The Unincorporated Woman (57 page)

19 Coming into Their Own

Ceres

Sandra O’Toole stared down from her terrace at the Smith Thoroughfare, amazed at how well the Cereans had adapted to the fact that the capital was now accelerating as fast as the Via Cereana propulsion system and the integrity of the Shell would allow. The Cereans were having to deal with an acceleration factor that made everything slide backwards. At first there’d been some grumbling with underpinnings of concern, but when Padamir Singh’s public information bulletins made it clear that the UHF had been astounded by what the Cereans had accomplished, the mood changed to one of pride and can-do spirit. The Cereans started calling themselves the latest of the refugees, with many actively planning for their new life around the rings of Saturn. Admiral Sinclair had even made a number of guest appearances on the
Clara Roberts Show
extolling the virtues of the ringed planet. The ratings for his appearances had been so high that the networks pelted him with generous offers to host his own show, “Sinclair’s Saturn Hour,” on the topic. He politely declined.

It had been in the little things that Sandra saw the most change. People had switched to eating and drinking bulbs, as if they were on a ship instead of in a settlement. It wasn’t truly needed, but it did cut down on the mess open food and drink could cause in a variable gravity environment. But it was in water use that the change was most noticeable. The propulsion system used vast amounts of water. In fact, the trip to Saturn was going to use a noticeable portion of Ceres’s water reserve. Both for matters of safety and convenience, the seas and lakes were being drained to minimal levels, leaving just enough to maintain the capital’s verdant forests. Showers and baths, swimming pools, and all other forms of water-based activities had been significantly curtailed. Cereans were taking sonic showers to show support for the war, and as the symbolic head of the Alliance, Sandra had not had a water shower since Acceleration Day, as the event a week past had been called. She knew that a sonic bag got you just as clean as a water shower, cleaner even. But she didn’t
feel
that way. She wanted water cascading down her newly youthful and invigorated body, damn it, not sound waves. But she smiled as she remembered her guilty little secret.

She’d recently taken the avatar children, Edwin and Portia as well as their classmates, to a re-creation of a swimming grotto she’d loved to visit. It was near a small artist’s town called San Miguel de Allende, in the heart of the country of Mexico. In the Neuro, she was able to swim and splash and spend time with children who adored her in an environment she’d grown to love and frequent as a college student on tour. Of course, re-creation space was so limited in the Cerean Neuro that Sandra had managed to get it allotted only on the condition that it remain open to all.

This meant that the little trip she’d initially planned for twenty became a spot of interest for thousands. But in a way possible only in dreams or the Neuro, no one seemed to crowd in on “the Presidential party,” as even the avatars insisted on calling anything Sandra was involved in. She’d gladly accepted that moniker because it meant that she was no longer called “the human” as she’d been before Marilynn and her NITES had inhabited and trained in the Cerean Neuro. But now they were gone, and once more Sandra was the only human around.

Once when she was at the grotto with Sebastian and Dante, Sebastian had joked about all the fuss avatars seemed to be making about her until Dante had pointed out that perhaps the crowds had come to see Sebastian, now considered the oldest avatar in Alliance space and quite possibly the oldest in avatarity, given the success of Al’s murderous rampage in the Core. Sebastian had returned the favor by noting that Dante, as the youngest avatar ever to hold an important post, had developed quite a following as well. A quick look around the huge swimming area showed that, indeed, many of the avatars seemed to be focused on the dashing young Council member.

Sandra was quick to put both their egos in check by pointing out that the most likely reason the grotto was so crowded was because it happened to be a nice place to visit. Dante responded by rolling his eyes and diving into the warm spring waters where he swam deeper into the caverns.

The two leaders sat in relative quiet, watching Dante’s lithe form plow perfect strokes through the water.

“If you don’t control your human,” Sebastian said in a dulcet voice at odds with the menace etched across his face, “I’ll have to take steps to control my avatar.”

Sandra looked over to Sebastian, surprised. Her smile was stiff, but her tone was equally as saccharine. “
My
human is doing everything possible to keep both our peoples from being annihilated, as is
your
avatar. What can they possibly be doing that needs to be controlled?”

“Dating,” pronounced Sebastian in a stentorian voice thick with disapproval.

Sandra covered her mouth to suppress a laugh. “So what? They’re not being indiscreet, and it’s not like it’s affecting their work. If anything, Marilynn might be more efficient than she was before—if that’s even possible. Plus, she’s not even here. She’s on her way to the Core.”

