Nearspace Trilogy

by Sherry D. Ramsey

  “Dankon,” Yuskeya told Maja, inclining her head as she took the proffered mug. Steam curled from the top and I knew it held sweet, milky chai. Maja had taken on the unofficial role of stores officer, and made sure she knew everyone’s favourites in the food and drinks department.

  Holding the mug with both hands, Commander Yuskeya Blue carefully lowered herself into her seat at the navigation console, her long dark braid twined into an intricate coil this morning. She was one of my brother’s most trusted officers, on “loan” to the Tane Ikai for over a year now—although for most of that time I hadn’t known about her Protectorate affiliation. I’d been more than a little angry with Lanar when I found out he’d put a Protectorate officer on my ship without my knowledge—but I couldn’t be angry with Yuskeya. Dignified, competent, and brilliant, I couldn’t have asked for a better navigator and medic. Why was I worrying about how Viss would take it when the Protectorate wanted her back? What would I do?

  Somehow Maja had known or guessed that Viss would turn up on the bridge too, because she’d brought a caff for him as well. He took it gravely and toasted the rest of us before taking a sip. “Here’s to whatever bad news the Captain has in store for us,” he said. “It’s bound to be interesting, if nothing else.”

  “Hey,” I protested, “it’s not always bad news when I call everybody together on the bridge, is it?”

  They looked around at each other, silently considering—or pretending to.

  “Well, maybe not always,” Rei conceded. “Nine times out of ten?”

  “Maybe eight times out of ten,” Baden said. “And only about seven of those involve someone else shooting at us.”

  “Har har, very funny,” I said. “Do you want to know what’s up, or not?”

  “Go ahead, Luta,” Hirin said. “I’ll make sure they behave.”

  They did quiet down then, and I put Lanar’s request to them, conveying the explanation for why the Protectorate had to do an end run around the Council. As I’d expected, they were accepting.

  “Admiral Mahane wouldn’t ask unless it was important,” Yuskeya said, hands cupped around her steaming mug. “I consider it my duty to agree with his suggestion.”

  Viss nodded. “He’s a good guy. If he says it’s important to Nearspace that we go, I don’t have a problem with it. Although I would have liked to break down the intakes—”

  I held up a hand. “If we go, it’s as soon as possible. Any major overhauls will have to wait until we get back—or, hey, you could do it while we’re there. The Corvids will be happy to help if you need it.”

  The engineer grimaced. “They’re friendly and helpful enough. But a little odd to have around. I think I’ll handle the maintenance on my own, if it’s all the same to you.”

  The Corvids had helped us install a special drive when we’d been at their station last, and while it had ultimately saved our lives, both Viss and Baden had found the crow-like aliens’ presence discomfiting. In order to co-exist in the same physical space with us, they wore all-encompassing black enviro-suits, which responded to the Corvids’ movements by constantly shifting and reconfiguring the small, flat hexagon-shaped discs of which they were constructed. The suits moved and flowed around the Corvids’ seven-foot-tall bodies, hinting at arms, hands, and legs without completely revealing them. At least their helmets were completely transparent, oblong-shaped to accommodate the aliens’ beak-like mouths, with some sort of holographic displays on the inside faceplate. The Corvids communicated via speakers on the lower rim of the helmet, and fortunately for us could speak fluent Esper.

  “The diplomats will travel on their own ship, and we’ll have some other Protectorate observers on board with us. For now, let’s get prepped for at least a month of self-sufficiency if needed. The last time we did Lanar a favour it didn’t go as planned, so let’s not get caught off-guard this time. And we’ll have a few extra mouths to feed.”

  Maja stood. “I’ll review ship’s stores. We’ll have to replenish some stock.”

  As the others dispersed to make their own preparations, she stopped next to my chair and put a hand on my arm. “Are you okay with this? You haven’t been back on your feet all that long, and it was a trip to the Corvid system that started everything.” Her blue eyes shone with a concern that wouldn’t have existed a few short months ago, when our relationship was about as bad as it had ever been. If what we’d been through lately had any redeeming aspect, it was that the bond between my daughter and I had been restored.

