He anchored his armored body against full acceleration. Leaving the frozen moon behind and escaping the rubble of their base, the robot ships fled into space.

CHAPTER.

37.

ELISA REEVES.

Elisa spent four days stranded alone in space at the site of the exploded bloaters. She worked on her ship, rerouting power around the damaged systems to bypass any that were not absolutely vital. And she did it herself.

Garrison had always been arrogantly proud of Roamer ingenuity; he bragged about how his people could take the most unlikely hodgepodge of components and make them work like magic-the proverbial spit, chewing gum, and bandages. Elisa found it ridiculous.

Lee Iswander was also a Roamer, but instead of relying on his pilots being able to make duct-tape-and-twine repairs, Iswander Industries simply provided each ship with adequate spare parts in case anything should fail. It seemed a much more rational way to prepare for emergencies. Elisa had worked for days swapping out life-support modules, navigation circuits, and damaged engine controls.

Eventually, her ship was ready to fly again.

During the flight away from the site, where most of the bloaters had been destroyed, she pondered and rehearsed exactly how she was going to tell Iswander what had happened. Her mission had not turned out the way she'd expected, but at least she wasn't returning empty-handed-thanks to her intrepid investigations. She had studied two of the surviving bloaters and couldn't wait to tell Lee Iswander what she had found.

She didn't want Iswander's pity for the tragic death of her son as well as, she supposed, her husband. But once the industrialist learned what she had discovered, he would surely promote her (after acknowledging the painful loss of her family). This find was worth an incalculable fortune.

When she reached the Sheol system, the binary planet looked like a glowing ember in space, cracked and bleeding with lava. Just like always. The lack of space traffic surprised her, though. She heard none of the constant comm chatter of cargo ships hauling exotic metal-polymer materials or shipments of ingots. She surfed the channels, expecting to hear the usual drone of conversation from smelter barge crews and the control towers, even Alec Pannebaker showing off some stupid stunt. Their perimeter systems must have detected her, but she received no ID request. Odd.

She transmitted her queries, trying to find someone who would answer, and finally received a reply-but the transmission did not come from the admin tower down on the fiery surface; rather, the response was from a small satellite station in orbit that received bulk shipments and transferred supplies down to the main facility.

It was Lee Iswander's voice. She couldn't believe he would be manning the comm himself. By now, she had expected he would be the new Speaker for the Roamer clans.

"Elisa, you came back!" He sounded strange, shaken ... relieved? "Did you retrieve your son?"

"No, he ... he's dead. Garrison put him in a hazardous situation. He was reckless. He ... they were both lost in a massive explosion."

Iswander groaned and said in a much quieter voice, "Haven't we had enough deaths already?"

Elisa felt a sudden chill, now even more alarmed that the lava-processing facilities were so silent and empty. "What happened? Where is everyone on Sheol?"

"Everything happened. The facilities are gone. Hundreds dead-fifteen hundred and forty-three. The survivors are at Newstation, but I had to come back here, see if I could salvage anything. It seemed the best place." He didn't sound like himself at all. He seemed broken.

Though Elisa was ready to explode with questions, she quelled them, forced a businesslike calm. "I'm docking soon. You can tell me about it face-to-face."

She guided her ship into the orbiting transfer station, and hers was one of only four ships in the bay; half of the lights had been dimmed.

She carried images of the bloater cluster, the record of the explosions, and her quick analysis. Rushing back to Sheol, she had been bursting with excitement over her news-enough to temporarily overshadow the loss of her son. But when she presented herself in the control chamber, she was astonished to see Lee Iswander's face. He looked exhausted, aged. His skin tone was grayish, and he had shadows around his eyes.

"I'm glad to have one supporter back," he said. "You don't know how much that means to me."

Alec Pannebaker swept into the control center, and his usual smile looked more relieved than excited. "Elisa! Well, that's one step closer to digging our way out of this hole."

"We're in space," grumbled Iswander's son. "Everything's a hole."

Arden's mother wrapped her arm around the boy's shoulders and pulled him close, though he resisted. "I told you it'll be all right. Your father's had ups and downs before. We'll get through this-we just have to be strong."

Elisa looked Iswander straight in the eye. "No matter what happened, sir, I'm here to provide anything you might need for Iswander Industries. You have my full commitment ... now that my son is gone." Her voice cracked at the end.

Now that I have no distractions. No family obligations. Nothing else to divert me.

"We'll need it," he said. "But I'm afraid I've lost everything."

Iswander explained the disaster in the lava-processing facilities, how he was being accused of using "irresponsible safety margins." Elisa had also dismissed Garrison's Chicken Little fears. Well, he hadn't lived to see his fears proved right.

Iswander continued. "Only two dozen workers followed me back here, in hopes of salvaging something from the wreckage. Not necessarily because they have faith in me-they may not have anyplace else to go."

