“What’s the problem?” A crispy voice and a chain of footsteps sounded in the room as Edwards’s sister, Princess Isabella, walked over to Pompey and his girlfriend. “They are my guests.” She smiled at them. Then she turned around to the others, her golden sequin dress twisting like a snake. “You are all my dear guests! This is one of the most gorgeous moments in my brother’s and my lives. I hope you could enjoy the day and forget about any discordance we might have had in the past.”
Discordances? Geneva thought of Mason, the four hundred soldiers who were lost with the Caparise, and the unpredictable casualties that were bound to come along within the next couple of days. Why would Isabella do that? Geneva wondered. Did Edwards and their parents know she invited Pompey?
The music from the nearby ballroom grew louder, and the wedding coordinators urged everybody to join the dance with the bride and groom. Guests from local areas quickly moved over as if to avoid a plague.
Pompey also stood up. “I’ll be staying in Hotel Andromeda for two more days. I welcome anybody to come visit me … and my younger brother.” He threw Geneva a quick glance.
“Nobody’s going to visit you,” Stella said, her eyes traced Pompey and his girlfriend as they walked in her direction. Then her hand flickered at a table, and seconds later she was holding Pompey’s girlfriend in her arms with a knife pointed at the hostage’s neck.
“Stella!” Geneva and Charlie called at the same time.
Soon a dozen royal guards ran into the room with guns aimed at Stella’s head. But Pompey looked calm and amused. “What do you want, Princess Stella?”
“You bring us Geneva’s son, Terence, and I’ll let her go.” She then turned to Isabella. “And you tell your men to stay away from our business.”
“All right, all right!” Pompey raised his hands. “I promise that you could take Terence with you. He’ll be waiting for you when you get back to your hotel. Now please give me back my fiancée! She’s terrified.”
Geneva saw Stella looking at her and nodded firmly. After Stella released Pompey’s girlfriend, the guards put away their guns and filed out of the room under Isabella’s instructions. Geneva ran to Stella and hugged her tightly. It was so good to have a friend!
Chapter 26
At the time when the Rainprian fleets departed for Pathway Trawtle, Sterling visited Harold’s institute and received a warm reception from the faculty and staff. Still grieving over Harold’s death, they admired him for his famous deeds in the Sunpherean fleets, and told him they’d like to have him as their boss if he ever wanted to.
When he came home around noon, Crystal had left for her physical therapy appointment. Just as he was going to order food, Larissa called and invited him to come over for lunch with her grandma. After the meal, the old lady went upstairs to take a nap. Larissa crouched on a sofa and turned on the TV.
Sterling grabbed some newspaper and sat down in a wooden armchair. This was his favorite chair since he was a boy, and every time he visited Larissa’s house they’d save it for him. “Women like you shouldn’t be fond of those melodramas.” He didn’t need to look at the TV to know what type of program she was watching.
“So I ought to be staring at stock markets all day? … Hey! You’re on the TV!”
He peeped at the TV and resumed his reading. He knew recently there were a couple of dramas about Geneva, which would inevitably involve his presence. Most of the episodes were made out of pure conjectures. For example, one of them started with how the queen picked her military assistant from twelve candidates: she invented all kinds of methods to test—torture might be the better word—them, and based her final decision on their overall performance, including performance in bed.
He tried to neglect sounds from the TV and focus on his reading, but the constant giggles from Larissa made his effort vain. He finally gave up and joined her on the sofa.
“For God’s sake!” he yelled after a few minutes’ watch. “I never had a dragon tattooed on my arms! … I can’t watch this.”
He seized the remote control from Larissa, who was almost paralyzed laughing her head off. Then his expression became solemn as a news channel reported on the colonial rebellion situation.
“The vanguards of the Rainprian First Fleet have just arrived at Pathway Trawtle. Now that the intersystem war has lasted for over ten years, the allied forces in the Renaisun-A finally have their counterstrike. The Treagian and Ribbon Islands fleets are gathering around their orbit, ready to depart within the next three hours. It remains unclear when and how Sunphere and Sparkland would respond, since their monarchs are currently attending the royal wedding in Artorna …”
“She’s here,” Larissa said quietly.
Sterling turned off the TV, his eyes staring at the blank monitor. Larissa leaned forward to the coffee table and pulled out the Monopoly from a stack of board games. They played for a while, and as usual, Sterling ended up losing every penny and property to her.
“All right,” she said with a consoling voice. “Now let’s play the Task Force, and it’s your turn to beat me.”
As she sorted the pretend bills and put them back to the box, Sterling’s eyes became misty. He looked at the artful movements of her long fingers, the rubbery of the sleek hair against her shoulders, and recalled what a popular girl she used to be when they were in high school. For a while, everyone in the neighborhood believed he and she would end up being together, but now … He sighed quietly. His kids were two-year-olds. Did she ever have a life?
“Stop wasting time on me, Larissa.”
Her motion froze. Her head rose a little higher, but she didn’t look up.
