Nearspace Trilogy

by Sherry D. Ramsey

  It was something I never got used to, though, being the odd one out after all those years flying with Hirin.

  I sighed and got down to work. The request for passage to Kiando was there on the job log, and the name matched Hirin's information. I sent an offer to the researcher, a Dr. Ndasa, knocking ten percent off the usual passenger fee just in case he had a tight fist. I did a quick scan for cargo offers going to Mars, the Cassiopeias or other systems en route, and sent out a few tenders. Might as well have the cargo pods full wherever we were going.

  A knock sounded at the cabin door and Rei poked her head in. She looked fabulous, skin glowing, hair down and flowing around her shoulders like water. I wished suddenly that I'd gone for a facial, too. I could use some pampering.

  “You're back!” she said, echoing Baden's words.

  “I'm back,” I agreed, “and on the trail of a new job. A few new jobs. We might not be here very long.”

  I'd tried to keep my voice matter-of-fact but Rei knew me too well. She came into the cabin and shut the door behind her. “What's wrong, Luta?”

  “There have been some—unforeseen developments.” I leaned back in my chair and tucked my feet up under me.

  Rei flopped gracefully into my big reading chair, the one that I allow myself as a captain's luxury. She, too, was dressed in street clothes, if you could call them that. I know I wouldn't be seen on the street in them. Not even in my cabin. It was a two-piece golden biosuit, with flowing fabric bits intermixed with something that looked like medieval chain mail. Whatever you wanted to call it, Rei could carry it off.

  “Hirin?” She said it softly.

  “Well, yes, but probably not quite what you think.” I thought maybe if I talked fast, I wouldn't start crying again. “He had a few bits of news. One was a possible lead on my mother. On Kiando.” Rei was the only person in the crew who knew I was looking for her—but she didn't know everything about why.

  Her eyebrows shot up. “That's a long run. Do you think it's worth investigating?”

  I shrugged. “Might be. We might have a job that would take us that far. Hirin doesn't have much longer to live,” I blurted suddenly.

  “Oh, honey,” she said, but that was all.

  “But here's the interesting part.” I swung my legs down and leaned forward, resting my elbows on the clear desktop. “He wants to ship out with us when we leave Earth this time. He wants to die in space.”

  There, I'd said it, and I still wasn't crying.

  She thought about it. “Well, the guest quarters are empty,” she said matter-of-factly. “I'd put him in there, it's closer to your room than the passenger cabins.”

  “So you think it's a good idea?”

  Rei nodded. “If it's what he wants, I don't see any harm in it—except that it will be harder for you, right?”

  I clamped my lips together tightly, because she'd hit upon the thing I'd been too cowardly to admit to myself.

  “In the end it might be better for both of you this way. It's been a lot of years with a lot of distance between you.”

  I nodded. The incoming message alarm chimed and I shamelessly used the distraction to change the subject. As I'd hoped, it was from Dr. Ndasa, and I pressed the screen to take it realtime.

  “Saluton,” I said in Esper. “Good afternoon, Dr. Ndasa.” He was an older Vilisian male, the amber-coloured flesh around his jowls wrinkled, the tips of his low-set, slightly upswept ears poking through ebony hair pulled back into the usual thick braid. A few pale amber streaks ran through his hair, the Vilisian equivalent of grey. He looked at me with eyes the shade of dark violet common to his race.

  “Captain Paixon?” He seemed startled, looking at me with what, even on a Vilisian face, seemed an odd expression. “Th-thank you for your message,” he stammered.

  I couldn't imagine he had a problem with my speaking Esper; the Vilisians were generally good linguists and he could probably converse with me in several Earth languages, although they often clung to the older, more stiffly constructed Esperanto. When we'd first become allies with the Vilisians, during the Chron War, they'd had to use clunky computerized speakerboxes to converse with us, Vilisian voices being pitched too high for humans to hear. In the long years since then they'd fixed the problem with some kind of implant, and a distinct accent replaced the stilted mechanical voices. I gave him points for pronouncing my last name correctly, pay-zon and not paxon. Of course, he'd already encountered Hirin, so he had a head start.

