Nearspace Trilogy

by Sherry D. Ramsey

  Hirin had his own EVA suit on and I clomped over to him as quickly as I could. “Can you pilot while Rei gets into her suit? I'll take weapons.”

  “I think I can manage,” he said with a flash of a grin. Hirin had piloted the Tane Ikai for decades. I just hoped his recent de-aging experience had restored his reflexes.

  I sat down at the console just as the targeting locked onto another of the runners. Without hesitation, I touched the button to fire the torp and watched it launch from the bay soundlessly, arcing toward the runner bearing down on us. The pilot rolled to avoid it, but it contacted the edge of a wing and an orange bloom scattered sparks and debris in all directions. The impact sent him spinning away out of sight below us. With luck, it might be enough to take him out of the equation.

  “Message from the Trident,” Baden said.

  “Audio only,” I said.

  “That's all she's sending.”

  “Captain Paixon, this is your last warning,” Dores Amadoro's voice was as cold and icy as the space around us. No battle heat there. “We will try to disable you only, but at this point I'm sure you understand that I can't make any promises.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Amadoro,” I said. “I'm sure you can understand that I can't, either.” I broke the connection, tired of the woman's threats and games.

  Hirin sat at the secondary pilot's console and Rei bent over, pushing her feet into the EVA suit. I hadn't noticed even a stutter in the handling of the ship when they swapped control. “Any chance we can just outrun them?” I asked, although I already knew the answer.

  “Not with that burst drive,” Hirin said. “The runners, maybe.”

  “All right, then. Concentrate on taking out the main ship,” I ordered. “Disable them if possible, but don't hesitate to take any opportunities, either.”

  A chorus of ayes met the order.

  “Try to get a lock on the Trident, Luta,” Hirin said. “I'm going to try a chicken run.”

  I swallowed even as my hands danced over the controls. Hirin certainly hadn't lost any of his nerve, anyway. A “chicken run” was old jargon from our early spacefaring days together. It would take us in a swerving line toward the enemy ship, hoping to get a shot away at them before they could get one off at us. Part of me wanted to order him not to, but I'd always trusted him in the past. How could I refuse to trust him now?

  We'd been trying to put distance between ourselves and the Trident; now Hirin pushed the ship into a sharp climb relative to the far cruiser and brought us around in a tight turn to make a run toward it.

  “Searching for lock,” I said, and Hirin started the ship veering left and right, sharper than should have been possible, it seemed to me. I heard Dr. Ndasa gasp, but kept my eyes on the targeting screen. The Tane Ikai trembled under the stresses and a low whine sang along the walls.

  “Torpedo away from the Trident,” Yuskeya said. Even now her voice was steady and strong. I guess my brother had trained her well.

  I should have ordered Hirin to break off, but I didn't. He swerved harder, more erratically, and I waited, finger poised over the screen, for the lock to turn green. Or the ship to fly apart at the seams.

  Then Maja's scream came over the comm, and cut off as abruptly as it had begun.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The Company of Friends

  “Maja, what happened?” I demanded. I could not move from my seat or take my eyes off the targeting console, or risk all of our lives.

  For a long, long moment there was no answer. “Maja!”

  “I'm okay,” she said, her voice small and strained. “I fell off the hatchway ladder. But I'm okay.” She ended with a sharp intake of breath that did not sound okay at all.

  The lock went green and I fired the torpedo. “Away!” I said to Hirin, in the same breath as Yuskeya said, “Trident has fired again.”

  Now it was just a question of who could dodge faster. The Tane Ikai immediately veered starwise in a sharp twist, and the metal all around us screamed in protest at the forces pulling at it. On one of the viewscreens I saw the bulk of the Trident dart to one side as well, then I couldn't keep following it. I was too busy trying not to black out as Hirin pushed the ship through maneuvers that were near-certain to tear us apart.

  “Torp has a trace lock on us,” Yuskeya said.

  “Jettison the trash,” I ordered. “We might confuse it.”

  “Done,” said Baden, as the flotsam and jetsam that would usually be dropped at at spacedock for recycling trailed out behind us.

