It was surprising, then, that neither her looks nor her character did any good at all with her husband's family.
Linda sighed. Patricio's family has never liked or accepted me. I suppose they never will. No, that's not quite fair, she amended. With the exception of this one cousin, they despise me. But Annie is always friendly. These trips would be a lot more difficult than they are but for her. Linda smiled at her husband's cousin, seated opposite her in the crowded First Landing restaurant.
Annie Hennessey was taller than Linda by almost half a foot. Where Linda was dark with midnight hair, Annie was pale white and dark blond. Not as pretty-well, few were-she was still quite an attractive, and exceptionally well built, woman in her own right. She felt none of the common jealousy at Linda's uncommon looks.
Linda sighed again. "Why don't they like me?" she asked.
"Like you?" Annie asked. "Honey, everyone likes you… oh, you mean the family. Well… they're just assholes." Leaning forward across the table to be heard over the hubbub of the crowd, Annie said, "The thing is, Linda, dear, that you make them feel inferior. After all, what is my family but a bunch of broken down farmers who grafted themselves onto some down and out families of WASPs? Well, and a few well-to-do Jews, too, of course.
"But you on the other hand? When the first major colonization ship to this part of the world made its final approach orbit you had ancestors to wave to it from below. When they put up their first building, you had ancestors that said, 'There goes the neighborhood.' You even come from old money. Oh, not so much as we have, I know-not nearly-but it's older. And that counts, my dear.
"You make Uncle Bob's skin crawl, because everything he has clawed his way to, everything his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather clawed their way up from, you came by naturally."
Annie stopped speaking and sawed and speared a bit of steak from her plate for emphasis.
"Is that why he insists on seeing me and the children at his office? Surrounded by his tokens and triumphs?" Linda asked.
"That… yes," Annie responded, slowly. "Other things too. You see, our family has been in decline for more than forty years. Not in money, but in people. We lost about half when the UEPF bombed Botulph. After that, few of the women wanted children. Of those few, some couldn't have any. Bob's wife never had any, for example. And when you subtract the couple of gay boys and the occasional girl who will never have children… nope, we are in decline."
Annie paused and leaned back in her chair, looking back across the veil of years. "I remember when I was a little girl everyone setting so much store by Pat. It used to kill me the way he was doted on. Yes, even us girl cousins… we all spoiled him rotten. He seemed to have something the rest of us had lost; a certain, oh, spark, I guess. Uncle Bob in particular expected him to grow up to take over the business."
Linda snorted. "Patricio? Business? He despises business."
"Oh, I know," Annie agreed. "He always did. Me, too. So I don't do it; I just live off the trust fund."
Annie sipped at her drink, sipped again… again. "I always understood him better than the others did. If I had been a man, I'd have joined the army too, to make my own escape."
She continued, "So, anyway, when he ran off to join the army at age eighteen, it just infuriated Bob. And enlisting rather than going to one of the military academies? Well, we haven't had an enlisted man in our family since Great-great-great-uncle Bill with the 12th Wichita Infantry in the Formation War. Then, when Pat insisted on staying in the army… well… it took the heart right out of Uncle Bob at first. That was when he cut Pat off, you know. It wasn't anything to do with you."
"Well, here I have one son and two daughters," Linda said. "They carry the name, they've even got your family's color rather than mine. And the women of my family insist on having children… lots of them. Speaking of which…"
"Yes?" Annie asked, expectantly.
Linda just smiled and held up three fingers, then slowly raised her little finger to make a fourth.
Cochea,
10/7/459 AC
As Linda and Annie dined in First Landing, in the Federated States, Hennessey, Parilla and Jimenez pored over maps from the Federated States invasion of Balboa, in 447, called "Operation Green Fork." Hennessey was working on a history of that invasion-something neutral and objective to balance the often propaganda- distorted works already in print. He had to work on something to keep busy and to feel useful, not having a job to call his own anymore. Indeed, he had several projects going at any given time. One of them was a translation into Balboan Spanish of a novel by an Old Earth writer he knew only as R.A.H.
Jimenez pointed a long, thin finger at the map. "Right there, Patricio. Right on that damned corner was where the war started."
Hennessey straightened up from the maps. "Tell me about it, Xavier."
As Jimenez spoke, Hennessey went to his computer and began to type, fingers blurring over the keyboard.
Zabol, Pashtia, 10/7/459 AC
Some miles from the center of the city of Zabol a bearded man hunched over a keyboard. Very slender and tall, as were most of his people, the man had to hunch deeply, uncomfortably, to perform his task. In the dim light the glow of the computer monitor illuminated his face to the semblance of a demon, though in daylight his face was quite decent and even handsome. Distantly, an electrical generator groaned, the sound traveling down damp, narrow hallways. The generator brought light and heat, and powered the fans that brought fresh air to this elaborate complex of caves and tunnels painstakingly carved and blasted from the living rock. The complex was one of several, not all of them in Pashtia.
Abdul Aziz Ibn Kalb brought up a free e-mail service, Firestarter, and then typed a sign-in name-"islandsrfrdude"-and a password. The screen changed to reveal an account with nothing but spam in the inbox, and no messages sent. He began to compose a meaningless message.
Composition completed, Aziz attached a photo as a jpeg file. The photo, properly processed, contained a message, simply, "CA39, Desperation Bay, Execute, 11/7."
Aziz saved the message to his draft folder, which was actually physically located on a server far, far away. He then closed the account. When it was opened later in the day, in Yithrab, it would be copied to a different account and saved into yet another draft folder and server. From there it would be opened in Lancaster in Anglia and copied yet again to a different account. Finally, when opened in the rebuilt city of Botulph, in the Federated States, it would never actually have been sent. There would be no easy trace to Zabol or to Abdul Aziz.
That task completed, Aziz typed into the computer, "Wahoo. sig."
Botulph, Federated States, 10/7/459 AC
"The orders are received. We go tomorrow."
" Allahu akbar. Allahu akbar, " the swarthy men congratulated each other, shaking hands and slapping backs in unconstrained joy. God is great; God is great. Now, finally, they were chosen to strike a great blow against their greatest enemy. Now, at last, they would bring home to the Great Demon the meaning of war. Could there be any doubt of their coming success, their cause being just and the Most High being on their side?
"Shall we rehearse again?" asked the youngest member of the team.
The leader smiled indulgently and answered, "No need, Samadi. We have rehearsed so many times any one of us could cut a throat in our sleep. Go out. Have a good time. Just be asleep before midnight and remember that tomorrow night you will be feasting among the houris of Paradise."
Samadi simply shook his head in the negative and went to his room to study his flight manuals.