I let out a long sigh. “Now what?”
Lanar turned to look at the smoldering remains of the mountain, the PrimeCorp base, and the Chron ship. “Now we go back to your ship, try to figure out where the hell we are, and take whatever intelligence we can back to Nearspace,” he said.
“I was afraid you were going to say that.” I looked around. “I guess it’s not a great planet for a vacation anyway,” I said.
Lanar put an arm around my shoulders. “That’s my little sister,” he said. “Always looking for the bright side.”
“Big sister,” I reminded him, and poked him in the ribs. That kiss had been interesting, to say the least. I was going to have some fun with little brother the next time we were alone.
WE SETTLED OUR extra passengers wherever we could make them comfortable, and as Rei took us up into orbit around the planet, I went to quickly shower and change my clothes. It felt like days since we’d set down on the surface, and I had to stare at the time on my datapad to convince myself that it had been mere hours. I looked longingly at the bed as I pulled on clean pants and a sweater . . . even just a twenty-minute nap would make me feel a whole lot better. I almost gave in, but resolutely shook my head and left the room. We had to find the Dorland and make a plan to get everyone back to Nearspace safely.
And I was damned if I was going to be the last one to show up on the bridge.
As it was, Jahelia was there before me, but I managed to make it before Lanar. Hirin slid out of the command chair without even asking me, so I sat down gratefully and let the servos massage my back.
“Yuskeya’s still tending to the injured,” Hirin told me, and sat down at her nav console. “Your brother and Commander Yu are with her. I think they’re having a command meeting while Yuskeya cleans wounds and applies bandages.”
“Where’s Mauronet?”
“Lanar muttered something about what kind of a ship has no proper brig, and then they decided to keep the dear admiral sedated in First Aid,” he said with a grin. “And before you ask, Sedmamin is sulking in his quarters, after Yuskeya told him his bumps and bruises could wait while she triaged everyone else.”
“Captain, we’re in orbit around the planet,” Rei said. “No indications of any other ships in the area.”
“Quiet on the comm channels,” Baden confirmed.
“Rei, let’s get over and scan that smaller moon—the one we suspect is the operant device. Let’s confirm that so we aim the activator drive at the right place.”
With a nod, Rei engaged the thrusters and the Tane Ikai moved toward the small moon. The brick-red clouds of the gas nebula were behind it from this vantage point, making it look impossibly tiny for something that was so vital to us at this moment.
I pursed my lips. “So, where’s the Dorland? If they’re scouting for wormholes, they should still be in range. I can’t imagine they’d actually try a skip without reporting to the admiral first.”
“Hope they didn’t run into any unfriendly Chron,” Jahelia said from the secondary engineering console. “We did see those two ships right after we’d arrived.”
“It’s a Pegasus-class cruiser,” I said. “They should be able to handle a few Chron; if not, Nearspace is doomed before we even get started.”
“True enough, but this is their territory,” Jahelia said. “We—and the crew of the Dorland—don’t know our way around or what’s here. Perfect for ambushes, asteroid-mounted auto-defence systems, proximity mines—”
“All right, point taken,” I said, holding up a hand. “Let’s not dwell on those possibilities. As soon as Lanar gets here—”
“He’s here,” my brother said, striding onto the bridge. Commander Yu was with him and looked around with interest. “Yuskeya’s just gone to take a look at Sedmamin, and then she’ll join us.”
“Commander Yu, there’s no sign of your ship,” I told him. “What were their orders when Admiral Mauronet left them to go down to the planet?”
Yu pressed his lips into a thin line and stared at the viewscreen, which showed us only the planet rolling now far beneath us, and the nearby operant moon that marked the entrance to the strange intersecting wormhole. The mouth itself was too dark to discern from here, and melted into the darkness of space around it.
“He told them to scout for and map other wormholes in the near vicinity, but not to venture into any of them,” he said. “He also told comms to send a distress signal on a particular channel, and to include a certain code in it.”
