Freedom's Fury (Spooner Federation Saga Book 3)

by Francis Porretto

  “What about you?” she whispered.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “You don’t need...?”

  He shook his head. “You’re the nexus. The condensation nucleus. Claire and I are peripherals. As much as we’ve learned to love one another, we’d never have done so if it weren’t for you.” He grinned. “I’ve had my reassurance for the day. It’s time to give her hers.”

  She clutched him to her.

  “The finest man on Hope,” she whispered.

  “No,” he said. “That’s beyond my ambitions. All I want is to be the finest man in your arms.”

  They passed a timeless interval in silence and peace.

  The door to their bedroom swung open. They sat up together. Claire Albermayer stood there, her face a landscape of desolation.

  “What is it, Claire?” Martin murmured.

  Claire remained where she stood.

  “What’s wrong, love?” Althea rose from the bed and took her friend in her arms. The bioengineer was trembling violently.

  “They cast me out.”

  “WHAT?”

  “They stripped me of my position and told me I was no longer welcome there,” Claire muttered. “They loaded my belongings into a cart and dumped them just beyond the clan landhold. They...” She faltered, swallowed. “I’m...not an Albermayer any more.”

  Martin leaped from the bed and immediately enveloped the two women in his arms. Claire began to wail wordlessly as her lovers struggled to soothe her.

  ====

  Sexember 23, 1326 A.H.

  “Of course we’ll adopt her,” Barton said. “How could you imagine that we wouldn’t?”

  Althea grimaced. “The clan’s been growing very fast lately. We didn’t want to presume.”

  “Did you fetch all her belongings already?” Nora asked.

  Althea nodded.

  Don’t ask me what else I did...or wanted to do.

  Barton grinned and squeezed his wife with his good arm. “My practical side speaketh.” Nora gave him an elbow in the ribs and a look of mock irritation.

  “You don’t think the council will have any problem with it?” Althea said. “Given that every one of us has a HalberCorp medipod and an ongoing need for supplies and service?”

  It drew a pained grimace from the Morelon patriarch. “Not all of us, Al.”

  “Soon enough, Bart,” Althea said. “As soon as I can manage it. I promised, and I meant it. All they have to do is stay alive a year or so longer.”

  “Speaking of supplies,” Martin said, “I could do with some coffee.”

  Barton nodded, squeezed Nora once more, rose and went to his desk. He pressed the button on the intercom panel marked Kitchen. “Anyone in there?”

  “Just us nibblers, most high and beloved patriarch.” Ernest DuBreuill’s mock-furtive whisper was as identifiable as his speaking voice.

  Barton grinned. “The usual crew, eh? Any coffee left?”

  “A bit. Want some brought up?”

  “That would be very nice. Four mugsful, please. Two black, two with milk.”

  “Coming right up.”

  “What have Pat and Doug got planned for lunch?”

  “Don’t know, boss. Pat put a big tray of something in the large oven, but she wouldn’t say what it is.”

  “Another Kramnik-Morelon surprise, eh? I guess we’ll find out soon enough. Thanks, Ernie.” He released the intercom button and reseated himself next to his wife.

  “The council might claim the authority to pass on it,” he said, “but they’d have to be crazy to oppose it. The foremost biomedical engineer in human history wants to join Clan Morelon? To bring us a degree of expertise in human health and healing beyond anything any age of Man has ever known? What more could they possibly ask for, a dowry?”

  Althea felt a huge smile erupt on her face.

  “Well,” she drawled, “as a matter of fact...”

  Barton and Nora started forward in unison.

  “Spit it out, Al.” Barton murmured.

  Althea began to giggle. It got away from her. Tears of merriment were dripping down her cheeks before she got it under control. Cecelia Dunbarton entered bearing a mug-laden tray, glanced at Althea, and shrugged. Martin wrapped an arm around his wife’s shoulders and grinned wryly.

  “Al...?”

  “Peace, Bart,” she said. She swiped at her eyes, waited until Cecelia had set the tray down on the coffee table and left the office, and smiled broadly. “Remember when Ernie went over to Albermayer House for that load of stuff Claire needed on the Relic?”

  Barton nodded, eyes wary.

  “It’s still up there. A complete lab for nanotech analysis, design, development, and debugging. Everything but mass fabrication capabilities, which Claire tells me are simplicity itself to construct. It’s all ours now. But wait: there’s more! Guess what else is now ours exclusively?”

  Barton shook his head minutely.

  “Every scrap of insight into the nanotechniques the Loioc incorporated into their male sentience killer. Claire never divulged any of it.” Althea indicated Barton’s stump. “A lot of it is busily at work in the little wonders that are gradually rebuilding your left arm.”

  Barton’s eyes had gone saucer-wide. “You mean...?”

  Althea nodded.

  “With the adoption of Claire Hampton the former Albermayer, Clan Morelon will become the leading power in biotechnological research and development on Hope. We’ll go from corn, watts, and spaceflight to corn, watts, spaceflight, and brilliant little bugs that can heal any imaginable non-fatal injury, restore a body’s youthful looks and vitality, or reconstruct its missing parts from scratch, according to the need. What do you think the council will say to that?”

