Troy Rising 1 - Live Free or Die (3 page)

“Yes, ma'am,” Tyler replied.
Here it comes.

“Speaking of it getting cold, I think I asked you to bring by some firewood.”

“Yes, ma'am. And I said I'd get it over there on Friday.”

“Well, it's gone Wednesday. Are you going to
be
here on Friday?”

“When I say I'm going to be there, I'll be there, ma'am.”

“Well, I asked for it last week. Seems you could have got it here before Friday. You're
not doing much else.”

Just working at the market, part-time, working in the bookstore, part-time, working at
the mill, part-time, cutting wood, splitting wood, by hand, and answering your damned
phone calls every damned day. Oh, and the rare consulting gig. But other than that I've
got all the time in the world! I suppose I could point out that I could have delivered it
Sunday night at 10PM but she'd go and tell all her friends I'd been snippy with her and
half my clientele would dry up rather than go up against her vicious tongue.

“Gotta work at the market this evening, ma'am,” Tyler said, politely. “Couldn't get it by
until late. Tomorrow I'm going to be working at the bookstore all day and then in the
market that evening. I'll be there at one Friday if the job I've got to do at the mill
don't take too long. No later than four.”

“You'd better be here by one,” Mrs. Cranshaw said. “I don't want to be without wood this
weekend.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Tyler said.

“You be with the Lord, Tyler Vernon,” Mrs. Cranshaw said and hung up.

Tyler closed the phone and swung it back and forth in his fist, wanting to crush it and
the whole damned world that seemed to be determined to do nothing but ruin the life of one
Tyler Vernon.

Tyler Alexander Vernon was five foot two, one hundred and thirty-five pounds and long over
the problem of having three first names. He'd been born and raised in Mississippi,
graduated from LSU with a masters in computer science and, after applying five times at
NASA, ended up working for an internet backbone center in Atlanta. That had led to various
positions in the IT field and a pretty steady corporate advance culminating in a senior
manager position at AT&T in Boston. Then came the real breakout:
TradeHard
.

He'd had it made in the shade. He and his wife, okay, had some issues. But money couldn't
solve everything but it could solve a lot. He'd never thought that his webcomic was going
to be anything other than something to fill the time and maybe make its nut. How was
he
to know it would take off like a Delta rocket? The awards, the adulation. He'd really not
cared that much about the money. He really hadn't. It was more about making a change in
people's lives. But as it turned out...

No, that was unfair. Petra hadn't cared about the money. She cared about the lifestyle the
money brought in. She'd hitched her wagon to a rising star at AT&T back before he'd been
doing much more than scribbling. Dug in there through the tough years, reveled in the
good. Tyler hadn't really wanted the cabin in New Hampshire but he was glad they'd bought
it. And paid it off as the money got better and better and...

A science fiction based webcomic about a free-trader ship. One of the few that had gotten
national syndication. A small TV show. A movie deal in the works.

And the gate opened. And science fiction, as an industry, died.

Well, there was always IT. Five years was a lifetime in IT. Catching up was possible but
hard. He'd been
making
it.

And the Horvath came. And the inevitable depression that followed the orbital bombing of
three major cities. Not to mention stripping the world of all its heavy metals.

And like one of those rocks tumbling towards the planet below, his life had gone into
freefall. The fiery reentry culminating in the plasma explosion of the divorce.

And now he lived in a cabin in the woods and saw his kids when he had any time between
working five jobs.

He put his phone away, picked up the saw, yanked it into life and applied it to the oak he
was chunking. Hard.

***

“Tyler, Chuck needs you to work on Saturday.”

Steve Moorman was the night manager of Mac's Market in Franconia. Tall, stooped and
prematurely balding his life ambition seemed to be to retire as the night manager of the
Mac's Market in Franconia. Tyler considered him lacking in ambition. But despite his
current downcycle, Tyler considered most people to be lacking in ambition.

Since it was Chuck that needed help that meant day-shift and there was an 'issue.' He had
a gig at a con in Reading on Saturday. The greater SF market may have suffered the fate of
the dodo but fandom just would not let go. There was even some anime still going.

