Victoria

From CleanPosts

VICTORIA

As Brand and Jabs and Victoria neared their destination the word got around about what was going to happen. Two Water Guild ships started harassing the incoming Millet ice ball with laser strikes, like trying to frying ants under a magnifying glass. They desperately wanted to prevent the Millets from getting to the Gravel Pile. The Water Guild knew full well Brand's ice ball would allow Roth Wardian break their local monopoly and wipe out their razor-thin profit margin.

The attack pissed Brand off, so he decided to play his hole card. He melted the ice around Chivalrous and worked the ship free. Her fangs were brought out to bear on the offending Water Guild vessels. But it was all a bluff. There was very little power remaining to fight.

As soon as they were painted by fire control radar the Water Guild ships recognized the Chivalrous as Femina Caelestis' (and indeed human history's) very first fighting spaceship and they moved off to a safe distance to wait.

Brand actually considered the arrival of the Water Guild gnats a stroke of luck. Now he had a valid explanation for his inability to finesse the ice- ball into the Gravel Pile. He had Jabs radio their buyer, Roth Wardian, and tell him that har macro had been damaged in the attack so sha needed his help.

So Roth came out with his four ships and let loose a missile at one of the Guild ships. When it was destroyed the remaining one departed the area with its metaphoric tail between its legs. Then with a huge carbon-fiber net the Millet's ice ball was taken under tow with Roth's four ships flying at the four points of a tetrahedron. They weren't trying to slow the ice ball down, they were merely guiding the ice in for the last few million miles.

At one point Mr. Wardian himself paid a short courtesy call to Jabs aboard Chivalrous, where she introduced little Victoria and also her "boyfriend" whom she definitely billed as the junior partner in the operation. Jabs didn't mention Brand's name to Roth, because the deception was still on, but for the ruse she was pulling off, his name wasn't important anyway.

Brand acted cool towards Roth, as if flexing his muscles. The idea was to put out of Roth's mind any idea he had of pushing Jabs around when it came time to pay up. During this visit Jabs gave Wardian the information for the account which she expected him to credit upon actual delivery of the ice, which was now less than three weeks away.

As planned, Roth Wardian allowed the ice ball to crash deep inside his Gravel Pile, which swallowed it up with hardly a ruffled stone. In fact, only a few boulders were knocked loose forever from the Gravel Pile, and only a fraction of the water was lost as steam. He gladly paid the account of Jabniel Bat-Naseth her agreed-upon amount.

Brand and Jabs didn't want to stick around and join Wardian to celebrate their venture. They wasted no time flying aboard Chivalrous to the asteroid Ceres, the largest one in the Belt.

Little Victoria was overwhelmed there. She was born and lived her whole short little life on a six hundred foot asteroid, and now she was jumping around on one that was six hundred miles across. Ceres even had a little gravity, about three percent of Earth's, not enough to beat Victoria down, but enough to get her used to the concept of gravity.

Ceres was a genuine world. In fact, Ceres was to the Moon in size what the Moon was to the Earth.

The settlements on Ceres, which were half above the surface and half under- ground, were still rather chaotic. There was a wild west flavor to the place, and no one political entity ruled the entire asteroid. However the Femina Caelestis quarter of the town of Tasker was fairly civilized.

Brand inquired about passage to Earth, and was told there would be a mili- tary transport leaving in about a month which could make room for them. It was one of the vessels Belial had given to Robyn after the Fortuna Summit. It wouldn't be nearly as fancy as a full-up nephilim cruise liner, but the Millets had just made a horrible crossing from Saturn and it sounded like the lap of luxury to them.

In the meantime Brand took the FC up on their offer of hotel accommodations, so long as they didn't try to offer anything for free. While the Millets stayed safe and snug among the angelic hosts on Ceres, Brand and his family were secure from any retribution by Roth Wardian.

For already Roth had discovered the reason for the Millet's sudden haste. Their entire ice rock was already phantomized, making it totally useless as a source of power.

The possibility of such a thing happening never made the slightest glimmer in his mind. It never occurred to him that Jabs' ice ball would be made entirely of phantomized water, because normally that was all thrown over- board as propellant, a natural waste byproduct of the process of moving the dang thing with a macro.

He had no idea what they did, but he saw that Jabs' collision idea was really just a way to mask the lack of any unphantomized water on her ice ball to slow it down.

Even what little good water there was to start with in the Gravel Pile be- fore the collision was now thoroughly mixed with the bad water, requiring an elaborate, time consuming test, and essentially making all his water worthless. Soon the word got around that the Gravel Pile's water was taint- ed. Roth was financially ruined.

