NOVEL NEXT Chapter 64: Executive Class
––––––
Hiram: Autonomous redistributable propulsion was the central paradigm shift that made our century possible. I thought it up watching your mother cycling through partners in the ballroom. I must have looked on her for quite some time, because she walked up to me to demand that I explain myself. And that is how we met.
Claire: Romantic.
––––––
Saturday, November 16th, 2090, about 2:30 pm MST, Montana City
Of course, Hiram got what he wanted.
They were using a hauler—one of the massive ships whose electrothermochemical batteries offset the heat from long intrasystem burns, arcing from the Jovian Bootstrap base all the way to Martian or even Earthen orbit. There, they'd typically offload most of the payload mass.
The rest usually went into orbit, the engines decoupling to take short-term contracts as orbital tugs.
Not today.
Today, a small school of engines—Gordon thought of them like fish, though he couldn't have honestly named the correct plural—had linked themselves remora-like to the empty hauler—but not passive hitchhikers, these. Together, they were poised to jump across the void to Mars on a priority burn, consuming resources that could have carried them, at far slower speeds, across most of the solar system.
All for one passenger. Two, technically.
But Gordon didn't count himself. His father would have gone anyway.
Gordon wasn't the executive on record. He wasn't even listed as primary cargo. But he had delayed production across two facilities with a single statement at last month's board meeting. Not a request. Not a memo. Just one observation, offhand and mostly muttered:
"If we don't ease that delivery schedule, the plant's going to cut corners. They're short two days' work and cycling workers in off vacation. It's a QA issue, but within our margin for error."
No one had checked his numbers. They didn't need to. He was Gordon Stone: architect of the firm's automation overhaul, head of Quality Assurance, and the guy whose last warning had saved an entire product line from recall.
So when the board members glanced around and saw each other nodding, Hiram hadn't needed to speak. He'd just leaned back in his chair and watched. And when no one objected, he moved to the next topic.
Gordon had felt the shift then. Authority was a strange thing. Buoying in the moment, crushing in retrospect..
Now he sat in a gravity couch lined in navy synthetic, trying to breathe through the onset of 2.5 gees of sustained thrust. No coasting, no orbital slingshots. Just raw fusion burn from Montana to Mars.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
An extravagance, maybe. But not a mistake.
The launch had been old-school: a 33-mile hypersonic rail shot up the Elkhorns, straight-line tracked and mountain-hugged until the snowline, where the first-stage hydrogen feeds kicked open and eight fusion drives screamed to life. It was a rough jump.
And then came the handoff.
No Martian run was ever just one vessel, not when Hiram Stone designed the routing. Gordon's orbiter had docked with the Chiaroscuro—a ship meant for intersystem hops, not atmospheric burns. Bigger. Redundant. Stylish, in the way of a four-star prison. It had airlock vestibules with brass rails. Hiram's idea of practical.
The atmosphere in the common corridors was already dialed to .7 standard—what they'd be breathing the rest of the trip. Gordon would spend the next hour letting his lungs adjust while pressure-stiff air filled the compartments.
No windows. Just HUD projections showing Mars growing closer by the second.
Just him and Hiram, in a three-meter room, alone, for an hour. That had been awkward.
"Have you thought about what I said, my son?" he had asked.
Gordon didn't say: "Which part? The part where you told me I didn't matter? Or the part where I was a disappointment?"
He didn't say it, because a harsh experience led him to know that it would be a mistake. Years of hard-won diplomacy had taught him better. But that didn't mean he was backing down.
Growing up with a narcissistic parent, you learned the workflow early.
Step one: pretend you had no idea what they'd said in the moment.
Step two: If they asked whether you remembered last time, you answered vaguely. Such a cool idea, you'd say. Which—if it had been expressed calmly—might've been true.
Step three: carefully avoid repeating the actual insults. If you brought those up, even word-for-word, you risked hearing: Why is my son such a spineless weakling? I called you a coward and said you weren't special. Why didn't you stand up for yourself?
Obviously, because that hadn't worked the last time.
But you didn't say that either.
You also didn't go head-to-head. Because if you met their argument with a stronger one—or even just a solid one—that was "backtalk."
It was a lot to navigate.
Gordon (aloud): "Of course, I thought about what we talked about," he said evenly. "You gave me a lot to think about that night."
Lies.
Lies were the secret sauce to avoiding explosions.
Hiram (prompting): "And?"
Gordon: "Father," he said, voice measured. "To be frank, your argument hinged on whether Mars is the miserable place you claim it to be. I don't have any new information on that. We're on our way there now."
His father stared at him.
Just because it wasn't safe to poke the narcissist didn't mean it wasn't fun—when there was nothing they could say to defend themselves.
He watched as Hiram mentally reframed the statement into something flattering: an acknowledgment that he might be proven right.
Gordon could tell by the way his father's expression shifted—from upset, to thoughtful, to a slow lean back into his seat. He closed his eyes.
Hiram (mildly): "This will be a long trip, son. It would be best for you to prepare yourself to ask useful questions once we land. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity I've given you."
Gordon: "That's true."
Silence followed—the stiff, awkward silence of two men, neither of whom could afford to give an inch.