"Yes, we got along well, but Armand...well, you'd know better than anyone. He's a very private person. I couldn't help thinking that he kept a lot inside all the time. Stuff he might have been better off letting out."
"Yeah. Well, one of the things he kept inside him, at least as far as I was concerned, was this job he took. He was working eighty hours a month in the Genet Center, but he never told me or anyone else back in Jacksonville what it was about. All we ever got were a couple of names: Charles Petrus and Dmitri Ianushkevich. And now I can't get to see them."
He stared at her for a long silent moment. "You think this job has something to do with...what?"
A desire to be completely candid welled up in her. She held it down by main force. "I can't tell you, Chuck. Only that it's very serious, and Armand's well-being is involved, and his girlfriend Teresza's, too. I have to get in to see those men, but they've got defenses I never expected to find in Gallatin's Humane Studies Center."
Chuck kept his eyes fixed on hers, but he put his shoulders through a curious back-and-forth orbit, as if he were loosening the muscles in them in preparation for a great effort.
"I dated a Jacksonville girl, just once. We didn't get on too well. She struck me as shifty...no, as overly guarded. Big agenda, no confidants, and everyone around her just a cog to her driving wheel. Maybe you know her? Victoria Peterson?"
Charisse nodded. "I've met her."
The focus in his eyes became threateningly intense. "You're not like that, are you? Can I take you at your word that this is all on the up-and-up?"
Charisse Morelon, who as the Morelon farms' representative to the rest of Hope had dealt as an equal with the toughest negotiators on Alta for nearly a year, felt herself quailing before the force of Chuck Feigner's gaze.
"You can," she said, barely above a whisper.
They sat in perfect silence for what seemed a whole year.
"All right," he said. "What were the names again?"
"Charles Petrus and Dmitri Ianushkevich."
"Both Humane Studies?"
"Ianushkevich, yes," she said. "Petrus is an agronomist."
"Life Sciences Building, then," he said. "Have you tried over there yet?"
"Uh, no."
He rose and laid a two-deka coin on the table. "Then let's go." He held out his hand to her.
She rose and took it.
***
With about a mile to go to the last rise before the land bridge descended to the continent, Armand brought the crude motorcycle to a shuddering halt. Teresza, startled by the cessation of the jouncing ride, immediately turned toward him with a look of alarm. Valerie was asleep in her arms. She'd clutched the infant to her chest from the moment they left Defiance.
"What's the matter, Armand?"
"Nothing," He lowered his head and summoned his courage. "I have to leave you here for a little while. Shouldn't be more than an hour. Think you'll be all right?"
"Why?" He could see her arms trembling even through the five layers of cloth around them.
He swept his gaze over their surroundings. Even at his height, he could barely see over the reeds and sawgrass that sprouted from the banks of the land bridge. The arctic ocean was a flat gray plain, undisturbed by visible waves. No breeze stirred the curtain of greenery. Behind them was only silence.
Hardly matters. The threats aren't behind or beside us. They're ahead of us.
"I have to make sure it's safe to cross back, love." He ran the back of a finger down her cheek. "You stay here and keep Val warm. I'll be back before you know it."
The fright in Teresza's eyes did not abate. "Armand --"
"Peace, Terry." He dismounted and stared forward. "I have to. You know why."
She nodded.
***
As he strode toward death by laser, Armand thought of Victoria.
How did they talk her into it, anyway? She was never the self-sacrificing sort. Did they trick her into it? Promise her something they couldn't deliver? They couldn't have coerced her. She would have been no use to them...
...unless her use to them doesn't depend on her willing cooperation.
It was an ugly thought. That he might be heading toward the same fate didn't improve it.
Suppose there'd been no Victoria. Suppose there'd been only me. Would I have accepted the role? Would I have asked Teresza to accept it with me? Would they have allowed her to remain with me...if she wanted to?
