Star's End

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  NOW

  He was dying.

  The restaurant hummed, soft murmuring voices, the rattle of silverware, a cobwebbed overlay of music.

  “What?” Esme said.

  Miguel balanced his fork on the edge of his plate and made a show of wiping his hands on his napkin. He wouldn’t look her in the eye. It was a tell she had warned him about when he first joined the company.

  “He’s dying?” Esme said.

  Miguel nodded. “He went in for testing three days ago—”

  “Three days?”

  “Yes. It’s galazamia.”

  The word was sharp-edged, like a knife. Galazamia. Aina Mitsuke’s disease. Zamia. It had a hundred different names but the results were always the same: you wasted away until you were nothing. It was not a disease Esme would ever have associated with her father.

  “I’m sorry he didn’t tell you himself. He asked me not to, but—” Miguel twisted in his seat. “It didn’t feel right, keeping it a secret from you.”

  Esme closed her eyes. Her body hummed like a live wire. She thought about the last time she had seen her father. It had been less than twenty-four hours before. He’d been sitting across the table from her at an investor’s meeting up in the space station, lightscreen glowing while Steve Bajori rattled on about this season’s financial reports. She hadn’t paid much attention to him, having other things on her mind, but she did remember glancing at him halfway through the meeting to catch him staring out the window at Coromina I, at the fine-hewn golden-red swirls of its surface.

  Her father wasn’t one for looking out windows.

  “Esme?”

  Esme opened her eyes. Miguel was staring at her, leaning into the table, looking concerned.

  “I’m sorry if this was an intrusion—” he began.

  “An intrusion.” Esme shook her head. “No, it’s fine.”

  “I felt bad keeping it from you.”

  “I understand. It’s fine.” Esme looked down at her half-finished meal. She didn’t have the appetite to finish. “He seemed healthy the last time I saw him.” She said this more to herself than to Miguel.

  “It’s in the early stages.”

  Esme laughed, shaking her head. She didn’t mean to but it slipped out anyway. “The early stages,” she said. “What else do you know?” She looked up. Miguel looked away. “Come on, Miguel, it sounds like he really opened up to you.” It came out more bitterly than she intended, but bitterness was impossible to avoid when Phillip Coromina was involved.

  “Not much.” Miguel sighed. “Just that that it’s galazamia, that it’s in the early stages, that he’s already started treatments.”

  “How long?”

  “How long what?”

  Esme clenched her jaw, teeth grinding together.

  “Oh. How long till he—” Miguel shook his head. “God, Esme, I don’t know. He didn’t tell me. I don’t know why he told me about the zamia in the first place.”

  “He likes you.”

  Miguel blinked at her in surprise, his eyes big and dark. Her father did like Miguel. Esme liked Miguel too, which was why she had brought him on as her assistant almost fifteen years before. But it had been her father who’d been impressed with his work, who promoted him to senior vice president. Esme outranked him on the corporate ladder but not, apparently, on personal matters.

  “Esme, I’m sorry,” he said. “Let me get lunch.”

  The muscles in Esme’s face tensed into something like a smile. She didn’t know what Miguel was apologizing for—the fact that her father told him first, or the fact that her father was dying at all. Maybe both. Maybe it didn’t matter.

  “It’s not your fault,” she said, a response that would fit either circumstance.

  Miguel smiled at her, a sad smile, tactful and appropriate. Esme poked at the salad on her plate, then dropped the fork and drained her glass of wine. Miguel watched her, his face blank. Nonjudgmental. That wasn’t the reason she hired him, but it was the reason she went to lunch with him.

  “I’ll get the check now,” he said, and lifted one hand in the air.

  • • •

  Esme clicked off the holo and stared at the bluish haze the image left behind as the light faded. Another call finished. This one had been with the lab out at Starspray City on Catequil, the heart of the Coromina Group’s weapons manufacturing. She’d been on three such calls in the two hours since lunch, and with each one she’d smiled, she’d soothed, she’d promised her employees that the Coromina Group was looking into their concerns about the whispers of anti-corporate rebels hiding out in the system, about the possibility of a containment breach. She didn’t let any of her colleagues know that her father was dying.

  Esme pushed away from her desk and walked over to her window. Her office was on the seventy-fifth floor, high enough that she could almost make out the ocean sparkling in the distance, the water that bright emerald green that was one of Ekkeko’s many trademarks. She crossed her arms over her chest. Her reflection moved in the glass. Her father was in a meeting; at least, that’s what his assistant Lucia had told her when she rang her up on the holo, right after she had returned to her office. No telling when he’d be out.

  Esme leaned against the glass. Wind whistled around the building but down on the ground the jacaranda trees and tall silvery-green sea grass were unmoving. This wasn’t the first person she’d lost in her life—her mother had died in a war in the Iaon system a few years earlier, doing what she loved. And of course Esme’s sisters were gone, a fact she had come to accept a long time ago. But her father was different. He was three hundred years old. He’d been taking rejuvenation treatments since before they were safe. He was the sort of person you wanted to die and so you knew never would.

