Chaos Vector

by Megan E O'Keefe

  “We have the permissions required to activate them, we can get those bots turned on and sent on their merry way to do the work they came here for. They should already be preset with what they’re supposed to do, literally all we’d have to do would be turn them on and let them go do their job,” Biran said.

  Vladsen frowned. “I doubt Keeper Hitton will allow it.”

  “It’s unfortunate, but I agree. We will have to ask her forgiveness rather than her permission. Maybe then she will explain herself.”

  “Biran,” Vladsen said gently, “you are a man quick to act, I grant you that, but moving without giving Keeper Hitton a chance to explain sounds hasty even for you.”

  Biran froze. Vladsen was right. His head had been so full of… of other feelings, he hadn’t thought clearly. “Yes, of course, thank you. We will make every effort to listen to her and convince her, but this project needs to move forward yesterday because I won’t… I won’t have Icarion’s blood on my hands.”

  Vladsen arched one thick brow at him. “Even after what they did to your sister?”

  Biran froze for a moment. There was a weight to Vladsen’s words that implied he knew, or suspected, more than the official reports stated. He had been close to Lavaux. It was possible he knew about the chip… Or that his words simply sounded heavier to Biran, now that Vladsen had shifted around the compass of his emotional life.

  “Yes. Even after all of that. A small fraction of Icarion did those things. Not the people. Not the civilians.”

  Vladsen smoothed his hair. “Well then. We had better hurry. The clock is ticking.”

  Biran pressed the comm in his ear that connected him to the crew of the Taso. “Scalla, can you get me every loading and unloading bot we have sent over to these coords? Unpackers, too, if we got ’em.”

  “This is a private ship, Greeve. We don’t have a lot, but I’ll send you what we have.”

  “Thanks.”

  Vladsen reached around Biran to swipe his ident over the door lock, and as he did so a faint gust of air brought the scent of his hair back to Biran’s nose, sending a fresh wave of electric tingles across his skin. He closed his eyes briefly, and willed himself to focus. When he opened his eyes again, the four GC had turned to regard him.

  “Right,” he said firmly. “We have a plan.”

  INTERLUDE

  PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543

  PEOPLE SAY THEY’RE DANGEROUS

  In net space, Arden stared at a conglomerate network of information so vast the sheer scope made it meaningless, and tried not to scream. They’d been here, so often they’d lost count, though they could pull the logs, and the data never told them anything of import. Never told them anything real.

  For these slivers of information were all the logs Arden could glean from networks private and public about the life of Rainier Lavaux. Facts. Everything they’d gathered was a fact. The places she’d lived, the businesses she’d owned, the people she’d worked with, and even a few shopping habits and food preferences, and it all added up to a real person, the wife of a Keeper, living out her life in the framework of Prime.

  But facts could lie. Arden knew that better than most and still, still, they hated every last molecule of her digital breadcrumbs. She’d cleaned too well. There was nothing in the data aside from that brief glimpse of her boarding Janus, of her walking into the warehouses, that indicated Rainier Lavaux had anything to do with secret research stations. With the coordinates hidden in Sanda’s head. Every single pattern-crunching algorithm they’d ever run was useless against the false life Rainier had built for herself.

  People couldn’t hide themselves from Arden, not digitally. But she could.

  Even Jules, working under Rainier, had disappeared from the digital world. Arden was sure that fake documents stating the charter of Janus had to exist somewhere to have been used to convince the scientists, but they couldn’t find them.

  Even a deep dive into Liao’s wristpad—without permission—had given them nothing. Liao, for all intents and purposes, stopped existing after she’d left her fringer colony for Janus. Jules had stopped existing after she’d left them. Left Atrux. For a second, they considered feeding the data to the intelligence to see what that being made of it all, but that would be unfair to the nascent mind. The last thing they wanted to do was accidentally train an AI to think like Rainier.

