A Family War: The Oligarchy - Book 1

by Stewart Hotston

  The pilot left them when they reached the shuttle; he needed to prep for the flight. Helena was impressed that he had enough implants to handle both atmospheric and orbital craft. Either his parents had beggared themselves paying for them or Euros valued him highly enough to release two sets of enhancement technology for his benefit.

  She decided to find out if he also had the advantage of the limited gene therapy his class could access: a combat pilot’s dream that endowed faster, more acute senses with a greater processing capacity for incoming information. He could be a valuable asset in the field and excellent in bed. She stopped herself; he had already been an asset. She would not have made it this far without him.

  “Ma’am, with the loss of the 2nd Fleet to Indexiv, I cannot help wondering why Euros would send out two orders relating to the same person? Not only must we detain you until Director Woolf arrives, but upon the direct order of the diplomatic bureau we must give the launch clearance.” He was clearly unhappy, although no more so than Helena, who was startled to see how divided Euros was.

  “Commander,” she said before making for the changing rooms. “Your orders appear clear to me. Arrange our launch window and we will be out of your hair, no longer your responsibility. As for the 2nd Fleet, once they’ve limped back to port, they’ll be out there again, I am sure.”

  “Ma’am, the 2nd Fleet was destroyed. Down to the last ship. Survivors are being brought into Christmas Island as we speak,” Lancaster said uncomfortably.

  “Is this true?” asked Helena pointlessly, but the commander nodded anyway.

  “Damn.” In truth she was speechless, the words feeling utterly inadequate as they slipped from her lips.

  Helena turned away, the board will be shaken into unpredictability by the defeat of the 2nd Fleet. She shook her head in disbelief as she went to get changed. She wanted to believe it was a mistake, but knew thinking like that would only cause her to make bad decisions.

  Helena found she was mistaken after all. The Australasian government were not giving them a free ride. When she boarded the ramp at the rear of the shuttle, she discovered the pilot poring over a freight manifest. He handed it to her without a word.

  The payload was three Remote Attack Platforms. Standing over five metres high and as much around, RAPs were over seven metres long when stowed and up to ten metres with weapons extended. Covered in a thick film of nanomachines they could camouflage themselves in any terrain managing to be almost invisible to the naked eye, even at point blank range. The seven barrels arranged around each body had a range of four hundred kilometres and could hit a pinhead at three hundred. The AIs running them were highly advanced, capable of selecting threats out to the limit of their range and responding accordingly although still far from full sentience.

  In addition to the RAPs there were seven armoured personnel carriers and one hovertank. Helena’s brother, a military officer, would argue at every family dinner that tanks were obsolete. He claimed, normally after they’d all had several glasses of wine, that they were a symbolic presence in a time when engagements were rarely fought at anything except stand-off range. Constructed by RDK and only one year old, the hovertank was as big as the RAP, weighing in at twenty tons. The model they were carrying was lightly armoured, but it still packed the same punch as the more commonly used, heavier, plasma-cell tanks.

  Helena knew the military hardware of the various corporations well; it was part of her knowledge base. Although it had made her name a century ago, negotiating water-supplies was a civilian sideline Helena had not indulged in for more than twenty years. Even then, she saw civilian activities such as securing water sources as war by diplomatic means.

  Helena’s more recent briefs had involved a central focus on arms trade and treaties with minor corporations and landlords staking out new colonies across the Solar System.

  From the shuttle’s loading ramp, Helena saw a rack of wardrobes stuffed behind the hovertank, on the left-hand wall of the shuttle. On a hunch, she checked the manifest. Nothing. Officially the wardrobes did not exist. She walked up to them and saw they were sealed, although a detailed description of the contents was plastered across the wrapping: three dozen semi-organic armoured bodysuits, capable of stopping almost any projectile weapon available. They were only really vulnerable to laser weapons, and even then continuous-wave rather than pulsed. Helena was trained in their use; all Oligarchs were at one time or another over the course of their long lives.

