Nimbus

by Jacey Bedford

  *There are some smaller ones that nearly always appear in pairs and are quite playful.*

  *They remind me of otters, though sometimes they’re cigar-shaped, sometimes more snakelike?*

  *Yes, those are the ones,* Moyo said. *But what about your black cloud, the Nimbus?*

  *It wants to wipe us all out, like the plague we are, to keep us out of the Folds.*

  This time the silence was entirely understandable.

  Ben continued. *It has good reason. The platinum we lose in the Folds is toxic to it. We’re poisoning its environment.*

  Ben went on to explain what they knew about the Nimbus and how they knew it. He spared no detail.

  *So we’re closing down the jump gates within our, that’s Crossways’, jurisdiction to keep the independent colonies safe. In the interim, we’ll be supplying them with as many retrofit jump drives as possible, especially to those colonies which still rely on imported goods for daily staples.*

  *That’s a drastic measure.* Rodriguez’ mental tone was still tinged with shock.

  *We’ve had colony attacks, too. We believe the only way to deal with this is to close all the gates. Every ship that enters the Folds through a gate is a potential target. And every one of them could come back to attack us. We think the hubs are likely to be a major target. With multiple gates, the platinum detritus will have built up in the corresponding regions of foldspace. Similarly, any planet with multiple gates, even Earth itself.*

  Cara couldn’t sense how Ben’s news had been received. That was often the case when working through a Telepath. You got a better idea of what the Telepaths were thinking than their clients. These two were worried. One was already planning to cancel his next off-world job. Wise move.

  Ben didn’t let up. *Check the figures of gate ships as opposed to jumpships that have been lost. Jumpships are safer, but they’re only an interim measure. Ideally, we—that’s mankind, sir, not just Crossways or the Monitors—have to solve the problem of platinum loss in the Folds. We’re poisoning the environment, and we don’t have a right to do that. Think of all the mistakes we made on Earth in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.*

  *The megacorporations . . . * Rodriguez left his thought half-finished.

  *That will be better coming from you than from Crossways,* Ben said.

  *We know about Crossways and the megacorps.*

  *You may know some of it, but you don’t know it all. I told Jess—Captain Jessop—I’d give myself up, and I will when the time is right, but in the meantime, I’m happy to give you a sworn statement if you have someone who can take it down verbatim.*

  Cara pushed down her surprise. He meant to go through with it. She couldn’t let him do it alone. She didn’t plan to give herself up to the law. If she did, she’d end up back with Alphacorp having her brain scrambled, but her story both supported and added to Ben’s and the Free Company’s.

  *If I may interrupt,* Cara said. *Cara Carlinni, formerly of Alphacorp, lately of the Trust, and now with the Free Company on Crossways. If Ben is going to give you a sworn statement, I’d like to add mine to it.*

  A statement taken telepathically was as good, if not better than, a verbal statement under oath. Lying mind-to-mind was next to impossible.

  It took a while. Wenna arrived before it was over, and they moved into Ben’s office, walking as if in a dream.

  When it was done, Ben raised his eyes to Cara’s. “You didn’t need to do that.”

  “Yes, I did,” she said. “Fair’s fair. I’m not brave like you. I’m not going to go and throw myself on the mercy of the law because I think we already know the law has no mercy, but if my story backs up yours, then I’m happy to give it.”

  “Thank you.”

  Chapter Forty-Six

  FAMILY

  OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS BEN TALKED TO all the Protectorate planets and all of them agreed to close their jump gates, though not without reservations.

  Six colonies were nowhere near being able to become self-sufficient. Three were mining operations, one for gold and other precious metals, including modest amounts of platinum, and two for iron and industrial metals which were then processed and exported. One of them was Ironhold, which until recently had relied on Butterstone for food staples, being the next planet in the Onix System, but too far from the system’s star for optimum crop production. Since Butterstone was still a ghost settlement, they’d had to import supplies from beyond the system.