  The holo trilled on Esme’s desk.

  She pulled away from the window and sank down in the chair. She ran one hand over her hair before switching on the holo. It was a reflex. She hardly even knew she did it.

  Lucia materialized in miniature on the top of Esme’s desk. “Good afternoon, Ms. Coromina.”

  “Lucia.” Esme said the name carefully, not wanting to give away any of the turbulence spilling around inside of her.

  “Mr. Coromina is out of his meeting, if you’d still like to speak with him.”

  “Love to.” Esme forced a smile. “I’ll be right up.”

  “Very good.” Lucia reached forward with one hand and then her image vanished. Esme took a deep breath. She’d told Lucia this was about the contract with the Spiro Xu Military Alliance. It was going to be a surprise when he found out it wasn’t. As much of a surprise, perhaps, as Esme learning from Miguel Lee that her own father was dying
.

  Esme rode the elevator to the top floor. She wore a lightbox around her wrist to look official, but no one was in the elevator with her, so she just leaned against the cool, sleek metal and closed her eyes. Her heart fluttered. It was like she was a teenager again, an intern, afraid to look her father in the eye. She hadn’t felt like this in years.

  The doors slid open. The warm honeyed lights her father favored made Esme’s eyes hurt, but she stepped off the elevator with graceful strides. Only she knew how hard her blood was pumping through her system, how hard she found it to breathe.

  Lucia glanced at her. “You can go on in.”

  Esme nodded. The orchids flanking the big wooden door leading into his office were new, replaced since the last time Esme had been up there. White petals speckled with red. And as a little as Esme knew about galazamia, she knew the early symptoms involved coughing blood. Red on a white handkerchief.

  For God’s sake. Even his decor knew before she did.

  She went in without knocking.

  Her father sat at his desk, lightscreen up. From Esme’s perspective the screen was nothing but a display of neo-minimalist red flowers (more red, more blood), transparent enough that she could see her father staring at whatever file he had pulled up.

  He swiped his hand across the screen. “So, what’s this about Spiro Xu? I thought we had that one in the bag.” Another flick of his hand. The red flowers rippled.

  “We do.” Now that Esme was there, in his lush, golden-lit office, her words had drained away. The window behind his desk took up an entire wall. You could see the ocean from there, easily, but he kept the glass dark.

  “So, what’s the problem?” His focus stayed on the lightscreen. “Don’t you usually have Will deal with these military guys? That’s why we brought him on board, remember? You know how those assholes are; they think anybody who didn’t—”

  “It’s not Spiro Xu,” Esme said.

  “Then what is it?” Her father finally looked up, staring at her through the lightscreen. The glow fell across his face, turning his eyes unnaturally blue.

  “You’re dying.”

  She hadn’t meant to say it so directly; she’d meant to build to the moment, to massage him. She’d learned how to manipulate people from him, after all.

  Her father went still.

  “Excuse me?” he said.

  Esme walked up to his desk, reached over, and switched off the lightscreen.

  “I had lunch with Miguel this afternoon.”

  Nothing.

  “You told him,” Esme said, her voice tightening like a wire, “before you told me?”

  No answer.

  “I’m your daughter.”

  Her father sighed. He folded his hands across his desk. “He wasn’t supposed to tell you.”

  “You couldn’t expect him to keep a secret like that.”

  “I just wanted to—” Another sigh. “You’ve got a lot on your plate right now, especially with the potential breach issues.”

  Esme bristled. “I’ve been handling the breach issues just fine. That’s no excuse for you to keep this a secret from me.”

  Her father rubbed his forehead, and Esme’s anger lurched inside her. He was all she had left. Even Star’s End was gone, burned away in the war that made them trillions. She should have known better. It was too much to expect him to even realize that. To even care.

  But she didn’t tell him any of this. Her father was not one for public displays of emotion.

  “You weren’t supposed to find out that way,” her father said, as if that was all she needed to know.

  Esme knotted her hands into fists. Even as spacious as the room was, the walls seemed too close, the ceiling too low. She wished the glass in the window was clear, wished she could see straight on through to the ocean.

  “Then you should have told me.”

  He looked up at her then, and Esme felt herself falter. She expected him to be stern, forceful, the way he’d been her entire life. But there was a sadness in his features that caught her off guard. She didn’t know what it meant.

  “I’m telling you now,” he said.

  And like that, the moment was gone. He reached down and switched the lightscreen back on. “Go back to work, Esme. Your first concern needs to be with the security breach. And don’t worry about me.”

  Esme stared at him, her throat dry. Her eyes itched and she thought she might start crying. It seemed absurd, to cry over him.

  “Go,” he said, and she did.

  • • •

  The next morning, Esme rode to Hawley Laboratory, her head pressed against the window’s glass. The car’s engine hummed, a low soft song that flared when the driver directed the car out into the highway. The scenery blurred, like stars on a hypership. Esme’s stomach roiled. She closed her eyes.

