Koban by Stephen W Bennett Read Free Book Online

like a
knife. “This is unacceptable Ladies! How can as distinguished a group of
scientists as you, ignore logic and facts?”
    Dillon cringed inwardly as he listened to Fisher rip into
the theories Cahill and her toadies had offered. She skewered their arguments,
making similar points as had Mirikami, but without any of his tact. Dillon
decided then that males were truly the gentler sex, despite past wars to the
contrary.
    In a matter of moments, none of the other four neutral Board
members would have admitted that they had ever seriously considered Vicechairfem
Cahill's fears to have any rational basis what so ever. The inevitable and only
possible conclusion, they agreed, was that it was impossible for a private
militia to have mounted a system-wide attack on Midwife. They agreed with the
Chairfem that the notion of secret government intervention was implausible and
ridiculous.
    Two of Cahill's weaker willed supporters changed sides and
joined with those four neutral members. Neither of them considered themselves
to have switched to Fisher's side at all, but rather they were helping build a
united Hub university coalition, and the rustic Chairfem just happened to be on
the same bandwagon.
    Cahill, bitterly resentful of Fisher's appointment as
Chairfem over her own candidacy, stung smartly from the seemingly irrefutable
rebuttal. Unwilling to concede to someone she thought of as an uncultured and
undereducated New Colony backwoods bitch, she played her vindictive trump card
without hesitation.
    “Well,” she sneered, “if our duplicitous Madam President and
her Security Council wanted to keep a covert operation a secret, I doubt that
the media or even Doctor Fisher's provincial Senator friends would have learned
of a plan to terminate Midwife militarily.”
    With a gentle smile, Fisher prepared to twist the blade. She
began softly. “So, now we are to place our suspicions on Madam President?” She
shook her head in wonderment. “Dear Lady, just where do you think the Academic
Council found all the grant money to pay for our expensive little project?
Perhaps out of the entire pitiful Bioscience budgets of all our collective
universities?” she added with sweet sarcasm.
    Not waiting for a reply, her smile became predatory. “The
Joint Academic Council moved to support this project only after I personally
and privately requested President Stanford to intercede, and she agreed to
provide covert government funding. Politically, she can't openly back us, but
the Lady is highly intelligent. She recognizes that regaining our lost
biological knowledge is vital to the long-term survival of the New Colonies.”
    Fisher was just warming up. “The President understands that
alien worlds are inhospitable to our crops and animals” she went on, now
tapping into an old speech she had once made. “Only genetic alteration of our
crops and livestock can help them flourish in an alien ecology, and to modify
them to produce safe food for local consumption and export. This is how every
single one of the Old Colony worlds were settled hundreds of years ago. It
was unregulated alteration of the human genome that hurt society. That made the
Clone and Gene wars not only possible, but probably inevitable. If the New
Colonies don't become self-sufficient food producers, and even food exporters,
then they cannot help support our expanding populations and economy. The risk
of hunger and eventual abandonment of these worlds would be an economic
disaster for the Hub worlds and Old Colonies.”
    She
paused, looking at each member in turn.
    “No Ladies, the Government, particularly President Stanford,
needs and wants us to succeed in our out of the way research station. If they
had changed their minds and decided to terminate Midwife, simply cutting the
purse strings would do the job. Stanford is not about to commit political
suicide to use the militarily to wipe out a project she privately supported.
What utter nonsense.”
    Cahill seemed to be