Giving In
matociquala threw down a challenge in the form of "International Embarass Yourself As An Artist Day."
I don't know that I qualify as an artist, as such, but I certainly do have embarassingly bad juvenilia to throw into the mix. My biggest hesitation, of course, comes from my lack of published stuff to point to and show you all how much better I've gotten, so there's a certain added level of anxiety to this all. But what the hell.
This is the first chapter of a novel I wrote in high school, and submitted to Baen for summary execution rejection.
Seriously, feel free not to click.
In Defense of Another
Chapter 1
The security guard scanned the surrounding neighborhood with a watchful eye. He paced his section of sidewalk just outside the two meter tall perimeter fence. Inside the fence was the sprawling InterStar Corporation spaceport. Office buildings, apartments, hangars, and government offices covered the thirty-plus square kilometers beside two, two-and-a-half kilometer long runways. Outside the fence was poverty, decay, unrest, and hate. Hate for those who had brought the poverty and decay onto Tau Ceti IV. Hate for the InterStar Corporation.
On a daily basis, cargo jets, loaded with ore and uncut gems, thundered off the runways, heading for the levitating staging platforms in the stratosphere. The platforms, supported by antigrav generators, accepted the cargo brought by the jets,
then freight-handlers loaded it onto shuttles headed for orbit. These shuttles joined InterStar's mammoth Star Freighters which carried the planet's ore and raw materials to the farthest reaches of the known galaxy.
Planet-side, the guard still walked his beat. The early evening sky promised rain, so he stalked off towards the south gate for his rain slicker. Inside the gate house, he set his Uzi submachine gun on the table before grabbing a cup of coffee and his urban-fatigued raincoat. Outside, a security hover-car pulled up to the gate. Picking up his weapon once again, the guard stepped out.
"Where are ya goin', sir," he asked, recognizing the man in the driver's seat as Sergey Davydov, the Deputy Head of Security for Tau Ceti IV.
The car window buzzed down. "I'm off to see my niece, Tia. Anything wrong with that, Private?" A grin spread across Davydov's leathery face. The security corps could always count on him for humor even in these bleak surroundings.
"No sir. Give her my regards." He grinned and slapped the car's rear fender as it pulled away from the gate house. Once again heading off onto his beat, he watched a streak of lightning appear in the northern sky. He mumbled a prayer specifically designed to get himself off this miserable planet.
Tau Ceti was an odd system. Not very odd geographically, that is. It had a warm, yellow sun, just a slight bit warmer
than Sol. There were seven planets, three gas giants, four inner planets. The fourth was the habitable planet in the system (almost all G-class stars had them). It had an axial tilt of 19.4 degrees, a period of 380 days, and a day cycle of twenty-five hours. The planet's surface was broken up into four continents, taking up twenty-nine percent of the total surface area.
It had been skipped over in the original colonization drive of 2047 E.S.Y. (Earth Standard Year), having been labelled a "bad luck system". This nonsense superstition came from the ill-fated Explorer colony ship. The Explorer was the first attempt at colonization after the discovery of hyperspace in 2023. Sent off in 2040, the ship had been programmed with the incorrect destination, and ended up on the single planet of a mediocre yellow sun some twenty light-years away. The scout ship that was sent to ensure its safe arrival through hyperspace, however, went to Tau Ceti and found no one there. Even when the colony was found, twenty years later, and the accidental hyperspace vector discovered, the Tau Ceti enigma remained.
Finally, in 2090, a non-superstitious group of prospectors and geologists arrived in the system. Shunning three decidedly worthless inner planets and failing to be mesmerized by the less than spectacular gas giants, they landed on Tau Ceti IV. The planet was rich in iron deposits with large amounts of gold, silver, plutonium, iridium, beryl, titanium, and tungsten. By 2112, Tau Ceti IV's population had grown to three million.
In 2123, Tau Ceti IV achieved galactic membership when the Duke, and Family, of their quadrant visited from the provincial seat, eight light-years away. The celebration of their visit had lasted for four months, even though the family had left after only three weeks. For thirty more years, Tau Ceti IV continued on in uninterrupted peace and prosperity.
