Nearspace Trilogy

by Sherry D. Ramsey

  Maja got up and gave me a quick hug. “It’s a deal. I’m sorry. I just thought I could handle it on my own.”

  “We’re family. You don’t have to keep secrets, okay? I don’t know where you get these ideas,” I teased her, thinking guiltily about my own decision to deal with Sedmamin without waiting to talk to Lanar.

  “Right,” she said with a wry grin. “Must be from Dad.”

  “I won’t tell him if you don’t,” I said, and went to see if Sedmamin had given Rei the directions to his apartment.

  I WAS FINISHING up a round of tae-ga-chi when someone buzzed my door. Hirin had gone down to the galley in search of lunch and I’d planned to join him there in a few minutes. I felt a slight buzz of irritation as I called, “Come in!” I wiped my face with a towel as the door slid open, and Alin Sedmamin stood, hesitating, just outside.

  “Captain,” he said, but didn’t make a move to come into the room. His normally pale, greyish skin was flushed and his eyes bright with nerves.

  “Chairman,” I said, although he’d told me before not to call him that. It was an old habit, and a difficult one to break. “Come in, please,” I repeated. “What’s happened?”

  He came in slowly and the door slid shut behind him. He held a datapad, and when it said, “Hello, Captain,” I realized it was Pita.

  “Hi Pita,” I said. “Still working hard?”

  “File decryption is just one of my many talents,” the AI drawled, sounding so much like Jahelia Sord that I almost smiled.

  “That’s why I’m here,” Sedmamin said. “We’ve found something that I think you should know about.”

  “Okay.” I sat at my desk and motioned him into the big armchair. “I’m listening.”

  Sedmamin stared down at the datapad for a moment, apparently gathering his thoughts. “It’s worse than I thought,” he said finally. “PrimeCorp—what they’ve been doing, with the Chron. There’s a conspiracy here that’s so huge, and goes back so far, even I can’t believe it.”

  I leaned forward in my chair. “Enough to bring them down?”

  He barked a short, humourless laugh. “More than enough. Definite references to dealings with the Chron. They’re circumspect, but with these files, it becomes obvious. But that’s not actually why I’m here. There’s something else.”

  “Coordinates,” Pita piped up. “Very interesting coordinates!”

  “At this point, I’ll believe just about anything,” I said. “More wormholes we don’t know about?”

  Sedmamin snorted. “Try coordinates pinpointing a location on an unnamed planet. Some kind of a base, we think. There’s something important there—a top secret research project. But I can’t identify the planet or the system, and neither can Pita.”

  He turned the datapad so I could see it, but although I recognized them as latitude and longitude, the mere numbers meant nothing to me. The description of the system went on in some detail, but didn’t sound familiar. “Pita? Can you tell if this is somewhere in Nearspace?”

  “If it was in Nearspace, I could tell you where,” the AI said with some asperity. “There’s a description of a binary star and identifying points about the system. The only binary in the Nearspace system is Keridre/Gerdrice, and this isn’t it. The planet is referred to as Orbis Latet, but that’s just Latin for hidden world, so no help there. Not a Nearspace name or nickname and I can’t match up the description to anything in Nearspace. But they went to some lengths to pinpoint a location on the planet. Defined a prime meridian using a geographical feature—the highest mountain peak in the northern hemisphere—and then used latitude and longitude to locate it.”

  “But what’s there?”

  Sedmamin shook his head. “Whatever it is, it’s big. Big and vital and secret.”

  “But you can’t tell how to get there. Pita?”

  The AI said, “Not enough data, Captain. I’m certain this is a planet outside what we define as Nearspace. If we were there, we could use the coordinates to find the base. But I don’t know how to get there.”

  “Here’s the thing.” Sedmamin leaned toward me, eyes serious. “I did not know about this, and I am not taking the fall for it. You’ve got to protect me, Captain. I’m bringing this to you, and you can do whatever you think is best with it, but none of this is on me.”

  I nodded. I’d never thought much of Sedmamin’s veracity, but I believed him this time. This went far beyond the treachery he’d been part of or even dreamed about.

