Read Renegade for Free Online

life on Phoenix — one of them had to be a dream. He just wasn’t sure which. Why would anyone leave this? His shipmates had asked often enough. Exchange this room, and this house, for ten years of cramped Fleet quarters, dreary food, fake sunlight, and a final three years with the very real possibility of sudden death. Fleet hadn’t desperately needed him, there was no conscription. He could have stayed here, like his sisters, and run the various family businesses in luxurious safety.
    ‘What, can’t rich people be idealists too?’ he’d joked whenever one of his shipmates had pressed on it. It was a good way to deflect the questions, but even then, he hadn’t been sure he believed it. An idealist about what? The need for human victory? Everyone was that, and five hundred years of war against the krim had pretty well ironed all the pacifist delusions out of the human race a long time ago. Humanity’s spacefaring age had been born in fire, and the inability to fight well at the established galactic level had at one point cost ninety-nine percent of the human race their lives. They were all descendants of the survivors of that Holocaust, and when such descendants said ‘never again’, they meant it.
    But Family Debogande had appearances to upkeep. A long tradition of military service, among the men of the house. No one had told him he had to go, but he’d felt it, that needling expectation. And so he’d gone, and could not now for the life of him say whether it was a genuine passion for the cause, or the desire for the family to think well of him. Was that truly bravery, or cowardice — the seeking of favours and approval? Or was this onset of melancholy doubts just that he was tired, and no longer so enamoured of the war as he had been? And what kind of thinking was that anyway, to be doubting this last phase in humanity’s war of survival just because it hadn’t been as brutally hard as the first phase, and humanity had been winning for a change?
    He sighed, rubbed his eyes, and rolled from bed to do his exercises. Then he went for a run, and the family security staff tailed him out the gate in big dark cars, but no one on these high, exclusive hill-top roads noticed or cared. He ran past mansion after high-walled mansion, up and down slopes, happy just to be out in the open air. Some spacers reported mild agoraphobia after too much time in space, but Erik loved the open sky, and the sense of freedom every time he rounded a corner to a beautiful, unobstructed road ahead, flanked by lovely green trees and alive with birdsong, was indescribable.
    Time to get out of Fleet, perhaps? The war was over now. But there were vast new territories to patrol, and the defeated races weren’t going to accept their new status easily. Some enforcement would be required for a long time to come. The new colonial age was beginning, and colonial ages required large fleets. A man with important friends and a strong service record could progress far in such an age… and the truth of it was, as much as he knew he must be insane for leaving this life, he truly didn’t find the world of corporate management all that inspiring. It didn’t matter , not like service mattered.
    Or like politics mattered, he had to admit. If he wanted to go in that direction, Mother would back him all the way, and those pockets ran indefinitely deep. The way Spacer Congress politics worked, he’d need a longer and more distinguished service record than he had now. Three years on Phoenix was a start, but he’d held no combat command, and won no battles. Captain Pantillo was not in the business of career planning for his underlings, but he had let slip occasionally that he thought Erik could go far in Fleet, if he chose to. Another ten years in service, perhaps even twenty… and then a political run? With lifespans at two hundred years, he’d have plenty of time to enjoy the big houses and open roads when he got back.
    The family were all up when he