CHAPTER 21
PETER
ELECTION
It had been a few days since Peter and the team had touched down on the planet Everest.
One of the interesting things about the planet he’d learned was the people were shorter than normal. The higher gravity meant the people of Everest had thicker bones and wider torsos. A human from Earth would struggle to move around easily on the planet because of the extra strain the gravity placed on their body. Peter hadn’t worked out whether the Ange’s Angel left on the planet to colonize it had genetically engineered everyone to be this way or whether it had just happened naturally. He filed that question for later, once he’d had a chance to ask someone about it.
The merging of Angelique and the Ange’s Angel didn’t yield much in the way of insights as to what happened with the fabricators. There were plenty of hypotheses, but nothing concrete. What was clear though was that Callum Overwood was an evil man. He overthrew the government and heavily limited Ange’s ability to do much on the planet. More and more of Ange’s resources were stripped away from her, under the guise of the greater good.
While Angelique updated them all on what had occurred, Peter had taken a back seat to the conversations, surveying everything and trying not to impose himself on everyone.
This was a relatively new situation for him. Usually he was in a position of power because he was the most experienced in the group. Or he was the one with the most money and influence.
In this situation, he had none of these advantages. Angelique had far more experience than he did with interstellar travel. And Angelique was the one with the spaceship and influence on the planet.
He had nothing, not even money at his disposal, which brought him memories of his early days when he was first starting out in the business world.
If Peter wanted to get back into a position of power, one where he could decide what he wanted to do, he needed to be deliberate and tactful with what he did next. He didn’t want Angelique to feel like he was stepping on her toes.
Rightfully so, Angelique’s opinions carried the most weight in the team’s decisions. She had the most to lose with one of her colonies attempting to secede.
But also, Peter didn’t want Angelique to get into a pissing competition with Callum. From what he’d learned about the prime minister, he had a big ego and was easily bruised. Peter could also tell that Angelique was angry at the man and wanted to do nothing more than to put him in his place.
Which was a bad situation for them to be in. Reading between the lines, this man sabotaged the planet’s advanced manufacturing capabilities to secure power. Those kinds of men were dangerous.
He needed to guide Angelique away from this conflict, and he also needed to earn the right to insert himself into the conflict.
Usually, he would simply push his way into the conversation via force. But in this situation, he needed to be asked to fight against the prime minster of the planet—so that Angelique wouldn’t feel alienated.
He needed to do that not because he didn’t want to hurt Angelique’s ego or because he was afraid she might get upset. He needed to do it tactfully because he genuinely respected what she had accomplished here. He was her old boss, and now he was back, which didn’t mean he could automatically start acting like her boss again.
Peter had seen plenty of managers leave his company and come back years later. In that time, employees of the manager had been promoted to executive positions. He always found the old managers struggled in those environments when their old subordinates became their bosses.
He needed her to invite him back as an equal. He needed to be humble and patient.
That’s why he liked the idea of him running for prime minster so much. Running for that role would help both their goals. It would give Angelique more control of the planet again and put him in a position of power once more. He might even be able to build his own spacecraft.
“Is it worth us staying here?” Peter asked. “They don’t have the infrastructure to build anything we need. We should consider building a fabricator for them and giving it to the people. Give them what they need, then we head out to the next closest planet.”
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Angelique shook her head. “What if they just blow up the fabricator we give them? I want to know my people are safer before we leave.”
“Our most important mission is to inform all your other colonies about this hostile alien,” Peter said. “So if that greater mission says we need to leave Everest, then we should leave Everest.”
Unity had just finished crunching several numbers on a piece of paper. “If speed is our key metric, then building it all here is always going to be faster, even if we need to create the fabricators from scratch. If we focused on fabricators building fabricators, we could build up the machinery to create everything faster than it would take us to travel to any of the nearest planets.”
“Okay,” Angelique said. “So then we need you to win an election, Peter.”
Peter struggled to hide the smile on his face. He’d always wanted to run for office. So running on another world would be a fun prospect, but if he was going to run, he was going to win. And he wasn’t someone who jumped into a political race without a complete picture. “Your Ange’s Angel, did she collate information about world leaders on the planet?”
Angelique nodded.