His misery was compounded further when he learned who the "boyfriend" of Jabniel really was: Brand Millet. The schmuck he had ripped off years be- fore. So that was it. Brand had his vengeance. It was beautifully played. Roth Wardian swore to use the last dregs of his resources to hunt down and destroy Brand and his whole family.

During their stay on the Ceres asteroid Brand, Jabs, and Victoria went to the Barbuda embassy. US law dictated that all visitors had to show citizen- ship in a recognized sovereign state Earthside. To satisfy this legal requirement for travelers whose primary residence was now in space, the Carribean island state of Barbuda, formerly a part of Antigua, stepped up to provide citizenship to anyone, for a substantial fee.

You sent Barbuda a couple photos, a short biography countersigned by a Femina Caelestis member, and a thousand solyad, and they sent you a nice coffee-table book about the island and a real passport. Blaine and Joy had already done this for Brand in the 1980s. After tourism and money laundering it was the largest industry on Barbuda, and getting bigger, although Saint Lucia was planning soon to offer a similar service at a competitive price.

Victoria and Jabs, of course, had no ID, but the Barbuda embassy, who knew full well who Brand was, accepted his word that Jabs was his wife and Vic- toria's mother. Getting an payment of 3,000 (the extra grand sort of thrown in gratis) smoothed things over wonderfully.

The day of departure rolled around, but the final leg of their voyage would be no luxury cruise. The Femina Caelestis troop transport Illustrious was designed not for pleasure but to deliver Lilith's warriors to any point in the Solar System ready to fight.

Illustrious was a ship with two sections, both spinning at the end of a thick cable to simulate gravity with rotation lest the Girl Guards lost their physical conditioning in free fall.

Brand and Jabs joined the brutal physical training regimen to get into shape for the full gee of Earth. Even Victoria participated to a degree. After spending her entire short little life in free fall, gravity was still a new concept to Victoria.

During the transit, Brand and his family worked their way into shape, guided by the best physical therapists the WDF had to offer. Brand was philosophical about it. "This is where we pay for the zero gravity fun we had all those years."

Brand remembered that he, Jabs and Victoria were still totally pre-Phantomized, making all of them uniquely immune to Phantom guns. It was an advantage he didn't want to give up yet, not with Roth Wardian no doubt waiting for them when they landed.

The problem was that any water or food they consumed would filter into the cells of their bodies, making them gradually vulnerable to being phantomized again. The next phantomization might be under conditions he could not carefully control, like at the point of a macro. So Brand went exploring around the ship.

He found a wide passageway called "Broadway" that accessed the propulsion areas. Here he found the Engineering Officer and tried to explain his prob- lem to her without giving anything away. "I don't quite know how to put this," he began, feigning embarrassment. "My wife belongs to a religion that requires all our food and drink to be consecrated to the goddess Chok- mah. And by 'consecrated' I mean phantomized for a few seconds. Would that be possible?"

"Yes, of course. I could make this station available to you for the whole transit."

"Many thanks!"

So for the entire voyage, Brand and his family maintained the phantomized status of every atom in their bodies.

One time when Brand was resting from a particularly strenuous bout of exercise, he took a time-out near a portal looking out on the spinning stars while Jabs continued to work with Victoria. A red-haired member of the WDF sat down close enough to Brand to speak without being overheard. "It pleases me to see you again...brother," she said.

"Chayn?" he said, looking her in the eyes, but getting a shake of her head in denial. "Del?"

"I'm trying to be discreet," the woman said. "I'm not sure your wife would understand some strange woman suddenly throwing herself into your life claiming to be your sister, especially if you've already shown her photos of me from before."

"So...Del. What do you call yourself now?"

"Still Del. Mom never gave us middle names. All I had to do was drop the Millet."

"What about Chayn? Did she go into the FC too?"

Del shook her head sadly, remembering how close she once had been with her twin sister. "She's following Mom's example."

Brand noticed Del's gaze following a particularly attractive angel running by.

"Did you go gay on me, sis?"

Del smiled. "Robyn is preparing us for star travel. Femina Caelesitis isn't just an organizational title, she says, but a new species. Cosmic Woman. The idea is that living in space puts demands on a colony for food and energy. Men bring nothing unique to the table, but women bring the ability to reproduce. A space colony with nothing but women will have a better chance of surviving than the classic 50-50 mix."

"Well, you still need men to kick start the embryo," Brand pointed out.

