Nearspace Trilogy

by Sherry D. Ramsey

  “Then why is it turning around and heading back to the planet—fast?”

  He was right. The shuttle I’d pegged as his had turned tail away from us.

  “Captain, priority message coming in from Orbital Admin,” Baden said.

  “On screen.”

  “—ships in orbit around Nellera. Be advised of possible hostile craft approaching the planet. Protectorate craft are scrambling to meet any threat but you must remain on alert. All ships in orbit around Nellera. Be advised—”

  I motioned to Baden to cut the repeating feed. “Rei, anything on the scan?”

  “I’ve got a handful of blips on the short-range, moving fast,” Rei said.

  “PrimeCorp?” Sedmamin wondered, unease evident in his voice. “Maybe they followed us here—”

  “They’re not PrimeCorp ships,” Rei said. “I wish Yuskeya were here, she’s better at this drive signature stuff than I am.” She keyed commands into the screen.

  “Chatter on the public Protectorate channel says they think it’s Chron,” Baden said.

  “Drive sigs?” I asked.

  “That, and general configuration,” Baden answered. “And apparently there’s nothing else like this scheduled to come in today.”

  “Let’s get moving, folks,” I said. “Sedmamin, take a seat.” I touched my own screen. “Jahelia, we’re moving out of here, and fast. Any reason not to?”

  Her voice came after a pause. “Everything in order down here, Captain. What’s happening?”

  “Unwanted visitors to Nellera,” I said. “Give Rei whatever she asks for.”

  “Got it.”

  From the surface of the planet a scattershot of ships surged up and away, heading to intercept the interlopers. One passed across the big viewscreen in close enough magnification for me to see the Protectorate emblem on its side. It was too fast for me to read the words, but I knew what they said: In Astra Pax. Peace Among the Stars. It had been mostly true for a long time, but those days were quickly coming to an end.

  “I’m a little surprised you don’t want to stay and help out, Captain,” Sedmamin said with the hint of a sardonic smile. “You have a reputation for altruism.”

  “Not today, Chairman. Top priority is getting those files to Fleet Commander Holles.”

  As Rei turned us in the direction of the wormhole to Delta Pavonis, the rear viewscreen showed a bright flash of shields as the Protectorate ships and Chron engaged.

  Chapter 17 – Lanar

  All About Control

  I COULDN’T SAY we limped back to FarView Station, because there was nothing much wrong with the Cheswick except for one hastily-patched hole in the aft hull and a disabled skip drive. But it felt like limping. A subdued air permeated the entire ship, and even Viss and Yuskeya were quiet. I’d messaged Regina immediately to tell her about the Chron ships coming through the Split, and what Mauronet had done, but I didn’t mention the PrimeCorp ship. That would wait until we were face-to-face. We had the wormhole data we’d gone to collect, and no Chron ships had made it past us into Nearspace, but it still felt like a failure. We had no idea where Mauronet and the Dorland might be, we’d lost the PrimeCorp ship and our chance to interrogate its crew, and had suffered damage.

  Regina summoned me to her office as soon as we’d docked. I was only slightly surprised that she’d managed to get herself off the med level so quickly—I’m sure they were only too happy to let her get back to her desk. Viss, Yuskeya, and I left the Cheswick together. Viss had requested permission to use the Protectorate data station to start analyzing what we’d collected at the Split, and Yuskeya had the necessary permissions to get him in there. I’d found out what he’d been doing at that empty station on the Cheswick’s bridge during the Chron incursion.

  “Started the data collection module up again once the wormhole opened and the first Chron came through,” he’d told me laconically after Mauronet had chased the Chron ship through the Split. “I thought we might get something different when it was active. Couldn’t pass up a chance like that. There’ll be a lot of interference from all those weapons, but I might be able to clean some of it up.”

  Now we’d find out if his hunch had paid off. We rode down in the elevator from the docking level to the Administrative level on 3 in relative silence. In some areas, through the glass panes of the elevator, we glimpsed repairs still being effected. I wondered dully if it would do any good, if the Split was going to spit out more Chron fighters every time we turned around.

