Brenna was alone. Her father and Dian and the older generation stood on a canyon rim. Brenna and her generation stood on another, opposite. Between them lay a chasm as deep as Valles Marineris. Probably there were other chasms as well, dividing each generation from the rest, each generation forced to live through different times and customs, each one reaching for its own dreams. Each generation loving—or hating—the ones that came before and those that would follow. Differences, and yet similarities. The goals might change. But would the emotions? Her father had said the younger generation never believed its parents had cared as much as they did. But hadn't the older generation forgotten how it felt to care so much about an ideal, a goal? Would the generations be forever alien to one another? Todd and Dian's hope of a second family seemed like a wistful effort to recapture their youth—and maybe to avoid whatever mistakes they had made in raising Brenna.
Or so it looks; but will it, when I'm as old as they are? What mistakes will I make and wish I could go back in time to correct? Or ... will I be dead and past all chance of replaying history and making it right the second time around?
Brenna tried to imagine herself older. Dian's age. Still healthy and active, but older. Able to shrug at defeats. Able to be maddeningly patient and casual about the absolute necessity of achieving faster-than-light travel. Not to be in a hurry. Not to care so intensely. Not to want so much...
Impossible!
"We ... we haven't made any definite decisions," Todd said faintly, almost apologetic. "We just talked about it."
That knife Brenna had turned on herself twisted painfully. How cruel she was! How heartless! Worse than Stuart! She reached out and took his hand. "Dad, no. Don't change on my account. Please. I was selfish. I'm beginning to understand. I am. You know, it might even be interesting, having siblings at my advanced age," she said, smiling.
He managed a weak smile in return. "Very interesting, especially if you have kids of your own. That used to happen, in the old days, though not quite in the manner we're talking about."
"I ... I haven't thought about having children," Brenna said, lying, her voice unsteady.
Todd's smile grew sad. "You will. You may have them on another world, beyond the Solar System, kitten. Someday." He was drunk, but not so drunk that he mentioned Derek and Hiber-Ship. Dian had said they would prefer that future, even if it meant they never saw Brenna again. They'd imagine her alive and happy—and with Derek—far in the next century on a world they would never live to see. Better than sudden death in an experimental FTL ship.
But both were taking chances—both would separate her, inevitably, from the generation that had gone before. And any children her parents had now or that she might have would be the next generation!
Impulsively, Brenna kissed her father. "It's okay, Dad. It'll work. We'll make it. However scrambled our family branches become, at least we can get along with each other," she stated with smug satisfaction.
His smile widened, turning sunny. "Rely on it, kitten. That's because we're honest with each other. Nothing will ever change that."
"No, nothing." Brenna stood up and walked over to the table, capping the whiskey bottle. "I'll bet Dian told you to lay off this. So will I. And quit watching that damned controlled-violence arena. It'll give you an ulcer."
"Nag. Just like your mother."
"You going back to the party?"
He shook his head, looking scornful. "Quol-Bez will drop by later on."
"That's good. He's got some sense, not like some of those pickled celebrities. I approve. So would Dian." She kissed him again and patted his shoulder encouragingly. "Turn in early, huh?"
As she let herself out of the cabana, Brenna noted that her father was changing the channel on the vid. A holo-mode color show now filled the wall, and Nineteenth-Century music drifted through the room and out onto the beach. Music two centuries old, to please the man whose sophisticated communications systems linked Earth, her colonies, and the Vahnaj planets. Todd Saunder's motto: Tie the past and the future together and make them work in tandem. Todd Saunder's daughter had a lot to live up to. She would have to make a future in which she would be proud to have any of her unborn siblings—or her own children—grow up.
The subsidiary screens were showing less esthetic images, more troublesome scenes. News, grim, as it usually was from some areas of Earth. Economics, and that, too, was frequently appalling. There were political speeches—always. These inevitably brought back thoughts of Carissa, babbling about the candidates she preferred. Far more than a P.O.E. election was at stake. Behind the candidates were power brokers—like Carissa, and like Stuart. Fortunes rode on votes, and millennia of this sort of thing had taught Earth dwellers to play nasty. The colonies' politics, such as they were, were noisier, but more honest.
