Breach of Containment

by Elizabeth Bonesteel

  He wasn’t sure what he would do next, either. Freja Taras’s words kept playing over and over in his head. He could see himself with PSI: among other things, it would give him resources. He would have organized backup as he kept fighting for what he believed in.

  But he could not, quite yet, see himself leaving Galileo. And he could not imagine leaving Elena at all.

  “Captain Foster?”

  “Yes, Bayandi?”

  Bayandi had retreated from Yakutsk as soon as he had finished streaming all of the data he had amassed on Ellis’s plot, circling Lena to head toward the center of the system. At Greg’s request, Jessica had moved Galileo away from Yakutsk, just far enough to be able to see the system’s star through the office window. It was a cool star, only 3,200 degrees kelvin, and Bayandi had been pleased. They are cold, he had said. I must be cold to join them.

  Greg had visited one last time to rescue a handful of Ilyana’s things: still photographs of her children and grandchildren, some small square objects that might have been sculptures or trash. He had given it all to Ted to bring up to a proper temperature, to repair any damage that had been done by the icy vacuum. She may never want any of it, he supposed; but if she did, he thought she would want it as it had been before.

  Greg had tried, for a while, to talk Bayandi out of it. “You’re not vulnerable anymore,” he said. “You’re no more a weapon than Galileo is. And you know more about how to defend yourself from Ellis than any of us.”

  “It is not about Ellis,” Bayandi had said, his voice gentle. And he had said nothing else, except, “Will you talk me through it, Captain Foster?”

  Greg had not known how to refuse. And now he stood, looking out the window, in the office he had been glad to give up, keeping a machine company so it did not have to fall alone.

  “I have always liked red dwarfs,” Bayandi said. His voice had regained its warm, curious tone. “I’m not sure why. They are, strictly speaking, no more or less remarkable than anything else around me. But they are small. They are dying. And yet they fight, on and on, and will be fighting long after the rest of us have been dust for billions of years. That is a thing of wonder, don’t you think?”

  Greg swallowed. “Yes, it is.”

  “Is she improving, your Chief Shaw?”

  “A little,” Greg said. “Our doctor uses words like stabilized. They’re still not sure when she’ll completely wake up. Or if.”

  “I am very sorry, Captain.” Bayandi’s empathy seemed genuine. “I shall be hopeful for her with you.”

  Greg could not keep himself from asking. “With everything you’ve seen, with all the people you’ve known over seven hundred years—how is it that one person can still matter to you?”

  Bayandi was silent for so long Greg thought he wouldn’t answer. “Everyone matters, Greg Foster,” he said at last, and his voice was gentle. “Everyone, every time. She is yours, and she is mine, and she is her own, and she matters. She will always matter, long after she is gone.”

  “So will you, Bayandi.”

  “Ah.” Bayandi sounded pleased. “Kindness. This is a thing I learned from my children, long ago. Such a lovely thing, for all that it so often flies in the face of logic. You are kind, Captain Foster. Do you know this about yourself?”

  “I’m actually known as something of a son of a bitch.”

  Bayandi laughed. “I imagine you can take pride in that as well.” There was a pause. “It is becoming warm here. Not affecting my systems yet. But the ice is starting to melt.”

  “Do you feel it?”

  “Not the way you mean. But it is . . . comforting.” For several minutes, Bayandi said nothing, and then: “Do you read poetry, Captain Foster?”

  My mother read poetry. “Not for a long time.”

  “There is one I have always liked. I have been told it is sad, but somehow . . . I have always found it strong. Angry. A song for fighting, for life. Is it strange, to find anger joyous?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “And in that near silence I would rest, and wait / and all would be darkness.”

  So much Greg had seen in his life. So much loss and pain and ache, and this machine—this creature, whatever he was—was going to undo him entirely. “I know that one,” he said. Old. Older than the Second Wave. Greg wondered if Bayandi was older.

