Was Once a Hero

chapter Three



Fenaday paid the tab and hurried back to his room at the Spacer’s Lodge near the outer edge of Marsport’s dome, facing the industrial zone. He locked the door, turning on the battery of jamming devices he kept secreted in the room. Only then did he pull out an unlinked portable computer to scan the data disk.

Authorizations came first. They looked authentic. He’d have them checked by a lawyer if need be. Next came the contract. Fenaday gaped at the figure, one billion Confederation credits, exclusive trading rights to Enshar, citizenship, diplomatic immunity, protection from extradition for any past misdeeds, free docking and port privileges. All possible assistance in the search for Lisa Fenaday, including support for Fringe Star expeditions.

“Pity all I have to do for it is die,” he muttered.

A knock at his door interrupted his reading. Fenaday cut off the computer. He picked up a lock-blade knife, snapped it open and tucked it in his back belt, wishing he’d been able to smuggle in something more lethal. He checked the outside monitor. A middle-aged human stood outside, bulky, once very strong, dark-skinned, balding, and utterly unremarkable. With a pang, Fenaday remembered his wife telling him what great spies undistinguished people made. Somehow he knew this was such a person. It fitted too well with the night’s developments. He opened the door warily.

“Captain Fenaday?” asked the man in a deep, pleasant voice.

“You know that,” Fenaday countered. “Are you Foreign Office, or my wife’s old service?”

The man smiled suddenly, teeth bright in the dark face. “Yes. The branch doesn’t matter. You can call me, Mandela.”

“That’s not your real name,” Fenaday said wearily.

“Nope,” said the man, “one of my heroes. Can I come in?”

“I suppose it could be worse,” Fenaday said. “On second thought, I suspect it is worse.”

“Captain Robert Fenaday,” Mandela repeated, entering the room and examining it casually, “of the Fenadays of New Eire. That’s quite a name. Your people turned their first-landing privileges into land and later, into interstellar shipping. The Shamrock Line’s banner became quite famous as your family clawed its way to wealth and power. Not too interested in sharing that wealth and power though. Your great-grandfather opposed the original Articles of Confederation.”

“Did you come here to give me a history lesson?” Fenaday snapped.

Mandela seated himself on the most comfortable chair, placing his briefcase on the table. “Shall I cut to the chase, or do you want to go through the motions first?”

“The chase, by all means,” replied Fenaday, leaning against a table where he could watch the door and the one window.

“Good. I may even get home in time for the game. I know you met Belwin Duna and I know why.”

Fenaday raised an eyebrow. “And you don’t want me to help him.”

“On the contrary, Captain. We very much want you to help him. We can’t insist on such a suicide mission. However, we can give you additional incentives to go and additional resources, the like of which you never imagined.”

“Why?” Fenaday asked. “No bullshit, why?”

Mandela smiled. “No bullshit. Every planetary government in the Confederacy worries about Enshar. We don't know what happened. We don’t know if it will happen again. There’s a threat out there, Fenaday. It has to be understood and if possible, controlled.”

“Send the Space Forces.”

“And risk having all those nasty pictures from orbit repeated for the folks back home?” Mandela returned. “All over the Daily Vid and the Times? Reporters and Congressman howling about why ‘Our Boys and Girls’ are being sacrificed for foreign worlds after all we lost in the war? Nope, it’s an election year, Fenaday, bad for the President.”

“Do it covert,” said Fenaday.

“Plug in your brain, Fenaday. Every surviving Enshari is waiting on Duna’s report. If he isn’t allowed to go or dies before he gets there, we face mass suicides, or they send another Enshari. Same problems for the President with the newsies.”

“So,” Fenaday began, “a highly expendable privateer, who you guys don’t like anyway...”

“Civilians ships running around with chain-guns and mass drivers are a loose end and a menace,” Mandela said. “Some have become private operators.”

“Not me,” Fenaday said. “My wife was ... is Confed.”

“Yeah,” Mandela replied after a few moments, “sorry.”

“Spare me.”

“Here’s the deal, Fenaday. For what it’s worth, I don’t like it. You may not be a private operator, but you skate damn close. There is the little matter of a Dua-Denlenn freighter and a surrendered crew murdered while under parole.”

Shock spread through Fenaday. Mandela knew Sidhe’s deepest secret.

“I don’t know…” Fenaday began.

“Now you can spare me,” Mandela fixed him with a glare as he settled further into the chair. “Your pet amazon, Shasti Rainhell, polished off the crew. You covered it up, even hired her as head of security. I’m sure she is quite effective. Not many people can boast a genetically enhanced assassin for their crew. Olympians are mercifully rare off their mad homeworld. Still, that’s accessory after the fact for you, beingslaughter, at best, for her. We are aware of your relationship with her.”

“Past tense,” said Fenaday tightly, wondering how in God’s name Mandela had ferreted that out.

“On the disk Duna gave you,” Mandela continued, “are plans Telisan stole for a new stealth electromagnetic emissions masking program. Doubtless he hoped it might help you sneak up on Enshar and whatever killed everyone. He needn’t have bothered. We’ll give your ship a far better EME holosystem. All factory assembled, even has a warranty.

“You’ll have trouble getting a crew and keeping it once they figure out where you’re going. We will give you additional people.

“Finally, we’ll add to that cash offer. We’ll throw in pardons for anything you and your command crew have done to this point. Which is more than you have any idea of, in regard to Rainhell. It’s that big, Fenaday.”

“So, I take them within shuttle range of Enshar and stand off—” Fenaday began.

Mandela laughed. “No, Fenaday. It’s too easy for an accident to occur. A shuttle explosion, perhaps? You’re not going to drop a decorated war hero and a Nobel Laureate on Enshar and watch the show. You’ll scout Enshar before they land. You personally, so we know there won’t be any accidents.”

“You think I’d do that?” Fenaday demanded, his lips drawn thin.

“No one pays me to think or to guess,” Mandela said, his smile fading. “My job is to know. For what it’s worth, I don’t think you would do it, but there are others on your ship who might. One of them is very pretty and very tall.”

“I could fight you in court,” Fenaday said. He walked to the window, looking out of it in feigned indifference, but careful not to let Mandela see the knife in his belt.

Mandela looked amused. “You got any friends left, Fenaday? Big friends with influence? You got money stashed away for real lawyers? You’ll be fighting us in our courts. I don’t even have to rig it to convict you on stock and securities fraud, committed when you sold off the Shamrock line. Then there’s the less savory stuff: gun running to Morokat, smuggling, illegal intelligence gathering, sheltering deserters, taking that condemned Frokossi prince off-world. He was declared a traitor. Do you want to be extradited to a Frokossi court on a political engineering charge and try out that defense?

“Of course you might win,” Mandela continued, “but you’ll be broke and disgraced. As for Rainhell, whatever she is or isn’t to you, she goes away. The charges against her just start with murdering prisoners under parole. Assuming she decides to surrender into custody, which I doubt.”

“Christ,” Fenaday muttered, as Mandela put a data chip on the table.

“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.