  Today, her father’s illness felt like a strange dream, something left over from her adolescence, when she still thought she might become someone else. But she hadn’t dreamed last night. Her sleep had been deep, fathomless, the sleep of comas and sickness.

  The car slowed as it wove through the woods surrounding the lab. Esme looked out at the greenery already curling up in the heat. They were coming into the dry season. Everything was dying.

  “What entrance would you like to me to drop you at?” The driver spoke with the mechanical cadence all drivers did when they were hooked into a car, their mind and the car’s engines twisting together into a dance really too complex and elaborate for chauffeuring Coromina Group executives around. But the technology hadn’t been developed for cars.

  “The main entrance is fine.” Esme could see it up ahead; Will was waiting for her, standing in a soldier’s stance, feet planted wide apart, arms crossed. It was a stance that had been engineered into him almost thirteen years before.

  The car stopped, and Esme thanked the driver and stepped out into the bright morning heat. Will waved at her. She wondered if he knew about her father. Probably not. He was one of the R-Troops—part of that first batch, actually—and although he had been trained after the war to work alongside the upper tiers of the Coromina Group infrastructure, he was still a soldier to most of them. Still a bioengineered piece of weaponry.

  “Morning,” he said, giving her that drama-star grin of his. It faded quickly enough, though.

  “Aw, come on, Esme,” he said. “You know this is just the scientists worrying about nothing.”

  It took Esme a moment to realize that he was talking about the possible containment breach and not her father’s illness. She sighed. “I had a bad night.” They walked toward the entrance, the lab doors sliding silently open for them. Cold air billowed into the heat. “A bad afternoon, yesterday.”

  Will frowned, turned his dark eyes to her.

  “I shouldn’t talk about it here,” she said.

  “Later,” he said. “Promise.”

  “Promise.” Her father probably didn’t want her telling Will—his rank was too low for personal matters—but she told Will things she wasn’t supposed to all the time. Will was her only friend in a world full of colleagues and underlings.

  They walked side by side down the narrow entrance hall. Invisible scanners washed over them, reading the microscopic chips embedded in both of their bloodstreams, ensuring that they were supposed to be there. Esme only knew the scanners were installed because she was ranked a Ninety-Nine, the highest rank you could have within the Coromina Group.

  A lab assistant materialized up ahead, stepping out of one of the side rooms—Esme couldn’t remember her name, only that she was a transfer from the lab on Catequil, that she came highly recommended by the program director there.

  “Ms. Coromina, Mr. Woods,” she said. “Right this way, please. The new recruits are set up in one of the meeting rooms, as you requested.”

  “Has there been any more trouble?” Will asked.

  The lab assistant shook her head. “Not since the report we filed, no. And just between you and me”—she smiled s
weetly at Will—“I don’t think it’s anything major. But Dr. Goetze was part of the team that had been affected by the last breach, so he can be paranoid about these things.”

  “He’s conscientious,” Esme said. “That’s why I hired him. Let’s just hope you’re right about this being nothing.”

  Their shoes clicked across the slick tile of the laboratory hallway. The meeting room was set off from the main corridor. The windows hadn’t been tinted and Esme could see the three soldiers she had read about yesterday morning. Before her world broke open. Before she found out about her father’s illness.

  They went inside. The soldiers stood to attention. None of them had Will’s face. Five years ago, Esme had requested that it be phased out. She didn’t like seeing a man who was Will and not Will at the same time.

  “At ease,” she said. “Have a seat.” She slid into the chair at the head of the table. Will settled into the one on her right, and she surveyed the three soldiers, looking for outward signs of trouble. They were obedient, bright-eyed. One of them smiled nervously at her. She wondered how old he was. At least a year, but if they were new recruits, they wouldn’t have been going through training for long.

  “None of you are in trouble,” she said in the calm, clear voice she used when she wanted control. “And none of you are at fault. This is simply an inquiry to ensure that the Radiance aren’t attempting to break through the boundaries again.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” murmured the soldier who smiled at her. The other two nodded.

  “Good. I want you to know you can be forthright with me and Mr. Woods. Mr. Woods comes from your same background, so he’ll be asking most of the questions.”

  More nods. Esme turned to Will. This routine came easy to her these days, even if this particular inquiry left her feeling anxious. The two of them had interviewed R-Troops on all four planets in the system, looking for defects, for problems, for solutions. The information they dealt with was too sensitive to trust to lower-ranked employees, so even though she held the title of Vice President of Genetics, she spoke to the R-Troops herself, with Will at her side. This was especially true when there was a chance that the Radiance might be trying to break through to the world again. They had last tried almost five years before, reaching out to a squadron of new recruits, manipulating the minds of the R-Troops, using them to work their way back to the world. The Coromina Group had caught it early, though, and now upper management all knew the signs. Dreams. Disloyalty. Insubordination. Two reports of suspicious behavior had come in recently: one here at Hawley, and another out on Catequil.