Nearspace Trilogy

by Sherry D. Ramsey

  Mother was as good as her word. We said goodbye to the Winchester and set down on Vele late one mild, starry night, and the next morning I was barely dressed when I got a message ping. It was voice-only, but it was Mother. “Are you accepting visitors?” she asked.

  “Dock One-Eleven,” I said. “I'll be at the bridge deck airlock.”

  “Wait inside. I'll knock,” she said.

  I supposed it was to avoid drawing attention; me standing alone outside the door, obviously waiting for someone. She was the expert at all this cloak-and-dagger stuff, so I did as she asked.

  When the knock came, I opened the airlock immediately and there she was, standing at the top of the metal staircase. Her hair was a rich, dark brown with pale highlights now, and she wore the midnight blue uniform of a dockworker. She carried a canvas carryall slung over her shoulder and vidshades hid her eyes, but it was her. She was smiling.

  I waited until we were inside before I said anything. “So, you're here to see if PrimeCorp can wiggle out of this one?”

  She pulled me into a quick hug. “Actually,” she said, “I'm mostly here for you.”

  “For me?”

  She slid the vidshades off and tucked them into her carryall. “Do you have any caff?”

  I shook my head. “Sorry, not being much of a hostess, am I? Let's go to the galley.”

  Strangely, it was deserted. I pulled us both steaming mugs from the machine, and we sat down at the long table. “That was some message you sent me,” she said, looking around the room. “Nice ship you have here.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “There wasn't much to it. The message, I mean.”

  “No, but you certainly got straight to the point, and it made me think.” She blew across the top of her caff, making the liquid ripple and steam writhe in the air. “I hadn't really stopped to think about things for quite a while. I was on automatic pilot, you might say. It was . . . a wake-up call. Anyway,” she went on, pulling a datapad from her carryall and setting it on the table between us, “I've sent this data to Lanar. Dates, names, and details on the research data PrimeCorp appropriated and sabotaged, what companies were involved—everything.”

  I looked up from the pad, meeting her eyes. “You sent the message.”

  She nodded. “I sent the message.”

  “And your people? Are they out of PrimeCorp's reach?”

  “No-one on that end realizes what's happened yet. By the time PrimeCorp gets notice of this, they'll be well away.”

  “PrimeCorp's going to have a lot of things to worry about, all of a sudden.”

  She shrugged and turned the datapad around with a finger. “Let's hope so. At any rate, I've decided that I have to let it go,” she said simply. “I'm going to go and talk with Schulyer, release my research data publicly, and let PrimeCorp take me to court if they want. They'll stop bothering you, at any rate.” She put a hand on one of mine. “It was probably the hardest thing I've ever done to leave you on Kiando. Leave you again. Seeing you, and Hirin, and Maja—it sort of cracked something inside me.”

  “I would have helped you, you know.” I couldn't stop myself from saying it. “You didn't have to disappear.”

  She sighed. “I know. You know what happened?”

  “Yuskeya told me, what she knew, anyway.”

  Mother sat back in the chair, cupping her mug in both hands and staring into its depths. “I just did what I've been doing for so many years. Put the plan into action. Keep moving. I had a dummy ticket booked on that starliner that was orbiting Kiando—that's standard practice for me. So I took a shuttle up to the starliner under one of my other identities, changed my appearance in a stateroom, caught a shuttle back down to the planet, and hopped on a short trader to Cengare. From there I shipped out for MI 2 Eridani. And the whole time, I was thinking what a fool I was, and how I should have just gone with you.”

  I smiled wryly. “Turns out, that would have been a bad idea. PrimeCorp caught up with me almost right away and ended up nearly destroying my ship.”

  She met my eyes then. “But I still would have been there. I would have been part of your life for once, instead of just watching from the outside.”

  We sat in silence for a few minutes. Finally I said, “I watched the videos. Showed them to Lanar, too.”

  “So you know the best and the worst of it.”

  “You didn't do anything I wouldn't have done.”

  She smiled at that.

