Luta glanced at me. “Lanar, could you take over Yuskeya’s board if she takes the Chairman to medical?”
I nodded, and for once I saw a slightly rebellious look cross Yuskeya’s face. I didn’t blame her—who’d want to leave the bridge right now to see to Alin Sedmamin? But typically, she said nothing in protest, simply stood and motioned for the Chairman to follow her as she led the way to the medical bay. On the Tane Ikai, she was the resident medic.
It’s been a while since I ran much navigation, but I could see what Yuskeya had going. “We’ll lose the ships in a few minutes, once the planet’s between us, but they’re still heading in this direction,” I told Luta. “Not travelling particularly fast, so I’m guessing they haven’t noticed us.”
“Let’s keep it that way for now,” Luta said.
“They’re probably on their way to the wormhole,” Hirin guessed.
I felt my jaw clench reflexively. If the ships were Chron, and headed to the wormhole, they were on their way to Nearspace. My instinct was to intercept and destroy them, but I knew that wasn’t an option. This wasn’t my ship, for one thing, and that wasn’t my mission, for another. But it was hard to know they were passing so close and I could do nothing to stop them. I had to console myself with the knowledge that a Protectorate force waited for them at either end of the Split.
“Planet seems uninhabited so far,” Baden said. “But it’s a big place. No definitive answer for a while. But nothing coming from the continent below us. Emissions in the atmosphere suggest lots of ships have come and gone.”
“Jahelia,” Luta said, “Could you call up those files on Pita, the ones Sedmamin said referred to a system and planet that weren’t identified? I want to know for sure if this is it, and if so, what we might find here.”
“Sure thing, Captain. But you could have asked me yourself.” The voice made me look up, and I realized it was Pita, not Jahelia Sord, who had answered. Jahelia’s datapad rested on the console beside her, and I guessed the AI was always listening. Good to remember.
Sedmamin came back onto the bridge then, his arm in a yellow plasticast. He went to the viewscreen and looked out, studying the planet. Yuskeya came after him and crossed to the nav station, which I vacated for her.
“This is the place?” Sedmamin asked.
Pita spoke up with his answer. “Captain, I’ve calculated a 95% certainty that this is the system mentioned in the PrimeCorp files. The description and the system data fits, and we know there’s access from Nearspace. If we can find the location on the planet that’s pinpointed in the file and there’s anything of interest there, we’ll know for sure.”
“All right. Yuskeya, could you set up a scan using the data in the PrimeCorp file? Get it to define the equator and locate the prime meridian as it’s described. Then run latitude and longitude lines and find the spot mentioned in the file.”
“Will do, Captain,”
Luta sat back in her chair. “All right. Assuming nothing attacks us in the next little while, I think we need a plan.”
“Fight Chron, find the treasure, escape back through the wormhole,” Jahelia offered with a grin.
“Sounds like a plan to me,” Hirin agreed. “Save Nearspace should be in there somewhere, though.”
“And save Nearspace for Gramps,” Jahelia confirmed.
It was the first time I’d seen Luta smile all day.
Chapter 20 – Luta
What the Mountain Hides
I TOLD REI to stay in the scan shadow of the planet until the Chron ships had time to arrive at the wormhole and skip through. Then we edged out to check. The wormhole terminal point lay closed and quiet, and the ships were gone. I let out a breath I’d been holding forever. It seemed we’d gambled right.
Everyone had gathered on the bridge. Scans of the planet had completed and Yuskeya had found the mountain peak that marked the prime meridian—it was taller than all around it by a good hundred metres. With that located, it had been a relatively simple matter to calculate longitudinal lines. The planet’s rotation showed us where to place north and south poles, and with those in place we could define an equator and the rest of the latitude lines. Yuskeya laid in a course that would take us over the coordinates noted in the file, and Rei took us into orbit above it.
From up here, there was little to see.
