The Unincorporated Woman (27 page)

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Hell of a lot of rocks to be moving.”

“That’s why we’re short on techs. Sent most of ’em over for support—make sure the settlement gets to its final destination without incident.”

Sandra nodded while continuing to scan her DijAssist.

“Why the interest, Madam President? None of what we’re doing over there would involve anything under your purview.”

At that comment, Sandra looked up from her reading and snorted. “Purview? You’ve got to be kidding me, Commodore. I cut ribbons and kiss babies.”

“Nonetheless, ma’am, ceremonial functions do have their place, and as I was saying, there are none scheduled for Oberon.”

“What if I schedule one? I
am
the President, after all.”

“Well … I suppose,” conceded Marilynn, caught off guard.

“Says here, it’s known for some kind of water slide.”

“Not ‘some kind,’ Madam President. They call it the Water Asterisk because of its unusual shape—Wa, for short—and let me tell you from personal experience, that thing is diabolical.”

Sandra’s eyebrow shot up. “Really?”

“Yes, ma’am. As Damsah’s my witness. Our school went there on a field trip when I was testing at the fourth level. Some rides you never forget. That …
thing
is one of them.”

“Perfect.” Sandra sprung to her feet. “What better way to show the displaced peoples of Oberon our support than by a visit to this Wa thing?”

“By not drowning?” jibed Marilynn.

“That’s what you’ll be there for, Commodore.”

Marilynn made to protest but saw it was too late. The President’s gentle resolve was every bit as tenacious and unrelenting as a river stream forging a canal through stone.

Oberon Settlement in flyby of Ceres

Sergeant Holke grimaced as he kicked his foot in the dirt a few more times. Again, he stared up at the massive structure dominating the asteroid’s center—particularly the fifth tube, known systemwide as T-5. It was just as wide and long as the others. He watched from afar as revelers were either gently sucked up from or dumped out into the wide river ringing the asteroid at its circumference. The only difference with the fifth tube was what it contained inside. While the other tubes in the asterisk-shaped structure had been designed for fun and leisure, the beast Holke had his eyes on had clearly been designed by a sadist. The sergeant let out an exasperated breath and then warily made his way back over to where the President was standing. “I can’t guarantee your safety, ma’am.”

“It’s not a safe universe, Sergeant. Do the best you can.”

Holke again stared out at the behemoth. “Have you been fully informed about what’s inside that thing, ma’am?”

Sandra folded her arms and glared at Holke.

The sergeant looked around for help from other members of the President’s entourage. None was forthcoming.

“Actually, Sergeant,” Dr. Gillette offered a bland smile, “a good bit of physical exercise is just what the doctor ordered.”

“That’s not exercise, Doctor—it’s retribution.”

“For what?”

“Does it matter?”

“My dear Sergeant,” interrupted Sandra, “in case you hadn’t noticed, I’m in the middle of the best-protected space in the Alliance and I’m surrounded by
your
handpicked detail.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“So unless you’ve got a good reason why I shouldn’t go, I’m going. So do you, Sergeant?”

Holke looked down at the ground and unloosed another clump of dirt with his boot. “No, ma’am.”

“In that case, I’ll be going all the way up to the top, where I look forward to buying everyone a round once I’ve made it.” Her exhortation and confidence caused a wild burst of applause from the small crowd of press and VIPs that had quickly gathered on the news of her arrival. Holke had the power to stop the foolishness but chose not to. He’d save that chit for another day. Plus, he reasoned, having her humbled by what he knew to be one of the toughest globstacle courses in the Alliance might do them both a bit of good. He returned the President’s gaze and gave a grudging nod. Her grin was immediate and infectious. A smile twitched the corner of his mouth as he started subvocalizing commands into a secured communicator. “Don’t know,” he said to the voice on the other end. “Let me ask.” He stopped talking and looked around in search of his target.

“How about you, Commodore?”

Marilynn’s head jolted back. “How about me, what?

Sandra turned toward her liaison with a devilish grin.

“Oh no, you don’t, Madam President.”