  Ben needed to call Nan back into service. She was a much better negotiator than he was.

  “I’m going to Jamundi to talk to Nan,” Ben told Cara in the office. “Do you want to come with me?”

  He tried to keep the question light. Her attitude to him hadn’t slipped, but she wasn’t actively antagonistic. If she said yes, he’d know she was thawing slightly. He almost held his breath.

  “No.”

  “We could go in the Dixie. It would be like old times.” He tried not to sound as if he was pleading.

  “No, we couldn’t. You’ve been so busy you haven’t been to Port 46 since Gen left. I gave her the Dixie with your compliments. It seemed only fair.”

  He swallowed hard. “Yes. Fair. When were you going to tell me?”

  “I wasn’t. I was going to let you find out for yourself. I’m not sorry.”

  “I don’t expect you to be.”

  So in the end he took Solar Wind, which meant he had to take a crew. His first choice was always Yan Gwenn, but Yan declined. Garrick had approached him to help establish the factory on Olyanda. After all, Yan had been working alongside Dido Kennedy and knew more about the retrofit jump drives than anyone else except Kennedy herself.

  “Garrick’s offered me a permanent job, managing the factory, and has offered to set up a workshop for Dido, dirtside, and even said she can bring the feral kids with her. That was the clincher. I haven’t accepted yet, but I’m seriously thinking about it.”

  “You should go for it, Yan. Dido’s a good woman.”

  “She’s a nutjob, but she’s my kind of nutjob.”

  Ben laughed. “I wish you both well. Make lots of drives for us. We’ll miss you, though.”

  “The old team’s not what it was, is it?” Yan said. “Suzi and Serafin gone to Jamundi, Gen and Max gone, Cas and others killed in the battle, and that’s not counting the losses on Olyanda in the first year. And you’ve as good as said you’ll go when this is over. So has Cara. I think I’m taking the coward’s way out and leaving while there’s still something to leave. I can’t fly a jumpship, so if you get your way, I’ll be flying shuttles. It’s time for a new career.”

  Ben couldn’t think of an answer that didn’t consist of platitudes, so he slapped Yan on the shoulder, wished him well, and walked away with a heavy heart.

  In the end, his crew for Jamundi consisted of Dobson in engineering, Lynda Munene on comms and Naomi Patel as copilot. Ben did bodkin jumps in and out of the Folds, which took longer but was safer and kept the void dragon and the Nimbus at bay.

  There was always a warm welcome on Jamundi. Ben wondered if it would have been as warm if they’d known about him kidnapping Gen’s child—or perhaps they did. There was every chance the psi-techs on Jamundi had been in touch with friends on Crossways.

  Whether they knew or not, they didn’t let it show in their attitude. Ben left his crew amusing themselves visiting old friends or sampling the hospitality of the Ecolibrians. He borrowed a groundcar and headed for the Benjamin farm, unannounced.

  Tam and Lol, Rion’s two working dogs alternately barked and bounded around his vehicle in delight as he pulled up in the yard. Rion came out first to see what the noise was about, with Nan following close on his heels. They say home is the place where when you turn up on the doorstep, they have to take you in, but for Ben it wasn’t the place, it was family. Their welcome humbled him.


  At times like this, he wished he could stay and leave the big decisions to someone else.

  There was always plenty of food on the table in the Benjamin household, mainly because Thea was eating for two and Kai and Ricky were trying to match her.

  “We did it, Uncle Ben,” Kai said. “We didn’t want any fuss, so Thea and I snuck into town early last Friday and Director Lorient married us. Thea’s a Benjamin now.”

  “Well, congratulations,” Ben said and gave Thea a peck on the cheek as they milled around the table to sit down. “There, I’ve kissed the bride. Is that acceptable?”

  Thea blushed while Kai helped to push her chair as close to the table as she could go with her pregnant belly. “Not long now,” Thea said. “And the house is almost finished. Just a little bit of decorating left to do.”

  “Finished enough that we already moved in,” Kai said.

