Chaos Vector

by Megan E O'Keefe

  “Greeve, I need you to power down that unknown ship and stand still. I’m sending a transporter to pick you up and tug the Thorn, and whatever that other ship is, back to a fleet station. This mission has been escalated to alpha-level classification, and you may not discuss any of it with anyone who has less than five bars on their uniform. Am I clear?”

  “Yes, General.”

  “Good.”

  “But I won’t be following those orders.”

  “Greeve—”

  She shook her head. “This call was a courtesy. I am telling you, woman-to-woman, what happened out there beyond the deadgate, and I am telling you it as a warning. There are factions at work within Prime that we have only begun to see the surface of. I will leave the Thorn here, blinking its derelict beacon as Demas intended. But I, and my crew, are getting back on board that alien ship and I will not return to your command until I figure out what the fuck is going on and who I can trust.”

  “Are you saying you cannot trust me?”

  “No. But I can’t trust your superiors, and if you do anything short of executing me after Okonkwo discovers I survived, then I would bet my ass that forced retirement would be coming your way, and this universe needs you at the helm. They’ll say I’m crazy, General. That my time as a prisoner of Icarion broke me. They’ll say how sad it is, that a hero should lose their grip on reality. And people will believe it. I’d believe it.”

  “Maybe they’re right.”

  “Maybe. In three minutes, I will send you footage of the ship, taken as we crossed through the gate. You will see that all its systems remain online, escaping the gate’s governing system. You will see… It. What it is, how it moves. I will include what still images we captured of the sphere before it was stolen. The Thorn, I leave to you, but I am not its captain anymore.”

  “Think reasonably. Whatever ship you have, we will find you. If you come to me now, we can talk this out. If you go AWOL, you tie my hands.”

  Sanda’s smile was small, but genuine. “This is not a ship that Prime is capable of catching. Good luck to you, General.”

  She cut the feed, set the timer on the data packet to send, and sat there, looking around the empty deck of the Thorn. It was not the leaving of the ship that hurt.

  Stepping out that airlock was desertion of duty in the eyes of her commander. Anford would not make a public spectacle of Sanda’s abandonment. That woman was too tactful, and mindful of the fact that she needed the sentiments of the people on her side at the moment as she struggled with Icarion’s final throes of desperation against Prime’s control.

  Sanda sympathized more with Icarion in that moment than she ever had with her own people.

  “Ready to go, boss?” Nox said.

  “Yes,” she said, and was surprised to feel like she was going home.

  CHAPTER 69

  PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543

  EVERYONE BLEEDS. WE HOPE.

  Bero stealthed the ship and they waited, breathless, as they watched the incoming fleet vessel creep across the blackness of space toward the Thorn. The wise thing to do would have been to tuck tail and burn across the system, even attempt a gate crossing out of Ordinal, but Sanda had to know two things. One: Could Bero hide himself from a fleet ship that was actively looking for him? Two: Was Anford going to prove hostile?

  The general had sent a transport ship. No guns. No escort. Just a very confused recovery crew who searched the area for a second ship for hours before giving up. When that ship had passed beyond even Bero’s impressive camera range, she called an all-hands meeting to the deck.

  They arrayed before her in a semicircle, watching and waiting, though Nox and Arden looked ready to break the silence and get on with things. Arden, in their excitement about the AI they’d just met, couldn’t feel the wariness and Nox, in his bullheaded manner, didn’t care.

  But the others did. Liao and Knuth and Conway. They were Prime from the middle of society, raised to report any suspicious activity of AI, and later bombarded with horror stories about Icarion and their mysterious weapon.

  Said weapon was now in control of their HVAC. Their home.

  “You are now the crew of The Light,” she said. The ship—the vessel—could have its own name to keep the humans on board more comfortable, but the intelligence piloting it would always be Bero. They’d talked it out ahead of time, in the small room she’d claimed as her own, dancing around a thousand other things that she felt needed to be said. The personal could wait. “And Bero is its pilot. I have no doubt that you are wary. I would be, given your position. I was. But Bero was a soldier in a war he did not want any part of. Everyone here can relate to that.”