  Viss and Yuskeya turned off in one corridor, and I continued along to Regina’s office. When I knocked, she called, “Come in!” and I pushed the door open.

  The auburn-haired woman who turned from Regina’s guest chair to smile at me was a surprise, and I almost blurted “Luta!” before I realized that it wasn’t her—it was Mother. Even more shocking.

  She stood and came to give me a hug while Regina smiled benevolently at us. “I’m so glad you’re back! Fleet Commander Holles tells me you encountered Chron ships?”

  Regina still didn’t know about the PrimeCorp ship, so I merely nodded. “Two of them. One was destroyed, but the other one went back through the Split.”

  “Along with Admiral Mauronet,” Regina said, her smile slipping as a frown took its place. “I can’t say I’m terribly surprised, although I’m mad as hell at him for taking that risk.”

  Mother let me go and returned to her chair, and I sat in the other one next to her. “Now that it’s just us, I’ll add that there was a third ship that came through after the Chron—a PrimeCorp ship,” I said.

  “After the Chron? You mean in pursuit of them?” Mother asked.

  I shook my head. “No, following them through. It actually joined in the attack on the Cheswick and the Dorland. They were the ones who took out my skip drive.”

  Regina sat back in her chair. “That was bold. They’re not concerned with hiding their involvement with the Chron anymore, then.”

  “They probably didn’t expect anyone to be sitting right outside the Split,” I said, “and once through, they could break off from the others. We were just in the right place at the right time to see it. And then they had to try and take us out.”

  Mother sighed. “I still don’t know what PrimeCorp is playing at.”

  “Did you think of anyone with ties to PrimeCorp who might be able to help us figure it out? Is that why you’re here?”

  Mother pursed her lips. “I have some information I thought the Protectorate should have.”

  “We’re just waiting for Harle,” Regina said. “He’s on his way over.”

  “There’s something else, too,” Mother said. “We’ve had Chron incursions in Mu Cassiopeia. Gusain’s been able to handle it with the Duntmindi forces stationed on Kiando and Cengare, but if the assaults get much heavier, they won’t be a match. They’ve got some corporate corvettes and runners they use to patrol for pirates and smugglers, but they’re not warships.”

  Regina’s frown deepened. “This is my fear. If we have to dispatch Protectorate ships to defend every planet in Nearspace—”

  “Maybe it won’t come to that,” I said. “Maybe Admiral Mauronet will take out every Chron in Otherspace before he comes back. He was quite enthusiastic.”

  “Very funny,” Regina said, but she didn’t smile.

  A knock at the door signaled the arrival of Harle Southwind, and he came into Regina’s office with his slightly bouncing Lobor gait. As soon as he saw me he said, “Heard you had a little dustup out there. Chron coming through the Split? That’s new.”

  “I have a couple of people working on readings we took before the wormhole opened up, and then again after it did,” I said. “Not sure what it might tell us, but if Mu Cassiopeia’s being targeted too, that might tell us something. It’s only one skip from Delta Pav, and this is where we’ve witnessed them coming through.”

  “The Split is an essentially useless wormhole for Nearspace navigation anyway,” Regina said. She limped over to a cabinet
and pulled it open, offering hot drinks to all of us. I knew better than to offer to help her. “Maybe we should consider blowing the damn thing up.”

  “Luta’s information from the Corvids suggests that might not be a long-term solution,” I said. “But we could ask her about it again.”

  Regina introduced Mother to Harle and he shook Mother’s hand gravely. “I hear you might be able to help us,” he said.

  “I don’t know if you’d call it help, exactly,” Mother said. “But I do have information I think you need to have.”

  Mother glanced at Harle. The Lobor smiled a bit uncertainly, but Regina seemed to understand Mother’s hesitation. “Harle can be trusted, Emmage. You can speak freely.”

  But Mother ignored her and turned her attention to me. “It involves the . . . family secret,” she said after a moment.

  The nanobioscavengers.

