Nearspace Trilogy

by Sherry D. Ramsey

  “Okay, okay.” I clapped my hands. “Great job, everyone, but it's not over yet. For all we know the Trident is still right behind us, so we want to high-tail it out of here. Viss, are you there?”

  “Here, Captain. That was a hell of a ride.”

  “You got that right. Now listen, that magical power-boosting you were doing down there, how long can that work?”

  “I know you'd like me to say indefinitely, but I can't. I'm stealing power from all kinds of places, but I can't keep it up or I might overload the system. We could burn it to the next wormhole if you think it's necessary, but I wouldn't advise switching it again or running it for longer than that. I should really put things back to normal then.”

  “Okay, keep the reroutes on the main drive until we get to the next wormhole. We won't need to switch it back to the stabilizers for that one, and you can put everything back in place then. But I'd appreciate any extra distance we can put between us and our friend Ms. Amadoro.”

  “No problem, Captain.”

  “Yuskeya, lay in a course for the Keridre/Gerdrice wormhole, and Rei, let's get there as fast as we can. Everybody else—take a break, I guess.” I grinned. “I wonder what Dores Amadoro is doing right now?”

  “As long as she's not running for the Split, she's not a worry,” Baden said. “You want that message from the Protectorate on Nellera now?”

  “Yes, please.” It came up on my screen, brief, and not what I'd been hoping to see. My brother's ship, the S. Cheswick, was back in Sol system, too far away to help get PrimeCorp off my tail—or help me figure out where Mother was now.

  Chapter Twenty

  To Those Who Wait

  “Damne,” I whispered, but Baden heard me and turned in his skimchair.

  “Not what you were hoping for,” he said.

  I shook my head. “I really want to talk to him,” I said, “and I don't want PrimeCorp listening in. But Sol system is three skips from here no matter which way you go.”

  Baden cocked an eyebrow at me. “Remind me again what we're going to do while we're here in K/G?” he asked.

  “Find the cargo crate, if we can,” I said with a frown. “But I'm not going to spend too much time on it now. Talking to Lanar seems more—”

  I broke off because Baden was looking at me expectantly.

  “What?” I asked.

  “And the cargo crate is going to be near . . .?”

  “The pinhole,” I said in exasperation, but by the time I got the words out I realized what he was getting at. “The pinhole! Which is a communications gateway to—”

  “Sol system,” he finished for me. “And if we get a message to him and bring him to that end of the pinhole, and we cozy up to this end, it'll be about as secure a communication as you could have face-to-face.”

  “As long as we get into K/G before the Trident catches up with us,” I said. “Thanks, Baden.” I stood up. “I think I'll go talk to Viss, see if he can't get us even a little more power to the main drives.”

  Trying to get somewhere in a hurry when you don't know if you're being followed is enough to make anyone want to scream, and this trip took almost twelve hours. It was a relief to arrive at the terminal point for the wormhole to Keridre/Gerdrice with still no sign of the PrimeCorp ship behind us. Viss had managed to get us a little more juice at the expense of the heating systems, but with extra sweaters we were all okay. I sat down next to Yuskeya while Rei and Viss did the last-minute preparations for the skip.

  Baden's readings from his tracer scan had come from the planet Nellera, so the pinhole wasn't too far from there. The wormhole we would be entering the system through, on the other hand, came out somewhat closer to Stana, the middle inhabited planet. As long as the homing beacon on the cargo crate was still broadcasting, it shouldn't be too difficult to focus our efforts and find both the crate and the pinhole.

  I wasn't surprised when everyone showed up on the bridge for the skip into K/G. It was something to do besides look over our shoulders for PrimeCorp.

  The skip was nothing out of the ordinary, although the inside of a wormhole is always worth looking at—same as you can't really ever get tired of sunsets or starry nights no matter what planet you happen to be on. I held my breath as we neared the end of it, though, because no matter how cocky I'd tried to sound, I wasn't altogether sure there wouldn't be an armada of PrimeCorp ships lying in wait just beyond the terminal point.

