“I think what Arthur is reluctant to say,” Dunbarton said, “is that now that Claire is gone, no one remaining at HalberCorp is sharp enough to penetrate their mysteries. Isn’t that right, Arthur?”
Hallanson nodded, eyes still downcast.
“That being the case,” Dunbarton said, “he must bring her back into the fold. But that will require imagination, planning, and embracing a certain degree of risk. Arthur knows he lacks the insight and expertise required for the first two. As for the courage the ultimate deed will demand...well, why pursue that any further?” He returned to his place and reseated himself. “That’s why he’s here. So you needn’t bother trying to talk him out of it, Patrick.”
The edge on the final sentence was unmistakable.
I was a fool ever to hitch the Wolzman wagon to his star.
“Well,” Hallanson said, “suppose I agree to your terms. What then? Neither of your clans has orbital capability. Do you have a way to get Claire to leave the Relic?”
Dunbarton nodded. “As it happens, I do.”
“Well?”
“Claire loves her new family, Arthur,” Dunbarton said. “Very much, as it happens. Particularly its patriarch, for whom she developed the little wonders in that jar you hold. If she were told that Barton Morelon is in danger of his life, and that only she could provide the remedy, she’d come down from the Relic immediately, even if she had to jump off. So we’ll give her exactly that incentive.”
Wolzman frowned. “How?”
“Our agent will infiltrate Morelon House and inflict such a condition upon Barton Morelon. The rest will follow automatically.”
“Alex,” Wolzman said, “no one even remotely associated with either of our clans could get through the door to Morelon House. Not after the maneuvers we’ve already pulled.”
“How true.” Dunbarton’s smile flamed to maximum brightness. “But we needn’t send someone from either of our clans. Nor from Arthur’s, though we will need some technical help from HalberCorp. You see, Patrick, I’ve located Charisse.” He rose, went to the door, and beckoned the others to follow. “And I have just the lever we need to bend her.”
* * *
Althea found the flexosteel parcel exactly where she had moored it. She approached it with the shuffling gait demanded by the microgravity of the Relic, a deviation from which could send her careening into space. It was as exhausting a regimen as she remembered.
I really have to get to work on gravity control. Either that, or some day one of us is gonna forget himself out here and become a temporary new moon.
She settled her rump onto the Relic’s surface about six feet away from the parcel, fixed her gaze on the latches that held it closed, and composed herself for effort.
Careful, babe. It’s been a while, and this stuff isn’t kids’ modeling clay.
When she was certain she had a perfect mental image of the thing that was proof against dissolution, she closed her eyes and set her viewpoint free.
Though it had been critically important to her on several occasions, Althea’s clairvoyance was the least well practiced of her psi powers. She was disinclined to trust it fully, which made it difficult for her to keep her eyes closed as she strove to unlock the latches on the package telekinetically. Yet it was necessary, for she knew from experience that the dissonance between her eyesight and her telekinetic kinesthesia would make the fine manipulations required next to impossible.
It was among the reasons for her dry run, and the chief reason she’d chosen to expose herself to the hazards from handling the most exoenergetic anaerobic compound Man had ever synthesized. Few things make one quite as careful as the chance of being eaten alive by a tongue of plasma flame.
Once the latches were unlocked, Althea shifted her viewpoint to the inside of the parcel. Four hundred pounds of the pebbled fuel for the main engine of Freedom’s Horizon rested lightly against the bottom of the container. Her task was to enclose them, remove them, and reinsert them without allowing even one to escape. In the currents and eddies of the atmosphere of Hope, it would have been far more difficult, perhaps even impossible. In the vacuum of sperosynchronous orbit, she had a better chance.
She envisioned the creation of a sheet of fabric between the pebbles and the bottom of the parcel, and strove to weave one from self-contained threads of telekinetic force. The containment had to be both impervious and persistent, for she would have to release it from her grip to pry open the parcel and lift it out. She had never attempted such a thing before. It was harder than anything she’d ever done with her psi powers.
The sheet took form slowly. She strained to keep it clear and bright in her psionic sight it as it wrapped around the load of pebbles. To her mind’s eye, it manifested as a glowing shroud, an impervious membrane of force woven perfectly smooth, slowly growing along one edge as she curled it over the upper surface of the load.
The effort taxed her ever more as the shroud grew. She poured all her resources of will and emotion into it: her fury at the Loioc women, their arrogance, and the fear that dominated them; her love of her spouses, her kin, and her world; and her ironclad determination that Probe, who had been dispatched unwittingly on a mission of evil and had rejected it from an ethical sense its dispatchers had not suspected, should not suffer for the horror they had intended to visit upon the people and world Althea loved.
She pulled the shroud tight around the payload and joined the edges with a series of elaborate knots she’d learned from Adam Grenier. He’d assured her that his knots were proof against any sort of random perturbation. She labored to close her shroud as precisely as she’d closed the defile in Martin’s brain.
She tied it off and glanced at her suit chronometer. The task had taken fifty-three minutes and twelve seconds.
Now we’ll see how good I really am.
She shifted her viewpoint to the outside of the parcel once more, released the latches, and eased the lid open as gently as she could.
