Mother took a deep breath. “It’s all right,” she said, glancing at me. I nodded. “I think it’s time we came out of the shadows anyway. I still won’t broadcast it—and we’ll have to see how Luta feels about it—but if it has to come out in order to save Nearspace, then there’s no question. Talk to whomever you need to about it, Regina.”
MOTHER AND I had dinner at the Blackstar restaurant, on the fifth level of FarView. They had sustained only minor damage in the Chron attack, being on the opposite side of the hub, and normal operations had resumed. Everything on the surface, at least; it was harder to repair the fear that had gripped everyone on the station. An undercurrent of unease ran through every level now, and it couldn’t be dispersed even by the finest jarlees wine and pasta primavera.
We tried to talk mainly of trivialities, but weightier issues continually intruded; I asked about Gusain and Mother said he’d stayed on Kiando—mainly because he wanted to oversee the defence of the system if the Chron threatened again. Mother asked about Luta and I gave in and told her about what had happened on the Corvid station, because she was bound to hear it eventually now and I preferred she hear it from me. Whatever new course we attempted to set for the conversation, it inevitably wound back to the threat we were all facing.
We’d finished our wine when my ID implant buzzed. I took the call on my datapad, but it was text-only, from Regina. Please come to my quarters if you’re free after dinner. That was it, no intimation of why. It wasn’t an official order, but neither did it have the feeling of an invitation to another dalliance.
“I’m going to my quarters now, anyway,” Mother said. “I’ve only just realized how tired I am.” The tiny lines around her eyes, usually so faint, seemed deeper and more firmly drawn tonight. She was tired. No wonder. The technology that she’d so eagerly developed to help all of Nearspace, then sacrificed so much to keep hidden away for years to prevent its exploitation, had now taken on the potential to be an active threat. I wondered if she’d be able to sleep at all.
We rode up the elevator together in silence, and she got off at level three, the main habitat level. I continued up to the top level, above the docking ring, where Regina had her suite, and knocked at the door.
She had changed out of her uniform from earlier, into black tights and a long, pale green sweater. One leg of the tights was rolled up above the level of her walking brace. Her hair was still up in its no-nonsense pins, although a few more strands had come free and now curled around her face. She stood at the view-wall, a glass of wine in one hand. Beyond the glass, a few ships came and went from the docking rings, but most lay quiet, settled for the artificially-induced night of the station.
“I want to know what you really think of our plan,” she said, motioning me to sit on the sofa. She sat across from me, not beside me, and raised her glass in a mute question, but I shook my head. The wine I’d had with dinner was enough for the evening.
“I think it’s as good as we can do,” I said. “There’s too much we still don’t know. We need the input from the Corvids. And the Relidae. We need whatever Luta’s bringing. Where was she, anyway?”
Regina shook her head. “I don’t know—nowhere I sent her.”
“I think we’ll have to send someone through the Split,” I said. “Off the side. You can’t put it off forever.”
She nodded wearily. “I know. But I need more before I can do that. I’m not sending anyone to their possible deaths on a guess.”
“You might not have that luxury.”
“Oh, Lanar.” She smiled at me. “Always ready to make me face the hard truths I’m trying desperately to avoid.”
“That wasn’t my intention,” I said, but she put a hand up to stop me.
“I know, and I needed to hear it. But I’m also facing up to another hard truth, too, which is why I asked you to come over.”
I felt a pang of fear. Was she sick? Something beyond her injuries from the Chron attack? I’d never seriously contemplated something happening to Regina until the station had been targeted, and now the spectre of it loomed everywhere I looked.
“Don’t look so stricken,” she said with a smile. “I’m not dying or anything.”
“Well, that’s good to know. Not that I was worried,” I said lightly. “You’re too stubborn to do that anyway.”
“Charmer.”
“I try.”
Regina sighed. “That’s the problem. You are charming. And the other night was . . . lovely.” She swirled the wine in her glass and took a sip.
