War World X: Takeover (60 page)

Serafimov took a deep breath.

“So. Here is my solution to your problem, gentlemen. The colonists on Sauron have proven they can field the finest athletes in the CoDominium—be quiet, Minister Maldonado. Therefore, having nothing left to prove, the Sauron colony is heretofore banned from competition in the CoDominium Olympics until such time as further review by CoDominium officers
at their convenience and discretion
deem otherwise.”

Serafimov turned his gaze to a white-faced Voorhees. “Since the Sauron colony has proved herself to be capable of such unequalled expertise in these matters, all CoDominium Olympics judges will be drawn from—and solely from—the Sauron colony, with citizens of the colony assigned by their colony senate to such duties based on their expertise in the individual events of the CoDominium Olympics, until such time as further review, etcetera.” He glanced sideways toward his secretary. “Have that written up for my signature and distributed appropriately for the next colonial diplomatic disbursement.”

Serafimov turned back to his guests. “Now, gentlemen, I have to deal with food riots in Omaha, Kiev, Lebanon and half a dozen other cities—some of which are rumored to have suffered outbreaks of cannibalism—before I authorize the forced colonial relocation to some wretched rock at the back of beyond for approximately twenty-two thousand luckless wretches from Afghanistan. I hope this helps you both appreciate the amount of time I have spent on your
crisis
.” The last word was greasy with contempt.

Voorhees and Maldonado rose in stiff coordination, thanked the Chairman for his time and left the office. The two men were marched side by side down the long corridor of the CoDominium’s offices on Luna, toward the launch bays where they would board shuttles to vessels which would return them to their respective homes; Maldonado to Earth, Voorhees back to Sauron system.

For a brief moment they stood on the platform alone together. Neither man looked at the other.

“So,” Maldonado finally said, “That went well.”

Voorhees did not nod, but agreed: “Better than expected. The funds will be in your account by the end of the week. Geneva, as usual?”

Maldonado sighed. “Where else? How anyone can claim to live a civilized life on those colonies is beyond me.”

Voorhees’ shuttle pod arrived first. He turned and smiled as he entered it. “Yes”, he agreed, making a frank appraisal of Maldonado’s portly form. “I’m sure it is.”

The pod doors closed on Maldonado’s reply.

Voorhees hailed a private car, sealed himself in the back and activated a small device in his case that would scramble any surveillance equipment. He checked the time; he would be early for his meeting with the Sauron colony’s representative in the CoDominium Senate, but he would put the extra half hour to good use.

He began opening cascade-encrypted files and reviewing the status reports of an operation he had initiated almost two decades ago, and today he could report to the Senator that he, in turn, could inform the Sauron High Council that the operation was on schedule.

The file name read: Project
Perseus
.

THEOCRACY

Haven, Royce Farm, Northern Pasture: 2081 A.D.

Becca Royce concentrated on controlling her breathing, no mean feat in the thin air of Haven, even at sea level, and she was well above that now. The fingers of her right hand twitched as they moved in tiny, tickling probes over the surface of the rock beneath them, seeking purchase. Finally, she felt just the right texture beneath her fingertips and dug them in, gripping the rock with such force that small puffs of dust rose from beneath her hands. Only when her grip was secure did she pull herself up, one-handed, toward the ledge above. Beneath her dangling fifteen-year-old legs, three hundred feet of daylight separated the soles of her shoes from the rocks below.

With one last effort, Becca pulled herself onto the ledge, twisting round to sit next to the terrified lamb that had fallen from the meadow above but, miraculously, no further.

“Well, baby,” she said, stroking the lamb’s head to calm it down, “Some view, huh?”

Becca had crawled down and around to reach the ledge, and after securing the lamb in a sling and the sling onto her back, she returned the way she had come: twenty-five feet straight up an almost sheer rock face overlooking the Shangri-La Valley to a meadow above, where the rest of the herds grazed, one dam bleating in sheepish befuddlement over her lost offspring.

Becca trotted over to the dam and returned her offspring, oblivious as it sought its mother’s teat, then went to get her tools to repair the fence around the meadow’s perimeter.

