Ahokas put a hand in front of her mouth, running her fingertips over her lips, and turned to stare out into the Deep Dark again.
“Something to think about,” Zoya said.
Chapter 54
Smelter Seventeen:
2368, June 3
Natalya watched Star Struck on the short-range scan. “Has he submitted an invoice?”
“Not as far as I know,” Ahokas said.
“We’ll have a little talk with him,” Zoya said. “He’ll be here shortly.”
“You’re going to bust his balls about doing us a favor?” Ahokas asked, glancing up from the scanner.
“He’s going way out of his way to help Usoko Mining. I don’t like taking advantage of people,” Zoya said.
Ahokas looked at Natalya. “You want to talk about it?”
Natalya shook her head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“He’s our neighbor. He’s always been there to help us. We’ve always been here to help him. Micah was the station manager.” She shrugged as if that explained everything.
Natalya tried to parse that last statement. “I get the ‘help thy neighbor’ part. What’s Micah got to do with it? Who’s Micah?”
“I just told you. Usoko hired him to be station manager. Micah? You know. Micah?” Ahokas frowned at Natalya.
Natalya felt more confused than ever. “Micah who?”
Ahokas sighed and shook her head. “Micah Regyri. Your brother? Remember him?”
Natalya felt the station tilt slightly under her. She fumbled herself into a chair. “I don’t have a brother.”
Ahokas looked at Zoya.
Zoya shrugged. “She’s never mentioned a brother.”
“I thought Demetri Regyri was your father,” Ahokas said.
“He is.”
“Well, dearie, Micah was your brother. At least I’m pretty sure Demetri was his father. Maybe your half-brother.” She tilted her head and stared at Natalya. “You didn’t know.”
Natalya shook her head.
“He was quite a bit older than you are. Usoko hired him away from your father’s operation. He knew how to run a station.” She nodded at Zoya. “That’s one man I would have been able to learn a lot from.”
Zoya nodded. “That explains a lot.” She sighed. “When I told Demetri about the station being destroyed, he took it hard. I figured he had friends there.”
Ahokas nodded and looked out at the Deep Dark. “Almost all of us lost family and friends.” Her eyes blinked rapidly and she swallowed hard.
“Sorry,” Zoya said.
Ahokas shook her head. “I’m all right. Just catches me by surprise sometimes.”
Natalya felt anger heating up her gut—hot-cold betrayal inching up her esophagus. “Why didn’t he tell me?”
“You had no idea growing up?” Ahokas asked.
“None. He never mentioned—” She bit down on that thought. “He never mentioned any family at all.”
“No brothers? Sisters? Your grandparents?” Ahokas asked.
Natalya shook her head. “Nothing. I never thought of it. My mother didn’t either. It just wasn’t part of our life.”
“Well, you hardly saw your mother,” Zoya said. “Between runs for a corporate freighter? A few days here and there?”
Natalya nodded. “True. We weren’t part of any kind of extended family structure. It was my father, my mother, and me.”
“Maybe you’re adopted,” Ahokas said.
Natalya stared at Ahokas. “Adopted?” She paused, letting the idea rattle around in her head. “I suppose I could have been, but that seems far-fetched.”
“Why?” Ahokas asked. “Kids get adopted every day. Parents get killed on the job, don’t come back from a run. Lots of kids grow up with adults who didn’t give birth to them.”
Natalya pulled out her tablet and rummaged through a few screens before she found what she was looking for. She held it up. “That’s my mother and me just before I left for the academy.”
Ahokas stepped over and leaned down to stare at the digital. “Mercy. You could be sisters.”
Zoya looked over Ahokas’s shoulder. “Without DNA testing I don’t think you could be certain, but you sure look like her.”
“UMS17, Star Struck. Holding at ten meters, over.”
Ahokas keyed the mic. “Star Struck, UMS17. Roger that. I’ll grab the door. Out.”
Natalya stood up. “I’ll get it. I think it’s time I had a little talk with my father.”