  “Were you interested in travelling on the Tane Ikai?” I asked. Perhaps he hadn't been expecting a female captain.

  “Oh . . . oh yes, I am,” he managed. He must have realized that he hadn't yet greeted me properly, and hurriedly made the usual Vilisian gesture, the touch of a palm to eyes, lips and heart. Then he blinked and seemed to make an effort to shake off whatever had made him uneasy. “I haven't had many other offers.”

  I wasn't surprised. Kiando was a long run—three wormhole skips with long insystem stretches between—and there wasn't much passenger traffic direct from Earth to the Cassiopeias. I mentioned Hirin, hoping to put the alien more at ease, and his face broke into a smile, the wrinkles in his skin thinning and flattening.

  “My good friend Hirin Paixon! He is family?”

  “He is family,” I agreed. “He may be making the trip with us, so you can speak with him again if you like.”

  “But his health! Is it wise?” The doctor seemed truly concerned, which made me like him despite his initial weirdness. Maybe it was just an alien thing.

  I shrugged. “It is—irrelevant,” I said finally. “He wishes it.”

  The doctor nodded his head sagely, and we turned the conversation back to business. Rei waved silently to me and left the room.

  When we had completed our conversation and terminated the connection, I sat back from the screen. Dr. Ndasa's words rang in my head. Is it wise? I smiled. No, it was not wise, but wisdom had not been a notably guiding principle of our lives together. It was too late to start taking much notice of it now.

  Chapter Three

  Shortcuts and Long Moments

  I was busy following up cargo tenders an hour later when Yuskeya hailed me over the ship's comm.

  “Captain?”

  “Right here, Yuskeya.”

  “Do you have a minute? I have the wormhole data. I think you'll want to see it.”

  “I'm on my way.” I went to the galley first and fixed myself a double caff. My eyes felt bleary after staring at cargo manifests for too long, trying to decide which were the most advantageous offers. If we made the skip to Kiando our first priority, which I wanted to do, it didn't leave much leeway for arranging other stops. The trip to Mu Cassiopeia involved skipping through three wormholes, taking us through the MI 2 Eridani and Beta Hydri systems. I could take on cargo for Mars, the planet Eri in MI 2 and either Vele or Vileyra in Beta Hydri, but that was as far as I wanted to stretch it for cargo hauling. Any more stops would add too much time, and the mysterious female scientist on Kiando could leave long before we got there. It had to be a balancing act.

  I sighed and breathed the caff's enticing fragrance in deeply, the mug warm in my hands. Was she my mother? Was there really much chance, or was I still hanging on to a groundless hope that I'd been chasing for thirty years now?

  Our life had been fairly normal, as far as I could remember, up until the time I was nine. Mother was a scientist and worked for PrimeCorp. I knew she worked on anti-aging research, but that was all I understood. She talked to me sometimes about how someday we'd live forever, would have probably found a way long before then if it hadn't been for the Chron War and then the Retrogression, but hell, I was nine, how closely did I listen? I went to school, I had friends. I was happy.

  One day my mother came home from work and took Father into the study. They had a long, low-voiced conversation that lasted until my little brother Lanar finally pounded on the door and demanded some supper. They didn't say much when they came out, although the
y both looked grave. The next morning we woke to find our entire apartment packed up to move, and we left on a far trader before noon. There wasn't much in the way of explanation, only that this was “the way it had to be” and that it was for our safety. A succession of travels, moves, and midnight getaways continued until I turned fourteen.

  That's when Mother said she couldn't keep putting all of us in danger and that she'd have to “go away” for a while. They fought about it, she and Father, but in the end there came a morning when she just wasn't there. For a while we received sporadic, untraceable messages, saying she loved us. Then—nothing. Father never believed that anything bad had happened to her, and after I'd stopped being angry and started noticing how neither Lanar nor I aged past about thirty, I didn't want to believe it, either. I wanted to find her. Lanar had used the opportunities presented by his Protectorate career to search for her for a long time, too.