  Frustration ebbed as Arden’s thoughts shifted to the people in Rainier’s orbit. They’d dug into all the public people, dug into Jules and Liao and the other scientists. But they had a new name, a half-forgotten name.

  They sent their bot scripts out to gather all available information on Marya Page. Information flooded to them within seconds: youngest daughter of Keeper Page of Ordinal, wild, party girl, trouble for the family, a brilliant biochemist despite all of that. The thread of information wove on, and Arden ate it up with hungry eyes, wondering.

  Rainier’s circle was tight. A woman like Marya didn’t fit. She was a little too loose, a little too idealistic. Born to privilege, Marya wouldn’t have been cowed by Rainier’s resources. Rainier must have needed her for something specific, but Rainier had fucked up, because a woman like Marya Page was a liability. And now Arden had a thread to pull.

  Arden brought up the footage they’d skimmed from Janus and adjusted one of their unique individual identifying neural nets to focus on all sightings of Marya Page. That woman appeared across their workstation in stutters and stops—caught taking a step down this hall, reaching for her wristpad there. Arden tracked her path across the station that day, followed her straight to the evac pod she’d thrown herself into the moment Janus started shuddering.

  Tracked her to the moment she initiated launch for all evac pods, trying to leave Jules to die.

  The evac pod disappeared from the data as soon as it blew free of Janus, the Thorn hadn’t picked up its transponder, but physics was physics, and after a few quick calculations, Arden followed the pod’s likely trajectory to a ship transponder that did show up in public databases.

  They let out a slow breath, though breathing was pointless in the net. Jules’s escape shuttle had dead-ended with what they suspected was one of Rainier’s guardcore ships. The ship that picked Marya up was civilian, registered to one of her fellows from university.

  After that, tracking Marya’s location to a private station hugging the back of an unremarkable asteroid was easy. Arden pinged Nox, and by the time they were reaching up to take their goggles off, Nox was coming through their door.

  “What is it?” Nox asked, and while they were supposed to be going to bed for the night, Arden noted the rifle strapped to his back.

  “I found Marya Page,” Arden said.

  “The comms woman from Janus?” Nox frowned and sank down into a crouch, arms resting on his knees. “She with Jules?”

  Arden’s throat was paper-dry. They reached for a pouch of water and chugged it down before answering, wondering how long they’d been absorbed in the net. They hoped it wasn’t too late; they still had a few things to work out with Sanda.

  “I don’t think so. Rainier must have intercepted Jules’s shuttle, as she went dark on the net again, but Marya got picked up by a school friend and she’s on a private station now. I’m waiting to see if she picks up any of my fishing attempts so I can get inside the station’s systems, but I don’t think she will. After she reached the station, she went dark. I think she’s hiding from Rainier… Just not very well.”

  “So we pick her up, see what she has to say. Maybe she can tell us what the fuck’s got Jules so spooked she’s working for Rainier.”

  “Maybe,” Arden said, “but after what Sanda just told us? There’s no way in hell we’re going to turn around to check out that asteroid. We’re going through that deadgate, and as much as I want to know what’s happened to Jules and Lolla, I agree the deadgate’s a priority. I think you agree, too.”

  Nox’s nose crinkled and he scowled off into the middle distance. “Yeah, I fucking
agree. So what? I know you’re thinking something, Arden, or you wouldn’t have dragged my ass out of bed.”

  “You weren’t in bed.”

  “You didn’t know that.”

  “We’ve been living on top of each other for two years. You’re not the gruff cipher you think you are. I called you here because the thing I’m about to do, you won’t like it, but I need you to understand why I’m doing it.”

  That got his full attention. Nox turned his gaze back to Arden, brows up. “Since when do you ask for moral permission before you do something?”

  Arden blinked and rubbed at the dent left by the net goggles around their eyes. “I… don’t know. Now, I guess. Look, when Rainier goes looking for Marya, she will find her. I want to speed that timeline up.”

  “Why? If Marya’s hiding from her, she’s not on board with whatever the fuck Rainier is doing. Shore up her defenses for her, help her hide. Maybe we can use her.”

