Demas stiffened. “Okonkwo is allowing the spin of the deadgate only under the pretense that—”
“What the fuck?” Nox said. “So where did you get ’em then, a Ouija board?”
She held on to the handles on the ceiling for dear life. “I found them on board Bero, in a lab laid out identically to the one on Janus. Lavaux wanted Bero because he believed Bero still had those coordinates.”
Demas’s eyes narrowed slightly.
Conway said, “Why not tell us that, Commander? Don’t make much of a difference.”
She took a long, slow breath. “Because the coordinates were hidden inside of a Keeper chip. I believe this chip belonged to the last known member of the Acolytes to visit Ada, Rayson Kenwick. I believe Keeper Lavaux funneled intelligence and money to Icarion, allowing them to construct Bero, in exchange for the capture and return of Kenwick. I also believe the Icarions kept Kenwick instead, betraying that arrangement, which was why Lavaux was so keen to get inside Bero.”
“That’s a hell of an accusation, Commander,” Demas said. “I know the man tried to kill you, but selling intelligence to our enemies—”
“Demas, I’m not even sure he sold it. He very well might have given it away for the chance to get at Kenwick.”
Arden leaned back and laced their fingers behind their head, pressing their lips together in thought. “There was a lot of arguing on the net about the Icarion problem—not the planet’s rights and taxation stuff but the actual tech—once they confirmed the existence of Bero. Icarion was having problems keeping the hab domes they bought from Prime working. It didn’t make sense that they’d come out of nowhere with a state-of-the-art ship, especially considering the lengths Prime goes to keep autonomous intelligences from forming. Lavaux feeding them the technology for the ship that housed Bero would explain a lot.”
Demas flicked through their wristpad. “Kenwick was active decades ago, he shouldn’t even be alive.”
“He very much wasn’t,” Sanda said.
Demas looked up from the pad, met her gaze, and blinked slowly. She catalogued every twitch of his muscles, for how he reacted now spelled out how much she could trust him once he understood the full scope of what she was about to reveal. His expression remained an implacable cipher.
“How were the coordinates recovered from the chip if the Keeper was dead? To access the data on a chip, the password must be thought by a living being,” Demas said.
A cold feeling of dread swept through all those on deck. For Icarion to have those coordinates meant that they had broken Keeper technology. That, somehow, they could get a Keeper to image the correct password and receive the data hidden there—whether by force or, more likely, social engineering. But Keepers were trained to resist all those things, and the passwords couldn’t be imaged without complete intent. So if they hadn’t broken the Keeper, then it followed that they had broken the encryption on the chip itself, and that, as far as anyone in the universe knew, was impossible.
“Funny thing.” Her voice cracked, her extremities felt too heavy. It was a very good thing that she wouldn’t have to face them when doing this, because she wasn’t sure she could stand to see their expressions. “They popped it in my head.”
She turned and pushed her hair up to reveal the telltale Keeper scar lurking below her scalp line. The foundation she’d used to obscure the scar wiped off easily enough as she scraped her thumbnail across it.
“Impossible,” Demas said, mostly to himself.
Sharp intakes of breath followed from most of the crew. Sanda’s head was buzzing too much for her to pinpoint it all, but the general feeling in the air on the deck was one of shock. She couldn’t blame them. It’d taken hours for her to stop shaking whenever she thought of the secret hardwired to her brain stem. Even thinking of the chip still threatened to bring her headaches back.
“That is so cool,” Arden said.
Sanda dropped her hair, turning back around to face her crew. Nox’s hand had moved away from his blaster, his arms crossed defensively. Arden leaned forward with bright, fascinated eyes. Conway’s mouth was open, and when she noticed Sanda looking, she snapped it shut and leaned back, shaking her head. Knuth was already looking something up on his wristpad, and Liao had the same fascinated look Arden did.
Demas had shut down, his face going blank. “Even with the chip implanted, you would have to know the password to get the data out.”
“Yeah. Icarion had that problem. My memory of that time was scrubbed so many times I don’t—” She grimaced and shook her head. “It gives me debilitating headaches to think about it. But Bero was convinced they never got me to image the password. Icarion does not have the coordinates.”
