War World X: Takeover

by John F. Carr

  Wyn sat alone in the detention pen, wondering who would emerge from an inner office to claim her. Everyone knew, when applying to graduate school, on about what day the letters of acceptance or rejection would be delivered. And everyone waited for mail that day for the precious thick or damning thin packets delivered the old-fashioned way. She had sat on admissions committees since then and knew how candidates were discussed. How were her new…her new masters discussing her?

  The door slid open slowly and a guard entered. Wyn rose, quickly enough for deference, slow enough to preserve her own illusions. “This way,” the guard said.

  No statement that Mr. so-and-so had bought her contract? She started to raise her eyebrows, then thought better of it.

  She was brought to a tiny room. In it sat a man dressed in rugged, all-weather clothes conspicuous only by the shimmer of the gemstones he wore on one hand and on the slide about his neck. She had seen such a stone only once, when her niece Caroline had wed that improbable Texan and Shreve’s had had to set the veritable boulder he gave her in platinum. It had been vulgarly large, but the stones this man wore as baubles made it resemble a seed pearl. The man rose as she entered. Her eyebrows did flick upward at that.

  “Ms. Baker?”

  She inclined her head.

  “I’ve been studying your file. Oh. I’m Dan Carmichael, private contractor, at the Kennicott Mines over Hell’s-A-Comin’ way.”

  She froze. She had always been able to identify euphemisms. And from her days working in the Projects, she recognized this man. I know a pimp when I see one.

  “I said I’d get ya. Never thought I’d find you alone, though, and on your knees. Good place for you.”

  Her callused hand went out to brush the back of an empty chair, and she shut her eyes against the pain, the violation and thereafter, the feel of her hand driving steel into flesh and hot blood spurting over her wrist.

  He was aiding her to sit; in an instant, he would shout for help, she knew it. She summoned strength from the core of rage she had learned to nurture—”spit on the bastards’ graves”—and shook her head.

  “I am too old to…I believe you call it, ‘turn tricks.’ Not to mention my lack of other attractions.”

  He stared at her. I’m not going to faint. When he seemed to be sure of that, his laughter rattled the flimsy partitions of the room.

  “Varley owes me a favor. He said I ought to meet you, that you were likely to wind up near the top. It stands to reason. The Consul General flags all the politicals; and hell, lady, you’re something special even in the way of politics. Can’t think of a job I could offer you, unless it would be teaching… My gals tend not to have kids. Down the road, though, it’s sure going to cost plenty to send the ones they do have to Company schools.”

  “I would hardly think so,” Wyn murmured.

  “Some of ’em do, though. And sooner or later, they’ll need schools. Well, that’s down the road.…”

  Frontier schoolmarm. Wyn you are going back all the way—at least, if you’re lucky.

  “You might tell me something, though. That little girl, the one who talked to you, then started…ugh! That’s all an act, isn’t it?”

  Nina had cried in her arms. The urge to protect her like a student made Wyn shiver.

  He can check to see if you’re lying, her good sense told her.

  “She was raped at Luna Base. When her father tried to help her, they spaced him. She won’t earn back your investment,” she said crisply. Then, inspiration struck.

  “Sir…”

  “Lord, you speak fine!” He shook his head at her.

  “Sir, if you have access to the BuReloc files, you should know that there is one woman…”—How could she phrase this appropriately?—”in your line of work. We called her Ellie.…”

  Wyn slid forward on her chair. Sure enough, built into the computer panel on the table was a screen for observing the prisoners awaiting assignment. There sat Ellie. Obviously, she had finished processing later than Wyn. “That one.”

  The man’s fingers tapped on the keyboard. A guard emerged and shepherded Ellie out of the holding pen into the cubicle. One quick glance, and she had sized up Carmichael. A grin, a pass of her hand across her hair and coverall, and she looked younger, flushed, even pretty. Wyn blinked. So that was how a real pro did it.

  “Damn-it all, Boston,” she blurted. “I thought you said you didn’t want my line of work!”

