Nearspace Trilogy Read online

We rode the rest of the way in silence. Our stop was in a much quieter part of the city, away from the main routes. The streets here seemed a little darker, more shadowy, although the sky was still clear above.

  The buildings were dingier and not as well marked here, the streets narrow and crooked. We walked slowly, peering through dust-coated windows and trying to decipher signs in Vilisian and Lobor as well as Esper. There were almost no other pedestrians, but I didn't turn to look when I heard footsteps behind us. I was studying the datapad, trying to locate the store, when a black-clad pair of arms went around me roughly from behind. I jerked in surprise, dropped the datapad, and heard Maja scream.

  Reflexively I kicked out backwards, but missed my attacker's legs and stumbled forward. He was ready, however, and didn't loosen his grip. I tried the opposite end, throwing my head back in an attempt to smash it into his face, but he ducked that, too. I heard a nasty chuckle.

  I twisted my head to try to see Maja. She was in the same state I was, held tight in the grip of a man in a dark biosuit. I caught a glimpse of his face but I didn't recognize him. A bruise was darkening beneath his left eye, so Maja must have had better luck than I'd had in landing a blow. I felt a flash of surprise at that, but I didn't have time to think about it then. I had a brief impression of two or three other dark-suited figures. Something small and cold pressed against the back of my neck, I heard the snick of a pulse injector, and my vision dimmed. A wave of nausea rolled over me.

  I heard Maja gasp, “What are you doing? Not now!” just before I lost consciousness, and wondered foggily what she meant.

  Chapter Ten

  Various Items Stolen and Recovered

  Whatever they'd injected fortunately wasn't meant to kill me or incapacitate me for very long—or perhaps my mysterious internal defence systems had come to the fore again. I fought back to consciousness with the realization that I was being trundled along on a cargo sled, arms bound in front of me. For a wild moment I thought the cargo sled meant we were back at the spacedock, but I didn't recognize the rhythmic thumping noise that echoed around us, and when I gingerly opened one eye a crack I saw what looked like the inside of a warehouse or factory. The air was thick with an oily smell I couldn't place.

  I didn't want to move around enough to attract attention, but I could hear the treads of another sled behind us, presumably carrying Maja. The footfalls of our captors were soft, and they didn't speak. It sounded like all five or six of them must still be with us.

  At last we stopped and someone punched a code into a keypad on the wall. The cargo sled moved through a doorway into a darkened room. The second sled nudged up beside mine, and something hit the floor nearby with a clunk. I caught the glint of Maja's fair hair before they shut the door, closing us into the dark. The oily smell was less noticeable in here, and the thumping quieter.

  I tried to sit up and realized that something bound my ankles as well. A wave of dizziness swept over me when I raised my head and I almost fell sideways again, but I bowed my head and fought it off. The only other sound in the room was Maja's even breathing. She didn't seem to have moved yet.

  I felt around my ankles for what held them, and was disappointed to feel the smooth, hard lines of ultraplas cuffs, not good old-fashioned ropes and a knot. My wrists were doubtless held by the same kind of cuffs, since there was no give to the binding at all. I took a deep breath and slid off the edge of the cargo sled to stand, swaying a little until I gained my balance. It felt good to have accomplished even that much.

  Shuffling as quietly as I could over to the other cargo sled, I leaned down close to Maja and whispered her name. She didn't stir. She lay on her side, facing away from me, curled up almost into a fetal ball. Blindly, I ran my hands over her wrists and ankles—they were bound just as mine were. I shook her, gently at first, then more urgently, but she still didn't show any sign of returning to consciousness. Panic threatened to overtake me, but I told myself that she was okay; her breathing sounded steady and strong. They must have injected her after they put me out, or given her a stronger dose. Or my “entity” had allowed me to wake early.

  Belatedly I thought of the beacon implant in my ID biochip—if I could activate it, the Tane Ikai would know that I was in trouble, and the crew could follow the signal to me. I hadn't even thought about the implant until the day Baden had asked me about it, but it was worth a try. If it still worked—he hadn't been kidding when he'd said it was outdated. And if the factory we were in wasn't wire-blocked. And if anyone back on the ship was on the bridge and listening.