Becca wasn’t even aware that she ran everywhere she went. Despite the barely-tolerable altitude in Haven’s already thin atmosphere, she wasn’t even out of breath.

“Good trueday, father,” she said as she entered the tool shed. Her father was standing at his workbench, working on a new leather harness, big powerful hands twisting the leather, the great curved needle pulling the lacings through and back, through and back.

“Harmony, daughter,” her father Emil offered in the way of their faith. Becca’s forebears had been among Haven’s first permanent colonists, members of the Church of New Harmony, who had petitioned the CoDominium for colonization rights to Haven when it was just one more unlovely, unloved little moon, another speck of non-terrestrial real estate that no one else had wanted.

Led by Church Founder Charles Castell, the Harmonies had come here to live and worship as their new faith guided them, far from the prejudices of those outside that faith, and the interference of CoDominium laws.

For years the Church had flourished and, given the doctrine’s few material needs and Haven’s meager resources, had even prospered after a fashion. Haven was just slightly more than survivable, but more important to the Harmonies, it was isolated, and it was theirs. And for a while, it was large enough to accommodate the Harmonies and the rare Bureau of Relocation shipload of forced-emigration refugees without the groups ever bumping into one another, except for the fairly common converts to the faith who found the doctrine amenable…or at least preferable to death by starvation or freezing.

Those idyllic first few decades had only lasted until some of those refugees had started mining the little moon; Haven, as it turned out, was rich in several odd but commercially valuable minerals. Now the Church was locked in battle with the mining consortiums over Haven’s future and who would shape that future, and by extension the surface of Haven itself.

Emil was a member of the church council and this made him a target for all sorts of attention from the mining interests, none of which he welcomed. But today, it seemed they had changed their tactics; today their agents had approached him about his daughter.

“Had a pair o’ discos up to the house looking for you, child.” Emil used the contracted version of one of the Church’s casual term for those outside of their faith. As
Harmonies
sought to live in harmony with the universe, those who did not were known variously as
tinears
,
deafs
or
discordants
—”discos” for short.

Becca’s heart rate went up significantly for the first time all day. Whatever her father and the Church thought of the non-Harmonies on Haven, to Becca they represented opportunities she would never have without them.

“Yes, father?”

“Summat ’bout your schooling in the town,” Emil went on as he continued working on the harness he was fashioning. The “town” was Castell City, the largest metropolis on Haven. Originally the small trading center of the Church of New Harmony’s original settlement, in recent years the mining corporations and the CoDominium’s policies had spurred its growth into an unrecognizable sprawl. But to old timers like Emil, it would always be “the town”. He looked up at Becca—the girl was already taller than he—and met her eyes. “They tell me you ran, daughter.”

Becca looked at the floor. “Yes, father.”

Emil studied the leather lacings in the sunlight coming through his workbench window. “Schooling in the town, you wanted. Your mother wanted it for ye, too, and I give in, so long you kept t’ the Harmony Way and no wildness.”

He put the leather down and rubbed his hands. Becca could hear the joints grinding inside his flesh, the arthritis getting worse by the year, but her father didn’t even wince. “An’ ye been true to your word, daughter, an’ never did you give us cause to regret letting you go.” He smiled, and Becca felt her father’s love for her like a warm breeze. “I’m proud of ye, Becca; these discos say you’re the smartest in your whole school. But this running thing….” Emil’s frown was one of concern, not of censure. Even so, Becca could not stop herself from interrupting her father.

“I’ve not run overmuch, father, never in competition; only the regular health class courses…it’s just….” Becca blushed and quieted, aware of her disrespectful behavior.

Emil was quiet for a moment.

“Mm-hm. I know. They make all the youngsters do their fitness trials. Want t’be sure ye’re fit for their militaries, if need be… as if just livin’ t’ fifteen Earth years here on Haven wa’n’t proof enow of how hale and hearty a child is, an’ has to be.” Emil’s voice dropped.

Becca’s mother Thora had lost two daughters and a son to Haven’s thin air and harsh climate, and Becca’s own robust—even amazing—good health did nothing to relieve her parents’ worrying over their eldest and only living child.

