Read Was Once a Hero for Free Online

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