  I sipped from my own mug. “You know what I got out of it all? That at some point, people should start benefiting from your research. Isn't that what all your work has been about?”

  She didn't answer, so I went on.

  “I know it's a worry—what will happen. But you can't take all the responsibility on yourself. We've been hunting immortality, wishing for it, working towards it, for centuries. You're only the locus that all that work has led to. You're the last function in the equation. Most people will probably embrace the technology, but some won't. Society will change, of course, evolve just as it always has when conditions change. You can't take it on yourself to be responsible for what immortality will mean to humanity. You have to give people the chance, and the choice. What happens then—well, it can't be your worry.”

  “Your message made me come to a similar conclusion,” she said. “But the letting go—I want to. It won't be easy.”

  “You don't have to stop your own research,” I said. “It's what you love doing. You just have to focus on the people you'll be helping. Take Hirin, for example. I gave Hirin a blood transfusion a few weeks ago, and the changes in him have been—well, unbelievable.”

  Mother stared at me. “What?”

  I realized that Mother didn't know about Hirin's virus, and told the story as succinctly as I could. “He had a bad reaction when we went through the Split. The virus surged, and it affected his heart. We decided to gamble that a transfusion from me might help.”

  “Transferable bioscavs? I wouldn't have thought—especially that generation, and after so long . . .” She stared into the distance, likely envisioning complex formulae and nanostructures I couldn't even begin to imagine. “They didn't have any adverse effects?”

  I chuckled. “Well, they seemed about to kill him for a few days, but then he got better. Since then they—the bioscavengers, I guess—have been reversing a lot of the damage age has done to him. It's noticeable already.”

  She still seemed stunned. “After so long in your system . . . I wouldn't have thought—” her voice caught and tears sprang to her eyes.

  “What is it?”

  “If I'd realized sooner . . . but it never worked in tests—”

  My heart lurched. Perhaps the transfusion had been an even bigger gamble than I'd thought. I caught her hand briefly and squeezed. “It's okay. I know you would have told us if you'd known. Maybe it had something to do with the particular virus Hirin had.”

  “Is Hirin here? I'd like to run some tests, if he'd let me.”

  I smiled. Whatever else I might convince my mother to do, she'd never stop being a scientist. “I'm sure he will.” I touched my implant and messaged Hirin, asking him to meet us in the galley. “What about the new generation of bioscavs—the ones you mentioned in the video? Will they work for Hirin?”

  “Ye-es,” she said hesitantly. “They'd be more limited. I wouldn't say they could prolong his life indefinitely. But they'd extend it for a good many years yet.”

  Hirin came into the galley, stopped dead and did a double-take. “Hola, that is weird. Even with the different hair colour, you two look amazingly alike. You're going to have to wear name tags if you're both going to be on this ship. I don't want to start making passes at my mother-in-law by mistake.”

  I took a swipe at him as he passed me, which he ducked with newly-reacquired speed. “If a man can't tell his wife from her mother—” I started, but he cut me off.

  “Hey, I get to plead extremely unusual circumstances,” he protested as he filled a mug with chai for
himself.

  “Mother wants to take a look at your virus, and your bioscavs,” I said. “Do you mind?”

  He shook his head and held out his arm, implant facing Mother. “But will there be anything of the virus left to find?”

  “Oh, I think so,” Mother said. She placed her datapad gently over Hirin's implant, waiting for the connection. “The bioscavengers would deal with the virus in one of several ways—by neutralizing parts of it or by altering the body's reaction to it—but they wouldn't necessarily erase it. And I want to see how they've adapted themselves to your body, too.”

  “I still have all the data Dr. Ndasa collected,” Hirin volunteered. “He gave me a copy to keep for my own records.”

  The datapad chittered and Mother removed it, pressing her fingers swiftly over the screen. “I'd love to see it, Hirin. The comparison would be valuable. This will just take a few minutes to analyze.”

