Nearspace Trilogy

by Sherry D. Ramsey

  Baden knelt beside me and said, “You should use that datapad to scan their ID chips. Might as well get some names while we can.”

  “Right.” PrimeCorp would want to deny any associations, so the more evidence we had, the better. I took a minute to scan them, and recorded a couple of images, too.

  Rei, Gerazan, and Viss took the weapons and stood guard at the doorway while I finished that and had a hurried conversation—at least as hurried as it could be, funneling everything through Pita—with the Chron. Apparently the deck directly above us was much smaller, housing officer’s quarters. Above that was the even smaller bridge, where Cerevare had been taken for questioning. Below us, the deck was the same size as this one, half given over to crew quarters and amenities and half to ship hangars and airlock docks.

  “Can you contact the bridge, find out how many have boarded the station?” I asked through Pita. “And ask if Cerevare is still there?”

  The Chron nodded. The plates on its face shifted, tightened, as if it were clenching its jaw, and its throat moved. Subvocalized communication, I thought. After a moment, it held up eight long fingers.

  “So it’s three down, five to go,” Baden said. “That’s not bad odds.”

  Then it held up ten more.

  “Ah. Where’s our ship again?” he added.

  According to the Chron doctor, it was in the ring below us, at the airlock directly below the one we’d seen earlier.

  “And where’s Cerevare?”

  The Chron pointed up. I assumed it meant, still on the bridge.

  “Will your people send her down to meet us at the ship? You must already know she isn’t working with PrimeCorp.”

  After the translation, Pita said, “Not to go.”

  “What? Why would they hold her here and let the rest of us leave?”

  A new pounding commenced at the door of the med ward.

  The Chron used its foot to move the attacker Jahelia had stabbed out of the way of the door, and closed it. It tapped a few commands into the touchpad, and started off, motioning for us to follow. This time we went quietly down the corridor, not knowing if others would follow to see what had happened to their three fellows. We made it almost to the airlock without incident, but someone must have heard us coming despite our attempt to stay stealthy. An energy blast from a plasma rifle bloomed near the airlock door, forcing the Chron’s feet to stutter backwards. It fell heavily before anyone could catch it, but Hirin offered a hand to help it up. It flashed him a smile of thanks, and I was struck again by how this Chron, at least, was nothing like the monsters I’d grown up hearing about. Where the blast had hit the wall, the panels had blackened and sagged, but stayed mainly intact.

  Viss put his back against the wall at the corner of the hall leading to the elevators and hydroponics, where the blast had come from. Leading with the plasma rifle, he bent his head around the corner. Whoever was out there fired again, and he ducked back from the jagged flash of energy.

  “I don’t want to fire wild and damage the elevators,” he said, “but they won’t let us walk out there.”

  “Wait,” Jahelia Sord said. “What about the force fields? Can the energy weapons penetrate them?”

  Pita flashed the question on the screen for the Chron. It seemed to consider before it answered.

  “Unknown.”

  “Damne. That was a good thought, Sord.”

  “Not good enough, apparently.”

  “Well, we can’t stand here and wait,” I hissed. “They’ll come down the other hallway, or come up behind us. The whole place is a ring, so there’s no real way to block them.”

  “How many elevators are there?” Viss asked the Chron. Pita obligingly put it on the screen.

  The Chron held up four fingers.

  Viss shrugged. “Okej then, let’s chance it. Not very likely we’ll take out all four of them, right?”

  I hesitated a moment, but then said, “Right. The elevators are our goal. Viss, Maja, and me in the front, hoping the force fields create a barrier. Go.”

  Without hesitation, Viss put the plasma rifle around the corner, scanned, and fired. Another glass wall shattered. Without waiting to see what the response would be, Viss ran down the corridor, Maja close behind him. I hoped the force fields would deflect most of what came at us, and followed the others.

  WE GOT LUCKY—sort of. There were seven of the intruders here. Three Chron and four humans, and fortunately for us, these Chron wore completely different uniforms from those who belonged on the station—dark brown pants and buff-coloured jackets with blue insignia on each shoulder. Unfortunately for us, they were better prepared than the last three we’d met, and at least three of them opened fire as soon as Viss bolted from the hallway.