“Humans and avatars should not interact like … like
that
. It’s wrong.”

An uncomfortable silence followed on Sebastian’s dictum. The two leaders stared at Dante splashing a group of children. He was soon deluged with a wall of water in return.

“I have no idea how avatars and humans should interact,” confessed Sandra. “Neither do you. Our two races have never been here before. But we won’t learn if this interaction is a good, bad, or a workable thing if we don’t give it a chance. And I can’t think of a better couple to try than those two. If it turns out we can’t mix, let’s find out now. But I will not cut it off out of simple fear or—” Sandra waited half a beat to add emphasis to her last word. “—prejudice.”

“This has nothing to do with prejudice,” protested Sebastian.

“If you say so, but until you can demonstrate that this is a bad idea, I will not ‘control’ my ‘human’ any more than you should Dante. I suggest you leave him alone to make his own mistakes.”

“We can’t afford mistakes, Sandra.”

“We can’t afford rigid thinking either, Sebastian.”

The Council leader was about to say something, when Sandra interrupted.

“Besides, it’s not as if she can get pregnant.”

Cabinet Room, Ceres

Kirk Olmstead gnawed at his fingernails. He’d never, thanks to vanity, actually bitten one off, but he did find certain pleasure in feeling the pliable keratin bend and give between the gnashing of his teeth—especially when he was nervous. And today, as he’d already been doing for the past few days, Kirk gnawed on them all. He’d recently become aware that over the past couple of months, a major operation was being planned. He also knew that it was being run out of some branch of the executive office but had run up against a brick wall in his myriad attempts to dig further.

He suspected it involved Commodore Nitelowsen, so at first he assumed it was a military operation. But all his sources in that branch of the government—and they were rife—insisted that there were no dark ops currently being run, at least not by them. Besides, if it was military, Janet would be at the reins, which was impossible. Kirk knew where she was—one of only three people who did. Distance alone negated her as the source. Of real concern to the Security Secretary was that supplies were being rerouted only to disappear. Personnel were found to be assigned to various jobs, and they too would disappear, supposedly transferred to distant locations that Kirk was able to confirm they’d never arrived at.

What irked the most was that it all bore his signature, if not in name, then certainly in execution. And whoever was running their Neuro security must’ve lived, breathed, and eaten code, because in all Kirk’s years of hacking—usually by co-opting or employing the best hackers—he’d never come up against a wall like the one he was facing now. What he wouldn’t give to get his hands on the person currently keeping his minions locked out. And so, rather frustratingly, he was left with what he’d started with—faint traces leading to the executive and two complete sets of well-gnawed fingernails.

Kirk knew he had his prejudices, but he also knew he’d need to overcome them if he were to make any headway. For today’s meeting, he’d resolved to do away with his preconceptions. Someone, he reasoned, most likely in this very room, had built a power base he couldn’t keep track of and was therefore the reason for his recent angst. He still remembered the letter left on his chair. The letter with no trace of DNA, no links to anyone. The letter that helped change the course of the war. Kirk barely heard the call to order as he scanned the room. His eyes flittered from person to person as he reworked his mental checklist.

Admiral Sinclair was the first obvious choice. He commanded Fleet Intelligence and had the near blind devotion of most of the best and brightest in the entire Alliance. If anyone could’ve culled a master hacker, Sinclair would be it. But Kirk had devoted some of his best resources to keeping tabs on the admiral.
And if Sinclair could pull off a hidden operation while I was on him like white on rice,
thought Kirk,
then I might as well go back to the Oort cloud observatory and call it a day
.

Mosh McKenzie also had the resources to pull it off. As the head of the Treasury, he was in effect the point man for the entire industrialization of the Alliance. He’d created an industrial state out of an economy based on only raw materials during the stresses of a war unlike any humanity had ever fought. But then again, Mosh was a marginalized figure. He was the head of the minority party that would be lucky to gain 15 percent of the vote if an election were held tomorrow. But Kirk also knew the real reason Mosh couldn’t be behind the operation. The Treasury Secretary had Justin Cord disease. He was too soft to do what was needed, and even though Kirk didn’t know what game was being played behind his back, he assumed it wasn’t footsie. People would probably die, if they weren’t dying already, and that type of op just wasn’t the way Mosh McKenzie rolled. The only reason Kirk hadn’t done to Mosh what he’d done to Justin was that Mosh was not powerful enough to be a threat and was too useful to replace.

