Nearspace Trilogy

by Sherry D. Ramsey

  I laughed and shook my head. “I spent a lot of years away from Maja, but honestly, I don’t think she’s ever been happier.”

  “Part of that is because the rift between you two is healed,” he said. “I think that bothered her more than she’d ever even admit to herself.”

  “That’s good, then.” I studied him. “But what happened to that ladies’ man who used to work my communications board?”

  He snorted a laugh as we skirted around a Vilisian mother with a child in a hovercart. “Don’t rub it in, Captain. This is all your fault, anyway.”

  “My fault?”

  “She’s your daughter,” he said, as if that explained everything.

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” I said. “Don’t worry too much, okay?”

  “We have enough to worry about as it is,” he said with a wry smile.

  “Ain’t that the truth,” I told him, and released his arm. I was supposed to be going to this meeting alone, after all. If Sedmamin was watching, I didn’t want to make it too easy for him.

  We returned to a comfortable silence the rest of the way, then entered the shopping centre separately. I just went on ahead and let Baden work it whatever way he wanted. Although I expected Viss would have more experience with this kind of thing, I trusted Baden to handle it. He knew my history with Sedmamin and PrimeCorp and appreciated the possible—if remote—implications of the meeting.

  I didn’t see Sedmamin inside, so I crossed to a huge luminescent fountain in the middle of the lobby and waited. The building was mid-afternoon busy, with shoppers obviously on their way home from work mingling with tourists, off-duty Protectorate types, and family groups. The crowd was mostly human or human-origin colonists, although I spotted a few gliding Vilisians and lightly bouncing Lobors in the crowd. Glowing e-boards descended from the ceiling, ads cycling through various pitches as different shoppers passed beneath them. The boards read data from their ID chips and served ads accordingly. A family got ads for toys, office workers saw the latest in datapads and implants, soldiers were reminded of deals in restaurants and other entertainment venues. Curious, I wandered over to one to see what it would show me. I got several ads for clothing stores and one for a hair stylist. I tried not to take it personally.

  Sedmamin showed up then, appearing across the wide corridor and beckoning to me to join him. I was shocked by how thin he looked. It was more obvious in person than over the vidscreen. His dark blue business biosuit looked baggy and ill-cut, although it must have been expensively tailored when he bought it. His skin still looked grey, even worse under the pale, flickering light from the adboards. I took a quick scan of the area, just trying to be careful, but I really didn’t see anything that made me nervous. I crossed to meet him, weaving through the flow of hurrying shoppers as I went.

  “Thank you for coming,” he said briefly, although to my relief he didn’t make any move to shake my hand or take my arm. It was difficult for me to come to terms with the notion that Alin Sedmamin was anything less than an annoyance, if not an outright enemy. “Shall we talk over a caff?”

  “Sure,” I said, and we made our way down the mall, threading our way through busy shoppers to a cafe. I didn’t look around for Baden. I knew he’d be around, blended inconspicuously into the crowd.

  “I’m sure you didn’t come alone, Captain,” Sedmamin said, as if he had read my mind.

  “You’re familiar with my prudent nature,” I said with a smile.

  “I would have expected nothing less,” he said. “Although I assure you it wasn’t necessary. I have much more pressing concerns than your bioscavengers now.”

  “I won’t say I’m glad to hear it, since those concerns are obviously causing you some distress,” I answered, matching the formality of his tone.

  He didn’t answer right away, since we’d reached the cafe. It was open to the main corridor of the mall and had an upper level, festooned with artificial greenery, where one could enjoy their beverage while shoppers passed beneath them. Plenty of the tables up above sat empty, so we each brought our own drink and headed up there. Sedmamin climbed the steps ahead of me like an old man, carefully and hyperaware of the danger of tripping.

  Settled at a small round table with a recently-wiped imitation-wood surface, I took a sip of caff and asked, “Okej, Chairman, I’m ready to hear why you wanted to talk to me.” I managed not to grimace. The caff was horrible, somehow managing to be both watery and bitter at the same time.