  Nan and Ricky ferried pots from the stove to the table while Rion hacked a fresh-baked loaf of bread into ragged slices. Chatter died while they addressed dinner. Ben tried to bring up the current situation while they were still eating, but Nan redirected the conversation elsewhere.

  *After dinner,* she said. *There’s time enough.*

  Ben supposed there was, and settled down to enjoy a meal with his family.

  “So, Reska . . .” Nan said after the pots had been washed and put away. Kai and Thea had gone across to their own little house and Ricky had been sent to finish his homework. “Want to tell us what went wrong?”

  They were sitting in front of the living room fire. The offcuts of timber from the new building crackled and snapped in the grate.

  “Do I look as though my life collapsed around my ears?” Ben asked. “You always knew how to read me too well.”

  “You and me, both, brother.” Rion rose from his chair to stir the fire and put another chunk of wood into the ash of the last one.

  He told them everything, including kidnapping Liv and driving away Gen and Max, and outlined the threat that now faced them.

  Neither Nan nor Rion responded immediately.

  “Well, say something,” Ben said.

  “I finished my homework,” Ricky’s forlorn voice came from behind them. “And I heard all that. Can I come and join you, or do I have to pester everyone tomorrow to find out what’s happening?”

  Rion sucked his teeth and looked at Nan. She shrugged.

  “Come in, sit down, and shut up,” Rion said. “Any requests for an early implant will get you an early bedtime.”

  “I get it. I do.”

  Ben turned to his nephew. “Just for the record, Ricky, in future when I say: do as I say and not as I do, I want you to take note. I’ve messed up bigtime.”

  “Maybe,” Nan said. “Why did you think the baby was the key to understanding the void dragon?”

  “The dragon as good as told me so. In pictures, not in words. It gave something to Liv on the day she was born. She’s uncannily advanced for her age. She’s not only talking in sentences, she’s naturally telepathic. Maybe that helped with language.”

  “Do you think the void dragon imparted any kind of compulsion to you? It wanted to see the child, and the child, by all accounts wanted to see the dragon.”

  “Truth is, I don’t know, and I don’t suppose I’ll ever find out. I don’t think I was acting under a compulsion. I won’t use that as an excuse.”

  “Do you think the child and the dragon communicate across the dimensional barrier?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “And you learned things you wouldn’t have been able to learn any other way?”

  “Yes. I’m sure of that. We might have figured out what the Nimbus was up to eventually, but we’d never have known why.”

  “What good do you think you can do with that knowledge?”

  “Closing the jump gate system will cut off the Nimbus altogether. It’s the only way to protect ships and colonies. I can’t wave a magic wand and do that, of course. The megacorps, the Five Power Alliance on Earth, and possibly the Monitors are the only ones who can do that successfully, and then only if they work together.”

  “What’s the worst thing that can happen?”

  “That people don’t appreciate the danger and refuse to close down the jump gate system because they’ll lose their profit. More and more ships disappear in the Folds and more colonies, and possibly the inner system planets are attacked by an increasingly large army with increasingly more resources.”

  “Can the Nimbus ever succeed in wiping out humans?”

  “I don’t see how it can, not if it continues to use other humans to do the job. It’s self-defeating. But it can cause massive hurt and damage, not only now, but for as long as we keep sending it more ships. A long war of attrition could knock us back to the stone age.”

  “How much hurt and damage will closing the jump gates cause?”

  “Some colonies aren’t self-sufficient, but others will be fine. Yes, their economies will change, but they can feed, clothe, and shelter their people, and that’s a start.”

  Nan gave him one of her hard stares. “Are you sure—very sure—you don’t have an ulterior motive for closing down the gates? It’s going to put a serious dent in the megacorporations. Wouldn’t you like that?”