“What was all that about?” Lanar asked with a frown.
Yu shook his head. “He didn’t explain. Just said that if anyone answered on that channel the crew should tell them he—Mauronet—was in command of the ship and ask for assistance. That they could trust them, and bring them back here to meet us.”
“A PrimeCorp channel?” I guessed, and Lanar spread his hands wide.
“Makes sense. Even if he was disillusioned with PrimeCorp, he knew he needed their help to make it back to Nearspace. He might have planned to take them out once he had what he needed. Another thing we’ll ask him about when he wakes up.”
“So, the Dorland might just be out of our scanner range,” Rei said. “Or there could be something between us and them blocking or messing up the signals.”
“Or they could have run into Chron ships,” Jahelia said again.
“Or they could have found a wormhole and decided to try skipping through despite what Mauronet said.” I looked at Yu. “You think everyone was suspicious that he’d gone over the edge?”
“I do, but they wouldn’t go off and leave the rest of us,” Yu said with certainty, and Lanar nodded in agreement.
“No Protectorate crew would do that.”
“And we can’t, either,” I said, managing to stifle a sigh. It would have been so nice to just spin up the activator drive and skip through the wormhole to home, hand all these problems off to someone else. But I knew Lanar would never agree to that, and my conscience wouldn’t, either. I said as much. “I know we have to get back with what we’ve learned, and what these techs from the planet can tell the Protectorate, but we have to make an effort to find the Dorland before we do.”
“And avoid any Chron in the area,” Baden said. “Jahelia’s right, we don’t know anything about this system or how often they come and go through here.”
“Thank you, Baden,” Jahelia said sweetly.
“Captain? Scans of the moon match up pretty closely with the first one we encountered, in the Woodroct’s Star system,” Yuskeya said. “That’s the operant device, all right.”
I felt a little knot of tension at the back of my neck loosen. “Good. We’re in business. Viss? Whatever you can do to make sure that activator drive is ready to go, please do it.”
“Aye, Captain,” Viss answered.
A thought struck me. “Hey, Pita,” I said.
The AI answered from Jahelia’s datapad, where it lay close to her on the console. “At your service, Captain.”
It was really amazing how sardonic an AI could make herself sound when she wanted to.
“I’m just thinking . . . you have all the Corvid data Fha gave us, and the PrimeCorp files you and Jahelia, um, obtained when Sedmamin wasn’t looking, all the files we got from PrimeCorp Main last week, and whatever you just downloaded from the computer here.”
“And I might have picked up a few tidbits when we were with the good doctor on the Chron station,” she added smugly.
“I didn’t know about that, but okay,” I said. “Do you think in all of that, there might be information about these systems, and some of the links between them?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” the AI said. “Let me have a look and see what’s here.”
She went quiet, and I caught Jahelia’s eye and shrugged. “Worth a shot?”
“If she finds something useful, you realize we’ll never hear the end of it,” Jahelia said.
I looked out the viewscreen at the slowly-revolving, tiny moon. �
�I’m willing to take that chance.”
Chapter 25 – Lanar
Incoming
LUTA HAD A good idea when she asked Pita to determine where we were in relation to the Otherspace systems we’d identified. But while the AI worked on collating the masses of data she’d accumulated, we couldn’t just sit still.
“All right, let’s assume the Dorland would follow standard procedures,” Luta said to me. “What would the Protectorate protocol be for a ship exploring a new system?”
We’d gone to the galley for food and drink while we regrouped. Luta had suggested it, and I’d realized how hungry I was. So now Luta and I, Hirin, Jahelia, Commander Yu, and Yuskeya gathered around the big table with hot soup and drinks. Luta had told Rei that until we had a better plan, she should keep the Tane Ikai in an ever-widening orbit around the unknown planet, with long-range scanners in constant use.
I shrugged at the question. “Apart from Woodroct’s Star, I can’t remember it happening,” I said. “There are probably protocols left over from the early days of wormhole exploration and the formation of the Protectorate, but I don’t know what they are.”