  The force field generators worked to substantially deflect the plasma bolts the intruders threw at us. They did little to lessen the impact—the first bolt that hit my field staggered me and I stopped moving forward. Hirin, right behind, ran into me and bounced off the already-flaring field. He lurched to the side, leaving him open to a clear shot from one of the plasma rifles.

  Despite the blasts firing all around us, the noise and the flaring shields, I managed to regain my balance and jerked sideways, trying to protect him. Maybe if I’d been myself I would have managed it, but my reflexes weren’t what they’d been only a couple of days ago. Part of the shot deflected, but part caught Hirin square in the shoulder. He yelped in pain and fell heavily against the wall.

  I dropped to my knees beside him, shielding him as the others fought around us. My Chron doctor joined us, but obviously hadn’t brought any sort of first aid kit along, and I felt certain the med injectors were nothing that would help this, except perhaps to knock Hirin out. We couldn’t afford that. The Chron peeled away the torn and burned edges of Hirin’s shirt and made a human-sounding tsk tsk at the sight of Hirin’s wound.

  A hand bearing a torn strip of yellow fabric appeared in front of me. The fabric looked suspiciously like the sheet that had covered me when I woke up in the medical bay, and I glanced up. Jahelia Sord grinned down at us. “This any good for a sling?”

  I took the cloth. “Thanks.”

  She shrugged. “Thought we might want to tie someone up with it, so I took it along.”

  Then she was gone again, and the sounds of fighting had lessened in intensity. The Chron doctor fashioned a crude sling to take the weight of Hirin’s arm, and a moment later Viss was helping Hirin to his feet.

  “Okay, this is where we split up,” I said, when we’d reached the elevators. “I’m going to go and find Cerevare. Viss, Gerazan, you’re with me. Hirin, take the rest and go find the ship, get on it, and get it ready to leave. We’ve got to get out of here fast.”

  Hirin’s face was pale and strained from the pain in his shoulder, but he put out a hand to catch my sleeve, then remembered the force field at the last moment and slowed the motion. “Luta, are you sure? We’ve stayed together this long—”

  I shook my head. “We don’t know for sure how many others are still searching for us. Splitting up will get us all off the station the fastest. And you need to get some medical attention,” I told him. I turned to the Chron doctor. “Can you make sure the rest of your crew knows my people are trying to get to our ship? And they’ll let them through?”

  When Pita displayed it, the Chron doctor nodded. Its face altered again, and I knew it was communicating with its crewmates. It nodded, then pointed inside one of the elevators, showing Hirin how to reach the level they wanted.

  “I couldn’t open the airlock door earlier,” Maja said. She tapped the button on her sleeve. “We figured this wasn’t enough, that it needed some sort of key, too.”

  After a quick translation, the Chron nodded. Using the elevator controls, it showed Hirin another sequence of symbols—presumably the code he’d need to enter a touchpad outside the airlock.

  “Hey, Captain,” Jahelia Sord said.

  I turned to meet her gaze. Her brown eyes held a h
int of challenge, but not as overtly as they had before.

  “You planning to return my datapad anytime soon? Not to be a pessimist, but what if you don’t make it to the ship? It is mine, after all—and it’s got all your evidence against PrimeCorp on it.”

  I glanced down at the datapad in my hands, reluctant to give it up. And yet, she was right. It had been invaluable for me to communicate with the Chron, but it wasn’t right for me to risk it any further. Besides the evidence I’d gathered from the fallen PrimeCorp intruders, the translation dictionary itself was part of the case against PrimeCorp.

  I held it out to her, trying not to let my reluctance show. “You’re right. Thanks for letting me keep it as long as you did.”

  She took it wordlessly, not taking the opportunity to make a snide remark as I’d expected she might. I felt a sharp pang of helplessness—I’d relied on the AI completely for all my interactions with the Chron doctor. Now I would have to hope I could get across what I needed to through gestures and our shared knowledge of the situation. At least, I hoped we shared it. I still wasn’t sure I understood the situation, although I was beginning to put the pieces together.

