Rich Man's War (29 page)

Someone ran down the passageway up ahead. Tanner saw only shadows, but he didn’t need more. He launched himself up from the deck to chase after the fleeing crew, knowing from ugly experience the importance of seizing the initiative and holding it. His priorities fell into place as he reached the edge of the compartment and dove through, ready to hit the deck and fire again as soon as he saw a target.

His leap took him right through the edge of the hologram. Tanner found himself in the dark margins of numerous other holographic training areas. Tiles marked out the edges of each, and in fact he found his left hand and wrist partially within another holographic cube, causing a disruption at the edges.

“
Woah, woah, Malone,” came a voice in his helmet, “what the fuck are you doing?”

Tanner blinked. He took a deep breath, making sure to calm himself before he spoke. His first few tries at judgment shoots after the loss of
St. Jude
had left him shaking. He’d passed a similar test on
Joan of Arc
, but given the restrictions of the cargo bay, it was easier to remember that the people were all holograms.
I’m fine
, he thought after another second.
I’m fine
.

“Malone, get back in here!” demanded another voice.

“Aw, Christ,” muttered Tanner. He holstered his weapon and walked back through the edge of the hologram—now just a flat blue projection—to face the music.

Two uniformed Masters at Arms stood behind a red line on the opposite end of Tanner’s training “cube,” both with holocom screens in front of them listing his performance info, testing parameters or whatever else they looked at while watching someone decide whether or not to shoot at holographic people. Both had a good fifteen to twenty years in service on him. Neither looked terribly pleased.

“What was that?” asked MA2 Divin.

“That was
reflex. Sorry.”

“Reflex?” scowled MA1 Hartford.

“Are you taking this seriously?” pressed Divin.

“Sure. Yes. Of course I am,” Tanner answered sincerely.

“Then what the hell was that?” asked Hartford, pointing at the holographic wall behind Tanner. “You just shot every motherfucker on the deck.”

Tanner hesitated, but couldn’t hold it back: “I didn’t shoot my boarding team leader.”

“You—!” blurted Divin, but then bit off his anger.

Hartford was less restrained. “You mowed down everyone you didn’t know, and then you charged off into the passageway! What the hell were you going to do?”

“I was gonna take engineering,” Tanner admitted.

“…what?”

“Well, I didn’t know how far back the hologram went,” Tanner explained, hoping that part sounded at least a little convincing, “and so I figured the test might still be running, and—“

“You were gonna take the engineering space of a hostile freighter. By yourself.”

“Yes.”

“You thought this whole test layout would take you all the way to a holographic engineering space?” asked
Divin.

“Seems kind of silly now, yeah.
” Tanner scratched the back of his neck.

“Okay, wh
atever, forget that,” Hartford decided with a wave of his hands. “You planned on taking engineering all by yourself? Without calling for any back-up at all?”

“That was on my mind, yes,” Tanner said, “I just hadn’t spoken yet. But I can’t wait on that when the suspect ship might take off.” He paused. “It’s happened to me before.”

Divin’s mouth hung open for a moment, but it closed with a snap as he turned to share a quick look with his fellow instructor. The other MA raised both hands in the air as if to relinquish the situation, turned around and stalked out.

“Malone,” said
Divin, “I’m not used to saying this, but I think we’re gonna have to dial you back a bit. I’m putting you back at the end of the line tonight. Head out into the waiting room and send in whoever is next. In the meantime, you open up your holocom, call up an incident report form and fill it out the best of your ability to explain all this like it was real. I want attention to detail. I want an explanation of your decision to escalate violence of action. I want descriptions of the suspects. All of it. From memory. Did you see anything that gave you hints that this was about to turn bad? Write it down. Doesn’t matter if it would be admissible in court or not, write it down. Got me?”

“Aye, aye,” Tanner nodded. He took off his gun belt and handed it to
Divin as he passed, who accepted it without another word.

Out in the hallway, Tanner found Hartford coming back. Tanner stopped, unsure whether the older man would say anything. Instead, Hartford slowed long enough to pat Tanner on the shoulder and then continued on his way.

The waiting room held several rows of chairs, more than enough to accommodate Tanner’s whole class. About half of his fellow MA students were in other training spaces within the firing range. That left fifteen or so in the room, most of them either playing with this or that on their holocoms or talking to pass the time. “Hey, whoever’s next,” Tanner spoke up, jerking his thumb over his shoulder, “Hartford and Divin are ready. Compartment Four.”

A young woman rose and threw Tanner a concerned glance. “You’re done already? You just went in there ten minutes ago.”

Tanner shook his head. “They said to send in the next person.” He looked for a chair in a relatively empty corner as his classmate went on her way.

“What happened?” asked one student.

“Did you wash out?” asked another.

“No, I don’t think so,” Tanner frowned as he called up the reports screen from his holocom. “I’m probably not supposed to say anything. They told me to put myself back at the end of the rotation and write up a report on the last test.”

“Reports? Holy shit, they want us to do reports on this, too?”

“God, how many reports are we supposed to do?”

“They didn’t tell me to write anything up! You think that means I failed?”

Tanner
used the report as an excuse to turn his back on his classmates. In truth, he wondered if perhaps he should go hide in the bathroom while he calmed down. He’d managed to keep his hands from shaking this far. Isolated from the conversation, Tanner took in several deep breaths, leaned forward and rubbed his eyes. He breathed some more. He could still feel his blood pumping. His shoulders remained tense. Yet he felt it slowly drain—thankfully.

The edge came off of his
fight-or-flight reaction as soon as he’d run out of the hologram on the testing floor. Tanner considered that a good sign. In the first months after
St. Jude
, he had to focus on things like the lights in the ceiling and the view out the nearest window to calm himself.