  “Poetry and song are the same, did you know?” Bayandi asked him. Greg thought he heard something in the signal, some flaw, the beginning of digital artifacting, of falling apart.

  “Prose, too, sometimes,” Greg said, and Bayandi laughed again.

  “Yes. Language—it’s remarkable. It can carry with it so much. I have no real skill with language, but poems, songs—there is an old adage. A picture is worth a thousand words. I have seen beautiful pictures, Captain Foster, but I have never found I could see so much in them as I have seen in words. It is time alone that carries us. That says so much, and it is not even a thousand words. Do you think that is true, Captain?”

  “It’s Greg.”

  “Greg.” A smile in that generated voice. “Do you think our lives are not our own?”

  Whose life is their own? He thought of his mother, who’d had less than forty years, her life taken by an accident born of courage. He thought of Ilyana, everything she loved destroyed out from under her, and of Herrod, and the hell of good intentions. He wished Elena were awake, were here with him. He had no idea anymore what was his own. “I think we choose,” he replied.

  “I wonder if choice, for me, is an illusion of perception. There are not—” The signal dissolved.

  “Bayandi?”

  “—here. I am sorry, Greg. It is getting very warm.”

  “Does it help?”

  “Yes. I—” More hiccups. “—will be warm now. All of us together, as it has always been. I like that. That makes it all right, I think. Do you?”

  At some point tears had fallen on Greg’s face. He could not remember when they had started. “I do, Bayandi.”

  “I wish I could sing. They taught—” Another break. “—never sing. That makes me more human, I think. We can none of us do everything. We. That is a good word, isn’t it, Greg?”

  “We will remember you, Bayandi.”

  “I am glad.”

  And Bayandi began to sing, not a song, but words that Greg knew, the few words he remembered from that ancient poem.

  “No fear of flaw, of sin, of age, or youth.”

  And remarkably, the connection steadied.

  “In the end, in the fire, in the silence, in the dark / In the end, there is still—”

  And there was silence.

  “Bayandi?” Greg asked.

  But it was Galileo that spoke. “Chryse has been destroyed,” the ship told him, her voice matter-of-fact, unchanged.

  And for the first time that he could remember in all his life—nearly forty long years—Greg Foster put his hands to his face and allowed himself to weep.

  Chapter 64

  “You look tired,” Tom Foster said.

  Greg sat in his quarters, taking in the image of his father. He looked older, somehow, although Greg did not think he had changed since the last time they had spoken a few weeks earlier. Greg had always looked at his father and seen the man who had raised him, quiet and even-tempered and sometimes detached, the man who had put up with Greg’s insults and rages and childishness long past the age when he should have let go of the tangles of adolescence. Today he saw a man with graying hair and weary eyes, and it crossed Greg’s mind that for all the fears he’d had for his father over the last few days, his father would have had far more for him. Waiting for another comm, another person he loved lost to the Corps.

  You can’t lose me to the Corps anymore, Dad.

  “We’ve been busy,” Greg told him. “Everybody wants to send messages back home, and the system is clogged. Add the stream to that, with unfettered data trying to get in and out, and it’s been a nightmare sorting things out.”

  Greg
had set himself to helping with Galileo’s comms systems. It had been years since he had worked so hands-on, but his memory was coming back, and once Samaras got past the idea that the man he used to report to was now an unranked technician, he had turned out to be efficient and easy to work with. They had set Galileo up as a public relay, helping to shunt some of the stream traffic through Chronos Relay in the Fourth Sector, giving the new temporary relay set up by Syncos some breathing room. Nearly everyone, from PSI to commercial freighters to the area colonies, had agreed that people’s private messages needed to be the priority for a while.

  Jessica had set up a lottery for Galileo’s crew, weighting it toward people with old or ill family. One of the first things she had done was send a message back to the Admiralty on Earth that all of Galileo’s crew was safe and alive. The news of Admiral Herrod’s death she had given in person to Admiral Waris, and when Greg had asked her how it had gone, she had shrugged. “That woman is predictable,” was all she said.

