Breach of Containment. Elizabeth Bonesteel
of the CCSS Galileo dropped to a brisk walk, following the curve of the ship’s gymnasium track around the corner. “She say why she was comming?”
“No, sir. But … she was very cheerful, sir.”
Shit. Taras was an acutely intelligent, observant woman, with an oversized personality she knew exactly how to wield. If she had been expansive with Samaras, that meant she was discouraging him from asking questions. Which almost certainly meant something was up. “Thanks for the warning, Lieutenant,” he said. “Put her through.”
Greg stopped by the door to the locker room, where he had left a towel and a flask of water. Two of his officers passed him running the other way, nodding a greeting; Greg, in self-defense, had long since suspended rules around saluting in both the gym and the ship’s pub. He nodded in return, and rubbed the towel over his face. He was sweatier than he had thought.
Taras’s voice was in his ear. “Captain Foster. Have I commed at an inopportune time?”
Not cheerful with him—but more interestingly, not, as Taras usually was, painfully loud. Something was wrong. “Not at all, Captain Taras. Is there something we can help with?”
Another pause. “I don’t know, to be honest, Captain. I am … uneasy, and I am hoping that you can provide an alternate perspective.”
All the tension he had just run off returned. “Is this about Yakutsk?”
“Nothing so immediate, Captain. I have heard nothing from Yakutsk since our earlier meeting concluded.”
From the first news of Yakutsk’s terraformer failure, Central Gov had coordinated support and diplomatic efforts with PSI, the informal confederation of generation ships to which Meridia belonged. Both Greg and Gov’s assigned diplomat had been in touch with Captain Taras daily, discussing issues and strategies, remaining in contact with the Yakutsk dome governments to reassure them that help was coming. Not that the reassurance had made a difference; Yakutsk, stuck with limited food stores and an abruptly space-limited population, was falling prey to old political squabbles and civic unrest. The previous week, the entire Baikul government—six administrators and the governor—had “mysteriously” ended up outside the dome without environmental suits, and a new government had been installed in their place. Worse, rumors had been surfacing for days about a developing black market for pocket nuclear devices—the endgame of more colonies than Greg liked to remember.
Before he had embarked on his run, Greg had spent some time persuading the governments of both Baikul and Smolensk to refrain from any violent coups for a while. He was not confident he had succeeded.
Meridia was a day behind Galileo, and Greg had found himself wishing frequently that the PSI ship, with her separate armaments and different rules about interference, was closer. But it seemed, for now, Yakutsk was not Taras’s issue.
“Captain Foster. You are aware of Chryse, are you not?”
Chryse was the last thing Greg would have expected Taras to bring up with a Central Corps starship captain. And that, somehow, was more unsettling to him than nukes on Yakutsk.
Chryse was Meridia’s sister ship, and was known throughout the Six Sectors as the most insular, least communicative PSI ship currently in service. Greg himself, patrolling the same sector as Chryse, had only spoken with them twice in his entire career. They had been polite enough, and scrupulously efficient, but it seemed clear that Chryse preferred their relationship with Central to be distant. “Of course, Captain,” he told Taras, struggling to remember Chryse’s current location. “She’s out by the Third Sector border right now, isn’t she?”
“Actually, Captain, she is headed for Yakutsk.”
“As support?”
“One might presume that.” Greg detected sarcasm. “But we did not ask for support. More curiously, she’s sent us her first officer, Commander Ilyana, whom we also did not ask for, ahead in her own shuttle. Ilyana is in the field, half a day ahead of Chryse, and answers every attempt at contact with nothing but an automated telemetry ping verifying that her mission status is green.”
It hadn’t occurred to him that Chryse might be as secretive with her sister ship as she was with Central. “Have you contacted Captain Bayandi directly?”
“Oh, certainly.”
“And he hasn’t explained any of this?”
“Bayandi,” she said archly, “does not explain, Captain Foster. Bayandi is extremely pleasant at all times. He remembers my birthday, and the birthdays of all of my officers, and never fails to ask after my health. But he is evasive like no one I have ever met, and I include all of your Corps officers on that list.”
Bayandi, Greg recalled, had been Chryse’s captain longer than Greg had been alive. “Respectfully, Captain Taras—do you think he may just be getting old?”
“I cannot know.” She sounded frustrated. “I have been focusing on Yakutsk, and to have Chryse cheerfully deciding to participate without coordinating with us first—I am perhaps more tense than I ought to be. And …” She paused. “You understand, Captain, that it is not my instinct to trust the Corps with this information. You, however, are an individual, and I have always found you to be honorable.”
He had tensed as soon as she said and. “What’s happened, Captain?”
He heard a puff of air, as if she were preparing herself for an ordeal. “Four months ago, Chryse went dark for four days. We thought, at first, that they were hit by that same loopback virus that’s been flitting around. The one that hit you a few years back. But when they came back on line, they said nothing. We had to comm them to ask what had happened, and all we got was Commander Ilyana telling us politely that everything was fine.”
Four months. “You think this may be related to the equipment failures.”
Four months ago, the colony of Odisha had lost one of their polar terraformers. There had been a freighter in the area with replacement parts, and a number of PSI ships able to provide food and staples until the pole was stabilized, but as soon as Greg saw the hardware report on the equipment he knew what had happened. Ellis Systems, the manufacturer of the faulty part, had apologized and offered to provide a full replacement system at a substantial discount, and all was made well. But most people were unaware that Ellis, known galaxy-wide for commercial environmental equipment, was also developing weapons.
That had been the moment Greg had realized how far his own stature within the Corps had fallen. Despite applying all of his considerable powers of persuasion—despite knowing there were people within the Admiralty who knew as well as he did that Ellis was capable of using micro terraformer failures as a type of weaponry—he could not convince his chain of command to suggest to Odisha that they avoid anything manufactured by Ellis. It had been on Odisha that he and Captain Taras had forged something of a personal alliance: she knew, via her PSI channels, what Ellis had been up to, and she told him that the Fourth Sector PSI ships would keep an eye on Odisha’s new terraformer.
That was almost enough for Greg to forget how helpless he had become.
Since Odisha, there had been thirty-seven suspicious equipment failures that Greg knew of, some of which were catastrophic. Galileo had been deployed to respond to fourteen of them. But only twelve cases had provided enough data to prove—or suggest strongly—that Ellis-specific equipment was involved.
Privately, Greg had no doubt it was all of them.
“Impossible not to be suspicious,” Captain Taras agreed. “Chryse was at Odisha a few weeks before the polar issue. It’s possible she picked something up there, either that ugly loopback virus or some other malicious system worm. All I know is that they’re being entirely themselves and telling me nothing, and I’m rather tired of it. Would you be willing to talk to them, Captain? It would certainly send a different message.”
Greg was