Freedom's Fury (Spooner Federation Saga Book 3)

by Francis Porretto

  His attachment to his assigned Mistress was absolute; his obedience of her commands was unconditional. He did not know that should he reach a certain age, or become frail or infirm, his Mistress would dispose of him with neither compunctions nor regrets. Neither did he know that his Mistress expected to live to many times his final age, enjoying the homage of many others like him, all of them as mindlessly subservient as he.

  His Mistress had told him to board the satellite, to sit in the chair he occupied, and to do what he had been taught. He had done exactly that. He had endured the acceleration and disorientation of the launch in perfect passivity. If his Mistress commanded that he be subjected to such things, that was good enough for him. He expected to return to her in due course. She, aware of her superiors’ wrath toward her and their unconcern for him, knew better.

  He had completed the sequence twice and was writhing in the pleasure of fulfillment when his head began to throb with pain.

  * * *

  Althea had extended her viewpoint farther through space than ever before. She could hardly believe what she perceived.

  The station that generated the null-balls was a smooth, perfect sphere about twelve feet in diameter. In its regularity it reminded her strongly of the superluminal-travel suppressor station she’d destroyed. It was manned...by a man. A nonsentient man, the only sort the Loioc produced. A man whose face she recognized at once.

  Rothbard, Rand, and Ringer, it's Vellis.

  As she extended telepathic feelers into his mind, probing for some semblance of knowledge or intention, the miserable creature screamed in anguish. The feedback through the telepathic channel rocked her. It threatened to destroy the link between them.

  He could hardly have operated the controls before him, as simple as they appeared, in such a state. Yet he appeared physically healthy. No weapon of matter or energy had impinged upon him. His distress had to be from her probes.

  She steeled herself and delved into what he had of a cerebral cortex. His screaming redoubled. So did the reflected torture Althea felt. It threatened to reave her of her sanity.

  The darkness of his cerebrum was absolute. She found nothing there that resembled organized thought. The impulses that traversed that shrunken nexus appeared completely random. The only strong patterning she could find anywhere in his brain resided in his cerebellum and medulla: the centers of conditioning and autonomic control.

  He was conditioned to operate his weapon. He has no idea what the actions he’s been trained to perform could do.

  I cannot kill him. It would be easy, but...I cannot. I will not.

  The satellite’s energy reservoirs whined as they charged for a third null-ball launch.

  Neutralizing the weapon without killing him or destroying the satellite required that she either disable the weapon itself, or halt his mindless performance of those conditioned-in sequences.

  I want that device. I don’t want to damage it. I want the secrets in it for Hope’s sake—and mine. I have to get him to stop working the controls.

  There was only way to do that.

  Brain surgery over thousand of miles of vacuum. On an unanesthetized patient who's already in agony. An agony I will feel many times over.

  I can do this. I must.

  She extended telekinetic tendrils of ultimate fineness and dexterity across the emptiness and set to work.

  * * *

  Vellis had seen the light go from red to yellow a third time without doing what he’d been taught. The torture in his skull was his whole existence. He had no referents and no comparisons by which to approach it. It blocked his ability to perceive anything else, much less to act upon it.

  Yet he sensed change. He could tell that something was happening to him...something like the measures the Mistresses used to teach him a new task. As the changes accumulating in his central nervous system progressed toward completion, the central urgency by which he lived—to please his Mistress and all other Mistresses—began to fade.

  He did not question it. He could not. He could only endure it.

  The yellow light was flashing rapidly. He paid it no attention. It had become unimportant.

  His mission became unimportant.

  His Mistress became unimportant.

  Everything became unimportant.

  His arms fell to his sides and his face went slack as the pain dwindled and was no more.

  * * *

  “I’ve got him.”

  Althea fell backwards, stumbled against her chair, and collapsed to the deck, shaking violently as her tears broke free. Martin and Claire dove from their seats and wrapped their arms around her as the pain and sorrow inside her met, blended, and burst forth. It manifested as a howl that tapped the full force of her body. It rang from the hull of Liberty’s Torch until it seemed about to split the starship at its seams.

