A stowaway named Skida Tbibodeau with a small leather sack full of lead shot had happened to it, but there was no point in burdening Marco with unnecessary information. Much of the vessel had been useful to the Helots—high-speed diesels were not easy to come by—and the rest had joined the crew in a very deep sinkhole.
“OK,” Marco said, wiping his brow with a handkerchief. “You want me to fix you up a place at-a my house?” he said, with insincere hospitality. Skilly had more than enough to rent or buy a place in town for her visits, but that would have offended her sense of thrift. As often as not she dossed down on a cot in Thibodeau Inc.’s single-room office.
“No, Skilly going to catch a curry patty and a beer here and then meet her boyfriend,” she said. Take another car out to his place, rather, but there was a mild pleasure in teasing the factor.
Marco shuddered again. “Skilly, he’s a Citizen and First Families, and he’s in politics and the government don’t like him,” he said half-pleadingly. “Why?”
“Love be blind, my mon,” Skilly said. One reason she avoided it, but an affair was surprisingly good cover. The founders of Sparta had had a privacy fetish that they built into the local culture. She reached over and pinched the Italian’s cheek. “You leave a message for Skilly as soon as you find a way to wash the silver money, hey?”
CHAPTER THREE
Crofton’s Encyclopedia of Contemporary History
and Social Issues (2nd Edition):
THE EXODUS
The great outburst of interstellar colonization in the early 21st century paradoxically led to the reappearance of economic and social problems which Earth had thought vanished. Fusion-powered spaceships, mass-driver launchers and the virtually energy-free Alderson drive brought transport costs between systems down to levels comparable to those of 20th-century air freight, but they were still not cheap. New colonies were chronically short of the hard currency they so desperately needed to pay for imports of capital equipment. Human labor was plentiful—the Bureau of Relocation would furnish it whether the recipient wanted it or not—but everything else, from transport to machine tools, was chronically scarce.
Earth’s markets were jealously guarded by the cartels which dominated the planetary economy; and there was a well-founded suspicion that those cartels and the shipping lines they controlled conspired to maintain the colony worlds as dependent markets. Some metals and drugs could bear the costs of interstellar transport, along with extrasolar rarities and luxury goods, but bulk agricultural produce was shipped only to mining systems without habitable planets.
The stable elite of colony worlds—Dayan, Xanadu, Meiji, Friedland, Churchill—were those where wealthy parent governments or corporations provided cash and credit enough to finance self-sustaining industrialization. With plentiful resources and fewer social problems, by the late 21st century these planetary states had populations in the 10—50 million range, higher per capita incomes than most Earthly nations, and were taking advantage of the CoDominium’s retreat to establish sub-imperialisms and trade spheres of their own. Some planets (see Haven) remained mere dumping grounds, sustained by Colonial Bureau largess; Hadley was an interesting example of such a world escaping mass die-off after CoDominium withdrawal.
Many of the less well-financed colonies, launched by “Third World” nations or private organizations—some religious, some secular—with only enough funds to pay for transport, lapsed into a virtually pre-industrial existence of peasant farming and handicrafts; see Arrarat, Zanj, Santiago. A common pattern on intermediate planets was the emergence of a severely hierarchical society, with a dominant elite using access to interstellar technology to rule an impoverished mass; see Frystaat, Thurstone, Diego, Novi Kossovo.
Constant political and social unrest resulted from this situation. See Sparta for an interesting case-study of an attempt to deal with these problems through careful planning; while partially successful, it . . .
* * *
SPARTA:
Major Peter Owensford looked up from his laptop computer to the viewport of the shuttle. It was a Royal Spartan Airways custom craft, on continuous orbit-to-ground runs; rather different from the assault boats he was accustomed to, which had to be small enough to be carried within a starship’s hull. Certainly more comfortable, with the seats in facing pairs and lavishly padded. The orbiter was low enough to switch to turbojet mode, a difference in the subliminal hum that came through the hull. Below, the surface of the Inland Sea was bright-blue, speckled with islands; even from fifteen thousand meters it looked clear and inviting. A welcome change from the livid yellow and green of Tanith’s seas, always warm as blood and full of life-forms more active and vicious than anything Earth had bred. You could swim in Sparta’s seas.
