Island in a Sea of Stars (2 page)

Lee Iswander was a busy man, an important man, but he always had time for her. As far as she could tell, he didn't hold her husband's irresponsible behavior against her.

Iswander stood with impeccable posture before the wall of thick polarized windows that looked out upon hell. His charcoal-colored suit fit him well. A frosting of gray at the temples of his dark brown hair gave him a distinguished look. He was a man who inspired respect and confidence at first glance. He was a boss, a business leader, a man who automatically knew what he was doing and thus was able to convince armies of middle managers and employees to do as he asked. They believed him when he made a business decision or took a corporate gamble, even when others advised against it. And Elisa believed in him too.

Turning from the window, he welcomed her with a smile. “Pannebaker says there's a new rooster tail forming. He's heading out to the hot spot to get images. You know how he is with fresh geological activity.”

Elisa knew how dangerous that was. “Did he sign a waiver?”

“He's signed numerous waivers. He hasn't managed to kill himself yet.”

“Then you're set, sir.” Elisa came to stand next to him at the wall of windows.

The lava currents were slow-motion waves, their swells and dips caused by seismic instabilities. A reinforced landing gridwork stood in the middle of the three habitation and control towers. Armor-hulled smelter barges drifted on the molten sea, scooping up metals, sorting them, skimming out the valuable ones, and vomiting the detritus back into the pools.

For more than a century, Roamer clans had made the most profit by harvesting the exotic hydrogen allotrope called ekti, which fueled all stardrives. Ekti was one of the most valuable commodities in the Spiral Arm, but Lee Iswander had found other ways to make a profit. He had turned from traditional ekti harvesting to these operations. He had a sharp mind and common-sense business practices that were more efficient than the sometimes haphazard routines of the Roamer clans.

The cratered other half of the binary planet filled much of the sky, tidally locked with the main body of Sheol. The two planetoids fell toward each other, orbiting around a common center of mass. The stresses squeezed and pushed the crust in a gravitational tug of war. Garrison claimed that the broken planet was unstable—brilliant observation! It was that very instability that kept all the hot raw material flowing for easy industrial extraction.

Iswander seemed preoccupied. Though Elisa wanted to explode with her news about Garrison—to scream, “My son has been kidnapped!”—she forced herself to remain calm. Lee Iswander was her best ally.

He looked at her, raised his thick eyebrows, and touched the front of his jacket. “A special suit for my speech at Newstation in two days. Specially tailored. I want to cut the figure of a leader.”

“You always look like a leader, sir … but I'm not a fashion consultant.”

Iswander pressed his lips together in an unsuccessful attempt to hide his smile. “I don't ask my wife for her opinion on these things because she always dithers and says it's fine. I wanted an honest answer.”

“I give you an honest answer every time. When you present yourself, the Roamers will see that you are a businessman and a leader, not a sloppy worker who shuffled off a production line. I doubt your opponent will even bother to change out of his jumpsuit. I expect the decision will be obvious.”

“Then I accept that. Sam Ricks cannot possibly believe he has a chance of winning, although there are some clan members who prefer their eccentricities to the reality of business and politics.” He frowned.

“They are a dying breed,” Elisa said, thinking of her husband and his backward family. Garrison had already caused so much trouble. She searched for a way to tell Iswander, but he was preoccupied.

“I've been looking at the records of the Roamer clans, studying their interactions with the Confederation government—the concessions we've received, the inroads we've made. My business model takes us away from those old, inefficient Roamer ways. It's time for the clans to get serious. I truly believe that I'm best qualified to be the next Speaker.”

She fidgeted, wanting to explode, but she knew Lee Iswander's advancement as Speaker would also open up many opportunities for her. He would have to delegate the Sheol operations, put her in charge. “Having watched Roamer politics from the outside, I'd say anything would be better than Isha Seward, sir.”

He gave her a wry frown. “That's not exactly a ringing endorsement. She was just a compromise candidate chosen because she was lackluster and didn't offend anyone. Now it's time for vision, and I've certainly proved myself.” He chuckled. “Sorry, I shouldn't be giving you my speech.”

“It's practice, sir—the election's in a few weeks,” Elisa said. She struggled with her own pain, her admission of failure, as well as the guilt of knowing that this unexpected matter would take her away from her work.

Before she could make her request, though, Alec Pannebaker broke in on the comm. “The plume's about to burst, Chief. Right on schedule, right on target. I'm getting images that'll take your breath away!”

Elisa felt brief tremors in the deck of Tower One. Sheol was in a constant restless slumber on an unquiet seismic bed.

Out on the lava lake near Pannebaker's small, shielded craft, a large bubble appeared that became a spurting geyser of lava. It sprayed high, then rained down in a rooster tail that splashed back into the magma. Pannebaker whistled as he withdrew his shielded boat. “Those will make great PR images!”

Iswander sounded skeptical. “‘Come to Sheol and see the sights'?”

“No, Chief—I was thinking more of how it shows you're a visionary with the foresight and the balls to establish a viable industry where other Roamers feared to tread. No one can argue with your profit reports.”

“It might be good for your Speaker campaign, sir,” Elisa said after the deputy signed off. “But you should delete the part about the balls.”

As Iswander returned to his desk, Elisa stood straight-backed, anxious. Surely, he could see her agitation! But she had never brought problems to him before. Finally, she said without preamble, “Garrison's gone. He stole one of your ships.”

Iswander sat back. “What are you talking about?”

“He left between six and ten hours ago. He kidnapped our son and flew off.”

“I can't believe your husband would do that. He seemed like such a…”

“Passive man?” Elisa said. “Yes, he fooled me too.”

“I was going to say ‘good father.' Is he still insisting that we're operating too close to safety margins? It's nonsense. We've been here for years without any mishap.”

“He thinks the seismic makeup of Sheol is changing, and the old calculations are no longer valid.”

Iswander was disturbed. “He riled up the other workers. If they find out he's left, they're going to demand answers.”

“I knew he was plotting something.” Elisa focused more on her specific problem than on the overall question and its impact on Iswander Industries—which demonstrated just how rattled she was. “I could tell by his mannerisms. Garrison couldn't keep a secret to save his life.”

“Do you have any idea where he's gone? For a man to steal a child away from his mother is … not a good thing, not a good thing at all.”

“I'm glad I was suspicious. He checked the Iswander ships, saw which ones were fueled and supplied. Garrison thought he was being discreet, but I rigged tracers on all our ships. No matter where he goes, each time he stops and changes course, it'll drop off a tiny signal buoy and squirt a message with his new coordinates.” She hesitated, fought with the dryness in her throat. “I can track him, sir, but I'll need to leave right away. He's got a head start.”

Iswander folded his hands on his desk. “You're one of my most important employees, Elisa.”

She thought he was going to refuse her request. “I understand this is a very critical time for Iswander Industries, sir. You're just leaving for Newstation—”

His expression softened. “And I understand that this is even more important. Choose a ship of your own, any one you like—you've earned it. You'll be going alone, I take it? I'll inform the other team leaders that you're taking an unspecified amount of time for a personal matter.”

Elisa should have felt relieved, but her anger wasn't dampened, merely focused. “Yes, Mr. Iswander. This is definitely personal.”

3

GARRISON REEVES

In uncharted, empty space, Garrison and Seth floated among the mysterious globules for two days of unthreatening quiet and just relaxed. They played games. Garrison told Seth about Roamer history, about other planets they would someday see. He knew they couldn't stay here forever, and he had to decide what to do next, where they would go, what new life they would make. Although the knot in his stomach didn't go away, it loosened a little.

The strange bloaters drifted around them, occasionally sparkling, moving onward like slumbering space jellyfish.

They were cut off from all communication, and he prayed that his concerns about the Sheol lava-processing operations were exaggerated. He would rather be proved wrong. But if nothing happened, Elisa would insist that his alarms were paranoid irresponsibility, and that he had willfully stolen her son. Garrison knew his wife could be vindictive if she wanted to be—and after what he had done, she would definitely want to be.

