That got nods of agreement from all of the Colonials. Abby just raised an eyebrow. She’d been around when Kris Longknife drove space ships through tiny cracks in the pavement. She’d learned the hard way never to trust a Longknife.
“Where’s this warrant you gave her as downside Viceroy?” the former Longknife employee asked.
Lago had it up on the wall as the screen that had been showing a map of human land use on Alwa vanished. In its place was a long proclamation with only a few letters, those starting paragraphs, in calligraphy. The rest was easily readable.
Abby began to read through it slowly.
“Ah oh,” Kuno said. “Check out the ending of Paragraph 8. Was that sentence in any of the drafts we discussed?”
Ada read it slowly. “The Viceroy shall likewise be charged with securing the safety of all Colonials in their abodes, no matter where they reside.” The first minister looked at her own reader.
She scowled and scanned through several pages of her reader. “I’ve got six different draft versions of paragraph 8. None of them had anything after ‘Securing the safety of all Colonials.’ Where’d that ‘in their abodes, no matter where they reside’ come from?”
All three of her staff had been there when the warrant had been negotiated. Each one studied their own notes. Baozhai pulled out another reader and began paging through it hurriedly.
At the end of a long five minutes, all four of the Colonials found themselves staring blankly at each other.
“Hold it,” Baozhai said. “This thing she added on is in conflict with the rest of the two commissions we gave to her and Admiral Santiago. Rita got authority dirtside. Sandy has authority in space.”
“Yeah,” Kuno said, “but it’s in her warrant anyway. Where native Alwans abide, she has authority and we’ve got a lot of Roosters and Ostriches abiding on both the space stations and moon. I think most ships have Alwans and there are even some Ostriches out in the asteroid belt.”
The four went back to staring at each other.
Ada finally turned to Abby and summed it up for all of them. “That old fart pulled one over on all of us. Do you think she was planning this nationalization scam from the first day production fabs began to show up here?”
“I’ll have to ask her,” Abby said.
“When?” Ada asked.
“As soon as she’ll see me. Mata, connect me to Granny Rita.”
“Hi, Abby. I figured you’d be the sacrificial lamb they’d send over to talk to me. You do remember, I’ve still got the old hangman’s phone number on speed dial, don’t you?”
“I’d expect nothing less from a Longknife,” Abby answered.
“Oh, now you’re just being mean. I ain’t been a Longknife for nigh on ninety years. I finished washed all the blood out from my misspent youth quite a few years ago.”
“Whatever. We need to talk.”
“Drop by any time.”
“I’m on my way,” Abby said.
“I’ll keep the light on for you,” and the line clicked off.
“Do I need to call out the guard to form an armed escort for you?” Ada asked. Abby suspected the bureaucrat was at least partially serious.
“Nope, but if I’m not back in three hours, I’d be mighty grateful if you’d mount a rescue mission.”
“You got a deal.”
* * *
A cab was waiting for Abby as she left Government House. When she asked if he knew were Granny Rita lived, he just laughed.
“Everyone knows where Commodore House is.”
The drive took Abby along a road around the edge of Refuge. If she didn’t know better, she’d think that the New Government House had been intentionally built to be as far from Commodore House as they could get it. Much of the drive had city buildings to her left and open fields to her right. Finally, they turned down a gravel road and approached a wood. Driving through it, Abby realized that the forest had been planted over the years to form rings. Nearer the main road were small saplings, new planted to ten or twenty years old. Then the trees jumped to taller, forty-year-old trees. Finally, they drove through tall Earth cedars and spreading oaks seventy to eighty years old that must have been planted just after the survivors made planet fall.
The birds had given the humans only the worst land they had: dry, barren, hard scrabble ground. The colonials had struggled to make any of it decent. For this strange, layered stand of trees to be this rich and this tall meant someone had devoted a lot of effort as time and land became available.
They came out of the woods to see a large building standing on a slight rise. Commodore House was in the form of an H made of adobe bricks topped with red roof tiles. The horizontal bar which looked the most weathered was two stories. The four wings coming out from its edges were three or four stories high. The different colored adobe of each wing, as well as different roof tiles showed that they been added at different times and with a slightly different designer involved.
There were other two and one story additions growing out of the two tall vertical wings. These also looked like the most recent add-ons.
The cab took Abby to a two-story addition that formed a horizontal addition to the bottom of the north wing and slowed to a halt.
“I’ll wait for you. You won’t get a cab out this far this late at night.”
Abby dug into her purse for a tip, but the cabby waved her off. “They paid me before you got in. Don’t worry about it.”
Abby thanked him and headed for the broad, white painted door. There was only a door handle, no lock and no knocker. Abby rapped on the door and waited. She was about to rap again when she heard the sound of a wooden bolt being lifted. A moment later, the door opened and Granny Rita, herself, peaked around the door.
“Hi, Abby. What brings you here this late in the evening?”
“A little of this, a bit of that,” the former maid and assassin said, vaguely.
“Oh, that, huh. Hi, Howard,” she said, waving at the cabby. He waved back.
“He going to wait for you?”
“That’s what he told me.”
“I can put you up for the night.”
