*swoon*
Oh right, Liberation of Terra was published under your watch, wasn't it? If you ever need a writer for a beloved 1980s gaming property, hit me up my man.
Amaris is likeable... ;D
Well, he has killed his father, his cousin, the CinC of his armies, his psychologist and his childhood tutor so far, so not THAT likeable, I hope.
***
Aside from Legos and Scoffins, I’ve been lucky to have such good friends.
Selim Bey is that smartest man I know, because he’s the only one I know with enough brains to realize he’s a moron. Everyone is either trying to impress you with how smart they are because of the school they went to or the job they have, or how street-smart they are because they’re not like those idiots who went to school or got a job. Not Selim. He’s my rock. Both physically and mentally. Seriously, less than one original thought in that cranium of his, negative one ideas. His skull is an intellectual black hole, his brain is where genius goes to die.
“Selim,” I said, throwing my arm around his shoulder. “Selim, buddy, pal, compadre, I got a favor to ask.”
“Yeah?”
“Mi amigo, amiglette, amigorosso, how would you like to be the ruler of the Rim Worlds Republic?”
“Yeah.”
“Companion, comrade, confrere, it’s just for a while, see, because I’ll be down Terra way, overthrowing the Hegemony government, usurping control of the Star League and slaughtering every Cameron I can get my hands on.”
“Yeah?”
“Selim, my brother, my blood, my better half, I need you to hold the fort while I’m away. See, Kerensky or somebody might come along while I’m otherwise occupied, and they might tell you to give them the Republic, but don’t let them have it, no matter how nice they ask. Okay? Can you do that for me?”
“Yeah.”
“Fantastic. Oh, and try to usurp my place and I’ll castrate you, disembowel you, flay you, dismember you, electrocute you, feed your body to the piranhas and cut your head open and eat your brains with a spoon. Capisce?”
“Yeah.”
“Knew I could count on you, chief, chum, chumlette, chumerino, chumalista.”
Then there’s Sammy. Samir Njari, runs PR for me. I mentioned him already, didn’t I? Known him since we were kids together back on Apollo. Good kid, very sweet, but not altogether there, you know? Took me a while to get through to him.
He burst into my office one say, almost in tears. “Stef, my network is losing money hand over fist,” he cried. “Soon I’m gonna have to sell a few of our houses, maybe even one of our yachts to cover the bills. What am I going to do?” (Medic!)
After I took my finger off the hidden button under my desk that would have opened a trap door beneath his feet and sent him plummeting twenty meters into a vat of sulfuric acid, I sat back and invited him to take a seat. “What’s the problem, Sammy?”
“Nobody wants to pay for news anymore,” he moaned. “Subscriptions are down, and the second you start putting ads on the news everyone starts screaming blue murder.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Could I work for you?” he asked me. “Think about it: Exclusive interviews with Stefan Amaris! Everyone’s Favorite President for Life! Touring the Republic with Stefan Amaris! The wit and wisdom of Stefan Amaris! Dramatic recreations of the life of Stefan Amaris! Amore with Amaris! Stefan’s Kitchen! You could be our only subscriber, and we’d never have to run an ad again!”
“I dunno,” I ran a hand across my pate. “I think people might stop watching if you turn into a propaganda channel.”
“Who cares?” he said. “That’s the beauty of it: My customers are paying zero SL dollars in revenue now, so losing half the viewers is half of nothing, or in other words, nothing! If anybody complains, we’ll just say they’re dirty Elsie sympathizers, luddites, anarchists, atheists, religious fanatics, sexual deviants, celibates, criminals, drug-dealers or some combination of all of the above. Watching our channel will be the patriotic duty of all good citizens of our great Republic!”
Funding Sammy’s little network is paying off now that I need someone to muddy the waters a little bit, reassure everybody that I’m not about to do what everyone can see me about to do. Full credit to Sammy, when I was dreaming up the idea to have a Secret Army to start a war and distract Aleks, he had an idea to stop the operation from looking even weirder than it already was.
“We’ll have a battle on Gotterdammerung,” he said.
“Who will?”
“The Rim Worlds Army and the Secret Army.”
I smiled, as patiently as I could. Bless that boy Sammy, nice kid, very sweet, but about as reasonable as using a wasps’ nest as the ball in a soccer game. “Gott dammerit Sammy,” I said to him. “The Secret Army is OUR army.”
“Well, yeah,” he nodded. “There won’t be any fighting.”