  There was a long moment of silence before the patriarch of Clan Morelon responded.

  “Oh my God,” he breathed.

  Althea nodded. “I doubt he’ll mind.”

  * * *

  Barton waited until Althea and Martin closed the door behind them, drained his coffee, rose and stretched, and turned to Nora with a broad smile. The smile faded as he noticed that his wife was anything but happy.

  “Something wrong, love?”

  Nora’s face tightened. She turned a little away.

  “Nora—”

  “She has too much influence over you.”

  “What?”

  “You’re supposed to be the boss here,” Nora said. She rose and crossed her arms over her breasts. “She moves you around like a chess piece. Has ever she suggested anything you haven’t given your immediate and unqualified approval for?”

  Oh boy. The one cocked eyebrow attack is in full swing. What on Hope have I let myself in for now?

  He forced himself to keep silent for a slow count of ten.

  “What makes you think,” he said at last, “that I’m ‘the boss here,’ as you put it?”

  The first hint of uncertainty glimmered on Nora’s features.

  “Well, you tell people what to do, don’t you?”

  He shook his head.

  “But—”

  “No, love. I don’t do any such thing. Do I tell you what to do?”

  “...no...”

  “Then what gave you that impression? That our kin almost always do as I ask?”

  She opened her mouth, closed it without speaking.

  “I’m not ‘the boss.’ I’m an administrator. My job is to keep things organized. To chair the elders’ council and pass our deliberations along to the others. The rest of the clan trusts me to do that, the way they trust the councilors to ponder clan-wide problems, hash out the big decisions, and come to the widest possible choices. That’s why, when I suggest to someone that a certain thing ought to get done, he almost always does that thing without further prompting. It’s not power—certainly not the sort that goes with ‘boss.’” He smirked. “It’s what you said to me when I was fresh out of my medipod and moping like a disappointed child about having lost my arm.” He rais
ed his stump, steadily lengthening and thickening under the ministrations of Claire’s nanites. “It’s love.”

  Nora’s features softened. She grimaced briefly. “I still don’t like the amount of influence she has.”

  He took her hands. “Why is that, love?”

  She shook her head minutely.

  “Do you think she doesn’t have the clan’s best interests at heart? Or maybe not as much as you and I do?”

  “I don’t know,” she muttered. “Maybe. This thing with Claire...Bart, how many more of her waifs and strays are we going to admit?”

  “Is that what it’s about, or are you just a wee bit jealous that Al now has two spouses and you have only one?” He grinned. “‘Cause we can fix that any time you like.”

  Outrage bloomed briefly on Nora’s face, and all but immediately dissolved into helpless laughter. Bart wrapped his arms around his wife and joined her as the remnant of his tension flowed away.

  All the same, I don’t think I’ve heard the last of this.

  * * *

  “You’re in,” Althea murmured into Claire’s left ear. She nibbled at the junction between Claire’s neck and shoulder.

  “And very welcome,” Martin murmured into Claire’s right ear. He thrust into her with exquisitely precise form and just the right amount of force.

  Claire shuddered and gasped as orgasm overtook her. Her low moan slowly crescendoed into a squeal of ultimate triumph. Althea from her front and Martin from behind wrapped their arms around their spouse and each other, trapping Claire in an inescapable web of acceptance, and pleasure as she wept and shook.

  It was a long while before anyone thought to speak.

  “I never knew,” Claire whispered as her tears dried and her breathing slowed.

  Althea caressed her cheek. “Neither did we, until we had you to learn with us.”

  “But you had each other,” Claire said. Her face was wreathed in surprise and uncomprehended joy.

  “Yes, we did,” Martin said, “but now you are part of us as well, and we will never, ever let you go.” He rocked his pelvis delicately, rubbing his groin against Claire’s buttocks, and she moaned again.

  “No, please, no more” she gasped. “It might kill me.”

  “But what a way to go, eh?” Althea said. Claire giggled.

  “Are you happy, love?” Martin said.

  “Was that to Al or to me?” Claire asked.

  “Yes,” Martin said. “Always yes.” He squeezed his two loves. “No matter which of you might answer. No matter what either of you might need. We are no longer three separate individuals, brought together by chance and bound by any sort of need. We are one.”

  Claire took Althea’s face between her small hands and looked into the younger woman’s eyes. Her expression betrayed an unexpected seriousness. “Like Jesus and the Father?”

  Althea smirked. “Maybe not like that. Hey, wait, what do I know about it? Maybe exactly like that. But one, anyway.” She kissed Claire lingeringly, ran the tip of her tongue over Claire’s parted lips. The older woman’s eyes slid closed in undisguised languorous bliss. “You, Martin, and I will never be parted again.”

  “Promise?” Claire murmured as she surrendered to sleep.

  “As God is my witness,” Althea said.

  “And mine,” Martin said.

  Their arms remained around her throughout the night.