He did some quick calculations.

He wasn't getting paid for the gig, the only reason he was invited as the Artist Guest of
Honor was that he was somewhat famous, local and cheap. But he still could move some merc
in the dealer's room and people still bought his sketches of Gomez, Frank and Forella. The
market was a little saturated but he'd still make more sitting on his butt in the dealer's
room than working it off in the store. And Saturday sucked. The ski-birds from Boston and
NYC would be flooding in and asking 'Why don't you have arugula? Where's the couscous?'

The flip side being that if he said no not only would one of the other stockers get asked
the next time some extra time came up, Steve, the passive-aggressive asshole, would
probably start cutting back on his hours.

Short term money or long term money? More like medium term because he was
not
going to retire as the night manager of Mac's Market.

Somehow
the con co-chair had gotten a Glatun to attend. That decided it. The chance to talk to a
real-live alien wasn't one to pass up.

“Steve, I'm really sorry but I'm already scheduled for something on Saturday,” Tyler
replied, diplomatically. “I'd love to work but I've got a gig in Boston.”

“Uh, huh,” Steve said, slowly. “Isn't that one of those... convention things?”

“Yes,” Tyler said, just as slowly. “It's one of those convention things. I can work the
evening shift...”

“No, that would be too much juggling in the schedule,” Steve said, puffing out his cheeks.
“I'll just ask Marsha.”

“Sorry about that,” Tyler said. “Anything else?”

“There's a spill in produce,” Steve said. “Help Tom clean the oranges.”

“Right away.”

***

Tyler took the two crisp twenties from Mrs. Cranshaw and nodded.

“Thank you,” he said, politely.

“Forty dollars seems an awful lot of money for a cord of wood,” Mrs. Cranshaw said. “Not
like I don't already own plenty.”

Owner of five maple sugar distilleries and over four thousand acres of maple forest and
white pine, one of Mrs. Cranshaw's noted peculiarities was that she was so tight with
money she made the buffalo squeal.

“Going rate, ma'am,” Tyler said. He'd wondered when he started delivering wood to her why
he'd been chosen rather than one of the local lumberjacks. You know, people who
worked
for the old witch.

The answer being, nobody else would put up with her.

“Forty dollars is just robbery for firewood,” Mrs. Cranshaw said. “When I was a girl,
Cokes were a nickel. A nickel I tell you!”

“Yes, ma'am,” Tyler said. If you tried to stop her she got mean. Best to just ride it out.

“And the winters is getting worse. It's these damned aliens.”

At best the orbital bombardment of Shanghai, Cairo and Mexico City had dropped global
temperatures by .0001% according to Glatun backed studies. It took a lot more than a few
megatons of rock and, okay, some really major secondary fires, to disturb earth's climate.

“Yes, ma'am.”

“I'm thinking about selling this place,” she said. “My old bones can't take these winters.”

She'd apparently been saying that since before her fourth husband died. They'd all been
wealthy, they'd all left her all their fortune and they'd all died natural causes. Anyone
who suggested anything different had better move out of the county. Besides, after husband
three there'd been a pretty thorough investigation and the final result was 'dead of
stress.'

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Everything seems to go up but maple sugar land,” she said, angrily. “Wood isn't bringing
what it used to, not at all. Nor maple sugar. Damn aliens. Hate those damned aliens.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Tyler said. He bit his tongue before adding:
'And so do the Chinese, Egyptians and Mexicans.'

“They're listening to everything we say,” she said, looking at the sky nervously. “They're
up there right now, listening to us.”

While the Horvath information systems did seem to be able to track just about any
conversation made around an electronic device, Tyler rather doubted that they were
personally listening in on this one. He had a moment's empathetic thought for any Horvath
who was and quashed it rather automatically.

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Well,” she said, relenting a bit. “You did stack it neat. I like a good neat stack of
wood.”

Most people when you delivered a cord it was 'Here you go' and get it off the pick-up as
fast as possible. 'All done, that'll be forty bucks.' Not with Mrs. Cranshaw. That
firewood had better be stacked in a neat and tidy cord on her back porch. Which took about
five times as long as just dumping it in the yard.

