Nearspace Trilogy Read online

  I think it was about then that I heard other doors opening and the soft pounding of bare feet in the corridor. Someone was answering my summons.

  I heard a step on the ladder, no attempt to be quiet this time, just as two sets of legs flashed past me. There was a bit of yelling and thumping then, as Viss and Yuskeya attempted to catch hold of the escaping intruder and haul him back up from the ladder.

  Dr. Ndasa emerged from his cabin, inquiring sleepily about the disturbance. A faint metallic scent—confusion and apprehension—wafted from him. I was trying to mumble something reassuring when there was a yell and an ominous thud from far below.

  Viss swore under his breath, turned to me and barked, “Are you all right?”

  “He just—jumped,” Yuskeya said in a low voice. Her eyes were wide and her voice shaky. “Viss had his arm and then—idioto! Did he think he could fly?”

  Still breathless, I crawled over to the open hatchway and looked down the nine meters to the decking of the cargo level below. A dark shadow lay sprawled and still on the unforgiving metal, and I really, really didn't want to be the one to go down there.

  Viss saved me the trouble. “Yuskeya, see why the Captain has blood on her pretty sleepsuit, would you? Doctor her up if she needs it. I'm going down to see what's cluttering up our nice clean cargo pod.”

  I found my voice. “Viss, wait, don't go alone. Here's Baden, he'll go with you.” Baden came down the hall at a run then, shirtless, eyes wild.

  “What the hell—?”

  “Baden, go down to the cargo deck with Viss. There was an intruder aboard, he fell down the hatchway, and we need to know what shape he's in.”

  One thing about Baden, he never asks needless questions. He started down the ladder after Viss without another word.

  Suddenly all the lights went up, and Rei called from up the hall, “All clear, Captain?”

  “Clear, as far as I know,” I answered back, looking up the corridor. Rei emerged from the alcove that led to the head, cradling a plasma rifle and taking in the scene warily.

  It was probably nerves, but I couldn't help it. I giggled and said, “What the hell are you doing?”

  She looked momentarily hurt. “When I heard the racket I didn't think it was a good idea for all of us to run headlong into trouble. I grabbed this,” she said, hefting the rifle, “slipped out of my cabin, went up through the bridge and around through Sensors and the First Aid station. Thought I might need to catch someone by surprise.”

  “They would have been surprised, all right.” Rei doesn't sleep in the nude, but the diaphanous rose-coloured thing she was wearing came pretty darn close. Alien genetics notwithstanding, Dr. Ndasa was trying not to gape and failing miserably.

  “Wait,” I said, “you keep a plasma rifle in your quarters?”

  “It's one of my souvenirs,” she said with a wicked grin.

  “Come on, Captain,” Yuskeya said, tugging gently at my uninjured arm. Her hand was trembly. “Let's get up to First Aid so I can take a look at your arm.”

  “All right, all right.” I winced at the pain in my chest as I stood. “Dr. Ndasa, I think you can safely go back to bed now. I'm terribly sorry for the disturbance; things like this don't happen often on the Tane Ikai. When we know what it was all about I'll let you know.”

  He turned away reluctantly as another voice sounded from the corridor. “Rei dam-Rowan, you'd best cover yourself. My eyes are enjoying the view, but it's sure a strain on my old heart.”

  “You're a dirty old man, Hirin Paixon,” Rei said, and stuck out her tongue at him. She headed down the hall towards her cabin, but I knew she'd be back to find out what she'd missed.

  Hirin stood in the open doorway of his cabin as Yuskeya and I passed by on the way to First Aid. He smiled sheepishly.

  “Figured I'd better stay put,” he said. “Old men tend to get in the way without meaning to. Are you all right, Captain?” He managed to ask it very casually, although I knew how difficult it must have been for him to hang back.

  “I think so, thanks. Just a flesh wound. And some bruises, I expect. Yuskeya's a good medic—she's handled much worse than this. I'll fill you in on everything later.” I knew he'd expect me to report in before the night was over. If that was awkward for me, well, too bad. Hirin was an eminently reasonable man, but he was still a husband.

