Nearspace Trilogy

by Sherry D. Ramsey

  A half-hour or so later Baden commed me over the ship’s system; I’d gone to the galley for some lunch. “Guess you were right, Captain. I think that ship is following us.”

  “Really?” I hadn’t actually suspected anything of the sort. I was just following the precautions Lanar had asked me to take.

  “They haven’t gotten much closer to us, but they haven’t moved off, either. Unless they’re following a route parallel to ours, and I can’t really see where that would be taking them, since we’re only marking time.”

  I chewed the last bite of my sandwich while I thought about it. “Hmm. Okej, give them another half hour. If they’re still keeping pace, we’ll head over to their position and see if they want to talk about anything.”

  They hadn’t changed course in the allotted time, so I gave Rei the order to move toward the ship. I hadn’t decided what to do. I could make contact with them, get their story—but I didn’t know if I wanted to come right out and accuse them of following us. That would imply that we had a reason for someone to follow us, and I didn’t want to put that idea in anyone’s head.

  We didn’t get to ask any questions, anyway. We did, however, get one answered. The ship took off quickly as soon as we’d covered about a quarter of the distance between us, so there was no doubt that whoever they were, they’d been monitoring us.

  “Want to chase them?” Rei asked, swinging around in her skimchair to face me. Her eyes were bright behind the mask of her pridattii, and I could tell she hoped the answer would be yes. “We could try out the new burst drive.”

  I hesitated. I was, in fact, burning to know who was following us and why. Was it that someone had noticed us pick up Cerevare and had reason to wonder why? Or was it PrimeCorp again?

  “I don’t want to get sidetracked,” I said finally, “but I want to know who that was. Run us close enough to scan the drive signature—use the burst drive if necessary. That might put a scare into them and they’ll leave us alone for a bit, which will give us time to get through the new wormhole.” I grinned. “They won’t be following us there, I’ll bet.”

  So Rei poured it on, with a little encouragement from Viss, and the new burst drive worked beautifully. We managed to close the distance between the two ships enough for Yuskeya to catch our quarry in a drive scan. Once she gave the word that she had enough data, we dropped back and let the other ship keep running, putting a nice margin between us again, then wheeled to head for the wormhole.

  “Okay, Rei, use the burst drive all the way to the spot where we engaged it before. Even if they come back, our normal signature should have dissipated before they can trace it to the wormhole.”

  “Who did you piss off this time, Mother?” Maja asked, then bit her lip. “Sorry. That came out wrong.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t really know. Could be PrimeCorp, could be someone following Cerevare. Could be something else entirely—pirates, trying to decide if we’re a worthwhile target.”

  “Hey, Captain, guess what?” Yuskeya looked up from the nav board where she had analyzed the scan data. “It’s our friend from the other day. That’s one pirate who gets around.”

  I frowned. “Now, that, I don’t like. He’s far too persistent.”

  “Yeah, and I’m guessing he’s got a lot more inside that hull than you’d think,” said Baden. “I sent a little tracer piggybacking on Yuskeya’s scan, and it picked up some tech readings you wouldn’t expect.”

  “Like what?” I crossed to study the data over Baden’s shoulder.

  “Better weapons than flash-pack torps, for one thing,” he said. “Wasp missiles and a particle beam, too. Long-range scanners that are probably as good as ours, enhanced comm capability. You name it, he seems to have it. You just wouldn’t think so from the outside, or from what he’s demonstrated so far.”

  “Put that ship on long-range alert status,” I ordered. “I want to know the instant he comes within range of us.”

  “You’ve got it, Captain,” Yuskeya said. “Now if we hightail it into that wormhole—”

  “It’ll be the last we see of him for a while,” I finished. “And amen to that.”

  Ah, wishful thinking.

  BACK AT THE coordinates Lanar had provided, we ran all the scans again, long- and short-range. At the all-clear, we turned our attention to the new wormhole. It looked much like any of the others studded around Nearspace, a darker area of space where no stars twinkled in the far distance. A moonlit shadow against an ebony background. You could pass it without noticing if your scans were off and you weren’t paying attention.