“I hate to say this to you. I should have, though, a long time ago. It’s been twelve years since I first left home. Every time I came back I wished I would see you with a good guy.” He put the last stack of bills into the box and covered it. “We belong to different worlds, Larissa. You’ll never understand what I think, how I feel, and I can’t bring myself to care about things that are important to you.”
“I thought we always had a good time together.”
“When we were willing to play a game we weren’t both interested in?”
“I’ve tried.” She sat up straight, still not looking at him. “I’ve dated a few guys who belonged to my world, who could share my failures and successes. But there was something missing with them, something important to me.” She finally turned to him, her eyes filled with despair. “Sometimes when I was meeting clients, writing progress reports, doing things that were completely unrelated to you, I would suddenly think of you. And now I know what people in my society are missing. It’s the remote, but unbreakable attachment to other humans, an incapability of pursuing one’s own well-being when others are suffering. It contrasts any sales performance, any commercial miracle that is valued by our society.”
“I’m not that great as you think.”
A sour smile emerged on her face. “Grandma told me several times. The saddest thing for a woman is to grow up with a hero, because one day he’ll have to go out into the big world. As he gets recognized for his talents, he’ll also meet women that are prettier, smarter, or simply funnier than you are.”
“It’s only good for you not to have him.” He remembered his mission to Treagium, the impact of his fake death on Geneva, her trip to Thyphol, and the loss of their son. She wouldn’t have gone through any of these if she had never met him.
“Listen, Larissa, you are living the type of life people are supposed to have. It’s what we are fighting for. Peace always looks mundane. You wouldn’t know how precious it is until you lose it. Similarly, men who aren’t wearing uniforms may seldom get a chance to show their courage, but if you live with them long enough you’ll find their greatness.” He rose from the sofa and looked at her one more time before heading to the door. “I’m going back to where I belong. I miss the time I’ve spent here, the time with you. It’s just … There’s something beyond my ability to choose.”
&nbs
p; * * *
Sterling thought Crystal would’ve been back when he got home, but she wasn’t. The phone rang twice. Each time a stranger asked to speak with Crystal—urgent and polite—but didn’t want to leave a message with him. Recently this happened several times when he was home alone. He stood in front of the phone, trying to think of what the issue could be. Then he saw the message indicator flashing and picked up the speaker. There were two messages for him, and one for Crystal. After he heard them all, he sat down in a nearby chair, tired.
He was lost in time until he leaped up and rushed upstairs to pack his stuff. When he came down with a suitcase, he saw Crystal coming in with her assistance.
“Are you going somewhere?” she asked, holding a bag of medicine in her wheelchair.
He nodded.
“When are you coming back?”
The question took him sometime to answer. “I don’t know, Mom.”
Crystal heaved a long sigh. “I knew you wouldn’t be able to forget about them. All right, but please don’t volunteer for another mission this time. Don’t let anything bad happen to you.”
“I won’t.” He walked to the door and grabbed the handle. Then he dropped his suitcase to the floor and went back to the living room. “Why did you do that to me, Mom?”
Crystal was bewildered. “What?”
“You were the one who told Rafael Tait about Geneva’s trip, weren’t you?” His voice quivered. “When she was pregnant with my kids?”
She leaned back in the wheelchair and looked away from him. “No, I didn’t.”
“One of your colleagues did?”
“I only knew that afterward, or I wouldn’t have let it happen.”
He calmed down a little. “When did you start taking charge of the Ragged Wealth?”
“Not long after we moved here.”
“Did Dad know it?”
“Of course!” She moved her wheelchair closer to him and looked up at him eagerly. “We aren’t a bad association, Sterling. We work hard to protect nature, to build a better society. I was planning to tell you about it when you went to college, but then you chose to go to Sunphere, and I knew you aren’t a person who’s good at lying. So it was for your benefit not to know it … Then you met her in person. Your father actually believed it was a good thing. He was hoping that your relationship with her would eventually end the resentment between her family and our association.”
“That’s never going to happen now,” Sterling said. “Not when she finds out what your fellows have done to her.”
“In fact, it wouldn’t matter any more what she thinks of us.”
Sterling’s eyes became stern again. “What are you going to do to her? What are all those phone calls about?”
“All we need to do is sit here and watch. Now I’m sure she knows that our association shouldn’t have been implicated in the assassination. But she just made another bad decision, fatal enough to cost her everything.”
Sterling looked at his mother, and then the house that was filled with his childhood memories, the one place that never failed to console him whenever he felt sad, frustrated, or abandoned in the outer world.
“Not everything, for sure.” He picked up his suitcase and left.
* * *
When Sterling arrived at the Silk Road ten hours later, the captain of the ship informed the passengers of an unexpected delay. People gathered in front of several large windows, while Sterling remained in the seat working on his laptop. There was nothing one could do when a pathway was deemed unstable.
“Spectacular!” A man fully dressed in a business suit said to his company when they sat back opposite to Sterling. “I’ve never seen so many freighters going through the pathway at once.”
“They’ve just started a battle. Maybe we’re selling weapons to them.”
Sterling frowned at those words. Artorna wasn’t supposed to sell weapons to either of the two belligerent systems. He put away his laptop and left his seat.
