One's Aspect to the Sun (37 page)

“Not blackmail.” I grinned. “I'd prefer to think of it as firm persuasion. And if the Schulyer data turns out to be solid, PrimeCorp might be willing to forget any plans of action against Mother just to get their own data back.”

He nodded. “It might be persuasive enough. And it wouldn't interfere with the bigger picture of what the Protectorate's doing.”

I sat back again and rubbed my hands over my face. “I just wish I knew where she was. She gave us the password—we could send the message to get her people out of PrimeCorp and take their evidence with them, and that would give us even more leverage against them. But I hate to do it without her permission. I don't know if the situation is really desperate enough to pull down what she has set up there, because once it's gone, it's gone.” I sighed. “At first I was scared PrimeCorp had taken her on Kiando, but Dores Amadoro certainly didn't seem to think that. So in that case, I don't know where she is. Or even if she's acting as a free agent.”

I stared at him earnestly. “Is there anything the Protectorate can do to help find her now? Could you start trying to track her from Kiando, or put out some kind of watch on her known aliases, or—”

Lanar sighed and gestured for me to stop. “I think before we go any further with that, it's time for me to come clean on something. Would you mind inviting your navigator to join us in this little chat?”

“Yuskeya?” I stared at him. “What's Yuskeya got to do with any of this?”

He smiled, the mischievous smile I knew so well from when we were kids. “Get her, and I'll tell you.”

Shaking my head, I touched my comm button. “Yuskeya, would you come to my cabin, please?”

“Right away, Captain.”

In moments she tapped on the door and I told her to come in. “For some reason, my brother the Admiral requests the favour of your presence.”

She moved to stand just behind my chair, so Lanar could see her. “Hello,
Admiralo
Mahane.”

Lanar nodded. “Good day, Commander. Luta, I'd like you to meet
Commander
Yuskeya Blue, of the Nearspace Protectorate. Under my command, and currently on covert assignment aboard the
Tane Ikai
.”

I stared at Lanar for half a minute, trying to decide if he was playing some joke, then turned to look at Yuskeya. She'd stood to attention, and nodded when I met her eyes. Her cheeks flushed pink. “It's true, Luta. You can scan my implant if you'd like. The Admiral will give you the Nearspace Authority codes you'd need to read the secure layer.”

“Oh, no, I believe you both,” I said. I waved her to the other chair. “You might as well sit. I have a feeling this might take a while.”

Yuskeya? A Protectorate officer?
And yet, maybe it made sense. She'd been shaken the night the intruder got aboard the
Tane Ikai
. She'd been extra cautious performing the transfusion—what had Lanar told her?—and running that scan on me when I'd been injured. She'd been the first one to Mother when she collapsed, the first one to think PrimeCorp might be following us.
The one who'd been with Mother when she disappeared again.

Lanar had the grace to look a little sheepish when I turned to the screen again.

I leaned back and crossed my arms. “So, this is how you had my back, huh, little brother? You couldn't have
told
me?”

Lanar shrugged. “You wouldn't have let me put a Protectorate officer on your bridge if I'd asked you.”

“No, I wouldn't! I don't like being spied on!”

“Come on, Luta, Yuskeya wasn't spying. She was just doing what I told her to do—keeping an eye on you to make sure you didn't get into too much trouble.”

I shook my head. “Oh, sure, that's nothing like spying. But Yuskeya's been with me for over a year. PrimeCorp only started bothering me lately.”

Lanar nodded. “Sure, they've only started bothering
you
again lately, but we've been keeping a close eye on them for longer than that. Ever since Sedmamin made his way to the top, we've been aware of changes in the way PrimeCorp does things—big changes, Luta. There are things underway that go beyond industrial espionage and stepping over the line of the law. I figured they'd be after you eventually, but in the meantime, there were other uses for an undercover officer on a far trader.” He had the nerve to wink at me.

“So I've been unwittingly participating in covert Protectorate operations? First Viss, and now Yuskeya. Is there anyone on board besides me who
isn't
on the Protectorate payroll? Wait a minute—did Yuskeya know about the illegal tech, too?”

“No, I didn't,” Yuskeya said, and there was a touch of ice in her voice.

Lanar shook his head. “No, our Commander Blue isn't one to look the other way when the Protectorate has to venture into grey areas, even when we feel the ends justify the means. I thought it best to keep her out of that loop.”

I believed him. I remembered how shocked Yuskeya had seemed when Viss told us about our “secret” cargo. She hadn't been faking. “I hope she gives you hell for it, then.”

“Don't worry, she already did, in a very strongly-worded coded message. So I've been suitably chastised, and we can just put that little issue behind us,
okej
?”

I wasn't about to let him off the hook that easily. “If the Protectorate knows how crooked Sedmamin is—and they certainly do now—why don't they go after him? PrimeCorp wouldn't necessarily fail if you took him out of the picture.”

Lanar shook his head. “The Nearspace Council made a mistake in letting PrimeCorp get as powerful as it is,” he said. “It's not just Sedmamin. The entire corporate infrastructure is rotten, and they're greedy for even more power. Yes, we could target Sedmamin and take him down, but the Board of Directors could replace him with someone even worse. We're building our case, gathering information, but if we move before we have enough, it's all going to come tumbling down. We can't have that. Nearspace can't afford it. So all we can do is quietly crack down on the worst of what they're doing and try to get some leverage at the top. A series of surgical excisions, rather than an all-out attack.”

“Baden thinks PrimeCorp might have an informant in the Protectorate, so you might want to be careful who you trust.”

He seemed to consider the possibility. “I'm doubtful, but I'll keep it in mind. One more thing—I think I can help you make your case against PrimeCorp look even better.”

“Well, I want it to look as damning as possible,” I said. “They're more likely to cut a deal if they're worried.”