“And yet, you do.”
She smiled slyly. “I do. I accessed the data myself, at a secure Prime facility, then waited until I could give the coords to someone I trusted to keep them from being spied on while having them located. That was Arden. The souls on this ship, Anford, and Okonkwo are the only people in existence who know that those coordinates are anything worth looking at. Lavaux wanted them. He did not get them, nor did his wife.”
“So we’re not walking into an ambush,” Nox said.
“Truthfully, I have no idea what we’re walking into. The records on the deadgate are sparse and boring. The gate remains offline, so I can only assume Rainier hasn’t used her swarm to spin it up. I have no hint as to Kenwick’s goals aside from the fact that he was probably an Acolyte and wanted this data kept from Lavaux for some reason.”
“I have to ask,” Demas said carefully. “Is it only the coordinates on that chip? Kenwick was a Keeper. There should be gate schematics as well. If you accessed gate data…”
“Then you’d have to execute me. I can’t prove it to you, not here without a scanner, but as far as I know the only thing on this chip is those coordinates. Kenwick must have wiped all the data off at some point and, while I can take some guesses as to why he would do that—fear of being discovered while hiding in Icarion, for a start—I can’t tell you why, and I can’t guarantee that.”
“What the fuck is so important about a location that it needs to be hidden in a Keeper’s skull?” Arden asked.
“I don’t know,” Sanda said, “but don’t you all want to find out?”
CHAPTER 51
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
BOOZE WORKS IN MYSTERIOUS WAYS
Biran took another long sip of something clear and harsh and far too strong for him and squinted at Vladsen across the room. Nominally, alcohol wasn’t allowed on a research station like AST-4501, but in places where alcohol was banned, it had a remarkable ability to turn up in larger and stronger quantities than usual supply could account for.
They sat on their respective beds in the room, lights cranked up to full daylight, a bottle of something the GC obtained from station stores on a table between them. The Taso had better booze, but this… stuff… felt appropriate at the moment. Biran’s stomach would regret that decision tomorrow, but now, he didn’t care.
“Do you think there’s anything to it?” Vladsen asked.
And this was why Biran had asked for the hard stuff. Even Speakers needed help to loosen their own tongues every so often. “There is something I have to tell you, but you won’t like it, and will probably think I’ve gone as mad as Hitton.”
“Well, now I must hear it.”
“This is not the first credible account I’ve heard of guardcore being where they’re not supposed to be,” Biran said.
“Credible? While I trust Keeper Sato’s instincts, we must remember her account is a secondhand report of one woman’s paranoia.”
“Keeper Hitton’s paranoia. I don’t like her, but she’s not easily misled.”
“These missions take their toll. The isolation can creep up on you.”
“You’re starting to sound like one of my press briefings.”
Vladsen waved his glass and took a long drink. “It’s not incorrect.”
“No, but in this case, I think it is wrong.”
“We could ask Hitton herself. Judge her reaction.”
“She would shut us down immediately and pack us back on the Taso without so much as a fare-thee-well, and I wouldn’t blame her. It’s exactly what I would do if I were concerned we had a rogue GC on station and two Protectorate Keepers showed up to stick their noses in things. We could very well take what’s a carefully balanced situation and flip it over into violence. If three Protectorate members died here, Icarion would be destroyed within hours. No hesitation, no deliberation.”
Vladsen swirled his half-empty glass. “Meanwhile, this gate project will drag on so long that Icarion will think we’re stalling purposefully, and the war will go hot again. Icarion will be destroyed within hours of firing the first shot.”
“Right. We have to get Hitton to use the survey bots.”
“And if she’s right, and there’s a rogue guardcore here tampering with the results?”
“There’s only one of them, and we brought four of our own.”
“Ah but, Speaker, you said you had heard of another account. What if one of our four is another saboteur?”
