The Sam Gunn Omnibus (48 page)

My father’s strong voice cut
through the babble of argument. “To hell with the legalities!”

That stunned them all into silence.

“When a nation’s vital interests
are being usurped by foreigners, when a nation’s legal rights are being
trampled under the heels of imperialists, when a nation’s wealth is being
stolen from its people and their chosen leaders— then that nation must fight
back with any and every means at its disposal.”

The Indonesian paled. “You are
speaking of war.”

“Exactly so!”

“War?” echoed the Ugandan, dropping
the finger sandwich he had been nibbling.

“We have no other course,” my
father insisted.

“But...
war?” squeaked the slim and timid representative from the Maldives. “Against
the United States? Europe? Japan?”

My father smiled grimly. “No. Not
against any nation. We must make war against the corporations that are
operating in space.”

The Brazilian ran a fingertip
across his pencil-thin moustache. “It should be possible to destroy a few
satellites with ASATs.” He was showing that he knew not only the political and
military situation, but the technical jargon as well.

“Fire off a single antisatellite
weapon and the U.N. Peacekeepers will swoop down on you like avenging angels,”
warned the delegate from Gabon.

“The same U.N. that refuses to
consider our request for justice,” my father grumbled.

The Colombian representative smiled
knowingly. “There are many ways to make war,” he said. “Space facilities are
extremely fragile. A few well-placed bombs, they can be very small, actually. A
few very public assassinations. It can all be blamed on the Muslims or the
ecologists.”

“Or the feminists,” snapped the
Indonesian, himself a Muslim and a devoted ecologist. Everyone else in the room
laughed.

“Exactly so,” said my father. “We
pick one corporation and bend it to our will. Then the others will follow.”

Thus we went to war against Sam
Gunn.

My father was no fool. Making
war—even the limited kind of terrorist’s war—against one of the giant multinational
corporations would have been dangerous, even suicidal. After all, a corporation
such as Rockledge International had an operating budget larger than the Gross
National Product of most of the Twelve Nations. Their corporate security forces
outgunned most of our armies.

But Sam Gunn’s corporation, VCI,
was small and vulnerable. It looked like a good place to start.

So our meeting ended with unanimous
agreement. The Twelve Equatorial Nations issued the Declaration of Quito,
proclaiming that the space over the Equator was our sovereign territory, and we
intended to defend it against foreign invaders just as we would defend the
sacred soil of our homelands.

The Declaration was received with
nearly hysterical fervor all through Latin America. In Ecuador, even the
revolutionaries and the news media reluctantly praised my father for his
boldness. North of the Rio Grande, however, it was ignored by the media, the
government, and the people. Europe and Japan received it with similar iciness.

My far-seeing father had expected
nothing more. A week after the meeting of the Twelve he told me over dinner, “The
gringos choose to ignore us. Like ostriches, they believe that if they pay us
no attention we will go away.”

“What will be your next move, Papa?”
I asked.

He smiled a fatherly smile at me. “Not
my move, Juanita, my beautiful one. The next move will be yours.”

I
was stunned.
Flattered. And a bit frightened.

My father had chosen me for the
crucial task of infiltrating VCI. I had been educated at UCLA and held a degree
in computer programming, despite my father’s grumbling that a daughter should
study more feminine subjects, such as nutrition (by which he meant cooking). I also
had a burning fervor to help my people. Now I received a rapid course in
espionage and sabotage from no less than the director of our secret police
himself.

“You must be very careful,” my
father told me, once my training was concluded.

“I will be, Papa,” I said. I had
joined him for breakfast on the veranda of the summer palace, up in the
foothills where the air was clean and deliciously cool.

He looked deep into my eyes, and
his own eyes misted over. “To send my only child to war is not an easy thing,
you know.” He was being slightly inaccurate. I was his only legitimate child,
and it was obvious that he had been planning to use me this way for some time.

“Yet,” he went on, “I must think
and act as
El Presidente,
rather than as a loving
father.”

“I understand, Papa.”

“You will be a heroine for your
people. A new Mata Hari.”

The original Mata Hari had been a
slut and so poor at espionage that she was caught and executed. I realized that
my father did not know that. He was a politician, not a student of history.

Turning his head to look out over
the balcony to the terraced hillsides where the peons were hard at work on the
coca fields, he murmured, “There is much money to be made in space.”

There was much money being made
from the coca, I knew. But since the cocaine trade was still illegal the money
that came from it could not be put into the national treasury. My father had to
keep it
for himself and his family,
despite his heartfelt desire to help the destitute peons who were forced to
labor from sunrise to sunset.

The rebels in the hills claimed
that my father was corrupt. They were radical ecologists, I was told, who
wanted to stop the lumbering and mining and coca cultivation that provided our
poor nation’s pitiful income. My father saw our seizure of the equatorial orbit
as a means of making more money for our country, money that he desperately
needed to buy off the rebels—and the next election.

He dabbed at his eyes with his
damask napkin, then rose from the breakfast table. I got up too. The servants
began clearing the dishes away as we walked side by side from the veranda into
the big old house, heading for the door and the limousine waiting for me.

