Nearspace Trilogy

by Sherry D. Ramsey

  “I'll get word to you if anything changes,” he said. “I hope we'll speak again soon, Captain. And if you find Demmar before I do, tell her—tell her I look forward to her return, would you?”

  “Will do.”

  I shut down the commscreen and turned to Baden. “Okay, it's time to scramble. Did you get Viss?”

  “He's already down there.”

  “I want to be ready to burn for a wormhole as soon as the spaceport is facing away from it. I'll wake Rei—”

  “Don't bother,” she said, coming onto the bridge. In deference to Hirin, I suppose, she was wearing her souvenir crimson robe.

  “Doesn't anybody sleep around here?” I asked.

  “Who could sleep with so much excitement happening?”

  “So where are we going, Captain?” Yuskeya asked, coming in, too. Apparently she wasn't going to pay much heed to any of us about getting some rest. Maybe I'd have to get Dr. Ndasa to have a little talk with her.

  “That's what I'm trying to decide,” I said. I drummed my fingers on the arm of the chair, thinking. “I want to try and reach Lanar. I want to tell him everything that's happened, and I have some videos he needs to see. My best chance of tracking him down is to get to a planet with a Protectorate outpost or find a Protectorate ship—either one will tell me where he's currently deployed.”

  Yuskeya nodded. “True.”

  I got up and paced around the chair. “Also, I'm thinking about Mother—if she's still on the planet, either hiding out or kidnapped, the Chairman has the best chance of finding her or getting a message from her. I can't do either if I'm trying to avoid PrimeCorp myself. However, if she's off-planet, then I'm the one she's likely to try and get a message to if she can, so that's another reason I should get away from here and out where we don't have to keep the communications locked down.”

  “Good thinking,” Rei said.

  I stopped walking. “And the other thing I want to do is skip into Keridre/Gerdrice and see if we can't find our missing cargo crate with the intruder's body inside.”

  “You think we need that for the case against PrimeCorp?” Yuskeya asked. “We do have his DNA, thanks to Rei.”

  “I know, but the Chairman is right—PrimeCorp will just say we could have gotten that anywhere. If we have the body, too, it's better proof that he was here, on the ship, and that our story is true. It's been frozen all this time, so they can do whatever forensic tests they like on it. And it's evidence that he was operating without an ID biochip. It's got to help our case.”

  Yuskeya nodded. “You could be right. And with the homing beacon and knowing where the pinhole exits, we should be able to find it.”

  I took my seat again. “So, knowing all that, where should we go?”

  “Well, we don't know about your Mother—so other than getting out of this system, her whereabouts don't influence where we go,” Rei said.

  “The last place you knew your brother was heading was Beta Comae Berenices, right?” Yuskeya asked, calling up the wormhole map on the big screen.

  “Right.”

  “So we can make one wormhole skip right into Beta Comae. There's a Protectorate outpost on Jertenda there, and then we're only one more short skip to K/G, to see if we can find the cargo crate,” Yuskeya said. She smiled. “Sounds like a no-brainer to me.”

  “Okay,” I said. “As soon as we're in an optimal position to burn for the wormhole to Beta Comae, we'll do it. Might as well wake Maja and Dr. Ndasa and let them know what's going on.”

  I left the bridge and headed back to my quarters. Hirin was awake when I opened the door and patted the bed beside him. “You still look tired,” he said with a grin. “You should come back to bed.”

  “Ha ha,” I said, leaning down to kiss him, but dancing away when he tried to pull me down next to him. “I don't know how much time we have before we break for the wormhole out of this system, and I want to watch the last video from Mother.”

  I explained my plan to catch up with Lanar and try to find the intruder's body while I got out the chip and inserted it.

  “Well,” he said, “for an old lady you aren't too senile. That's brilliant!”

  I blew another kiss over my shoulder toward him. “Gosh, you'll turn my head with compliments like that. I don't know if it's brilliant, but it's a chance. All I can do is try.”

