Hidden Empire (14 page)
F
ar from the private meeting chambers in Hansa headquarters, Raymond Aguerra scrounged for dinner in a small apartment on the
eighteenth floor of a mass dwelling complex.
Trying to be optimistic, he scratched his dark hair and stared at the supplies in their cupboards and the cold preservation
unit. He would have to scrape the bottom of his imagination to make these ingredients resemble a satisfying and nutritious
meal for himself and his family.
The counters were cluttered with small boxes, toys, secondhand electronic gadgets, hand-made potholders and keepsake printouts.
No amount of care or housekeeping could make the cramped apartment look more organized. Raymond’s two youngest brothers, nine-year-old
Carlos and six-year-old Michael, chased each other pretending to be monsters, then fell into a laughing heap, wrestling on
the kitchen floor.
Raymond playfully nudged them out of the way with his foot. “If you make me spill your food, you’ll have to eat it off the
floor.”
“Might taste better that way.” Carlos giggled as he tried to dodge Raymond’s swift kick, which landed on the boy’s bony rear
end.
Their mother, Rita, rested in her chair in the main room, half watching an entertainment program but deriving little enjoyment
from it. Years of practice allowed her to ignore the roughhousing. Next to her, ten-year-old Rory complained about being forced
to do his homework while his younger brothers were able to play.
Raymond felt guilty about sending the rowdy boys into the other room, where they might bother their mother. Rita Aguerra had
already worked a long day and would get up well before dawn to get to her second job. She didn’t so much sit in her comfortable
chair as collapse into it, sagging within the seat’s broad contours. Raymond didn’t doubt she would be asleep by the time
he finished making dinner, unless she’d drunk too many cups of sour black coffee before returning home.
Over the main door frame hung a crucifix and some old dry palm fronds from the previous year’s Palm Sunday. She dutifully
attended Mass each week, though occasionally she watched broadcasts of official Unison Church services, which seemed bland
and passionless to her. The Archfather, with his beard and fancy robes, was supposed to be the impartial spokesman for all
faiths, as determined by the united representatives of the world’s major beliefs, but to Rita, the old Catholic Church seemed
much more religious.
Whenever he looked at his mother, Raymond’s heart ached. Rita Aguerra’s long dark hair was now streaked with gray. In her
younger days, she had spent hours brushing it, keeping the raven locks shiny, but now she usually just pulled her hair back
in a ponytail or twisted it into a bun. She’d been a beauty once—Raymond could still see it in the softening shape of her
face—though now she had no time to maintain her looks and no hope of finding renewed romance. Hard work and too many responsibilities
had turned her into a stocky, muscular matron.
Rita worked as a clerk for an off-world merchandising organization by day and as a waitress by night. A steady diet of coffee
and cigarettes gave her the false energy to get through the day and the jitters that kept her awake during the few hours she
should have been able to rest at night.
Every time she came home, though, Rita still managed to engulf each of her four boys in a heavy-armed hug, smothering them
with her rose-scented perfume. The strong woman held her family together by the thinnest of threads, and now Raymond was old
enough that she could lay some of the burden on his shoulders. He took it from her without complaint.
One night a month earlier, the two of them had sat up alone at the wobbly dining table. Rory, Carlos, and Michael had been
hustled off to bed and tucked in, where they would continue to goof off for half an hour before finally dozing. Looking across
at Raymond, Rita had lit another cigarette, something she rarely did when the younger boys were awake. The fact that his mother
did so made Raymond realize that she considered him an adult, the man of her house since Esteban Aguerra had run off.
She had told him about it, giving details he had always wondered about but had been too afraid to ask. “I might not be the
easiest person to get along with, especially for a happy-go-lucky man like your father, but I’ve always tried to live up to
my responsibilities and do the best I can. You boys are my treasures, and your father might have been a diamond in the rough…
but it was very much in the rough. The night he left, we had a shouting match, one of our worst arguments ever. I can’t even
remember why it was important… I had bought him a new pair of shoes, or something.”
One hand held the cigarette, but the other clenched into a fist. “I gave him one, maybe two, black eyes before he ran off.
That’s when he signed up for the colony ship and went off to Ramah.”
“Do you ever wonder if he regretted leaving us, Mama?”
Rita had shrugged. “He regretted leaving his sons, maybe, because he was such a proud man. But I doubt he’s ever thought about
me again.”
Since their discussion that night, Raymond had always wondered…
Now, he dished up a concoction of macaroni, soup-pax, and some minced-up bits of salami that looked as if it wouldn’t last
much longer in the preserving unit. He took a whiff, frowned, then added some powdery cheese and pronounced the dish finished.
“Come and eat. If it gets cold, I’ll have to serve it as leftovers tomorrow.”
“I thought it was leftovers tonight,” Carlos said.
“I can still send you to bed without supper.”
The boys gathered around to grab plates of scooped casserole. Rita took her own small share, hiding a chuckle at his culinary
audacity, and settled down to eat. She insisted it was one of the best meals she’d ever eaten.
Later, after Rita had crawled back to her chair to rest, and perhaps to sleep, Raymond put his little brothers to bed by himself.
He made sure they took baths and brushed their teeth, ignoring their complaints and rambunctious misbehavior; he was immune
to it by now. By the time he returned to the main room, his mother had indeed drifted off into a light slumber.
Smiling, he rearranged the bouquet of flowers he had snatched during King Frederick’s celebration for the new sun at Oncier.
After bringing the blooms home, he had found an empty food package and converted it into a makeshift vase. Rita insisted that
flowers were a waste of money, but her glowing expression made Raymond want to find a way to obtain a bouquet at least once
a week, no matter what the cost.
