Nearspace Trilogy

by Sherry D. Ramsey

  Because if anyone was down there, they were all that remained of the Domtaw.

  Chapter 13 – Jahelia

  Alone in the Dark

  “FEK!” I SCREAMED, as soon as the communication line to the Tane Ikai closed. I turned and pitched my half-empty mug of cazitta against the dark barrier behind me. It shattered and splattered as satisfyingly as if I’d hurled it against a cement wall. Bits of ceramic skittered across the floor amid dark, sticky droplets.

  “How dare she? How dare she leave me here?” The feed from one of my few working scanners showed the other ship slowly turning and heading away from me. Off to investigate the wormhole, I supposed. Somehow that was more important than getting me off my disabled ship. I stood up and kicked the skimchair, but it didn’t move since I’d locked it down earlier. That made me angrier.

  I paced the confines of the cabin like a caged beast. With the area of the ship effectively reduced to half, it did not make for therapeutic pacing. I fetched up in the tiny galley and leaned my balled fists on the counter top, forcing my breathing to slow. That megero Luta Paixon might have left me here to wait until it was convenient for her to rescue me, but I would not let her see that I cared.

  Once again, I ran my hands all over the dark field cutting me off from the rest of my ship, searching for a way to remove it. It felt completely solid, faintly cold but not chill. It couldn’t be solid as I understood the word—it hadn’t actually chopped the Hunter’s Hope in two—but it didn’t have any characteristics of a simple field, either. No hum of energy under my fingertips, no sound, no yield under pressure. No obvious seam where it met the interior wall. Nothing, nothing. Nothing.

  I couldn’t help myself. I slammed my fist into it and screamed again.

  All I got was a sore hand.

  More pacing, more cursing, more deep breathing. I missed Pita—more than I ever would have thought. My first priority had to be resurrecting her. The Tane Ikai would return for me at some point. Captain Paixon had said so, and I believed her—unless she got killed doing something stupid around the wormhole. I put that thought away and surveyed the small part of my ship that I could still access. The pilot’s console, the forward hatch, the tiny kitchen console.

  Cazitta still trickled, impossibly, down the dark field as if it were a solid wall. With a sigh, I knelt to carefully gather the pieces of my shattered mug, and used a cloth to sop up spilled, lukewarm liquid.

  Wait. I paused with the damp cloth halfway down the field wall. The kitchen console was a self-contained unit. It might still have power.

  I tossed the broken bits of ceramic into the recycler and pulled off the access panel below the kitchen station. It wasn’t difficult to trace wires and routing until I found an auxiliary power source. A tiny indicator glowed a cheery green. I sat back on my heels and smiled. If I could change the routing, patch some connections . . . I might be able to revive Pita. It wouldn’t be even close to enough power to get the entire ship online, but it might be enough for her.

  Half an hour later, a single screen on the pilot’s console flickered to life. I heaved a sigh and crossed my fingers. “Pita?”

  “What have you done to my ship, Sord?” Pita asked in a cranky voice. “We’re adrift, and I can’t get the engines online!”

  I leaned back in the single pilot’s chair. “Calm down, I know all that. I had to pull half the guts out and rewire them, to power you on.”

  “I’ve been offline for over an hour!” she said. She must have been checking all the shipsystems. “Did you do this?” she asked suspiciously.

  “Of course not, I—”

  “No, wait, what about those other ships? The Chron, and the other one—”

  “Don’t make me sorry I turned you back on. Shut up and listen.” Briefly I outlined what had happened, my conversation with Luta Paixon, and where we were at the moment. “So I need to make a plan. Either for getting us mobile again, or for when she comes to pick me up.”

  “You’ll abandon the ship?”

  “I don’t want to.” It pained me to think of leaving the Hunter’s Hope. PrimeCorp had paid for it, sure, but it was mine. My freedom, my lifeline, my ticket to wherever I wanted to go. Even with pain-in-the-ass Pita, it was my sidekick. Without it, I’d be alone again.

