She showed images of the swollen nodules drifting about in the empty dark between the stars, thousands of them. “This is where I tracked Garrison in his stolen ship, a large cluster of strange nodules. Maybe organic, maybe not. They aren’t in any database. He tried to hide among them, but look how dangerous they are.”
She displayed the furious inferno as the bloaters detonated, one after another, a chain reaction that swelled outward like multiple supernovas. The blast flung her ship on the crest of the shock wave. She didn’t tell him that the initial energy discharge had come from her own ship.
Iswander blinked, as if reminded of the erupting fires on Sheol. He reached out to clutch her hand, a surprisingly warm and compassionate grip. “I’m sorry about your son, Elisa.”
She pulled her hand away and called up another file. She had to make him see. “That isn’t all, sir. Those bloaters…” She felt a pang as she used the word Seth had made up. “I analyzed a few outliers that survived the explosion. They were scattered across great distances, like bread crumbs in a line, and once I knew what to look for, I scanned far and wide—and discovered a second cluster of bloaters near the fringe of an uninhabited star system. I suspect there are other conglomerations as well. I left a marker at the new site—we can go back whenever we like.”
Iswander looked at the images of the exotic bloaters, dull brownish green nodules barely lit by the distant spray of starlight. “But what are they? Why should I care?”
“Because, sir, they will save you, make you fabulously rich.” Elisa’s eyes shone, and now she clasped his hand, trying to push her intensity upon him so that she reignited his own drive. “The bloaters are filled with ekti!”
THIRTY-EIGHT
GARRISON REEVES
The battered Iswander Industries ship made its way to the rubble belt that had once been the heart of Roamer government. Thanks to Garrison’s falling out with his father, Seth had never been to Rendezvous, despite its significance to the clans. The boy seemed nervous as they approached the main asteroid. “Does my grandfather even know who I am?”
Garrison tried to keep his voice light, though his heart felt heavy. “Of course he knows who you are! And I’m sure he’s anxious to meet you.” He reached over to tousle his son’s hair.
Seth ducked his head away. “But do you think they’ll be glad to see us?”
“Definitely.” This time, it was harder to sound convincing.
He was sorry to see how quickly Seth recovered from the loss of his mother. The boy had cried a great deal during the long flight from the explosion site in deep space, but now he seemed to be denying or ignoring what had happened. Children were resilient, but Garrison thought this was more than that. Maybe at Rendezvous his son would feel more settled, for a while.
Garrison had paid little attention to his last sight of the asteroid cluster when he turned his back on the place eleven years ago to run off with Elisa Enturi. Although clan Reeves had worked hard in the intervening years, he saw now that they had not made a great deal of progress in rebuilding Rendezvous. The project was just too big for them.
Garrison had been a teenager during the Elemental War, and he remembered the frantic evacuation of Rendezvous as the Earth Defense Forces bombarded the connected asteroids, a devastating act that had turned the clans into outlaws. From that point, Garrison had lived with his family in place after place, scrounging a living, surviving without “frivolous comforts,” as Olaf called them. After the end of the war, when the proud clans vowed to rebuild Rendezvous, Olaf Reeves championed the task as if it were a sacred duty.
But the scope of the reconstruction project became plain over the years. The members of clan Reeves spent years maneuvering the dispersed asteroids back together, connecting them with struts and walkways, excavating the collapsed grottos that had been meeting chambers.
Once the clans joined the new Confederation, however, Newstation became a more viable government and trade center. Rendezvous had originally been established as a mere stopping-over point for the generation ship Kanaka. Aside from its historical significance and being a place close to every Roamer’s heart, the system was out of the way, with no particular resources. Speaker Del Kellum had suggested a fresh start for the Roamers in a more hospitable place.
As the other clans lost interest and withdrew their support for rebuilding Rendezvous, calling the project a boondoggle, Olaf Reeves grew more intractable and more determined, though he refused to accept any outside assistance—especially not the Iswander Industries modules Garrison had tried to deliver.
“Stubborn” seemed an insufficient word to describe his father.
Garrison sighed as he flew the battered ship toward the main docking asteroid, steeling himself before he flipped on the comm. “Hello, Rendezvous, this is Garrison Reeves, on my way home. My son is with me. If you’ve got a place for us to stay for a few days, we have a story to tell.”
The thin face of his younger brother Dale appeared on the comm screen. His voice was almost a yelp. “Garrison! We thought you were dead on Sheol.”
Garrison’s heart lurched. “Dead on Sheol?” He had been cut off from all communications since fleeing the lava-processing facility. “What happened?”
“A disaster. The whole facility—lava eruptions! Hundreds killed.”
Seth’s eyes went wide as they filled with tears, and Garrison felt a hot coal in his chest. “You were right, Dad.”
“Not the way I wanted to be.”
After he landed the stolen Iswander ship—which he had never bothered to name, though Roamers always named their ships—several clan members gathered in the rock-walled bay to meet him. Clan engineers came forward to fuel the ship and check out the systems, as if this were any other vessel landing for a brief stopover.
A squat, swarthy man with the incongruous name of Bjorn eyed the discolorations on the hull. “You’re awfully hard on your ship, Garrison.”
“Not my ship.”
“Then you’re awfully hard on other people’s ships. We’ll fix what needs to be fixed, patch what needs to be patched. How long are you staying?”
Garrison didn’t have an answer for that. “Depends.” Depends on the reception we get. Depends on what happened at Sheol. Depends on what I decide to do from now on.
Bjorn scratched a bristly cheek. “I just need to know how much time we have to complete repairs.”
“As long as you need,” Dale said as he entered the bay. His younger brother had a high forehead and a pointed chin that was now covered with a wispy beard, as if he were trying to imitate his father’s extravagant whiskers, but came up far short—as he did in most things. He stepped forward to shake Garrison’s hand, then enfolded him in an awkward embrace. “Your timing is perfect—we’re all packing up to leave.”
“Leave?” Garrison couldn’t believe that his father would finally give up on the insurmountable task of reconstructing Rendezvous. “Going where?”
Seth broke in, pale and anxious. “Tell us what happened at Sheol?”
Dale grinned down. “This is your boy? Sendra and I have two sons of our own, five and nine. You knew that, right? We have plenty of time to catch up and…” He looked uncertain. “I, uh, should let Father tell you everything. He’ll be glad to see you.”
Garrison raised his eyebrows. “Will he, Dale?”
Shy and awkward, his brother avoided the answer. “He’ll certainly want to talk with you.”
As they left the hangar bay, they encountered a slender and pretty woman with strawberry-blond hair. Standing inside the rock-walled corridor, she directed an intense gaze toward Garrison. Dale said stupidly, “You remember Sendra, my wife?”