Prison Planet (THE RIM CONFEDERACY Book 3) (2 page)

“Affirmative, Sir. I have had my last drink.”

“Save it, Captain, as I doubt that. But one year from today, you will be standing right there in front of me again a cold sober captain, or you will be a bum on some street on some planet ... but never a Navy man again! See my adjutant. Dismissed!”

Tanner whirled in a perfect about-face and left the admiral’s office in quickstep. Outside he accepted the large package of the envelope of orders. He took the stairs down to the large Navy Hall lobby two at a time, crossed the lobby as quickly as he could, and made his way out front to the Jeep that was awaiting him.

His driver raised an eyebrow, and all Tanner said was “back to the
Marwick
,” and they pulled away quickly.

Minutes later, they pulled up at the boarding escalator and slowed down for only a minute when they came upon a new Ensign being vetted by the landing officer in front of them.

“Sir, Ensign Radisson seeking permission to come aboard, papers are here,” the young fresh graduate of the Navy Academy standing at attention said. He glanced sideways at his new captain and tried catching his eye, but Tanner ignored him, brushed by him, and went up the moving stairs and into the ship.

“Permission to come aboard, granted, Ensign. See Lieutenant Sutherland on Deck One, and he’ll see to quarters and uniforms too. Welcome, Ensign ... no idea where we’re off to, but we’ll all soon know,” Lieutenant Paterson said and clapped the new ship’s officer on the back as he helped him board the stairs.

#

Billy Abrahamson, the head foreman on the day shift, threw his spanner onto the floor and simply said, “Shit.”

Around him, the balance of the five-man crew stopped and looked at each other sideways before Jerry, the lead hand, spoke up.

“Billy, what’s up? We’re making headway here, right?” he said as he swept his hand across the turbine on the bench. It was massive, but in this state, all taken down, it was more a very specially sorted series of parts and cogs and wheels and gears. Normally hooked up to the superheated steam, it ran at more than 16,000 revolutions per minute, but right now it lay inert and in pieces on the repair bench. With more than forty of these turbines running in parallel series using the volcano that was in fact the creator of the island millions of years ago, it powered the whole planet and the energy-hungry space elevator too.

Jerry looked over and cocked his head to one side as if to ask Billy for comment.

“Yeah, Jerry, but I am so pissed off at the head honchos here that we gotta fix this number seven turbine one more time ... when we all know it’s past its best-before-date. How is that a way to run this VolPower station?” he griped as he shook his head and bent over to pick up the spanner.

It was true that for some reason the number seven turbine usually went offline with alarms about once a week now, and no one seemed to be able to figure out why, but that was of no importance to the repair crews. They simply had to take the time to do the diagnostics and then replace the parts. For number seven, as usual, it was the rotor blade assembly and its connection where the rear seal expander spring looked again like it was made out of confetti as it had been eaten by the turbine nozzle assembly. Same as last time.

“If they’d send out some kind of engineer who could figure out what causes these parts to go fubar, we’d be much better off. Hey, anyone know when the next load of parts arrives anyways?” he finished with a look at his crew.

“Scuttlebutt says it’s on the next RIM Navy ship due to take over from the
RN Gunnar
—dunno who it is though. But supposedly, our parts are on that ship ... least that’s what my contact says,” Jerry said, which immediately got the whole crew chuckling at that.

“You mean Max Island Penitentiary Captain Phyllis Terrance?” someone offered, and the whole group laughed loudly as Jerry’s wife had just been identified.

“Not true,” Jerry said, “that is not my contact—besides that kinda info is probably classified ...” he finished off and stared at the whole crew who didn’t stop laughing but now laughed even louder.

“Knock it off,” Billy said mildly, “and back to that dang expander spring assembly ...” he sighed and turned to the bench once more.

As the crew worked again on the turbine assembly and slowly disassembled the chewed-up parts around them in the repair shop, another team was also at work on a set of relay switches, performing normal replacement of the electronic leads and positrons.

