Chaos Vector

by Megan E O'Keefe

  “Commencing communication,” the ship said.

  Jules craned her neck to get a better view of the coffin. It’d pressed itself into the hatch on the back of the shuttle, but didn’t seem damaged. The status screen showed all the right numbers, including a full charge of power.

  If Nox and Arden would listen to her long enough to let her explain, then she could rendezvous with them on the Thorn. She wouldn’t be able to stay, and that would be one of the hardest conversations she’d ever have to have, but it would get her and Lolla out of the black. Once they knew about the ascension-agent, they’d have to let her go back to Rainier. For Lolla’s sake.

  The widebeam was intercepted, and Rainer’s face—or one of them, anyway—filled the screen.

  “You didn’t have to get out of my maze by breaking it, you know.”

  Jules shook as she turned around to face her. “You set the whole fucking thing to self-destruct!”

  “I couldn’t have that research falling into the wrong hands, and the station was compromised. It’s too soon.”

  “The research? They hadn’t touched it!”

  “Of course they had. Arden Wyke was in the station’s systems. Everything was compromised.”

  “What about Marya? Did she make it out?”

  “Oh yes. That girl always had an exit plan. Went straight for an evac pod the second gunfire broke out and never looked back. Deployed all the pods at once. She took what she wanted and is fleeing from me now. Isn’t that funny? All your desire to get away, and the one who wanted to be nearest to me is the one who made it out.”

  “You could have killed us all. At the very least you should have given me the trigger so that I could make sure we were clear!”

  “You worry too much. I wasn’t so foolish as to store the data in one place, and Arden did not have long enough to download anything.”

  “Data? I’m talking about the people.”

  “Does human life mean so much to you, Juliella?”

  “Does it mean anything to you?”

  “Oh dear.” She leaned toward the camera, fingers laced together under her chin in a cradle. “Are you trying to break away? To assert yourself? How much power does that shuttle have? How far can you get before you have to hook Lolla’s energy stores into the system to keep you alive as you limp toward the nearest station? Do you think you can get there before her stasis chamber gives out? Do you believe, really, really believe, that when you get where you’re going the people there can fix whatever damage was done to the little one in your desperate flight?”

  “Why must you leash me?” she demanded, body shaking with shock or the onset of sobs or both. “Why do you drag me back if you don’t care? I will betray you someday, Rainier. You must know that.”

  “And when you do, it will be on my terms, to my benefit. And there’s not a single thing your tiny brain can do to get around that. Now, if you’re done with your tantrum, prepare for capture. There’s something I want to show you.”

  The screen flicked to black before she could answer, a request for piloting control flashing on the console in the same instant. In a small corner of the display, Jules watched the Thorn pull away, widebeam never received.

  Every last scrap of strength in her drained away as she pressed accept on the nav request.

  CHAPTER 35

  PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543

  ONE MORE DECEPTION

  Sanda found that the scientists, once safely on board the shuttle, had rather a lot to say about their future. Liao, who was green in the cheeks but otherwise recovered from her shock, floated near the airlock, one hand on the grip set into the wall next to it, and stared Sanda down.

  Or tried to stare her down, anyway. Sanda switched her helmet visor to mirrored, so Liao was staring at herself.

  “We are not prisoners, Major. I understand that the station you found us working on may have deceived us regarding the legality of our activities, but we are victims, and we will not be held like cattle in a pen.”

  “I’m not saying you are prisoners.” Sanda spoke over open comm so that the others would hear her. None of them had needed serious medical care, save Sarai, and even she was sitting upright now, strapped into an inertia couch, with Dal offering her tiny sips of water from a pouch. “But I’m not letting you on board the Thorn.”

  “Why in the void not? We’re… we’re refugees, and this shuttle is only intended for short, interstation travel. We don’t have enough chairs for everyone, for stars’ sake.”

  “You’ve got enough once my crew and I return to the Thorn. We’re not abandoning you. You’re tethered to the Thorn. I swear we won’t leave you behind.”