He thought about rousing his mother so that he could help her to bed, but decided to let her sleep where she was. He didn’t
want her to miss a moment of rest. Now, with their apartment quiet, Raymond quickly changed clothes, knowing he had only a
few hours before he needed to be back to help his mother get off to work and his little brothers prepare for school.
He would run the streets, check out a few all-night factories, maybe a craft shop. He could usually find a few hours’ work—performing
odd jobs or dirty labor that no one else wanted to do—in return for cash or sometimes even fresh food. His late-night errands
were all that allowed them the discretionary money for clothing or occasional treats.
While his mother slept, Raymond slipped out of the apartment, careful to lock up behind him. His head ached and his eyes were
scratchy with weariness, but he would catch a nap later. They would get by—provided he didn’t stop working. He took the elevator
down eighteen floors to street level and ventured out into the city.
It was the last time he ever saw his family.
A
whiplash of flares licked out from the roiling ocean of the hot star, slow-moving, beautiful… and deadly. “Get closer,” the
eager engineer said to Jess Tamblyn, unable to tear his eyes from the spectacle. “We’ve got to get a lot closer.”
Though he was sweating, Jess trusted the other man’s intuition. “If that’s what we have to do.” He sent a brief, silent prayer
to the Guiding Star, then did as the other man asked.
Kotto Okiah had no more than a theoretical conception of genuine dangers, but he did understand tolerances and risks better
than any other Roamer. Kotto had already designed and established four successful extreme-environment settlements. If the
Speaker’s youngest son hadn’t known what he was doing, tens of thousands of Roamers would already have died.
As the shielded vessel gingerly approached the solar storm, Kotto alternated his attention between the filtered window and
the specific-band scanners. With short, spiky brown hair and eyes like bright gray-blue buttons, the engineer looked like
a child inundated with remarkable presents. “There! You can see the planet… not as bad as I’d feared.”
Jess noted the sparkle of rocky Isperos orbiting close to the turbulent star, embedded in the densest part of the corona.
“Not bad?
Kotto, it looks like an ember in a blast furnace.”
Distracted by his readings, the engineer said, “In some ways that’s an advantage.”
An advantage
. No one had ever accused Kotto Okiah of being a pessimist.
After leaving Ross at the Golgen skymine, Jess had taken his ekti cargo escort to a Hansa distribution complex, then made
his way to the asteroid cluster of Rendezvous. He had duties to perform for his family’s water-mining operations, clan obligations,
business contacts and meetings with other clan leaders… and his brother’s gifts to deliver to Cesca Peroni.
But Cesca had not yet returned from her mission with Speaker Okiah. While Jess could easily have arranged for someone else
to present Ross’s tokens to his fiancée, he did not want to waste a legitimate excuse to spend a few private moments with
her, even if the choice went against his better judgment. He knew he shouldn’t feel this way, after he had denied himself
so much…
Jess had lingered at the Rendezvous complex for several days, waiting for Cesca. But once it began to grow obvious to others
that he was stalling, he couldn’t let anyone suspect his feelings. He had no choice but to schedule his return to Plumas.
When Kotto Okiah had asked for a willing pilot to take him to Isperos on a survey mission, Jess had leaped at the opportunity…
not that any other Roamer was the least bit interested in volunteering.
Now, the reconnaissance ship circled the hot planet, fighting the sun’s massive gravity before it passed into the blessed
cone of shadow behind Isperos. Jess looked down at the baked and glassy surface, seeing fissures caused by heat stresses.
Lava seas spilled across the continents, smoothing the scars of impact craters, then hardened into a skin of rock during the
cold months of darkness.
“Kotto, you are insane to want to build a Roamer colony here.”
The young engineer stared avidly at the blistered world. “Look at the metals, though. You don’t find resources like that just
anywhere. Lighter-element impurities are all boiled away. Solar-wind bombardment has created plenty of new isotopes for the
taking.” He tapped his chin with a finger. “If we used fiber insulation, double-walled containment, vacuum honeycombed structural
support, we could easily keep colony integrity.…” His voice trailed off as he considered the possibilities.
From an early age, the youngest of Jhy Okiah’s sons had demonstrated his imaginative and quirky understanding of low-gravity
construction. He loved to push the envelope with solutions to difficult survival problems. Kotto had spent more than a decade
working in Del Kellum’s hidden shipyards within the rings of Osquivel and had twice developed improved ekti reactors for skymines.
Despite his successes, and occasional failures, Kotto was not arrogant or stubborn. He was filled with an insatiable curiosity.
As a boy, Kotto had proven quite a challenge for the Governess compy UR, who raised many Roamer children at Rendezvous. The
curious boy had caused the maternal robot much grief, not because he misbehaved, but because he constantly asked questions
and poked and prodded and dismantled things—which he only rarely managed to reassemble. As an adult, though, Kotto had repeatedly
proved his genius, to the benefit of many clans.
Jess took the vessel low over the melted and rehardened ground. Seeing the utter confidence on the engineer’s face, he began
to believe in the potential here. After all, Roamers had disproved the impossible time and again.
“Roamers have this belief they can do anything,” Cesca had once said to Jess, “given the resources and time.”
“An unconventional people do not need conventional wisdom,” he said.
He and Cesca had been alone in her rock-walled office chamber in the Rendezvous cluster. It was an innocent meeting to discuss
water and oxygen supplies clan Tamblyn would deliver from Plumas. They had kept their distance from each other, though their
eyes remained locked. It seemed as if they were separated by an elastic barrier that both forced them apart and pulled them
together.
“Even so, time can’t solve all problems,” Jess said. He had taken half a step forward, disguising his movement with a hand
gesture, as if to emphasize what he was saying. Then he froze, remembering all the expectations that weighed him down.