Zoya raised an eyebrow. “You want backup?”
Natalya shook her head. “Might be better if we do this in private.”
Zoya nodded. “I’m here if you need me.”
“Thanks, Zee.”
Natalya made her way down to the docking bay and set the lock to accept a dock. In a few ticks, she heard the distinctive ka-chunk of a docking vessel. Her brain kept trying to make sense of what Ahokas had said but she couldn’t quite get things to settle in her mind long enough to sort any of it out. Every time she thought she had a handle on it, it slipped away like a greasy wrench in zero-g.
The lock opened and her father stepped out. He smiled at her but something in her expression must have made him second-guess himself. “Natty? What’s wrong?”
“Who’s Micah?” The question erupted without conscious thought. She had no control of the whirlpool in her skull. It just spun her thoughts around and around.
Regyri’s face drained of color and his lips parted as if he might need more air than normal.
“Who’s Micah?” she asked again.
He sucked in a long breath, staring at her. “Your half-brother,” he said. “But you know that, right?”
“How could you?” she asked.
“How could I what?”
“How could you keep that a secret?” she asked, the words cascading out, each word scraping up her throat and pulling a tear from her eyes.
“That’s going to take a while.” He sighed and looked at the deck for a few heartbeats before looking up at her again. “Cup of coffee?”
Natalya closed her eyes and took a couple of deep breaths. “I still have some good beans on the Peregrine.”
“Then let’s do that, shall we?”
She nodded, feeling it as a herky-jerky bob of her head. Everything felt a bit disconnected.
She led the way up the ladders and into the boat deck.
Zoya stood in the common room watching them go. “You all right, Nats?” She shot Regyri a murderous glance.
Regyri thrust his hands into the pockets of his shipsuit and stared back.
Natalya smiled and shrugged. “Ask me in a couple of stans.”
Once in the galley, Natalya found some stability in the familiar process of measuring beans, grinding them, and assembling the coffee maker. She punched the brew button and leaned back against the bulkhead. She flashed back to a similar scene when it was Dorion backed against the opposite bulkhead. She shook her head to clear the image. “So, you and Inge?” she asked.
Regyri’s eyes widened slightly. “That’s quite a leap.”
Natalya shook her head. “We met her. She’s very nice. Based on what she said, there was something between the two of you. I just never had a reason to look too closely at it.” She paused, taking a deep breath. “Am I wrong?”
Regyri shook his head. “You’re not wrong.”
“Want to tell me?” Natalya hated hearing the sting in her own voice but found she couldn’t control it.
The coffee maker gurgled, signaling the end of its cycle. Grateful for the interruption, Natalya pulled two mugs out of the rack, filled them both, and handed one to her father before settling back against the bulkhead. How many times had they stood just like this in the past? She couldn’t count them.
“Inge and I go way back. Half a century at this point.” He sipped his coffee as he gazed somewhere else. “I was banging around Toe-Hold space in this ship. It was spaceworthy and served my purpose. Got me around and
I even got some survey beacons. In those days there were still a lot of blank spaces in the map. Still are, truth be told. I stumbled on Last Nail and realized it had never been registered. It wasn’t rich enough for the big boys to be interested in, only a single gas giant but a lot of rock. Mid-sequence star. Anyway, I registered it and then got a century-long lease for fractions of a credit. It’s legally mine.” He glanced up at Natalya. “That’s how I met Inge. That was before she settled on Dark Knight.”
Natalya sipped her coffee, his story distracting her from her anger.
“Anyway. We signed a ten-stanyer partnership agreement and we tried to get Last Nail established. Got a couple of cargo cans and a used fusactor off a wrecked tractor. Over the course of our contract, we got the basic structure built and in a stable orbit around the primary. In the third stanyer, we decided to have a baby. Modified our contract and Micah came along.” His face softened and he started to shake his head. “Pain in the ass kid. Always getting into things, tearing things apart to see how they worked.” He glanced up. “Just like you did.”