  “You didn’t answer me why.”

  “Dr. Liao, I don’t have to. Step aside, please.”

  Her lips thinned, but even she knew that all her protests would be a pointless retreading of previous arguments. If Sanda told her why she wanted them to stay on the shuttle, Liao could use that as a lever to force her opinion. But Sanda wouldn’t. Because she didn’t need them to know that she suspected one of their number was a spy.

  Liao tried a disappointed head shake, but Sanda had grown up with two exacting fathers and was inured to that kind of thing. Not getting the reaction she wanted, Liao pushed off the door and floated out of the way. Finally.

  “Major—” Novak began.

  “Unless it’s life or death, save it.” Sanda swiped her ident over the lock and stepped through, Knuth and Nox tight on her heels, and slammed the shuttle side closed. They waited in tense silence while the sensors involved equalized the slight pressure differences between the shuttle and Thorn, then popped the door open on the Thorn. Graham stood immediately on the other side, arms crossed, chin tilted down, one eyebrow up. Shit. Liao should have tried that posture.

  “What the fuck were you thinking?” Graham said.

  “Nice to see you, too, Pops,” Sanda said, and yanked off her helmet, shaking out her sweat-sticky hair.

  “That station was dissolving under your feet and you wasted time—”

  “Saving the lives of eight innocent scientists?”

  He snapped his mouth shut.

  Sanda kicked off the floor and gave him a brief, but tight, hug before floating by. She dragged herself by the ceiling handholds toward the command deck. Her helmet, she left floating.

  “I taught you to clean up after yourself!” Graham shouted after her.

  “You know where the helmets go, old man,” Nox drawled. “We all pitch in on this bucket.”

  She grinned to herself and pushed through to the command deck, Nox on her heels, leaving poor Knuth to explain the situation to Graham. Arden met her gaze as she floated through and, after a second’s pause, grinned back.

  “He’s been waiting for hours to tell you off.”

  “Guess he’ll wait a little longer.” She swung herself down into the captain’s seat and synced her wristpad, pulling up an array of status checks on the forward screen. She frowned.

  “What’s up with our air recyclers?”

  “We’re burning through air filters,” Conway said. “We were in to repair the system when we got the call to pick you up. I think the lazy fucks in maintenance shoved a new filter in and sent us on our way. Since Knuth was with you on Janus, I sent Grippy to check out the system.”

  Anford. There was no doubt in Sanda’s mind that the general had given Sanda a ship prone to blowing through its filters to force her to land it, at some point, and let fleet engineers monkey around in the guts of her ship. The second the fleet touched the Thorn, it’d be crawling with new surveillance devices. Anford may have had time only to load the thing with surveillance software before she sent the ship to Sanda, but she’d pulled her one ace and made certain Sanda would have to give her a second chance.

  Sanda pinged Grippy, requesting a status report. A flood of data came back, but the analysis was simple enough: the HVAC system was pushing air through the filters at a higher pressure than standard, causing them to bui
ld up gunk faster.

  She pressed a comm button. “Knuth, I need you to look at the HVAC. Something’s gone fuck-y there and I don’t want fleet hands on it. I’ll send you the report from Grippy, feel free to use the bot.”

  “On it,” Knuth called back.

  “Fuck-y?” Nox asked.

  “Tits-up, sideways, gone to shit. Come on, gunhead, stay with me.”

  “Speaking of fuck-y,” Arden said, “what happened with Jules?”

  “I’ve got no goddamned idea. Insights, Nox?”

  He stripped off his weapons and began checking them before putting them back into the locker in the bulkhead. “She told us off. Looked like she was in control of that whole damned station, but…”

  “But she wasn’t,” Sanda said. He looked up from cleaning a blaster and met her gaze, obvious relief washing over him. “I don’t know Jules, but that behavior was off. She wasn’t even comfortable in her own clothes, let alone that station. Someone else was calling the shots, looking over her shoulder, and I think we all know who that was.”