Outside the VolPower repair shop lay the huge berms that ran the length of the tunnel down into the volcano with its giant cables glistening in the sunlight. Connecting to the power grid on the other side of the repair shop, they pushed the power generated by the huge force-field-protected styluses that were inserted more than a mile deep in the volcano. Volcanoes generated heat, which superheated the water to turn into steam, and the steam powered the turbines in the power plant. From the plant, there were huge conduits that carried the outbound power cables first to the prison, then the Pod Plant for all its manufacturing, and finally across the bridge over to the sub-station in Andros beside the landing port and stadium. The conduits carried more than enough power to run all of Andros and Max Island and had never been much of a problem in and of themselves. Power went were you sent it, Billy thought, and that's just the way things worked.

Once a live volcano, it had lain dormant for what was believed to have been more than a hundred thousand years as it rose from the bottom of the sea on the continental shelf. Around it grew the place now called Max Island, a small roughly circular landmass less than three miles in diameter, which held the large domed penitentiary with almost 2,000 maximum security convicts.

The only other facility on the island, besides the penitentiary and the VolPower Plant, was the EL Pod plant where the convicts were the labor force who built the pods used on Halberd and sold throughout the RIM. It was hard work but it kept the felons busy and working and kept the costs of the pods low enough for the plant to be successful. Max Island was a hub where power was used to both house criminals and build pods ... ends that obviously justified the means.

#

The gavel pounded over and over. The chaos didn’t stop even though Chairman Gramsci had three gavels in three of his hands, and he smacked the sound blocks on the Council table as hard as he could.

Tossing the gavels in front of him, he leaned back in his chair and watched the furor around him. The Baroness was standing up at her station well around the U-shaped Council table, leaning on one hand, as she pointed at his Vice Chairman seated beside him and shouted “shame” over and over. Sharia al Dotsa, the Caliph of Neria, was the RIM Council member who was receiving that abuse, but he too was standing and waving his arms as he said over and over, “Not going to happen, Baroness—not going to happen!”

Halfway across the table, the Duke of d’Avigdor was arguing with the Faraway member who was trying once again to call for a Point of Order, and the Leudi representative had his neck snake coiled around his head as it hissed at them all.

Not to be outdone, the DenKoss contingent was doing some kind of a stereo clicking through their gills as they argued with all of the members near their wet seating, and the Ttseens barked so loudly that they sounded like a pack of wolves.

The Chairman let it go on for a full minute more and then began to bang the three gavels once more, making the smacks on the sound blocks into a pattern ... and soon it quieted the Council members down. With another hand, he quickly motioned for them to all be re-seated, and with his last two hands, he picked up the Agenda and waited for full quiet.

“Council members, please ... remember that we represent our citizens of the RIM, more than one hundred billion souls, and we have sworn to work together to manage our affairs. Manage being the active word in that sentence, members ... and I believe that we were ah, interrupted at the point that the Vice Chair was making, so let’s resume right there, shall we? But with some decorum, please,” he said and held up a hand to quiet the Baroness who was starting to rise again.

She sank back down into her chair. Tossing her long blonde hair back behind her shoulders, her face was locked into a grimace that anyone would call unattractive even though she was normally a stunning woman. Stunning looking but sly, he thought and turned to his side to hear the speaker resume.

“Chairman, yes, thank you,” the Vice Chairman said and nodded to the alien on his left, “I believe I was trying to make the motion that we should simply wait for the planet Throth to fully assimilate itself within the Barony—before we entertain any reassessment of our current Council standings.”

Behind him, in the first row of staff seats, Admiral McQueen nodded to himself and wondered why it had taken so long for this to come to a head. Throth had been settled by the Ikarians during the past six months or so, having accepted the world for their race as a gift from the Barony. And now the Baroness had put forward the request for the RIM Council staff to reassess their realm with ten worlds—Throth was going to be a new Barony world, no question, but at this point, it was too early to assume that. Of course, if the reassessment was authorized by the Council, then that would put the Barony as the second largest realm in the Confederacy—bigger than the current number two, the Caliphate of Neria, hence the move by the Vice Chair to belay that reassessment.