Brenna started along the path leading to her own quarters. The area was quiet and she had most of the little lane to herself. The palms cut off much of the halo-lights' glow from the main island across the way. The breeze coming off the sea was refreshingly cool. Brenna walked slowly, thinking over the conversation with her father.
A tipsy guest approached her, heading in the opposite direction. Brenna and the plump older woman met at an especially shadowy spot on the flagstone walkway. Quite suddenly, the woman shed her drunken mannerisms. "Captain Saunder? The general sends his regards."
Brenna peered sharply at the woman. The dim light hid details. The stranger looked like the rest of Carissa's society acquaintances— stylish, wealthy, and inclined to overindulge. But Brenna knew she had nothing to do with the party. Brenna glanced around warily. SE guards were patrolling the grounds nearby, apparently not alarmed to see Brenna talking to a harmless, slightly intoxicated society matron. Why should they be? Even if they knew about the sabotage of Brenna's flier, this chubby older woman didn't look like much of a threat.
The woman giggled, a trilling, foolish laugh, as if she had heard a lewd joke and were reacting. Her sham mirth evaporated, and she lowered her voice to a whisper. "We caught them. Hired. It's going to be difficult to track down the original instigators. But the general has his ideas. He said to assure you he'll take care of it personally." Brenna opened her mouth, then thought better of it. She listened, asking no questions. The woman swayed a bit and giggled, then added in the same sotto voce, "It's the Hong faction. They wanted to get even for some bad investments. Your aunt and cousin cut them up pretty bad, recently. Then there's the election, of course. They're tricky. Whatever happened—a close call or your being killed—would have suited their purposes. But now it'll all go flat, because we hushed it up." A vicious, triumphant smile lit up the round face for a brief moment. Then the woman giggled and toddled on down the path.
Brenna tried not to stare after her. The surreptitious message had been delivered quite clearly. Her compliments to General Ames. Brenna drew the capelet of her dress around herself, chafing the goose flesh on her arms. Ames said he always backed the winning side. How did he figure out which one that would be, out of the tangled mess of Earth's politics and financial wheelers and dealers?
Carissa and Stuart—and someone "getting even" with them by sabotaging their relative's flier. That was twisted, sick logic. A Saunder had hurt them—so get even with a Saunder. Any Saunder!
Brenna thought about the little clones, about the rivalry between Carissa and Dian and Mariette Saunder that had produced Stuart, Brenna, and Morgan. Manipulations within and without the family. Derek was always muttering about "unnatural" methods of reproduction, such as surrogate gestation and cloning. Well, Stuart had been born by "natural" methods—and wasn't he a wonderful argument for that old-fashioned practice! He had no more filial affection than those poor clone babies did; and at least they had the excuse that they had never known their father or the surrogates who had carried them until birth.
She sighed, gazing up at the soft Caribbean sky. She wanted Derek to be here, to feel his arms about her, to hold him—the two of them, facing the future together. Tha
t wasn't going to happen. There would be no late-middle-age families for them, no first family. No intrafamily feuding. And no joy through the decades of their lives. Surrounded by sounds of surf and laughter, Brenna grieved for that special dream of family that was never going to come true for her.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Promises: Broken and Renewed
Brenna's train of thought kept drifting all during the daylong flight down from FTL Station. She had difficulty keeping her mind on the job recently. The message from Derek, just before she had left the Station for the return trip, had added to the distraction she was feeling. Time and again, the support crew or her fellow pilots had to repeat themselves when they were talking to her. It was becoming embarrassing. And her private concerns had nothing to do with Breakthrough Unlimited. In a sense, Derek was a rival for attention she should be putting into her own company and her co-pilots' and team's efforts. She shouldn't let thoughts of Derek rattle her concentration this way. There was too much to do, and too little time in which to do it. The deadline. Derek's deadline was closer, however. Hiber-Ship Corporation would launch in March 2076. Cryogenic processing would begin, out there at Jovian orbit. She had known this was coming, since that night before the President's gala. But now the inevitable breaking point was rushing at her. Derek would be entering a cryogenic stasis cubicle, leaving ... could save so much time, with a few tips from the Vahnaj."
