Elizabeth Bonesteel - Breach of Containment

“He’s close,” Dallas told her.

In fact, she saw them in the shadows, less than twenty meters ahead: bodies, perhaps two dozen, in a haphazard pile. Most of them, she noted, were still wearing env suits, although they were hoodless. Torture, then: keep them alive out here to think about it for a while, and then yank off the hood.

What has this place become?

But Jamyung had not been wearing a suit. She spotted his familiar flimsy overalls, the flat soles of the shoes that had always seemed too small for him. Approaching the body, she shone the light on his face: familiar, frozen, startled, dead.

Shit.

Behind her Dallas brought the pallet. “I’ll get his feet,” the scavenger said, and positioned the skiff next to the body. Elena walked around to Jamyung’s head and slid her arms under his shoulders. Light, here on the surface; probably light inside, too. Wiry and muscly, but never large. Barely as tall as Jessica.

“You’re my last hope here.”

Damn, damn, damn.

“On three,” she said, and counted. They lifted, and laid the body gently on the pallet. Dallas made an attempt to brush some of the red-brown surface dust off Jamyung’s overalls. Whether or not it was grief, it was at the very least respect, and Elena was glad of it.

Dallas pulled, and Elena flanked the skiff as they made their way back through the airlock. Caught by an unusual bout of claustrophobia, she tugged her hood off as soon as the corridor pressurized. She looked down at Jamyung; the ice that had frozen around his mouth and nose was already melting. “He won’t last long in this warmth,” she said.

“Got a place for him,” Dallas told her, and she nodded.

And then she noticed something.

Reaching out with a gloved hand, she slipped her finger behind Jamyung’s exposed right ear. He’d worn it on his right, she was sure; she had memory after memory of him querying his comm, telling her he was taking alternate bids on what she was buying, trying to drive up the price. She’d never fallen for his trick.

But there was no comm now behind his right ear.

She checked the other side. “Did he take his comm off often?” she asked Dallas.

“A comm means money’s coming in,” Dallas said. “He wouldn’t ever disconnect.”

She looked up then, wondering why she hadn’t asked before. “Do you know—when he was killed, was there anybody in port? Like we are now?”

Dallas shrugged. “I don’t keep track of visitors. Too many.”

“You saw them take him.” A nod. “Did they scrape off his comm?”

“Nope. Grabbed him. Hauled him off. Threw him out.”

“Did he fight?”

“Wouldn’t you?” When she glared, Dallas added, “Screamed bloody murder, hung on to the doorway. Took three of them to get him out.”

The doorway. It made no difference; she doubted he would have had that kind of presence of mind. Still, he had been right about people being after him, had made the effort to locate her to ask for help … She walked up to the door and ran her fingers around the frame.

And when she pulled her hand away, a tiny, blood-covered comm strip was stuck under her fingernail.

Comms weren’t guaranteed durable storage, although many people used them that way. Anything important, anything you really wanted to keep, was better passed on to a longer-term system. Most people kept their information on the open network, encrypted with bio codes: vids, games, books, messages from family and friends. Elena, when she had been with the Corps, had saved almost nothing locally; but even so, when she resigned, she destroyed her comm strip rather than turning it in. The one she was wearing now she’d had only for a year, and it held nothing beyond ordinary comms traffic and a few vids from her mother. An older comm, like Jamyung’s, would be packed with intertwined data, but recent messages would be easy to retrieve.

And the best place to find a decent scanner that could examine the comm was in Jamyung’s vault.

Without looking at Dallas, she dropped into the hole in the floor next to Jamyung’s desk. Increasing the output of her light, she straightened, and scanned the big room. It had been, not unexpectedly, entirely tossed; but Jamyung’s diagnostic equipment was more or less where he had left it. His comm scanner was on the floor, still in one piece, and Elena wasted no time adhering the comm chip to the tabletop and flicking on the scanner.

And there it was, right on the top, recorded less than two minutes before the comm was deactivated: a message.

She tried to replay it, using her own comm to amplify, but it was encrypted. Damn. He had to have left the message for her. What would he have used to encrypt it, with little to no warning that the end was coming? A number? How could she guess? An ident code? A bio key? His own bio key would be invalid now that he was dead, and she was fairly certain he wouldn’t ever have had access to hers. Remembering his cleverness, she tried it anyway, but the message didn’t budge.

A code word, then. Something he thought she would try.

“Jamyung,” she said. And then: “Dallas.” Maybe he’d sent the scavenger to meet her for a reason.

Nothing.

Budapest. Earth. Yakutsk. Smolensk. Rat-fucking murdering bastards. None of them worked. She was running out of time.

And then it came to her, certain and obvious.

“ Galileo, ” she said, and the message began to play.

“They’re here,” Jamyung whispered. Wherever he was, he was in hiding; she heard bangs and crashes around him. “They won’t find it. Don’t let them get it. It’s in the back, in the compost. Well, it was compost. The cats get at it now. Take it out of here, and don’t let them know. I don’t know what the fuck it is, Shaw, but you need to keep it away from these bastards. It won’t help them, not on purpose. But maybe it won’t have a choice. Don’t give them the chance, Shaw. Don’t—”

Jamyung took a gasping breath, and the message ended.

Elena sat back on her heels, thinking, pushing aside a wave of sorrow at the trader’s death. She still found his description unconvincing, and his anthropomorphizing of this unknown object didn’t change her mind. But he’d died for something, and whether or not the thing was really talking to him, someone had thought it was important.

She wanted to know why.

She checked her comm; she had twelve minutes before Bear would expect her back. She stood, and turned to Dallas. “Where’s the compost heap?”

Greg rarely used the off-grid anymore. Earlier in his career, it had been a last-ditch method of communication with parties he was not officially supposed to be contacting: PSI ships, off-schedule freighters, even—occasionally—Syndicate raiders, although in those instances he was almost always delivering some sort of threat disguised as compromise. As a general rule, if he could provide the Admiralty with a positive result, they didn’t much care if all his negotiations were on the record with Galileo ’s comms system or not. The off-grid allowed him to use tactics of which the Corps would not have officially approved.

The Admiralty would know, if they cared to check Galileo ’s logs, when he had spoken with Captain Taras, and what she had asked him to do. They would not know when—or if—he had managed to contact Chryse unless he chose to tell them.

Greg went through the door connecting his office with his quarters and let it sweep closed behind him. Some of his pent-up tension evaporated in the silence. He was aware it was an odd room, given how long he had lived in it: unadorned with vid, picture, or artwork of any kind, nothing personal except a few physical books his mother had left him when she died. For years, the Corps-issue dresser had held a still picture of his wife, and he had kept it long after he had realized he had no love for her anymore, long after he had resigned himself to hanging on to a marriage that meant nothing to him. Getting rid of it after their divorce had felt freeing, but also disorienting. Some days he walked in still expecting to see her looking back at him, pale and beautiful and not at all what he wanted.