Dark Beneath the Moon (46 page)

Yuskeya caught and held my gaze. “She’s breathing fine, heart rate’s good. I’d say she took some kind of feedback hit from the drive overflow when the power went, but I think she’ll be all right.”

“Should you try to get her into First Aid?”

“No room, with Maja in there.”

I felt ridiculous. How could I have forgotten—even for a heartbeat—that my daughter was in there, wounded?

“I’ll sit with her,” Gerazan said. “Not like I was doing anything helpful, anyway.”

“We could try to get her to her quarters,” Yuskeya suggested.

“I think she’s comfortable enough here,” Gerazan said. “Let’s not move her. She might come around any minute, right? It’s not worth unsealing the bridge.”

“Pursuing ships aren’t gaining any more, but not giving up, either,” Baden said. “Should I fire again?”

My anger at the ships chasing us had faded. Unfortunately it had taken much of my strength with it, and I felt shaky as a newborn kitten. I lifted a hand from the armrest tentatively; the tremors had stopped, leaving my muscles fatigued and achy. I shook my head. “Let’s put everything into the drives, and get out of here. They shouldn’t be able to follow us through the wormhole, anyway—we’ve got the coordinates for the asteroid field at the other end, but they don’t.”

“Drives and shields, then,” Viss said, and the ship shivered a little as our speed increased.

We continued that way as one tense moment followed another. Sord said little, completely intent on getting us to the wormhole as fast as possible. Gerazan stayed on the floor with Rei. Yuskeya went to First Aid and fetched a blanket for her, then returned to check on Maja.

The ships chasing us fired a few more torpedoes. Only one hit, but it barely rattled the strengthened shields. Little by little, they receded, losing the ground they’d gained on us. Silently I berated myself for allowing them that little victory—it was my fault Rei was hurt. If I hadn’t given in to my anger, wanted to return fire at them, if I’d concentrated on getting us out of there—

“These Chron don’t seem to have that same light beam thing, anyway,” Hirin said, breaking the silence. “They’d have stopped us by now if they did.”

“Wow, we got lucky on
one
front,” Baden said.

“Two, if you count having me on board to drive this thing when no-one else could,” Sord drawled, “but I guess that’s hardly worth mentioning.”

“Gee, thanks for saving your own
azeno
along with ours.” Baden’s voice dripped mock sincerity.

“That’s enough, children, we’re coming up on the wormhole,” Hirin said. “I’ve activated the coordinates Fha gave us—Yuskeya already had them in here. Sord, are you up to this?”

“Gramps, if you knew how many skips I’ve run—never mind. I’ll be a good little pilot and say, ‘Yes, sir.’”

“Skip drive is ready,” Viss said.

“Ships still in pursuit,” Baden said. “They must see that we’re about to make the skip.”

“I wonder why they stopped firing on us?” Gerazan said. “Think they ran out of ammunition?”

“Could be. Or they realized it wasn’t doing any good.”

“So why keep following us?”

“PrimeCorp and the Chron,” I said. “The one thing they have in common is—they never give up.”

“Initializing skip drive,” Jahelia Sord said. “I’ll switch to auto as soon as we’re through the wormhole, to get us past the asteroids, is that right?”

“Right,” I told her. “We should have some breathing room then, we’ll get Rei sorted out and make a plan for getting—”

“PrimeCorp ship is firing on us!” Baden yelped. “Particle beam, maybe. It’s lighting up the shields!”

It was too late to stop or turn. The dark mouth of the wormhole swallowed us, and the spill of colours swirled across the viewscreens. Remembering the last time I’d seen a ship fire an energy weapon into a wormhole, I wondered if it was the last thing any of us would ever see.

OKAY, SO I
hadn’t piloted a ship the size of the
Tane Ikai
in decades, but I wasn’t about to tell Luta Paixon that. With Little Miss Pilot and Gramps both out of commission, and Paixon dealing with her bioscav sickness, I was obviously the only hope to get us out of there. I’ll admit there was a small voice in my head suggesting that maybe if I could get the PrimeCorp folks to listen, tell them about my assignment from Alin Sedmamin himself, I could extricate myself from this mess. But a smarter voice replied that there was no guarantee these guys would believe me—or care. And I no longer trusted anything PrimeCorp. So I stuck with Paixon. Better the devil you know and all that.

Furthermore, I’d already hidden a small stash of goodies from the Chron station here on the ship. They’d finance the next part of my life. It would be a shame to have to leave them here.

So I was doing pretty well, I thought. It was all coming back to me, and once you’ve flown a few ships around Nearspace, you can fly almost anything. All I had to do was make this one skip and then I had no doubt they’d find someone else to take over. Paixon needed me, but I could tell she didn’t really like to see me sitting in Little Miss Pilot’s seat.

But when Baden yelled that the PrimeCorp ship had opened fire on us with an energy weapon, I have to admit I had a bad moment. I hadn’t seen the shot that took out the wormhole to Delta Pavonis, but I’d seen the end result. That red vortex of an eye, spewing radiation. I had no doubt that anything inside that wormhole when it had gone
boom
had gone boom also.

I bit down hard on my tongue, until I tasted blood. The hot, coppery tang steadied me, kept my hands solid on the controls. Seconds passed. The wormhole seemed normal. Luckily, piloting a skip was mostly a matter of a few small steps, done in the right order and repeated until you got to the end.
Touch. Nudge the drive thrust. Repel off the side. Slide around. Touch.

Maybe the weapon the Chron had used had been some other kind, and a mere particle beam wasn’t enough to disrupt the stability of a wormhole. And if nothing bad had happened so far, there still had to be a chance that if I could hold us steady through this wormhole, we’d come out the other end intact.

“Sord? You all right?”

I didn’t take my eyes or hands from the skip controls. “Holding on, Captain. Happy to see we haven’t blown up yet.”