  “I want you to take me to Nellera now,” he said, his voice finally cracking a little. “I want out. I’ve gone through the files. They’re ready for your brother. I have nothing to add.” He ran a hand over his face. “I just want out.”

  I could see Sedmamin’s point. If there was anything iron-clad by the Nearspace Authority it was the protocol for new system exploration and discovery, and this looked like at least twice PrimeCorp had broken it. But it put me in a bad spot. I’d thought I had a loophole in my promise to Taso through Lanar and Regina Holles—that they’d want a chance to question Sedmamin, find out more details than what might be in the files, and he’d pass from my hands to theirs and that would be the end of it. I’d tell Taso I would have turned Sedmamin over to him, but the Protectorate got in the way and I didn’t have a chance. Taso would be angry, but I could deal with that.

  But if Sedmamin wanted to go to Nellera now, maybe I had to let him. He hadn’t steered us wrong on any of this, he’d delivered what he promised, and I had the files. I’d had no intention of doing what Taso thought I’d agreed to. This just meant I wouldn’t have an easy excuse.

  “Okay,” I said. “But look, keep working on the files with Pita while we’re en route, in case there’s more about the location of this mysterious planet. I’ll start us toward Nellera. You still have your contact there?”

  “I hope so.” The flush had left his cheeks and been replaced by the wan grey tone that was his usual colour of late. He looked more tired than I’d ever seen him. “I haven’t had a response to my last message, but I’m going to send another one.”

  I nodded. “All right. I’ll tell Rei to forget FarView for now, and head for the wormhole into Keridre/Gerdrice.”

  WHEN WE ENTERED the twin star Keridre/Gerdrice system, the wormhole deposited us nearest to the planet Stana. It was still distant, a softly glowing orb in the reflected light of the system’s double suns. Our destination, Nellera, was the system’s fifth planet, just barely squeaking into the habitable zone. Much more removed from the suns and it would have been too cold to offer colonists a hospitable welcome. However, Nellera’s equatorial island chains were warm and hospitable, making it a popular tourist escape for inhabitants of Stana and Tarcol and even planets from other systems. I never visited Nellera without feeling a bit of a pang, though. We’d lived here when my mother had gathered her things and quietly left one night, hoping to leave us to a better life without PrimeCorp constantly on our tail. Seventy years later, we’d finally been reunited. That was the important thing, but Nellera always left me disquieted and sad for what had ended here so long ago.

  This visit was disquieting for another reason; as we transited the system, Sedmamin’s contact on Nellera still hadn’t answered his messages. The strain told on him—he became even more quiet and withdrawn, keeping to his quarters sometimes even at mealtimes. He hadn’t exactly become fast friends with the crew; there was too much history for that. But we’d managed to maintain a cordial co-existence within the confines of the ship.

  I knocked on the door of his quarters when we were a day out from Nellera. He called for me to come in. When the door opened, he was at the small desk, his datapad and Pita on the surface while he hunched over them. He didn’t even look up.

  “Chairman?”

  “Come in, Captain. I suppose I’ll just stop asking you not to call me that.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Old habits. Still no word?”

  He heaved a great sigh and turned to look at me. His face was gaunt,
his eyes red-rimmed and sunken. He shook his head grimly. “Nothing.”

  I let the door close and leaned against it, crossing my arms. “Is there any sense in going further?”

  “If I don’t go to Nellera . . .” he paused and started again. “If I can’t go to Nellera, I don’t know where else to go.”

  “Surely you have friends—”

  He stopped me with a vehement shake of his head. “No. In my position, you don’t have friends, only allies. And when they stop being that, they’re enemies.”

  I stayed silent for a moment. “When’s the last time you messaged?”

  “This morning.”

  “The Protectorate will probably offer you asylum,” I suggested. “Set you up somewhere—”

  “Fek the Protectorate,” he snarled. “I don’t want their pity or their makeshift life. I wanted to deal with them—fair exchange—and then be left alone.”

