bad drop-out can cause memory issues.”

  “But you didn’t have a bad drop-out. The logs clearly show a controlled return.”

  Shit.

  “Would it interest you know that the logs and the recordings had been tampered with?”

  Her advocate took notice, shook his head at her ever so slightly. Ravennis continued his uneven pacing. It was starting to wear on her nerves.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Forensics found software running that kept Dougal from being recognized as a living entity by the maintenance and fire-fighting systems.”

  “That seems strange.” Helen already knew about Dougal’s trick; she’d taken advantage of it to unleash the eenies on him. A sick feeling twisted in her gut, but as Ravennis continued to sketch the outlines of a larger industrial espionage theory, she refused to allow herself any sympathy for either Beauchamp or Dougal.

  “It is strange. It’s also telling that the same software was used to conceal whoever accessed your coffin software in the earlier incident, the one that resulted in the spinning off of the Golfball from Line Drive.”

  Her advocate got to his feet. “Ms. Vectorovich is hardly qualified to analyze two separate incidents in which she, for all intents and purposes, was the aggrieved party.”

  “Fair enough,” Ravennis conceded. “But that does go towards my next point. If these two incidents are so closely linked, then we are looking at a single case of industrial sabotage that began while the Golfball was still under our jurisdiction on Line Drive and continued through the activities at the Recovr lab.”

  “So?” Helen couldn’t help herself. It seemed a harmless enough response, but it gave Ravennis a springboard from which to drive his point home.

  “So. Exigent circumstances. XERMo still has the right to access all of Recovr’s information under the terms of the original Line Drive agreement.”

  Oh shit.

  Her advocate shuffled his papers together and swept them into his binder in one swift motion, cutting Ravennis off. “I believe this now requires the opinion of our legal team.”

  “So, Ms. Vectorovich, do you know if Dougal was after the connection to the alien organism out on the Golfball all along? Or was that just a bonus once they’d pried the Golfball free from Line Drive?”

  “How the hell would I know that? Go ask Dougal.”

  A line of worry sketched itself across Ravennis’ forehead, very brief, very fast. They don’t have Dougal. The realization was like a blow. If Beauchamp and Dougal were still able to act, if Beyond Blue was protecting them, then everything was still at risk.

  “That’s enough, Ms. Vectorovich,” her advocate warned.

  “I presume you know something. You were the one who turned on the fire suppression system in the first place.” Ravennis directed his gaze directly at Helen. Helen met it without blinking, despite the stab of guilt. She wasn’t sure why they were keeping her isolated, but she was absolutely sure that she’d done what she had to in order to stay alive. She wasn’t about to let anyone get any traction on that point.

  “Not another word from either of you.” The advocate stepped between Helen and the attaché. “We can start again after legal brings us their assessment.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  It was just over two weeks before Helen finally returned to Recovr—two weeks of enforced downtime and a series of interviews with XERMo that never seemed to go anywhere but circles. They knew about the Scale, that was clear, but Helen couldn’t get a handle on who had told them or what they were planning to do about it. She was unable to contact or connect with Ivester or Hofstaeder, and the feeling of being shut out began to rattle around inside her head, trying to find a place to stick tight. Helen was cut off as completely as they could keep her.

  Her union advocate continued to argue that keeping her under quarantine conditions was inhumane, but XERMo just quoted laws and statutes and ignored her advocate. In turn, Helen crushed her guilt about Dougal and allowed them to chase the “industrial accident” line of reasoning. She was under no obligation to compromise herself, employers be damned.

  Helen had been assigned a new XERMo doctor after Marshall had been too kind. The new captain was an unsmiling woman with an unsmiling manner who failed, repeatedly, to keep Helen locked out of XERMo’s network, thanks to the tablet that Marshall had loaned Helen for personal use. Helen had been able to watch, helplessly, as Catherine Beauchamp vanished into the wind and Beyond Blue closed ranks around her. Both sides committed legal teams to what was shaping up to be an epic fight and XERMo was squarely in the middle, trying to get their hands on every piece of tech that had even come in contact with the Scale.

  After completing every list and checking off every one of XERMo’s boxes, when Helen finally stepped back through Recovr’s doors, she found it empty, the coffin completely disassembled and spread in parts across the lab.