“It was.”
She stood and moved toward me, bending to put a hand on my cheek. “Yes. And I may have read more into it than you meant, but I have to say this anyway. It’s not going to happen again.”
I said nothing. She turned away and walked to the window again, setting her glass down on the counter as she passed and crossing her arms, hugging herself.
“We tried this before, Lanar, and we both know there’s no future in it. And, neither of us can afford to be distracted.”
I joined her at the window, standing close but not touching her. “You were never just a distraction. But it does seem like bad timing again,” I said. “We never seem to get it right.”
She rested her head lightly on my shoulder. “I don’t think we ever really had a chance at that, Lanar. Time—and timing—were against us from the beginning.”
Beyond the glass wall, ships glided against the dark velvet background pricked by beckoning stars. Looking across it, it was almost possible to believe that time could stretch forever, that you could set sail across its ocean and never reach the end. But we both knew that ocean was finite, and that its shorelines differed for everyone.
“Time doesn’t care one way or the other,” I told her. “We made our choices.”
“We made some. Others were out of our hands,” she said.
It was true. I’d had no say about my nanobioscavengers, and there were times I’d wished Mother had left well enough alone.
Chapter 18 – Luta
Enemies and Alliances
“WE JUST DON’T have the luxury of waiting around on this,” Lanar said. I rubbed a hand over my eyes. I think it was the third time I’d heard my brother say the same thing, and every time the discussion just went around and around and didn’t end up at any clear plan of action.
We were closeted in a boardroom in the Protectorate’s administrative space on FarView Station. The Protectorate contingent consisted of Fleet Commander Regina Holles, Lanar, his friend Harle Southwind, a Vilisian Vice-Admiral I’d never met before named Mare Ker, and Yuskeya’s friend Jolah Didkovsky. He looked none the worse for his encounter with the Chron—they’d been the peaceful ones everyone now called Relidae. Hirin and I and Viss and Yuskeya were there from my ship, and I’d been happily surprised to find Mother waiting on FarView, too. Alin Sedmamin was in attendance to explain the files we had obtained from PrimeCorp Main. Jahelia was there with Pita, to explain the information she’d decrypted in those files that pertained to the Split.
It had been a long day of explaining.
There’d been a couple of bright spots—seeing Mother was one, and she hugged me tightly for a long moment. The other, strangely, had been introducing Lanar and Jahelia Sord.
She’d looked him over from head to toe, and I’d been surprised to see my brother discomfited by the inspection. “Even without the uniform, I’d have guessed Protectorate,” she said. “Must be the famous brother, even though I don’t see the family resemblance too strongly.” She looked at each of us in turn with a calculated impertinence.
“Admiral Lanar Mahane, meet Jahelia Sord.”
Lanar recovered his composure; he grinned and stuck out a hand. “The equally famous rogue element,” he said, and left his hand there long enough that she eventually reached out and shook it.
In a more serious tone, he added, “I’m honestly glad to meet you. I understand you were instrumental in saving my sister’s life a few weeks ago.”
Lanar slid his arm around my shoulders in a half-hug. “I like her,” he said. “She puts up with me and hardly ever complains.”
“Not to your face,” I said dryly. “Okej, okej. You two have met, and we’ve all formed a mutual appreciation society. Maybe we could just send the two of you off to make friends with the Chron.”
It was a weak joke, and not very funny, but I felt a bit flustered. Something strange hung in the air between Lanar and Jahelia, and I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.
But I soon forgot about it as the council of war started. And went on for a long time.
It wasn’t that we’d made no progress; we’d pooled our knowledge about the Split, the Chron, Sedmamin’s files, and PrimeCorp. Alin Sedmamin had been closely questioned by Fleet Commander Holles and Admiral Southwind. Holles hadn’t spared him anything. She might be grateful that he’d turned over important information, but she couldn’t forget that he and PrimeCorp had been a thorn in her side for a long time. Although he’d made a couple of blustery attempts to characterize this questioning as illegal, Holles had shut him down pretty quickly. In times of potential war, protocol goes out the airlock. And I think Sedmamin himself knew that whatever his treatment at the hands of the Protectorate, he could expect worse from PrimeCorp.
