The Dark Between the Stars

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Iswander couldn’t be allowed to think Elisa was not reliable, that she was one of “those” professional women who couldn’t balance family matters with business necessities. She didn’t want to be seen like that. She had worked too hard, devoted too much of her life, made too many sacrifices to get where she was.

  All along she had thought Garrison was her partner with the same goals, who saw the same intensely bright Guiding Star—to use his silly Roamer metaphor.

  While cruising along, not knowing how soon she might encounter the next shifting point, Elisa called up her personal image library and scrolled through to find a photo of Seth (not that she had forgotten what her own child looked like, thank you!). The first photo she found was a portrait of herself and Garrison, smiling as they held the one-year-old boy. Happy times. Elisa frowned when she saw it, recognizing the delusion in her eyes.

  Without thinking, she deleted the image, scrolled through the library, and found another one of Garrison and Seth laughing as they ate some gelatinous pasta meal they had cooked together. She deleted the second image as well. When she finally took Seth back, she did not want her son to be able to view and remember enjoyable times with his father.

  She found several more images of Garrison and Seth at different ages. Then two of herself and Garrison. She deleted them. Elisa didn’t need to be taunted by her mistakes. Even more photos of Garrison and Seth. What did he do, spend all of his time staging images? No wonder he hadn’t advanced far in his job.

  But she couldn’t find any warm photos of just herself and Seth. And since Garrison was so keen to take images, he must have intentionally left her out. She finally uncovered several images of her son alone, which she kept. She studied the shape of Seth’s nose, the curve of his smile, tried to determine how much of his features looked like her. She saw hints of Garrison there too—that couldn’t be helped. Seth was her son, regardless. Elisa displayed the images on the cockpit screens. She could always use her imagination to place herself there alongside him, or splice some images together. It would be good enough.

  She realized that she hadn’t kept photo images of her parents or brothers either . . . not for years.

  Elisa Enturi had grown up in a lower middle-class family on Earth, small home, two younger brothers, her parents both factory workers. After the faeros attack destroyed the Moon, everyone with the ability and resources had evacuated Earth to flee the bombardment of meteors. But that was beyond the means of people like them, her father had said. Elisa huddled with her family and hoped for the best as impacts peppered the Earth, wiping out several major cities. She felt so helpless—and she never wanted to feel that way again.

  The Enturi family seemed incapable of getting ahead, and Elisa was told she couldn’t have the finer things she wanted. Her mother said, “At least we know what the future holds for us. We’ll content ourselves with what we have.”

  Elisa had no interest in being content. Her brothers were brought up to believe they would never be anything more than factory workers, would probably never even leave Earth. Her parents told Elisa the same thing, but she turned a deaf ear. While in school, she got a job to earn extra money for herself and for her family, and also to gain work experience so she could be ahead of her classmates.

  But all the money she contributed into the family kitty disappeared into occasional meals in nice restaurants, tickets to shows that Elisa didn’t want to see. So she took a second job and deposited those wages into a private account in order to pay for her college tuition.

  She didn’t believe that nice things should be out of their reach. She looked for opportunities and found them. She impressed people, who gave her even more chances, jobs, projects, and quick bonuses, and she started to save additional money. She took the late shifts whenever necessary. She volunteered for extra hours. She made herself useful, and then invaluable.

  She worked hard at both jobs and maintained her grades, much to her brothers’ astonishment. They had told her she couldn’t possibly do both (probably because they didn’t want to be pressured to take even a single job while they went to school). Because of her grades, Elisa was accepted into a decent college, though she kept living at home to save on expenses.

  When the family vehicle broke down because her father hadn’t maintained it, Elisa was the only one who had the money to make repairs. Her mother had just drained the family account by buying an expensive teak dining set unlike any of their other furnishings. (She justified her extravagant purchase, tearfully, “Can’t I ever have something nice, just for me? For once?”)

