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big way, and if he liked your work, it would be a safe bet he could override the roster and requisition you for his personal cadre.
    So I had the job I didn’t want, and the job that they did. But they were career-Security, they loved the uniform and the sense of power it carried. I’d never intended to spend my life working for Security – or anyone else. I had dreams.
    When I was a kid ,I had dreams . . .
    Unfortunately, most of those dreams had involved working the land that my father was granted as part of the immigration package, when he signed up for us to make the trip from Old Earth. It was a standard sort of deal. The Deucalion Mining Corporation paid the expenses for the Jump, and the government kicked in with an offer of farming land. In return, my father agreed to work for the Corporation for three years, with an option to renew if he liked the work. Most of the immigrants were offered the same deal. After all, it didn’t cost the government anything – there was more than enough land to go around.
    And the DMC was getting its money’s worth. With Earth’s resources so badly depleted, they could charge what they liked for minerals, especially the heavy metals. Of course, the thing that made it so cost-effective for them was the fact that it was actually less expensive to warp a huge ore-carrier to Earth than it was to warp a small shuttle – something to do with the DiBortelli Principle, and the law of inverse-proportion between mass converted and energy expended in warp-state. They built these immense carriers, the size of a city-block, and people like my father filled them. Then, twelve months and one warp-jump later, the minerals arrived back on Old Earth, and the DMC raked in the profits.
    Which was great for the Corporation. But not for my father. Or my dreams. You see, it didn’t really serve the Corporation’s best interests for workers to see out their contracts then go off to be farmers. It meant new recruitment costs, and the waste of training new workers. And as the taxes and royalties that the Corporation paid were so important to the Ruling Council, a few strange things began to happen.
    For one, at about the time we arrived on the freeze-liner, the rules were changed. They still assigned the land grants – they were part of the contract, after all. But though there appeared to be plenty of perfectly good land around, the grants all seemed to be on the edge of the desert, or in areas of high salinity where the best you could grow was old.
    And the Corporation was granted monopoly rights over surface transportation, so that even if you managed to grow a crop, the costs of getting it to a market were so high that you ended up selling them your soul, just to survive. A couple of lean seasons and the only way out was to go back and work for the Corporation, while you watched the agricultural conglomerates buy up the land.
    I watched my parents fight the system. And I watched the system destroy them.
    When they lost the farm, my father went back to work in the mines, but he was little more than a shadow of the man he had been. The night they called and informed us of the accident, I don’t think my mother was any more surprised than I was. At least he died at work. That meant that the compensation gave us enough to buy a small house in the suburbs of New Geneva, with money left over to live on. I used to wonder if it was really an accident, or if it was his final act of defiance. The only way he could think of to make the Corporation give something back. I guess I could never decide.
    We grew vegetables in the backyard, and hybrid fruit trees, but a suburban garden was a long way from the farm of his dreams. And mine.
    So I ended up in Security. And, though I say so myself, I was damned good at my job. Probably it had something to do with not really wanting it in the first place. Security is a job where you have to think on your feet, and you can’t do