Nessa and Victoria sat in stunned silence, unconvinced.
“I could use more clean socks, though.” They didn’t bite on the misdirection, but there was almost nothing more he could say, and he now felt desperate to hear any good news at all—anything that wasn’t the Coit, death, or suffering.
“I’m OK,” he persisted. “You’ll prob’ly hear more about it on the news, so I just wanted to call to tell you I’m OK. Just a little banged up.” He let it sink in. “How are things there? You look a little tired.”
He was grateful when Victoria finally worked through her shock and told him about the storm and the long hours of recovery work. It wasn’t an uplifting tale, but it was nonetheless a relief. She then turned to her curriculum on the Track, lifting his spirits instantly. As she talked, he was reminded why he signed up, and why he had to make it through.
Inevitably, his mother returned to the subject of the Coit. The massacre, his arrest, and whatever-it-was that had landed him in such a bad state. Though Paul was determined to say as little as possible, lest the listeners cut off the call and shove him back in the slammer, he was surprised to learn that none of these events had gotten any time in the news cycle.
The escapades of movie stars, Ellie marriages and divorces, and sporting events dominated the news as it had always done. Migrant penetrations along the borders, skirmishes on the edges of the agricultural belt, and the onset of storm season flirted with the news coverage as well.
“No matter,” Victoria chimed. “We have a plan to get you out.” Paul fell silent and quickly looked around to see who might be within earshot. He worried that the listeners would disconnect the call, but he couldn’t bring himself to stop her from explaining, especially since his release from the stockade was still a mystery. Victoria proceeded to outline how she and his cousin Emily Goldbloom had convinced Jasmine Goodwell to lobby for his exoneration—and possibly even transfer or release from the military.
Paul listened in an almost giddy silence. Get off the Coit? Get out of the Expeds? Get out of the military? It was everything he’d been wishing for since the lottery.
At least at first. But as Victoria explained in more detail, Paul found himself flooded with unexpected doubts.
If I’m pulled off the Coit, what’ll happen to all my mates?
He reflected on the faces of his comrades. Their quirks and foibles. Their driving hopes and fears. Their shared desperation to survive and get home. Before them, he hadn’t had any real friends for what had seemed like ages. Even his closest friends in Cali-Sur had moved away with their families, looking for other ways to eke out a living. He hadn’t even realized how lonely he had been all that time, until he found Charlie, Chris, Gajah, Phil, and Mauricio. These people would give their lives for him—and probably for his family if it was necessary. How he could he leave them, even if they were all living in hell?
What happens to all the people we’re helping? …Loyal to a fault, they always said. Even Vic says it.
He thought about the work they had already done, and how much there was still left to do. He honestly wanted to help the vulnerable and dispossessed around them. Despite the horrors of the massacre and the demoralizing missions to protect Ellie property, they had delivered water purification units, re-built shelters, and fed orphans. They had—twice—intercepted chain-ganged children being led off to slavery.
Hopelessly idealistic, he recalled his father saying. He could do this same work at home, but Gajah’s words about people had taken root: “Human beings all suffer the same. Makes no difference their borders, or riches, ethnicity, or religion.”
Fearless was the other term he had heard said of himself. He had always dismissed it, if only because he did feel fear. But in this swirl of thoughts, he realized that his fears had never controlled him. He thought back to the time he took on two grown men trying to have their way with his younger sister before she had even reached the age of consent. He took a beating but landed one of the men face down in a ditch and the other staggering away bloody. He recalled standing up to his own father at the Las Vegas MAC.
He didn’t fire a shot at the site of the massacre—not out of cowardice, as he had been telling himself since—but because he knew it was wrong, and his people weren’t in danger. He would have let loose had those things been different. He knew in his heart he would have.
Paul then realized that he had risen to a leadership role in his unit, and among his mates, precisely because he could swallow fear and do what was necessary. It was a quality uniquely valued—and desperately needed—in the military, which is probably why the aptitude test routed him this way.
