Cold Welcome

^{CHAPTER TWELVE}

Rafe Dunbarger looked up when his office door opened. His sister Penny had dressed in the exact shade of blue that best suited her, a flowered scarf at her neck. She closed the door behind her, thumbed the lock, and walked across the carpet to stand on the other side of his desk, a challenging look on her face.

“I’m busy,” Rafe said. He knew he had been scowling, glaring even, before she came in, and hoped he’d adjusted his expression quickly enough.

“Is it Ky?” Penny asked. Rafe looked at her, but staring his sister down did not work these days. “I saw the latest news reports,” she went on. “They’ve ended all searches; they’re saying survival is highly unlikely.”

“Stella told me not to come,” Rafe said. He unclenched his hands deliberately. “I could have gone—”

“And done what?” Penny shook her head. “You know what your old friend Gary said—”

Rafe snorted.

“He told you that you lacked the skills to rescue us. Why do you think you could do anything for Ky, on a planet you’ve never visited, a foreign state, where you have no connections—?”

“Stella’s there,” Rafe said.

“And do you think she and Ky’s family are doing nothing? Her aunt or great-aunt or whoever she is, that’s head of their military?”

Rafe took in a long breath and shoved all he wanted to say back down. Penny meant to be helpful. She was his little sister. She couldn’t possibly understand.

Except she could, and he knew it, and the unfortunate effect of being Ky’s—whatever he was—had been a contamination of his insouciant attitude toward truth with her absolute white-hot honesty. At least in some things. At least where it mattered.

“They are. I’m sure they are. But there’s something they don’t know, and you don’t know, about Ky and me. And I can’t tell you; it’s too dangerous.”

“If you mean the implant ansible, I do know.”

“What?” Terror and outrage met. “You can’t possibly—”

“I saw you use it, remember? You tried all sorts of ways to hide what you were doing, but that’s all it could be—”

“Penny, never talk about that. Never.” He felt cold sweat trickling down his backbone. “It could be fatal. For me, for Ky—”

“Of course I won’t. You were the prototype, right? And somehow she got hold of one—”

“The less you know, the better.” He scrubbed his face with one hand. “I shouldn’t even—the thing is—I know she’s alive. I can’t communicate, but I can tell if the implant’s still working. Which it wouldn’t be if she were dead.”

“Well, then?” She folded her arms.

“So—I need to be in range to get a heading from it. I can’t do that from here. And the report says her skullphone’s blocked—no signal they can detect—so either there’s some solid jamming going on, or she’s dead, but she can’t be dead because the implant’s still on.” He looked up at her. “I check every day. I have to know, Penny.”

Her expression this time was tender, more motherly than sisterly. “There’s only one way you can go, you know.”

“Go? What do you mean?”

She sat down in the chair across from him, leaning forward a little. “Arrange for someone to run ISC while you’re gone. That would be me, the only one who should be running this monster, other than you. Just step down, name me as your successor—”

“You!”

“You’re the one who told me once I had more head for the business than you.”

“Yes, but—but you’re—”

“Younger. Prettier. And have more friends on the Board than you do. They won’t worry about me falling in love with Stella or Ky Vatta, for instance.”

“But are you ready? After all that—”

“Shall we ask my therapist? Rafe, I know you started me working here as a kind of therapy—but you also know I’m long past that now. I haven’t been to my therapist for over a year now; we sometimes run into each other socially, but that’s all. You’re not stuck here anymore, Rafe, if you don’t want to be.”

“And you think I should go.”

Penny shrugged. “I think you should decide whether running ISC is the life you want. You’ve said before you hated it; you took it when no one else could have, and you saved both ISC—to the extent anyone could—and Nexus itself. But I don’t see you inhabiting the big office with the big windows forever, and I’ve seen you looking more and more dour these last months. You enjoyed your freedom before. I expect you’d like it again.”

“But Mother—”

“She’s doing well enough in Port Bergson. She has her friends and we talk several times a week. She doesn’t want to move back to the north, she says. So—if you want to go, go.” She tilted her head. “I would never push you out—”

Rafe laughed in spite of himself, a bubble of unreasonable joy rising through his chest. “But you are, Pennyluck. That’s exactly what you’re doing. And—you’re probably right. No, you are right. I never liked this job, even when I did it well—”

“Which you did, brother mine.” She smiled at him, the smile he’d seen her use on others: approval of his cooperation.

“And just the thought of getting off this stuffy planet—but what about the house?” The house their parents had given them, when they moved.

“We sell it. You sell it and take the money—I’ve got plenty, and I like my apartment. We’ll visit it one last time together, pick out anything we want. I’ll send Mother that damned potted tree she was crazy about; in Port Bergson it can grow outside.”

“Penny—it’s none of my business, but will you ever marry again, do you think?”

She flushed a little. “Maybe. But not for another two years. Frieda said I should wait five years before marrying. I am, as I think you know, seeing someone, but casually.”

Nothing would be casual with the heir to ISC’s CEO, but Penny knew that already.

“So,” she went on, “how about it? What’s on your schedule the rest of the day? We could go out to the house now, after asking Emil to call a Board meeting for… let’s see… two days from now? Three?”

Rafe raised his brows with intent. “You don’t waste time, do you?”

“No. I learned not to wait,” Penny said. For a moment memory darkened her gaze; then it lightened again. “Besides—I do want to be the boss. This office will suit me.” Her glance around it was somewhere between predatory and proprietary.

And Ky was somewhere—surely still alive—and if not, if she died before he could find her, he would have the whole wide universe again, anywhere he wanted to go anytime he felt like going.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s do it. I’ve nothing on today that can’t wait a day; I finished the quarterlies last night.” He signaled Emil in the outer office and leaned back in his chair. He felt lighter already.

That lasted only until he was once more in his room at their house with all the things his parents had saved. Clothes. Books. That fateful sword with which his eleven-year-old self had killed a man. He came out of the room after a few minutes only to meet Penny coming out of hers, hands as empty as his.

“Maybe we should just—” she began.

“Burn the whole thing down?”

“No. Not the musical instruments. Not the library. But there’s nothing of mine from up here that I want.”

“Me neither, and yet I don’t want strangers digging through it.” He called up a business directory. “Documents destruction first.”

Within a few days the house was empty, put up for sale; the real estate agent would have it professionally cleaned and prepped under Penny’s supervision. The Board had agreed to let Penny take over for the time being, and granted Rafe a leave of absence with pay for six months. He didn’t explain why, but “the strain of the past months” covered it. Penny agreed not to announce the change in her title until he reported from Slotter Key. “But must you go in disguise?” she asked, watching him prep for departure.

“It’s safer,” Rafe said. “You don’t want ISC involved in whatever trouble has hit Vatta again; neither would the Board. And if I have to transfer through some of the places I’ve been, there might be legal complications.”

“You were in trouble,” Penny said.

“Let’s just say I wasn’t always a perfect citizen,” Rafe said. “And not all the bodies stayed buried.”

She laughed. “I’m not as tame as you think, Rafe. I think I’d have liked knowing you then.”

“I’m glad you didn’t.” He kissed her forehead. “I hope you enjoy running ISC as much as I expect to enjoy being free of it.”