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    One Bad Apple: The Clar1ty Wars, Part One
    One Bad Apple: The Clar1ty Wars, Part One
    One Bad Apple: The Clar1ty Wars, Part One
    Ebook88 pages1 hour

    One Bad Apple: The Clar1ty Wars, Part One

    By Patrick Todoroff

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    About this ebook

    Money. Power. Drugs. War.

    For nearly a century the Orbital Corporation Pfizer-Teva has supplied the leading citizens of Drop City with Clar1ty: a potent and effective cerebral enhancer. Hailed as a miracle of modern science, its use has catapulted the planet to untold heights of wealth and power.

    There is a dark side to the wonders. Behind the scenes, Pfizer-Teva leverages the supply to influence government policy, manipulate financial markets, and ruthlessly eliminate dissent. Clar1ty insures the entire Kepler22 system remains dominated by the Orbital Corporations.

    There are those who believe its hold must be broken. At all cost.

    This morning, seven Clar1ty addicts were found bled out in an abandoned warehouse, the beautiful fence who handled the black market shipment woke up framed for murder, and somebody tried to assassinate fifteen government officials.

    War is coming, and these are snapshots from the crossfire.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPatrick Todoroff
    Release dateDec 14, 2012
    ISBN9781301032181
    One Bad Apple: The Clar1ty Wars, Part One
    Author

    Patrick Todoroff

    Patrick Todoroff's love of miniatures began more than 40 years ago when his step-father took him to the MiniFigs USA factory and he's been hooked ever since. A stained-glass artisan and SFF writer, he lives and works on Cape Cod, MA.

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      Book preview

      One Bad Apple - Patrick Todoroff

      The Clar1ty Wars

      Part One: One Bad Apple

      Patrick Todoroff

      The Clar1ty Wars. Part One: One Bad Apple

      ©2012 Patrick Todoroff

      SMASHWORDS EDITION

      ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher.

      This is a work of fiction.  Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      For Rachel

      who loves me and lets me write.

      ________

      "Nothing is more difficult than the art of maneuvering for advantageous positions."

      - Sun-Tzu The Art of War

      "No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible."

      -  Voltaire

      ***

      1 - WEIGHTS AND MEASURES

      The hips don't lie, Heckie grunted.

      Aolanee danced on top of his monitoring station, her tiny lime-green skirt jiggling from side to side. Heckie sucked his cigar, eyed the gyrations, then looked at the telemetry screen as the deep space freighter descended. Hundred fifty thousand kilos, my ass. More like one seventy five. Aolanee smiled at him.

      She was a speck over eight inches tall and almost a hundred years old. Practically an Original Colonist, the Hawaiian bobble-doll had survived the six hundred light-year FTL trip to Kepler 22, along with Heckie's great-grandfather and two thousand others in the First Wave. She was Heckie's prized possession and he figured she counted as a family heirloom.

      She was showing her age these days: pink vinyl peeked through her black hair and the ridges of her grass skirt. Nothing was left of her wink but a grubby smudge, but little flirt that she was, she kept one hand at her side, the other behind her head, and worked her hips like a trooper. Aolanee had been on the job at West Station Five every day since Day One. She had never called in sick, never taken lunch, was never hung over, pissy or mean. She had danced faithfully for every lift-off and re-entry, day in and day out all these decades, that sweet smile never leaving her lips. The girl was no slacker.

      And she was never wrong .

      The morning sun was obnoxious, shining right in his face, and Heckie squinted through the armorglass as the boxy, silver rocket slid down out of the sky towards Pad Seventeen. Fifteen hundred meters and dropping, the pilot kicked on the secondaries. The little thrusters would take it the rest of the way down. Heckie absently flicked the flood switch for the landing pad. Three second later, the steam plume swallowed up the view.

      He looked over at the telemetry one more time. Twenty-five thousand off, the Orbital smartasses think we can't catch something that obvious? Sky pricks cram the ships with their fancy pants gadgets, their nano-gizmos and super meds until they're busting seams, ignoring every code in the TTA book.

      He chewed the tip, spit tobacco flakes. Downright dangerous, it was. And arrogant. Rich bastards just spread their crack and dump their cyber crap on our heads, and we're supposed to kowtow like it's manna from heaven. Heckie had half a mind to toggle Seventeen's seismics after touch-down and watch 'em try to explain the 'discrepancy' to the TTA agents. Now that would be a show.

      Heckie puffed, knocked his ash on the tiles. Why, with the threat level at Orange, he imagined an inconsistency as big as that would trigger an automatic Lockdown. Then the Scratch and Sniff teams would turn up whatever sordid contraband the Orbital frakkers were smuggling dirtside.

      Four kilometers away, the steam plume had subsided and the freighter stood alone on the pad, the curved heat shields cooling red to orange to gray. Numbers bounced on his monitors and Heckie could see the cargo lifts swarming the causeway like ants towards a picnic basket.

      He kicked his feet up on the window ledge and framed the ship with his boots. What if there was an Anachronist strike team in the hold? Or a shedload of Semtex, or the latest Ishii biotox? What if a gaggle of amped up homicide bombers burst out the doors like on Dengler's World? Or maybe ol' Khalaf Jihad Jones was on his way to his next planetary hidey-hole? Heckie was damn tired of seeing that goat-face every time he switched on Central Newsnet.

      He drew on his cigar, smoke stinging his eyes. God Almighty, the CE's got satellites that can read an e-pad from miles up in space. You'd think we could find one crazy old guy, an Anachronist at that.

      Heckie sat up and slid his chair over to emergency panel. As a responsible and duly-authorized civil servant, Heckie had sworn to uphold the Planetwide Security Act. Terrorists on board, he'd be a hero. Nice reward, face time on the TalkNets, everybody patting him on the back, buying him drinks. That'd be a dream come true. The power of his little finger: one touch and the whole space port was locked down. King of Bradbury, baby.

      Out the window, the Pad Seventeen gantries locked into place with two distant booms. Finger hovering, Heckie grinned at Aolanee. She jiggled her hips in response.

      Thing was though, Heckie already had two strikes in his jacket. Not that hung-over qualified as Operating under the Influence in his book, but the TTA reps took a dim view of Heckie's interpretation of the employee regulations, and had flagged him anyway. Snotty twerps.

      And what if he were wrong? What if the loadmaster Upside had ticked the wrong box? What if it was just pallets of Server upgrades for the Feed? Some Rejuv or a batch of that brain juice all the suits take? Botch this call, Heckie would be in it up to his hairy ears.

      Hundreds of thousands of kilos moved through Bradbury every shift. Hell, in a

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