Abby Nightingale leaned back in her desk chair and sighed. She was finally done.
Her desk was clean – as much as it ever was. Her in-baskets, both real and virtual, were either empty or tapped down enough that they wouldn’t catch fire for at least two weeks. She could finally walk away from her job and enjoy two weeks’ vacation. She had the papers signed, sealed, and printed out in her purse.
“I’m a free woman,” she shouted joyfully, but very softly.
Abby’s office was right next door to Pipra Strongarm’s executive suite. Being this close to the CEO of most of the industrial production in the Alwa system, all the way on the hell and gone on the other side of the galaxy from human space, often facilitated free and open communications.
Just now, that was the last thing Abby wanted.
If she hurried, she could just catch the final shuttle of the day down to Memphis on the Columbia River in Rooster territory. In three hours, she could be at her shared plantation, in General Steve’s arms, and loving it.
Make it two hours, if he met her at the shuttle landing dock at Memphis.
Considering Steve’s lusty nature and the six weeks since their last vacation, she was betting on him meeting her at Memphis.
Abby grabbed her small, overnight bag from beside her door, turned out the lights and was halfway across the empty outer office in a flash. Everyone else had gone home long ago.
She’d almost made it to the door when she got caught.
“Abby, get your butt back here and in my office,” came in a voice that was better at sultry and sexy, but at the moment was shouting a command.
“Boss lady, I got two weeks’ vacation that I damn near had you sign in blood. I’m out of here,” Abby answered back, but she was standing in place, no longer running for the shuttle.
“Abby Nightingale, get your damn ass back here, now!” showed some serious intent. Pipra was usually very soft spoken when she gave Kris Longknife’s former maid directions. This was starting to sound like a Level Red 3 crisis. The only thing higher than a Red 3 crisis was a Granny Rita crisis.
Abby dropped her bag and turned to meet her fate. Quickly, she was at the door to Pipra’s office. “Boss, you do recall that in my last job, I killed a whole lot of people while keeping Kris Longknife alive.”
“And here I thought you washed her hair,” was Pipra’s oft repeated comeback to Abby’s oft repeated threat.
“Wash her hair. Shoot an assassin. Make the body disappear. All in a good five minutes’ work around her royal pain in the ass.”
Pipra motioned Abby to the visitor’s chair beside her desk and the former maid slipped into the seat she warmed way too much these days.
“It’s your hands-on experience with Longknifes that I need,” Pipra said, handing a message flimsy across to Abby, “Granny Rita is at it again,”.
Abby groaned, even before she set eyes on the message. “Granny Rita!”
“Yeah. Rita Nuu Longknife to some of us.”
“What’s she gone and done now?” Abby said, scanning an unusual message. It was all in fancy calligraphy!
Pipra said nothing, so Abby did her best to adjust her eyes to an ancient format of letters with flowing language to match.
One word drew her eyes. A word that hardly belonged imbedded among such archaic language and fonts. “Nationalize!”
Abby’s eyes shot up to stare in horror at her boss.
Pipra was grinning back at her. “Is that a good enough reason for you to miss your shuttle?
“But she can’t do that!” Abby insisted. “Even Kris Longknife never tried to do anything like that. Nobody is that stupid!”
Pipra handed Abby another flimsy. This seemed to be the same message in a readable font. “That says she thinks she can. Note what I highlighted.”
In yellow was a section where Granny Rita proclaimed:
BY THE POWERS VESTED IN ME AS VICEROY OF KING RAYMOND OF THE UNITED SOCIETY TO THE VARIOUS PEOPLES OF THE PLANET ALWA, I DO PRONOUNCE AND PROCLAIM THE CONFISCATION AND NATIONALIZATION OF ALL MEANS OF PRODUCTION USED BY HUMANS IN THE ALWA SYSTEM EXEMPTING ONLY THOSE ON THE PLANET ITSELF.
Pipra leaned forward in her chair. “I’ve got my computer researching the history of nationalizations, but she hasn’t come up with much. You think yours can do better?”
“Mata Hari?” Abby asked. Abby, as a result of her close and uncomfortable work with Kris Longknife, had been one of the first recipients of one of the Magnificent Nelly’s kids. Mata Hari, a name left over from when Abby was as much a spy as an assassin or a hair washer, was sentient. Unlike her mother, she had never shown a desire to argue with Abby or tell horrible jokes. Her occasional humor was usually quite tasteful as well as funny.
“Nationalization was a practice among smaller nations,” Abby’s computer began to immediately report, “that developed during the latter half of the twentieth century as colonial powers retreated, although a major power might, indeed, have a radical change in government that brought on nationalization, but usually only for a short time. It has been rarely used since the diaspora into space. Its last significant usage was on the planet Savannah. They nationalized all off-planet ownership in order to delegitimatize some of the more egregious actions of the Unity Government before its collapse after the Unity War. This sort of nationalization was then declared unconstitutional on Savannah in order to gain off-planet investment. Rita Nuu Longknife was heavily involved in that investment and may have been the source of the constitutional amendment.”