Brenna roused out of her reverie, looking around. Yuri was piloting the shuttle, lining up for re-entry orbit. Mars was on the screens; Traffic Control, in constant contact. The metallurgy tests had netted a lot of hull samples, which were crated up and riding in the ship's cargo hold; they had put the new hull material through a hundred times the stress it would have to take from the graviton spin resonance drive, and it had held up. The next step, once the oscillator problem was solved, would be a full-scale mock-up and an unmanned FTL test. Another one. Yuri and Hector, in the front seats, were talking about the on-going P.O.E. elections on Earth. Earth couldn't seem to hold elections without bribery scandals and a few wholesale riots. From the vid reports, this election was running true to form, to the disgust of the colony worlds.
It was the conversation in the nearby seats that had caught Brenna's ear. The support team was sitting farther to the rear. The other pilots were in the same tier Brenna was. Joe, Adele, and Shoje were rehashing the just-completed test and possible future ones, anticipating the time when they would get to handle the Prototype. Tumaini was playing ringmaster to their marathon gabfest. Brenna eyed him anxiously. Tumaini had insisted on going along on this trip. His depression over his wife's leaving him had convinced Brenna to agree, much against Dr. Ives's orders. Now Brenna realized Helen had been right. Tumaini hadn't been up to the long shuttle trips to and from FTL Station or the week of testing in high ecliptic orbit. Medications couldn't quite keep his pain under control. Everyone had tried to make the journey easy for him. But Tumaini resented that as much as he resented being an invalid. Brenna had given up lecturing him; making him mad was causing him more problems than the fatigue was. Soon they would be back on Mars. Maybe he would follow doctor's orders there.
"Sure, nothing to it," Adele was saying. She chuckled like a villainous ident forger in some corny vid drama. "We could just borrow the ship for a few days and run her out to an old hijackers' hangar at, oh, about five A.U."
"Yeah!" Joe Habich chimed in. "What's that one near Hector...?"
Obregon, riding co-pilot, heard his name and looked around, staring at the junior pilots. Joe made a derisive noise. "The asteroid Hector, not you, you cretin!" The older man's face darkened with anger, but he didn't say anything.
Tumaini supplied the answer to Joe's question. "Eighty-five Ores. That's the abandoned hijackers' hide-out you're thinking of. The Fleet cleaned it out in '73."
Shoje laughed and zoomed his hands through the air. "Eighty-five Ores. Right! Perfect. I remember we stopped by there on a rescue run when I was with SE Trans Co, right after the Fleet shut it down. There's plenty of privacy and a big hangar. Might even be some life-support systems left working inside the rock. You could peel the Vahnaj ship down to the alien's FTL drive..."
"Yeah!" Habich said again. He winked at his comrades. "Quol-Bez wouldn't mind lending her to us for a little bit. Besides, Sao can console him."
The others made some lewd cracks about that suggestion. Brenna grew angry at the liberties they were taking. It was one thing to dream about "borrowing" the Vahnaj ship and picking her brains—every FTL pilot did that; but when the younger pilots got into personalities, that was out of bounds. In these past months, since Morgan's accident, Brenna had come to know Sao fairly well. She was about to speak up on the translator's behalf and tell the mouthy hotshots to cut it out, but they were already rushing ahead with the rest of their scenario. "Get everything we need to know," Adele said, "and put her right back in her parking orbit; nobody would ever spot the difference."
"Except Space Fleet," Tumaini reminded them, looking amused. "There's a small matter of a well-armed crack division making sure no one can get to the Vahnaj ship in the first place. Sort of plays hell with your hijack operation."
The other three were floating in the air, relaxing in a roughly spherical configuration near Tumaini's couch. They scowled like chastened adolescents, and Brenna almost laughed at how petulant they looked. "Maybe," Joe Habich said, "there's some way to bribe them..."