Over those thirty years, money and industries from all over the galaxy poured into Tau Ceti IV. InterStar had been one of the first. Being a new corporation in 2128, they had found it necessary to take their chances in business. InterStar had dropped a prospecting crew onto a little-explored continent. What came about was the find of the century. The ground was loaded with desired ores and precious gems. InterStar's fortune was made.
On the two hundredth day of 2153 E.S.Y., the peace died and the prosperity ended for all but a select few. Armed members of the Anti-Monarchial Society of Earth hit dozens of strategic points on Tau Ceti IV. In one night of heavy fighting, they had decapitated the prospering government. All was not lost, however, as InterStar's paramilitary security force (ostensibly there for security of the corporation's various assets) quickly and efficiently destroyed the coup. Using armored personnel carriers, orbit-launched attack-fighter planes, and just about everything short of a battalion of main battle tanks, they subdued the uprising. Three days later, the Crown granted InterStar a ninety-nine year lease of the Tau Ceti system as a
reward for stamping out the mini-insurrection.
Things deteriorated quickly. InterStar immediately set up a sort of "corporational dictatorship". Outside communications were screened and edited. Travel off-planet was heavily restricted. For those not in direct employ of InterStar, the standard of living went through the floor. Millions of people lived in abject poverty, barely able to scratch out a living in the mines or in one of the ultra-hazardous factories. "Middle class" was barely better. People prayed daily for an end to come. It was on its way, just not the one they wanted.
Tia Tretiak sat, huddled in sheets and blankets to keep out the cold. The walls of her dingy apartment barely kept out the chilly November air themselves. The sound of wailing sirens pushed through the thin window panes. A heavy pall of pollution hung in the city's sky. This city was foreign to her, even though she had been born in it. Nov Petrograd, on Mars, was her true home. The giant Tretiak estate waited for her, as soon as she could escape this horrible planet.
At age twenty-three, sanity was slipping out of her grasp. Hundreds of imaginary voices, all calling her name, pushed the sirens from her ears. Stray and unintelligible thoughts careened around her skull. She drifted in and out of sleep, each time waking from a nightmare more horrible than the previous one.
During one of her waking moments, she looked around her apartment. Five kilometers south of the InterStar compound, it
was in terrible want of service. No running water forced her to walk three kilometers to a service station any time she needed to use the restroom. A cube refrigerator sat next to the sofa she was on, half-filled with water in plastic jugs from the same service station. A tiny two-D television showed a news program displaying cheerful news from the outside and equally cheerful, make-believe propaganda from the inside.
Each day, she walked eight kilometers to the diner at which she worked. There, she ate her only meal of the day, and that only at the kindness of the cook. It was on that tiny income that she managed to maintain the rent on her apartment. Her Uncle Sergey would come by once a month, each time dropping off food and money, then begging her to come live with him on the compound. She always declined, but never gave him the reasons.
In fact, she thought, it's about time for another one of his visits. As if on cue, there was a knock on the door.
Tia rose and shuffled to the door, still clutching the blankets tightly around her. She experienced her customary moment of panic upon looking out the peephole and seeing the security uniform, its badge enlarged by the convex shaping of the lens. Davydov's beaming smile replaced it, however, as he leaned closer to the peephole.
She pressed the button to the left of the door to admit him, then cursed as the servos protested loudly, trying to open a door in serious need of maintenance. Finally it slid aside,
revealing the 186 centimeter tall figure of her uncle (by habit, not blood), holding two large bags. He was a handsome man, with piercing blue eyes and blond hair that was going grey as he approached fifty.
He stepped in and carefully placed the bags on top of the fridge. They exchanged cheek kisses, the traditional greeting. His next action was to reach inside his extra-insulated standard issue jacket and withdraw an envelope.
"Two hundred geckos, Tia. Spend it wisely." "Gecko" was
the common nickname for the Galactic Currency Unit or G.C.U. It was very annoying to anyone who thought of a gecko as a small green lizard, and not a large orange piece of paper with the likeness of King Henry X on it. But, it had become tradition, and those who were annoyed simply had to live with it.
