Another Word for Magic

by Mackey Chandler

  “My apologies for my temper and thank you for explaining it,” Jean said.

  While they were speaking the aircar turned from deep glossy red with vivid flames tipped with tinges of yellow and blue to a pale blue on the bottom shaded to almost black on top. It lifted slowly a few meters and then with more authority. When it was a couple of hundred meters overhead it was almost invisible, just a blurry spot in the robin eggs blue sky. Then it was gone.

  Jean lowered his gaze from watching it disappear.

  “If you were trying to impress me, it worked,” Jean assured Lee.

  Jeff and April watched all this with interest but no comment.

  “Are you coming back up with us?” April asked Lee.

  “No, I’ll see that the hotel takes care of these two and I’m done for the evening,” Lee said. “The food was pretty much gone so I bet everybody left by now.”

  “Except Strangelove,” he’ll be waiting to resume guarding me,” Jeff predicted.

  * * *

  “Mr. Oliver, Heather Anderson just called on com and said to inform you she wishes to have a word with you. She asked rather rudely why your com address isn’t in the public directory. She signed off before I could explain why it is the security department policy.”

  “Thank you, Helga. Forward it to my message queue and I’ll pop an answer back to her in a couple of minutes. I’ll give her my private address for her to reply. The lag is long enough a few more minutes won’t matter.”

  “No sir. I mean that she is at the dock and coming to the office to speak with you right now. She didn’t even ask if you were here, just said that she was coming up.”

  He paused. Oliver’s voice wouldn’t betray his concern if you didn’t know him as well as Helga did. She could hear he was rattled.

  “OK, ask John Weaver to come to my office as quickly as possible and let me know when Ms. Anderson arrives,” Tod Oliver said.

  Helga called John and then pulled out her private phone and called Frank Abel.

  “Frank, you should know the Queen of the Moon is on the way up to talk to Tod, and he doesn’t seem thrilled about it. He called in John.”

  “Why would he do that?” Frank asked but the tone was sarcastic.

  “Because he’s terrified of her?” Helga asked back.

  “I doubt John will shoot her for him,” Frank said.

  “Wouldn’t that be embarrassing if he asked and was refused?” Helga said.

  “And I doubt he’d stop her from shooting Tod. His being there is kind of useless. I’m thinking about it. I may just happen to show up needing to talk with Tod too.”

  “You think this is about you?” Helga asked.

  “Oh, for sure. About my notice to the Martians. She needs the Martians for her land deal and for Singh’s land purchase to have any legitimacy.”

  “Show up and I’ll send you right in,” Helga promised.

  “He might still fire you for that,” Frank warned her.

  “Oh, boohoo. You’ll take care of me in a couple of weeks and we can’t let her derail the Martian takeover. Whatever she says in there he’s too spineless to resist her.”

  “OK, but just forget to relock his door when she goes in, not unlock it for me. The log will show it was just a mistake not a deliberate action.”

  “Smart. That will only merit a warning on my record,” Helga said “After all the whole thing is out of the ordinary and upsetting. No wonder I’m distracted.”

  Frank just chuckled, amused, and ended the call.

  When Heather walked in the door there was fire in her eyes and Helga was jolted. Not by her but by the large humorless man behind her wearing two Singh pistols with the grips sticking forward from under his embroidered vest. The hood thrown back on his shoulders indicated he was wearing Lunar armor beneath it all too.

  “Ms. Anderson?” Helga squeaked. She immediately hated how it came out. It betrayed her anxiety when she wanted to project calm.

  “No, the frigging Easter Bunny, fool.”

  “I’ll tell Mr. Oliver you’re here,” Helga said and managed a closer to normal tone.

  “Don’t bother, I’ll tell him myself,” Heather snarled.

  When she slapped the door pad it was locked.

  She stopped for a full two seconds frozen in disbelief at the arrogance of it.

  “He is not playing dominance games with me,” Heather declared. She retreated even with Gunny to be safely out of his way. “Gunny, remove that door for me,” she said pointing if he hadn’t figured out which door she meant.

  “That’s a high-security door,” Gunny pointed out. He visibly had a thought and looked over his shoulder. “That’s interesting. They don’t put her inside a security door,” he said nodding at Helga.

  “Well, if you can’t kick it down, and you didn’t bring breaching charges, burn it.”

  “OK,” Gunny said agreeably and pulled up his hood. “You might want to wait in the corridor, my Lady. There’s going to be quite a bit of molten steel spraying around.”

  “No, no,” Helga said suddenly. “I’ll unlock it,” she said scrambling on the desk for the release.

  “That’s smart,” Gunny said. “No telling how much damage would happen behind it.”

  The was a solid >chunk< of six big lugs retracting.

  Gunny held a forestalling hand up and stepped forward to open the door himself. He drew a Singh pistol, slapped the same pad Heather had and the door retracted to each side. He stabbed the tab to keep it open and stepped in the opening far enough to check both walls each way before he holstered the pistol again.

  “Clear,” he informed Heather.

  Oliver was staring at them with his mouth hanging open.

