The Lotus Eaters (32 page)

Not bad
, Marguerite thought.
Sure, he's got a little fear in his own voice. If it were completely absent that would scare me—or any sensible member of the crew—more, since that would mean he was an idiot. Not bad.

* * *

"I'm sorry, Captain," the simulated crewwoman said. Subtle hints—the drape of shoulders, the angle of heads, and the few expressions he could see—told Richard he'd said approximately the right thing.

" 'Options,' I said." Richard paused for a moment and then added, "Think before you give them to me. In the interim, sound Red Alert, General Quarters, and Don Suits."

A siren wailed through the notional ship. Lights flashed. The simulacra on the bridge began reaching into nearby compartments and pulling on their emergency suits. These were unarmored but would at least keep air in. The computer could not simulate Richard putting on a suit, but, after a short period of time, changed his image to show the outlines of a clear facemask even while the VR suit pressurized in places to simulate the feel of a emergency suit.

The chair shuddered once again, then began to spin. Even though the image painted on Richard's eyes stayed approximately the same, barring only that several crewmembers who were still unstrapped while putting on their suits were thrown violently across the bridge, the combination of spin and unchanging view rekindled his nausea.

Fuck
. "Where was that?" he demanded.

"We've lost the mast, sir, though the sail's hanging on by the stays! Medical team to the bridge!"

There was another shudder in the chair, followed by spinning in the vertical plane.

"Another strike amidships, Captain!

How many
more
of these
? Richard wondered. That sparked another thought.

"Activate the alternative bridge. XO to the alternate bridge. XO to the alternate bridge."

"I've got some options for you, Captain," Operations said. "But they're not good options."

Life support announced, "Captain, that last strike missed Reactor Number Two, but it's taken out the cooling system."

"Captain, we've just rotated into the remains of the mast."

"Captain, sick bay has taken a hit."

"Captain, inspection shows the keel tube is bent and rotation of exterior decks must halt. She's ripping herself apart, Skipper."

At that the gimbaled chair began a purely random rotation, even as the speakers in the helmet began to blare out the sounds of screeching metal and composites, being torn apart.

"Option One, skipper, is to . . ."

* * *

Disasters were coming at him fast and furious now, with still new disasters springing up from old ones. Was there an urgent repair that needed to be made? Was one of the Damage Control teams annihilated?
Why, oh why, didn't I have them suit up after the first hit?
Reactor overheating?
I should have ordered one of them shut down to reduce the chances of a critical hit.
Worse, some of his regrets were mutually exclusive or contradictory. Power outages?
Thank the elder gods I kept both reactors going; what if I'd shut down Number One?

Richard was simply too busy at the moment to suspect the truth, that the simulation program was
designed
to keep him behind the command power curve, to throw him decisions and disasters faster than he could keep up with them, however quickly and even however wisely he might have decided, to do so the faster, the faster he moved.

In the end, it didn't matter what he did. Reactor Number Two went critical and, next thing, he found himself once again slowly spinning, alone with the simulated stars.

This time, right into his helmet, he did vomit.

* * *

Wallenstein wrinkled her nose at the vile aroma arising from the helmet as she removed it from Richard's head.

She pushed it as far from her nose as she could, then carried it to a stand against one wall. There she picked up a towel which she carried back and handed to Richard.

"Actually, you didn't do badly," she said.

He answered, while wiping his face with the towel, "I lost my ship."

"Everyone loses his ship," she assured him. "
Everyone
. That's not the point."

"Then what
is
the point?" he asked, dropping the foul towel.

"To see who panics, who turns into a gibbering monkey, who becomes abusive. On those grounds, you did pretty well."

"Not well enough to be worthy of actually commanding the ship."

Again, Richard's basic decency, so rare in a natural born Class One, and humility, which was much rarer, struck her.

"You will be," she assured him. Moreover, she was surprised to discover, she believed it was true.
And that's important, not least because I'm not going to have time to hold your hand once I get back and have to deal with that idiot, Battaglia.

Democracy, it has been said, can only exist until the voting populace discovers it can vote itself largesse from the public coffers. Though it is less often said; it also happens that the voting populace discovers—indeed it is educated to the notion—that it has the power to radically expand the size of those coffers, seemingly the better to vote themselves largesse.
How quickly this happens depends on many factors. A relatively classless society is relatively immune, for so long as it remains relatively classless. There are several reasons for this. Large among these reasons is that, without great disparities in wealth being shoved into people's faces, they feel little envy. Less emotionally, without some apparent concentration of wealth to be tapped, people will tend to see government redistribution schemes as little more than an exercise in taking money from their pockets, peeling off a large percentage for government overhead and then returning that much reduced sum back to their own, now sadly emptier, pockets.
Never mind that even in societies with great inequalities in wealth it works much the same, as the poor use the government to take from the rich, and the rich use the fact of ownership over property, and the ability to set prices (which price setting is driven by the common tax, acting in lieu of a conspiracy), to take it right back from the poor. People tend to want to believe the illusion that this does not happen or, at least, need not, even though their own lot never improves, long-term, under such a regime. Thus they demand that the government take ever more from the rich, which causes the rich to take ever more from the poor, with only the government itself gaining any advantage whatsoever, as it takes an increasing cut of an increasing share.
This continues, at least, until the taxation gets to the point that it begins to hurt the economy. After that, government takes an increasing share of a decreasing pot.

