“And the cost and time to manufacture?”
Those are the real bounds on what I can do.
Claire grimaced. “I’d say eight to nine months, about a hundred sixty million dekas apart from capital-expansion costs. But Althea,” she said, “I’m not at all confident that I can talk the board into taking the order at all.”
Althea cupped the bioengineer’s face in her hands. “Why not? You being the company’s CEO and guiding light ought to swing some weight, shouldn’t it?”
Claire nodded. “It should. But I’m not sure it will swing enough.” She rose and put her arms around Althea’s waist. “There are more considerations than just the revenue from the order...even if you were to pay for the capital expansion without a quarrel.”
“Educate me, Claire.” Althea grinned. “Consider it an expansion of our relationship.”
The bioengineer smirked. “Are you sure you want to expand it in that direction? Oh, never mind.
“One of the things our corporate predecessors learned—mainly on Earth—is that there are always consequences from acquiring a dominant customer. As matters stand, you would become such a customer. We wouldn’t just have to double our capital plant; we’d need to double our staff as well, from procurement and manufacturing through quality assurance and shipping. So a lot of people’s livelihoods would become dependent on keeping you as a customer, at the level at which you became one.
“Then there are the costs of operation and maintenance that accompany an expansion of that sort. They’re roughly proportional to the size and value of the company’s plant, and they’re paid for out of sales revenues. So if your order were to be the one-time event you’ve forecast, we’d be left with twice the plant we require for all our previous business, and no ongoing increment of revenue to pay for it. We’d have to liquidate it or pay for it out of current profits...which, candidly, wouldn’t be great enough to cover them.
“So you see, your patronage—your preferences and ordering patterns—would become the most important consideration of all to my company. And the one-shot order you contemplate is probably the worst of all seemingly good events. After we were finished satisfying it, we’d be left badly unbalanced...perhaps fatally.”
Althea frowned. “Why wasn’t that a consideration when Clan Morelon placed its order for forty medipods?”
“It was,” Claire said. “What tipped the scales in your favor was that you were our first customer. We’d already anticipated the popularity of the device and had started ramping up for a surge of orders. That surge followed your order only a few weeks afterward, and the orders have continued at a steady rate ever since. The timing couldn’t have been better. That’s not the case today.”
Spooner’s beard. What can I possibly do without HalberCorp to make the nanites?
“How about,” Althea said, “if I were to purchase the capital equipment myself, and take all responsibility for the staffing and the rest of it? That way HalberCorp would only have to advise me on how to make the nanites.”
Claire looked at her levelly. “You’re asking if HalberCorp would willingly collaborate in the creation of a competitor company of equal size?”
“Hm” Althea chuckled despite herself. “Forget I suggested it.” She swept her gaze over the elaborate array of nanoengineering devices Claire had had brought to the Relic for their efforts. “Makes all this seem pretty pointless, doesn’t it?”
The bioengineer grimaced. “You mustn’t say that, love. There’s still one approach left to try. I think it's the one I should have pursued in the first place.”
“And that is?”
“A two-stage technique.”
“Hm?”
Claire grinned. “What’s the most common application of nanoengineering, Althea?”
Althea hardly hesitated. “General fabrication, isn’t it?”
Claire nodded. “Indeed it is. Nanites engineered to make other things. Electric motors. Refrigeration units. Recyclers. All sorts of tech that was once made on assembly lines, before we got terminally bored with the work and fed up with the nuisances. But that’s not the only sort of fabrication nanites can perform.” She grinned mischievously. “They can also make other nanites.”
“So...” Althea felt her adrenaline level rise.
“So,” Claire said, “what I’ll try next is to construct a nanite that’s resistant to acceleration and high temperatures, and that will fabricate the nanite we want at a very high rate, entirely from ocean-borne feedstock. Imagine that I discover a design for a nanofabricator that would turn out a million of the hunter-killer nanites in a year. The hunter-killers would no longer have to endure the stresses of injection from orbit, and you wouldn’t need nearly as many nanites for your campaign, only a hundred quadrillion or so. That would be on the scale HalberCorp is used to handling as a one-time order. With the re-entry capsules, the cost would come to about two million, delivery would be about a month ARO, and the corporation would hardly notice it.”
“ARO?”
“Oops! Sorry.” Claire giggled. “It’s a purchasing term. It means ‘after receipt of order.’”
“Well, do you think you can do it?” Althea murmured.
Claire looked off for a moment, then smiled and nodded. “I have all the notes and markers I’ll need. Give me a week. Two at most.”
Althea pressed her friend against her full-length and kissed her firmly. Claire responded in kind.
“We might be home in time for Sacrifice Day after all,” Althea whispered against Claire’s cheek.
“Haven’t we made this our home, love?” Claire replied.
Althea struggled not to envision Martin’s face.
“For now.”
* * *
“Bart, we have to tell her.”
“Why, love?” Barton Morelon spread his hands in a gesture of confusion. “Don’t you think she has enough on her plate at the moment? What with being infected with some ultra-dangerous mystery bug and having to put up with Claire Albermayer?”
Nora shuddered, rose from her seat at his side, and ambled randomly around his office.
