Ion Curtain
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Synopsis
Brought to you by Penguin.
"Citizens of the Federation. Greetings from the Core."
Lieutenant Kalina Sokolova is aid to Counter-Admiral Kasparov the major strategist for the Russian navy. Kalina is also an agent of the Jinyiwei, an elite spy working for the UN. She is tasked with watching the Counter-Admiral, and assassination is not out of the question. For decades the UN and the Russian military have navigated a tense interstellar Cold War. Peace is on the knife's edge and events are coming ever closer to open conflict. Solitaire Yeung is a corsair, a scavenger, a pirate, In the heart of a destroyed Russian battleship, his salvage crew discovers a mysterious device they shouldn't have, the brain of the ship's top secret artificial intelligence. And against all better sense they take it and run. The UN wants it and the Russians want it back. Solitaire and his crew are on the run from the most powerful forces in the system, but they are not the only ones hunting the AI brain. An even more powerful foe grows in the darkness of space. Now all of humanity has to fight to survive...
© Anya Ow 2022 (P) Penguin Audio and Rebellion Publishing 2022
Release date: July 19, 2022
Publisher: Solaris
Print pages: 320
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Ion Curtain
Anya Ow
CHAPTER ONE
The Kashin-class destroyer Song of Gabriel Descending Gated out of tian into normal space in what would have looked like a magic trick to a casual observer. One moment it wasn’t there—and the next, it was: a monstrous orbital spear, ringed with centrifugal decks and slung with pulsar teeth. As the Gabriel synched back to the network and broadcast its location on general and VMF channels, it began to wake some of its crew from their pods, powering down its stardrive and warming up its standard engines. Then it settled down gleefully to wait.
Commander Viktor Kulagin, to his profound irritation, woke up from podsleep to the deep bass caterwauling of some pre-Ascent Sol song. Booming from the seeded speakers along the hull was a brassy, trumpeted military reveille.
“Ship, shut it off!” Viktor growled, stumbling over to the cleanser to throw up. Podsleep, in general, had never agreed with him. For all that Song of Gabriel Descending had been upgraded with the very latest in suspension tech when it had been refitted with an Eva Core, its Gating process was even more jarring to his physiology than usual.
The cleanser voided, and Viktor stepped into the purifier. “Good morning, Captain,” Ship said, in the voice of a young woman. “I’ve woken the Tula and Orel Directorates. Once you’ve all finished feeling sorry for yourselves, breakfast will be served.”
Viktor leaned his forehead against the smooth, cold plasteel shell of the purifier and prayed briefly for patience. “You’re not yet far enough from Sol that I can’t get you refitted off my ship,” he warned. Viktor finished the rinse cycle and stepped out of the purifier, pulling on his pressed uniform from the wall shelf.
“Kwang ships are not far from anywhere. Unlike the non-Kwang ships that can only Gate into tian from stellar platforms. That wasthe point of getting refitted in the first place.”
“This is a military ship,” Viktor complained, not for the first time. “I don’t know why they coded you into a Kwang Core.” It was already an old argument between them, one that Ship leant into enthusiastically. Ship had a pedantic soul—if an artificial super intelligence could be said to have a soul.
“Hmm, I wonder, could it be that there are military benefits to being able to Gate without a Gate?”
“I didn’t mean that.” Viktor scrubbed his hands over his eyes. “I meant you. What is the point of encoding a military ship with a personality?”
“I suppose they thought it’d be better than having you talk to an ASI with the emotional range of a toaster,” Ship said.
“I would’ve preferred that,” Viktor grumbled, though High Command had explained the reason behind the non-clinical aspect of the ASI to all Kwang ship captains. Military, impersonal ASIs would run the risk of what the Admiralty delicately called ‘over-efficiencies’. In simulators, they often tended to chuck their inefficient human passengers out of the airlocks.
On some days, Viktor could even sympathize.
“You’re lucky that I’m functionally obliged to like people,” Ship said, as Viktor went through his usual limbering up exercises in the small Captain’s cabin. “I was bored within tian. I’m glad you’re all awake.” There was a faint pause. “And alive.”
“You can’t get bored. You are an ASI.”
“I’m bored all the time,” Ship retorted, with mock sadness.
“Of all ships, why mine?” Viktor muttered.
