Nearspace Trilogy

by Sherry D. Ramsey

  She was right. “Go ahead, then, Rei, but be careful. Block all outgoing transmissions except from the bridge. I'll speak to Chairman Buig if I have to while we're there, but otherwise we don't want anything going out that PrimeCorp could pick up on.”

  I sent a ping to Chairman Buig and he came up onscreen. I quickly outlined our plan. “Will you send me an encrypted message when they dock at Ando City?”

  “Certe,” he said.

  “What are you going to tell PrimeCorp?” I asked.

  A glimmer of a smile touched his lips. “Why, that Sinjorino Holsey went off to visit someone at the spaceport, and I haven't seen her since. Naturally, I'll keep my men searching for her.”

  “And you'll leave out our little conversations?”

  He grinned. He looked quite nice when he did that. “I don't know what conversations you mean, Captain. I've also instructed my docking authority to 'lose' the documentation on when you left.”

  There wasn't much to do then except sit and watch as Rei piloted us up and around the planet. On the viewscreen, Kiando spun slowly below us, the ochre swirls of its many arid deserts interspersed with verdant dots of scattered oases and small blue seas. Was my mother still down there somewhere? Any number of small vessels and mining ships had lifted off since the message had come from the PrimeCorp ship; the spaceport at a busy mining colony rarely went quiet, and a silvery starliner hung in orbit, with a busy stream of shuttles flitting between it and the surface. But if she'd wanted to get off the planet, why hadn't she simply come with me?

  “We're just about in a perfect position,” Rei said.

  “Oh, thank goodness,” said a voice from the archway. I looked up to see Yuskeya, very pale and with a somewhat messily wrapped bandage encircling her head, leaning against Maja. Her robe was a wrinkled mess but she seemed supremely unaware of it.

  “She insisted,” Maja said, shaking her head.

  Yuskeya stared at the bag in my lap. “Where's your mother?”

  I jumped up and went to her. “I wish I knew. But I know where you should be. Lying down,” I told her.

  She shook her head, then half-closed her eyes, grimaced, and pointed to the empty skimchair at her nav station. Maja and I helped her into it and I knelt beside her. “What in the world happened?”

  Yuskeya closed her eyes. “I was hoping you could tell me. We had your mother's things—she gave me that bag to carry for her—and we were on the way to meet you.” She touched the tips of her fingers gingerly to the lump on her head. “Whoever or whatever hit me, I never saw it coming. The next thing I knew, I woke up in First Aid.”

  “Who was with you?” I wanted to check out Gusain Buig's story.

  “Just me and your mother,” she said. “The Chairman went with Baden to hook him up with the comm centre. Did you send me a message?” She squinted as if she were trying to remember something.

  I nodded. “Several. You only answered the first one.” I kicked myself mentally. My message had probably been the distraction that let someone sneak up on Yuskeya. “I'm sorry,” I told her.

  She shook her head, then winced again. “No, I'm the one who's sorry. This never should have happened.”

  I patted her hand and went back to my chair, where I'd left the leather bag. It felt a little voyeuristic to go through it, but I justified snooping by telling myself there could be a clue inside to tell me where Mother was now. To be honest, I think I just wanted to feel a little closer to her. I sat down and opened the top.

  It looked like a pretty ordinary travel bag. I pawed through carefully. A denim-blue t-shirt and rolled-up pair of jeans. A set of tiny earphones. A chipcase. A personal bag with toothpaste, toothbrush, soap and other toiletries. Socks. Mints. A tiny light and an actual paper book, Ring of Tears by Juris Lell. A hand-drawn wormhole map of Nearspace, a red pen, and a sheaf of papers filled with scientific diagrams and notations that made less than no sense to me.

  I sighed. It was all pretty standard, and what I would have expected. Could have belonged to almost anyone, really, except for the scientific stuff. And the wormhole map, I supposed.

  But . . . there was the chipcase. I drew it out and opened it. There were slots for six chips, but only three of them held anything. Two were labelled NB2897 and PC35411, respectively. The third was labelled, L/L.

