Persistence

Charley awoke, in prison. He was in his bed in his bedroom in his house, the Founders House, on the planet Junction, that could just as easily be called his planet. He could hear his one and great love, Clarity of Purpose, making domestic sounds in the kitchen of his house. Nothing he heard or saw suggested incarceration in the least. Yet, still, the feeling persisted.

He arose, showered and dressed, the last because he remembered that today was to be a clothing day. He sought out his love, still messing about in the house’s food preparation area, and kissed the nape of her neck, part of him still sorting out wakefulness from sleep.

It was now five years since the battle of Junction, since the physical founding of the colony, since Charley’s last application for immortality. The first order of business back then had been to concoct a defense in case of a return of the Han and, in that pursuit, Daniel Wang fully earned his colony-wide reputation as “genius in residence.” The solar tap could not be turned on again, not without charbroiling everyone, so Danny, with the considerable assistance of the planet’s intelligent but not sentient computer system, also frequently called Junction, designed and built avatars, mechanical spaceships with capabilities similar to that of the solar tap. Essentially fusion generators with engines, they used hydrogen to project a plasma beam not unlike what the tap produced, although on a greatly reduced scale. These ships were scalpels whereas the solar tap, as last utilized by Charley, was more of a broad axe. Although of significantly lesser magnitude, at least in total output, they were several times greater in accuracy and, overall, every bit as deadly. Nothing in the universe was thought able to withstand their incisions, not even theoretically.

As soon as their plans had been finalized, even before the construction of the first prototype, Percival, nee Percy, the exploration class Quanck ship that had been a full, fellow conspirator in the adventures that had facilitated the founding of colony – along with Clarity of Purpose and Charley - took off for Quanck space to deliver the specifications of the ground breaking design to the empire.

The main bottleneck was that Junction’s dry dock facilities could only produce one ship every five months. Four ships were deemed mandatory for the protection of the colony. Even with limited but extremely quick skip-space capability, that was the minimum that was thought able to afford the colony anything like a reasonable level of security. That meant that, with the associated replacement of one of Starlight Sailor’s four shuttles - destroyed back in the Sol System - that it was five years before enough of the destroyer class ships were constructed to be able to upgrade Earth’s defenses as well.

That had bothered Charley but since no instances of Han activity had been reported anywhere within a hundred light years of Junction, or Earth, as related by the quarterly appearances of Quanck picket ships, he concluded that the Han had finally gotten it through their thick, ugly heads that a full frontal attack on the Quanck – and their borderline colonies - was simply not going to work. There had been reports of a few guerilla style attacks in faraway places but that could have simply been rumor or misstatement.

Still, Charley knew he could delay no longer.

“Morning,” he murmured into Clarity’s back.

She turned and surveyed the sight before her. There was a twinge of disappointment to her gaze. “You’re going to town, aren’t you?” This she surmised from the fact that he was clothed. She was not.

“Yes, I have a meeting with our favorite miscreant.”

“George is going to be there, in person?”

“I would have demanded it if the bloody bugger had not brought it up first himself.”

“Well, don’t argue with him on an empty stomach.” She turned to the food selection panel and started performing what was still largely magic, as far as Charley was concerned, making quick, slight movements with her fingers while incanting chants and spells in Standard, so softly and melodically that it might just as well have been song.

Two minutes later, an amazingly close approximation of scrambled eggs with sausage presented itself, or, more specifically, her personal interpretation of such. The associated drink dispenser also presented an orange colored liquid that could almost pass for Florida’s finest. Charley smiled the smile of the pleased.

One advantage to having ten thousand colonists around for five years now was that experimentation with the food processing systems had succeeded beyond Charley’s wildest hopes. Many Earth dishes had been almost exactly duplicated. Charley had neither the temperament nor the patience to attempt such feats. Clarity had neither the knowledge nor experience of earthly cuisine to do so herself, nor desire, for that matter. She had been perfectly content with her Quanck fare, the substance of her life, so Charley had had previously to endure the system’s more typical output of alien slop, that he usually ate with his eyes closed.

To Charley’s way of thinking, such successes made onerous tasks such as dealing with George Esterman’s unfailing truculence well worth the trouble. That coffee, or its Quanck corollary, soon appeared, simply sealed the deal.