This was why Biran had ordered the stronger booze. “I hoped you might be able to shed some light on that, Vladsen. You said you had heard rumors…”
He blinked slowly, glanced at the door, and shook his head. “Heard that, did you? It seems my guard is getting rusty. Alas, I know nothing substantial. Keeper Lavaux surrounded himself with the younger, rising stars of Keeperdom. Those of us who fell into his good graces earlier on spent more time with him in private company. We… overheard things, sometimes. Arguments with his wife about a GC being in the wrong place, nothing more.
“But you were also one of his rising stars, Greeve, and you said you’d heard of another incident.”
Biran grimaced. “Nothing to do with Lavaux. Do you remember the call I took privately before we landed?”
“I do. You looked positively ill.”
“It was Sanda. She had what looked like a hostile GC ship barreling toward a civilian station. When I checked the records, there was no indication of a GC operation in the area. As soon as I realized”—he shuddered—“I put out a distress call. Okonkwo answered it. The Prime Director messaged me after landing to confirm Sanda’s safety, and that the guardcore were not our people.”
“Okonkwo knows about these phantoms?”
Biran cough-laughed and took another drink. “I regret to inform you she seemed unsurprised.”
“Did she have any idea what they want, where they come from?”
“No.” Biran stared into the contents of his glass. “Though it’s possible she wouldn’t tell me, or doesn’t yet know.”
Vladsen set his glass down with a soft clink on the nightstand. “Speaker, what do we do?”
Biran swallowed a hard gulp of booze. “I don’t know. I wish this asteroid hadn’t come from Anaia. I wish Hitton hadn’t entered this mission paranoid, because she knew the source of the data. Anaia was… Anaia was good. I don’t know why she did what she did, I wish to fucking everything that I could understand why she turned, but I don’t believe she had anything to do with rogue guardcore… And if that makes me seditious then fuck it, rip my chip, too.”
“I… Christ, who am I to judge you, Speaker Greeve? My truth is, I only wish I could be half so brave as you.”
Biran looked up, and found Vladsen staring at the floor between his boots, his skin sallow from paleness, his curls hiding the set of his eyes. Invisible weight pressed down his shoulders, bent his back.
“Shit. I’m an asshole. I’ve opened old wounds for you. I am… Well, I’m not sorry about Lavaux, but I am sorry he was your friend, and that his loss pains you, Keeper Vladsen.”
“Rostam,” he said.
“What?”
“My first name is Rostam, please use it in private. These titles are just more layers of obfuscation…” He sighed, brushing away a thought with the side of his hand. “I believed Lavaux to be a good man, too. Whatever his real game was, whatever his reasons for attacking your sister… In retrospect, knowing all I know about him, I don’t know what he was truly working toward. I thought he wanted to make things better, for everyone. I believed in him. Feels fantastically stupid now. If I had any spine at all, I’d hire a Nazca to unearth his real plans.”
“If you’d done that, then we couldn’t have afforded to crew the Taso,” Biran said wryly.
He snort-laughed. “Ah, yes. At the very least I can finance the ventures of better men.”
“This ‘better man,’” he said with deep-felt bitterness, “was too self-involved to notice his best friend hurting. I should have seen it. I should have known when Anaia turned traitor… I should know why.”
Biran rubbed the side of his face, scorching hot to the touch, and hunched over, feeling tears welling in his eyes and hating it, because he shouldn’t be feeling these things now. He needed to, as Ilan said, think like Sanda. Needed to put a lid on the hurt a little while longer.
And, if he were being honest with himself, the tears were forcing their way out now because he knew, deep down, he would never know why Anaia had done it. Never understand why Anaia sat in that room on the Taso and worked to keep Biran’s sister in Icarion’s hands while his heart was breaking to get Sanda back.
“Speaker.” The bed beside him sank under Vladsen’s weight. His hand, light as a breath, settled on the small of Biran’s back.
“Biran,” he said.
“Biran,” Rostam repeated. The hand grew heavier. “This war has made assholes of us all, hasn’t it?”
A knot eased in Biran’s chest. He let out a long, slow breath, emptying himself of an unseen weight, and dragged the back of his hand across his eyes, scrubbing the tears away. “Dios, I want it to end already.”
Rostam chuckled quietly.
“What?”