An argument had broken out about how to run the recon. Viss, Yuskeya, and Hirin came down on the side of continuing to sweep and scan the area from orbit, looking for anomalies or anything suspicious or out of the ordinary, until we had an idea of what might be down there. I felt that this was reasonable for an initial approach, but that a ground search would soon become necessary. Lanar sided with me. The others were carefully non-committal.
“Finding something from way up here is only going to take us so far,” Lanar said, drumming his fingers on the co-pilot’s board. It wasn’t active, so Rei was obviously trying to ignore it and not be irritated with him. I knew that part of his fidgeting was due to not being in command, an unusual and probably not-very-comfortable position for my brother. “We want to go back to Nearspace with more than an unidentified blip on a scan. We need solid information.”
“This is PrimeCorp,” Hirin said. “If there’s something down there, the whole area could be booby-trapped, rigged, watched, or patrolled by drones or paramilitary—you can’t put anything past them. If this is something so big that they’ve been hiding it for over a century in a system outside Nearspace, they won’t have skimped on the security.”
“Or it could all be a red herring,” Maja said. “There might be nothing there at all. Just a hoax to keep the Protectorate occupied if they ever managed to discover it.”
“I think that gives them too much credit,” Lanar said.
“Or they might have been so sure they wouldn’t be discovered by accident that they kept security to a minimum, knowing that it would be less likely to attract attention by mistake,” I said.
“That sounds likely, to be honest,” Sedmamin said. He’d found an empty skimchair and sat, cradling his plasticast-encased arm with the other. “PrimeCorp is cagey. And they have a very realistic understanding of the scale of Nearspace. The chances of a secret base on an uninhabited planet in a hidden system being discovered by anyone—that would seem almost infinitely improbable.”
Lanar nodded. “So they’d keep security to a minimum, to save money and divert attention. Everything could be automated, just to keep an eye on things. Someone discovers the system—not likely in the first place—and they’re quietly silenced. The security threat is very small. The Split’s rarely used, so who’s going to go through it and get diverted into the unknown system?”
“Us,” Rei said, throwing a grin over her shoulder. “But we all know how exceptional we are.”
“You think PrimeCorp won’t even see us coming?” Viss scoffed. “You’re underestimating them.”
I stood up from my chair. “Well, arguing is getting us nowhere,” I said. “Let’s do a detailed scan of the area and see what shows up. When there’s something new to look at or argue over, we’ll do that. In the meantime, I want a constant scan for other ships in the area, out to the edge of our range. I want to know the instant we have any company. I want to know if anything happens with the wormhole. And now I’m going to get something to eat.”
That, at least, was hailed as a good idea, and Maja came with me to the galley. We heated pasta and sauce for everyone and took it back to the bridge. We didn’t talk much while we got it ready. I don’t know what was on my daughter’s mind, but I was seriously questioning the wisdom of what we were doing. Should we be trying to get back through the wormhole and home instead? But although we differed on how to approach the problem, everyone did seem to think investigating was the next step.
We ate in relative silence, too. I was scraping the last of the pasta sauce from my bowl when Yuskeya said, “I’ve got it.”
She’d put her bowl down beside her console. “I’ll put it
up on the main screen, will I?”
I nodded. “Otherwise everyone will be breathing down your neck.”
The image of the planet below us flickered. Now it showed the planet surface, but traced in layers of colour that overlapped, merged, and flowed over the topographical features of the landscape as well as delving the depths of the earth.
I studied the tracery of colours and lines, trying to read features and clues in their intricate patterns, but soon gave up. “You’ll have to tell me what I’m looking at, Yuskeya,” I said. “This looks like a beautiful abstract painting to me, not a secret operations base.”
Yuskeya chuckled. “I wouldn’t call it a base. Not like the thing is jumping out at us. But . . . an anomaly.” She got up from her chair at the nav board and went to the screen. “This is a mountain,” she said, pointing to an area that obviously rose from sea level green through a series of gradations to a dark rust colour at the peak. “But if you look closely here,” she circled her finger in an area on one side of the mountain, “you can just make out a pocket of shadow—and it’s a little pinker.”