It was a futile sentiment. High Command had told all four Kwang Ship Captains in confidence that the Kwang Project had almost been a failure. Coding a pure ASI from the ground up would take years, if only because it had to be taught the appropriate ethical constraints and thought processes. Dr. Alek Kwang had instead mapped and coded the brain patterns of a handful of test subjects, a controversial lateral decision that had proved to be mostly a failure. Most of the original Cores had woken up unusable, save those mapped with the brain patterns of Alek’s daughter, Eva. The VMF Rossii, the Russian Federation’s Navy, had still been willing to gamble on outfitting a brace of ships with Eva Cores.
Now Viktor and a thousand people under his command were effectively test subjects. Were his ship to snap and decide to vent them all, there would be little that Viktor could do but hope to use his Captain’s overrides in time. Still in a grim mood, Viktor made his way to the Bridge rather than to the mess hall. His stomach was in no mood for sustenance right out of podsleep, and Viktor felt no real need to add more involuntary vomiting to an already-bleak day.
A skeletal crew from the Orel Directorate were already operating the consoles, doing their routine status checks. Lieutenant Petrenko glanced up as Viktor headed to the Captain’s chair. He was dour, and whippet-thin, older than Viktor by a decade but without the driving ambition that would allow him to rise further in the VMF.
“Counter-Admiral Shevchenko left you a message, Captain.” Petrenko stepped away from the Captain’s chair. The crew spoke in Russian in the common spaces of the ship rather than Galactic, as a matter of preference. “Captain has the Bridge.” Viktor sat down. The synthsteel chair molded automatically to his back, rippling as it did so, before synching to Viktor’s DNA, unlocking Captain’s access.
“You should be eating right now,” Ship said into Viktor’s ear on a private line. Viktor ignored it. Viktor’s access linked up to the galactic network, pinged from packet courier drones that Gated routinely back and forth from the stellar Gates, releasing broad-access as well as private band data across tian. The VMF used their own private couriers. As Viktor waited, his access code unlocked a datapak on the encrypted VMF band. The familiar insignia of the Imperial double-headed golden eagle flickered into view, the words ‘Voyenno-Morskoi Flot’ interspersed with a pulsing warning in Russian that the incoming VMF transmission was confidential.
“Shevchenko to Captain Kulagin.” Counter-Admiral Grigor Stepanovich Shevchenko had made the recording aboard Gagarin station. He was in his boxlike office; everything neatly battened down and secured following military regulations, even in normal grav. “If you are receiving this then I presume that your second Kwang jump has gone well and you are in the Morgana System. While you woke from podsleep, your Ship will have sent me confirmation of a successful jump. I will be brief. The Slava-class cruiser Farthest Shore has disappeared. As you know, Captain Nevskaya’s cruiser was the only Slava-class warship to be fitted with an Eva Core.”
Viktor kept his expression deliberately blank. The skeletal crew had faltered at their consoles, watching the feed. At Viktor’s pointed stare, they returned to their tasks. Shevchenko’s recording continued. “The Farthest Shore was set to arrive at the Borei System after a few test jumps. It never got there. The VMF courier picked up its distress beacon recently, set on our private band in the Autarch System. Its second jump of the set. You are as of this point the closest of the VMF ships—Kwang or not—to the Autarch System. Gate there immediately and investigate. You are authorized to defend yourself in the event of hostile elements. Transmission end.”
“Ready to Gate again at any time,” Ship said into the silence. Viktor muttered something foul under his breath. “Shall I get everyone to return to podsleep after an hour?”
Viktor nodded. “Have it known. We will Gate again once the hour is past.” In the corner of his eyes, he could see even the stern Petrenko grow a little pale. Humans risked heart failure on successive jumps through the spatial tunnels between Gates—referred to even in the VMF under its Galactic term ‘tian’—even with the best implant tech available. An hour’s grace between each Gate was the minimum recommended break, but anyone who’d had to Gate within a small span would know that they could be fighting nausea for days. Even the most hardened naval officer would cringe at the prospect. Viktor knew that his crew would not be happy, but orders were orders. “In the meantime, I want to see all known records on the Farthest Shore and the Autarch System.”
Before Petrenko could move, Ship brought up neat reams of dense datapaks over the deck. The files were organized by date and classification level, along with a small 3D hologram of the Farthest Shore, rendered to a greater degree of detail than Viktor had ever seen. The tiny ship floated perfectly over his deck, with its pulsar racks and single typhoon lascannon mounted close to its tapering nose. Most space-only ships were built for efficiency and to maximize shield tech. As such, they tended to be bulbous and pod-like. The Farthest Shore—like all VMF warships—looked like the blade of a knife.