  The Olam flagship had done its job, emerging from the field into close Earth orbit, right above the southern coast of Africa. The ship’s captain had demanded the immediate resignation of Central Gov, and the disbanding of the Admiralty and the Corps. When Gov had stalled, amassing the small fleet they had on Earth for local defense, the Olam ship had hit the ocean around the Hope Islands and drowned fourteen thousand people with a sequence of tidal waves. They had expected, Greg knew, the remainder of their fleet to emerge in moments to back them up; instead, the small-scale fighters that were Earth’s primary defense had zeroed in on the single ship and taken her out with less trouble than Olam had obviously thought it would require.

  “They think we’re going to make peace,” Emily Broadmoor had complained over breakfast. He had found himself dining with her and Ted Shimada more and more often; apparently years of reporting to him had given them a pent-up need to be candid. “They’re trying to tell us it was all a mistake, that the fleet captain was some kind of crazy person doing it all on his own. Like we’re going to believe that.”

  Greg suspected that was the likely outcome: the public would accept that this was a mistake, that Earth would then let Olam make peace, and blame the entire incident on a dead man. Gov would catch some blowback from that, and on top of the repercussions of Bayandi’s exposure of the Admiralty’s knowledge of what was going to happen to Athena Relay, the political situation was going to be deeply unstable for a while. The data that Budapest had pulled off Indus Station showed a much longer, deeper collusion between Gov and Ellis Systems—and other organizations, many defunct, involved in activities that were deeply illegal. The information had shattered any illusion that Gov was either unified or in any kind of real control, and people were reacting with predictable volatility. Greg was not sure if his father was safer on Earth, or if he would be better off on a colony that hosted no Gov or Corps bureaucrats of any kind at all.

  He was not sure of Galileo’s crew, either. The mood on board was shifty and strange. There was happiness that Earth had survived, that Olam had been defeated, that Ellis had been exposed. There was grief, still, over Athena, and over the Hope Islands and the surrounding damage. But mostly there was anger and suspicion directed at their own chain of command. Not at Jessica, or Emily, or even at Greg; but at Chemeris, Waris, and the Admiralty, all the people who had known what was happening, and had decided the deaths of ten thousand people were worth keeping their own secrets. The mood was one of betrayal, and deep offense; but none of it had resulted, locally at least, in insubordination, and Greg didn’t think that it would.

  “It’s not an indefensible position,” Ted had pointed out, “if you think of it from a certain angle. If they really believed this was the only way to shut down a Fifth Sector coup attempt, if they really thought the loss of life from a civil war would be greater than the population of Athena Relay . . . there’s precedent, from a military perspective.”

  “Do you really believe that?” Greg did not know Ted Shimada well, despite having worked with him for nine years, but he knew Ted was on a very short list of people Elena trusted with her life.

  “I believe what they did was horrific and unconscionable,” Ted said. “And I can see how they managed to talk themselves into it.”

  “The difference between deliberate evil and passive evil?” It was an interesting concept. Greg was not sure the distinction was important. “Which do you think is worse?”

  “Passive evil,” Ted said decisively. “Because you don’t see it coming.”

  They hadn’t seen it coming, any of them. They were out here, risking their lives, fighting for peace and expansion and people’s simple right to live an ordinary life, and their own government had treated them like chess pieces. Greg was a better politician than he wanted to be, and he understood the complexities of distributed government; but he had no qualms about turning his back on the government that had made such a choice.

  The trouble was, he wasn’t sure quite where to go.

  “Dad,” he said, his eyes on his father’s, “there are some things you need to know.”

  Tom Foster tensed. “Are you all right, Greg?”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “But . . . I could use some advice.”

  And he told his father everything, about Herrod and Elena and the Admiralty’s betrayal, and his own choice. “It’s strange,” he said, when he finished, unsure if any of it made sense. “I’m so sure, down to my bones, that I made the right decision. But I have no idea what to do with myself now.”