Staring straight into her liaison’s eyes, Sandra raised her voice just loud enough for the mediabots and press to hear. “Surely Commodore Nitelowsen, fleet representative and former aide to our famous Admiral J. D. Black, isn’t afraid of—” She paused to let her last words have greater effect. “—a little water slide?”

Marilynn’s face turned beet red as soon as she realized everyone was waiting on her response.

“Of course not, Madam President.”

*   *   *

Of the seven who had started out on the ascent, including the four guards Holke had “volunteered” into duty, only three remained. Sandra hadn’t been at all surprised that her sergeant was one of them. She watched him briefly, then returned to staring intently at the rope she’d soon be leaping toward.

Forget the pain in my arms and legs,
groused Sandra.
That’s at least familiar territory
. After seven hard-fought hours of climbing, it was her lungs that were now providing a whole new level of excruciation. She was aware that the old Sandra, even in her prime, could never have made it this far. But nanoimproved body or not, her lungs were still hurting in parts she hadn’t known existed. After the legs and arms had cramped up, her fingers began their protest. The impossibly small crimps, mere pimples on the wall, were proving even more treacherous than the damned pegs she’d barely finished railing against.

And she was loving every second. The magicians at Ceres may have brought her back to life, but it was the T-5 excursion that was making her truly feel alive.

The climb had started later than expected, due to Sergeant Holke’s vigilance in securing her safety. He’d made quick work of two separate teams—thirteen climbers in all. He did, however, face a dilemma about one straggler—an officer on leave just twenty meters shy of her goal. Holke knew that had he forced
her
off, the outcry would’ve been deafening. Torn, the sergeant had lobbed the decision over to the President. “We wait,” were the only two words she’d uttered. Ten minutes after Sandra had given the order, the straggler fell from above and splashed down near where their boat had been moored. The President’s dingy had been the first to haul the woman out of the water—unplanned but fortuitous nonetheless. It was good for the publicity and the woman had provided the team with some invaluable information about the course. Holke wanted to know what to expect, but even more important, what had gone wrong. After the exhausted officer had finished cursing her luck, she was happy to oblige. She explained how she’d gotten far enough up the wall that there were no longer any pegs or crimps to grab on to—just a series of wet, fifteen-meter-long dangling ropes—any one of which she could’ve used to climb to victory. The problem, she’d said, was that the closest rope to her was frustratingly out of reach. “Plus,” she added, “the higher up I got, the less gravity there was. More than once, I felt the urge to just let go and float up to victory, but then I’d remind myself that T-5 was rigged. If I let go for even a second, I’d be swept to the center of the tube and dropped.” Her fatal flaw, she cautioned, had been impatience. Rather than negotiate the wall for a better ascent, she instead attempted to move sideways toward the rope. When she felt herself slipping, she gamely tried to leap, but without a well angled and fully committed launch, there was no way she could could’ve made it—especially at a distance of fifteen meters.

T-5, like its four counterparts, had five spiderlike support beams dropping down into the lazy river. However, where tubes number one and three had been designated as “ups” and two and four as “downs,” number five had a special status: It could be used for both. But given T-5’s treacherous and constantly reconfigured ascent, far more people had suffered the indignity of being dropped into the river below than had actually made it to the precipice above.

The support beam they’d attached the dingy to had a built-in ladder, and the team used it. Where the beams ended, an encircling platform began. They had to shout over the din that greeted them as thousands of liters of water came racing down and over the jutting rock formations along the centrifugal inner wall. The noncentrifugal half, noted Sandra, was a smooth white surface polished to a sheen. It was at that moment that Sandra knew Holke would not fail. While all those around her, including herself, stared in awe at the spectacle above, the sergeant had gone all business, calmly walking the perimeter in order to assess the best line of ascent. Sandra got the feeling that Holke would sooner rip the nanite-constructed handholds off the tube’s inner wall than ever let her out of his sight. But it had been her fleet liaison officer who had surprised her the most. As one by one, the combat veterans had been buffeted off the wall, Marilynn Nitelowsen had grimly soldiered on—sticking to Sandra like glue.