"What's the good word?" she asked him as soon as they were both seated on the sofa.
"None good, I'm afraid." The second envelope in his jacket made his thoughts reach back seven years. At the time, he had been a sergeant under Stanislaus Tretiak, Tia's father. He remembered ringing the doorbell on the Tretiak's InterStar apartment. Tia had let him in and they both took seats in overstuffed chairs, her favorite. His appearance was horrible. Sleeves torn, hair mussed by the riot helmet, and face aged by fatigue and worry. He distinctly remembered recounting the tale of how her father had accidently been shot in the back of the head by a trigger-happy rookie.
It had been a protest strike by power plant workers in the city's northern district. Tretiak's security force had been dispatched to break up the strike. The riot police dispersed from the bus out onto the broad avenue. Stanislaus Tretiak stood at the fore, shouting commands to the strikers. Suddenly, a Molotov Cocktail flew from the assembled workers. It broke between Tretiak and the rest of his men. It was then that the nervous rookie began shooting into the crowd. Unable to see through the flames of several more cocktails, he fired three shots right into the security squad's leader. Stanislaus Tretiak had been pronounced dead on arrival at InterStar's base hospital.
She had run screaming and crying from the apartment, unable to handle the deaths of both her parents in such a short span of time. Her mother had died, allegedly in Tia's mind, of a severe case of food poisoning just one month earlier. Her flight did not end until she was well outside the InterStar compound and thoroughly lost. An elderly woman, by the name of Anne-Marie Johansson, had taken her in.
All this, plus the fact that she had started work at the diner just two months later, met Sergey Davydov there, and kept in contact with him ever since, was on her file at IS security. Sergey had seen it on occasion in his role as Deputy Head.
Staring calmly but sorrowfully into his niece's seagreen eyes, he withdrew the other envelope. "Here," he said, handing it to her. "Read this." She tore open the envelope and pulled out the letter within. It was an inter-office memo from Tau Ceti IV's director to the Head of Security. She read it quickly, her mouth hanging open in surprise by the time she'd finished.
"They're leaving?" Her voice was full of worry.
"I'm afraid so, sweetie. It seems they've got about all they can out of this rock. I'll have to go, too. If you come onto the compound at once, you'll be able to leave with me. I'm about to retire, and we can go back to Mars, together."
She was sorely tempted by the offer. "I can't, Uncle Sergey. What about all these people left behind? Someone has to be here who can lead them out of all this." She spread her arms wide in an all-encompassing gesture, momentarily letting the cold air reach her body. She shivered and quickly re-surrounded herself in the super-warm cocoon of electro-fiber. "We'll have to start planning immediately. Storage of food. Starting some sort of agricultural program. Chain of authority. They're certainly not going to leave us with any communication equipment. It'd be suicide. I have to pass this on to Anne-Marie," she finished, waving the memo in the air.
"Please honey, don't. If you pass this information down the Chain, who know's what might happen? People talk, Tia. People also panic. With news this big, they're liable to talk loudly and panic violently. Retributions would be horrendous." His voice was pleading to the point of whining.
She decided to quiz him a bit about this abandonment. "How are they going to keep this quiet with the media? They won't
fail to notice a system being abandoned like this."
Davydov let his breath out loudly. "A press release to the effect of a nuclear meltdown or accident, or perhaps a dangerous plague infesting the planet's surface will be released soon after the final departure. Warning buoys will be placed and the galaxy will forget about you. Please leave with me, Tia. If you don't you'll never leave this planet."
"I'm sorry. I can't." These people need me. They need all the leaders they can get. It would be unfair if I just jaunted off to safety and security, leaving them behind. She abruptly decided to return to the quizzing. The people would need all the information they could get, too. "What's the time frame? The memo is too vague on that one."
"I ship out in a week," he replied with a sigh. "The last Star Freighter breaks orbit in two."
"They're moving unnaturally fast, aren't they?"
"Yes and no. It's got to look authentic. Like a real emergency evacuation. They'll take a few token Cetians with them, but most of them will be the puppet politicians that don't have the brains or morals to speak out. The planning and execution of this isn't fast, though. I've heard rumors that they knew the minerals were running out a year ago. I'm sure they've been planning for the contingency of the geologists telling them that they couldn't mine anymore."
