Freedom's Scion (Spooner Federation Saga Book 2)

by Francis Porretto

  The murmurs of assent went unpolluted by any demurrer. Chuck nodded and turned at once to Althea.

  “For my part,” Althea said, “I’ve regarded my designation as scion as more a burden and an obligation than an honor. I don’t have any taste for the sort of work Charisse does, and I doubt I’ll acquire any in the future.” She drew herself up into a formal stance. “Therefore, I hereby renounce my scion status...”

  Althea paused and looked briefly into the distance, as if she were receiving advice from some unseen source.

  “...with the hope that the council will nominate as my replacement...”

  The attendees turned unanimously toward her.

  “...the familiar, worthy, and eminently deserving person of Barton Kramnik Morelon.”

  Uproar.

  ====

  Chapter 18: Quartember 7, 1307 A.H., 1600 hours

  Althea settled herself into the pilot’s seat, pulled the restraint harness over her head and latched it, and turned to her husband.

  “Last chance to back out.”

  Martin shook his head. “Whither thou goest, love.”

  She nodded, released the brake, and engaged the ground transmission.

  Freedom’s Horizon, though slenderer and lighter than any previous manned spacecraft, was still a considerable mass. The rear wheels groaned audibly as the modest kerosene-fueled ground drive struggled to turn them. It took several minutes for the plane to roll out of the Morelon hangar and down to the beginning of the Grenier Air runway. Althea jockeyed it carefully into position, such that the exhaust from the main engine would fall onto the massive flexosteel exhaust baffle, twenty feet square and six inches thick, that she’d had mounted there for the purpose.

  She set the brake and glanced out to the port side. As he’d promised, Adam Grenier watched from afar. Despite his considerable distance from the runway, the tension in his face and bearing was evident.

  Mustn’t ruin the nice man’s airstrip.

  “Carefully, carefully,” Martin muttered.

  “Hm?”

  “Just don’t get carried away,” he said. “Six percent power on takeoff, no more. If you firewall the engine, that plate will be found on Sulla.”

  She scowled. “I’m not an idiot, Martin.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re something almost as dangerous.”

  “Huh? What?”

  “The invincible, indestructible, utterly unstoppable Althea MacLachlan Morelon.” He smirked. “Just remember that there’s an ordinary mortal in the seat next to you.”

  Despite the lightness of his tone, the comment sobered her.

  Grandpere?

  —Yes, dear?

  Am I being too headlong about this?

  —That’s not a fair question, Althea.

  Hm? Why not?

  —You’re the scientist. You conceived of and designed that plane. You’re the formulator of its fuel and the co-developer of the engine that will burn it. In life, I was a corn farmer with a passing interest in the humanities. I’m not more knowledgeable for having shed my mortal body.

  Even with Idem’s mind added to yours?

  —Even so. You’ll have to rely on your own knowledge and judgment.

  A chill passed over her.

  Remember what you said about my optimism, Grandpere?

  —Indeed I do.

  This is the downside, isn’t it?

  There came no reply.

  “Al?”

  “Hm? Oh, sorry, love. Woolgathering again.”

  Martin cocked an eyebrow at her.

  “Maybe after we’ve landed would be a better time for that.”

  She nodded and laid her hand on the main engine’s ignition toggle.

  “Al...”

  “Hm? What now?”

  “Kill the kero engine and disengage the ground transmission.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  The sound the main engine made as it awakened was a deep, throaty rumble like nothing heard before on Hope. It announced the birth of an unprecedented power, marshaled to a human hand, held at the ready and eager to be unleashed. The magnitude of it awoke a new awareness in her: of her smallness, her fallibility, and her fragile, mortal humanity.

  At the edge of her vision, she saw Martin cross himself, bow his head, and mutter inaudibly.

  Hey, God? If you’re real—I still can’t work out how that could be, or why you would care about people, but Martin believes it, and he’s got me about half convinced—would you please look after my husband? This should be my risk alone, but I couldn’t dissuade him, so whatever this lunacy might do to me, would you please keep him safe? Thanks a bunch.