  “It’s painful for me to say this, but I need your help, Captain,” Sedmamin confessed, after sampling his own drink. He didn’t look anymore pleased with it than I was with mine.

  I didn’t say anything, just raised my eyebrows for him to continue.

  “I’d like you to believe that I misjudged Dores Amadoro when I gave her the authority to deal with you,” he said first. “She was completely out of control and not acting under any sort of instruction from me.”

  I didn’t believe that, but nodded anyway. Amadoro wasn’t a problem for me any longer, so why argue about her? “Okej.”

  “And I also want to state that I had no knowledge of any PrimeCorp dealings with the Chron.” He regarded me intently, watching for my reaction.

  Merde! Was he admitting it? That PrimeCorp had secretly been in collaboration with humanity’s greatest threat? I tried to keep the surprise out of my face. “But you’ve become aware of it now?”

  He held up a hand. “I’ve become aware of rumours to that effect—all right, perhaps more than rumours,” he added when he saw my face. “I have no personal knowledge, so I can’t confirm or deny anything.”

  “It’s a pretty important thing for the Chairman not to know about,” I said carefully, wrapping my hands around my warm mug. The inside of the mall was a chilly contrast to the heat outside.

  “You’re completely right about that. I do take some responsibility, because I believe it was my . . . er . . . views on certain situations . . . that made others believe the Chron could be used to our ends.”

  I suspected he meant his previous obsession with my mother’s research data and my own nanotechnological secrets, but I let it pass. I wasn’t here to antagonize him over past problems. If he had anything to say about the Chron, I wanted to hear it.

  “But now,” he went on, “there are elements within the corporation who are trying to cover their own misdeeds.” He leaned toward me, his pale brown eyes dark and serious despite the sagging skin around them. “To put it bluntly, they want me to go down for this.”

  “You wield substantial power as Chairman,” I noted. “There must be some people who would continue to back you.”

  He glanced around the café, as if he thought he might have been followed. “There’s been an internal power struggle at PrimeCorp for years now. Various factions, trying to promote their own interests. It’s the way the corporations work. It starts out small; someone has a project they’d like to see go ahead. They start rounding up support for it. Looking to cut funding to someone else’s project, or get ahead of them in the timeline. The internal structure of the corporation fragments; there’s no longer a common good or a common goal. Just infighting and backroom deals.” He sighed. “Eventually it reaches the highest levels, if it didn’t start there. If it’s splintered enough, there are entire cadres working at cross-purposes. And then everyone starts to think that if someone else were Chairman—”

  “There’d be a better chance to promote their own agenda,” I finished for him. It did explain some things I’d wondered about in the past, like how sometimes the left hand of PrimeCorp didn’t seem to know what the right hand was doing.

  “There are enough factions now that want me out,” he said simply. “There’s no avoiding it.”

  “And they’re not offering a nice fat retirement package? A golden handshake and a titanium datapad?”

  He pinched his lips together. “Hardly. The best way to get me out is to make me take the fall for everything the corporation has done wro
ng lately. Or ever. Some of the things I’ll be accused of will probably date back to before I was born,” he said bitterly, “but they’ll still argue that I knew about it and am to blame.”

  I took another tentative drink of my caff. It hadn’t improved. “I still don’t see how I can help you, though.”

  “I want to get to a friend I have on Nellera,” he said.

  “Why would that be a problem? Surely, you’re free to move around Nearspace however you want,” I said. “You’re here, after all.”

  “I’m here with the clothes I’m standing up in,” he said wearily, “and a small bag at a hotel. They don’t just want me out of PrimeCorp. They want me ruined—or even conveniently dead, because then I can’t argue my case. I’m what you would call ‘on the run’. I have funds I can access in the future, but I won’t risk doing that until I’m in a secure location.” His lips twitched in distaste.