“It’s been three weeks and he hasn’t asked after her even once,” she said at last. “That’s what she’ll be coming home to. That’s the ‘husband’ she thinks will greet her with open arms and a joyous smile. She needs to be prepared. I know she’s struggling with something even worse, but imagine if you were to come home to me, and I were to treat you like a stranger—the way he’s likely to treat her, unless something unimaginable changes.”
“Yes, eventually she should be told...but not now,” Barton said. “The last time she radioed, he was in his medipod on the edge of death. She doesn’t even know he’s out of his coma. As soon as we tell her, she’ll demand to speak to him—and that’s when her troubles will really begin.”
A spasm crossed his wife’s face.
“That’s another thing,” she said. “Why hasn’t she radioed these past four weeks? It’s not like her at all, especially after the business with the other clans.”
“If I had to guess,” he said, “it’s because she doesn’t want to disturb us while our hands are full. She knows the clan suffered badly from the attack. She knows we took losses. Rothbard, Rand, and Ringer, one of those losses was her great-grandmother! If that didn’t catapult her into full-scale vengeance mode, just about nothing could—but it didn’t. She kept herself leashed, something I wouldn’t have expected from the Althea we knew. Which tells me that she not only needs peace for herself, she knows we need it just as much.”
He rose and took his wife’s hands. “Let her have peace enough to deal with her own problems, at least until she forces our hand. When she radios to tell us she’s all better and to expect her for dinner, that will be soon enough to lay this new burden on her shoulders.”
Nora nodded with obvious reluctance.
“You’re right,” she said. “I know you’re right. But I’m so worried, Bart. What if the reason we haven’t heard from
her is that she died from the...whatever it was? And that it killed Claire Albermayer in the bargain? When would we ever learn about that? When Ernie goes up there to retrieve the corpses?”
Barton’s eyebrows rose. He pulled Nora into an embrace and caressed her gently.
“Are you suggesting,” he said, “that some microorganism could kill Althea MacLachlan Morelon? Some pathetic little bug you can barely see with a microscope could get the better of the woman who amassed Hope’s first billion-deka fortune? Who bought medipods for the whole clan? Who broke the lightspeed barrier? Who invented a starship and an entirely new power source to push it around? Who’s traveled among the stars? And who single-handedly won the first war ever to take place on Alta? Seriously, love?”
He lapsed into helpless laughter. Nora caught it from him. It shook the two of them for several minutes.
“You’re right again,” she said. She wiped her eyes futilely with her hands. “I suppose I’m being silly.”
He shook his head. “Not at all, love. The only thing I can think of that could take her down would be something small enough to sneak up on her undetected. But I’d never bet against her. I’d bet on her, and give odds.” He chuckled again. “In fact, I’d bet this house that the bug that bit her would be sorry he tried it.”
Barton beamed at his wife. “How about I ask Dot to make some of that fruit and noodle dish Al concocted? That’s always good for a few groans.”
Nora smiled. “Sounds good. Annelise has never had it. Maybe the time has come. But do you think we’ll be able to make love afterward?”
He chuckled. “On that subject, never bet against me.”
* * *
Patrice Morelon nudged open the door to Martin Forrestal's workshop and hesitantly stuck her head inside.
“Martin?”
“Hm?” He looked up from his soldering. “Yes, ah, Patrice? Can I help you?”
She smiled. “Do you have a few minutes to spare me? There are a few things I’d like to chat about with you.”
He frowned, but set aside his work, beckoned her inside, and gestured to a metal chair beside his. She settled herself into it tentatively, struggling against a discomfort not of the body.
Why did I think this was a good thing to do? I can’t remember.
He peered down at her from his labworker’s perch and said “What is it you’d like to talk about?”
“You.”
“What about me? Have I done something to offend someone?”
“Not exactly.” She knotted her hands in her lap and stared down at them. “It’s just the way you’ve kept to yourself these past few weeks, since you came out of your pod. It’s not at all like you to be this distant from your kin, as if you want nothing to do with us. A few of us have wondered whether everything is...all right.”
Martin shrugged. “I feel fine. Whatever put me in the pod is apparently cured, fixed, healed, whatever.”
She hefted the weight of the question she knew she had to ask next, steeled herself, and plunged ahead.
“Are there any gaps in your memory?”
“Of what?”
“Anything.”
Another shrug. “Only that I have no idea what injury or malady got me into the medipod in the first place. No one else has been willing to discuss it with me. Are you?”
She recoiled from the barrage of memories. Alvah being struck down as he vainly tried to shield Elyse from the rain of lead. Alvah’s blood pooling around him as he gasped out his last. Alvah and Elyse being laid in their coffins. Riding in the hovertruck to the Leschitsyns’ crematorium. The coffins rolling into the furnace under Tomasz Leschitsyn’s watchful eyes. The door closing and the flames rising to consume all within.
Her hand moved automatically to the cross pendant she wore.
I can do this. I’ve survived loss before. I can do this.
“If you like,” she said, her voice trembling only slightly. “Morelon House was attacked by an alliance of six other major clans. You were attempting to reason with one of the leaders when you were shot with an unusual weapon.” She shivered. “We feared we’d lose you before we could get you into your pod. Your recovery strikes many of us as verging on miraculous.”