  Luta/Lanar? Or was I being silly and sentimental?

  “Yuskeya,” I said slowly, “my mother didn't say anything about this bag, did she? Or anything in it?”

  “No. She just asked me to carry it. She had a few bags.”

  “Rei, we're okay here for a bit, yet, right?” I asked her.

  She nodded, leaning back from the piloting console and folding her arms. “Until we hear from Chairman Buig that the PrimeCorp ship is down, we just have to stay in geosynchronous orbit.”

  “Then I'm going to my quarters for a bit. Hirin, Maja, would you come with me?”

  I saw the quizzical glance that passed between them, but they both got up to follow me. “Yuskeya,” I added, “Go lie down, okay? There's nothing for you to do here, and you could use the rest.”

  She smiled and nodded. “I've felt better, I have to admit. Thank you, Captain.”

  I knew it wasn't necessary, but I added, “Keep an eye on her, Viss.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  I took the whole bag with me to my cabin. Hirin and Maja trailed after me, and we stopped in at the galley for hot drinks.

  “What's up?” Hirin asked, drawing off a chai tea for himself. Yuskeya seemed to have won him over to her favourite drink.

  “Maybe nothing,” I said. “But maybe a message from my mother. I’d like a little family support if that's what it turns out to be.”

  Hirin squeezed my arm and Maja simply nodded, spooning sugar into her own tea. “That's what we're for,” Hirin said.

  We settled in my room, Hirin in the big armchair and Maja on the edge of the bed, while I sat at the desk. I twisted the screen around so that we could all see it. When I inserted the chip marked L/L, a message popped up. Please enter the password to view this data.

  I slumped back in my chair. “Well, this might be a short meeting. Having not seen the woman in seventy years, I doubt I can guess this password.”

  “There's nothing else in the chipcase, or the bag?” Maja asked.

  I passed the bag to her and opened up the chipcase, showing it to her and Hirin. “Two other chips, that's all. Everything in the bag looks pretty normal.”

  While Maja went through the contents of the bag, I tried the other two chips, but they were both password-protected as well. I put the first one back in and tried the labels of both the other chips as the password for this one. I thought that was pretty clever, but neither of them worked.

  Hirin leaned back and steepled his fingers in his characteristic “thinking” pose. “Okay, let's think about this. Assuming she meant this for you or Lanar, she must have made the password something you could figure out.”

  “Assuming that, I suppose. I don't even know for sure that's what L/L means, but we're working under that assumption.”

  “So it's likely something that relates to your life together,” he went on, “before she had to leave.”

  “Well, I was only nine when she left PrimeCorp, and fourteen when she went off on her own,” I said. “I doubt that I remember very much from that time. What if there was something that she thought was important, but I didn't?”

  “All we can do is try.”

  For ten minutes or so we tried street names, pet names, teachers, schools, my father's and grandparents's names—anything we could think of that tied to my early life. We moved on to places we'd lived, friends, children; still no luck. I ran my fingers through my hair in frustration.

  “What about things you and your mother have in common?” Maja suggested.

  I typed in red hair, but that wasn't it.

  “Very funny,” she said. “No, really. So you've been separated all this time—that doesn't mean you have n
othing in common.”

  I typed in PrimeCorp, but that wasn't it, either. PrimeCorpSucks? No.

  “Something you have in common, something important to you both,” Hirin mused. “But maybe with a more positive connotation?”

  I sat back and closed my eyes, thinking about the all-too-brief conversation we'd managed to have. Had she said anything that might be a clue?

  . . . it wasn't because I wasn't interested in my family.

  Family. We did have that in common. I typed in KernenEmmageLutaLanarKarroMaja.

  And we were in.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Sounds in the Vacuum

  There were several files on the L/L chip, but they were all labelled Luta & Lanar vid, followed by a number. I paused only long enough to take a deep breath and pat myself mentally on the back for guessing correctly about the contents of the chip. Then I tapped the screen to play the file that ended with -01.

