The Star Bell (The Cendrillon Cycle Book 3)

by Stephanie Ricker

  Elsa shook her head. “I still don’t understand why you’re less than thrilled about exposing the dark side of the Tremaine Mining Company. Isn’t this the same sort of underhanded behavior that led to your wife’s death? You of all people should be jumping at the chance to reform the Fleet.”

  “Don’t drag Katrin into this,” he said, restraining his first impulse to snap at her again. “I want what’s best for the Fleet, the same as you. I just have different ideas about what that is. Cutting off the Fleet’s access to cendrillon isn’t it.”

  Elsa was silent. She shivered, suddenly looking cold and tired and almost painfully young. She’d left her quarters without her long coat, he belatedly noticed, and the Fleet ships were always on the cool side, even for her. He relented. “I know this matters,” he said. “Not just to you, but to all of us.”

  She looked him squarely in the eye. “Yes, it does. And I’m not going to let it go.” She stood. “I’m not sure yet how I can pursue it, but I will. And now I’ll let you go back to sleep.”

  He smiled at her, hoping to make everything right between them, but she didn’t return it.

  After she left, sleep evaded Bruno. After an hour of tossing and turning, he finally gave up. Maybe a run was what he needed. His life had been entirely too sedentary aboard the Sovereign, and the ship’s gym never closed.

  He’d assumed he would have the exercise facility to himself, but to his surprise, a silver-haired older woman was already there, running on one of the auto-trails. He glanced at her perfunctorily, but chose an auto-trail on the opposite side of the gym. He didn’t feel like being sociable.

  He warmed up and settled into a steady pace on the auto-trail. Running was good for thinking, and he needed to think.

  Elsa’s claims were serious. If she found the evidence to prove that her father’s death was actually a murder, she could do the relationship between the Common Union and the Tremaine Mining Company some serious damage.

  But would that be so bad? If there was corruption, didn’t it deserve to be exposed? Why did he feel so threatened by the idea of the Fleet cutting ties with the mining company?

  If he was honest with himself, he knew the answer to that one. Even when he had refused to return to the Fleet as a young man, a part of him still idolized the Fleet as an institution. For years it was everything he believed in, everything he trained for. It was his life. Giving that up had been a hard decision, but a decision that was necessary at the time. He had never, ever wanted to see harm come to the Fleet itself. If the Tremaine Mining Company lost its power and thus much of its access to new cendrillon, the Fleet would be crippled. Elsa was right; the situation was not as stable as many seemed to think it was.

  He wiped sweat from his forehead, noting that the woman at the far end of the gym was still running at the same pace. What angered him most, he finally acknowledged, was his own cowardice. He was willing to let a man’s murder remain covered up if it kept his precious Fleet safe. That was unacceptable. What was the solution?

  First, more investigative work needed to be done. All of this was based on unsubstantiated theory, and none of it would have much of an impact in court unless Elsa could find something more solid on Anser. Beyond that? He didn’t know.

  Sometime later, having come to no useful conclusions, he checked the chronometer on the machine. He’d been running quite a while, which explained the twinge his left knee was giving him. He would normally consider stopping, but he recognized the beginnings of a stubborn competitive streak in himself. The woman at the far end of the gym was still going strong. He wiped the sweat from his forehead again and glared as he ran. Elsa always teased him about his scowly face, as she termed it.

  Twenty minutes later, just as Bruno was thinking that his competitive streak was actually a brand of stupidity that would give him a heart attack sooner rather than later, the woman finally turned off her auto-trail. In relief, Bruno brought his own pace down to a slow walking speed. He was an idiot for letting his pride almost give him a coronary. And now he was wheezing, great. Super attractive. He took a swig of water from his bottle and was able to calm his breathing after a few more minutes of walking.

  He had a feeling he’d sleep just fine now, although his knees told him he’d be regretting his stubbornness in the morning. He took another swig of water from his bottle, but it was nearly empty, so he stepped gingerly off of the auto-trail and made his way to the water station.

  The running prodigy was there ahead of him, refilling her water bottle as well. He consoled himself that it was just her silver hair that made her look older; judging by her build, she was probably several years his junior. He didn’t mind having a younger woman beat him, but his ego couldn’t handle getting beaten by an old lady.

  “You are in seriously good shape,” he said to the woman, who had her back to him. “I just about killed myself trying to keep up with you. I should know better than to race against a youngster.”

  The woman turned with a smile on her face and took a step away from the water station. “Thank—” She stopped short, so fast that her jaw-length silver hair swung forward with the movement. Her face went stark white. “Lorengel!”

  Everyone always said time travel was impossible, but for a fraction of a second Bruno could’ve sworn he had stepped back in time almost twenty years. She seemed nearly unchanged from when he had last seen her almost two decades ago. She had been a young captain then, he knew—maybe thirty-five. She had seemed so much older than him at the time. Perhaps because he had looked up to her so much.

  He had to work his jaw once before he could speak. “Captain Volkova,” he managed to say. “I apologize for disturbing you. I didn’t realize who you were.”

  “No need to apologize, Lieutenant or…” She glanced at his shoulder automatically, looking for rank insignia, but of course there weren’t any on his workout clothes.