  Light flashed in a brilliant rush on the viewscreen, painting the dimly-lit bridge like moonlight. “That's a hit,” Rei said with satisfaction. She'd finished suiting up, but wasn't about to take the piloting controls back at this point. “Looks like we might have taken out that burst drive, she's coasting now.”

  I started to grin but it didn't last long. Hirin sent the ship into a rolling dive that threatened to bring up the contents of my stomach, and I remembered the PrimeCorp torpedo still chasing us. The Tane Ikai jolted suddenly sideways and an even brighter light roiled over every viewscreen. Metal shrieked and a horrible rushing sound filled the comm.

  “We're hit,” Yuskeya said with the tiniest catch in her voice. “Cargo Pod Four and Engineering.”

  “Main drive is losing power,” Hirin said.

  “Switching to secondary,” Rei answered without missing a beat.

  I was up and on my feet before I realized what I was doing. Luckily my mags were still engaged or I would have gone flying across the bridge. I yelled into my helmet comm. “Maja? Viss?”

  I started clomping toward the rear of the bridge, planning to take the ladder down to the lower deck.

  “Captain?” Hirin's voice sounded behind me. Just the one word, and he didn't shout. But it halted me in my tracks, and I shook my head to clear it. No. Despite what my heart was telling me, I couldn't go running to see what had happened on the deck below us. I was in command. I started walking again, but I stopped when I got to the command chair and sat down shakily.

  “Reports,” I said. My throat was so tight, the word seemed to scratch it, heart thumping so hard and painfully it must be audible over the comm.

  “Emergency bulkhead between Decks One and Two has sealed,” Baden said. His voice was shaky, with no trace of his usual cockiness. “Engineering deck is depressurized.”

  Maja, I thought in agonized silence. I knew he was thinking the same thing.

  “Trident appears to be disabled,” Yuskeya said. “One runner left, and it's coming this way.”

  “We still have secondary drive and manoeuvring thrusters,” Hirin said. “Coming about to face the runner.”

  “Fire everything we have at it,” I heard myself say calmly. My voice sounded like it came from someone else.

  The ship shook as a volley of torpedoes vaulted out toward the oncoming runner. It got just close enough to launch one of its wasps before one of our torps took it squarely in the body and it blossomed into a silent red ball. I felt nothing, not even relief. My mind had gone to some place where it simply did whatever came next.

  Another tremor ran through the ship as the last wasp missile hit, but our luck held one more time. Hirin had managed to keep the manoeuvring thrusters turning us sideways once our torps were away, and the wasp struck the door to Cargo Pod One. The reinforced doors were possibly the strongest parts of the ship, and although the wasp detonated and the Tane Ikai juddered harshly again, I didn't think the missile had penetrated.

  “We're okay.” Maja's voice came weakly over the comm. She was panting. “At least, I'm okay, and I think Viss is . . . I hurt my leg when I fell . . . might be broken . . . so I couldn't get the suit to Viss as fast as I should have.” Her voice rose in pitch and her words tumbled over each other, hysteria vibrating beneath them. “He didn't have the helmet all the way on when we were hit. But . . . it's on him now, and he's still breathing. It doesn't sound right. Someone . . . should get down here, soon.”

  I let
out a breath that was almost a sob. “Good—” I had to clear my throat and try again. “Good work, Maja. Glad to hear you're okay.”

  “All threats seem to have been eliminated or disabled, Captain,” Yuskeya said, and for the first time her voice had a tremble in it. “Weapons systems on the Trident appear to be offline. Permission to render medical aid in Engineering?”

  “Go ahead, Yuskeya,” I said. “Folks, we're going to have to seal all the bulkheads and depressurize the corridor to open the hatch to Engineering. I don't know how good our overall integrity is, so everyone check your suits and say when you're ready.” We'd have to go and inspect the damage soon, see if we could patch ourselves up to get to Vele, but first I wanted everyone safely on the bridge deck.

  “Captain?” Dr. Ndasa's voice came over the comm from his helmet mic, shaky but resolute. “I will go with Yuskeya and help her see to the others.”