—Jorge y Marqueli Mendoza,
Historia y Filosofia Moral
,
Legionary Press, Balboa,
Terra Nova, Copyright AC 468

The government which had been electorally defeated by Raul Parilla, running with the support of the Legion, the same government which had been kept alive by the Tauran Union and the Federated States, didn't control much of the country. It owned some of the police. It had most of the old city, which was but a fraction of the new, and not the largest fraction at that. It had some government buildings, the national cathedral, a museum, a few monuments, an opera house, and some very nice urban residential areas along with some wretched ones. Also it had the Presidential Palace, a sort of Venetian palazzo, complete with courtyard, and even some trixies. Wire mesh over the courtyard kept the trixies in and the antaniae out. Neither species was very happy about that.

"I want him dead! I want the
ijo de puta
dead!" The patriarch of the Rocaberti family fairly shrieked at his son in law, Belisario Endara-Rocaberti. Belisario had been named for the republic's greatest hero, Belisario Carrera, multi-great grandfather-in-law of Patricio Carrera. No one, least of all Belisario himself, thought he quite deserved the name. Frankly, at five feet, six and with a girth of two thirds of that, he just didn't look the part. Nor was he, as he'd have cheerfully told anyone, the stuff of which heroes were made. Sometimes women found that honesty charming. Other times, for some women, his not inconsiderable wealth and prominent family name were more attractive.

Still, he had his virtues. Realism was one of them. Young Endara-Rocaberti walked to his uncle's second floor office window and drew the curtains.

"Do you remember whose statue is out there, uncle," he asked.

The pseudo-president scowled, his jowls trembling with rage. "Of course I know. Your namesake. The peasant bastard."

"Not just
my
namesake," Endara-Rocaberti corrected. "My mother and father just gave me the first name. That's not too uncommon, really. But your great enemy, your
dangerous
enemy, has the last name."

"He's no blood of the original."

"No, he's not," the nephew agreed, shaking his head. "He's worse for us. He gave up his own country and citizenship. He adopted the name of the clan he married into, the real Carrera clan. He became one of the people and as one of the people he's defended the people.

"Uncle, he's
popular
, he's
dangerously
popular."

"Fine. Now tell me something I don't know," the rump president said, bitterly.

Belisario Endara-Rocaberti remained silent.

Forcing himself back to a degree of calm, the eldest of the family continued, "Two days ago Donati at the
Aduana
disappears. This morning several hundred kilos of uncut, prime huánuco was seized. Uncut, I tell you! And it's all the doing of that motherfucker Parilla and his dog with the pilfered name, Carrera. Whatever it takes, however you have to do it, make those two disappear. And soon.

"On the plus side, at least Donati didn't tell them anything of the major stash in the city."

Belisario chewed on his lower lip for some moments before answering. "I have a warning, Uncle. I can find the men to do this. Our friends in Santander will probably be willing to help. Or perhaps the Taurans. But such a thing would not be without risk. How do you suppose they got Donati to talk so quickly? How do you suppose they
got
to Donati so quickly? Parilla and Carrera, especially Carrera, are men of complete ruthlessness. If we try and fail the penalty will be great. I think you should wait until Pigna is ready and in position."

"No. Just get rid of them and let me worry about the risks."

"I shall try, Uncle. On your head be it."
Except it won't. It will be on
all
our heads.

While the ex-President had gotten some of the police, Parilla had most of them, most of the country,
and
the prison system. The police had come with all their virtues and vices intact.

The small cargo aircraft that served, among other things, to transfer serious criminals from the mainland to Balboa's shark-encircled prison colony on Santa Catalina Island turned slightly southward. The passengers leaned against the movement.

"Over water now, Tribune," the pilot of the aircraft said.

"We'll wait a few minutes, then, Sergeant," the police tribune answered. In pre-Parilla days he'd have been a senior lieutenant. Now the police had adopted the same rank structure as the Legion.

After that short time had passed, the tribune jerked open the passenger door, stuck his head out, and looked below. A rush of sound and air entered the aircraft, causing the prisoners, including ex-customs supervisor Donati, to shiver with more than cold. Looking back the tribune saw that already the land was several miles behind.

Pulling his head and shoulders back into the airplane he turned his gaze to the regular passengers—all of them convicted of serious crimes; the brutal prison colony on Santa Catalina was not for mere pickpockets—and nodded with satisfaction. The prisoners, fourteen of them, were bound, hand and foot. Their eyes were either shut tight, or opened wide in pleading terror. The tribune took another look outside. He made a gesture with his thumb.

The sergeant and another policeman walked over to the prisoner next to Señor Donati. As they walked the swaying deck their hands traced along the walls of the cabin for balance. Reaching down, the two policemen picked up Donati's neighbor, who began to thrash in their grip. They carried him, despite his struggling, to the door.

The tribune read the prisoner's sentence sheet aloud, almost shouting to be heard over the engines and the air rushing past the door. "For participation in
narcotrafico
you have been sentenced to 15 years at hard labor on Santa Catalina. Sadly, you seem to have escaped." He reached over to pick up a weighted chain. This he hung from the prisoner's bonds, wrapping one chain around the other and fastening them with a loose knot. The prisoner sagged, helpless and hopeless, weeping like a baby.

With a sneer, the tribune tilted his head toward the plane's door. The sergeant grabbed overhead handholds for stability and placed one foot in the small of the prisoner's back. The last Donati saw of his recent neighbor was his back and the back of his legs, feet flailing, as he made an unplanned and unscheduled exit from the aircraft.

The tribune made as if spitting out the door and turned back, walking towards Donati.

"Wait! Wait!" Donati shrieked. "I know more. I know much more. I can tell you where the stuff is stockpiled."

Bingo
, thought the tribune, turning away from and passing over Donati to grab the next in line.

By the time the aircraft reached Santa Catalina only seven men—the three policemen, the flight crew, and a cowering Donati—remained aboard. The others would be entered on the prison colony rolls for a few months, then be reported as missing. Given the currents, and the presence of sharks around the island, no one would ever even bother to look for the "escapees." It was all very clean and above board.