War World X: Takeover (38 page)

But even though the pay was paltry, there were few jobs on Haven that paid anything, there was always a steady supply of transportees and new workers riding the steam tugs back up the river.

When the gallium was loaded on the shuttles, they were fueled with liquid hydrogen and oxygen separated from the lake water. They then backed away from the docks, skittered across the lake until they became airborne and clawed their way back into orbit. This process would take days with shuttles arriving every few hours until all the transportees were offloaded and the gallium was in orbit. The towns would become a hive of activity with every business humming and every able-bodied man working. Spacers would spend a day or two in town, enjoying what rough pleasures they could find and buying some fresh food before departing for the next leg of their journey.

New arrivals were always a problem. The amount of supplies and equipment that came with them was pitifully small. The personnel needs of the mining companies had long since been satisfied, but still the transportees came. It made Abdullah think of a cartoon he had seen in his youth, where the young Sorcerer’s Apprentice had summoned animated brooms to do his chores and draw his water, but then found himself overcome with too much help and drowning in far too much of that water.

It was obvious that the CoDominium didn’t care about the local economy, as long as the mining operations continued. This was a dumping ground, a place to send the excess population of Earth, undesirables who were no longer welcome. The mining ships might as well carry something on their deadhead trips from Earth to Haven. Many of the newcomers arrived glad to be off of Earth and full of hope, but were cruelly disappointed to find that the Muslims of Haven were still an oppressed people and that the time of liberation had not yet come. The new arrivals found a land so chilly and barren that had it not been for the CoDo’s protein plant in Eureka the local settlements would not have been possible. So they found what work they could in town, tried their luck at farming on the lakeshores around Lake Dire to the north or spread across the plains in a desperate search for someplace to eke out a hardscrabble existence.

One day, Abdullah was summoned to the presence of the Mahdi. He smiled at A’isha, as she led him into the room and at Faryal as she brought tea.

Abdullah nodded to Tawfiq, who gestured for him to sit.

“Pregnant women are losing their babies, and sometimes losing their lives,” Tawfiq said.

Abdullah was surprised. Tawfiq usually asked about how he was doing; starting the conversation with polite chitchat, rarely getting right to the point.

“You are a learned man,” Tawfiq said. “Talk to the people in all the towns. Find out what they know of this. Talk to doctors, and midwives. We must solve this problem. As my A’isha is so fond of telling me, a jihad without women and families ends after a single generation.”

Abdullah looked at A’isha, and saw her hands knotted in her lap, her knuckles white. He looked closely at Tawfiq, and saw pain in his eyes. He realized that this problem was not just a theoretical one, the person Tawfiq was worried about most was sitting in this room. His eyes must have widened, because A’isha caught them and nodded. He said nothing, because Tawfiq was a deeply personal man who would not want to discuss this with someone outside the family, even someone like Abdullah, who had become so close to them during their travels.

So Abdullah set out to research the issue. He found that the rate of successful pregnancies in the highlands above the Shangri-La Valley were less than four out of ten. And at least two or three out of each ten pregnancies led to the death of the mother. There were midwives in Medina who did their best with what was little more than folk remedies. The CoDominium Marine medics were useless, saying
female problems
were “not their department.”

The mining company doctors in Eureka were more sympathetic, but offered little more than theories—something in the water, or the thin air, or diets or the odd cycle of days and nights. One of them, an older man, gave Abdullah access to his desktop computer, and Abdullah quickly realized how much he missed a world where so much information had been at his fingertips.

He spent hours in front of the computer, learning more than he ever thought he would about the subject. He interviewed women in the towns and would have gotten a reputation for being a bit odd had not A’isha put out the word that he was doing work for the Mahdi, work that would improve the chances of life for the children of the Faithful.

He did learn that some of the wealthier men in town sent their wives south through the Karakal Pass and Fort Stony Point into the Shangri-La Valley below. Success rates for pregnancies in the valley were apparently much better than they were here in the north.

In the end, though, he discovered his answer one night while taking a break, with his mandolin in his lap, and a pint of beer at his side. They were at the pub, and had just finished a set of reels, the “Banshee,” and “Far From Home.”
Far from home, indeed
, thought Abdullah as he took a drink.

“What ails you?” asked his friend Patrick, in town after one of his many scouting trips, his tin whistle on the table in front of him.

Abdullah explained the task that Tawfiq had set before him and how his research was hitting dead end after dead end.

“I know whatcha need,” said Patrick. “A birthing chamber.”

“A what?” asked Abdullah.

“A chamber, like in a hospital, where pregnant women go if they are having trouble.”

“What do these chambers do? What do they look like?”

“I don’t know what they do,” answered Patrick. “But the doors look like the doors on those tin cans you folks came in. Except ya go through two of ’em, one after another. I saw ’em when I went to visit Moira, when she was pregnant with her third kid, and havin’ problems. Made my ears hurt to go in and out, even though I swallowed hard, like they told me to. There aren’t many of them, but people travel hundreds of miles to use ’em. Don’t they have any ’round here?”