“Nope. I had two weeks leave approved and I’m burning one day of that right now. I hope we can get this problem resolved and I can get over to see my husband.”
“General Bruce and you have a place outside of Memphis, don’t you?” Granny Rita said, inviting Abby in.
There was a foyer with a mat to wipe muddy feet on. Off to the right was an open door leading to a cluttered office. Off to the left was open space forming a kind of sitting room, big enough for a medium size meeting. Rita pointed Kris Longknife’s former maid in that direction and she settled into a wooden rocker across from another one. The walls and floors were lovely sawn wood, a bit rough on the finish, but the women Abby had worked for on old Earth would have paid a medium size fortune for something half as good.
A young girl, maybe fifteen, likely six months pregnant, brought a tea serving for two out and put it on the table between the two of them.
“Can I get you anything else, Granny Rita?”
“Maybe some of those short bread cookies your granny makes,” Rita said and the gal scampered off. Pregnancy has got to be for the young.
“She’s one of my great-great-great granddaughters,” Rita said by way of explanation. “Once Commodore House was full of three or four generations, but now, most of the older folks have moved out to their own places. I get the occasional boy or girl that can’t stand to stay home one more minute. Sometimes they come with friends. Sometimes they come with a kid on the way like Alana there. The house is more a hotel than a home anymore, but I love them no matter why they come. So, you the sacrificial virgin they sent out to feed this rampaging old dragon?”
“I ain’t been a virgin for a long time, you old biddy, and you ain’t no dragon. Though I think you are an old fool.”
“Old fool?”
“We had everything calmed down and running smoothly and th
en you had to run a truck full of manure right into the family’s Sunday dinner.”
Rita took time to pour the tea, then hand Abby a cup and took one for herself. She blew on it, touched it to her lip, and frowned. “Too hot. I take it you’re talking about my nationalization decree.”
“The selfsame.”
“What’s not to like about it?”
“You know it’s a bitch for us to balance out competing demands, and then level resources so we get the closest we can to full production and happy customers. Before Kris left, we worked out a nice balance that gave consumer goods a bit of a lead over defense and left just enough over to grow production to keep ahead of both our growing human population and the number of birds that want into our economy. You were there! You know we sweat blood and Kris Longknife chewed a lot of our asses before we settled on the production schedule.”
“I do remember,” Rita said, and tried her tea again. Abby’s was untouched and still cooling.
“Then why did you jump into the middle of this and what do you think you’re gonna get out of it? For God sake, woman, this is just plain dumb.”
“What if I told you I don’t intend to jigger anything?”
“Then why do this? You got people all riled up and no one knows your agenda. It’s just plain damn fool stupid.”
Rita took a tiny sip, found it to her liking and took a deeper swallow. She nodded toward Abby’s cup and the visitor tried a taste.
“Chamomile tea. You knew this was gonna be a bitch of a meeting.”
“I figured as much,” Rita admitted.
“You want to tell me what you think you’ve done and why it’s worth all the howling I’m hearing from here to the asteroid belt?”
“Were you there when that new management team my spoiled brat of a son sent out here to run things arrived?”
“I was with Pipra when they busted in and told her to pack up her desk and get lost. Yeah.”
“Assholes. But who can you expect an asshole to hire. Yeah. Where you there when they met our honorable former Viceroy, Her Highness, Admiral Kris Longknife?”
“I helped Pipra persuade them that they should pay their respects to the only shareholder of Nuu Enterprise’s preferred voting stock before they got too far into their plans to change everything and strip farm to extinction that magic plant down south that’s worth trillions because it will remake nano tech. My boss deputized me to be their seeing eye dog and get them over to Kris.”
“How’d it go?”
Abby snorted. “Not at all like they intended. I know Pipra had called ahead. Kris was way pregnant. Her feet hurt and her legs were swollen. She was not at all ready to suffer fools. But you got to give her credit. She let them hang themselves. She got them talking and then sat back and listened to them.”
Abby shook her head. Kris Longknife did know how to set traps – for alien monsters or stupid thieves. “It took about two shakes of a lamb’s tail before they were strutting around telling her how they were going to make a fortune for your bratty son and all Nuu Enterprise shareholders. She gave them rope, they took the rope, tied it in a fine noose and hung it so prettily around their necks. Then she strung them up high. They hardly knew what hit them, and were still hollering as Marines hustled them off to the brig.”
“I would have loved to be there and see that,” Rita said.
“I could have made a fortune selling tickets, but having a bleacher full of paying customers might have given away Kris’s hand.”
“No doubt. So, what do we do when the next ship of fools arrives from my son and tries to ruin it for everyone else?”
“It may be a while,” Abby said. “Kris pretty much stripped them down to brig jump suits and put them on a returning merchant ship that won’t make planetfall until it gets to Chance. Those folks at Chance really do believe in no such thing as a free lunch. It will be interesting to see if any of those big boss types can find a job there that pays more than digging ditches. Certainly no one’s going to spot them the money for a interplanetary message. I figure those dudes will be a long time earning enough to phone home for help. Meanwhile, your boy Alex will be fat, dumb and happy figuring he’s running things here and he ain’t.”