  “Ellie…” It was Wyn’s turn to flush as she realized that she had never known her shipmate’s last name, “I would like you to meet Mr. Daniel Carmichael, who manages.…”

  What was the proper way to introduce people in their line of work? Apart, of course, from the obvious. Aha! What had Ellie called her business when they’d met back on Luna?

  “…an escort service at Hell’s-A-Comin’.”

  She glared at Ellie, willing her to hold out her hand first. The lady always indicated whether she wished to shake hands.

  Ellie shook her head, then Carmichael’s hand. Only then did she start to grin.

  “Thank you, Ms. Baker,” Carmichael intoned, his voice hollow with laughter.

  “Boston, you never told me your name was Baker,” Ellie said. “One of those Bakers? And you let me. Hoo-eee! I’m surprised you even spoke to me.”

  Wyn shrugged. Both Ellie and Carmichael watched her with growing amusement.

  “Is that how you learned to keep a straight face? You ought to come to work with us…make you the standup comic.”

  Wyn smiled at her. So few words, and it was all arranged. I ought not to approve, she thought. But there is Hell’s-A-Comin’, and the brothels are real; and no question, the women in them will do better with Ellie to look out for them.

  “Or I could play the piano in the parlor,” she said slyly.

  “Got a keyboard instead,” Carmichael said. His face reddened as he lost the struggle against a great shout of laughter. “Sure you won’t reconsider?”

  Wyn smiled. “I’ll take my chances.”

  “Ya know, Boston, you can be a real asshole sometimes,” Ellie said.

  “I’ll be fine,” Wyn assured her with more confidence than she felt. “You’ll make so much money up at the mines you probably won’t even recognize me next time you see me. Or want to talk to me.”

  “You’ll still be respectable. Still Boston,” Ellie said and hugged her. The next instant, she was all business “Where’s those papers?” she demanded. “Isn’t there someplace I got to sign? You want it in blood or what?”

  More keystrokes, and the contract whirred out of a slot in the console. Tongue between her teeth, Ellie signed and handed the papers over to Carmichael.

  “Ms. Baker, I thank you,” he said. Then he hesitated. “Here’s for luck. The way you’re thinking, you’ll need all the luck you can get on Haven.” He lifted the slide with its glowing gem, a tiny replica of Haven’s giant moon, from about his neck and threw it over to Wyn. “Will you get a move on it, Ellie? We open for business at 2000, and we need to find you a decent dress.”

  Ellie followed her new employer out the door. “…gave away a fortune, and you ought to see the stuff she’s still got hidden in that green thing she carries.…”

  Silence. The tiny room seemed suddenly cold, echoing. Wyn was relieved when the guard escorted her back to the holding pen. Quickly, she stuffed her new lucky charm into the green bag. At some point, she might be able to sell or trade it. And there was no sense in being a walking target.

  There were no windows in the pen. It smelled like every other pen in which Wyn had been deposited with a grunted “wait here.” It shouldn’t, Wyn thought. This was an alien world; somehow, she had expected it would look and feel different. She wanted out, to fight for whatever future Haven might offer her; she wouldn’t get that future sitting here.

  “Ms. Baker?” Not a guard this time, but a man dressed almost drably, in what Wyn was suddenly sure was “solid citizen” clothing. Once again, she trotted do
wn the hall to the interview cubicles.

  “Ms. Baker, I am Richard DeSilva. He waited for her to acknowledge his family name and to take the hand that he—a vast concession—held out to her.

  “How do you do?”

  “I assume that your trip here was rather trying.”

  Wyn inclined her head and nodded again when DeSilva waved her to a seat. A DeSilva of Kennicott here on Haven? Must be from a minor branch of the family. Not old enough to be a failure, shipped out to the frontier; not young enough to be an heir, proving himself. Probably just old enough to be desperate to make one last push to better himself here, if not lift himself off-world.

  “The Consul General alerted me when your file crossed his desk. Yours was marked for two reasons: politics and high intellect.”

  “The charges against me were false,” Wyn said levelly “All of them except terminal folly.” And you can’t file an appeal back on Earth for that.

