Temporary Duty (82 page)

At the end of the form-filling and information-sorting his total tax obligation had come to $178,714,231.17; they’d offered to strike the seventeen cents, making it come out in round dollars, but Peters refused out of whimsy. Penalties, interest, and a whopping fine had brought the total as of the arbitrarily selected cutoff date of 1 June 2056 to a trifle under a billion dollars–$982,211,704.84, to be exact. Six and a half percent interest added over five million dollars a month, almost two hundred thousand a day. Five bucks a breath, more or less. The cost of living was outrageous these days. At that point Briggs had entered the picture, and one of the first things the lawyer had accomplished was to get the continuing interest accrual stopped.

The IRS had offered to accept a handwritten order of payment to be delivered to
Llapaaloapalla
, in
ornh
at one to the dollar, exactly as he and Todd had predicted. Peters had cheerfully written it out, in English and decimal numbers, and gotten transferred to a high-class prison with windows and grass outside when he handed it over. Two weeks later he’d been brought here and tossed into solitary for ten days. He knew why, too: he could just imagine Prethuvenigis’s face when the paper had crossed his desk.

"I don’t see a check," he told Briggs. "That’s the only thing I know of that’ll get me out of here."

The lawyer smiled again, and Peters drew back. He hadn’t realized that a pudgy, blond, balding guy in a sharp suit could look so feral. "Well, not
quite
the only thing," Briggs said, his tone tense with an overlay of whimsy.

Peters was trying to formulate an answer when the door behind Briggs opened briskly and Dzheenis strode through, carrying one of the bent-level bür weapons and wearing a bright shield on his left breast.
Must have stuck the pin in the pocket slit
, Peters thought irrelevantly, as the guards on Briggs’s side brought weapons to bear and the two by him, whom he’d ignored as usual, aimed pistols at his head. The damnedest assortment followed the Grallt: a pair of bür, also with shiny badges; two Marines with M27 sliver guns; a couple of ferassi in
Trader 1049
livery, with badges; and Prethuvenigis’s goons, again with shiny shields. There seemed to be more outside, but the room was only so big.

"U. S. Marshals, by direct Presidential appointment," Dzheenis said, and tapped the badge. "Put down your weapons. You behind the glass, release that man and step aside." The two guards did no such thing. One of them grabbed Peters’s collar preparatory to dragging him off, and the two bür demonstrated what the armor glass was worth to Maker weapons.

Briggs had ducked below the counter. Peters did the same, wiping his face. Glass cylinders five millimeters in diameter, fifteen centimeters long, and moving at several Mach made for really messy head shots. More guards ran up the corridor from the cell block, and one of the bür methodically picked them off as they rounded the corner. He got three before the rest figured out that that wasn’t the way to do it. Then the world started getting fuzzy and accelerating on odd vectors.

Peters woke strapped to a gurney with an oxygen mask on his face, being carried down a corridor with lots of fresh scars on the walls. It took a bit for him to recognize the man walking alongside, and longer to credit it. "Good, you’re awake," said Dr. Steward. "I already injected the antagonist, you’ll be fine in a minute." He brandished a small handweapon, either the one Peters and Todd had taken from the nekrit or one just like it. "Audit this, motherfuckers!" he shouted derisively, and several people cheered.

Being carried up stairs on a stretcher isn’t pleasant, but the two bearers did a good job. After two flights they came out at street level, on a cold, blustery day with mist swirling around. Wherever they were it was the middle of town, concrete and stone and glass in various configurations. "Do you know where you are?" Steward asked. "IRS headquarters in downtown DC. Some changes are being made." He looked down, and his face changed. «Somebody get this man a couple of blankets,» he snapped in fair Trade. «He doesn’t have a suit.» A blanket arrived immediately, and the doctor looked on benignly as Peters was wrapped. "I work for you now," he told the bewildered ex-sailor. "My daddy was a science fiction publisher. I always wanted to go to space, so I jumped on Dzheenis’s offer, but I’d have sold my soul for this opportunity."

"Bonus time," Peters mumbled weakly, and Steward grinned like a thief.