  Yuskeya pulled me along relentlessly, so I threw Hirin a helpless look in passing and he winked and nodded. Rei came back down the corridor, still toting the plasma rifle, but now covered up with a floor-length crimson kimono. The kimono was another one of what she called her “souvenirs”—things that reminded her of one adventure or another. She had quite a collection in her quarters, everything from clothing and jewelry to weapons. Most of them were from exploits I'd rather not know about, but occasionally she'd tell me a story to go with an item. She grinned at me and continued down the corridor, curious, I knew, to see what Viss and Baden had discovered.

  In the First Aid station, Yuskeya deftly checked me for broken ribs, then rolled up my sleeve and tsk-tsked. “I can't imagine that this was caused by a weapon,” she said, cleaning away the congealing blood. “It looks more like he was trying to—I don't know—give you a needle or take a sample or something, and the instrument raked along through the skin. It's not just a clean piercing.”

  “You're right.” I frowned, remembering. “He wasn't attacking me when this happened—not in the usual sense, anyway. He had some kind of techrig.”

  She smeared a clear gel on the wound—it felt very cool and soothing—and pressed a healstrip over it. “Well, it looks clean, and unless the instrument was contaminated—”

  “Or poisoned?”

  Her face froze. “I didn't think of that! Do you think it's possible?”

  I shrugged, then grimaced at the stab of pain in my chest. He'd kicked me hard, the bastardo. “I doubt it, but he wasn't here to ask me for a date.”

  “I'll run a blood scan,” she said, pulling a datamed from the shelf above where I sat. “What else is wrong? I saw you wince.”

  “Bah, he kicked me, too. It'll leave a bruise, I guess, but it's not that bad. The blood scan's probably not necessary, either.” I was sorry I'd brought it up. Chances were, even if he had been trying to poison me, it wasn't going to work. I'd withstood a lot of nasty things in the last six decades, and none of them had made a dent. I really wanted to get back and see what the others had found.

  However, Yuskeya didn't know about my seemingly limitless immunities, or that, left alone, the wound would have been gone in twenty-four hours anyway. She shook her head firmly. “It will only take a minute. I won't be able to rest until I've checked, now.” She touched the datamed to my implant for a few seconds, then to the inside of my wrist and the side of my neck. She pressed a command into the screen and watched it as the analysis ran.

  “Okej,” she said after a moment. “No toxins. I think you're clear.”

  “Sorry I mentioned it.”

  “No, you were right. I should have thought of it myself.” She scanned my chest and abdomen and narrowed her eyes at the results. “No fractures, either. Ice and painkillers for that,” she said with a smile. She put the datamed back on the shelf and cleaned up the small mess we'd made, after watching me down a couple of little tablets she produced. “What do you think he wanted, Captain?”

  “I don't know,” I said, sliding carefully off the gurney, “but I'm going to see if we can find any clues to that. Coming?”

  She hesitated, as if about to say something else, but then she nodded. “You bet,” she said, and we left the First Aid station together.

  “We're in here,” Rei called from the galley as we made our way back down the corridor.

  We entered to see a strange tableau. Hirin sat in one of the big armchairs, looking extremely pleased to be included. Viss, Baden and Rei stood around the big central table, and on it lay the dark-suited figure who had assaulted me. He wasn't moving, and the unnatural stillness of his chest t
old me that he wasn't going to.

  “Morta?” I asked.

  “As a careless wormhole explorer,” Viss answered. “He had this,” he said, passing over a shiny multipurpose techrig, “and not much else. No ID, and look at this.” He held up the man's left arm and pulled back the sleeve of his biosuit. A fresh healstrip covered the spot where an implant should have been nestled in his skin.

  “No implant? That's illegal!”

  Baden shrugged. “So's using that thing to bypass the airlock protocols and the alarm system, tamper with any internal systems it wants—”

  “Like the guidelight,” Rei said.

  “—and try to take blood and tissue samples from you without your permission,” Baden finished. “Anyone who's up for all that isn't going to balk at having his ID biochip removed for a while.”