  “All we can do, Luta. You're not alone in this.”

  I reached over and squeezed his hand. “I know. The idea just takes some getting used to again. Now, do you want to watch this with me?”

  He did, and I touched the screen to play the video.

  Mother was back in a tiny, unassuming stateroom, likely on another of the big starliners that ferried people around Nearspace. This one had at least made a nod to décor, and a wall holo behind her displayed slowly morphing images of soothing Erian landscapes. She'd dyed her hair dark brown, covering up its signature bright auburn, and it made her look older.

  I do want you both to understand why I've done the things I've done, Luta and Lanar, she began. I had to test the bioscavengers on someone, and it seemed only fair that it be me. Once I knew they worked, and I had started to suspect that PrimeCorp wasn't going to play fair with them, I couldn't live with myself until I'd shared them with both of you. Few parents want to outlive their children, and I especially wouldn't have been able to stand it knowing I'd engineered my own longevity. I'd have treated your father, too, but he didn't want it. I've never quite understood why.

  And when your father died—you were probably angry that I didn't come to the funeral. I was there—in a way. I sent a good friend with a hidden recorder. But I also knew that PrimeCorp would be watching, expecting me to turn up. And it was so hard—knowing I could have saved him, if he'd let me . . .

  Her eyes brimmed and she blinked quickly, denying the tears. I felt guilty. I had been angry, for a long time. Until I'd figured out what her reasons probably were. That's one thing about living on a far trader—lots of time to think.

  She went on. The generation of bioscavengers you both have should keep on self-replicating without errors for at least another ten years or so, but there is a new generation I've produced that's—well, they should last pretty much indefinitely. I did plan to contact you both sometime in the next couple of years and offer them to you. If something has happened to me, all the instructions for producing them are on the chip marked NB2897, which should be in the chipcase with this one. The password is the sum of your two birthdays, plus the ages you were when we first left Earth, written in standard format. You'll have to decide yourselves if or how to go about that.

  She leaned back in her chair, which squeaked in protest, and stared at the space above the camera as if gathering her thoughts.

  My own mind was whirling at what she'd said. Indefinitely. That meant, barring accidents, I was, or could be . . . functionally immortal.

  An idea like that takes some getting used to. I was quiet, too, while Mother composed her thoughts on the screen. I felt Hirin take my hand.

  “Wow,” was all he said, and then Mother was speaking again.

  There are many things to consider if the choice has come to you. When I started this project I thought it was important, the best thing we could do for humankind. I sacrificed so much because I didn't want it to come at the price of putting us all at the mercy of PrimeCorp or one of the other corporations. All these years I've kept working at it, hoping the day would come when we could distribute it freely. But sometimes when I think about it, it seems like the worst idea in the world.

  On the one hand, we could accomplish so much more if we had more time, longer lives. So much misery could be avoided if there were no death. We would have limitless capacity for joy, for discovery, for loving.

  Hirin squeezed my hand again, and I squeezed back.

  Mother shifted forward in her chair. Then I consider the other side. The necessity to keep expanding, to find room for all of us to live. The wars and disagreements that might never end beca
use death doesn't hand the problem over to a new generation. The endless ways greedy power-seekers will invent to oppress others if they have all the time in the universe to think about it and implement their plans. How much longer it will take for views and attitudes to change if there's no dying-out of a generation. I don't know. Maybe it would be a disaster.

  She paused again and I considered that. What would Alin Sedmamin do with endless years in which to scheme and plan? Would he eventually get bored with money and power and turn to philanthropy? I doubted it. You don't know how a couple hundred years could change a person, but they'd probably only reinforce character traits, whether good or bad.