The massacre was a nightmare, and in all the hours he had spent wrongly accused and confined he never would have given a second thought to leaving. But all that could just as easily have happened at home. He needed look no further than Phil Kim for that lesson, and he’d seen as much lawless carnage in Cali-Sur or their work excursions through the Desert Plains Territory to cement that certainty in his head.
Maybe I’m already where I need to be, no matter how miserable it is. He couldn’t believe he was actually gravitating toward staying on the Coit.
If I’m pulled out, how will they get permanent residency? They could get kicked out of the township, and that’s the whole goddamned reason I came to this fucking shithole. This epiphany made his face go hot with a frustration and anger he couldn’t contain.
“Why the hell would you make that kind of deal?” he heard himself snap. He immediately regretted it, and their stunned faces signaled that his comment struck them as bizarre—possibly insane.
“B—because that’s the deal that’s gonna keep you alive,” Victoria bit back.
Paul rubbed his forehead, trying to reconcile his consternation with the fact that his sister was both correct and risking everything to save him. He shifted tack.
“If I’m pulled out,” he sighed, “and the rest of the family is in the Ozarks, how’ll we ever be together?”
. . . After all the suffering we’ve gone through to anchor ourselves.
“Well,” his mother said waveringly, “we may not stay in the Ozarks.”
Victoria’s expression saddened, and she had had enough. She got up and left the room before he could mollify her. His mother stayed, of course, though her expression communicated an anguished mix of disapproval and maternal worry. Paul felt sick to his stomach, just as the red light in the comms booth started blinking, his warning that his call time was running out. Flustered and a bit overwhelmed, he caught only snippets of his mother’s rapid-fire explanation . . . The contract ending soon . . . A possible offer in the Mid-Atlantic Province . . . But Vic on the Track . . . A decision soon . . . A trip east in between storms.
Paul’s head swam with more questions than answers, but the red light flashed more quickly. The call would end, regardless of what he might retain, which he thought was close to nothing. So they exchanged urgent words of affection.
“Tell her I’m sorry, mom,” he said.
God knows what’ll happen next, he lamented, knowing if anything happened to Victoria, he’d never forgive himself.
“Of course, sweetie. She loves you, and she knows how—”
The red light stopped flashing, and the call went dark.
Chapter 32: Baumgarten Frenzy
(Patrick Baumgarten)
Patrick Baumgarten escorted Jasmine Goodwell from his father’s office. They said little, though Patrick felt like there was still a lot to discuss. He regretted the way his father had treated her.
If she wasn’t already in the pocket of the Templetons, she is now. …Not that it really matters in the grand scheme of things.
“Forgive my father’s behavior.” He could taste the futility of his own words. “He’s not—we’re not—really the villains the Templetons make us out to be.”
“Oh, they’ve never said a word about—”
Patrick cut her off with a smirk and raised eyebrow.
“M
y father’s never been more than lukewarm about the whole church thing,” Patrick continued. “There’s no denying that. He believes religion isn’t something to be trifled with.”
“Do you think we’re trifling with religion?”
“Do I think you are? No. You seem sincere enough to me. But there’re more people involved in this than you and your family, and people’s faiths have a way of breaking out of a church’s boundaries and doing things no one expects. That can be dangerous.”
“Forgive me, but I think my father’s teachings are the opposite of dangerous. …That’s the entire point of the church, isn’t it? I wonder if it’s the tactics, not the religion, that determine what comes out of this.”
It is indeed the entire point of the church experiment, Patrick admitted to himself, though there was something in her tone that made him realize that she didn’t trust any of them. Not him or his father, as he suspected. But not the Templetons either. He doubted there was anything he could ever say to convince her otherwise. Thinking back on their first meeting at the Nautilus, he had always seen Jasmine as the trusting—maybe even naïve—one. So unlike her brother, whom he saw as more grounded and cunning. Now it seemed that Alias had warmed, while Jasmine was more jaded and suspicious.