I looked the question at Yuskeya. “When we found ourselves in the Corvid system, it made sense to me to pick a base point, like the wormhole, and start recording data from there. Then you can work out from that and always find your way back. But what direction to go if you’re just exploring, with nothing else to factor in—” She spread her hands. “That would be random.”
“All right. So, all we can do is what we’re doing,” Luta said. “Next question is, what do we do if we find them?”
“If Pita can figure out where this system is in relation to others we can identify, we might be able to contact the Relidae,” Jahelia said. “They could help them plot a course back to Nearspace.”
“They could try to ride the trail of the Tane Ikai if we go back through the wormhole that intersects with the Split,” Hirin said. “They got here that way, after all, following the Chron ship.”
“We don’t know if that will work with the activator drive on this ship,” I said. “The Chron version could be different.”
“And we don’t know yet,” Luta reminded us, “whether our activator drive is even going to work. So, Pita’s data—if she can come up with some—could be just as important to us.”
“No pressure,” Jahelia said in a low voice.
“The crew of the Dorland could come aboard with us, and we’ll all take a chance on the wormhole together,” Yuskeya said. “I don’t love the idea of leaving the ship here, but it could be locked down. It’s more important to get the crew back, after all.”
Yu looked uncomfortable but I nodded. “My thoughts exactly, but we won’t abandon the ship unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
Rei’s voice came over the comm. “Captain! I have a ship on long-range . . . coming this way and it looks like it’s coming hot.”
“Drive signature?”
“Too far out to tell yet.”
“Be on the bridge in a minute,” Luta said. She looked at me. “If it’s the Dorland, they might be running from something. We’ll have to decide what to do in a hurry. If it’s not the Dorland . . .”
We all stood then. She didn’t have to finish that sentence. Hirin said, “Go on, I’ll secure everything here.” He started picking up dishes and dumping them into the scrubber. Luta threw him a grateful glance but the underlying meaning of his action wasn’t lost on any of us. We might be heading into a fight, or flight—or something else. And we had to be ready.
THE PLANET STILL wheeled below us on the viewscreen when we arrived on the bridge, but we were far enough away from it now that I could no longer make out the plume of smoke from the explosion. The shadowed background of space was littered with stars—an image I’d seen hundreds of time before, and yet every planet was different, and so I never got tired of the view.
“Still coming fast,” Rei said as Luta slid into her command chair. I was still a bit lost on the bridge of a ship I didn’t command or crew, so I just stood next to her.
“Anything chasing it?” Luta asked.
“Not so far—hang on.” Rei stared down at her console for a long moment. “Yeah, there’s someone on its tail,” she confirmed. “Just caught it on the edge of the scan.”
“But no identification on the lead ship yet?”
“I might have it,” Yuskeya said. She’d gone directly to her navigation console and now looked up from the screen. “Tentative ID is a Protectorate signature, so if that’s right it has to be the Dorland.”
“Let’s assume they’re being pursued by a Chron ship—or at least one,” Luta said. She turned to me. “What’s our plan of action in this scenario?”
Before I could answer, Pita chirped from Jahelia’s engineering console. “Captain, I believe I know where we are. Well, sort of,” the AI amended. “In relation to some other places we’ve been.”
Luta hesitated. Regardless of what Pita had discovered, we weren’t going to be able to take much time for a discussion with the Dorland. “Give me the quick version,” she said finally.
“All right. I think there are at least two other wormholes out of this system, in addition to the one we came through. One leads to a system we’ve visited, Commander Blue’s designation OS-G5V-03. That’s the one with the Relidae station, where we left Professor Brindlepaw.”
Luta locked eyes with me. “If we could get the Dorland there, they’d find help.”
“The second wormhole I believe leads to a binary star system with one Relidae-inhabited planet,” Pita continued. “It’s one skip away from the system we passed through on our way to Tau Ceti. So that route could lead them back to Nearspace, too.”
