Heart of the Nebula (48 page)

“
What are you going to do?”
she asked softly.

“
I don’t know,” James
admitted. “Go down to the surface, join the settlement effort
there. Find a place where I can leave the past behind and reinvent
myself.”

“
Alone?”

He sighed. “I don’t know. I’ll find out when
I get there.”

Deirdre knew that if he went alone, he would
never recover from the pain he carried now. She could see it in the
slump of his shoulders and the lines of his face just as clearly as
if it were written in a book. The thought of him living out the
rest of his days as a long-forgotten hermit, barely eking out a
life on some distant, lonely mountain all but broke her heart.

“
You still miss Sara, don’t
you?”

“
Yes,” he said
softly.

He hasn’t read her letter
yet,
Deirdre realized. She could see that
in his face, too. This wasn’t the man she’d read about in Kyla’s
journal. This was a man stuck in limbo, unable to move on with his
life.

“
How often do you think of
her?” she asked.

“
All the time.” He sighed
and shook his head. “She would have handled the crisis much better
than I did—she might have even gotten the rebels to
reunify.”

“
I doubt that. They decided
to secede from us long before we revived you.”

Deirdre stepped forward and put a hand on
his arm. She looked into his face until he met her gaze.

“
You haven’t read her
letter, have you?”

He stared at her a moment, then looked away.
“No,” he whispered. “I haven’t.”

“
You need to find closure,
James. If you don’t, the pain will kill you.”

“
I’ll think about
it.”

She took a deep breath, her skin tingling.
“You’re afraid, aren’t you?”

He didn’t answer.

Should I tell him?

Her heart throbbed in her chest like a
nuclear engine, and sweat began to form on the back of her neck.
She tried to keep her hands from shaking, but she couldn’t help
it.

Yes, I should.

“
After you first woke up,”
she began, “you asked me if I knew what it felt like to lose
someone I loved after saying something stupid and careless. I
didn’t answer you then, but the truth is that I do.”

She paused, hands trembling. James stopped
to listen.

“
When I was seventeen
standard years old,” she continued, “I loved a boy—an engineer, one
of the fast-trackers for ship-wide maintenance. He was young and
handsome and absolutely brilliant, and we fell head over heels for
each other. Our genetic mapping and pedigrees forbade us from
having children, but we had friends who were willing to let us
adopt.

“
We were married on my
eighteenth birthday,” she continued, “and for a little over a
standard year, we were happy together. Our friends became pregnant
with a boy that would be ours. I took on an apprenticeship with the
ship’s chief historian, and he became a line operator for the main
ramjet engine. Everything was so…”

Her voice trailed off. James frowned and
opened his mouth as if to speak, but she recomposed herself quickly
and forced herself to press on.

“
One day, we had a fight.
It was just a petty one—I don’t even remember what it was about—but
we both stormed off to our jobs without making up. That was a
mistake.”

“
Why?” James
asked.

“
Because there was an
accident at the main engine,” said Deirdre. She bit her lip and
drew in a sharp breath through her nose. “It was bad, to say the
least. Fifteen people were killed, and my husband…”

James’s eyes widened. “Oh, wow. I’m
sorry.”

“
Yeah. It took me months to
get back on my feet, and the whole time, all I could think about
was how we’d never made up. I felt like an idiot—no, like a stupid,
selfish bitch.” She looked James in the eye. “But you know what I
realized after a while?”

“
No,” he said.
“What?”

“
I realized that it was
even more stupid not to forgive myself. My husband wouldn’t have
wanted me to live the rest of my life moping over something I
couldn’t change. He’d want me to be happy, to remember the good
times.”

“
So what did you
do?”

“
I did exactly what you
should do,” she said, looking him in the eye. “I found closure and
moved on. It wasn’t easy, but it was what he would have
wanted.”

She stopped and turned to the storage
compartment that contained the letter. He glanced over at the
compartment, then up at her.

“
You think you can run away
from your past,” she continued, “but you can’t. Unless you confront
it, it’ll haunt you wherever you go. And James, I don’t want that
to happen to you. I really don’t.”

She squatted down so that she was at eye
level with him. “So will you do it? Will you read the letter?”

He bit his lip and looked away. “I don’t
know,” he muttered. “Not now. Maybe later.”

An awful sinking feeling grew in Deirdre’s
stomach, and the edges of her mouth turned down in a frown. “But
you promised—”

“
I know, I know. And I
will, believe me. Just not now.”

He stuffed the last of his clothes into his
duffel bag and closed the compartment. The bag was only half full,
but that was everything he owned. He threw it over his shoulder and
turned to face her.

“
Thank you for everything,
Deirdre. You’ve done more for me over the past few weeks
than…”

Her breath caught in her throat as his voice
trailed off. She felt as if she’d laid her heart bare to him, and
as his gaze penetrated her, something magnetic passed between them.
He leaned slowly forward, his mouth slightly parted, and she found
herself leaning slowly towards him as well. She closed her eyes,
and as their lips met, tingles of electricity shot from the top of
her head to the ends of her fingers and toes.

But the kiss was little more than a guilty
peck. James pulled back almost the moment their lips touched—not
because he didn’t want it, she sensed, but because he couldn’t stop
thinking of Sara.

“
James—”

“
Goodbye, Deirdre,” he said
abruptly. With his duffel bag on his back, he walked around her and
out the door, leaving her alone.

What should I do?
Deirdre wondered, her heart racing. The shuttle
James was leaving on was scheduled to depart in just a few
minutes—there was no way she could convince him to turn back now.
And since he was already on his way there, she’d probably never see
him again.

No,
she told herself, clenching her fists.
I won’t let you go, James. Not like that.