"No, there's a new thing that came out while you were away. We can dissolve the cell walls between two eggs and tease their nuclei together, and 'kick- start' cell division with an enzyme that was reverse engineered from a sperm cell. So two women can now have a baby girl that is truly a co-production."

Brand shook his head in wonder at Del. "It's not really immortality you know. You Femina Caelestis say you go back to when Gramma Kim Lokken was first Changed in 1943 but in a real sense Kim died a long time ago. The memories that made her unique are so diluted by now there really isn't a Kim anymore. Just Round Robyn. And the same thing will happen to you some- day, beloved sister. It's just a way to ease your fear of death by making life fade slowly away instead of suddenly burning out."

"That's close to the mark, beloved brother. My original personality lingers like an afterimage for a while, but the person named 'Del' is really like a bus. Some women get on, others get off, and the only thing in common is that we all agree to call ourselves 'Del.'"

There was an uncomfortable silence just then.

Del asked, "Are you going to see Mom?"

"No. I'm going to Earth."

"Chayn's living on Earth now, in Seattle. I know she would love to see you again. She can't get out here the same way I came, in a data stream at the speed of light. Mom misses you terribly, Brand. You should at least visit Fortuna again."

Brand indicated quietly that his wife and daughter weren't ready for the "full frontal reality" of the FC yet, as he put it. Del accepted this, and remained silent for a time.

Jabs came over to them holding Victoria by the hand. "Who are you talking to, honey?" she asked.

"Hi, Jabs, I'm Linda. I was just telling Brand how much we consider you part of our Femina Caelestis family. And we take care of our own. If you ever need anything, anything at all, use this Gridphone. You don't need to dial anything, just flip it open."

Del wisely handed it to Jabs, rather than Brand, lest Jabs grow understandably suspicious of a strange woman handing him a telephone.

They didn't see Del again for the remainder of the flight, but they did see the same body now and again being used by a stranger.

   * * * * * 

Roth Wardian was flat broke. His entire fortune was tied up in the Gravel Pile, and he had even taken out some loans to finance the Millet ic eball deal. Soon those creditors would be looking for his head.

He had a plan to get his money back, but he'd have to call in a bunch of favors he'd been banking since the day he ditched his WDF girlfriend and went renegade, and all of them were as good as gold.

One marker was owed by a thug in the dockyards of Ceres who had his finger in every ship repair contract pie. He told Roth his boys had counted on having Illustrious in "drydock" (meaning the entire ship would be laid up in a chamber with normal atmosphere so work could be done on her hull), but it fell through. Femina Caelestis cancelled the work order. That could only mean the ship was being diverted to somewhere at Earth-Luna where better facilities could be used.

So now Wardian knew generally where the Millets were going. He called in another marker to get passage to Earth on a fast ship. But it would be even less of a picnic than the Millet's trip on Illustrious. His ship was an unnamed cargo transport for rich bitches on Ceres who wanted their toys (animal, vegetable, mineral) sent out from Earthside as fast as possible. The transit would only be five months.

But there was a catch: it didn't rotate. There was no artificial gravity to get Roth Wardian ready for Earth's gravity. He spent most of the last twenty years of his life in free fall so when he got dirtside he would have serious problems.

   * * * * * 

Grant County Airport, in the arid flatlands near Moses Lake, Washington, was the designated point of entry for arriving spacecraft in the United states. This was due not only to the extraordinary length of the two wide, crossed runways, but also to the noise of the double sonic-boom that an orbiter always made when it came down, which would have rattled windows, dishes, and wall clocks, and generally disturb the good voters of a metropolitan area such as Seattle or Denver.

Brand and his family were traveling light, with just a carry-on bag for himself and one for Jabs, to make the ritual of passing through customs as easy as possible. People arriving from space was still enough of a rarity at the airport, with flights of no more than twenty passengers arriving weekly, that US Customs officials had the luxury of being extremely thor- ough. Each incoming passenger was interviewed separately in a small conference room in the airport.

"Your documents, please?"

Brand handed the inspector three passports and a sheet of paper declaring everything in their leather bags.

"Barbuda, huh?" he said, pursing his lips. "How's the weather down there this time of year, Mr. Millet?"

It was a game and Brand knew it. He wasn't interested in games at this particular time, so he stuck to the truth. "I've never been there, sir."

The inspector shrugged. Congress was planning to do something about the loophole this session but he was only concerned with existing Immigration law.

"Who do you work for?"

"Astrodynamics Corporation."

