Starfist: FlashFire (5 page)

Wellington-Humphreys stared at Stutz in surprise for a moment. The man did not always talk like a bumpkin! She realized then that his folksy manner was assumed and behind that façade worked a facile and astute intelligence. She had underrated the man. She should have known anybody who could have built an agricultural empire such as the one Stutz ruled was no rube. But he had inadvertently given himself away with that outburst. Obviously his own harvests had been most adversely affected by the Mad Tomato virus. A very undiplomatic smile crept across her face.

“You find that amusing?” Stutz asked, not amused.

“Not in the least, sir.” Since her smile nettled Stutz, she enlarged it to a grin. She challenged him with it and at the same time let him know she was on to his tactics.

Realizing he’d made a slip, Stutz permitted himself a tight grin and continued in a more affable tone. “Wall, it was all exaggerated and it’s behind us now, but don’t forget that other worlds have had their problems too. How’s about what happened on Atlas just a while back, whose crops were destroyed by a virus imported from one of the Confederation worlds? We ain’t the only ones with problems like that.”

“We understand that,” Pieters replied, “but there is the problem with Mylex and their failure to protect the intellectual properties of the Confederation’s member worlds, their massive violations of the copyright laws, and the very profitable trade they have built up selling cut-rate bootlegged books, vids, all kinds of entertainment media that are protected elsewhere in the Confederation. Why, the Mylex representative isn’t even with us today!” He glanced at the three negotiators who’d accompanied Stutz, all of whom shook their heads.

“Naw,” Stutz grinned, “ol’ Jenks Moody. He couldn’t make it, had a bit too much of our fine Hobcaw bourbon last night.” The members of his delegation guffawed.

Wellington-Humphreys couldn’t help but admire the way the negotiators were laying it on, pretending to be a bunch of “cracker-barrel” cronies. She glanced out of the side of her eye at Pieters, who really did think these people were hicks, and winked. “Well, Mr. Stutz, there is also the situation on Embata, with the use of slave labor in the mines there. That sort of practice doesn’t sit well with our ideas of human rights.”

“Oh, yeah, Miz Wellington-Humpfriz? Those people are felons, ma’am, they don’t have no rights. But you ever hear of a place called Darkside, eh? How does your highfalutin’ ‘human rights’ ideas justify that?” Darkside was the highly secret penal colony the Confederation operated for the incarceration of its worst criminals. Often they were sent there without benefit of a trial.

“Touché,” Wellington-Humphreys replied.

“I’ll ‘touché’ you sumptin’ else, ma’am.” Stutz leaned back, narrowing his eyes. In her mind Wellington-Humphreys imagined him snapping his galluses. “You remember a scribbler, someone from Carhart’s World, I recall, he visited Embata about a hundred years ago and wrote a book about the place? His name was Oldlaw, Frederic Oldlaw. He became famous as a city planner back in the last century. He wrote about his travels through Embata but he really meant everywhere in our quadrant. He wrote the Embatans they were all a collection of lazy ignorant folks who’d rather hunt and run with dawgs in the woods than work for a living, lived off their pregnant wimmen’s labor, ate a diet that’d puke a hound off a gut wagon, ’n got fallin’-down drunk just to relax. He reported a conversation he had with one fella at a roadhouse on a back road somewheres. The man was braggin’ about how he was gonna get drunk ’n go home ’n beat up his wife and kids. ‘How much do you weigh?’ this Oldlaw fella asked. ‘Oh, ’bout a hunner fifty kilos,’ the guy answered. ‘Wall, how much do your kids weigh?’ Oldlaw wanted to know. You see where he was drivin’ at? ‘Nuttin’, when they’s flyin’ thru th’ air,’ the man replied.” Stutz laughed and slapped his palm on the table.

“Now, Miz Humpfriz, Mr. Pieters,” Stutz continued, “that’s a good ol’ story, but it’s pure hogwash, pure hogwash. That writer fella was so stupid he never realized that’s just how the Embata people get their fun, leadin’ strangers on that way. That’s what happens when you don’t stay someplace long enough to get to know the folks there. Wall, how do you think trash like that set with the folks who read it but never visited Embata themselves? And that attitude is at the bottom of the problems we are having today with your Confederation of Human Worlds. You people think you’re so much better’n we are ’n we don’t like it, not one damn bit. Our differences have been growin’ us apart for two hundred years now and we want out of this Confederation, ma’am.”