“That means hollow,” Jahelia said, nodding.
“Probably hollow,” Yuskeya cautioned. “I’m not making any promises. But it would be a logical place. And difficult to spot, even with the depth imaging, unless you were looking for it.”
“What are all these shapes?” Maja asked, pointing.
“Seems like a lot of rock formations in the area,” Yuskeya said. “They’re too irregular to be anything constructed.”
“And here?”
Yuskeya pursed her lips. “That does look different,” she said. The area lay a short distance away from the mountain. “More regular.”
“Could be discarded equipment, maybe,” Baden suggested
“We need to get on the ground,” Lanar said, “and have a better look.”
“Still seems dangerous,” Hirin said. “What about a closer fly-over?”
“That’ll give us away entirely, Gramps,” Jahelia said. “A ship randomly buzzing a mountain on the side of an out-of-the-way planet? Sure, nothing suspicious about that.”
“We could be prospectors,” Hirin said huffily. “Or explorers. It makes as much sense as putting people on the ground to investigate.”
I put a hand on Hirin’s arm. “Except that there shouldn’t be either in this system. You’re both right. If we’re spotted, anyone is going to be suspicious, no matter how or what we’re doing. The best course of action is not to get spotted.” I looked around at the assembled faces. “Which means small vehicle, on the ground, being as unobtrusive as possible. While a larger vessel, say a ship, provides a distraction by appearing to look for something else if it’s spotted.”
It was a good plan, and they knew it. But everyone waited to hear what Hirin would say. “And who goes down to the surface?” he asked.
“Me, Lanar . . . and Jahelia,” I said carefully. “And Sedmamin.”
Sedmamin began to splutter and Hirin opened his mouth to say something, but I held up a finger. “If Lanar or I run into trouble, we’ll heal faster than anyone else,” I said. “And Jahelia and the Chairman might still have special PrimeCorp access, or other knowledge or information. They might be useful.”
It was a good explanation, and Hirin could see that, too. Of course, my real reason for including Jahelia was that she had the same nanobioscavenger advantages Lanar and I had, but I wanted to keep my promise and not mention that to anyone who didn’t already know about it.
Hirin contented himself with shaking his head. “I don’t like it. It’s a good plan, but I don’t have to like it, and I don’t,” he said defiantly. “But all right. Let’s get the ground car ready. Planetary data says the atmosphere is breathable, so you have that going for you,” he said. He pointed a finger at me. “You’re not going unarmed,” he stated unequivocally.
“Excellent,” Jahelia said, and started for the weapons locker.
“I can’t use a weapon with this arm,” Sedmamin complained, holding up the plasticast.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said, patting him on the shoulder as I passed. “I wasn’t going to give you one, anyway.”
I WENT TO change my clothes into something suitable for planet exploration, and Maja followed me into my quarters.
“Are you sure this is smart?” she asked, folding her arms across her chest and leaning back against the edge of the desk while I rummaged in the dresser. “Shouldn’t one of you—you or Uncle Lanar—stay on board in case something goes wrong?”
“That’s why I’m leaving your father in command,” I told her, pulling a dark, long-sleeved t-shirt from a drawer. “And Yuskeya is here, too. Your uncle and I can heal quickly if anything goes wrong.”
“I thought Dad had the same things now, too,” Maja said.
I caught my breath a little. Was she waiting for the day when her grandmother would offer her the nanobioscavengers, too? Was she hurt that it hadn’t happened yet? I was certain Mother would do it—in her own time, and when she thought she and Maja could talk about it dispassionately. I suppose I was waiting for the same thing, to bring it up with my daughter. Maybe it was cowardly. But there wasn’t time to tackle it now.
“Your father has improved so much, it’s true—so much of the damage done by the virus is gone,” I admitted. “But he’s still older, and he hasn’t had the benefit of the bioscavs all these years. He’s the best one to stay with the ship. It makes no sense to leave Lanar, and I have to—”
She smiled reluctantly. “You have to keep everyone on track,” she said. “I know. That’s what you do best.”
