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.”
“Good point.” I collapsed onto the bed. “But what are they doing here?”
“That’s what everyone wants to know.”
I got up and paced the room. Ideas and plans flashed through my brain, each one replaced by the next as quickly as it bloomed. What would PrimeCorp pay to make sure their presence in Chron space stayed secret? Would they still be interested in Corvid tech, assuming I could get my hands on some, or the specs? Did I have any other information that might be even more useful to them now? The secret to the Corvid asteroids? The Corvid revelations about the nature of wormholes?
At that point in my musings I bumped up against the realization that had hit me when Paixon came and found me in the cargo pod. The only way I could capitalize on any of this was if I—and necessarily, the Tane Ikai—reached Nearspace in one piece. Which meant keeping Luta Paixon from doing something stupid and noble like trying to confront PrimeCorp here. I sighed. I might have to put my dislike for the woman aside and actually pretend to work with her.
And then it struck me that Pita had said something important. She thought she didn’t know what PrimeCorp could be doing here, but there was actually a good chance that she did know. She just didn’t realize it.
“Pita, how many of those classified files from the PrimeCorp main hub system have you actually cracked?”
A pause. “About half, why?”
“I’m wondering if there could be something that might explain why PrimeCorp is in Chron space?”
“Hmmm. Good idea. I’ll start checking.”
“Put a list of the decrypted ones on the screen, and I’ll go through them, too.”
The process took a while, since many of the file names weren’t terribly descriptive of their contents, and Pita hadn’t been discriminating about the files she’d grabbed. I couldn’t blame her, though, since I hadn’t told her to search for anything in particular. I’d really only wanted to see if she’d do it. If something came in handy later, great, but I didn’t have any high expectations that she’d find anything she could crack, anyway. She’d surprised me on that one.
So I sorted through financial reports (obviously a second set of books), employee records, dossiers on other corporations, product specs (some for illegal tech), manufacturing records, inventory sheets, shipping manifests, and archived press releases until my eyes burned and a tight knot of pain had settled behind my eyes. I had a fistful of leverage if I ever wanted to blackmail Alin Sedmamin, but nothing about the Chron.
And then suddenly, there it was. Something that made me consider that I might want to start distancing myself from PrimeCorp as soon as I possibly could.