Eternity's Mind

by Kevin J. Anderson

  “I am now convinced the faeros understand the danger of the Shana Rei,” the Mage-Imperator announced. “Whether they will help us as they did in ages past … I cannot be certain.”

  “They will help us,” Osira’h said, strengthening the crowd with her crystal-clear determination.

  Reyn rushed to her. “You’re safe!” He embraced her, looking rejuvenated, and she winced with pain from her burns.

  “I do not think any place is safe until we defeat the Shana Rei,” she said. She took Reynald’s hand, addressing her father. “I brought Reyn to Kuivahr so that Tamo’l’s research could help him. We still have the viable kelp extracts, but it is not enough. He needs to be back home in the worldforest.”

  Nira nodded. “The worldforest will share its health and give him strength. I certainly understand that.”

  “I need your strength even more, Osira’h,” Reyn said. “Will you come with me?”

  “Of course.” She did not even look at her parents for confirmation.

  “Let’s not be left out of the party,” Zhett said to Patrick, urging her family forward. Seeing no point in being shy, she spoke to the Mage-Imperator. “If an Ildiran ship is heading back to the Confederation, could we tag along?”

  Mage-Imperator Jora’h looked at the Prince, but his gaze took in the Kellums as well. “We will see that you are returned to your own people.”

  “We can’t pay for passage, though,” Del grumbled. “We lost everything when the Shana Rei wrecked Kuivahr.”

  Jora’h gave a dismissive wave. Zhett knew that economics meant little to the Ildirans. “You helped rescue Osira’h. We will deliver you wherever you wish to go.”

  Zhett didn’t have to consult the others. “Newstation is where we’ll most likely find the help we need.”

  “And where we’ll find the rest of our distillery workers,” Del said.

  “We don’t have any money to pay them,” Patrick pointed out.

  Zhett said, “I’d rather be penniless at Newstation than anywhere else.”

  CHAPTER

  17

  GARRISON REEVES

  Working in operations at Fireheart Station, Garrison couldn’t help but stare at the ominous void in space. The black opening was a stark blot in the nebula sea.

  As a Roamer, Garrison had wanted to be part of the Big Ring project, a part of history. He had accomplished what he set out to do. Kotto Okiah had done something spectacular, no question about it, but Garrison wasn’t sure that the dimensional wound would lead to a new transgate network, as intended. The thing just seemed … dangerous.

  Though not a superstitious man, Garrison didn’t want to go near that void. None of the Roamers did. At the Iswander extraction fields, he had already seen a Shana Rei shadow cloud: a roiling black nebula emerging from its own doorway in space. This new hole in the universe reminded him too much of that experience. Once was enough.

  Kotto would keep studying how safe—or unsafe—the vicinity was, but Garrison didn’t want to take any chances. He took it upon himself to deploy danger buoys along a very conservative perimeter. Roamers often made up their own minds, getting cocky and feeling immortal. His perimeter buoys wouldn’t prevent any determined pilot from flying too close, but he felt better just for having laid down a warning.

  Station Chief Alu rallied his workers and set an ambitious production schedule to bring the complex back to profitability. Many of Fireheart’s facilities, laboratories, and packaging habitats had taken a backseat to the Big Ring project, and now it was time to catch up. Alu appointed him a new team leader with increased responsibilities—although Garrison never promised he would stay.

  Fireheart Station was like a wonderland for a Roamer, a facility for scrubbing isotopes, developing ionic catalysts, and cooking exotic raw materials in the extreme environment. But Garrison wasn’t sure this was where his Guiding Star led him. His thoughts turned more and more often to Orli.…

  Garrison now led other exosuited Roamers as they reeled out vast sheets of absorptive film to catch the furious stellar wind from the nebula’s core. The racks and sheets would take advantage of the photonic bombardment, and when the film was saturated, it would be folded thousands of times and packaged into dense wafers as power blocks. A large power block could serve the energy needs of an entire colony for months.