He remained alert, keeping watch out the windowports of his ship, observing the odd nodules as they shifted around. The things were beautiful and exotic.

Olaf Reeves had had very little patience for distractions or any opinions other than his own, but he had insisted that Garrison and his younger brother Dale respect the unknowns of the cosmos. This majestic cluster was certainly representative of that.

Garrison didn't want to admit it, but he was afraid that his most viable alternative would be to take Seth back to the bustling safety of clan Reeves. His family would take the two of them in, but Garrison knew that would involve an apology from him and lengthy rebukes from the stern clan leader. He would have to slide himself back under Olaf's thumb and let Seth be raised in that environment.

Yes, though Lee Iswander and Elisa represented impersonal human ambitions, Garrison also didn't care for the isolationist Roamers. He didn't accept his family's scorn for “clans tainted by civilization.”

No, he would find somewhere else. He had many different skills and interests, and he could apply for any number of useful jobs. His resourceful Roamer background guaranteed that, at least.

“Look, there's static on the screens,” Seth said. “A sort of pulse every thirty seconds. You think it's a signal from the bloaters? Maybe they're trying to communicate with us.”

On the screen, Garrison saw a tiny blip, a flicker of static. Seth counted, and when he reached thirty, the blip appeared again. “See!”

Garrison ran some diagnostic routines, trying to pinpoint the origin. “It's not coming from the bloaters. They're all around us, but this signal is … coming from our hull.” A chill ran down his spine—some kind of a tracer? “I'm going to suit up. I better go outside and check it out.”

He donned the flexible environment suit with easy familiarity. Everyone who grew up among the gypsy Roamer clans spent half their childhood in a suit. They knew how to fix things, tinker with all sorts of machinery; they could rig life support from the most unlikely assemblage of scraps. For a long time, that was the only way the clans managed to survive, because they got no help from anyone else.

Now, after twenty years of assimilation into the Confederation, Olaf insisted that many Roamers had forgotten their heritage, but as Garrison fastened the fittings on his suit and went swiftly through the safety checks, he knew it was something he could never forget. It was part of him.

He went to the airlock, clicked his helmet comm. “I'll be back in a little while.”

“I've got the ship, Dad.”

Garrison cycled through the airlock and emerged into disorienting open space. For many years, he had worked outside at the wreckage of Rendezvous, the cluster of inhabited asteroids that had been the former Roamer government seat before it was broken apart during the war. Garrison and his comrades reconnected fuel tanks, erected support girders, strung access tubes from one asteroid to another. The clan Reeves workers had taken care to lock them together according to the old plan. Olaf wanted to recreate the old seat of government exactly as it had been, refusing to consider improvements or modifications.

“Rendezvous served us for centuries, and the clans did just fine,” Olaf said. “I wouldn't presume that I know more than they did—and neither should you.”

As Garrison emerged from the airlock and moved away from the hull, he looked up and around him. The bloaters were eerie, dimly lit by far-off starlight, as well as the glow from the running lights of the stolen Iswander ship. The swollen spheres hovered in silence, fascinating and unknowable.

Garrison stared for a long while. Seth's voice echoed in his helmet. “Find anything yet? I'm watching the blips—every thirty seconds.”

“Still looking.” He held onto hull protrusions as he worked his way along the ship inch by inch. His hand scanner picked up signals, and he spotted the pulse coming from beneath the engines. He jetted down, maneuvered over to the exhaust cones.

Like cosmic soap bubbles in space around him, the bloaters shifted, rearranged their positions.

Now that he knew what to look for, he easily found a magnetic tracker, a cluster device that dropped out tiny signal buoys. Garrison knew about such things.

No signal could travel while a ship used the stardrive and moved faster than the speed of light, but each time they shut down the stardrive and reset course, this insidious tracking device would drop a marker with the appropriate information.