“Be a good soldier, my child,” he
said to me once we had reached the front door. The butler was waiting there
with my packed travel bag. “Be brave. Be fearless.”

“I will do my best, Papa.”

“I know you will.” He gripped me in
a full embrace, unashamed of the tears that streamed from his eyes or the fact
that he was so much shorter than I that I had to bend almost double to allow
him to kiss my cheeks.

My own eyes were misty, as well.
Finally he let go of me and I went quickly down the steps to the waiting
limousine. While the butler put my bag into the trunk, I turned back to my
father, came to attention, and snapped a military salute to him. He returned my
salute, then turned away, unable to watch me step into the limo and start the
long ride to the airport.

Thus I went to war.

I
HAD BEEN
surprised, at first, that Sam
Gunn’s company had hired me on nothing more than the strength of the faked
university credentials of the fictitious person that my father’s secret police
had created for me. Of course, I knew enough computer programming to pass—I
hoped. And of even more course, it would never do for the VCI people to know
that I was the daughter of the man who had issued the Declaration of Quito.
Even if they ignored our Declaration, I reasoned, they could not possibly be
ignorant of it.

VCI was a surprisingly small
operation. I reported to their headquarters in Orlando, a modest office
building quite near the vast Disney World complex. There were only a couple of
dozen employees there, including the company’s president, a lanky silver-haired
former astronaut named Spencer Johansen.

“Call me Spence,” he said when I met
him, my first day at VCI. I had just sat down at my own desk in my own
office—actually nothing more than a cubbyhole formed by movable plastic
partitions that were only shoulder high.

Johansen strolled in, smiling
affably, and sat casually on the corner of my bare desk. He offered his hand
and I took it in a firm grip.

You must understand that, by any
reasonable standard, I was quite an attractive young lady. My hair is the honey
blonde of my Castilian ancestry. My figure is generous. I have been told that my
eyes are as deep and sparkling as a starry midnight sky. (The young lieutenant
who told me that was quickly transferred to a remote post high in the Andes to
fight the rebels.) I am rather tall for a woman in my country, although many
North American women are as tall as I, and even taller. Nonetheless, I was not
that much shorter than Spence, whom I judged to be at least one hundred and
ninety centimeters in height.

“Welcome aboard,” he said. His
smile was dazzling.

“Thank you,” I answered in English.
“I am happy to be here.” I had worked hard to perfect the Los Angelino accent
that my fictitious persona called for.

His eyes were as blue as a
Scandinavian summer sky. Despite his smile, however, I got the impression that
he was probing me, searching for my true motives.

“We had planned to start you off on
some of the more routine stuff, but we’ve got a bit of an emergency cooking and
we’re kinda shorthanded—as usual.”

Before I could reply he went on, “Can
you handle a VR-17 simulator? Reprogram it?”

I
nodded
cautiously, wondering if this was a true emergency or some kind of a test.

“Okay,” Spence said. “Come on down
to the simulations center.” He headed for the opening in the partitions that
was the doorway to my cubicle. There was no door to it.

I
followed him,
stride for stride, as he hurried along the corridor. He was wearing a soft blue
open-necked, short-sleeved shirt and denim jeans. I wore a simple modest blouse
of salmon pink and comfortable russet slacks. He glanced at me and grinned. “You
play tennis?”

“A little.” I had won every
tournament I had ever entered; the daughter of
El Presidente
had to win, but I thought it would be best to be modest with him.

“Thought so.”

“Oh?”

“You’re not puffing,” he said. “Not
many of these desk-jockeys can keep up with me.”

“I am curious,” I said as we
entered the simulations center. It was nothing more than a large windowless
room, empty except for the big mainframe computer standing in its center and
the desks with terminals atop them set up in a ring around the mainframe. The
four corners of the room were bare but for a single cheap plastic chair in each
corner.

A man was sitting in one of those
chairs, with a virtual realty helmet covering his face and data gloves on both
his hands, which twitched in the empty air, manipulating controls that existed
only in the VR programming.

“Curious about what?” Spence asked
as he showed me to one of the computer terminals.

I
slid into the
little wheeled chair. “You are the president of this company, right?”

“Yep.”

“But I had the impression that the
company belonged to someone named Sam Gunn.”

Before Spence could answer, the man
in the VR helmet began swearing horribly at the top of his voice. He called
down the wrath of God on everyone connected with the machinery he was supposed
to be operating, on the person or persons who had programmed the VR simulation,
on Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein and all the mathematicians in the world.
All the while his hands gesticulated wildly, as if he were desperately trying
to ward off a host of devils.

Strangely, Spence grinned at the
interruption. Then he turned back to me and said, loud enough to be heard over
the continuing tirade of abuse, “I’m the president of VCI, but Sam Gunn is the
founder and owns more stock than anybody else. He doesn’t like to sell shares
to anyone who isn’t an employee.”

“I can become a stockholder?”

“We have a very generous stock
option plan,” Spence replied, almost yelling to be heard over the continuing
screaming. “Didn’t you watch your employee orientation video?”