  One of Elisa’s brothers got arrested for vandalizing a clothing shop run by the parents of a girl he didn’t like, and only Elisa had the funds to bail him out. (She did suggest selling the teak dining room set to raise bail—a perfectly practical idea, but it made her mother angry.)

  After a succession of other family financial crises, which she had been forced to rectify, Elisa finally marched into the living room one evening, her face flushed.

  She had lived with them all her life and had grown blind to their habits. Elisa was shocked to realize the obvious—that neither her brothers, nor her father or mother ever put in the slightest bit of extra work than they had to. They ducked when someone asked for a volunteer. They grumbled about being forced to put in overtime, despite the extra pay. They actually liked being idle and sat around on their days off “relaxing”—sleeping in, or amusing themselves with stupid games.

  For Elisa a “day off” was a chance to catch up and get ahead on other goals. She took night classes, she self-studied, and as she grew more successful, her family often commented that she was just lucky. Once, when she got a raise, one of her brothers even sneered that she must be sleeping with the boss. They couldn’t imagine that she had earned it, that it was possible to get ahead.

  “You all deserve your situation!” she said. “You’re lazy, unambitious, disappointing. If any of you pushed yourselves, tried harder, and worked to be something, then you could pull us all up higher. Instead, you do nothing and just resent those who have more than you do.”

  Her parents looked deeply insulted.

  Elisa shook her head. “And all this time I’ve enabled you. I see that. You’re on your own now. Sink or swim, it’s up to you.”

  She took the remaining money from her account, only a fraction of what it should have been without the drain from her family’s constant needs, and left home. She started from scratch—a frightening prospect at first, but she found it much easier without the dead weight of her family holding her back.

  She went to work for Lee Iswander, a man whose attitude she admired, and she hitched her star to him. Then she met Garrison Reeves, a member of an important Roamer clan, who needed help. He said all the right things, offered her a chance to make a huge investment in a major business deal for Iswander. They could help each other.

  She also thought Garrison was a kindred spirit. Together, they could have become powerful and important business leaders. But he had let her down too, failing to step up to the plate when an opportunity presented itself, and causing trouble with the industrialist who had made her whole career possible.

  And now he’d run off with her son.

  Her ship stopped at the next bread crumb tracker, and she reoriented her nav system, studying the new course. “Where the hell are you going?” she muttered to herself. “That’s the middle of nowhere. Didn’t you even bother to make a plan?”

  When she arrived and scanned for signs of Garrison’s stolen ship, Elisa found that the area was not empty at all. She encountered filmy greenish brown spheres brought together through gravity or some kind of willful motion. The cluster looked like a miniature galaxy, with hundreds of other globules floating around the periphery. Trails of outliers extended across the emptiness, marking a mysterious trail through the void.

  She wondered if Garrison had come here on purpose. Did he intend to hide this strange discovery from her and from Iswander Industries? The magnetic trac
king device had stopped transmitting, but as she extended her sensors, she detected his ship.

  Found you!

  Yes, Garrison was here. That was what mattered.

  TWELVE

  LEE ISWANDER

  After making his case to the Roamer clans, Iswander headed back to Sheol, anxious to return to business. Though he could have spent days in meetings at Newstation, chatting with clan heads and Confederation trade representatives, he had obligations at his lava-processing operations.

  The flight back seemed long. After the first few hours of making notes and putting his thoughts in order, he was ready to be back in his office. Once he was elected Speaker, he would have to rely on Alec Pannebaker and Elisa Reeves for the day-to-day work. Though he liked to show good leadership by being there and being involved, some things would have to change. That was the price one paid to move forward.

  From space, the hot binary planet looked dramatic, two halves playing tug-of-war. He deployed the cruiser’s heat shield, descended toward the magma operations, and radioed ahead to let Pannebaker know he was coming. “Prepare a production summary for me, please.”

