Nearspace Trilogy

by Sherry D. Ramsey

  They both responded in the affirmative, and the tenor of the ship’s hum changed as the skip drive kicked in. After a moment, the change in the wormhole was visible as the drive acted on it. The dark mouth of the wormhole changed and widened, beckoning us in. Runnels of plasma tendrils streamed along the edges, hot and wicked-looking.

  “Engaging,” Rei said, and the Tane Ikai moved slowly toward the mouth of the wormhole.

  I felt a thrill of excitement that I hadn’t felt in a long time. I’d explored nearly every corner of Nearspace with the Protectorate, but like the vast majority of Nearspace inhabitants, I’d never traversed the Split.

  Naturally, I’d read all the data about it, and even had Luta describe it to me. Despite not being an engineer, I know how wormhole travel works; skip drives generate a thin layer of Krasnikov matter, which keeps the wormhole from destabilizing while a ship is inside it. Alternating positive and negative energy pulses allow the ship to skip through the tunnel-like wormhole, protected by a Ford-Roman field. The field repels from one side of the hole, and the ship slides around to bounce the next time off the other side, creating a water-going-down-the-drain effect. That’s the experience.

  But the Split is essentially only half a wormhole. Once inside, the usual tube-like passage is more like the half-pipe used in extreme gravity sports. One half of the tube reflects the wild swirl of colour found in any wormhole. The other half of the tube, however, is simply a plain grey haze. A ship spinning over to that side would simply punch through and careen off into—no-one knew where. Wormhole spelunkers—a few—had attempted it and never returned. Nor had any probe. No sensors have picked up useful readings for what’s beyond it. So, the pilot must manage to keep movement caused by the Ford-Roman repulsions constrained to a much narrower area. I’d never seen it done.

  Now we had to consider that maybe something survivable lay beyond that hazy curtain.

  But we were not here to find that out. We were here to run a normal skip—or what passed for normal in the Split—and take readings. That was it.

  My heart beat abnormally fast as my mind raced. I turned my focus to Luta, facing the wormhole with aplomb, and felt better. I realized suddenly that I’d been taking cues from her for as long as I could remember.

  Despite Luta’s calm confidence, the mood on the bridge was tense. I sensed it in the clipped, intense way the crew spoke to each other, running checks. It thrummed in the air, a sense of heightened alertness. It made me wish I had something productive to do, but all I could do was sit and watch as the wormhole terminal opened and we slid inside.

  The colours of the safe side of the Split blossomed before us, the cloudy side looming opposite like a crouching animal. Rei swung the ship along the safe side, coming heart-stoppingly close to the demarcation between the two sides, and then slid us back in the other direction. The ship careened side to side like a pendulum as the swirling plasma slid beneath us.

  “Scans are running, Captain,” Yuskeya said. She watched the wormhole unfold through the viewscreen, glancing down at the readouts on her screen occasionally. “Huh,” she said suddenly.

  “What?”

  She turned slightly to face Luta. “Remember those grey striation lines we noticed in that first wormhole from Delta Pavonis into the system with the operant moon? They’re here, too.”

  “Is that new? Or did we not notice them before?”

  Yuskeya frowned. “Hard to say. We could easily have missed them before. It’s a distracting place.”

  “But they mean that at some point, this wormhole has been ghosted,” Luta said. “Affected by an operant device.”

  “Which could account for the malformed side,” Hirin added. “Fha told us that ghosted wormholes sometimes suffer anomalies or damage, right?”

  “And it could mean that the Chron—the Pitromae—are ghosting it now, to get into Nearspace,” Luta said. “All right, that’s a helpful observation, Yuskeya. Rei, anything out of the ordinary?”

  “Struggling to hold us to one side,” Rei said in a strained voice. “So, absolutely normal for the Split.”

  Moments later we emerged from the other end of the wormhole, into the quiet emptiness of GI182. I felt an odd mix of elation and disappointment. I’d been through the Split, had finally experienced the odd and dangerous wormhole first hand. But we didn’t seem to have discovered anything striking that would help with the current problems.

  Luta responded to the Protectorate vessel that hailed her to check on our status, then turned to Rei. “We’ll go back through once Viss has a chance to re-check the drives, all right? Are you up to it?”

