Freehold

by Michael Z. Williamson

  "I am," Kendra said. Everything suddenly took on an icy clarity. She realized she wouldn't see Earth again for a long time, if ever.

  "Okay. Here's how it looks. One of our less reputable personnel, coincidentally from logistics," Maartens said with an ironic smile, "managed to part out your car for about ten thousand. You have slightly less than a thousand in cash. The staff threatened me with mutiny if I charged you for your stay here, which we ordinarily do, so there's no boarding bill. They also took up a collection of fifteen hundred. I don't know how you feel about charity, but I advise you to take it. Our chief of security was extremely impressed by the courage you displayed and the speed with which you acted. In his opinion, you probably would have been snatched the next time you stopped for any purchase. He passed the hat for you himself. From sources I am not at liberty to discuss, there is a grant of four thousand available. So, you have roughly sixteen-five in assets.

  "Now, there's a Freehold registry commercial transport departing in three days. It's an Earth crew, but the ship is registered out of Station Ceileidh in Freehold space because we have less bureaucracy. The crew doesn't know who you are and might try to turn you in for the reward if they ID you. We'll get you aboard and manage the adminwork.

  "After that, you are going to pretend to be sick for twelve days. Your meals will be delivered and you'll stay in your cabin. That's not too unusual; lots of travelers do that, anyway. We'll also give you additional cover. Once in Freehold space, you're safe. You'll be met at Station Ceileidh and transferred insystem.

  "Transit fee is fifty thousand. Residency fee for planetside is five hundred. I believe your best chances are in Jefferson. Local residency fee there is one hundred. That's fifty thousand, six hundred total. You need thirty-four-four."

  "I don't have it," Kendra said with a grin as a façade.

  "Of course not," Maartens agreed. Her expression was not discouraging and it was clear she had an idea. She continued, "So the problem is raising it. Which is no problem at all. Now, let me explain this before you say anything.

  "We have a system known as indenturing, but it's not the historical system you may be thinking of. A Citizen will be assigned to your case, and you pay a fee to the government for his service. He will arrange for you to find employment and a payment will be deducted from your wages. You are free to change jobs or make other arrangements for payment. You are responsible for your own lodging and food, so you are not going to be assuming a spiraling debt. I'm sure you'll have no trouble locating work in a city like Jefferson."

  It took Kendra a few moments to sort through the statement. She was only peripherally aware from her schooling that indenturing had existed, but its context was clear. The rest was plain enough after some thought.

  "I don't have a lot of other options, do I?" she asked rhetorically.

  "No, not really," Maartens said. "But you've come this far. Otherwise, we'll give you your assets and slip you out the gate late tonight. Your presence is potentially very embarrassing to us."

  "I'm sorry to be a burden."

  "Has anyone complained? Look, lady," Maartens said, her face softening, "You are about to enter a system that's totally out of your experience. It's bound to be a shock. We're trying to be honest and give you as much help as we can. If you're willing, we'll get you to a new home. If not, we need to protect ourselves."

  "Well," Kendra said, "I came here to get away, so I suppose I should finish the job."

  Nodding, Maartens said, "I'll get to work."

  * * *

  The vertol was sitting on the roof of the main embassy building. Standing near it, Kendra was seeing the suburbs of Washington from a completely different angle. There were still a few details to take care of, so she took the chance to look around. The old city really was pretty, especially when seen through the murky morning haze.

  "Hey!" Kendra head the yell subliminally over the howl of the aircraft and turned to see Jelsie come up the stairs. She waved. A few seconds later, the two of them were hunched over, trying to hear over the whipping wind and the roar of turbines.

  "You need some candy money," Jelsie said, handing her a palm-sized folder of Freehold currency.

  Kendra pushed it away. "Thanks, but I can't take any more. You've been so generous already."

  Jelsie grabbed her with powerful arms, stuffed the money into her chest pocket and said, "Then take it as a 'thank you' for not making me shoot you. You've got a great attitude for back home. You'll be fine. I'll be back in about a year and I plan to look you up. Pay me then, if you wish."