  “So, you want me to somehow help you get to this friend, along with, I’m assuming, some of your worldly possessions.” He started to say something, but I said, “Just wait, you can finish explaining that part in a minute. What I really want to know is, why do you think I would help you now? You have to admit you’ve made my life unpleasant for a long time.”

  And unpleasant was an understatement. He’d hounded me, tricked me, infected me with a virus, had me kidnapped and knocked out, almost caused an irreparable rift between me and Maja, might have been responsible for the virus that had made Hirin sick and confined to a nursing home for so many years, and set Jahelia Sord on my tail. Granted, some of those things could have been initiated by other people in the corporation; I couldn’t be sure he was the driving factor behind all of them. But I knew he’d had his fingers in enough to make me question again why I was sitting here talking to him.

  But I knew the answer well enough. Damne curiosity.

  “I’ll grant you that, if you’ll believe it was all just business.” He grinned crookedly. “Nothing personal—although you were damned aggravating at times.”

  “It’s always personal, or it should be,” I said. “And I take some comfort in knowing that I got under your skin. But that’s irrelevant. I still want to know why you think I would help you now.”

  His eyes narrowed, and I saw a glimpse of the manipulative man I’d always known him to be. “Because I have information your brother the Admiral would very much like to have. And the only way I’ll divulge it—the only way I can get it—is if you help me. You, and Jahelia Sord, and that very competent crew of yours.”

  I sat back in my chair, letting my fingertips play with the handle of my mug. “My brother is not exactly one of your biggest fans either. You’d have to have something . . . exceptional . . . for him to even want to speak with you.”

  One side of his mouth stretched up as if it wanted to scratch his cheek. “I know that. Your family and I have simply had the misfortune to be on opposite sides of a shared interest. But that’s behind us.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I know it had to be Jahelia Sord who took some files from PrimeCorp; I know she handed them over to your brother, or at least to you. No-one at PrimeCorp has figured out how they were leaked yet, and it’s driving them crazy. They’re in the hands of the Protectorate now, but with that illegal provenance they won’t be of any useful effect. They won’t be admissible in legal proceedings and the Protectorate must hate that. They’ll be desperate at being unable to act on them.”

  “And you’re willing to help the Protectorate against PrimeCorp now? That’s a remarkable shift in loyalties.”

  His voice dipped almost to a snarl. “They have no loyalty to me; why should they have mine? If I don’t do this, I’m going down, Captain—a very long way down. I don’t think I deserve it, and I’m willing to do anything to avoid it.”

  The desperation in his eyes was an almost palpable thing. Apparently, rising to the top of PrimeCorp was not an achievement that came without dangers. “Well, what do you have to offer my brother?”

  He studied me with narrowed eyes for a moment. “You’re willing to help me?”

  Every ounce of sense I had was telling me to walk away and leave Sedmamin sitting here in his sagging clothes and the ruins of his career. But if I could help Lanar—and Nearspace, too—maybe it was worth putting up with Sedmamin for a little while. It was satisfying to know that he’d lost the power to intimidate or hurt me.

  I kept my face neutral and shrugged. “I might be. I’m not expecting you to spill everything to me, but I have to know you’ve actually got something that Lanar would want.”

  “Only—everything,” he said, just above a whisper. “Everything PrimeCorp knows about the Chron. Everything they’re planning now. All those files Jahelia Sord took and more—but from a legitimate source, a whistle-blower, who can still obtain them legally and turn them over to the Protectorate.” He sat back and tapped his chest. “Me.”

  For a moment, I couldn’t speak. “I thought you said you didn’t know anything about PrimeCorp’s involvement with the Chron?”

  “Oh, I didn’t—at the time. Trust me, since I’ve seen which way the wind is blowing, I’ve made it my business to dig deep into everything while I still had access to it.”

  “And all that information is—?”

  “Back on Earth,” he said. “It’s all together. The things I want, and the things your brother will want.”

  “Convenient,” I said.

  He shrugged. “I didn’t get to be chairman of PrimeCorp without learning a few things.” He drank off the rest of his caff and grimaced. It surely hadn’t improved by growing cold. “So?”

