One's Aspect to the Sun (29 page)

“It was before we left Earth,” I said. “Someone, I'm assuming Sedmamin, sent a stripped operative to break into the
Tane Ikai
and get a biological sample from me without my permission. He didn't get it,” I added when I saw the worried look on Maja's face.

“What happened?”

“He tried to fly from the bridge deck to the cargo deck, without stopping at Engineering in between,” Hirin said wryly. “But PrimeCorp hadn't thought to give him wings first. He left a mess on the deck, and we left what was left of him in the outer Sol system.”

“And then in the Keridre/Gerdrice system,” I added. “He slipped through a communications pinhole when we jettisoned the body in a cargo crate. We planned to tuck it away on an asteroid until we'd decided what to do.”

“Were you hurt?” Maja asked.

I shrugged. “A bit of a scratch, that was all. Yuskeya fixed me up.”

“I didn't know about that,” Maja said, frowning.

“That was before you caught up with us,” Hirin explained, patting her hand. She still looked troubled and pale. “Could he have—I don't know—injected you with something to make you trackable somehow?”

I hadn't thought of that possibility before, but then I remembered my “entity.” “I don't think that would be very useful. I'm almost always on one of the wire-blocked decks.”

“So where was he on the ship?” Maja asked.

I waved a hand. “Pfft. Everywhere, I guess. Well, no, that's not true. I came out into the corridor as he got to this deck. We had to assume he got in through the airlock on the engineering deck. He could have been in any of the cargo pods, and anywhere on Engineering. I don't think he got anywhere on this level before he ran into me. Or I ran into him.” I grimaced, remembering.

Hirin stood up. “He could easily have planted something on the cargo deck. Did we run any scans after that?”

I shook my head. “I don't think so.”

“Then let's go check.”

I popped the chip out of the reader and put it back in the chipcase, pocketing the whole thing. I wasn't letting it out of my possession until I'd watched everything that was meant for me.

Rei and Baden were on the bridge, and Yuskeya was still there, too. Someone had been to the galley, since they all had empty mugs and a plate specked with crumbs sat on the console next to Baden.

“Didn't I tell you to go and lie down?” I demanded of Yuskeya.

She held up her hands in surrender. “I'm resting. I haven't moved from this chair since you left. Rei and I were just chatting, and we sent Baden to the galley for us.”

“Oh, all right. Next time I'll make it an order.” I turned my attention away from her. “Baden, nothing from Chairman Buig yet?”

“Not a word.”

“Is Viss in Engineering?”

“As far as I know, yes.”

I opened up the comm to the Engineering deck. “All right, then listen up, everyone. We have reason to suspect that the intruder who boarded the ship before we left Earth might have left a tracking device on the cargo deck.”

“He came in through cargo pod Four, Captain,” Viss said. “I got that much from that techrig he had.”

“All right, we'll start there. What do we have for scanners? It'll probably be minuscule.”

Baden held up his updated datapad. “This will pick up any transmission that would be strong enough to use for tracking. I'd just have to scan for the right frequencies.”

“So that could have been a
putra
PrimeCorp ship behind us when we jumped for Kiando,” Yuskeya said, already halfway out the door before I could tell her to sit back down. “I'll get the datameds from the First Aid station. The implant bioware could scan for transmissions if I tweak the sensors a little.”

“My datapad's got the same capabilities as Baden's,” Hirin said, following Yuskeya. “He got me a new one when we were on Renata. I'll be right back.”

Diable
. I didn't know Hirin had a new datapad. I think I gaped after him a little. The changes in that man just didn't stop.

“I have a new datapad, too,” Maja offered quietly. “I bought it to come on this run. I don't know everything it does yet, but if Baden will show me how, I'll help.”

“And if I shut down the wireblocker on the engineering deck I can scan the cargo deck from the diagnostics station,” said Viss.

“All right. At this rate, I can't imagine not finding it, if it exists. Let's go.”

There didn't seem to be anything for me to do but go along and . . . watch.

I stood to one side, watching the others move around the half-empty cargo pod in their search. I wasn't sure if I hoped they'd find something, or not.

