STAR'S END - Hardcover

CLARKE, CASSANDRA ROSE

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1481444298 ISBN 13: 9781481444293

Verlag: Pocket Books, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

The Corominas family owns a small planet system, which consists of one gaseous planet and four terraformed moons, nicknamed the Four Sisters. Phillip Coromina, the patriarch of the family, earned his wealth through a manufacturing company he started as a young man and is preparing his eldest daughter, Esme, to take over the company when he dies. When Esme comes of age and begins to take over the business, she gradually discovers the reach of her father’s company, the sinister aspects of its work with alien DNA, and the shocking betrayal that estranged her three half-sisters from their father. After a lifetime of following her father’s orders, Esme must decide if she should agree to his dying wish of assembling her sisters for a last goodbye or face her role in her family’s tragic undoing.

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Cassandra Rose Clarke is the author of Star Trek: Prodigy: A Dangerous Trade, Star Trek: The Next Generation: Shadows Have Offended, Our Lady of the Ice, Magic of Blood and Sea, Magic of Wind and Mist, Star’s End, Halo: Battle Born, and Halo: Battle Born: Meridian Divide. She grew up in south Texas and currently lives in Richmond, Virginia, where she tends to multiple cats. Cassandra’s first adult novel, The Mad Scientist’s Daughter, was a finalist for the 2013 Philip K. Dick Award, and her YA novel, The Assassin’s Curse, was nominated for YALSA’s 2014 Best Fiction for Young Adults. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons and Daily Science Fiction. Visit her at CassandraRoseClarke.com.  

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Star’s End

NOW

He was dying.

The restaurant hummed, soft murmuring voices, the rattle of silverware, a cobwebbed overlay of music.

“What?” Esme said.

Miguel balanced his fork on the edge of his plate and made a show of wiping his hands on his napkin. He wouldn’t look her in the eye. It was a tell she had warned him about when he first joined the company.

“He’s dying?” Esme said.

Miguel nodded. “He went in for testing three days ago—”

“Three days?”

“Yes. It’s galazamia.”

The word was sharp-edged, like a knife. Galazamia. Aina Mitsuke’s disease. Zamia. It had a hundred different names but the results were always the same: you wasted away until you were nothing. It was not a disease Esme would ever have associated with her father.

“I’m sorry he didn’t tell you himself. He asked me not to, but—” Miguel twisted in his seat. “It didn’t feel right, keeping it a secret from you.”

Esme closed her eyes. Her body hummed like a live wire. She thought about the last time she had seen her father. It had been less than twenty-four hours before. He’d been sitting across the table from her at an investor’s meeting up in the space station, lightscreen glowing while Steve Bajori rattled on about this season’s financial reports. She hadn’t paid much attention to him, having other things on her mind, but she did remember glancing at him halfway through the meeting to catch him staring out the window at Coromina I, at the fine-hewn golden-red swirls of its surface.

Her father wasn’t one for looking out windows.

“Esme?”

Esme opened her eyes. Miguel was staring at her, leaning into the table, looking concerned.

“I’m sorry if this was an intrusion—” he began.

“An intrusion.” Esme shook her head. “No, it’s fine.”

“I felt bad keeping it from you.”

“I understand. It’s fine.” Esme looked down at her half-finished meal. She didn’t have the appetite to finish. “He seemed healthy the last time I saw him.” She said this more to herself than to Miguel.

“It’s in the early stages.”

Esme laughed, shaking her head. She didn’t mean to but it slipped out anyway. “The early stages,” she said. “What else do you know?” She looked up. Miguel looked away. “Come on, Miguel, it sounds like he really opened up to you.” It came out more bitterly than she intended, but bitterness was impossible to avoid when Phillip Coromina was involved.

“Not much.” Miguel sighed. “Just that that it’s galazamia, that it’s in the early stages, that he’s already started treatments.”

“How long?”

“How long what?”

