Star Wanderers: Tales of the Far Outworlds (Omnibus V-VIII) Read online

  The dream monitor clicked off, and he slowly began to stir. Noemi’s heart skipped a beat as he lifted the monitor off of his head and carefully replaced it in the ceiling compartment. For a gut-wrenching moment, she feared he’d lash out at her—but then she saw his face and realized that he was smiling, with tears in his eyes.

  Thank God, she silently prayed.

  He reached up and tentatively stroked her cheek. She hesitated for a moment, not sure what it meant, but when she leaned in to him he didn’t resist. “Noemi,” he whispered—and then, ever so gently, pulled her to him. Her breath caught in her throat, tension building like the flames of a meteor—and then her lips were pressed against his, chills shooting to the ends of her fingertips.

  It worked, she realized, panting for breath as their bodies intertwined. He’s ready. His hands slid down to her hips, and she unclasped his belt, opening his jumpsuit and pulling it down off of his shoulders. Her body burned with excitement and fear and anticipation, much as it had that first night—but this time, Jeremahra wasn’t a stranger, but a kind and gentle man who she knew would take care of her.

  His hands slipped underneath her chemise, and she pulled it over her head and let it fall to the floor. A few days ago, she would have been nervous and apprehensive, but when she looked in his eyes, she knew there was no reason to feel that way. She leaned forward and pressed her lips against his, tenderly this time. The feel of his touch was a confirmation that he would stay with her—that together, they would wander the stars until they found a place to call home.

  Part VI: Benefactor

  Chapter 6

  Jakob never felt more bone-weary than when he came off of a twelve-hour shift at the Oriana Station dockyards. His feet ached and his back groaned with pain, even in the low gravity of the tram as it raced from the hub to the rimside habs. As usual, the narrow car was crammed like a vacuum pack, every seat occupied with the hot and sweaty bodies of the other dockyard workers. He glanced out the window to catch a glimpse of the stars, but an advertisement for a synthetic protein formula filled the holographic windowpane.

  My life is a prison, he thought to himself—silently, as always. It’s a prison of my own making, but it’s a prison nonetheless.

  The twelve-hour shifts had started only a standard week ago, but already it felt like months. A Gaian Imperial battlegroup had just arrived from the Coreward Stars, stirring up some panic at the top and driving everyone at the bottom to work a lot harder. Jakob didn’t have much time to follow interstellar politics, but he knew it meant overtime for the foreseeable future. Which really wasn’t so bad, except that the extra pay would barely keep the family above water, without paying off any of their debts.

  From the quadrant tram station, he took an elevator to the slums on the lowest level. This was always the worst part: getting used to the slightly heavier gravity, after spending so much time in null-gee at the hub. He shuffled down the rimside corridor, barely lifting his feet off the floor. The walls were drab and gray, but spotlessly clean. That was something to say about the immigrant community—they might be poor, but they weren’t dirty.

  The pungent odor of Deltan cooking spices met his nose the moment the door hissed open. That would be his mother-in-law, fixing dinner. He stepped inside and dropped his work boots on the floormat, waking his sister-in-law’s baby in the living room. He cringed from the high-pitched wailing almost as much as he did from the tongue-lashing he expected to get for it. But what did it matter? Ignoring the baby’s cries, he trudged off toward the bathroom for a much needed shower.

  “Oh, hi Dad!”

  His daughter Mariya bounded down the hallway, her black hair bobbing with every step. The bright smile on her sixteen year-old face cut through his dark mood, at least momentarily. She gave him a great big hug, and he returned it with a grunt.

  “Guess what?” she said, her eyes lit with excitement. “I found someone to rent out the closet bedroom to!”

  Jakob raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

  “Yeah! A couple from Megiddo Station back home—at least, the girl is from there. Her husband is out working on his ship—he’s a star wanderer, see—but she’s in the living room, talking with Aunt Giuli. Do you want to meet her?”

  Her words passed over him like a flurry of raw, unprocessed data. He focused on the essentials and disregarded the rest.

  “How long are they going to stay?”

  “Oh, not long. They just need a place to stay for a couple weeks until they’ve refitted their ship. Apparently they—”

  “How much are you going to charge them?”

  She hesitated a moment before answering. “Well, I was going to charge them two hundred, but Dad, they’re from back home! Remember Master Korha? She’s his oldest daughter!”

  “Marta?”

  “No, Noemi—the quiet one.”

  While certainly interesting, he refused to let this piece of information distract him from the issue at hand. “How much, Mariya?”

  “Uh, well, I gave them a small deal …”

  “How much did you say you’d charge them?”

  She held her arm behind her back and scrunched up her face. “A hundred?” she said, her words sounding more like a question than a statement.

  Jakob sighed and shook his head. “That’s not enough, Mariya—not for both of them. Better double it.”

  “But Dad—”

  “When you and Benyamin have an apartment of your own, you can do with it as you please. Until then, you live on my floor space. Understand?”

  “But Dad—they’re practically family!”

  The last thing we need right now is more family.

  “Two hundred, or they leave.”

  “Fine! One twenty.”

  “That’s not enough.”