“True enough. Baden, Viss, Hirin, how are we doing?”

Paixon tried to keep her voice light, but the strain was hard to hide. I didn’t know how she was still upright, unless it was whatever the Chron had given her in that shot. And who knew how long that would last? Despite my concentration on getting us through the skip, my thoughts darted to my father’s desperate, last-ditch attempt to save my mother’s life. The memory flickered through my mind like a series of still images strung along a wire.

Longate had been a disaster, instead of the game-changer my father and Nicadico Corp had banked on. I’d been suspicious that everything hadn’t been on the shiny side of the law when my father came home regularly with enough for us to live on and plenty for him to gamble away. We’d had to move quickly when the deadly flaws in the treatment had come to light, like cockroaches scurrying away from prying eyes. My father swore to me repeatedly that he’d known nothing of the shortcuts, the paid-for endorsements, the manipulated research results. His version of our swift and secretive departure was that they’d be looking for scapegoats, and he was a logical choice, having occupied a primary place on the research team. That also made him a logical choice for someone who’d bent the rules, but I didn’t say that. I was too worried about my mother’s rapidly deteriorating health and how much of my time it was taking to care for her.

So when my father finally came up with his brilliant plan to simply remove the malfunctioning bioscavs from her system, we were months and systems and wormholes away from the Nicadico lab where, if he’d only thought of it earlier, he could have borrowed the equipment he needed. As it was, I had to exert all my skills at obtaining things in secret deals and shady trades to come up with what he wanted. A high-tech dialysis machine, with a lot of tweaks and add-ons that hadn’t come cheap—except for the couple I’d been able to obtain by blackmail.

Mamma’d been almost entirely bedridden anyway by the time we had it all set up in the mildewy back bedroom of the four-room apartment I’d found us on Xaqual. I had to empty the trashcan next to the bed every night—it would be filled to overflowing with bloodied tissues from her nosebleeds. When I’d help her to the washroom, her legs would often begin a wracking tremor that ended in a weakness so profound she’d drop to her knees. The headaches, angry outbursts, and paranoia were everyday occurrences now. The new normal.

It took the entire night for her blood to filter through the machine that Dad had altered. She slept through most of it, although she kept unconsciously knocking the transcutaneous diverter
out of place, and I had to sit beside the bed and monitor her. In the morning she actually woke up brighter than she had in a long time, and demanded to be let up out of bed so she could have a shower. She was still weak, but the other symptoms had abated drastically.

Until that night.

I shivered myself out of the memory. “Last skip coming up,” I said, and when we’d slid around the inside of the wormhole one more time, we shot out the end. I flipped the ship over to the auto-nav to guide us through the tumbling asteroid field we’d been expecting.

The nose of the
Tane Ikai
grazed the side of an irregular grey rock the size of a small house. The shields flared and it was close enough to make out individual craters on its pocked surface.

“
Merde
!” I switched to manual and punched the controls again. The asteroids that were supposed to form a constantly moving barrier to guard the wormhole mouth were frozen in place like an avalanche stopped in mid-slide. Now, instead of being able to navigate it via the pre-set coordinates in the nav computer, I had to run it manually like a demented obstacle course.

Gasps and exclamations came from around the bridge as I jammed on the reverse thrusters and kept my fingers on the maneuvering jet controls, tweaking our course with minute bursts as we wove through the eerie graveyard of stones.

“Everybody quiet! Sord?”

I knew what Paixon was asking in that one word.
Can you do this?

“
No. Problem.” I’m not sure how convincing I sounded, speaking through gritted teeth. But what was the alternative? If Paixon wasn’t capable of flying us through a skip, she certainly couldn’t guide the ship through this. The path through the asteroids narrowed and gaped, twisted and spun, making the passage treacherous, even at a crawl. If they suddenly started moving again, we’d be battered and crushed in seconds.

“Bad news,” Baden said. “The PrimeCorp ship—they followed us through.”

“They must have something to do with the asteroid field being like this,” Paixon said. “They had to have known.”

We were almost through the field—the asteroids began to thin ahead of us, and I could see the greater unbroken darkness of space beyond.

Except it wasn’t as unbroken as it should have been. Darting bits of movement and flashes of light told me something was wrong. It wasn’t until I could see my way clear through the last of the asteroids that I realized what I was seeing.

“Worse news,” I said. “I think we’ve landed in the middle of another firefight.”

“
THAT’S THE CORVID
station,” Paixon said. “
Merde
, it’s under attack!”

The station appeared identical to the one where the crew had first met the Corvids. I hadn’t been on the bridge at the time, but Pita had shown me feeds from the viewscreens after the fact. This one was as dark, creepy, and completely alien as the other one had been. Unfortunately, it was a lot busier. Small Corvid fighters engaged with both PrimeCorp starrunner and Chron ships. No surprise there.

“
Damne, damne.
We’re not in very good shape to help out here,” Paixon said.

“We’re not in
any
shape to help out here,” Viss confirmed. “Our shields took a beating from the torps and the particle beam.” He threw a glance at me. “And if we lose another pilot—”

“Viss is right.” Hirin used his one good hand to bring up the coordinates for the asteroid field leading out of this system. “We can’t get caught up in this. We need to verify these coordinates and reach Nearspace.”

“And, um, if I could just mention,” Baden added, “the PrimeCorp ship is sailing through the asteroid field behind us like he knows the way. We slowed down to get through it; he’s
accelerating
through. And I’m guessing he plans to skip the party around that station and keep coming after us.”

“Tell me where I’m going, folks,” I said. “I need a plan.”

Paixon hesitated a moment more, then said, “Right, the wormhole it is. Baden, contact the station to confirm the coordinates we got from Fha. Sord—punch it for the wormhole.”