  Smiling, Kendra said, "I'll do that. Thanks again."

  "Sure. You owe me. We have a saying in Freehold Military Forces. 'Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.' Next time I have a mysterious corpse, I'll be calling."

  Tears leaking, Kendra promised, "I'll be there." She hugged the shorter woman, was almost crushed back, and turned quickly. She climbed in through the vertol's broad hatch and waited. It was a basic transport craft, not a diplomatic courier with appointments, and it was loud and stark.

  Two men joined her, personnel rotating home, and the hatch slammed as the craft lifted smoothly and angled toward the south. She spent the flight nervously rubbing the small scar on her hand, where her implant ID had been removed. The chip was used to locate people during emergencies. It was also used to locate criminals. Once out of the embassy's heavy shielding, it would have been an immediate giveaway, as there was an open warrant out for her arrest now and they would be looking for the trace.

  The flight was smooth, brief according to her watch no matter how subjectively long it seemed to be and there was no interference after they landed. She was getting away clean, so far. With a hundred kilometers down, she had only thirty-four light years to go until she'd be safe in the Iota Persei system.

  * * *

  Kendra and the two embassy personnel simply walked through the scanners at Kennedy Spaceport. She was wearing a hat, had her hair darkened and tucked into her collar and her skin slightly darkened with a nano. She reminded herself to slouch a little. Slouching was very un-Freeholder, but it disguised her height. By Earth standards she was tall; by Freehold standards she towered over people. Taking a cue from the others, she flashed her diplomatic pass at the guard. Unlike the others, she was sweating.

  She needn't have worried. The guard gave the brilliantly forged document the most cursory of glances, nodded imperceptibly and turned back to his vid. No one paid much attention to diplomatic personnel, she realized. Certainly not to determine if they might be administrative criminals trying to flee the system. Kendra almost felt insulted on behalf of the specialist who'd doctored the pass. She grinned inwardly at the thought of walking back and demanding that the guard examine it in detail. It kept her spirits up as they entered the shuttle and took couches. She had no trouble with the familiar safety harnesses, having done this before only a few months previously. She adjusted the lumbar support, angled the neck pads for comfort and nodded briefly to the attendant, who glanced over to ensure everything was secure and moved on without a word.

  By prearranged plan, Kendra was feigning a sore throat, ostensibly from shouting at a concert. She rasped some favorable comments in a whisper. The two men with her did most of the talking, both to her and to each other. They kept a cheerful conversation going, interspersed occasionally with comments about going home, until the final count before lift.

  The ride was familiar. Three gees tapered off slowly as they headed into low orbit. Kendra found herself undisturbed by microgravity. She fell asleep, relaxed by the condition, even though she was not out of danger yet. One of her escorts nudged her awake as they docked with the station.

  A small, rather ugly tug took them to the Shamaya. She wondered about the name. Some person of historical significance? The ship was old but sturdy and smelled adequately clean as she swam through. The three of them were given cabins in the same passage and Kendra relaxed considerably as the klaxon sounded and thrust
began with gentle gees, building to slightly more than Earth standard as they headed out. It would be her second and quite possibly last trip out of the Solar System.

  As she placed her meager possessions on the lone rack in one outer corner of the pie-shaped cabin, there was a knock at the door. "Yes?" she rasped.

  "It's me," Kevin Sanchez said, sticking his head in. The embassy had listed him as a computer technician, but Kendra felt sure he was an electronic spy. He was the most normal looking, by Earth standards, of the personnel she'd met, with short blond hair and brown eyes and no exotic coloring, jewelry or tattoos. "Thought you should know," he said, "that there isn't likely to be any trouble. I've met the crew of this ship before. The captain-owner and his family are most of the crew. They maintain Earth citizenship because it makes smuggling, excuse me, trading, much easier. They don't have to worry about some of the bonding fees. They are good mercenary Freeholders at heart, probably haven't seen you on any loads and wouldn't care if they did. The reward would interest them a little, but they wouldn't want the Freehold Military Forces angry with them. Keep in mind, however, that there are at least six crew of unknown loyalties who might jump at it. So don't sweat, but don't flaunt either."