  “What about me?” It was hard not to think of Pita as another person when she could infuse such a sense of betrayal and indignation into three little words.

  “That’s why I worked so hard to wake you up. I need you. If you can get rid of this field or bypass it to get the ship moving, we’ll get out of here before Paixon comes back. But if not, then I want a way to take you with me.”

  “I’m flattered,” Pita said. “All right, let me see this field, first.”

  So we did, for the better part of an hour. I even shut down the heat for a little while to give Pita access to some extra power for scanners, but by the time I had started to shiver, she declared it a pointless exercise, anyway.

  “I don’t know what it is, what it’s made of, or what it’s supposed to do,” she said finally, in the tone of someone who’d just thrown her hands in the air.

  I hugged myself, trying to get warm. “All right, then, I guess we’re on to alternate plan B. How do I take you with me?”

  “Do we have options?”

  “Well, I can’t get to my sleeping quarters, so I’m limited to what I have here with me right now, including clothes and personal items. I have my datapad, and I can access everything as far as the kitchen console.” I had my vazel, leaning in the corner near the kitchen, but I doubted they’d let me bring a six-foot wooden staff with me. I also had a small flechette pistol, which I might try to sneak aboard the Tane Ikai, but that was irrelevant to this conversation.

  “Your datapad is the only way I can see,” she said after a minute. “But we’ll have to make some modifications. I’m rather . . . large.”

  Pita was rather large—larger, now, than even PrimeCorp knew. While I’d been ensconced at PrimeCorp, letting them read my brain to create Pita, I hadn’t been exactly idle. Pita and I had walked out of the labs with a lot of PrimeCorp data—a lot of classified PrimeCorp data—far more than she’d been trusted with by the corporation itself.

  What can I say? Breaking into the classified files was a good task to test her loyalty to me. And it never hurts to have an ace up your sleeve, even if I still hadn’t had a chance to discover half of what comprised my particular ace. Getting the files had been easier than I’d expected. My own techdog tendencies and three years of AI training at the Protectorate akademio, plus Pita’s extensive and wide-ranging skills (never meant to be used against her makers, but I guess they should have thought of that possibility, shouldn’t they?) made it almost laughably easy. The encryptions on individual files were daunting, but trying to break them gave Pita something to do in her downtime.

  I was damn glad she had a wide knowledge base to dip into right now, at any rate.

  We began to hash out a plan. I couldn’t keep the ship, perhaps, but I could take parts of it with me. The datachips from the main computer console and the kitchen console. The transmitter to send messages to PrimeCorp. A few select bits of other hardware that might come in handy.

  Humming a little to myself, in between arguing with Pita, I started to take apart the brains of the Hunter’s Hope.

  Chapter 14 – Luta

  Rocks and Hard Places

  THE BRIDGE OF the Tane Ikai was unusually silent as we made our way around to the operant moon. None of us, it seemed, could keep our eyes off the screen displaying the roiling wormhole.

  It was a relief when we got close enough and Rei switched the view on the pilot’s board over to the main screen so the rest of us could see it, too. The moon seemed unperturbed by the chaos that had erupted around it a few short minutes ago, and still hung, rotating slowly, like a golden ornament.

  “Anything?” I asked Yuskeya.

  After a moment’s pause, she said, “The scans of the moon are wor
king now.”

  “And?” My voice was tight.

  “There’s someone still down there.”

  “How many?”

  “I read three.”

  Three survivors. From a ship of a hundred and seventy-five. I felt sick, and it was nothing my nanobioscavengers could fix.

  “Then let’s get down there and get them,” Baden said.

  I nodded. “We’ll pinpoint them as closely as possible and set down. Baden, you take care of that, please. They could be in their shuttle or somewhere on the surface. They might be in bad shape after that blast—look what it did to us—so Yuskeya, I want you to take a full complement of med supplies. And why don’t you change into your Protectorate uniform?”

  She raised her eyebrows. “What? Why?”

