The Dark Between The Stars

ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN
GARRISON REEVES

After refueling the Prodigal Son at Newstation, Garrison followed the coordinates Jess and Cesca had given him. He couldn’t understand why Elisa would take Seth so far out into uninhabited space, with no nearby planets or moons. That wasn’t like her. What possible operations could Lee Iswander have established out here?

Garrison had heard of the man’s lucrative new stardrive fuel business. The CDF had purchased a great deal of ekti-X for their fleet, provided by Iswander Industries. He had paid attention only because of Iswander’s name.

When the Prodigal Son arrived at the obscure coordinates, Garrison looked around in astonishment at another grouping of bloaters, just like the cluster he and Seth had discovered out in the emptiness between the stars. Like the one that had exploded in such a titanic detonation…

What did Elisa—and Lee Iswander—want with the strange nodules?

As he eased the ship nearer to the cluster, he noticed the artificial lights. At higher magnification he spotted the dispersed industrial complex: vessels, tankers, modular habitats, loading platforms, pumping facilities—all bearing the logo of Iswander Industries.

He remembered how the bloaters had exploded, the flame front, the shock wave, the devastating fire. The drifting sacks were filled with some volatile substance… and now an industrial operation had been set up here?

Garrison narrowed his eyes and put the pieces together as he saw pumping stations connected to the bloater spheres like giant mosquitoes. Beyond the lights of the complex he saw drifting deflated membranes. Elisa must have told the industrialist about the bloaters after the Sheol catastrophe, and he had built a factory complex out here where no one could find him.

Lee Iswander had found a tremendous source of stardrive fuel.

And Elisa had brought Seth to another dangerous place. Hadn’t she learned? Hadn’t Iswander learned?

As anger welled up inside him, Garrison flew in toward the operations. Even if Iswander had taken a lesson from Sheol and improved his safety systems, Garrison didn’t want his son there. Not with Elisa, not with Iswander, not with those explosive things…

He flew in close before announcing himself. By now, someone must have picked up his ship, but there was substantial traffic in the vicinity, and the Prodigal Son was a typical cargo vessel. In fact, the ship’s ID beacon might still be in the Iswander Industries database, since he’d taken the craft from the Sheol yards.

He flipped on the comm. “This is Garrison Reeves, and you have something of mine.” He didn’t care about the bloaters or the ekti-extraction operations, and he doubted Lee Iswander would fight to keep a ten-year-old boy in his operations. Elisa liked the idea of winning, of taking the boy away from him, but business operations would preoccupy her. Garrison hoped he could just take his son and leave—but he knew that hope was naïve.

He heard a buzz of garbled chatter on the comm, scrambled transmissions. Five ships raced toward him, closing in and surrounding him. A voice came over his comm. “This is Iswander Security. Mr. Reeves, you are trespassing.”

“I didn’t see any signs posted,” he said. “And you have my boy.”

After another flurry of chatter, he recognized the voice of Alec Pannebaker. “Garrison, we wish you hadn’t come here. I have orders from Mr. Iswander to bring you to the admin module.”

“Good, that’s where I wanted to go anyway.”

The ships flanking him were not exactly security vessels. Garrison doubted they were even armed, but they made sure he flew toward the docking module. Garrison realized, with a pang of sadness, they were the same design of modules he had bought from Iswander for his clan’s use at Rendezvous, the ones Olaf Reeves had discarded.

After he landed the Prodigal Son inside a bay, his heart was pounding. Lee Iswander stood there waiting for him. He wore business attire, kept his hands at his sides; his expression was more disappointed than angry, as if this was the last problem he wanted to deal with today. “Mr. Reeves, I see you’re well. You must be relieved that you got away from Sheol before the disaster happened.”

“I’d be more relieved if you had listened to me back there,” he said. “More than fifteen hundred people would still be alive.”

“I can’t argue with your point, Mr. Reeves. Believe me, I’ve suffered from it, and my conscience still weighs heavy on me, but we have to move on. You saw these ekti-extraction operations. I have implemented thorough safety procedures, believe me.”

“I’m not here about your operations. I came to retrieve my son. I intend to take him and leave.”

Iswander frowned. “I’m afraid that may be problematic.”

Garrison felt suddenly cold. “Why? Has something happened to Seth?”

“Not the boy, Mr. Reeves—it’s you. It’s this place. It’s what you’ve seen. Follow me.”

Garrison followed him through a connector into the main admin module. The first thing he saw was Seth standing with an older boy and a woman he believed to be Iswander’s wife.

Seth’s face lit up. “Dad! I hoped you would come!” He bounded off the deck and shot toward Garrison in the minimal gravity. Iswander’s wife reached out, trying to grab Seth’s shoulder, but he slipped away. He careened into his father like a cannonball.

Garrison wrapped his arms around his son. They both caught their balance.

“As you can see, the boy is unharmed,” Iswander said.

Garrison held on to his son. They were going to have to pry Seth away from him. “A child belongs with his family—in a safe place.”

Elisa swept onto the admin deck like a thunderstorm. “How dare you suggest I would hurt my son!”

“Good,” Iswander said with an odd smile. “I see we’re fundamentally in agreement.” He looked at her as if he expected her to agree automatically.

“You should never have found this place, Garrison,” Elisa said. “We can’t let you leave.”

Iswander was trying to calm them both. “No need to be melodramatic, Elisa. I’m interested in a clear solution. There’s got to be an answer that works best for everybody, so let’s solve this. Garrison has shown himself to be a good worker, and he is technically still an employee of Iswander Industries. He could stay here, work the ekti operations, live in our habitation module—separate quarters, of course, unless you manage to reconcile?” She made a low angry noise. “And that way you can both be with your boy. No need to tear a family apart.”

Garrison didn’t like that idea at all, but Seth wore a hopeful expression.

Iswander continued. “And unlike the lava-processing facility on Sheol, these are just simple ekti operations. Despite the volatility of the bloaters, we have solid safety procedures in place. It’s all perfectly safe.” He seemed pleased to have solved the problem.

Then alarms began to ring. Sensor screens in the admin deck lit up, and the ops crewmembers hurried to respond.

Elisa snapped, “I bet he led someone here! Who is it, Garrison? Roamers? CDF? Mercenaries?”

“I came alone.”

Wide-eyed, Seth stood close to his father. Then with a yelp he pawed at his pocket and yanked out a small vial—the sample of wental water Jess and Cesca had given him. Now it glowed bright, flaring with a pale blue illumination. “It’s hot and cold at the same time!”

He let go of it and stared down at his tingling fingers. The vial fell gradually in the module’s minimal gravity. The contained wental light flared bright, then went out like a snuffed candle just before the vial clinked onto the deck and bounced back up in a slow ricochet.

One of the sensor techs hunched over a screen. “This doesn’t make any sense! The stars are disappearing—it’s like a crack in space. A dark nebula.”

Garrison’s eyes widened. Through the broad windowports of the admin module, he watched a shadow cloud unfold as something emerged—huge, black hexagonal cylinders, like ebony crystals extruded from a poisoned seed of night. Having seen the report of the disastrous CDF engagement at Plumas, he knew exactly what this was.

“Please listen to me this time, Mr. Iswander! You have to evacuate,” Garrison said. “That’s a shadow cloud. The Shana Rei. The last one devastated both the CDF and the Solar Navy, then crushed the entire ice moon of Plumas, wiped out clan Tamblyn’s water mines there. They’ll do the same here!”

More alarms sounded throughout the ekti-extraction facilities. The dark nebula expanded, exploding blackness across space.