  He repressed the petty, perverse desire not to tell her his rank—not to give the woman a single piece of information about his life, as if he could protect himself somehow if he gave nothing away. “I’m Bosun Lorengel these days.”

  Her eyebrows rose fractionally, and he lifted his chin in a subtle, silent dare to comment on his rank. If he had accepted her offer all those years ago and stayed in the Fleet, he might have reached the rank of captain himself by now. “When did you rejoin the Fleet?” she asked.

  “Last month,” he said curtly. “Is there something wrong with the gym on the Strelka?” The question came out more belligerently than he intended, but he didn’t try to backpedal.

  The Volkova he knew from years ago would have bristled at his tone, but for some reason this woman did not. She looked, if anything, sheepish. “Not a blessed thing. But the Strelka is rather more crowded than the Sovereign, and sometimes I prefer to be alone. I was here for a dinner with the Tsareviches, and then we started shooting the breeze, and before I knew it, it was so late that I thought I’d just stay here and get a run in.”

  “If you were looking for solitude, then I’m doubly sorry for my intrusion,” he said. He turned on his heel. He would get water at his cabin.

  “Bruno, please wait.” He didn’t think she’d ever called him by his first name before. On anyone else, he would’ve called her tone gentle. But he knew Ruby Volkova. The Red Wolf, they called her. There was no gentleness in her.

  The use of his first name was a manipulation tactic, he told himself. Keep walking, he told himself. But somehow he found himself facing her again.

  “Yes, ma’am.” He’d be damned if he’d drop the formal address. They weren’t friends. He didn’t know why she was prolonging this encounter.

  “You were angry with me when last we met, and rightly so,” Volkova said, her tone unreadable. “Are you still angry with me?”

  “Pardon my frankness, ma’am,” he said coldly. “But a handful of years isn’t likely to change my mind about the captain who killed my wife.”

  He didn’t hate many people in this galaxy, but
he hated the woman standing before him.

  A touch of the old temper flared in her eyes. He was strangely glad to see it. “I have not forgotten my part in how events played out on Atthis,” she replied evenly. “I’m not as I was then. I want you to know. I was a new captain then, painfully young—so I did as I was told. And I’ve never had a moment’s peace about it since.”

  As if that were any excuse, Bruno thought.

  “I believed in the Fleet—and I believed it was incorruptible.” Her mouth twisted in a bitter smile. “The years betwixt then and now have taught me how wrong I was. The Fleet belongs to the Common Union, and I have little faith in the Common Union.”

  He hadn’t intended to answer, but he found himself speaking without meaning to do so. “If you were ordered to commit the same action now—to keep silent in spite of the danger to civilians because the Common Union told you to—what would you do?”

  “I’d mutiny,” she said, her voice iron. That tone he remembered hearing in decades past. “Nothing would please me more than to see the Fleet dissolve its connection to the Common Union. Stars, we’ve all paid for that connection with almost a decade of war.” She smiled suddenly, with genuine mirth behind it this time. “Do you remember Humphreys?”

  Bruno nodded. Even though he hadn’t seen the irascible, eccentric ship designer in nearly twenty years, he was a hard man to forget.

  “He was always saying the Fleet shouldn’t be linked to the Common Union, that we would become a political pawn. He was right, of course. I thought then that he was the unrealistic idealist, but I was the idealist. I thought the Fleet could do no wrong, and I was proud to serve the Common Union through it.”

  “Not anymore?” Bruno asked, drawn into the conversation in spite of himself. It eerily paralleled the conversation he had just had with Elsa hours before.

  The smile was long gone now. “Not anymore. Things are improved somewhat now, I grant you. But we can never unmake the Cendrillon Wars. I can never undo my part in that first battle.” Her voice grew softer. “I can never bring your wife back.”

  Bruno waited for fury to bubble up inside of him again, but it didn’t come. He felt exhausted, old, and sore; and he desperately wished for his bed. “I know,” he said, voice bleak.

  “I am sorry for what I have done. But it was done a very long time ago, and so much has changed. I don’t ask for your forgiveness; I know you can’t give it.” Her voice did sound old, finally, and the lines in her face now made her look haggard. “I know I wouldn’t be able to, if I were in your place.”

  He didn’t answer. He couldn’t.

  She looked at him for a long moment, then sighed. “I wish you well, Bruno.” She picked up her water bottle and strode to the gym’s exit.

  Bruno stepped up to the water station. He was shaking. His water bottle trembled so much that he had trouble filling it. He couldn’t remember the last time he had the shakes—not when Nebraska almost died, not in the aftermath of the plasma storm on Aschen. Bruno turned his head to watch Volkova leave the gym, his face an expressionless mask all too close to cracking.

  The star bell saw much.

  It stood anchored on the Periphery, on the edge between known, charted space—and the unknown, uncharted territory beyond. Its brothers, distributed along this boundary, formed a protective ring around the Common Union. The Common Union Fleet used the bells for navigation, confirming their position as they traveled. The information web used the bells to transmit data halfway across the sector in an eyeblink. Private ships used it as a danger marker. Go no farther: who knows what sails beyond this point?

