Tyger Bright Page 15

  Two ships flanked her: The Jerusalem, the ship where Wilson now navigated, and the Higgins with her brother, Win. San winced at the Higgins. A destroyer, the ship was an older design and even with orders to run silent, waves of radio signals and electromagnetic noise leaked from its hull but San recalled that was partly the point: the Higgins would play a dangerous role; Fleet had decided that in order for the mission to succeed, the group would need a ship to burn ahead through transits and test for hidden Chinese sensors and detection cells on the other side. The Higgins had been loaded—packed to its limits—with extra passive and active electronic sensors and emitters that even now broadcast its data to the Jerusalem, where it flowed into San’s calculations. Its crew will never make it back, San thought. I could do nothing, and my brother would die anyway; and if not the Chinese but the Sommen detect our incursion outside the human zone: war. And we all die.

  You’re leaking, Wilson sent.

  San laughed out loud, and had to pause her mapping. We are underway; I was just about to de-tomb and take a break while I can. The computer estimates a year just to reach the first wormhole.

  Yeah but don’t look at the time it will take for the whole journey, round trip.

  Why not?

  Depending on the route we take, we’ll be gone ten to twenty years, San. Mostly in cryo. My parents are going to be old; everything will be different when we get back and we’ll be the same age we are now.

  My mother, San thought. Why hadn’t she realized the implications? Even with the most advanced propulsion systems, cryo had been an integral part of space travel as long as San had known; it had been one of the first technologies born from Fleet’s work on Sommen technology. But now that she faced the reality of spending years asleep, San felt as though her chest was about to break open and a tear ran down one cheek; if she wasn’t dead already, her mother would be when San returned.

  I have to go, Wilson, she sent.

  Wait. I have one more thing for you. I used the vision. I saw your brother on the Higgins.

  Not now, Wilson. I have to go.

  He’s bad, San. Really bad. And half the Higgins’s crew is totally freaked out; the other half . . . I don’t know. They’ve already been trained to be comfortable with him, or something.

  San shut him out. She whispered disengage and waited for the needles to retract before starting to cry, and at first didn’t hit the tomb’s opening mechanism; San didn’t want anyone to see her tears. The sound of her sobbing would never make it through the banks of steel and minutes passed until San regained control. She used her tongue to activate the fiber-optic headset.

  “Captain? This is navigation.”

  The captain’s voice crackled in her ear. “Go.”

  “We are on course for leg one. Primary burn in one hour, three gees.”

  “That’s a lot of sustained gees; you’re going to make our nonengineered guests on the Higgins very uncomfortable.”

  “They can take it, sir. I’m going to get something to eat before cryo.”

  “Negative. I need you on the bridge; get your escort to take you, they know the way. Then you can eat.”

  San waited for the clamshell to open. Four Marines flanked her, two on each side of the tomb and fixed to the steel floor by magnetic boots; they faced outward, looking away while San floated to don her undersuit and environmental suit. When she’d finished, she tapped one on the shoulder.

  “Okay, Marine. The captain wants me on the bridge.”

  The abbess had been strict about the need for Marine guards and made it clear that San was to be grateful for their presence; these men were Proelian—selected based on a sincere willingness to die to keep her and Wilson safe. But San saw the unspoken truth that Sister Frances tried to hide: The men would kill her if ever it became clear that she could be taken. The abbess had also given her and Wilson a pill. It hung in a tiny plastic pouch, tucked inside her black environment suit near the neck ring where she could reach it. But what if I was wearing a helmet? Somewhere, someone hadn’t bothered to think it all the way through and San knew one thing: In the event of capture, she was expected to take the pill and never fall into enemy hands—Chinese or Sommen.

  The main navigation hatch opened and one of the Marines, a lieutenant and leader of the group, nudged her.

  “Helmet on at all times, ma’am. We can’t lose you in the event of emergency evacuation. If you go, we’ll have a hell of a time getting anywhere, including home.”

  “That’s not smart planning.”

  The Marine grinned. “Someday we’ll carry two navigators, one as a backup in cryo full time. But my understanding is that right now there aren’t enough of you to go around.”

  San locked her helmet in place, after which her team escorted her into a small passageway that enveloped them with pipe galleries. It made her feel claustrophobic again. Despite having been conditioned to serve on deep-space vessels, the Bangkok was a different animal than anything she’d trained for and San couldn’t put her finger on it. Why did this ship feel so different?

  “Because it’s big,” the lieutenant said over his shoulder. He led them down the passage, turning at intersection after intersection and pulling them further into the ship’s interior.

  “How did you know I was thinking that?” San asked.

  “I thought it too. All of us did. The size of this girl makes it feel as though you’re surrounded by a mass so dense that it could collapse inward on itself to form a black hole. Also, these passages are smaller than normal ship designs; the engineers and designers needed more room for the computation core. But what the hell, right? I mean, we’re engineered for tight spaces, high gees, and the pure boredom of space travel.”

  The other Marines laughed and San shook her head. “Maybe you are prepared. I was too smart to qualify for Marine.”