  “Captain? Are you coming?” Yuskeya's voice on the comm broke my reverie.

  “Sorry, I'll be right there.”

  Yuskeya had been fidgeting while she waited for me; all the workstations were tidy, all the screens wiped clean. Yuskeya's one of those people who cleans when she needs to calm her mind. I've never understood people like that, but it's handy sometimes to have one on your crew.

  Anyway, it was a good sign. It probably meant she had something interesting to tell me.

  “Okej, what did you find?” I was hopeful there might be something to help on this new job, but I wasn't letting myself get too excited. Wormholes that actually made any of the trade routes shorter didn't turn up very often. In the first place, they were dangerous to explore and there weren't many hole-spelunkers. They're mostly either already rich or already dead. In the second place, wormholes didn't have to make sense. They simply existed, had probably been around since the creation of the universe. They weren't all useful. If a wormhole led to a system with a habitable planet, eventually we colonized it, but most of them didn't. Occasionally a new one provided a shortcut to somewhere we wanted to go.

  She looked up from her screen and grinned. “Two out of six useful, Captain. They're nice ones, too.”

  “Really?” I slid a skimchair over from communications to look at her screen. She pulled up a number of starmaps and overlaid them.

  “Now watch.” She typed in a command and twelve endpoints appeared in green, connected in pairs by broken yellow lines. Four of them started in Nearspace but ended in systems that didn't even have names yet, just Gliese Codes from the star catalogue. Two, however, looked promising.

  “This one,” said Yuskeya, tracing a broken line with a delicate finger, “starts near Eri and ends not far from Jertenda in Beta Comae Berenices, so that cuts a whole lot of time off that run.”

  She looked up at me and I nodded. “Impressive.”

  “And this one,” she said, indicating the other wormhole, “goes between MI 2 and GI 892.”

  “Great.” It was hard to keep the disappointment out of my voice. I know I had no right to expect it, but neither route was going to make the trip to Kiando any faster.

  Yuskeya notices everything. “I thought you'd be pleased!”

  “Well, I am. I was just hoping there'd be something that would work for the Cassiopeias. It was silly.”

  She pursed her lips and I realized she was suppressing a smile. “Want to take another look?”

  I frowned and leaned in toward the screen, but I still couldn't see what she meant. “The Beta Comae Berenices route eliminates one skip, but the in-system travel times would still be longer.” Since every wormhole seems to be similar in “length” no matter how distant the systems they connect, in-system travel times are the deciding factor in making routes longer or shorter.

  Yuskeya grinned. “That's not it.”

  I grimaced. “I'm stulta today, I guess. You'll have to tell me.”

  “It's risky. You may not want to do it,” she said. “Look at where this second hole terminates. It's only about two days from the Split.”

  I saw it then. The Split was a wormhole that connected the uninhabited system GI 892 and Delta Pavonis. Another wormhole out of Delta Pavonis terminated about a day's journey from Cengare, Kiando's sister planet. Yuskeya was right, that route could cut a good bit off the travel time.

  The Split was rarely travelled, however, for very good reason.

  I don't pretend to understand exactly how wormhole travel works—you'd have to talk to Viss for that and you'd probably come away feeling like you'd just stuck your head into a plasma drive. I do know that the skip drive generates a thin layer of what the physicists call “Krasnikov matter,” enough to keep the wormhole from destabilizing while a ship is inside it. Then it uses alternating positive and negative energy pulses to launch the ship into the wormhole at one end. The effects of the Krasnikov matter and the pulses allow the ship to skip along the tunnel-like inside of the wormhole, much like a rock skipping on water. A Ford-Roman field holds the ship intact, countering the immense forces at work inside the wormhole and protecting it from the high-frequency radiation, which would prove disastrous for ship and crew.

  However, unlike a rock skipping on water, the skips don't follow a straight line. As the Ford-Roman field repels from one side of the hole, the ship slides around to bounce the next time off the other side, to create a water-going-down-the-drain effect.