  And what would my future hold if I got my bioscavengers refreshed from my mother's bag of nanotechnological tricks? I couldn't imagine running a far trader forever, however much I might enjoy it now. And even if I could share them with my family, would it be the same for them? I had quite a head start in the non-aging department. Maybe I'd still have to face losing Hirin someday and spending forever without him. Maybe Maja and Karro, too. I'd thought it might be a possibility before, but I hadn't let myself consider the ramifications because I hadn't known. I could have been programmed to drop dead on my ninetieth birthday, for all I knew before. It wasn't worth worrying about. Now it was different. Now I knew.

  Or did I? With an infinite future lay infinite possibilities. It would be the same for all people. Perhaps that was how it should be.

  Mother spoke again. At any rate, there's one major reason why I haven't been forced to make a decision about whether to release the data—industrial espionage. No-one else has arrived at a workable prototype because PrimeCorp has agents in its major competitors—Schulyer, Genusana, AriAndas. They steal data, they subtly sabotage experiments, they do whatever it takes to make sure that PrimeCorp is going to be the corporation that wins this race.

  I glanced at Hirin and he raised his eyebrows, as incredulous as I was. I whispered, “How would they be able to manage an operation like that without someone figuring it out? Wouldn't someone get suspicious eventually, if none of their research ever worked out?”

  Hirin nodded. “You'd think so, eventually. But isn't that exactly why Dr. Ndasa said he came out to find your mother? So maybe PrimeCorp's luck is running out.”

  You're probably thinking, Mother continued, that with all of that stolen data at their disposal, along with their own legitimate work, PrimeCorp would have made more headway by now. It's true. But PrimeCorp has one little flaw.

  Hirin snorted. “Only one? I doubt it.”

  I shushed him.

  Hubris, Mother said, one side of her mouth twisting up a wry smile. They've never stopped to think that any game they can play, someone else can, too. I've managed to retain a little influence on what goes on at their facilities. Let me explain—and confess, I suppose.

  None of my colleagues were happy about what PrimeCorp planned to do, when we found out about it; and, well, most of us were friends. There was no question that the original research was mine. Most of them would have had moral scruples about using my ideas without my permission. Almost all of them left PrimeCorp just after I did. I stayed in touch with them—in roundabout ways—from time to time, to make sure we remained friendly. There was one who would eventually have gone along with PrimeCorp, but he had—gaps, let us say, in his ethical makeup. And with what he knew, he probably could have helped others duplicate the research.

  But—one of those ethical gaps had allowed him to have an affair with one of the PrimeCorp executives' wives . . . an affair that involved some very embarrassing appetites. After I left, I contacted him and threatened to make it public if he ever used my research. I had holos to prove it. Very nasty and explicit holos that I had lifted from his datapad before I left, and I sent him one—just one—when I contacted him. He died a number of years ago, and he'd never worked in anti-aging research again.

  You might call it blackmail, she said, but I thought of it as firm persuasion. After all, I didn't want anything from him. I just wanted him to do the honourable thing.

  At any rate, almost my entire team left the corporation, but a few stayed on, claiming that their loyalty was to PrimeCorp, and that they'd keep working on the research, even though I'd taken the data. She paused. I don't know if PrimeCorp really trusted them at first, but I guess in the end they were convinced. It wasn't entirely for show. My colleagues did some good work there on the Vigor-Us program. They were the ones who found out when PrimeCorp put moles in the other corporations and started stealing data, and they contacted me through a communication route we'd set up when I left. We decided the best thing to do was to quietly make sure that other research fell through. And as they aged, they carefully recruited people to take their places.

  I felt a little awed. PrimeCorp was the most powerful of the megacorporations, but she had managed to secretly manipulate them from the inside. And then a realization struck me.