  “Uh—” Knuth started to raise his hand like he was in class, stopped himself, and cleared his throat. “Bero?”

  “Yes?” His voice did not come from any speakers Sanda could see, but seemed to radiate from all around. That was a little shiver-inducing, even she had to admit.

  “Could you show me where the engine room is on this thing? I’ve been trying to figure out where the damn power is routing from.”

  “Yeah,” Conway cut in, “and does this thing—sorry, is that offensive?—do you have weapons?”

  “And what about a research facility?” Liao said. “I’d like a chance to go over what little we saved of the sphere before it was stolen. Wait—is there any data on the sphere stored on your internal systems? I know you said the hardware was wiped, but maybe—”

  “One at a time,” Sanda said, holding back a laugh.

  A pause. Bero said, with slight indignity, “I can process multiple requests, but answering them all at once may cause confusion to human ears. I will grant you access to the engine room, and am happy to explain what I understand of these systems to you. Though, to answer Liao’s question, there was no previous data left behind on this hardware. It had been wiped clean before my upload. This ship has weapons, and you may call the ship an it, so long as you refer to myself as a he. This is… not the body I was raised in. I do not feel that it is myself. It is a difficult matter to explain. I do not yet fully understand.”

  Sanda glanced down at her constantly changing prosthetic. “Maybe that will change.”

  “Maybe. In the meantime, I prefer the separation between myself and what we will call The Light.”

  Liao latched onto the missing data. “There’s nothing here? No data at all? Something ran systems to greet us—turn on the lights, the HVAC, open doors. Something must be on the system’s hardware.”

  “Firmware wrapped in layers of encryption I may not be able to break in my lifetime, whatever that is, though I have initiated the process. As for a lab, I am still experimenting with manipulating the ship’s systems, but I find them highly adaptable. There is no equipment on board aside from what you loaded off of the Thorn, but I can carve you out a room and the furniture you might need.”

  “Damn,” she muttered. Then, quickly, “To the situation, I mean. Thank you, Bero.”

  “I understand, and share, your frustrations.”

  “I’m about to give you all another,” Sanda said. “We’re not going after Demas.”

  “What?” came the chorus.

  “If we had caught him on the other side of the gate, then we would have hunted him down. But we have no definite bead on the direction he went. Even if we did, if a GC ship picked him up, then he is already safely ensconced in Okonkwo’s hands. If we found him, or the sphere, any attempt at retrieval would be a suicide mission.”

  “With this ship—” Nox began.

  “With this ship we could sneak right up to Okonkwo’s door. But we’d have to get off the ship to get the sphere. If we even knew where it was, and you can bet your ass she’s not using it as a paperweight in her office. Our only shot was finding him on the Thorn, or within the vicinity of the deadgate. We didn’t.”

  “Then what the hell are we supposed to do? Might as well have stayed on the Thorn and accept whatever bullshit mission the fleet threw at us,” Nox
grumbled.

  “What we need to do is gather more information. Arden, Liao, you two both took images of the sphere. I understand the resolution wasn’t up to snuff, but with Bero’s help maybe you can clear it up some. Send those images to him now.”

  “Bero,” Arden said, “don’t run any searches on what you find against open net databases. Keep it all internal for now.”

  “Understood,” Bero said.

  Arden and Liao tapped lightning fast at their wristpads. In a matter of seconds, Bero said, “I have a preliminary suggestion, though the data is fragmented and I am no expert on the matter.”

  “We understand, B. Give us what you can.”

  “I believe you were already discussing the unique properties of the alloys described in the initial portion of the sphere. The rest is heavily damaged on a microscopic scale. Large areas are burnished away, and so the finer details are impossible to make out, but from what I’ve seen, I believe these are directions for building a type of mechanical cell.”

  “A nanite?” Liao asked.

