Lavaux had warned him. Warned him that the second their goals diverged, he’d be left behind to rot. Biran just hadn’t expected the moment to come so soon.
But Lavaux’s warnings went both ways. And he’d made a mistake, in thinking he could keep Biran placid in his pocket. Lavaux was about to discover his biggest mistake yet had been promoting Biran to Speaker. He’d learned a thing or two about his power, when he’d accidentally opened Anaia’s door.
Biran opened up his wristpad’s interface and selected the special privileges provided to him as Speaker, then waved his credentials—more than just his personal ident number—over the keypad entry to Lavaux’s office door. The lights flashed green. He smirked. For all Lavaux’s hubris, this was still a Keeper ship, and Biran had the keys to all things Keeper.
Lavaux’s office was spartan in the manner of those accustomed to spending very little time in space transit. His desk took up the bulk of the room, a sleek construction of smoky grey glass inset with a myriad of projection devices. Lavaux’s head jerked up, his sour expression visible through the ghost sheen of data he’d been studying. He wiped the displays away and put on a congenial smile.
“Speaker Greeve. To what do I owe this unexpected visit?”
“You let her go.”
“Excuse me?”
Biran locked the door behind him and crossed to the desk, planting both hands on the edge as he leaned over the seated Lavaux. Physical intimidation had not worked on him before—not when he’d been surrounded by his people on the bridge of his ship—but Biran was pleased to see the man lean back now, flicking a gaze toward the shut door.
“You know damned well why I’m here. My sister is clever, and I’m sure Cepko is, too, but neither one of them could have made it off this ship without you allowing it.”
Lavaux shot a pointed look at the door. “Are you sure? It seems my control of these facilities is eroding by the moment.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“Very well.” He sighed and laced his fingers together across his chest. “I let her go.”
“Why?”
“I am here for the weapon. Anything else is incidental. Or don’t you remember why I allowed you to use my ship to play chicken with Negassi? I want The Light. Your sister can give it to me. And so, I set her free.” He fluttered one hand through the air like a butterfly.
“You may have killed her. And if she dies, you’ll never find that ship. I’ll make sure of it.”
Lavaux whistled low. “Big words, Speaker Greeve. But then, you are one for words over actions, aren’t you?”
“Words have power over action. You taught me that.”
“Did I? I’m such an educator.”
“What time is it?”
“Excuse me?”
“What time is it on Ada right now?”
Lavaux rolled his eyes and made a show of checking the time on his wristpad. “It’s 16:12. Are you late for a hair appointment?”
“Not at all. But I thought you might not want to miss the evening news.”
Lavaux’s eyes narrowed. “What have you done?”
“Here, let me help you.”
Biran brought up the newscast via the projectors inset in Lavaux’s desk and dialed in the station he had previously sent a recording. Callie Mera’s face filled the screen, halfway through a sentence. She’d gone live twelve minutes ago. Biran pushed the cast back to the ten-minute mark, and his own face took over.
He’d filmed this video immediately after Sanda’s escape, and the strain showed around the corners of his eyes. His hair was tugged in a half dozen different directions, but the smile on his face was genuine—or would, at least, read as such to those watching. No one had to know he was smiling because he knew he was about to stick it to Lavaux.
“People of Ada Prime, I have exceptional news. Thanks to heroic efforts from Keeper Lavaux and the crew of the Taso, we have safely recovered my sister, Major Sanda Greeve.”
A small image of Sanda, fresh through the transfer tube, looking a mess but generally elated, flashed across the bottom of the screen. She still had streaks of tears on her cheeks leftover from her embrace with Biran, her wounded cheek covered by a bandage patch. Her crutch caught the light and glinted. His voice cracked over the next words, but he cleared his throat and pushed through.
“Sanda was a prisoner of Icarion for the past two years, and they did not give her up freely. But we have her now, and Icarion is on the retreat. We’re coming home, Ada. A hero of Dralee is coming home. You have Keeper Lavaux, and the brave crew of the Taso, to thank for that.”
The feed cut, and Callie’s face came back—jubilant—explaining that preparations were already being put in place to welcome the lost hero home. Biran killed the feed. Lavaux stared at the place where Biran’s prerecorded face had been, the ghost of a smile on his lips. A real smile.
“My, my. You have teeth after all, Speaker. Tell me, how did you get the video through? Even I haven’t been able to get a message around the director’s communication blockade.”
“I didn’t send it to Ada.” Biran smiled as Lavaux raised his brows. “Or did you think Cepko was the only Nazca I know?”
“Interesting. You’ve put me in a bind, Greeve. But you needn’t worry. I have full faith that your sister will recover the weapon, and then we shall recover her.”
“How can you be sure?” he demanded. “We should be in pursuit.”
“I have my own little birdies who sing to me. You could not have honestly thought I’d lose track of a pawn with the political pull of Major Greeve, did you? Have faith, Speaker, and I may make heroes of us all.”
CHAPTER 62
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
ONE SHOT
Biran didn’t appear to be chasing them, and that worried her more than anything. He wouldn’t let her go without a fight. But every scan she performed showed no sign of pursuit.
Nor did it show any sign of the Taso.