“I do?”
Maja crossed the room and gave me a quick hug. “Yes. You do. So, I guess you’d better go and do it. Just be careful, all right? I hate that you’re going into a total unknown.”
“Not total. We’re pretty sure that someone from PrimeCorp will be down there,” I said, pulling on a short brown canvas jacket.
“Great. I feel so much better now,” she said, and we hurried back to the bridge.
Chapter 21 – Lanar
Secrets and Allies
LUTA DECIDED TO keep the Tane Ikai well away from the mountain. We didn’t know what we might find there, but anything PrimeCorp saw fit to hide away on an uninhabited planet inside a mountain was worth investigating. Rei set the Tane Ikai down about an hour’s distance by groundcar from the suspect mountain. They’d stay only long enough for us to set out, then return to orbit. From there, they’d monitor what we were doing, watch for approaching ships or anything coming out of the wormhole, and scan for drive signatures or debris that might offer a clue about the Dorland. We could signal the ship at any time to come back and collect us.
Meanwhile, Luta, Jahelia, Sedmamin, and I would take the groundcar and, as unobtrusively as possible, make our way to the mountain. We’d find out as much as we could and retreat. That was pretty much the entirety of the plan.
If the mountain turned out to be guarded by real manpower or weapons power, we’d retreat, regroup, call the ship back to the surface to get us, and come up with another plan. Maybe just turn tail, head for the wormhole, and send back reinforcements. I wanted whatever information we could take back.
I wasn’t sure about Luta’s insistence that Jahelia Sord and Alin Sedmamin come with us. Sedmamin, I expected to be more trouble than he was worth, and I didn’t expect he’d have much to contribute.
I still didn’t know much about Jahelia, but I’d had the impression that Luta didn’t particularly like her. I’d been mildly surprised to find her still in the picture—but they appeared to get along fine now. Her attitude was . . . confusing. She pretended to be mockingly amused by everything and everyone, and yet somehow looked for approval, too. She was openly rude, and yet the crew tolerated it with no more than mild annoyance. Maybe their shared experience on the Relidae station had bonded them.
As I checked my weapon and a few other gadgets, I considered my own feelings about Jahelia Sord. Th
ey were almost as confusing as her relationship with the others. She was attractive, no doubt about it. I’d seen enough rare smiles on her pixie face to know that they transformed her. Her brown eyes held a different emotion every time I looked into them. But her personality conflicted me the most. Half the time I wanted to shake her, and half the time I wanted to—
A knock sounded at my door. “Come in,” I called, slipping the laser pistol behind my back and into the waistband of my jeans.
Luta opened the door and poked her head inside. “All set?” she asked. She’d changed from a shipsuit into her trademark jeans and switched to a dark t-shirt. For a change, she’d foregone the somewhat flamboyant long dark leather coat for a shorter, closer-fitting brown jacket. I grinned inwardly, thinking of what her reaction would be if I described anything about her as “flamboyant.”
“Ready to go.” I put a hand on her arm, stopping her when she would have turned away again. “Luta, do you really think Sord is the best one to go with us? And do we need Sedmamin? We’d move faster on our own.”
Luta crossed her arms and leaned against the door frame. “Sedmamin may have passcodes that will work down here—or there may be biometrics—or he may have more information than he even realizes. Or will admit to. I know he claims not to have known anything about this, but it’s possible he’s lying and it will take being on the spot to get it out of him. Jahelia is—handy. Especially in an unknown situation. You’ll have to trust me on that one.”
“I know. It just seems—odd. I mean, Yuskeya or Viss, even Baden if you want to leave Hirin in charge of the ship—”
She grinned and repeated, “Trust me, Lanar. I know what I’m doing.”
“And what you’re doing is keeping secrets from me? Not very sisterly.”
Her face fell a little and I knew I’d struck a nerve. “You know what it’s like with secrets,” she said diffidently. “They have to be yours to tell. I would if I could, Lanar. I will if it’s necessary. Can you live with that?”
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