  I let it out in a long sigh when we cleared the end of the wormhole and the only thing waiting for us was the distant globe of Stana, shining in the reflected light of its double suns.

  “Baden, can you get any kind of a reading on the pinhole yet?”

  “Hola, Captain, we're still too far out. I'll start scanning, but don't expect any return for a while yet.”

  “I know, I know, but it doesn't hurt to ask. Okay, let's head toward Nellera with our sensors at maximum.”

  The fifth planet of the K/G system, Nellera, was just inside the double star's habitable zone. Much further out and it would have been too cold to be welcoming, but as it was, some nice little colonies gathered around the warm and watery equator. The hospitable spots on Nellera were mostly island chains looping around the planet's middle, and they did a booming tourist trade with the two other inhabited planets in the system, Stana and Tarcol.

  The most likely scenario for the crate was that it had come through the pinhole's terminal point and was still coasting along an unobstructed path that led in-system. While this wasn't necessarily a good thing, since it meant the path would take it further and further into more heavily travelled space, it was my preferred scenario because it made the crate the easiest to find. It also meant that it would be heading towards us as we pointed our nose towards Nellera, and that if we found it, the pinhole would also be easy to find.

  We watched Nellera grow larger and larger in the viewscreen for a while. Baden said, “Well, I hate to say it, but if the crate had just come out and headed in this direction, I should be picking up the homing beacon by now. I think we'd better consider some other possibilities.”

  Damne. “Such as the chance that some piece of space junk or a small asteroid collided with it and changed its trajectory?”

  Or smashed it to smithereens. No one said it, but I was sure everyone was thinking it.

  “Possibly, yes. I can change the parameters of the sensor field, to extend further out to one side or the other from the ship,” Baden said, “but there's not much else we can try. We at least need to get within reach of the beacon.”

  “I think we should concentrate on finding the pinhole,” I said. “It would be great to find the body, too, but I think the priority has to be contacting Lanar. Turn the attention to that for now, but keep the sensors up. If we're looking for the pinhole and we come across the crate, too, so much the better.”

  But I didn't really feel that lucky. The initial anticipation I'd felt in the air on the bridge as we entered the last wormhole was fading fast, and we needed to focus. I wanted to have my discussion with Lanar before the possibility of PrimeCorp appearing at any moment made me any more anxious.

  “Come on, folks, don't be so gloomy. You didn't expect it would be sitting outside the wormhole waiting for us, did you?”

  “No, but a person can hope,” Yuskeya muttered.

  “Let's get to the pinhole first, and worry about the crate later.”

  Baden called up the data from his tracer scan and went about analyzing where it meant the pinhole should be. After a few minutes he said, “Rei, I'm shooting you some coordinates. Head for them, and if the pinhole's within sensor range of there, we should find it.”

  My nerves were running high, since two of the inhabited planets in this system were PrimeCorp-controlled. The Protectorate administered Nellera, and that was the only planet we were planning to get close to. I didn't know how much notice PrimeCorp took of the rest of the system. For all I knew they might have their eye on Nellera, watching for data runners or other corpora
tions or who knew what.

  And I wondered what Lanar was going to say about Mother's revelations. As an admiral in the Protectorate, I didn't know what he'd think of her confessions to things that had been outside the strictly legal. Then again, he was good at turning a blind eye to things I'd done when I didn't feel that “right” and “legal” completely coincided. Maybe he would do the same for our mother.

  “Got it!” Baden yelled suddenly.

  I jumped. “What?”

  “The cargo crate, off to the dock side, almost outside the sensor range.” He entered coordinates on his screen. “Rei, you want to take us over there?”

  “Sure thing,” she said with a grin. “That's easy compared to some of the things I've been asked to do lately.”

  “So the pinhole should be . . .”

  “Just got a fix on that, too,” Baden said. “We can pick up the crate, then head straight over there to try and contact Admiral Mahane.”

  It wasn't long before we could actually see the crate onscreen, hanging still and dead, looking like a discarded toy. I felt another pang of conscience, much like the one I'd had the day we jettisoned it. It didn't seem like a very dignified place for a body, especially when I felt responsible for it being there.

