Was Once a Hero (5 page)

“There’s
a number on that chip.
 
Call it and say
the word ‘Faust’ if you’re going to accept.
 
Our specialists will find you.
 
You’ll still have to recruit your own crew, but we and Duna will advance
you sufficient funds to make it possible.”

“Faust,”
Mandela repeated as he stood, “and we make all your problems go away.”

“Lisa,”
Fenaday said suddenly.

Mandela
looked back from the door.
 
“I won’t mess
with you.
 
You got everything we
had.
 
Lisa Fenaday was one of ours, one
of the best.
 
We looked and we still keep
an ear out.
 
Didn’t you ever wonder why
your bribes and wire-taps worked?”

Fenaday
snapped around startled.

Mandela
opened the door.

“You
forgot your case,” Fenaday called.

“It’s
yours,” Mandela said breezily, “your jamming equipment isn’t worth jack.
 
Instructions are in the case.”
 
He closed the door behind him.

“Son
of bitch,” Fenaday said.
 
After a minute,
he went to the single window and sat on the ledge.
 
For a cheap room, the view was not bad.
 
He could see part of the sandy Martian
landscape, sere even in the weak sun.
 
A
hundred years of terraforming had raised pressure, temperature and oxygen
levels to where a small re-breather mask allowed humans to endure the outside
for short periods.
 
The Martian sky remained
pink in the daytime and the stars blazed brighter than in Earth’s night
sky.
 
Mars was still colder than hell.

He
could also see the landing apron of the western edge of the port.
 
A small freighter lifted off, the type the
Shamrock Line used in another lifetime.
 
He sat there for three hours watching the rusty sand blow and the
occasional movement of ships and personnel in the distance.
 

Fenaday’s
thoughts roamed over the years, the ones past and the ones seeming to lie empty
before him.
 
He was broke and alone.
 
Family and friends had fallen away over the
years—due to the war, the bitter breakup over the Shamrock Line, or the natural
drift when one leaves the mainstream of life.

“How
did I get here?” he asked the room.
 
“How
in the world did I get here?”

Her
face came to him as if in answer, the details blurry, which frightened
him.
 
He’d first seen Lisa standing on
the verandah, at one of his father’s legendary business parties.
 
Slender, with blue-eyes and dark-red hair,
she wore a filmy white dress that floated around her in the summer breeze.
 
Everyone else disappeared, until all that was
left was her face, her voice, and her laugh.
 
They created a minor scandal by disappearing from the party into the
gardens.
 

“More
idle playboy nonsense from my spoiled son,” his father had growled when he
learned of their relationship.
 
He was
wrong.
 
Lisa differed from everyone else
he had known.
 
She held a commission in
the Confederate Space Forces, Field Intelligence Section.
 

His
father opposed the romance.
 
Fenaday’s
hands unconsciously clenched as he remembered the fury his father’s belittling
of Lisa brought out in him, a rage that daunted even his domineering father,
“The Fenaday.”

“Well
and enough,” the elder Fenaday said, just before it came to blows.
 
“I should know better than to cross a man
where his woman is concerned.”

Not
many people stood up to the elder Fenaday and his son had been late in
starting.
 
Robert came to suspect that
his father was secretly pleased with the changes Lisa wrought in his son.
 

They
married in the fall of their second year together.
 
Lisa stayed in the military despite his
wealth.
 
He accepted it as the price of
having her.
 
Then, humans and the six
other member races of the loose Confederacy collided with the Conchirri, a
nightmarish species of intelligent carnivores, implacably hostile to all other
life.
 
Scientists speculated the behavior
was sociological or religious.
 
The
explanation was what sophisticated people afraid to believe in true evil fell
back on.

When Lisa
left for combat duty, Fenaday stayed to help his father keep the Shamrock Line
afloat.
 
Losses in ships and lives
mounted.
 
The elder Fenaday, in bad
health from a lifetime of hard living, aged rapidly before his son’s eyes.
 
Decisions fell to Robert more and more often.

In
the second year of the war, Fenaday saw a Confed aircar land and raced to the
door, reaching it before the butler.
 
A
nervous young officer in dress-blacks stood there.

“Lt.
Commander Elizabeth Fenaday,” he said, voice cracking with strain, “is three
months overdue and presumed lost on a classified mission.
 
The
Blackbird
left a forward base just before a Conchirri cruiser attacked the outpost.
 
The base and the reasons she left charted
space are gone.
 

“The
Secretary of War wishes to express….”

Fenaday
stared at him.
 
This isn’t real,
he said to himself.
 
I’ll
wake up any second now.
 
I always do.

The
young officer left the letter and a neatly folded gold flag with the
butler.
 

Fenaday’s
father died two weeks later.
 
Robert buried
him on the estate.
 
A few friends came by
and offered useless advice and hollow comforts.
 
Most had gone, fled to the safer inner worlds.
 
Fenaday had no brothers or sisters; his
mother had died when he was three.
 
A
throng of lesser relations came to the estate seeking advantages under the
cover of consolation.
 
He sent them
away.
 

His
Uncle Patrick had glared in contempt before leaving.
 
“Aye, go sulk.
 
Your old man would have got a gun and bagged
a Xeno.”
 

The
words raced round and round in his mind till the early hours of the next
morning when he stood on the veranda where they first met.
 
“Lisa,” he said finally, “I think I’ll go get
that gun now.”

At
sunrise he put everything up for sale.
 