  “Thank you, Doctor.”

  There was silence from Dores Amadoro or anyone aboard the PrimeCorp ship. The Trident itself seemed to be coasting, slow and blind, and I wondered with a pang if they had wounded or dead to care for. I set my jaw. If they did, it wasn't my fault. She'd risked the fight, and it definitely hadn't gone the way she'd expected. But I did have one other thing on my mind.

  “Hirin,” I said, and he turned in the pilot's chair. “You didn't see fit to consult with me before loading up the ship with torpedoes?”

  He had the decency to squirm in his seat. “You were busy . . . you had a lot on your mind. I didn’t think it was a detail you needed to be bothered with.”

  “A load of torpedoes is something I don't need to be bothered with? Let me state for the record, here and now with everyone paying attention, that any munitions brought aboard this ship constitute a detail that I need to be bothered with. Anything else will be considered mutiny. Is that clear?”

  It was greeted with a quiet chorus of “Aye, Captain.”

  Rei said, “I bought a new plasma rifle when we were on Eri . . .”

  And at the same time Baden was saying, “I picked up a—”

  I waved my hands to stop them. “Personal ordnance excepted. All right?”

  Nods and smiles all around. Much later, I thanked Hirin properly for saving us with the torpedoes, but those details aren't important here.

  “Captain, your brother is pinging us like mad,” Baden said.

  “Put him through.”

  Lanar was on his feet, leaning on his desk with white knuckles as he stared at the screen. “Luta! Are you all right?”

  I nodded, realized he might not be able to see my face very will inside the EVA helmet, and said, “I think so. Viss is injured and Maja might have a broken leg. Yuskeya and Dr. Ndasa are seeing to them. The ship has a few more perforations than it did the last time we talked, but we're holding together.”

  “I've got a far cruiser on the way but she won't be there for an hour or so. Are you secure?”

  I laughed. I couldn't help myself. My ship sported numerous holes, was partly depressurized, and the “enemy” was still within sight. As far as I knew, PrimeCorp still wanted samples of my DNA, Mother continued to be missing, and I'd had a Protectorate “spy” on my ship for over a year without suspecting it. Secure?

  “I guess we're as secure as possible under the circumstances, little brother,” I said. “But I'll certainly be happy to see the spacedock on Vele.”

  Not one, but three Protectorate far cruisers showed up to escort us to Vele, along with the disabled Trident. By the time they arrived, Viss and Maja had been brought back up to the bridge deck, and Hirin and Baden made a cursory inventory of the damage we'd suffered. The Trident turned out to be in worse shape than we were; the torpedo that had taken out their burst drive had also caused a chain-reaction failure in their main and secondary drives, so they were pretty much dead in the dark. Generators strove to keep life support at least minimally functional, and that was it. One of the Protectorate cruisers had to call for a tug to get them moving again.

  I did hear that no-one on the Trident had been killed, but beyond that, nothing. I wondered briefly what Dores Amadoro had told the Protectorate officers about what had happened here, but decided that I didn't really care. I'd had my own Protectorate officer aboard the Tane Ikai, who had witnessed the whole altercation, and I was pretty sure that Amadoro's hot-headedness would prove to be a game-changer in our dealings with PrimeCorp. After her stunt, Lanar and the Protectorate might not get their wish to take the corporation apart little by little. I couldn't say the thought made me sad, despite Lanar's conviction that a PrimeCorp collapse would be bad for Nearspace.

  We had fared much better than the Trident; we needed some emergency patch materials from the Protectorate ship that had taken us into their care—the Winchester—and some electronics, but our secondary drive would get us to Vele all right. The main drive would have to be replaced. Maja's leg was in an ultraplas cast, a weird echo of the ultraplas cuffs from our kidnapping episode on Rhea. But she was limping around just fine.