  Mariya pouted. “Come on, Dad—I promised!”

  “Since they’re from back home, I’ll let you charge them one eighty, but anything less and I’ll ask them to leave right now.”

  “Dad!”

  A grin played around the edges of Jakob’s mouth. It had been far too long since he’d played hardball in a price negotiation. But the opposing party was his own daughter, and he knew he couldn’t hold out against her. Besides, she had her own brand of stubbornness.

  “Let’s meet in the middle,” she said. “One fifty—it’s only fair.”

  He groaned and rubbed his eyes. “Very well. Just see that they pay it promptly.”

  “Don’t worry, I will. Thanks, Dad!”

  Mariya turned and scampered off toward the living room, radiating with youthful excitement. She’s the reason I slave away at the dockyards all dayshift, Jakob reminded himself. If she didn’t have much of a head for business, it was only because she was still generous at heart, a sign that the hardships of refugee life hadn’t yet broken her. He would gladly give up his life to make sure they never did.

  His wife, Salome, was waiting for him in the bedroom they shared with her sister and brother-in-law. Though she was not an old woman by any stretch, the last few years hadn’t been kind on her. Wrinkles creased her forehead beneath her jet-black hair, and her thighs bulged out a lot more than they had when they were young. From the way her arms were folded across her chest, she didn’t seem too happy. Not that that was anything new.

  “How was work?” she asked.

  “Same as usual,” he muttered, pulling off his shirt. He could really use that shower.

  “Did you ask your boss today for that pay raise?”

  He sighed and shook his head. “No.”

  “No? Why not?”

  “Because I want to keep my job.”

  “Oh come on. With all the mandatory overtime, do you really think they’d fire you?”

  “I don’t know,” he muttered. “You want me to be the squeaky wheel, with an Imperial takeover looming over us? Stars—we don’t even know if we’re past the brink yet.”

  “Past the brink?” she said, her cheeks turning red. “Do you know who’s past the brink?
Us, that’s who. We’ve been living like—like stowaways ever since we fled our home. When are we going to stop living from crisis to crisis? When are we finally going to have some stability?”

  The wailing of the baby grated on Jakob’s ears. He took a deep breath and leaned against the wall, trying to ignore the headache that was starting to make his temples throb.

  “I’ll do what I can, dear.”

  “No,” she said, her eyes wild and her hands shaking. “I don’t think you will—I don’t think you are.”

  Why does every conversation with you have to turn into an argument? It hadn’t always been this way—they used to be quite close, back when life was simpler and filled with possibilities instead of hardships. And yet, as much as he wanted to get back to the way things were, he couldn’t keep the anger from rising like bile inside of him.

  “What more do you want from me?” he asked. “I slave away every day for you and the rest of the family. I work twelve-hour shifts doing heavy, dangerous work—work that could get me killed. And after all that, this is the thanks I get?”

  The look on her face told him he’d said exactly the wrong thing. For a brief moment, he felt as if he were poised at the top of a gravity well, drifting in free fall without enough delta-V to maneuver into a stable orbit. She paused for a second as if choosing her words, but he already could see how the argument would play out.

  “Don’t pretend to be the victim when you were the one who brought us here,” she said. “If we’d stayed at Delta Oriana, none of this would have happened.”

  He groaned and shook his head. “We’ve been over all this before, dear. The famine was getting so bad we had no choice. We’re lucky we got out when we did.”

  “Oh, so we’re lucky to be here. Instead of starving with our own people, we’re starving at a foreign star where we don’t even speak the language. And for that, I’m supposed to be grateful!”

  “At least we’re alive,” he retorted. “And you should be thankful I managed to bring out the rest of your family as well.” Thankful that they’re out here leeching on us.

  He started for the shower, but his wife wasn’t about to let him have the last word. Her face was red, and her eyes burned with a fire that was all too familiar.

  “Do you know what you lack? Ambition. If I’d married a more ambitious man, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Hot blood rushed to his cheeks, and he clenched his fists to keep his rage from spilling over.

  “Oh, you know what I’m talking about. You’ve always been a drifter, wandering from one place to another with no direction in your life. Sometimes I think the only reason you married me was because I was the first woman who asked you.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Isn’t it? And now, instead of making an effort to get a pay raise or find a better job, you’re grinding away at the first place that gave you work. And for what? So that the rest of us have to live like beggars?”

  Her words stung like needles, sharp and dripping with venom. She knew he would never hit her, but at times like this, it was all he could do to keep from lashing out at her. Was that what she wanted? Was that why she goaded him like this?

  “You think I want to live this way? If I could find something better, I’d do it in a minute. You know how racist these Alphans can be—I’m lucky to have the job that I do.”

  “See, there you go again. ‘Luck, luck, luck.’ Why is it always luck? Why doesn’t work ever come into the equation?”

  “I work plenty hard!” he shouted, his whole body shaking. A small crowd of eavesdroppers had gathered in the doorway, but he didn’t care anymore. “I work harder than anyone else in this house! Svenson is the only other one with a job, and he only works at the restaurant. All the other men just sit around all day, rotting their brains in the dream simulators.”

