Dark Beneath the Moon (32 page)

And I would have to admit to everyone why I was taking myself off the roster. That might be the hardest part of all.

I made my way slowly down the corridor to my quarters, hoping I wouldn’t run into anyone and have to answer questions. My luck held; I collapsed on my bed without seeing anyone else. For a long moment I lay on my back and stared out at the stars though the porthole above me. Usually, I left the bridge with pleasant anticipation of the moment I’d return. For the first time ever, I felt as if I didn’t belong there. And despite everything that was on my mind and should have kept me awake, I fell asleep with chilling ease.

The next thing I knew, the signal tone of the ship’s comm woke me. I pressed my implant, and Hirin’s voice came through.

“Luta, you’d better get up here. You won’t believe what we found.”

“On my way.”

The nap had worked magic. My head felt surprisingly clear, and the weakness in my limbs had fled. It was a good thing, too, because I wasn’t at all prepared for what met my eyes on the viewscreen when I entered the bridge. All sorts of possibilities had skittered through my mind as I hurried up the corridor: a Chron ship, a wormhole, another station. It was none of those.

It was PrimeCorp.

HIRIN HAD KILLED
all the drives and brought us to a stop with the thrusters by the time I reached the bridge, and the
Tane Ikai
hung silent and relatively still. The viewscreen, I could tell, was at its maximum magnification, but still the ship it had focused in on wasn’t visually clear. The data scrolling across the bottom of the screen, however, was.

Closest vessel: PrimeCorp drive signature type RT34564: Registration unconfirmed: Class unconfirmed

I stared stupidly at it, wondering if I had sunk low enough medically to be having hallucinations. For a fleeting moment I wondered if I’d been so sick thak I slept through the rest of the journey and we had actually made it to Nearspace. Hirin wouldn’t have simply called me to the bridge, though, if that were the case. And if I were hallucinating, everyone else was, too. Still. “It can’t be a PrimeCorp ship. We’re in Chron space.”

Baden said, “It
could
be some other kind of ship, with a PrimeCorp drive in it, I guess.”

“What are the chances of that?”

He shrugged. “Pretty low, I’d say. It’s too new to be something the Chron could have stolen or captured during the war.”

I narrowed my eyes. “What could they be doing here, and how did they get here? Any wormhole leading into this system would have to be in the Nearspace catalogue. If we don’t know about it, PrimeCorp shouldn’t. And the Corvids would have it blocked anyway.”

“Well, ‘shouldn’t’ is the operative word, isn’t it?” Hirin said. “PrimeCorp could be carrying out its own wormhole exploration program, and keeping the results a secret. If there was a profit to be made. Wormhole spelunking was how they got started, after all.”

“And the Protectorate knew about the other wormhole, and hadn’t released it,” Rei reminded me.

“Do you think they’ve noticed us?”

Baden shook his head. “I doubt it. They haven’t moved, and we stopped the instant we picked them up.”

“All right. What’s this?” I asked, pointing to a mass on the nav screen.

“Asteroid,” Yuskeya said. “About half our size. You’re thinking of using it as camouflage?”

“I wondered. If possible, get us close and try to match the asteroid’s path. It might keep us from getting noticed. Keep an eye on that ship. Hirin, you still have the chair. I’m going to talk to the only person on board who might know more about PrimeCorp than I do.” And I headed for the quarters where we were holding, more or less successfully, Jahelia Sord.

I shut down the enhanced plasma bar that Viss and Baden had reconfigured, and knocked on the door. No answer. I knocked again, a little more sharply. The logical part of my brain suggested that maybe she was asleep, but the cynical part had gone way past that. It was thinking that she’d done it again.

I opened the door cautiously, in case she was waiting to jump me. That seemed too unsubtle for her, but one never knew. I was beginning to think I understood her, which is a dangerous thing to think about your enemy, especially one who’s your prisoner.

The room was empty. It wasn’t one with access to the secret lockers, so there weren’t many places she could hide. Not any, in fact. I moved outside the room and stood, trying to decide what to do next. I didn’t want to initiate a full-scale search, because we were starting to look like incompetents. My crew didn’t need more frustrations.

It wasn’t a terribly big ship, but Sord could be in a number of places. Any of the other quarters, for a start, since no-one locked their doors. The galley, the head. The First Aid station, although she probably didn’t know how to get there through the storage room behind the head, so the only other way would be through the bridge. The engineering deck, although she’d have to get past Viss. The cargo pods.

I started down the hatchway leading to the cargo area. Something told me she’d be there, waiting to be found, strolling the catwalk or doing something equally relaxed. She wasn’t trying to escape; there was nowhere to go. Her chances of commandeering the ship with this crew on board were next to nil, and she had to know that. But it wasn’t in her nature to let herself be caged, and she had to let
me
know that.

I deliberately tried to sneak down the ladder past Viss, and managed it; not that difficult if you watched for your chance. I saw her as soon as I emerged into the cargo pod. She was engaged in a smooth, flowing workout I recognized, after a few moments, as the Vilisian martial art of
zelendu
. She didn’t have a staff, but had improvised one from a long broom handle. She’d rolled up her pant legs and shed her boots, reminding me of Rei when we sparred. Her grey t-shirt showed dark sweat blotches.

“Hello, Captain,” she said easily, continuing to move her arms, legs, and makeshift staff in the controlled, precise movements of the form. Her breathing came smooth and easy. “I hope you don’t mind my taking advantage of the peace and quiet down here. And the space. My room really isn’t big enough for a good workout.”

“I get the feeling,” I said, stopping a short distance from her (well out of reach of the broom handle) and crossing my arms, “that it wouldn’t matter much if I did mind.”