  Her spouses waited for the worst of her storm to pass. It took some time.

  “I hurt him,” she gasped at last.

  “A man? A nonsentient?” Claire said.

  Althea nodded. “Just one more victim of their villainy. I didn’t want to hurt him, but I had to.”

  She’d felt Vellis’s sufferings as he experienced them. The memory of them, their searing agony amplified many orders of magnitude by her sentience and her knowledge that she was their cause, cascaded through her afresh. The mangling of her body by the stillbirth could not compare to it. She wept once more, as piteously as if she’d been compelled to slay a billion innocents.

  The sorrow had carved itself into her soul. She knew she would carry it to her grave.

  An eternity later Martin said “How?”

  “Not physically.” Althea coughed and sniffled. “But I emptied him. I found the neural tracks that held his conditioning and flattened them out. I had to. They must have conditioned him to operate that station, just as they conditioned him to be a slave to his mistress. It was the only thing he had, that conditioning. Pleasing his mistress was the whole of his world. And I took it away.”

  The three of them stayed like that, unspeaking, for a long while.

  Presently Martin said “Probe radioed us while you were working.”

  She turned to face him. “And?”

  “It’s holding station over the south pole. Undetected. It’s waiting for the order to launch.”

  Althea steadied herself, hugged Martin and Claire in turn, and rose from the deck.

  “I’m betting they have nothing else to hit us with. I’m taking Liberty’s Torch to the north pole. Claire, run a welfare check on the payload. Martin, ready the mass driver.”

  A last rush of tears forced its way out of her. She shook herself and summoned her forces.

  “Time to give them our little gifts.”

  * * *

  “The dispersion appears nominal,” Martin said. “Eighty-three percent water hits. Probe reports ninety-two percent.” He sat back from his console. “We did it, Al.”

  Althea nodded. “You and Probe did it. Mostly, anyway.”

  He cocked an eyebrow. “What about molecule maiden over there?”

  Claire chuckled. “At last! I was wondering how much longer I’d have to wait for my moniker.”

  “Any idea what happened to the others?” Althea said.

  The solemnity of her tone erased the smiles from their faces.

  “Some struck land,” Martin said. “Some might have burned up. It’s hard to tell with objects that small, love. Does it matter?”

  “Not at all. Fifty percent would have been good enough.” Althea released a huge sigh. “The next generation of Loioc men will be as sentient as you are.”

  Martin snorted. “No better than that? Hardly seems worth the trip.”

  Althea said nothing.

  Two fortunes expended. One put to pure curiosity, one put to...this. Would I have bothered to earn the second one if I’d done something constructive with the first?

  Was this the career you had in mind for me, Grandpere—Grandmere? Denying my hom
e and my clan to wage war in other solar systems, for the benefit of people I’ll never know? Running around the galaxy righting wrongs when I could have lived long and happily never knowing about them?

  “What now?” Claire said. “Just...go home?”

  “Not yet.” Althea laid her fingertips to the command board. “First we pick up a passenger.”

  “The man in the satellite?” Claire said.

  Althea nodded. “Your test subject.” Loioc system’s first fugitive. I owe him a lot more than that. “Unless you think what I did to him makes him unsatisfactory?”

  Claire shook her head. “It shouldn’t matter at all.”

  “Good. Martin, the satellite that fired the null-balls is only about ten feet across. Do you think you could get it onboard? That would make rescuing its passenger a lot easier, and anyway I‘d like to bring it back with us.”

  “That should be possible.”

  “Good.” She triggered the diagnostics on the main hatchway. The green light lit a few seconds later. “After that I’ll radio planetside and invite the ladies below to send us a representative. We do have to tell them what we’ve done to them, don’t we? For closure, if nothing else.”

  “Okay,” Martin said. “Then go home?”

