“Fire off a single anti-satellite 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 in 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 190 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 Angeles 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.