  Mother's face filled the screen. She sat at a scarred, metal-topped desk, and the background looked like any one of thousands of small passenger rooms on any one of hundreds of starliners that operated around Nearspace, carrying folks between planets and systems. She looked pretty much exactly the same as she had when I'd spoken to her earlier, although she wore an azure mandarin-collared shirt and her auburn hair was piled in a messy updo—that kind I can never achieve myself.

  She took a deep breath and began to speak.

  I'm not sure who'll be watching this, Luta, or Lanar, or maybe both of you together. So hello to you both, and before I say anything else, I love you. I'm sorry I haven't been able to say it more often.

  She blinked away tears that had threatened to spill over, and smiled. I have a lot to tell you. I doubt that it will all happen at once. I'll number the files consecutively so that you can watch them in order, and they'll make sense. If you're watching these videos, it's because I'm dead—which I sincerely hope is not the case—or for some other reason, they've come into your hands without me. I hope we'll be able to talk this over together, but if not, it's important for me to tell you everything. She smiled. Or at least a few things.

  “She sounds like you, too,” Maja said quietly.

  “She does,” Hirin agreed. I had no opinion, not really knowing what my own voice sounded like. But my mind was busy elsewhere. I felt guilty to be watching this without Lanar. He deserved to be here as much as I did. I couldn't send him any kind of message without possibly alerting the PrimeCorp ship to our presence, though, and I needed to know if there was going to be anything in these files that might help me decide on my next move. Mother began to speak again.

  PrimeCorp has been dogging me—sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly—for as long as I've been away from you. She breathed a deep sigh, letting it out slowly, as if she were releasing more than just breath. That's a long time.

  They have always maintained that they have a proprietary interest in all the research I carried out during the years I worked for them. Sometimes their attempts to find me have seemed almost cursory, but then they will ramp things up again. They stopped almost completely for a time, when they brought Vigor-Us to market, but the reprieve did not last long. In the past two years, they've appeared to be growing more desperate. They want my data and knowledge, and they want it now.

  Mother paused and took a sip from a mug. She positioned her hand to cover the ship's logo imprinted on the side of the mug. Always careful.

  “They probably know or suspect that Schulyer is getting close with their own research,” Hirin commented.

  Let me be clear, Mother continued. Legally, they do own all my data up to the point when I left. It's plain as plain in the contract we all signed when we went to work there. I can't argue with that, legally or ethically. But I don't want them to have it.

  It's a complicated story, but I'll try to be concise. I worked for PrimeCorp for fifteen years doing research on what was then the next generation of bioscavengers.

  Even though she couldn't see me, I nodded once, my heart thumping. I'd been right.

  We were looking for a way to incorporate all the functions of the previous generations—cancer and disease fighting, trauma repair, toxin purification—into one super-protein, and supply an extra function as well: age-related change suppression. Once we could create nanobioscavengers to deal with the main causes of aging—telomere shortening and damage, DNA glycation, and oxidative stress—in addition to everything else they could do, it would be easy. PrimeCorp fed us a lot of encouragement about the philanthropic value of what we were doing, how this would change humanity forever, how their business model would make it universally accessible. We believed them.

  She smiled. It was probably the most exciting time in my life. We all thought that we were on the verge of offering virtual immortality to the human race.

  And then—we discovered PrimeCorp's actual agenda. We'd just had a breakthrough. We had a prototype designer protein for bioscavengers that could self-replicate, and delay aging by about seventy years before an individual would need an infusion of new proteins. Then we discovered a way to make that protein indefinitely self-replicating. It would mean something close to human immortality.

  I heard someone, Hirin or Maja, take a deep breath. I couldn't take my eyes off Mother.

  She brushed a few stray hairs back from her face and went on. PrimeCorp stood to make enormous profits, because effective as the bioscavs would be, they couldn't be inherited. Each new generation would have to have an initial infusion.