“Damn,” Pipra breathed. “The old biddy’s dug deep into her bag of tricks to come up with this stinking pile of shit.”
Abby raised both eyebrows. Her boss was definitely stressed out by this one. Why wouldn’t she be? When Kris Longknife was called back to human space, Pipra had been dumped with running an industrial empire that stretched from the mining operations in the asteroid belt all the way to the production fabrication plants on Alwa’s one large moon. Oh, hell, had Rita also nationalized the space stations and the starship building yards on them as well?
The king had sent out the first yards and made sure they were civilian activities even if all of the managers were retired senior Navy officers. At the time of their arrival, Kris Longknife had been, at best, a commander. She would have quickly been outranked by a Navy force.
Had that previously good idea just born poisoned fruit?
“Abby, get down to Refuge. You’ve spent more time with Longknifes and the corkscrews that pass for their brains than anyone on staff. See what you can make of this and get this withdrawn. We sweat blood to come up with the latest rebalancing of production to get the most for defense, consumer goods, and industrial investment. I don’t want to have to go through all that again because one old lady pulled the rug out from under our feet.”
Pipra leaned back in her chair and scowled at the ceiling. “Our production effort is held together with spit, glue, and bailing wire. We’ve got over half a dozen different corporations now making up our consortium. If they don’t think I’m doing a good enough job for them, they’ll have my head for a hood ornament even if I do have the largest interest and I represent Nuu Enterprises. Understand?”
“This she-bull in the China shop can wreck everything,” Abby concluded.
“You got it, gal. Now, go get ’em tiger.”
“Go get a Longknife?” Abby snorted. “Nobody, even the Peterwalds, have ever succeeded in mounting a Longknife head over their mantelpiece.”
“No head required,” Pipra said. “Just walk her back from this. Find out what she wants. Figure out a way to get it for her without all this mess. Whatever.”
Abby stood. “On my way, Boss. But you owe me. You own me an extra week’s vacation.”
“What’s the big rush?” Pipra said. “You and that soldier boy of yours aren’t going to start a baby or anything like that, are you?”
Abby dodged the question. “That man is a Marine.”
“Yeah, yeah. Whatever. Run. I’ve got them holding the last shuttle to Refuge for you.”
Abby ran. Yes, a dumb manager could hold a shuttle, but if it missed its drop window, it would just have to ride the station around for another orbit and be ninety minutes later.
Abby hailed a cab at the shuttle port. A few years back, the shuttle landing had been a floating dock serviced by a few electric jitney cabs.
Now, the shuttle dock had a pair of hangers serviced by a solid concrete ramp up from the lake as well as a major T-pier that could handle two or three longboats at a time tied up alongside. The cabs were now fully electric cars good for sixty miles an hour on roads that weren’t so rutted that they’d shake the passengers’ eyeteeth out.
A lot had changed in the four years since Granny Rita had brought Abby down, at Kris Longknife’s elbow, to see her town.
Abby saw all around her that the city of Refuge had changed as well. The surviving human colonials had been scratching out a bare subsistence on the land given to them by the local, bird-like Alwans. Now they had two harvests in the granaries and were living as comfortably as any human in a startup colony. Adobe mud buildings were being replaced by perma-plastic and steel buildings. A six-story building was going up at Alwa University.
Yes, the times were a-changin’.
The woman known as Rita Nuu Longknife, Commodore Longknife, or Granny Rita, may have aged over the years; however, she certainly didn’t seem to have changed. This so-called Proclamation of Confiscation and Nationalization alone said the old gal hadn’t lost a bit of her bite.
The drive to Government House was much longer than Kris Longknife’s ride, even though Abby took it at a much faster pace. The old Government House was now relegated to a City Hall for Refuge. Ada’s new Government House was on the outskirts of town. Though, if the city kept growing, it would likely be the center of town soon enough.
The cab pulled up to the back of Government House. There was a Rooster waiting at the curb. He paid the cab driver in Colonial script and then motioned the human to follow him into the working entrance to the Colonial capital building. He led her up a flight of stairs, then down a dimly lit hallway before stopping to open a door for Abby.
Abby stepped into a cluttered office that would have fit any number of worried people in human space. Except for the specifics of the large map on the wall, it could have been fit for a government official, business manager, or truck dispatcher.
Ada didn’t look up from the reader she was looking at. “This better be good. I was actually going to have dinner with my husband and kids today. My mom was even coming over. They reserved today a week ago. Said something about it being my birthday.”
Now the First Minister of the Colonial Government looked up at Abby and scowled. “You didn’t say why you were in such an all fired hurry to see me or give me a reason I should. There aren’t many people who would get me to jump just on their say so. Please tell me that I’ll soon be scratching your name off the list of people who would never waste my time.”
