Sister Time-ARC

by John Ringo

  He cursed the theft that had caused the delay in the Dulain-Diess run on his watch. He would be decades repairing his reputation and career from this debacle. At the moment, he was directing all his spare time to tracking down the thief for deterrent punishment. Recovery of the stolen wealth was probably too much to hope for. His most recent efforts followed the line of an old Human adage for the hunting of attackers: Who profits? Unfortunately, his "short list" was not yet short enough.

  "AID. Display Hunt File One and control pad for evaluation. Show suspect list. Retrieve cash flow intelligence for each entry on suspect list for six months prior to the theft." He doggedly resumed his search for connections, humming softly. The departure of the freighter, albeit belated, had put him in a better mood than he'd enjoyed for weeks. Gistar, Cnothgar, Adenar. Someone wanted a trade war. But which? Any one of them would have profited enormously by the theft, but only if their group could throw off suspicion on one of the others. He didn't for a moment suspect the Tir Dol Ron. As administrator for the Sol System, he was separated from the covert jockeying of inter-group rivalries. The Darhel Ghin had some limits to the behavior he was willing to tolerate in the name of business. The Tir's squeezing of rival Darhel groups would have to follow the same traditions as anyone else's—confined to systems where he had interests, but not direct administration. Sometimes Pardal wondered if the old Darhel maintained the rules just for the sport of it. Not that it would matter. He proceeded in his happy attempt to untangle conspiracy from betrayal from intrigue. Someone, somewhere, was going to pay.

  * * *

  As with any world, some parts of Dulain were stunningly beautiful. Unfortunately for those who lived there, Bounty City was not one of those places. Chin Ming looked over the ugly galplas cube that held the indentured servants. Her hair, which she wore today in her own elegant bob, blew in the wind as she stared at the slave barracks many of them would only leave feet first. The top Tong leader on Dulain, one of the Grandfather's full Lieutenants, was a very petite woman. She had shipped out among a generic batch of colonists and been one of a core of bought-out former indentures planted by the Tong to establish a foothold for their new operation. The wife of a respected Hong Kong businessman within the organization, she had ridden out the Posleen war in Ontario. Her husband and children she lost to the war. Her own not inconsiderable operational and business experience had remained intact. Juved, she looked like a sweet, demure, little flower. Her protective detail thought so, Little Flower being the code name they had assigned her. Mrs. Chin had raised being underestimated to a high art. She functioned well with the Indowy not only because of her diminutive size and habit of indirect gaze, but also because each sensed in the other a certain skill set, and respected it.

  Chin Ming had never underestimated, nor been underestimated by, one of the Indowy in her life—which certainly put her one up on every Darhel she'd ever had to deal with. She had avoided ever meeting one of the Sidhe in person, but in the game of competing interests she dealt with them every day.

  The vast majority of the Human population had been set down here in the dry, gray-green scrub more for the lack of water and subsequent ease of containment than for any other reason. Planetary admin shuttles dropped armed indents wherever the latest infestations of feral Posleen had been sighted, then picked up the Human survivors afterwards for return to the cube, healing and recuperation. They laid down their arms and reported aboard the return ship for the simple reason that if they did not, ankle and wrist bracelets would start to administer increasingly painful electrical shocks. If ignored, the bracelets would inject the wearer with hiberzine, rendering him unconscious and setting off a beacon for pickup whenever someone got around to it. Frequently, delinquent pickups came in much the worse for wear. More often, they came in as very depleted remains.

  On Indowy worlds, of which Dulain was one, although it had been depopulated to the point of emptiness, the Darhel controlled all commerce, including food shipments from automated farming worlds. If a rebellious Indowy—they occasionally cropped up in so large a population—got too far out of line, the Darhel group that owned his debts for his working tools called those debts in. His the tools repossessed, the hapless Indowy starved with no intervention by his fellows, and the Darhel were minus one problem. Living in a society that had been fundamentally static for millennia, all of the Galactics had gotten too used to a predictable, immutable status quo. Ming smiled. Galactic inertia made it very hard to change standard contracts. Contracts the Darhel had written to entangle the Indowy didn't have the same results with Human laborers.

  The clear intent had been to force the indents to purchase food and healing services from on-site company stores and render servitude lifelong, much like sharecropping in parts of post-bellum North America. The right of laborers to purchase from competing providers had always served to protect the rights of the Darhel groups to compete with each other. Darhel stores had a monopoly on wheat and rice of strains enhanced by Tchpht manipulations to provide all necessary nutrients for sustaining humans in a healthy state. Under-managers had evaluated and assessed the potential outcomes of Human women bringing seeds of unenhanced, inferior food plants native to Earth and found them to be a useful way of marketing expensive hydroponic equipment to humans and keeping the breeding stock occupied, and deeper in debt.