The pebbles remained where they lay. The shroud she’d woven around them gleamed brightly in her psionic vision. She slipped telekinetic fingers underneath the package and lifted it cautiously.
It rose as a self-contained whole. Nothing inside the shroud shifted or jiggled to the slightest extent. She raised the package to about ten feet above the surface of the Relic, held it there, and gazed at it for a long interval.
I did it.
Thank you, Grandpere.
Thank you, God.
She returned the pebbles to the parcel, re-engaged the latches, and locked them. When she was certain that all was as it had been, she rose shakily to her feet, shook her head once to dispel the moisture pooled in her eyes, and turned to regard the world glowing below her.
She luxuriated in the beauty of the refuge of the Spoonerites. She strove to imagine how those pilgrims reacted upon discovering that they had come upon a world where they could live in freedom. Knowing from the outset how rare are the worlds capable of sustaining life, they’d expected little. They would have been happy to make planetfall upon any rock that might offer them the barest chance at survival. What they’d found was a planetary utopia, the fulfillment of their most optimistic dreams.
No wonder they named it Hope.
Voices dimly remembered from years before, when an accident of genetics had cast her into a trial of her strength that had almost defeated her, spoke inside her once more.
I am a warrior. I have fought, and I will fight again. And I will not fail.
She turned and made for the sally port.
==
Octember 29 , 1326 A.H.
“You’re certain about this?” Claire said.
Althea closed the neck seal on her pressure suit and checked it carefully. “It’s time.”
“After only three dry runs?” Martin said.
She nodded as she ran her hands over her suit’s junctures and fastenings one final time. “Check my pottet reservoir?”
He motioned that she should turn
around and squatted to read the level indicator. “You’re good for a little over eight hours,” he said as he rose. “What if it takes longer?”
“Then I down tools, fly back here, and refill from the huge quantity of fresh pottet you synthesized while I was away.” She turned and took his hands in her gloved ones. “It’s a good idea anyway, love. There’s a lot of nothing out there. You should show Claire how to do it, too.”
Claire moved toward them. Each of them gave her a hand. “What’s pottet?”
“Potassium tetraoxide,” Martin said. “Your suit’s recycler liberates oxygen from it as needed. It’s a neat way to avoid having to carry a big tank of compressed oxygen on your back when you go into vacuum.”
“Oh,” Claire said. “I wondered about that.”
Althea grinned. “One of Martin’s inventions.”
Martin’s expression sobered. “Al—”
“I’ll be all right, love,” Althea said.
“You think,” Claire said
Althea looked directly into Claire’s eyes. “Yeah. I think. I do know the risks. I do know how completely things could go to hell if I miscalculate or fumble. But I have to do this.”
Martin nodded. “We know.”
Althea pulled her spouses into a hug, kissed each of them, donned her helmet and locked it down, and turned toward the airlock to Freedom’s Horizon, when Martin murmured “Wait.”
She stopped and turned back. He and Claire were holding out their hands. She took them again.
“What did I forget?” she said.
“Father,” he said, “which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on...in space as it is in heaven. Give us day by day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who have sinned against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. And please protect our beloved spouse Althea as she ventures into the darkness to do what she feels she must. Please bring her back to us safe and whole, for we love her more than words could ever say.”
“Amen,” Claire said.
* * *
With Probe’s signal to guide her, Althea used tiny bursts of her spacecraft’s main engine to match its orbit and converge on its position. Though Probe had maneuvered to make the rendezvous as simple as possible, the process was time-consuming and exacting. It took nearly four hours and left her more fatigued than she expected.
When Probe’s ovoid form gleamed immediately ahead and she’d stabilized the gap between them at a small but safe separation, she locked her helmet on once more, started the timer on her left wrist, and went to the cargo compartment.
The cargo bay of Freedom’s Horizon contained three items: the flexosteel parcel in which she’d brought her extra reactor pellets to the Relic, a laser torch, and a large bottle of compressed air. Each was magnetically moored to the hull. She crouched over them, pondering.
I can’t afford to make a bunch of jaunts back and forth between here and Probe. I have to do this in one round trip, or I’ll run out of oxygen, propulsion, or both.
She unsealed the rear hatch, pinned it back, and pried her tools loose from their moorings. Carefully, ever mindful of Newton’s Third Law, she tugged each item out to space and reattached it to the outer hull. When all were in place and she stood upon the dorsal surface of Freedom’s Horizon, she pulled the straps of the torch’s backpack unit over her shoulders, linked the parcel and the compressed air bottle to rings at her suit’s hips, and used a microscopic jet of air to push her and her burdens a few feet above the spacecraft.
This is it. No anchor to Hope or the Relic. No tether to Freedom’s Horizon. Just me and a bottle of air. I’m really a space babe now.
She oriented the bottle to thrust her toward Probe and cracked open the valve.
* * *
The four hundred yards between Probe and Freedom’s Horizon took Althea twenty-six and a half minutes to cross. She chafed at the leisurely transit, but feared to accelerate lest she overshoot her target, or collide with it hard enough to injure her, or, worst of all, deplete her propellant supply below what she would need for her return trip. When her boots finally took a firm magnetic grip on Probe’s surface, she released a huge charge of anxiety.