  Bowman Ruskin, his deputy, used a jetpack to maneuver the unwieldy frame. Garrison jetted to the opposite corner to orient it properly. The nebula looked like a turbulent place, but the gases were so thin they barely registered above a vacuum. Even so, maneuvering such a gigantic, delicate structure took great care.

  “There we go,” Ruskin said when he had stabilized it in place. “Halfway done rebuilding the energy-film farm.”

  Garrison said, “Chief Alu won’t be happy until we start making shipments. We have a lot of ground to make up.”

  “Stay here another six months, Garrison, and you’ll be running the power block division.”

  “I came out here for the Big Ring.”

  “You mean, the Big Hole?” Ruskin laughed into his helmet.

  “I mean it’s hard to be away from my son, who’s at Academ and … I have other things dividing my attention.”

  Ruskin chuckled again. “Yes, you told us about her.”

  No one could see Garrison flush behind his faceplate. “I have to make up my mind about a lot of things, Bowman. Sometimes personal business takes priority over Roamer business.”

  “It wouldn’t if she was a Roamer. There must be plenty of daughters who wouldn’t mind marrying the head of clan Reeves.” Ruskin paused, realizing what he had said, the reminders he had triggered.

  Too many people were expecting Garrison to finish the work of his gruff father, who had wanted to rebuild Rendezvous. Garrison had no interest in it, especially now that Olaf Reeves and all of the self-exiled Roamers had died in deep space. Garrison was independent. He would make his own way, along with Seth—and Orli … if she decided to go with him.

  After the shift was over, he went back to the habitation module with other workers to play games and watch entertainment loops. Garrison looked at the calendar: only one more day until their month apart was up. He decided to send a message to Seth through the green priests in the terrarium dome.

  Before he could jot down his notes, an unexpected ship arrived in the nebula and headed toward the Roamer complex. The inbound cargo vessel carried a load of supplies for Fireheart and asked to pick up any power blocks or outgoing isotope samples.

  Garrison recognized the Voracious Curiosity, and couldn’t stop grinning when he received a message from the admin hub. “Garrison Reeves, you have a visitor.”

  He didn’t even need to ask. He knew exactly who had come.

  * * *

  His reunion with Orli was everything a month apart had prepared them for. He laughed when he saw her face light up upon seeing him. She rushed toward him, overcompensating for the low gravity, and he caught her in his arms. “I thought we still had one more day!”

  “I didn’t need the extra day,” she answered, and kissed him.

  He swung her around. It felt so good to hold her again. “Neither did I.”

  Tasia Tamblyn didn’t try to hide the roll of her eyes. Robb said, “We came to see the Big Ring in operation, but it looks like we’re too late.”

  Garrison said, “It was spectacular, but … we seem to have damaged the universe.”

  “If anybody can fix it, Kotto can,” Orli said, still holding him. “We’ve had a few adventures of our own. Taking a month’s break from you was a lot more stressful than anything we ever did together.”

  Garrison listened with seesawing emotions as she told him how his former wife had attacked them when they accidentally found Iswander’s bloater-extraction operations. “Elisa always had a hard edge, but I didn’t think she was a killer.”

  Then he remembered how she had also fired at his ship when he and Seth hid among the first bloaters ever discovered. The resulti
ng explosion had nearly killed him, along with Seth and Elisa. He’d always thought it was an accident … but he couldn’t be sure she would have held her fire even if she had known how volatile the bloaters were.

  “Are you staying here at Fireheart, Garrison?” Orli asked. “I’ll stay too if they can find some compy work for me.”

  “I’d prefer something closer to Seth,” he said. Orli’s report on Elisa’s ruthlessness worried him more than he wanted to admit. “I still have the Prodigal Son. I’m not sure exactly where my next job will be, but I am sure I want to be with you.”

  Orli said, “In that case, when you wrap up your business here, we can figure it out together.”