  “Got it already, Chief. I do my homework before I have fun. And by the Guiding Star, there’s lots of fun now—thermal instabilities, more than usual. Three lava geysers. One shoots half a kilometer into the atmosphere.”

  Iswander remembered the warnings of Garrison Reeves. “Does it pose any danger to our facilities?”

  “It’s five kilometers away from the towers, but worth the trip to go see. I’ll take you out there if you like.”

  “I’m sure you’ve taken hundreds of images, Mr. Pannebaker.”

  “Thousands, actually. Got to get just the right frame. We’ll show them off to Captain Kett when she gets here.”

  The head of the Confederation’s largest trading fleet, Rlinda Kett was due at Sheol to take a large cargo of metal products to Newstation. It was a symbolic gesture to impress the clan heads, and the hearty businesswoman knew that full well, but she had agreed to do it, so long as he gave her sufficient inducement.

  “A bribe?” Iswander had asked her in a preliminary meeting. He was familiar with the way business and politics worked, but he didn’t think Rlinda Kett would be so blatant about it.

  “Not at all,” she had answered. “Shipping terms—I want a ten percent reduction in my costs on all exports from Sheol.”

  Iswander knew a negotiation when he saw one. “Pure ingots only.”

  “No—ingots, processed-metal foams, alloy films. Ten percent reduction across the board.”

  “Ten percent on ingots, five percent on other specialty materials.”

  Rlinda had let out a loud laugh. “Good enough—and we’re done here.” She broke out a bottle of her specialty aqua vitae to celebrate. “This is distilled by my associate Del Kellum on an Ildiran planet called Kuivahr. A new product, lots of interest in it.”

  He had sipped the murky liquid in the glass, controlled his expression, and tried to be polite. “Tastes . . . rough. A little like seaweed, but with a burn.”

  “He’s still fine-tuning the recipe, enhancing the health benefits. But the sea was the source of all life, and he’s thinking about calling this Primordial Ooze.”

  “Doesn’t sound very marketable.”

  Rlinda, a big, dark-skinned woman who had only grown bigger over the years, had been the Confederation’s first trade minister, which gave her numerous connections. Previously, she’d run a small shipping company, and now she ran a large one. She owned three upscale restaurants, traded in exotic food items, and ate enough of them herself to make a dent in her profits. Everyone liked Rlinda, and Iswander was sure he could do business with her.

  “I’ll have Robb and Tasia handle the details and draw up the paperwork,” she said. “You know I’m just a figurehead these days.”

  “Hardly,” he said. Robb Brindle and Tasia Tamblyn could manage the business, but Rlinda would never be a mere figurehead of Kett Shipping.

  After a handshake, they had set up a date for her Voracious Curiosity to fly to Sheol to pick up a large shipment of materials to show off to the Roamer clans. For the upcoming election, the timing was important, though it had to look casual. . . .

  Now, Iswander descended using assisted piloting, as thermal disturbances shook his cruiser from side to side. The cracks below were like arterial wounds that bled molten metals and incinerated rock. His extraction facilities rode the hot seas, plated with ultra-heat-resistant materials so they could scoop up fresh material. Alloy processors and fabrication chambers in Tower Two created exotic metal foams and films, useful mixtures with polymers and ceramics.

  He steered clear of the lava plumes that had so excited Pannebaker and aimed for the cluster of extraction structures, the three towers, and the anchored landing platform. His cruiser settled into place, and he waited while a heat tunnel extended so he could transfer into the shielded admin tower.

  Pannebaker met him in the office on the high deck of Tower One, grinning as he handed Iswander a report, anxious to be rid of it. He was a competent engineer with management abilities, but no great fondness for administrative work—in other words, the best kind of deputy.

  Pannebaker had silvery hair and intense eyes, as well as a mustache that framed his mouth all the way down to his chin. Every day in the Sheol lava mines excited him like an adrenaline rush, and his extreme competence sometimes led him to take unwarranted risks for the sheer fun of it.