  “Viss, we’ve arrived,” I told him over the ship’s comm. “How’s the new skip drive doing?”

  “Running smooth as organic velvet,” he assured me. “The new upgrade should make it easier for Rei to stabilize the skips as we go through.”

  “Usual scans are running,” Yuskeya reported. “Everything seems to be within the normal range—wait a second, belay that observation. Hmmm . . . ” Her fingers darted over the display, keying in commands.

  “What is it?” I didn’t want any further complications. Lanar hadn’t given me an alternate plan B.

  “One sec . . . the wormhole seems to have an irregular mass node. It’s causing the readings to fluctuate, where most wormholes remain steady.”

  I frowned. “Not something that should stop us, though, right? I’m sure there are a few similar wormholes around Nearspace.”

  “No, it’s nothing serious, but worth noting. I’m sure Admiralo Mahane would have warned us if it were likely to cause a problem.”

  “Unless it’s a new development.”

  “No, I’d say this is intrinsic to the wormhole’s nature, or the result of something that happened to it a long time ago. It means that the wormhole’s mass node reading varies from point to point along its length, where usually it’s a single, unvarying number.” She flashed a grin. “Rei might have to work a little harder to keep the ride smooth, that’s all.”

  Rei snorted. “After piloting the Split when Hirin took his attack, there’s no wormhole that scares me anymore.”

  I shuddered, thinking of that experience, still sickeningly fresh in my mind. We’d come close to slipping off the safe side of that unusual wormhole into the unknown, and Hirin had suffered a heart attack. Not a skip I wanted to remember, or was ever likely to forget, no matter how long my mother’s nanobioscavengers allowed me to live.

  “Any idea what’s causing the anomaly, Yuskeya?”

  “None.”

  Viss spoke up over the ship’s comm. “We don’t know anything about the star system beyond this wormhole, Captain. It could also be caused by some type of radiation we’re not familiar with, leaking through the wormhole’s terminal point on the other end. Or some other force working on the wormhole from that system.”

  I noticed he addressed his remarks to me, not to Yuskeya, and stifled a sigh. “Thanks, Viss, that’s a reasonable notion. Okej, folks, let’s take a step into the unknown.”

  “I wonder if this is what wormhole explorers feel when they find a new one,” Baden said. “I’ve got a weird feeling in the pit of my stomach.”

  “That’s fear, Baden,” Rei said smoothly. “I suppose you’d have us believe you don’t recognize the sensation.”

  “I’d never claim that, dearest Rei,” he retorted. “Not after flying with you at the helm for this long.”

  “All right, children, settle down,” Hirin admonished, “or you’ll be going to bed with no supper.”

  “You’d better listen to him. He means it,” Maja said with a grin.

  I rolled my eyes. As if she’d ever been sent to bed without supper!

  “Pipe down, everyone, I’m calling our guest to join us on the bridge,” I said. “I’d like to maintain our civilized facade for a little longer, if possible.”

  “No need to call, I am here,” Cerevare said, entering from the main corridor and crossing to sit in an empty skimchair. “And I believe I know this crew pretty
well by now,” she added with a lupine smile. Today she wore an emerald-green shirt with billowy black pants, as well as the bright, ever-present sash. I didn’t know if all Lobors favoured such intense colours, but Cerevare certainly did. Human chairs not being made to accommodate the different proportions of Lobors’ legs to their torsos, she always unselfconsciously tucked her legs up under her when she sat, so they wouldn’t dangle. At first it had seemed too casual, but we were used to it now. I’d already made a note to buy a Lobor-style skimchair and one for the galley at the first opportunity. I’d never had a Lobor crew member, so I’d never really considered it before; now that seemed close-minded on my part.

  “Excellent,” I said. “And to answer your question, Baden, I don’t think we can equate this with exploring a new wormhole. At least we know what’s beyond this one, even if it’s only a general idea. We know it actually has an ‘other side’ and that we won’t be stuck forever in a closed-point singularity. We know we won’t emerge in a fatal proximity to a star. We know there’s no weird interstellar dust cloud carrying particles that our arrival will suddenly ignite or start some other reaction, annihilating us so fast you wouldn’t even be able to wonder what happened.”

