Freedom's Fury (Spooner Federation Saga Book 3) Page 8

  “Want might not be the most precise word,” he said. “Recent developments have made it quite clear that, whatever we think, the rest of the clans in the region consider us a minor branch of Clan Morelon. What I’m suggesting—”

  “Is that we surrender what little autonomy remains to us,” Everett Kramnik growled. “That we fold our identity into that of a clan that was partly responsible for our exile. And that your son, whom you allowed to leave our clan, should become patriarch of this clan as well as Clan Morelon.”

  Whom I allowed. That’s rich.

  “Everett,” Douglas said in his most mellifluous tones, “would you please quote me the clan’s year to date revenues and profits?”

  Everett Kramnik sat back in surprise. “How should I know that?”

  Douglas smiled. “You shouldn’t. But by the same token, perhaps you might grant just a spot more respect to a proposal that’s based, in part, on my knowledge of those figures.”

  He looked once around the table. The faces of the Kramnik elders were still guarded, but they seemed to him to express somewhat more respect for his initiative. He rose.

  “In calendar 1325,” he said, “clan revenues came to just over one million, one hundred thousand dekas. Clan profits on those revenues just barely broke a hundred twenty thousand. That amount had to cover a range of needs, desires, and opportunities well beyond those of the previous year. Very few of the requests submitted to this council were turned down. The aggregate of the ones approved have virtually wiped out our profits. Now, gentlemen,” he said in an elevated voice, “recall for me what I bring to the clan through my labors as a member of the Morelon Investments Corporation steering committee.”

  No one spoke.

  Douglas nodded. “Some reluctance to remember the exact amount, gentlemen? It’s a hundred thousand dekas per annum, the entire amount of which is deposited into Clan Kramnik’s treasury. Roughly three-quarters of our profits for the year.”

  “Are you about to claim,” Sebastian Kramnik said slowly, “that we’re already so dependent upon the Morelons that a formal merger would make no difference?”

  Douglas smiled. “I could, couldn’t I? But that’s not my point. I see the merging of our clans as a massive strengthening of our overall position. We would enjoy the security of Clan Morelon’s cash reserves. We would share in Clan Morelon’s immense bargaining power. We would thereafter attach our purchasing and shipping logistics to those that arise from Clan Morelon’s far larger activity in those domains. And gentlemen,” he said in his lowest register, “may I remind you that Clan Kramnik owes its continued autonomy, and I owe my personal freedom, to a timely intervention by none other than Althea Morelon? That this house would still be occupied by armed invaders, and I would still be absent from this table, were it not for the unanticipated and wholly unearned benevolence of the pride of Clan Morelon?”

  The phrase rose to his lips without thought. He could see that the Kramnik elders found it appropriate.

  “Althea Morelon holds the highest of the high ground,” he continued. “She possesses the power to wreak unanswerable destruction on whoever might displease her. That’s a power I want on our side, gentlemen. The only way to assure ourselves of that alignment in perpetuity is to make it open and official. That would be reason enough even if the financial advantages of a merger were nonexistent.”

  He looked once more around the table.

  “I’ve said my piece. I propose that we approach Barton Morelon with a petition for a wholesale merger of our clans. Should that petition be accepted, the Kramnik surname would be maintained only for one generation more. Those who bear it as a surname today would be the last to do so, though it would be their children’s option to make it their patronymic. All our progeny from the date of the merger forward would be Morelons, cherished and protected by the power and prestige of the most powerful, most prestigious clan on Alta. The most respected clan on all of Hope.”

  And I and my son would be of the same clan once again.

  “Well, gentlemen,” he said, “do I have your assent?”

  * * *

  When the train was about five minutes from Sun Tzu, Charisse silently rose from her seat, retrieved her bags from the security bin, and made ready to debark without being seen. As soon as the train was stationary and the doors open, she hustled down the steps and trotted down the platform as swiftly as she could manage. Other debarking passengers hardly spared her a glance through the encroaching shadows.