The bearers popped one set of wheels out on the gurney and set Peters at an angle against a wall so he could see. A bür smallship took up a good part of the street, and two men in sharp suits were maneuvering a ladder into place. A third man, also nicely dressed, climbed the ladder and reached behind to help a woman. Hatches popped, and Marines, bür, and more Secret Service people climbed out in no discernible order, to take up suspicious watches all around. The well-dressed man held up a bullhorn and said into it, "I’m Gene Hansen." The crowd didn’t go wild, but there were cheers, along with enough weapons held aloft to give the most militant pause.

When relative quiet was restored Hansen continued: "Pursuant to Executive Order nine-oh-one-three, which I just signed an hour ago, no employee or contractor of the Internal Revenue Service is authorized to carry a weapon as defined in the Peaceful Streets Act of 2017." Nail files and up, that meant. "If you are an IRS employee and are carrying a weapon, go immediately to the nearest U.S. Marine and surrender it. If you aren’t sure of the definition, be conservative. Carrying a weapon in violation of this order is a felony, and peace officers are authorized to shoot to kill if such a violation is detected."

Another cheer, followed by stirs and eddies in the crowd accompanied by a few clinks and clanks. "The rest of it is too complicated to go into here," Hansen continued, "but the end of it is, you tax collectors work for the people of America, not the other way around, and if I have to call in help from the farthest star to insure that, well, I’m just grateful that such friends exist." More cheers went up.

"Dr. Steward, may I borrow that handweapon?" Peters asked calmly. The President was still talking, but Peters was sure he’d seen the fellow in the blue anorak before.

"Certainly. It’s yours anyway. Let me loosen the straps so you can get your arm out." Steward suited action to the words, leaning across Peters to do so.

Steward didn’t like to be called "Doc." "Thanks, Doctor," Peters told him. He took the weapon and held it below the blanket, and the doctor started to straighten up and turn. "What the–"

Blue-anorak had spun around and produced a revolver. He got off one shot, but his mistake was to take the time to stretch his arm at full extension before firing. Peters was thumbing the button, and kept it up until somebody else took a hand. The bür weapons were too much in this situation, but M27 sliver guns were specifically designed for close-quarters urban combat. The man’s chest exploded in gore before he’d begun to fall from Peters’s shots. A Marine and a bür smiled and nodded at one another.

"Medic!" somebody shouted, but this wasn’t the sort of crowd to run screaming in terror. Marines clustered around the downed man, and a couple of other people–Grallt, in this case–were clutching wounds in testimony that even sliver rifles were a bit much some ways.

"What the Hell was that all about?" Steward wanted to know.

Peters let the handweapon fall to clatter on the concrete. "Look for his ID," he suggested. "Betcha it says ‘Styles.’"

"Are you all right?"

Peters stretched his lips in a strained mockery of a grin. "No. It don’t hurt, though. Must be the sleepygas." Then he passed out again.

* * *

The suite at the Willard had been repaired, but if you looked closely at the window frames you could still see traces of the events of a year ago. Peters leaned back in his chair, careful not to stretch the clips and stitches under his left arm, and looked at the scene with pride approaching hubris and satisfaction well past the ‘smug’ point.

Alper was on the floor, helping little Emmett with the brightly colored toys scattered around; the boy had already tried most of them and rejected them as inedible. Ander was asleep in one of the wingback chairs, with Eve a blanket-swaddled lump in her arms. Lisi was suckling baby Thu in the other wingback, and Dzheenis was looming over her and his son with the same sort of expression Peters knew was on his own face. Khurs was half-prone on the couch, too swollen to more than waddle; her mate, a
zerkre
called Denis, was in the kitchen making her a peanut butter and
zishis
sandwich. Peters had just met him. He seemed a decent sort. He’d better be.

"We ain’t found you a girl friend yet," he said to Steward, who was sitting in the fourth wingback around the coffee table sipping something with ice in it.

"It’s being worked on," the doctor replied. "She works across the road there." He jerked his thumb at the building behind, which was the White House. "First I need to find out whether it’s me or outer space she wants, then I’ll introduce her to this lot and see if she runs screaming. I don’t think she will." He swirled his drink and sipped.

Peters chuckled. "Good enough. Like I told Dzheenis a bit ago, a
pa’ol
can grow by recruitin’ as well as by natural increase."

