Hex (24 page)

“But you didn't say so until we actually arrived.”

“Right. When I saw for myself that I'd made the right guess, I said so.” He smiled. “You're going to have to be patient with me, Captain. Sorry, but that way I don't have to apologize for making a wrong guess.”

“I suppose you're right.” Andromeda finished her apple. For lack of anything else to do with the core, she tossed it beneath the tree. “I guess we can only hope that Sean learns more . . . if he gets here safely, that is.”

D'Anguilo slowly nodded. He regarded her with a pensive gaze that she found discomfiting. “You're worried about him, aren't you?”

“He's my son. Shouldn't I be?”

“Of course. It's just that”—he hesitated—“if I didn't know better, I wouldn't know the two of you were even related.” Feeling her face grow warm, Andromeda cast him an angry look. “Sorry,” he quickly added. “I'm not trying to pick a fight here. But it's pretty obvious that the two of you don't get along. I mean, you can barely stand to be in the same room . . .”

“Not because I haven't tried,” she shot back. “If you're half as observant as you claim to be, you'd notice that Sean's been the one who's been hostile.”

“Yes, I suppose you're right, now that you mention it.” He was quiet for a few moments before he spoke again. “So . . . what's going on between you two? If you don't mind my asking, that is.”

“I do mind.” Even as she said this, though, Andromeda had a compulsion to answer his question. It had been a long time since she'd talked about Sean with anyone except Jason and Melpomene. One was a former lover, and the other was the closest she had to a best friend, but both were members of her crew and thus couldn't be expected to be impartial to their captain's feelings. Although D'Anguilo sometimes irritated her, Andromeda realized that it wasn't entirely his fault. He meant well; he simply had a tendency to put curiosity before common sense.

She looked up the ramp. The lift had almost reached the top. It would be a while before Melpomene and Rolf returned from the ship; meanwhile, she and D'Anguilo had time to kill. They could either talk about apples and aliens, or . . .

“If I tell you,” she asked, “can you keep your mouth shut? This is personal, and I don't want this getting back to your company or . . .”

“I promise. It's just between you and me.”

“All right, then.” Andromeda let out her breath, then walked over to the ramp base and sat down beside him. “It goes back to when I was in the Union Astronautica, and Sean and I were living in New Havana with Dean, his father . . .”

“Your husband?”

“We were married, yes . . . or at least we'd been, once upon a time.” She shrugged. “But it didn't work out, so a couple of years after we had Sean, he and I decided to call it quits.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Don't be. Other than the fact that he helped give me a son, marrying him was the biggest mistake I ever made.”
Almost the biggest,
she silently added. “Fact of the matter is that I got hitched to him more as a career move than anything else. Dean was the son of a Patriarch, which meant that his old man was in a government position where he could help me get what I wanted . . . namely, my own ship.”

“That's how you became the
Montero
's captain?” D'Anguilo stared at her in disbelief.

“It was called
The Patriotism of Fidel Castro
back then, and no, it wasn't entirely a matter of patronage. I'd already earned my commission and was certified for command rank. But there was a long list of other people who also wanted their own ships, so Dean's father pulled some strings to have me bumped to the front of the line.” A grim smile. “All I had to do was marry his son.”

D'Anguilo had a guarded look in his eyes. “That sounds rather . . . opportunistic.”

“Don't get me wrong,” Andromeda said, a little more hastily than she meant to. “I liked Dean . . . I just didn't love him. Or at least not enough to want to remain married to him. And I think he felt the same way about me, too, because he didn't fight the divorce.” She paused. “Only one problem . . . he wanted Sean, and I wasn't about to give him up.”

“You had custody?”

“I did, but it was only temporary. After the divorce was finalized, I moved to Copernicus Centre on the Moon, and took Sean with me. Dean didn't like that, so he decided to fight it in court. Since he had his father on his side, I pretty much knew Grandpa would use his clout to make sure that the magistrate would reverse the earlier decision and give Sean to Dean.”

