The Dark Between The Stars

SIX
GARRISON REEVES

In uncharted, empty space, the ship floated among the mysterious globules. Two days of unthreatening quiet gave Garrison and Seth freedom to just relax. They played games, and Garrison told him about Roamer history and other planets they would someday see. It was the sort of family life he’d hoped to have with Elisa.

They had plenty of fuel and supplies, but he knew he and Seth couldn’t stay here forever. He had to decide where to go next and what new life they would make. Although the knot in his stomach didn’t go away, it loosened a little.

The strange bloaters drifted around them, occasionally sparkling, moving onward in a big cluster like slumbering space jellyfish.

With no communication from the outside, Garrison had no way of knowing what might be happening at Sheol. He would prefer to be wrong about his fears for the lava-processing operations. And if nothing happened, Elisa would use that to prove his paranoid irresponsibility and claim that he had willfully stolen her son. Garrison knew his wife could be vindictive if she wanted to be. And after what he had done, she would definitely want to be.

During their downtime, Seth studied different types of compies in the ship’s databases, following his fascination with the different models. He could rattle off the capabilities of Friendly compies, Listener compies, Teacher compies, Domestic compies, Worker compies, and numerous subcategories. He even knew the specs of the outlawed Soldier compies, which had caused such disastrous mayhem during the Elemental War. Thanks to those fears, many people had stopped using compies.

Seth, however, could talk on and on about the specialized programming and how new fail-safes had been implemented so there was no longer anything to worry about. Despite these facts, Seth had little interaction with compies. His mother refused to let him have one, and Lee Iswander used only a few of them at his Sheol operations.

As they drifted along, Seth called up the research from well-known compy scientists Orli Covitz and her husband Matthew Freling. Over the years, the couple had championed the cause of compies, helping to rehabilitate them, trying to prove that fears and hesitations were no longer valid. They took in and rehabilitated compies abandoned by their owners.

Seth nudged his father to sit next to him when he played video reports Orli Covitz had recorded. He particularly liked an entertaining set of educational loops that Orli and her compy DD produced. Although DD was a Friendly rather than a Teacher model, he served as a proper and unintentionally amusing foil when Orli explained ways that compies were helpful and loyal. Seth found DD charming, and had mentioned several times that he wanted a compy of his own just like DD.

On the educational loop, Garrison watched the attractive woman in her midthirties, surrounded by compies like a naturalist surrounded by her favorite animals, clearly loving them. Orli had an easy smile and conveyed a childlike sense of wonder as she showed off her compies. She seemed so earnest, both delighted and dedicated. Her sweetness captured Garrison’s attention because she was such a striking contrast to Elisa…

Seth went to the cockpit to do a regular systems check, as Garrison had shown him. Garrison, meanwhile, remained alert, observing the odd nodules as they shifted around. The things were beautiful and exotic, possibly organic, possibly some bizarre natural phenomenon.

His father would have given them a cursory glance and then gone back to work. Olaf Reeves had very little patience for distractions or any opinions other than his own.

Garrison feared that his most viable alternative would be to return with Seth to the bustling safety of clan Reeves. His family would take the two of them in, but it would involve an apology from Garrison and lengthy rebukes from the stern clan leader. He would have to slide himself back under Olaf’s thumb and let Seth be raised in that oppressive, close-minded environment. The members of clan Reeves were mockingly referred to as “Retroamers” by the modern and open clans at the new government center of Newstation. Garrison didn’t accept his family’s scorn for “clans tainted by civilization.”

No, he would find something else. He had enough skills and interests that he could apply for any number of useful jobs; his resourceful Roamer background guaranteed that at least. A good job was all he wanted, and the best environment for his son.

Seth called from the cockpit. “There’s static on the screens, Dad—a sort of pulse every thirty seconds. You think it’s a signal from the bloaters? Maybe they’re trying to communicate with us.”

Garrison came forward to look. On the screen, he saw a tiny blip, a flicker of static. Seth counted, and when he reached thirty, the blip appeared again. “See!”

Garrison used a ship diagnostic sensor to pinpoint the origin. “It’s not coming from the bloaters. They’re all around us, but this signal is coming from our hull.” A chill ran down his spine—some kind of a tracer? “I’d better go outside and check it out.”

“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.”