Island in a Sea of Stars Read Online Free PDF

particular star system, no known Roamer outpost, no Confederation planet.
    She activated her stardrive and headed after him again.
    Her personal mission had focused her for days. Though she’d remembered to bring work along—documents to review, processes to audit and, if possible, streamline—she hadn’t been able to think about her job since she raced away from Sheol. And she resented Garrison for that too.
    By now, Lee Iswander would be making his case to the Roamer clans at Newstation. Normally, in his absence, Elisa would have been left in charge of the lava-processing operations, but since she had to take care of this nonsense, Iswander would have turned over the responsibility to Alec Pannebaker. She should have been his choice.
    Iswander must think that she was not reliable after all, that she was one of “those” professional women who couldn’t balance family matters with business necessities. Elisa did not want to be seen as a woman like that. She had worked too hard, devoted too much of her life, made too many sacrifices to get where she was.
    All along she had thought Garrison was her partner with the same goals, seeing an intensely bright Guiding Star—to use a metaphor from the silly Roamer superstition.
    As Elisa cruised along, not knowing how soon she might encounter the next shifting point, she called up her personal image library and scrolled through to find a photo of Seth (not that she had forgotten what her own child looked like, thank you!). The first photo she found was a portrait of herself and Garrison, both smiling as they held the one-year-old boy. Happy times. Elisa frowned when she saw it, recognizing the silly delusion in her eyes.
    Without thinking, she deleted the image, scrolled through the library, and found another one of Garrison and Seth laughing as they ate some gelatinous pasta meal they had cooked together. She deleted the second image as well.
    She didn’t like to be reminded of that, and when she finally took Seth back, she did not want her son to be able to view and remember enjoyable times with his father.
    She found several more images of Garrison and Seth at different ages. Then two of herself and Garrison, and she deleted those as well. Elisa didn’t need to be taunted by her mistakes. Even more photos of Garrison and Seth. What did he do, spend all of his time staging images of them? No wonder he hadn’t advanced far in his job.
    But she couldn’t find any warm, smiling photos of just herself and Seth. And since Garrison was so keen to take images, he must have done it on purpose, intentionally leaving her out.
    She finally uncovered several images of just the boy alone, which she kept. Elisa displayed them on the cockpit screens. That was a sufficient reminder, and she could always use her imagination to place herself there alongside him. It would be good enough.
    Though she didn’t need to shore up her resolve, she studied the shape of his nose, the curve of his smile, tried to determine how much of his features looked like her. She saw hints of Garrison there too—that couldn’t be helped. Seth was still her son, regardless.
    Her ship stopped at the next breadcrumb tracker, and she reoriented her nav system, studying the new course. She shook her head. “Where the hell is he going? That’s the middle of nowhere.”
    She flew off again, increasing speed, because by now she was growing impatient and angry. The course took her out into an emptiness well outside the nearest star system.
    When she arrived and scanned the area for signs of Garrison’s stolen ship, Elisa found that the area was not empty at all. She encountered a cluster of large globules, greenish-brown spheres brought together through gravity or some kind of willful motion. The cluster looked like a miniature galaxy, with hundreds of other globules floating around the periphery. Trails of outliers extended across the emptiness, marking some