He nodded. “Thank you.”
“Does anything else strike you as missing or blurry, Martin?”
“Other than that?” he said. “Nothing I’m aware of...assuming that it’s possible to be aware that there’s something you no longer remember.” His expression became pained, and he looked a little away.
That might have been the right thing to ask after all.
“There is something, isn’t there?” she said.
He nodded.
“What is it, Martin?” she said in her gentlest tones.
He looked her in the eyes again.
“Why do I matter to the rest of you?”
“What?”
He leaned forward. “Why do I matter? You clearly think there’s something wrong with me, or about me. Why does my...condition, whatever it might be, cause any of you the slightest concern?”
She gaped, stricken speechless.
“I do, don’t I?” He dismounted his lab chair, leaned back against his workbench, and folded his arms over his chest. “I must, the way you’ve all been tiptoeing around me since I revived, as if you’re afraid of saying or doing something that might upset me. But for the life of me I can’t imagine why.”
“Does that...irritate you?”
He smirked and shook his head. “Not at all, Patrice. It’s just a puzzle I figure I’ll solve eventually, with or without clues from the rest of you.”
She rose shakily from her seat, slipped her arms around his waist and laid her head against his broad chest. His arms rose hesitantly to encircle her, though it was plain that she had mystified him.
Where’s his cross pendant?
“It’s not about clues,” she whispered. “No one’s trying to deceive you or hide anything from you. You’ve suffered a loss that’s unique in our experience: the loss of your emotional memory. You’ve forgotten that we love you. Every one of us cherishes the air you breathe and the ground you walk on. You’ve forgotten that you loved us.” She met his eyes as tears dripped down her face. “You’ve even forgotten Althea, loving and being loved by her, and if there’s a worse sort of loss than that, I can’t imagine what it might be.”
His mouth fell open. “How could I forget such a thing?”
“I don’t know. You did have a head injury. But Martin,” she said, “do you remember your faith?”
“My faith?” he said. “My faith in what?”
==
December 33 , 1325
“This is extremely irregular, Claire.”
“Be that as it may, Art.” Claire glanced back over her shoulder at Althea, who shrugged. “Do it anyway.”
“Without money in front? The production committee—”
“Will do as they’re told. This is far more important than you know. The customer is Althea Morelon herself. She just isn’t in a position to issue a check at this instant. If need be, you can draw the customary advance from my personal account.”
The sudden silence on the radio spoke eloquently of Arthur Hallanson’s incredulity. Althea moved up behind Claire and gently laid her hands upon her friend’s shoulders.
“What’s gotten into you, Claire? You were never this peremptory before. This is too murky a development to pass without resistance. Even if I can bulldoze the committee into going along with it, there are sure to be questions.”
Claire smiled. “I have no doubt of it. Let them ask what they will. I predicted some time ago that what I’ve learned here will advance the company’s nanotech by orders of magnitude. As it happens, that prediction was conservative. We’re at the edge of a wholly new era in nanoengineering—one that might just give us what I’ve dreamed about for decades now.”
“What would that be?”
Claire keyed the mike, released the key, and glanc
ed back a second time.
“If you’re sure,” Althea said, “do it.”
Claire nodded and keyed the mike.
“The self-repairing body.”
Hallanson gasped.
“Will you proceed as I asked, Art?”
“As you’ve requested, but...if I pass that tidbit along to the committee, the questions will become even worse.”
“Leave that to me.” Claire hung the mike on its hook, switched off the radio with a flourish, and spun her seat to beam up at Althea.
“That’ll give them something to think about,” Althea murmured.
The bioengineer giggled and nodded. “I know. They’re all going to be wondering if we’ll need a new line of specialties.”
“Will you?”
“Someday, no doubt,” Claire said. She wrapped her arms around Althea’s waist and laid her cheek against her friend’s bosom. “Not terribly soon, but someday. What of it? Every trade is eventually obsoleted by technical advances. Ours was never issued an exemption.”
Althea stroked her friend’s hair. “Every trade? What about farming?”
Claire shrugged. “Perhaps I phrased that poorly. The trade, or rather the product it provides, might not become obsolete, but the techniques used to produce it keep advancing. The farmers of old Earth would hardly recognize those of today. Imagine the days before autotillers, when men had to plow, sow, and reap by hand. Those were undoubtedly formidable and valuable skills, back then. What are they worth today?”
“Hm. Good point. Say,” Althea said, “you didn’t tell Art that you’d be back tomorrow.”
Claire smiled again. “You haven’t told your kin, either.”
“Well,” Althea said, “no, I haven’t.”
“So let’s make it a surprise, see how badly they really missed us.”
Althea grinned. “Okay.”
* * *
Eyes were wide in disbelief around the Kramniks’ conference table.
“You really want to do this?” Sebastian Kramnik said.
Douglas Kramnik started to speak, checked himself.
It doesn’t matter how good an idea it is. It still has to be sold.
Freedom's Fury (Spooner Federation Saga Book 3) Page 7