Abby settled into the chair next to Ada’s desk, the one she had not been offered. “Have you seen Granny Rita’s latest?”
“Good God, not her. I thought she’d been too quiet lately. What’s the old gal gone and done this time?”
Abby handed over the lovely calligraphed declaration.
Ada’s scowl got even deeper as she eyed the document. “I’ve never seen such scribble in my life. What’s it say?”
Abby handed across the proclamation in plain font.
Ada scanned it quickly, eyed Abby, then read it a bit more slowly. Then she looked up and frowned at the woman from the other side of the galaxy. “Please tell me this doesn’t mean what it seems to be saying. Oh, God, please.”
“Are you asking if that rambling collection of fancy words means that Granny Rita has just taken control of all the means of production in the Alwa system except for those located on the lovely mud ball under your feet? The answer, according to my computer and my ancient degree in Business Administration, is yes.” Before Abby could go on, Ada interrupted her.
“She can’t do that.” was a lot more definite than the, “Can she?” that followed.
Abby shrugged. “She says she can. She says as King Ray Longknife’s viceroy on Alwa she can do just that.”
Ada launched into a long stream of expletives that would make even a Marine’s ears burn. Abby knew. She’d been on a drop mission or two that hadn’t gone according to plan. They ended with, “Get me a drink. Some of that single malt whiskey. The three-year-old bottle.”
Abby found a bottle and two dirty glasses. She wiped them out with a stray paper napkin and poured them half full.
Ada shook her head as she took the glass. “I knew when Granny Rita asked us to vote her co-viceroy, just for Alwa, she said, that we were making a mistake. That damn dame hated Ray Longknife. Why would she ever want to be his viceroy?”
Eighty years ago, at the end of the Iteeche War, Rita Nuu Longknife had been married to Ray Longknife. She’d also commanded a battlecruiser squadron that beat back an Iteeche invasion fleet. She’d killed a lot of good Iteeche Marines and really pissed off the Iteeche Navy. They had chased her until her velocity was so high that when she and her two remaining ships hit an unmarked jump, she’d been shot well across the galaxy. A few more highly improbable jumps, and she was hacking the ice armor off of one battlecruiser to give the other ship enough reaction mass to slow down.
Alwa was the system they finally came to rest in.
Rita had been a harsh taskmistress as she drove her crew to do what they needed to survive. She hadn’t been averse to using a hangman when she had to. She was remembered by the survivors from those days not fondly, but respectfully.
As a kind of wedding present, Kris Longknife had managed to get a vote out of the local Colonial assembly to make her Viceroy. Only Rita could have gotten the same vote without tying a knot with someone again.
The argument she presented was simple. She’d share the duties with the newly assigned Grand Admiral Sandy Santiago, new commander of the Navy on Alwa Station. Sandy would be the viceroy from King Ray for everything above the atmosphere, and Rita would be the viceroy from King Ray for everything dirtside. It would all work out just fine.
The problem was that Grand Admiral Santiago had taken off to try to regularize relations with the other aliens they’d stumbled upon, the cats who had their claws on the button for nuclear weapons. At the time, it seemed like a good idea
Now? Not so much.
Ada tapped her commlink. “Kuno, get in here. If you can find Lago, get him, too.”
“On my way, chief,” came back immediately.
Ada took a long swig off her drink, then leaned back in her chair and stared at the ceiling. “Can a government actually walk off with the whole kit and caboodle, lock, stock and barrel?”
“They ain’t done it recently, but yeah, it’s been done in the past. Hell, didn’t Kris do something like that? Didn’t she have you claim that you’d given the Alwans the right to all the natural resources in the system so Ray and the lawyer types that came out with him for that one visit couldn’t latch onto them for themselves?”
“I seem to have the original of that proclamation around here somewhere,” Ada admitted. “Still, that was to keep us and the birds from being robbed blind by you interlopers. This?”
“Is Granny Rita robbing the interlopers of everything, including their underwear?” Abby answered.
Ada’s Pretorian guard began to arrive. Lago was a young Rooster; he still had his first mating plumage along what passed for arms and legs. The other two were humans, one tall and dark, the other short and fair. Abby knew them for Kuno, who coordinated Mining, and Baozhai, who was the colonial’s treasurer, which was one tough job since taxes were still paid in kind.
The government’s paper “work” script was still not all that respected.
Ada quickly filled them in on Granny Rita’s latest hijinks. All three of them just shook their head. Ada finished with a question. “Can that old biddy do this? I don’t remember any place in her warrant as downside Viceroy where we gave her that kind of power. Do any of you?”
All three shook their heads, but Kuno was going through his reader even as he shook his head.
“I’ve got the official commission the Senate voted on,” he said. “Let’s see. I thought we tied it down pretty specifically. Everyone knows that woman would drive an elephant through a mouse hole.”