  With the ultraplas cuffs firmly locking my wrists together, though, I couldn't reach my forearm to activate it. One good press was all it took, but it was impossible with the cuffs on. I swore under my breath. I looked around for something to extend my reach, realized it was too dark to see anything, and knew that I had to get Maja awake to help me.

  Hard as I shook her, though, she didn't wake. I whispered into her ear as loudly as I dared, but with no response. Finally I shuffled around to the other side of the cargo sled and leaned over her, trying to maneuver one of her limp fingers into position on my implant. If I pressed against her finger hard enough, I thought, it might activate the beacon. I was just thinking that I might have done it when the door to the room opened, spilling blue-tinged light around us. It was too late to feign being still unconscious, so I stood up as if I had merely been trying to rouse Maja and faced my captors with more confidence than I felt.

  “Kidnapping is a Primary Statute crime, you know,” I said conversationally to the figure outlined against the light in the doorway.

  The figure said nothing, just reached toward the wall. Overhead lights sprang to life and I blinked in the sudden glare. When my eyes had adjusted, I saw three of them in the room with us. All were dressed in black biosuits, two men and a woman. I didn't recognize any of them. One of them shut the door.

  The shortest of the three, a blocky man with thin grey hair sparsely peppered across the top of his head and a jagged white scar across his upper lip, pulled a chair out from a computer console and pushed it in my direction. “Have a seat, Captain Paixon,” he said. “You and your daughter can be on your way in a few minutes.”

  Like I believed that. I hesitated, hating to give in to his orders, but there wasn't much I could do to resist. With my hands and feet bound by the ultraplas cuffs, any one of them could have me on the floor in a second without breaking a sweat.

  “Why hasn't my daughter woken up yet?” I asked as I sat.

  “She hasn't been out as long,” the same man said, unclipping a techrig from his belt. It looked familiar to me, but at first I didn't realize why. “She should be coming around any time now.” As if she had heard him, Maja twitched her head and groaned.

  “Do I get to know what this is all about?” I asked, to hide my relief.

  “Come on, Captain, I think you already know.” He was busy with the touchpad on his techrig, and I glanced over at the other two. They stood just inside the door, their faces impassive. One was the man with the blossoming bruise under his eye, the skin around it taut and swollen now. Maja must have landed a hard one on him. The short man looked up from his screen at me and grinned, not a friendly grin. “And if you don't, your daughter can explain it all to you when she wakes up.”

  He nodded to one of the guards and she moved behind me, clamping her hands on my shoulders. The short man pressed the end of the techrig to my upper arm, and when I glanced down at it, I realized where I'd seen one before. The intruder on the Tane Ikai had carried the same kind of modified datapad. I'd only had a glimpse of it before Viss tucked it away for further study, but I was sure this one was the same. The prick of a needle stung suddenly where the techrig pressed against my arm. I twitched away, but the woman's hands held me like a vise and the needle didn't dislodge.

  “Almost done,” the man said, and pulled the techrig away from my arm. He moved it over my ID implant, about to link into it. I remembered Baden's datapad beeping whe
n it recognized the beacon implant. If he linked to me, he'd know I'd set the beacon. I had to try and delay that, to give someone on the ship more time to get to us.

  The guard behind me had relaxed when the other man had taken the techrig away, and I twisted to the side, swinging my wrists in the ultraplas cuffs up toward the techrig. They connected with a solid thunk and the rig flew out of his hands and skittered across the floor, into the alcove where he'd gotten my chair. Unfortunately, it didn't smash.

  He cuffed me across the face, hard enough to bring tears to my eyes, and I heard Maja gasp.

  “Mother!” she said, struggling to sit up. “Just—just let them do this. Then they'll let us go.”

  I turned to look at her. Her face was set, but her eyes were frightened. Your daughter can explain it all to you when she wakes up, the short man had said.

  “How would you know that?” I asked her.