It was my first time learning about PrimeCorp’s plans to clandestinely move executives into other corporations, with a view to controlling both the Nearspace Worlds Council and the resources needed to manufacture and control the nanobioscavengers. I sat somewhat stunned, trying to get my head around all the ramifications, while Holles and Southwind put their suspicions to Sedmamin. He initially hedged, and then confirmed that it was all true. Not an idea that had originated with him, he hastened to assure us, but one that he had known about and yes, tacitly approved. I didn’t think anyone believed his protestations, but there was little point in arguing about that now. The pressing concern was what to do next.
Fleet Commander Holles advised that she had already sent a message to the Corvid system, with an urgent request for someone with wormhole expertise to examine the Split and advise how we might stop the Chron using it as a conduit into Nearspace. We knew destroying it was useless, but maybe there would be another way. She’d also set up a cordon around both terminal points of the Split, both here in Delta Pavonis and in GI182. “It might force them to come through in Tau Ceti,” she said, “but we’re waiting for them there, too. We’ll wait and see what happens.”
Lanar had said, “If we look at what happened to Mauronet’s ship—it didn’t come out the other end of the Split, so it went somewhere else—and the information in the PrimeCorp files about a base outside Nearspace, I think it’s clear we need to consider sending someone through the Split to investigate further. We don’t have the luxury of time on this.”
That was the first time he’d said it. Now he’d repeated it for the third time and I was about to stand up and volunteer to take the Tane Ikai through.
It wasn’t as crazy as it sounds. It was logical to assume that Lanar was right, and the Dorland had followed the Chron ship back to wherever it had come from. How they’d done it remained to be discovered, but we weren’t going to figure that out sitting here. Holles also made it clear that the Protectorate was stretched to the limits of its capability with two new cordons and increased demands for protection from many planets in Nearspace. And we’d run the Split not long ago. We weren’t going to be freaked out by its inherent weirdness and make a mistake.
But before I could do that, Regina Holles fixed Sedmamin with an icy glare. He’d been sitting quietly since his initial questioning, staying out of the ongoing conversation unless asked a direct question.
“And what has PrimeCorp been doing in this mysterious system?” she asked him. “From what Admiral Mahane and his sister have observed independently, it seems you’ve developed quite a cozy relationship with the Chron.”
Sedmamin paled but shook his head. “As I’ve already stated,” he said in an aggrieved voice, “I knew nothing about that side of operations. I’ve never had direct contact with any Chron myself, nor ordered any.”
That was his story and he appeared to be sticking to it, but Holles didn’t ease off. “Please, Mr. Sedmamin, I’m not a fool. You may not have been directly involved, but you must have some educated guesses, now that you do know.”
Sedmamin licked his lips. A muscle twitched erratically on his jawline. He did know something, I thought. And he was weighing whether or not he should mention it.
“Spill it, Chairman,” I advised. “I could always call Taso.”
He shot me an evil glare. “I’m really not sure. I’m guessing.”
“Guess away,” invited Regina Holles. “I won’t hold it against you if you turn out to be wrong.”
He swallowed, still trying to decide. Finally, he said, “I did always wonder where some of the breakthrough technologies came from.” He picked up a mug of caff that must have gone cold long ago and sipped from it. “There were times—I wouldn’t be aware that we were even working on something, and then there’d be a major development. Over time I realized that these developments always came from a particular department. They were supposedly just a think-tank—Innovation and Advancement. You have to understand that I was much more occupied with overall strategy for the corporation, not individual departments or projects.”
Lanar nodded. “But now you think these might have had something to do with the Chron connection?”