  “You didn’t think of just turning your information over to the Protectorate in the interests of avoiding a war with the Chron and maybe saving lives?” I asked him.

  “I could do that,” he agreed. “But the way I see it, I’m fighting for my life, here, too. If you help me, it benefits everyone.”

  “Uh-huh.” I stood. “Well, I’ll take it to Lanar. How can I reach you?”

  “I’ll get back to you. I think I’m going to FarView station, but I may end up on Rhea or Renata, instead. How long before you’ll have an answer for me?”

  “Not sure. Lanar shipped out on a mission a few days ago, so I’m not sure where he is,” I said. I wasn’t telling Sedmamin that Lanar might be in Otherspace, trying to retrieve Yuskeya and the others. Let him sweat a bit if I couldn’t get in touch with my brother right away. I turned to go.

  “Captain?”

  “What?”

  “You wouldn’t think of just helping me in the interests of maybe saving my life?” he asked, the wry grin on his face making it clear that he was deliberately echoing my own words.

  Briefly I thought back to everything Sedmamin and his minions had done to make my life miserable, and the decades they’d chased my mother from one end of Nearspace to the other, simply because she had ethics and they didn’t.

  Only for a few seconds. “Nope,” I said, “I can’t seem to work up much interest in that.” And I left him.

  I DIDN’T HAVE any intention of sending a message to Lanar, because he’d left two days previously for the Corvid system. What I did want was a chance to think about Sedmamin’s offer, and I didn’t mind the idea of Alin Sedmamin having to cool his heels in some poky little motel room for a while. I guess that was mean, but I can live with myself. Baden rejoined me when I reached the mall entrance, appearing magically out of the crowd. We pushed outside. The breeze had kicked up, but it was still warmer out here than inside the mall.

  Baden said, “That man does not look well. What did he want?”

  I shook my head. “He really doesn’t. He offered me a job, but I have to give it some thought.”

  Baden raised his eyebrows, but didn’t press me for anything more. I knew the curiosity must be killing him, but I wasn’t ready to talk about the whole crazy idea just yet.

  Back at the Tane Ikai, I went looking for Hirin. I found him in the galley, having apparently finished
whatever machinations he’d been up to with the weapons systems, and rewarding himself with some cinnamon pano and tea. I pulled a mug of double caff for myself and took the last slice of pano.

  Hirin watched me with his eyebrows raised, waiting for the report.

  “Let’s talk in our quarters,” I told him, picking up my plate and cup, and he followed me down the corridor. I settled at the desk and he sat in the big armchair, setting his mug on the corner of the desk.

  “Must have been quite the discussion,” he observed.

  “I just need to talk this through with you before anyone else hears about it,” I said. “I didn’t see it coming, I’ll tell you that.”

  “Don’t keep me in suspense.”

  “Alin Sedmamin wants to hand over information to Lanar. Information about PrimeCorp and the Chron. Everything.”

  Hirin just stared at me. It wasn’t often I made him speechless.

  “It’s true,” I said, after a sip of caff. “PrimeCorp has decided that heads must roll, and Sedmamin’s is the first head scheduled for the block. But he’s got other ideas.”

  “He’s getting back at them by going to the Protectorate? I don’t know how much trust they’ll put in anything that comes via that route.” Hirin was frowning now, his snack all but forgotten.

  “It’s not exactly that. He wants a favour from me, and he’ll give them everything PrimeCorp has regarding the Chron—past and present—in exchange. He says he didn’t know the contact with the Chron was even happening now.”

  “And you believe him?”

  I snorted. “Hardly. But I think whatever he’s going to turn over—it’s probably genuine. He really wants this favour.”

  “Which is?”

  “He wants us to get him to Earth and help him retrieve his personal stuff, then get him away safely again. He has a place to go to ground, and funds he can access from there. He’s not planning to lie down and die just because some of the factions at PrimeCorp want him to take a fall.”