Into the Light by David Weber

Author:David Weber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

. VII .

AURORA, MINNESOTA,

UNITED STATES

“So you’ve decided which one you want?” Lewis Freymark inquired, looking at his daughter Jacqueline across the supper table.

“Really?” Janice Freymark smiled at their next to youngest. “Finally!”

“Don’t pick on me,” Jacqueline replied with a smile of her own. “It wasn’t an easy decision with so many makes and options to choose from. Besides, it’s my very first car, and I’m buying it with my own money, so I have a perfect right to spend however long I want to thinking about it.”

“Yeah, but do you have to take months?” her younger brother asked. Lewis Alexander Freymark was only thirteen, nine years younger than Jacqueline. He hadn’t experienced the Shongair invasion firsthand, for which his parents were profoundly grateful. And he had every iota of the typical kid brother’s attitude.

“I have not taken ‘months,’ pipsqueak.” Jacqueline’s tone was repressive, but her eyes twinkled. “I’ve only taken about one month. Well, okay—one and a half, if you’re counting. Which I’m not.”

“Gee, Dad always said you weren’t great at math, but I thought for sure you could count!”

“You are so going to regret that one,” Jacqueline promised.

“Come on! Admit I got you!”

“I shall do nothing of the sort.” She elevated the pert nose she’d inherited from her mother with an audible sniff, and Freymark pointed a finger at him.

“Don’t expect me to sympathize when she starts looking for somewhere to hide the body, young man,” he said. “Although,” he lowered the pointing finger and grinned as he extended his fist across the table for a fist bump, instead, “you did get her.”

“Riiiight!” Lewis Alexander said with a huge, infectious grin of his own that sent a fleeting jab of pain through his father as Freymark remembered the brother Lewis Alexander would never know.

“So, what did you pick?” he asked, turning back to Jacqueline with a smile that hid his own flash of grief.

“I’m going with Franklin’s Rapier with a second-tier upgrade option,” she said.

“Going to be a little pricey,” he mused, and she nodded.

“Really wish I could go first-tier, but I don’t think I can quite swing it now that I’m out on my own.” She shrugged. “And second-tier is still gonna be great!”

“Yeah, it is,” he agreed.

The horrible days of reconstruction immediately after the invasion were a thing of the past, not just here in Aurora but pretty much around the world. There were still places that wasn’t true—like Pakistan, which had actually managed to get worse following the demise of the Ghilzai regime—but anywhere the Planetary Union’s writ ran, the pre-invasion distinction between the “First World” and the rest of the planet had become a rapidly receding image in people’s rearview mirrors. The standard of living only a minority of nations had been able to afford before the Puppies’ arrival was now the baseline, the starting point, for the invasion’s survivors and their children. In fact, they’d actually achieved something very like a true post-scarcity economy.

There’d been some changes in how the economy worked along the way, of course.

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