“Uh-huh.” D'Anguilo nodded. “And how did Sean feel about that?”

“He was too young to really understand what was going on, except that Dad was no longer with us and Mom didn't like to talk about him. But he loved Dean, and Dean loved him, and . . . well, I wasn't sure he wouldn't go with his father if given a chance to choose for himself.”

Andromeda slowly let out her breath. “Anyway . . . the lawyers were still duking it out when the WHU collapsed. When the government fell, it took both the Union Astronautica and the legal system with it.” She looked at him askance. “I'm sure you remember what that was like.”

“Not really . . . or at least not the way you do. I'm a secondgeneration colonist . . . My folks came to Coyote aboard the
New Horizons
, the second Union ship to reach 47 Uma.” A shrug and a smile. “I knew what was going on, of course, but I've never been to Earth.”

“Yes, well . . . believe me, you haven't missed anything. The global environment had gone to hell by then, and all the old governments and coalitions were breaking down. Anyone with any sense was getting out of there if they could. And I had a ship . . .”

“So you escaped.”

“Uh-huh. I took the matter to my crew, and after they voted unanimously to defect to Coyote, I approached the Federation consulate on Highgate about having a hyperspace key installed in the nav system. They were only too happy to oblige—they were eager to acquire ships since Coyote wasn't able to build any of their own—and so we took the
Castro
before the Union Astronautica knew what was going on.” She shrugged. “It wasn't hard, really. By then, a revolution had broken out in New Havana, and the social-collectivists were being overthrown. So the government had a lot worse things to worry about than someone's hijacking a ship.”

“And, of course, you took Sean with you.”

“Damn right I did.” She looked him square in the eye. “When the
Castro
was ready to leave, I went back to our apartment on the Moon, grabbed him and a few belongings, and caught the next shuttle to Highgate. Sean didn't know what was going on until we were actually aboard ship and about to launch.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That we were going far, far away, but it was going to be to a happy place, where he could run and play and . . .” Andromeda sighed. “Well, you can probably imagine the rest. The sort of thing you'd tell a little boy when you're yanking him away from everything he's known and taking him to another world.”

“And what about his father?”

Andromeda hesitated. This was the part of the story she didn't like to talk about, and she found herself wondering why she was telling it to a relative stranger. But it was too late to stop, so she went on.

“I told Sean that his father would be joining us later. That he had a few things he still had to do on Earth, but once he settled his business, he'd be taking another ship to Coyote.” She shrugged. “And, of course, Sean believed me. Why shouldn't he? I was his mother, and I'd never lied to him before.”

She shook her head. “Funny thing is, I kinda believed it myself. I figured that Dean would eventually find out where we'd gone and that he'd pull strings to get aboard the next Union Astronautica ship to Coyote. But since I'd already requested political amnesty from the Federation, and the Union didn't have any extradition treaties with them, he'd have a tough time taking Sean away from me. Unless he wanted to defect to Coyote himself, of course.”

“And did he?”

“No.” Andromeda let out her breath. “When New Havana went up in flames, I lost contact with him. The
Castro
. . . the
Montero
, I mean . . . was one of the last ships to leave Earth before Starbridge Coyote was destroyed. So I never heard from Dean again.” A wry smile. “Weird thing is . . . once he was gone, I realized that I missed him. If he hadn't tried to take Sean away from me, we might have even gotten back together again. But . . .”

“But that didn't happen.”

“No.” Her smile faded. “Anyway, I thought my problems were over. And they were . . . but only for a while.”

D'Anguilo said nothing, but only waited for her to go on. Feeling restless, Andromeda stood up. “I bought a place in New Brighton, and Sean and I settled in, and I got to watch him grow up while I waited for the starbridge to be rebuilt. He had only one parent, but he didn't seem to mind so long as he was able to continue believing what I'd told him . . . that his father was supposed to be joining us but had been left behind when the starbridge was destroyed. He never knew that Dean and I had broken up or that I'd abducted him, and I didn't intend to tell him. And he might have gone on believing just that if he hadn't found my old logbook.”