Through the front window he saw more than a dozen freighters lining up ahead, apparently all from the same corporation. Some of them were quite large—spectacular!—but still reasonable as freighters. It wasn’t the size. Something else about those ships unsettled him. He studied them for another minute and gradually nailed down his anxiety. It was the arrangement, the way they berthed against each other. Assuming the three humongous ships at the center were supercarriers, it would make sense to have four anti-ship defenders protecting their sides and back. The five ships on the front could be destroyers—three small destroyers for easy maneuvers and fast attacks, and two bulky ones with more sustained power. What could be the smallest ship lingering at the back? For rescuing?
He shook his head. There was no reason for Artorna to start a war on them. Then he remembered Geneva’s suspicion about Princess Isabella’s relationship with Pompey. Were these warships actually from Thyphol? A regular custom inspection would have caught them when they entered the RC from Pathway Wintrail, but if Isabella was indeed collaborating with Pompey, she should be able to let them through easily. That would make perfect sense! Now that the majority of RA’s forces had gone to the RB, a sneak attack with even a small number of warships may generate serious outcomes.
He stopped a ship attendant and asked if there was any way for him to contact the planets in the RA, but just as he had suspected, the ship wouldn’t have the transmission power until it went through the Silk Road. He could, as reminded by the attendant, use the phone booth in the ship to dial any number inside the RC. So he tried Geneva’s cell phone, but she didn’t pick it up.
He left the phone booth in disappointment and went back to the window. Then he heard a young voice from behind, “Mom, what is a pathway?”
“A pathway is like a tunnel in space.” A woman carried a small girl and stopped at his side. “It brings us from one place to another in a short time.”
“But I don’t see a tunnel!” The girl pressed her face against the window.
“We can’t see it, but it’s there.”
“How many pathways does the universe have?”
“There must be a lot, but so far we only know three … actually, four of them.”
The mentioning of the newly discovered pathway inside the RA reminded Sterling of Charlie Swinburne. Didn’t Charlie give him his phone number before the last battle? He wasn’t sure if Charlie also came to the wedding, but he ran back to the phone booth and tried his number. Fortunately, his call was answered right away.
* * *
On the morning following the wedding, the royal family of Artorna provided each country from the neighbor systems a conference room with secure communication devices, which was a hospitable act highly appreciated by Matthew. After a connection was formed between here and headquarters, Geneva learned that most of her three fleets had gone through the Trawtle with their combatant commanders and joined the forces from Rainprus and Treagium. Since they did not have ground transmission facilities on any of the RB’s planets—of course!—they could only get a brief situation report from their ships every ten or twenty minutes.
“How about our other allies, sir?” she asked Admiral Wilson.
“Ribbon Islands still have some of their ships on the way. The Sparklish fleets arrived at the Stony Band four hours ago, but it seems they are waiting for something.”
“Did we encounter heavy resistance on the other side?”
“At least not yet. Our enemy’s major forces are engaged with the rebels. We probably went there at the right time.”
A small picture appeared beside Wilson’s image. One battlefield was close to Thyphol’s home Planet RB-4. Another was on RB-4’s orbit with quite a distance from the planet. To reach the second battlefield from the exit of the Trawtle, one would pass by Planet RB-5 first.
Geneva was relieved. “I’ll talk to Matthew to find out what he’s waiting for.”
She left the conference room and headed to Sparkland’s temporary headquarters. Then she met Ch
arlie in the corridor.
“I talked to Matthew earlier,” Charlie said. “You know what he said? We could take turns.”
“Take turns?” Geneva’s pitch shot up, and she felt her ears burning.
“Yes. He’ll send his troops over when our soldiers are tired.”
“Or dead! Let me deal with that guy.” She stepped past him. A gentleman wouldn’t do certain things, but she would.
“Wait a second, Geneva. There is something more urgent you should know.” He told her about Sterling’s phone call.
She rubbed her head. “The Silk Road is under your control. Could you simply not let them in?”
“If they are what Sterling had suspected, our Pathway Escorts wouldn’t be able to stop them.”
“Okay, I’ll see if I could get help from Edwards. When the pathway is stabilized, could you make some arrangement with your escorts? Sterling has to be at the fortress as soon as possible.”
She left Charlie and went to find Edwards. A maid led her to a roof garden where Edwards and the bride, Melissa, were studying their wedding pictures.
“There’s another one!” Melissa handed him a photo, her satin dress bulging in the wind like a piece of white cloud.
“Again?” Edwards sighed as he looked at the photo. “You know what? Maybe I did have a bug inside my eye!”
Geneva waited patiently for Melissa’s giggles to subside before she stepped up.
“Is there something I can do for you, Geneva?” Edwards looked up at her with alienated politeness.
“I’m sorry to interrupt, but I need to talk to you … No, Melissa, you don’t have to leave.” Intuition told her that the bride might be on her side.
She sat down at the table and told them about the suspicious freighters. “We don’t have evidence that your sister is behind this, but whoever did this has seriously violated the Neutral Agreement.”
The Starlight Fortress Page 23