That got nods of agreement from all of the Colonials. Abby just raised an eyebrow. She’d been around when Kris Longknife drove space ships through tiny cracks in the pavement. She’d learned the hard way to never trust a Longknife.
“Where’s this warrant you gave her as downside Viceroy?” the former Longknife employee asked.
Lago had it up on the wall as the screen that had been showing a map of human land use on Alwa vanished. In its place was a long proclamation with only a few letters, those starting paragraphs, in calligraphy. The rest was easily readable.
Abby began to read through it slowly.
“Uh oh,” Kuno said. “Check out the ending of Paragraph 8. Was that sentence in any of the drafts we discussed?”
Ada read it slowly. “The Viceroy shall likewise be charged with securing the safety of all Colonials in their abodes, no matter where they reside.” The first minister looked at her own reader.
She scowled and scanned through several pages of her reader. “I’ve got six different draft versions of paragraph 8. None of them had anything after ‘Securing the safety of all Colonials.’ Where’d that ‘in their abodes, no matter where they reside’ come from?”
All three of her staff had been there when the warrant had been negotiated. Each one studied their own notes. Baozhai pulled out another reader and began paging through it hurriedly.
At the end of a long five minutes, all four of the Colonials found themselves staring blankly at each other.
“Hold it,” Baozhai said. “This thing she added on is in conflict with the other commissions we gave to her and Admiral Santiago. Rita got authority dirtside. Sandy has authority in space.”
“Yeah,” Kuno said, “but it’s in her warrant anyway. Where native Alwans abide, she has authority and we’ve got a lot of Roosters and Ostriches abiding on both the space stations and moon. I think most ships have Alwans and there are even some Ostriches out in the asteroid belt.”
The four went back to staring at each other.
Ada finally turned to Abby and summed it up for all of them. “That old fart pulled one over on all of us. Do you think she was planning this nationalization scam from the first day production fabs began to show up here?”
“I’ll have to ask her,” Abby said.
“When?” Ada asked.
“As soon as she’ll see me. Mata, connect me to Granny Rita.”
“Hi, Abby. I figured you’d be the sacrificial lamb they’d send over to talk to me. You do remember, I’ve still got the old hangman’s phone number on speed dial, don’t you?”
“I’d expect nothing less from a Longknife,” Abby answered.
“Oh, now you’re just being mean. I ain’t been a Longknife for nigh on ninety years. I finally washed all the blood off from my misspent youth quite a few years ago.”
“Whatever. We need to talk.”
“Drop by any time.”
“I’m on my way,” Abby said.
“I’ll keep the light on for you,” and the line clicked off.
“Do I need to call out the guard to form an armed escort for you?” Ada asked. Abby suspected the bureaucrat was at least partially serious.
“Nope, but if I’m not back in three hours, I’d be mighty grateful if you’d mount a rescue mission.”
“You got a deal.”
A cab was waiting for Abby as she left Government House. When she asked if he knew were Granny Rita lived, he just laughed.
“Everyone knows where Commodore House is.”
The drive took Abby along a road around the edge of Refuge. If she didn’t know better, she’d think that the New Government House had been intentionally built to be as far from Commodore House as they could get it. Much of the drive had city buildings to her left and open fields to her right. Finally, they turned down a gravel road and approached a wood. Driving through it, Abby realized that the forest had been planted over the years to form rings. Nearer the main road were small saplings, new planted to ten or twenty years old. Then the trees jumped to taller, forty-year-old trees. Finally, they drove through tall Earth cedars and spreading oaks seventy to eighty years old that must have been planted just after the survivors made planet fall.
The birds had given the humans only the worst land they had: dry, barren, hard scrabble ground. The colonials had struggled to make any of it decent. For this strange, layered stand of trees to be this rich and this tall meant someone had devoted a lot of effort as time and land became available.
They came out of the woods to see a large building standing on a slight rise. Commodore House was in the form of an H made of adobe bricks topped with red roof tiles. The horizontal bar which looked the most weathered, was two stories. The four wings coming out from its edges were three or four stories high. The different colored adobe of each wing, as well as different roof tiles showed that they been added at different times and with a slightly different designer involved.
There were other one and two-story additions growing out of the two tall vertical wings. These also looked like the most recent add-ons.
The cab took Abby to a two-story addition that formed a horizontal addition to the bottom of the north wing and slowed to a halt.
“I’ll wait for you. You won’t get a cab out this far this late at night.”
Abby dug into her purse for a tip, but the cabby waved her off. “They paid me before you got in. Don’t worry about it.”
Abby thanked him and headed for the broad, white-painted door. There was only a door handle, no lock, and no knocker. Abby rapped on the door and waited. She was about to rap again when she heard the sound of a wooden bolt being lifted. A moment later, the door opened and Granny Rita, herself, peeked around the door.
“Hi, Abby. What brings you here this late in the evening?”