  CHAPTER

  18

  ELISA ENTURI

  She couldn’t stand it anymore. She no longer felt welcome at the bloater-extraction complex. Iswander’s workers continued to drain the floating nodules, filling countless tanks with ekti-X and discarding the shriveled husks. To her eyes, the production crew just seemed to be going through the motions.

  Elisa felt like a pariah. She had commanded these people, guided them whenever Iswander was away on business. Because she took her responsibility seriously, she was a far better administrator than Alec Pannebaker, who wanted to be everyone’s friend rather than their boss.

  The employees revered Iswander. That was why they had trusted him and followed him out to this new business venture after the Sheol debacle. Elisa had always been his most loyal deputy—every Iswander worker knew it. Her actions were driven by his best interests, and although she never asked Lee Iswander for credit or public acknowledgment, her discovery of stardrive fuel inside the bloaters had resurrected his ruined company. She had done it for him.

  Now everyone here shunned her. In their eyes she saw the haunted looks, anger, fear, even disgust. Worse, though, was the fact that Iswander himself had cast her aside. That left a sharp wound in her chest. After everything she had done for him …

  At first Elisa tried to justify it as a cool business decision that made practical sense. He needed a scapegoat, someone to take the blame in order for Iswander Industries to survive. But when he confronted her, she saw the cold reality in his face. He wasn’t doing it for pragmatic reasons that he regretted. He was truly throwing her to the wolves, and that hurt more than anything.

  At that point, her life had unraveled for her. Even as she watched Pannebaker command the work teams, directing the extraction tankers and the ekti arrays, she knew that Roamer clans were racing across the Spiral Arm to find untapped bloater clusters, which were growing more and more common. Roamers would have little difficulty finding them. Within weeks, dozens more operations could be harvesting stardrive fuel and rushing it to market.

  Iswander Industries would fall apart—and it was her fault.

  She didn’t regret what she had done, because she knew it was necessary—and she knew damn well that Iswander had wanted her to do it. No matter what he said, her mind and heart were perfectly connected to his. But she’d been careless; she left evidence behind and let witnesses escape. If she had been more careful, the bloater operations would not have been exposed. Iswander could have continued to extract and sell ekti-X at great profit for quite some time. And he would have kept her at his side.

  Now, though, the Roamer clans had all turned against him. Against her.

  For a full day after Iswander returned and rebuked her, Elisa stewed, avoiding him. She wrestled with her memories, replaying their earlier discussions about the future of his commercial empire. He had talked about protecting his secrets. From the gleam in his eyes, the hard look on his face, she had known what he wanted. She had always been able to read him, and she understood the necessities of business, especially when the stakes were so high.

  “By any means necessary”—how else was she supposed to interpret that?

  But now he had abandoned her. He pretended he hadn’t meant what he so clearly instructed her to do. When someone else broke the highly lucrative Iswander monopoly, had he really planned just to shrug and chuckle, “Oh well, you caught us!” She had tried to protect his empire, his legacy, his fortune.

  I will leave you alone so you can consider the consequences. Take all the time you need. Clearly, he meant that he would turn a blind eye if she chose to dash away like some guilty criminal, if she went into hiding and never again showed her face in the Confederation. He had pushed her away and backed her into a corner.

  She hated him for that. For her years of service, for her dedication, for spending her every waking hour building his empire, for the pain she had suffered, the blood she had shed … The only thing Iswander had offered her in return was the chance to run away. Was that all he thought of her? And he would rescind that offer the moment anyone from the Confederation came looking for her.

  Elisa had to leave. She wouldn’t even say goodbye, didn’t want him to offer her an insincere wish for good luck. Elisa was too angry now, and she doubted she could even look at his face without seeing a betrayer.

  She gazed out at the bustling complex. She knew these people, but she was alone in her heart. They had turned their backs on her, shut her out. They saw her as a murderer rather than as their protector. Well, with the imminent collapse of the ekti market, all of these workers would again find themselves without a viable existence. Iswander Industries would fall apart yet again, and this time, Elisa wouldn’t be there to save it.