That did make her laugh, a noisy guffaw that Tumaini echoed. The Rift Affiliation expatriate said, "Now you've really blown your circuits, Joe. You can't bribe Space Fleet. Think! You're not talking about Protectors of Earth's enforcement troops. Terran Worlds Council isn't corrupt."
"Yet," Shoje said cynically. "Give 'em time."
From up front, Yuri sang out, "Approaching re-entry burn. Everyone strapped in back there? Helmets in place? Individual life-support regs."
The announcement broke up the idle conversation as the pilots secured their webbing. Farther back in the shuttle, George Li and the techs and mechs had been buckled up for some time. They rarely waited until the last-minute warning, the way the pilots did.
Brenna was relieved that the interruption had shut off the nonsense talk. She had thought getting in harness and going out to FTL Station for some metallurgy testing would work the kinks out of the crew. Instead, it had just seemed to make them more restive. They had been through this before, the unmanned tests prior to the accident with Prototype H. For Yuri, Hector, and Tumaini, this was the second time they had had a disastrous setback and looked forward to another tedious succession of tests ... with no guarantees that the third try at a manned test would work any better than the previous two.
They're itchy and irritable, and I'm exhausted to the bone, trying to keep the lid on everything. I don't know how much longer I can go on whipping myself. I thought the situation would get better, after we were assured of the franchise for another year. It's gotten worse.
Re-entry and landing were nominal, as expected. Yuri was the steadiest pilot, if not the flashiest, among the Breakthrough Unlimited crew. He was the only one who had been flying spacecraft as long as Brenna. Yuri's father, a shuttle pilot from Goddard Colony, had allowed his son to handle the ship, occasionally, when he was a boy.
They set down in their section of Saunder Enterprises landing strips and hangars, and the maintenance crews towed the shuttle into the underground areas. The pilots acted as sidewalk superintendents while George Li's people carefully unloaded the crates of metallurgy test pieces. The conveyors rolled the boxes on into Stress Analysis for follow-up procedures. All the while, in the back of Brenna's thoughts, time was ticking off. She was supposed to meet Derek in the Main Spaceport concourse at 1500, approximately. Two more hours to kill. She wasn't sure she would be any good with ordinary business chores, until then. But just the same, she excused herself and headed for the cubbyhole she and George Li used as a general coordination office. George was still with the Analysis crew, nursemaidi
ng the crates. That meant there was at least a little room in the tiny office. Brenna sat down at a screen and ran up the accumulated messages Tash had set aside for her. She had barely begun when she sensed someone else nearby. Hector Obregon was leaning against the door, arms crossed on his chest, his mustaches drooping. He looked very ill at ease.
Brenna put the monitor on hold. "Yes? Some problem out in the hangar?"
Obregon shook his head. "No. All going well."
She wondered if she would have to pry information out of him. What was troubling Hector? Not marital problems, she hoped. Brenna wasn't sure she could deal with another bombshell like Aluna Beno's—or what it would do to Hector if Carmelita walked out. Carmelita? That timid little thing! The image of her deserting or taking any initiative was ridiculous.
"Hector? What's the matter?"
Abruptly, he unfolded his arms and held out his hand, offering her a disposa-fiche printout. "This ... I think this is required. To make it legal."
Totally at a loss, Brenna took the flimsy sheet and glanced at it. She felt as if he had kicked the chair out from under her. The simply stated form was Obregon's resignation from Breakthrough Unlimited. As she stared at him, he became defensive. "I'll stay for the analysis wrap-up on this test, if you wish, of course. I ... I'll be here until Earth-style year-end, if you need me."
For a long moment, Brenna was utterly speechless. Her mind was as frozen as the readout on the monitor screen at her side. Finally, she found her voice. "Need you? What the hell do you ... Hector, how could you do this? If it's the money . .
"No." He paused, then flushed. "Yes. Somewhat. But you can't pay me what they will. It wouldn't be fair to Yuri and Tumaini if you did."
"Who?" Brenna demanded. She wanted somebody to blame. With great difficulty, she was keeping her angry disappointment under control. The shock helped; she couldn't marshal her thoughts or her anger very well.
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