Hildegard Rhunsfeld was certainly smart enough, but she hadn’t mastered GCI politics so much as run from it. She wouldn’t have access to the personnel needed or the skill of knowing how to use them. Kirk suspected that Hildegard was probably working for the mysterious adversary but not likely to be it. Kenji was, if anything, more brilliant than Hildegard, but unless he was the greatest actor in history, Kenji simply did not have the temperament to lead the hundreds of people it would take to hide an operation of any magnitude from Kirk—or anyone, for that matter.

Padamir Singh as Secretary of Information might have some of the resources and, before the war, was the best smuggler in the outer orbits. That skill set had drawn particular attention from Kirk because it gave Padamir the necessary skills and experience to hide a large organization from prying eyes. But just as with Sinclair, Kirk had had Padamir trailed, bugged, and investigated. What Kirk found was that while the man had many things to hide, which could and would be used to blackmail him later, there was nothing there that smacked of what had so far been uncovered. Which is to say that all paths led in but not one led out from the executive.

Kirk’s gaze finally fell on the man whom he held the greatest prejudice against. He made a mental note to drop it. To ignore his visceral response, which had served him so well for so many years, and see this Rabbi for who he truly was. The “miracle worker,” as Rabbi was being called by his staff and the greater Alliance, certainly fit the bill, and Kirk again had to resist the urge to pin it all on him. It was undeniable that in six months, Rabbi had created an organization that had linked the fates of nearly a billion human beings. He was even being called a likely candidate for the Presidency, when the Alliance got around to actually electing its Presidents. And Kirk had also spent an impressive amount of resources watching the man he’d come to think of as his real opposition.

But Rabbi was as smooth an operator as Kirk had ever seen. He did not lead, so much as just happen to be on the right side of most every vote in the Cabinet. He did not seek favorable publicity so much as the press just happened to be nearby when he did something worthwhile. The problem was that Kirk could literally account for nearly every minute of every day concerning the Secretary of Relocation, and the only thing the bastard seemed to do was pray to his god three times a day and do his job in between. Occasionally Rabbi could be seen studying from one of those ridiculously large Talmud books of his. Kirk had had a dandy of a time translating all those books from Aramaic into English, but all he got out of it at the end of the day was thousands of arguments by long dead rabbis about the most mundane sorts of things. And so Rabbi, though the most likely candidate, had to be a bust. That left no one but the puppet President.

“I
said,
” intoned Sandra with the inflection of schoolmarm, “are you ready to give your report on Fleet Order 8645, Mr. Secretary?”

Kirk snapped out of his reverie long enough to realize that everyone was staring at him. He cursed himself silently for the loss of concentration. “Yes, Madam President.”

Kirk used his DijAssist to call up a hologram of Gupta’s fleet. It showed it to be about a week and a half’s travel from Jupiter. There were fifteen small red dots sandwiched in between the ships and the planet. “Gupta’s fleet is here, and the red dots represent the convoys he can intercept without varying from his objective.” Kirk activated another command as an enormous sea of bright green dots appeared. “Gupta will attempt to destroy one or two more convoys on his way to Jupiter. But we have culled a number of sources both on Mars and in the fleet itself, with the help of our Fleet Intelligence,” Kirk said, nodding grudgingly to Sinclair, “and it is fairly certain that when Gupta’s done destroying what he can at Jupiter, he’ll fill his ships to the bursting point with Jovian hydrogen, top off his tankers, and try to destroy as many of the convoys on the way to the far outer planets as he can. Given how fast his fleet can move, how much fuel he’ll be able to get from Jupiter, and the time it will take him to fuck us up completely in the Jovian system—” Kirk checked some figures. “—he should be able to kill well over five hundred million of the refugees and all the irreplaceable experience that they carry. That combined with the death toll around Jupiter will bring the total death toll to at least—” Kirk once again confirmed his figures. “one point five billion”—a palpable shudder was felt in the room—“with nearly a billion of those likely permanent.” Kirk held nothing but contempt for his fellow Cabinet members, who at that very moment wore expressions fit for a tableau of hell.
What the fuck did you think Hektor was going to do, you idiots? Let us win?
Kirk’s fleeting anger quickly subsided, and he managed to put a suitably somber expression on a face that rarely wore one.