  “You want to throw them out, then? Send them to beg in the concourse and sleep in the unused maintenance shafts?”

  “No, but it would help if everyone else around here would pull their own damn weight.”

  She glared at him in silence for a moment. “It’s better to starve than to abandon one’s family.”

  “With family like this, we just might.”

  Her eyes went glassy, the way they always did when she played the martyr.

  “All I wanted was to make a safe and happy home. That’s all I wanted from the very beginning. Now my family is languishing far from home, where my birth star shines dimmer than the stars of the unbelievers.”

  The room began to spin as a wave of rage and dizziness swept over him. He knew that this argument couldn’t end well. If they kept arguing, they would both say things that they would regret later—if they hadn’t already. But just like a meteor hurtling toward a barren planet, he felt powerless to stop or change direction. His anger blazed like the flames of re-entry, streaking across a starless sky.

  “You want to go back to Megiddo Station and starve to death with the rest of your people?”

  She glared at him. “You wouldn’t know what it means to be rooted somewhere—or to someone. Even to your family, you’re just a wanderer.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Then what about our sons?” she shot at him. “Where are they now? Isaac and Aaron—you stole them from me!”

  His vision blurred, and his headache exploded like the flare of a meteor. “That’s not true,” he said, his voice falling dangerously low.

  “Oh, isn’t it? You sent them away without even giving them a chance to say goodbye to their mother. Both of them—and they were only boys!”

  “A boy has to be a man someday,” he muttered, walking past her to the shower. She tried to stop him, but he brushed her off and kept walking.

  “Hey! Where do you think you’re going? Don’t walk away when I’m talking to you!”

  “I’ve had enough, woman,” he snapped.

  “Oh, is that all I am to you? Just another woman?”

  He stepped into the bathroom and shut the door. She continued to yell at him from the other side, but he ignored her.

  I did it for their own good, he told himself as he peeled his sweaty clothes off of his weary body. A dozen tired arguments rose to his mind, like an age-worn track that tolerated no deviation. Still, the links were buckling in places where doubts had begun to creep in.

  Had he saved his sons at the cost of his own marriage? Had he even saved them at all? Aaron would be eighteen standard years by now—Isaac would be twenty. Were they still alive? Or had something terrible happened to them? So many starfarers died when their ships broke down in deep space, or fell into the hidden gravity wells of uncharted brown dwarfs and rogue planets. Even those who successfully navigated such hazards often fell prey to pirates and slavers, or got caught up in some arcane blood feud or other dispute. There were no laws in the Outworlds, after all—only the promises people made to each other. And Jakob knew all too well how empty those promises could be.

  * * * * *

  The shower worked wonders. When Jakob came out, he felt like a new man. It always amazed him how something so simple could make such a huge difference. If only everything in his life could be so simple.

  The living room was crowded, though his wife was notably missing. That relieved him a little bit more than it probably should have. All of the threadbare couches that lined the wall were filled, mostly with his younger nieces and nephews. They crowded around Opa Jirgis’s chair, where the new tenant sat.

  She was a plain, lanky girl, with dark brown hair and a face that spoke more to hardship than to innocence. Still, she retained that youthful girlishness that Deltan women tended to lose so quickly. Jakob guessed she was no older than twenty—not young by Deltan standards, but not too old either. Salome had been only a little younger when they’d started their family.

  She seemed a little embarrassed from all the attention, judging from the soft tone of her voice. Mariya sat on the armrest, chattering exci
tedly like she always did whenever they had company over. When the girl’s eyes fell on Jakob, though, she perked up.

  “Hello,” he said in Deltan, stepping forward and extending his hand. “The name’s Jakob.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” said the girl, rising as they shook hands. “My name is Noemi.” She smiled and nodded graciously before sitting back down on the edge of the chair.

  “That’s my father,” Mariya explained. “He’s the one who convinced us all to move here to Oriana Station.”

  “When did you move?” Noemi asked.

  “A little over a standard year ago,” said Jakob. Something about the girl seemed oddly familiar. He took a seat on the nearest couch, and the kids scampered off to make room for him. “How is the situation at Megiddo Station?”

  Noemi’s face darkened, and she looked down at the floor. “Very bad,” she said softly. “When we left, it … was very bad.”

  “So things never improved?”

  “No,” she said, sighing. “The synthesizers and reprocessors were maxed out months ago, and our food stores were never that good to begin with. We tried to install a new hydroponics module, but it failed catastrophically when a backlog from the old system contaminated it. When I left, rations had just been cut to bare subsistence levels, and people were already starving.”

  Mariya’s eyes widened, and some of the older children started to cry. Giuli, who had poked her head in from the kitchen, covered her mouth in shock and quickly made the sign of the cross. While the news certainly vindicated Jakob’s decision to bring the family to Alpha Oriana, he couldn’t say it gave him any satisfaction.

  “So no one sent any aid?” Jakob asked. “No humanitarian assistance ever came from the neighboring systems?”

  “No—though God knows we asked for it.”

  He shook his head and swore. “The racist bastards. Even if they were too dense to foresee this—which I seriously doubt they were—Theta Oriana and Altari weren’t too far off to send help.”