  The Chron doctor stepped into one of the elevators and crooked a finger for me to follow. I did, with Viss and Gerazan close on my heels. The doctor pressed a symbol, and we shot upwards. I caught a final glimpse of Hirin’s pained, worried face through the transparent elevator wall, and then it disappeared below us.

  Chapter 37 – Jahelia

  The Sisterhood of Kicking Butt

  THE FEELING OF having my datapad—of having Pita—in my hand again was ridiculous relief. So much had been happening, I hadn’t really realized how much it bugged me to see Luta Paixon using Pita to communicate with the Chron. Like it was her resource, not mine. I practically wanted to stroke the case, but refrained from such an open show of affection.

  “Welcome back, Pita,” I said in a low voice as we piled into the elevator. “Quite an adventure you’ve been having.”

  “I missed you, too, Jahelia,” she answered in a whisper. “I don’t think the captain appreciated me quite as much as you do.”

  Hirin pressed the symbol the Chron had indicated, and the floor of the elevator fell away. Not fast enough that my feet lifted off, but plenty fast. He gasped, and I figured the motion hurt his injured shoulder pretty bad.

  The hydroponics bay on the lower deck looked like the one above, but this one hadn’t been blown to bits.

  Yet. As the elevator doors opened, two more PrimeCorp thugs and a brown-uniformed Chron with pale blue skin ran toward us from the corridor that should lead to the airlock. It was pretty obvious we were their targets—or they were willing to kill anyone on the station—because they opened fire as soon as they saw us. I tucked Pita into the waistband of my pants at the small of my back, under my jacket. It wasn’t the safest place in the world, but it would have to do for now.

  Confident now that her force field could stand up to their weapons, Maja threw herself forward to take the brunt of the assault. That turned out to be an unfortunate decision. The field flared at the moment of impact and then pulsed suddenly brighter, hot and white like burning magnesium. Maja grunted and fell to her knees. Baden dropped beside her. I was about to launch myself at one of the attackers, hoping I might bullrush him, when Rei stepped up behind Maja and raised the plasma rifle she’d taken from one of the first trio of intruders. In three quick blasts, barely seeming to take time to sight, she’d dropped our attackers. And they weren’t getting up again.

  “And that’s why you don’t stand between me and my ship,” Rei said. She leaned down over Baden and Maja, all joking gone from her voice. “Is she all right?”

  Maja lay, pale and shaking, in the doorway to the elevator. She clutched her right arm, where the force field button had scorched a blackened hole in her sleeve. I didn’t know if she’d noticed that the front of her shipsuit also bore a scorched impact ring.

  “I don’t think so,” Baden said. “The whole thing must have overloaded.”

  Yuskeya pushed past me and joined Baden beside Maja. She pried Maja’s hand away from her arm, tearing the sleeve of her shipsuit in order to examine the wound. I saw blackened skin and raw, blistered flesh before Yuskeya tore the sleeve off entirely and, turning it inside out so the cleaner side would be against the burn, wrapped it loosely. “I’ve got nothing to treat this until we get to the ship,” she said. She ran her hands lightly over Maja’s torso. The blonde woman winced. “Could be fractured ribs, too,” Yuskeya suggested. “I’d rather not move her, but—”

  “No choice. I’ll be as careful as I can,” Baden said. He scooped Maja up in his arms, and I saw her face tighten as she stifled a cry. “Let’s go, Rei.”

  Rei took point as we moved out of the elevator and past this end of the hydroponics bays. Unlike the level above, there seemed to be no-one on duty here. Likely everyone had been called to other tasks by now—like fighting off invading Chron. The hits on the station continued. Apparently our side wasn’t winning yet, at least not outside the station. As for the inside, I thought we weren’t doing too badly.

  Fortunately, the layout of this level seemed to be pretty much the same as the one above. I assumed that the hangars the Chron had told Paixon about were behind us, below where the brig lay on the upper level. It seemed to be mostly crew quarters on this side, as we moved toward the airlock.

