The Sam Gunn Omnibus Page 33

  “What will be your next move, Papa?” I asked.

  He smiled a fatherly smile at me. “Not my move, Juanita, my beautiful one. The next move will be yours.”

  I was stunned. Flattered. And a bit frightened.

  My father had chosen me for the crucial task of infiltrating VCI. I had been educated at UCLA and held a degree in computer programming, despite my father’s grumbling that a daughter should study more feminine subjects, such as nutrition (by which he meant cooking). I also had a burning fervor to help my people. Now I received a rapid course in espionage and sabotage from no less than the director of our secret police himself.

  “You must be very careful,” my father told me, once my training was concluded.

  “I will be, Papa,” I said. I had joined him for breakfast on the veranda of the summer palace, up in the foothills where the air was clean and deliciously cool.

  He looked deep into my eyes, and his own eyes misted over. “To send my only child to war is not an easy thing, you know.” He was being slightly inaccurate. I was his only legitimate child, and it was obvious that he had been planning to use me this way for some time.

  “Yet,” he went on, “I must think and act as El Presidente, rather than as a loving father.”

  “I understand, Papa.”

  “You will be a heroine for your people. A new Mata Hari.”

  The original Mata Hari had been a slut and so poor at espionage that she was caught and executed. I realized that my father did not know that. He was a politician, not a student of history.

  Turning his head to look out over the balcony to the terraced hillsides where the peons were hard at work on the coca fields, he murmured, “There is much money to be made in space.”

  There was much money being made from the coca, I knew. But since the cocaine trade was still illegal the money that came from it could not be put into the national treasury. My father had to keep it for himself and his family, despite his heartfelt desire to help the destitute peons who were forced to labor from sunrise to sunset.

  The rebels in the hills claimed that my father was corrupt. They were radical ecologists, I was told, who wanted to stop the lumbering and mining and coca cultivation that provided our poor nation’s pitiful income. My father saw our seizure of the equatorial orbit as a means of making more money for our country, money that he desperately needed to buy off the rebels—and the next election.

  He dabbed at his eyes with his damask napkin, then rose from the breakfast table. I got up too. The servants began clearing the dishes away as we walked side by side from the veranda into the big old house, heading for the door and the limousine waiting for me.

  “Be a good soldier, my child,” he said to me once we had reached the front door. The butler was waiting there with my packed travel bag. “Be brave. Be fearless.”

  “I will do my best, Papa.”

  “I know you will.” He gripped me in a full embrace, unashamed of the tears that streamed from his eyes or the fact that he was so much shorter than I that I had to bend almost double to allow him to kiss my cheeks.

  My own eyes were misty, as well. Finally he let go of me and I went quickly down the steps to the waiting limousine. While the butler put my bag into the trunk, I turned back to my father, came to attention, and snapped a military salute to him. He returned my salute, then turned away, unable to watch me step into the limo and start the long ride to the airport.

  Thus I went to war.

  I HAD BEEN surprised, at first, that Sam Gunn’s company had hired me on nothing more than the strength of the faked university credentials of the fictitious person that my father’s secret police had created for me. Of course, I knew enough computer programming to pass—I hoped. And of even more course, it would never do for the VCI people to know that I was the daughter of the man who had issued the Declaration of Quito. Even if they ignored our Declaration, I reasoned, they could not possibly be ignorant of it.

  VCI was a surprisingly small operation. I reported to their headquarters in Orlando, a modest office building quite near the vast Disney World complex. There were only a couple of dozen employees there, including the company’s president, a lanky silver-haired former astronaut named Spencer Johansen.

  “Call me Spence,” he said when I met him, my first day at VCI. I had just sat down at my own desk in my own office—actually nothing more than a cubbyhole formed by movable plastic partitions that were only shoulder high.

  Johansen strolled in, smiling affably, and sat casually on the corner of my bare desk. He offered his hand and I took it in a firm grip.