  “Yes. If I had all the data, I could say for certain. These nanites appear to be replicators. They could very well make up the greater bulk of this ship’s design, but that is speculation.”

  “Speculation?” Nox asked. “Aren’t you the biggest brain in the universe? Shouldn’t you be certain?”

  “I have never seen anything like these before. I have never even seen something like these proposed before. I do not believe them to be human technology.”

  The crew shifted uncomfortably as a whole. They knew. They’d known. And yet, having an intelligence like Bero confirm their deepest suspicions made something in their hindbrains stand up and take notice. Sanda glanced at the deck, sculpted for their comfort, and wondered what shape this ship would take if its original designers were on board.

  “A swarm of nanites could construct something as large as this ship, or a Casimir Gate,” Liao said. She had the glazed-eyed, faraway look of someone lost in thought.

  “They could build anything, really,” Arden mused. “No wonder Halston hid the method of construction. No one would have agreed to building, let alone utilizing, a nanite swarm derived from alien technology.”

  “Nanite research is one of the sciences restricted to Keepers,” Liao said, “which was why Dal and I were so eager to get the chance to work on Janus.”

  “Janus?” Bero asked. Liao filled him in. After a while, he said, “You are certain that this Valentine person is entangled with Rainier Lavaux?”

  A quiet tension lurked in his voice. Based on the relaxed expressions of the others, only Sanda could hear it.

  “I identified her myself,” Sanda said.

  “Sanda. Do you remember the moments before you were spaced?”

  She stiffened, a dread chill running down her spine. “The fight with Lavaux, you mean? Yeah. I remember.”

  “His leg. Do you remember his leg?”

  Nox was giving her a what-the-fuck look. The others looked baffled. “I bashed it open.”

  “And?”

  “And I was preoccupied with staying alive in that moment.”

  The damn ship sighed at her. “Grippy had already restored my camera capabilities at that point in time. I was recording.”

  She was sweating. It crowned her brow and pooled between her shoulder blades. What she had seen was not real. Even in the doctored footage in which she had been falsely shown killing Lavaux, his leg knitting back together hadn’t been there. When Arden had that footage fixed and re-released, even then there had been no mention. People would have noticed. Arden would have noticed.

  “That wasn’t real,” she said, quietly.

  Bero answered by putting the video up on the forward viewscreen. She wanted to tell him to knock it off, that she knew he could doctor footage and he was fucking with her and wasting all their time, but if he saw—well. He couldn’t have seen her hallucination, if that had been what it was.

  Sanda hadn’t watched this footage all the way through. She’d caught glimpses of it, and always looked away, but she watched now, feeling the sweat against her skin turn to ice as she and Lavaux struggled across the screen in Bero’s cargo bay. Her prosthetic went out and she noticed, dully, that the members of her crew winced, but that wasn’t the moment she dreaded.

  In the video Sanda surged and cracked the wrench across Lavaux’s shin. Nox grunted approval. Conway chuckled. All noise on the deck stopped, then.

  Suit and skin and muscle split, revealing gleaming titanium-white bone, and in that moment she had hesitated, because even though she wasn’t thinking so much as reacting, every animal instinct in her body had screamed that that was wrong, and that had been the second in which he gained the upper hand.

  He stalked toward her. Over that bone—the same color as The Light—red muscle knitted itself back together in record time, a nature documentary sped up. Skin patched. Healed. And then he was smirking above her with a razor blade to the back of her skull, and a wave of white-hot panic washed over Sanda there on the deck.

  “Cut it,” she snapped.

  Bero ended the feed. “I’m sorry. I’ve been thinking about that moment for a long time.”

  “What the fuck was that?” Nox thrust a thumb at the blacked-out screen.

  “Something I believed to be a figment of my imagination.”

  “Looked pretty fucking real to me,” Nox said.

  “That… explains a lot,” Arden said. Everyone looked at them. They flushed. “When the edited footage first came out, netheads knew it was faked, but couldn’t agree on how much was faked. When I cleaned it up, there was still some grumbling that what was re-released wasn’t actually the raw footage, but nobody listened. They knew it’d been faked, they had their correction. Only cracks kept digging.”