The government and the Shamrock board tried to stop him, but now he was
“The Fenaday” and forced the sale through.
 
He learned of a captured starship languishing in a Confed yard, a
Conchirri
Tokkoro
class
Frigate-leader taken in a raid.
 
Fenaday
christened her
Sidhe
, after the
ancient elvish sprits of Ireland.
 
He
ordered her painted in the cheapest color the dockyard had.
 
In bitter irony, the color was blood-red.

Letters
of Marque and Reprisal followed and Robert Xavier Fenaday became a
privateer.
 
Fenaday, who had rarely gone
without anything, learned about want as everything went for the ship.
 
He signed whomever he could, paring the
misfits, at least those that he could live without.
 

Sidhe
launched into the war as a hired
escort, priority cargo runner, anything that kept Fenaday near the Fringe Stars
where Lisa disappeared.
 
Two years passed
in his search, but he found no sign of Lisa or her ship.
 
Fenaday lost track of the spaceport bars in
which he hunted wild rumors of lost ships.
 
Handling a board room or trade negotiation hadn’t taught him how to live
in the world he now sentenced himself to.

Confed
fleets beat the Conchirri out of the lost colonies, back into their space and
finally to their homeworld, where the Conchirri fought until exterminated.
 
His enemies were extinct, but Fenaday was no
closer to learning Lisa’s fate.

Fenaday
shook himself out of remembrance to find that Sol had long since set.
 
He finally turned on his private computer and
spent an hour reading the data chips.
 
Afterwards, he walked to his dresser and fished out a tiny, precious
possession.
 
He opened the small silver
box and gazed at the photo of his wife, studying her dark red hair and
startling blue-gray eyes.
 
He returned to
the window and set it there.

“What
should I do, Lisa?” he asked.
 
“Mandela’s
offer seems like the only way to carry on.
 
It also seems like certain death.
 
Where, Lisa?
 
Where do I go from
here?”
 
The picture gave back only
silence now, where once it had spoken hope to him.
 
Fenaday slowly closed it and stood turning to
the desktop communicator.

He
made two calls.
 
The first was brief, to
the number Mandela left him.

“Faust,”
he said.
 
The videophone emitted a beep
and the words ‘video denied’ flashed on screen.
 
Then the line went inactive.
 
He
let out a long, shuddering breath.
 
One
way or another, life as he knew it had just ended.

He
placed the second call to the suite of Belwin Duna at the Paradise.
 
He wasn’t surprised when Telisan’s image
flicked on the screen.
 
Duna appeared on
the screen a second later.
 
“Yes,
Captain,” said Duna.

“If I
can get a crew,” said Fenaday, “we go.
 
I’ll call you in two days.
 
We’ll
meet Friday at twenty hundred hours at the Excalibur near Dome Top.
 
You’re buying.”

“God
bless you, Captain Fenaday,” Duna exclaimed.
 
“You will not regret this.”

“I
know,” Fenaday said.
 
“Only the living
have regrets.”

“Now,
now I can sleep,” Duna said.
 
“Enshar…Enshar.”
 
He wandered out
of view of the monitor.

Fenaday
found himself looking at Telisan.

“Hyperbolic,
huh?” Fenaday said.

The
Denlenn smiled, human-like.
 
“As your
people used to say in the war with the Xenos, ‘Hoo-rah.’”
 
The screen faded.

Fenaday
put his head back and laughed for the first time in weeks.

Chapter Four

In
the morning, everything seemed less amusing.
 
Fenaday made his next call with a certain amount of dread.
 
After he identified himself, Shasti
Rainhell’s image appeared on the screen.
 
Mandela had called her his pet amazon and she looked the part.
 
Jade-green eyes looked back at him from a
perfectly symmetrical face of imperious beauty.
 
Her ivory skin contrasted with night-black hair.
 
She wore a judo gi and had evidently been
working out.
 
Not that she’d broken a
sweat in Mars’ low gravity.

“Found
other work?” he asked.

Shasti
gave back her usual impassive gaze.
 
Steady, impenetrable, betraying little.
 
Like a statue,
he thought,
the eyes reflect light, but not warmth or
depth
.
 
Shasti was all surfaces.
 
In the two years he had known her, she
revealed almost nothing of herself or her past.

“Haven’t
looked,” she replied in a surprisingly musical voice.
 
“Have you left the privateer business?
 
Should I start?”

Fenaday
sighed.
 
“I am into a new business that
is very much an endgame, one way or another.
 
If it works, your and my problems, the ones about the ship and money,
end.
 
If it doesn’t, the problems end
anyway.”

Shasti
looked at him without speaking for some seconds.
 
He could almost feel the distance grow.
 
“What have you gotten yourself into?”

“Meet
me at the ship in an hour and I’ll fill you in.”

For a
terrible second, he thought she might say no.
 

“Should
I bring anyone?” she asked.

Fenaday
thought for a second.
 
He had high
turnover among officers and crew for one reason or another.
 
He didn’t trust most of them.
 
“Do you know where the Exec went?”

“To
jail,” she replied.
 
“There was a
manslaughter charge waiting for him here.
 
Evidently Romola isn’t his real name.”

“How
distressing,” he replied.
 
“Just come
yourself then.”

She
nodded, giving him her most enigmatic look.
 
The screen faded.

Fenaday
leaned back with a sigh.
 
Shasti was
in.
 
His odds of survival had just
doubled.
 
Unfortunately, twice zero was
still zero.