Rogue Stars

by C Gockel et al.

  He shrugged mildly. “Something I had done, or maybe everything I had done, had attracted their attention. And I said yes.”

  “Why?” She was observing him rather intently, bright gray eyes dancing in the dim lights. It might have felt like an interrogation, except he wanted to tell her.

  “I didn’t want to end up stuck in a corporate job for the next eighty or a hundred thirty years. I enjoyed engineering well enough, but I also loved the outdoors and working with my hands. I had good people skills, and orbital hardware construction isn’t known for its vibrant social scene. This though, it offered adventure. New places, new goals, new challenges on every mission. I would never be bored.”

  He paused to take a bite of rice. “And before you ask, I don’t regret it. There are downsides I didn’t foresee at the time, but I’m not sorry I chose this life.”

  “Hold that thought.” She slipped away in the direction of the cockpit, he assumed to activate the sLume drive. It occurred to him he was busy spilling forth his life story to her…but he found he couldn’t summon up the urge to stop.

  A few seconds later he felt the almost imperceptible shift in the purr of the engine beneath them and the glow of the Nebula blurred outside the viewport. She didn’t return to the table immediately, and he sensed her move behind him to the corner of the kitchen area.

  It came as a pleasant surprise when she showed up at the table holding a bottle of wine and two glasses. “I think escaping that godforsaken planet is worth a little celebrating. Want some?”

  It was so easy to get lost in her eyes, and for a moment he let himself. “I’d love it.”

  She broke the gaze to sit the glasses down and pour the wine before returning to her chair. “What about your parents, your sister? It wasn’t difficult having to lie to them?”

  He took the time to enjoy the first sip of the wine. A chardonnay, chilled to the perfect temperature. Deep golden in color, it drew in the light until a glow emanated from within. Also, it tasted delicious. Then again it would.

  “We weren’t close—I mean my sister and I are fairly close now, but she was still a young teenager then. And my parents…well, they weren’t a consideration.” He sighed. “Probably sounds cold and heartless, doesn’t it?”

  She had finished her dinner and settled back in the chair, legs comfortably crossed and the glass of wine in her hand. Her hair, damp from her shower, cascaded messily across her shoulders. She grimaced at the glass; it didn’t appear to be vicariously directed at him.

  She took a long sip, then contemplated the wine as it swirled languidly in the glass. “Perhaps, but I understand how it can happen. My mother and I don’t exactly get along, and haven’t for years.”

  His head tilted a fraction. Curiously, but nonthreatening. “Why not? If you don’t mind me asking.”

  She glared at the ceiling. “What does it matter why not?”

  He flinched at the sudden sharpness in her tone. Goddamn but her parents were a touchy subject.

  “It matters to you.”

  He almost frowned, taken aback by the intimateness of the words coming out of his mouth, not to mention the sincerity of them. He had fallen so far off his game it was laughable. Except he wasn’t actually playing the game any longer, was he? Nope, apparently he was not.

  She didn’t seem to notice his mental gymnastics; her words dripped with bitterness, but again it didn’t appear to be directed at him. “It really doesn’t….”

  He nodded slowly and sipped his wine, letting the silence linger. Finally he sat the glass on the table and idly ran a fingertip along the rim. Already shared far more than you meant to, might as well go all in. What the hell. “My mother’s a nutcase.”

  “I thought your mother was an industrial architect?”

  “The two are mutually exclusive?”

  She merely shrugged in response.

  “She is—or was anyway. Had a decent career and several prominent buildings to her name. Then one night, out of the blue and after twenty-four years of marriage, my father walked out on her. Said he simply didn’t love her anymore and needed to find some happiness for himself.

  “She had always tended toward the emotional side, but so long as he was there she stayed stable and fully functional. But…I don’t know. I guess she viewed him as her whole world. When he left, she just…broke.”

