When she could see that the destruction was complete, Althea nodded in satisfaction, damped the main drive, constricted the exhaust baffles, pulsed the attitude thrusters to reorient the ship for system exit, and headed for the cometary belt to top off the ship's reaction mass tanks.

When Liberty's Torch had ingested enough cometary ice to bring her reaction-mass reserves to maximum, she went to high thrust and swiftly left the last objects in the outer system well behind. A few hours later, the densitometers declared that the vacuum was thin enough to go superluminal. She disengaged the reaction drive and briefly contemplated the return journey.

An elaborate procedure was required to prepare the ship for an automated return to Hope system. She'd allowed for the possibility that it might be needed and had designed the necessary control linkages and software to make it possible, but of course had never tried it out.

No help for it. As soon as I'm under superluminal drive and properly headed up, I'm getting into the medipod. With luck, it will find the nanites and strain them out of me. Without...God, be with me.

She had to be certain she'd been thoroughly purged of them before she would allow herself to return to the surface of Hope.

Chapter 32.

Althea's medipod brought her slowly to consciousness as Liberty's Torch's proximity alarms sounded around her. As her senses and coordination returned, the pod hatch swung open. She climbed out tentatively, uncertain of the reason for her revival.

Efthis implied that they'd made a lot of progress in AI. If that damned station found a way to keep me tethered to Loioc system, I'm gonna be pissed.

She went to the piloting board. The ship had dropped out of superluminal drive and was holding station in normal space. She glanced down at the run clock and was immediately relieved. Fifteen months and twelve days had passed since she'd programmed the ship for automated return and climbed into the pod. She lit the lidar system and set it to scanning nearby space.

The returns arrived within seconds. A large mass loomed some thirty thousand miles off the bow of Liberty's Torch at an azimuth of seven degrees and an ascension of minus two. The returns were consistent with a nickel-iron composition. The viewscreen displayed a spherical mass with a rough surface, about twenty-one miles in diameter. Althea immediately quenched the lidar, activated the communications laser, and triggered the digital interrogator. She grinned as the acknowledgement arrived.

I'm home. Well, close enough, anyway.

The Relic was in sight. Eleven thousand miles below it, brilliant in the light from its sun, shone the blue-green glory of Hope.

Docking Liberty's Torch to the Relic proved more difficult than Althea expected. It wasn't a shortcoming in the control system but in her unexpectedly slow fingers and fuzzy sense of touch. Her orientation and balance were off, as well. Apparently a year and a half enclosed in a medipod wasn't something from which one should hope to rise in perfect starship-piloting trim.

When the mating collars had finally reconciled their differences and the starship's flexosteel grapples had pulled it snugly against the portal, she scanned the airlock gauges, found no deviations from nominal operation, and popped open the inner hatch. The faint hiss of the pneumatics as the hatch retracted was more reassuring than she would have expected.

I agonized over subcontracting that subsystem. Martin told me I should have more faith in my fellow man. I suppose he was right, but it wasn't as easy as he made it sound.

The coupled system on the Relic responded equally smoothly. Her orbital workshop was perfectly silent. Other than a faint mustiness to the air, there was no sign that anything had changed for the worse during her absence. She staggered to the control chamber, brought the satellite's systems out of standby with the flick of a switch, dialed up the air scrubbers, and smiled at the peaking whine of the auxiliary circulators.

There's no place like home.

The Relic was as much of a home as she'd known for nearly a decade. As much as she missed Martin and Morelon House, it was absurdly comforting to find the niche she'd carved out of the nickel-iron satellite intact and ready for her return.

Well, why should it have fallen apart while I was away? Unless there've been big changes down below, no one but Martin can get up here just yet. And it's not like the solar array or the reactor in the core were going to stop working. They didn't, anyway.

Even so, she yearned to return to the surface of Hope. The longer she allowed herself to think of it, the more eager she became to have Hope's gravity tugging at her, her husband's arms around her, and her grandfather's silent voice in her head.

The Loioc are fools and worse. Nothing in this universe compares to the love of a whole, intelligent, capable man. Except maybe a clanful of them.

I hope Martin, Patrice, and Doug have been careful with my money. Liberty's Torch has to be made to go a lot faster if I'm going to make it to Earth and back in less than a decade. Or see much of the rest of the neighborhood.

The urge to board Freedom's Horizon immediately and head straight back to Jacksonville rose near to overpowering. She forced it down with a will.

First order of business is getting all the way back into shape. I'm not going to risk a re-entry with my eyes and hands this sloppy or my balance this wobbly.

The surprise Efthis had sprung on her came immediately to mind. It occurred to her that a Hallanson-Albermayer medipod, as capable as it was, might have been overmatched by the Loioc geneticists' nanoengineering. It had never been tested against an intelligently designed artificial organism whose designers intended it to be impossible to eradicate.

I have to make sure I'm completely free of those damned things. I can't return to the surface until I'm sure. Come to think of it, I can't have any visitors until I'm sure, either. At least, none that would like to return home.

I could be up here alone for a while. Doesn't mean I can't use the radio, though.

She powered up the radio, checked the alignment of the antenna, dialed in Morelon House's domestic frequency, and keyed the microphone.

"Anyone in Morelon House, please reply. This is Althea Morelon, in sperosynchronous orbit eleven thousand two hundred thirty miles above you. In case it's not immediately obvious, I'm back and looking forward to coming home and seeing you all again." She paused as a surge of emotion passed through her. "Could someone please bring my husband Martin to the mike?"

She released the key and waited. No response was forthcoming. She waited another minute before repeating her call, releasing the key, and waiting some more.

Althea repeated the hailing pattern, with minor variations in wording, six more times against a swelling torrent of directionless fear, before a response arrived.

"Hello, Althea, and welcome home. We've missed you terribly. This is Dorothy. Martin can't come to the radio. He's in his medipod, barely alive."

"What?" she screamed into the mike. "What happened to him, Dot? What's going on down there?"

"Multiple projectile wounds. Weaponry we've never seen before." Dorothy Morelon uttered a strained, half-choked sound. "Morelon House is under attack."

We will return to Hope, the Relic, Althea and her kin in Freedom's Fury.

About the Author.

Francis W. Porretto is an engineer, fictioneer, and commentator. He operates the Liberty's Torch Website (http://bastionofliberty.blogspot.com), a hotbed of pro-freedom, pro-American, pro-Christian sentiment, where he and his Co-Conspirators hold forth on every topic under the Sun. You can email him at fran.porretto@yahoo.com. Thank you for taking an interest in his fiction.

Books by Francis W. Porretto.

The Realm of Essences trilogy:.

Chosen One On Broken Wings.

Shadow Of A Sword The Spooner Federation Saga:.

Which Art In Hope Freedom's Scion.

Freedom's Fury (forthcoming) Other novels: The Sledgehammer Concerto.

Priestesses Short-story collections:.

For The Love Of God A Dash Of Spice: Erotica for Good People Colored Shadows, Unsetting Suns.

Caucuses, Cabals, Assignations and Trysts.

Non-fiction:.

The Storyteller's Art: How Not to Bore Your Reader to Sleep, Tears, or Homicide.

From The Bit Bucket: (A)Musings on Engineering, Supervision, and Management An Indie Writer's Odyssey.