Tia's only response was a thoughtful frown. At that point, Sergey looked at his wristwatch and swore. "Tia honey, I've got
to run. I'm supposed to be at the Security Head's apartment for dinner in half an hour, and I've still got to change. Please reconsider. I'll stop by the day before I go." After giving her a quick peck on the cheek, he hustled out the door. The date was November 11, 2177.
Tears filled Sergey Davydov's eyes as he trotted down the six flights of stairs to his hover car. He always hated seeing her like that. Guilt racked his mind. It was truly his fault that she lived like that. No trigger-happy rookie had shot her father. It had been a weathered and trusted sergeant under Tretiak's command. The shooting was a result of intelligence that Tretiak was sympathetic to several anti-occupation groups. Davydov had done the killing in exchange for looking the other way on his drug addiction. He hadn't had a choice.
Consumed with guilt afterwards, he searched high and low for Tia. Upon finding her, he had been unable to tell her the truth. He did, however, support her in any way he could. That included getting information for her to pass along the Chain.
The Chain was the most secret organization Tau Ceti IV, and perhaps the rest of the galaxy, had ever seen. It had been started by Tarrin O'Malley, one government survivor of the coup. Gathering his closest friends just after the granting of the lease to InterStar, he told them of his suspicions about their new "owners". Each friend (there were nine) formed a chain of
people and information. These "Chains" extended anywhere from twelve to fifty-eight people. All Chains had their terminus somewhere within the InterStar organization. They all began with Tarrin O'Malley.
The crux of the Chain system was this: Each Link in the Chain had one identical characteristic with the next person on the Chain. A characteristic would be hair or eye color, hobbies, Earthly nation of origin, or even personality traits. For example: a black haired man who had emigrated from Mexico would have a contact who had black hair and one who also emigrated from Mexico. Otherwise, the Chain's next Link was untraceable, except for infiltration or confession. Also, they were completely ignorant of the identity of the people beyond their own contacts.
For a time, it had been wildly successful. Shipments of weapons to security outposts had been intercepted. Ore convoys obliterated. Assassinations of InterStar personnel. It began to crumble quickly, though. By November 11, only four Chains were intact and Tarrin O'Malley was a hunted man.
When Davydov was still inside with Tia, a figure clad in black stole from the shadows of an apartment building. The man's name was Christopher Jackson. His only relation he had to the woman and man upstairs was that he was sixth and seventh down from them on the Chain, respectively. A liberal amount of visitation information had leaked down to Jackson through the Chain concerning Davydov's visits. Had he known that Davydov was the orgiginator of sixty percent of the information on which Tarrin O'Malley had acted, he would not have done what he was about to do.
Jackson crept quietly up to the driver's side of the car. Using a homemade device, he was able to electronically disable the car's alarm and locks. From a backpack he was carrying, he drew a large grey brick with a small black box on top. He placed the brick underneath the driver's seat. A spool of hair-thin wire came next. He carefull attached two strands to two terminals on the black box. He laid the wire, carefully concealing it in the upholstery. The wires were run up to the ignition slot on the left side of the steering wheel. He placed each wire just a hair's breadth apart. They almost completely invisible to the naked eye. Entirely unnoticeable to the casual one. Finally, Jackson flipped a switch on the black box.
Silently, he closed the door and re-armed the locks and alarm. Like a cat, he crept back to the alley from whence he had come.
As Davydov stepped out into the rain, he pulled his jacket's collar up around his ears. The tears in his eyes had long since dried, but the guilt still hung there like oppressive summer heat. He opened the side door of his car and got in. He next placed the magnetic key in the ignition slot.
As he did this, an electrical contact closed, completing a
circuit. The wire trailed from the ignition to a small, dry-cell battery that powered the little black box atop the brick of gray putty-like material. The IHX plastic explosive detonated in a huge fireball of dazzling pyrotechnics.
In other news, I'm pretty much quitting Mt. Dew this weekend. Wish me luck. I'll have Satan's Own headache this time tomorrow.
