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 tracking 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?”