“Anyway,” Emil changed the subject and the tone, “These two discos come t’ ask your Ma an’ me about your future schooling. Asked if ye planned on goin’ t’ th’ University in town, like your Mother did.”

Becca’s eyes met her fathers. “I want to, father.” she admitted. “I’ve never made secret of that.”

Emil nodded. “Ayuh. An’ you still want to go for the same thing, yes?”

“Veterinary sciences, father, yes. For the farm.”

Emil’s heart swelled with pride at the iron in his daughter’s tone. He and his wife Thora would have no more children, and Becca would hold the farm in her name when she came to wed. It would not pass to her husband; Emil had already seen to that when he filed his daughter’s marriage contract with the Church Elders. With luck, Becca’s husband would be a neighbor boy, making the farm she one day left to her own children even larger and more prosperous. The man who married Becca would share her wealth, but he’d best have no illusions about taking anything away from her; Harmonies might now and again fail in strictly adhering to Church Edict, but Emil had never known Becca’s will to bend.

“Well, then, they say they want ye to come try for those colony games the CoDo people run. If ye want to, they think ye might go as part of Haven’s group of young people. An’ if ye’ll do that, they say y’can attend University fully paid for by the Redfield Foundation.”

Becca was confused. “Colony games? The CoDo?” For a moment she couldn’t understand what her father was talking about, then: “Father, do you mean they were talking about the CoDominium Olympic Games? They want me to try out for a
spaceontheHavenOlympicteam, oh, father!
”

Becca was a devout Harmonite. She was ferociously intelligent and iron-willed and usually very serious, but she was also fifteen-years-old. She threw her arms around her father’s broad shoulders and hugged him with almost all her strength, and then Emil
did
wince.

“Now daughter, “he managed to gasp out as the last of the air was crushed from his lungs, “Ye may run and jump all ye want,” Becca heard the sternness in his tone and stepped back. Emil put his hands on her shoulders, keeping his astonishment off his face as he held her gaze;
by Old Charlie Castell’s Beard, the child was as strong as a tamerlane!
“But ye may not wrestle. It’s unseemly. Are we agreed?”

“Yes father,” Becca agreed readily, and meant it. She didn’t care for wrestling, in any case.

It was too easy.

AUTOCRACY

Earth, The Kremlin, Russia: 2082 A.D.

When the latest CoDominium Olympics began, few citizens of the colonies, and almost no one on Earth, had ever heard of Haven. By the end of the first week of the two-weeks of the games, “the little moon that could” was all the news.

Haven athletes had medaled in a third of the events and excelled in so many others that the standings, normally dominated by the Sauron System athletes, had been completely thrown off due to upsets and displacements of Sauron’s competitors by Haven newcomers.

Compared with the day-to-day workings of the CoDominium—where striving to keep a star-spanning civilization functioning in the face of economic chaos, burgeoning corporate power and a resurgent nationalism among the countries of Old Earth and their colonies—it was hardly an important event.

But in the corridors of power of that same CoDominium, where nothing that might prove a fulcrum or a pole ever went un-noticed, unexamined or un-used, the advent of an obscure moon-colony into the forefront of inter-colonial competition was noticed, examined, and its usefulness discussed and pondered with great interest.

The term of office of the Supreme Chair of the CoDominium Council alternated every two years, by law, between American and Russian appointees, with neither country allowed to place the same person in the office within the same ten-year period. Americans were used to revolving-door bureaucrats, but the Russians liked their leaders to proceed directly from supreme power to divine judgment and a peaceful transfer of power that was actually held to a schedule did not sit well with them, at all.

So, as they had always done with every other law that got in the way of what they actually wanted, the Russians simply ignored it. For the last eighteen years, whatever the name of the Russian appointee who happened to actually hold the Supreme Chair, the person who actually held the reins of power was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Reformed Soviet Union: Sergei Yevgenievich Volkov.

Volkov was of medium height and build, with a pronounced potbelly and a bulbous red nose that gave him the appearance of a hard drinker. In fact, he routinely substituted water for vodka in nearly all political meetings and every social event; one more way he maintained an edge over anyone in his immediate circle who might be probing him for weakness or maneuvering to replace him.