“I didn’t know that our decks could do that,” Petrenko said.
“I upgraded our systems while we were Gating,” Ship said in Viktor’s ear. Petrenko’s eyes widened fractionally. Ship had shared that with the lieutenant as well. “Under my directive, I am allowed to carry out any necessary non-invasive upgrades autonomously.”
Viktor took in a slow breath. Kwang ships were going to take some getting used to. “What else did you upgrade?”
“Fuel core efficiencies. I’m going to work on our shielding next.”
“Get Engineering to sign off on your ‘non-invasive’ upgrades first,” Viktor said, his hands tightening on the armrests.
“I’d know better than them, and I won’t sabotage myself. What would be the point? I’m authorized to—”
“That’s an order,” Viktor said. The thought of having his Ship quietly edit itself without first being signed off by a human made his skin crawl. “Send me a copy of any upgrades that you make.”
“If you like.” Ship sounded faintly reproachful as it went quiet. Viktor ignored it, flicking through top-level data.
The Farthest Shore had been meant to jump to the Autarch System after visiting Ila. It was on the final leg of its experimental trip after Gagarin station, testing how far a warship as large as it was could Gate under a Kwang Core. It was supposed to arrive at Borei to briefly bolster VMF presence in what was technically one of the Neutral Zones. There was a Federation colony in the System called Duma, a small mining colony on a harsh snowball of a planet rich in huginnium—one of the core elements of stardrive seeds. There was also a Virzosk Inc trading post that had once been a Federation generation ship, sitting at three day’s hard sail from the Autarch System’s stellar Gate. The colony itself was three months’ standard sail from the stellar Gate, the second-to-last planet from the Autarch sun. The Farthest Shore’s distress beacon was placed about a week’s sail from the stellar Gate, between the Gate and Duma.
“Viktor brought up the star map of the Autarch System with a wave and pointed. “We should jump here,” he said. Ship helpfully made a pinpoint mark with coordinates.
“Three days’ sail from the beacon?” Petrenko asked.
“Too close and we might accidentally Gate into survivors or wreckage. Besides,” Viktor said, “if it is a trap, I don’t want to jump right into it.”
“Easy,” Ship said.
“Yes, sir.” Petrenko hurried down to the lower deck of the Bridge to broadcast their acknowledgement and response through to the VMF courier. Viktor waved away the star map and brought back the hologram of the Farthest Shore.
“That’s nearly a third bigger than I am,” Ship said helpfully, as though reading his mind. Viktor closed his eyes briefly in irritation. All VMF crew wore implants that linked them to a ship, Kwang or otherwise, allowing the constant monitoring of their vital signs. On a non-Kwang ship, this was routine and barely noticed. Ship, on the other hand, had quickly proved that it could read vital signs to such a detailed degree that it could uncannily predict what its crew was thinking. It unsettled Viktor’s crew. It unsettled Viktor.
“You are doing it again,” Viktor said.
“Just forwarding an opinion that if something out there could damage a VMF cruiser, they’d have no problem damaging me.”
“You are Ship. Ship is not meant to have an opinion.”
“I think I would have had more fun as a UN ship,” Ship said. It let out a surprisingly human laugh in Viktor’s implant as Viktor stiffened in outrage.
“I can still get you refitted,” Viktor grit out.
“Not until this mission is over, you can’t,” Ship said, “and I think you’d probably warm to me before this is over.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Shee-utt,” Pablo whispered, nosing their ship closer to the wreck. The Now You See Me was a reasonable size as far as corsair ships were concerned, a ten-man ship that could be run by a crew of five. It could have fit entirely within just the nose of the wrecked starship that lay before them.
Solitaire strained forward in his seat, gesturing to zoom in on the dead ship on his ship’s holodeck. Not that they needed the imaging. The wreck was massive enough that everyone could see it through their steelglass nose port, a dark, hulking finger that was pale gray on the sun side, broken into two like a snapped twig. Debris dotted the space around it. As Solitaire zoomed in as far as he could, he could see that the debris was mostly plasteel, odds and ends, and bodies. His First Mate, Indira, made a soft sound that was tight with horror.
They had been on their way out of Prana Colony when they’d received the distress signal, broadcast only on the VMF private band. Most self-respecting corsair teams tapped into at least one military band—it wasn’t too hard to buy access codes out of the Neutral Zones. There were lots of disaffected defectors out there. Military salvage wasn’t a gig that Solitaire preferred to run, but they were in need of a good gig, and he had been curious. He’d expected to maybe run into a supply ship out of Duma having an engine malfunction, and perhaps wrangle a fee to tow them to Prana. This—this was nowhere near what he’d been expecting.