  “I don’t know, ma’am; there’s still time. You might qualify for honorary Marine someday.” He stopped at the end of a long corridor, punched a code into the lock pad, and began spinning the hatch wheel. “This is the bridge. We’ll wait here.”

  San squeezed past. The bridge consisted of multiple control stations packed into a tight compartment, into which she wormed her way. Her environment suit barely fit in the crawlspace as she navigated, peeking into each crew compartment, just large enough for one genetically engineered person; although not directly like San had done in the tomb, the bridge crew partially merged with the ship itself by stuffing themselves into narrow pods. When she reached the captain’s station, San had begun to sweat with the effort of squeezing through its constricted passages.

  The man popped his helmet release and pulled it free. “San, we just received a tight-beam transmission, from Ganymede. Take your helmet off and deactivate your suit pickups.” When she had, he leaned out of his tiny station and whispered into San’s ear. “Fleet sent additional ships after the Stalingrad. One of you, a new navigator, scanned the region and there’s no sign of a Chinese home world. Nothing. So now Fleet intelligence thinks there’s an even greater chance the Chinese are sending ships to ambush any Fleet vessels that approach wormholes—at least the ones closer to Earth. That’s where the Stalingrad got hit.”

  “Did the navigator see that?”

  “No. This is just a best guess from Fleet intelligence. So once the computer locks in the full navigation solutions, we’ll go into cryo. But we’re coming out early.”

  “For what?”

  “I may need you to look ahead, San. To find any Chinese vessels that might be waiting for us; even with the Higgins as a decoy I’ll need every advantage I can get. Go eat and then I need you back in the tomb to finish setting courses for all the transit legs.”

  San left the mess hall with her head tingling as she struggled to pull her helmet back on; she sensed Wilson’s reach. Instead of concentrating on his message San brushed it aside and sent a quick not now, motioning for the Marines to follow. She pulled herself through the corridors. Thoughts of nervousness and apprehens
ion about the coming cryo sleep leaked from the minds around her, filtering into her brain in the form of unwanted messages that San tried her best to reject but couldn’t. By the time she reached her quarters she’d started crying again.

  “Are you all right?” asked the lieutenant.

  “I’m fine; I just wanted to change into a new undersuit before the burn. But . . .”

  “But what?”

  “Lieutenant, did you know that almost all this crew grew up as orphaned children? I can’t read their thoughts, but sometimes thoughts leak.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I did know. We’re orphans too. Fleet prefers us now because of how much time it takes to transit to and beyond wormholes. We don’t have much to miss back on Earth.”

  San shut the door and spun the wheel. She popped her helmet and curled into a ball, rotating in midair so that the tears spun off her face and hung to form small crystal globes as they drifted toward the air intake; in a universe where Fleet used orphans and the Proelians altered children to suit their needs and goals, who was good and who was evil? In the moment, everything became a problem set so overwhelming that San felt herself begin to hyperventilate, control of her physiology slipping away in an instant of panic that crashed through her mind.

  She had just started to sob when movement caught her attention. A small panel opened above her cryo couch; the motion triggered a deep memory, which now filled her mind with the low voice of an old man. Death surrounds the faithful. One must always consider weapons of choice among our enemies. Chief of these is assassination—a profession as old as prostitution, and as common as oxygen. The assassin moves in darkness. The assassin relies on his victim’s complacency. San’s heart raced with fear and she held her breath, staring at the opening only a few feet away.

  A finger-sized device emerged from the opening that had formed; San grabbed a nearby strap to halt the spin, doing her best to freeze when she identified it: butcher bot. A tool of Chinese killers, it was one of the most feared among politicians and Fleet flag officers, and so San wondered why she, a relative nobody, would have been targeted. There was no time; as soon as it detected her heat signature it would act. And the small plastic sphere on its back indicated the thing would kill with poison instead of explosives or projectile, making her want to scream for help from the Marines. But her guard would never spin open the door fast enough to stop what was about to happen; there was no time!

  The suit helmet, San realized. It spun nearby but still out of reach and she would have to push off the wall to get closer. Fear had turned her legs to lead. Even if San grabbed it, could she seal the locking ring in time? Without a perfect seal the agent would enter the tight confines of her suit, and San knew she’d only be able to hold her breath for a short time. Besides; the agent was probably a skin penetrator. Less than a drop would do the job whether she held her breath or not. San broke the chain of thought, angry at herself for having wasted even a second; there was no time.

  San kicked. She pushed off the wall and sped toward the helmet, fumbling with it when her back impacted against the door. The bot screamed forward. Time slowed with adrenaline and she almost laughed at how it took her several tries to get the helmet on and then several more to work the neck-ring seal, cutting herself off from the room’s atmosphere.

  The bot clinked against her faceplate. Its sphere burst to release a small cloud of mist—forming droplets on her helmet—after which it deactivated and bounced toward a corner.

  Someone pounded on the door.

  “Ma’am, are you all right?” the lieutenant asked, his voice muffled by thick steel.