I don't know that I qualify as an artist, as such, but I certainly do have embarassingly bad juvenilia to throw into the mix. My biggest hesitation, of course, comes from my lack of published stuff to point to and show you all how much better I've gotten, so there's a certain added level of anxiety to this all. But what the hell.
This is the first chapter of a novel I wrote in high school, and submitted to Baen for summary execution rejection.
Seriously, feel free not to click.
In Defense of Another
Chapter 1
The security guard scanned the surrounding neighborhood with a watchful eye. He paced his section of sidewalk just outside the two meter tall perimeter fence. Inside the fence was the sprawling InterStar Corporation spaceport. Office buildings, apartments, hangars, and government offices covered the thirty-plus square kilometers beside two, two-and-a-half kilometer long runways. Outside the fence was poverty, decay, unrest, and hate. Hate for those who had brought the poverty and decay onto Tau Ceti IV. Hate for the InterStar Corporation.
On a daily basis, cargo jets, loaded with ore and uncut gems, thundered off the runways, heading for the levitating staging platforms in the stratosphere. The platforms, supported by antigrav generators, accepted the cargo brought by the jets,
then freight-handlers loaded it onto shuttles headed for orbit. These shuttles joined InterStar's mammoth Star Freighters which carried the planet's ore and raw materials to the farthest reaches of the known galaxy.
Planet-side, the guard still walked his beat. The early evening sky promised rain, so he stalked off towards the south gate for his rain slicker. Inside the gate house, he set his Uzi submachine gun on the table before grabbing a cup of coffee and his urban-fatigued raincoat. Outside, a security hover-car pulled up to the gate. Picking up his weapon once again, the guard stepped out.
"Where are ya goin', sir," he asked, recognizing the man in the driver's seat as Sergey Davydov, the Deputy Head of Security for Tau Ceti IV.
The car window buzzed down. "I'm off to see my niece, Tia. Anything wrong with that, Private?" A grin spread across Davydov's leathery face. The security corps could always count on him for humor even in these bleak surroundings.
"No sir. Give her my regards." He grinned and slapped the car's rear fender as it pulled away from the gate house. Once again heading off onto his beat, he watched a streak of lightning appear in the northern sky. He mumbled a prayer specifically designed to get himself off this miserable planet.
Tau Ceti was an odd system. Not very odd geographically, that is. It had a warm, yellow sun, just a slight bit warmer
than Sol. There were seven planets, three gas giants, four inner planets. The fourth was the habitable planet in the system (almost all G-class stars had them). It had an axial tilt of 19.4 degrees, a period of 380 days, and a day cycle of twenty-five hours. The planet's surface was broken up into four continents, taking up twenty-nine percent of the total surface area.
It had been skipped over in the original colonization drive of 2047 E.S.Y. (Earth Standard Year), having been labelled a "bad luck system". This nonsense superstition came from the ill-fated Explorer colony ship. The Explorer was the first attempt at colonization after the discovery of hyperspace in 2023. Sent off in 2040, the ship had been programmed with the incorrect destination, and ended up on the single planet of a mediocre yellow sun some twenty light-years away. The scout ship that was sent to ensure its safe arrival through hyperspace, however, went to Tau Ceti and found no one there. Even when the colony was found, twenty years later, and the accidental hyperspace vector discovered, the Tau Ceti enigma remained.
Finally, in 2090, a non-superstitious group of prospectors and geologists arrived in the system. Shunning three decidedly worthless inner planets and failing to be mesmerized by the less than spectacular gas giants, they landed on Tau Ceti IV. The planet was rich in iron deposits with large amounts of gold, silver, plutonium, iridium, beryl, titanium, and tungsten. By 2112, Tau Ceti IV's population had grown to three million.
In 2123, Tau Ceti IV achieved galactic membership when the Duke, and Family, of their quadrant visited from the provincial seat, eight light-years away. The celebration of their visit had lasted for four months, even though the family had left after only three weeks. For thirty more years, Tau Ceti IV continued on in uninterrupted peace and prosperity.