“A little of this, a bit of that,” the former maid and assassin said, vaguely.
“Oh, that, huh? Hi, Howard,” she said, waving at the cabby. He waved back.
“He going to wait for you?”
“That’s what he told me.”
“I can put you up for the night.”
“Nope. I had two weeks leave approved and I’m burning one day of that right now. I hope we can get this problem resolved and I can get over to see my husband.”
“General Bruce and you have a place outside of Memphis, don’t you?” Granny Rita said, inviting Abby in.
There was a foyer with a mat to wipe muddy feet on. Off to the right was an open door leading to a cluttered office. Off to the left was open space forming a kind of sitting room, big enough for a medium size meeting. Rita pointed Kris Longknife’s former maid in that direction and she settled into a wooden rocker across from another one. The walls and floors were lovely sawn wood, a bit rough on the finish, but the women Abby had worked for on old Earth would have paid a medium size fortune for something half as good.
A young girl, maybe fifteen, likely six months pregnant, brought a tea serving for two out and put it on the table between the two of them.
“Can I get you anything else, Granny Rita?”
“Maybe some of those shortbread cookies your granny makes,” Rita said and the gal scampered off. Pregnancy has got to be for the young.
“She’s one of my great-great-great granddaughters,” Rita said by way of explanation. “Once Commodore House was full of three or four generations, but now, most of the older folks have moved out to their own places. I get the occasional boy or girl that can’t stand to stay home one more minute. Sometimes they come with friends. Sometimes they come with a kid on the way like Alana there. The house is more a hotel than a home anymore, but I love them no matter why they come. So, you the sacrificial virgin they sent out to feed this rampaging old dragon?”
“I ain’t been a virgin for a long time, you old biddy, and you ain’t no dragon. Though I think you are an old fool.”
“Old fool?”
“We had everything calmed down and running smoothly, then you had to run a truck full of manure right into the family’s Sunday dinner.”
Rita took time to pour the tea, then hand Abby a cup and took one for herself. She blew on it, touched it to her lip, and frowned. “Too hot. I take it you’re talking about my nationalization decree?”
“The selfsame.”
“What’s not to like about it?”
“You know it’s a bitch for us to balance out competing demands, then level resources so we get the closest we can to full production and happy customers. Before Kris left, we worked out a nice balance that gave consumer goods a bit of a lead over defense and left just enough over to grow production to keep ahead of both our growing human population and the number of birds that want into our economy. You were there! You know we sweated blood and Kris Longknife chewed a lot of our asses before we settled on the production schedule.”
“I do remember,” Rita said, and tried her tea again. Abby’s was untouched and still cooling.
“Then why did you jump into the middle of this and what do you think you’re gonna get out of it? For God’s sake, woman, this is just plain dumb.”
“What if I told you I don’t intend to jigger anything?”
“Then why do this? You got people all riled up and no one knows your agenda. It’s just plain damn fool stupid.”
Rita took a tiny sip, found it to her liking and took a deeper swallow. She nodded toward Abby’s cup and the visitor tried a taste.
“Chamomile tea. You knew this was gonna be a bitch of a meeting.”
“I figured as much,” Rita admitted.
“You want to tell me what you think you’ve done and why it’s worth all the howling I’m hearing from here to the asteroid belt?”
“Were you there when that new management team my spoiled brat of a son sent out here to run things arrived?”
“I was with Pipra when they busted in and told her to pack up her desk and get lost, yeah.”
“Assholes. But who can you expect an asshole to hire? Yeah. Were you there when they met our honorable former Viceroy, Her Highness Admiral Kris Longknife?”
“I helped Pipra persuade them that they should pay their respects to the only shareholder of Nuu Enterprise’s preferred voting stock before they got too far into their plans to change everything. They were wanting to strip farms to extinction for that magic plant down south that’s worth trillions because it will remake nano tech. My boss deputized me to be their seeing eye dog and get them over to Kris.”
“How’d it go?”
Abby snorted. “Not at all like they intended. I know Pipra had called ahead. Kris was way pregnant. Her feet hurt and her legs were swollen. She was not at all ready to suffer fools. But you got to give her credit. She let them hang themselves. She got them talking and then sat back and listened to them.”
Abby shook her head. Kris Longknife did know how to set traps – for alien monsters or stupid thieves. “It took about two shakes of a lamb’s tail before they were strutting around telling her how they were going to make a fortune for your bratty son and all Nuu Enterprise shareholders. She gave them rope. They took the rope, tied it in a fine noose, and hung it so prettily around their necks. Then she strung them up high. They hardly knew what hit them and were still hollering as Marines hustled them off to the brig.”
“I would have loved to have been there and seen that,” Rita said.
“I could have made a fortune selling tickets, but having a bleacher full of paying customers might have given away Kris’s hand.”
“No doubt. So, what do we do when the next ship of fools arrives from my son and tries to ruin it for everyone else?”