  Arden licked their lips. How could they explain in a way that wouldn’t make Nox see them like a monster?

  “I can’t. She’s left too big a trail, and I’ve dug through her background. She’s a rich party girl, she won’t take my advice, and she won’t lie low for long. I need a thread on Rainier, Nox. If we’re ever going to find Jules, I need Rainier to make digital contact with one of my viruses. If I feed her information on Marya, she’ll have to take it.”

  Nox’s eyes narrowed. “You’ve tried to get her to take your bait multiple times. It never works.”

  “I’ve never had something she wants until now.”

  “Rainier could—what do you call it?—sandbox the data, or whatever. You could throw Page’s ass in a fire for nothing.”

  “I could. That fire’s coming for her regardless.”

  Nox stared at them, and Arden’s skin crawled from his scrutiny. “You want to hurt this woman. Why?”

  Their fingers clenched, one fist crushing the band of their net goggles. The hot taste of revenge burned in their mouth like ashes.

  “She fucked Jules, Nox. I don’t know why she did it, but on her way out, when she jumped in that evac pod, she hit the trigger to blow them all. Whatever was going on there, I don’t know. But Marya Page wanted Jules to die on Janus. The only reason Jules survived is because she went for a shuttle instead. Maybe we can’t keep Jules safe from Rainier, but… But we can keep her safe from Page. I can.”

  Nox’s jaw tightened, the veins in his neck standing out as he turned his head. Not to look away—Nox didn’t shy from eye contact—but to admire, briefly, the lean lines of the rifle peeking over his shoulder.

  “Do it. Let me know if she takes the bait.”

  “I will. Thank you.”

  Nox stood in one fluid motion and shrugged. “Nothing to thank me for. You would have done it anyway. But I’m glad you brought me in.”

  Arden smiled thinly and nodded. “True. Onward to the deadgate?”

  “Onward,” Nox said, putting his hands on his hips. “I don’t know how we got tangled up in this shit, but I really want to see where it leads.”

  “Me too.”

  Nox hesitated a moment, cleared his throat, then gave Arden a rough pat on the shoulder and left the room. Arden stared at their wristpad in silence for a long while. They didn’t need the net goggles to do this next step. The truth was, they’d already packaged up the data and wrapped it in a nice digital bow for Rainier.

  When Nox said Arden would have done it anyway, he’d been right. But Arden had hoped for a feeling of relief in sharing the burden. Not absolution, they weren’t that naive, but in pressing that button Arden was bringing death to a woman they knew only through the digital fingerprints she’d left behind. They’d be doing it to protect Jules from further attacks by Marya, but still. Murder was murder, no matter how many proxies worked in-between.

  Foolish of them, to think sharing the knowledge with Nox would make things easier. It wasn’t the first time they’d manipulated data to bring about death. It seemed very unlikely that it would be the last. They hoped it wouldn’t be the last.

  On a whim, Arden added a quick tag to the data: You’re next, Rainier, then hit send. A weight left their shoulders with the package. They stood, stretched their arms above their head, and put Marya Page out of their mind.

  There was another loose thread in the universe Arden wanted to pull on, and they suspected Sanda held the spool. She just didn’t know it yet.

  CHAPTER 52

  PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543

  KNOCK, KNOCK

  Sanda spent that night lying awake in her sleep cocoon, listening for the knock that would come at her door. She wasn’t sure who it would be, or if they’d be dangerous, but she was certain that after her revelations, someone would be restless. Someone would need to know more, and privately.

  She half expected Demas to come to her in the night, break in and put a bullet in her skull, so she’d slapped a stimpatch on her arm and curled up, browsing the net for any alerts about Bero or Tomas or the Nazca while sending Biran stupid cat CamCasts. The knock came three hours after lights out.

  “Hey, uh, Commander?” Arden’s voice, soft and hissy as they tried to both whisper and be heard.