  I nodded and smiled. “I’m okay. What happened had nothing to do with the Corvids, after all. They were nothing but helpful. And if they can offer any keys to preparing us for the Chron, we have to do it.”

  She leaned in to kiss my cheek. “All right, then. I’ll be sure to lay in lots of that pastina you like so much.”

  “And hope we don’t need it all,” I said.

  THE NEXT FEW days went according to plan. Lanar made good on his promise, and by the time we touched down on Jertenda, the subcontract for the ore delivery was arranged. We restocked there, and a little over two days got us back to FarView. Now we were waiting for one more Protectorate officer to arrive. The Council launch conveying the diplomats would rendezvous with us out near the new wormhole and we’d go through together.

  Our Protectorate guests were installed in the passenger suites. One was Lieutenant Gerazan Soto, whom we’d rescued from an abortive mission at the start of our last misadventure. He and Rei had formed a quick and close bond, and they were both delighted to be back on the same ship for our jaunt to Corvid space. I expected they’d be pretty much inseparable during the travel times to and from the Corvid station, which made me smile.

  The second was a pale-furred, dark-eyed Lobor Lieutenant-Commander named Emar Summergale. She shook my hand firmly when I met her at the docking station, her skin exuding the feverish heat I had now come to expect from Lobors. Her dark Protectorate uniform was spotless, and the highly-polished starburst insignia on her collar sparkled under the overheads. As I walked her down the corridor to her quarters, she politely bombarded me with questions about Cerevare Brindlepaw.

  “She is something of a hero in my eyes,” Summergale explained, her partially-furred hands clasped behind her back as we walked.

  “She’s a lovely person,” I said. “I very much enjoyed having her on board the Tane Ikai.”

  The Lobor’s ears twitched. “I am rather in awe of Brindlepaw’s decision to remain with the peaceful Chron. It must not have been an easy decision.”

  I smiled. “I think, for Cerevare, it was incredibly easy,” I said. “She viewed it as the chance of a lifetime—a lifetime spent studying the Chron without any real hope of ever understanding them, let alone meeting and conversing with them. Finding a segment of the population who want peace, not war, made the opportunity irresistible.”

  “But certainly a dangerous decision to make, especially for a civilian,” she observed. “I heard that she remained on the Chron station even though it was still under attack!”

  “She did. I tried to talk her out of it. I thought it was too dangerous to stay. But she practically laughed at the notion that she should leave.”

  “My, my,” Summergale said. “Quite a personality.”

  “And quite a hand at quozit,” I said. “If you ever meet, you should challenge her to a game.”

  The Lieutenant-Commander looked slightly scandalized at the notion, but merely smiled in that canine way the Lobors have. I suspected that if we could arrange communications with Cerevare, the Lieutenant-Commander would be first in line to speak with her.

  The third officer arrived just before we were scheduled to leave to meet the Council launch. He was a tall, thin human with close-cropped black hair, dusky skin, and a peppering of darker freckles across his nose and cheeks. He arrived at the airlock and introduced himself in a rich, deep voice as Lieutenant-Commander Jolah Didkovsky. As I shook his hand and introduced myself, he asked immediately after Yuskeya, saying tha
t they’d been classmates at the Protectorate akademio and he’d heard a rumour she was aboard. I led him to the galley to find her.

  She turned from pouring a mug of hot chai when we entered, and her face positively lit with pleased amazement. “Jolah! What are you doing here?”

  He set his duffel bag on the floor and crossed the room with arms spread wide to catch her in a hug. “You didn’t see my name on the passenger list?”

  I watched with a hint of bemusement as they hugged warmly. Yuskeya was generally so reserved that such effusiveness was out of character. The only other man I’d ever seen her hug was Viss. “The Captain didn’t share it with me,” she said with a laugh.

  “Well, I would have, if you’d asked me!” I protested. “I wasn’t trying to keep it secret!”