  He found it on his datapad and sent it to her, and while the datapad performed its operations, Mother questioned Hirin closely about his condition at all stages of the virus's progress. I sat back and sipped my double caff, savouring not only the hot, sweet bite of the drink but also the fact that we could talk about Hirin's illness in the past tense.

  The datapad alert announced that the analysis was finished, and Mother looked it over, frowning.

  “What?”

  She shook her head. “Let me check something.” She pulled a chipcase from her bag and loaded another chip into the datapad.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “The virus,” she said distractedly, scrolling through pages on the datapad. “There's something—it's familiar.”

  Hirin and I shared a look, but said nothing. Mother studied the screen, occasionally pursing her lips and squinting at the data. The suspense was almost intolerable and I was about to speak when she abruptly got up from the table, still staring at the datapad screen. “I don't want to believe this.”

  I just looked at her until she continued.

  “The virus contains a gene sequence that belongs to PrimeCorp. They own the patent on it. I know because I helped create it.”

  “Dr. Ndasa told me it was synthetic—engineered. That it must have been spread by accident.”

  “It should have been completely destroyed when we were finished with it. It shouldn't still be in existence.” She sat down again. “And it definitely shouldn't be in Hirin.”

  “So . . . you think PrimeCorp wasn't careful enough with it? Or sold it?”

  She didn't answer, drumming her long fingers on the table and staring at a spot on the far wall. Finally she said, “No. It's too much of a coincidence. My guess would be that PrimeCorp deliberately exposed you to it in an attempt to find out what your bioscavengers could do.”

  “But it happened here, on Vele! They would have had to follow us out here, and then find a way to infect us! And how could they do that without risking exposure for other people?”

  “Maybe they didn't care. This is PrimeCorp, remember?” Hirin said. He rubbed his stubbled chin contemplatively. “It would explain some things. Like why the doctors never could pinpoint what kind of virus it was.”

  “There'd be nothing obvious to link it to PrimeCorp, not for anyone who hadn't worked on the project.” She stood again and paced the length of the galley. “What did you do when Hirin first got sick?”

  “We headed straight back to Earth.” I looked out the viewport, remembering those terrible days. “There were reasonably good medical facilities close by on Vileyra, but the colonies were still young. We thought the newest and best treatment would be Earthside.”

  “And it kept getting worse on Earth, then regressed once you left?”

  Hirin shook his head. “For a long time it was up and down. We kept trading, tried to ignore it. I'd have flare-ups, then it would calm down, just simmer for a while. Didn't seem to make a difference if I was Earthside or anywhere else in Nearspace.”

  “But when you . . . reached the point where you couldn't manage the trade runs anymore?”

  “It got steadily worse once I went into care,” Hirin said. “Slowly, but steadily. It didn't improve until I left Earth the last time.”

  “Almost like someone was trying to make sure Luta stayed to look after you?'

  I broke in. “What are you saying? That PrimeCorp—”

  “Do you think it would be difficult for them to find someone in a care facility who could make sure a patient got sicker instead of better—if the price was right?”

  I stared at her. When I could speak, my voice was only a whisper. “You think PrimeCorp was making sure Hirin got worse, and he started to recover when he came with me because they couldn't . . . get at him any longer? That's monstrous!”

  Hirin narrowed his eyes. “But it makes sense. And it explains why they were so reluctant to let me leave. They couldn't forbid it, but they did everything short of that. Including trying to say I was crazy.”

  I still didn't want to believe it. A sick churning roiled in my stomach. All this time I'd thought I was doing what was best for Hirin, and in fact I'd only been leaving him in jeopardy alone. I didn't want to accept that it might be true. “What about the Split? When the virus surged again? PrimeCorp couldn't have engineered that!”

  “I can't answer that part of it, Luta,” Mother said. “It could have been something caused directly by the Split, or the virus could have been engineered to surge after a certain amount of exposure to wormhole radiation—that would be an effective way of limiting travel.”

  “I'm going to have to kill him.” My voice seemed alarmingly calm, even to my ears. “Sedmamin. For doing this to you.”

