M.J. Markgraf
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BSE Chapter 3-4.5
🕑 Added 2024-12-22 16:28:14 +0000 UTCAfter feedback from readers on RR I have decided to add this foreshadowing chapter for Sorin as well as to give better reasoning for the Council to vote the way it did. There will also be changes to 3-6, 3-7, 3-9 to align those chapters with the changes in this one. I think those are the only chapters that need to be modified. If not, I will let you all know. The overall outcome of Sorin's actions won't change, so it's not necessary to go back and read those other chapters unless you want to. I will try to get them posed for tomorrow.
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Sorin stewed as he watched another one of Sheila’s harvests come in. This time her yields were nearly double his even though he had expanded his plots as new areas opened up with the gradual repairs of Eden’s End.
It wasn’t the fact that she was outproducing him that irked him the most, however, it did play into his resentment towards her. The main reason he was upset was because he was losing control.
His family had been the primary provider of food for Eden’s End going on twenty years. With that position came some well-earned respect and a few added benefits that went with that power. Now that respect and power were being eroded by Sheila and other farmers who had quickly hopped onto Kane’s bandwagon and shoved his meager efforts aside.
When Sorin had first met Kane, his impression of the man behind the machine or alien if the newest rumors were to be believed, was one of indifference. When he made that bet with his infuriating counterpart, he assumed Kane would provide minimal assistance if he provided any at all.
Instead, the bastard went and provided her with state-of-the-art farming tools and access to knowledge that he didn’t have.
Sorin was too proud to admit he was wrong or ask Kane for a handout. And he wasn’t going to join the idiots who were working for him for contribution. That was just credits by another name and Kane controlled that process completely. Sorin’s grandfather had taught him to never turn over control because once you did, you were nothing but a puppet to someone else.
With those things in mind, Sorin knew he was going to continue to fall further behind and his standing within the community would be completely eroded, leaving only the other things people whispered about him behind his back.
It didn’t matter that they were all true.
He needed to even the playing field. With one last sneer, he turned and walked off. Sheila may have friends, but he had his own as well.
That evening, he invited them to a fancy dinner at his house. He needed them on his side so he spared no expense and pulled out some nice wine he had purchased a few years ago from one of the merchants that visited. All of the food was fresh as well, no freeze-dried or canned nonsense for this little soiree.
His wife had been livid by the expense and waste, but she had been even more upset by the fact that he had excluded her and their son Charlie from the evening festivities.
“This is a business meeting, dear. We can discuss your feelings later,” he told her pointedly, shutting down the woman’s complaints.
His wife wouldn’t understand the reasons behind what he planned to discuss in this meeting. She had never been the smartest woman, but she was beautiful and caring for their son. He did this just as much for them as he did it for himself. If he left things the way they were, her quality of life would quickly deteriorate and he couldn’t have that.
Sorin shook the hands of his guests as they arrived and showed them to their seats. He had even brought his most trusted worker, Elijah. The man wasn’t here for his opinion though. He was here to serve his guests.
The man did so without complaint.
Sorin enjoyed the meal and made sure to join in on the light banter, but soon it was over and drinks were all that remained.
Anita swirled the drink in her glass slightly before speaking up. “Sorin, dear, while I’m sure I can speak for everyone present that the meal was delicious, I can’t imagine you invited us here simply to indulge in your generosity.”
Sorin enjoyed Anita’s company. Especially when it was just the two of them, unfortunately, tonight wasn’t one of those nights. As much as he loved his wife after she birthed Charlie, she found the act to be too painful and as a man, he had his needs. He tried to keep things discreet between the two of them and so far he hadn’t heard any rumors floating around Eden’s End about him and Anita.
The blonde-haired woman was a unique character. Anita had been a movie star back in one of the core worlds before her gambling habit got her into trouble and she was forced to hide from the people she borrowed money from. She liked money and power. Fortunately for Sorin, there was no money on Eden’s End, so she gravitated to those in power instead. Most of the time the woman worked as a fairly capable seamstress.
