Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict Read online

  Table of Contents

  The Story So Far …

  Part 4 – 2030: Life and Death1. The New Watchdog

  2. Red Handed

  3. Aches and Pains

  4. Retribution

  5. New Body Work

  6. Temblor!

  Part 5 – 2058: Digging In and Digging Out1. Celebrations

  2. The New Generation

  3. Developing the Ground

  4. Robot Ethics

  5. A Life of Crime

  6. Up in Smoke

  Part 6 - 2088: Love Amid the Ruins1. Bump in the Road

  2. Running on Empty

  3. The Truth That Lies Within

  4. Stabbed in the Dark

  5. Test of Loyalty

  6. Last Bite of the Apple

  Epilogue – 2114: That Great Gettin’ Up Morning1. The Brain Explodes

  2. And Then You Die

  Appendix 1: The Wonderful “One-Hoss Shay”

  Appendix 2: Praxis Family Tree Circa 2088, and Other Characters in the StoryPraxis Family Tree Circa 2088

  Characters Other Than Family

  About the Author

  COMING OF AGE

  Volume 2: Endless Conflict

  By Thomas T. Thomas

  COMING OF AGE, Volume 2: Endless Conflict

  Thomas T. Thomas

  Hope for Peace, Prepare for War

  The Italian proverb says, “Hold your friends close, but your enemies even closer.” Sometimes you must hold family closest of all. As John Praxis and Antigone Wells benefit from the life-extending techniques of regenerative medicine to enter that unknown space beyond the traditional enfeeblements of old age, they discover that the endless conflicts of family, business, and politics still pursue them.

  In her efforts to secure financing for the revived Praxis Engineering & Construction Company, John’s daughter Callie has brought a viper into the nest who will follow them through two generations. But the Praxis family has vipers of its own, as John’s second son Richard returns from Texas to install new intelligent software that will spy on their operations. Along with these local adversities, the family must also cope with political reverberations from the Second Civil War, dislocations from an untimely Bay Area earthquake, and the disaster of a mid-continent volcanic eruption followed by political collapse and foreign invasion.

  Volume 2 of Coming of Age is a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit in the face of personal challenges and social changes. John, Antigone, Callie, and their family members become strangers—both to themselves and to each other—in a world that is only partly of their own making.

  COMING OF AGE

  Volume 2: Endless Conflict

  All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction.

  Any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental.

  For more information, contact [email protected].

  Copyright 2014 Thomas T. Thomas

  Cover photo © 2013 NejroN via iStockphoto®

  ISBN: 978-0-9849658-4-7

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  The Story So Far …

  In the middle of a trial over Praxis Engineering & Construction’s responsibility for defects in a new hospital project, Chairman of the Board John Praxis suffered a massive heart attack. Sometime later, the lead attorney for the plaintiff suffered a stroke. Both were candidates for innovative stem cell therapies: he got a new heart with muscle and nerve tissue grown on an armature of synthetic collagen; her brain was seeded with new nerve cells that replaced those killed by the aneurysm. While each patient recovered slowly, they met in the rooftop garden of the medical center and developed a personal relationship.

  John and Antigone returned to a world on the edge of collapse. The country’s inflation had gone into overdrive, and when the Chinese, Japanese, and other holders of U.S. debt refused to buy any more and sold their assets, when the oil-producing countries refused the falling dollar as payment, and when international bankers forced restrictions on U.S. growth in return for monetary support, the country started to fall apart. In the midst of the crisis, John and Antigone adopted new, healthier lifestyles—his through jogging, hers through Okinawan karate—and trid to remain hopeful in navigating their respective organizations—his construction company, her law firm—through the collapsing economy. They also renewed their personal contact outside the hospital when John retained Antigone as his personal attorney.

  As the country fell apart, John’s sons Leonard and Richard chafed under his renewed leadership and considered his every move to save the company as the desperation of a sick old man. Yet between his own and his daughter Callie’s shares, John retained a controlling interest in PE&C. Richard as chief financial officer with access to the accounting system formulated a plot that would make Callie seem to have embezzled massive amounts from the company. This nullified her support and enabled the boys to remove John from the company. At the last step, John brought in Antigone as Callie’s defense counsel, and she negotiated a settlement that preserved John’s and Callie’s fortunes as the company collapsed. Soon after, Antigone’s law firm was also forced out of business.

  While John’s wife Adele succumbed to alcohol-related illness and eventually slipped away, his grandson Brandon was pulled into the U.S. Army through his ROTC commission. After an abortive foray to block the distribution of an arms cache in Arizona, Brandon was sent for combat training in California and then joined the federal government’s attack on the secessionist capital, Kansas City. The Second Civil War was well under way.