As he neared the crest of the rise, his thoughts turned to tactics. The simplest thing would be to disable the laser, but he'd never attempted to exert his telekinesis over that great a distance and wasn't sure he could. He could try to deflect the attention of the men manning the emplacement with telepathic noise, but that seemed to carry an unfortunate chance of failure.
Well, I know my clairvoyance will reach that far.
He set his viewpoint free of his body and sped it forth.
The muzzle of the laser swelled before him. It was a curious model, bare of the collimator assembly a typical military laser would have had. He steered his viewpoint down the barrel, questing for the synthetic sapphire whose silvered ends would bounce fifty megajoules worth of photons back and forth until they were a single coherent slug that nothing could contain.
It was much larger than he expected: perhaps five pounds. A standard Spacehawk laser's sapphire was only about a pound. Its photosources were larger, too. Disproportionately larger. The power buses attached to their capacitors were distressingly thick.
This isn't a standard model. This thing is hot, five hundred megajoules at least. One shot from this could vaporize Morelon House.
Now I get why no collimator.
The intent wasn't just to execute a returning ostrakon, but to leave no evidence that he'd ever existed.
I can't mess around with this thing. I have to kill it dead, now and forever.
A extraordinary rush of anger filled his mind. Without further thought he wrapped a ghostly hand around the huge sapphire and squeezed.
The jewel shattered in his telekinetic grip. It disintegrated into a pile of blue dust and a few dozen fragments the size of beach pebbles.
Let's see what you can do with that, boys.
He contemplated the ruin of the sapphire for a moment before reeling his viewpoint back to his body, still seething with the urge to crush and kill.
***
Teresza was exactly where Armand had left her, Valerie still bundled against her chest. When he appeared again, she had to fight down the urge to run into his arms.
"Is everything okay?" She hefted her daughter even more closely against her.
He nodded. "We have one more little chore to see to, and then it's non-stop to the Norsland train station."
Her brow wrinkled. "What chore?"
"Just some folks I have to talk to." He mounted the motorcycle, yanked the starter cord, and grinned shallowly when it caught. "I think I'd like them to meet you and Val, too."
"Armand...?"
"Later, love." He gunned the engine and sped them up the final hill.
When they crested the hill and began the descent to greater Alta, Armand killed the engine and let them freewheel. The cycle rolled at a stately ten miles per hour over the last few hundred yards. From the Spacehawk dome came a low grinding sound. The muzzle of the laser weaved a bit, steadied, and settled on them. The aperture did not illuminate. No blast of destroying light issued forth.
"Right now," Armand said, "there are people in that dome yelling at one another and demanding to know why we're not dead yet." The bare landscape before them seemed unnaturally open after the curtained ride over the land bridge. "Want to introduce yourself, ask them what they have against you?"
"Armand --"
"Of course you do, Terry." He slewed the cycle slightly sideways to kill its remaining speed and stuck out a booted foot for additional braking. They came to a stop a few yards from the dome wall. "If you didn't, you'd wonder about it for the rest of your life." He dismoun
ted, circled to Teresza's side, and pulled her gently out of the sidecar. The wind swirled around them, in welcome or warning.
He took her hand and pulled her toward a plain steel door in the side of the dome.
It was locked.
Armand grinned again. "No matter." He stared down at the lock cylinder for a moment. It swiftly turned cherry-red, then white, and then dripped away as molten steel. He nodded, kicked the door open with a force that ripped it partway off its hinges, and led her inside.
There were four men inside. All four were young, tall, and garbed in the defense cadre's dark blue overalls. Two were standing over the laser that pointed at the land bridge, arguing over what the trouble might be. The other two stood a little back. They'd been exchanging jokes and skipping the occasional insult at their colleagues.
"Where are your manners, gentlemen?" Armand said. "Didn't you hear me knock?"
Four heads swiveled toward him. Four faces filled with panic. Four hands went for the needleguns at their hips.
Armand raised a hand. All four sidearms leaped from their holsters. They flew in tight formation to clatter at Armand's feet.