  Damn them all. They were on their own.

  After Garrison railed about an imminent disaster on Sheol and no one believed him, he had run away with her son—as well as an Iswander ship. She had never forgiven him for that, but now she would steal a ship of her own. Elisa had no qualms. It was the only way she could get away.

  She briefly considered taking Iswander’s private yacht; it would serve him right if she just took it. But that would be too petty, and Elisa Enturi was not childish. Whether or not Iswander recognized it, she was a professional, and everything she had done was for professional reasons.

  She made her way from the admin hub to the docking bay. Most of the craft were small scout pods, never meant for long-range travel. Iswander workers were bound by confidentiality agreements and were not allowed to travel even on furloughs, for fear that they would reveal the company’s secrets.

  Elisa went straight to the ship she had selected. She discreetly checked its systems, made sure the tanks were filled with stardrive fuel—Iswander’s fuel, of course, but she would take it, and he would allow it. She was sure he had even turned off some of the surveillance monitors. He probably thought he was doing her a favor.

  Plausible deniability.

  Monitoring the shift operations, Elisa watched industrial vessels moving among the bloaters. The nonstop operations here had managed to drain three-quarters of the cluster, but Iswander knew he could always find more. Elisa herself had scouted alternative clusters for when this field was played out. Now, though, she wouldn’t be part of it.

  She powered up the ship, drained the atmosphere from the launching bay, dropped the atmosphere-containment field, and drifted away from the admin hub—the place she had helped build, the place she had considered her home and headquarters. She filed no flight path, didn’t authorize her own departure, but none of the systems locked her out.

  Iswander Industries was hers in everything but name. Her eyes burned as she flew away, though she refused to believe it was from tears. She blinked several times and focused her vision on the innocuously peaceful bloaters that lumbered across space. Workers swarmed over the huge protoplasm-filled sacks. Drills and pumps drained the fuel—what the mad green priest had called “the blood of the cosmos.”

  They paid no attention to Elisa. She was sure that back in the control center, Iswander had noticed her departure. He could have transmitted a farewell, or sounded an alarm … or begged her to stay. But her comm system remained silent. No one contacted her, no one questioned her.

  As she departed, she saw the bloaters sparkle as
energy bursts traveled along a line of them in sequence. Everyone on site had experienced the strange flashes, some kind of bloater energy that linked them all together. Knowing the danger, the extraction crews retreated to a safe distance. The sparkles bounced around the dwindling cluster, then settled down again, and the pumping crews went back to work.

  Elisa turned her ship about, looking forward instead of back.

  In that very first bloater cluster, when she opened fire on Garrison’s ship, she had only intended to frighten him. She had realized he was holding their son hostage in his ship, and she was astonished when all the bloaters exploded. She had never meant any harm to come to Seth. For a long time after the explosion she had believed the boy was dead—only to find out that it had been an illusion. Garrison had tricked her somehow. Another betrayal.

  When she left her husband and devoted her life to Lee Iswander, she had felt no reservations. When Iswander forced her to choose between chasing after her son and being promoted as his second-in-command, Elisa had never regretted her decision—until now. Maybe she had made the wrong choice. Maybe she had trusted the wrong man.

  Or perhaps none of them were trustworthy. She could rely only on herself.

  She would go where she wanted, make up her own mind. As she thought of the debris that remained of her life, she needed to hold on to something she could call her own. Something she would not let anyone take from her.

  She set the navigation systems and activated the stardrive, heading for the Roamer school at Academ. Where her son was.

  CHAPTER

  19

  JESS TAMBLYN

  Four new Teacher-model compies came to assist at Academ, and Jess Tamblyn welcomed the help. The compies’ instructional programming contained Roamer history and culture, along with scientific techniques, survival skills, and engineering exercises that could help clan children learn to solve problems, both in daily life and in emergencies.