CHAPTER SEVNTY-FOUR

Mike strode into the Senate chamber. Joe walked next to him. Mike let his blue aura encircle them. They wore the clothes they’d had on when taken from Earth, the only such in the chamber.

The silence was complete.

Mike found the absence of Bex comforting. That man’s atoms were somewhere scattered among the stars.

Mike walked down to the center seat. Empty now. Waiting for him. Mike’s main feeling at this moment was, I beat you assholes. Beat you with power and money. You are such shits, and I beat you. He knew how President Obama must have felt after both elections. He was also fed up and disgusted. He just wanted to leave all these people and their politics to themselves. He wanted to go home.

As an alien he was free to make as many billions and trillions as any of them. Mike had double of what all of them had put together. A lake of liquid zukoh. Refineries would be built. Weapons created. Jobs created. And the assurance of mutual destruction might convince them to not kill each other.

The colonists were free. Those who had been on 6743-0A were all rich and planning lives off or on the former colony as they wished. All those collected were returning to whatever planet they wished with full reparations planned. The Senate exile and collection laws had been revoked throughout Hrrrm.

Mike wasn’t into nation-building. He left that to idiot politicians on Earth. He wanted a life of peace and love with Joe forever on Earth. He wasn’t going to negotiate. He was going to give all these people their marching orders.

He didn’t care. He wanted to go home.

He remained standing next to the central chair. He expanded his aura until it filled the chamber, and then he diminished it so that it just surrounded the two of them.

Still the chamber was silent. He saw the tangerine faction, the Religionists, stirring. Their numbers were half of what they’d been when Mike was first here. Mike’s voice rang out over the assemblage. “Here is how things are going to go from now on.”

He explained his plan that he’d already negotiated with Def and the others. Most of those present knew it already. The Religionists faction was cut out of any profit from the zukoh. The Religionist worlds were to pay reparations to all the gay people for what had been taken from them. Bex’s fortune would also be contributed to the reparations fund. The collapse of their own agriculture prices and transportation industries had caused the Religionist governments on numerous planets to fall.

When Mike finished, Def stood up and said, “I second the motion.”

A tremendous silence followed.

A minute later someone in the back row shouted, “Traitor.”

But a vote was superfluous and Mike and all of them knew it. Money had spoken. Mike had used his cash to create a better world. He hoped. In his heart he didn’t much care.

Mike turned to Joe and said, “I want to go home.”