by Rick Partlow
Obsessed with the accumulation of wealth for its own sake, they had little understanding of the power they wielded, much less the proper use to which it should be put. That, Damiani acknowledged with a sigh, was the risk in dealing with inherited wealth. He'd had to guard against the narcissism and decadence himself, but his strength of will had kept him free of such weaknesses.
In a perfect universe, he would have put them to work digging cesspits on some agrocolony, but for now, they were a necessary evil. Best to simply get this over with as quickly as possible.
"Good evening," Damiani said, striding purposefully into the conference room. He pulled out a chair at the head of the table and took a seat. "I'm sorry if any of you were inconvenienced, but it was necessary we discuss these things in person."
"Oh, no problem, Andy," Cameron Weber drawled, resting his head back on his hands, stretching his legs out with an intentionally disrespectful casualness. "After all, I was only thirty light-years away." Andre fought to keep a scowl off of his face as he regarded the man who controlled most of the transportation industry. An old-money brat who fancied himself an adventurer, he'd long been Andre's nemesis---only constant vigilance kept the man from taking control of the Council.
"As I said, Cameron," Damiani continued, keeping his voice calm and friendly, "I'm sorry for the trouble, but we are at a critical juncture, and we must talk in private. We couldn't take the chance of some military Netdiver penetrating our systems and discovering everything, just as our plans come to fruition."
"I still have my doubts about this, Andre." Celia Hitura shook her head, the hologram dolphins projected from her earrings flashing against her dark hair. The communication mogul's taste in clothes, Andre had to admit, was impeccable. "It will be wonderful, of course, if it works...But if we are found out, it would mean the end of everything. Would we not be better off simply accepting the post-election situation and attempting to ameliorate whatever legislation results?"
"This is quite a gamble," the rapier-thin man opposite Damiani agreed, steepling his long fingers thoughtfully. "None of us got where we are today by taking foolish chances."
No, Andre thought, you all got here because a quirk of genetics. Though that wasn't strictly true of the last speaker, Maurice Rasheed. The ebon-skinned director of the Commonwealth's largest agricultural corporation had started out as a mid-level executive over seventy years ago, and had worked his way to the pinnacle by a frightening combination of genius-level intelligence, predator's instincts and an absolute ruthlessness. Andre didn't consider him a rival---not the way Weber was a rival---but he knew if he made one mistake, Rasheed would be on him like a lion on a lame gazelle.
"It is a risk," Damiani admitted. "But I don't see that we have any choice. This isn't a simple situation. It's not just a question of influencing possible legislation if our man loses the election. The whole geopolitical balance is shifting and we have to act, not react. The Transition drive has opened the Cluster to anyone with the resources to acquire a starship, and it is only a matter of time before a route out of the Cluster is discovered. Once that happens, the kind of control we now assert over the economy will be impossible.
"Limits on colonial settlement and individual transportation must be established, and to do so we must expand our control of the government. If and when the Northwest Passage is discovered, it must be by one of our scouts, and we must be the ones to exploit it. If this is not the case, all the accomplishments we have achieved will fall apart within a century. I don't know if I can make this any clearer to you."
He watched their faces, seeing them take it in and, in turn, accept it.
"All right," Cameron Weber agreed reluctantly. "Let's say that's the way it'll shake out. What I want to know is, how are we going to convince the military?"
"That's a good question," Celia said. "President Jameson can help us sell this thing to the Senate, but I don't see Admiral Sato or General Murdock being so easily deceived."
"Oh, I hope not." Damiani had to grin. "Because I have other plans for those distinguished gentlemen. I need you ladies and gentlemen to concentrate on wielding your influence in the Senate---while we still retain some influence. Don't worry about the military; I'll take care of them."
"Excuse me if I ask to hear the details, Andre," Maurice Rasheed interjected quietly.
"But of course, Maurice," Andre assented. "It's a simple enough strategy. When hunting a tiger, it's always a good idea to have a Judas goat..."
