The Unincorporated Future (39 page)

“I don’t doubt it, Admiral, but first consider: You don’t know if you can destroy her body before we wipe you all out. I’ll admit the odds
are
in your favor, but”—Marilynn glanced briefly over to where the suspension units had been collected—“those are combat-rated capsules, and their bodies are already encased in preservative foam. You would’ve had to have ’em specially wired to ensure their total destruction, and it’s pretty obvious you haven’t. Guess you ran out of time. So to really kill her, you’d have to open her unit, pull her body out, and put a bullet through her brain—and you’d have to do it during a firefight while three of the best sharpshooters in
all
the Alliance have their rifles trained on the President’s box; two nearly as good, by the way, now have them trained on you.”

“My life is not so important that your threats would sway me.”

“Hmm, then perhaps you should consider this before you decide to climb onto your moral high horse. Had your coup succeeded, I’m assuming you would’ve taken the Presidency.”

Sinclair’s nonanswer was answer enough.

“Makes sense, you’re popular with the fleet and the people—or at least you were—you’re from Saturn and you’ve been a NoShare since the earliest days of the war. I think then that it’s obvious enough what course of action you would’ve taken with regards to prosecuting this war.”

“There would never have been a Martian Massacre,” Sinclair offered, voice thick with anger. “The murder of innocents can never be a defense.”

“There have been no innocents in this war since Alhambra,” Marilynn answered with equal ardor.

“So it’s an eye for an eye, is it?”

“I wish it were that simple, Sinclair, but I’m not here to argue the ethics of war—just the terms of your surrender. So consider: Even if, at the cost of your own life and all the soldiers here, you do succeed in killing Sandra now, guess who takes over?”

Marilynn smiled cruelly as she watched the two men come to the bitter realization. “Yes, her,” she answered with a slight bow, confirming their worst fears.

“But she never wanted the job,” said Mosh.

“No, she didn’t, did she? And had she, we wouldn’t be in this little predicament. But our President’s death wouldn’t leave her much of choice, now, would it?”

More silence followed on her words. “Understand this, gentlemen,” continued Marilynn, knowing full well she was about to lie through her teeth, “Admiral Black had to be held back at Mars,
held back
. And the
only
person in this entire solar system who’s actually capable of doing that just so happens to be lying right over”—Marilynn swung her eyes in the direction of the suspension units—“there. Sandra may have ordered the destruction of the Martian environment, but she also ordered the transportation system be spared, giving every Martian some sort of chance. Our next President may not be so generous—may in fact, be more like Hektor, who I don’t have to tell you, would have shown no hesitation in taking out the entire planet. And there’s the rub. Should you decide to become martyrs and somehow succeed in killing our President, you would put into play a leader whose other well known name is the Merciless, thereby adding to the pile of bodies you both were supposedly trying to mitigate against.”

Marilynn folded her arms; done.

“Give us a minute,” said Sinclair.

Marilynn nodded as Sinclair and McKenzie stepped a few paces back and began talking in hurried whispers. Exactly one minute later, they returned, faces grim but all business.

“How do we do this?” asked Mosh.

To which, Marilynn turned her head and called for the captain of the Unicorns to join them.

“Yes, sir,” he said, approaching the small group, seemingly unafraid at his exposure.

“Captain, they’ve agreed to withdraw under the terms you and I discussed. How do you propose we do this?

Brodessor nodded. “Sixty of my spacers file out immediately. At the same time, your men remove the explosives from the door. Then each side removes groups in sizes of five till only five remain. Our last five secure the hostages while their last five leave. Then I suggest they get out of Ceres as fast as they can. If ten minutes after they board their ship they’re in range of the defenses, deal or no deal I will order them fired on and destroyed.”

McKenzie and Sinclair looked at each other, gave a brief nod. “Agreed,” said Sinclair. All across Ceres, the viewers of this most real of dramas let out a collective sigh they had not been aware they were holding. In a half hour, the conspirators were gone and the President was safe.

6 Dissension

ATTEMPTED COUP IN OUTER ALLIANCE!!!

A coup attempt by at least two members of the Outer Alliance Cabinet has been reported. Unfortunately, the heroic Cabinet members failed in their attempt to oust the criminal leaders, responsible for the terrorist actions, brutal destruction, and murder of innocents on Mars. Both leaders of the coup attempt, Treasury Secretary Mosh McKenzie and Grand Admiral Joshua Sinclair, along with their supporters, have purportedly escaped to the Belt.

—Terran Daily News

UHFS
Martian Express
En route to Earth from Mars

He’d been aboard the ship for only one day, but already Hektor was exhausted. He wasn’t alone. With the exception of the crew, already used to Earth’s gravity, Hektor, along with everyone else would steadily and incrementally feel the increase of the simulated gravity. He almost wanted to believe that the speed of the ship as well as the Earth’s closer proximity to Mars had colluded against him. He could have used more time to adapt, but it was necessary that he be back on Earth: the old, and now once more new, political center of the UHF.

His enervation also had to do with his having followed Irma and Luciana’s advice to the letter. He’d personally delivered food and blankets to the cold and hungry and had made sure to be seen helping with the loading of evacuees from the surface of planet. In a particular stroke of genius, Irma had Hektor ridden up with a group of evacuees and then stayed in the cramped pod with them while everyone inside was frozen, including himself. He, along with the pennies, were packed in moving foam and placed in orbit. Unlike the rest of the pennies, he’d remained there for only two rotations.