  You must understand that, by any reasonable standard, I was quite an attractive young lady. My hair is the honey blonde of my Castilian ancestry. My figure is generous. I have been told that my eyes are as deep and sparkling as a starry midnight sky. (The young lieutenant who told me that was quickly transferred to a remote post high in the Andes to fight the rebels.) I am rather tall for a woman in my country, although many North American women are as tall as I, and even taller. Nonetheless, I was not that much shorter than Spence, whom I judged to be at least one hundred and ninety centimeters in height.

  “Welcome aboard,” he said. His smile was dazzling.

  “Thank you,” I answered in English. “I am happy to be here.” I had worked hard to perfect the Los Angelino accent that my fictitious persona called for.

  His eyes were as blue as a Scandinavian summer sky. Despite his smile, however, I got the impression that he was probing me, searching for my true motives.

  “We had planned to start you off on some of the more routine stuff, but we’ve got a bit of an emergency cooking and we’re kinda shorthanded—as usual.”

  Before I could reply he went on, “Can you handle a VR-17 simulator? Reprogram it?”

  I nodded cautiously, wondering if this was a true emergency or some kind of a test.

  “Okay,” Spence said. “Come on down to the simulations center.” He headed for the opening in the partitions that was the doorway to my cubicle. There was no door to it.

  I followed him, stride for stride, as he hurried along the corridor. He was wearing a soft blue open-necked, short-sleeved shirt and denim jeans. I wore a simple modest blouse of salmon pink and comfortable russet slacks. He glanced at me and grinned. “You play tennis?”

  “A little.” I had won every tournament I had ever entered; the daughter of El Presidente had to win, but I thought it would be best to be modest with him.

  “Thought so.”

  “Oh?”

  “You’re not puffing,” he said. “Not many of these desk-jockeys can keep up with me.”

  “I am curious,” I said as we entered the simulations center. It was nothing more than a large windowless room, empty except for the big mainframe computer standing in its center and the desks with terminals atop them set up in a ring around the mainframe. The four corners of the room were bare but for a single cheap plastic chair in each corner.

  A man was sitting in one of those chairs, with a virtual realty helmet covering his face and data gloves on both his hands, which twitched in the empty air, manipulating controls that existed only in the VR programming.

  “Curious about what?” Spence asked as he showed me to one of the computer terminals.

  I slid into the little wheeled chair. “You are the president of this company, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “But I had the impression that the company belonged to someone named Sam Gunn.”

  Before Spence could answer, the man in the VR helmet began swearing horribly at the top of his voice. He called down the wrath of God on everyone connected with the machinery he was supposed to be operating, on the person or persons who had programmed the VR simulation, on Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein and all the mathematicians in the world. All the while his hands gesticulated wildly, as if he were desperately trying to ward off a host of devils.

  Strangely, Spence grinned at the interruption. Then he turned back to me and said
, loud enough to be heard over the continuing tirade of abuse, “I’m the president of VCI, but Sam Gunn is the founder and owns more stock than anybody else. He doesn’t like to sell shares to anyone who isn’t an employee.”

  “I can become a stockholder?”

  “We have a very generous stock option plan,” Spence replied, almost yelling to be heard over the continuing screaming. “Didn’t you watch your employee orientation video?”

  In truth, I had not. It had never occurred to me that employees might become partial owners of the company. A very clever gringo, this Sam Gunn. He undoubtedly keeps the majority of shares in his own hands and doles out a pittance to his employees, thereby gaining their loyalty.

  As if he could read my thoughts, Spence said, “Sam’s a minority stockholder now. My wife and I own more shares than anybody else except Sam, but no individual owns more than a few percent.”

  Wife? Spence was married. For some reason I felt a pang of disappointment.

  “Sam Gunn must be an unusual man,” I said, loud enough to be heard over the rantings from the corner of the room. But the instant I started to speak, the ravings stopped, and my voice shrilled stupidly. I felt my face flame red. Spence’s grin widened but he said nothing.

  “I would like to meet him some day,” I said, more softly, as I turned to the computer terminal.