When Iswander looked at her, his reddened eyes and his intense but distant stare made her stomach knot. He said, "When we came back here, I didn't expect anyone to be alive, but the station had recorded transmissions from the smelter barges below, and some survivors in one shielded chamber in Tower Two that remained intact after the collapse. Those people knew they were going to die as the temperature rose and the insulation failed."

His voice sounded hollow and distant, as if he had scrubbed and scrubbed to remove all emotion from it, but the stains remained. "They recorded farewell messages, said goodbye to their wives or husbands, families, friends. Some of them cursed me, some of them seemed resigned. Sooner or later they all died, and most of them not quickly. In the last seconds, they-" His voice hitched, and he glanced at his son. "Arden heard some of the messages. I should have sent him away sooner."

Elisa stood straight, determined. "Do I need to listen to them? Anything valuable in the last words?"

"I deleted the messages. All of them. Couldn't risk anyone else hearing that."

She thought for a moment, then nodded. "Good decision, sir."

He hung his head. "I'm ruined. I have assets from my other industries, and I've buried funds in banks on scattered planets, but it won't do me much good. After this debacle, no one would partner with me again."

Elisa had never heard him like this. "So ... you came back to lie low?"

"We're not hiding-we're reassessing." Iswander gave Elisa a self-deprecating smile. "Oh, and I lost the election to become Speaker, in case you were wondering. I got one vote."

"I wouldn't vote against you," she said, and decided it was time. "In fact, I've found a new venture for you, something no other Roamer knows about. Are you willing to start from scratch?"

"Don't have much choice," Iswander said. "And I've done it before."

Now she saw a faint light in the back of his eyes again. Good.

She displayed the file she had brought. After the explosions and the loss of her son, she had felt defeated as well, but there was too much at stake. Even if she was wounded from her own loss, she had to be strong in order to help Lee Iswander.

She showed images of the swollen nodules drifting about in the empty dark between the stars, thousands of them. "This is where I tracked Garrison in his stolen ship, a large cluster of strange nodules. Maybe organic, maybe not. They aren't in any database. He tried to hide among them, but look how dangerous they are."

She displayed the furious inferno as the bloaters detonated, one after another, a chain reaction that swelled outward like multiple supernovas. The blast flung her ship on the crest of the shock wave. She didn't tell him that the initial energy discharge had come from her own ship.

Iswander blinked, as if reminded of the erupting fires on Sheol. He reached out to clutch her hand, a surprisingly warm and compassionate grip. "I'm sorry about your son, Elisa."

She pulled her hand away and called up another file. She had to make him see. "That isn't all, sir. Those bloaters..." She felt a pang as she used the word Seth had made up. "I analyzed a few outliers that survived the explosion. They were scattered across great distances, like bread crumbs in a line, and once I knew what to look for, I scanned far and wide-and discovered a second cluster of bloaters near the fringe of an uninhabited star system. I suspect there are other conglomerations as well. I left a marker at the new site-we can go back whenever we like."

Iswander looked at the images of the exotic bloaters, dull brownish green nodules barely lit by the distant spray of starlight. "But what are they? Why should I care?"

"Because, sir, they will save you, make you fabulously rich." Elisa's eyes shone, and now she clasped his hand, trying to push her intensity upon him so that she reignited his own drive. "The bloaters are filled with ekti!"

CHAPTER.

38.

GARRISON REEVES.

The battered Iswander Industries ship made its way to the rubble belt that had once been the heart of Roamer government. Thanks to Garrison's falling out with his father, Seth had never been to Rendezvous, despite its significance to the clans. The boy seemed nervous as they approached the main asteroid. "Does my grandfather even know who I am?"

Garrison tried to keep his voice light, though his heart felt heavy. "Of course he knows who you are! And I'm sure he's anxious to meet you." He reached over to tousle his son's hair.

Seth ducked his head away. "But do you think they'll be glad to see us?"

"Definitely." This time, it was harder to sound convincing.

He was sorry to see how quickly Seth recovered from the loss of his mother. The boy had cried a great deal during the long flight from the explosion site in deep space, but now he seemed to be denying or ignoring what had happened. Children were resilient, but Garrison thought this was more than that. Maybe at Rendezvous his son would feel more settled, for a while.

Garrison had paid little attention to his last sight of the asteroid cluster when he turned his back on the place eleven years ago to run off with Elisa Enturi. Although clan Reeves had worked hard in the intervening years, he saw now that they had not made a great deal of progress in rebuilding Rendezvous. The project was just too big for them.