"Seems to me you’ve got a nice balance of both here."

There was a knock on the door, and Dzheenis, the only one mobile and unencumbered, went to answer it. He held a low-voiced colloquy with whoever had come, then pushed the panel wide, turned, and announced, "Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States of America."

"Don’t get up, and if anybody starts that damn music I’ll sing," Hansen threatened as he came in. "George, it’s a small room and ought to be pretty safe. Why don’t you and Brenda stay, and the rest wait outside?"

"We can do that, Mr. President," the Secret Service agent said.

"Good, thank you. I told you not to get up," Hansen said to Steward, who had risen despite admonitions.

"I can move and my
de’pa’olze
can’t, not easily anyway. Won’t you sit down, Mr. President?"

"Thank you."

The little boy focused on the new visitor, got to his feet, and took two steps before falling on his face. Alper snatched him up, muffled the screams, smiled "sorry" at the President, and took him to the bedroom.

"My son," Peters said. "Named for my daddy. Alper wanted to make it John Junior, but I didn’t think that was a good idea."

"Seems like a fine boy," Hansen said. "Were those his first steps?"

"I reckon so." Peters was grinning.

"Mr. President, you’re reputed to sip a Tom Collins now and again," Steward commented, and offered a glass. "Here’s something you might like from a star too far away to see."

Hansen took the glass and sipped. "Now that’s first class," he said, echoing Prethuvenigis. "What’s it called?"

"Thivid," Peters told him. "The n’saith make it from berries, and a tea that’s real good from the leaves of the same plant. Dzheenis, I’d take it kindly if you’d see to it Gene, here, gets a quarter-square of bottles of thivid to remember us by."

"At your command,
de’pa’olze
."

The Secret Service agents’ faces had gone stiff. Hansen looked up at them, then at a grinning Steward. He smiled slightly, sipped his drink, and said, "I take it you’ve decided to go with the Head of State option."

Peters frowned. "I can’t see as I’ve got much choice."

"No, I don’t think you do," Hansen agreed.

"No," Dzheenis put in. "My
de’pa’olze
has been the catalyst for changes that are still propagating across the Web like waves from a dropped stone. Mr. President, I’m sure you get tired of hearing about stars you can’t see, but even we don’t know how far the influence reaches. One small thing:
Trader 1049
came when asked, and the ferassi have been cooperating with free Grallt, bür, and humans. Nothing like that has ever happened before, and John Peters set in motion the train of events that led to it."

"Interesting times," the President observed. "Not the best time for humans to get mixed up in it."

"But you are," Dzheenis said. "If ever there were Makers of radios and associated technology they have failed or been lost, and as for computers–well, Mr. President, the human species will be rich soon if you do it right, and that will mean you’ll be mixed up with it, as you say, as thoroughly as anybody."

"The United States hasn’t seen much good out of it," Hansen objected.

"That ain’t our fault," Peters observed.

"No, it isn’t," Dzheenis confirmed. "Warnocki’s shipyard is in Brazil because he couldn’t get permits; he already has customers. Captain Collins’s anti-pirate fleet operates under Grallt law and funding because the United States wouldn’t license it; we just heard of their first kill. We never released the funds SPADET 1 earned, because we found out right away that they’d just get taken away from the sailors. Many of them are back with us, now, with modest wealth and great demand for their services, because you couldn’t wait for them to spend the money, you had to grab it at gunpoint."

"I’ve heard all that," Hansen growled. "I believe it. Hell, I’ve said it often enough, that’s how I got elected in the first place. But dammit, there has to be some organization, otherwise it all falls apart."

Peters snorted. "Somebody’s got to drive. It don’t mean the driver gets the side meat an’ ever’body else gets hoof and horns."

Hansen stared into space. "That’s not a principle very many people in this town will be anxious to apply."

"No, and that’s why I gotta do this." Peters looked Hansen in the eye. "I done took the Pledge of Allegiance more times than I can count, with and without God in it. I’m still proud to have been an American, but now I gotta withdraw that pledge."

"I as well," Steward put in. "I have a new allegiance."

"Voluntarily, before witnesses. That’s all it takes," Hansen observed. "A toast to the new order." They all sipped, and Hansen went on, "Leaves me with a tough job, though."