“You'd written about it in your log?” D'Anguilo asked.

She nodded, not looking at him but instead gazing up the mountainside. “It was all there, in my personal log from the
Castro
. By then, the starbridge had been rebuilt, and I was back in the captain's chair. Sean had grown up, but he was still living at home while he finished school. I was on a mission for the merchant marine when he accessed my old logs through our home comp. Just curious, really, to read what his mother had been doing way back when. And that was when . . . well, that's when he found out that I'd been lying to him.”

Tucking her hands in her jumpsuit pockets, Andromeda stared at the ground. “I'd forgotten how much he'd loved Dean. I'd tried as hard as I could to be a good mother, but the kid had grown up without a father, and he'd done so thinking that it was only an accident that Dean had been left behind. So when he found out that I'd deliberately taken him away and never really had any intention of letting his father see him again . . .”

“He was upset.”

Andromeda gave him an annoyed glance. “Now there's an understatement. He felt . . .” She stopped, searching for the right words.

“Betrayed?” D'Anguilo said tentatively.

“That's one way to describe it.
Infuriated
is another. We had it out as soon as I returned home, and some things were said that probably shouldn't have been, and . . .” Andromeda looked away again. “He moved out. He got a place of his own in New Brighton and stayed there until he finished school, and the next day he enlisted in the Corps of Exploration. He's got a key to the house, of course, and sometimes he drops by, but only when he knows I'm not going to be there. I've sent him letters, but he's never answered them, and when I've tried to apologize, he doesn't listen.”

“I see.” D'Anguilo was quiet for a moment. “And now the two of you are on this mission together.”

“Not my choice, believe me. But when Ted Harker told me that I'd be escorting a Corps of Exploration survey team, I knew that he'd be aboard, and that there was nothing I could do about it.”

“But if he . . .”

D'Anguilo suddenly stopped. Because she wasn't looking at him, Andromeda didn't realize that he was staring past her. “It's tough for both of us, yeah,” she said, still gazing at the ground. “And now that he's gone, I'm afraid that I'll never see him again, or tell him . . .”

“Tell me what?” a voice behind her said.

Her eyes widened, and for a moment Andromeda thought it was Sean who had spoken. But when she turned around to look, she saw that it wasn't her son who was walking toward them from the nearby grove but Zeus Brandt.

For several heartbeats, Andromeda was unable to breathe, let alone speak. His EVA suit was gone, and he wore only his jumpsuit, but
Montero
's chief petty officer appeared to be unhurt. Indeed, there was a wide smile across his face as he strolled out from under the apple trees.

“Hi, skipper,” he said. “Did you really think you'd never see me again?”

Behind her, D'Anguilo brayed laughter, but Andromeda was too astonished to mind. “I . . . I . . .” she began, then swallowed hard as she tried to collect herself. “I wasn't talking about you, but . . . yes, as a matter of fact, I did. Where the hell have you been?”

“It's a long story.” A grin and a casual shrug, then Zeus held up a hand before she could go on. “I'll tell you everything, but first, there's a message I've got to give you.”

For the first time, Andromeda noticed that he had a small paper scroll in his other hand. “What's that?” she asked as he held it out for her.

“Like I said, it's a message. The
danui
told me to deliver it to you . . .”

“The
danui
?” The captain's mouth fell open. “You've met them?”

“Yeah . . . well, sort of.” Zeus held the scroll out to her. “Anyway, here it is.”

There were a dozen things she wanted to know, but Zeus seemed insistent that she first take the scroll. It appeared to be made of some brittle parchment, like old hemp paper, and it was tied together by a slender blue ribbon.

She untied the ribbon and unrolled the scroll, and for a moment she thought this was all a joke; the paper was blank. Then, as she watched, words materialized upon the scroll: