Читать книгу Breach of Containment - Elizabeth Bonesteel - Страница 18

How’s the kid?” Ted asked Jessica.

Jessica was seated in Ted’s office, her feet on his desk, going over the history of Commander Tatiana Ilyana. The easiest thing, as it turned out, had been to find her original name: Leslie Barrett Millar, born on Achinsk, reported as a runaway at seventeen after a history of run-ins with the police at government protests. What was more interesting than her early history, though, was the reason it was easy to find: the Admiralty had commissioned a similar search on Ilyana nearly twenty years ago. Greg, as it turned out, had been right to be concerned: the Admiralty, although lacking concrete proof, believed she was a fairly accomplished spy.

Of course, with PSI having been allied with Central almost without interruption for hundreds of years, she wasn’t sure why the Admiralty would be worried about a spy. She had been thinking, lately—as rumors swirled about colonies in the Fifth Sector wanting to shift the seat of Central Gov to their territory, leaving Earth in political limbo—that Central had wasted a lot of time over the decades worrying about PSI. PSI was often secretive, and certainly standoffish to a degree that Gov seemed to find puzzling. But in every instance that had mattered, Jessica had seen PSI step up and fight on the same side as Gov, the Corps, and the colonies.

Besides, she thought, thinking of Admiral Herrod, Central has plenty of accomplished spies of their own.

She looked up at Ted, who was leaning against one of the office’s windowed walls, his back to the open engine room outside. Ted never sat at his desk. Ever since he had been appointed chief of engineering, he had used the office, but never sat in the chair. He hadn’t said so, but she knew in his mind it was Elena’s. Of course, it might also have been Ted’s endless kinetic energy—he was not big on sitting at the best of times—but given how his teeth set every time someone called him Chief, she didn’t think that was the main reason.

“Stabilized, Bob says,” she replied. “If he were one of us, Bob would already have cut him loose. As it is, he wants to sit on him until Budapest has to leave.”

“So he’s worried.”

“I think cautious is probably more accurate.” Or, she thought, possibly territorial. For a cynical old man, Bob became deeply possessive of his patients, especially those who had been badly hurt. “If he was worried, he’d tell Bear to delay their next drop and stick around. I’m not so sure Bear won’t do it anyway.”

Ted was watching her curiously. “This kind of worrying familiar to you, Jessie?”

She met his eyes as neutrally as she could. “More than I’d like it to be,” she admitted. Ted knew her too well. “Ted, you’ve been around a bit.”

“You’ve been listening to gossip again, haven’t you?”

She ignored him. “Did you ever run into this Commander Ilyana?”

He shook his head. “Never dealt with Chryse directly,” he said. “But one of the guys I originally deployed with—he’s out on Borissova now—did an airlift with Chryse’s help. Said they were unbelievably well organized, but otherwise kind of rude.”

“Not surprising, PSI being PSI.”

“That’s why I remember him remarking on it. They must have been really unpleasant.”

Which was not unusual in isolation. But Jessica thought of Greg, and his reaction to Captain Bayandi. Greg was both curious and mistrustful of the man, and she did not think he would be so concerned if Bayandi had behaved with PSI’s typical coolness.

She shoved aside her research, giving Galileo a chance to digest more records. “Did you get anything on that artifact yet?” she asked.

For a moment, she thought he wasn’t going to let her change the subject. But then he pushed himself off the wall and began to pace in front of her. “So what we’ve got there,” Ted told Jessica, “is an enigma.”

“Haven’t you scanned it?”

“Oh yes. I scanned it from every possible angle with everything we’ve got.” He shook his head. “It’s shielded. No matter what I point at it, I get a happy little NO DATA back from the system. So whatever it is, it’s got better tech than we have, which does not please me.”

It did not please Jessica, either. Better tech almost certainly meant Ellis.

“But the other side of it,” he added, “is that it didn’t actually do anything.”

Jessica raised her eyebrows. “What about Lanie’s message?”

“It’s not a message.” He leaned across her and hit a panel on the desk. A waveform appeared in the air, and he reached his fingers into the image and pulled it apart. “It’s an audio amalgam of comms she’s received and sent. There’s nothing original in there at all.”

Jessica got to her feet, walking around the waveform to stand at Ted’s side. “So it tapped into her comm and composed something from what it found.” She looked up at him. “Is it just me, or is that the opposite of not doing anything?”

“Well, okay, it’s not nothing,” he allowed. “But it’s not sophisticated, Jess. It’s basically an audio compositor that uses emphasis based on frequency. It’s a parlor trick. It’s the shielding that’s more interesting, and it’s possible even that’s just a variant of the loopback virus we hit a while back.”

She frowned. “I’d feel a lot better if I knew who was after it. Or how to use it.”

“I’ve got one more test I want to try,” he told her, “but I’ve been waiting for you, just in case I pass out or something.”

“You’re going to touch it.”

“Only way, Jess.”

“If it goes after you like it did Lanie—”

“I swapped my comm out right before you got here,” he said. “If it’s doing what I think it’s doing, it’s going to give me nothing but our conversation. And of course some lovely words from you about how wonderful I am.” He grew more serious. “You with me on this?”

She sighed and dropped her feet off the desk to stand. “I suppose I might as well watch the thing melt your brain.”

At that, he shot her a grin. “I live to serve.”

He led her to a small workroom. When he closed them into the space, she raised her eyebrows at him. He shrugged, looking sheepish. “It’s a paranoia thing,” he told her. “It commed Lanie when she touched it, but if it’s got an interface that gets activated on contact, I don’t want to give it access to Galileo. This room is comms-locked.”

She looked around the small space. “What, always?”

“Sometimes we need a space where things can go wrong without broadcasting to the whole ship.”

The box containing the artifact was sitting on a table, next to a haphazard stack of spanners. “Is it safe to open?” she asked.

“The one thing I know,” he told her, “is that if there’s anything radioactive in there, it’s contained by whatever shielding it’s got.” He gave her a look. “You want to wait outside?”

She shook her head, and he opened the box.

The artifact was, she thought, about as anticlimactic as it could be. It was a flattened cube with rounded edges and corners, done in a gray polymer. If it had been sitting in a corner of the ship, she wouldn’t even have noticed it. Easy to camouflage, she thought. Easy to make someone pick it up without thinking.

Ted took a breath, extended a finger, and touched the cube.

After a moment he lifted his hand and touched it again, then laid his palm on the surface. He took it out of the box and held it with both hands, threaded it between his fingers, tossed it into the air and caught it again. He looked across at Jessica. “Nothing.”

“What do you mean, ‘nothing’?”

“I mean,” he said patiently, “I’m not getting anything, comms or otherwise, and monitoring is showing no signal.” He placed it back into the box. “If I hadn’t looked at Lanie’s comm myself, I’d have guessed she just hit some kind of random interference.”

Jessica frowned down at the artifact, suddenly ominous in its nondescriptness. “Is it possible that’s what happened?”

“Sure. But if it’s not this thing that scrambled her comm, there’s something roaming out in the wild doing it. Besides, she said Jamyung heard it, too, remember?”

She looked over at him. Something had occurred to her, but she didn’t want to share it yet. “Maybe it’s the comm,” she said. “Something Lanie’s and Jamyung’s had in common.”

“Maybe it doesn’t like the new ones,” Ted mused. “I could put my old one on and try it again.”

She shook her head. Regardless of the persistent inertness of the thing, risking Ted felt like an extreme response. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” she said. “There’s more we can find out without getting reckless. How thick is that inert polymer?”

“About half a centimeter.” He caught on to her thoughts. “You want to shave it, see if we get something stronger?”

She nodded. “Slowly. We see anything, any kind of a spike, and we stop right away.”

Ted pulled on safety gloves and removed the artifact again, clamping it securely against the tabletop. He could have used a hand spanner, but instead he mounted a mechanical one, setting it over one of the artifact’s narrow sides. “This will dig a micron at a time,” he told her. “As soon as it hits a variation in any reading at all, it’ll stop.”

And it was this exercise that gained them a result. The mechanical spanner stopped at 350 microns. “Anomaly detected,” it said, and projected what it had found. Jessica recognized it instantly.

Dim, incomplete, and fading: it was the magnetic shadow of a comm signal.

This was Jessica’s field. “I need an amplifier,” she told Ted, “and something that’ll extrapolate for me.”

“Extrapolation is awfully inexact.”

“Less inexact than just hacking it in half,” she pointed out, and he left to find the tools.

She spent the better part of an hour on the shadow, focusing on the smallest fragments she could find, telling Galileo what she did and did not want the ship to consider important. Galileo might have made entirely different choices, if Jessica had left it to the automated systems. None of this was precise, and it irked her cryptographic mind to be analyzing a potential weapon with what were basically guesses.

In the end, what she had was a muddled mess, but if she listened to it in just the right way, she could believe it was fragments of someone speaking. “Or dogs barking,” she said aloud, disgusted with herself. “Or maybe bats. Shit, Ted, this is meaningless.”

“Probably,” he agreed. “But see what you get from the extrapolator.”

They had to give the tool parameters. Yes, they thought it was human speech. Yes, they thought it was a known language. Yes, they thought it was recent. Yes, they thought it was a comm signal. She sat back and listened to the iterations. The extrapolator was focusing on the rhythm of it, the rise and fall of the tone; they had said speech, and the extrapolator was finding words.

“This is a chicken-egg thing, Ted,” she protested. “Nothing we hear will—”

Cytheria, the extrapolator said.

So much for doubts. She turned to Ted. “Did you hear that?”

He nodded. “Let it iterate a few more times.”

But having heard it, she couldn’t unhear it. Cytheria. And then, a few iterations later, a second word emerged, further down the stream: Chryse.

“What the hell?” Ted said, frowning.

But Jessica hit her comm to look for Greg. “Captain?”

He answered immediately. “What’s the matter, Commander?”

“Nothing. Everything’s—well. We’ve maybe got something on this … thing of Elena’s, sir. Do you still have the comm of the distress call you received on Yakutsk?”

“Of course. Hang on.” There was a pause, and the message played over her comm: This is an automated distress call. This is Cytheria, off of the PSI starship Chryse. We are in need of retrieval. Repeating. We are in need of retrieval.

“Galileo,” Jessica asked, “what are the odds that’s the message we’re trying to reconstitute?”

“Rhythmic and tonal match eighty-five percent certainty,” the ship said.

“Greg,” she said into her comm, “you should probably come down here.”