A Charter for the Commonwealth

by Richard F. Weyand

“Got it in one.”

  “My God, is Fournier finally moving against Andrews?”

  “Don’t know. Could be. The Fournier, Westlake, and Orlov families are all close, on Earth and out in the colonies. My point, though, is there is much going on here I don’t yet understand. And I didn’t get to where I am by leaping without looking.”

  “So you’re going to wait and see what happens?”

  “Sure. It’s not like I need to make any decisions yet. We just keep doing what we’re doing. Only one thing I think might be smart to do, and that is to rename your police force the Bahay Protective Service.”

  “You think we should?”

  “Sure, why not? Depending on which way the wind blows, having ‘Earth Special Police’ stenciled on your building in big letters might not be so smart with a Commonwealth battleship holding the high orbitals, eh?”

  Claude Fournier, Stepan Orlov, and James Allen Westlake V were on a video conference call on Earth.

  “I am assuming we all got correspondence from Jim Westlake on Jablonka, is that right?” Fournier asked.

  “I did,” Westlake said.

  “I got correspondence from Georgy, who’s also on Jablonka, but I suspect it amounts to the same thing,” Orlov said.

  “And we’ve all seen the press release from Doma?”

  Westlake and Orlov both nodded.

  “So what do we make of it all?” Fournier asked.

  “Well, our kids – and I include Suzette in that – are clearly on the right side of history. We three have discussed this before. At some point, the colonies are going to go their own way, and the best move at that point is to make sure we have a friendly enough relationship with them we can continue trading with them. It seems they think now is the time,” Westlake said.

  “And Georgy is obviously in there with them. Putting Jim and Georgy both on Jablonka together might have been a mistake in retrospect,” Orlov said.

  “I got a letter from Edmond, too,” Fournier said. “He just heard about this whole thing when the press release issued on Doma. He’s pretty upset about it, that they did it on Doma without even talking to him about it. He’s afraid of reprisals.”

  Fournier waved a hand, as if to brush everything aside, before continuing.

  “Be that as it may, we are where we are. The question now is what do we do about it. Andrews is chairman at the moment, and he will be until his term is up, absent a no-confidence consensus. I don’t think that’s possible right now.”

  “It may be, if he overreacts and steps in it as badly as he could,” Westlake said. “He’s not a deep thinker, and he’s not exactly known for his restraint. Jim seems to think the colonies are in a position to force the issue, and Earth won’t be able to counter them.”

  “Georgy was more explicit,” Orlov said. “They have a navy, and he’s convinced they can prevail over the ESN. He wasn’t very specific on details, but Georgy tends if anything to understate such things. And I will mention one other thing. Jarl Sigurdsen is his VP of operations out there.”

  “Admiral Jarl Sigurdsen?” Fournier asked.

  “Yes,” Orlov said. “And in addition to being a damn fine admiral in his own right, he knows all of ESN doctrine. Bruneau is going to have a hard time with him.”

  “So what I hear emerging as a consensus is that Andrews is going to overreact and probably do something incredibly stupid, and then Sigurdsen is going to hand Bruneau his head,” Fournier said.

  “Probably,” Westlake said.

  “I agree,” Orlov said.

  “All right. So we’re going to have to let Andrews play out his hand. At some point his position is going to become so untenable I will be able to force a no-confidence. We’ll just have to bide our time and watch for our opportunity.”

  “Agreed,” Westlake and Orlov both said.

  “That’s what they’re up to. They’re making a play to take the colonies for themselves,” Arlan Andrews said.

  “That’s what it looks like, sir. The younger Westlake is named here as the Chairman of the Council. The chief executive, I guess,” Andy Hasper said.

  “Oh, they’re all in on it. The younger Orlov. Fournier’s daughter. Fournier’s son, too. This damned charter thing was signed on Doma.”

  “And Fournier’s son is married to Orlov’s daughter.”

  “Oh, yes. It all fits a pattern now,” Andrews said. “What the hell are they thinking? They’re going to pit some fucking Q-ships against the ESN? Good luck with that.”