  Rei nodded as she massaged her hands. “That’ll take him an hour, if I know Viss. By then I’ll be good to go. Hands need a little break, that’s all.”

  I stood and crossed to Luta’s chair. “You think there’s still more to find?”

  She half-shrugged. “Quite possibly. And it’s still the fastest route back to FarView, right?”

  Jahelia Sord stood from the secondary engineering console. “I’ll go down to engineering and offer to give Viss a hand, Captain.”

  Luta nodded. “Come back up when we’re ready to go.”

  After the first few exciting minutes of talk about running the Split itself, since I was the only person on the bridge for whom it was a new experience, the next hour passed as slowly as if we were stranded on the event horizon of a black hole. The only break in the monotony came when Sedmamin appeared on the bridge, asked where we were, and returned to his quarters with a sniff. Yuskeya and Rei huddled over a screen, running through the data we’d collected, and the rest of us made stilted attempts at desultory conversation. It was a huge relief when Jahelia returned and Viss assured Luta over the comm that everything was in order and the ship was ready to make the skip back to Delta Pavonis.

  Luta apprised the Protectorate ships that we were ready to go, and with little fanfare, we approached the terminal point. The dark mouth of the wormhole, once again painted with streams of colourful plasma, swallowed us up.

  This time I saw the grey lines Yuskeya had mentioned. I’d never observed them in a wormhole before, which apparently meant I’d never been through a wormhole that had been ghosted. This was good; it meant that few of the Nearspace wormholes had been affected by the ghosting technology.

  No-one commented on anything else unusual as the Tane Ikai swung pendulum-like across the safe side of the wormhole.

  “Rei, you all right?”

  “Fine,” was Rei’s clipped reply. I wondered if we should have given her a longer break between forays into the Split.

  “You’re doing great,” Luta reassured her. “The ship feels rock solid. Viss, everything okay on your end?”

  Whatever Viss’s answer would have been, we never got to find out.

  WE’D SWUNG FROM side to side five times, which, judging by the previous skip, meant we were about halfway. I didn’t expect anything untoward to happen, despite all of Regina’s admonitions about what Luta should do if it did. With one uneventful skip just behind us, I’d relaxed.

  I was completely unprepared for a gaping hole to open in the gauzy grey half of the Split just ahead of us, and a Chron ship to come screaming through.

  We’d swung almost to the limit of a left-hand arc, so we weren’t directly in its path. The offset wasn’t much, but it probably saved our lives.

  Rei gasped. Luta jumped up from her chair. Jahelia Sord swore. “Merde!”

  The Chron pilot slid to our right as far as possible, but the wormhole was only large enough for one ship at a time. This was why Nearspace had strict protocols regulating the use of tracer pings to ensure that a wormhole was empty of other traffic before any ship entered. If Mauronet had destroyed the ship he’d followed—or if they’d met with misfortune—the Chron likely remained confident they had the Split to themselves. They didn’t expect company.

  But there we were. We clung to the side, the Chron ship swerved, but it wasn’t enough. The impact was a bone
-jarring shudder that resonated through the entire ship. I hadn’t stood or moved from my chair, only grasped the arms when the rift in the wormhole had appeared, so I guess I was more stable than the others. They were occupied with screens and tasks, or like Luta, had stood or half-started from their seats at the intrusion. Despite the intensity of the jolt, it seemed surreal because it wasn’t accompanied by the flare of shields that would normally happen when anything impacted or came close to impacting the ship. No shields inside a wormhole, I reminded myself. I wondered if the hull had been breached and felt a rush of relief that no siren had begun to sound. Then I realized that Luta’s ship might not even have such a thing. This wasn’t a Protectorate vessel.

  I saw Luta stumble and Rei rock sideways in her chair, one arm flying out to try and steady herself while she kept the other one on the board. It wasn’t enough. Our precarious hold on the safe side of the wormhole slipped from her grasp and the Tane Ikai’s aft end swung crazily toward the hazy unknown.