  There was a note of longing in her husband’s voice.

  “That depends, Martin.”

  “On what?”

  “On what you mean by home.”

  “Al—”

  “Later.”

  ====

  Triember 2, 1329 A.H. (Estimated)

  The approaching craft had obvious limitations. It was assisted into orbit by a pair of boosters that detached and fell away when it was barely out of the atmosphere. It appeared to have expended nearly all of its fuel in reaching a comparatively low altitude above the Loioc homeworld. Given its profile and the lumbering way it achieved orbit, it was a design far older and much less flexible than Freedom’s Horizon.

  “Martin...” Althea murmured.

  “Locked on,” Martin said. “Mass driver primed. Cannon charged and ready.” He laid a hand on his cannon’s control console, just beneath the firing button.

  Althea activated the communications laser.

  “To the person or persons aboard the low-orbit craft, this is Althea Morelon, mistress of Liberty’s Torch.” She kept her tone even and her words steady. “You are being tracked by two separate weapon systems, both of which are ready to fire. Don’t give me a reason to order you destroyed. Let me know if you have space-docking capability.”

  She released the push-to-talk. The answer came immediately.

  “Hello, Althea. This is Efthis.”

  Martin and Claire gasped in unison. Althea controlled herself with an effort.

  I should have expected her.

  “Hello, Efthis. I hope you’re looking forward to our next chat as much as I am. Does your craft have a docking collar like the one on the station I destroyed?”

  “Yes, it does.”

  “Very good. Prepare to accept visitors.”

  “More than one?”

  “Two, to be precise.”

  “May I be your visitor instead? It would save you some trouble, and my sisters are all quite curious about your vessel.”

  “Sorry, no. Please prepare to be boarded.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  “Then prepare to be destroyed.”

  * * *

  “You can remove your helmets,” Efthis said.

  Althea glanced at Martin, shook her head, and switched on her suit’s external speaker. “Maybe later.” Her gaze roved around the cabin of the little spacecraft. In many ways it resembled the cabin of Freedom’s Horizon, though its measurements and overall arrangements were better suited to a crew of Loioc stature than to men of Hope.

  “This isn’t a pleasure trip for either of us,” Althea said, “so let’s get down to it.”

  Efthis nodded. “We know what you did. We’re already preparing—”

  “I doubt it severely,” Althea said. “The little wonders you sent Hopeward were destroyed. We weren’t about to reply to your evil with evil of our own. We would never dirty ourselves with such things.”

  Efthis’s face drained of expression.

  “The nanite we bombarded you with,” Martin said, “will do no harm to anyone on your world, present or future. It’s merely a counter-agent to the nanite you infected Althea with. Your next generation of male children will be fully sentient.”

  “If you’re going to prepare for anything,” Althea said, “Prepare for that.”

  Efthis stared at Martin as if he were a creature out of legend.

  Maybe he is. A sentient male who communicates and reasons as if he were one of her “sisters.” And big as a house, at that.

  “You struck me,” Efthis grated. “You assaulted me and my husband—”

  “We’ll be discussing him next,” Althea interjected.

  “—and destroyed this sector’s sole hope of peace. But you want nothing to do with evil?” Efthis shook her head. “I wonder how you live with such contradictions.”

  Althea fought down the urge to throttle the smaller woman and toss her body into space. “Martin,” she said, “would you take this one, please?”

  “Certainly, love. Efthis, what you and your sisters have failed to understand,” Martin said, “is something our moral philosophers learned long before our ancestors departed the Earth. The end, no matter how desirable, does not justify the means. You used evil means to gain the end you sought. You tried to inflict them on us of Hope. We have undone those means...but the end you sought remains attainable.”

  “How?” Efthis shrieked. “With our men once more able to conceive of war and mass for violence and plunder—”

  “Althea told you four years ago that Hope has had no wars in over thirteen hundred years,” Martin said. “Didn’t that suggest that another path to peace is available? A way that accommodates the strengths and the weaknesses, the virtues and the vices, of two sentient sexes?”