  “You can meet him right now,” said Spence. “That’s him in the VR rig.”

  My mouth must have dropped open. I spun the little chair around to see Spence looking off toward the corner. The man there was pulling off his VR helmet, still muttering obscenities.

  I stared at Sam Gunn as he got up from the chair and tugged the data gloves off. He was short, much shorter than I. His torso was stocky, solid, although I could see that his belly bulged the faded blue coveralls he wore. His face was round, with a little snub of a nose and a sprinkling of freckles. Hair the color of rusted wire, cut very short, and sprinkled with gray—which he insisted (I soon learned) was due to exposure to cosmic radiation in space, not from age. From this distance, halfway across the room, I could not tell the color of his eyes. But I could easily see that he was angry, blazing furious, in fact.

  “Goddammit, Spence,” he said, stamping toward us, “if we don’t get this simulation fixed and fixed damned soon somebody’s gonna lose his ass out there.”

  Spence put a fatherly hand on my shoulder. “Here’s the gal who’s going to fix it. Just started with us this morning.” My shoulder tingled from his touch.

  Sam gave me a stern look. “This kid?”

  “Juanita O’Rourke,” Spence introduced me. It was my alias, of course.

  Sam stared at me. He was about the same height standing as I was sitting. I saw that his eyes were a bluish-green hazel color, flecked with golden highlights.

  “From Los Angeles,” Spence added. “Computer programming degree from—”

  “I don’t care where you’re from or where you went to school,” said Sam Gunn. “I love you.”

  I had heard that he was a womanizer of the worst sort. Some of his escapades had been included in the dossier my father’s secret police had given me to study. The dossier hinted at much more. Strangely, my father never mentioned the danger that Sam Gunn might pose to me. Perhaps he did not know of it. After all, his attention was focused on affairs of state, not affairs of the bedroom.

  I got to my feet and put on a modest smile. Partly it was because I towered nearly thirty centimeters over Sam Gunn. The feeling gave me joy.

  “You give your heart quickly,” I said, adding to myself silently, And very often.

  His round, freckled face turned into an elf’s delighted countenance. “Will you have dinner with me tonight?”

  I hesitated just long enough to let him think I seriously considered his invitation. “Not tonight,” I said. “I just arrived here and there’s so much to do....”

  Spence cleared his throat and said, “You want this simulation checked out, don’t you?”

  All Sam’s anger and frustration had disappeared as quickly as a dry leaf is blown away by a gust of wind. “Okay, Esmeralda—”

  “Juanita,” I corrected.

  Sam shook his head. “To me you’re Esmeralda, the beautiful gypsy girl that Quasimodo loves.”

  “I am not a gypsy.”

  “But you’re beautiful,” he said.

  “And you will be Quasimodo?”

  Sam dropped into a crouch and twisted his head up at a bizarre angle. “I’ll be whoever you want me to be, Esmeralda.”

  He made me laugh.

  “The simulation,” Spence reminded him.

  “Oh. Yeah. That.”

  Fortunately, the problem was simple enough for me to solve, although it took several days’ intense work. VCI’s major business was removing old commsats that had ceased to function from the geosynchronous orbit so that new commsats could be placed there. There were only a finite number of slots available in GEO, and they were strictly allocated by the International Telecommunications Authority. VCI crews flew from space stations in low Earth orbit (LEO) to GEO and removed the dead commsats to make room for new ones.

  It was a small part of the satellite communications industry, but a key factor. VCI also had contracts to sweep debris out of the lower orbits where the space stations flew. I learned that the company’s name originally stood for Vacuum Cleaners, Incorporated. Sam’s company cleaned up the vacuum of orbital space.

  More recently, Sam had begun sending people up to GEO to repair malfunctioning commsats. It was cheaper to fix them than to replace them—in theory, at least. In practice, the costs of sending astronauts to GEO even for a few hours was almost as much as replacing a malfunctioning satellite.