Abby and Rita shared a laugh, whether it was at six suits struggling to find a real job or having to do an honest day’s work or Alex being cut out of the loop, they didn’t bother to clarify.
“But,” Granny Rita said when their mirth ran down, “I still ask, what do we do when the next bunch of fools show up? Next time it might not be Alex. It could be any one of the half dozen plus conglomerates that we’ve got working as a team here that compete against themselves back in human space.
Rita paused to reflect for a moment. “We’re functioning as a collective. We have to do it that way out here on the tip of the spear. How much you want to bet that the folks that spent the money for our initial fabrication plants are going to want a return on investment sooner rather than later?”
Abby had to admit, it was a good question. Still? “What can folks back on the other side of the galaxy expect to get from us out here. The shipping costs for pretty much anything will price just about anything we ship back there right out of their market. Wood like your lovely house is made of might bring a small fortune if it could be sold back on Earth, but there are plenty of forests a lot closer to home that can meet Earth’s needs.”
Abby shook her head. “The only reason we’re here is to be a stalking horse for the damn aliens. King Raymond got the stuff sent out here to make us look like a real going concern. A serious industrial economy so when the aliens take us down, they’d figure they got all of us. Kris being Kris turned what was supposed to be a Potemkin village into one tough nut that they can’t crack and now we do what we have to do to live out here. They’ve got to consider us a charity case, not a profit center.”
“Honey, I know these types. I met them when I was still sitting on my daddy’s knee. Everything is a profit center with them. No. They’re going to do their damndest to pluck this turkey. We got to make our turkey so damn mean and ornery that they don’t dare risk going for a feather for fear of losing a finger.”
Abby thought for a moment, and couldn’t see a flaw in Granny Rita’s basic argument.
“I worked for some real tightwads back on old Earth. I guess I’ve wiped the decrepit asses of some of the self-same folks your daddy introduced you to. Still, Rita, this was not well done. You’ve tossed your old body right into the middle of the punch bowl and there are too many people who remember when you solved your problems by stringing people up. You’ve burned too many bridges for anyone here to be happy with you standing in the middle of our damn bridge.”
Rita leaned back and rocked for a few moments. “So, you like my solution. You just don’t like me doing it.”
“Basically, yeah.”
Rita shook her head slowly. “Name me someone who could pull this off. Ada? She’s too nice. Your Pipra? They bulldozed her already. Your Grand Admiral Santiago? She’s Navy and her being boss girl of our industry smacks of a military junta. No, I’m sorry Abby, but it’s either this ornery old cuss or it don’t get done.”
Abby sipped her teas as the two women rocked quietly for a few minutes. What with Rita’s longevity treatments, the two of them didn’t look all that different in age. Abby had had a hard life growing up in the slums of New Eden, then did what she had to do to earn her way off planet. She’d done what she had to for a very long time and it cost her.
The same could be said of the woman rocking across from her. Rejuvenation had tightened and softened her skin. She could pass for forty rather than her hundred plus years. Still, Rita had done what she had to do to hold together a struggling colony.
The problem here was that Rita’s sins followed her around like the chains on Marley’s ghost on some Christmas Eve night. People remembered.
The survivors had put up with it because, in their own hearts, they’d known they had to accept Rita’s hard
rule or go down under an onslaught of misfortunes that any generous god would never have allowed one small group of humanity to suffer.
They’d put up with her then, but no one wanted to put up with her now.
In the natural order of things, old people died and their sins were interred with their bones. Now, old bones got to dance around at weddings and births, naked in their sin, and folks were trying to figure this new way out.
Rita needed to retire from public life.
Fat chance of that happening, Abby thought as she finished her tea.
The visitor stood. “I’d best be going. I need to talk to some folks, pass along your intent to’em and see if I can calm them down. Rita, it would have gone down better if you’d included a few folks in your thinking before you shoved us all off this cliff.”
“And if I had, they’d have voted me out of my Viceroy job and this would never have been done.”
“They may yet vote you out of your job,” Abby pointed out.
“Yeah. I was looking for a job when I found this one. I don’t care.”
“The next Viceroy could cancel this decree.”
Rita snorted. “You just watch them try. Once the pig has a bucket of acorns, there ain’t no way you’re getting them acorns back. Once folks around here hear what they now own, you ain’t gonna take it away from them. Not without a fight.”
With that thought, Abby took her leave.
The drive back to Government House was quiet as she mulled over the twists and turns of what Granny Rita had dumped on her. As much as Abby hated to admit it, the old biddy had some good points. The truth was that the money grabbers in human space would demand, sooner or later that they get something in return for what they’d sent here. Unfortunately, Rita’s response to that created all kinds of complex challenges. It might cut the strings human space had on Alwa’s industry, but was there anyone here on Alwa station that could wield all the power Rita had gathered up and put into one person’s hand?
Kris Longknife had managed to juggle a whole lot of things, but Kris was kind of unique, one powerful gal who could address all the challenges facing Alwa who also knew how to depend on and get the most out of the people around her.
Kris Lpnglnife's Maid goes on Strike_Like on Alwa Station Page 2