  Viss was confined to his quarters, where Dr. Ndasa and Yuskeya had moved a load of equipment from First Aid to monitor him. He'd been exposed to vacuum for a mercifully short time, but one lung had collapsed, and some small blood vessels in his eyes and face had burst. Once Maja had secured his helmet and the suit had repressurized he'd seemed stable, and Dr. Ndasa had been able to treat him quickly, but they were keeping a close eye on him. Viss was helping his own recovery mostly by complaining a lot and trying to get someone to let him onto the Engineering deck.

  It would be three skips to get to the Beta Hydri system, where Vele and its sister planet Vileyra circled the yellow-orange star. That meant I had lots of time to think, when I wasn't overseeing repairs and visiting the patients. And what I mainly thought about was my mother. My mother and all her worries and fears and sacrifices, and how she'd looked on Kiando when she said it wasn't because I didn't care about my family. I thought about her, and the bioscavs, and Hirin and Maja and Karro. And me. And how this mess with PrimeCorp was all going to sort itself out.

  The conclusions I came to were these: she was tired of running. And I was finally tired of chasing.

  So one day I sat down and loaded the chip marked PC35411 into my datapad. I added up the numbers for my parents' birthdays and the year she left us on Nellera, punched it in as the password, and it opened up the message like a charm. But I didn't send it, not that message. That decision was my mother's to make, unless and until she wasn't able to make it herself and I had proof of that. Instead I took the address it was to be sent to, and wrote my own message.

  STATIC ELECTRONIC MESSAGE: 25.7

  Encryption: securetext/novis/noaud

  Receipt notification: disabled

  From: “Captain Luta Paixon”

 

  To: “Anonymous”

  Date: Sat, 14 Dec 2284 11:16:55 -0500

  To whom it may concern: Please forward this and the attached message along the route established. There is no danger to you or recipient.

  Many thanks,

  Luta Paixon,

  Captain, Tane Ikai

  Encoded inside that message was the one I wanted Mother to read. I used the same password she'd placed on the L/L chip; she'd figure it out.

  Mother,

  You said: No one should have sole control of human aging. Think about it?

  Come home,

  Luta

  Four days later I was lying on my bunk, trying to get some rest. That goal was being thwarted by my brain insisting on trying to figure out how I was going to pay for a new main drive, when Baden commed me. We'd made the skip through to Beta Comae Berenices the day before, with the Winchester hovering behind us like an anxious mother, and tomorrow we should make the wormhole to MI 2 Eridani. One more skip from there would take us to Beta Hydri and the proceedings on Vele.

  “Captain, message for you.”

  I sat up and touched
my implant. “From Lanar?”

  “No.” Baden's voice sounded strange. “It purports to be—from you.”

  “On my datapad,” I said, bounding for the desk to snatch it up. It wasn't vid, only a text message, and it was brief.

  Received: from [205152.59.68] Eri Main Datastation

  STATIC ELECTRONIC MESSAGE: 25.7

  Encryption: securetext/novis/noaud

  Receipt notification: enabled

  From: “Captain L. Paixon”

 

  To: “Luta Paixon”

  Date: Wed, 18 Dec 2284 6:25:22 -0500

  Dear Luta,

  You may be right. I'll see you on Vele.

  M.

  I thumbed my implant comm. “Baden, where did this message come from?”

  “Through the comm relay from MI 2 Eridani,” he said.

  It did have the relay stamp from the Eri datastation at the top, but that didn't mean it had originated there. It could have bounced around Nearspace for a while before it got to me.

  It seemed like, at least when this message had been sent, she'd been safe. And somehow, she knew about what was happening on Vele. I wondered if Lanar had found a way to get a message to her, too, or if her network of contacts was just that good.

  Either way, it seemed like everything was going to come together on Vele. I rolled over, closed my eyes, and this time my brain let me sleep.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  One's Aspect to the Sun

  Vele was a smallish planet, about the size of Mars, circling its star at a distance similar to Earth's from Sol. It was Earthlike and yet somehow alien; it had little axial tilt and so seemed to have one long temperate season that rarely varied, and something in their biochemical makeup made a lot of the plants look wrong. It was a nice enough planet, though, and I would have liked it more had it not been the place where Hirin originally took sick.