Speaking of time.

“Ma'am, I'd love to stay and chat. But I've got an event in Boston where I'm the speaker
and I need to be going.”

“Speaker?” she asked, incredulously. “About what?”

“The webcomic I used to do,” Tyler said, evenly.

“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Cranshaw said, with the most perfect note of neutrality that it descended
past condescension and straight to contempt. “You used to do that comic thing.”

“Yes, I used to do that comic thing,” Tyler said. “And now I'm going to go talk to people
about doing comic things.”

“Used to run in the paper,” Mrs. Cranshaw said. “Never did get what was so funny about it.
And I didn't like all them alien names. Couldn't figure them out.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Tyler said.

“Well, if you've got a commitment you best be to it,” Mrs. Cranshaw said. “Can't hardly
figure out what you're going to talk on seeing as there's real aliens now. But you do go
on and talk about comic things.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Tyler said. “See you in a couple of months, then?”

***

“Sorry I'm late Mr. Du Vall,” Tyler said, shaking the con-chair's hand. “Got hung up doing
some server work.”

“Not a problem,” the convention co-chairman said. James Du Vall was 5'11, AmerAsian and
shaped something like a large bear. He had black hair, a white and black beard and it
patterned in a very familiar way. Tyler had never met him but could just about guess his
nickname... “Call me Panda. Everybody does. You're just in time for opening ceremonies
which was your first panel.”

Tyler had gotten a peek into the ballroom as he was walking in and shook his head.

“I thought you said this was a small con. There must be a thousand people in the ballroom.”

“I'd say they're all here to see you,” Panda said with a shrug. “Truth is they're mostly
here to see...”

“A real-live Glatun,” Tyler finished, gesturing with his chin at the alien standing in a
corner and watching the 'pros' straggling into the small, walled-off area. “I won't ask
how you got him to attend.”

“Simple,” Panda said, smiling thinly. “I paid him. More than I'm going to get out of the
con but that wasn't the point. Science fiction isn't dead, it's just become reality. And
fandom is still where people who want to work for the future gather. I could go on but
we've got to get going.”

“Lead on,” Tyler said.

Panda headed up the steps to the stage and the other 'Special Guests' sort of straggled
after him.

There was the usual series of tables flanking a podium and the usual milling as people
tried to figure out where to sit. And Tyler had his usual flash of annoyance at it.
They're chairs. You sit in 'em. Sit. Heel.

Since the Glatun looked particularly puzzled he caught its eye and waved to a chair,
pulling it out. Fortunately Glatun and human design were similar enough a human chair
worked just fine. The Glatun sat down and Tyler snagged the chair next to it by right of
conquest. Worked for the Horvath.

“Ladies and Gentlemen and honored extra-terrestrials...” Panda said to some cheers at the
last part. “Welcome to MiraCon...”

“You are Tyler Vernon,” the Glatun whispered as Panda started into what sounded like it
was going to be a very
long
speech.

Tyler noted that the voice, which was fairly human normal, was coming from a small pod on
a collar and the Glatun had not, in fact, opened his mouth. He'd heard that they mostly
communicated through their implants but it was still a bit of shock.

“Yes, I am,” Tyler whispered back.

“I am Fallalor Wathaet, captain of the
Spinward Crossing
. A pleasure to meet you. You used to write
TradeHard
, did you not?”

“Yes,” Tyler said, shocked again. “How did you...?
Why
do you know that?”

“The security situation on Terra for traders is good,” Wathaet said. “But if I was going
to be dealing with people I wished to know who I might be near.”

“We are, after all, potentially dangerous locals with bizarre and disgusting customs,”
Tyler said.

“ 'Who will do anything to screw us out of our credits. Our job is to be better screws.' ”

“You
read
the comic?” Tyler was still recovering from the earlier shocks. This was water on a duck.

“It is one of the few times when I have understood human humor,” the Glatun said. “Perhaps
in part because it struck so close to home and was so true. Although banks do not
routinely send mercenaries to collect your ship. There are people in our government who do
that quite well, thank you.”

“It was a rare situation,” Tyler pointed out. “But... thanks for the compliment.”