  “You’re forgiven,” she said. “Jolah, still drinking triple caff? Would you like one?”

  “I’d love it,” he said, and turned to me. “Captain, do you mind if I just stop off here? I’ll settle in later if that’s all right.”

  “Not at all. Yuskeya can show you the way when you’re done here. Yuskeya, I can put Maja on the nav board for the first part of the run if you’d like. She has enough hours in now to handle it, and she’ll love the opportunity.” When Maja decided to stay aboard the Tane Ikai for a while, following the end of her marriage and our reconciliation, she’d started learning navigation to, as she said, “make herself useful.” Although she hadn’t quite graduated to deep space navigation yet, she could easily take us away from the planet and start us on a set course.

  Yuskeya smiled her gratitude. “That would be wonderful, Captain, thank you. We have a lot of catching-up to do.”

  “Then I’ll leave you to it.”

  I’ll admit my ship was beginning to feel a little cramped. I was secretly glad that none of our Protectorate passengers out-ranked Yuskeya, and wondered if Lanar had done that on purpose. If anything catastrophic came up and I had to let the Protectorate contingent commandeer my ship, it wouldn’t be so bad if Yuskeya was at the helm. I wondered idly what sort of relationship she’d had with Jolah Didkovsky. I sensed that it could have been more than simple friendship and wondered what Viss would think of the admittedly handsome Lieutenant-Commander.

  I shook off those thoughts and let my feet carry me all the way forward to the bridge to find Maja and install her at the nav board. With all of our new passengers aboard, it was time to head into the Delta Pavonis system to find the new wormhole coordinates Lanar had given me. I took a deep breath. We were leaving the safe boundaries of Nearspace proper again. I hoped it would all go better than the last time.

  Silly me.

  WE’D BEEN GUESTS at the Corvid uruglat, or space station, for just about the full week, and I was growing weary of all that unrelieved black. They were obviously an intelligent and sophisticated species, but their taste in decorating left a lot to be desired.

  Don’t get me wrong, I liked the Corvids. Once I’d gotten past my initial surprise at their crow-like beaks and sleek black feathers, I expected them to be different, expected everything about them to be alien. It was just that their station was black on the outside and black on the inside and everything else about it was black, and it got old after a while.

  I said as much to Hirin as we lay in bed that night. “Night” by our internal clocks, anyway; the rhythm of the Corvid station operated on a different cycle, but we’d all managed to make accommodations. Folks came and went at all hours in making those accommodations, and at the moment, the Tane Ikai was unnaturally quiet. No throb of engines, only the soft hiss of the life support system cycling air throughout the ship and the occasional gurgle from an internal pipe. And for once, no voices or footsteps in the corridors. The Corvids had offered to outfit quarters on the station for us and for the diplomats, but that would have meant creating and constantly maintaining an atmosphere for us, in a much larger space. So, we compromised. Most of the interactions between the envoys and the Corvids happened via hologrammatic projections in the launch’s cargo space, which had been hastily outfitted as a makeshift boardroom. The diplomats had comfortable chairs and a big table, and the Corvids “beamed” themselves in. It was working. The Corvids had provided opportunities for us and for the diplomats to explore other areas of their station for limited time periods, or wearing EVA suits, but for the most part, it was easier for us to stay aboard our own ships where they were docked.

  If you can call sticking partway through the gelatinous wall of a space station “docked.” That’s what the Corvids called it. The rest of us were still a little unsure. The Tane Ikai sat on one side of an entirely black docking bay, and the diplomats’ launch, the Airavata, took up the other side. The Corvids had assured us that the bay would be pressurized and atmospherically safe for us at all times, so that we could come and go between the ships as we pleased. At the diplomats’ invitation, the three Protectorate observers had been present on the Airavata for most of the sessions with the Corvids.

  “I still don’t get the all-black decor,” I said to Hirin. “Fha says they can distinguish other colours, but they all seem to have a propensity for black. It’s soothing, or something. But you’d think it would get boring. It would drive me insane.” We’d had tours of many parts of the station: recreation areas, engineering and physical plants, eating and command stations. All various tones of black, interspersed with grey.

