Was Once a Hero

chapter Four





In the morning, everything seemed less amusing. Fenaday made his next call with a certain amount of dread. After he identified himself, Shasti Rainhell’s image appeared on the screen. Mandela had called her his pet amazon and she looked the part. Jade-green eyes looked back at him from a perfectly symmetrical face of imperious beauty. Her ivory skin contrasted with night-black hair. She wore a judo gi and had evidently been working out. Not that she’d broken a sweat in Mars’ low gravity.

“Found other work?” he asked.

Shasti gave back her usual impassive gaze. Steady, impenetrable, betraying little. Like a statue, he thought, the eyes reflect light, but not warmth or depth. Shasti was all surfaces. In the two years he had known her, she revealed almost nothing of herself or her past.

“Haven’t looked,” she replied in a surprisingly musical voice. “Have you left the privateer business? Should I start?”

Fenaday sighed. “I am into a new business that is very much an endgame, one way or another. If it works, your and my problems, the ones about the ship and money, end. If it doesn’t, the problems end anyway.”

Shasti looked at him without speaking for some seconds. He could almost feel the distance grow. “What have you gotten yourself into?”

“Meet me at the ship in an hour and I’ll fill you in.”

For a terrible second, he thought she might say no.

“Should I bring anyone?” she asked.

Fenaday thought for a second. He had high turnover among officers and crew for one reason or another. He didn’t trust most of them. “Do you know where the Exec went?”

“To jail,” she replied. “There was a manslaughter charge waiting for him here. Evidently Romola isn’t his real name.”

“How distressing,” he replied. “Just come yourself then.”

She nodded, giving him her most enigmatic look. The screen faded.

Fenaday leaned back with a sigh. Shasti was in. His odds of survival had just doubled. Unfortunately, twice zero was still zero.

*****

An hour after his call, Shasti Rainhell’s two-meter-plus shadow fell on the gantry leading to the silent Sidhe. The frigate lay in a takeoff cradle, secured by the Marsport Authority. Shasti gave them a wide berth, having already passed a security checkpoint and as always, wary of police. A few dock workers labored on the cradle or the ship. One, she noted, appeared to be watching her sidelong. Men often did. It was not unusual for one to be surreptitious about it. Her size and obvious strength kept catcalls stilled, but she sensed other intentions and trusted her instincts.

Shasti paused on the catwalk leading to the ship. Leaning back against the slim metal rail she looked up, pretending to study the ship. Not that she needed to. The vessel had been her home since her escape from Dua-Denlenn cutthroats.

Sidhe sat with her four hundred and eighty meter, blood-red hull engulfed in the launch cradle’s embrace. Wings, set far back on the hull, held two black Wildcat fighters. Far over her head, hung the turrets for the chain guns. Sidhe’s big punch, the mass acceleration driver, ran the length of the horizontal interior axis of the ship. Her crew of two-hundred fifty was largely dispersed through Mars by now.

The spot she’d stopped at allowed her to study her watcher from the corner of her eye. He was using some hand tools to work on the scaffolding, bolting and unbolting the same piece of decking. Confed police, she thought, and that means big trouble. Maybe coming was a mistake. What the hell has Fenaday done now? And why do I keep staying to save his ass?

When she had seen enough of the man’s face to remember it, Shasti started back up the gantry. A personnel lift took her up to the main gangway. She used her ship’s officer pass to enter the secured airlocks and boarded the turbovator. The door to the spade-shaped bridge opened.

*****

Fenaday looked up from his command chair as Shasti walked onto the bridge and cocked an eyebrow at him. He didn’t rise or reach out a hand. Shasti hated to be touched. For a while, he’d thought her uninterested in men, until she proved otherwise one spectacular night.

“I’ve checked the ship out,” he said. “I’ve got every anti-bugging and white noise device we have working,” he said, “I think it’s secure. No guarantees.”

“In this or anything else in life,” she replied. “I assume you didn’t bring me here for a sparring rematch.” She dropped into a bridge chair at her security station with an easy grace.