“It may be a while,” Abby said. “Kris pretty much stripped them down to brig jumpsuits and put them on a returning merchant ship that won’t make planetfall until it gets to Chance. Those folks at Chance really do believe in no such thing as a free lunch. It will be interesting to see if any of those big boss types can find a job there that pays more than digging ditches. Certainly no one’s going to spot them the money for an interplanetary message. I figure those dudes will be a long time earning enough to phone home for help. Meanwhile, your boy Alex will be fat, dumb, and happy, figuring he’s running things here and he ain’t.”
Abby and Rita shared a laugh, whether it was at six suits struggling to find a real job or having to do an honest day’s work or Alex being cut out of the loop, they didn’t bother to clarify.
“But,” Granny Rita said when their mirth ran down, “I still ask, what do we do when the next bunch of fools show up? Next time it might not be Alex. It could be any one of the half dozen plus conglomerates that we’ve got working as a team here that compete against themselves back in human space.
Rita paused to reflect for a moment. “We’re functioning as a collective. We have to do it that way out here on the tip of the spear. How much you want to bet that the folks who spent the money for our initial fabrication plants are going to want a return on investment sooner rather than later?”
Abby had to admit, it was a good question. “Still, what can folks back on the other side of the galaxy expect to get from us out here? The shipping costs for pretty much anything will price just about anything we ship back there right out of their market. Wood like your lovely house is made of might bring a small fortune if it could be sold back on Earth, but there are plenty of forests a lot closer to home that can meet Earth’s needs.”
Abby shook her head. “The only reason we’re here is to be a stalking horse for the damn aliens. King Raymond got the stuff sent out here to make us look like a real going concern, a serious industrial economy, so when the aliens take us down, they’d figure they got all of us. Kris being Kris turned what was supposed to be a Potemkin village into one tough nut that they can’t crack and now we do what we have to do to live out here. They’ve got to consider us a charity case, not a profit center.”
“Honey, I know these types. I met them when I was still sitting on my daddy’s knee. Everything is a profit center with them. No. They’re going to do their damndest to pluck this turkey. We got to make our turkey so damn mean and ornery that they don’t dare risk going for a feather for fear of losing a finger.”
Abby thought for a moment, and couldn’t see a flaw in Granny Rita’s basic argument.
“I worked for some real tightwads back on old Earth. I guess I’ve wiped the decrepit asses of some of the self-same folks your daddy introduced you to. Still, Rita, this was not well done. You’ve tossed your old body right into the middle of the punch bowl and there are too many people who remember when you solved your problems by stringing people up. You’ve burned too many bridges for anyone here to be happy with you standing in the middle of our damn bridge.”
Rita leaned back and rocked for a few moments. “So, you like my solution. You just don’t like me doing it.”
“Basically, yeah.”
Rita shook her head slowly. “Name me someone who could pull this off. Ada? She’s too nice. Your Pipra? They bulldozed her already. Your Grand Admiral Santiago? She’s Navy and her being boss girl of our industry smacks of a military junta. No, I’m sorry Abby, but it’s either this ornery old cuss or it don’t get done.”
Abby sipped her tea as the two women rocked quietly for a few minutes. What with Rita’s longevity treatments, the two of them didn’t look all that different in age. Abby had had a hard life growing up in the slums of New Eden, then did what she had to do to earn her way off planet. She’d done what she had to for a very long time and it cost her.
The same could be said of the woman rocking across from her. Rejuvenation had tightened and softened her skin. She could pass for forty rather than her hundred plus years. Still, Rita had done what she had to do to hold together a struggling colony.
The problem here, was that Rita’s sins followed her around like the chains on Marley’s ghost on some Christmas Eve night. People remembered.
The survivors had put up with it because, in their own hearts, they’d known they had to accept Rita’s hard rule or go down under an onslaught of misfortunes that any generous god would never have allowed one small group of humanity to suffer.
They’d put up with her then, but no one wanted to put up with her now.
In the natural order of things, old people died and their sins were interred with their bones. Now, old bones got to dance around at weddings and births, naked in their sin, and folks were trying to figure this new way out.
Rita needed to retire from public life.
Fat chance of that happening, Abby thought as she finished her tea.
The visitor stood. “I’d best be going. I need to talk to some folks, pass along your intent to ’em, and see if I can calm them down. Rita, it would have gone down better if you’d included a few folks in your thinking before you shoved us all off this cliff.”
“And if I had, they’d have voted me out of my Viceroy job and this would never have been done.”
“They may yet vote you out of your job,” Abby pointed out.
“Yeah. I was looking for a job when I found this one. I don’t care.”
“The next Viceroy could cancel this decree.”
Rita snorted. “You just watch them try. Once the pig has a bucket of acorns, there ain’t no way you’re getting them acorns back. Once folks around here realize what they now own, you ain’t gonna take it away from them. Not without a fight.”