Wellington-Humphreys suppressed a sigh. She’d had enough for one day. “Mr. Stutz, I think Dr. Pieters would agree, this meeting has been very fruitful. Can we adjourn until tomorrow, say around ten? Perhaps by then your friend from Embata will be feeling up to attending and we can continue this discussion?”

Stutz nodded affably. “Before you go, ma’am, I want to give you somethin’.” He produced a large bottle filled with an amber liquid. “This is a bottle of Old Snort, the finest aged bourbon in Human Space and it comes from my own distillery. I want you to sample it tonight and tomorrow you tell me if you ever tasted anything so smooth and delicious in your life. Yes, ma’am,” he nodded, “drink it neat or with spring water, ’n you’ll see we Cob’uns know our whiskey.”

Wellington-Humphreys had engaged rooms in one of Fargo’s most exclusive hotels for the negotiations, something she often did when she wanted off-world diplomats to feel comfortable during difficult meetings. She and Rafe Pieters were sitting in their suite, relaxing.

“ ‘Old Snort,’ ” Pieters laughed, regarding warily the bourbon Stutz had given Wellington-Humphreys. “Well, let’s try some and see if the old boy knows what he’s talking about. ‘Old Snort,’ Julie, where did he come up with a name like that?”

“Same place they came up with a name like Hobcaw.” Wellington-Humphreys grinned, holding out her glass. “ ‘Pokin’ fun at strangers’ seems to be ingrained in the ‘Cob’un’ culture. One finger, please. No, make that two! I need something strong after sitting in there with those characters, but I don’t trust this stuff not to make me go blind or something. But you know, Rafe, I could actually get to like that old bastard. There’s more behind that ugly nose of his than sinuses full of snot.”

“Julie!” Pieters shook his head, pretending shock. He poured her whiskey and then himself. He regarded the amber fluid carefully. “We might be taking our lives in our own hands, drinking this stuff. That’d be the ultimate insult, wouldn’t it? Send buffoons as negotiators and then have them poison us to boot.” He laughed and regarded the label on the whiskey bottle. “ ‘Old Snort’ indeed!” He sniffed the bourbon carefully and raised an eyebrow. “Umm, might just do!” Then: “They’re stalling, you know that, don’t you? They want to keep us talking while they plan something. We’ve negotiated with them for years on these very same issues we’ve been discussing all day, Julie, and always it’s been they’ve done nothing anybody else wouldn’t have done, nobody likes us, everybody owes us, blah, blah, blah. They can be the most fractious, disagreeable, one-way people to deal with. I think we need to report that to the President, advise her she’d better get ready for the other shoe to drop.”

“You mean the Ordinance of Secession?”

Pieters nodded. “Yes, and her response.”

“They really aren’t buffoons, Rafe, you know that, don’t you?”

“Yep. That’s how I figured out they’re up to something. Chin-chin, Ho Chi Minh!” He touched his glass to hers.

They sipped the bourbon.

“My God, Rafe!” Wellington-Humphreys gasped, “it goes down like water and burns like fire!” She took another sip. “Ohhhh! Off with the shoes, my toes are on fire!”

“It really is damned good stuff!” Pieters whispered, holding his glass up to the light, admiring the whiskey. “I can see how Jenks Moody might’ve overindulged last night.”

“Rafe, you’ve dealt with these people before, what are they really like?”

“Well, I’ve had contact with the ‘Cob’uns’ as the people from Hobcaw like to call themselves. A long time ago. That was during one of the Silvasian wars, I can’t remember which, can’t keep them straight anymore. I was a second lieutenant in the infantry in those days, yes,” he smiled as Wellington-Humphreys raised her eyebrows, “the old economist, ah, the
distinguished
old economist, who now stands so humbly before you, was a goddamned ground-pounding soldier once.” The Old Snort was having its effect on Pieters. Eagerly he poured himself another generous dollop. “We had a regiment of Cob’uns with our brigade and I got to know some of their officers and NCOs pretty well. They were a hospitable and friendly bunch of guys. In many ways they were a lot like that bum in the story Stutz told us, they liked to get drunk, talked all the time about things they’d hunt when they got home, kept a sloppy bivouac. But, Julie, in a fight you couldn’t ask for better men to be at your side! Damn, those boys could shoot and maneuver! If we have to go to war with the Hobcaws it won’t be a pushover, take it from me. I suspect some of the other worlds in that Coalition aren’t far behind the Cob’uns in their fighting spirit, especially the Embatans and the Wandos.”

