The Impossible Future: Complete set by Frank Kennedy (mini ebook reader .txt) 📕

employee, they’ll consider you a … a co-conspirator. Yes?”

He lit the pipe and took a small puff. His nose crinkled, as if the poltash was off.

“It would be bad for business. Worse yet, my family will notice.”

If the thought bothered him, Merton gave no outward sign. Sam didn’t want to compromise his holdings. Not only were they tied into her own, but he offered his services back when most EM’s thought the Pynn name was toxic. She owed the man.

Sam took a deep breath and plunged forward.

“What’s the current value of all my assets?”

He set his pipe on the desk and studied Sam.

“Based on NAC or Collectorate valuations?”

“Global exchange.”

She expected him to open a holocube, but he didn’t.

“As of three days ago, 4.2 billion creds. Given the new crisis, I anticipate a ten percent slide in the short haul.”

The numbers were a product of Merton’s strong financial management. He wasn’t going to like what she was concocting.

“Thank you, Merton. I need to think.”

As she started out, he said, “Don’t think too long, Samantha. The valuation will be sliding hourly.”

Exchange. Assets. Valuation. Leverage.

These words became part of her daily calculus since inheriting the Pynn descendancy. For a while, she took a strange pleasure in the power they implied. They dominated conversations with other Chancellors, especially those who considered her too feeble-minded to compete among the elite. The words themselves were commodities, given value if practiced with verbal discipline. She chose them as carefully as she did her collection of fifty saris, finding the right one to fit each context. Now, Sam loathed the words.

She stepped out onto the south balcony and took stock of the immaculate rose garden designed into a pair of figure-eights. The pink and white combinations reminded Sam of her mother, Grace, who grew the same colors in their front yard in Albion. Sam never thought about Grace except when she saw the roses. Even her face seemed to be fading into a mist.

Sam mumbled. “You never taught me anything. Did you, Mom? You just repeated Daddy’s commands.”

Walter, on the other hand, was omnipresent, the ghost she couldn’t dismiss if she tried. Dead on his feet, drenched in blood, killed at Jamie’s hand. Torturing an enemy in the lake house while Sam tended the woman’s bullet wounds. Demonstrating how to make incendiary bombs. Running with Sam through the swamps of Louisiana training alongside militias. Freezing her heart in order to kill human quarry.

“Hear me, Pumpkin,” he told her on the drive to her first hunt, a week after she turned fourteen. “You can’t appreciate what it means to be a Chancellor until you have taken human life. Stare in their vacant eyes and realize what you have stolen from them. Trust me. You will never fear an enemy and you will enter every battle knowing your leverage.”

“You mean I’ll never lose?”

He laughed. “Lose? Pumpkin, the possibility of losing is what thrills a Chancellor. For every winner, there’s a loser. Yes? The key is you do not begin with a loss. When we cross the IDF, you will be challenged immediately. I expect my daughter to win.”

Somehow, his rationale made sense. She felt no compassion or confusion when Walter removed their victim from the trunk. He was a frail, perplexed man with a sloppy beard and no clothes other than his briefs. It was early February. A rare ice storm was forecast to push through that night. The man bolted as her father ordered, but he never had a chance. After all, this was Dacha.

Sam remembered the moment when she caught up to him, crouched against the base of a tree. Every whimper, every plea for mercy. He claimed to have a son. He said he loved his mother. When she raised the pistol and aimed, he tried another strategy.

“I know this isn’t you,” he begged, his hands extended outward. “You’re a good person. I know you …”

She put one slug through his heart and the second, after a slight nudge of the weapon, between his eyes. Exactly as Walter trained her. And he was right about something else.

The eyes. Whatever story the man once told, Sam took it from him in full. He was a non-entity, as if he were never born.

They ate steak and baked potato for supper and never talked about it again.

“You knew,” Sam said from the balcony’s edge. “You knew what I had to be. Didn’t you, Daddy? You knew what would happen if I went soft.”

She tapped her amp and opened a holocube. Merton grinned.

“That wasn’t long,” he said.

“How much will it cost to buy an army?”

32

Danielson Outpost

 

W E CAN TRY TO RIDE THIS OUT and hope they don’t discover  us,” Matthias told his Solomon brothers and sisters, who remained shell-shocked over the news of their inevitable demise. “But we must not kid ourselves. We are enemies of the Guard, and the Guard does not negotiate.”

The youngest man in the room, an 18-year-old utilities surveyor from Tampa Bay, lost his cool. He flailed madly as he shouted.

“That’s why those cudfruckers never lose. They blast everyone to dust then say, ‘problem solved.’ It’s worked for a thousand years, so the Chancellors expect we’ll be easy to take down. Not me. Not this guy! They won’t bury me like some sand-dragging indigo running around with sharp sticks.”

Matthias signaled for quiet as disparate voices created chaos.

“Thank you, Carlos. I’m sure everyone here agrees with the sentiment. No one wishes to die. Where we need to find common ground is with our strategy.”

“Strategy?” Carlos Rivera all but spit at the word. “It’s obvious. We have to take the fight directly to them. We have to hurt them at the start so they have no choice. They’ll have to negotiate.”

Michael had yet to say two