Chapter 1

Carmen

Previously

When Carmen Luisa Colletti was a 12-year-old nosepicker in convent school, a Benedictine nun told her, “Boys have a tendency to be shallow, young men not much better. Wait it out, and use your brain to make a sensible choice.”

The advice was a bit early, Carmen not yet aware of inherited Gypsy allure; but it served her well, all the way through business college, Air Force flight school, and a tour of duty piloting helicopters in Iraq.

In 1994, a Jewish matchmaker introduced her to Anton Benequista, heir-apparent to a New Jersey real estate title insurance company.

Anton was steady, focused, reliable; the marriage a satisfactory arrangement until he died of metastasized skin cancer at the age of 47, leaving Carmen and their 17-year-old daughter to the charity of his parents, who assessed Carmen’s stake in the family business on the high side, and bought her out.

Thus was Carmen Benequista granted the means to become active in politics and then, having earned recognition as a populist firebrand, to ultimately find herself elected President of the United States.

An unlikely outcome indicative of ballot tinkering by aliens from outer space, an argument that would not make sense until later in the news cycle — with a show of furry hands.

Earth was a second home to lemur-folk from the planet Vidura, bearing records of off-world immigration dating back to the Ice Age.

Real estate titles. Tax receipts. Defensible claims of dual citizenship. Not the Sci-Fi invasion everyone imagined, although plenty disruptive and, amid the chaos that followed, Carmen received an opportunity to welcome romance into her life.

Finally, at 60 years of age, by the attentions of former NSA officer Brandon Lopez — a front-row witness to interstellar diplomacy, a durable companion in uncertain times.

Less than a year later, on a Sunday morning in April, a fleet of space tugs prepared to launch a made-on-another-planet airborne village above the Pacific Ocean.

An ancient artifact of advanced civilization. Ten acres of grass, trees, gardens, a lake, a stream, a waterfall, buildings, pavement, paths and hollows — atop a 335-meter-tall faux-rock-faced grav-lift barge shaped like a curved-blade obsidian flint hatchet with a fat 400-meter-long spine, sharp edge down.

In a political sense, it was an unnecessary provocation. There were certain to be consequences.

On the other hand, President Carmen Benequista was cordially invited to attend a housewarming party.

And she had a date.

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