She opened her personal drawer and pulled
out a duffel bag of her own. With shaking hands, she began to fill
it with her belongings. She had a lot more than James, of course,
and it would take her some time to get it all, but the shuttles
left for the surface every six hours, and that gave her plenty of
time to catch the next one.

“
I’m coming after you,
James,” she said aloud, as if he could hear her. “I’m not going to
let you destroy yourself.”

Chapter 25

James stepped out of the inflatable dome
shelter into the hot, sticky air of Chira V. His breath caught in
his throat as he gazed at the alien landscape around him. The
bright blue sky stretched far overhead like an infinite ceiling,
bound only by the long, thin line of the horizon and the golden arc
of the planet’s rings. How long had it been since James had seen a
planetscape from the ground? A long time—far too long.

Of all the worlds he’d seen, Chira V was
undoubtedly the most beautiful. The puffy white clouds drifting
aimlessly in the sky reminded him of the wispy tendrils of the Good
Hope Nebula. On the horizon, craggy mountain peaks reached
heavenward like a bridge between earth and sky. The jungle, so much
thicker than the aquaponics labs on the colony ship, gave the air a
distinctly earthy taste that was fresh and clean. High in the air,
the floating blue-green islands of biomass looked like flying
carpets, while the shimmering golden band of rings arced across the
sky like a highway to the heavens.

I could spend the rest of
my life here,
James thought to
himself.
I could run away to those
mountains and never come back.

He followed the other migrants to the
open-air rover at the end of the launch pad. There were more than a
dozen settlement areas under construction around the landing site,
and James had chosen the farthest one. According to the map, it was
about half an hour’s drive away, but because there were only three
operating rovers, he’d had to wait a few hours at the main base for
a ride. He’d spent the time napping in a sleep cube, trying to sync
his sleep-cycle with the rhythms of the new world.

As he crossed the launch pad, another
orbital shuttle ferry touched down. The whine of the engines grew
louder as the spacecraft descended, the smell of ozone mingling
with the sickly-sweet smell of the jungle. Once the shuttle was on
the ground, the noise soon died to a much more tolerable level.

James threw his duffel bag into the back of
the rover and climbed in with the rest of the colonists. The driver
turned back in his seat, a patch of fresh stubble spreading across
his cheeks and chin.

“
This rover is for site
fourteen, folks—site fourteen. It’s a bit of a drive, so be sure to
secure your belongings tightly and strap yourselves in. Enjoy the
ride.”

“
I will,” James muttered to
himself, though inwardly he wasn’t so sure. There were a lot of
things about the way he’d left that made him wonder if he’d come to
regret it. His resignation at the gala hadn’t exactly been
graceful, and there were still all the colonists in cryo who would
look to him once they revived.

More than that, though, he wondered if it
had been wrong of him to leave Deirdre. He missed her a lot more
than he’d thought he would, and his thoughts constantly wandered
back to her. Just thinking about that forlorn, dejected look on her
face as he told her goodbye—only a moment or two after kissing her,
no less—made his chest constrict painfully.

“
Wait!” someone cried out
from the launch pad. It was a woman, carrying two heavy duffel bags
in hand. James squinted to get a better look at her, and his heart
skipped a beat.

Deirdre.

“
James!” she cried, running
for the rover as fast as she could. “Wait for me!”

“
You have to register at
the main base, ma’am,” the driver yelled at her. “I can’t drive you
anywhere until you show me some proof of registration.”

“
Hang on,” said James,
rising from his seat, “I’m getting off.”

The driver frowned. “Are you sure? The next
ride to site fourteen won’t be until the end of the day.”

“
I’m sure.”

With that, James jumped to the ground and
fished out his bag from the back.

“
James!” Deirdre cried,
throwing her arms around him. “Thank the stars you’re still here!”
As they embraced, the rover rumbled to life and drove away, kicking
up a cloud of dust all around them.

“
Deirdre—why did you come
down?”

“
Did you think I was going
to just let you leave like that? After all we’ve been
through?”

He smiled. “I suppose I should have known I
couldn’t get rid of you that easily.”

The sunlight shining through the jungle
canopy cast dappled shadows on her face, making her look like
something from a dream. He hugged her again, tenderly this
time.

“
I’m glad you’re
here.”

* * * * *

Deirdre walked with James hand-in-hand along
the perimeter fence of the landing site. The touch of his hand sent
tingles up and down her spine, and she felt more alive than she
ever had before.

“
What about your duties as
ship historian?” James asked. “Did you resign from your position
like I did?”

“
The
Chiran Spirit
isn’t going to be
around much longer,” she answered. “They’re dismantling it now to
build the main orbital—they want to name it McCoy
Station.”

“
I’m flattered,” James said
dryly.

“
Names like that are for
commemorating things. No one seriously expects you to come back.
Besides, you
do
have quite the legacy. It’s only fitting to name the station
in your honor.”

He brightened a little at that. She squeezed
his hand, and he squeezed back.

“
In any case,” Deirdre
continued, “I figure I can do just as good a job down here as I can
up there. After all, this is where the real history is going to be
made.”

“
What about the rebels?”
James asked.

“
What about them? There’s
some talk about an arms race, but Carlson says it’s more likely
we’ll make peace and set up trade relations. No one wants a war so
soon after our arrival.”

“
A lot of the original
colonists are going to be horrified when they find out what the
rebels did,” he muttered.

“
Yeah,” she said, glancing
over at him. “But Carlson says he thinks you did the right thing by
stepping down. If you were still in power, there’d be no chance for
reconciliation. Now, there’s a lot of hope that we’ll work
something out.”