  I shook my head. “Not having an ID biochip is serious—it's a Primary Statute crime. He was taking a big risk, and so was whoever sent him.” Planetary statutes were instituted and enforced by planetary governments, whether corporate, Protectorate, or autonomous. Primary statutes, though, were put in place by the Nearspace Worlds Administrative Council itself, and applied to every citizen in Nearspace. They were the most serious, by far, and not having an ID biochip was considered to be very serious indeed. All the governments of Nearspace depended on them for keeping track of their citizens—and their criminals. If caught, the intruder could still be identified, through the information on record in the Nearspace Inhabitant Database—retina scan, fingerprints, DNA and hologram—since everyone was sampled and entered at birth and updated at intervals. But only top-clearance government officials had access to the database.

  They'd pulled the mask from his face. I studied the features. High cheekbones, a nose that had been broken once or twice, a pale, thin scar tracing his jaw on one side. He didn't look familiar. “Well, I don't know who he is.”

  “Neither do we. But we have a guess at who sent him,” Viss said.

  “PrimeCorp?” I suggested.

  “PrimeCorp,” Rei said flatly. “They're beginning to get annoying. Baden told us about that notebug virus.”

  Well, I hadn't sworn him to secrecy. I'd only said he couldn't ask me any details about it. I sighed. Was there any sense in trying to keep secrets anymore?

  “I wonder if this has anything to do with the flitter that followed me back from Nova Scotia the day we got here?”

  Hirin frowned. “Someone followed you? You didn't mention that.”

  “I know.” I shrugged. “It didn't seem that important—they kept their distance, just followed me as far as the docking ring and then left again. It's not like we were making any secret of where we were docked.”

  “They get a look at you?” Baden asked.

  “Sure, they could have. I wasn't hiding, and I hung around the rental kiosk to get a look at them if I could. But no-one got out of the flitter, and it didn't have any markings.”

  He looked down at the dead operative thoughtfully. “So, say if someone wanted to confirm who you were, so they'd know you at a later date—”

  Goosebumps prickled my skin as I followed his glance. The cut on my arm stung again. “You think I was being pointed out to someone? Maybe this guy?”

  “It would make sense. If he was coming after you, he'd want to be able to identify you without a doubt.”

  I shuddered. “Ick.”

  “You might want to mention it the next time someone follows you,” Rei suggested with just a hint of sarcasm, and I nodded.

  “If you don't mind, Captain,” said Viss, obviously changing the subject, “I'll take that techrig back. I'd like to have a closer look at it. Might be a handy thing to have around sometime.”

  I passed it back to him, knowing he couldn't wait to strip it down and see how it worked and what it could do. “It's contraband tech, Viss. Keep it to yourself.”

  He grinned. “Captain, that hurts my feelings.”

  “Where's PrimeCorp getting something like that to outfit its ops?” Baden asked. “They're medical and research. You can't just go out and order a batch of illegal tech.”

  Each of the big corporations had its own area of specialization, and they usually stayed within their own boundaries. Stepping outside would lead to conflict with some other corp, and they'd at least learned that it was more productive for everyone if they simply stayed out of each others' way.

  “Well, technically, you could—no pun intended—if you weren't too worried about getting caught,” said Yuskeya. “But they took over GintenoTech a while back, didn't they?”

  “GT's always been non-weapons tech, though,” Baden argued. “I can't see them making something like this. It's way outside the boundaries.”

  Viss shook his head. “Who knows what direction PrimeCorp might have steered them in, if they had an agenda. And if they're sending out stripped ops now, they've crossed all kinds of lines.”

  “Captain,” Yuskeya said suddenly, and I knew she was thinking about my suggestion that the intrusion could have been an attack on my life, “is there anything else you ought to tell us?”

  I didn't answer right away, staring down at the man who'd come to steal the most personal of items from me and died rather than be caught alive. He must have known he had little chance of surviving that fall.

  “Probably,” I said finally, “but not right now.”

  They had to be content with that.

  “So what do we do with him?” asked Viss. “You going to call the police?”