  “You’re a historian, Nan. Bubbles burst. The megacorporations don’t need help from me to reach the natural end to their lifespan, whether it happens now or two hundred years in the future. They’re already unwieldy. They’ve expanded beyond their ability to control and support what they’ve created. Otherwise, the independent colonies would never have been able to break away. Closing the jump gates may hasten some kind of radical reorganization, but I doubt it will destroy them. They may take a dip in profits, but with enough jumpships they could be back in business within a decade, and they’ll be better off for the contraction. Or, better still, they can join together to solve the problem of platinum pollution in the Folds.”

  He felt Nan’s look going straight through him, as it always had when he was a child. Eventually, she cleared her throat, or it might have been a noncommittal grunt. “So what do you want from me? Reassurance that you’re doing the right thing?”

  “No, Nan, I want you at the negotiating table.”

  She chuckled. “I wondered when you’d get around to that.”

  “Well?”

  “I’ll come when Thea’s had her baby and we have a new generation of Benjamins. In the meantime, get those jump drives into production and watch your back in the Folds.”

  Some days it was like old times, Cara thought, apart from the situation between her and Ben.

  They saw each other for work and that was it. She missed his easy company in off-duty hours and his body in her bed, though technically speaking it was her body missing from his bed, since she was the one who’d moved out.

  He was never anything but polite and considerate when they were working together, but otherwise he left her alone. Ronan had tried to make peace between them, but this wasn’t anything that could be solved by a third party—even Ronan—though he’d taken great care to point out that by stunning her alongside Gen and Max, Ben had protected her from the fallout.

  The Free Company got on with things in its usual professional manner. Within a few weeks of Yan and Dido taking up residence on Olyanda with a house full of adopted kids, jump drives started to come off the assembly line in the new plant. It wasn’t working to capacity yet, of course, but that would come with time.

  Captain Dorinska had recruited three more qualified jumpship pilots from Vraxos and signed up a further eight likely candidates who had seen the void dragon in foldspace. The colonies themselves were suddenly keen to identify potential jumpship pilots now they were close to getting their own vessels.

  That meant Ben, Jake, the Magena sisters, and Naomi Patel were taking it in turns to fly tra
ining runs while the three qualified pilots from Vraxos, all known to Jake, worked most of the regular runs, ferrying goods and passengers as required alongside Crossways’ own jumpship pilots.

  Lynda Munene, Issy Monaghan, and Corin Butterfield, together with J.P. and Pami Lister, had salvaged another three ships from those Eastin-Heigle had abandoned, adding to the pool of armed ships now available to protect Crossways, Olyanda, and any of the Protectorate planets that called for help.

  Blacklock, as the first colony to sign up to the agreement with Crossways, took delivery of three jump drives and a party of psi-techs to retrofit them into existing freighters. Its heavily industrialized cities, nestling in productive farmland, traded tech with its nearest neighbors and imported coffee and pharmaceuticals from Blue Mountain. With the delivery of those ships, Ben had sent a team of Psi-Mechs under Archie Tatum to decommission the Blacklock gate.

  Blacklock was the first, Keynes the second, and Brazil Colony the third. They’d decommissioned seven gates already and—so far—no more attacks on Protectorate planets.

  That was good news, Cara thought. Crossways and the Free Company were trying to catch up while still waiting for news from the Monitors that they’d approached the megacorporations about closing the jump gates.

  In this case, maybe no news was bad news.

  “Let’s get down to business.” Ben addressed the ten potential jumpship pilots he’d agreed to train. The six women and four men had come from all over the galaxy and now gathered in Solar Wind’s mess. Three from Vraxos and seven from the Protectorate planets.

  “How many of you were trained by one of the megacorporations?” Ben asked.

  Predictably, most were.

  Two of the pilots from Vraxos, Caleb Morlen and Chloe Durand, said they’d had their implants fitted on the black market from a shady dealer working with an Alphacorp runaway med-tech. They’d learned their trade from a pilot on Vraxos a couple of years apart.

  “So the eight of you who have learned from megacorp instructors need to know that the most important thing your instructors never told you is that foldspace illusions are real.”