  San grabbed the wheel to stop it, engaging the lock. “Don’t come in! There was a Chinese butcher bot, with poison gas. Tell maintenance to shut off air handling in this section and send a decontamination crew.” She paused to grab the end of a cable within a recessed wall mount, and pulled, jacking it into the side of her helmet. “I’m plugging into coms now.”

  The channels filled with activity and San listened to Marine security teams, who closed the system to all traffic except theirs. Everything blurred. They tried to kill me. San began crying again, almost forgetting to switch on her oxygen supply, which, she thought, would have been ironic given the amount of trouble someone had gone to poison her. Hypoxia or poison—either would have made her just as dead.

  They tried to kill me.

  The lieutenant clicked onto her speakers. “Ma’am, Marine security and decon teams are on their way. Are you okay?”

  “I was able to get my helmet on before it detonated but I’m covered with some kind of agent.”

  “How much oxygen do you have left?”

  San checked her suit computer, then opened a pouch on her side. “Enough. I have an extra cartridge. Hours.”

  “Captain,” the lieutenant said. San had to recall her rank—to remember that navigators all made captain upon deployment, bypassing lower officer ranks, and that the Marine was still speaking to her. “Who would want you dead? I need you to think. Who would go through all this trouble to go after you?”

  And who would have had the access needed to install such a device, San thought. Who would have been able to make sure she would be assigned this room? It couldn’t have been Chinese agents.

  “I don’t know. My first guess is that it was planned a long time ago, when the ship was under construction. The bot was concealed within a secret compartment near my cryo bed and the easiest time to install such a thing would have been during a time when lots of people had access to the area and could easily make changes. Then someone else would have had to make sure I got assigned here.”

  “But why chemical? Whoever did it had to know that you’d be in an environment suit. You’re lucky they didn’t add a suit penetrator.”

  They didn’t have time for proper planning. San shook her head, doing her best not to start crying again. “It activated after I broke seal. I think it was programmed to go into action when the sound of helmet removal was detected.”

  “Yeah, but wouldn’t an explosive been more sure? Wouldn’t . . .”

  “I don’t know!” San interrupted, shouting.

  “Sorry, ma’am. The decon team is here and we’re coming in.”

  San unlocked the hatch, its wheel spinning as she moved away, creating enough room for two men in white environment suits to enter; the corridor outside had been sealed with dense foam. The men ran a scanner over San’s helmet and the handheld device spoke, listing the names of several chemicals that San didn’t recognize.

  “Three agents,” one of the men said. “Two nerve, and one blood. Whoever wanted you dead, wanted to be sure.”

  One began spraying a white liquid, which foamed and turned blue on contacting live agent, while the other sucked it up with a backpack unit. They released a cloud of microbots. After a few minutes one checked his scanner again and gave the thumbs-up, removing his helmet to breathe what little air remained in the room. He laughed when he looked at San.

  “It’s okay, ma’am; we know what we’re doing. Your suit is now decon’d too.” He pulled a cable jack from the wall and plugged it into his helmet, holding the mic close to his mouth. “Air is safe now. Security teams can enter and activate normal air handling.”

  The lieutenant burst in. He grabbed San by the arm and pulled her through the hatch, after which two of his team led the way, shouting at crewman to get out of the way as they barreled through a foam wall and upward, heading toward the tomb.

  Something bothered San and it took her a second to figure out. “Why the tomb? Wouldn’t that also be a logical area to place an assassination device?”

  “Yes,” the Marine said, “but far more difficult. The security measures put in place by the Proelians made it so only certain people could work either on the tomb mechanisms or on this part of the ship. It’s the safest place.”

  The group punched through the hatch and into the tomb chamber, where San watched. Marines scanned everything. The room cramped with activity as the men
ran deep-penetrating search electronics over every surface, comparing the images with schematics from the original ship’s blueprints to make sure nothing was out of place. San had begun to cry again by the time they finished.

  “It’s okay, ma’am,” the lieutenant said. “They won’t fool us twice.”

  “What if they try again? Maybe my cryo tube is sabotaged, or one of the tomb needles coated in slow-acting poison. How can I live this way?”

  “The needles are clean, their mechanisms sound. And right now our teams are scanning your cryo compartment.”

  She was about to respond when Wilson broke into her thoughts, stopping her.

  They put one in my cryo chamber. We heard about the incident on the Bangkok and our security teams checked. They found one set to activate as soon as my sleep began.

  Who did this? San sent. The Chinese?

  We think it was made to look Chinese. But I’ll give you two guesses.

  Zhelnikov and my brother.

  Wilson’s response contained a sense of rage. Not literally, but yeah: their kind. I started scanning the Higgins’s crew when I got the chance and most of them are resistant to penetration. All of them Proelian trained to hide thoughts. A few aren’t very good, but none of them were involved.

  Ganymede infiltrators, San sent. The abbess underestimated Zhelnikov’s reach and the abilities of his faction. She thought that her station was still a secret to non-Proelians.

  I reached out to notify her already, through the other students. I suspect the Proelians are turning Ganymede upside down as we speak. Could it get any worse? We have three enemies: Chinese, the Sommen, and Fleet traitors. At least the Sommen threat is far off—for most people anyway, if not for us.