  That's when we found that PrimeCorp had no intention of using the research to the full benefit of humanity. They planned to halt the research where it was, and manufacture only the non-replicating bioscavengers. They'd offer them for distribution only to colonial and planetary governments—at exorbitant prices. A huge advertising campaign would practically force governments to pay whatever PrimeCorp asked. If people knew the technology existed, they'd demand it from their governments, and if the governments didn't come through, the people were sure to revolt.

  Mother folded her hands, set them on the desk in front of her. When we found out, some of my colleagues wanted to argue with PrimeCorp about it, try to fight them. Someone mentioned starting legal action on the basis that we'd been encouraged to work under false pretenses. That didn't make much sense to me; I could see where that would go. We'd all had to sign non-competition contracts when they hired us so that we couldn't take our data or even our experience and go start working for some other genetics firm. We couldn't just move to a less greedy company. It would be tied up in the courts for years, and meanwhile PrimeCorp would let the news slip out, and the demand would be so great that they'd win in the end.

  So I took matters into my own hands. I was the project head, after all, and most of the original ideas had been mine. Before PrimeCorp began to suspect that we weren't happy, I stole all the data and we ran with it. She leaned back in the chair and looked suddenly very tired. I've been running ever since.

  The image froze and I realized that was probably the end of the first video file. I was about to tap the next one when Maja said, “If they were after her for that long, how do you think they finally caught up with her now?”

  I started guiltily and turned to face her. “I'm afraid I must have done something to lead them here,” I said. “Although I don't know what. I tried to be careful.”

  Maja tapped her fingers against her lips in an echo of her father's gesture. “Somehow, they keep finding us. Could they have put something on the ship?”

  I shrugged. “All the decks except cargo are wire-blocked, so it wouldn't matter if they managed to smuggle something on with one of us. And a tracking device on a piece of cargo doesn't really make sense—it could be offloaded anywhere.”

  “What about the intruder?” Hirin said suddenly. “Didn't you say he came up from the cargo deck?”

  “What intruder?” asked Maja.

  “It was before we left Earth,” I said. “Someone, I'm assuming Sedmamin, sent a st
ripped operative to break into the Tane Ikai and get a biological sample from me without my permission. He didn't get it,” I added when I saw the worried look on Maja's face.

  “What happened?”

  “He tried to fly from the bridge deck to the cargo deck, without stopping at Engineering in between,” Hirin said wryly. “But PrimeCorp hadn't thought to give him wings first. He left a mess on the deck, and we left what was left of him in the outer Sol system.”

  “And then in the Keridre/Gerdrice system,” I added. “He slipped through a communications pinhole when we jettisoned the body in a cargo crate. We planned to tuck it away on an asteroid until we'd decided what to do.”

  “Were you hurt?” Maja asked.

  I shrugged. “A bit of a scratch, that was all. Yuskeya fixed me up.”

  “I didn't know about that,” Maja said, frowning.

  “That was before you caught up with us,” Hirin explained, patting her hand. She still looked troubled and pale. “Could he have—I don't know—injected you with something to make you trackable somehow?”

  I hadn't thought of that possibility before, but then I remembered my “entity.” “I don't think that would be very useful. I'm almost always on one of the wire-blocked decks.”

  “So where was he on the ship?” Maja asked.

  I waved a hand. “Pfft. Everywhere, I guess. Well, no, that's not true. I came out into the corridor as he got to this deck. We had to assume he got in through the airlock on the engineering deck. He could have been in any of the cargo pods, and anywhere on Engineering. I don't think he got anywhere on this level before he ran into me. Or I ran into him.” I grimaced, remembering.

  Hirin stood up. “He could easily have planted something on the cargo deck. Did we run any scans after that?”

  I shook my head. “I don't think so.”

  “Then let's go check.”

  I popped the chip out of the reader and put it back in the chipcase, pocketing the whole thing. I wasn't letting it out of my possession until I'd watched everything that was meant for me.