Chapter Seven
"I'm sorry," Deke said, shaking his head, "but I just don't see the point. The Corporates have had months to haul off anything they thought was important enough to look at. Going back to that system now's just a good way to waste a month."
I sighed, trying to think of another way to explain things to him. We'd been sitting there at the jump point for nearly an hour, waiting for the capacitors to charge and arguing about our course of action. As I saw it, we had to return to the Predecessor outpost that Kara had discovered. It was our only lead---our only hope of finding out what the Council was up to. Deke might be right, but I just didn't know what else we could do.
"Look," Kara spoke up, "I saw that base. It was huge, and it was crammed full of more equipment than the whole damned Commonwealth Corps of Engineers could even think about moving in ten years. The stasis chamber where I found the bodies was only a small part of it---the whole fucking mountain was hollow. Now I'm sure the Council research people took the corpses, and probably whatever was small enough to transport safely, but we're talking a technology so advanced we might not even understand half of it."
"The point is," I interjected, "they'll have to have left people there to guard and study it, and maybe one of them will know something we can use."
"Then why can't we wait until we get some support from the Colonel?" Deke wanted to know.
"If we leave now," I explained patiently, "we'll get there in about two weeks. If we go to Murdock now, we're talking at least two months turnaround time. Up till now, they've apparently assumed we'd try to run for help, but after Thunderhead, they're likely to figure that we've got help. If we don't do this now, they're going to be ready for anything we throw at them. If we do it now," I shrugged, "we might have a chance."
"There's a comet halo around the system," Kara said. "If we come out near it, they probably won't detect us. We can sit out there and take a read on the situation before we jump in."
"At the worst," I pointed out, "we lose time. But we'll lose that either way. If you have a better idea, Slick, I'll listen."
Deke sighed heavily, scratching the side of his head, and stared silently at the viewscreen for a moment before he turned back to us.
"All right, we'll do it your way. But I'll tell you something, Farmboy," he said, his tone serious, but the nickname seeming more affectionate than derisive, "this is going to be risky as hell. I already lost one good friend today, one of the few people I could count on. I don't want to lose another."
"Nobody's gonna' lose anything," I declared, shaking my head firmly. "We've all lost too damned much already."
* * *
The first day in Transition Space went by in silent isolation, with each of us replenishing our bodies and implants with rest and food, one of us watching the con while the others occupied the pair of small cabins. Finding myself restless and unable to rid myself of that lingering image of Rachel torn and lifeless in the automed, I let the others go first and stayed in the cockpit.
Falling into the pilot's acceleration couch, I reached back to the little refrigerator built into the cockpit bulkhead behind my seat and pulled out a beer. I didn't normally go too much for beer, but I needed something to take the edge off. Popping the lid open, I tossed down a long sip. It wasn't too bad, as beers go, but it still had that bitter aftertaste that made me think I was drinking distilled urine.
"You worried about something, partner?" I heard Deke's voice ask from behind me, but didn't turn around.
"What
? Me, worried?" I chuckled softly. "What would I have to worry about?"
"It must be pretty rough on you," he said, ignoring my denial, and stepping around to retrieve a beer for himself before leaning against the control console. "I mean," he said, pausing to take a swig, "me, I'm used to sleeping with one eye open, flying out under the radar and burning my bridges behind me. But you were always the type to put down some deep roots. It must be tough to leave it all behind."
I took another long draw on the beer, letting out a deep breath. Looking up at Deke's unreadable dark eyes and uncharacteristically serious expression, I thought of two younger men who had walked the knife's edge every day, with no one to rely on but each other. Were we still the same people, I wondered, or was I trying to play-act a decade-gone camaraderie because I had no one else to turn to?
"I'll be okay," I told him quietly. "I've got people counting on me to come through this." I swallowed a mouthful of bitter liquid, choking back the aftertaste. "I'll be okay." I looked back up at him, eager to change the subject.
"Tell me something, Deke," I asked him. "Just how did you end up in the Pirate Worlds, anyway? When you shipped out, you were talking about going home to Canada, back to school, maybe getting into genetics with your parents."
