“I’ll stay in here and monitor,” Seth said. He couldn’t resist adding, “You know, if you let me have a compy, he could be a copilot too. Orli Covitz would let us have one of the compies from her lab—maybe even DD.”
“Right now, you’re my copilot,” Garrison said. “Keep watch.”
He donned the flexible environment suit with easy familiarity. Roamers spent half their childhoods in a spacesuit. They knew how to fix things, tinker with all sorts of machinery, rig life support from the most unlikely assemblage of scraps. For a long time, that was the only way the outlaw clans could survive, because they got no help from anyone else. But they had proved themselves indispensable when they took over Ildiran skymining operations, harvesting the stardrive fuel ekti from gas-giant planets.
His father insisted that Roamers were forgetting their heritage by being assimilated into the Confederation, but as Garrison fastened the fittings on his suit and went swiftly through the safety checks, he knew it was something he could never forget. It was part of him. Standing in the airlock, he clicked his helmet comm. “I’ll be back in a little while.”
“I’ve got the ship, Dad.”
Garrison cycled through and emerged into disorienting open space. He had worked outside at the damaged Rendezvous site for years, reconnecting support girders, stringing access tubes from one asteroid to another. Although Roamers were renowned for their innovation, clan Reeves workers insisted on rebuilding the old seat of government exactly according to the original plan. Olaf refused to consider improvements or modifications. “Rendezvous served us for centuries, and the clans did just fine,” his father said. “I wouldn’t presume that I know more than they did—and neither should you.”
As Garrison moved away from the airlock hatch, he looked up and around him. The eerie bloaters were dimly lit by far-off starlight, as well as the glow from the running lights of the stolen Iswander ship. The swollen spheres hovered in silence, fascinating and unknowable.
Seth’s voice appeared in his helmet. “Find anything? I’m watching the blips—every thirty seconds.”
“Still looking.” He held on to hull protrusions and worked his way along the ship inch by inch. His hand scanner picked up signals, zeroing in on the pulse. It was coming from beneath the engines.
Like cosmic soap bubbles, the bloaters shifted, rearranged their positions.
He jetted down, maneuvered over to the exhaust cones. Now that he knew what to look for, he easily found a magnetic tracker, a standard cluster device that dropped out tiny signal buoys. Garrison knew how such things worked: no signal could travel while a ship moved faster than the speed of light, but each time they shut down the stardrive and reset course, this insidious tracking device would drop a marker with the appropriate information.
Elisa must have put one on every Iswander ship.
Garrison cursed her in silence, aware that Seth was listening on the helmet comm. Breathing heavily, he detached and deactivated the tracker—resisting the urge to smash it, since that would do no good. Instead, he just let it drift away.
High above, a glint of light distracted him, and several bloaters sparkled again. One nucleus flared with a bright flash. A moment later another one lit up in a different part of the cluster. Like a succession of firecrackers going off, two more flickered in some kind of pattern or signal, followed by three more sparking nearby.
Then, a surge of light poured out of the nearest bloater. The flash washed over him and the entire ship, overloading his suit systems. His diagnostic screen went dark, as if the pulse of energy was too much for the sensors to handle. Static crackled through the helmet comm before he was left in deafening silence.
He struggled to make his way back to the airlock. Because of the overload, his life support was failing. He had enough left to get inside, but without power assists from the suit’s servomotors, he found it much more difficult to move.
With a crackle, the helmet comm came back on as a backup battery surrendered enough juice for him to hear a signal. “Dad, half our systems just shut down!”
Garrison crawled along the ship’s hull, grabbing protrusions to pull himself to the airlock. He hoped the controls still functioned. “Coming back inside.” He hammered the activation panel, got only a faint blip in response, then nothing.
Around him, the bloaters were quiescent again. Garrison could already feel deep cold settling in through his suit, though the insulation should have protected him for much longer.
His breathing sounded loud in his helmet. With gloved hands he fumbled with the access plate beneath the useless controls and managed to trigger the manual override, forcing open the airlock. Garrison pulled himself inside, manually sealed the outer door, then used the chamber’s emergency canisters for an air dump that equalized the pressure.
Worried, Seth grabbed him as he reentered the main cabin, helping unseal the helmet. Garrison reassured him. “I’m all right… but I wouldn’t want to be outside during another one of those flare-things.”
“Did you find what caused the static signal?”
“Yes, it was…” He paused, pondering how much he should say. “It was a tracker placed on our ship back at Sheol. Could be just a standard precaution on Iswander ships.”
The boy frowned. “Or maybe Mother put it there.”
Garrison hadn’t realized it before, but Seth always called him “Dad,” while he referred to Elisa with the more formal “Mother.”
Garrison was careful to avoid an outright lie. “I don’t know who put it there, but it’s gone now.” He cracked his knuckles. “Better get to work. After that flash, we’ve got repairs to make.” Though the repairs could take days, Garrison made up his mind that they should not stay here any longer than was necessary.
Seth couldn’t resist the opportunity to add, “Of course, it would be a lot easier if we had a compy to help us.”
SEVEN
LEE ISWANDER
Managing the dangerous operations on Sheol was a challenge, but becoming Speaker for the Roamer clans would be an even greater one. With Elisa Reeves gone on her own mission, Iswander left the lava-processing facility in Deputy Alec Pannebaker’s capable hands and headed off to Newstation.
Iswander never stopped looking at the big picture. Considering business possibilities in the Confederation, opportunities that even the most imaginative Roamers had only begun to explore, he concluded that the united clans needed someone with vision to lead them into the future. He could fill that role.
He guided his personal cruiser toward the bustling center of Roamer government—and his future headquarters, if all went well. His cruiser was equipped with the best Ildiran stardrive, a well-appointed interior, and redundant systems, though it looked like any normal ship. Iswander had plenty of wealth, but found no advantage in flaunting it.
The destruction of Rendezvous had scattered the clans, and for years the Roamers were held together by a frayed tapestry of family alliances and habits. After the end of the Elemental War, clan Reeves and their stubborn leader persisted in trying to rebuild the old asteroid complex, but the task was pointless and few people paid attention to them. Lee Iswander certainly didn’t.
In re-forming their government, the Roamer clans constructed Newstation as their cultural and administrative center. The new space habitat orbited a planet named Auridia, which had a working Klikiss transportal into the alien transportation network that linked numerous worlds. Iswander approved of the choice.
His cruiser glided toward the toroidal space complex. With its bright silver hull, Newstation was an old-fashioned but serviceable design, spokes radiating from a central hub out to a main ring. It rotated like a giant wheel in space above the bleak and rocky planet, which held little of interest for settlers.