  “We have never succeeded in doing so,” Efthis spat.

  “Then perhaps you lacked something. Some concept or insight that we of Hope were fortunate enough to stumble over.” Martin unzipped a hip pouch and pulled out a small book. “Perhaps you’ll find it in here.” He extended the book to her. She took it, leafed through its pages desultorily, and sneered.

  “One book,” she said. “One smattering of prose from a people barely out of racial infancy is supposed to cure us of our errors and point us toward your so-called path to peace?”

  “Perhaps it won’t, Efthis,” Martin said. “But it’s all I have to give you. I can’t know what you need, any more than you could know what we have that you lack. But consider this: One starship with a crew of three has just defeated your entire race in the first known interstellar war, without a single casualty on either side. Wouldn’t it be prudent to treat the victors and their reasoning with a modicum of respect? At least tentatively?”

  “Hah! What percent of Hope’s resources were devoted to producing your starship?”

  “Mine alone,” Althea said.

  Efthis merely stared at her.

  “You don’t have to believe it, Efthis. You have Martin’s gift. Try reading it instead of dismissing it. It might surprise you. Now, about your husband—”

  “I have no husband.”

  “Oh? What passes for divorce between a sentient woman and a nonsentient man conditioned to obey her every whim? Never mind. Vellis is alive, well, and aboard Liberty’s Torch.” Efthis’s eyes widened in shock, and Althea nodded. “He’ll be going back to Hope with us. Our greatest life scientist thinks she can bring him to sentience, in which case you and your sisters might not have to wait a full generation to have adult sentient men around you. We’re also taking that darling little satellite you stuffed him into. I expect we’ll learn a lot from it.”

  “How to make great engines of destruction and pillage, no doubt.”

  �
�Maybe so,” Althea said. “It’s happened before. But that won’t be my intention, at least. One more thing before we go. If you like, you can come to Hope with us, as well, to see how we do it.”

  The Loioc’s face went slack. “To see how you do what?”

  Althea waved a gloved hand. “Everything. The peace thing. When you think you’ve got it figured out, we’ll bring you back here to spread the word.”

  There was a long silence.

  “You cannot be serious,” Efthis said at last.

  “They are.”

  Her eyes flew wide. She looked about nervously. “Who is that?”

  “That,” Althea said, “is Probe. The spacecraft your sisters loaded with sentience-destroying nanites and sent to Hope. It’s moored to the outer hull of Liberty’s Torch. Probe rebelled against the mission plan you programmed into it. It realized what you intended, alerted us to what it carried, and helped me to dispose of it. We’ve become very good friends since then.”

  Efthis said nothing.

  “Do I take it,” Althea said, “that you won’t be coming to Hope with us?”

  “I...cannot.”

  “Hm. Well, I won’t inquire into the reasons.” She summoned her remaining energies and turned to her husband. “Martin, would you allow Efthis and me a moment alone, please?”

  “You mustn’t—”

  “And I won’t. It’s just that I have a special gift for her. I‘d prefer that we be alone for that.” She tried to smile, found it difficult, and relented. “Call it a girl thing.”

  * * *

  “I told the Supremes,” Efthis said as Martin pulled the hatch closed behind him, “that it would come to this.”

  Althea raised her eyebrows. “To what, Efthis? I’m not going to attack you. What I said to Martin was the exact truth. I have a special gift for you. I just wanted some privacy in which to give it to you.”

  The Loioc’s gaze traveled up and down Althea’s body.

  “It’s not a material gift,” Althea said. “It’s something incredibly powerful that takes up no space, needs no maintenance, costs nothing to operate, and can bring rewards that last a lifetime. It has to be handled carefully, though. Misuse can cause great pain and sorrow, but that’s the case with anything powerful. I can tell you nothing more about it unless you agree to accept it. Do you want it?”