Esme clenched her jaw, teeth grinding together.

“Oh. How long till he—” Miguel shook his head. “God, Esme, I don’t know. He didn’t tell me. I don’t know why he told me about the zamia in the first place.”

“He likes you.”

Miguel blinked at her in surprise, his eyes big and dark. Her father did like Miguel. Esme liked Miguel too, which was why she had brought him on as her assistant almost fifteen years before. But it had been her father who’d been impressed with his work, who promoted him to senior vice president. Esme outranked him on the corporate ladder but not, apparently, on personal matters.

“Esme, I’m sorry,” he said. “Let me get lunch.”

The muscles in Esme’s face tensed into something like a smile. She didn’t know what Miguel was apologizing for—the fact that her father told him first, or the fact that her father was dying at all. Maybe both. Maybe it didn’t matter.

“It’s not your fault,” she said, a response that would fit either circumstance.

Miguel smiled at her, a sad smile, tactful and appropriate. Esme poked at the salad on her plate, then dropped the fork and drained her glass of wine. Miguel watched her, his face blank. Nonjudgmental. That wasn’t the reason she hired him, but it was the reason she went to lunch with him.

“I’ll get the check now,” he said, and lifted one hand in the air.

• • •

Esme clicked off the holo and stared at the bluish haze the image left behind as the light faded. Another call finished. This one had been with the lab out at Starspray City on Catequil, the heart of the Coromina Group’s weapons manufacturing. She’d been on three such calls in the two hours since lunch, and with each one she’d smiled, she’d soothed, she’d promised her employees that the Coromina Group was looking into their concerns about the whispers of anti-corporate rebels hiding out in the system, about the possibility of a containment breach. She didn’t let any of her colleagues know that her father was dying.

Esme pushed away from her desk and walked over to her window. Her office was on the seventy-fifth floor, high enough that she could almost make out the ocean sparkling in the distance, the water that bright emerald green that was one of Ekkeko’s many trademarks. She crossed her arms over her chest. Her reflection moved in the glass. Her father was in a meeting; at least, that’s what his assistant Lucia had told her when she rang her up on the holo, right after she had returned to her office. No telling when he’d be out.

Esme leaned against the glass. Wind whistled around the building but down on the ground the jacaranda trees and tall silvery-green sea grass were unmoving. This wasn’t the first person she’d lost in her life—her mother had died in a war in the Iaon system a few years earlier, doing what she loved. And of course Esme’s sisters were gone, a fact she had come to accept a long time ago. But her father was different. He was three hundred years old. He’d been taking rejuvenation treatments since before they were safe. He was the sort of person you wanted to die and so you knew never would.

The holo trilled on Esme’s desk.

She pulled away from the window and sank down in the chair. She ran one hand over her hair before switching on the holo. It was a reflex. She hardly even knew she did it.

Lucia materialized in miniature on the top of Esme’s desk. “Good afternoon, Ms. Coromina.”

“Lucia.” Esme said the name carefully, not wanting to give away any of the turbulence spilling around inside of her.

“Mr. Coromina is out of his meeting, if you’d still like to speak with him.”

“Love to.” Esme forced a smile. “I’ll be right up.”

“Very good.” Lucia reached forward with one hand and then her image vanished. Esme took a deep breath. She’d told Lucia this was about the contract with the Spiro Xu Military Alliance. It was going to be a surprise when he found out it wasn’t. As much of a surprise, perhaps, as Esme learning from Miguel Lee that her own father was dying.

Esme rode the elevator to the top floor. She wore a lightbox around her wrist to look official, but no one was in the elevator with her, so she just leaned against the cool, sleek metal and closed her eyes. Her heart fluttered. It was like she was a teenager again,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Pocket Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2020
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1481444298
• ISBN 13: 9781481444293
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 448
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchpark GmbH; gpsr@buchpark.de; ; Krügerweg 1; Trebbin; Brandenburg; 14959; Deutschland