“We at war?” Joey asked nervously. He crossed himself.
Joey was a thin young man with the elongated muscle structure and bone that came from being born spaceside rather than downwell somewhere. Like most spacesiders, he had a thoroughly mixed parentage: brown skin, peppery black hair, narrow eyes that seemed perpetually on the move. Joey’s nerves were a little too shaky for life as a corsair navigator, but he could stitch together jump scheds on the fly and calculate complex trajectories in his sleep. His skills had saved the crew more than once.
“Not that I know of,” Indira said. She sounded irritated that Joey had even asked. Indira was an ex-UN spacesider, merchant Navy probably. Solitaire had never asked. A corsair’s past was traditionally nobody’s business but their own. She kept her black hair shaved down. Her dark skin always stood in sharp contrast with the pale gray mech shifts that she liked to wear, and she was both good at comms and the crew’s only crack shot. Indira pursed her lips as she scanned comm chatter. “Nothing out of Duma. Or the general VMF line.”
“Probably some sort of secret war,” Frankie said. Born downwell in a colony that had a higher g, Frankie was stocky and dense-looking, with olive-brown skin and black hair.
“For a medic and an engineer, you do sure love your conspiracy theories,” Solitaire said.
“I’m educated. Doesn’t mean I’m not open-minded,” Frankie said loftily.
“Pssh. Nobody does that anymore,” Pablo said. He looked over at Solitaire for support. “Secret wars, cold wars, warm wars, whatever. All that destroying each other in space is last century shit.”
“No comment,” Solitaire said, forever surprised that Pablo could retain such a sunny opinion about intergalactic affairs, given his background.
Pablo and Solitaire were the only ones who had been born on Sol itself. Where Solitaire was tall, Pablo, a citizen of the South American Conglomerate, was compact and boxy, his broad, brown face always cut with an easy grin. Solitaire had known Pablo the longest. They’d come up through the UN Reserve Navy together and had, eventually, left for about the same reasons, even if they had ended up in different places. Pablo had started working private freight, while Solitaire had been headhunted elsewhere. He’d run into Pablo again by chance years after, when he’d finally gone private himself.
“You know what I mean. Since we’re one big space family now. Families quarrel and have the occasional punchup, but we haven’t had all-out war for over a hundred years. Since everyone took their heads out of their asses and figured out that the universe’s way, way big enough for everyone,” Pablo said.
“I do wish that I shared your optimism,” Frankie said, “but historically speaking, people have never ejected their heads from their asses to such a degree.”
Solitaire clenched his hands lightly over the rests of his cradle. “The hell is a VMF cruiser doing out here? Without an escort?” Only the VMF made ships like this.
“Who the hell was crazy enough to fire on the Russians? They’ve got long memories,” Indira said. She shot Solitaire an uneasy glance. “Can’t have been corsairs. I’ve never heard of a corsair fleet big enough to take on a cruiser. Even one without an escort.”
“Maybe it was an accident,” Frankie said. He didn’t sound convinced. “Fusion core meltdown? Their reactor’s in the centre, right? Along with the stardrive. Ship shattering into half like that, maybe that’s what happened. Boom, then pfffsth.” Frankie mimed something splitting apart with his hands.
“We didn’t need the sound effects. There’s no sound in space,” Solitaire said. Frankie rolled his eyes.
“On a VMF warship? Got to be very deliberate sabotage—their ships are built with multiple redundancies. And it’ll be the first time I’ve ever heard of such a thing,” Indira said.
“Maybe it was aliens,” Joey said.
Pablo groaned. “Not this again! Joey. There are. No aliens.”
Joey scrunched up his face. “Never say never. Who the hell else would fire on a VMF cruiser, eh? Whack it up like that? Could be they came upon the ship and were like hey, what’s up people, and the VMF did the VMF thing, where they shoot first and ask questions later, and then boom.”
Solitaire exhaled. “Joey. No.”
“No sound in space,” Frankie muttered.
“It wasn’t boom like a sound thing but as an explosion thing,” Joey said. He looked hurt. “Aliens, man. I’m telling you.”
“Anyway, what do we do?” Indira raised her voice as Frankie and Joey started to squabble. “Doesn’t look like there are any survivors. Our shipscan isn’t picking up any preliminary heat signatures.”