She laughed. “I’m not very good at taking orders from someone who isn’t paying me, I’ll admit.”

“Was that a problem at the Protectorate
akademio
?”

“Not really.” She studied me intently while her arms twisted the staff through a complicated block and stroke. “You checked up on me.”

“Does that really surprise you?”

“I suppose not. I’m almost finished, and then I’ll go back to my room like a good girl.”

“You should spar with Maja some time,” I told her. “She has a silver crest in warrior chi.”

“That would be an interesting engagement,” she said, not missing a beat. “But I think she might enjoy it too much.”

I sat on a small empty cargo crate. “How much do you know about PrimeCorp’s activities?”

“Interrogation time again, is it?”

“Just a few questions.”

She finished the form and clipped the broom handle into its holder on the bay wall. “You’re bound to be disappointed. I already told you, I’m nothing but a messenger—and a snoop, I suppose. Not in the confidences of the high and mighty.” She bent low, languidly stretching out the muscles in her legs and back. Her dark curls clung to her neck.

“Would you be surprised if I told you that PrimeCorp appears to have interests outside of Nearspace?”

She laughed and straightened. “Outside of Nearspace? What’s outside of Nearspace? All this, I suppose. Chron and crows. Not much here for PrimeCorp.”

“The Corvids have tech that I’ll bet PrimeCorp would love to get its hands on.”

“Well, sure. I’ve thought of that, myself. They’d pay well—more than well—for new tech. But the only way to get to it would be through the Protectorate, once a new wormhole opened up for trade. There’d be reams of treaty negotiations to go through before that happened.”

“Unless
someone
could smuggle it into Nearspace.”

She shrugged. “Sure. But no-one even knew where that second wormhole led before we went through it.” She started toward the hatchway ladder, but I didn’t get up yet.

“Now, how do you know that? You weren’t in the system very long before that Chron ship came through and all hell broke loose.”

She turned to face me, a smile twitching at the corners of her lips.

I shook my head. “Never mind. You probably had a data miner on the
Domtaw
before it blew up.”

Jahelia Sord laughed. “Very good, Captain. The data miner, sure, I launched that as soon as I entered the system. Protectorate wire block codes aren’t changed all that often. You might want to mention that to your dear brother when we get home.”

I got up and walked toward the ladder, watching her. “So if I were to tell you that we’re still in the first Chron system, but we’ve spotted a PrimeCorp ship, you’d be as surprised as anyone?”

She raised her eyebrows. “Surprised? It would shock the hell out of me if you found a PrimeCorp ship in this system. Is there? A PrimeCorp ship out there?”

“There is,” I said, “and if you try and contact them or signal them in any way, all they’ll find of you is a dead body shot out the jettison tube.”

“I think you mean that,” she said, staring at me with narrowed eyes.

“Oh, be sure I do.”

She gave me one more appraising survey, then said, “Captain, how are you feeling? Physically, I mean.”

It was so unexpected I don’t know how much my face gave away before I answered. “Fine. Why do you ask?”

She shrugged again. “I know you’re sick. I suspect your nanos are failing.”

For the space of a few heartbeats, I stood dumbstruck. Questions fought for precedence in my mind, a new one scrambling to the top before I could ask the one before it.
How could she know anything about that? How much
did
she know?
Finally I realized that she could have listened in on any number of conversations on the ship before I knew she had the capability. She could be fishing for information. “You didn’t get that from Alin Sedmamin.”

“No, I didn’t.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “Unfortunately, I’ve seen something like this before.”

She was bluffing—had to be. I crossed my arms. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Sord, but I wish you’d stop playing games.”

“Oh, this is no game,” she said. “If you don’t want to talk about it, fine. But tell me one thing—have the nosebleeds started yet?” She didn’t wait for my answer, but turned and started to climb the ladder to the upper decks.

A chill of fear froze me in place. I wanted to reach up and grab her, haul her down, and demand she tell me what she meant. What could she possibly know about what was happening to me?

Hirin’s voice over the ship’s comm stopped me. “Luta, where are you? Everything
okej?”

I thumbed my implant. “Coming.” I pressed my lips together, stifling what I wanted to ask Jahelia Sord. We had bigger problems than her games and my headaches and nosebleeds. Whatever I wanted to know from Jahelia Sord would have to wait.

Wordlessly I followed her up the ladder. I almost laughed aloud at the startled frown Viss gave us when we climbed past the engineering deck. For a few seconds, I felt better, but it didn’t last.

LUTA PAIXON DOES
not like being made to look a fool. But she has a certain dignity about it that I was grudgingly coming to appreciate. She saw me inside my quarters and shut the door on me, but she didn’t even bother to put the plasma bar back in place. I knew she’d send one of the crew to try and find out how I’d bypassed it, but she wouldn’t replace it herself, knowing it was useless. That had a certain class.

As soon as her footsteps faded away down the corridor, I snatched up the throat mic and earbuds. “Pita? You’ll never guess what Paixon told me!”

“That they found a PrimeCorp ship?” she said in a bored voice.

Oh, right. I’d left her monitoring the ship’s comm, so she’d heard everything from the bridge already.

“What the hell is it doing here? How did it get here?”

“Through a wormhole?”

“Ha, ha. Come on, Pita. This is big! If I could get a message to them—”

“If you try to get a message to them, you’ll be dead,” Pita told me flatly. “I heard what Paixon said, didn’t you? You think she was bluffing?”

I pursed my lips. “No, I get the impression that she doesn’t bluff.”

“Anyway, whoever’s on that ship probably doesn’t even know who you are. It’s not like you and Alin Sedmamin are best pals or anything.”