  The first cracks in the system on Dulain had occurred when the Tong orchestrated the payment of the debts of one hundred men and women in what would become Bounty City. They had purchased land, immediately outside the barracks compound, at an exorbitant price. The Tongs had used an intermediary to keep the left hand from knowing what the right hand was doing. Simple. The Darhel factor executing the buy had thought some stray humans were increasing their indentures for worthless wasteland they'd have no opportunity to use, anyway, and had taken the commission as easy money. The Darhel factor selling the land had been happy to unload land at higher than market price, even if the group it presumed it was selling to managed to recoup some percentage of the loss.

  Darhel groups were secretive with each other about their dealings. It had taken upper management decades to sort out that the owners of the land were not another Darhel group but were some Human entity. They reprimanded and demoted the underlings involved, but the damage was done. Certain humans, returning from the field, spent their pay buying their food and incidental healing in town. The prices were much better, so the free citizenry always sold all they could grow. The best the Tong could do so far for meat was raising abat in hutches. The Darhel were never going to surrender easily. They tried sending humans who were paying down their debts to the forefront of combat and to die, rendering the reduction in debt pointless. The greenhouses of free humans, and some of the humans themselves, had suffered assaults and accidents.

  The Darhel of the Cnothgar Group, administrators of Dulain, had quickly discovered that humans were not as easily managed as Indowy. Indents stopped using their savings to pay down their debts directly to the Darhel, instead banking the money in town by buying lottery tickets. Only humans alive at the time of drawing were eligible, by the terms of the ticket. The Tong's front in town held drawings as soon as a lottery pool reached the average debt level among the ticket holders. The Tong bought out the winner's contract no matter what he or she owed, holding the debt if it was larger, paying the excess to the winner if the debt was smaller. When the Tong banked for individuals, it had proved adept at hiding the records off planet and protecting the privacy of depositors. If a depositor died, the Tong paid the balance, minus a fee, to the depositor's designated beneficiary. Darhel creditors had been unable to collect at the death of an asset, unable to prove he had left behind an account. The Cnothgar Group's collections department kept trying to find a way to trace the money. The Tong was better at laundering it.

  Humans who hired out to kill humans tended to die, quickly, at the hands of their fellows. Without Human police willing to investigate and prosecute the murders, with the Tong carefull
y orchestrating the removals, this strategy was not working for the Elves. Ming conceded that they did tend to take down the occasional local Tong head. Rarely. Now, the locals protected greenhouses around the clock with Human shields. Indowy or Darhel could not attack the clearly sophont-occupied facilities, and the humans the Elves hired to do so had low success rates and short life expectancies. The result, over the decades, had been a slow but steady increase in the population of free, rejuved humans in towns like Bounty City all over Dulain.

  The residents of Bounty City, of course, would rather be free and rejuved in town than enslaved in the barracks. Still, the surroundings alone rendered it an ugly place, where the wind quickly draped everything with a coating of gray dust. Beeseers, as they called themselves, never planted greenery out of doors. Transpiration would have wasted too much precious water. As it was, they replenished the deficits to Human sweat and breathing from water left as wastes by the shoppers, window-shoppers, and patrons of the brothels and other entertainments in town. Careful management ensured efficient water and fertilizer recycling. Also, despite unbeatable differences in biology, desert life around them was still carbon based, still ninety-something percent water, still carried most of the right trace minerals. Anything organic the hordes of children could grab, the waste treatment facilities could handle.

  The Darhel could not obtain new indentures from women who would not bear, despite the Darhel's own refusal to provide contraceptives. Contracts had never included any obligation to breed. The whorehouses sold condoms to all buyers, as well as offering discrete abortions in the rare cases those were necessary. No galtech required. The women, already juved, felt no pressure of a ticking biological clock. Indentured males certainly were more willing to plant their seed in town, when they could, than risk slavery for their children. Besides, the women in town were, for those very reasons, so much more available. Pimps found their best profits in buying the indentures of women grateful to get away from the combat missions that now included them—women with sterling prospects of working those indentures off. Under the circumstances, the pimps harbored no hard feelings at the ladies who graduated from their employ. There were always more whores where they came from.

  For the goods the residents could not manufacture or raise in town, the Tong did a brisk black market trade. In the case of the off-Earth free cities, this had included the deliberate policy of supplying capital equipment wherever practical.

  The Randy Tabby in Bounty City was quiet today. Nobody was playing the electric piano, and even the men who would have been customers were hard at work with heat guns or scissors, turning endless meters of colorful, plastic beads into cheap necklaces. All along main street, the buildings contained people scrubbing out every shipping crate that the Beeseers could find, stuffing waxed paper bags with handfuls of necklaces, and filling crates with the bags. Beneath the BC General Store, a pair of workmen fed the machinery that produced the long strings of beads, winding them off on much-used spools.

  One of the first capital packages shipped out, piece-meal and hidden, by the Tongs had been an integrated PVC plant. With it, the humans in Bounty City could begin converting waste organics and desert salts into versatile plastics, useful for so many things. Other communities specialized in other Earthtech goods, but plastics were Bounty City's specialty. For Dulain, Bounty City wasn't a bad place. Ming liked it much better than most, worse than a few.