I blew out my breath. “If we have enough time to set them up for either of those options. We have to deal with what’s headed this way first.”
“The bad news is—both wormholes are days away in-system,” Pita said.
“One ship in pursuit, we can probably handle,” Luta said. Hirin returned to the bridge just then and made his way to the improvised weapons station. “Hirin, your weapons systems are ready to go?”
He gave a brief nod. “We’re not a Protectorate battle cruiser, but we can protect ourselves.”
Sedmamin also came onto the bridge, cradling his arm and looking aggrieved. “Captain, your medic said she’d be back with something for pain for me, but she hasn’t returned.”
“We got a little distracted, Chairman,” Luta said in a tight voice. “I’d tell you to go get it yourself from First Aid, but Mauronet’s in there. Have a seat and we’ll get to it when we can.”
With a glare that Luta completely missed—or ignored—Sedmamin sat in a skimchair near the EVA suit bank and folded his arms. Or tried to. The plasticast ruined the gravitas of the gesture.
“Merde,” Rei said suddenly. She swivelled her skimchair around to look directly at Luta and me. “That pursuing ship behind the Dorland? It just turned into a squadron.”
“BADEN, HOW SOON can we get any kind of a connection to the Dorland?” Luta asked.
Baden hesitated. “No FTL WaVE capacity here. It’s not going to be until they’re within range of a short-range scan.”
“All right. As soon as possible, I want a line to them. Lanar will talk to whoever’s in command.”
Commander Yu had said nothing to this point, but spoke up now. “That should be Commander Mattu, if nothing’s changed since they left.”
“Use his name, Baden, that’ll help them realize they can trust us,” I said.
“The question is, what are we going to ask them to trust us on?” Luta asked me. “We’re not defenceless, but we’re not a warship.”
I nodded. The Tane Ikai and one Pegasus-class cruiser were not going to win any dogfights with a squadron of Chron fighters. I heard myself say, “They’ll have to try to follow us into the wormhole.”
I waited for someone to argue with me, but the bridge had gone oddly quiet. Finally,
Luta nodded, and Jahelia said, “I don’t suppose I get a vote, but that makes sense to me. Anything else, you’re risking everyone.”
“And the possibility of getting the information about the base and the ship back to Fleet Commander Holles,” Yuskeya added. Then she said, “Captain? Another flight of ships has showed up on the long-range.”
I crossed to Yuskeya’s console. The ships were only a cluster of dots on the scan, but they moved as one, following the squadron behind the Dorland. I swallowed, tasting something sour in my throat. Either the Dorland had done something to mightily piss off the Chron—or this was the beginning of a full assault, heading for this wormhole into Nearspace.
“Rei, take us to the wormhole,” Luta said. “Let’s make sure we’re in place so we can move through as quickly as possible when the Dorland arrives.”
“What?” Sedmamin demanded, his voice thin with fear. “Why are we waiting? We need to get out of here now!”
Luta fixed him with an icy glare. “We’re not going to abandon that ship. They don’t have their own activator drive.”
Sedmamin threw up his hands in exasperation. “You’re all freneza. I’m going to get my own pain meds.” He stomped off in the direction of First Aid.
“What if Mauronet’s awake in there?” Luta called after him.
“I’ll take my chances,” Sedmamin threw over his shoulder at her. “If I have to, I’ll hit him with my cast.”
Jahelia raised her eyebrows at Luta. “You know, I think there might be hope for that man, yet.”
“What if the Dorland doesn’t want to follow us through?” Maja asked. She’d been silent through most of this, sitting next to Baden at the communications console.
“Lanar can order them through, don’t forget,” Luta said. “He’s the ranking Protectorate officer in this area . . . probably in this entire system.”
“I don’t think that’s our biggest concern,” I said slowly.
Luta turned to me. “What?”
Nearspace Trilogy Page 104