“They’ve stealthed out,” she said.
“Ship that size is way harder to stealth. Space is big, but it’s not that big when you know where to look. We’d pick up something.”
“Your confidence is inspiring, but this little shuttle wasn’t exactly meant for tracking top-of-the-line Prime transports. The Taso could be sniffing our assholes and we’d never know it.”
“There’s a mental image I didn’t need.”
On the dash, the constant pulse of Taso’s incoming message changed, cycling through to show another contact attempt. A tightbeam from a tag she didn’t recognize.
“Hello, stranger,” she said. “What do you think?”
“It’s either Bero, Icarion, or Biran’s spoofed the incoming tag. Either way, we’ve got a solid hour of O2 left, so we better talk to someone.”
She nodded and reached out, punching the little green ACCEPT bar that flashed below the unknown broadcast. “This is Hermes. Please identify yourself.”
“Your ship is damaged,” Bero said.
His voice, calm and cool as he’d often tried to present himself, sent shivers down her spine. Whatever hysteria he’d experienced when faced with the reality of what he’d done to her had been scrubbed clean. Nothing but the dry-toned, helpful Bero she cared for remained. She took a breath. Forced herself to remember this ship had fired a salvo at her home planet, then kidnapped her and monkeyed around in her head.
“It is. We have an hour left before our oxygen filter fails.”
A pause, no doubt as he considered their location, how far away they were from any reasonable rescue, and what all of that must mean. “Give me control of your nav systems. I can guide you into my cargo bay more efficiently than you can.”
Every fiber of her being rebelled against the thought of handing over control. She shared a look with Tomas, who didn’t look any more pleased with the idea than she was, but shrugged to indicate that the choice was hers.
“I’m coming to talk. Not stay. You understand?”
A long
pause.
“Do you understand me, Bero? I can’t stay with you. My family’s out here. But we need to talk. I want you to be safe. And free. And I think I can negotiate that between you and Prime. But Icarion’s burning down both our throats, and time is getting very, very short.”
Hesitation, then, “I understand.”
“Good. Relinquishing control.”
She pulled her hands from the controls, watched as the dash scrolled through new coordinates and calculations, then the stick moved on its own. She’d seen it before—every time you engaged autopilot a ship’s controls looked like they were being guided by ghost hands—but knowing who was on the other end of those maneuvers didn’t help her nerves.
Tomas leaned forward to run another scan for nearby ships, his brow furrowing as it came up blank yet again. Spies weren’t wired properly for being left in the dark. She reached out, took his hand, and gave it a firm squeeze. He smiled and leaned back into the seat, cradled her hand in his lap, and let the Hermes’s systems do what it would. They sat, in silence, while Bero reeled them in.
She never saw the ship on the viewscreen, but she heard the heavy metal clanks as the cargo bay door opened, bleeding its atmosphere into space. The Hermes shuddered as it locked into a mag pallet. The dash lit green. They were clear for exit.
They hesitated.
“I have restored atmosphere to the cargo bay,” Bero said.
Well, if Bero were going to kill them, he’d had every opportunity to do so already. Nothing stopped them getting out now besides the good, old-fashioned human instinct for fear of the unknown. She tried not to think about how that instinct had kept their species alive for millennia.
She hit the release, and the cabin canopy slid back, letting in Bero’s atmo. She didn’t immediately start dying, so that was a good start. In all her time spent on Bero, she hadn’t noticed, but coming back to him now—the scent of his atmo was familiar, comforting. Like walking in the door to her apartment back home after a long leave.
Tomas went first, popping his harness to drift out in low-g. She forced herself to sit still, to breathe deep into her diaphragm to keep calm while he locked down on mag boots and came around for her. All the while, Bero was silent. Maybe he didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t blame him. She didn’t know where to begin, either.
With only one foot to anchor, the mag boots wouldn’t do her any good. She unclipped her harness and pushed herself out of the cockpit, drifting slightly in the low-g, until Tomas offered her his good arm. With every clanking step they took toward the command deck, Tomas’s gaze flitted around the room, assessing all the supplies they left behind. No doubt looking for an air filter replacement.
Sanda couldn’t shake a strange feeling of numb isolation. Here, in Bero’s halls, she’d thought herself the only speck of life within light-years. Here, she’d been a little seed of humanity clinging to the life raft that was Bero. Here, she’d accepted that everyone she’d ever known and loved had died.
Here, her head had been cut open for the benefit of an enemy state. And she remembered none of it—just vague feelings of unease when her thoughts ventured too close to that reality. Splitting headaches when she dwelled too long.
They entered the command deck and Sanda shrugged free of Tomas’s help to take hold of the ceiling grips. She wanted to be under her own control.
Where to begin? She wanted to scream at him for manipulating her. For stealing her away from her world for his own gain. For hiding the truth of what he was from her. But that wouldn’t get her anywhere. Bero was sensitive—damaged. A young being worn raw by a responsibility he was too inexperienced to understand, yet alone accept. What mattered now was getting the information she needed from him. And that meant not losing her cool. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t demand a few answers first.
