Amasee ran a hand through his wife’s long brown hair, stroking idly down the length of it as it fell over her shoulders and down her back, unintentionally dislodging the lilacs she’d tucked behind one ear. The huge orange ball that was Dannen’s Star hung low on the horizon, and the oblique rays of the evening light glinted hazily through her sweet-smelling hair.
“Can’t blame me there, can you?” He shrugged, reaching for the fallen lilacs. “I’m in no hurry to admit my advancing age. Any more than you’re ready to admit that you’re about to lose your eldest son… old woman.” He brought the flowers to his nose, pretending to hide the mischievous grin spreading across his face.
“Who are you calling an old woman!” She pulled back in mock protest and jabbed him playfully in the ribs. They both laughed and held each other briefly before he turned to lean on the fence and stare out again over the darkening landscape. Already the first stars were beginning to appear and it was getting more difficult to distinguish the green grass from the angry gray rocks in the distance. Marabell embraced him from behind, and he reveled at how good her arms felt around him.
“I wish I was just a farmer again,” he said finally. “I wish I didn’t have to leave you.”
“Then don’t,” she replied simply. “Stay home and take care of us.” Her arms tightened around his waist and for a moment he considered giving in to what they both wanted: for him to quit, and devote himself to his family.
“No.” He sighed heavily in resignation. “I can’t.” He shifted his gaze skyward, searching for the right grouping among the early stars, then extended an arm to a point just above the eastern horizon. “The Westland Congress has only four weeks of Joint Dominion with Eastland left before that starship will be here, in orbit around Pallatin. Oh, did I tell you we can see the Levant now? They’re in full deceleration and we’ve been able to spot the flare.”
She moved to his side, her right arm still around his waist, and followed his gaze into the night sky. “I hate them.” Marabell’s voice was a whisper.
He smiled. “You don’t even know them.”
They walked silently, hand in hand, back to the house where Amasee picked up Thad, tossing him gleefully into the air several times before giving him a hug and good-bye kiss.
“When you coming home, Daddy?” he asked.
“I’ll be back next week, but only for a few days before I have to go again.”
The boy considered the information, accepted it and turned back to the play set. “I’ll wave from the top!” he called over his shoulder, then proceeded to scramble up the narrow bars of the play set until reaching a small, enclosed platform above the swings. “All right! I’m ready, Daddy!”
“Just a minute,” Amasee called out, then turned back to his wife. They embraced a last time and kissed softly before walking together to the car. He lifted the door, glancing at the suitcase he’d tossed into the backseat earlier, and got in. There was a catch-all on the console between the seats and he carefully set the lilacs in it. “I’ll call when I get to the capital.”
She nodded and stood back from the car as he swung the door down and started the engine, the soft whine of the electric motor fading in intensity as the flywheel came up to speed. Amasee pulled the car slowly down the gravel drive that led to the main road to the city, careful to remember to wave to Thad, and flashed his lights in a silent good-bye to Marabell.
The main road was hardtop, and he accelerated rapidly on the smooth pavement. Darkness was closing in quickly now, and he dialed the car’s headlights to their highest setting until he reached the connecting ramp to the intercity highway. Built shortly after the Quake, the new road was a straight throughway to the shuttle station on the south side of Dannen.
As he pulled the car into the leftmost lane, a chime sounded and an accompanying light blinked on the dashboard indicating that the magnetic guidance strips embedded in the road had linked to the car’s system. “Dannen Station,” he said aloud, “northbound terminal.” He squeezed the steering wheel twice, locking the car into road guidance, and leaned back into the seat. The car accelerated smoothly.
It would take nearly an hour to get to the station and he thought about napping, realizing that he’d get little rest once he arrived at the capital, but instead watched the cars in the noncontrol section of roadway at his right as they sped past the windows. When the glow of Dannen Station appeared through the windshield, still two kilometers distant, he idly watched the red and white lights of aircraft coming and going from the facility. Most were simple air traffic, but at one point he recognized the lights and exhaust signature of a spaceplane. Even at this distance the white-hot exhaust almost hurt to look at. As the spaceplane’s trajectory became more vertical, the windshield vibrated and he felt the rolling thunder of the rocket motors kick in as the air-breathing jet engines shut down. It receded rapidly into the sky, but the night was cloudless and he was able to follow the pinpoints of its exhaust as they dwindled on its way into orbit.
He glanced at the clock on the dash. Right on time, he thought. The plane was the daily shuttle ferrying personnel and supplies to a starship in orbit, a very special ship. The Thunder Child was among the fastest class of starships Pallatin constructed, but its mission would be diplomatic, not exploratory. The diplomacy carried aboard her was backed with more than diplomats, however: Instead of the latest scientific equipment Pallatin’s researchers could devise, the ship fairly bristled with weaponry. In less than three weeks it would leave orbit to meet the Imperial starship that even now was decelerating toward Pallatin.
Amasee Niles, as Speaker of the Westland Congress—together with his Eastland counterpart—would be aboard the Thunder Child when it left.
He followed the lights until they grew too dim to see, then, squeezing the steering wheel twice to disengage the road link, pulled the car back into the manual lane. The automatic system would have taken him directly into the terminal, but he felt the sudden need to do something, anything, to keep his hands—and his mind—occupied. Despite his best efforts, however, one thought forced itself upon him, against his will, just as it had time and again in the last months of final preparation for the starship’s coming:
Yes, I hate them, too.
Javas’ message string was different from the many thousands that awaited Adela when, still a month away from Pallatin, she awoke from nearly twenty years of cryosleep. She had put through a worm program, of course, to sort and categorize each of the strings according to importance, subject matter, timeliness and any of dozens of other criteria that would allow her to better handle the sheer mass of information demanding her attention. Many didn’t need to be addressed for some time, and could wait in a holding file until later. Messages that did not require her personal attention at all, according to the explicit criteria she’d encoded into the worm, were rerouted automatically to other members of her project team. It was their job—indeed, their whole reason for accompanying her on this trip—to handle the items related to her work while she was involved in the diplomacy of the mission or while she was in cryosleep. Still other messages had been outdated years ago and were simply purged from the waiting queue entirely.
It was the queue coded as “personal” that concerned her now, and even among them the worm program had arranged all the strings in order of importance. Except one. The worm had kicked the string to the top of the queue against the criteria that she’d carefully emplaced: her own programming superseded by Imperial code.