  “Maybe they think you’ll treat it as a fait accompli, sir.”

  “That’s not going to happen. No, we’re going to teach Fournier, Westlake, and Orlov a lesson they’re never going to forget.”

  “What do you want to do, sir?” Hasper asked.

  “Tell Bruneau I want him to get together what ships he has here and space for Doma.”

  “He’s going to want to wait for more ships, sir. They’re just starting to come in from the closer colonies.”

  “Navy people always want more ships,” Andrews said. “It’s part of their DNA. You tell him he can wait a week, then whatever he has, he has. We’ll send anything that comes in later to Doma to meet him there.”

  “All right, sir. And his orders for Doma?”

  “Burn it down. Bomb the cities. Destroy Orlov’s mining interests there. Lay waste to the system. Leave Fournier nothing.”

  “Are you sure, sir?” Hasper asked.

  “Yes, dammit! Fournier wants to fuck around? OK, fine. He fucked around with the wrong guy.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And then get in touch with your assets on Jablonka. Young Westlake? I want that little prick dead.”

  Jablonka

  As the news of the Charter spread across the Commonwealth, Gerald Ansen, Mineko Kusunoki, Patryk Mazur, and twenty-three other members of the Council were in transit to Jablonka. Ansen and Kusunoki were once again aboard the Jewel of Space, and Ansen once more had his smoking lounge across the hall.

  They had actually left after the press release had been published. Passenger ships between systems did not leave every day, or even every week. Interstellar travel was expensive, and the number of passengers willing and able to pay such fares was limited.

  As a result, they didn’t get to Jablonka until eight weeks after the press release was published.

  News of their impending arrival reached Jablonka five weeks before they did, on the high-speed courier ships that delivered interstellar mail. Those same ships had carried the news of the Charter to Earth in four weeks, and Arlan Andrews’ orders back to Jablonka in another three.

  Richard Paolinelli considered the mail he had just received from Earth. It had a return address he knew led nowhere, but he knew who it was from. The message itself was cryptic, but he knew what it said.

  Kill Westlake? How the hell was he supposed to pull that off and get away with it? It was a truism that any political figure could be assassinated as long as the assassin didn’t care whether or not he got away, but Paolinelli did care.

  It didn’t help that Westlake had become an insanely popular figure. The news from Doma of the Charter, and Westlake’s whole-hearted endorsement of its civil rights clauses, had occurred almost a month ago. People who had had to worry their whole lives about what they said, or what they printed or published, had become sort of giddy with the freedom to say or print or publish whatever the hell they wanted. Westlake had always had a light hand compared to some planetary governors, but that just made him even more popular. In the view of many, he had been conspiring all along to break away from Earth and make Jablonka free.

  Which was all well and good, but it didn’t help Paolinelli do his job. And of course the Charter and Commonwealth nonsense was the whole reason for doing the job in the first place, he had no doubt of that. His orders came from Earth, and the colonies breaking away from Earth would not be a popular concept in some quarters there, that’s for sure.

  Whatever. A job is a job.


  He went back to considering how he was going to pull this off.

  The newspaper said there was going to be a rally at the shuttleport to welcome back the members of the Council from Doma. Maybe he could do the old switcheroo play.

  The shuttle down from the Jewel of Space touched down on the farthest shuttlepad from the terminal building of Jablonka spaceport. This was to accommodate the crowd that had come out to welcome the return home of Gerald Ansen and Mineko Kusunoki as well as the arrival of another two dozen members of the Commonwealth Council.

  The Planetary Governor, James Allen Westlake VI, and several other dignitaries were waiting on the next shuttlepad closer to welcome them home. Perhaps ten thousand people stood between the shuttleport building and the barricades separating the crowd from the dignitaries. There was a microphone set up so Westlake could address the crowd. A small passenger shuttle for the dignitaries and the ever-present ambulance when Westlake was out and about stood on the next pad to the side.