Yuskeya tired more quickly than she'd expected and came to stand next to me, having handed her scanner over to Maja. “You know, Captain, just going through the Split might have been enough to throw anyone off our trail.”

“Thanks, Yuskeya, but they found Mother somehow,” I said grimly. “If this was how they managed it, I guess I'd rather know.”

I got my wish.

“Got it!” It was Baden, over in a far corner of the cargo pod. He knelt beside a cargo lockdown slot.

Everyone rushed over. “I can't see the damn thing yet,” he said, “but this reading shouldn't be here. There's nothing else it could be.”

“Let me see.” Rei knelt near the lockdown slot, tucked a tendril of chestnut hair back from her face, and pressed something just behind her right ear. A bright, slender beam of light emerged from somewhere near her temple and shone wherever she looked.

“Huh,” Baden grunted.

“I knew this implant would be useful someday,” Rei said, not looking up from the search. “Ah-ha! There it is.” She ran a fingernail over a spot just under the lip of the lockdown slot and came up with a tiny black and silver circle on her fingertip. It was no bigger than the stud Baden wore in his ear. “Nice.”

I hailed Viss over the comm. “We've got it. I'm bringing it up to you.”

“Excellent, Captain,” he said, “I'll reset the wire blocker, and once it's up here it'll be mute. If I can reprogram it, it might be a handy little thing to have around, don't you think?”

“Good idea,” I agreed. A thought struck me and sent a chill down my back. “Has this thing been transmitting to the PrimeCorp ship ever since we left the planet? Do they already know we're here, hiding behind it?”

Viss didn't answer right away, but Baden said, “I doubt it. This type of signal would get lost really easily once we were inside a planet's atmosphere, to say nothing of all the extra chatter coming from the planet and the ships coming and going—and the
Trident
is still pretty far out. I don't think they'd have any chance of picking it up.”

“
Okej.”
I didn't feel entirely safe, but Baden knew his stuff. Anyway, there wasn't much we could do about it now except stop the transmission and hope for the best. We left the cargo pod and climbed back up to Engineering.

I handed the minuscule bug to Viss and Maja said suddenly, “But if PrimeCorp knew their operative had left a beacon on the ship, why did Dores Amadoro try to get me to plant one, too?”

“What?” Hirin exclaimed, frowning. He put his hands on his hips. “Seems like I haven’t heard all of this story.”

The others, who didn't know about the way Amadoro had conned Maja either, stared at her uncomprehendingly.

I held up my hands. “Sorry, Hirin, you were out of the loop on that one. We’ll fill you in as soon as we’re done here.”

He didn’t look entirely happy about that, but he nodded. I thought about Maja’s question

“Because Amadoro wouldn't have known if this beacon was in place or not. All she—or she and Sedmamin—knew then was that the virus trick had failed, and the op hadn't come back from the mission. If they couldn't stop me from leaving, they at least wanted to be able to track me.”

In a display of unusual tact, none of the others asked for details. Rei looked a query at me, but I shook my head a little and she seemed to accept that.

Viss said, “The tracker probably wasn't set to start signalling until we made the first skip out of Earthspace, to minimize the chances of it being found.”

“So when Amadoro learned that you were coming after us—”

“She thought she could set up some 'insurance,'” Maja finished bitterly.

I squeezed her arm. “Stop worrying about it. We've put that behind us, right?”

She nodded. “What do you mean, 'virus trick'?”

“That was before we left Earth, too. Chairman Sedmamin sent me a notebug infected with a virus in an attempt to get me in to PrimeCorp for some 'discussion.' It didn't affect me in the way he'd hoped, so I guess that's when he sent the operative to break in.”

“How did you know he came from PrimeCorp?” Maja asked.

“Well—we don't, not for sure,” I said. “He didn't have any identification, not even an ID chip. But he did try to get blood or something from me. Makes sense that he was from PrimeCorp.”

“Too bad you can't prove it,” she said. “If you had actual proof of some of the things they've done to you, maybe you could make them stop.”