  Helena had shunned them the few times it might have been advisable to wear one and she did not, currently, have a post that required her to use them. She found that they hindered her movement as well as obstructing her senses. It was her considered opinion that in a firefight, they were more likely to get someone with enhancements killed, because they would be too busy compensating for lost sensory input.

  She took in the expensive arsenal sitting in the bay of the shuttle.

  She was shocked by their presence. The Aussies are clearly worried the war between Indexiv and Euros is going to spill.

  Quite why they were shipping these items into Southern Africa, and to whom they were being delivered, wasn’t clear. Helena had no expertise on Australasian holdings in the region, nor on their corporate allies. The main point was that they were not being given the shuttle for free.

  I don’t even know where we land, she thought.

  Checking the manifest, Helena saw their destination marked as Johannesburg, the capital of the Southern States of Africa. She cross-referenced the maps she had downloaded, sighing as she saw it wasn’t remotely near Swakupmund.

  Closer than Brisbane, though, she thought wearily.

  The pilot waited until she had finished, then took the manifest from her, placing it in a container to the side of the bay doors.

  “Ma’am, if you’ll take your seat we can get going.”

  Helena climbed up into the cockpit to squeeze into the co-pilot’s position. She would not be much good to him. As Helena worried to herself that it would be easy to track them to Jo’burg the shuttle was pitched upwards at an eighty-degree angle.

  Her pilot – she accorded him that due now – fired the launch engines and the final twenty second countdown began. The polymer panels in the cockpit were blacked out; they would only become transparent when they entered low orbit.

  In the midst of the recent pandemonium, Helena was looking forward to the stillness of the forty minutes in orbit before they would begin their descent. She never tired of seeing the silent Earth from space.

  As the hangar doors opened above them and the whole craft began to shake in its eagerness to be airborne, she patched herself into the ship’s AI. It was curt with her, demanding that she log out until the launch was complete. Helena meekly obeyed, thinking she caught a trace of a smile on the pilot’s mouth in the process.

  He seems trustworthy, might even have a mind of his own.

  Not that loyalty counted for much when most corporations had AIs capable of taking the brain apart a neuron at a time for any information they needed. Nevertheless, as he released the first of the clamps binding them to Australasian territory, she decided she needed to talk to him as a person before they landed in Southern Africa.

  The last of the clamps came free and the Dreamtime shot free of its constraints, ascending like a god into the summer sky.

  Chapter 3

  THE SHUTTLE was no frills. The last time Helena had flown so cheaply was a forced transit between Toronto and Istanbul when a particularly stubborn client had refused to come to their offices because one of the team mistook his mother for an Orang-Utan.

  Her other memories of the experience were not so pleasant; Istanbul stank of excrement, people and heat. A colleague had professed his adoration for the glorious stench of life. Helena coolly preferred London or Tokyo, their ordered formalities excluded the chaos that burst from Istanbul’s every hidden cranny. Helena, almost physically overwhelmed by the city’s redolent defiance of the best technologies money could
buy, was unable to summon any sense of warmth for the place even in retrospect

  She’d been team lead for a salt extraction negotiation between the European Union and Euros. A corporate listening group had intercepted the client speaking with another firm, worse still they were sharing Euros’ contractual Heads of Terms. Helena did not regard herself as ruthless but seeing someone else trade her own terms against her made her furious. So she had the deal team shunted onto a shuttle so they could meet the threat face on. After seven years as a senior team member, this was her first operation as a team leader. Six months in, she wasn’t about to let it end in ignominy.

  The client claimed he was driven by relationships, so she did everything she could to appear reliable and trustworthy, to be on his side. Face to face she used his own words against him with the result that he signed the contract far beyond their agreed fall back bargaining position.

  A silent mood of approval greeted her efforts. Her mother, Edith, had been especially pleased. The Woolfs had been in the logistics side of the corporation for more than two hundred and fifty years. Edith was openly dismissive about Helena’s move across to the diplomatic bureau, so she was as close to delighted as Helena had ever seen.