Maybe Dad’s right, he reasoned. His father, the great Senator Baumgarten, was more suspicious of the entire Goodwell family than he would let on in public. He had no illusions about the sweet girl who was the Church’s rep to the Templetons, especially considering her ongoing affair with Carlos Templeton. Only Alias had earned a modicum of his father’s confidence, and even that was being tested with Alias’ ill-timed relief mission in the Desert Plains Territory. His father’s lingering anger over Patrick’s escapade with Alias in Arlington also hadn’t helped, even if that was more Patrick’s fault than Alias’s.
Making things worse for Jasmine was the timing of her request to get some random soldier, Paul Lancaster, exonerated from war-crimes charges. Given the magnitude of the crisis unfolding, it was about the worst idea Patrick could imagine. They were already knee-deep in the aftermath of the massacre in Indonesia, with no idea how it happened, or why. The soldiers implicated were conspicuously made up of Ozarks, Great Lakes, and Mid-Atlantic provincials—the backbone of the Baumgarten family’s alliance. With the regional general there known to be loyal to the Templetons, and the inexplicable disappearance of the comms data at the time of the massacre, the whole thing felt off.
“Well, my dear,” his father had snorted at Jasmine after making her wait a full day to see him, “you can be sure we’re doing all we can to ensure all the soldiers get the just treatment they deserve.” Then, in one of the most belittling tones he’d seen his father dole out, the Senator sniped, “and if the Templetons really take the same interest in the men accused, maybe your sponsor from Oregonia could find his way to call General Yin to find the missing comms data—the ones that would almost certainly exonerate our troops. But I suspect Senator Templeton won’t do more than send a girl across the country to ask a family for something it’s already doing. Is your message from him that he would like us to do it faster?”
Jasmine sat gobsmacked, unable to speak, and Patrick winced at seeing his father so uncharacteristically charmless.
Patrick also knew that all his father’s energy was being spent kissing the Chief Regent’s ass. The massacre had put the Chief Regent in an untenable position with Caliph Abdullah Azzam, who reasoned that either the massacre had been done on purpose and the Chief Regent was lying, or it had indeed been an accident, and the Expeditionary Force was incompetent. Either way, the Chief Regent would have to compensate the Caliph without appearing weak, or the Caliphate would retaliate in some thinly veiled way, and things could escalate.
Since the accused men came from just three provinces, the Chief Regent surely suspected those Senators of conspiring to exact some punishment against the Caliphate. The fact that the Senators didn’t even know their troops had been concentrated so far overseas in the Expeditionary Force this way—itself a serious breach of protocol—didn’t resonate with the Chief Regent, who would likely direct his frustration at Patrick’s father, Senator Crispen, and Senator Griffin.
Senator Baumgarten’s first damage-control mission to the Capital since the massacre, they learned the Chief Regent was leaning toward sending all three senators on a peace mission to the Caliphate—the same tactic that had had disastrous consequences for the emissaries sent to Persia two decades earlier. In the meantime, the Chief Regent ordered the three senators to reinforce the Expeditionary Force, fortify its positions, and prepare for the tit-for-tat retaliation that would surely come—and that had just come with the truck bombing at Wooden Finger. Hundreds of soldiers and tons of matériel were already being surrendered to the Expeditionary Forces in what was really a steep tax to compensate the Chief Regent for his discomfort.
On top of all that, Jasmine had re-approached his father just as a new batch of reports arrived, describing the increasing shipments of drugs and weapons through the PetrolChurch’s facilities. The drugs didn’t bother the Baumgartens nearly as much as the weapons, which were now turning up in the hands of mercenaries, road raiders, militants, marauders, and criminal gangs in almost every corner of the Commonwealth, including the Mid-Atlantic Province. Their own weapons trafficking was beside the point.
Alias had confirmed the shipments of contraband transiting the church sites, and Minister Goodwell had even lodged one of his many complaints about it to the Gang of Seven. But all the Ellies—including Patrick’s father—were smuggling something or other through the church network. Ali Ibn al-Rashid, the interlocutor for the entire church project, could only offer a shrug, as everyone was poised to profit, and the don’t-ask-don’t-tell understanding was the underpinning of the whole thing. Of course, there was no point in raising these concerns directly with Templeton. Whatever he was up to, he’d certainly deny.