  Sanda laughed shakily. Knuth put a hand on her arm, squeezed, then pulled it back. She didn’t think he touched much beside engines, and the fact that he’d tried to soothe her comforted her more than the attempt. “Even I bought it.”

  Bero said, “This sphere could contain instructions for the creation of people like Lavaux.”

  “People?” Conway scoffed. “I think that man left humanity behind long ago.”

  “I agree, but we don’t understand how the nanites work. People, ships, gates. Anything is a possibility.”

  “I know some people who could help,” Liao said, scrunching up her brow like the words themselves hurt.

  “How?” Sanda pressed.

  “As I said, nanite research is banned by the Keepers, and mostly for good reason. Out-of-control swarms are a real concern. But my lab and I, a long time ago, had special permission to work on what we called ‘mechanical therapies’—medicine using nanites.”

  “Like the NutriBaths?” Sanda asked.

  Liao shook her head. “Those are one hundred percent biological compounds. Programmable, in their own way, but a messy solution to some problems. We were getting close to a solution to repairing damage caused by diseases that could cross the blood-brain barrier when Vela, one of our researchers, was picked up by the fleet for researching gate technology.”

  “Was she?”

  “No,” Liao said emphatically. “Absolutely not. We knew we walked a razor’s edge and were careful. She was my roommate and she… Well. She wouldn’t. Afterward, we slowed some aspects of our research, but soon another one of us went missing.”

  “The fleet took them?” Sanda said, aghast. “There should have been a trial.”

  “No. Not for scientists who cross the line. A trial would include introducing their research into evidence, and drawing that kind of attention would be counter to everything the Keepers do.”

  “That’s true enough,” Nox said slowly, lifting his gaze to meet Liao’s. “I disappeared a few researchers in my time. We delivered them to a special GC facility and asked no further questions. I’m… sorry for that.”

  Liao straightened her back. “Apology accepted. The point is, after we lost two, we
feared for ourselves. We pooled our resources, bought a ship, a small dome, fabricating equipment, and ran. One of us, Yaxia, owned mining rights on an asteroid in the outer Ordinal belt. We lived on the ship while the fabbers dug and built us a home shielded from radiation under the rock, then went back to our work.”

  Sanda arched a brow. “They would have found you eventually.”

  “Yes,” she laughed softly. “But they wouldn’t have bothered. We discovered quickly how disparaged fringers and their science are. No one would listen to us. We found a few allies among other fringers after a while, and some of their specialists came to us to help us build better medicines, though those therapies will never see a wider market.”

  “Why bother?” Conway asked.

  Liao lifted a shoulder. “Because it was the right thing to do. And we didn’t want to wait around to get picked off one by one. But the point is, if we take what data we have on the sphere to my colleagues, then they might tell us more about what it’s supposed to do. I didn’t work on the nanite construction side of things, I worked on getting those nanites to communicate with outside terminals. I know you have access to a great deal of information, Bero, but the research my colleagues have is not available on any database you can access.”

  “And yet you left your noble cause behind to build amplifiers for Rainier Lavaux,” Sanda said.

  “I thought Valentine was legit, and that if I could publish via official Keeper means then some of the legitimacy might rub off.”

  “Oh,” Arden said softly.

  “What is it?” Sanda asked.

  “It’s just… Jules. She’s working for Rainier, and we don’t know why. But if the Lavauxs were messing around with nanites, then presumably the amplifiers weren’t the only ones on Janus. Maybe Rainier was trying to recreate the nanites the sphere describes. If Jules knew she was at the mercy of alien tech…”

  “Then she wouldn’t risk revealing her reasons, she’d be too damned scared, and I can’t blame her.” Nox finished the thought. Dread crept across his face. “What if… what if those nanites could change a person? Jules moved too damn fast at Janus. I couldn’t even see her when she fled.”