  “Whoever’s down there on the moon, now, I’m guessing you’re technically in charge of them. You’re the only Protectorate officer we seem to have functioning in this system—whatever it is.”

  Yuskeya nodded briefly and left the navigation board to Maja. She was only a novice, but we weren’t going anywhere. She settled into the chair, glanced up and caught my eye, and nodded.

  “No worries, Mother, I can definitely navigate for a ship that’s about to set down.”

  I winked at her. “Carry on, then.”

  I got up from the chair and went to stand behind Rei. Hirin came over, too. “Cerevare,” I said, “would you join us?” I motioned her into the empty co-pilot’s seat at the board next to Rei. “Okay, ladies, what do we know about this operant moon?”

  Cerevare seemed glad of something to do. Her ears perked forward as she briskly called up the data on the blank screen in front of her. “The composition of the moon alone would be the first thing to suggest it was a Chron artifact. The alloys and other materials used in its construction are identical or very similar to those used in the Chron ships we were able to study. It has a relatively weak gravity, although stronger than one might expect for an object with its mass.”

  “So, artificial gravity, you think?”

  “Quite possibly.”

  Scientific data scrolled up the screen, but I wasn’t really trying to read it. I’d take Cerevare’s word for now.

  She continued, “The rings are not the normal accretion of ice and dust and debris, but are also made of alloys particular to Chron construction. They appear to have enhanced solar-energy collecting capabilities. I’d made an educated guess that they’re used to power the workings of the moon.”

  “Whatever those are,” I said.

  She grinned wolfishly and nodded. “Unknown at this time. I’m not a scientist; my knowledge comes only from the obvious data in the scans combined with what I already know about the Chron. But I do have a guess.”

  I raised my eyebrows, waiting.

  She held up a hand. “This is only speculation, mind you. If there are scientists still on the moon with whom we can talk, they may already have information to refute my theory.”

  “Understood.”

  Cerevare turned the skimchair to face me. Her lupine face was animated, her eyes bright with excitement. “It has occurred to me—those unexplained rays that the moon began beaming into the wormhole once the Chron ship appeared to ‘trigger’ it. They were the same as those that affected this ship when we made the skip, correct?”

  “They seemed to be.”

  “I wonder if they could be a mechanism related to the supposed Chron ability to ‘timeslip’ during the war.”

  I glanced at Hirin, then back to Cerevare. “I thought you said you didn’t believe in that ability?”

  She shrugged. “Not in time-travel precisely, but they had some ability that allowed them to give that appearance, for certain. Whatever it was that they could do, I think it’s possible that the clues to it lie in this moon.”

  Hirin blew out a long breath. “Well, that would certainly explain why the Protectorate wanted to keep this as quiet as possible.”

  “That technology, if it existed, would be extremely valuable.”

  “Too valuable to let one corporation lay claim to it, that’s for certain,” I said, thinking of how much PrimeCorp would love to get its greedy, exclusive hands on something like that.

  Rei pursed her lips. “So if the technology wasn’t on their ships, if it were on a device—like a constructed moon—operating on the other side of the wormhole in question . . .”

  “Exactly. There would be nothing for an enemy to find and turn to use against them.”

  “Clever,” Hirin said.

  “If you’re right,” I mused, “then we’d finally have at least one answer to all the questions the Chron left behind them.”

  Cerevare sighed. “It would be nice to have something new, after all this time.”

  “Captain, we have them,” Baden said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “The Domtaw crew members. The scientists.” He turned to me with wide eyes. “I think they’re inside the moon.”

  HIRIN AND I had a polite debate about who was going EVA to find the folks from the Domtaw. He thought he should go, and I should stay on board. Predictably, I thought the opposite. He said stuff about it being important for me to stay in charge on the Tane Ikai, and I said things about him working his way up slowly to that kind of activity, after his years-long sidelining for health reasons. He protested that he was fine—better than fine. I asserted that the crew were equally comfortable with either of us in the big chair.

  We had the debate in my quarters—well, our quarters again now—while I changed my clothes. I didn’t want the crew observing any marital or command-centered spats.

