Ben Bova - Test of Fire

“Is that what you wanted?” she asked him, in a low voice.

Kobol grinned at her. “Not entirely. But it’s a step in the right direction.”

Alec started around the table for his mother.

She said to Kobol, “Martin, I want to… thank you. It took a considerable amount of sense and courage to suggest this compromise.”

“I’m always willing to settle for half a loaf, when it looks sure that I won’t get any if I don’t compromise.”

Alec reached her side, but she was still focused on Kobol, who had also come closer. Now he was only a pace or two away from Lisa, within arm’s reach.

“You’re still determined to rule the Council, aren’t you, Martin?”

“The Council—and everyone on it.”

She smiled at that. “And you believe you can use this expedition to enhance your position? Even as deputy commander?” Lisa put a subtle emphasis on the word deputy .

“Of course,” he answered. “Why do you want Alec to head the expedition so badly? He’ll be a Council candidate, won’t he, when he comes back? Someday you’ll try to maneuver him into the chairmanship, after you decide to step down.”

“Why not?” Lisa said.

“Because I’ll be chairman by then,” Kobol said, with iron certainty in his voice.

She laughed. “You’re dreaming, Martin.”

“Some dreams come true,” he replied, shrugging. “You’ve dreamed big dreams, god knows. And now one of them’s coming true. Your son’s going to avenge your husband’s treason. Clear the family name. Preserve your power on the Council.”

Lisa reached an arm out toward Alec. He took her outstretched hand, and she pulled him close to her.

“That’s right,” she whispered back to Kobol, in a low, breathless hiss. “Alec is going to achieve greatness. And you can’t stop him.”

“Stop him?” Kobol chuckled. “I’m going to help him. I’ve voluntarily placed myself under his command, remember?”

“Yes,” she said. “Of course you have.”

For a nerve-stretching moment the three of them stood there: Alec by his mother’s side, Kobol facing them both. Alec saw that his mother had locked her gaze on Kobol, whose eyes were hidden, unfathomable. But the fire in Lisa’s eyes was something Alec had never seen before, something beyond fear, beyond malice, much stronger even than hatred.

At last Kobol took a step backward. With a muttered, “If you’ll excuse me…” he headed for the door.

After the door slid shut behind him, Lisa turned to her son. “He’ll try to ruin you, subvert your authority, perhaps even wreck the expedition.”

“I know,” Alec said. “He’ll try to kill me.”

She shuddered and grasped his arm tightly. Alec pulled her to him and let her lean her head against his shoulder.

“No, no, he wouldn’t… Martin wouldn’t go that far.” But she looked up at him with real fear in her eyes. “I shouldn’t have pushed you so hard. I shouldn’t have forced you…”

“You didn’t force me to do anything.”

Her eyes closed wearily for a moment. “Alec, you’re still a child. You don’t understand any of this. I can manipulate you, the Councilors, everyone…” She looked away, toward the closed door.

“Almost everyone.”

“I can take care of Kobol,” he insisted.

“Can you? Will you know what to do, when the time comes?”

“Yes.” He was dead calm inside now. “When the time comes, I’ll kill him.”

“No! It mustn’t come to that! I don’t want you even to think that way. If it comes to violence, he’ll kill you. He’ll strike when you least expect it. He could be a thousand kilometers away and he’ll still be able to reach you. It mustn’t come to violence, Alec, or you’ll end up the dead one.”

Alec pulled away from her. “I can take care of myself. And him. And you, too.”

She gazed at him, the expression on her face slowly changing, shifting, as she appraised her son.

“And your father?” she asked. “What about him?”

The old sickening wave of hatred rose inside Alec again. “I can take care of him, as well.”

“He’ll come looking for you, as soon as he learns that we’ve landed an expedition on Earth.”

“Let him,” Alec said. “If he doesn’t, then I’ll go looking for him.”

“And when you two find each other…?”

Alec’s fists were clenched so tightly that his fingernails were cutting into his palms. “When I find him, I’ll kill him.”

Lisa Ducharme Morgan smiled. “Tell me again,” she said softly.

“I’m going to kill him,” Alec repeated. “For all he’s done to you, Mother. I’m going to find him and kill him.”

He was born in a ditch alongside the road that twisted through the hilly wooded territory between bombed-out Knoxville and abandoned Oak Ridge. His mother left him half-immersed in rain water that had accumulated in the muddy bottom of the ditch. Her only act of mercy toward him was to bite off the umbilical cord and knot it.

He never saw her.

If a pair of scavengers had not passed by a few hours later he would have died. If the woman of the pair — girl, actually, she was barely past fourteen — had not lost her own week-old baby a few days before they would have left the infant squalling there in the mud. As it was, the man scowled and grumbled when his woman took up the redfaced, naked baby.

“Leave ’im fer the varmints,” he told her.

But her eyes welled up and she started sputtering and he relented.

They had been following in the wake of a larger band of raiders, a few dozen ragged men and women who scoured the countryside, picking it clean of everything edible, wearable, or tradable.

The band had a few guns, a clever hard-faced leader who knew how to set up an ambush, and the desperation of hunger. The two scavengers had tried to join the band, but had been rebuffed angrily and threatened with death if they got close enough to be seen again.

So the two of them hung well behind the band, gleaning what they could from their leavings. It was not much. When the band attacked a farm or village they usually burned what they could not carry.

“Yer maw must’ve been one o’ them raiders,” the girl told her foundling child, once he was grown up enough to halfway understand her.

“Prob’ly her man din’t want t’ be saddled with a newborn baby and made her leave yew fer us t’ find.”

Her man would nod and mutter to himself when she crooned the story to the youngster. Feeding an extra mouth was not to his liking. Besides, the baby’s crying meant they had to stay even farther behind the raiders than they had before. He wandered off one day, less than a year later, as the autumn rains began to strip the trees of their leaves. Two weeks later she found him nailed to a tree, his gut sliced open to make a nest for teeming maggots. From the look on his face he had still been alive when they did it.

She stopped wandering then and built a crude hut of sticks and mud for herself and her baby.

They nearly starved that winter; only her forays into the shattered, haunted remains of suburban Knoxville saved them. It was pure desperation; everyone new that the buildings and streets were poison. Lingering agonizing death lurked in them, invisibly. But she slunk through the shadows night after night to take the cans of food from the abandoned store shelves that others were too frightened to touch.

By the time he was six, she was obviously dying of cancer. She hung on for four years of pain and terrifying strange growths that twisted her body horribly. He buried her and faced the world alone, a skinny pinch-faced ten-year-old who knew how to run and hide in the woods, but little else.