He smiled at this. Astrodyne was known to have a close relationship with Femina Caelestis, but this relationship was not clear. Many female "citi- zens" of Barbuda with single names had come through this airport, and they always claimed to work for Astrodyne. "What do you do there?"

"I'm a scheduler for teardowns and buildups on the Mark 17 Interconnect Module line."

"A scheduler? And what is the purpose of your visit to the United States?"

"Pleasure. Sometimes you just gotta come back down here and look at the trees and take in the fresh air, do you know what I mean?"

"Yes. Enjoy it while you can, Brand. We're slowly catching on to you so there may not be a next time." With that point made he stamped their pass- ports and handed them back to him.

When Brand, Jabs and Victoria emerged from the terminal and set foot on Earth for the first time in their lives, they marveled at all the cars and trucks driving on Interstate 90. Brand took to driving again like a duck to water. He used to drive up and down the roads in Fortuna city with an electric drawn from the motor pool.

Jabs said, "Driving. It looks impossible to do."

"It's exactly like riding a bicycle," Brand said. "Once you learn, you never forget how."

"Great," replied Jabs. "What's a bicycle?"

   * * * * * 

When Roth decided to strike, about a month after the Millets arrived on Earth, it was against Brand's daughter, Victoria. He worked through a third party, with men unknown to Brand and Jabs, men who could watch Victo- ria all the time for a moment, any moment, no matter how brief, when Victoria wasn't being watched like a hawk by her parents.

They got her when the family was shopping in downtown Seattle. Brand and Jabs stopped to admire some blown glass art in a street-level window. One man whisked Victoria into a car with a hand over her mouth. Another man, unseen within, whisked the car away.

Ten seconds was all it took. And it took another ten seconds for Brand and Jabs to notice Victoria was missing. Brand was in a terrible rage at this low blow but he understood it as an escalation of the war between him and Wardian.

Jabs was an inconsolable wreck. She couldn't sit down the rest of that day.

"So Wardian made his move," sha said. "I just never thought he'd stoop to hurting Victoria."

Jabs wanted Brand to call the police. Sha wanted him to call Femina Caelestis. Call anybody. Brand decided to wait until Roth contacted him.

The next day, the driver of the getaway car arrived on their doorstep and gave them an envelope. "I work for Mr. Wardian," he told them. "The kid is safe. Mr. Wardian wants a refund. He'll be in touch."

Inside the envelope was a picture of Victoria, her face wet with tears, tied up in a strange room. Jabs screamed, "Now call the police!"

"Strangely enough, I want Victoria back alive," Brand told her, shaking his head. "I'll call my family instead."

So Jabs handed him the Gridphone Del had given her, and he flipped the lid open.

His sister Chayn arrived at their hotel within minutes, courtesy of a macro-powered Veetle. He was very happy to see her again after years apart. They embraced for longer than it took Chayn to hop to his location. If Del hadn't switched bodies he would have done the same thing with her. He loved both of his sisters equally.

When they released each other, Brand introduced his wife and sister to each other.

"This Roth Wardian guy found your house," Chayn said when he told their story to her. "That's an easy trick. We can turn that right back around and track him down. It won't be hard. They say he's wheelchair-bound from the gravity."

"Show her the picture," Jabs said. Brand passed the envelope to Chayn.

She looked at the picture of Victoria closely, and then held it up to her blouse-button cam, which permitted everyone available on the Grid to try to match it. If Chayn had chosen to join Femina Caelestis like her twin sister she would have just looked at the image with her eyes, and it would have been available on the Grid all the same.

This was a problem personally important to Robyn, so many members of Femina Caelestis dropped what they were doing to help.

A few women recognized the walls behind Victoria as the interior of a certain power plant, and relayed this information to Chayn with a phone call.

"We're in luck, little Victoria is being held in a macro power plant about two hours to the south. At the Trojan site, as a matter of fact. Any macro power plant is open to us. Maintenance. The FC can come and go at will."

Hunky and Dory showed up in a van, looking remarkably youthful and spry for two women who were supposed to be as old has his grandmother, in their 60's at least. They had two other FC troops with them he didn't recognize.

Jabs and Chayn were fitted out in Femina Caelestis power plant technician's uniforms to match the clothes Hunky, Dory, and the other two women were wearing. Jabs was six and a half feet tall, so she wore a man's uniform. Brand went in his own clothes, but no one would question his presence among the FC team. He was to be a "contractor" tagging along.