  “Rei!” Luta shouted, steadying herself with her console. She made a lunge toward the auxiliary pilot’s board, but it was too far, and too late. The ship careened past the safe zone, spun now almost a full hundred and eighty degrees. The viewscreen showed the Chron ship as it ricocheted away from us, bilious gas streaming from a truncated wing, bright fingers of plasma arcing in a web across its ebony surface as if searching for a way inside. It tumbled into the multicoloured swirl of wormhole plasma and shattered like glass. Black shards erupted from the point of impact to be swept into the maelstrom of colour.

  Viss’s voice resounded over the comm. “Captain! What’s happening?”

  But no-one answered him. We were too busy staring in horror as the Tane Ikai twisted around again, showing us the dark, gaping mouth in the gauzy arc of the wormhole as we tumbled toward it.

  “Rei, can we—” Luta gasped as she half-fell into the auxiliary pilot’s chair.

  Rei had regained her balance, and her hands flew over the control board. She was shaking her head, though. “Lost it. We’re completely out of control.”

  Alin Sedmamin’s voice came over the comm, thready with fear. “Captain! What’s wrong? Are we under attack?”

  I wasn’t sure what he expected to attack us inside a wormhole.

  “Not now, Chairman,” Luta managed. “Brace yourself and shut up.”

  A dozen commands clamoured for me to say them, but with an effort I clamped my mouth shut. This wasn’t my ship, not even a Protectorate ship, and half the things I wanted to say probably wouldn’t even make sense.

  Hirin shouted, “Viss! Switch to maneuvering drives!”

  Luta turned to look at him. “What about the skip drive? We’ll lose the Ford-Roman field. We’ll be crushed if the wormhole collapses!”

  Hirin looked at the hole in the grey side of the Split. “We’ll be inside that in seconds. Something else is holding that one open. We don’t want to interfere with it.”

  “And we might need some kind of control once we’re in,” I said, understanding what Hirin was saying. My voice sounded like a mere croak but I think Luta must have heard me.

  “Merde!” Luta swore. “Shut it down, Viss! The instant it’s safe, I’m going to raise the shields. Rei, whatever we slide into, just try to get us out. Maneuvering only.”

  “Sord, keep things running. I’m coming up there,” Viss grunted over the comm.

  “Got it,” Jahelia answered him. I looked over and saw her frown of intense concentration as she took control of the auxiliary engineering board. The hum of the skip drive died and I had just enough time to look up at the yawning hole on the viewscreen as we skidded through it and into the unknown.

  THE BLACKNESS OUTSIDE lasted the space of a few heartbeats—I know because mine was pounding as if trying to fight its way out of my chest. On the bridge, the overhead lights flickered off, leaving only the eerie glow of the active boards to illuminate the space. The ship shuddered as its momentum battled Rei’s attempts to bring it under control with the maneuvering drives, but I felt it catch the swirling plasma of the new wormhole and steady. Now we spun along the inside of the tunnel as we would a normal wormhole, and multicoloured streaks of plasma coiled along the inner walls of the wormhole like variegated lightning.

  Viss gained the bridge and crossed with purpose to where Jahelia sat, glancing up at the viewscreen as he went. He snagged an empty skimchair in passing and slid it next to Jahelia, but didn’t nudge her aside at the board. “What’s that bastardo done to my ship?” he asked no-one in particular. “And where the hell are we?”

  “Bumped us into a ghosted wormhole—or something,” Luta answered, “And I don’t know. I didn’t even know two wormholes could intersect.”

  Viss shot her a look of complete incomprehension. “That’s not possible.”

  “Tell that to the Chron.”

  “We’re in a wormhole with no Ford-Roman field?” Viss asked, incredulous. “We should be dead already.”

  “I’m sure there are answers, Viss, but I don’t have them,” Luta told him. “Stay tuned.”

  He pressed his lips together and turned his attention back to the engineering board.

  It felt like a normal wormhole skip now, even without the hum of a skip drive and the curiously dark wormhole interior. The usual visual of multiple rainbows spinning down a drain had been replaced by rivulets of colour streaming across black glass. But we corkscrewed smoothly around the inside of this new wormhole.

  “Damage?” Luta asked.