The traveler was fairly large. Its minor axis was about ten feet; its major axis was perhaps four times that. From what Probe had told her, much of its volume was unused. The bay that contained the nanites was a mere three cubic feet. Its active systems occupied about three times that. Perhaps its designers had intended that it some day carry a passenger in suspension for the duration of a journey between suns.
She quickly found the joins that indicated the position of Probe’s payload compartment. The artificial sentience was correct: it had been designed to release the nanites without damaging itself, that it might return to the Loioc system and confirm the completion of its mission. She had to assume that it was also correct in asserting that she would not easily open the compartment from outside.
Now comes the fun part. No mistakes now, space babe.
She closed her eyes and sped her viewpoint into the compartment.
Probe’s payload consisted of several hundred small spheres: vehicles that would shield the nanites within them from the heat and stress of re-entry. No doubt they had been designed to fragment or dissolve when they hit water. In the vacuum of space, with nothing organic to batten upon, they were perfectly stable. It was the break she’d counted on to make her task achievable...if there were no hidden surprises to deal with.
Probe said there would be a risk to me.
She began to weave her telekinetic shroud.
* * *
At two hours and seventeen minutes, the shroud was complete. She tested it as best she could in the confines of Probe’s payload bay. It seemed stable and perfect.
Probe estimated an hour and twenty minutes to cut away the hatch. The shroud has to hold together for that long at least.
Time to get started.
She detached the business end of the torch from its body, flicked the igniter, and set to work.
The hatch’s joins gave way slowly but steadily. After an hour of cutting, Probe’s estimate appeared likely to be very close to exact. The question that remained was whether the payload was booby-trapped—whether an unprogrammed removal from the bay would trigger an immediate release of the nanites.
If the shroud is good, it won’t matter. If not...
Would those bitches have considered the possibility of a break-in like this? Why would it have occurred to them? They thought Probe would follow its orders blindly, like one of their derationalized men.
But what if Probe’s designer was a man? Would that have made them distrust his work, build in a fail-deadly mechanism that would ensure that if they couldn’t manage to poison our world, they’d at least manage to contaminate whoever had thwarted them?
The shroud has to hold.
She quenched her torch with a single hinge left to sever and sped her viewpoint into the bay once more.
The shroud seemed perfect. She probed it at multiple points and found no openings, however small. Its contents were quiescent to the limit of her ability to determine.
She ignited the torch again, severed the remaining hinge, and pulled the hatch away from Probe’s body.
Multicolored lights were playing over the shroud. Its contents had begun to writhe and bulge.
She swiftly opened the latches on the flexosteel parcel, took a telekinetic grip on the shroud, and slung the package into the parcel in a panic. As she slammed the parcel’s lid closed and latched it, she heard the contents rattling against the enclosure: living creatures awakened to an unexpected confinement, hurling themselves against the walls of their cage in a blind need to escape.
Protrusions had already begun to appear in the steel.
Althea kicked off Probe’s body, spun to face Freedom’s Horizon, and opened the valve of her propellant bottle wide.
* * *
Had it not be
en for her extraordinary, psi-augmented strength, Althea would have overshot Freedom’s Horizon. She would have achieved an orbit to die in. It would last until her friction against the thin solar wind should degrade it and send her corpse plummeting toward Hope.
Her gloves caught a purchase on the edge of the open cargo bay. She slid along it, her grip tightened to the maximum, coming to a halt at the very end of the craft. She needed a long moment to recuperate before she could do anything but quake in terror.
The parcel was badly deformed along all its surfaces. Praying that the flexosteel would continue to give without rupturing, she reattached the parcel to the hull, pulled down the outer hatch, and scampered for the inner hatch to the personnel cabin. She barely allowed the hatch to close behind her before commanding the repressurization of the cabin and igniting the main engine.
When Freedom’s Horizon was once more docked against its dedicated airlock, she jammed her helmet back on, raced to the cargo bay, popped the outer hatch and yanked the ever more turbulent flexosteel container from its mooring. An instant later she was running hell for leather across the surface of the Relic with the parcel trailing behind her, eyes and will fixed on the device that was the only hope of saving her and her spouses from nanite infection.
She shoved the parcel into the mass driver’s input channel, thrust herself away, and activated her suit radio.
“Martin, Claire, whoever’s listening! Fire the mass driver at once!”
It seemed an eternity before she heard an answer.
“Gotcha, space babe,” Martin said. “Firing.”
She streaked away toward the sally port as the mass driver’s capacitors charged. A few seconds later, the surface of the Relic quivered as the mass driver shot the parcel irrevocably toward the sun.
* * *
Althea: Probe, did I harm you at all?
Probe: Apart from the forcible breach of my payload enclosure, you did not damage me in any way my diagnostics can detect.
Althea: I’m glad. Before we proceed, are you aware of any other attribute of your current condition that should be corrected or adjusted before you join us here?
Freedom's Fury (Spooner Federation Saga Book 3) Page 24