  “Most unwise to launch a frontal attack against entrenched authority.” He steepled his fingers. Recognizing the tone of Official Pronouncement from many dinner parties, Wyn nodded: You expert; me, unworldly professor. So tell me, Mr. DeSilva, have you bought my contract? And what do you need me to do?

  “I would not do it again,” she said.

  “So you have learned from the experience?”

  “A very great deal, sir,” she said. She had learned to study those in power, to figure out their weaknesses and survive by playing upon them. She had been a trusting fool, and then she had been helpless. She would not willingly be helpless again.

  “It is your knowledge of Earth that I could find useful.…”

  “My knowledge of Earth?” Wyn allowed herself to smile. “Mr. DeSilva, I left Earth more than a year ago on what I fully expected to be a one-way trip. And I think neither of our families would say I knew much about the real world when I lived on it.”

  “Still,” he said. “Your family’s contacts. Your education, the way you speak.”

  She glanced at his hands. He wore a wedding band. That told her: outpost mentality.

  “Do you have children, Mr. DeSilva? School-aged children perhaps? And the local schools—are they adequate to those children’s needs?”

  Years of faculty/parent conferences and student advising made him easy to read. Shipped out from Earth or maybe born here: an early marriage to a local woman unable to keep pace with his ambition or supply their children with whatever polish he thought they ought to have.

  He’d bought her contract for politics. But teaching them could be her insurance policy once he’d mined out her few Earth names and networks.

  His face lit. “I have taken up your contract.”

  Wyn inclined her head.

  “Please think of it merely as an employment contract. My children, of course: and we could use an executive assistant, discreet, cultivated.”

  In short, a major domo, their resident status symbol from Earth.

  You won’t get a better offer, she heard Ellie’s voice.

  No doubt, he would pump her for details of Earth politics, out-of-date as they were. No doubt, he would mine what connections he thought she had about as thoroughly as Kennicott went into the hills by Hell’s-A- Comin. And in return?

  Maybe, just maybe, I can strike back.

  The idea did not provide the angry pleasure it once had. She had learned something, after all. If DeSilva was a power here and relied on her, she too would have power of a sort, even a chance to shape a place that was not already hopelessly corrupt.

  Even her tie to Ellie and Carmichael at the mines might be worth something. Exiles made what choices they had to: anything to cease being “the weak” Anything they could stomach. Ellie’s and Carmichael’s work might be cleaner than the game she was offered.

  She thought she could manage. Life on board a BuReloc ship toughened her to the point where she thought that maybe, just maybe, her ancestors—who had not been pampered aristocrats—might not find her a weakling. She was well up to this game, she thought. In fact, even if DeSilva could produce passage back to Earth, she thought she would spurn it in favor of the promise she saw for herself on Haven. She would not always be “the weak,” fated to suffer what she must.

  It was not often a person got a second chance. Hers sat across from her, folding up the contract of her indenture and tucking it into his jacket.

  DeSilva rose, and she rose with him. “We would be obliged if you would begin at once. Tonight, we have an important dinner.… You will, of course, join us.” He looked pained. “There is the matter of suitable clothing….”

  Hadn’t Dan Carmichael said the same thing to Ellie? No, Wyn didn’t think she’d stop speaking to Ellie.

  “When I earn it,” Wyn said. She had a sudden crazed vision of stripping open the seams of her faithful green bag, extricating the pearls she had sewed within it, and wearing them with the coverall that was the convict’s badge.

  He flinched. “Consider it a condition of employment. You must appear…presentable. One of the Hamiltons will be there.”

  Well, thank you, sir! She was a Baker; of course, she was presentable. Then she thought about what else his statement might mean. She intended to teach. But there was always that other way. Marry one’s way up and out.

  At her age?

  Why not even that? After all, when Great Aunt Phoebe had gotten thrown out of China, she’d come back to Boston and she’d married (which branch of the family was it?).… But DeSilva was waiting for her reply. Wyn copied Ellie’s, even to the downcast look and the breath held long enough to let her blush.

  Decent clothes, fabrics that didn’t chafe. And chances to stop being “the weak.” She could hope. It was dignified to hope.