  “I’m almost sure there’s no breach,” Yuskeya said. She’d been quiet up to now, and I realized that she’d been running damage checks without waiting for Luta’s order. I almost smiled. That was Yuskeya; quietly proactive, seeing what needed to be done and doing it. “The dockside door into Cargo Pod One might have lost its seal, though. The brunt of the impact was there.”

  “No cargo in that pod that should be affected,” Maja said. My niece’s voice was thin, but steady.

  And then we flew out of the wormhole.

  “Shields up!” Luta ordered.

  “Main drive coming online,” Jahelia said. “Rei should have full power in thirty seconds.”

  “Scanning the system,” Yuskeya said. “Navigation data log initiated. I’ve designated this system OS-05 to start. I’ll add the spectral data on the stars when we have it.”

  I stared out the viewscreen at the system that opened around us. A planet hung not far away, wreathed in cloud layers that revealed browns, greens, and blues where they parted. I didn’t immediately recognize it, but that didn’t mean anything; apart from a few in Nearspace that had notable features, most habitable planets were visually similar from a distance. A star burned beyond it against the dark of space, bright white and similar to Sol as viewed from Earth; but it could have been larger and further away, or smaller and closer. After a moment, I realized that a more distant light signalled a binary star system. A largish moon, grey and pockmarked, orbited the planet, and a smaller one hung nearer the wormhole terminal point. To starwise sprawled a gas nebula, iron-red in the centre and splaying fingers of blue and green emissions into space.

  “It’s the system from the PrimeCorp files,” I said, but no-one noticed because Yuskeya spoke at the same time.

  “Two ships on long-range,” she said. “Moving, possibly toward us.”

  “Identification?” Luta asked.

  “Too far away yet.”

  “Nothing on any communications channel,” Baden reported. “No signals coming from the planet. Start a scan for habitation?”

  “Yes, and let’s move away from the wormhole,” Luta said after a moment’s hesitation. “We don’t want to be discovered here yet. Let’s try to catch our breaths. Rei, get the planet between those ships and us.”

  “The wormhole has closed,” Yuskeya added. “Reverted back to inactive.”

  “Let’s look up the records of exactly what the Corvids told us about ghosted wormholes,” Luta suggested. “Maja, would you
do that?”

  “Aye, Captain.” Maja’s fingers flew over the screen in front of her as she searched the ship’s database for the information. I tried to remember what I’d read in Luta’s report, but I thought that any poorly-recalled details I might contribute would not be useful at this point.

  Alin Sedmamin arrived on the bridge then, looking frightened and angry and cradling one arm to his chest. I couldn’t see blood, but lines of pain had etched themselves across his gaunt face. He stared up at the viewscreen. The system was obviously neither Delta Pavonis nor GI182, to anyone familiar with them. “Where are we? What happened?”

  No one answered for a moment, then Luta said, “We collided with a Chron ship inside the wormhole and were bumped into another one. We ended up here.”

  “Bumped into another what?

  “Another wormhole.”

  “How is that—” Sedmamin broke off and tried again. “But where’s here?”

  “I think it’s the system those secret PrimeCorp files mentioned,” I repeated, when no-one else answered.

  This time it got a reaction. Luta looked up sharply at the viewscreen. “Really? You think so?” After a moment, she pursed her lips and nodded. “Yes. It fits, doesn’t it? And really, where else would we expect to wind up?”

  “I thought if we found this system, it would be full of PrimeCorp ships and Chron,” Hirin said. “That it would be a hub of activity.”

  Jahelia shrugged. “Could be more of a waystation en route to somewhere else. Or maybe they’re all in Nearspace already.”

  “Don’t even say that,” Luta said sharply. “All right. Let’s start a scan of the planet. We’re here, we might as well collect as much information as we can.”

  “There’s nothing here about how long a ghosted wormhole might stay open,” Maja said, studying the screen. “But I wonder if that smaller moon is an operant device. If so, we should be able to open the wormhole again ourselves when we’re ready. We still have the activator the Corvids installed.”

  “Can someone look at my arm?” Sedmamin asked in a surprisingly subdued voice. “I fell and twisted it when—when the other ship hit us, I guess. I don’t think it’s broken, but it hurts like hell.”