  "Got it. Thanks, Kev," she acknowledged, feeling greatly relaxed.

  * * *

  Kendra woke immobilized, stared at the grins on her captors' faces and tugged at her restraints. Nothing moved, and one of the special investigators stepped forward. He pulled his arm back, prepared to deliver a vicious backhand.

  Yelping, she woke for real and thrashed, getting tangled in the bedclothes. Her breath was ragged, the sheets soaked with sweat. Eight days of grinding tedium punctuated by eight nights of terror. She rolled out of bed, stood and walked to the lavatory to rinse her mouth. She stared into the mirror at her sunken eyes. Four more days, she told herself.

  Sleep would be a long time returning, so she sat up and turned on the cabin comm to find something to do. None of the thirty-odd channels she flipped through had any appeal, although she did spend a few minutes listening to the traffic between the Shamaya's bridge crew and engineering, which was interspersed with jibes at each other and at other ships in the queue of tonnage heading for Sol System Jump Point Six, all bound for Grainne, then perhaps elsewhere.

  She decided to do a bit more research on what was to be her new home and pulled up the Freehold's Constitution again. It was a bizarrely short document and effectively denied any legislative power to the government. The "Residency fee" she was paying was a head tax, but one so low as to be negligible. None of it made any sense to her. It almost seemed as if there was no government. She wondered again if she really knew what she was doing and switched over to an atlas.

  Grainne had one large sprawling continent writhing from southeast to northwest around two-thirds of the planet. There were a couple of continental islands and several archipelagos of smaller masses. The climate was roughly like Earth's, but that "roughly" was deceptive—with smaller oceans, greater solar influx and a longer year, it had seasons that swung the temperate zone from the Minnesota-like winters she was familiar with, to scorching summers akin to those in the American Southwest.

  She tackled the business analysis for the nth time and was confused in seconds, as she had been every time before. Nothing about it was comprehensible. It was an absolute anarchy in the economic sense, from her perspective. She sighed and shut everything down, called out the lights and selected some soft dance music to ease her back to sleep. It was some time before her thoughts drifted into the warm comforting blanket of unconsciousness.

  * * *

  The Shamaya's klaxon alerted everyone to the impending point jump. Kendra actually relaxed, knowing that most of her ordeal was over. The lights flickered once, her stomach turned upside down and they were in the Freehold system. In less than an hour, they were trimming into an orbit around Station Ceileidh, the roughly cylindrical rock that was the business, industrial and government office for Jump Point One. She was led into an office and someone drew blood from her forearm. They implanted a nano tracer in her thigh, handed her a flash ram bearing a label with her name and directed her toward a gate. She loped in the low centripetal gee of the station and she was shortly aboard an in-system craft bound for Grainne proper. It would be another ten days of boredom before they arrived.

  This shuttle, the Torchy, was new, built with travelers in mind, and was typical of those run by any large line. She took another small stateroom, strapped down and waited for launch. She was still nervous, but it was a different kind of nervous. The UN authorities couldn't touch her now, but she was still alone and without connections or friends. It felt almost like stage fright.

  Chapter 3

  "If a man neglects to enforce his rights, he cannot complain if, after a while, the law follows his example."

  —Oliver Wendell Holmes

  It was amazing how fast things were accomplished in a society run by commercial concerns and not much else. The Torchy, which had brought her this far docked at a tether. They swam through into a shuttle cabin and strapped in. Torchy cut loose and they were already headed for the surface, but without thrust. She asked for an explanation.