  Ten days each in Teller, Gallatin, and Kosciuszko should have left enough bread crumbs to keep the heat off my back for a while. Assuming Althea still cares enough to follow them.

  Her plans had barely begun to settle. She knew Sun Tzu for a commercial center and a digital communications nexus. From her researches, it seemed to her a place in ferment, not tightly bound to any particular allegiances or activities. The sort of place where a significant number of residents might be interested in a new notion or two.

  Martin said his family was among the twenty percent aligned with sweeping change. I don’t know anything else about them, but it’s still more than I know about anyone else in this town.

  Yet to approach a group of strangers, even one with whom she could claim a familial connection, with a proposition for a radical alteration of Hope’s longstanding attitude toward property rights would be risky at best.

  I have to prepare the ground for it. But how?

  As she walked from the station toward the town’s main thoroughfare, she pondered the avenues by which new ideas might be introduced and made attractive. Passers-by avoided eye contact, though many took note of her luggage. All steered well wide of her. None offered to help her with her burden.

  Resentment worked in Jacksonville, but there I had Clan Morelon for a target. A rich, poorly defended target that tempted with both its obvious wealth and its apparent vulnerability. If there’s a clan of comparable stature here, I can’t detect it from what’s open and obvious. There’s no pattern to the clothes or merchandise. The street names give nothing away. The storefronts don’t make a discernible pattern.

  I won’t achieve the leverage I’ll need without a nice fat target and a way to rouse sentiment against it.

  The Sun Tzu transients’ lodge stood at the far end of the main boulevard: a modest three-story building of brick and glass. A sleepy-looking young desk attendant took her assumed name and her eight dekas, handed her a time-limited passkey, and pushed a printed sheet at her while mumbling “rules of the house.” It was mostly the usual sort of code for a transients’ billet: no unnecessary noise, courtesy toward other patrons, leave the room tidy, and so on. But there was an extra notation at the bottom of the sheet:

  Remember to log off before checking out.

  She looked up at the clerk. “Free Hub access?”

  He nodded, eyes still fixed on his reading material. “Bandwidth in Sun Tzu is so cheap that we can provide access as a courtesy to our guests.”

  “Is online storage similarly inexpensive?”

  Another nod. “If not more so.”

  “I see,” she said. Her half-formed plans began to mutate at once. “Once I’m established in a place of my own, where would I go to register for persistent personal access, and perhaps purchase hosting for a Hub site of my own?”

  He looked up from whatever he was reading, noted her beauty, and finally gave her his full attention. “At DigiView. I can take you there in about an hour, if you like. I work there part time, as a site designer and analyst.” He smiled and extended a hand. “I’m Darren Berglund.”

  “Why, thank you, Darren!” Charisse smiled her prettiest smile, took the proffered hand, and clasped it with a subtle suggestion of a caress. “That would be very kind of you. May I treat you to dinner in exchange?”

  His smile broadened. “I’d like that very much.”

  She inclined her head. “In an hour, then.”

  He rose, glanced down at her bags, and stepped out from behind the rece
ption desk. “Would you like some help with your luggage?”

  She looked him up and down as unobviously as possible, dimpled, and dropped a curtsey. “You’re far too kind.”

  “Tell me, Miss Dunwoodie,” he said with a grunt at the weight of her bags, “what has a beautiful young lady alone and on the road so close to Sacrifice Day?”

  “It’s a long story, Darren. Let me bore you with it over dinner.” She laid a hand on his forearm. “And please call me Cherie. Is the restaurant in the lodge at all decent, or would you prefer to go somewhere else?”

  He smirked. “Mediocre, no better than that. But I’m a pretty good cook. How about if I fix us something at my place?”

  “How charming!”

  ====

  December 35, 1325 A.H.

  Claire fumbled with the buckle on the seat restraint, threw her hands up, and turned to Althea.

  “Help me?”

  Althea chuckled, reached over, grasped the tongue of the buckle by its anchor retractors, slid it into the receptacle with a click, and pulled the belt snug across her friend. Claire’s eyes widened.