"You won't be needing those," he said. "We weren't planning to stay long. I just wanted you to get a close look at us. The folks your laser was intended to obliterate." He curled an arm around Teresza's shoulder and edged her slightly forward.
"This is my wife Teresza and my daughter Valerie. Terry is twenty-two years old, and Val is about four months. I'm about to turn twenty-one. We've been vacationing on the peninsula these past couple of years. Thought we might head back, see how civilization was getting along without us."
None of the Spacehawks moved nor spoke.
"I remembered things a bit differently from this," Armand said. "Back before I brought my wife north, it wasn't...fashionable to kill travelers in cold blood. Especially not with a laser powerful enough to reduce them to a heap of ash. But I suppose things have changed. Oh, by the way, you won't get that thing working by fiddling with the dials. There's no sapphire in it any more." He bared his teeth. "And there never will be again, so long as I'm alive to see to it. Got me?"
Silence hung leaden in the air for a long moment.
"Well, that's all I have to say. You boys stay alert, now. Wouldn't want a fleet of Earth battlecruisers to slip past you while you're fixing your defenses against us nasty ostrakons." He turned to Teresza and nodded toward the door.
Before they could leave, one of the Spacehawks said, "Wait."
"Yes?" Armand said.
"Who are you?"
"Oh, did I leave that out? Silly me. I'm Armand Morelon. Would you be a kindly sort and radio ahead to Norsland for us? We'll need seats on the next train to Jacksonville."
They left.
Chapter 42
As they passed through the outer doors of the Life Sciences Building, Chuck halted Charisse and gently turned her to face him. A few yards further in, a young woman in a red silk blouse sat at the reception desk, looking at them expectantly.
"How's your self-control?" he said softly.
The question unsettled her. "It varies with the circumstances. Mostly it serves my needs. What did you have in mind?"
He grinned. "I'm going to have to do some lying. I didn't want you to go in unprepared. Can you keep a poker face on you while I spin some whoppers?"
She studied him at some length.
Lies coming out of that face? Hard to imagine. But that would only make them more effective, wouldn't it?
"Can I help?"
He shook his head. "Try to look a little anxious, and uncomfortable about being here. You see," he said, "you're my fiancee, and Dr. Petrus is the father of your unborn child."
"WHAT?"
"You do want to get to talk to him, don't you?"
"Well, yes, but --"
He winked, and she subsided. His charm all but overpowered her. It wasn't about his admitted good looks. It was more about his poise and his gentle style of flirtation. He had what Grandpere Alain would have called "a way about him," and he used it well.
"Okay," she said. "You've got the baton. Uh, should I try to look...bigger?"
He grinned again and squeezed her hand. "No need." They pushed through the inner doors and strode toward the reception desk.
"Can I help you?" the receptionist asked.
"Yes," Chuck said. "We'd like to see Dr. Charles Petrus." The receptionist opened her mouth to reply, but Chuck pressed ahead before she could speak. "We're here to draw up a support agreement for his child by my fiancee."
The receptionist's mouth dropped open. She snatched up an intercom handset and began punching its buttons frantically.
***
The cobbled-together motorcycle got Armand, Teresza and Valerie to within eyeshot of the Norsland railway terminal before it sputtered and died.
Armand pulled the starter cord twice, then gave up. The remaining walk wasn't substantial. He gestured surrender to Teresza, and they dismounted the ungainly contraption. He took a step toward the terminal, and Teresza tugged him back. She was gazing down at the machine they'd rode back from exile.
"What's the matter, Terry?"
"Nothing." From the crook of Teresza's arm, Valerie cooed and waved a fist. "I'm just feeling a little sentimental about this thing we're about to abandon."
He nodded. "It deserves a proper burial, but --"
"No," she said. "It was a gift. An expression of love. It's the people who gave it to us who deserve better." She looked him full in the eyes. "Can we see to that?"