  I crossed my arms over my chest and stared at the intruder unsympathetically. Yes, he was dead, but he'd broken onto my ship and attacked me, and the problems didn't end there. If I called the police, it would throw our departure schedule completely out the window—questions, statements, a full-blown investigation. I was loath to trigger that because it could cause me to miss Mother, if it really was her on Kiando. I couldn't very well tell the crew that. But there were other reasons, too.

  “If he's a PrimeCorp operative, it seems kind of pointless, doesn't it?”

  Rei chuckled humourlessly. “Gee, trying to get a police force on a PrimeCorp planet to do something PrimeCorp doesn't like? Why would that be a problem?”

  Viss nodded. “Absolutely right. If he was working for PrimeCorp, you're never going to prove that on Earth.”

  “So how about this?” I said. “We put him in the secret locker until we get a little further up the gravity well. Then we put him in a cargo crate and park him on a lonely little asteroid, where he won't be causing anyone to ask awkward questions we don't want to answer. But if we were ever in a position to need him, we'd know where to find him.”

  Every good far trader has a secret locker—because in space, you just never know—and while I'd never used one to hide a dead body before, it seemed like a handy place. I didn't really like the plan, because it did seem disrespectful—but I could live with it. No-one else had a problem with it either. Viss snapped a picture of the dead face. “Just in case,” he said. “I've got a few friends I could show this to. Someone might know who he is.” I suspected that Viss's “friends” could range from a Protectorate secret agent to an underworld crime lord, so I left that up to him. We settled the intruder in a cargo pod. The locker was on the bridge deck, so we put him in a refrigerated pod to lessen the . . . unpleasantness.

  After all that, I managed to fall asleep pretty quickly in my own bed, and as soon as the last of the cargo arrived the next morning we lifted off. The weight that lifted from my spirit when we reached the limits of the atmosphere was no less than the pull of gravity itself.

  I shouldn't have been so quick to relax.

  Chapter Six

  Brother in Arms

  When Baden contacted Mars Central Berthing a day and a half later to offload the cargo destined for the red planet, we were comm-flagged by the Mars Planetary Police and told to assume a geosynchronous orbit. It was routine, they assured us—they had the same questions for all ships that had departed Earthspa
ce around the same time we had.

  Every corporate-controlled and autonomous world has its own planetary police force, and the Protectorate polices the worlds it administers, as well as the spaceways. Mars was governed by Schulyer Corp, but most of the planets had reciprocal agreements for dealing with legal matters. I know we all had the same thought when the police message came through. But surely this couldn't have anything to do with the lonely body reposing in the locker?

  Baden acknowledged the request and Rei put us in a parking orbit and then they both looked at me.

  I shrugged. “No sense worrying until we know what they want.”

  “Of course not,” said Baden, “but I think I'll just go and check that all our cargo is secure, while we're stopped here anyway.”

  “Probably just coincidence,” Rei said. “They could be looking for data runners, smugglers, pirates . . .”

  “. . . local criminals, world-jumpers, illegal tech . . .” Yuskeya added.

  I wondered what Viss had done with the dead man's techrig. I knew we were all thinking the same thing, so I said it aloud. “Or they could be looking for missing PrimeCorp operatives. Let's just wait and see, shall we?”

  Baden came back after a few minutes and said that everything was secure, and not long after that, the MPP hailed us again.

  I told Baden to put the main screen on. “Captain Luta Paixon here. How can I help you?”

  The MPP officer on the screen was an older man, not recently shaven and with the look of someone who'd already done this too many times. He sighed and nodded once. “Flight Officer Halderan. Thank you for waiting, Captain. Would you mind sending your cargo manifest, crew and passenger lists down the datalink?”

  “Not at all.” I nodded to Baden. “I'd be sending that to Central Berthing in a moment anyway. What's the problem, Flight Officer?”

  “I'll just ask you to wait another few moments, Captain,” he said, ignoring my question and blanking the comm signal. The words “Please Wait” flashed on the screen in Esper, New Asian, Vilisian, Lobor, and a couple of other Earth languages.