  “Is that all it takes?”

  “A little practice helps,” Althea said. “Never mind. Do you know how to lock your helmet into place?”

  Claire nodded, lowered her helmet over her head, mated it to the suit junction with great care, gave it the requisite clockwise quarter turn, and slid the retaining pins to the locking position. Althea did likewise, then reached over again, pressed the button that activated Claire’s suit radio, and activated her own.

  “You’re about to go on the wildest ride of your life,” she said. “Re-entry’s unlike anything else in space travel. You’re going to see and feel things that no one who hasn’t done it could even imagine, so hold on tight and enjoy the show.”

  “Is it...dangerous?”

  Althea grinned. “Not in this craft, with me at the controls.” She made to start the engine ignition sequence, but was interrupted.

  “Althea?”

  “Yes, love?”

  Claire’s eyes were wide. “Do you think we could come back here, now and then?”

  Althea squinted at her. “You really like it up here that much?”

  Claire nodded, her expression hopeful.

  It’s not about the Relic. It’s about work and love. This is the first time in her life that she’s had both. She’s probably never been this happy.

  A realization darted out of Althea’s backbrain to pierce her consciousness with a barb composed half of insight and half of guilt.

  It hasn’t been half bad for me, either.

  Without Martin.

  How am I going to make this work?

  “Claire,” she said, straining not to let her voice tremble, “you and I will be back here many times. I can’t say the next visit will be soon, though. Trust me?”

  The bioengineer smiled and nodded.

  Althea fought down her misgivings and turned to the controls once more.

  She carefully cast Freedom’s Horizon loose from the Relic, pulsed the starboard thrusters in quick bursts until the spaceplane had achieved a safe separation from the planetoid, and turned her a hundred eighty degrees about. Claire watched the procedure attentively, but in silence.

  “Know anything about orbital mechanics?” Althea said. The bioengineer shook her head. “Well, it’s like this. When we look down at the surface of Hope from here, we see Alta as if we were floating right above it. In a sense, we are. But to remain right above it, the Relic and Freedom’s Horizon have to orbit Hope at a little under four thousand miles per hour west to east. As long as we keep that velocity, we’ll stay right where we are. So to descend, I have to slow us down.”

  She ignited the spaceplane’s engine in anaerobic mode. It surged to life with a satisfying rumble. As the globe of Hope commenced to turn beneath her, Althea pulsed her forward dorsal thruster to tilt the nose of Freedom’s Horizon a gentle two degrees below her orbital tangent. The spaceplane began its deliberate departure from orbit.

  “How long will the descent take?” Claire asked.

  “About eight hours,” Althea said. “I try not to rush it. I like to have a big fuel margin for landing.”

  “What can we do in the meanwhile?”

  “Talk is about all.” Althea flipped a hand at her instrument board. “I have to pay a fair degree of attention all the way. Of course, it’s when we re-enter the atmosphere that things get really interesting.”

  “Interesting how?”

  “Bow waves. Ionic rainbows. Some sonic and turbulence effects.” Althea made a minute adjustment of the spaceplane’s orbital pitch. “The earliest spacecraft to re-enter from Earth orbit had to shed their orbital velocity against the atmosphere. They carried these thick heat shields that literally burned off from atmospheric friction. The temperature of their hulls could rise into the thousands of degrees. We haven’t got that problem, fortunately.”

  Beneath them, Hope was turning ever so slightly faster with each passing minute. Claire gazed down raptly at it. She seemed to be straining to see details.

  “With a little luck,” Althea said, “I’ll have you home in time for dinner with your clan.”

  Claire turned to Althea. “Do you think Martin is out of his medipod yet? I’ve become eager to meet him.”

  Althea shook her head. “Bart or Nora would have radioed us. Never fear, love. The time will come.”

  * * *

  Althea’s first pass over the Grenier airfield showed both runways occupied and more traffic in the pattern than she wanted to cope with. She turned to Claire with a smirk.