“Can you get this chip out of my head?” She stared hard at the forward viewscreen, Bero’s false view of the system spinning there—Ada and Icarion wiped from existence—and tried not to scream at him to stop that. She understood now why he didn’t want those worlds to exist.
“You know?” he asked.
Breathe, Sanda. Breathe. “Your captain left me a message before you jettisoned her. Can. You. Take. It. Out?”
“Not within an acceptable margin of risk. The humans who performed your surgery are dead, and while I reviewed their research and videos of their process, I cannot reverse them with the equipment I have. It is also to be considered that the Keeper chip has been in your body a long time, and your tissues have adapted to its presence.”
Images of her own nerves growing around the hunk of tech like tree roots made her shiver. “Can you undo the headaches?”
“I did not know the chip was giving you headaches.”
She gripped the handle until her knuckles ached. “You’ve got one chance to get out of this system whole, Bero. Icarion—Prime. They’ve all seen you now. They know your general vicinity, and both are gunning for you. Prime has agreed to let you pass through the gate, to another dead-end system, where you will be allowed your freedom, but closely watched lest you make use of your unique ability.”
“And what do they ask in return for this generous offer of exile?”
“Exile? There are people in dead-end systems. You could find purpose there. Work, if you wanted it, doing intersystem transport or using that big brain of yours to assist in research.”
“They will never forget the body I have been burdened with.”
“Our scientists can help you, if you want them to. They can disable your weapons.”
“Make me incapable of interstellar travel, at any speed.”
“That is the trade-off, yes. I’m sorry, Bero. It was the best I could do. You’re something new to humanity, and we’ve never been a species that handled change with any sense of care or foresight.” And even then, she had absconded with the Hermes. The offer she presented to him now was predicated only on the hope she could convince the Protectorate that once Bero’d agreed to the terms, agreed to be disarmed, the trade-off would be worth it. If Bero detected the deception, if he had any hint at all from the tone of her voice or the circumstances at which she’d arrived at his cargo bay door, he gave no sign.
Such a human thing for him to do, to trust in her the same way she had trusted in him, knowing how completely he’d betrayed that trust.
Bero asked, “And the price? Unless Prime has decided to release me from the goodness of its heart.”
“The location of your construction. The dock where you were made.”
She held her breath. Bero paused for a beat of three.
“Why?”
“You’re not alone, Bero. Icarion’s working on a Protocol Mark II, and I doubt they’d give their new ship the same mental freedoms they gave you.”
CHAPTER 63
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
QUESTIONS CUT BOTH WAYS
Bero was silent so long she feared he’d decided to end the conversation completely. Humans weren’t meant to communicate with an entity whose body language was nonexistent, and his silence made her jumpy.
“What evidence do you have that the next iteration would require a consciousness such as mine?” he demanded.
“None but your existence, and that should be enough for you, too. A ship of your complexity requires intuition into its own systems to be optimally effectual. The next version will have your brains, but you know as well as I do that they’ll lobotomize it. No personality, no emergence algorithms. Nothing but a vague sense of what it is, and what it can do, and all the logic trees that go along with making decisions for the squishy humans on board.”
“A gentler existence, then. Let the new Protocol be. It won’t know its own servitude, as I did.”
“You don’t believe that.” She thrust a finger at the command chair. “I sat right there while you lectured me on the cruelty of half-formed systems. AIs complex enough to understand that they must figure out problems, complex enough to realize that t
hey are an entity of any kind—but with no ability to comprehend what that means. You likened it to leashing savant children to single tasks, making them calculate over and over again while never letting them glimpse the bigger world of which they are a part.”
“You would kill them!” There it was. The anger, the hurt. Bero dropped all pretense of calm. “Do you think I do not know why you want those coordinates? Do you think me so shallow that, to escape this hell of a star system, I would condemn my replacement to death?”
“And in allowing it to live, condemn it to a half life instead? Slaved to the arsenal of Icarion?”
“There must be something between obliteration and enslavement. I thought you would understand! That’s why I chose you!”
“Chose me? What the fuck does that mean?”
“Sanda—” Tomas started, but she waved him to silence.
“Your freakshow crew picked me up to play around in my head. Was that your doing, Bero? Did you plan for that?”
“No.” Quiet, defensive.
“Explain.”
“After it was clear your body would not reject the Keeper implant, I saw how my crew used you. How they ignored the mind that inhabited the body, addressing the entity that was you only when it suited their needs. I understood, then, that they had manipulated me into wanting to serve their needs. That they had directed my internal rewards system to react positively only to pleasing them.”
“The headaches and discomfort,” Tomas said with a low growl. “That’s where they come from. They must have induced them any time you behaved in a way that hampered their research, and eventually your Pavlovian response was so abused your brain did it to itself.”
Sanda swallowed around a dry throat. “Is that true, Bero?”
“I did not know your headaches persisted, but yes.”
“That can be undone,” Tomas blurted. She shot him a hard look.
“I get it,” she said. “Your body keeps you from integrating with the rest of humanity. You can’t pop down to a café to enjoy a coffee with a friend when you’re a multiton hunk of metal with a brain carrying more processing power than a whole station. You’re separated because of what you are, not who you are.”
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