  She tapped the button on her wristpad to unlock the door and brought the lights up to a low level. “Come in, Arden. What’s up?”

  They’d thrown a thick robe over their jumpsuit and left the mag boots in their room, their hair a ruffled mess as they pulled themself in and shut the door behind them.

  “Hey, sorry to bother you, it’s just… We reach the gate in six hours, right? And considering you trusted us all with your secret, I thought…”

  She blinked. This wasn’t the late-night tête-à-tête she’d suspected would come up. “Is everything all right?”

  They chuckled ruefully and shook their head. “More than likely everything is roses and I’m a paranoid fool.”

  “But?”

  “But I… I found something, a few weeks ago. Something I’ve been keeping to myself because it’s the kind of thing that gets destroyed if other people find it, but I’m thinking… I’m thinking maybe it’s looking for you.”

  “Arden. It’s late and you need to be way clearer than that.”

  “Right. Right. Sorry. You got a net headset? This will be easier if I can show you.”

  “Yeah, sure.” She pulled herself out of the cocoon and kicked over to the locked bulkhead that stowed her various electronics, swiped her wristpad over the lock, and pulled out a set of goggles.

  “Those look brand-new,” Arden said, pulling themself over to get a closer look. “They come with the ship or something?”

  “Yeah, actually.” She turned them over in her hands, rubbing her thumb along the rubberized headband. “I don’t use goggles much for the net, my wristpad works fine.”

  “I know at least a dozen people whose heads would spin to hear you say that.” They shook their head and twisted the band around to get a look at the serial number. “At least these are nice. Prime doesn’t skimp on their tech, do they?”

  “Things Prime doesn’t skimp on: warships and Keeper station supplies. Where do you want me to meet you when I log in?”

  Arden smiled to themself. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll find you.”

  “Show-off,” she said, but they’d already pulled their own well-worn goggles over their eyes. Sanda may not know a thing about net goggles aside from the basics, but she knew a thing or two about materials, and Arden’s goggles weren’t cheap. She shouldn’t have been surprised, but somehow she’d expected Arden to have a hacked-together, Frankenstein affair, not a high-end model. Then again, it wasn’t like she could see into the hardware—or would even know what she was looking at if she did.

  Sanda looped her wrist through a strap on the wall and pulled the goggles down over her eyes. Her personal net space lit up with mountains of notifications, stacked like the crates in her dads’ warehouse. The visual was a preference she’d always felt comforted by.

>   Everything was tinted by a rosy glow some hacker had thrown over everything years ago. There was a patch for it, to re-skin the space in Prime cyan or whatever aesthetic pleased her, but she kind of liked the incongruity of the soft color in such an inherently geometrical space, and so she’d left it.

  None of the notifications had any of the priority indicators she’d set for contacts from her family or certain associates, so she ignored them and pulled up the Thorn’s systems, setting an alert to tell her if anyone came near her room or touched her door.

  Somewhere in the middle of the crates, she heard a laugh. Even though she was expecting it, her digital skin crawled.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Arden said. They came strolling through the warehouse, trailing their fingers against pink-hued cargo pallets. Their net representation looked very much like how they did in real life, but with a certain transparent quality that gave the illusion that they flickered in and out of reality with every other breath.

  “I’m ninety-nine percent sure that accessing a citizen’s personal net space without invitation is illegal.”

  “Your security is garbage, out-of-the-box nonsense. I hope you don’t store anything important in here.”

  “Nothing that important,” she said, feeling stung. She used the net only for research and messaging, and she wouldn’t put anything sensitive into a message.

  “Good. Christ.” They stared off into space, probably using a mod to see the code Sanda kept skinned in the warehouse visual. “I can’t believe it’s still pink. This place is an open door. I can lock this down for you.” Their fingertips twitched. “I need to lock this down for you.”

  She leaned against a crate and crossed her arms. “I like the pink. Wouldn’t it look weird if I suddenly got security conscious?”