"You worthless little twat," the vendor said, frustrated at the apparently lost sale. The frustration was all the worse because he hadn't a clue how the wretched bitch had screwed it up. He raised a scream from the girl when he struck her across her budding breasts with his short whip. He raised his arm to strike his property again. Before the blow could land, the vendor felt his wrist held in a firm grasp. Turning, he saw the blond woman in the black uniform, a wicked grin splitting her face and her fingers wrapped around his whip hand.
"That will be quite enough," Marguerite announced. She released the hand and then turned to one of her Marines. "Call in the troops," she ordered.
The Marine spoke into his communicator. Almost immediately the air was split with the sonic boom of a dozen or more shuttles. These landed and began disgorging troops to surround the largest and oldest slave market on the Continent. Indeed, it was so old it had actually been established by the long since defunct United States of America.
Turning back to the vendor, Marguerite said, "Fetch me the owner of this place, and any vendors who wish to make a claim for recompense on their . . . property . . . before I seize it for service to the Fleet by the authority of the Secretary General of the Consensus."
Chapter Eight
The perception of a left-right political spectrum has survived for seven centuries and spread across two planets. There are sound reasons for this, despite the fact that it is not perfectly descriptive. One reason is that the core of political differences is the varying perception of the nature of man, at those perceptions' extremes: Perfectible by breeding (right), perfectible by training and education (left), neither perfectible nor even all that changeable by either (center). A second reason is that the existence of one extreme tends to organize people along the other. Perhaps better said, the two extremes tend to organize each other. Moreover, they tend to drag people away from the center, or to make those who remain in the center very quiet . . .
Take the typical X-Y graph that purports to describe the true nature of the political spectrum, one that, perhaps, posits an X axis that describes the attitude to planned social progress or attitude to human reason, while the Y axis describes the attitude to government or attitude to power. If one plots out a given sample of people one will find that two corners of the graph are uninhabited. There is no one who is both sane and not a moron who has a very positive attitude towards government (except insofar as such a person may be personally dependent upon a government meal ticket) and a very negative attitude to planned social progress, or vice versa. Instead, in plotting a sample, one gets a fairly narrow oval, running from lower left to upper right. Turn that graph clockwise forty-five degrees and look at it again. Yes, it now describes left-right again, with minor up and down differences, which differences are irrelevant when compared to the major right-left differences and which are, again, overcome by the mutual and hostile organization driven by the extremes . . .
—Jorge y Marqueli Mendoza,
Historia y Filosofia Moral,
Legionary Press, Balboa,
Terra Nova, Copyright AC 468
Anno Condita 471 Isla Real, Balboa, Terra Nova
There were secrets well kept and then there were rumors of secrets not so well kept. One of the latter was that the Legion had captured a UEPF shuttle in Pashtia some years before. The rumor was, in fact, quite true, though never admitted to.
"Unfortunately, Patricio, we can't get it to so much as hover, let alone fly," Lanza said to Carrera, the both of them deep in the bowels of Hill 287 in a specially constructed hangar.
"Why not?" Carrera asked.
Lanza sneered. "It's partly a function of the fact that your ham-fisted ground pounders shot it up. But what little damage that didn't do was done when you had infantrymen—Boss, what the fuck were you thinking? Infantrymen? They can break anvils!—take the goddamned thing apart before you loaded it out."
"Best we could do on short notice," Carrera shrugged. "Besides, it looks fine."
"Oh, sure," Lanza agreed. "We got the body put back together. Sortakindamaybealmost. We even got the engines to work. But you know what? You can't fly it without the computer and the right program and the computer was toasted. Just toasted. We can't even make up a simulation to train somebody to fly it."
"Well don't cry about it," Carrera said. "What do you need to make it work?"
Lanza shrugged. "A new flight computer? At least the goddamned manual for the wrecked one."
"No manual in the thing?"
"No, lots of manuals in the thing. On Old Earth microdisc. Which, admittedly, we have been able to read. But none of them tell us how to fix the blasted flight computer. Apparently it an 'echelons above God' level of maintenance."
For just a fleeting moment Carrera thought about a UEPF communications device sitting in an electro-magnetic proof safe at the Casa Linda. No, he thought. That UEPF captain with the sexy voice knows about a lot of what I have. But she doesn't, I don't think, know about this. Besides, the only things she'd take in trade are my nukes and those I'm not about to give up. And even if I would, I not only need this thing to fly, I need her not to know about it. Which she would if I asked to trade for a replacement flight comp.
Carrera looked over the smooth lines of the dead shuttle. It was actually quite a pretty craft, a large wing itself with smaller, variable geometry wings for control when in atmosphere. The repair crew had even repainted the symbol of United Earth, a distorted drawing of the home planet in white, surrounded by a wreath, and with abstract lines superimposed for latitude and longitude.
"We think the IFF"—Identification, Friend or Foe—"still works," Lanza offered. "Though the codes have got to be out of date."
"Why do you think so?" Carrera asked.
"Just that it had no obvious damage and when we took it into the secure vault and powered it up we got a satisfying light display. 'Best we could do,' " he echoed.
"I asked Fernandez already," Lanza said. "He says his 'special intelligence source' has dried up. At least temporarily. He also said he was doing his best."
Hmmm, Carrera wondered. What's the best I could do? Hmmm . . . haven't used her in years, but maybe, just maybe, Harriet might be of some help. On the other hand, can I really trust Harriet, even if she can help and is willing to? Have to think about that one.
"Is there anything the Federated States might have that would help you?' he asked Lanza.
"A Lob mainframe computer, maybe," the aviator admitted. "Maybe somebody really good at recovering data from a fucked up . . ." Lanza stopped momentarily, plainly puzzled. "I was about to say 'hard drive,' but the fucking thing doesn't have a hard drive, at least not what we generally mean by the term."
"Keep working on it," Carrera said. "Let me see what I can do."
BdL Dos Lindas, Naval Harbor, Isla Real
Aircraft took off and landed in steady streams from the airfield at one end of the arc of land that made up the tail of the tadpole shaped island. A very few ignored the airstrip, landing or taking off from the ship anchored in the harbor that the tail formed.
The ship was old and, more than any warship afloat on Terra Nova, battle scarred. The worst of the scarring was on her portside rear quarter, where she'd once been the recipient of an anti-shipping missile that had nearly destroyed her . . . and had destroyed many, many of her crew.