  Helena’s three older brothers had all elected to stay in her mother’s area of the business. Edith was generally indifferent to what her children achieved, except when it reflected on her own reputation within the firm. So Helena took her thin smile as a victory hard won.

  The pressure of acceleration in the cockpit meant there could be no unnecessary conversation. Helena thought of her father’s disappearance. In the century after he vanished, Edith, who was not known for her marital commitment and fidelity, had slowly begun to spin out.

  Five years following his disappearance Edith announced her resignation from the Company. Euros, and Johannes in particular, refused to let her waste away. After months of negotiation on her behalf she was given a broad folio without boundaries or productivity requirements. Helena could only guess at what was actually required from her mother. They were not close enough for her to ask.

  Regardless, Helena would have rather impressed her own father, but he wasn’t in the picture. She ignored her mother’s caustic judgements, striving to please in the face of blank faced greetings. Thinking about the admiration she would have liked to receive, her brother, Michael, came to mind.

  Perhaps, she allowed herself. I appreciate his approval instead.

  Which led directly to the Amazon Fell. The competition to host the final negotiations was far from fierce. Being the poster girl for their takeover was as likely to harm her career as enhance it. However, she felt that the balance of positives against negatives came out in her favour. Michael had pushed her, saying the risk was worth the rewards. What sealed the deal was when the European Parliament, under whose auspices the negotiations had been held, requested her as their representative. Plenty of corporations would be open to her if she decided her career at Euros was done.

  Most of the disquiet emanating from other corporations, in waves of desperate disbelief expressed in share buy backs and bloody C suite politics, centred on the operational flexibility Indexiv would achieve if they succeeded. Plenty of them objected on what the media was calling humanitarian grounds, but analyst attacks based on the morality of economic decisions did not move share prices.

  Indexiv’s argument was economically sound: Normals could almost always be replaced with alternate more efficient means of production. For those roles that did demand a human touch, working hours could be extended without increasing pay.

  The argument about the right and wrong of retiring millions of Normals moved from boardrooms to dining tables and parties. Domestic discussion served to bolster the disquiet of Indexiv’s competitors and those who felt politically moved targeted their message there. Indexiv, and its many supporters, argued that most of the retirements would be natural wastage. Normal breeding rights would simply be curtailed, with bonuses for those willing to undergo voluntary sterilisation.

  Most Oligarchs were close to the view held by her mother, who openly suspected Normals of basic fecklessness, as somehow deserving of whatever miserable fate might be in store for them.

  Michael commented that it was the idea that all people had rights versus those who believed people earned privilege.

  The markets, despite the passionate debates at society suppers, sympathised with Indexiv’s logic. Forced retirement was the most efficient solution to the Normal problem for all concerned. Some argued that there was no need to wait for natural wastage to clear out the house. Why wait ninety years when optimistic estimates suggested the entire Normal population could be made redundant in less than five?

  Grasping both the sentiment and nature of the argument, Helena reported to the board that the only solution in the long term was for Indexiv to be taken over and for the rest of the market to fall in line. Her report was written in her spare time, spurred on by a conversation she’d had with one of the directors in a lift and Michael’s clear summary of the two contesting ideologies.

  Regardless of the opinions of actual traders, Euros’s board, and the boards of many other corporations, were panicked when faced with such a stark analysis. Helena’s conclusions were, inevitably, leaked. Euros found it was quite unwillingly centre stage for those looking to oppose Indexiv. Their position as a focus for discontent was cemented when the head of the European Parliament, a tepid historian called Frederic Cucheval, put his head above the parapet with an opinion piece stating that the inherent value of humanity trumped economic growth.

  The backlash against Frederic was harsh and personal, but, when slurs failed to bolster their own share price after more than eleven days of rancid vitriol, Indexiv called for mediation.

