The Dark Between The Stars

ELEVEN
ELISA REEVES

Though her ship was faster than Garrison’s, the search was tedious. Elisa raced along the course her husband had set, making up for lost time in open space. But she had to wait for the ping from her bread crumb tracking devices, had to find the little beacon buoy that was automatically dropped off each time he changed course. Then she had to take readings, adjust her course, and head off again. It was so time-consuming.

Yet she didn’t consider giving up or letting him get away with her son—not for a minute.

She had found three bread crumbs already, and Garrison’s staggering path made no sense. If she could figure out where he was taking Seth, she could head there and intercept him. But his flight was erratic, zigzagging across space and out into nowhere. Why would he do that, unless he was trying to hide from her? Maybe he guessed that she was hunting for him. Yes, in some ways Garrison was a smart man. She clenched her jaw. In some ways, though, he was a fool.

Drifting near another bread crumb buoy, she projected where he was headed now. Garrison didn’t seem to be aiming for any particular star system, known Roamer outpost, Confederation planet, or even an Ildiran splinter colony. She activated her stardrive and headed after him again.

Her personal mission had consumed her for days. Though she’d remembered to bring work along—documents to review, processes to audit and, if possible, streamline—she hadn’t been able to focus on her job since racing away from Sheol. And she resented Garrison for that too.

By now, Lee Iswander would be making his case to the Roamer clans at Newstation. Normally, in his absence, Elisa would have taken charge of the lava-processing operations, but since she had to deal with this nonsense, he would have given the responsibility to Alec Pannebaker. She should have been his first choice.

Iswander couldn’t be allowed to think Elisa was not reliable, that she was one of “those” professional women who couldn’t balance family matters with business necessities. She didn’t want to be seen like that. She had worked too hard, devoted too much of her life, made too many sacrifices to get where she was.

All along she had thought Garrison was her partner with the same goals, who saw the same intensely bright Guiding Star—to use his silly Roamer metaphor.

While cruising along, not knowing how soon she might encounter the next shifting point, Elisa called up her personal image library and scrolled through to find a photo of Seth (not that she had forgotten what her own child looked like, thank you!). The first photo she found was a portrait of herself and Garrison, smiling as they held the one-year-old boy. Happy times. Elisa frowned when she saw it, recognizing the delusion in her eyes.

Without thinking, she deleted the image, scrolled through the library, and found another one of Garrison and Seth laughing as they ate some gelatinous pasta meal they had cooked together. She deleted the second image as well. When she finally took Seth back, she did not want her son to be able to view and remember enjoyable times with his father.

She found several more images of Garrison and Seth at different ages. Then two of herself and Garrison. She deleted them. Elisa didn’t need to be taunted by her mistakes. Even more photos of Garrison and Seth. What did he do, spend all of his time staging images? No wonder he hadn’t advanced far in his job.

But she couldn’t find any warm photos of just herself and Seth. And since Garrison was so keen to take images, he must have intentionally left her out. She finally uncovered several images of her son alone, which she kept. She studied the shape of Seth’s nose, the curve of his smile, tried to determine how much of his features looked like her. She saw hints of Garrison there too—that couldn’t be helped. Seth was her son, regardless. Elisa displayed the images on the cockpit screens. She could always use her imagination to place herself there alongside him, or splice some images together. It would be good enough.

She realized that she hadn’t kept photo images of her parents or brothers either… not for years.

Elisa Enturi had grown up in a lower middle-class family on Earth, small home, two younger brothers, her parents both factory workers. After the faeros attack destroyed the Moon, everyone with the ability and resources had evacuated Earth to flee the bombardment of meteors. But that was beyond the means of people like them, her father had said. Elisa huddled with her family and hoped for the best as impacts peppered the Earth, wiping out several major cities. She felt so helpless—and she never wanted to feel that way again.

The Enturi family seemed incapable of getting ahead, and Elisa was told she couldn’t have the finer things she wanted. Her mother said, “At least we know what the future holds for us. We’ll content ourselves with what we have.”

Elisa had no interest in being content. Her brothers were brought up to believe they would never be anything more than factory workers, would probably never even leave Earth. Her parents told Elisa the same thing, but she turned a deaf ear. While in school, she got a job to earn extra money for herself and for her family, and also to gain work experience so she could be ahead of her classmates.