How he’d hated that, but it sure did play to the people. When Hektor had been retrieved from orbit, pried loose from the foam and then had emerged smiling and unscathed, the Martians were no longer as afraid. As a result, the initial trickle of those volunteering to get off the planet suddenly became a flood. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. Trang showed up with his fleet, and after only a brief but well-publicized meeting between the two leaders, Trang took over evacuation duties and Hektor took off for Earth.

The
Martian Express
was about as loaded as the life support system would allow, and everyone other than Hektor had been doubled and tripled up. Irma had wanted to put two families of low-ranking administrators into the Presidential suite with him, but Hektor put his foot down. Reasoning that his reputation was about as good as it was going to get, he felt no need to subject himself to the wailing of minority children struggling through the discomfort of gravity acclimation.

Hektor picked up the DijAssist and read the day’s briefing. After a moment, he shook his head and laughed. McKenzie and Sinclair had actually felt they’d been defending Justin’s legacy. He could only be grateful that the bumbling idiots hadn’t succeeded. They would have sued for peace immediately, and on Hektor’s terms. He would’ve had no choice but to go along. And then it would only have been a matter of time until the whole damned thing started up again. The Outer Alliance was made up of a stiff-necked people if ever there was one, and Porfirio’s premonition had been sadly correct. It was better to be rid of the lot of them. But without Sandra in place fighting Hektor’s kind of war, there’d be no “terrorism,” like what happened on Mars, to point to—and so, nothing to rally the citizenry against, nothing to use as an excuse for what Hektor and Porfirio and Gupta had known must ultimately be done to ensure the incorporated movement’s supremacy: Eliminate the people in order to eliminate the problem.

UHFS
Liddel
High orbit of Mars

Trang’s fleet engineers had been working without sleep for days, and he was now being asked to sign a requisition that would up their energy meds in order to keep their frenetic work pace going. He soothed the vein on his temple and left his thumbniture on the DijAssist. The engineers’ task had been to maintain t.o.p. service under conditions the transorbital pods had never been designed for. The t.o.p.s themselves were mostly fine. With the exception of the luxury models, most of them were pretty basic. In fact, there wasn’t much that could go wrong with one that couldn’t be fixed with a little experience and a handy set of tools. The problem wasn’t mechanics so much as it was nature. All orports had magnetic guiding fields to make sure that the t.o.p. hit the landing tube exactly right, every time. But the high winds, rains, and snows were straining the guiding units past their capability. An error of even one centimeter on landing could not only destroy that t.o.p., killing everyone inside, but also destroy one or more launch tubes. Fewer tubes meant increased wait times for the ever-burgeoning lists of Martians wanting to flee into the warm embrace of ice and polystyrene.

Almost every shuttle in Trang’s fleet had been transferred planetside in order to reach the isolated areas with no access to an orport. One such area was the ski lodge on top of Olympus Mons. Much to the dismay of the rescue teams, the residents of the lodge were not only
not
glad to to see them but also had no desire to evacuate. They roundly proclaimed that they had enough food and beverage to last for months. A quick check of their food stores confirmed their claims; if left to their own devices, the Martian elite could maintain their lavish eating habits for months. And they were situated high enough above the storms that they wouldn’t be bothered by the atmospheric tumult. The rescue team’s leader, at a loss for what to do, called it in. A few minutes later, he got his answer: The food and beverage was to be immediately confiscated and distributed to the destitute, of which there were many. The residents had been outraged. The confiscatory tactics, they hollered, were a violation of their property rights! When they realized their rants were falling on deaf ears, they threatened to call their Assemblymen. The exasperated officer told them, per a message from Grand Admiral Trang himself, that the fleet would gladly accept and store any communications the residents wished to leave with the rescue team, and even see to those messages being delivered—once their Assemblymen had been thawed out. As soon as all their food stores had been packed into the shuttles, the lodge residents glumly acceded to being evacuated.

The rescue teams encountered little if any resistance after word of the “lodge incident” spread through the Neuro. An “each to his own” philosophy simply wouldn’t cut it in a world with dwindling resources and diminished production ability. Everybody was expected to help in any way they could. Trang had encouraged that spirit of volunteerism and was proud to see it epitomized by the ceaseless work of his marines. Soon shuttles were being launched around the clock, and while Trang and his crews knew it was impossible to save everyone, they went about their business as if they could.

“Admiral Trang.”

“Yes, Nolly?”

“Admiral Jackson requests communication.”

“Put her through.”

Zenobia’s familiar image appeared above his command chair.

“How’s it going, Zenobia?”

“If you’d bet me a month ago that we could evacuate close to six billion people off a storm-infested planet—in a little over a month!—I’da called you insane.”

“I
did
bet you, Zenobia, and ‘insane’ wasn’t the word you chose.”

Zenobia’s brow creased. “I did?”

Trang laughed. “You did. I believe the word was ‘foolish.’”

Zenobia shrugged. “Guess I’m the one looking foolish now.”

“We’re not there yet, friend.”

“But we’re getting there, sir. I hate to admit it, but the President getting himself frozen helped quite a bit.”

Trang nodded. “I think it’s manifestly clear that while the President should not meddle in military decisions, he’s clearly very skilled with the political ones.”

Zenobia nodded.

“Was that all, Zenobia?”

“Well, sir, my ship is mostly empty except for the loading bay crews, and I’m not doing much of anything here.…”

“You want to be useful?”

“Hell yeah! Uh, Admiral. I’m rated as a magnetic field tech and was repairing shuttles to make ends meet—as you know the starving artist thing didn’t work out.”