Lanar pursed his lips. “Yuskeya sent me a coded message not long after you left Sol system. About a certain . . . item that had gone missing.”

At first I drew a blank, but then I realized what he meant. “The body from the cargo crate? You have it?”

He nodded. “Picked it up and put it into storage, just in case we might need it someday. And because we didn't want PrimeCorp getting its hands on it. I guess it was a good idea.”

I turned to Yuskeya. “Why'd you bother letting us go hunting for it?”

She shrugged. “I was under orders not to reveal my identity—unless it was a life-or-death situation. And I wasn't sure if it had been picked up, anyway. So I had to just go along.”

“Well, I'm glad
someone
has it, anyway,” I admitted, and got up to pace. I'd been sitting too long, with too much new information coming at me. I turned to Yuskeya. “So, does this mean you know where my mother is? Was all that knocked-unconscious thing just a cover to help her get away?”

Yuskeya actually looked uncomfortable and touched the place on her head where the lump had been. She glanced an unspoken question at the screen, and Lanar nodded. “Yes, and no. The lump and the bruise—they were all too real,” she said with a grimace. “I was under orders, if we ever found your mother and she seemed to be in danger, to get her to a Protectorate safe area as quickly as possible. That's why I volunteered to go with her. So I could contact one of our agents on Kiando and get her safe.”

“She could have been safe with us!” I protested.

Yuskeya shook her head. “With the PrimeCorp ship on the way, I couldn't be certain of that. I thought it was best to get her into Protectorate hands as quickly as possible.”

“So you do know where she is.”

“No.” Yuskeya bit her lip. “Your mother is a very—strong-willed person. She said she'd take my advice and not go back to the
Tane Ikai
, but she wouldn't let me get her to our agent. She had her own . . . contingency plan, she said.”

I almost smiled at the image of my mother telling Yuskeya that she could take her protection and stuff it. But I didn't. I was hurt. “Why didn't you just tell me all this?”

She pulled a deep breath. “I'm sorry about that, Luta, I really am. But I knew that you'd be able to think clearer—and not have to lie—if you really didn't know where she was.”

“So you let yourself get hit on the head to convince me that you didn't know what had happened to her. Were you really unconscious at all?”

She smiled a little and put hand to her forehead again. “Your mother apparently has a black belt in Warrior Chi. But she gave me a shot so that I wouldn't have to 'fake' being unconscious.”

I shook my head. “Nice little conspiracy,” I said with a certain amount of bitterness. “I wouldn't have thought I was that easy to fool. Or so untrustworthy.”

“She did want me to make sure you got the bag, and the messages on the chip. Maybe it wasn't the right decision. But we had to act fast.” She grinned. “And you have to admit, the
Tane Ikai
taking off like it did made a good distraction. We got the
Trident
away from Kiando, which might have made it easier for her to get off the planet.”

“But,” I said, “you don't know where she is?”

Yuskeya shook her head, her grin fading. “She wouldn't tell me her plan. Just that she had confidence in it.” She looked up at me, and her eyes were dark and sincere. “And she told me to tell you, when I could, that she'd be in touch as soon as possible.”

I wasn't sure what to say to that, but as it turned out, I didn't have to say anything. Because that's when PrimeCorp caught up with us.

Chapter Twenty-Two

“Sorry to interrupt, Captain, but we've got company,” Baden said over the ship's comm.

“Who is it?”

“Our new acquaintance the
Trident
just showed up on our sensors
—
and it looks like they brought some friends. I count four runners, all with PrimeCorp sigs.”

“How far away?”

He hesitated. “That's the strange thing. Closer than they should be for our sensors to just be picking them up now. I can't explain it. Viss says maybe they have some new stealth technology or something. But they're here.”

I swallowed. Even with three planets in the K/G system and Nellera in sight, we were far out of the local traffic lanes, and there were no known wormholes out here. This sector of K/G was pretty lonely, the equivalent of being ambushed in a dark alley. Even if I was, so to speak, on the phone with the Protectorate.

“I'll comm them, Luta,” Lanar said.

I was happy to let him try, but I doubted it would do any good. Dores Amadoro was unlikely to care about a Protectorate ship in another system.

I opened the ship's comm so everyone could hear me; I wasn't sure where everyone else was. “Everyone take a seat somewhere and buckle down,” I ordered. “I don't know what these oncoming ships have in mind, so we might have to get out of here fast, and when I say fast, I mean fast enough to take the pseudo-gravs offline.”

“Aye, Captain,” Viss said from Engineering.

“Dr. Ndasa and I are in the galley,” Maja said over the comm. “What's going on?”

“With luck, not much, but I wouldn't count on it,” I said. “It's PrimeCorp.”

“They're not answering my pings,” Lanar said.

“They don't know about the pinhole; they probably think it's some kind of trick I'm trying to pull,” I said. “They can't see a Protectorate ship, so if they haven't noticed the pinhole, how could one be pinging them?”

“I'm going to see who else is in the vicinity. If there's another Protectorate ship anywhere close, I'll send them to you.”

“Thanks, Lanar,” I said. “Signing off now. With luck, I'll call you back in a few minutes. Don't go anywhere.”

With Yuskeya at my heels I hurried to the bridge, and switched the bridge view to all the ship's screens. That way everybody could follow along with the rest of us.

When they hailed us a few moments later, the angular face of Dores Amadoro did nothing to improve my mood. I'd thought, with the summons to Vele, at least I wouldn't have to see her again until I got there.

“Captain Paixon,” Amadoro said in her coldest voice. “Here we are again. I'm still looking to execute this warrant for the arrest of Emmage Mahane. I'll have to ask that you prepare for boarding so that my agents can carry out their duties.”