Torch of Freedom

'I'll give him a reprimand of some sort. But even that won't be very severe. Enough to make him walk on eggshells for a couple of years, but not enough to wreck his career.'

'And Irvine?'

'You know, Father,' Collin smiled crookedly, 'he's actually the one bright spot in all this. He was completely loyal, start to finish, he was smart enough to realize something was happening that shouldn't have been, even if he didn't have a clue what that 'something' really was, and he's the only one involved who did his job properly.'

'So your thoughts are—?'

'Well, he wants a field assignment, but, frankly, I don't think that's going to be possible any time soon.' Collin shook his head. 'He knows too much about what happened—especially now, after all the interrogations. We can't put him out, use him for a deep-penetration agent, with all of that rattling around inside his head. By the same token, his genotype doesn't really lend itself well to any other assignment. So, what I've been thinking, is that we might bring him all the way inside.'

'All the way?' Albrecht's surprise was obvious, and Collin shrugged.

'I think it makes sense, Father. We can run him through the standard briefing program, see how he reacts. He's already halfway inside the onion, and as I just said, he's demonstrated loyalty and intelligence—and initiative, for that. If he can handle what's really going on, I think he could be very useful to us in Darius now that we're in the final runup to Prometheus.'

'Um.' Albrecht considered for several moments, then nodded. 'All right, I can see that. Go ahead.'

'Of course. And now,' Collin pushed himself up out of his chair, 'if you'll excuse me, there's a memorial being planned for all the people killed at Pine Valley Park. They'll be unveiling the sketch for it in a public meeting where the Children's Pavilion used to be this afternoon, and'—His face tightened with something that had absolutely no relationship to the physical discomfort of his still healing body—'I promised the kids we'd go.'

Chapter Sixty-Three

April, 1922

Brice brought the cab to a halt at the very apex of Andrew's Curve. 'Well, here we are.'

Nancy Becker got up from the seat and went to stand with her face almost pressed against the observation window. That wasn't as foolish as it seemed, because that was a real window, not a vid screen. Allowing for the various protective shields, she was looking at the vista beyond with her own eyes, not something relayed electronically.

Brice had thought she'd like that. He'd timed the trip so that they'd be in shade when they arrived. Ameta, along with its various moons (the smallest and certainly the most recent of which was Parmley Station), revolved around an F5 subgiant star, which was half again as massive as Old Earth's sun, had twice the diameter, and was almost eight times more luminous. Had the roller coaster cab been perched in direct sunlight, Brice would have had no choice but to use the vid screens. Even with the protective shields—which were cut-rate quality, forget state of the art—it would have been too risky to look at the vista directly.

But they'd be able to do so for at least two hours before the station's revolution around Ameta brought this portion of it back out of the shade.

Brice came to stand next to her. Ameta was on full display, with all of its cloud bands and rings. There seemed to be every shade of blue and green there, along with enough white bands to set them off perfectly. As a bonus—this was rather unusual—the moon Hainuwele was just peeking around the curve of the giant planet below. Most of the time, Brice wasn't fond of the moon. It was close enough to Ameta to be subject to pronounced tidal heating, and its blotchy red, yellow and orange surface was usually sick-looking. In its current location, however, it was far enough away for the ugly details to be unnoticeable. At that distance, its bright colors made a striking contrast to the much cooler shades of its mother planet.

Even Yamato's Nebula was on its best behavior at the moment. It was as if the entire sidereal universe had decided to give its full support to Brice's bold and risky endeavor. He knew that was a fantasy, of course. But it ought to be true.

'It's beautiful,' Nancy said softly.

'Told you,' said Brice. Then, spent a minute or so silently berating himself for being less suave than any human male since the extinction of Homo erectus.

But he did not concede defeat. Quaked, but did not lose heart. He'd been planning this campaign for months, and had warned himself over and over that there would be setbacks. Most of them, caused by his clumsy tongue.

This was the first time the two of them had ever been alone, since they met on the tarmac of the spaceport. The months they'd spent since their escape from Mesa drifting on the Hali Sowle had been the equivalent of months spent in the most densely populated apartment in creation. You'd think that a freighter massing slightly over a million tons would have enormous empty reaches, but . . . it didn't. Or, rather, it did . . . but it was a working commercial vessel, nothing more. Despite the cpaciousness of its huge cargo holds, the living quarters were small and Spartan. Neither Ganny nor Uncle Andrew would have reacted kindly if Brice had proposed that time be taken from the repair work needed to get the ship's drive working again to turn some of the freight compartments into additional living quarters so that he might have a chance to spend some time alone with Nancy, either. It was best not to even think how Zilwicki or Cachat would have reacted to that suggestion, and, just to complete the unfairness of the universe, there'd been the minor fact that every square meter of every cargo hold was covered by the bridge security and monitoring cameras. So even though there were all those vast stretches of space, Brice had been gloomily certain that any effort on his part to inveigle Nancy out into them would have been instantly discovered. Even if it would never have happened to anyone else, it would definitely—inevitably!—have happened to him. At which point his supposed best friends and the loving members of his family, with that dubious quality which supposedly served them—ha!—as a sense of humor would have made his life a living hell.

To be sure, had Brice and Nancy already established a clear relationship, they could have figured out a thousand ways to elude the informal chaperonage provided by Ganny and Nancy's mother . . . and those damned cameras! But that was precisely the task at hand. And while there were undoubtedly some fifteen-year old boys somewhere in the galaxy who'd have the sheer nerve to try to start a romance by immediately proposing that the two of them disappear somewhere so they could . . .

Well. Brice was not one of them. His isolated upbringing as a member of the Butre clan had made him very self-confident in some situations, but very shy in others.

This was one of the others.

Nancy's head turned, her attention drawn by the sight of a shuttle heading toward the Hali Sowle.

'How soon are they going to be leaving, do you know?'

Brice shook his head. 'I haven't heard anything definite yet. Uncle Andrew says they're still waiting for the proper replacement parts to arrive.' He laughed suddenly. 'I think he's a bit pissed off that they don't trust his repairs to get them there, but I sure don't blame them. 'Course part of the reason he's pissed is because he already had all the parts he needed, before we dumped 'em out to squeeze you and your Mom in. Way he sees it, it was all their fault to start with, so they don't have any business turning their noses up at his custom-built parts.'

Nancy returned his grin, and he shrugged.

'Anyway, the guys on the Custis'—EMS Custis was the Erewhonese repair ship which had been at the station as part of the ongoing work to turn Parmley Station into something that still looked like a decrepit and mostly-abandoned amusement park but was actually quite a powerful fortress—'agreed to make a quick hope to get replacements for us. I think their skipper probably works for the people we got Hali Sowle from in the first place. Anyway, he obviously thinks we should use real parts to fix the hyper generator.'

'How about us? How soon will we be going to Beowulf?' Nancy asked.