But even Marilynn’s proximity couldn’t have saved the President from her fate. The momentary distraction of a mediabot emerging from a nearby cloud of mist had been the deciding factor in separating the President from almost certain victory. The fraction of a second had been more than enough to allow water to slip through and under Sandra’s fingertips, easily defeating her already tenuous grip. She instinctively leapt for the rope and for an instant it was tantalizingly close—mere centimeters from her grasp. But then her body stopped. There hadn’t been enough momentum to span the few centimeters her hands kept clawing for.

Her cursing, though hardly Presidential, was loud and honest in its fury. As the float field took over, Sandra was shifted farther away from the wall and in toward the center of the tube. Once there, she floated downward, picking up speed as centrifugal gravity took over. Sergeant Holke, with what appeared to be a look of relief, launched himself off the wall after her. Commodore Nitelowsen followed his lead. Seconds later, all three were flushed, like so much detritus, into the river below.

Oberon’s Palace Hotel, Oberon Settlement

Agnes Goldstein sat at a table, lost in the evanescent fragrance of the chai cupped between her hands. Cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, and ginger filled the air around her. The restaurant, like the hotel it was attached to, was five-star rated—only one of seventeen with so high a designation in the Outer Alliance. As usual, the management refused to let her pay, and as usual, it only compounded her misery.

There’d been times her cover on Mars had been so well adapted that she couldn’t be sure if the childhood memories she experienced were hers or those of the programmer’s niece. Still, deep down,
Agnes Goldstein
lived and never stopped believing that one day she’d be back … be
her
again. But now, gazing absently into the cup of chai, Agnes knew that belief to be false: The Agnes she’d dreamed of returning home to was gone, cruelly replaced by another. In the space of a week, she’d gone from unseen to overexposed. It had been Kirk’s decision. “You’re more useful to us as a thumb in the eye of the UHF than as an operative. Plus,” he’d informed her during one of the debriefings, “you’re going to do more good for the Alliance making appearances and signing autographs than you could ever do undercover. We need heroes, Agnes Goldstein, and you are one, so smile and get the hell out of my office, I got work to do.” She’d been too dazed to object and wasn’t sure that even if she had, anything could’ve been done. Everyone was making sacrifices—who was she to complain?

And so the story went out of the daring operative who’d infiltrated into the heart of enemy territory in order to “rescue” the UHF’s most famous doctor. Without Agnes’s heroic effort, Justin’s successor, the now popular if powerless Sandra O’Toole, could not have been revived. Even more intriguing, the agent extraordinaire had known Justin in his first year of rebirth and had even had him personally intervene in her life.

At first, Agnes welcomed the attention. She dutifully gave autographs and, when asked, freely spoke at length about life inside the UHF. However, the adulation grew tired fast. Especially creepy were those who felt the need to touch her. Some would ask permission, but more often than not, they wouldn’t—in their eyes, she was part of the anointed, that rare group of individuals in whose life Justin Cord had chosen to intervene. Everybody wanted a piece of her: News feeds wanted interviews; organizations, photo ops; war rallies, speeches; and religious institutions, sermons. She’d been forced to hire a PR firm when an overabundance of adolescents got too descriptive in the ways they’d like to pleasure her and an overwhelming number of children kept writing to say they wanted to be like her. To relieve some of the pressure, she’d been promoted to the rank of Intelligence liaison officer for the military and then assigned detached duty handling VIP security details. In one fell swoop, Agnes Goldstein—insurgent, rebel, action wing operative, arms smuggler, courier, and sometime assassin—had become a glorified bodyguard.

And that was how she’d ended up situated at the Oberon Settlement overlooking the security arrangements for Rabbi, the Alliance’s brand-new Secretary of Relocation. He was supposed to be meeting with the President after her little water park publicity stunt and had apparently requested Agnes specifically. Why, she couldn’t fathom. The oddly dressed man’s errant looks in her direction didn’t clarify the matter. Rather, they only added to her already surly mood. She’d assigned some trusted guards to cover him and then escaped to the restaurant for some respite.

Agnes’s DijAssist came to life, informing her that the President had not made it up T-5.
There’s a surprise,
she thought to herself. On the plus side, it meant she could move up Rabbi’s meeting. She informed his avatar of the time change and then headed up to his suite.