But all the money she contributed into the family kitty disappeared into occasional meals in nice restaurants, tickets to shows that Elisa didn’t want to see. So she took a second job and deposited those wages into a private account in order to pay for her college tuition.

She didn’t believe that nice things should be out of their reach. She looked for opportunities and found them. She impressed people, who gave her even more chances, jobs, projects, and quick bonuses, and she started to save additional money. She took the late shifts whenever necessary. She volunteered for extra hours. She made herself useful, and then invaluable.

She worked hard at both jobs and maintained her grades, much to her brothers’ astonishment. They had told her she couldn’t possibly do both (probably because they didn’t want to be pressured to take even a single job while they went to school). Because of her grades, Elisa was accepted into a decent college, though she kept living at home to save on expenses.

When the family vehicle broke down because her father hadn’t maintained it, Elisa was the only one who had the money to make repairs. Her mother had just drained the family account by buying an expensive teak dining set unlike any of their other furnishings. (She justified her extravagant purchase, tearfully, “Can’t I ever have something nice, just for me? For once?”)

One of Elisa’s brothers got arrested for vandalizing a clothing shop run by the parents of a girl he didn’t like, and only Elisa had the funds to bail him out. (She did suggest selling the teak dining room set to raise bail—a perfectly practical idea, but it made her mother angry.)

After a succession of other family financial crises, which she had been forced to rectify, Elisa finally marched into the living room one evening, her face flushed.

She had lived with them all her life and had grown blind to their habits. Elisa was shocked to realize the obvious—that neither her brothers, nor her father or mother ever put in the slightest bit of extra work than they had to. They ducked when someone asked for a volunteer. They grumbled about being forced to put in overtime, despite the extra pay. They actually liked being idle and sat around on their days off “relaxing”—sleeping in, or amusing themselves with stupid games.

For Elisa a “day off” was a chance to catch up and get ahead on other goals. She took night classes, she self-studied, and as she grew more successful, her family often commented that she was just lucky. Once, when she got a raise, one of her brothers even sneered that she must be sleeping with the boss. They couldn’t imagine that she had earned it, that it was possible to get ahead.

“You all deserve your situation!” she said. “You’re lazy, unambitious, disappointing. If any of you pushed yourselves, tried harder, and worked to be something, then you could pull us all up higher. Instead, you do nothing and just resent those who have more than you do.”

Her parents looked deeply insulted.

Elisa shook her head. “And all this time I’ve enabled you. I see that. You’re on your own now. Sink or swim, it’s up to you.”

She took the remaining money from her account, only a fraction of what it should have been without the drain from her family’s constant needs, and left home. She started from scratch—a frightening prospect at first, but she found it much easier without the dead weight of her family holding her back.

She went to work for Lee Iswander, a man whose attitude she admired, and she hitched her star to him. Then she met Garrison Reeves, a member of an important Roamer clan, who needed help. He said all the right things, offered her a chance to make a huge investment in a major business deal for Iswander. They could help each other.

She also thought Garrison was a kindred spirit. Together, they could have become powerful and important business leaders. But he had let her down too, failing to step up to the plate when an opportunity presented itself, and causing trouble with the industrialist who had made her whole career possible.

And now he’d run off with her son.

Her ship stopped at the next bread crumb tracker, and she reoriented her nav system, studying the new course. “Where the hell are you going?” she muttered to herself. “That’s the middle of nowhere. Didn’t you even bother to make a plan?”

When she arrived and scanned for signs of Garrison’s stolen ship, Elisa found that the area was not empty at all. She encountered filmy greenish brown spheres brought together through gravity or some kind of willful motion. The cluster looked like a miniature galaxy, with hundreds of other globules floating around the periphery. Trails of outliers extended across the emptiness, marking a mysterious trail through the void.

She wondered if Garrison had come here on purpose. Did he intend to hide this strange discovery from her and from Iswander Industries? The magnetic tracking device had stopped transmitting, but as she extended her sensors, she detected his ship.

Found you!

Yes, Garrison was here. That was what mattered.