  It was like she read my mind, because she leaned toward the screen and said, Yes. I set up a secret way to communicate with the colleagues I left behind—but not with my family. Her face showed a sadness so deep I could almost feel it through the screen. When I left PrimeCorp, I didn't think we'd be on the run forever. And I wanted a way to keep up on what they were doing, keep tabs on them, and on my colleagues, to make sure they stayed loyal. Years later, by the time I left you and your father, though . . . she drew a deep breath and blew it out. I knew how tenacious PrimeCorp was going to be. It seemed like the only way to keep you safe—to make sure you could have a normal life—was to cut our ties completely. All I could think of was keeping you out of it. If they somehow found out you could contact me, it might have made you a target. She shook her head. In hindsight, perhaps I should have done things differently. But I made what seemed the best decision at the time. I'm sorry.

  At any rate, my only leverage against PrimeCorp is the evidence from my contacts on the inside. To use that means pulling my people out of there, and once that happens, there's no going back. So I have to be sure that what I have is enough, and that the time is right to do it.

  If necessary, you can trigger that. One prearranged, coded message, and they'll get out and take everything with them, and get it to me as quickly as possible. Or to one of you, if they can't contact me. That's what will take the time. It'll be a roundabout route, because I didn't want to put anyone in the position of actually knowing where I was. Safer all around. The message is on the chip marked PC35411, and the password is the sum of your father's and my birthdays plus the year I left you all on Nellera. Please use it if you need to, but not without due consideration.

  She leaned back again. Anyway, there it is. My explanations and my sins. As I said, I hope we'll have a chance to talk about it all together sometime. And if not—well, it's in your hands now. I love you both. Good luck. She blew a kiss toward the screen and the image froze.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Gambles, Mysteries, and Playing the Odds

  “Excuse me, Captain.” Yuskeya's voice came over the comm. “We're ready to try and sneak out of the planet's sensor shadow now. Ando City's going into the shadow on that side and we have a clear run to the wormhole to Beta Comae Berenices.”

  I touched my implant. “Start to move whenever you're ready, then. I'll be there in a minute. Thanks.” I didn't get up right away, though.

  “That's a lot to process,” Hirin said.

  “You're telling me. And I feel guilty seeing these without Lanar.”

  Hirin stood, pulled me to my feet as well, and kissed me lightly. “Then let's go find him,” he said.

  By the time we reached the bridge everyone else was there, too. Rei had taken over the pilot's console from Yuskeya, who was back in her seat at nav. Maja and Dr. Ndasa stood near the archway into Sensors, talking quietly. The main drive ticked over like a clock, its pulse rumbling through the ship as Kiando fell further and further away behind us.

  “Anyone noticing us yet?” I asked as I slid into t
he chair.

  “Would everyone please sit down so I don't have to worry about knocking you over if I have to take evasive action?” Rei asked. Maja and Dr. Ndasa moved to take skimchairs.

  “Not yet,” Baden answered me from the comm station. “Only a few short traders have left the planet since we did; they all seem to be headed for Cengare. There's a starliner in orbit getting ready to ship out in a couple of hours, so there's a lot of shuttle traffic between it and the spaceport, but that's it.”

  “Let's hope it stays that way. How long to the terminal point?”

  “I guess we're a little faster than that bucket PrimeCorp sent,” Viss said with evident satisfaction from the engineering station. “We'll get there almost an hour faster than it took them to come in.”

  “So we'll jump to Beta Comae, then take the wormhole there to Keridre/Gerdrice?” asked Maja.

  I nodded. “Viss, I know you wanted to have a look at that tracking device we found in the cargo pod, but did you do anything to it yet?”

  “Not yet. There hasn't exactly been an opportunity,” he said dryly.

  “I know, that's what I was hoping. I wondered if it might be a good idea to drop it somewhere—I don't know, like maybe near a wormhole we don't plan to take, just as a bit of misdirection in case someone comes looking for us?”

  He grimaced. “What a waste of a perfectly nice little tracker! I thought we were going to have some fun with it.”

  “Well, you might have to sacrifice that in the interests of survival. If it looks like they're trying to follow us, I want to leave it as a red herring.”

  “Oh, all right. I'll load it into one of the jettison tubes so it'll be ready.”

  “Good thinking. And if we don't need it, I promise you can have it back.”