  In the end I had to do the thing I’d tried to avoid. “Well,” I said, putting my hands on his shoulders and holding his gaze, “it comes down to this. I am the current Captain of record of this vessel, and I am asking you to take the chair while I’m not on board.”

  I didn’t say ordering. That would have brought everything between us to a head, and that would have to wait.

  He stiffened anyway, his muscles going taut under my hands. “Well, if that’s how you put it.”

  I slid my hands down and wrapped my arms around his chest, resting my head against it. “Hirin, I just got you back. I don’t want you taking risks. It’s too soon, and you’re still regaining your strength. I know you’re feeling great, but—I need a little longer.”

  For an anxious moment I didn’t think he’d relent, but then he hugged me, hard. “Mostly the same reasons I don’t want you to go.”

  “I know.” I pulled away. “But I think the crew needs to see that I’m handling things, you know? This situation—”

  He nodded. “—is bad. I’m trying not to think about it, but we’ll have to, soon.”

  “Agreed. But first we have to see if there’s anyone on that moon that we can save. And I think it’s good for the crew to have this to focus on.”

  He kissed me then, and that was the end of the argument. At least for that round.

  I thumbed my implant to open the ship’s comm. “Rei, take us down to the moon. Yuskeya and Baden are with me.”

  I met Yuskeya and Baden at the rear airlock, and we climbed into our EVA suits. Yuskeya had done as I’d asked and changed into her Protectorate uniform. The rows of coloured starburst pins, from pale blue Dark Cadet through the ranks to her silver Commander’s insignia, gleamed at her throat. They were visible through the clear section of the suit where the helmet and neckline met, for which I was glad. I didn’t know who the Domtaw survivors might be, their rank or position, or what they might think of our arrival. Or if they had any notion of what had happened to their ship. But Yuskeya in her uniform radiated an extra air of confidence and competence that I was happy to have beside me.

  We loaded three extra EVA suits and Yuskeya’s medical supplies onto one of the anti-grav cargo sleds, and cycled through the airlock. Rei had set the Tane Ikai down close to the shuttle that had brought the scientists over from the Domtaw. Once we were close enough, it
hadn’t been difficult to find them. Their shuttle crouched near the doorway to what resembled a sod house from Earth’s ancient history, built right into a rise in the surface of the moon. The Chron hadn’t simply built an artificial sphere. They’d taken the trouble to create the illusion of a real moon, with uneven surface topography and a convincing layer of regolith. Only scans or close inspection would reveal the operant moon’s true nature.

  “I don’t think we have the technology to build something like this even now,” Baden observed, his voice tinny and small over the suit-to-suit comm.

  “We might have the tech, but I can’t imagine the cost,” Yuskeya said.

  “I hope the door isn’t locked,” I said as we paced carefully across the surface.

  “And me without my lockpicks.” Baden’s voice held a grin, even over the comm. He hadn’t had a good adventure since our encounter with the PrimeCorp agent who’d tried to take out the Tane Ikai in the Keridre/Gerdrice system, all of six weeks ago.

  Yuskeya was silent as we made our way to the doorway. The moon’s gravity was enough to keep us on the ground, but I wouldn’t have wanted to try bouncing on a trampoline. Our tether to the surface felt as tenuous as a spider’s web. I hoped it was comparably strong.

  It wasn’t locked, and opened into a tiny foyer, the walls formed from something similar to plasteel. Beyond that was a transparent door leading to what appeared to be a fairly standard kind of airlock system. A control touchpad lay embedded in the wall to the right of the door, labelled with symbols that meant nothing to me. A sort of frosted panel above the door emitted a pale light, limning the foyer with enough light to see, but it wouldn’t shine beyond the entry.

  “Cerevare?” I said. We had full video and audio link to the bridge of the Tane Ikai, where the others watched us and waited.

  “Here, Captain.”

  “Can you see these symbols? Any idea what they might mean or how we can operate this door?”