The Baumgartens had to assume their enemies knew they were also smuggling though the church network, including arms for their allies in the Ozarks and Great Lakes Provinces. Military support between provinces was banned without express approval from the Chief Regent and the Senate, but it was the only way to bolster the Baumgarten’s partners against the incursions and infiltrations orchestrated by Templeton, Mosino, and their partners. Their shipments were mostly surveillance and comms equipment to make their technology secure and compatible. They took every precaution to cover their tracks and hide their involvement in the shipments, but his father knew not to push too hard on Templeton, lest their own crimes be exposed.
Just as concerning to Patrick’s father were the reports that some of the new church sites—those under the auspices of the Templetons and their allies—were being fortified well beyond what was needed to defend against raiders, mobs, and criminals. Three along the Oregonia border and three more with Mosino on the border between Ozarks Province and the Desert Plains Territory. Each Senator was expected to provide security for any church facilities in their sphere. But the Baumgartens had been hearing about triple reinforced walls, bell towers outfitted with machine gun turrets, and earthworks for defilade. Even one report of anti-air defenses.
Senator Crispen of Ozark’s Province, the Baumgarten’s longest and most enduring ally, was at the end of his rope with the raiding and incursions from the Desert Plains Territory, and he suspected Governor Xavier Mosino was behind most of the troubles. He dared not risk an invasion to knock out Mosino once and for all, though, and he lacked the resources to do it anyway. Crispen was in damage-control mode, trying to contain the unrest that always followed the kind of storms that had just ripped through his province. He also had to figure out how to pay his own share of the Chief’s Regent’s punitive tax for the Expeditionary Force massacre.
Closer to home, coyotes were infiltrating the Mid-Atlantic Province, thousands of foreign migrants in tow. They were arriving with advanced comms jammers, anti-drone missiles, and ship-born cannons. A coastal g
unboat had been destroyed in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor intercepting one throng. Fifteen sailors wounded. Five killed. Before back-up could arrive, the human cargo had dispersed into the swollen ruins of the old warehouses and sky-scrapers, vanishing into the sprawling suburban shanties.
The Baumgartens had lost fifty soldiers, sailors, and private security guards over the past two months—five times the normal rate for the dog days of summer. Their forces were on edge, and the summer heat fueled their propensity to lash out. Nativist pressures and vigilantism were soon to follow.
Then there was the storm barreling down on the Mid-Atlantic Province. The first hurricane of the season had already battered the Southeast Coastal Province and the Gulf Coast Province, sending more refugees north. Seven coastal cities were underwater—again. Those migrants would flood into the Mid-Atlantic Province about the same time the next wave of storms hit the coast. It would be another humanitarian disaster, with masses of homeless, displaced, and thirsty people roaming in the aftermath. Then, most likely, disease—like the outbreak that had killed Patrick’s mother when he was a boy. Followed by the looters, raiders, and possibly separatists trying to capitalize on the chaos.
The longer disorder reigned, the more tempting it would be for the Chief Regent and the Senate to intervene. The supreme charge of the Provincial Senators and Territorial Governors was to maintain order. Failing that charge had been the death knell for more than one Great Family over the years.
His father’s edginess was reinforced by his conservativism. Senator Baumgarten was a firm believer in the universal mantra, “Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.” In fact, if Patrick could pick one thing that underpinned the tensions between him and his father, it would be that Patrick didn’t adequately embrace this mantra, preferring—however subtly or unconsciously—to live in the moment and enjoy the benefits their privileged position had bought them. That, to Patrick’s way of thinking, didn’t make him less capable . . . and not very much less hard working. But the difference was there. It was entrenched, and it eroded his father’s confidence in Patrick as the heir to the Baumgarten empire. That added to his father’s unease when troubles stacked up, as they were now, for Patrick’s brother Joey was still too young to assume the reins.
Fire, Ruin, and Fury (Embers Saga) Page 37