“No, no rematch,” he replied. It took him ten minutes to lay out the details of the meetings with Duna.

“Enshar? Why would you even consider this voyage?” she asked, looking at him as if he’d gone mad.

“I had another visitor later, a man, calling himself Mandela. He’s with Confed Intelligence. He knows about the day we met. Someone talked.”

Shasti did not yell, scream or curse the unfairness of the world. “Inevitable,” she shrugged. “Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead. I’m surprised it didn’t come out earlier.”

“There were too many eyes,” he agreed, standing and stretching. “You never would tell me how you ended up a prisoner on a Dua-Denlenn pirate vessel. Shoddy treatment for the man who rescued you.”

She cocked her head. “You had no idea I was aboard. You were after a bounty as always.”

“And for my troubles, you nearly brained me, ran off my guards and shot up my hold full of valuable prisoners. Next thing I know, my landing force is running, I’m looking at a pile of dead Dua-Denlenns and the barrel of my own pistol.”

Shasti leaned back in her chair looking pleased with herself. “It showed you why you needed to hire me. As for the rest, my solution took care of the need for paroles.”

“Yep,” Fenaday agreed. “Less paperwork, clearly. I suppose you had your reasons.”

Something flickered in her eyes, quickly suppressed. “I was working as a bodyguard,” she finally said, “when the Dua-Denlenn struck my employer’s compound. Someone hated her to have commissioned such an expensive raid. The cook drugged my food and they took me alive. My patron and her children died badly. I had to watch.”

“My only regret about the Dua-Denlenn,” she continued, “is that I didn’t have time to kill them slowly. Torture is part of the Dua-Denlenn culture, almost an art form. I’d have made each one of them into a masterpiece. But with you there, I had to settle for just dead.”

He looked at her sidewise. It was the most she’d ever said on the subject. “I don’t disagree,” he replied, “but it put us in the trap we’re in.” He drew a deep breath and came to a sudden decision. “Or at least, it’s the trap I’m in. I’m too well known to run and where would I go? I put most of my family into bankruptcy when I sold off the Shamrock. I have some money in a small emergency fund. It’s not enough to lift ship, but it’s enough for you to run.”

Shasti stared at him. “You’d do that, for me? They’ll jail you on that basis alone.”

He shrugged. “There are worse things.”

She stared at him, then shook her head. “No, I’ll stick with you.”

“Shasti, I’m going to die on Enshar. There’s no chance. It’s a fool’s errand. They’re sending my ship because they have to send something and no one cares if we die.”

To his surprise, she gave a small smile. It was the first he could recall. “If we don’t survive,” she said. “I’ll never have a chance to meet this wife of yours. A woman who could so obsess a man might teach me a thing or two.”

He laughed ruefully. “If that happens, I may end up with some explaining to do.”

“Is that why you stopped?” she asked, catching him off guard. Her expression closed up again; the glimpse into the depths suddenly shuttered.

Now he was in uncharted space. “I don’t know,” he sighed. “I thought our affair meant I was giving up. After all the things I did to start my search, I can’t do that. A lot of people were hurt when I sold the company. My cousin’s father shot himself... Then there’s all I’ve done since. Maybe some of the people I’ve dealt with had it coming, but that doesn’t seem to square somehow. If I give up, then I did it all for nothing and I’m not sure I can live with that.

“There’s something else,” he hesitated, then plowed ahead. “I wasn’t sure if you were with me because you felt you needed to be...”

She shook her head; her long, glossy, black hair shimmered.

A knot released in his chest. He hadn’t realized it until then, but it was important to him that it had been more than business. Vanity, he supposed. “I’m not free to give more. I felt bad about that.”

Shasti smiled again. It seemed the day would be full of such surprises.

“You’re an anachronism, Robert, a throwback to the days of white knights. Even now, with Enshar staring us in the face, you’re thinking of ways to keep looking for her. Why? Tell me why?”

He looked at her blankly for a second. “She’s my wife.”