  I fetched a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Seems to me that life under protection is still life. If you’re worried about being assassinated by PrimeCorp, it’s a viable alternative.”

  “Why do you care?” he asked me in an exhausted voice

  I shrugged. “You haven’t exactly been a force for good in my life, Sedmamin. But, well, I can afford to be gracious. You’re helping us out. I’m trying to help you. Does there have to be more to it than that?”

  He grunted and slumped further in his chair. “Maybe not. I’m not—”

  He broke off as his datapad dinged with a DIP message.

  I raised my eyebrows.

  He didn’t ask me to leave, just pressed the screen to bring up the message. He read it and sighed. “She’s there. It’s all right.”

  “She say why she hasn’t been responding?”

  “She was off-planet. Didn’t expect me this soon,” he said.

  “Well, all right then,” I said. “Tell her we’ll be in orbit by late afternoon tomorrow, and we’ll order up a shuttle to take you down.”

  “Thank you, Captain.” He didn’t look up, already typing out his reply.

  “Find anything else about that mysterious planet?” I asked. I assumed he’d continued to go through the files. He’d been closeted in here with the datapad and Pita, barely emerging for meals.

  “No. Nothing more about where it is. But the files I haven’t gone through, I’ll just include in the package for your brother. I don’t care anymore what’s in them,” he said recklessly. “I’ll be beyond the reach of anyone who cares, anyway.”

  “Okej. Why don’t you join us for dinner tonight, since it’ll be your last night aboard?”

  He turned a half-hearted smile my way. “Don’t pretend you’re going to miss me, Captain. The one thing I’ve always admired about you is your honesty.”

  I chuckled. “I didn’t say I was going to miss you,” I told him. “Just trying to be the perfect hostess. You know how much my reputation means to me.”

  “I can’t say you’ve treated me any worse than I deserve,” Sedmamin said, suddenly serious. “And thanks. Maybe I will see you at dinner, Captain.”

  SEDMAMIN DID JOIN us for dinner and the meal was actually rather pleasant. Maja had found a supply company that made stores-packaged food that reconstituted beautifully, and we enjoyed miraculously fresh teriyaki chicken and rice, washed down by jarlees wine. There was a celebratory feeling in the galley, perhaps because delivering Sedmamin safely to Nellera signalled a successful end to part of this undertaking. On the other hand, it might be more to do with getting rid of him, but everyone was civil.

  By the time we were in orbit around Nellera the next day and Sedmamin joined us on the bridge, he looked much better than he had the afternoon before. He’d cleaned up, shaved, and changed his clothes for one of our inconspicuous shipsuits, which I’d told him he could keep. He’d returned Pita to Jahelia with grave thanks, and she’d accepted her datapad and AI graciously. Everything he owned fit into two bulging duffel bags that lay at his feet as we watched Nellera spin slowly below us, wreathed in clouds.

  “Last chance to stay with us and go into protection,” I said lightly as we waited for the shuttle we’d ordered for Sedmamin. Nellera didn’t have planetside docking facilities for a ship as large as mine, and no orbiting station, either. So shuttlecraft were kept busy ferrying passengers to and from orbiting ships. There was talk of a space elevator sometime in the future, but that time hadn’t come yet.

  “I hope you’re joking,” Alin Sedmamin said. “The likelihood of my wanting to spend any amount of time in the company of the Protectorate is about as remote as . . .” He trailed off, apparently unable to think of anything that unlikely.

  “As remote as the chance you’d ask me for help?” I suggested.

  “Or that you’d acquiesce,” he returned, and half-smiled.

  I can’t say I liked Alin Sedmamin, but I didn’t loathe him quite as much as I had before. That had to count for something in my stock of private karma, didn’t it?

  Hirin had not come to the bridge to see Sedmamin off, but Rei was at the pilot’s board and Baden on the comm. Jahelia was, I assumed, down in Engineering, taking her job as Viss’s fill-in quite seriously. I wondered if she’d have trouble turning it over to him when we finally got Viss and Yuskeya back. I had no doubt that my crotchety engineer would roust her out of his chair quickly enough and spend at least a couple of weeks complaining about all the things she’d managed to mess up.