  He stared at the bottle a moment, grabbed it, refilled his glass and took a lengthy sip. “She quit working, quit sketching, quit doing much of anything at all. Even now, she mostly sits in the house and waits for him to come back.”

  “Do you think he will?”

  “After twenty years? No.”

  “Well, what does he say?”

  “Don’t know. Haven’t spoken to him since the night he walked out.”

  Her eyes creased at the corners as she regarded him over the rim of her glass. “I’m sorry.”

  She sounded like she meant it, but he supposed he carried a bit of parental baggage himself. “I’m not. He showed his worth when he left.”

  Upon first being given the advice to ‘never have anything you can’t walk away from,’ he had been skeptical. After all, wasn’t it the very thing he hated his father for? He had resolved the matter by developing a corollary rule: Never let someone get close enough to depend on you. That way they don’t get hurt when you walk away.

  He didn’t share any of those thoughts aloud, of course, and they fell silent again. He watched her without watching her. It was evident she struggled with something. Her gaze drifted around but failed to focus on anything while she absently twirled the stem of her glass between two fingers. Her lips pursed together as if to prevent words from spilling forth without prior approval.

  He hoped she viewed his confession for what it was: an honest, unpremeditated sharing of a less-than-pleasant part of his life—because apparently he intended to spill forth his entire damn life story to her—rather than a manipulative feigning of vulnerability to get her to open up in return. He had done such on more than one occasion; this wasn’t one of them.

  She refilled her glass and appeared to come to a conclusion. Her gaze finally settled on him.

  “The answer to your question yesterday is yes. My father and I were very close. He taught me to fly, he taught me to love the stars. Work took him away a lot, but he always came home with some new adventure for us to embark on. He was….” Her voice drifted off, but then she blinked and straightened her posture.

  “After he died, my mother shut down emotionally. She had never been a particularly affectionate or doting mom, but she became a robot, a cold automaton throwing herself into her work for eighteen hours a day. At a minimum.”

  She took a deliberate sip of wine. “Looking back, I realize she was grieving and it was the only way she knew how to deal with the pain. But I was thirteen years old and I was grieving, too, and she wasn’t there to comfort me, to tell me it would be okay. She wasn’t even there to silently dry my tears. She wasn’t there at all.”

  Her shoulders raised in a half-hearted shrug. “I rebelled. She reacted harshly. I rebelled more. She tried to exert military-style control over my life, and did not succeed.

  “And that’s it. We tolerate one another, but we never really made up. We never talked about it. And we most certainly never talked about my father.”

  “Maybe it’s not too late.”

  The laugh she gave rippled with cynicism. “I tried once. Before I left for the job on Erisen, I took her to lunch one day. I apologized for some of my more…extreme behavior in the wake of Dad’s death. I told her I understood now she had been grieving as well. And though I was only a child, it had been selfish of me to act as I did, and I was sorry if I had made her life more difficult at an already difficult time.”

  She stared into her glass, but her gaze seemed focused on someplace very far away. “She responded by saying I was still a child—note, I was twenty-five at this point—and I should never presume to believe I was capable of understanding
anything she had gone through or anything she had or had not felt.” A quick gulp of her wine. “And as for my behavior, while it was disappointing as she had expected better from me, it amounted to nothing of real consequence.”

  “No…” her head shook with an air of finality “…I’m afraid it is much, much too late. Whatever emotions the woman may have once possessed, they departed the premises long ago.”

  “I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve such a reaction.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. I was quite the recalcitrant teenager.” She took a deep breath and slid her chair out, leaving the nearly full glass of wine on the table. “And on that lovely downer, I’m going to call it a night. But….”

  Her eyes found his. “Thank you.”

  He met her gaze with his full attention. “For?”

  She gave him an almost wistful half-smile. “Being honest.”

  He had told her she probably couldn’t tell the difference, but perhaps she truly could. He didn’t know whether the possibility comforted or terrified him.

  He instinctively leaned forward, his hand moving toward hers. It paused halfway to its destination.

