One's Aspect to the Sun (34 page)

“They're too far away!” Rei protested.

“I think you were right in the first place,” Hirin said. “She's bluffing.”

I shrugged and left the chair, heading for the bank of EVA lockers near the bridge airlock. “Nevertheless, I am not taking any chances. Suit up.”

They weren't happy, but they did it. I didn't like it, either, since the suits were bulky and got hot after a while, but I didn't trust Dores Amadoro not to have some new long-range weapon she was just itching to try out on us. PrimeCorp could easily have developed something that was still a corporate secret.

So it wasn't the most pleasant time I've spent on the bridge of the
Tane Ikai
, but it passed, and we watched the
Trident
slowly devour the distance between us as we neared the wormhole to Delta Pavonis. They still weren't what you'd call close—but I wanted as much distance as possible between us. They hadn't fired on us by the time Rei fired up the skip drive, and I smiled to myself. As bluffs go, Amadoro's hadn't even been a very good one.

“Torpedo away from the
Trident
!” Baden said suddenly. “Moving fast.”

“Time?” I asked.

“We can dodge it or get into the wormhole, but we have to do one or the other. Immediately.”

“Rei?”

“Initializing skip drive now,” she said. The low whir of the drive thrummed through the ship and reverberated in the decking under our feet.

“Everyone take your seats,” I said, and opened a channel to Dr. Ndasa's room. He'd excused himself from the bridge and gone back to his room, with a promise to keep his EVA suit on. “We're about to make a skip, Doctor.”

“I'm ready, Captain,” he answered.

“Going in,” Rei said evenly as the mouth of the wormhole opened up and swallowed us. The mad swirl of colours spun us along its length, skipping and spinning as fast as the drive could propel us. Rei kept the ship rock steady, and I was sure we skipped that wormhole faster than it had ever been done before.

No-one spoke while we were inside. The instant we exited the terminal point, Rei cut the skip drive and Yuskeya's fingers flew over the touchscreen as she laid in the coordinates for the Split. I told Baden to monitor the wormhole we'd just exited for any signs of the
Trident
.

“Aye, Captain.” He touched the screen. “Message is away to Nellera regarding your brother. And I'm ready to launch that tracking device at your signal.”

“Use your own judgment unless I say otherwise, Baden, because I might be distracted. Fire it off at the optimal vector for the Beta Comae wormhole. That's the best we can do.”

“Will do.”

I took off my EVA helmet and said, “Okay folks, shuck your helmets and gloves but keep them nearby.” The air on the bridge felt deliciously cool against my skin.

I caught Hirin's eye and he smiled and winked at me as he unfastened his helmet. Then he crossed to Rei's chair and bent low beside her, telling her something in a low voice. My breath caught in my throat and I almost choked, but I managed to clamp it down. The last thing the crew needed now was a captain going to pieces on them, but this plan terrified me. What if the Split affected Hirin's heart again? He already had all the help I could give him.

All I could do was hope he wasn't going to get his wish to die in space just yet. Hope, in fact, that none of us were.

“Captain?” It was Yuskeya. “I was thinking—we should ask Dr. Ndasa to come back up to the bridge for this next skip.”

I sensed a silent presence just behind me before I could answer. It was Maja, but she said nothing, simply put a warm hand on my shoulder.

“That's a good idea.” I glanced over at Hirin, still talking to Rei, and Maja's hand twitched as she followed my gaze. She kept silent.

I lowered my voice. “I think he'll be fine, but it would be good to have the doctor up here just in case. The bioscavengers have been working in Hirin for a while now. They might have repaired all the damage that was done the last time
and
whatever caused it in the first place.” I turned to look at Maja. “Are you okay with this?”

She pressed her lips together, then nodded. “Look at him. He's not worried. He wants to do this. I haven't seen him like this for a long time.”

I nodded my agreement. “If I changed my mind now, and he thought it was because of him, he'd never forgive me.”

I reached up wordlessly and squeezed Maja's hand.
Thank you.
She squeezed back.

“Maja, would you go and bring Dr. Ndasa up from up his quarters?” I asked.

“Right away,” she said, with a final glance at her father, and hurried down the corridor.

Hirin straightened up from Rei. “We're going to go in cold this time, folks. You had last time to cut your teeth, this time, no babystepping. Rei's asked me to take the secondary helm, which I'll do if the Captain approves it.” He looked to me and I nodded. “So we're going to be firing up the skip drive on the fly. I want everyone sitting down and buckled in when we do that.”

He strode over to the secondary helm as if he owned the place—well, he did, half-ownership, anyway—and hailed Viss on the ship's comm. “Viss, about that power you've got re-routed to the main drive?”

“Oh yeah, can you feel it?”

Hirin grinned. “I can feel it. Do you think you could rig something to switch it directly over to the skip drive stabilizers when I give the word?”

“Give me half an hour,” Viss said. “It won't be a smooth ride, but I think I can do it.”

Yuskeya looked up from the nav screen. “Half an hour is on the outside edge of what you've got,” she told him. “We have to be out of sight before that PrimeCorp ship makes the wormhole. It doesn't have to be pretty. It just has to work. Right, Hirin?”

“You've got it,” he answered.

Diable
, I could see the day coming when he'd be captain of the
Tane Ikai
and I'd be busted back to piloting again, if the crew got to choose. No, Rei was a better pilot than I was. Cook, maybe. Seemed like Hirin was becoming their favourite person, but it was okay with me. He was already mine.

Half an hour passes with a speed relative to what you're trying to do in it. If you were Viss, trying to set up the power crossover, I expect it would go amazingly quickly. If you were me, sitting and watching everybody else work while I waited for the
Trident
to burst out of the wormhole behind us, it was agonizingly slow.