  I’d struggled with the question of whether I should tell Sedmamin about Taso. As things stood now, he’d probably never have to worry about running into my ex-son-in-law. Taso was not a particularly skilled operative; that wasn’t why PrimeCorp had picked him. It had been his connection to my family, and probably his willingness to do their dirty work in return for a quick payment. If Sedmamin’s connections were as good as he thought, no other PrimeCorp operative was likely to find him, either. Still, it went against the grain with me not to let Sedmamin know he’d been right to watch his back.

  “Look, Chairman,” I said, swiveling my skimchair to face him. “There’s something I should tell you.”

  “Should I sit down?” He looked vaguely amused.

  “I don’t think it’s that serious. But you were right about PrimeCorp sending someone after you.”

  All traces of amusement, and most of the colour, left his face. “What?”

  I sighed. “I don’t think you actually have to worry about this, but I don’t feel right not warning you. I left out a little detail about the day Jahelia Sord and I went into PrimeCorp.”

  There was no sign of Sedmamin’s shuttle yet, and he pulled one of the vacant skimchairs over from a console to sit near me. “Tell me.”

  So, I told him how Taso had followed us into the building and into his office. His expression didn’t change much as I related the conversation, but by the time I’d finished, the rest of the colour had drained away.

  “But I had no intention of turning you over to him,” I reiterated. “I intimated that I would, so we could get out of there with the files, but I didn’t have much choice. If he chose to interpret what I said as a promise, that’s not my fault.”

  “How did he know?” Sedmamin asked in a low voice. “How did he know where to find you, and when?”

  I shrugged. “He just said he’d followed us. I thought he might have put a tracker on Maja when they’d met, but she was sure he hadn’t touched her or any of her things. I got Baden to sweep the ship just in case, but he didn’t find anything.”

  “You don’t think you would have noticed someone following your ship?”

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “And you didn’t file a cargo manifest for Earth?”

  “No. We had you on board by then, and I wasn’t broadcasting where we were headed. I didn’t even tell Lanar in the message I left for him.”

  Sedmamin got up from the chair then, and stood, spinning it idly under his hand. “And your son-in-law—”

  “Former son-in-law.”
>
  “Conceded. Former son-in-law is not a trained operative.”

  I shook my head. “Not as far as I know. Just an opportunistic guy who couldn’t turn down the deal PrimeCorp offered him. He came to FarView to find Maja, thinking she might help him find you, and got lucky because you were actually there.”

  “I suppose it could be coincidence . . .”

  “What are you thinking?”

  Sedmamin turned and stared out the viewscreen at the slowly spinning planet beneath us. A small craft, probably his shuttle, had just come into view, heading our way. “My contact on Nellera,” he said slowly, “is the sister of the person who left my office open for you at PrimeCorp and got the decryption chip. But if she—my helper at PrimeCorp—found out what Taso wanted and let him know when you’d be there . . .”

  “Why would she double-cross you? I thought she was a friend.”

  “Money’s a better friend. She could do what I asked and take what I paid her, then tell Taso how to find me and also presumably share in whatever PrimeCorp’s paying him.”

  “So, in that case, your friend on Nellera—”

  “Could very well not be my friend at all,” he finished, his voice bleak.

  “Because if you turn up here, it means that Taso didn’t manage to get you his way, and they can let PrimeCorp know where you are themselves.”

  “Collecting the full reward and leaving Taso out in the cold.” He heaved a deep sigh and put his hands on his hips. “I can’t go down there.”

  I shook my head. “Not with those kinds of doubts. I’ll get Baden to put in a call and cancel the shuttle.”

  Sedmamin didn’t answer. Well, he was watching his carefully constructed plan for the rest of his life crumble. That had to be rough.

  “Captain?” Sedmamin said suddenly. “Did you tell Mr. Methyr to cancel the shuttle yet?”

  “No. You’d have heard me.”