If there was one thing he didn’t like about her, it was the fact that she constantly complained about her calloused hands after they made love. Everyone worked as a drifter, it’s just how the way things were. Would he prefer things to change, certainly. That didn’t mean he was going to complain about what was.
“I did not,” he stated as he set his nearly empty wine glass down. “I’m sure you’ve all been negatively affected by the changes that Kane is implementing?”
There was a round of grumbling agreements at that. Much like Sorin, these seven individuals made up the main movers and shakers of Eden End’s society. It may have not been much by the standards of the STO, but it was something. At least that was the case before Kane came in and fucked it all up for them.
“How many of you have seen old customers turn their backs on you for the ease and simplicity of Kane’s contribution system?”
“I’ve lost nearly half my customers,” Anita said with a pout that got more than one man’s attention at the table.
“Focus, please,” Sorin said. Anita probably wasn’t the type of woman to stick with just one man, but if that was the case, he didn’t want to know. “I have a plan that should see us back on top and not just back to where we were before Kane showed up.”
“Oh?” Rowan asked. “Do tell. This wine is lovely by the way. I wish we could grow grapes here, I could do a lot with them,” he added wistfully.
The facility's main alcohol provider was a bit of an enigma to Sorin. Obviously, something had caused him to become a drifter, but whatever his story was, he kept a tight lid on it.
“Easy, we simply take Kane’s power away from him,” Sorin stated.
While his statement got looks of shock from everyone, Dex snorted loudly. “I’m sure that will be super easy,” the former enforcer stated.
Dex had been responsible for security before Damien showed up with his brother and voluptuous girlfriend in tow. Their ideas of security had clashed and Dex still sported the scar on his lip from when Damien beat some sense into him.
While Sorin appreciated the added safety of not having as many criminals, things had certainly been more interesting when Dex had been in charge of that duty.
“It will be,” Sorin reiterated. “We have a few options when it comes to stripping Kane of his power. The first is simply controlling all of the food. Without access to food, people will riot. We simply need to make it look like this was Kane’s doing. The second but much harder option will be taking over the Council. He has essentially given them carte blanche to do as they please. If we control it, we can control him.”
“Why not just go after his kid?” Dex asked before gulping down another glass of Sorin’s small supply of wine.
“Do you want to end up like the last two people who tried to harm his kid?” Sorin asked pointedly.
“What’s to stop Kane from doing the same thing when we enact this plan of yours, hmm?” Dex asked in return.
“Kane won’t care. I’m pretty sure he is incapable of caring about most things. Maybe it’s a condition associated with his supposed illness or these rumors that he’s an alien, who knows? All I know is that I’ve never seen him lift a finger unless you threaten his daughter or his work. We won’t be doing either of those things. We will only be putting him to work for us.”
“Fuck it, I’m in,” Dex stated. “Not like I got much to lose. I’m pretty sure Damien’s already sniffing around for my new drug lab. Once he finds it, he's going to toss me off the planet anyway.”
“I can’t go back to how it was when I first arrived,” Anita stated. “I’m in.”
Rowan let out an exaggerated sigh. “With Damien’s crackdowns and the opening of trade, my position as the main supplier of fine alcohol to Eden’s End was coming to an end anyway. I might as well see if your scheme will play out.”
The rest of the people agreed as well and they planned.
The meeting had gone late into the night and they all had a few good laughs as they imbibed some more drinks and plotted how to become the leaders of Eden’s End.
One thing that Sorin had kept to himself was that he had no plans of sharing this power with any of them. The reason for that is what Kane had done only a few weeks ago. To think the man had somehow figured out how to get the STO to recognize this shithole as a nation. It astounded him. It was also too good of an opportunity to pass up. His grandfather had taught him that lesson.
Now Sorin just needed some leverage to ensure the Council voted the way he wanted and didn’t try to drag things out. Nancy would be easy, she would vote yes if she saw that as the only way to prevent possible violence. Damien would be impossible to convince unless he found some dirt on the man to blackmail him, and even then Sorin wasn’t sure that would work. The Head of Security was more likely to lead with his fist than his head.