  “Why isn't it still moving?” I asked.

  “Good question,” Hirin said. “The only answer is, something—or someone—stopped it.”

  “It might not be very . . . pleasant, when we open this,” Viss murmured. “Even if the body is frozen, and might not have decomposed much—”

  “Eww!” Maja said, wrinkling her nose.

  “He might be starting to look sort of freeze-dried,” he continued.

  “Do we have to talk about this?” Maja demanded.

  Viss just grinned. “Are you going to lift it into one of the cargo pods and keep it there until we get back to Kiando? They're all empty now.”

  “That's what I'd planned. Put it in Pod Two, it's the smallest.” I hadn't realized until now how creepy it was going to be, travelling all the way back there knowing what horrible cargo we carried below.

  When we got close enough, Viss and Baden went down to Engineering, where the controls for the remote arms were. We didn't use the remotes very often, but occasionally they came in handy for transferring cargo between ships in space instead of at a spacedock. With the remotes it wasn't necessary for anyone to go on EVA—you just put your arms inside the big gloves and mimed what you wanted the real things to do.

  Viss was working the remotes and keeping up a running commentary for those of us still up on the bridge. He'd latched on to the cargo crate on the first try and then muttered, “Uh-oh.”

  “I don't like the sound of that.”

  “It could be a misreading,” he said hesitantly.

  “Just tell me.”

  “There's not enough mass.”

  “Not enough mass?”

  “The remotes provide feedback on the mass of whatever they're picking up, since it has to match up to the cargo manifest especially on skip runs, where weight calculations are important,” Viss explained. “The reading I'm getting seems too small for the crate and its contents. Unless I'm wrong about what the crate weighs.”

  But this was Viss, the man who knew more specs about the Tane Ikai and everything in it than I did, and I knew how likely it was that he had it wrong—not likely at all.

  “Where's the crate now?” I asked, getting up.

  “Bringing it through the pod bay doors,” Viss said. “I'll have the doors closed and the air pressure equalized by the time you get here.”

  He hadn't counted on how fast I was moving, though, and I had to stand and tap my foot impatiently at the airlock hatchway to Cargo Pod Two while the air was pumped back in. Everyone else—including Rei, who really should have stayed at the helm—gathered around it, too. When the indicator went green I opened the hatch and climbed down into the cargo pod, the others clattering one by one down the ladder behind me. The cargo crate lay on the far side of the strapped-down groundcar, on its side over near the bay doors, and we practically ran over to it.

  I found out what I wanted to know soon enough, anyway. Not letting myself stop to think about what the inside of the crate might be like, I keyed in the simple unlocking code and lifted the lid.

  Viss, as usual, had been right. The crate was empty, and the body of the identity-stripped operative, one of our keys to bringing PrimeCorp down, had vanished into the blackness of space.

  I slammed the hatch closed. “Damne, damne! What do we do now?”

  Hirin shook his head. “Doesn't make sense. How could the body be gone?”

  “Are we sure it's our crate?”

  “Yes, because of the homing beacon. And the unlock code worked.”

  “PrimeCorp,” Maja said in a tight voice. “It has to be. Somehow they tracked him here—”

  “I don't think so.” I cut her off. I didn't want to believe it was possible. “They couldn't know he was in this system. He had no ID biochip for them to track him with, and there's no way they'd find that homing beacon by chance.”

  “Although they did have the tracking device on the Tane Ikai,” Hirin mused. “They might have been tracking us but staying just at the edge of our sensor range from the moment we left Earth. Maybe they knew when we jettisoned the crate and knew it went into the pinhole, did the same thing Baden did to see where it went, then sent someone out to pick it up in case it could lead back to them.”

  “The tracking device couldn't have had that strong a signal,” I argued. “Surely they couldn't have been close enough to pick up the signal but out of range of our sensors. And why leave the crate here?”

  “They could have had a tiny tracker on the op's body,” Viss suggested. “We didn't strip him down. Never thought of it.”