  The big passenger shuttle from the liner came slowly down out of the sky and landed on the far shuttlepad. The hatch opened and Ansen appeared in the doorway and waved. A cheer went up from the crowd. Ansen started down the stairs, followed by Kusunoki and the other Council members. They walked from the far shuttle pad to the pad where Westlake and the dignitaries waited.

  Ansen walked up to Westlake and shook his hand, as did Kusunoki. Ansen then introduced each of the Council members to Westlake in turn. Westlake’s aide said each Council member’s name over the microphone as Westlake shook their hand, and the crowd cheered each name.

  When the introductions were done, Westlake addressed the crowd. Ansen was standing behind Westlake slightly to Westlake’s left, with Kusunoki to Ansen’s left. She held his arm, as she often did when they were out. Just after Westlake started speaking, Kusunoki tightened her grip on Ansen’s arm once, then twice more, not as hard.

  As most couples who’ve been married a while, they had their signals. Kusunoki’s were mostly non-verbal. The one hard grab was “I don’t like this,” and two short grabs were, “Look at that.”

  Ansen scanned the crowd, and he saw it. One young man in a spaceport uniform standing in the second row of the crowd, behind the barricades about ten yards distant. The problem was, his expression was all wrong. He cheered whenever everyone else did, but it wasn’t real.

  As Ansen watched, a hand with a gun reached out of the crowd and lifted toward Westlake. Ansen threw his arms around Westlake and spun one hundred and eighty degrees as gunshots rang out across the spaceport.

  Paolinelli had gotten to the front of the crowd. He wanted to be in the second row. He was standing right behind and just to the right of a man in the front row. Once Westlake started talking and he was a stationary target, he reached his hand out between the two men in front of him and opened fire.

  Westlake and Ansen went down, whereupon Paolinelli dropped the gun on the pavement and grabbed the man in front of him, dragging him to the ground.

  “I’ve got him, I’ve got him,” Paolinelli yelled as security men rushed forward.

  Ansen and Westlake both went down and the crowd shrieked. Some people started running for the terminal building, while others stayed, transfixed by the scene. There was shouting from the shooter’s location. Medical men rushed out of the ambulance twenty meters away, two of them carrying equipment and four of them carrying a litter.

  When they got to the scene, Westlake and Kusunoki were on their knees over the prone Ansen. He was laying on his chest, and had three bullet holes in the back of his jacket. The EMTs cut through his shirt and jacket up the middle of his back, applied a stop-it to each of the bullet holes and activated them, then rolled Ansen on to the litter and ran for the back door of the ambulance.

  Kusunoki was right with them, and jumped aboard as the ambulance spooled up. The doors auto-closed and the ambulance veritably leapt off the ground and shot across the spaceport for University of Jablonka Medical Center.

  Ansen was awake as they connected an IV with a pint of blood to his right arm. Kusunoki was on Ansen’s left.

  Ansen looked up at Kusunoki and whispered, “Do not grieve, my Love. I’m very happy, and I’ve had a wonderful time.”

  And then he died.

  When the ambulance got to UJ Medical Center, Kusunoki got off the ambulance shuttle on the roof, took the elevator down to street level, and hailed a cab. She took it to the gate of the Planetary Governor’s Mansion, and asked to see Westlake.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, he’s not seeing anybody right now.”

  “Tell him it’s Mrs. Ansen.”

  “Oh! Oh, yes, ma’am. Just one moment.”

  The gate guard returned in just seconds.

  “This man will take you there, ma’am.”

  Another guard led her behind the guard shack to an electric cart. He handed her aboard and then drove her across the grounds, into a cart entrance, and to a stand of elevators in the basement. He parked the cart there, handed her out, and then led her into the elevator.

  At the proper floor, he waved her out of the elevator.

  “This way, ma’am.”

  He led her down the hall to a large set of double doors she recognized. Knocking once, he let her into the room and closed the door behind her.