Abdullah’s thoughts whirled. Two doors indicated an airlock, and what Patrick was describing was a pressurized chamber. He remembered reading about complications of pregnancies at high altitudes. He thought about their camp, with hundreds of capsules, each one a potential pressure chamber. He wondered if any of them had air handling systems that had not been scavenged for metal and parts. All along the answer had been right around them.

He whooped, and clapped his friend on the shoulders. He threw a coin on the table.

“Drinks are on me,” he shouted, as he ran out the door.

The next morning, the hard work began. He’d had the one percent of inspiration, now came the ninety-nine percent of perspiration. He got Tawfiq to assign him assistants, an Afghan machinist, a Pakistani electronics technician and a couple of other men who were handy with tools. They surveyed the capsules and found a pair, fairly close together, that still had their equipment intact. These were occupied by senior lieutenants of the Mahdi, who were too well-off to need to scavenge and sell off components. These lieutenants soon found themselves moved to other quarters.

The capsules had been designed without airlocks, since they docked with their carrier, and were not designed to open until they reached the surface of a habitable planet. So there was welding and reworking required to fit each with a working airlock, and then he had the few men with engineering background design compressors that would keep the pressure inside the capsule and adjust the pressure in the airlock when it was used.

Abdullah found himself reporting directly to A’isha on this project and was surprised, but pleased, to realize she was not thinking just of herself, but also of other women of the Faithful. In fact, she said, if this would work, they could build more chambers, and make money from the townspeople.

He sometimes found opportunities to talk to Faryal after these meetings, stealing moments together in supply tents, having rambling conversations about everything except what was most important to them, whether or not they would ever have a chance to be together. He didn’t dare tell her that he sometimes thought about running away, finding that place in the Shangri-La Valley that Patrick called ‘real friendly.’ She would never agree to leave her family, or her duties.

It took months, but finally, the chambers were ready. Midwives who had been trained as nurses went inside the chambers with women who were nearing their final trimester. In a few months, they would know if they were successful. A’isha herself was one of the first women to go into the chambers. It was hard to tell in her burqa, but sometimes, when the breezes swirled, you could see the bulge at her middle.

Tawfiq was bemused by all of this construction and activity. He didn’t understand how the air pressure could make a difference, in fact, he seemed to worry that this experiment could do his wife more harm than good. But he trusted Abdullah, and he certainly listened when A’isha spoke to him.

“The prophet was a man,” he once told Abdullah. “But he was born of a woman, and married a woman, and raised girls in addition to boys. And no man is wise who ignores the counsel of women.”

One night, Abdullah was called to a meeting with Tawfiq and Barbarossa. There was a stranger there, a blond-haired man with a thin beard Abdullah was called upon to translate.

“I represent people who want to help you in your cause, Mahdi,” said the man. He went on to describe how they could help with a stand alone protein factory, light and heavy weapons, ammunition, radios, radar. Barbarossa’s eyes widened at this description, almost licking his lips at the thought.

“I am not at war,” said Tawfiq. “Why do you offer me these things?”

“Because you do not wage war now,” the man said, “that does not mean you do not desire to overthrow the current order of things. I suspect that is what you would do if you could find the resources to support the effort. When the CoDominium controls most of the food, and leaves you unarmed, you have no choice but to accept their boot heels on your necks.”

“But why would you do this for us?” asked Tawfiq. “What is in it for you?”

“I represent those who want to see the CoDominium fail. We do not have the manpower to oppose them directly. But we do have the ability to help others who share our desires.”

The man went on to invite Tawfiq to send a delegation to a meeting in the hills to the east. There they could meet their representatives, see some of the resources that were being offered and meet with others who opposed the CoDominium on Haven.

“Barbarossa,” said Tawfiq. “You can barely contain your excitement over this development. You will go as my representative. Take our young African with you to translate and take the infidel scout, Patrick to guide you.”

“And Abdullah,” he continued. “You will help Barbarossa pick the young men for this mission. I want them picked based on their potential to play this game of baseball. Your idea of beating the Marines at their own game intrigues me. And even if we lose a hard-fought game, we will still gain advantage in their eyes. Train them on your journey.”

Barbarossa objected that this would be a meaningless distraction, but Tawfiq was insistent, and so, before they left, Abdullah and Patrick taught the women how to make the necessary leather gloves and bought bats and balls. From his few possessions, Patrick took out his Red Sox cap for the first time since he had started his journey; the women used it as a pattern for other caps, and made uniforms. Abdullah and Patrick also presided over tryouts, timing sprints, measuring the distance of throws, watching people catch, watching them swing, searching for potential five-tool players among the Faithful.