I stared at her. “But it's . . . PrimeCorp,” I said. “We wouldn't stand a chance against them. Anything we said—they'd find a way to bury it, or make it go away. Buy people off.” I shook my head. “They're just too big.”

Maja cocked her head at me, considering. “It's PrimeCorp, yes. But maybe they're bigger in your mind because you've spent so much time feeling attacked by them. They can't be free to act completely outside the law. Surely they can't be so big that in all of Nearspace, we couldn't find enough allies to move against them.”

“She's right,” Baden said, leaning back against one of the Engineering consoles and crossing his arms. Viss cleared his throat and Baden stood up straight again. “I mean, you seem to have found one in Chairman Buig. PrimeCorp might think he'll accommodate them, but he's under no real obligation to. Duntmindi Corp has its own sovereignty rights on its own planets.”

“And its own legal rights and justice system,” Hirin added slowly. “The things that happened on Earth and on Rhea—they're both PrimeCorp-controlled planets. I wouldn't think you'd have much luck there. But if you could manage to bring charges here . . .”

Yuskeya snapped her fingers. “The pirate attack! That happened in open Nearspace, not on any planet, which means you can bring the charges on any planet with an ambassador in the Administrative Council.”

My mind was whirling. “But we don't have much evidence from that. A techrig and a weapon. Maybe a bit of DNA or a fingerprint, if we could recover it from the weapon. And we'd have to be able to link that stuff to PrimeCorp.”

“Yes, but if you start the proceedings here, you can bring in the other incidents as well,” Yuskeya said. She'd sat down at one of the auxiliary engineering consoles, but she leaned forward in the skimchair, eyes bright. Viss didn't seem to mind her sitting there. “You'd have to prove that they were all related, but you could build the body of evidence for everything at once.”

“And maybe you don't even have to win,” Rei said thoughtfully. “If it even looks like you have a chance of winning, you may be able to get PrimeCorp to negotiate, or at least leave you and your mother alone.”

An ally in Chairman Buig,
I thought suddenly. An ally who had access to the Nearspace Database, and might be willing to access it on our behalf.

“I need to think,” I said. Which meant I needed to pace. I opened the bulkhead leading from the Engineering station to the long corridor between the fuel storage cells, where so recently we had raced in response to the pirate attack on Cargo Pod One. Before I stepped inside, I said, “Maja, take your father up to the galley and fix him a double caff while you explain about Dores Amadoro, would you? He’s a patient man, but he has his limits.”

Maja didn’t look like she relished the idea of telling that story again, but she nodded and took Hirin’s arm. I wasn’t too worried about how he’d react. If I’d forgiven Maja, I knew he would, too. But I had to let them handle this one themselves. I had too many other things to think about. I stepped through the bulkhead and pulled the door shut behind me, signalling my need for a few minutes alone, and stalked down the corridor. I used the easy rhythm of my feet on the decking to shuffle my thoughts into order.

What evidence did we have against PrimeCorp, if I stacked it all up together? We had a photo of the dead intruder, which might be enough to provisionally identify him. It wouldn't be enough on its own to do much damage to PrimeCorp, but if he were identified, then we'd know if he could be linked to PrimeCorp. His techrig might not be much use, since Viss had taken it apart, put it back together, and used it since then.
Body of evidence
, Yuskeya had said. I wished again, mightily, that we still had the body, but put that thought aside for now.

I had Alin Sedmamin's notebug message about the virus. I had the names of the thugs who had kidnapped me on Rhea, and I had the techrig, weapon, and if I was lucky, some DNA or a fingerprint from one of the pirates.

I reached the end of the corridor and turned, then slumped back against the wall as another thought hit me. There was also the illegal tech cargo that the pirates hadn't managed to get, which we—or Viss, anyway—had delivered to the Protectorate agents on Kiando. That meant they now had hard evidence of PrimeCorp's manufacture of illegal tech. If they'd help us. If they could do so without jeopardizing their own case against PrimeCorp, and the things Lanar had hinted at so obliquely. I couldn't say anything to the others about that yet. I needed to talk to Lanar—securely—and find out what the Protectorate could do to help.