  I paused for breath, and Baden fixed me with a quizzical stare. “So, I take it you’ve had the experience of spelunking new wormholes, Captain?”

  “No, but Hirin and I debated the possibility for a while when we were younger—much younger. Yes, before you were born, Maja,” I said, seeing the question begin to form on my daughter’s lips. “We considered it too risky, and having seriously considered those scenarios, I can tell you this is nothing like how it would feel to actually face them.”

  “I read that PrimeCorp is still the largest private funder of independent wormhole explorers,” said Hirin. “They’ve got their fingers in more pies than they even have fingers.”

  “They won’t miss any possible opportunity to make a dollar,” I said. “If they’re funding the exploration, they’re entitled to a cut of any resulting discovery royalties.”

  “I’ll take your word for it about the wormhole exploring anxiety,” Baden said. “But you have to grant that this is exciting.”

  I grinned at him. “I’ll give you that. I’ve never had the pleasure of travelling to a newly-discovered secret system before. Now, we’re supposed to send a message through the wormhole before we head in, and wait for confirmation, so let’s do that. To Admiralo Woodroct, on the O. Domtaw, according to Lanar’s brief. Tell him we’re here, waiting to come through on his word.”

  “Sending it now, Captain.”

  “Yuskeya, keep an eye out for our unwanted visitor, would you? I don’t think they’ll catch up with us, but they’ve surprised us before.”

  We waited in silence, but no reply came from the Domtaw. I drummed my fingers on the arm of my chair. “Baden, resend that message, would you? Add that we may have an unknown ship following us, and we’d like to get through the wormhole before they catch up to us.”

  Baden’s nimble fingers stuttered across the screen, and a moment later he said, “Message away.”

  Another few minutes ticked by in agonizing slowness. “What’s the delay over there?” I said, irritated. “I thought the priority was for us to get in there without being seen. Now they’re making us wait on the doorstep?”

  “They could be busy, I guess,” Hirin offered. “Although you’re right, I expected them to be watching for us.”

  I tapped a fingernail against my front teeth. “Yuskeya, any indication there’s someone coming through the wormhole from the other side?”

  After a brief pause, she reported, “Tracer scan seemed to take a little longer than usual, but it reports all clean, Captain.”

  “Well, I think we’ve waited long enough out here. Viss, let’s have the skip drive. Rei, whenever you’re ready, take us in.”

  “Aye, Captain,” she said, as the skip drive thrummed to life. Normal drives aren’t enough to traverse the inside of a wormhole—they wouldn’t even take you past the edge, or terminal point. 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, and a strong enough field to launch the ship into the wormhole at one terminal point. The field also holds the ship intact by countering the immense forces at work inside the wormhole, and protects it from the high-frequency radiation, which would prove disastrous for ship and crew. Finally, it repels the ship from the inside surface of the wormhole, propelling it through in a series of skips, like a rock skipping across calm water. Unlike a rock skipping across water, however, the skips don’t run in a straight line. As the skip field repels from one side of the hole, the ship slides around to bounce the next time off the opposite side, to create a water-going-down-the-drain effect.

  As we moved past the terminal point, the wormhole seemed like any other. The inside is actually quite a pretty place. All that radiation pouring into the wormhole gets blueshifted to high frequencies and reacts with the Krasnikov matter to hold the wormhole open. The result is a breathtaking swirl of constantly moving colour, like a hundred rainbows spinning down a drain.

  We’d made only the first skip, skimming the wormhole’s inner surface, when Viss’s voice came over the ship’s comm. “Might have some trouble here, Captain.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “You want to go to a private channel?”

  “No, go ahead. If we’re in trouble, everyone needs to know.”

  “Some kind of cosmic ray is penetrating the shields and affecting the skip drive,” Viss said in his no-nonsense way. “I don’t know if it will destabilize the drive or not.”