Natalya nodded. “Did he go to the academy, too?”
Regyri shook his head. “Never could get him interested in it. Toe-Holder through and through. He attended school at Mel’s. We put him in a residential program there when he was fifteen. The first couple of stanyers were hard for him. He wasn’t used to being around other kids, but he adapted and began to thrive. By the time he graduated at twenty, he already had a name for being a station designer. He had enough engineering to deal with construction and maintenance. Enough chemistry to do environmentals. He designed a couple of models that won awards.” Regyri sipped his coffee. “I brought him back and gave him Last Nail to run. It was still only barely functional. Only thing that kept it going was the gas skimmer in the Peregrine.”
“You were still with Inge?”
“No,” Regyri said, shaking his head. “When our extended contract expired, we went our separate ways. Micah was in school and we’d grown apart. She wanted to pursue her art. I wanted to start exploring again. The Peregrine needed an overhaul to get her back into shape before I would trust her in the Deep Dark.”
“That’s when you met Mother?”
He nodded. “That’s when I met her. She was between jobs and as taken by the Exploration Scout class as I was. There’s something romantic about the idea of a couple of people on their own against the universe on an adventure to make their fortune.”
“I’ve thought of trying it myself,” Natalya said. “Even got the models to build my own probes.”
“Never did anything with them?” he asked.
Natalya shook her head. She gestured with her mug. “Go on.”
Regyri sighed and took another sip. “Anyway. We contracted, she wanted kids. Micah was such a great kid, I thought ‘Why not?’ and a few months later, you came along.”
“Wait,” Natalya said. “Did she know about Micah and Inge?”
“Of course,” Regyri said. “What kind of person do you think I am?”
“Well you didn’t tell me,” Natalya said. “It seemed a logical extension.”
Regyri winced. “I deserved that.”
“Any other people I should get to know?” Natalya asked.
He shook his head again.
“What about Kristiana Ingesdottir?”
“Inge moved on,” he said with a shrug. “Kris is—was—Micah’s half-sister, not yours.”
“Go on,” Natalya said. “I’ll try not to interrupt again.”
He grinned at her. “Good luck with that.”
She grinned back, in spite of herself.
“So, when our contract expired, your mother went back to work for the big lines. Saltzmann first and then a stint with Federated Freight. She hated being away from you, you know, but accepted it as just one of those things. She loved being an engineer as much as I did. She knew you’d move on one day, especially after you went to the academy. Our contract had long since expired. She wanted to make sure you felt like you could follow your own course without a lot of emotional baggage to carry.” He glanced at her again. “For what it’s worth, I thought she was wrong to step back quite so far. We used to fight about it.”
Natalya took a swig of coffee. “Micah. How’d he come to work for Usoko?
“We lived in the neighborhood and heard about the new construction. One day before they even had the grinder finished, we took Star Struck over and paid a call.” He shrugged. “Micah got on famously with an engineer on the project. When the time came to hire a station master, Micah applied and got it. It was the job he always wanted. The job he worked toward his entire life.” Regyri shrugged. “I got my last hydroponic units up and running on my own. We can grow some food and there’s enough plant life to keep the oxygen level up, but I haven’t really done much there yet by way of figuring out what to do with the place. I’ve lost almost all interest in operating it now. It’s not far enough along to generate much revenue and I’m tired of dealing with it. With Micah gone, I’m just puttering on it to keep my hand in.” Regyri sighed. “I always thought I’d be able to leave it to him.” He blinked several times in rapid succession. “Now he’s really gone.”
“All this time. You never told me.”
“Well you knew about the station. That I came out to work on it.”
“I didn’t know I had a half-brother.”
Regyri nodded. “I never could find the way to tell you. Eventually I convinced myself that it would be needlessly cruel. He was already a grown man when you were born. I didn’t see how knowing about him would help you. Eventually I gave up on the idea of telling you altogether and convinced your mother to do the same.”