  “The shipment of ingots is ready for Captain Kett, sir—our purest, most expensive stuff,” Pannebaker said. “I also included some exotic materials that’ll really impress the Roamers.”

  “I already impressed the Roamers with my speech at Newstation. Speaker Seward set the bar low by accomplishing, uh . . . nothing. And Sam Ricks certainly doesn’t have impressive credentials.”

  Not being a Roamer himself, Pannebaker was not interested in clan politics. “Whatever you say, Chief. But you’ll want to look at those revised geological reports. Your consultants made a few optimistic assumptions that might not be valid. Heat plumes are rising up—which is great because it adds purer material to the mix, but temperatures are outside the norms. With the construction materials we used, we’re awfully close to tolerances. Could be something to worry about if it gets hotter.”

  Iswander wondered if Garrison Reeves had legitimate concerns after all—which reminded him, “Any word yet from Elisa?”

  “None, Chief. Isn’t she taking personal time?”

  “Yes, but I thought she’d be back by now.” Iswander was worried about her. Elisa would never take so many days away from work unless the situation was serious. Although her husband was an adequate worker, Iswander had plenty of adequate workers. But he could not replace Elisa Reeves. He hoped her family problems didn’t interfere with her job performance.

  Fortunately, his own wife never posed any problems, never interfered, never demanded too much. He had made the terms clear when he arranged the marriage: he needed a woman who was willing to operate within those parameters.

  Now that he was back on Sheol, Iswander considered going to the residence deck to see his family, greet his son (who revered his father), give Londa a peck on the cheek, answer her few rote questions . . . but he could do that later. Right now, he wanted to settle into his office—which, truth be told, felt more like home than the residence deck did anyway.

  When Iswander reviewed the geological reports from Pannebaker, he began to frown. The tidal stresses were higher than any previously recorded in eighteen years of study. His consultants had made no mention of that, perhaps because they knew he didn’t want them to find any problems. Had they missed something?

  Garrison claimed to have uncovered second-and third-order oscillations in the orbiting planetary fragments, which would begin a cycle that brought the two halves even closer, a minuscule difference in an astronomical sense, but enough to increase the tidal heating. Magma flowed upward at a higher temperature, heat plu
mes intensified, quakes struck more frequently—all of which had implications for the stability of his processing structures.

  Although Lee Iswander didn’t waste money on unnecessary protective measures, he did have a healthy respect for the inherent hazards here. The Sheol facility was dangerous by its very nature, but he had made sure it was designed with enough heat shielding to offer adequate—though not overboard foolish—protection. He had taken reasonable measures. Nevertheless, he would have to look into this in greater depth—discreetly, so as not to cause a panic. Garrison had already caused some uneasiness among the workers, and these fluctuations would only make the anxiety worse.

  Pannebaker cheerfully interrupted him over the comm. “The Voracious Curiosity is here a day early, Chief. Captain Kett says she wanted to catch you sleeping.”

  “I rarely sleep,” Iswander said. “Good thing our shipment is ready.”

  “And best of all—a fourth lava geyser just erupted! Our sensors picked up the heat spike, and it’s jetting high, definitely visible from the landing platform.”

  “Why is that good news?”

  “Because it’s spectacular. Captain Kett will see it as she comes in. She loves a good show. She’s brought Tasia Tamblyn and Robb Brindle along to handle the business details.”

  Iswander nodded to himself. Considering the erupting geysers, maybe it was a good thing the Curiosity had arrived a day early. With luck, her ship could fly off to Newstation with its cargo before anything dangerous or embarrassing happened here.

  THIRTEEN

  ZOE ALAKIS

  Every time Tom Rom returned from a voyage, he delivered vital material for the Pergamus research teams—scientifically valuable data, symptom records and case studies, potential treatments, pharmaceuticals, or cutting-edge equipment that had not yet been released on the market. Zoe Alakis wanted everything. At the very least he always brought her something interesting.