With that thought, Abby took her leave.
The drive back to Government House was quiet as she mulled over the twists and turns of what Granny Rita had dumped on her. As much as Abby hated to admit it, the old biddy had some good points. The truth was that the money grabbers in human space would demand, sooner or later, that they get something in return for what they’d sent here. Unfortunately, Rita’s response created all kinds of complex challenges. It might cut the strings human space had on Alwa’s industry, but was there anyone here on Alwa Station that could wield all the power Rita had gathered up and put into one person’s hand?
Kris Longknife had managed to juggle a whole lot of things, but Kris was kind of unique, one powerful gal who could address all the challenges facing Alwa who also knew how to depend on and get the most out of the people around her.
Be that as it may be, the biggest problem of them all still was that, having let the horse out of the barn, how do you get the damn critter to come back in?
Abby had the cabby drop her back at Government House. No surprise, the people who had been there when she left were still there when she got back. She quickly filled them in on the why and wherefore of Rita’s little power play.
Ada frowned. “Why am I just now hearing about some honchos from Wardhaven trying to take back our fabrication plants?”
“I’m sorry,” Abby said, speaking for her boss. “They got in and Kris Longknife had them packed off to the Wasp’s brig in just under an hour. I guess no one wanted to admit we’d dodged a bullet.”
“So how come Granny Rita knew all about it?” Kuno asked.
Abby shrugged. “I have no idea how she gets her information. Do you?”
The Colonial winced.
Ada took over the conversation. “I don’t care why or what, there is no way I want to have Rita sitting on all our eggs.”
“I agree,” Abby said, but noted that Ada hadn’t said anything about it not being a good idea for any one particular person sitting on all the eggs.”
Indeed, the four Colonials were exchanging glances like a couple of teenagers who’d just come up with the idea of throwing a multi-gender pajama party . . . with no pajamas in sight . . . and couldn’t wait for the adult supervision to go away.
“Well, if you’ll excuse me, I need to be getting back,” Abby said, standing.
“The shuttle’s not leaving until morning,” Ada pointed out. “You can stay at my place.”
“I’d rather bunk down with the shuttle crew so I don’t miss them. Who knows, they might launch a bit early and I might be a bit late, what with you serving me one of those wonderful Colonial breakfasts.”
“You’re really missing out on a treat,” sure sounded like a bribe being offered.
Abby shook her head. Lago was told to get her to the shuttle hanger. Fifteen minutes later, Abby was back at the port. She waited until Lago was out of sight before rousting out the duty shuttle crew and ordering the ready longboat for an immediate launch.
“You know, the folks around here get mighty pissed when we do a launch this late at night.”
“If you don’t launch when I say so, there’s gonna be some people in orbit that are gonna be mightily pissed. Who do you want mad at you?”
They launched thirty minutes later.
Abby spent the flight up to Canopus Station thinking. She definitely had a problem.
Rita had recognized the basic one: how would Alwa keep the humans on the other side of the galaxy from messing in their life? Sure, they were the ones who had paid for all that nice, expensive equipment in the first place, but they’d provided it as part of a prop to cover their own ass. If the aliens conquered and plundered Alwa, they wanted the raiders to think they had beaten the system that had caused them so much grief. That way, the aliens wouldn’t go looking for the real source of the people who had refused to roll over and die.
Of course, that entire concept was flawed. If the alien raiders had any skill with DNA, one sample of flesh from a bird and one from a human would show the two were from totally different evolutionary lines.
Still, the blood and sweat of the fight that the people and birds of the Alwa system had put up the last couple of years was certainly fair exchange for the expensive heavy manufacturing fabs the corporations from human space had donated.
Rita’s solution, nationalizing everything from the other side of the galaxy and reserving all its production for Alwa, was an idea that Abby expected to be acceptable to everyone.
Except it put Granny Rita in the cat bird seat, controlling everything.
And even if the Colonials voted her out of the Viceroy’s job, whoever got it could be just as bad. Maybe not immediately, but power corrupts and total power corrupts totally, or whatever the wise man said.
Abby needed to come up with a way to protect the means of production here from distant finagling, while keeping some local from killing the goose that lays the golden egg.
She was still thinking about how to square that circle as she walked into Pipra’s office.
“I wasn’t expecting to see you until morning,” Pipra said.
Abby filled her in on what she now knew about Granny Rita’s little plot, then added, “If I’m reading our friends in the Colonial Government right, while they don’t want Rita running the show, they ain’t at all bothered by the idea of one of them being our boss.”
“Damn. Once something like this gets loose, it’s not going to stop and it’s not going to be pretty. It’s been kind of nice having a government and industry that were working together to save our necks. Now, I guess with Kris Longknife having killed a couple of hundred billion aliens, folks feel they got enough breathing space to go back to their usual game of grabbing power and running with it.”