  Tom was quiet for a long time, and Greg waited, wondering if his father would disapprove, or scold him, or just disconnect. But when Tom spoke, his voice was gruff and thick.

  “You are the damnedest kid, you know that?” he said. “You—” He broke off, and looked away. “Sometimes you are so much like me I want to stop you from doing what you’re doing, just because I don’t want you to learn the hard way.”

  “You think I’m making a mistake?”

  “I don’t.” And Greg’s stomach relaxed. “I think you left not because you wanted a change, but because you didn’t want one.”

  “So what do I do now?”

  “Figure out how not to change.”

  Greg shook his head. “You make it sound so simple.”

  “It is simple. It’s just not easy.”

  Greg thought about that. “I don’t know when I can come home, Dad,” he said at last.

  “Will you be able to comm me?”

  “I should.” He had no idea. “I can stream to you, at least. I don’t know how much I’ll be able to say, but I’ll be able to let you know I’m all right.”

  Tom nodded, and Greg thought his father was having trouble speaking. “That’s more than I’ve had for the last eighteen years,” he said.

  “They’re probably going to come and talk to you,” Greg told him. “They were . . . unhappy when I resigned, and they’re going to be wondering why I’ve done it now, whether I’ve sold secrets to the enemy, that sort of thing.”

  “Which enemy?” Tom asked dryly.

  “I’m just telling you, they might make things unpleasant.”

  “Best of luck to them,” Tom said. “They’re not the only ones with resources.”

  At that, Greg had to smile. “My dad, the revolutionary.”

  “My life didn’t start the day you were born, kid.”

  Greg wanted to stay on the line, to talk with his father forever. “I’m hitting my time limit,” he said with regret. “I need to give the space up to someone else.”

  Tom nodded. “Anything you want me to tell Meg?”

  Greg thought his sister would not understand. “Just tell her I love her,” he said. “And Steve, and the boys. And tell her I’ll come and see her as soon as I can, whether she wants me to or not.”

  “Okay.” And then: “I’m proud of you, you know.”

  Greg swallowed. “I know, Dad. I’m proud of you, too.”

  He was packing his things when Jessica ra
ng his door chime. “It’s open,” he said, and Galileo let her in. “Good evening, Captain,” he said.

  “Fuck you, Greg,” she said easily, and frowned at his bag. “What are you doing?”

  She should already know. “I can’t stay here,” he told her. “It looks bad for the crew if Galileo harbors me. The Admiralty won’t stand for it.”

  He knew, too, that he needed to give her room, that his presence there would always make her hang back, second-guess herself, let the crew shove him back into a position of authority whether he had it or not. She didn’t need him, but she needed the room to see that herself.

  But she clearly wasn’t thinking that way. “Fuck the Admiralty,” she told him. “Where are you going to go?”

  “Well.” He had thought about this. “I thought I’d stick with Budapest for a while. I’m not totally rusty on comms, and Savosky said he could keep me busy, at least for a few months. And then . . .” He had thought about and then for a long time. “I was thinking of Meridia,” he said, hesitant, wondering how she would react. “Taras has already said she would take me. And it would let me keep doing the work I’m used to doing.”

  “You’d take the oath with PSI? Officially?”

  He was not yet at the point where he wanted to take an oath with anyone. Freedom was new. Part of him felt buoyant, enormous, endless, his spirit ready to fly across the galaxy with boundless energy. But a part of him was still waiting until Elena was well, until he could talk to her, until she could help him understand how any of this was supposed to fit together. He was not in a position to make a choice like an oath of fealty, to anyone at all.

  “Does it seem,” he asked her, “like such a terrible idea?”

  Jessica tilted her head at him, considering. He knew that look: she had something on her mind, something she thought would interest him, something she was holding on to like a surprise gift. She took a step forward, reached out, and pulled the stack of undershirts out of his bag.

  “Put these back,” she said. “Because there’s something I need to tell you.”