  “Rainier,” Nox said. “Sanda was contacted by her through comms, and played her helmet recording back for me on the shuttle to the Thorn. I recognized her from the speakers at Udon-Voodun. It was different, distorted, but the intonation…”

  “Big word, big guy,” Arden said, but their voice had a slight tremor.

  Nox didn’t take the bait. “It was definitely her. I think Jules was trying to keep Lolla safe. She said… said to tell you to let it go.”

  Arden puffed up their cheeks and blew out a long, slow breath. “What’s going on? Why does Rainier care about keeping Jules? She has to have access to better-suited people. And why bother taking Lolla?”

  “We’d have to ask her, and even then I don’t think she’d give us a straight answer,” Sanda said heavily. “Now, we have the little problem of eight refugee scientists on our hands.”

  “There’s a fleet port not far from here,” Conway said, flicking up a map to the way station onto the main screen. “We could drop them there.”

  “If the Keepers are compromised, then much as it pains me to admit it, the fleet probably is, too. There were mercs wearing fleet uniforms on Janus.”

  Conway grimaced. “I can’t believe Anford would allow that to happen.”

  “Neither do I. Which means she doesn’t know, and we can’t be sure how far the deception has spread. I won’t drop these people off at a fleet base if there’s a chance there’s impostors there. Get me a list of civilian stations in range of our filters. Something with security.”

  “It’s a bit far, and it’ll push our recyclers, but there’s a SecureSite-operated station in this sector, back in the direction of the Ordinal–Atrux gate—Monte Station. Big enough to have permanent residents, no fleet presence. It’s privately owned and of no strategic significance. They’re gene-splice farmers.”

  “Conway, set course for Monte Station. Arden—get me a secure line to Laguna.”

  Nox and Arden exchanged a glance. “Maybe we should leave the deck for this one.”

  “If you like. Arden, make the call before you leave. Nox, get me Liao and have her waiting at the door when this call’s over. That woman knows more than she’s letting on.”

  “Understood,” they said in unison.

  While the call pushed through the gate, reaching all the way back to Laguna’s wristpad on Atrux, Sanda took a moment to center herself. Three slow, deep breaths later, her heart was still in her throat when Laguna’s face popped up on the forward screen.

  “Detective Laguna, nice of you to take my call.”

  “It came in on a priority line, Greeve, you hardly gave me a choice. But SecureSite is always happy to help our friends in the fleet in whatever way possible, blah blah blah, what do you want?”

  “Actually, I have something for you. It will soon be public knowledge that a civilian research station called Janus in the Ordinal system was found in violation of their charter. In fact, I am convinced they had no such thing and the paper trail will be revealed to be fake. Regardless, the scientists on board the station were unaware of their illegal status, and when pressured, the controlling body of the station initiated self-destruct procedures rather than submit to questioning.”

  “That sounds like a headache for the fleet, but it’s nothing to do with me.”

  “Janus Station was administered by Jules Valentine.” Sanda sent the few still images she’d grabbed from Arden’s time controlling the cameras to Laguna’s wristpad. The detective leaned forward, eyes bright with interest.

  “You have her?”

  “No. Unfortunately she escaped with at least one other accomplice.”

  Laguna closed her eyes. “Damnit. Where was she headed?”

  “Unless you have access to a gunship, Detective, I suggest you leave the pursuit to me. Valentine seems to be embedded in larger powers than anticipated for a thief from the Grotta. I do have something for you, however. The scientists.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “While I’d love to get my hands on them, Greeve, shouldn’t you hand them over to your superiors for debriefing?”

  Sanda shrugged one shoulder. “Larger powers, Laguna. Strangest thing—our air recycler is running funky and the nearest port in this particular storm is Monte Station, where I believe a large contingency of SecureSite are already in place. I have every confidence that your people will take good care of my charges while we patch up the ship and continue pursuit.”