That left Gabriella and Sheila to lean on. He already had a plan in mind to undermine Sheila’s position and force her to ask him for a favor, which only left the lovely Gabriella.
From Sorin’s experience, women like that didn’t choose to become drifters, they were usually forced to because of something either they did or something their families did. Since it paid to know people's dirty little secrets, he had asked one of the traders to look into it for him back when she first arrived and the man came through for him.
Once the group left, he turned to Elijah. “I have a job for you as well.”
Elijah wasn’t the most astute person, but he was loyal.
“You do, sir?” the man asked.
“I do, and it’s an important one. I want you to fake an injury and go speak with Gabriella in the next few days.”
The man looked confused by the request. And he should. Sorin wanted to muddy the waters so the Council would be more amenable to accepting his nomination to the Council. Ideally, he would want to get equal seating to the Council, but he would be fine with a single seat at first.
If the council failed to accept the four seats right away, he would simply let Gabriella’s secret slip out. It would be interesting to see how the very strict Damien would react to the information that his dear girlfriend had murdered her former fiance. The man was so black and white when it came to administering the law that he probably wouldn’t even care that she had had a good reason to do so.
That plan might also get Damien off the Council but he couldn’t count on that.
If they still refused to cooperate, he would have the rest of his group continue to cause problems until he convinced the remaining Council that it was in their best interests just to let more join. That part mostly hinged on whether or not Dex could do what he promised.
“I want you to tell the woman that I know why she fled the STO, and that if she doesn’t agree to our terms when we come in front of the Council, so will everyone else. Can you do that?”
The man nodded.
***
“Dex do this, Dex do that. What am I a fucking errand boy?” he grumbled as he moved through the hallways to his destination.
In some weird oversight, the main seed storage was not guarded right now. It probably had something to do with all the shifting around of guards after the kidnapping. It wasn’t like Dex made it a habit of visiting this storage room to know for sure. Either way, he would take it.
If Sorin hadn’t convinced him that he had plenty of seed to make up the difference, Dex would have shot the man’s idea down. Starving was not something he wanted to experience.
With a last look down either end of the hallway, Dex slipped into the room.
Like with most rooms on Eden’s End, this one wasn’t all that large, but it was large enough to house containers of plant seeds and the chemical fertilizers that were a new addition since Kane’s arrival.
“So much wasted potential,” he muttered quietly as he moved through the rows. With Kane’s ability to produce chemicals, Dex could have made a killing selling drugs to the wider universe. He pushed those thoughts aside as he focused on his task.
He needed to make this look like an accident, thankfully there were some smaller bottles of chemicals that would work perfectly to speed up the spoilage. There was also a conveniently empty shelf above the seeds that looked well and truly rusted. The shelf's unstable condition was probably why nothing was stored on it.
Dex quickly got to work making it look like the shelf had fallen off the wall and that the bottles of chemicals had broken open on top of the large containers of seeds below them. It wouldn’t ruin all the seeds, but it would ruin enough.
Once his task was complete, he moved out of the room and found the hallway as empty as it was when he arrived. If someone had found him inside the storage room, his little ruse would have been quickly discovered.
***
Gabriella was working alone in the medical center when a slightly older man entered with a bleeding arm.
She hurried over to him after grabbing a bandage. “That’s going to need stitches and med gel,” she said as she got a look at the gash on the side of his arm.
“I don’t have any contribution,” he said simply.
Gabriella sighed. “Look, I’ll use some of mine, but don’t go spreading that around or I’ll run out in no time.”
She took the man over to one of the beds and had him hold the bandage in place until she returned with a tube of the med gel and a suture kit. If it was a bigger wound she would have let the auto-doc handle it, but the supplies for those machines were limited.
Gabriella quickly slathered on the med gel to stop the bleeding. Once it stopped, she started to suture the wound back together.
As she worked, the man spoke up. “You’re Gabriella from the Council, right?”
“I am,” she replied.