  WELL, AS FAR as I knew, Harle didn’t know about Mother’s research and our longevity, although Regina did. Mother and I held a silent conversation for a couple of heartbeats and I knew what she was asking. Can I talk about this in front of him?

  I thought about all the people who now knew about our functional immortality—Luta’s crew, Regina, a few others in the Protectorate, Gusain Buig, an indeterminate number of people at PrimeCorp—and shrugged. “I trust Harle,” I said. “Go ahead.”

  The Lobor laid a hand on my shoulder. The fervid heat of his normal body temperature reached through my uniform coat and warmed my skin. “Thank you, Lanar.”

  I reached up and patted the back of his hand with its covering of soft fur. “Brothers in arms,” I said with a grin.

  The drinks were forgotten as we waited for Mother’s revelation. She bent to the large carryall at her feet and pulled out a datapad. “I think I know what PrimeCorp is up to. The whole thing,” she said. “And it’s even worse than we thought.

  “I took the list of executives Lanar gave me and went over it, thinking at first that I’d look for connections that might link me to some of them,” she began. “That went nowhere, so I went through it again, paying more attention to the corporations they’d moved to.” She called something up on her datapad and turned it so we could all see. Regina, Harle, and I all leaned in, studying the screen. It showed three columns. In the first were names, presumably the executives who’d left PrimeCorp and moved to other jobs. In the second were corporations and divisions. In the third were words I didn’t recognize—some looked medical, some technical.

  “What is it?” I peered at her notes, but they were gibberish to me.

  She tapped the datapad. “All these corporations? They have one thing in common.”

  “What’s that?” Regina asked, peering at the lists.

  “They’re all manufacturers of, or control resources used in the manufacture of, nanobioscavengers. Not just the everyday ones. All of them,” she said pointedly.

  “So PrimeCorp wants to control the medical market?” Harle twitched an ear. “That’s not so surprising, is it? Pretty lucrative business.”

  “The nanobioscavenger market includes some applications that haven’t been widely known or utilized before this,” Mother said. “There’s new research that’s going to turn much of what we know on its head, and PrimeCorp is positioning itself to be able to take advantage of—actually, control is a better word—those applications.”

  “Okay,” Harle said slowly. “I agree that we don’t want PrimeCorp controlling important medical resources. And these are important applications?”

  “Harle,” Regina said, taking a deep breath. “What if I told you there was a type of bioscav that would make you, for all intents and purposes . . . immortal?”

  The Lobor Admiral’s ear twitched reflexively a few times. “Immortal? You’re saying this technology is imminent?”

  “More than imminent,” I said. I stuck out a hand for Harle to shake, and he took it automatically. “Nice to meet you. My name is Lanar Mahane, and I was born in 2204.”

  Harle stopped shaking my hand, although he continued to hold it. “2204?” His voice was incredulous. “Lanar, you’re eighty years old?”

  I nodded to Mother. “And my mother is a hundred and twenty-eight.”

  He took Mother in with wide eyes. “Luta?” he asked in a slightly dazed voice.

  “Eighty-four.”

  Harle swallowed a couple of times and looked over at Regina. She smiled and touched a hand to her shock of white hair. “Not me. Lanar’s family is it. I have exactly the number of years you think I have, not that you need to actually name that number,” she said. “Emmage was the researcher who developed the technology, and spent decades trying to keep it out of PrimeCorp’s greasy fingers. Now her research is freely available, so PrimeCorp can’t put a lock on it. But I guess they figure they can do the next best thing—control the resources.”

  I frowned. “But PrimeCorp started moving people years ago, according to Harle. They couldn’t have known that Mother’s research would become available.”

  Mother tapped the edge of her datapad. “No, but remember, they did have the research data up to a point. And they knew Schulyer Group was working on something similar—there was industrial espionage going both ways with PrimeCorp. Many of the components are the same for all nanobioscavengers anyway, and they’ve definitely been moving to put a lock on those. I can tell from some of the other corporations they’ve targeted that they were making certain assumptions. Reasonable ones. So now they’re well-placed to control the market, if they control the corporations.”