Over those thirty years, money and industries from all over the galaxy poured into Tau Ceti IV. InterStar had been one of the first. Being a new corporation in 2128, they had found it necessary to take their chances in business. InterStar had dropped a prospecting crew onto a little-explored continent. What came about was the find of the century. The ground was loaded with desired ores and precious gems. InterStar's fortune was made.
On the two hundredth day of 2153 E.S.Y., the peace died and the prosperity ended for all but a select few. Armed members of the Anti-Monarchial Society of Earth hit dozens of strategic points on Tau Ceti IV. In one night of heavy fighting, they had decapitated the prospering government. All was not lost, however, as InterStar's paramilitary security force (ostensibly there for security of the corporation's various assets) quickly and efficiently destroyed the coup. Using armored personnel carriers, orbit-launched attack-fighter planes, and just about everything short of a battalion of main battle tanks, they subdued the uprising. Three days later, the Crown granted InterStar a ninety-nine year lease of the Tau Ceti system as a
reward for stamping out the mini-insurrection.
Things deteriorated quickly. InterStar immediately set up a sort of "corporational dictatorship". Outside communications were screened and edited. Travel off-planet was heavily restricted. For those not in direct employ of InterStar, the standard of living went through the floor. Millions of people lived in abject poverty, barely able to scratch out a living in the mines or in one of the ultra-hazardous factories. "Middle class" was barely better. People prayed daily for an end to come. It was on its way, just not the one they wanted.
Tia Tretiak sat, huddled in sheets and blankets to keep out the cold. The walls of her dingy apartment barely kept out the chilly November air themselves. The sound of wailing sirens pushed through the thin window panes. A heavy pall of pollution hung in the city's sky. This city was foreign to her, even though she had been born in it. Nov Petrograd, on Mars, was her true home. The giant Tretiak estate waited for her, as soon as she could escape this horrible planet.
At age twenty-three, sanity was slipping out of her grasp. Hundreds of imaginary voices, all calling her name, pushed the sirens from her ears. Stray and unintelligible thoughts careened around her skull. She drifted in and out of sleep, each time waking from a nightmare more horrible than the previous one.
During one of her waking moments, she looked around her apartment. Five kilometers south of the InterStar compound, it
was in terrible want of service. No running water forced her to walk three kilometers to a service station any time she needed to use the restroom. A cube refrigerator sat next to the sofa she was on, half-filled with water in plastic jugs from the same service station. A tiny two-D television showed a news program displaying cheerful news from the outside and equally cheerful, make-believe propaganda from the inside.
Each day, she walked eight kilometers to the diner at which she worked. There, she ate her only meal of the day, and that only at the kindness of the cook. It was on that tiny income that she managed to maintain the rent on her apartment. Her Uncle Sergey would come by once a month, each time dropping off food and money, then begging her to come live with him on the compound. She always declined, but never gave him the reasons.
In fact, she thought, it's about time for another one of his visits. As if on cue, there was a knock on the door.
Tia rose and shuffled to the door, still clutching the blankets tightly around her. She experienced her customary moment of panic upon looking out the peephole and seeing the security uniform, its badge enlarged by the convex shaping of the lens. Davydov's beaming smile replaced it, however, as he leaned closer to the peephole.
She pressed the button to the left of the door to admit him, then cursed as the servos protested loudly, trying to open a door in serious need of maintenance. Finally it slid aside,
revealing the 186 centimeter tall figure of her uncle (by habit, not blood), holding two large bags. He was a handsome man, with piercing blue eyes and blond hair that was going grey as he approached fifty.
He stepped in and carefully placed the bags on top of the fridge. They exchanged cheek kisses, the traditional greeting. His next action was to reach inside his extra-insulated standard issue jacket and withdraw an envelope.
"Two hundred geckos, Tia. Spend it wisely." "Gecko" was
the common nickname for the Galactic Currency Unit or G.C.U. It was very annoying to anyone who thought of a gecko as a small green lizard, and not a large orange piece of paper with the likeness of King Henry X on it. But, it had become tradition, and those who were annoyed simply had to live with it.
"What's the good word?" she asked him as soon as they were both seated on the sofa.