  She didn't live here, of course. Ming's existence was nomadic, her travel itinerary a closely held secret. The Darhel groups did not officially acknowledge any of the Tong's planetary lieutenants, on any of the Posleen-infested planets that were undergoing the reclamation process. Unofficially, dealing with someone in charge was ingrained in their habits. Currently, they were still trying, with limited success, to have hit men target the lieutenants. The Grandfather said that it might take them some time to realize that expecting to stop Human black markets by lopping off heads was about as effective as beheading a Greek hydra. Mrs. Chin made sure that she remained a moving target.

  Proximity to the Indowy brought a certain amount of trade, and with the trade had come a certain familiarity with the furry, green teddy-bears. The Human factor for the town had noticed that members of Indowy breeding groups delighted in giving each other small, simple gifts as tokens of affection. Indowy being Indowy, they purchased even simple gifts which were individually crafted and expensive—not because the Indowy had a particular dedication to individual craftsmanship, but simply because they had never done it any other way. Two of the Beeseers, from New Orleans by way of a central Indiana SubUrb, and old enough to remember pre-war Earth, had amused themselves for awhile making strands of clear, colored beads and stringing them to sell to the green herbivores. They'd marketed their product as symbols of fertility, plenty, and fellowship. Dulain, being an Indowy world and the Indowy being able to outbreed all known sophonts anywhere, had a very few humans and a whole lot of Indowy. The Indowy considered the pretty little gifts so inexpensive as to be practically free. Page and Gilbeaux, with no marketing efforts to speak of, had been selling as many Mardi Gras necklaces as they could string.

  When Ming had received the message from Earth that Dulain's humans needed to assemble an alternate cargo for an incoming freighter, production had gone into round the clock shifts. They could count on some lower-margin Indowy goods being available to fill out the ship's hold—especially as the message came with suggestions of which Indowy ears for the Tong Lieutenanct for Dulain to drop a word in. Clan Beilil was not plentiful nor powerful on Dulain, but they did appear more open, for no reason that was readily apparent. Ming had quietly filed the name in her memory as a useful contact for the future.

  Meanwhile, several Human towns that were capable of turning out glass beads had gone into high gear, as well. The plus was that there was less of a bottle neck in the immediate machine production of colored glass beads, the downside that they had to be strung by hand. A cube containing a series of books on the construction of machine tools from scrap metal had been, and was still, very popular on Dulain. The necessary parts for generation of strings of the beads were being put together by every small machine shop on the planet. In the two weeks since they had had word from Earth, her people had accomplished a great deal. In the two weeks they still had before they had to ship the product off Dulain, they would do much more.

  Wednesday, 11/10/54

  The more time Michael O'Neal, Senior, spent in secure rooms, the more alike they all looked. The galplas walls were a light mud color, except for the purplish glow of the ceiling surface. It made his eyes hurt, if he didn't wear sunglasses. Which was, of course, the only reason he was wearing them.

  "Nice shades, Papa," George said as he walked past and moved a couple of the rolling office chairs around, trying to pick one that was less broken down than the others. The chairs all sported gray galactic silk slip covers over the seats and backs. Silk was expensive—unless it was from the first efforts of children and typically very off-spec. Color, texture, and quality were variable. The slip covers were marginally better than nothing, maybe. They didn't stop the feel of the torn tweed and disintegrating fifty-year-old foam padding beneath them.

  The blond grunted and set his mug down on the table, shaking a couple of chairs to pick one that wasn't going to dump him into the floor. A caster came off of one of them and he slid that chair over against the wall, putting the offending piece in the seat. The other chair seemed to only have loose handles, so he parked himself in it and kicked his feet up onto the badly chipped pine table.

  "So, the miracle kiddies down below get to make another part." George jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the chair.

  "Gotta hand it to them. Theirs don't break. At least, not so far." Papa spat neatly into his mug.

  "Bitching about the crappy fucking chairs again?" Tommy Sunday walked in wearing a grimace and carrying a steel camp stool. He pushed a couple of the inadequate chairs out of the way and unfolded his stool. "At leas
t you can sit in the damn things."

  "You aren't missing much, son," O'Neal said.

  The door opened again, admitting Cally and Harrison together. Cally's hair was a shining silver bell around her face. It hadn't looked that good in years.

  "Wow," Tommy said. "What the hell did you do to your hair?"

  "Why thank you, Tommy. Good afternoon to you, too," she said, smiling a little too sweetly.

  "Uh . . . I mean it looks really good," he said.

  The elder O'Neal suppressed a grin. "Your hair looks very nice, sweetheart."

  "Thank you, Grandpa."

  "Who would have thought that Darhel conditioner would work so well on Human hair?" Harrison asked the room at large.

  "Not me," said George. "Cally, you're a brave woman."

  "We tried it on a sample of hair from her brush first. I'm not a total novice at hair care, I'll have you know. I figured since Darhel depilatory foam works on humans, the protein structure might be similar enough that their conditioner would work as well." Their fixer looked insufferably proud of himself.