“Boss, I got some ideas about a thing or two.”
“Do I want to hear about them?”
“I think you’d rather be able to say you had no idea I’d go off and do such a damn fool stunt.”
“Suddenly, I really don’t want to know what you’re up to.”
“Yeah. Now, if you don’t mind, I got a couple of pots of stew to bring to a boil at just the right time. I’m going to pull in some IOUs, so if the next lunar shuttle leaves a bit early, don’t be surprised.”
“I don’t want to know anything,” Pipra said, and buried her nose in the nearest reader.
Abby let herself out of the office and headed for Canopus Station Yards. Within the hour, she was sharing some beers with a dozen or so folks. Good folks, the salt of the earth type folks. If you asked them, most would call themselves worker bees. Others among them got paid to supervise the worker bees.
None were in management.
They listened to what Abby had to say, then offered some suggestions of their own. The meeting broke up just short of an hour from its start. Most of them had already called some of their best friends to get together for a beer and had to hurry out.
An hour later, Abby was sweet-talking a lunar shuttle crew into giving her a fast, 2.5 gee ride to the moon. The morning shuttle left before midnight with only one passenger.
Abby spent most of the next morning trotting from meeting to meeting. She made use of the newly completed maglev train to get some face time before noon at the new complex at East crater. Her meeting with her friends at the North complex had to be by phone, but she got that moving.
She held up at her favorite bar in New Town, shared beers with whoever wanted to talk to her, and checked her mail regularly. There were a few disappointments, but nothing she couldn’t live with. She checked in with Pipra to see if there was any action on the Granny Rita or Colonial Government front, but Pipra knew nothing. Happy with a day well spent, even if it wasn’t in her lover’s arms, Abby went to bed early.
She fell asleep composing her next move.
The next day was busy. Proposals were floated, shot down, modified, reviewed, and polished. Abby was pulling strings that stretched all over Alwa orbit. Because of the time delay, she wasn’t sure that the asteroid miners would make it in, but they could sign up later.
Nine o’clock that night, Abby did one final scan down her first official transmission in her new capacity. Danged if she didn’t find a typo that had survived all those reviews. She corrected it, and hit send.
Official machines from Government House to every yard in orbit and every plant on the moon began to spit out a message that caused consternation wherever it was read.
LET IT BE KNOWN THAT WE, THE AMALGAMATED UNION OF CRAFTS, FABRICATION OPERATORS, SMART METALTM BUILDERS, AND ASSOCIATED WORKERS AS WELL AS THE ALWA ASSOCIATION OF FIRST LINE SUPERVISORS, DO HEREBY REFUSE TO HAVE OUR WORKPLACE CONFISCATED BY THE ILLEGAL AND UNPRECEDENTED ACTIONS OF THE VICEROY FOR ALWA DOWNSIDE. WE REJECT ANY EFFORTS TO DIVERT OUR WORK FROM THE PRESENT DRIVE TO MEET THE NEEDS OF ALL PEOPLE OF THE ALWA SYSTEM AND ASSURE THEIR COMMON DEFENSE. WE DEMAND THAT THE RELATIONSHIPS OF ALL WORKERS, MANAGERS AND GOVERNMENTS OF THE ALWA SYSTEM BE RESTORED TO THEIR PREVIOUS CONDITION OF HARMONY AND PRODUCTIVITY.
ABSENT AN AGREEMENT WITHIN THE NEXT 48 HOURS TO RETURN TO THAT PREVIOUS STATE OF LABOR TRANQUILITY, WE HAVE UNANIMOUSLY AGREED TO DOWN TOOLS.
WE ARE PREPARED TO STRIKE TO PRESERVE OUR SACRED RIGHTS EARNED BY THE SWEAT OF OUR OWN BROWS.
Signed: ABIGAIL NIGHTINGALE, BUSINESS MANAGER, THE AMALGAMATED UNION OF CRAFTS, FABRICATION OPERATORS, SMART METALTM BUILDERS AND ASSOCIATED WORKERS AND THE ALWA ASSOCIATION OF FIRST LEVEL SUPERVISORS
Abby was ready to get a good night’s sleep. No doubt, tomorrow would be a busy day, but messages started coming in from all over the place before she could lay her weary body down.
“I knew I was knocking over a hornet’s nest, but I figured it would take a while to hit the ground,” Abby said to herself as she pulled back on her clothes and called up the lunar to Canopus Station shuttle.
“We already got orders to haul the ready shuttle out of the hanger and prep it for immediate launch, Abby. There’s talk of jacking it up to 3.5 gees. Don’t they know a lunar shuttle don’t do nothing above two gees?”
“You tell them that it can’t do more than 1.5 gees, Albert. My old bones are getting tired of all this hurry up and wait.”
“I’ll tell them that. We union workers got to stick together.”
Abby hoped she wouldn’t live to rue this day. What did Kris Longknife say way too often? “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”