"None good, I'm afraid." The second envelope in his jacket made his thoughts reach back seven years. At the time, he had been a sergeant under Stanislaus Tretiak, Tia's father. He remembered ringing the doorbell on the Tretiak's InterStar apartment. Tia had let him in and they both took seats in overstuffed chairs, her favorite. His appearance was horrible. Sleeves torn, hair mussed by the riot helmet, and face aged by fatigue and worry. He distinctly remembered recounting the tale of how her father had accidently been shot in the back of the head by a trigger-happy rookie.
It had been a protest strike by power plant workers in the city's northern district. Tretiak's security force had been dispatched to break up the strike. The riot police dispersed from the bus out onto the broad avenue. Stanislaus Tretiak stood at the fore, shouting commands to the strikers. Suddenly, a Molotov Cocktail flew from the assembled workers. It broke between Tretiak and the rest of his men. It was then that the nervous rookie began shooting into the crowd. Unable to see through the flames of several more cocktails, he fired three shots right into the security squad's leader. Stanislaus Tretiak had been pronounced dead on arrival at InterStar's base hospital.
She had run screaming and crying from the apartment, unable to handle the deaths of both her parents in such a short span of time. Her mother had died, allegedly in Tia's mind, of a severe case of food poisoning just one month earlier. Her flight did not end until she was well outside the InterStar compound and thoroughly lost. An elderly woman, by the name of Anne-Marie Johansson, had taken her in.
All this, plus the fact that she had started work at the diner just two months later, met Sergey Davydov there, and kept in contact with him ever since, was on her file at IS security. Sergey had seen it on occasion in his role as Deputy Head.
Staring calmly but sorrowfully into his niece's seagreen eyes, he withdrew the other envelope. "Here," he said, handing it to her. "Read this." She tore open the envelope and pulled out the letter within. It was an inter-office memo from Tau Ceti IV's director to the Head of Security. She read it quickly, her mouth hanging open in surprise by the time she'd finished.
"They're leaving?" Her voice was full of worry.
"I'm afraid so, sweetie. It seems they've got about all they can out of this rock. I'll have to go, too. If you come onto the compound at once, you'll be able to leave with me. I'm about to retire, and we can go back to Mars, together."
She was sorely tempted by the offer. "I can't, Uncle Sergey. What about all these people left behind? Someone has to be here who can lead them out of all this." She spread her arms wide in an all-encompassing gesture, momentarily letting the cold air reach her body. She shivered and quickly re-surrounded herself in the super-warm cocoon of electro-fiber. "We'll have to start planning immediately. Storage of food. Starting some sort of agricultural program. Chain of authority. They're certainly not going to leave us with any communication equipment. It'd be suicide. I have to pass this on to Anne-Marie," she finished, waving the memo in the air.
"Please honey, don't. If you pass this information down the Chain, who know's what might happen? People talk, Tia. People also panic. With news this big, they're liable to talk loudly and panic violently. Retributions would be horrendous." His voice was pleading to the point of whining.
She decided to quiz him a bit about this abandonment. "How are they going to keep this quiet with the media? They won't
fail to notice a system being abandoned like this."
Davydov let his breath out loudly. "A press release to the effect of a nuclear meltdown or accident, or perhaps a dangerous plague infesting the planet's surface will be released soon after the final departure. Warning buoys will be placed and the galaxy will forget about you. Please leave with me, Tia. If you don't you'll never leave this planet."
"I'm sorry. I can't." These people need me. They need all the leaders they can get. It would be unfair if I just jaunted off to safety and security, leaving them behind. She abruptly decided to return to the quizzing. The people would need all the information they could get, too. "What's the time frame? The memo is too vague on that one."
"I ship out in a week," he replied with a sigh. "The last Star Freighter breaks orbit in two."
"They're moving unnaturally fast, aren't they?"
"Yes and no. It's got to look authentic. Like a real emergency evacuation. They'll take a few token Cetians with them, but most of them will be the puppet politicians that don't have the brains or morals to speak out. The planning and execution of this isn't fast, though. I've heard rumors that they knew the minerals were running out a year ago. I'm sure they've been planning for the contingency of the geologists telling them that they couldn't mine anymore."