  Euros, on record as the first Corporation to predict the inevitable impasse, became the obvious choice as mediator. Helena, whose original analysis had become the ubiquitous basis for all subsequent debate, was wheeled out as the face of Euros.

  Helena was conflicted. Everyone knew the negotiations were going to end in open hostility. This was a problem for Euros. Even if it was a member of the ‘Big 5’, it was only half the size of Indexiv. Her arguments were lauded as incisive but Helena worried that the whole thrust of her argument had been missed; that Indexiv would have to disappear for issue to be resolved.

  Her immediate manager, Frederic Tintagel, a timid lichen of a man who nevertheless had influence derived from razor sharp political acumen, pushed Helena hard. He pressed home that Euros would be a credible neutral mediator until the moment Indexiv refused to back down.

  ‘Then what?’ she asked.

  ‘Then the shooting will start,’ he replied. ‘All that will matter is that Euros sets its stall out for a post-Indexiv world.’

  Except that Indexiv did not wait for the negotiations to end before it began rolling out the cull of employees who were judged to require more than they could give.

  Is it delusional to think I’ve had my part to play in this? Helena asked herself. I bloody well hope not.

  She heard Edith’s contemptuous sneer at her presumptions and recognised in it the futility of agelessness so many of the first generation hinted at but refused to discuss openly. Helena’s solution to the meaninglessness brought on by endless life was to be busy. She reluctantly acknowledged that this drive came from her own mother, a family response to feeling trapped.

  Seeing that bleak sadness in her own future provoked thoughts of children, of new life and legacies, but Helena could not bring herself to slow down enough to sincerely consider raising a child.

  The flight was rough. The small shuttle rumbled its way into orbit like an old man coughing in the morning. It was somewhere between a rollercoaster and seasickness, a far cry from the silent silken slide of interplanetary flight. Neither Helena nor Denholme were bothered by actual feelings of nausea; genetic manipulation and timed protein release ensured that motion sickness was suppressed for both of them. Once the wo
rst of the turbulence receded, they relaxed.

  “How long have you been in?” Helena asked the pilot when she was sure he could ease his concentration for a while.

  “Eight years Ma’am.”

  “Captain yet?” she asked.

  “No Ma’am, lieutenant.” He pointed to the insignia on his shoulder. His rank explained why he had access to skill sets for both intra and trans-atmospheric flight. As if reading her mind, he continued, “My folks paid for the eyes and hands, Ma’am. Airforce gave me the rest when I graduated.” He turned towards her.

  She could see the information scrolling across his irises. His eyeballs were five centimetres across, perfectly round and dominated by soulfully dark pupils. His eyelids stretched uncomfortably across them every few seconds.

  How does he protect such vulnerable tools?

  “You know my name,” she said. “What’s yours?”

  “Denholme, Ma’am.” Automatically he pointed to the nametag on his left breast. She was irritated. She knew enough to have looked without asking.

  I’m just trying to make conversation, she told herself.

  “Do you mind if I call you Denholme?” she asked.

  “No Ma’am.” There was never any prospect that he might say no. She was his superior; deference was habitual.

  “Good,” she said, feeling she was getting somewhere. She felt it was ironic that of all the significant people she knew, she was reduced to asking a pilot his name. Knowing his name was something deeper than simply having something to put to his face. She already had that: pilot.

  As a child she had known only a handful of people who weren’t Oligarchy, a cadre of maids and her mother’s long, ever changing, train of servants. Of those she had only known her nanny’s name, Frida. A woman who seemed old for all the time she knew her. Helena remembered sorrow etched into the woman’s eyes more deeply than her wrinkles.

  The others she encountered blurred around the edges in both her experience and her memory, merging into one another like so much wallpaper. Helena could barely recall who was who, what their idiosyncrasies were, or even what they might have done for her. She mulled over the idea of accessing her memory processor to search out memories relating to her childhood. Then tutted to herself, nostalgia is not going to get me anywhere.