The power plant was formerly known as the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant, and it had been the only nuclear reactor to operate in Oregon aside from the research reactor at Reed College in Portland. It was taken off-line in 1992. Dirty fission power was being abandoned with the coming of macros and more recently the ultrasafe SHe-3 "fusion". The old turbines and generators and giant cooling tower at Trojan were still used. Only the source of the steam was different now.

The FC team entered a set of doors using keys provided by Hunky and stood in a large glass-enclosed gallery looking down on a dozen consoles attended by technicians. The glass was very thick and they could hear no sound through it.

"Just in front of this control room," Chayn told Brand, "behind that far wall, is one of two jumbo macros which provide the power. Should one of those macros go down for any reason they can quickly shift over to the other reaction chamber until the faulty one is repaired by us."

Chayn led them out of the gallery and down a sloping walkway leading under the ground. In this place a window looked into a round room with a three- foot diameter rotating shaft running from the metal-grated floor to the ceiling.

"This is the space between a steam turbine in the ground beneath us," Chayn said, "and the generator above. The steam comes directly from the macro chamber and turns huge blades. The rotation is geared down to sixty RPM, as you can see."

They walked further on down echoing concrete passageways and took a glass elevator which faced back toward the parking lot. It burst from underground and rose eight stories to a skybridge which went clear across the gigantic space of the power house. They went went halfway along the skybridge and looked over the edge eighty feet down onto the generators. There were ten red-painted generators, and each generator was the size of a house.

There was no sign of little Victoria.

The FC team left Brand and Jabs alone, some doubling back, some taking an escalator down, others seeking a way to get on the roof. The skybridge led to a broad observation deck. Here the floor was covered in luxurious thick orange plush carpet and the walls and handrails were trimmed in bright blue.

There were various science exhibits scattered around, like a little museum of electricity and physics. Jabs pushed the button on a Jacob's ladder, a pair of rods like an old TV antenna. A series of electric arcs started climbing up it.

There was another exhibit with a screen activated by a button which was supposed to show video clips of the power plant in operation. A yellow sticky was next to the button, and on it was printed the name "Millet." Brand pushed this button.

The screen showed Brand and Jabs a live image of his little girl, who was tied up alone somewhere in the plant and in tears.

For the rest of her life, four year old Victoria would tag this traumatic event as her first memory, not her time in space, and that was truly a shame.

"Millet! Where's my god-damned money?"

Brand fired a shot at the screen, in a tantrum. "I know where Victoria is being kept now," he told Jabs. "It has to be the inactive macro, the one on standby in case the active one went down." They both rushed down the stairs.

Brand and Jabs entered the chamber. "Mommy!" Victoria cried. There was no sign of Roth.

Roth Wardian saw them all on camera from the control room. He calmly acti- vated the phantomizer, but Jabs and Victoria and Brand were all unharmed. You can't phantomize stuff twice.

"Lucky shot," Roth said to himself, thinking the macro had been somehow destroyed by Brand.

Just as it didn't enter his mind at the time of the buy that Jabs' ice ball had been pre-phantomized, it didn't enter his mind now that Jabs and Brand had already been pre-phantomized, and Victoria too, by proxy. Surviving a macro went against everything he knew. He had no clue there was such a thing as a sub-macro that was more gentle with its samples.

This power plant's macros were not so gentle.

He came rolling down the ramp in his wheelchair, gun in hand, ready to kill all of them. And the instant he crossed into the chamber, he ceased to exist. His atoms were scattered to random spots within a sphere 14 miles across.

The momentum of the chair carried him all the way through. Half of his atoms were buried inside the Earth, the other half were scattered to the wind. And for Brand, that was the end of his Roth Wardian problem.

All and all, it was much too quick a death for Wardian, in Brand's opinion. After he killed the power to the macro, he muttered, "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread."

Then Brand swept Jabs into his arms for an extended kiss.

Presently the FC team entered and saw to their great relief that they were safe. They respected Brand and Jab's intimate moment and gathered around Victoria instead, showering her with love.

Jabs absorbed this for a moment, then summed it up. "So this was a family affair. The Millets solve their own problems."

"Look at the sweet little thing," Chayn said. "Niece, you have no idea what a happy, rich, spoiled brat you're going to be!"

"I want Victoria to be a happy, rich, spoiled brat," Brand said. "She may be a jen but she's not my son. She's got nothing to prove to herself. She can grow up and fall in love the traditional way and spend the rest of her life with no worries about anything. Don't you see? Victoria herself, and her mother and their happiness are my life's reward!"