  She hesitated halfway to standing, her expression now completely unreadable to him. “What?”

  Stay.

  He withdrew his hand and eased back in the chair, though his attention didn’t leave her. “Nothing. Good night, Alex.”

  31 Seneca

  Cavare, Intelligence Division Headquarters

  It was one-thirty in the morning when Michael, freshly showered and wearing pressed khakis and a crisp forest green shirt, walked in the incident command center at Division HQ. His wife was a saint, and as soon as this crisis passed—if it passed—he owed her a nice dinner out, if not a weekend getaway.

  He smiled at an agent who handed him a steaming mug of coffee and let his gaze run calmly across the room. Most of the Summit delegation had been brought directly here from the spaceport upon their arrival; a few lower-level staffers cleared of involvement or knowledge were allowed to go home for now.

  The agents tasked to Atlantis having exhausted their avenues of interrogation during the nineteen hour trip to Seneca, his best interrogators had taken over upon the delegation’s arrival. Several of the senior Trade Division officials were, shall we say, displeased about being detained. They shouldn’t have hired an assassin as an employee, then.

  Karin Pitrone, the team lead on Atlantis, spotted him and came over. Her stride appeared purposeful and her shoulders rigid, though she must have been awake for going on fifty hours now. He gave her a sympathetic smile, which she acknowledged only by a tight nod.

  “You asked to speak to Assistant Director Nythal, sir? He’s in Interview Room 3 whenever you’re ready.”

  “Thank you, Karin. No time like the present.” He was kept apprised of events via a constant stream of updates over the last two days and didn’t need further briefing.

  Jaron Nythal sat on the edge of his chair, his hands drumming a rapid rhythm on the table while his eyes darted around the empty room, then up to Michael as he entered. A half-empty cup of coffee sat to his right, a crumb-filled plate to his left. Dark irises almost masked the dilated pupils.

  Michael recognized it had been a long few days for everyone and would understand if the man was running on caffeine and adrenaline, but he just wasn’t sure it had been the best idea for him to take amps before the interview. He recalled Delavasi’s warning regarding Nythal; he already understood what Delavasi had been getting at.

  He made certain none of those thoughts tainted his expression as he smiled professionally. “Mr. Nythal, I’m Director Michael Volosk with the Division of Intelligence. Thank you for agreeing to meet with me. I realize the situation is far from ideal for everyone involved, so I appreciate it.”

  Nythal cracked his neck. “It’s fine…Volosk, is it? I’m still in shock over what happened. I can hardly believe it. We all had high hopes for the Summit, and it’s a shame it went down this way. It truly is.” He dragged a hand through sleek black hair. “So what do you need from me?”

  “Merely a bit of information.” Michael cleared his throat and sat down opposite his ‘guest.’ “I won’t take any more of your time than is necessary. What can you tell me about Christopher Candela?”

  Nythal shrugged. “I didn’t really know him.”

  “I understand if you didn’t know him socially, but he served as a staffer in your department, and you oversaw administration and coordination for the Summit. You approved his attendance, correct?”

  “Well, yes. But you must realize, there were thirty-seven people in the delegation. I can’t be expected to know each of them individually. I can tell you Mr. Candela’s record was clean. He wouldn’t have been permitted to go were it not.”

  “I’m sure.” He really wished the man hadn’t doped himself up, as it made it difficult to judge and interpret his body language. He considered putting the man on ice until he’d returned to a baseline state…but there was a lot to do and little time to do it in. “Do you have any personal impressions of him you can share?”

  Another shrug. “He was…young. Eager to please. Seemed intelligent enough, but we hadn’t asked anything of him yet. My impression of him is he didn’t make much of an impression.”

  “What about during the Summit? Any out-of-character behavior?”

  Nythal leaned into the table and clasped his hands together. His thumbs continued to dance erratically. “Look, Mr. Volosk. I stayed busy two ways from Sunday during the Summit. I barely noticed what my personal secretary did, much less some no-name lackey.”