Finally, we were there. I'd already picked out the dark mouth of the Split, and we were coming up on it fast. Maja and Dr. Ndasa had arrived and taken seats at two of the empty sensor stations near Hirin. The Vilisian caught my eye and nodded gravely. He knew why he was here.

“Data packet back from Nellera,” Baden said.

“I'll look at it on the other side,” I told him.

“Viss, you ready?” Hirin asked over the ship's comm.

“Well, I can't say for sure that it's going to work, but I'm ready to give it a try,” he answered.

“Okay, Rei and Viss, listen up. On my mark, Rei's going to engage the skip drive. Viss, you count about three seconds and then do the switch. Yuskeya, just do exactly what you did the last time. It was perfect. Baden, you're going to jettison the tracking device as soon as you hear me give Rei the word. Everybody okay?”

I couldn't resist. “Anything I can do?”

Hirin didn't turn around, but I was sure he was smiling. “Cross your fingers, Captain.”

I didn't. He knew I wasn't superstitious. Then Hirin barked, “Rei, skip drive now!” Baden said, “Jettison tube engaged,” and Viss must have done whatever he was going to do down in Engineering because the ship bucked violently a couple of times and then we were swallowed up by the eerie half-presence of the Split.

I'd kept my eyes locked on the screen that showed the sensor readings for other ships in the area. Just as we entered the Split, they seemed to be picking up something—maybe the
Trident
coming out of the wormhole from Mu Cassiopeia, I don't know. I didn't think they could have gotten to the wormhole that fast, but I couldn't be certain, with that burst drive. I hoped, if it was them, they hadn't seen us go into the Split.

Maybe I should have crossed my fingers after all.

At any rate, there wasn't time to worry about that now. Rei and Hirin between them were piloting us through the Split, keeping the skips so short and close together that we barely moved from side to side down the length of the tunnel. Viss's extra power to the field generators must have held, because the ride was exponentially smoother than the last time we'd made this trip.

And Hirin—I could hardly keep my eyes off him, watching for anything untoward, but he seemed perfectly fine. He was deep in concentration, synchronizing his efforts with Rei's, but he didn't seem to be in the least distressed. I couldn't relax just yet, but I let out a breath I'd barely realized I was holding.

The passage was so much faster this time—or at least it seemed so—that before I knew it we were slipping out the other end, into the quiet darkness of GI 892's red dwarf system, and I gave them a chance to sigh and cheer and babble in delight.

“Okay, okay.” I clapped my hands. “Great job, everyone, but it's not over yet. For all we know the
Trident
is still right behind us, so we want to high-tail it out of here. Viss, are you there?”

“Here, Captain. That was a hell of a ride.”

“You got that right. Now listen, that magical power-boosting you were doing down there, how long can that work?”

“I know you'd like me to say indefinitely, but I can't. I'm stealing power from all kinds of places, but I can't keep it up or I might overload the system. We could burn it to the next wormhole if you think it's necessary, but I wouldn't advise switching it again or running it for longer than that. I should really put things back to normal then.”

“Okay, keep the reroutes on the main drive until we get to the next wormhole. We won't need to switch it back to the stabilizers for that one, and you can put everything back in place then. But I'd appreciate any extra distance we can put between us and our friend Ms. Amadoro.”

“No problem, Captain.”

“Yuskeya, lay in a course for the Keridre/Gerdrice wormhole, and Rei, let's get there as fast as we can. Everybody else—take a break, I guess.” I grinned. “I wonder what Dores Amadoro is doing right now?”

“As long as she's not running for the Split, she's not a worry,” Baden said. “You want that message from the Protectorate on Nellera now?”

“Yes, please.” It came up on my screen, brief, and not what I'd been hoping to see. My brother's ship, the
S.
Cheswick
, was back in Sol system, too far away to help get PrimeCorp off my tail—or help me figure out where Mother was now.

Chapter Twenty

“
Damne
,” I whispered, but Baden heard me and turned in his skimchair.

“Not what you were hoping for,” he said.

I shook my head. “I really want to talk to him,” I said, “and I don't want PrimeCorp listening in. But Sol system is three skips from here no matter which way you go.”

Baden cocked an eyebrow at me. “Remind me again what we're going to do while we're here in K/G?” he asked.

“Find the cargo crate, if we can,” I said with a frown. “But I'm not going to spend too much time on it now. Talking to Lanar seems more—”

I broke off because Baden was looking at me expectantly.

“What?” I asked.

“And the cargo crate is going to be near . . .?”

“The pinhole,” I said in exasperation, but by the time I got the words out I realized what he was getting at. “The pinhole! Which is a communications gateway to—”

“Sol system,” he finished for me. “And if we get a message to him and bring him to that end of the pinhole, and we cozy up to this end, it'll be about as secure a communication as you could have face-to-face.”

“As long as we get into K/G before the
Trident
catches up with us,” I said. “Thanks, Baden.” I stood up. “I think I'll go talk to Viss, see if he can't get us even a little more power to the main drives.”

Trying to get somewhere in a hurry when you don't know if you're being followed is enough to make anyone want to scream, and this trip took almost twelve hours. It was a relief to arrive at the terminal point for the wormhole to Keridre/Gerdrice with still no sign of the PrimeCorp ship behind us. Viss had managed to get us a little more juice at the expense of the heating systems, but with extra sweaters we were all okay. I sat down next to Yuskeya while Rei and Viss did the last-minute preparations for the skip.

Baden's readings from his tracer scan had come from the planet Nellera, so the pinhole wasn't too far from there. The wormhole we would be entering the system through, on the other hand, came out somewhat closer to Stana, the middle inhabited planet. As long as the homing beacon on the cargo crate was still broadcasting, it shouldn't be too difficult to focus our efforts and find both the crate and the pinhole.