  The short man had retrieved his techrig and was fussing over it, while the woman's hands gripped my shoulders again, even harder this time. Maja pressed her lips together, then said in a rush, “They only want the samples, and then you can go. I—it wasn't supposed to be this way.” She glared at the short man, who was paying no attention to her. “They were supposed to wait . . .”

  “Wait for what?” I was amazed at how calm my voice sounded. She had managed to wind up sedated and bound herself, but Maja had obviously known something about this in advance. My mind was having trouble processing that information.

  I was going to have to wait for an explanation, though. The short man was advancing toward me, techrig in hand, his face hard. The woman clutched my shoulders in a death-grip. I wouldn't be able to take them by surprise again.

  In the next breath the room went dark. The short man swore. “See what's going on!” he barked at the man still standing guard. I heard the click of the latch, but no light spilled in when he opened the door. The muffled thumping noise had also stopped, I realized, and the entire building was eerily silent.

  I wished it meant that someone had come to rescue us, but there was no way the crew could have gotten to us that fast, even if I had managed to trigger the beacon. I realized I was holding my breath, and let it out in a long, silent sigh.

  “Get out there and tell me what's happening,” the short man hissed, and as my eyes adjusted to the feeble amount of light coming from the huge room outside, I saw the guard move out.

  I barely heard a soft thud outside the door, and then two beams of blinding light pierced the room, playing around quickly and coming to rest on our two remaining captors.

  Baden's voice said casually, “Now, these lights are the targeting beams on a couple of pin-beam plasma rifles. Let the ladies go and you won't have to find out just how painful a pin-beam plasma burn can actually be.”

  I couldn't understand how it was possible, but my body went limp with relief.

  The man and woman were obviously not as willing to die for their cause as the intruder aboard the Tane Ikai had been. They didn't move from where they stood, although the woman released my shoulders.

  Someone else slipped into the room, careful to avoid walking through the targeting beams, and I felt Yuskeya's hand on my arm a second later. She touched the cuffs and said, “Viss, maybe we could have the lights back in this room. I'll need to see to key in the disengage code that one of our friends here is going to provide.”

  “Sure thing,” Viss said, and the lights came on overhead. The targeting beams dimmed under the overheads, but were still visible, playing with ominous brightness on the chests of our captors. I noticed that Viss held a techrig very like the one the short man had used on me—it had to be the one he'd taken from the intruder's dead body. I grinned in spite of myself. He'd said it might be useful sometime, and he'd been right, as usual.

  Yuskeya looked pointedly at the short man and he snarled the code to disengage the cuffs. “You all right, Captain?” she asked as I rubbed my wrists where the hard ultraplas had bound them.

  “We're not hurt.” I glanced over at Maja as Yuskeya used the code on her cuffs as well. She wouldn't meet my eyes. I was far from all right, knowing my daughter was involved in this somehow, but I was willing to let it wait until we were alone.

  I stood and took the techrig from the short man's unresisting hand.

  “What shall we do with them?” Baden asked me.

  “Well, it seems a shame to let these perfectly good cuffs go to waste.” I passed them to Yuskeya. “And at least one of them has a pulse injector that might have a few doses left in it. There were more than just these three, though.”

  Viss nodded. “Already taken care of, Captain.”

  “Do you think that fancy techrig could extract names and personal data from their biochips, Viss?” I asked.

  He grinned. “I'm pretty certain it could, Captain.”

  While Yuskeya trussed them up, and Viss got their data. “Sylvana Kirsch, Ben D'Epiro, and Anshum Chieng, Captain,” he said when he'd finished.

  None of the names were familiar to me. I found the bag that they'd tossed into the room with us. My datapad was inside, as well as the things we'd bought from Dr. Ndasa's list. I tossed the second techrig inside and crossed to the short man, now sitting in the chair I'd occupied only a few moments before. Yuskeya had cuffed his hands and feet and held the pulse injector close to his neck.

  “One second,” I told her. I stuck my face close to his. “Tell your bosses at PrimeCorp that next time, we won't be leaving live bodies for them to find. You just got lucky today, Mr. D'Epiro. Stay away from me and my family.”