  Westlake looked up from his desk, which had several other men around it talking animatedly. He got up and came to her.

  “Professor Kusunoki, how is Professor Ansen?”

  “He died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.”

  “I am so sorry. Clearly I was the target. He saved my life.”

  “Yes, but the reason I’m here is you have the wrong man.”

  “What?”

  “The man arrested at the spaceport is the wrong man. The shooter was behind him, the man who dragged him to the ground.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive. I signaled Ansen that something was wrong, that the fellow in the spaceport uniform looked wrong. He saw it, and we were looking right at him as he raised the gun. Ansen didn’t have time to do anything else but put you behind him. The guy he dragged to the ground didn’t do anything.”

  “Detective Hartman.”

  One of the men walked up.

  “We have the wrong guy. It was the guy in the spaceport uniform who dragged down our suspect. He was the real shooter.”

  Richard Hartman looked at Kusunoki, back to Westlake.

  “Are you sure, sir?”

  “Test his hands for gunpowder residue. You should be able to tell whether he recently fired a gun or not. And find that guy in the spaceport uniform. I want that guy. And anybody who drags his feet on this is going to be busted down to guarding bus stations.”

  “Yes, sir. We’re on it.”

  “We need to do this by the Charter. Get me warrants to sign.”

  Spaceport security cameras showed Paolinelli getting on the people mover in to Jablonka. An electric bus system that ran in its own traffic lanes, it made stops at several stations on its way to the center of Jablonka. There was also a ring route of the bus system.

  Security cameras showed Paolinelli transferring from the shuttleport bus to the ring route bus, and exiting the ring route bus two stops later.

  JPS officers flooded into that neighborhood, asking everyone whether they had seen this person, and showing a still from one of the security cameras. Between the change of name from Earth Special Police to the Jablonka Protective Service and Westlake’s embrace of the charter four weeks before, people were no longer afraid of the police.

  They got a break. Someone had seen Paolinelli get in a cab two blocks away and around the corner from the bus stop. They had noted it because he was in a spaceport uniform.

  And the cab company had a record of the trip.

  Four hours after the assassination, Richard Paolinelli was arrested for the murder of Ansen and the attempted murder of Westlake.

  Randy Upton, the fellow Paolinelli had dragged to the ground
, did in fact test negative for gunpowder residue on his hands, and he was released from custody.

  Once Paolinelli was arrested, the forensics team went to work. It was very difficult to break into modern electronic devices, but it was not impossible. Not if you had a lot of computing capacity and time.

  Using the search warrants, they also got his bank data and everything else they could find on Jablonka about Richard Paolinelli.

  Hartman was able to brief Westlake on the initial findings the next morning.

  “It was Earth,” Hartman said.

  “Are you sure?” Westlake asked.

  “Oh, yes. We have records of the bank transfers, and we can sync them up to other fishy happenings over the past ten years. He seems to live pretty well for someone who has not had any record of income since he got here ten years ago. From Earth, by the way.”

  “And? You have more than that, surely.”

  “Yes. We are busting our way – slowly, mind you – into some encrypted communications. I think what’s more telling than the contents is the timing. He received an encrypted communication two days ago. First one in about six months.”

  “Does the timing for that work out?”

  “Oh, yes. We know when the Charter press release reached Earth. And we know which courier ship Paolinelli’s encrypted mail came in on. There’s about a 36-hour window there, from the news of the Charter arriving on Earth to the departure of the courier ship from Earth to Jablonka.”

  Mike Skibbe, the military liaison, walked into Westlake’s office.

  “Sir, we’ve just received communications from Stardust. She’s one of Mr. Orlov’s freighter conversions, and she just made her hyperspace transition into Jablonka. They jumped her. The ESN, that is. There was a battle, and Stardust took some hits, had some casualties. Here’s the captain’s AAR, sir.”

  Admiral Sigurdsen and Westlake made the trip to inform Jennifer Lowenthal’s parents of her death.

  “You don’t have to do this, sir,” Sigurdsen said.