I held up my hands. “Whoah now, Sammy boy, you want a battle, but you don’t want any fighting? Dammit all to gottlerung, I know military stuff ain’t exactly your forte, but you do realize the one tends to involve the other?”
“Stef, there won’t be any battle.”
I gave a little scream and threw my hands up in the air. “Now just wait one gottle-running minute here Sammy. First you said we’ll have a battle, now you say there won’t be one. Which is it? Are we having a battle or not?”
“A PRETEND battle, Stef. That way nobody thinks it’s weird that every realm in the Periphery has been attacked except ours.”
“Ah, gotcha. Thanks, Sammy,” I nodded and clapped him on the shoulder. Good kid, a little high-strung though, not the stablest of personalities. “That’s a great idea. I’m glad I thought of it first. Honestly, what would you do without me?”
I met Sammy’s girlfriend, Aisling Connor, at a party in Geneva. Fascinating woman, crackerjack at all that economical flim flammery. Completely mad, of course, but fascinating.
It was a swanky party, very swish, all the right people there. None of those lazy, good-for-nothing slobs who actually make things or build things or design things, but honest, hard-working, absolutely loaded speculative investors, third-generation billionaires, freshly-laundered criminal kingpins and venture capitalists. The cream of society in other words.
Diamonds fell in showers from the chandeliers. Golden thread was woven into the carpets. Genetically modified mammoth steaks were the main course, served with whale fin soup and topped with ground white rhino horn. The cutlery was elephant ivory, and the servants all wore thongs or bikinis made from the rarest leopard and tiger skins.
In this middle of all this, Aisling Connor stood out, like a diamond among pearls. Sammy introduced her as his fashionista squeeze and went off to find something with more bubbles and a higher alcohol content. We sipped champagne and she told me fashion was more about business than clothing.
“Oh yeah? Well, supposing, just hypothetically speaking, just spitballing here, just making idle conversation, supposing I wanted to slowly but steadily exert total control over the Terran Hegemony’s strategic industries without anyone noticing, how should I do it?” I asked her.
“Get the Hegemony to pay you to do it,” she told me immediately.
“They’d pay me to take over their industries?” I was dumbfounded. Astonished. This was the craziest thing I’d ever heard of.
“And gladly,” she nodded. “Listen: Set up a semiconductor manufacturing company.”
I am, let’s admit, no false modesty here, the smartest tool in the shed, the sharpest tack in the tin, but even I couldn’t see where she was going with this. “But I don’t want to make semiconductors,” I objected. “There’s a glut of semiconductors, the market’s depressed, margins are razor-thin.”
“I said to set up a company, I never said anything about producing anything,” she replied. “Let me be clear: Under no circumstances should your company ever make a single semiconductor. When the market learns there’s another competitor, prices will fall even lower. The whole industry will be threatened. Semiconductors are a vital military industry, so the Hegemony will step in, and pay you not to make semiconductors and thus avoid oversupply and bankrupting the other manufacturers. Then you use that money to buy up all your competitors.”
I’ll admit, it was a plan so elegant it could have been one of mine. Which means it probably was, only I’d forgotten I’d mentioned it to her before, on one of the many occasions we hadn’t met before. “And that gives me control of the Hegemony economy,” I nodded.
“Not quite,” she smiled. “Then you use your clout to start a trade war with the Commonwealth.”
“With the Commonwealth?” I was once again dumbfounded, floored, stunned, shocked and not a little amazed. “That’s crazy! You’re crazy! They’re an economic juggernaut. They’ll wipe the floor with us!”
“It’ll ruin the Hegemony’s economy,” she agreed. “Listen: Commonwealth corporations are major stock holders in just about every Hegemony business, and own a massive chunk of the Hegemony government’s own debt. When they start selling, stock prices will plummet, and even the government won’t be able to borrow any more money.”
I saw where she was going. “Except from us?”
“Bingo!” she cried, sloshing her champagne in a little fountain of delight. “By running the entire economy into the ground, throwing thousands out of work, causing runaway inflation and needlessly limiting the import of goods, we’ll sabotage the Hegemony economy to the point that we come out on top. We buy up the government debt. We buy up stocks at rock-bottom prices. In a couple of months, we’ll own practically everything.”
“Cheers to that,” I smiled, and clinked glasses with her. “That’s a great idea of mine. Sometimes, I astound even myself with my genius.”
I think she might have said “That can’t be too hard” but I must’ve misheard.
