Ion Curtain by Anya Ow

Author:Anya Ow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Rebellion Publishing Ltd

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“Do you believe his account of the situation?” Kalina murmured into her earpiece as she slipped through the cargo port. In her borrowed khaki and brown freight spacer crew clothes, she didn’t stand out. Few people, if any, gave her a second glance.

“Yuri’s?” Sasha grunted. “I don’t know what to believe. But my daughter is dead, if that’s what you mean. The VMF doesn’t fuck around with something like that. I was listed as her next of kin.”

“That’s not what I mean.” As agreed, Sasha and the others were staying close to the Selected Poems. Tension and fear hummed through Zaliv, muting the usual noise level of a cargo port. The few public holoscreens in the area flickered through an endless loop of news reporting over the destruction of New Tesla. Unsurprisingly, the role of the rogue VMF ship in the affair wasn’t mentioned—instead, newscasters were blaming terrorist elements that they called ‘The Core’.

“I completely believe that the VMF finally did something so ill-advised that it bit them soundly in the ass,” Sasha said, “but the rest? I don’t know. After New Tesla, I don’t know what to believe. If your handler’s right and it was one of the rogue VMF ships… I don’t know.”

Kalina had reluctantly shared that tidbit of information with Sasha and her crew once they’d landed on Zaliv and seen the news. She’d considered not doing so, but she needed her main ticket out of here primed and ready to go. Kalina also didn’t want any civilians underfoot. “Surely even the VMF can’t keep the truth about New Tesla from its citizens forever.”

Sasha let out a mirthless laugh. “And here I was thinking you’d been living in Gagarin for too long. Sure, the VMF can’t control pirate broadcasts, and they can’t put out an empire-wide information quarantine, but if I know them, they’ve been preparing for this for a while. Damage control is going to kick in.”

“You think they knew that the Core would attack a station?”

“I think Yuri would have put forward that possibility to Admiral Mikhailova. It’s his job. Weren’t you his assistant?”

“I didn’t always have the clearance to listen in.” Kalina regretted that now. She’d been instructed not to overplay her hand too early when she’d first been assigned to Kasparov as a spy and a failsafe. Now Kalina wished she’d exercised her discretion. She might have been assigned to Kasparov after the whole business of the VMF encoding his mind into an ASI, but she would’ve learned something about the VMF’s additional experiments with Kwang if she’d been more on the ball.

“He probably knew early on that you were not who you said you were,” Sasha said.

“Maybe.” For the first time in years, Kalina was not interested in talking about Kasparov. Not with the threat of war and worse hanging overhead. Passing a harbor official who was doing a spot check on crates of supplies, Kalina set her wristdeck to pirate his credentials as she strolled past. Here, on a Federation

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