"Maybe you just don't realize how much the war changed all of us," he muttered, turning away to stare at the bulkhead. "Your homeworld went through enough hell during the war that nobody noticed it when you came back changed, but Earth never got touched. I left home a cocky, naive teenager with a lot to prove to my parents and myself, and I returned a Goddamned killing machine. Society on Earth is a lot more structured than the colonies, even the older, more settled ones. There's no room for individualism, unless you've got a shitload of money, and there's certainly no room for out-of-work killers."
His gaze settled on a point on the deactivated viewscreen, but he was seeing something else.
"I got into a fight," he told me, his voice so quiet I could hardly hear it, "hurt a guy really bad. Almost killed him. When the cops came, I hurt some of them, too. I was drunk, stoned, and a war hero. Colonel Murdock pulled some strings, got me off. They gave me the choice of psych treatments or leaving the system for good." Taking a long pull on his drink, he sat silent for a moment. "I had a lot of pay saved up from the war," he finally went on, "so I put it and some money from my parents into the Dutchman, got the hell out of there and never looked back.
"I knocked around the colonies for a while, trying to haul freight, even tried scouting minerals freelance for the Corporates, but the damned Patrol's all over independent spacers, and there's so many taxes and tariffs that you can't do more than break even...unless you haul shit under-the-table. I smuggled Kick, illegal ViR, guns...anything to pay the bills." He shrugged, looking down at the deck. "Things got too hot in Commonwealth territory, and I had to skip to the Worlds. Had a pretty good setup on Thunderhead---owned part of the Bastard, got a cut of the games, made a run every now and then, trying to build a stake." He snorted. "It's all gone now, I guess, except for the tradenotes I have here on the ship. Easy come, easy go."
Downing the last gulp of my beer, I sat there in silence, taking in what he'd said.
"Shit, Deke," I finally said, "I don't know if I should feel sorry for you or arrest you."
Deke's somber expression trembled, then cracked all the way, breaking into a full, heartfelt laugh. I started, finally couldn't help but join him, my shoulders shaking as I leaned back in the chair.
"Isn't this a bit out of your jurisdiction, Constable?" he asked, smiling broadly.
"Yeah," I admitted. "And I suppose it'd be tough for me to bring in federal help."
"So what's your plan, Lawman?"
I tossed my empty beer can over my shoulder and propped my head on my hands, suddenly feeling ten years younger.
"Got a deck of cards?" I suggested. "And maybe something stronger than beer?"
"Constable Mitchell," Slick said with a grin, pulling a pack of playing cards out of his jacket pocket, "you've come to the right place..."
We were about halfway through our third game of poker and our second bottle of gin when Kara walked into the cockpit, rubbing a hand through her sleep-mussed hair. Regarding us with a wry smile, she stepped up to take a seat at the navigation console, snatching the gin.
"Is this a private game," she asked, taking a long draw off the bottle, "or can anyone play?"
"Deal the lady in, Slick." I laughed, slapping the edge of the copilot's station. Both Deke and I were thoroughly drunk by this time, of course.
"Next victim," he gloated, reshuffling the deck. "Got to warn you, love, I've already fleeced this sheep for a hundred t-notes, and I'm feeling exceptionally lucky tonight...today...whatever the hell it is in this fucking dimension."
"I can see I've got a lot of drinking to do to catch up to you two," Kara observed, tossing back another shot of gin, while Deke dealt her a hand and I shoved a pile of chips across the console to her.
"It may already be too late," I intoned solemnly, taking the bottle from her and gulping down a shot that, by this point, I hardly felt.
"So," Kara asked, taking her cards, "what's the ante?"
"Five bucks," Deke replied, placing a cigar between his teeth and lighting it with a dramatic flare, "but you may as well hand over all your money now, 'cause I'll have it eventually."
Kara considered her hand carefully, her face neutral, then lifted her eyes to face us once more.
"I bet ten." She threw the chips into the pot, giving Deke a challenging glare.
"Ooh," Slick chuckled, puffing on the weed, "we got ourselves a player with nerve."