  Hirin, curled at my back, chuckled. “We don’t know when they’re listening to us, remember. Fha said anytime we called out her name, she’d hear and know that we were looking for her.”

  I did my best to shrug. “I’ve concluded that they don’t much care one way or the other what we say or think about them as a species. They’re the most well-adjusted beings I’ve ever come across.”

  “They don’t seem to be holding back anything about the Chron, anyway,” Hirin said. “Gerazan says they’ve filled in all the missing pieces from the data packet they gave us before.”

  I sighed. “Good. I know this is all for the good of Nearspace, but to tell you the truth, I’m getting kind of—”

  “Bored?” Hirin finished for me.

  I chuckled. “Exactly. You too?”

  I felt him nod. “We’re not the diplomats, and although I know we were planning a vacation, this isn’t quite what I envisioned. It was interesting for the first few days, but now—”

  “You’re tired of sleeping on a ship that’s not going anywhere.”

  He squeezed my hand, where our fingers had interlaced. “You know me too well.”

  I rolled to kiss him. “I ought to, after sixty years.”

  “I was in that nursing home Earthside for too long, I guess,” he mused. “Now that I have the chance again, I just want to be on the move.”

  I snuggled closer to him. “I feel the same way, and I’ve never really stopped moving.”

  The ship trembled violently, and something fell over on the desk across the room.

  Hirin’s grip tightened around me, and I glanced up instinctively at the port above my head. Nothing to see through it except the unrelieved black of the docking bay’s interior.

  “What the hell—” Hirin started.

  A hologram of one of our hosts appeared without warning in the room. “I apologize for the interruption,” the crow-like Corvid said politely, “but we are under attack.” As usual, only its head was visible, the rest of its body covered in a sand-coloured, rough-hewn robe with a rolled collar. The most remarkable thing about the Corvids’ robes, I’d realized, was that they were not black.

  “By whom?” I asked as I rolled out of bed. Hirin was right behind me.

  The comm buzzed just then, and Rei’s voice asked, “Captain, what’s happening?”

  “Don’t know,” I said shortly. “Better get our crew to the bridge. And find out where all the envoys are. I want everyone aboard this ship or the launch immediately. Comm the bridge of the Airavata and tell them we’ll keep them informed.” I realized belatedly that that
might not be necessary; they might have their own Corvid hologram on the launch, imparting the same information.

  “Aye,” Rei said, and was gone. I pulled on a pair of jeans, not caring if the hologram could “see” me. I expected the Corvids were too preoccupied to spy on us. The ship shuddered again. The station must have taken another hit.

  The Corvid hadn’t answered me but the hologram remained. “Is it the Chron?”

  “Several Chron ships have entered the system,” the Corvid said finally, as if reluctant to give up the information. It was the first time I’d known one to be reticent. After a week on the station, I’d learned how to distinguish some of the Corvids from the others by striations in their “beaks.” This one I knew as Jarama.

  “How’d they get past the asteroid field?” Hirin asked as I opened the door of the cabin.

  “Unknown,” Jarama replied. “We believe we can keep you safe, Captain, but it would be wise to prepare your ships in case it becomes necessary to release you from the uruglat.”

  I didn’t like the idea of being “released” into a system with Chron fighters flitting around, probably just itching to turn their energy weapons on anything human, but I kept it to myself. I was too busy sprinting down the corridor to the bridge, and wondering why I was always in the vicinity whenever all hell decided to break loose.

  I EXPECTED A barrage of questions as soon as my feet hit the bridge decking, but only Rei and Viss had made it there ahead of me. Rei was already at the pilot’s console, her agile fingers calibrating the boards. She flashed a question at me, her eyes serious behind the beautiful dark pridattii tattoos, but I could only shrug. Viss sat at the secondary engineering board, cursing and muttering under his breath. The primary engineering station is one deck down, but in times of crisis Viss likes to be on the bridge with the rest of us. I don’t blame him one bit.