  Count no man happy until you have seen the hour of his death. She recalled the old caution from Herodotus.

  But don’t write him off till then either. Or her.

  DeSilva escorted her through the Processing Center and onto the launch bound for Castell City. A light snow was falling, and the fresh air filled her with new hope as she gazed at the huge, feline primary reflected in the water. When the launch docked, DeSilva made half the dockyard stare by handing her, dressed as she was in convict’s gray, down from the boat. She nodded thanks, then followed him out into her future.

  “And the town being now strongly besieged, there being also within some that practiced to have it given up, they yielded themselves to the discretion of the Athenians, who slew all the men of military age, made slaves of the women and children, and inhabited the place with a colony sent thither afterwards of five hundred men on their own.” (Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, translated by Thomas Hobbes, University of Chicago Press, Book 6, page 372)

  Atalanta

  Don Hawthorne

  Bureaucracy

  Luna, Co-Dominium Offices: 2073 A.D.

  After twenty minutes of preamble, Maldonado, the Minister for Sports, was framing his closing argument as any good bureaucrat would: In the form of an opening statement.

  “The problem, Mister Chairman, is that the whole justification for holding the games at all is at risk of being invalidated.”

  Chairman Vladimir Serafimov of the CoDominium High Council had been listening to his guests for nearly twenty minutes and his boredom threshold was, by his own estimates, about three sentences away and closing fast.

  “I disagree,” came the rebuttal from Voorhees, representative from the Colonial Athletics Committee and appointed to serve as an advocate of his colony world of Sauron and its participation in the CoDominium Olympic Games. “If one colony fields superior athletes, it should stimulate the other worlds to increase their efforts on behalf of their own sons and daughters to rise to the challenge.”

  Voorhees turned to Serafimov and addressed him directly. “It is neither Sauron’s fault, nor its responsibility, to accommodate the other colonies’ lack of commitment for an event to which Sauron’s young people dedicate themselves for years beforehand.”

&
nbsp; “Mister Chairman,” Maldonado said, “in the decades since the CoDominium nationalized the Olympics, they have steadily regained their stature and dignity as contests of amateur athletics held in a spirit of comradely competition.”

  “Sauron’s athletes are amateurs,” Voorhees interjected in an icy tone, “They receive no state funding or support whatsoever, and the CoDominium Olympic Organizing Committee verifies this on a yearly basis. A rather insulting process, in fact, which, I hasten to add, no other colony is required to undergo.”

  Maldonado clenched his teeth. “By the very nature of Sauron’s militaristic governmental structure,” he began, but never finished.

  Serafimov raised his hand, a gesture he rarely used. Anyone who had ever dealt with him in the political arena soon came to regret seeing it. “That is quite enough from both of you.” He leaned forward, interlaced his fingers and held the silence for a moment, regarding both men carefully.

  “This has gone from a tedious debate to a rather ominous allegory about nationalism. I would remind you both that when the Olympics were confined to this world, my own country often received the same criticism being leveled at the Sauron System. That’s one of the very good reasons the Olympics are not held between nations any more, but between colony worlds, each of them far more varied in their cultural composition than any one nation of Earth ever was.

  “Now,” he sat back and looked at his desk clock, “I require that you, Minister Maldonado, come to the point and make your proposal. Representative Voorhees, do not interrupt.” He nodded to Maldonado. “Proceed.”

  Maldonado sighed. “I wish to bring a proposal before the CoDominium Olympic Organizing Committee that Sauron be banned from future competition in the CoDominium Olympics.”

  Voorhees opened his mouth, but Serafimov stayed his words with the barest lift of a palm in his direction.

  “On what grounds, Minister Maldonado?”

  Maldonado spread his hands. “On the grounds that in previous Olympics, Sauron athletes have consistently increased their medal winnings at a steady rate, until the last Olympics, when Sauron took medals—gold, silver, or bronze—in all three hundred and eighty-six events! In addition, virtually all CoDominium athletic records are now held by Saurons! Given the trend of Sauron dominance of the games up to this point, there is every reason to assume that within forty years, every medal will go to a Sauron!”