“She went along with it?”
“She was never happy about it,” Regyri said.
“Are you?” Natalya asked.
Regyri stared at the overhead for almost a full tick. “I thought I was. Now? I’m not so sure. He was a good man. You’ve grown into a good woman. I shouldn’t have kept you from knowing about each other.”
“So he didn’t know about me either?”
Regyri shook his head. “I never told him.”
“That’s why you want to help the recovery effort,” she said.
He nodded. “As soon as I saw it, when Usoko first moved in, I knew it was going to be a great project.” He sighed. “I want to see it succeed.”
“Well, you’ve seen the Higbee sections coming in,” she said.
“Looks like Usoko isn’t wasting any time rebuilding.”
“It’s way beyond that,” Natalya said. “Your neighborhood is about to get crowded.”
Chapter 55
Smelter Seventeen:
2368, June 25
Everybody who could fit on the observation deck watched the Higbee crew move the first unit into place. Working with the site supervisor, an older man named Roby Helms, Zoya and Natalya located the spot and directed the orientation so that it wouldn’t grow over the marshaling yard.
At fifty kilometers, they couldn’t see much more than an oblong. The crew tenders’ brilliant spotlights made it glow like a new star in the sky. “It’s going to have to grow a lot before we can see much,” Bean said. He grinned at Zoya. “By what we’ve seen in the plans, it’s going to be a pretty sight when it’s all put together.”
“The next stage should be jumping in tomorrow,” Zoya said. “Helms said we’ll get a new section every few weeks now.”
“If they had them ready, why didn’t they bring them all at once?” Ahokas asked.
“Give us time to set them up and make sure they work before adding another section,” Zoya said. “The grinder should be installed and ready to run in a week. We’ll have to find some rock to feed it.”
Hercules’s skipper snorted. “I’ve a few dozen kilotons of rock you can use to test it.”
Everybody laughed.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the station grew. By the time the Higbee crews started unfolding the third piece, mo
st of the crews had left the observation deck and descended to the cargo deck where Ahokas and Kremer had assembled a buffet, stocked with finger foods and a few cases of beer courtesy of Demetri Regyri. The food went almost as fast as the beer.
Zoya had the reserve beer locked up in a closet in the marshaling yard. Few people even knew of its existence. Her “one beer per customer policy” would have broken down except for Ahokas’s foresight in bringing a roll of tickets and giving them out to each spacer who came aboard the yard structure.
By and large the party stayed well within the bounds of propriety, even measured by High Line standards. By Toe-Hold standards, it was absolutely subdued.
Natalya found Zoya nursing her beer in a corner. “Nice touch,” she said.
Zoya smiled. “The party to celebrate the re-founding of UMS17?”
“Yeah. You’re not going to be able to call it Smelter Seventeen much longer.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t know what we’ll call it.” She took a short pull from her beer. “Sorry about your brother.”
Natalya shrugged and sipped her coffee. “I’m sorry I didn’t get to know him. My luck he’d have been a twerp and I’d be feeling guilty now for not having treated him better when he was alive.” She grinned at Zoya. “Honestly, I don’t even know what to think about it. Disappointed that I was kept in the dark so long, maybe. I’m finding it difficult to gin up a lot of animosity over things I never knew.”
“It explains a lot about Inge,” Zoya said.
“Yeah. I always wondered what she was tap dancing around.” Natalya shrugged. “No big on the grand scheme.”
“Last Nail, huh?” Zoya asked.
“I looked. It’s there. Dumb name.”
“Cynical name,” Zoya said. “Last nail in the coffin of Toe-Hold space?”
Natalya loosed a tight chuckle. “That’s not played out very well, has it?”
Zoya shook her head. “Underscores the limits that one man has on his own out here, though.”
“Why’s that?”
“His station is older than this one. Even older than the one that got blown up. This one has been productive for well over four stanyers and his sounds like it’s still in the barely functional stage.”
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