Garrison had been a teenager during the Elemental War, and he remembered the frantic evacuation of Rendezvous as the Earth Defense Forces bombarded the connected asteroids, a devastating act that had turned the clans into outlaws. From that point, Garrison had lived with his family in place after place, scrounging a living, surviving without "frivolous comforts," as Olaf called them. After the end of the war, when the proud clans vowed to rebuild Rendezvous, Olaf Reeves championed the task as if it were a sacred duty.

But the scope of the reconstruction project became plain over the years. The members of clan Reeves spent years maneuvering the dispersed asteroids back together, connecting them with struts and walkways, excavating the collapsed grottos that had been meeting chambers.

Once the clans joined the new Confederation, however, Newstation became a more viable government and trade center. Rendezvous had originally been established as a mere stopping-over point for the generation ship Kanaka. Aside from its historical significance and being a place close to every Roamer's heart, the system was out of the way, with no particular resources. Speaker Del Kellum had suggested a fresh start for the Roamers in a more hospitable place.

As the other clans lost interest and withdrew their support for rebuilding Rendezvous, calling the project a boondoggle, Olaf Reeves grew more intractable and more determined, though he refused to accept any outside assistance-especially not the Iswander Industries modules Garrison had tried to deliver.

"Stubborn" seemed an insufficient word to describe his father.

Garrison sighed as he flew the battered ship toward the main docking asteroid, steeling himself before he flipped on the comm. "Hello, Rendezvous, this is Garrison Reeves, on my way home. My son is with me. If you've got a place for us to stay for a few days, we have a story to tell."

The thin face of his younger brother Dale appeared on the comm screen. His voice was almost a yelp. "Garrison! We thought you were dead on Sheol."

Garrison's heart lurched. "Dead on Sheol?" He had been cut off from all communications since fleeing the lava-processing facility. "What happened?"

"A disaster. The whole facility-lava eruptions! Hundreds killed."

Seth's eyes went wide as they filled with tears, and Garrison felt a hot coal in his chest. "You were right, Dad."

"Not the way I wanted to be."

After he landed the stolen Iswander ship-which he had never bothered to name, though Roamers always named their ships-several clan members gathered in the rock-walled bay to meet him. Clan engineers came forward to fuel the ship and check out the systems, as if this were any other vessel landing for a brief stopover.

A squat, swarthy man with the incongruous name of Bjorn eyed the discolorations on the hull. "You're awfully hard on your ship, Garrison."

"Not my ship."

"Then you're awfully hard on other people's ships. We'll fix what needs to be fixed, patch what needs to be patched. How long are you staying?"

Garrison didn't have an answer for that. "Depends." Depends on the reception we get. Depends on what happened at Sheol. Depends on what I decide to do from now on.

Bjorn scratched a bristly cheek. "I just need to know how much time we have to complete repairs."

"As long as you need," Dale said as he entered the bay. His younger brother had a high forehead and a pointed chin that was now covered with a wispy beard, as if he were trying to imitate his father's extravagant whiskers, but came up far short-as he did in most things. He stepped forward to shake Garrison's hand, then enfolded him in an awkward embrace. "Your timing is perfect-we're all packing up to leave."

"Leave?" Garrison couldn't believe that his father would finally give up on the insurmountable task of reconstructing Rendezvous. "Going where?"

Seth broke in, pale and anxious. "Tell us what happened at Sheol?"

Dale grinned down. "This is your boy? Sendra and I have two sons of our own, five and nine. You knew that, right? We have plenty of time to catch up and..." He looked uncertain. "I, uh, should let Father tell you everything. He'll be glad to see you."

Garrison raised his eyebrows "Will he, Dale?"

Shy and awkward, his brother avoided the answer. "He'll certainly want to talk with you."

As they left the hangar bay, they encountered a slender and pretty woman with strawberry-blond hair. Standing inside the rock-walled corridor, she directed an intense gaze toward Garrison. Dale said stupidly, "You remember Sendra, my wife?"

"He better not have forgotten me." She came forward to kiss Garrison on the cheek, which embarrassed Dale more than it did Garrison.

Sendra Detemer should have been Garrison's wife; everyone knew that. They were a perfect match, attracted to each other, and the marriage should have joined the two clans. But after he had left Rendezvous with Elisa, Sendra accepted Dale's marriage proposal. She was smart, pretty, and followed her own interests. His brother knew full well that he was merely the second choice. And now, after what had happened with Elisa, Garrison was painfully reminded of the bad choice he had made.

With Dale standing right beside her, Sendra gave Garrison a gaze full of meanings, regrets, questions, and not-so-subtle flirtation. You could've had me, she seemed to be thinking. "And how is your wife?" she asked.

Dale hissed, "Sendra-they came from Sheol."

She looked mortified at what she had said. "Oh, I'm so sorry!"

Garrison lowered his head. "Elisa wasn't there either."

The boy blurted out, "My mother died in an explosion out in space."