Sedmamin shrugged. “Perhaps. It was only six, seven times in all my years at PrimeCorp. But the department predated my tenure. Now, yes, I wonder.”
“So, this Innovation and Advancement group might have been responsible for trade with the Chron,” Harle Southwind mused. “Whenever the corporation needed a boost, they’d get something from the Chron that they could pass off as PrimeCorp’s own work or invention.”
“And in return, the Chron would get what?” Regina Holles asked. “Historically, they haven’t been notable for being easy to get along with.”
“I can’t guess,” Sedmamin reiterated. “I don’t even know what they’d want. You have to understand, PrimeCorp is huge. There are hundreds—literally hundreds of ways that money, goods, information could have been funneled to the Chron.”
“The Corvids said they stopped the Chron attacks during the war,” Hirin said. He tapped his fingers slowly on the table, thinking. “Sometime after that, PrimeCorp made contact with them again, and this time on a friendlier footing. They must have had something that the Chron wanted badly. Something they’d be willing to trade for.”
I looked at him. “You don’t think—even then?”
He shrugged and turned to Mother. “When you left the nanobioscavenger project at PrimeCorp—when you essentially shut it down—were you at a point where the technology could be adapted for other races?”
Mother nodded. “I just said that yesterday. We were looking at Vilisians first, but Lobors would have been next. From there it could have probably been adapted for anyone.”
Hirin spread his hands. “So that could have been it. The promise of immortality. And all the Chron had to do was keep providing PrimeCorp with the means to stay at the top of their game until they tracked you down or got what they wanted from Luta.”
“Which is why PrimeCorp could never give up trying to regain the data, either,” Lanar said. “The promise of it could hold the Chron at bay—but only if they were seen to be actively working at it.”
Jahelia had been mostly quiet since she’d explained Pita’s part in obtaining the PrimeCorp files. She sat at the far end of the table, and had leaned her chair back far enough to put her feet up. Surprisingly, Regina Holles had merely looked at her for a long moment, then ignored it. Now Jahelia spoke. “So once the Chron have enough
information to make their own nanobioscavengers,” she said, “what’s to stop them from picking up where they left off a century ago?”
All eyes turned to her. “You think they’d still want to destroy Nearspace?” Holles asked.
Jahelia shrugged. “Why not? I’m sure they don’t like us any better now than they did then. They’ve also decided to hate half their own people. They’ve figured out—maybe with PrimeCorp’s help and certainly with their blessing—how to infiltrate Nearspace. They seem to have lots of information about inhabited planets and stations, and they’re currently testing our defensive capabilities. Why wouldn’t they launch a full-scale invasion as soon as they have what they want? Or simply to get it?”
“But doesn’t Admiral Southwind think the attacks are just a distraction—to keep people from noticing PrimeCorp’s real endgame? Why would PrimeCorp get in bed with the Chron if the Chron were just going to turn around and attack us?” I was afraid I knew the answer, but I wanted Jahelia to keep going.
“PrimeCorp doesn’t know they’re about to be double-crossed.” It was Lanar, not Jahelia, who spoke. “Den-Aldar warned me that the Chron wouldn’t hesitate to break their deal with PrimeCorp if they had reason. And there’s one thing about getting to be as big as PrimeCorp has. You think you’re too big to fail. You don’t expect to fail. Eventually, you don’t even think you can. And you think you’re always the one in control.”
“So you open up the doors and let the tiger into your living room, thinking it’ll be fine, because you have it on a leash,” Mother said.
Jahelia nodded. “But you forget that the tiger doesn’t give a damn about a leash.” She lifted her boots from the table and let them drop to the floor, leaning forward to put her palms on the table. “Because it’s about to bite your hand off anyway.”
NO-ONE SAID anything for a long moment. I think we were all a little bit in shock at how vulnerable Nearspace had become—through complacency and the machinations of a corporation so proud, and so greedy, that they’d put all of the intelligent species of Nearspace at risk.
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