He blew a cloud of aromatic smoke toward us, my chemical scanners warning me that the grey haze contained carcinogens and a complex blend of mild narcotics. Flicking ashes off the tip of the cigar, Slick flipped thirty t-notes worth of plastic into the pot.
"See you," he said, "and raise twenty."
Glancing down again at my hand, I shook my head. It was certainly nothing to write home about. I threw two cards down, took two more from Deke, and tried not to show my surprise---I had gone from a pair of deuces to three kings. Attempting to act as nonchalant as I could with that much alcohol running through my bloodstream, I saw Deke and raised five.
I could have used my augments to counteract the effects of the gin, but that would have violated the spirit of the occasion. We'd all been through a lot, with no clear end in sight, and spending the next two weeks dwelling on it wouldn't do anything but get us killed.
"How much did I lose to you on that run to Girru?" I asked Deke, leaning back and taking a drink while Kara ruminated over her bet.
"Eight hundred bucks." He laughed sharply. "But you won it all back during the mission, remember? When I bet you that you couldn't make it from the water storage tanks to the drop pod without getting shot?"
"Girru?" Kara looked up from her hand. "You two were on Girru?"
"Were we ever!" I snorted. "We almost stayed there, too."
"We were supposed to sneak in," Deke explained, puffing his weed, his voice going soft with the reminiscence. "Inject a virus in the base mainframe, try to contaminate their attack squadrons. God, I hated those sabotage jobs. Not that psi-ops were a piece of cake either, but at least then you got to nail them before they could take a pop at you. Anyway, we didn't have a lot of room in the drop pod, and it was supposed to be a stealth job, so we left all the heavy metal on the Raven."
"Last time we made that mistake."
"No shit. So we drop out of the ship, and it pops back to the dark side of the larger moon, programmed to rendezvous with the pod in six hours."
"'Bout three fucking hours too late," I muttered.
Deke turned on me with a look of annoyance. "You telling this story or am I?"
"Be my guest," I replied, waving my hands apologetically.
"Where was I?" He frowned, chewing on the end of his smoke. "Oh, yeah. So we drop down in the middle of this geotherm
al vent, with all this fucking steam everywhere to fuck up their thermal sensors, and run in---was nearly ten klicks, I think. We get in, past the sensors and the guards and shit, and we get spotted by a Goddamned dog!"
"It wasn't a dog," I objected. "They call them Quori, or something. They're about the size of a large sheep, and some of the bases started keeping them to watch for infiltrators."
"Well, it looked enough like a dog," Deke insisted. "This fucking mutt smells us somehow, when no chemscanner can, and we wind up with this whole fucking base coming down on us, and all we have is our damned sidearms! I'll tell you, that was wild." He sat back, taking a long drag.
"So don't keep me in suspense," Kara prompted. "What happened?"
I shrugged. "We got lucky."
"Ha!" Deke snorted. "Lucky, my ass! Farmboy here has a gift for understatement. We were running around like a pair of virgins at a Marine R&R center, but we finally got out of the building and called the pod in."
"The tricky part," I put in, "was how to signal the ship to pick us up early---hard to put microwaves through a few dozen kilometers of moon. But we'd noticed that the Tahni had an Instel comsat sitting in a Lagrangian orbit, so we used their own satellite to bounce a signal to the Raven."
"And still damn near cashed it in," Deke complained, twelve years after the fact. "Not that the next mission wasn't even hairier..."
"Are we gonna' tell war stories all night or play cards," I groused, looking forward to playing my hand. "What's your bet, Kara?"
"I see and raise you fifty," she replied.
"Shit," Deke drawled, blowing a puff of smoke. "Down to some cutthroat poker, eh?" He held up his hand, peered at her suspiciously. "Dealer takes one," he said as he discarded. "And," he added, glancing at the new acquisition, "I'll see your fifty, and raise a hundred."
"Jeez," I grunted, sipping from the bottle. "I'm working on a cop's salary here." What the hell? If I lived through all this to pay off my debt, I'd consider myself blessed. "I call."