  Heather squeezed past Gunny and planted herself in one of the two large, comfortable chairs facing Tod Oliver’s desk. Gunny went to the side and stood with his back against an ornamental bookcase, where he could see both of them and the entry.

  “Start explaining what’s going on here you little weasel,” Heather demanded.

  “Is that any way to treat a trusted ally?” Oliver asked. He was projecting anger, but it was stage anger, and his body language was shouting he was scared stiff and it was bluster.

  “Central stopped being your ally when the North Americans made us disperse the habs for survival,” Heather informed him. “Once you couldn’t call an Assembly and have all three habs linking in a common session with a short lag, you were on your own. Each of you now has to see to your own futures without a common location and circumstances. If you haven’t called a new Assembly and started to iron out who you are and what you are going to do yet I have to ask, why? You might gain ally status with me again. Proximity isn’t an absolute requirement. Even distant Derfhome is now our ally. But making war on your neighbor who hasn’t done any aggression towards you isn’t a great start.”

  Franklin Abel appeared at the door, glanced around the room, and seeing Gunny spoke before he entered. He judged it was past pretending he just happened by.

  “I heard that,” Franklin said. “I believe this involves me. I sincerely believe no violence will be necessary. The Martians have no ability to resist any outside force. That’s why you and Singh extorted the majority of their territory from them so easily. I’m just picking up the scraps of territory you and Singh didn’t bother with taking yet. You are just pretending there is still any real Martian government to lend legitimacy to your claims.

  “If I did make war on them that’s certainly nothing you, Singh, and Lewis haven’t done to the Chinese, North America, and everybody who supported the UN in trying to evict you from the heavens. The Assembly of Home never told you to curtail that.”

  “You haven’t waged war on the Martians because your shiny new ship hasn’t been delivered,” Heather said. “If they don’t yield you will. It’s still a coup of aggression if they do so out of fear. So, why did you announce your annexation now, before you have the means to enforce it?” Heather asked.

  John
Weaver belatedly showed up behind Frank and cleared his throat.

  “Excuse me, old man. I should be in there.”

  “Both of you come in,” Oliver insisted.

  Franklin took the other seat uninvited, which said a lot about their relative status. John looked a little lost then assumed a position opposite Gunny at a sort of parade rest.

  “It seemed good to put them on notice and give them some time to come to grips with the reality of the situation. It avoids them taking foolish actions in the heat of the moment like they might do knowing I have a lander,” Frank said.

  “And it is better to do now than waiting a few days until my transport arrives to remove those who want to be repatriated to the Moon or other habs,” Heather said. “If you called your Assembly now, there are quite a few people in residence who would censure you. I expect very few will be coming here when it is uncertain where you’ll end up and you have no superluminal transport of your own. The brightest and wealthiest, who would oppose you if they had to stay, will be leaving in a few days.”

  “We have nobody like Muños, well known and trusted to run the voting,” Oliver said. “I have no political ambitions and no authority to call an Assembly or create any political entity. I’ll keep public order and serve whoever can muster a consensus.”

  “Certainly not you,” Heather agreed. “This one will wait to do that until the Martians have yielded, having no other choice. You have far more newly arrived rich people steeped in Earth Think than Home, used to coups and waiting to see how things shake out. Feeling they can’t abandon their cubic that took the most of their fortunes to acquire. They’ll favor anyone who promises stability.”

  “Why would it matter about the Martians?” Oliver asked.

  “Are you really that dumb?” Heather asked. “Mr. Charisma here has a few hundred people that follow him on your net. That’s not enough to vote themselves into power. Not even enough to intimidate a large majority. Once he has control of Mars, he’ll declare that being neighbors you are naturally a single political entity just like the three habs were when they were close together. I can think of a dozen ways to sweeten the pot to convince enough of your people to accept that. Land grants, promising Mars will be a market to the businesses that suddenly have none. Just the ability to go visit a planet and stand under a sky even if it does take a suit. He may even float some idea about terraforming it that the gullible will buy. That on top of intimidation if they don’t go along. Then, he will have doubled his force of bully boys, because the Martians are a bunch of fanatics who are accustomed to following orders and currying favor with authoritarians. At that point, they will be a good third of your population and he will have performed a reverse annexation, Mars absorbing you.”

  The look Oliver was giving Frank said he was that stupid and had never seen the whole picture before Heather spelled it out for him item by item. Well, he got it now. Unsaid was that Frank, fully in power, would want his own, wholly-owned Head of Security. He figured that part out all by himself.

  “Even allowing that everything you said should come to pass,” Frank said. “If we are all independent, and have no common Assembly, what business is it of yours? Is Gamma not free to pursue our own governance and do what is good for us?”

  “You mean good for you. You are destabilizing what small accommodations we have remaining with the Earth powers,” Heather explained carefully. “They see Spacers as a group and the Martians exist with the approval and support of the Europeans. You will tie Gamma to Mars which was never our intent when we parked you here temporarily. I see that was an error now. If you stay in the Solar System the burden of protecting you is on us. The way you do business you will eventually piss off some Earthies. They will remove you with a gravel storm just like North America tried on us. You can’t protect yourselves.