  John spent the nine years of the Second Civil War in San Francisco, where he worked as buyer in a plumbing supply company and helped out as the neighborhood handyman. The fortune he rescued from the family construction business had been invested in a national program that sold public property to private individuals—in his case, the Stanislaus National Forest—in order to raise needed revenue. Antigone was trapped on the other side of the border during a visit to her sister Helen in Oklahoma. She passed the Oklahoma bar and set up a practice inside the new Federated Republic. Callie Praxis went to Europe, married an Italian count with shady business connections, and raised her daughter Rafaella, who was eight at the end of the war. When Callie’s husband died in suspicious circumstances, her fortune was held hostage by his wicked Uncle Matteo. Brandon Praxis saw many battles and become a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army. Leonard Praxis and his wife retreated to a cabin high in the Sierra Nevada, where they died in a military strike into Northern California. Richard Praxis and his family moved to Texas, where he worked for a computer company developing software that brought about the economic collapse of the old United States.

  Callie returned to San Francisco and discovered that John was now suffering from a hormone imbalance, the treatment of which the underfunded California Medical Service had ruled as “age inappropriate.” With an armistice and peace pending, she took him to the Mayo Clinic inside the Federated Republic for his second round of stem cell therapy. Antigone discovered she has kidney disease and the best place for her treatment was also the Mayo Clinic. There John and Antigone were reunited and renewed their romance.

  Once cured, they returned to San Francisco with Callie to restart the engineering business and rebuild the country’s infrastructure. Unknown to John and Antigone, however, Callie was using seed money from her husband’s mafia connections to fund their projects. Brandon was demobilized and came to the new company to serve as their ruthlessly effective head of security. Their success also attracted Richard Praxis, who had new software that would accelerate the rebuilding programs and also grant him cyber access to their en
gineering business. At the same time, Uncle Matteo sent ex-policewoman Mariene Kunstler to represent his interests in the business, and she immediately spun her own web of control over Praxis Engineering’s projects and clients, as well as running her own side businesses. Mariene was introduced to Richard’s new software and instantly intuited something wrong about it. She promised to keep her mouth shut so long as he agreed to share information with her.

  With the war over, the State of California attempted to reclaim its interest in the Stanislaus National Forest by charging John with negligence and damaging public property. Antigone stepped in and defended his title under the National Assets Distribution Act. He will take complete possession of the land in thirty years—if he lives so long.

  John and Antigone agreed to have a child through in vitro techniques, and he had a silver pendant made that encoded their combined genomes. On a romantic visit to the Loire Valley, he gave her the heart-shaped pendant in the garden of the Château de Chenonceau, sealing their love.

  Part 4 – 2030:

  Life and Death

  1. The New Watchdog

  Rome was the last stop on their extended vacation. Antigone Wells had started to think of it as her honeymoon with John—but without a marriage ceremony to kick it off, nor the certainty of a marriage certificate to carry them home. Still, the fact that they were now expectant parents—but without the inconvenience of a pregnancy—helped her sustain the illusion.

  On a summer morning that was already growing in heat and humidity, Wells chose to wear a loose blouse of dazzling white cotton, a full skirt which floated around her bare legs and ended just below the knee in bands embroidered with colorful yarns, and light leather sandals open at toe. She looked and felt like a peasant girl and seemed to blend right in with the locals.

  She and John went sightseeing in the most ancient part of the city, centered between the Piazza Navona and the Pantheon, ending up hot and exhausted at the latter. John explained from his background in the construction business that the building was more than nineteen hundred years old and had been in nearly continuous use. That was why the little square before the entry porch was several feet below the surrounding street level.

  “The city has literally grown up around this place,” he said. “Layer by layer.”

  Inside the great bronze doors, after they crossed a stone threshold that he said had “felt the booted feet of Caesars and the slippered feet of Popes,” he showed her the soaring, sand-colored interior of the rotunda.

  “It’s the largest dome of unreinforced concrete in the world,” John said, “made lighter by the inner coffering.” From where he was pointing, Wells understood him to mean the waffle shapes stamped into the ceiling. He explained how, by tracing the curve of the dome down past the belt of blind windows and balconies at the dome’s base and then inward toward the floor, the structure enclosed a perfect sphere more than one hundred and forty feet in diameter.

  It was beautiful—and delightfully cool. Wells rushed forward, to the very center, where she could stand under “the oculus” and look up into the open sky far above.

  “What do they do when it rains?” she called back to him.

  “Mop the floor, I guess,” he replied, coming up to her.

  They toured the chapels and tombs around the perimeter, then turned to leave by the bronze entrance doors. As they walked out through the shadows of the portico, a woman came toward them from between two of the close-set pillars.

  She was brown skinned, wore her dark hair long and in ringlets, and had outlined her eyelids with too much kohl, like an Egyptian priestess. She was dressed not unlike Wells herself, except the woman’s blouse was torn and dirty, her skirt went down to her ankles, and she had a woolen shawl pulled over her head. She carried a baby on her right arm, and her left hand was stretched out begging for alms, or spare change, or whatever she was asking for in a language that didn’t sound like Italian. She kept pointing at the baby and murmuring.

  John smiled politely and leaned in to hear what the woman was saying.