“I have a message for you.” He leaned close to her and whispered. “My boss knows what you did before you came out here, if you don’t agree to his requests when he comes in front of the Council, so will everyone else.”
She froze at the man’s words and looked up at him. “Who knows? And what does he want?”
The man tilted his head slightly, seeming to think about the question before finally responding. “The leaders of the traditionalists. They want seats on the Council.”
Alexander had asked the Council to look into the issues with the traditionalists just last night. This couldn’t be a coincidence.
Surprised by this, she questioned the man further and managed to get a few names out of him. That was about all she could learn though as he seemed to realize at some point that he had said more than he should.
“I need to get back to work. Thanks for patching me up.” With that, he hopped off the bed and scurried out of the room like a cockroach.
Gabriella narrowed her eyes at the fleeing man. Once her replacement arrived, she was going to do some digging of her own and look into this Sorin person. If the man did actually know why she fled the STO, that could be a problem. She had come out here to start a new life away from the mistakes of her past.
***
Sheila cursed when she saw the state of the seeds. “What moron thought it would be a good idea to stack heavy bottles of chemicals on a rusty shelf over our seeds?” she asked nobody in particular.
The three people who had notified her of the issue simply shrugged.
She sighed and turned to her main assistant. “Are any of them salvageable?”
“Maybe if we had found them right away. Now, the rot and mold have spread to pretty much all of them,” the man said.
“What about the backup storage?” she asked, rubbing her face in exhaustion.
“Already spoken for. You are going to have to ask Sorin if you want to use those.”
“Seriously?” Sheila said in annoyance. “I doubt he can even use a third of those seeds for his plots.” Sorin was a monumental prick and he had only gotten worse since she had won that bet against him.
“They are still his seeds and he can do with them as he pleases.”
What her assistant said was true, and she had been doing the same, trying to build up their seed stock in case they needed to increase production.
“Alright, you three clean up this mess and dispose of the ruined seeds. I’ll go speak with Sorin.”
***
“And why would I do that?” Sorin asked after Sheila had laid out the problem and asked to borrow some of his extra seed for the growing season.
“Do you want people to go hungry?” she demanded.
The man had the gall to scoff. “I’ll be fine, and so will my friends. You and your outsider friends might suffer but I fail to see how that’s my problem.” Before Sheila could reply, the man held up his hand. “For the sake of peaceful cohabitation, I may be inclined to allow you the use of my extra product. I plan on speaking to the Council in the coming week, if you agree to my proposal at that meeting, I will graciously lend you the seeds you need. Deal?”
“What sort of proposal?” she asked, narrowing her eyes in suspicion.
“You’ll find out then. Either you agree now or go find some crop seeds somewhere else.”
Most people probably assumed they had a huge surplus of food in case something went wrong. That wasn’t the case. And with Kane’s fleet needing more of their storied supplies, they were barely keeping ahead of demand. The issue wasn’t immediately concerning but she couldn’t delay planting for more than two weeks without running into supply issues before the next harvest was due to come in.
Sheila mentally cursed herself for not trying harder to find more workers so she could have planted all of her crops on the last rotation. That would have provided a much-needed surplus of stored food and she wouldn’t have been forced into the position of agreeing to some nebulous terms from someone she didn’t trust. Letting people go hungry was not an option though. With great reluctance, she shook the man’s hand.
“When do I get the seeds?” She asked.
“After the meeting in a few days,” Sorin assured her.
Comments
mmarkgraf212
There was, but it only worked if I took the comma out after that.
Shmooggie
I’m no English major but I feel like there’s a comma missing: “As much as he loved his wife after she birthed Charlie,”. After wife.
Avdrdr
Well, I think he’s waiting for them to hang themselves by giving enough rope. There is no way the seeds were left unguarded or monitored.
Gabriel Melnik
In my opinion a firing squad should have been this guy's punishment. Not like being dropped in the sulfuric desert isn't a death sentence itself, but it's more clean and final. The banishment allows for these characters to be reoccurring, but they don't work as a compelling villain, making it annoying if they were reintroduced.
Liam
Thank you for the update and please take your time.