  Beside her, Martin looked straight ahead.

  She released the brake and shoved the throttle to the six-percent line as a single action.

  Freedom’s Horizon surged forward with a mechanical roar of joy. Its fuselage quivered to the engine’s tune: not threateningly, as if it might come apart under the stress, but with a sense of a purpose long awaited and imminently to be fulfilled. The spaceplane accelerated so swiftly that Althea had to rotate at once to keep it from shooting off the end of the runway and plowing into the forest beyond.

  It took a mere fingertip tug on the yoke to catapult the craft over the tops of the mason trees and into the sky of Hope. Thirty seconds after liftoff, it had reached five thousand feet of altitude and six hundred miles per hour. The groundscape below passed by in a greenish-brown blur.

  Althea’s nervousness vanished. She banked the spaceplane to starboard and let the yoke settle for level flight as she turned to her husband and released her own roar of fulfillment.

  “Yeeeee-HAH!”

  * * *

  It was far more difficult to land Freedom’s Horizon than it had been to get her airborne. The spaceplane wanted to go fast. Althea had to apply full flaps, essay a crab maneuver, and feather the throttle to just above engine flame-out to get the craft down to a speed suitable for shedding altitude. Even so, the landing took nearly the whole length of the runway plus a sharp braking jerk at the very end. Althea and Martin surged forward against their restraints with a force that emptied their lungs and foretold matching sets of V-shaped bruises.

  “I think,” Althea gasped when she’d convinced herself that the plane wasn’t about to hurl itself back into the sky, “we need to work on low-end engine control.”

  Martin nodded, eyes comically wide, and burst into a gale of laughter. Althea joined him.

  “Have you ever,” he said as their guffaws subsided, “had that much fun before?”

  She looked at him askance. “With my clothes on? Nope. That was the wildest ride I’ve ever taken. Maybe that anyone’s taken since the Spoonerites debarked from the Relic.”

  “Probably,” Martin said. He released his restraint harness and wriggled in his seat. “Well, now we know she’s a great atmosphere plane. Not that that amounts to much, given that she’s a six-seater with room for a couple of handbags, or a two-seater with about half a ton of cargo capacity. But it gives me hope for the next stage.”

  A ladder thumped against the port side of the spaceplane. Althea released her restraints and swung back the canopy as Adam Grenier mounted to face her.

  “Well? Where have you two been for the last two hours?”

  Althea started to giggle again. Martin leaned past her .

  “We flew north-northeast,” he said. “Buzzed our lab site at Thule a couple of times. Then Althea let the engine out a little further and we circumnavigated the arctic ice cap at about Mach ten.” He smirked. “Pretty scenery, nice place to visit, wouldn’t want to live there. After that, we flew south, skimmed the east coast, overflew the Jefferson ruins, turned west and cruised back here. Call it six thousand miles, total.”

  Grenier nodded. “How far up did you throttle her?”

  Althea grinned wickedly. “Nine percent, tops.”

  Grenier snorted. “You’ve got a lot more test flights ahead of you.”

  “Not in a
tmosphere, we don’t,” Althea said. “This lady wants to go to space. If I can convince myself that she’s tight and that the engine won’t explode at full thrust, our next destination will be low Hope orbit.”

  “After one test flight in air? Just how wild-assed crazy-reckless can you be?”

  “Mustn’t say that to Al, Adam,” Martin said. “She’s apt to take it as a personal challenge.”

  “Hm.” Grenier glanced toward the aft of the plane. “One way or the other, we have a few adjustments to make before you roll her out again.”

  “What sort?” Althea said.

  “Arranging a better baffle for your exhaust, for one thing.”

  She frowned. “Did we knock it over?”

  Grenier shook his head. “You’ll see when you go back to your hangar.” He peered forward at the tree line, not fifty feet beyond the nosecone. “Can you turn this thing around?”

  “Yeah, but it’s a hassle,” she admitted. “I’ll just roll her backward.”