  Michael maintained perfect composure, offering no hint of annoyance. “Of course you did. Do you remember the last time you saw him?”

  Nythal blew out an exaggerated breath and crashed back in the chair. “Uh, I think I saw him at the dinner Tuesday night. Wednesday though? I attended meetings all day.”

  “And around the time of the incident?”

  His gaze drifted around the small room as if deep in thought. “No, I don’t think so. I mean I was in the ballroom, so I suppose my eyes might have drifted across him, but….”

  Now Michael did show annoyance, with deliberate intent. He’d let the man play out his routine. Now to remind him he wasn’t actually in control of his situation. Nythal was a government official of moderate stature, certainly, but one didn’t get far in the intelligence business without learning to disregard political niceties. Granted, once you rose to a department directorship you needed to begin to practice them again, but not in this particular circumstance.

  “Fine. Did he have a reason to be in the receiving line? He doesn’t sound like the type of person who would want to glad-hand dignitaries.”

  “Maybe it was a secret dream of his. I don’t even know if he’d ever met Kouris—”

  “What was his job at the Summit? It doesn’t appear as though he did much of anything.”

  “He was an attaché, he…got shit for us. Ran errands. Made notes, whatever.”

  “How many attachés did you have serving you?”

  “Um, four, five? I don’t…remember….” The lines had begun to deepen around his sagging eyelids. The amps were wearing off.

  “Seems like a little too much bureaucratic padding to me—this isn’t the Alliance. What about the following individuals: Alice Terre, Gerald Michaels, Treyson Rivers, Brandon Chao?”

  “Wha—what’s special about them?”

  “They also participated in the receiving line and greeted Minister Santiagar prior to his collapse. We’ll need to review their files and activities as well.”

  Michael sat at his desk, the door closed. A few moments’ respite. His hands rested at his chin in a thoughtful pose. And he was thoughtful.

  He’d conducted half a dozen interviews at the request of his agents, spent hours reviewing summaries of three dozen more interviews and viewed the footage of the incident from every angle and the cams of the pursuing agents. He’d confirmed the logs of ever
y exit and patrol on Atlantis.

  The man in the receiving line was Chris Candela. Scans of both Kouris’ and Santiagar’s hands minutes after the incident recovered trace DNA. Yet the man pursued into the service corridors displayed evasion and subterfuge skills which nothing in Candela’s life history indicated he should possess.

  Worse, he was gone. Despite an ironclad lockdown on the facility in under two minutes—due as much to quick-moving Alliance security as anyone else’s actions—and a meter-level grid search, no trace could be found of the man.

  The exit logs stared back at him from the screen above his desk. Eventually they had been forced to allow the uninvolved guests and bystanders to depart. The official Summit attendees were accounted for, save Candela. The nine attendees not present at the final dinner—an Alliance staffer, three reporters and five corporate executives—were interviewed on-scene and provided viable reasons for their absence. After follow-up they had been cleared and allowed to depart as well.

  He exhaled softly, feeling every gram of the weight though it didn’t show in his posture or the bearing of his shoulders. Diplomatic relations with the Alliance hung by a dangling strand of a thread. If they could provide hard evidence of this being the act of a lone crazy, they stood a chance of at least regaining an uneasy détente. Otherwise, their claims of non-involvement came off as weak and impotent. But damned if he could find any such evidence.

  He traded the exit logs for the rapidly growing file on the life and times of Chris Candela.

  He had seen many criminals in his years in Division. Dangerous men and even more dangerous women. Small-time hucksters and savvy crime lords. Spies, gangsters, assassins, insurgents and wannabe-revolutionaries. True believers and soulless mercs willing to kill children for the right price.

  Candela was none of these things. While the possibility continued that something in the man’s past, some event they had yet to uncover would open a Pandora’s box of secrets, it became increasingly unlikely with each passing hour. Even if—