He thought back over their year and a half in Defiance. Apart from Burt Marchesand and his side boys, no one had ever treated them roughly. All the other villagers adhered to an unbending morality, in some ways more demanding than what prevailed in the rest of Hope. Armand had built his reputation among them with openhandedness and initiative, but the investment had paid off far more quickly than he'd expected. Every favor he did had been reciprocated. Every gift he gave had been answered with a gift in reply. Nor was it merely a matter of keeping the books balanced; it was about respect, friendship, and community.
Survival necessities. None of them could have survived up there alone. They need each other. Terry and I needed them. But need was only where it started. It ended with love.
"We can try, Terry." His chest became tight. "There might be a few stops along the way, though. Think you can bear with me while I see to them?"
She nodded. They trudged toward the terminal.
The terrain at the northern edge of Alta's northernmost town was uneven and untended. Little hills furred by clumps of mason trees and Earth evergreens dotted the approaches, with larger, lusher forests looming to east and west. Norsland itself was a tight, low-built settlement. All its buildings, residential or commercial, were clustered into a few dozen acres hacked out of the northern forest. Their builders had been mindful of the strong winter winds; none were above two stories high.
The power cable channel was not as Armand remembered it; it appeared to have gone untended for the summer past, at least. A bed of creeping judas covered most of it, and was seeking a purchase on the cable itself.
That stuff has a grip. If it isn't cleaned up pretty soon, it will eat into the cable, maybe short it out. That would leave our gallant guardians at Midgard battery just a bit embarrassed when the ostrakons come flooding back into Alta, wouldn't it?
The terminal was a single-story poured-concrete building. Its few windows were all heavily shuttered. Armand guided Teresza and Valerie around to its south-facing entrance, ushered them through the stout wooden doors, and past a handful of Norslanders who glanced at them in something between puzzlement and alarm.
The clerk at the ticket window was a prune-faced man with a large bald spot. He barely looked at them. "Destination, please?"
"Jacksonville," Armand said. "Two regular seats, and an infant."
"How old's the infant?"
"Four months."
"No charge for him, then
." The clerk pressed a stud twice, and two tickets appeared from a slot in his counter. "Twenty-two dekas."
Armand reached for his wallet, stopped.
Oops.
That got the clerk's attention. "Something wrong, sir?" His hand casually descended to cover the tickets, lest a presumptive pauper snatch them thinking to travel for free.
"No, it's...um..."
"It's all right, Armand," Teresza said. She handed Valerie to him and fumbled with the edge of her sweater, seemingly trying to work something out of its hem. A moment later she produced a fifty-deka gold piece and slid it toward the clerk.
The clerk regarded it with a hint of surprise. He seemed uncertain whether to accept it.
"Something wrong, friend?" Teresza said sharply.
"No, Ma'am, it's just...well, we don't see a lot of gold here."
She nodded. "I understand. But you can make change in notes, can't you?"
"Uh, yes." He pushed the tickets toward her. Twenty-eight dekas in paper followed immediately after.
Teresza smiled. "Thank you. When's the next train?"
"About forty minutes."
As they retreated to the benches that lined the walls of the terminal building, Armand said, "You had that with you all this time?"
Teresza nodded. "My father's idea. He always wanted me to have at least two hundred dekas on me, but he didn't want it to be too easy for me to spend them."
Armand shook his head and sat. Teresza said "What?" as she sat beside him and reached for Valerie. He surrendered the infant and sat back with his hands behind his head.
"I might have worried less if I'd known I was marrying an heiress."
Teresza snorted. Valerie cooed.
***
Victoria was bored with reading, bored with sewing, and thoroughly bored with being the Goddess of Hope. She was dozing alongside Ethan when he awoke from his cataleptic trance.
He struggled onto his elbows and blinked down at her. It took a moment for her to grasp the change.
"Ethan?"
He nodded, and blinked several more times.
She shrieked, threw her arms around him, and sobbed with relief. Seconds later he thrust his own arms between them and broke her grip as roughly as if she'd been an importuning stranger.
Which Art In Hope (Spooner Federation Saga Book 1) Page 29