Tia's only response was a thoughtful frown. At that point, Sergey looked at his wristwatch and swore. "Tia honey, I've got
to run. I'm supposed to be at the Security Head's apartment for dinner in half an hour, and I've still got to change. Please reconsider. I'll stop by the day before I go." After giving her a quick peck on the cheek, he hustled out the door. The date was November 11, 2177.
Tears filled Sergey Davydov's eyes as he trotted down the six flights of stairs to his hover car. He always hated seeing her like that. Guilt racked his mind. It was truly his fault that she lived like that. No trigger-happy rookie had shot her father. It had been a weathered and trusted sergeant under Tretiak's command. The shooting was a result of intelligence that Tretiak was sympathetic to several anti-occupation groups. Davydov had done the killing in exchange for looking the other way on his drug addiction. He hadn't had a choice.
Consumed with guilt afterwards, he searched high and low for Tia. Upon finding her, he had been unable to tell her the truth. He did, however, support her in any way he could. That included getting information for her to pass along the Chain.
The Chain was the most secret organization Tau Ceti IV, and perhaps the rest of the galaxy, had ever seen. It had been started by Tarrin O'Malley, one government survivor of the coup. Gathering his closest friends just after the granting of the lease to InterStar, he told them of his suspicions about their new "owners". Each friend (there were nine) formed a chain of
people and information. These "Chains" extended anywhere from twelve to fifty-eight people. All Chains had their terminus somewhere within the InterStar organization. They all began with Tarrin O'Malley.
The crux of the Chain system was this: Each Link in the Chain had one identical characteristic with the next person on the Chain. A characteristic would be hair or eye color, hobbies, Earthly nation of origin, or even personality traits. For example: a black haired man who had emigrated from Mexico would have a contact who had black hair and one who also emigrated from Mexico. Otherwise, the Chain's next Link was untraceable, except for infiltration or confession. Also, they were completely ignorant of the identity of the people beyond their own contacts.
For a time, it had been wildly successful. Shipments of weapons to security outposts had been intercepted. Ore convoys obliterated. Assassinations of InterStar personnel. It began to crumble quickly, though. By November 11, only four Chains were intact and Tarrin O'Malley was a hunted man.
When Davydov was still inside with Tia, a figure clad in black stole from the shadows of an apartment building. The man's name was Christopher Jackson. His only relation he had to the woman and man upstairs was that he was sixth and seventh down from them on the Chain, respectively. A liberal amount of visitation information had leaked down to Jackson through the Chain concerning Davydov's visits. Had he known that Davydov was the orgiginator of sixty percent of the information on which Tarrin O'Malley had acted, he would not have done what he was about to do.
Jackson crept quietly up to the driver's side of the car. Using a homemade device, he was able to electronically disable the car's alarm and locks. From a backpack he was carrying, he drew a large grey brick with a small black box on top. He placed the brick underneath the driver's seat. A spool of hair-thin wire came next. He carefull attached two strands to two terminals on the black box. He laid the wire, carefully concealing it in the upholstery. The wires were run up to the ignition slot on the left side of the steering wheel. He placed each wire just a hair's breadth apart. They almost completely invisible to the naked eye. Entirely unnoticeable to the casual one. Finally, Jackson flipped a switch on the black box.
Silently, he closed the door and re-armed the locks and alarm. Like a cat, he crept back to the alley from whence he had come.
As Davydov stepped out into the rain, he pulled his jacket's collar up around his ears. The tears in his eyes had long since dried, but the guilt still hung there like oppressive summer heat. He opened the side door of his car and got in. He next placed the magnetic key in the ignition slot.
As he did this, an electrical contact closed, completing a
circuit. The wire trailed from the ignition to a small, dry-cell battery that powered the little black box atop the brick of gray putty-like material. The IHX plastic explosive detonated in a huge fireball of dazzling pyrotechnics.
In other news, I'm pretty much quitting Mt. Dew this weekend. Wish me luck. I'll have Satan's Own headache this time tomorrow.