  Inside the ship, one isn't aware of these sensations, or at least they're very faint. Some folks feel slightly nauseous, and occasionally someone takes a heart attack, but it's rare. The hardest thing for most people to deal with is that the pseudo-grav fields get intensified, so it's pretty difficult to move around during a skip. Possible, but not fun. Sit and stay until we're out the other side, is what I tell passengers. It's a whole lot easier that way.

  The problem with the Split is this: once you get inside it, you realize quickly that it's only half a wormhole. From outside, the terminal point is just like any other. But inside, the usual tube-like passage is more like the half-pipe used in extreme gravity sports. While one half of the tube looks perfectly normal (for a wormhole), the other half of the tube—well, it either isn't there or isn't anything we can figure out. Instead of a brilliantly colour-shifting wall, that half is simply a plain grey haze, no sensors can penetrate it, and no probe that's gone through it has ever come back or been heard from again. So you can't skip through it the way you can a normal wormhole; you don't get that water-down-a-drain effect. Everything has to be tightly controlled—field, speed, pulses and other delicate factors—so the ship can go the whole distance like a skipping rock, in a relatively straight line down the normal half of the wormhole. Very few crews will take it on.

  I'd done it once before. It was an emergency, it was unavoidable, and Hirin was piloting. I didn't know if I could do it with anyone else, even Rei. I'd have to think about it.

  Yuskeya just sat there looking at me, her ebony eyes bright. She'd never say it, but she was daring me to say it was a bad idea.

  “You might have a point, Yuskeya,” I said with my best poker face. “Any far trader willing to go that route could offer some pretty nice discounts. I'll see what the others think.”

  “They'd do it if you wanted them to,” she said.

  “Maybe.” What was she waiting for me to say? You'd think at my age I could read people better. “Good work, Yuskeya, and thanks for telling me about it. We'll discuss it with the others later.”

  I didn't bother telling her not to mention it until then. I was sure she wouldn't be able to resist anyway, and that way they'd be prepared by the time I brought it up. I could get a reaction they'd had time to think about, not an automatic one.

  I heard the main bridge hatch cycle open as I went down the corridor to my cabin, still carrying my half-empty mug of caff.

  Yuskeya said, “Viss! Come here for a minute. I want to show you something.”

  I smiled. Maybe I wasn't so stulta after all.

  The next day I got a call from Hirin's nur
sing home. I was listed in their records as his next-of-kin, although to avoid questions about the age difference we hadn't specified the relationship.

  “Ms. Paixon?” The woman on my screen looked very corporate, with grey-streaked hair pulled back rather severely from her pinched and taut face. Her dark grey suit was unrelieved by any hint of colour or pattern, and although she wore earrings, they were also grey. I didn't remember her from the time we'd admitted Hirin there.

  “How can I help you?” I asked.

  She folded her hands on her desk. “My name is Evlyn Travis, I'm an administrator at Holbencare. We've had a rather abrupt and worrisome notice from Hirin Paixon, that he intends to leave our care,” she said. “I'm not sure that such a move should be permitted.”

  Permitted? Odd way to put it. “Yes, I've spoken with Hirin about this matter,” I told her. “It may not be convenient, but it's his decision.”

  She leaned forward a little and softened her face. I had the impression it was a very deliberate gesture. “His health is really not good, Ms. Paixon,” she said. “It is not in his best interests to leave here, but sometimes the older residents . . . well, they get these strange notions.”

  “I've spoken to him about his health, thank you, and I do understand the situation. But it is his decision to make—”

  She interrupted me smoothly, as if I hadn't been speaking. “Now, you may not be aware that it's possible to apply to the courts for a declaration of incompetency—”

  “Hirin is quite mentally competent, I assure you,” I snapped. “I'm sure you'll have no trouble finding someone to occupy his room, if that's your concern.”

  She managed to look misunderstood and sorrowful. “Our only concern is for the welfare of our residents,” she said. “Perhaps you haven't been fully informed concerning Mr. Paixon's health situation—”