T
herapy wasn’t always this effective. He wondered how veterans in earlier times ever managed.

Tanner took another long, shaking breath before he actually focused on the screen in front of him. It had been a long day already, mixing classroom instruction with role-playing scenarios, PT and a pop quiz on evidence rules. Yesterday had been much the same, and all the days before, though today was the first
day of judgment shoot training rather than the much more structured marksmanship training on the range.

The instructors saved this for the evening hours on purpose. They wanted the students to be a little tired and stressed. No one could expect to make all their shoot-or-don’t-shoot decisions early on a shift, just after breakfast and while they were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, whatever that meant. At first, Tanner wondered how much combat and defense training the school could pack in given all the other stuff on the agenda. Then he arrived and discovered that combat classes simply weren’t included on the schedule, but they were very much part of MA training.

As the instructors said over and over, the life of a junior MA was mostly that of a security guard… but if they had to deal with a dangerous suspect, chances were that suspect would be a combat-trained Archangel crewman or marine. An MA didn’t just have to train to take down the enemy; he had to be ready to take down one of his own.

* * *

“Rumors are already swirling that NorthStar is having trouble finding enough cash to cover its weekly obligations. Company officials have laughed off these rumors, calling them clumsy propaganda at best. Yet some major shareholders complain that detailed answers have not been forthcoming since peacekeeping operations in Scheherazade placed a new strain on the company’s security fleet. Many observers suggest that NorthStar may face the same weaknesses shown by CDC in recent months.”

--“Weekly Rundown,” Union Business Review, October 2276

“Seems like a crime to come all this way and not have any time to enjoy the scenery,” Andrea muttered. “Almost two weeks in transit and this is as close as we get.”

Men and women in suits and a handful of others in dress uniforms strode through the ornate halls, all of them presumably on important business. Through the arcing windows beyond them, Andrea could see the blue skies and white clouds of Earth looming above the station. Africa slowly passed by, lit and warmed by the sun, reminding her of holiday trips during her years at Harvard.

The planet and its people had survived all of the growing pains from the first uses of tools to spaceflight. Despite all of humanity’s self-inflicted wounds, from slavery to genocide to the environmental damage that took such a toll while the reach of humanity barely stretched out beyond the orbit of its moon, the race survived.

Yet even during the Expansion Wars, when humanity struggled fiercely against the Krokinthian and Nyuyinaro races for its place amongst the stars, those same aliens maintained all along that humanity was its own worst enemy.

Andrea couldn’t argue with that. She never saw how anyone with a shred of objectivity could argue with it. And here she stood, wondering if she was part of another self-inflicted wound.

“Never cared for it,” sniffed Abdul Shadid. Archangel’s finance minister stood beside Andrea, looking up only because she drew his attention to the
homeworld looming above. “I’ve been here a few times, but I’ve always been happy to go home.”

“Really?” Andrea replied. Like Andrea, Shadid looked several decades younger than his actual age. In truth, he had a couple of decades on her. “All that history? All the places to go? I’d have thought you would be all about this.”

“The history and culture are great, but I don’t care for the day-to-day reality up there. I was as excited as anyone for the Hajj, and it was a worthwhile experience, but everything else I found? Too depressing. I felt like everyone on Earth was either too poor to leave, too rich to care about anyone else’s problems, or too religious to look beyond the ground at their feet.”

“Speaking of too rich to care,” broke in Theresa Cotton, her voice deliberately low. Standing just behind the pair, she drew their attention to the suited gentleman approaching their small clutch of staff. “Looks like
it’s showtime. Stick to the plan,” she reminded her colleagues.

Andrea nodded. As foreign minister, Theresa technically held the senior position and therefore led the delegation, but the matters at hand fell more toward Abdul’s role. As the junior partner on this mission, all Andrea had to do was follow their lead. She did exactly that in a literal sense as they were ushered into a well-appointed conference room, where they found both their Union Assembly hosts and high-level executives and negotiators from NorthStar, Lai
Wa, CDC and others waiting for them.

“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us,” said Terrence Jackson from the head of the table. The Vice-chairperson of the Union Assembly presented a genuinely welcoming fa
ce, gesturing to open seats. He and the other Assembly representatives—most of the rest standing near chairs somewhat removed from the table, on hand in case they were needed—gave off a more congenial mood than the stone-faced corporate suits opposite Archangel’s side of the table. That much shocked no one, of course. The economic ripples of the dispute reached far beyond the belligerent parties. The Union wanted desperately to smooth all of this over.

So did the corporations, of course, but Andrea knew that urge came from a very different
mindset.

Everyone
sat. Jackson went through perfunctory introductions, naming those present as if anyone didn’t already know all the names and faces at the table. “Mr. Lung-Wei here represents Lai Wa, and Mr. Covington leads our CDC delegation,” Jackson explained. Andrea tuned out the rest of it while her eyes scanned the group. She felt all too familiar by now with Maria Pedroso, NorthStar’s head of Risk Management, and their Chief Administrative Officer, Jon Weir.

As it turned out, Weir either wasn’t as familiar with everyone at the table or
he felt like playing coy. He tilted his head as Jackson finished his round of introductions with Andrea. “That seems a little surprising,” he said, flashing a smile that might have been charming in other circumstances. “I wouldn’t expect a press secretary to be part of this.”

Andrea nodded slightly. “I can see how the title might give that impression, Mr. Weir. However, I’m a senior policy advisor to President Aguirre, I have some background in macroeconomics and I’ve served two terms in the Archangel Senate.” She offered a tight-lipped smile and added, “I also bake when the mood strikes me.”