  “Two and a quarter miles?”

  “Cut her some slack, Adam,” Martin said. “She’s still a little giddy.”

  Grenier shook his head, muttered “women pilots,” and descended the ladder.

  * * *

  “Good Lord,” Martin murmured.

  “Uh, yeah,” Althea concurred.

  The exhaust baffle was still standing...what was left of it. The exhaust of Freedom’s Horizon had bored a huge hole through it. Perhaps thirty percent of the original plate remained where it had been mounted. Beyond it, the exhaust plume had blasted away a strip of the forest about twenty feet wide and fifty feet long. The stumps that remained were still steaming.

  “Words cannot quite capture,” Grenier said, “how very glad I am that there’s nothing but trees in that direction for a couple of miles. Just what’s in that fuel of yours?”

  “Oh, nothing much,” Althea said offhandedly, eyes still riveted to the devastation. “Pureed green vegetables, a large onion finely minced, a dash of tabasco. You know, stuff.”

  “Hmph. Well, one way or another, you’re not rolling that beast out a second time until we come up with a way to limit the damage.”

  Martin cocked an eyebrow at him. “I’d say the damage has already been done.”

  Grenier started to reply, but Althea cut in ahead of him.

  “No, Martin, Adam’s right. We can’t chance it. What if someone had been walking through those woods? We’re going to have to make a baffle from the composites you used for the combustion chamber. Nothing else is guaranteed to withstand the heat.”

  Martin grimaced and nodded.

  “Adam,” Althea said, “are you okay with having us use your strip? If this makes you too uncomfortable, I’ll understand completely.”

  Adam Grenier pursed his lips and surveyed the ragged path the exhaust had cut through the forest.

  “You run up that new baffle and drag it over here,” he said, “and we’ll talk about it. I don’t want to put you out, and I certainly don’t want to alienate you, but this is something I hadn’t planned for. Besides, a few dozen trees burned down are the least of our worries. What sort of volatiles did your plane spew into the atmosphere? What’ll they do to the region as they settle?”

  “That, at least, we can relax about,” Althea said. “The exhaust is very hot, but it’s entirely inert. Mainly carbon dioxide and water vapor.”

  “Mainly?”

  She nodded. “There’s a little nitrous oxide in there, too.” Grenier’s eyes widened, and she quickly added “A very little.”

  “Too bad,” he said.

  “Why too bad?”

  “Because I could use something to laugh about over this.”

  * * *

  “So how much did it cost us?” Martin said.

  Althea said “Just a moment” without looking up from her computer. The total on the spreadsheet seemed impossible. If it was correct, the test flight had cost over six hundred thousand dekas. An orbital flight would cost almost two million, exclusive of any damage Freedom’s Horizon might cause by its passage. The composite baffle required to confine the spaceplane’s exhaust plume would cost two million more.

  I knew it would be costly, but this is ridiculous.

  —Spaceflight isn’t a penny-pincher’s hobby, dear.

  Oh, hi, Grandpere. That’s abundantly clear. But what will this do to our plan to use the Relic as our development site?

  —There’s no way to know that until you’ve been there and have a grasp of what materials, and how much, you’ll need to bring there. Do you still expect to use the ballistic launcher to get stuff up there?

  Now more than ever. There’s no way I could afford enough launches to ship everything I’ll need.

  —The more delicate equipment will have to go that way, won’t it?

  Yeah. But fortunately, most of what we expect to need can withstand the acceleration from the mass driver.

  —Could you make the plane a profit center somehow?

  (snort) Not unless there are a lot of extremely rich people on Alta desperate for orbital joyrides.

  “Al?”

  “Hm? Oh, sorry, love. Looks like about six hundred fifteen thousand dekas, if I include the cost of the exhaust baffle we destroyed. An orbital flight will hurt much worse. About two million per launch.”

  “Good Lord.” Martin winced, rose from Althea’s guest chair, and went to peer out the window. “I’d imagine we won’t be doing that very often.”