“Is there anything in her documents that can give me a comprehensive view of every leader on this planet? I’m keen to get an understanding of whom they vote for and why they vote for someone.”
“I can give you more than that,” Angelique said. “Every Ange’s Angel is tasked with collected all knowledge on the planet and taking a recorded unbiased picture of the planet’s history.” Angelique looked at Ship. “Can you plug Peter into everything he needs?”
Unity interrupted them, holding a tablet. “I’ve just finished studying your founding documents, Angelique. Really interesting stuff in here.” Her face changed to someone who looked quite upset. “This prime minster has started privatizing everything and selling it off to his mates for cheap. He even sold the moon to one of his mates named Caspian. Which is at total odds with the ethos of the constitution. Resources like that shouldn’t be owned by any one person; they should be shared by all.”
“Surely he didn’t sell an entire moon?” Angelique asked.
“It gets worse,” Unity continued. “This Caspian guy is going to terraform the moon. He wants to put an atmosphere around it for him and his rich mates to use as an exclusive casino.”
“You can’t terraform a moon,” Hezekiah said. “The gravity isn’t strong enough to hold an atmosphere.”
“Technically you can,” Angelique clarified. “The problem is it’s a waste of time and resources because you need to keep replenishing the atmosphere. And typically, as the gas is blown off the moon, it’s lost forever.”
Unity showed a display on the table with a marketing brochure. “They use it as a selling point. Right here it talks about how much new gas is lost by the solar winds each hour. It talks about how much is imported from Everest each day just to keep up with what is lost.”
Peter decided to not say a thing at that very moment. He was quite familiar with the attraction of exclusive places that weren’t natural to the region. Back on Earth, he would often go play golf in Dubayy, which was famous for being a desert. He couldn’t remember exactly how much water was used on some of those greens, but he remembered seeing in a similar promotional pamphlet something about how much water was used to keep the fields green.
“Surely, they haven’t terraformed the moon yet,” Angelique said. “They don’t have any fabricators; they don’t have the resources to terraform a moon. Or if they do, that shouldn’t be their focus?”
“They are the one percent of the planet,” Unity said. “They won’t suffer when the planet can’t produce enough power.”
Peter switched the topic back to the task at hand. He knew Unity’s political leanings and knew she was very firmly on the left side of the spectrum. He wondered whether she would approve of the proposal he was about to make. “It looks like the Everest alternates between conservative and liberal parties every ten years.” Peter watched everyone nod their heads in agreement. It was the kind of thing everyone was used to back on Earth. “Well, they’re overdue for a right-wing government.”
“What does that mean?” Unity asked, not hiding her disapproval of the statement.
“It means I’ll be running under whatever this planet’s equivalent of the Republican Party is.”
Peter didn’t want his team divided. However, Peter was politically agnostic; he was a pragmatist, what most would consider a swing voter. He didn’t believe ideologically following one side was in the best interest of anyone. But he also needed Unity to get behind him, even if that meant going in a direction she didn’t believe in. “Unity, can I get your help with this?”
Unity nodded. “Of course.”
“We have to get them talking about me running for prime minister before I decide to run. We need to get the speculation mills running while I’m denying it all.”
“That’s going to be hard, given we don’t have any connections to anyone in the media here.”
Peter looked toward Angelique. “Do they play golf here? Is it treated in the same way golf is on Earth?”
“There are a lot of exclusive clubs here.”
“Do you have a membership to the most expensive one?”
Angelique nodded. “Ange has lifetime memberships to most of them. They’re very similar to what you’re used to on Earth. All the key people on this planet are members.”
“That’s exactly what I need. Can you book me for a couple of days at the club’s resort? I’m going to do some schmoozing, and by the end of it I should have a clear plan for winning this election.”
The team set off after that. Since everyone had the smaller matrix unit, Angelique was able to print everyone a new android body for them to move around in. Even Angelique had her matrix transferred into a robotic body. Usually she’d move around the planet using hapticgraphic projectors, but she wanted free movement and not to be confined to locations with the projectors.
Everyone agreed to have their matrices backed up, too; everyone felt it was the safest option.
Ship stayed in orbit around the planet with Lex. If anything unusual happened, Ship had a clear extraction plan to get everyone off Everest.