  The virtual reality simulation that Sam was frustrated over was one in which an operator could remain aboard the space station in LEO and remotely direct an unmanned spacecraft to repair a malfunctioning satellite in GEO.

  “Bring the dead back to life,” as Sam put it.

  “It would be much safer for our people if they could stay in the space station rather than fly up to GEO,” Spence explained to me. “GEO’s in the middle of the outer Van Allen Belt. Astronauts can’t stay there very long because of the radiation.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “We could save a bundle of money if we could do this job remotely,” said Sam eagerly. “Just the drop in our insurance costs could pay for the whole program.”

  Spence added, “In the long run we could operate right here from the ground. No need to send people to one of the space stations, even.”

  “That’d save even more money,” Sam agreed happily.

  “But the simulation keeps glitching,” said Spence.

  “And until we get it right in the simulator we can’t try it in the real world.”

  Thus the burden of their hopes was placed on my young shoulders. I thought it strange that something so vital would be entrusted to a totally new and untried employee. Was this a trap of some sort? Or a test? Soon enough I learned that it was typical of the way Sam Gunn ran his company. He kept his staff as small as he possibly could, hiring only when there was no other way to get a necessary job done. And make no mistake about it, Sam

  Gunn ran VCI. Despite his lofty title, Spence took orders from Sam. Most of the time.

  The problem with the simulation was not terribly difficult. If Sam had not been so impatient his own staff personnel or a consultant would eventually have found it. But what Sam wanted was instant results, which meant that I spent virtually twenty-four hours a day working on the problem. Except for the hour or so each day I spent fending off Sam’s invitations to dinner, to lunch, to a suite in the zero-gravity honeymoon hotel he wanted to build in orbit.

  Within a few days I had the program running so smoothly that Sam was willing to try a test in orbit. And I realized that I could sabotage his operation quite easily. In fact, I planted a bug in the program that I could activate whenever I chose to.

  I discusse
d my accomplishment with my father on the direct phone link from our consulate in Orlando. I drove to the consulate in the dark of night, well past midnight, to make certain that no one from VCI would see me.

  I had feared that I would wake my father from his justly-earned sleep. As it turned out, he was in bed, but not asleep. At first he did not activate the phone’s video, which puzzled me. When he finally did, I realized that he was not alone in his bed. He tried to hide her, but I could see that a tousle-haired young trollop lay beside him, bundled under the sheets. She peeked out from behind my father’s back, showing a bare shoulder, a pair of flashing dark eyes, and piles of raven black hair.

  My father was delighted with the progress I had made in little more than a week.

  “I can sabotage their mission to repair satellites,” I reported to him, trying to ignore his companion. She could not have been much older than I. “And they will never even know that sabotage has occurred.”

  “Good!” He beamed at me. “Excellent! But do not attack them just yet. Let them run a successful mission or two. Wait until the strategic moment to strike.”

  “I understand, Papa.”

  “You are doing well, my child.”

  I looked past him to the young woman sharing his bed. My mother had been dead for many years and my father was still a man of vigor. Yet I felt angry. I did not tell him that Sam Gunn was attracted to me.

  “And you are well, Papa?” My question sounded acidly cynical to my own ears.

  Yet my beloved father obviously did not feel my anger. “I am in good health,” he reported smilingly. “Although the rebels have surrounded the army base at Zamora.”

  “What?” I felt a double pang of alarm. The lieutenant who had been infatuated with me was at the Zamora base.

  “Not to worry, my daughter. We are reinforcing the base by helicopter and will soon drive the scum back to their caves in the mountains.”

  Yet I did worry. The rebels seemed to get bolder, stronger, each year. I went back to work, angry with my father yet frightened for him. We needed to wrest control of the equatorial orbit from the gringo corporations, quickly. I began to look for more ways to sabotage VCI. I even let Sam take me out to dinner several times, although each evening ended at the front door of my apartment building with nothing more romantic than a handshake. Sam was not exactly a perfect gentleman: he was a persistent as a goat in mating season. I fended him off, however. My arms were longer than his.