Island in a Sea of Stars Read Free Page B

that was the only way the clans managed to survive, because they got no help from anyone else.
    Now, after twenty years of assimilation into the Confederation, Olaf insisted that many Roamers had forgotten their heritage, 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.
    He went to the airlock, clicked his helmet comm. “I’ll be back in a little while.”
    â€œI’ve got the ship, Dad.”
    Garrison cycled through the airlock and emerged into disorienting open space. For many years, he had worked outside at the wreckage of Rendezvous, the cluster of inhabited asteroids that had been the former Roamer government seat before it was broken apart during the war. Garrison and his comrades reconnected fuel tanks, erected support girders, strung access tubes from one asteroid to another. The clan Reeves workers had taken care to lock them together according to the old plan. Olaf wanted to recreate the old seat of government exactly as it had been, refusing to consider improvements or modifications.
    â€œRendezvous served us for centuries, and the clans did just fine,” Olaf said. “I wouldn’t presume that I know more than they did—and neither should you.”
    As Garrison emerged from the airlock and moved away from the hull, he looked up and around him. The bloaters were eerie, 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.
    Garrison stared for a long while. Seth’s voice echoed in his helmet. “Find anything yet? I’m watching the blips—every thirty seconds.”
    â€œStill looking.” He held onto hull protrusions as he worked his way along the ship inch by inch. His hand scanner picked up signals, and he spotted the pulse coming from beneath the engines. He jetted down, maneuvered over to the exhaust cones.
    Like cosmic soap bubbles in space around him, the bloaters shifted, rearranged their positions.
    Now that he knew what to look for, he easily found a magnetic tracker, a cluster device that dropped out tiny signal buoys. Garrison knew about such things.
    No signal could travel while a ship used the stardrive and 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.
    Garrison cursed Elisa in silence because Seth was listening on the helmet comm. Breathing heavily, he detached and deactivated the tracker—he wanted to smash it, but that would do no good. Instead, he just let it drift loose and free.
    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. Two more flickered in some kind of pattern or signal, followed by three more sparking nearby.
    Then, with a bright flare, the bloater closest to him sent out a surge of light. 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 ship’s airlock. With the overload, his suit’s life support was failing, but he had enough left to get inside. Without power assists from the suit’s servomotors, he found it much more difficult to move.
    Finally, 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!”
    â€œI’m coming back inside.”
    Garrison crawled along the ship’s hull, grabbing any rough edges to pull himself to the airlock. He hoped the controls still