  “This is why I like a fat fuel reserve.”

  She picked up the mike and keyed it. “This is Althea Morelon in Freedom’s Horizon, hailing anyone at Grenier Air. Althea Morelon hailing Grenier Air. Anyone at all, please.”

  “Hello, Althea, and welcome back. This is Adam. What’s your status?”

  “Good to hear your voice, Adam. I have approximately forty-five minutes’ flying time remaining. Hope you can clear an approach slot and a runway for me.”

  “No problem, space babe. Should take about fifteen minutes. Just loiter if you can, give my pilots a little show.”

  Althea chuckled. “Okay.” She set down the mike, banked away to port, and began a wide, lazy orbit around the airfield.

  Claire frowned. “Space babe?”

  “Martin started it.”

  “Oh.” Claire cocked an eyebrow. “You don’t mind?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Well...isn’t it a little disrespectful?”

  Althea chuckled again. “Not at all. If anything, it’s meant as a compliment.” She glanced briefly at her friend. “An affectionate jibe. Martin has a lot of them, at least one for everyone he knows and loves—and that’s quite a lot of people.”

  She looked off to her left as remembrance sprouted a smile on her face. “You’d get a better sense for Martin from his little jests than you would from talking engineering with him for ten days straight. As gifted as he is at...well, at just about everything, he’s twice as loving and considerate. I don’t know anyone who has a word to say against him.”

  Claire’s eyes glinted. “With you to take exception, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  Althea started.

  Do I really seem that combative? Or is she just reacting to how strongly I bond to the people I love?

  —The latter, dear.

  Grandpere! It’s been—

  —Three years, one month, and six days.

  Uh, yeah. It sounds a little funny but...well, how have you been?

  —Anxious beyond words.

  Over me?

  —Only in part, Granddaughter. There have been several developments.

  I know about some of them. Give me a summary?

  —You’ll learn about them in due course. For the present, concentrate on landing your craft. We have a lot of catching-up to do, and it would be best if you weren’t trying to do somethi
ng difficult and dangerous at the same time.

  (humor) Okay.

  “It’s not like that, Claire. If there’s anyone in Morelon House who doesn’t need anyone else to fight his battles, it’s Martin Forrestal. He’s...”

  What is there to say about him? That he’s broad-spectrum brilliant, unbelievably loving, and could stop a hovertrain with one arm? That he’s more considerate and generous than anyone who hasn’t met him could believe? That he loves me and stands by me despite everything I’ve put him through?

  That I might just die if his medipod doesn’t release him back to my arms sound and whole, and pretty soon, at that?

  “...the finest man on Hope.”

  Claire smiled broadly. “I simply must meet this paragon.”

  “You will.”

  * * *

  Adam Grenier had the ladder propped against the side of Freedom’s Horizon before Althea could release her seat restraint or pop the cockpit hatch.

  “The conquering hero returns! Hi, Claire.” Grenier’s smile was jaw-dislocatingly wide.

  Althea’s eyes widened. “Did the recent unpleasantness involve you, too?”

  Grenier nodded. “I was told in no uncertain terms to stay out of it.” He sniffed. “They were planning to divvy up my business among themselves, you know.”

  “Nora told me about it. Well, that was then.” She released Claire from her seat restraint, undid her own, and clambered carefully out of her seat. Hope’s gravity, ninety-four percent of that of Old Earth and many times what she’d endured over the three years past, caught at her and tried to drag her to the ground. She clenched her jaws, fought back, and reached back into the cockpit to assist Claire out of the spaceplane.

  Got to get to work on gravity control.

  —(humor) One thing at a time, Granddaughter. You have some other matters to attend to first.

  I could hardly forget it, Grandpere. But this still goes on my to-do list. Space travel and space habitats won’t be really practical until I can turn gravity up or down as necessary.

  —Practical for whom, dear? You have no problem with microgravity, and in a few minutes your feel for Hope’s gravity will be reestablished. Who else matters?