Both planets had high gravity, twenty percent greater than Earth. Otherwise very little on Sparta was like Tanith. Sparta had little land, but what it had was rugged, with high peaks and active volcanoes. There was hardly a mountain on Tanith.
The hook-shaped peninsula that held Sparta City on its tip came into view; off to the east across Constitution Bay was the vast marshland of the Eurotas Delta, squares of reclaimed cropland visible along its edges. The shuttle made banking turns to shed energy and descend. Most of the city was on a thumb-shaped piece of land that jutted out into the water. Owensford could make out docks at either side of the thumb’s base, the characteristic low squares and domes of a fusion plant in the gigawatt range, factory districts more extensive than on most planets. Lots of green, tree-lined streets and gardens, parks, villas and estates along the shores south of the city proper. Very few tall buildings, which was typical even of capital cities off-Earth; an entire planet with barely three million people was rarely crowded. Ships at the docks, everything from schooners and trawlers to surprisingly modern-looking steel-hulled diesels.
And a big section on the western side reserved for shuttles, buoys on the water marking out their landing paths. There were two more at the docks; a big walled compound topped a hill nearby, with the CoDominium flag at the guardhouse by the entrance. That would be the involuntary-colonist holding barracks. The major road ran south from that, to a cluster of parks and public buildings around a large square.
Owensford looked up at the man opposite him and smiled at his attempt to hide the obvious emotion he felt.
“I envy you, Prince Lysander,” he said. “Having a home to return to.”
“Yours as well, now,” Lysander said. His Phraetrie-brother Harv was beside him, staring out the viewport with open longing on his face.
“I hope so, Prince; I sincerely hope so,” Owensford said. Phraetries, he thought. Brotherhoods. It was another thing he’d have to get used to; Spartan Citizens were all members of one; being accepted was a condition of Citizenship. A Phraetrie was everything from a social club and mutual-benefit association to a military unit, and the Spartan militia was organized around them.
“Reminds me of California,” Ace Barton said beside him, as the shuttle’s wings extended fully and it touched down in twin plumes of spray.
There was a faint rocking sensation, then a chung as the tug linked and began towing them toward the docks. Owensford nodded; the houses on the low hills above the quaysides were mostly white stucco over stone or brick or concrete, with red tile roofs. None of them was very large, apart from the old cluster around the CoDominium center; even the colonnaded neoclassic public buildings were only a few stories high.
The style was appropriate enough; the local climate around the Aegean Sea had the same rhythm of warm dry summers and cool moist winters as the Mediterranean basin. And a fair proportion of the original settlers had been from the North American west coast as well.
“Before they mucked it up, Ace, like California before they mucked it up.”
“May I ask an awkward question?” Lysander asked.
“Considering that you’re paying our bills, you can ask just about anything you like,” Owensford said.
“Well—I’ve never been a mercenary. Maybe this happens a lot, but not long ago Captain Barton—Major Barton then—was the enemy. And outranked you. Now he’s your subordinate. Isn’t this a little strange?”
Ace Barton shrugged. “Maybe not so unusual as all that. And it’s OK by me.”
“Ace and I go back a long way,” Peter Owensford said. “I guess I told you the story one night.”
“I remember some of it, but that had been a long night,” Lysander said.
“I remember,” Peter said. “Anyway, rank isn’t a big deal in Falkenberg’s Legion. Hell, nearly everyone is a captain. The chain of command depends on what post you have.”
“First names in the mess,” Barton said. “Sort of a brotherhood. Like yours, Prince Lysander.”
“Ah. Thank you,” Lysander said.
Peter nodded thoughtfully. This command would have its problems, but Ace Barton wouldn’t be one of them. Ace had recruited Peter Owensford into the Legion. Peter flinched at the memory. It had been after a fiasco in the Santiago civil war on Thurstone, when he had ended up on the losing side. The memory was mildly embarrassing; you expected young men to be stupid, but that had been nearly terminal. Opting for the CoDominium service at West Point, when anyone who read the papers knew the Fleet Marines were disbanding regiments and had forty-year-old lieutenants in some outfits. No chance of a U.S. Army commission when he’d shown he was a commie-coddling CD-lover, either. Then letting the Liberation Party’s people recruit him for that blindsided slaughterhouse. . . .