Wellington-Humphreys held out her glass for a refill. “I hope we’re sober enough to make the meeting tomorrow.”

“If we keep this up we sure won’t be,” Pieters laughed, giving her another two fingers of the bourbon. He refilled his own glass but capped the bottle tightly and then set it aside.

“It’s going to be war, Rafe, I can see that now. They will secede and we cannot let them do that. How bad will it be?”

Pieters did not answer at once but swirled the whiskey in his glass and sipped before saying, “They had a saying they liked to quote when in their cups. I always thought it was hyperbole for my benefit as an outsider. It went something like, ‘Turn peace away, for honor perishes with peace.’ What happened at Fort Seymour was the first fatal move, Julie, and we shall never call it back. If we have war with those people it is going to be bad, Julie, very bad, I am afraid.”

But Rafe Pieters had no idea how bad it would really be and he was not half as afraid as he should have been.

CHAPTER FIVE

Tommy Lyons lay dying.

“General, the tests are conclusive. Your son does not have pneumonia or any other form of upper-respiratory infection. It’s a particularly virulent form of psitticoid tuberculosis that is very deadly in younger children if not treated promptly. And I have to tell you, it has not been.”

“Bu-but the other doctors assured us he . . .” General Davis Lyons gestured helplessly at the tiny form on the bed, its chest heaving spasmodically.

The boy’s mother, Varina, sat beside him, mopping the perspiration from the child’s forehead, occasionally daubing at the blood the intermittent bouts of coughing brought up from his tortured lungs. She glanced imploringly at the doctor. “Can’t you do anything?” she asked.

Dr. Ezekiel Vance, Ravenette’s foremost specialist in communicable diseases, shook his head sadly. “We could, if we could get the proper medication. This form of TB is very rare in this quadrant of Human Space but it is endemic on other worlds. I’ve ordered a stasis unit from Mylex. Once it gets here we could stabilize Tommy and keep him alive until I can find the medicine I need. You know how backward we are in medical science, compared to other worlds in the Confederation. And we don’t keep supplies of the medicine required to combat this disease on hand although there is a drug that can cure it, but—” he shrugged.

“But what?” Varina Lyons asked.

Ezekie Vance was a small, stoop-shouldered man, and the anxiety of the past hours was clearly etched on his face. As he spoke he twisted the hairs on his long white mustaches, an involuntary response to the frustration he felt at his helplessness in the face of the child’s fading life. “But the embargo,” he replied, looking at the two, surprise on his face. “Didn’t you know that Merrick Pharmaceuticals’s products are embargoed, and they are the only source for the drug that can fight this disease?”

“The embargo? That does not apply to the importation of medicines and food and nonmilitary goods, Doctor!” General Lyons replied. Little Tommy began to cough again and for agonizing moments the adults’ attention was directed toward the child. White-hot anger surged through the general. Goddamn the embargo! Goddamn the Confederation for imposing it! Goddamn the secessionists!

“Yes, General, the embargo. Merrick products are embargoed because some of them can also be applied to the manufacture of mind-altering drugs that have specific military applications. On Mylex for many decades there was a thriving industry in bootlegged prescription drugs. They used third parties to buy small quantities from companies like Merrick then replicated the ingredients and resold the stuff at vastly reduced prices. Often the stuff they sell is not as effective as the real drugs and people have died using the cut-rate imitations. So, when the Confederation put the embargo in place, Merrick volunteered to apply it to all their products. That’s why Tommy can’t get the medicine he needs to save him.”

General Lyons, commander of Ravenette’s military forces, a decorated veteran of many campaigns, had never felt such helpless anger and despair. Only days before, Tommy had been a healthy, active boy of eight, the light of the Lyons’s life, the one bright spot the general could always count on to revive his spirits and restore his fading faith in the future of his world. And now—this? “Maybe somebody on Mylex has some of the stuff Tommy needs,” he suggested, “it’d be better than nothing, doctor.”

“Maybe. I’m trying to locate some of this drug, believe me, General, I’m trying. If we can get a stasis unit in time—and mind you, that might not work in this case because Tommy’s condition is so far advanced—if I can find someone in our Coalition who has a supply of the drug, or contacts within the Confederation who can supply it, yes, I might be able to save your son. But time isn’t on our side, sir. General, one more thing. We’ve got to find out how Tommy was exposed to the virus that causes this form of TB. The public health epidemiologists must be advised. They’ll want to know what Tommy’s been exposed to these last weeks. If this is the first case of an outbreak of the disease, we could be in for a lot of trouble.”