  “Starting a scan,” Yuskeya said, not waiting for me to give the order.

  “Rei, how does it feel so far?” I asked. She was the one who’d know soonest if anything was going wrong with the skips.

  “No problem yet,” she said steadily. “Are these something we should worry about from a medical point of view?”

  “I don’t think so,” Yuskeya answered before Viss could, if he would have had an answer at all. As the resident medic, she was best suited to know, anyway.

  I realized that I’d sat forward in my chair and had gripped the arms with a white-knuckle intensity. I forced myself to sit still and try to relax. No crew functions well if their captain appears rattled, and if Rei wasn’t worried, I shouldn’t be yet.

  The destabilization of the skip drive would be dangerous, to put it mildly. The skip field and the Krasnikov generation keep the wormhole open while the ship skips through. If the skip field failed, it might cause the wormhole to collapse around the ship, and I can’t really describe what would happen at that point because I don’t know. We’d be killed, for certain; the shields would fail from the sheer strength of the forces inside a collapsing wormhole, and without the shields, the X-rays and gamma rays would fry us in an instant.

  That part, we don’t talk about with the passengers. But it was too late to try and keep any secrets from Cerevare now. I glanced over at her, but her lupine face was composed and still.

  “Anyone else notice these grey lines?” Hirin asked suddenly. “I’ve been trying to gather data on them but I don’t know if I’m actually getting anything. They seem familiar, somehow . . .”

  I’d noticed them peripherally, a series of grey streaks that ran lengthwise down the sides of the wormhole, like striations in rock or muscle. The colours swirled past them, leaving them visible and unmoving on the wormhole walls. Now I paid more attention to them. Hirin was right. “Yes, I’ve definitely seen something like them before. But I can’t recall–”

  Hirin snapped his fingers. “The wormhole into Tau Ceti. We didn’t make that run all that often, but I’m sure that’s where I’ve seen them before.”

  I nodded. The Tau Ceti system had only one inhabited planet, Quma, and only one wormhole entry, from Eta Cassiopeia. Being a “dead-end” run, we hadn’t travelled it as part of
our regular route in the days we’d been running the Tane Ikai together. But the wormhole did have these same grey striations. They’d never seemed to have any impact on how the wormhole functioned, so I’d forgotten about them.

  “Not getting much,” Hirin said. “We’d need specialized scanners built to gather data inside wormholes. Too much input, so our normal scanners are overwhelmed.”

  “We’ll ask the Protectorate smart boys about it when we get there,” I told him. “Rei, Viss, Yuskeya, how are we doing? Anything else strange? Talk to me.” We’d made about four skips now; the number in any wormhole was variable.

  “Still holding,” Rei reported. “Ship feels a little wobbly, but nothing serious.”

  “Readings are decreasing,” Yuskeya said. “I don’t have a fix on where they originated—it’s too hard to tell in here. Everything is so stirred up inside a wormhole . . .”

  “That’s okay.” I let out a long breath. “Viss?”

  “Nothing more to report down here.”

  Then the terminal point appeared, and a second later we emerged out the other side. Rei cut the skip drive, and the ship seemed suddenly silent as we sailed into the newest system to be part of Nearspace.

  It was certainly beautiful, this first glimpse of it. Sometimes wormholes emerge into empty space, a vast starfield with nothing to distinguish dock from starwise. This one, though, offered a spacescape so varied one hardly knew where to look first. A vast particle cloud hovered in the near distance, the mass of ionized dust radiating shades of orange with bright purple specularity at its centre. Far off, the system’s sun was a pale blue-white glow. Nearer to us a planet hung, its surface a mottled terra cotta smudged with yellow. And circling it were the moons.

  I counted three right away, although I found out later that there was a fourth, out of sight behind the planet when we emerged. The closest to us was a tiny thing, a shimmer of red in the reflected light of the planet. Nearer the planet, its twin sister spun, no larger, but more orange in colour; an echo of the particle cloud that provided the backdrop. The hidden moon, I found out later, was an irregular lump, an ugly grey stepsister to the planet’s other companions.