  Laguna pursed her lips, taking Sanda’s measure. The lie was a thin one, but Sanda hoped Laguna would overlook that. She was being handed an opportunity on a silver platter, and Sanda didn’t think Laguna would miss her chance to interview people who had been in direct contact with Jules.

  “Consider me en route. In the meantime, Leon Gutarra runs things there. Old friend of mine. I’ll give him a heads-up you’re coming.”

  Sanda nodded. “Thank you. Greeve out.”

  A heavy silence pressed in on Sanda. It wasn’t a perfect silence, nothing like what she had experienced when being spaced in the scant seconds before the beat of her heart drowned out everything else. This was a missing silence. The point when, after setting a plan into motion, Bero or Tomas would interject.

  Instead, Conway tapped steadily away at her console, the movement of her fingers and the constant hum of the ship’s HVAC the only sounds. Obedience, as she’d expected from her ship’s crew in the years before Dralee. This was, or should have been, her normal. The captain’s chair was a lonely place, by design, and she had ridden that emptiness often enough before Dralee. Before Bero.

  And yet… and yet, it hurt.

  She turned her wristpad, scrolled through the fleet’s internal news stream on the search for Bero. Nothing yet. He’d locked down his comms and thrown himself into an endless night to take out a weapon that could destroy her people and, if Sanda had been right, be a lobotomized version of himself.

  He had braking procedures. She told herself he could stop, could turn back at any point. His stealth tech was cutting edge, and if Prime hadn’t been able to find him after he’d taken off in what was essentially a straight line, then he must be stealthed. He might be okay. He might.

  She touched the image of him accompanying the article, battered by his escape from the hangar, then swiped the feed away and tapped her comms.

  “Nox, I’m ready for Liao. Let her bring a second, if she wants.”

  “On it, boss.”

  Sanda brought up a priority line to Anford, only accessible through her wristpad, and waited. Bero might be okay. She might be, too.

  CHAPTER 36

  PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543

  LEVERAGE

  Tomas thought Liao was going to get them all killed. She paced the length of the shuttle, mag boots clunking, her long hair hastily tied back and sticking up from the low-g. Space made her nervous. It made many people nervous, but those people weren’t usually in leadership positions and hadn’t just lost their whole research s
tation.

  “I don’t understand why they won’t let us on the Thorn,” she said to no one in particular.

  Tomas kept his mouth shut, keeping his attention locked on his wristpad. A lot of the other scientists were trying to make calls home, but the Thorn had thrown up a comm block. Arden’s doing, no doubt. While the others attempted to get around the block, Tomas filtered through what little data he’d been able to snag from Janus while its systems were vulnerable.

  “Maybe,” Dal said, “because it’s a military vessel and we are civilians.”

  “There’s no rule against it,” she shot back.

  Dal sighed a long-suffering sigh. “No, there isn’t. But I’ve worked with fleeties before, and they don’t enjoy having civs underfoot.”

  “She’s trapped us here so she can get rid of us.”

  Tomas covered up a snort of derision with a cough.

  Dal said, “There’s no point in that. If she wanted us dead, she could have left us behind on Janus and placed the blame at Valentine’s feet.”

  “They’re probably listening to us now,” Liao said.

  “Quite likely,” Dal agreed.

  “Trying to decide if we know too much.”

  He sighed again. “Unlikely. Doctor, please, use that head I know you have. The events of the last few hours have been traumatic, I know, but you should be thinking of ways to thank the major, not to escape a punishment that isn’t coming. We did not know that Valentine acted without a charter. The major, and the fleet, will see reason.”

  Liao slumped into a chair and gripped her knees tight. “We are not innocents, are we, though?”

  Tomas kept tapping at his data, but all his attention shifted to their conversation.

  Dal said, carefully, “What do you mean?”

  “Please,” she said. “Use that brain of yours. You did not actually believe that the research we were doing was Keeper-sanctioned, did you?”

  He licked his lips. “That is what the contract I signed said.”