“Wife,” she said with surprising bitterness, “just a word. It tells me nothing, Robert. You’ve searched for years for a woman whose ship disappeared in unknown space. When the ship doesn’t come back, the crew doesn’t.”

“Yes,” he replied. “I know all the sayings. Your life is the ship’s plus the air in your suit. I’ve heard them all.”

“Yet, you continue,” she said.

He looked at her intent face and gave a small sad smile. “Do you know what I was before I met Lisa?”

Shasti shook her head.

“Lonely,” he said. “Living a life without purpose or passion. Never had to struggle for anything, everything was handed to me because of my family’s wealth. I never knew if someone loved my wallet or me.

“Then I met Lisa. She wasn’t impressed with the name Fenaday. I found I had to be more than a spoiled rich kid to keep her. She told me once that I was her world. That’s a lot to live up to.”

“When her ship disappeared, I wasn’t prepared to just stand there and take it. I wasn’t prepared to be reasonable.

“I may not be the toughest or the brightest. God knows nothing I’d done before prepared me for this life. I’d be dead a couple of times if it wasn’t for you and dumb luck. What I am though,” he added with a grin, “is what the Irish are best at, stubborn and unreasonable.”

She stared in frustrated incomprehension. “Words and words. They mean something to you, born-human. To me, created and engineered, they convey nothing. The meaning seeps out of them. All I have left is the sounds.”

Fenaday looked at her tentatively. Created? Engineered? Her past was something she’d never discussed, a place barred and warded. Today, Shasti seemed so different, so much more approachable. “You’ve never told me about your life on Olympia. All I know is the same wild rumors—”

She stood abruptly.

Too far, he thought. Damn. He waited, dreading that she would storm out.

After a long, dark moment, Shasti sat back down, as if she’d forgotten the reason for rising. She dusted imaginary lint from her sleeve.

“Sorry,” he ventured.

She nodded, not looking at him.

“For now,” she said, before the silence could lengthen again, “since neither of us wants to spend the rest of our lives in a cell, we need to focus on how to do this and survive. You know they’re watching the ship.”

“Yes,” he said, equally anxious to get back to neutral territory. “I’ve spotted several of them on the external monitors. As obvious as they are being, I suspect they want us to know they are there.”

“We’ll need a crew,” she said. “We are not going to find a lot of people in our situation.”

“How about you taking the executive slot?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t have the navigation math or the certifications but I wouldn’t want the last fool back even if he wasn’t locked up.”

“No, I don’t want him back either,” Fenaday mused. “I’m promised a number of people by this Mandela, specialists he said, and better than what we could find, but still...”

“We don’t want them in charge,” she warned. “God knows their real agenda.”

“Agreed.”

“We need an X.O. who isn’t in their pocket,” she continued.

“I met a hot pilot with Belwin Duna,” Fenaday said, “navy-trained and a Wing Commander. For some reason—and it is just a hunch—I feel he is trustworthy, at least where it doesn’t cross Duna. His name is Telisan, a Denlenn.”

She stiffened.

“Denlenn,” he said, “not Dua-Denlenn.”

“They look much alike,” she growled, “but a hot pilot you say?”

He nodded.

“I can live with it,” she said, standing. “I’ll start rounding up a crew. The usual wages won’t attract anybody.”

“Tell everyone it is a high-risk mission,” Fenaday said, “with an extremely good chance of not coming back. No details, don’t mention Enshar. It will get out eventually, but I don’t want to deal with the press if I can avoid it. Tell them it pays a hundred thousand credits for able-bodied spacemen and twenty-five thousand more for every grade over that. It goes to their dependents if we don’t come back.”

She blinked. “We have that kind of money?”

“Yeah, but on a very short leash, otherwise we’d be lifting for the Fringe at maximum delta-v. We are not dealing with fools.”

“Be nice,” Shasti sighed, “if it was easy once. Just once.”

“Where’s the fun in that?” he asked

Shasti gave him a mock glare, shaking her head. “Standard humans,” she muttered.