Solitaire stared at the wreck. It didn’t look big from this distance, but he knew that to be deceptive from personal experience. Close up, a ship like that could swallow a dozen copies of the Now You See Me into its hangar with a lot of room to spare. As a VMF ship, it would have been slung with the latest in military teeth, with staff cycled onto efficient shifts at all times. Unlike the sprawling UN Navy, the VMF didn’t believe in cutting the occasional corner. It was why they were feared, even though the UN outnumbered the VMF. Yet here was one of their cruisers, dead in the middle of nowhere.
Curious.
“Keep the engines warm but stay close. I’m going in,” Solitaire said. The Now You See Me had a seed-shaped skip that sat snugly against a flank, a piloted two-seater with a quick thrust that could double as an escape pod. It wasn’t top-of-the-line and only had half a day’s worth of compressed air aboard, but it was maneuverable, fast for what it was, and had a few surprises aboard that Solitaire had installed himself.
“You’re gonna what.” Pablo stared at him. “This isn’t some merchant wreck, cabrón. It’s a VMF wreck. You don’t steal from the VMF.”
“We’re not stealing. We’re salvaging. Maybe even rescuing people who might be hiding in radar-blocked panic rooms and such. Not stealing,” Solitaire repeated. Pablo didn’t look convinced.
“The VMF shits on semantics,” Frankie said sourly. “Sometimes they shit on it so hard, the people they shit on end up buried in an exidium mine. Just saying.”
“Ooh,” Joey said, growing pale. “I’m allergic to exidium.”
“Everyone’s allergic to exidium. That’s why the VMF makes people they don’t like mine it,” Pablo said.
“Just admit that you’re curious,” Indira told him.
Solitaire held up his palms. “All right, fine. I’m curious.”
“What if the VMF shows up?” Pablo asked.
“We’re far from a Gate. By the time they even get here—assuming they even detect us—we’ll be home free,” Solitaire said, confident. “Nothing I haven’t done before.”
“It’s going to be like Mercer station all over again,” Frankie said. He pulled a face.
“You’re going to get eaten by aliens. I seen all the vids. Dead spaceship. Broken in half. No apparent reason. Full of aliens.” Joey drew up his hands beside his head into claws.
“That’s why I’m going to bring Indira.” Solitaire beamed. “In case of aliens. Given that she’s our inestimable head of public relations.”
“Fuck you, Yeung,” Indira said, though she was already hauling out her weapons cache.
“I guess if you people die, the rest of us can get rich selling the video from your suit cams to the feds.” Frankie perked up.
The skip took two hours to get to the wreck from where the Now You See Me sat idle, engines warm and ready to dart away quickly at the first sign of danger. Or, as Joey put it, the first sign of aliens. This meant that there was nothing to do but sit behind Indira and watch the gigantic wreck come closer and closer on the viewport, all the while listening to Pablo bicker with Joey over the comms.
“Cut chatter,” Solitaire said, once they were an hour in. The first body had floated past. It was a VMF officer, the bright bars of rank visible on her jacket sleeve. Her eyes were open and frozen, her body so swollen that her features were unrecognizable. On the sun side, her skin was blistered over and cooked. Solitaire and Indira touched their fingertips to their foreheads and gestured upward, in the Galactic gesture of respectful farewell.
Indira cut down the throttle carefully as they started towards floating debris. There were more and more bodies now, thousands of people. Too many for a fusion meltdown, if a meltdown could even cascade to such an event. In any case, a ship of this size should’ve automatically sealed itself in such an event. Backup generators should’ve kicked in, allowing parts of the broken wreck to stay life-capable until rescue came. This… this looked like all of the crew were dead, not just the poor bastards in Engineering.
Solitaire could see Indira murmuring some sort of prayer under her breath, tears in her eyes. Strange and aggressive as the VMF might be, no one deserved to die like this. At least it looked like it was quick.
“Look at that,” Solitaire murmured as they drew close. Many of the bodies were still locked inside sleep pods. Some pods looked intact, but the people within them were dead—sleep pods didn’t have independent life support systems like escape pods. “Looks like they were running off a skeletal crew, if at all. Weird.”
“This far from a stellar Gate? Yeah. I thought the VMF didn’t do that.”
“Not on a ship this size, no.”
“Gods.” Indira tried to slip their skip through a dense cloud of partly shattered pods and winced as they bumped through broken bodies. ...
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