  “While we are at it, I’ll mention your ingratitude for saving you from being killed and your lies about my motives and goals in doing so. I should put you back by Earth so you can have the joy of them as neighbors again or drop you off at a distant star where you can scrape along to survive until you can feed yourselves and develop a star drive.”

  That idea visibly rattled Oliver and his man John, but Frank didn’t twitch.

  “I think about my words, and I never spoke against you. I do object to Central gaining advantages from our misfortune. If nobody steps up to provide a plan and leadership for Gamma I may have to do so,” Frank said, spreading his hands like the matter was obvious. “You should be happy to have somebody to deal with and not an unorganized rabble who can’t even get it together to call a local assembly. I’m rational. You can deal with me.”

  “I’m not a weak-minded idiot. You will never be happy with Gamma and the Martian Republic. You won’t be satisfied until you have the rest of Mars and by then you will be a threat to anyone wanting to tap other resources of the Solar System like the minor bodies and the moons of the gas giants. Your thoughts were not deep enough to see you can’t divorce what you say about Central from me. I am Central,” Heather said simply.

  “Nevertheless, there’s nothing you can do about it,” Frank insisted. His manner abruptly was no longer supplicating or conciliatory. His voice had a rough contemptuous edge to it. “Are you going to declare war on Gamma? Are you going to punish our entire population by snatching us away in some sort of exile? I don’t think so. It would be political suicide. You’d make all the other habs and not a few worlds scared you would intervene the same way with them any time you fancy it.”

  “True,” Heather said, letting the word hang there. She drew fast as a snake and fired before Frank had time to look surprised. The beam flashed the room bright briefly and caught him high on the chest. The dull >POCK!< of expanding steam tipped him and the entire chair on its back. Behind where her shot penetrated both Frank and the chair-back, a glowing yellow hot spot on the bulkhead quickly faded to a burnt gray scar.

  John bent his arm a little, and locked eyes with Gunny who didn’t so much as blink. He foolishly ignored Heather who could have targeted him with a slight turn of the wrist and slowly relaxed his arm back to the rest position rather than die.

  “Sorry for the damage,” Heather said. “He was right. If I let him go ahead there was no way to stop the progression of events he planned. The price in chaos and conflict down the road would only get worse steadily. But the other habs and planets won’t give a damn about one power-hungry low life being removed from the game today.”

  She got up to leave and stopped at the door.

  “Don’t make me come back to sort things out again,” Heather warned them.

  They were shaken beyond responding but that was fine. It wasn’t a request.

  Helga was clutching her chest sitting shaking all over when they walked past.

  “She was complicit you know,” Gunny observed in the corridor.

  “Yes, she had to have called him in. He got there too fast,” Heather agreed. “It doesn’t matter. The rest of his mob don’t really matter now. They’ll break up into factions without one forceful leader. If anybody stood out as a possible replacement Frank would have removed them by now. He understood the way that works.”

  “As promised, you didn’t call him out,” Gunny said amused. “He had no idea that removing him directly was a possibility.”

  “As Heather, I couldn’t have considered it, but as the Sovereign, I had no other choice.

  I have the obligation of self-preservation for my nation far more than just myself.”

  “Much more so,” Gunny agreed. “I’m sure you saved hundreds if not thousands of lives back there. If you stayed your hand to allow it to become a contest between nations that would have been a very poor and false morality.”

  A few people passing them in the corridor registered shock and shied away or hurried on. Heather couldn’t figure why. Word couldn’t have gotten around that fast and if there had been a general com alert their spex would have told them.

  When they opened t
he hatch to the Remora, Barak was revolted too.

  “What happened to you?” he demanded of his sister.

  Heather was embarrassed to realize she was running on far more adrenaline than she realized. She took off her spex she hadn’t even noticed were speckled and looked down the front of her white tunic that was now pink.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, I was close to a person who exploded.”

  Chapter 20

  Lee left it to the hotel to show the Earthies to their rooms and suggested as it was late that they meet for dinner tomorrow and to talk at the fifteenth hour. When that got a raised eyebrow, she explained Derf ran on a twenty-hour day and suggested they get a local clock program for their pads that would display the time and allow them to set alarms.

  The room was oddly proportioned. The ceilings were high and the doors sized for Derf. The shower stall was big enough to be a water park for a family of four, and a tag on the showerhead said it was the Human version. Why? Water was water, wasn’t it? The toilet had an adapter for humans that covered two-thirds of the opening. A second door turned out to be a connector to the next room, but it was lockable so that didn’t matter. Kamala didn’t explore the small balcony just yet. There was a real Human bed with a mattress and regular sheets and pillows. It would do just fine.

  There was a com desk that seemed modern. Kamala was pleased she could access the local net on her pad without any fuss through the hotel. She didn’t have to use their screen. Wider mobile data service would require a day rate or weekly subscription and the cost made her grimace. She needed a currency conversion program too and alerts so her expenses didn’t get out of hand. The government could afford it but indifference to running up extravagant costs was one of those things that could come back to haunt you years later. Kamala had ambitions of advancing to a level where such things were scrutinized.