  “I know, I know. Nothing to be done about it, though. The reagents for the fuel synthesis are a bundle all by themselves.”

  He turned and fixed her with a speculative gaze. “Nothing to be done about it?”

  She peered at him suspiciously. “What are you thinking of?”

  He said nothing. His gaze did not waver.

  She rose from her seat. “Are you trying to suggest that I should forget the whole idea, Martin?”

  “I’d like to know,” he said, “why you’re so committed to it.”

  Incredulity spread through her. “We’ve been through this. It was my grandparents’ dying wish. Their bequest to me was specifically for this purpose. To go to Earth and see what had become of our kin there.”

  He nodded. “All very well, but do you think they had any idea what it would cost you?”

  “I know they did,” she said. She fought to keep her irritation well leashed. “They knew it would take much more than they left me. My grandmother said so the night she died. I wouldn’t have gone into finance otherwise.”

  “Or spaceflight engineering,” Martin said. He returned to the guest chair and slouched into it. “Or two years in Thule. Or forsaking free time enough for a reasonably normal social life.”

  His eyes filled with a longing Althea could not fathom.

  “Or deferring having children,” he said. “Or delaying the Hallanson-Albermayer series in the hope that we can still have children once all this is behind us.”

  “Oh,” she said. “That.”

  He nodded. “Yes. That.”

  ====

  Intermezzo: Octember 12, 1308 A.H.

  Charisse put her hand on the doorknob, paused, and glanced back once more at Tadeusz Leschitsyn as he labored over Althea’s unconscious form. The physician looked up briefly, nodded to her, and returned his attention to his patient. The Morelon matriarch summoned her resolve and exited the sickroom, closing the door gently behind her. She made her way down the hall with measured steps.

  I cannot have this any longer.

  It was her one and only thought. It had been with her from the moment Althea went into labor. It refused to be dispelled.

  She’s the only descendant of Alain Morelon remaining to the clan, even if not by blood heritage. She’s simply too precious to risk any further. Children or none.

  Althea had always seemed above all sickness and pain. Charisse could not remember ever hearing her complain of the slightest malady or the least discomfort. Labor had shattered her
illusion of invulnerability. Her screams as the contractions tore through her were the most terrifying sounds any Morelon had ever heard...until Tadeusz Leschitsyn most reluctantly declared the baby dead and forcibly extracted the corpse from Althea’s ripped and bleeding body.

  If only I could wean her away from the spaceflight nonsense! Damn my brother for passing his obsession onto her shoulders.

  I have to try again. Even if she comes to hate me over it. I have a duty.

  She descended the stairs, mustered what strength remained to her, and rounded into the hearthroom. As she expected, Martin waited there. He was alone.

  He’s desperate for children. That might be the key.

  He caught her eyes and immediately rose to his feet. She held out her hands, and he took them in his.

  “Tad says she’ll live,” she said slowly. “But she’ll be a long while healing. And she’s unlikely ever to carry a child to term. The damage to her womb was severe. He recommended a...permanent measure.”

  Tears welled in Martin Forrestal’s eyes.

  “Sterilization?”

  Charisse nodded.

  His face crumpled as he fell to his knees. She descended and wrapped her arms around him as best she could. He wept in the whimpering way of a man who has learned, to his surprise, that there is a limit to what he can bear after all.

  She held him and waited.

  “The Lord giveth,” he choked out at last, “and the Lord taketh away. Blessed, oh, blessed be the name of the Lord.”

  Charisse did not reply.

  * * *

  For three days Althea Morelon wandered a landscape out of a surrealist’s nightmares, a place occupied by wholly abstract entities seemingly disconnected from all reality, and from one another as well. Some of them were marginally comprehensible: reifications of physical laws, templates of ecology and society, and propositions in moral-ethical theory. Others were the purest expressions of form, mere geometric shapes animated by unseen forces. All moved among one another in Brownian patterns. Now and then two would crash together and vanish in a burst of brilliance.

  They did not develop. They did not deform. They did not communicate. Their endless ballet suggested nothing but chaos.