  That was when Wells saw a flash of metal, reflecting the bright sunlight out in the square. The flash came from between the folds of the woman’s shawl and the baby’s dangling feet. Operating blind beneath her burden, the Gypsy woman was wielding a knife, apparently trying to stab John, or perhaps to cut away his trouser pocket—which would be as good as stabbing him if he moved any closer.

  Wells reacted instinctively. With one hand she pushed back on John’s chest to force him away from the weapon. At the same time she performed a hop kick: her hind foot shifted forward, moving under her center of gravity, for balance, while her forward foot lashed out to strike at the wrist of the hand holding the knife. Her leg moved so fast that her skirt billowed around her knee and immediately closed behind it with a whump!

  The baby and the arm holding it went flying in one direction—with the arm actually detaching itself from the woman’s shoulder underneath the shawl. The hand with the knife went in the other direction, passing across and becoming momentarily pinned against the woman’s body. Well’s forward foot came straight down with a loud slap!

  That put her in a tee stance, ready for the next move. The slap of sandal leather on pavement echoed the clatter as the baby—actually, a wooden doll—and the false arm nailed to it landed on the flagstones five feet to the side.

  The Gypsy woman recovered instantly, spinning into a crouch and swinging the knife back across her body in a wild, thrusting arc that missed by less than an inch cutting open Wells’s stomach. The woman snarled, flipped the knife expertly in her hand, and prepared for a lunging, overhead strike that, given the short distance between them, would drive down, puncturing Wells’s sternum and passing through to her spine.

  But after all these years of training, Antigone Wells was quicker than any street-fighting Gypsy. Her forward foot came straight up, her bent rear leg unfolded until the knee almost locked, to give the kick added speed, and the ball of her flying foot arched back from the stiff leather of the sandal’s loose sole. Her skirt went whump! again, and the foot caught the woman on the point of her chin, while the sandal’s leading edge cut into her throat. The woman’s cry became a strangled “Yawp!” and she performed a backflip that landed her at the base of a pillar. Her head struck the stone and she folded up.

  Wells walked over, kicked away the knife where it had fallen, lifted the woman’s head, and touched her neck. Her throat was bruised with a raw blood line where the sandal had left its mark, but she was not deeply cut. Her carotid gave off a strong pulse. Behind her head, the pillar showed a fresh bull’s eye of blood on the gray stone.

  Only now were people beginning to react to the ruckus and move toward her and John. Not wishing to spend the rest of their vacation in an Italian jail, Antigone Wells took his arm, pulled him through the ring of people gathering around the Gypsy woman, and ran across the square, up the sloping ground, and off into a side street.

  * * *

  John Praxis wasn’t exactly sure what had happened. Apparently, Antigone had suddenly gone berserk, kicked a baby and then the woman holding it, possibly killing both, and then dragged him away from the scene of the crime. He knew Antigone was an expert in some form of karate, but he had never actually seen her in action.

  When they finally stopped running, she pushed him up against a brick wall and frantically felt the sides of his body, up and down, from armpit to thigh.

  “Are you hurt?” she kept asking insistently.

  “Am I hurt?” he repeated in a daze. “You just killed a woman and her baby!”

  Antigone stopped, drew back, and stared at him. “That was no baby. A doll—a distraction, while she tried to slit your pockets with a knife.”

  “You saw a knife?” he asked doubtfully.

  “Didn’t you?” she replied.

  Praxis thought back to the scuffle. All he had actually seen was Antigone’s kick at the baby, the baby flying off to one side, then a flurry of arms and legs th
at ended with the poor woman thrown back on her butt and striking her head on a stone pillar. It left a bloody mark. If a knife had been involved, then how was the woman holding it? Her free hand was in sight the whole time, outstretched for money.

  “I … can’t be sure,” he admitted.

  He reached into his trouser pocket, to draw out his handkerchief and wipe his face. His fingers went down, past the pocket’s bottom, and out into the open air, right through the torn cloth of his pant leg. He stared down at his fingers, wiggling them inanely.

  “Oh,” was all he could say.

  “She had a knife,” Antigone said quietly. “It was hidden by a doll hung on a false arm. I was afraid she would cut you.”

  “Is she dead?”

  Antigone grimaced and shook her head. “It takes more than a sock on the jaw and bump on the head to kill someone like her.”

  Praxis wondered how much experience Antigone Wells actually had with jaw socking and head bumping. Enough to know a thing or two about survival probabilities, apparently. What he still could not quite believe was the speed of the fight. He had never visited Antigone at the dojo she attended in San Francisco, never watched her sparring with other students, and only once or twice had he seen her performing a kata, or fighting form, in cleared space in the living room on Balboa Street. He had gathered—from nowhere in particular, from general knowledge, or from that one glimpse of her careful practice—that Antigone’s brand of karate was something slow and thoughtful, like tai chi or yoga. Something graceful and feminine. The reality was fast and brutal and left bloody marks.