Biran looked up and found Rostam’s face startlingly close. His brown eyes were shaded beneath thick lashes, as they always were, but this close Biran could make out the streaks of golden-green that meandered through them, subtle but gripping. Why was he thinking so much about Rostam’s eyes when… Fresh heat spread into his cheeks and Biran swallowed.
“I’ve only heard you let out a dios with family,” Rostam said. The corners of his eyes crinkled when he smiled, and while he was too young to have decided about letting his wrinkles come in, Biran found himself hoping he would. Rostam’s gaze slipped from his, tracking Biran’s face, perhaps making similar conclusions about his countenance.
“I suppose I’m comfortable right now.”
That gaze snapped back to his with shocking intensity. “I suppose I am, too.”
Oh, but this was a very, very bad idea. Keepers did not consort. Especially not Protectorate members. There were rules. Laws. Presumably Prime had very good reasons for them, but Biran couldn’t think of any as his head canted, ever so slightly, forward, asking a silent question. Rostam answered.
Every sense in Biran’s body surged. The heat of Rostam’s nearness subsumed him, the scent of his hair—clean and slightly beeswaxy—mingled with the sharp tang of alcohol in both their breaths and the impossible softness of his lips until Biran’s chest felt so full of hope and urgency he thought he’d laugh or cry or scream to bleed off some of the wellspring of emotion.
Rostam pulled back. It took every ounce of control Biran possessed to keep from throwing himself after him.
“I—” Rostam cleared a rough throat. “I’m sorry, Biran. You were hurting, and I shouldn’t have—”
Biran brushed a loose curl behind Rostam’s ear. “Don’t. Never apologize for that.”
He flushed and dropped his gaze, lashes obscuring the newfound enchantment of his eyes. There was so much detail to Rostam that Biran didn’t know. So very much he wanted to learn.
“There are laws,” Rostam said.
“There are,” Biran said, even as the fresh burst of life within him was caged i
n cold iron.
“We’re… very drunk.”
A poor lie. A drunk Keeper was a security risk, and while they could feel buzzed and sometimes ill from overconsumption, their metabolisms were all boosted so that they could never get properly wasted. Many Keepers spent their last night before chip insertion getting blackout drunk, because they knew they could never do it again.
“We are,” he agreed anyway, and took his hand away from Rostam’s ear.
Rostam’s hand shot out and caught his, firmly. The cold bars of Biran’s inner cage rattled.
“Rost—” He cut himself off. Clenched his jaw to hold back.
“I like that. Rost.”
“You are… I am…” He didn’t even know what he had meant to say. He knew what he wanted to say, but that… That couldn’t be. Dios, but that sly smile of his was not helping matters. Biran’s hand began to sweat and, embarrassed, he tried to pull it away but Rost held on.
“You aren’t making this easy,” Biran whispered.
“I’m so sorry.” Rost released his hand and stood, backing away. Biran felt the distance growing between them like a chasm of cold. Rost tugged at the neckline of his lightweight armor, and Biran was suddenly very glad that the guardcore had made them don body armor before entering the station. Prime jumpsuits didn’t leave a lot to the imagination.
“Don’t be,” Biran said firmly. “I mean that.”
Rost stopped pulling on his collar and let his arms hang at his sides. “Thank you. I mean that.”
Heat traveled up Biran’s neck once more and he grunted, standing, shaking his legs to get the blood back in them as he paced around the small room. “Right. Okay. We need to… to do something about those survey bots.”
“Huh. I’d been thinking we need to do something about Hitton’s extra GC, if there even is one, but you’re right. It’s the bots themselves that are key. They’re the only thing that can speed up the survey, and that is our primary goal here. If there is a false guardcore about, they would not have had the chance to sabotage all the bots.”
Biran had put little thought into what he’d said. He’d just needed to say something, to keep himself from giving in to the song his body was singing, and the bots had been the first thing to come to mind. But Rost—no, Vladsen. Keeper Vladsen was on to something. The survey bots only collected data, they couldn’t do any harm aside from returning bad results, and in large enough numbers bad data would stand out like a sore thumb.
Chaos Vector Page 35