  He didn't say anything, and I nodded to Yuskeya and left the room. My stomach churned with an anger so intense I could almost taste bile in my throat. The rest of the factory lay in darkness, but when the others followed me a moment later Viss used the techrig to pull the lights back up. Nobody said anything else until we were outside again, and Viss and Baden quickly loaded their weapons into a flitter that waited near the door with an anxious-looking Rei in the pilot's seat.

  I climbed inside. “I don't understand how you found us so fast. I wasn't even sure I'd activated the beacon, and you were there only a couple of minutes later.”

  Baden turned from the front seat and grinned at me, a little sheepishly. “Remember when I updated your virus protocols, after PrimeCorp sent you that bug?”

  I nodded. Rei started the flitter and we rose above the street level and up past the elevated slideways.

  “Well, I thought if PrimeCorp was ready to start playing dirty, it might be a good idea to update that beacon implant, too, and I keyed the signal into all the crew datapads. We got a signal from it as soon as you went unconscious. By the time you tried to activate it, we were probably almost there.”

  I took a deep breath. I wanted to hug him, but I had to be the Captain first. “But you didn't see any need to let me know about those little modifications?”

  “You would have told me not to bother,” he said with a shrug.

  I smiled. I was a long way from laughing just yet. “Your’re probably right. Well, thank you, Baden. It's nice to know that you've all got my back.” Maja was sitting beside me, but I still hadn't looked at her. There was one person in the flitter who most definitely hadn't had my back, and once we got back to the Tane Ikai I was going to find out why.

  I had to let Yuskeya and Dr. Ndasa fuss over us for a few minutes, and I gave the doctor what we'd been able to find from his list.

  “I'll come and check on Hirin in a little while,” I told him, “but I have a few things to take care of first.”

  He nodded, and his eyefolds were puckered with what I had come to recognize as Vilisian worry. The coppery scent of his emotion suffused the First Aid station. “You should have a rest, Captain. You've had a traumatic experience today.”

  I patted his arm. “I know, and I will. I'm going to talk to Maja now and see how she's doing.” He made as if to protest, and I added, “And then I'll have a lie down, okej?”

  Ma
ja had managed to slip away to her cabin, but she wasn't getting out of this that easily. I had to know what part she'd played in the day's events. I was confused, because although she'd obviously known something about what was happening, they had knocked her out and cuffed her, too. I stopped in the galley on the way through to her cabin and pulled myself a triple caff. As I held the steaming mug I realized that my hands were ice-cold and not as steady as usual. I pressed them tightly around the mug to keep them still.

  She didn't answer when I buzzed her door, but when I reached out to press the button again it slid open. She sat on the side of the bed with her head in her hands, and she didn't look up. I crossed the room and sat down in the desk chair, setting the caff down on the desk beside me.

  “I'm sorry,” she said in a muffled voice after a minute. “I am so, so sorry.”

  I was still angry, and though I kept my voice calm, it sounded hard and cold even to my ears. “That's wonderful and I'm glad to hear it, Maja, but I'm still not exactly sure what it is you're sorry for. How were you involved in what happened today?”

  She sat up and swallowed hard. Her eyes were puffy and rimmed with red. “I wasn't. Not involved. But I knew right away what it must be about, although that wasn't how it was supposed to go.”

  She stopped and took a deep breath.

  “I'm listening.”

  She didn't look at me. “A woman named Dores Amadoro contacted me after you left Earth,” she said. “She works for PrimeCorp, for Alin Sedmamin.”

  “I'm familiar with her,” I said dryly.

  “She told me that you were still refusing to cooperate with PrimeCorp even though they had a legal right to ask you for what they wanted—samples for their research.”

  “And you believed her, of course.”

  “Yes, I did. I . . . thought it sounded like something you would do.” She looked up at me defiantly. “You've always hated PrimeCorp, irrationally, I thought. And you don't always play by the rules, Mother. Even Dad admits that.”