  Kevin replied, "Let me think how to sum it up briefly . . . wow . . . okay, let me try this: It's called a 'skywheel.' It's two tethers extending outward from their mutual center of mass. The whole assemblage cartwheels from high orbit to almost ground level, I think about twenty kilometers. Cargo or shuttles are attached to the ends and release at the far end either near ground, near surface rotation speed of the planet, or in orbit at high velocity to ship out. Where it's released determines the vector outward. Does that make sense?" She nodded and he continued, "We pop things up to the receivers on magnetic launchers or by direct thrust, since we don't have enough launchers yet. It's cheap to operate, minimizes pollution and easy to schedule trips without waiting for launch windows. There are six huge ones throughout the system, rotating in free space. We use them to ship industrial products around the Halo. There aren't any in Sol System, because the UN safety bureaucrats are convinced they're dangerous. They're worried about one breaking and crashing, but we've never had a problem. The theoretical strength is about ten times the actual load usage."

  Kendra had heard of the concept, but hadn't realized any were in use. She nodded politely and stared in terrified fascination at the view. Safe, certainly, but what if one did crash from accident or malice? How large a footprint would it wipe out on the planet? Several hundred kilometers? At what velocity? Ten thousand kilometers per hour? More?

  The starscape moved rapidly up, the planet rose at an appalling rate. After a while, the direction had noticeably changed and the rate appeared to have diminished. There was a clank as the shuttle detached and the rest of the ride was a straightforward touchdown. They rolled out on a long runway bleached white in the Sun—or rather, Iota Persei, she reminded herself—and she squinted against the glare. Shortly, they pulled up to a terminal.

  The hatch opened and more glaring daylight streamed in, along with local air. Kendra waited for the crowd to thin and stood, wobbling. She made her way forward, gripping couchbacks for support and squinted again as she entered the tube. Light from Iota Persei poured through the clear roof. It was 2.3 times as bright as the Sun, she recalled, although that was diminished somewhat by the greater distance Grainne was from Iota, 1.5AU. It didn't seem that much brighter, but had a glare at the blue end of the spectrum that hurt her eyes, despite polarization.

  At the exit to the terminal, she suddenly felt dizzy. Grabbing a rail for support, she remembered Kevin warning her about the atmospheric pressure—about seventy percent of Earth's, with only eighty percent of the oxygen. She was hyperventilating, or not getting enough, or something, and she held her breath for a moment to regain her equilibrium. Kevin took her arm to guide her as they walked through the tunnel.

  She entered the terminal and looked around. She'd had no idea what to expect and had been prepa
red for rough hardpan dirt or facilities like a second-tier city would have on a commercial route. Instead, Jefferson Starport was small, but as modern as anything in an Earth national or regional capital. All construction was new, everything was so clean it gleamed, and she was impressed. Perhaps things would be better than she'd expected.

  The exit was to her left and down a level, according to glowing signs placed in easy view. She followed Kevin to a slideway and took it. Several other passengers merged from other orbital, ballistic and local flights along with them, and she studied them while Kevin pulled out a phone and punched a button. "Sergeant Sanchez," he announced into it. "We're here. Sure. Out."

  The travelers' modes of dress didn't appear to follow any real style. She very carefully kept her eyes averted from the man in a backless breechcloth and then had to look away again from a pubescent girl who was topless. Some wore full-length robes, several light-colored coveralls and two what she considered normal business dress. The spaceport apparently had tremendous security, as she could see uniforms in every direction. Three people near her were apparently plainclothes officers and were wearing guns.

  Then she realized that undercover officers wouldn't display guns. Also, all three people carried different guns, rather than a standard issue type, and the holsters were garishly decorated. She recalled the embassy, where guards and staff walked around armed. Apparently, the whole society was like that. As this thought worked through her brain, she realized that there were other people armed, also.

  My God! They let people swing guns around the fucking spaceport!? Sweat broke out all over her and she kept looking around nervously. She calmed a little when she realized that the soldiers present carried the same rifles she'd seen up close a few days before and in use on Mtali and had them loaded. Then she thought about what a firefight inside the terminal would look like and quickened her pace to get outside.