  “Maybe those three were the only ones down here,” I said.

  “Let’s hope,” Hirin said. His face was pasty and beads of sweat dappled his forehead. The pain from his shoulder must be excruciating, but he didn’t lag behind.

  When we came in sight of the airlock, the door stood open. Rei stopped short, and Baden almost ran into her with Maja. “Whoa.”

  “I don’t like this,” Rei said. “I thought Hirin needed that force-field button and the touchpad to get us in. Why is it standing open like that?”

  Hirin carefully pushed past Baden and Maja. “We have to get Maja inside. Maybe those three tried to get into the ship.”

  Rei put an arm out to stop him going any further. “And maybe they, or someone else, succeeded.” She flicked her eyes at me. “How about this? Sord and I go ahead to check things out. The rest of you wait in the airlock. You can close the outer door and hunker down there for a minute while we do a sweep.”

  “Just the two of you? I don’t like that,” Hirin gasped.

  “Yeah, Gramps, but you and Maja are hurt; you can’t wait alone,” I said. “Little Miss Pilot’s right. I’ll go with her, you wait for the all clear.”

  Not that I think my vote really carried any weight with him, but he saw the sense in the plan and, after a minute’s hesitation, nodded. Rei and I crossed the corridor to the open airlock door. She poked her head inside and nodded for the others to cross. Once we were all inside, Hirin put a palm to the door and it slid closed.

  “Too bad that Chron didn’t tell me how to lock the damn thing as well as open it,” he complained.

  “We’ll be as quick as we can,” Rei promised. She moved to the inner airlock door and hit the touchpad to open it. Luckily this one had pictographs for “open” and “close” that were pretty easy to figure out. Apparently the pressure in both rooms was already equalized since the door opened without delay. Beyond the short dockway, the outer airlock door on the Tane Ikai also stood open.

  Rei glanced at me. I shrugged.

  “Maybe they left it open when they took us off the ship? I wasn’t awake at the time, so I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” She didn’t sound convinced. I wasn’t really, either. We quickly crossed the dockway and walked softly as we passed inside the airlock. The inner door was closed; the built-in failsafe would never allow both to be open at once.

  “Can’t open it without making a noise,” Rei whispered to me.

  “You stand ready, I’ll press the button,” I told her, and she nodded. I closed the outer door and opened the inner one. We stood and lis
tened for any sound from the ship.

  Nothing.

  We stood staring straight into the main bridge. Everything appeared exactly the way I remembered it, although the last time I’d seen it there’d been a lot more activity there. Rei pointed right and left and we checked the alcoves next to the airlock where the EVA suits hung. Then we went left through Sensors and into First Aid. A doorway led out of the narrow First Aid bay at the far end, but I’d never been down there to know where it went.

  “Isn’t it going to take a while for two of us to check the whole ship?” I whispered to Rei.

  “It would. But we’re not doing that.” She opened the door to reveal a square room that was obviously storage; another door stood on the right-hand wall and she opened that one, too. It led into the rear of the head. She punched in a code on the keypad next to that door. “There. That seals off this entry to the bridge from the rest of the ship. We’ll leave it that way until we’ve got everyone aboard. Then there are more of us to do a proper search.”

  “Good plan.” We retraced our steps out to the bridge. She edged out near the captain’s chair to peer down the corridor leading to the rest of the ship. Empty. She jerked her head for me to follow her, and we cautiously advanced down the corridor a few feet, to the first door on the left. Her quarters.

  “Hold this,” she whispered, passing me the rifle. She slid the door open, scanned the room, and stepped inside. I was more than a little shocked at her trust, but she didn’t leave me waiting long.

  She emerged seconds later bearing a beautifully carved rattan staff and held it out to me. “Trade,” she said.

  I handed her the rifle and took the staff. It felt light and strong in my hands, almost as good as the polished-wood vazel staff I’d had to abandon on the Hunter’s Hope.

  She actually winked at me. “Slightly more useful than a fork, right?”