  “Or maybe someone just found the crate and opened it to see if there was anything valuable in it,” Maja said reasonably.

  “So when they discovered it was a body, why didn't they just put it back out in space?” Rei asked. “Anybody with any decency would. It's got no value.”

  “Anybody with any decency wouldn't have opened it in the first place,” Maja said.

  “It might be valuable to someone,” Baden mused. “There are lots of traders out here, and not all of them are dealing in things we'd like to think about.”

  “Ick,” said Yuskeya. “I know I don't.”

  I kicked the crate once, knowing it was childish. “Well, I'm freezing my butt off down here, so I'm going upstairs for a triple caff. I might even find something interesting to use as an additive. You're all welcome to join me. And then we'll see if I can get through to Lanar, or if this whole detour has been a waste of time.”

  We trooped back up the hatchway ladders again. I was starting to think I'd look into installing some kind of elevator when I put the Tane Ikai in for a refit. I'd never climbed the ladder as much as I had on this trip.

  Rei and Baden went back to the bridge. I fetched a bottle of Vileyran whiskey from the secret compartment in my cabin and plunked it down on the galley table with a “Help yourself.” When the rest of us had collected our beverages of choice from the galley we followed Rei and Baden to the bridge, taking drinks for them, too. The Tane Ikai was already moving toward the pinhole, and as I came onto the bridge, Baden said, “Message request queued up and ready to send on the WaVE, Captain. If Admiral Mahane is in Sol System we should know pretty quickly.”

  Baden was right. Lanar pinged back with a WaVE message within three minutes. I opened it up on my screen. Lanar was on the bridge of the S. Cheswick; I could see crewmen at consoles in the background. “Saluton, little sister! I didn't know you were back in Sol System.”

  It was good to see his smiling face, and I felt some hidden tension in my chest loosen. I hadn't realized just how badly I wanted to talk to him. “Saluton, Lanar, but I'm not actually in the system. If I send you some coordinates, can you tell me how quickly you can get to them?”

  He rai
sed one eyebrow. “Hmmm, all business today. Sure, send them along.”

  I nodded to Baden and he sent the data packet along the WaVE. I watched Lanar relay them to a crewman. “What's up, Luta? Are you all right?”

  I let myself smile a little. “I'm not even sure how to answer that, Lanar. An awful lot is 'up.' Although I am all right, for the moment at least. And better now that I'm talking to you.”

  His eyes softened and he smiled. “No more pirate attacks, I hope.”

  I shook my head. “Fortunately, no. But then again, I'm not carrying any particularly interesting cargo, either.”

  He looked off-screen briefly and then said, “We can be at those coordinates in about six hours if we burn hard,” he said. “And if it's important.”

  “I think you'll agree it's important,” I said, “But I don't want to say anything else unless I know we're secure. Will you come?”

  His grey eyes went very serious as he studied me on the screen. “We'll be there,” he said, “although my navigator claims there's nothing of interest in that sector.”

  “Well, maybe your navigator will learn something new,” I said with a wink. “Gis la revido, Lanar. I'll talk to you soon.”

  Six hours was a long time to wait and hope that PrimeCorp didn't show up. I retreated to my cabin and watched Mother's videos again, and tried to decide what she should do. Deep in my heart, I believed she'd been right to keep PrimeCorp from using the research unscrupulously. Whether she'd signed a contract or not, they were her ideas, and I felt she had a moral right to some control over them. And PrimeCorp had certainly proved itself an unworthy caretaker of humanity's future.

  But now, with the Schulyer Group to consider, the situation might have changed. If their research turned out to be sound, the control that Mother had guarded so closely was about to be taken out of her hands anyway. And if Schulyer hadn't gotten there, someone else would before long. Mother would not be able to stop it from coming. All she could do would be to try and ensure that people had fair access. But some of the things she'd said in her videos were bothering me. I wanted to talk to Lanar about them, but that wasn't going to happen for a while. And for some reason I didn't want to go to Hirin or Maja with this.