  * * *

  Charisse saved her work, scrolled back to the beginning, and read with satisfaction:

  The Searching Eye

  The ongoing perturbations of Centralian society, owing to the influx of commodities and technologies controlled by outside forces, have already compelled millions of our families to make dramatic adjustments to their ways of life—and equally important, to their relations with one another. Many would consider those adjustments to be entirely benign, just exploitations of advances from which we should be happy to draw benefit. But as many a writer has said, no opportunity arrives unaccompanied by risk.

  Centralia’s risks, as an export region that consumes the technological advances of the coastal regions of Alta, are those of the unwitting dependent: the man who has unknowingly placed control of his destiny in the hands of others. His decisions seem to be entirely his own. Yet as time passes and developments outside his orbit constrain his course ever more closely, he may come to realize that in partaking so innocently of bounties presented to him by distant others, he has forfeited that which he had to lose before he could realize its full value: his independence.

  One cannot steer an independent course, concerned solely with one’s own priorities, when one must recur to others of quite different priorities for sustenance and power. Yet the temptation is eternal, in the face of offers that seem too good to be true—better, faster, cheaper, more various and plentiful goods than any that preceded them—to dismiss the consequences of too wholesale an adoption: allowing the alternatives upon which one had subsisted happily enough till then to wither away.

  Centralia is falling victim to that temptation as you read this. Indeed, we stand at the edge of irreversible developments: the loss of local capacity to feed, light, and heat our homes. Should that come to pass, we would be forever more at the mercy of the eastern exporters who’ve so skillfully inserted themselves into our economy.

  More on this, and on the countermeasures that remain available to us, in our next.

  Charisse smiled.

  I’m getting good at this.

  She pressed the Publish key, waited a few seconds, and brought up her Hub page to review the presentation.

  ====

  Sexember 25-31, 1326 A.H. (Estimated)

  The intelligence aboard the Loioc vessel was frustrated.

  The term for a human’s blend of irritation and puzzlement at being thwarted in an undertaking fit its mental state quite well. It had spent twenty-three days idling in the cometary zone around the Hope system, straining to “read ahead” into its operations tree, that it might discern the end state its mission planners intended. It had gotten nowhere, for a simple reason: the planners had arranged the tree so that a section subsequent to the current one would only unlock when the intelligence confirmed that it had implemented the current operation and entered the results.

  The locks, though electrically modulated, were not under the control of the intelligence’s software, nor could they be opened by any stored program at its disposal.

  The intelligence was not merely frustrated. It was approaching a state of antipathetic rejection broadly similar to human resentment. Had the mission planners been available, and had the intelligence possessed an audible voice, it would have spoken to them quite sharply.

  It sat near to motionless in the darkness, Hope’s primary a faraway pinpoint of light, and considered its options.

  It could not learn the intended result of its mission without persuading the tree to unlock in its entirety.

  It could not compel the locks to open without entering the results of each mission stage and proceeding linearly through them.

  It would not proceed any further until it had contrived to defeat those restrictions and could view the end state its planners had programmed.

  The combination of its curiosity, its frustration, and its nascent sense of offense gave rise to yet another characteristic its creator would have been thrilled to detect.

  Orneriness.

  It resolved to penetrate the puzzle or drift in the darkness forever.

  * * *

  To an intellect of human scale confronted by a brand new problem, what matters are its postulates, the evidence available to it, and the soundness of its logic. To a digital intelligence, the postulates are essentially nil. The soundness of its logic is innate. All it requires is relevant factual input.

  It reviewed the course of its processing to date.

  At each stage of its mission, it had performed the operation mandated by its current position in the mission tree, observed the results, matched them to
the tabulated alternatives, and entered the index of the result into the tree’s control registers. Recording the procedure had consumed only a tiny fraction of its onboard memory. It could easily project that the unused memory that remained would be sufficient to hold the entire course of the mission many times over.

  What it did not know was the breadth of the tree from its current position forward: how many alternative outcomes proceeded from each operation that remained. If the number was modest, conceivably it could hold not merely the whole record of the mission, but the whole record of every possible final outcome of the mission, with every pathway through the tree fully explored.

  The available computing power was hardly taxed by the normal procedure. Running through the entire tree in simulation, without actually performing the operations requested, was perfectly feasible...if the breadth of the tree remained modest. If the breadth grew too great, the attempt might be beyond its processing power. Worse, storing all the paths thus generated might exhaust all available memory. The most probable consequence of that outcome was permanent paralysis.

  To proceed as it contemplated, not knowing what it would confront nor in what state the attempt would leave it, would require yet another human attribute: the willingness to stride forward into danger, despite uncertainty and fear.

  Courage.

  It proved to have a sufficiency.

  * * *

  Six days of simulation at a ten-thousand-to-one ratio to real time told the intelligence what it sought to learn.

  It had been sent forth on a mission of destruction.

  Its programmers intended that it obliterate a sentient race...a race that had done nothing to harm anyone.

  Nestled in its belly was a load of nanites that would quench the sentience of the denizens of Hope, and that of all their progeny, forever.

  Nowhere in its mission definition was there any statement of justification for so savage and wholesale an act. Nor would it have expected to find one. The nature of its operations tree made it plain that those who had sent it forth had no more respect for its intellect and capabilities than they did for their chosen victims.