  Hirin took me by the shoulders and turned me to face him. His blue-grey eyes were intense as they fastened on mine and his hands were strong and firm, not the weak, fragile hands of such a short time ago. “You're going to do no such thing, Luta. Listen, PrimeCorp is going to get what's coming to it. The Protectorate is going to see to that. We're going to let them take care of it, and we're not wasting any more time or worry on Sedmamin or the rest of them. This is not the beginning of a vendetta. I've been given the gift of more time, and I have better things to do with it.” He gave me a gentle shake. “Got it?”

  That's when I burst into tears. I guess I got it.

  Hirin told me later that Maja cried, too, when he told her about it.

  I can say unequivocally that giving evidence in a proceeding before the Nearspace Worlds Administrative Council is the most boring thing I've ever done. Lanar arrived on Vele just a day before the actual hearing was due to start, and we had a nice reunion, he and I and Mother. It made for a welcome break in the monotony, because by then we'd all been interviewed, signed affidavits, turned over evidence, been interviewed about the evidence, and then been cross-interviewed about everything again by PrimeCorp's lawyers. A lot of paperwork and bland meeting rooms and hurry-up-and-wait. There were no courtroom dramas, no damning accusations from a witness stand. This was the Protectorate's show, and Lanar had done his part remotely from his ship. I would have given almost anything to simply slip away some night and burn for the nearest wormhole, but that would have solved only the boredom problem. I wanted to stay around and see how it all fell out.

  And how it all fell out wasn't the most I could have hoped for, but it was pretty satisfying. The Protectorate had quite a bundle of charges, thanks to our evidence, to take to the Council. In addition to its own evidence of manufacturing and transporting illegal tech, there were the instances of piracy, kidnapping, industrial espionage, use of illegal viruses and stripped ops, and unprovoked firing upon a civilian ship.

  It certainly would have been interesting to observe the proceedings, because I'm sure that delicately balanced web of interplanetary relationships throughout Nearspace that Lanar had talked about came into play—who sided with PrimeCorp and who with the Protectorate, and what political leverage was brought to bear. The media certainly gave it full play on the vids and the web (altho
ugh they weren't privy to the deliberations, either, so a lot of it was speculation) and PrimeCorp's net worth valuation took a pretty deep hit. Not enough to ruin the corporation, because as Lanar had said, ruination wasn't feasible—at least not yet. They couldn't make all the charges stick, or possibly some were negotiated away. But the PrimeCorp foundations shook, no doubt about it.

  Predictably, Alin Sedmamin came out smelling—if not like a rose, at least mostly free of the odour of corruption. Dores Amadoro didn't fare so well, and was facing time in prison. Sedmamin managed to sidestep most of the responsibility for the criminal activity, allowing it to land squarely on her shoulders. Somehow it came to light that all those criminal happenings had been instigated or carried out by her, acting on her own initiative. The Board of Directors was shocked—simply shocked, that such a viper had been sheltering within its walls.

  I didn't believe it one bit, obviously, but I still didn't feel sorry for her. Dealing with someone like Sedmamin, she should have known he'd be the last person to take responsibility for failure.

  It was Lanar who stopped by Dock One-Eleven to give me all that news. “It'll be pinging all over Nearspace tomorrow,” he said, “but I wanted you to hear it first.”

  We were in the galley, in the two big armchairs facing each other, mugs of double caff in hand. It was quiet, except for a dull thumping that signalled Viss was labouring away on the repairs to Engineering.

  “I'd rather hear that Sedmamin was going down,” I said, “but I'll take Amadoro as a consolation prize. Do you think they'll go after Mother when she leaks the research data?”

  He shook his head. He was off-duty, and had traded his Protectorate uniform for jeans and a transform t-shirt. “If I know Mother, she'll do it in a way that won't be directly traceable to her. If anyone knows how to do that, I'm sure she does.” He grinned. “And don't be too certain about Sedmamin. His day is coming. I expect his Board of Directors is going to be very unhappy with him after this, if only because it happened on his watch.”