  Regina steepled her fingers and tapped them together. “Here’s a question. Would your super bioscavs work for different races?”

  Mother nodded. “They function at the cellular level. We may have different genomes from other races, but the bioscav programming can be changed to accommodate differences. When it comes down to it, they’re just tiny machines, after all. We were working on a Vilisian line when the breakdown in the project happened.”

  “So they’d work for Chron.”

  Mother looked startled, then nodded. “With the necessary alterations in programming, I can’t see any reason why not.”

  Regina slumped in her chair, looking every minute of those years she’d just joked about. “Can you imagine,” she said, “what a self-healing, non-aging Chron army would look like? If PrimeCorp has allied with them, there’d be no stopping it.”

  I stood up then; I felt an absolute need to be on the move. Regina’s office wasn’t large enough for truly satisfactory pacing, but I could stride back and forth in front of the desk.

  “All right, we need to regroup,” I said. “The Chron incursions are getting worse, and PrimeCorp is obviously allied with them; after what Mauronet and I encountered, I’d say there’s no longer any doubt. PrimeCorp is positioned to take over both the Nearspace Authority and the manufacturing of the nanobioscavengers. Mother,” I turned to her. “When you talked to Schulyer group about their anti-aging tech—will it be a viable competitor for PrimeCorp?”

  She nodded. “It definitely has the potential, but they’ll rely on the same resources that PrimeCorp is locking up. That’ll kill any competition before it even gets started.”

  “All right. So, we’re looking at complete domination of Nearspace by PrimeCorp within a few years, if we don’t stop it now. And the Protectorate doesn’t have the manpower or the ships to mount an adequate defence.”

  “Thanks for making us all feel better, Admiral,” Regina said bleakly.

  Harle put two furred fists on the table. His ears angled back in a way that I knew meant he was angry. “Well, what next? I’m not about to sit back and let PrimeCorp walk all over us on the way to the Nearspace Council.”

  I paced again. “This is what Commander Blue and Viss Feron and I talked about. We know the Split is key. The Chron are coming into Nearspace through it somehow. But not from the GI182 end. So that leaves the damaged side or a ghosted wormhole.”

  “They’re not coming through the wormhol
e in Tau Ceti,” Harle agreed. “We have that one shut down tight.”

  “Maybe Viss’s readings of the Split while it was closed and after the Chron ships began coming through will tell us something. He says he also has data on the Tane Ikai from when they traversed it. There must be something there.”

  “You’re sure we can’t just blow it up?” Regina asked. “I know they have an access route through the Corvid system and Woodroct’s Star, but if we work with the Corvids we can probably shut that one down again. And whatever other ones the Corvids can tell us about.”

  I shook my head. “According to the Corvids, if we disable the Split, another replacement wormhole will appear. We saw that with the one leading to Woodroct’s Star.”

  Regina ran a hand over her hair, dislodging some strands. They fell around her face, making her look vulnerable. “What about the ghosting? Anything there we can use?”

  “I don’t know if there’s any way to block one. We’d have to ask the Corvids.”

  “Okay, so we bring the Corvids fully into this,” Harle said. “See if one or more of them will come here, examine the Split, see if they can give us any advice. They seem to be the experts.”

  “Already in the works,” Regina said.

  I stopped walking. “What about the Relidae, too? They might be able to help. They know the Chron better than anyone else.” I looked around the room. “Get everyone together, pool our resources and knowledge.”

  “I had a message from Luta this morning,” Regina said. “She’s en route from Nellera and should be here by tomorrow. Said she’s bringing some very interesting information. Maybe it will be something we can use.”

  She straightened in her chair and I could see the fire come back into her eyes. “All right. We have the start of a plan. We also need to know what happened to Mauronet, but that ties in to what we find out about the Split, and I’m not sending anyone else through it until we know more.” She turned to Mother. “There are a few other people in the Protectorate who know about Lanar’s—uniqueness. I may need to tell others about the nanobioscavengers. I have to make the full scope of the possible threat clear.”