“Chair recognizes the member from the Duchy of d’Avigdor, the Duke,” the Chairman said.

The Duke rose, which quieted the table, and the hands seeking recognition to speak next all fell away.

“I think that, as many here too must reason, the fact is that the Barony will have the respect of us all here on the RIM for the gift of Throth to the Ikarians. And as they have been more than generous, we would like to add our support for their reassessment request. But as we too feel as do others here …” he said, as many at the Council table nodded and tapped the table to show agreement “that we should allow the normal year-long probationary time period for the Ikarians to request—as all new planets must of any realm—to join the Barony. This is the way, in our opinion, to handle this issue,” he said as he took his seat to a silent room. Well respected here on the RIM, the Duke was, as usual, presenting the best way to handle this situation, and all present knew it. His face was mature yet only approaching middle age, and his ability to sail through the Council meetings with reason was well received.

Nodding to the Baroness, the Chairman ignored all the others present, and she rose to speak.

She straightened her blouse and the heavy gold necklace around her neck and looked down at the papers in front of her, the Admiral noted, and he wondered what she would have to say in light of the new support for the delay by the Duchy.

“Chairman Gramsci, on behalf of the Barony, I will, of course, accept the ruling of this RIM Council—but I feel I do need to remind you all that Throth was, and is, a member world of the Barony, even though it was unsettled. The Ikarians, yes, have accepted our offer of the planet as their new home. We work with them each and every day in helping them get acclimatized and able to get used to planet living. One small point too, that so many RIM citizens seldom remember, is that in the Ikarian group of emigrants, more than 9,000 of them are children ... young children who are alone ... no parents or siblings to look after them,” she said solemnly.

This quieted the room totally as the Council members dwelt on that for a while but the Baroness went on.

“We have helped the less than 1,000 Ikarian adults with that set of tasks, and we feel as they do that the future of the whole Ikarian race will be a definite boon to both the Barony and to the Confederacy too. All we ask is to hurry the process so that these children will have a home that is a part of something other than a Sleeper ship. That is what we ask for today.”

Great argument, the admiral thought, but not enough.

“Chief of Staff,” the Chairman said, “I call for a vote—and I think this time we should merely stand to indicate our choice. All those in favor of doing an immediate reassessment of our member realms standings, which would mean increasing the Barony up to ten planets, please stand…”

Of the forty member realms in the room, only one member stood, the Baroness who looked straight ahead for a moment and then left and right at the other members. When not even one stood, she grimaced and then sat quietly in her chair.

“Chief, please record the unanimous nay vote in the minutes. Moving along, we have a judicial report from the Caliph of Neria, our Vice Chair. Sharia?” he said, and the man beside him rose to speak again.

“Chairman and members, I rise today to present the final judicial report on the trial of the Caliph of Olbia, Nusayr al-Rashid who in fact, yes, is a cousin of my own. As you all know, he was charged and indicted with the crimes of Treason, and his trial was almost a month long. Suffice it to say, he and his cabinet group were all found guilty and are in transport as I speak to Halberd, the RIM prison planet, where he will serve out his sentence of twenty-five years for his crimes. As you were all made aware of the depth of this treason, his attempt to secede Olbia away from the Caliphate realm and form his own member planet of the RIM Confederacy, I do not have to fill you in. As you may imagine, this has strained relationships among we Nerian Royals as this young man was a member of our family ... and now he will do his time on Halberd,” the Vice Chair finished and sat heavily into his chair.

“The bad ideas of youth,” the Chairman said and slapped a gavel down on one of the blocks in front of him.

“We will take a half-hour break and then resume with the Faraway-Leudi trade dispute item. But please, only thirty minutes, members,” he said, and the room slowly emptied.

The Baroness came over to the Chairman and spoke directly to him in a quiet voice.

“There is still the matter of the Ikarian virus, Chairman—something at this point we do not know anything about—have you as yet thought about that and what the import of such a longevity virus like this would do to the RIM Confederacy? Imagine offering up double or triple your life expectancy by swallowing a pill ...”