  The star bell, its sensors always active, had seen some of what sailed beyond it.

  Fleet ships, supposedly keeping to their own territory, slipping past on various missions, of which the star bell’s data systems could tell it nothing.

  Demesne ships, mostly sticking to their own sectors these days, winking in and out at remotest edge of what the star bell’s sensors could detect.

  A poor merchant ship, lost on its way between two space stations, which caught sight of the star bell and skittered past it back to safety as it realized it had dabbled into Periphery space, far closer to peril than it had intended.

  Pirate brigantines with holds stuffed with loot, heading into Union space to sell their wares on the cendrillon black market at ridiculous prices.

  Pirate brigantines shot all to pieces by other pirates, their loot spread across space when the ship’s bellies were sliced open by cannon fire. No honor among thieves, evidently. So the star bell was told, via the information streams that poured through it.

  Stranger things, things that moved through space not by powerful engines, but by other, less familiar means—things that the star bell’s sensors could not identify.

  The star bell saw much, but frequently there was no one to tell of what it saw. It stood alone at the edge of known space.

  But the star bell wasn’t always alone.

  Elsa took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and tried to look as tall as she could. Her eyes were scratchy from a night without sleep, but she had been unable to find rest after returning from her conversation with Bruno. Her head had raced with wild thoughts for hours, and her sleeplessness was not eased by the knowledge that today was the day she would become an explorer at last. Today the Sovereign left the star bell for unknown space—and she was supposed to spend her first day working with the Sovereign’s head engineer.

  She should be grateful for this chance, she told herself as she gave herself another moment in the corridor before entering the engineering section. This was what she had always dreamed of as a child. As long as she could remember, she had wanted to follow in her mother’s footsteps and become a propulsion expert. It was what she had studied for as a teenager, and her plan had always been to join the Fleet—right up until her father died and that was no longer an option. When she had become a crewmember aboard the Sovereign, Karl had said he would try to find a position for her in engineering where she could train periodically, and she had leapt at the chance.

  But now, physically and emotionally drained by the past twelve hours, she was having trouble drumming up the excitement she should be feeling. She hadn’t done a bit of propulsion work in nine years. What made her think she could do this? She closed her eyes briefly, feeling every moment of lost sleep.

  “What the hell are you doing?” someone asked rudely—and far too loudly.

  Elsa’s eyes flew open. A scowling pair of eyes set in a face like a thundercloud met her gaze. The short, thickset man standing in front of her was built like a bull mammut and looked nearly as belligerent.

  She cleared her throat, caught off-balance. “I’m reporting for duty with the head engineer,” she said, stumbling slightly over her words.

  “Looks more like you’re sleeping in the hallway,” he said bluntly. “What kind of duty?”

  Restraining her impatience, Elsa replied, “I’m Elsa Vogel. I’m supposed to train with him today. Kar—er, Lieutenant Tsarevich arranged it.”

  The grouch in front of her rolled his eyes. “Follow me,” he ordered, turning smartly on his heel to enter the engineering section, presumably from whence he had come.

  Elsa bit back a sigh and followed him through the sliding door. She gazed around the section; having never been in the engineering section of a ship like the Sovereign, she didn’t know what to expect. She knew Bruno worked not too far from here, monitoring the sails and rigger crews, but she had yet to see this portion of the ship.

  From her vantage point in the doorway, she could look down the length of the ship to see the cables from the Sovereign’s six Casimir sails. The foremast sail cables were closest, huge conduits that ran diagonally from the outer corners of the high-ceilinged section to the engines running down the center of the space. Farther on, the mainmast cables did the same, and farther still, the mizzenmast cables fed into the extreme end of the engines.

  The arrangement drew the eye, and for a
moment she didn’t notice the short, dark man off to her left staring at her with impatience. “Well?” he demanded, voice still too loud. “Done gawking, or shall I give you another five minutes to play the tourist?”

  Elsa smiled slightly, resolving not to be ruffled by his truculence. “I’m sorry. Ready when you are. You were taking me to the head engineer, I believe?”

  “Wrong,” he barked.

  Elsa looked at him without speaking the obvious question aloud, determined not to be baited.

  “You’ve already found the head engineer,” he said, tapping his barrel chest. “I’m taking you to a work station where you can stay out of my way and maybe, if you’re lucky, actually learn something.” He walked away without looking behind him to see if she was following.

  You wanted this, she reminded herself. She followed him around to the left, moving underneath the port foremast cable, which ran high above their heads at this point of the section. The cable was so wide, Elsa’s arms wouldn’t have wrapped even a quarter of the way around it. Though the head engineer was short, he moved quickly, and Elsa kept having to trot a few steps to keep up. She squashed down her annoyance with the man. If this was the person she would be working under, she’d just have to get used to him. She narrowed her eyes. But she’d be spaced before she’d allow him to bully her.

  He stopped at a work station and turned to her, mouth already opening for what was likely another rude comment. Elsa forestalled him. “I’m Elsa Vogel,” she said clearly. She stuck out her hand. “We haven’t met yet. Who are you?” Her forceful tone made it obvious—she hoped—that she was taking back some control of the situation.