  “What the hell?” she asked, half to herself, half to the empty room. She opened up her Insight, checked to see if there were any messages, any information. She had gone directly from the hospital at County to the Far Reaches campus simply to reconnect with James, to get her Insight access back. The Far Reaches AI informed her that neither Hofstaeder nor Ivester were available or on the Far Reaches campus at all, so she’d headed to the lab to see what was left.

  “We have a problem.” Ivester’s voice sounded in the air. Helen looked around the room, using the Insight to locate the source.

  Office, of course. She nudged the half-open door with a foot, peeked inside. The man himself was seated on the floor, making adjustments to some piece of hardware. The desk surface was covered with a dozen or so of the coffin’s drives and other internal parts, all in varying states of disassembly.

  “What kind of problem?” Helen asked. “And why does James think you’re off-site?” She entered the room slowly, a little suspiciously. Ivester’s normally pale skin tone had picked up an undercurrent of grey, the kind that meant not enough sleep and probably not enough anything else, either.

  “I’m hiding. So’s Hofstaeder, at least for a couple days.”

  “Isn’t this a bit obvious as a hiding place?” Helen closed the door behind her a
nd moved to the desk, shoving the coffin parts out of the way so she’d have a place to sit. “Anyone who knows you is going to look here first.”

  “James has informed the authorities that I’m out of the country in Tuyen for the next week. They’re probably going to try to arrest me when I show up at the airport coming back.”

  “ARREST? What did I miss while I was out?”

  “We managed to extract that communication from the images you sent back. It was, in fact, an offer to open a dialogue.”

  He paused while he tried to press a circuit board back into place.

  “But there was a bit of bad code couched inside.” Ivester gave her a rueful grin. “So it seems the question of whether the Scale are friendly or not still remains to be answered.”

  Helen remained silent, waiting on the rest of the explanation. It was coming. Ivester got to his feet, dropping the part he’d been adjusting onto the desk with its sibs.

  “What this means, however, is that I had to let XERMo back in, despite your best efforts. We had to get through to Beyond Blue to get a crack at those missing NAV particles and we have to figure out how the hell we reboot a first contact situation.”

  “And now they’re going to arrest you?” Helen asked, disbelievingly. “That’s a bit of an asshole move.”

  “Well, they’re a bit pissed that we did an end run around them in the first place.”

  “And that’s why the coffin’s in a thousand pieces?”

  “Well, as of now, you are the only person we know of to ever successfully waldo an alien life form. I’m trying to figure out just how that happened.”

  “Before they arrest you,” Helen repeated.

  It didn’t seem fair. They had done their best, their level best, to manage crazy circumstances. Dougal’s betrayal had blindsided them all. Despite surviving his horrific encounter with the maintenance eenies, the rogue analyst was now wanted for poisoning Helen’s coffin. Twice. Beyond Blue still had the NAV particle from Myrian but were denying everything. Catherine Beauchamp had been quietly spirited away to some kind of corporate-run recovery program before the authorities could even think about questioning her. The idea that her rival was taking advantage of some cushy corporate getaway set Helen’s teeth on edge, but she’d been far too busy to pursue any kind of revenge just yet.

  “Well, I may have been exaggerating a bit, or at least I hope I am. The point is, I can’t find anything unique in the coffin hardware or software that would let you make a connection like that.”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “If I’m right, and forgive me if I hope I’m not, but if I am, then it looks like you might be the only person we have that can talk to the Scale.”

  “But Cat—”

  “Catherine Beauchamp was communicating with the Scale, yes, but that was just delivering commands. I’ve had James dig through the data you brought back, and she wasn’t doing what you were doing. Dougal might know something, but he’s under arrest right now and not saying anything to anybody.”

  “You’ve been busy.” In her mind’s eye, Helen went back over the moments when she connected to the Scale, trying to remember if she’d tried anything different, done anything unusual.

  “The point is, XERMo’s going to need you too. I’m trying to keep the team intact. I want us to be the core of any diplomatic group that XERMo puts together to meet with the Scale. Are you in?”

  Helen spent a long minute considering, but really, there was only one answer.

  “I’m going to need a raise.”

  Kimberly Unger made her first videogame back when the 80-column card was the new hot thing and followed that up with degrees in English/Writing from UC Davis and Illustration from the Art Center College of Design. Nowadays she works with bleeding-edge VR, lectures on the intersection of art and code for UCSC’s master’s program, and writes science fiction about how all these app-driven superpowers are going to change the human race.

  TL;dr: She writes about fast robots, big explosions, and space things.