(C) 2001 by Larry Leonard 

    Jock Jarvis had a feeling that this was his last adventure.  A quote from somewhere came to him

“I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.   All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”

    The black ship behind him was powerful and armed to the teeth.  It was bulbous like a Jurassic beetle the size of the U.S.S. Missouri.  This wasn’t any mere, effete, planet-destroying space battlewagon under the command of the United Planets Space Marines.  It was one of the terrifying pursuit leviathans owned and manned by the most dangerous military force in known space – the Internal Revenue Service.  As with every other citizen of the Milky Way, the very name struck chilling fear down into the deepest corner of his guts.
     “You can run, Jarvis,” said Schmidt’s steely voice on the radio.  “But you can’t hide.  In fact, you can’t even run.  Take this!”
     Space turned a pale blue as the Bethe Blaster sent a charge of ionized hate toward his ship.  Jock bent his ship around a Titan-sized moon, which took the blast for him, instantly becoming a gas shockwave that, even at his ship’s velocity, point nine of C, toasted two of his titanium thruster shrouds.  He’d flown through the beam of a gamma ray burster and suffered less damage.  It looked like it was hopeless, but he felt defiant.
     “For fifty grand?” he shouted into the dash speaker-mike.  “You people are ghouls.  Vultures feeding on the flesh of  billions!” 
     The laugh that came back was vampirish. 
     “Fifty thousand or fifty billion, Jarvis, it’s all the same.  It’s not the government’s fault that you blew it all on that last shore leave.”
 Schmidt was an accountant.  All IRS warship commanders had to have an accounting degree.  Only people like that could kill without remorse.
    “I paid every dime I owed you guys on that Chelonidae deal!”
    “You didn’t include your gambling winnings on your tax return, Jarvis.”
    “I lost it all on the next hand!” yelled Jock. “On three nines!”
    “You had it for fifteen minutes, Jarvis.  That’s long enough.”
    “I’m taxed on my winnings but I can’t write off my losses?  You think that’s fair?”
    “The Democrats have the White House and both houses of Congress and they say it’s fair.  That makes it fair, Jarvis.  We can’t have slackers.  We can’t let criminals like you off the hook while decent men are in jail, their property confiscated and their families in work camps.  Give it up before I turn you into an X-ray.”
     “If you don’t back off, I’m going to register as a Republican,” retorted Jock.
     There was a moment’s silence, then pure hate came from the speaker.  “I’ll get you for that,” Schmidt said, his voice measured, low and spiteful.  “I’ll cook your carcass with a Bethe microwave and have your liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.”

     Jock laughed into the mike, but it was pure bravado.  Actually, his hands were shaking.  Everybody knew about the dungeons of the IRS.  The torture chambers of Orwell’s Big Brother were weekend cabins on the beach at Cancun compared to those rooms.  The Tower of London was a birthday party compared to them. 
    He had once met a man who had been caught for a mistake on line forty-three of section two, page nine.  He had underestimated by thirty thousand dollars the value of a harbor ship unloading crane twelve stories tall. Thirty grand off on a five million dollar machine!  He had been a former Olympic Decathalon champion!  Just three years before they got him, he had won the senior division of the Tour de France.  But, two weeks with a team of IRS community relations people and he had become a skeleton covered with a pest-ridden skin made of running sores. 
    They allowed him a three day leave surrounded by black-uniformed guards carrying military laser rifles while he made the arrangements for the transfer of his shipping empire to the government.  Then he had disappeared into the IRS penal system..

    A new determination filled Jock.  Fueled by pure terror and bunkered by hate, he decided that risking almost certain death was preferable to the IRS.  He hit the off switch for the re-entry clearance field, then aimed his ship at the nearby sun, a wicked grin growing on his square, slavic face.
     “Screw you, Schmidt,” he said softly, using the IRS agent’s name for the first time..  Then, just as his ship entered the corona, he kicked in the Sheckley star drive, turning everything within the field, including himself, into pseudo-neutrinos – similar to the false photons of Cerenkov fame, but with measurable imaginary Kamioka mass.  Since this subatomic particle is what is known as a “weakly interacting” one, and is capable of passing through a solid wall of lead thirty light years thick, there was just the slightest chance he might make it. 
    He got lucky. 
    During the billionth of a second he was in the star, he lost only a tiny chunk of his left ear and  three sheets off the roll of toilet paper in the head.  But, it worked.  The neutrino shock waves already coming out of the star had made him invisible to the IRS.  They thought he had flown in via normal space.  For a while, anyway.
    But, he knew they wouldn’t stop until they were sure.  Not  them.  Not the IRS.  They had open files on tax dodgers they had killed, themselves, just in case.  No, he wasn’t out of trouble, yet.  But, he had a little time.  And, he was going to need more luck than surviving a journey through a sun if he was going to get out of this scrape.  He was going to have to locate a find of galactic-sized profitability.  The current IRS interest rate on unpaid taxes was ten thousand percent per day.  And, the fines doubled the amount automatically.  At those rates, his fifty grand underpayment would run up to billions in months.
     He would need one hell of a discovery, all right.

                                    II

 He sat in the pilot’s chair, thinking as the audio tape replayed.  It was a conversation between Schmidt and some friend.  Jock had taped it just prior to their confrontation.  It had an odd quality about it, as if the two were trying to sound like two friends talking casually.  It was the other reason he was here.
    Jock always trusted his instincts.
 .  He was roughly twenty thousand light years north of the Triangulum.  A bit farther from the Milky Way than the Andromeda spiral.  It was a hick galaxy that contained only about ten thousand million stars.  When he was a kid, Old Mac, his grandfather, had pointed it out from Earth.  The separation was only a little more than two million light years.  You can see it with a good pair of binoculars.  The location was … right ascension. 01 hours, 31 minutes, declination north thirty degrees and twenty four minutes. 
    From his present location, it was due south.
     With only ten thousand million stars, it didn’t have much mass.  On the scale of some galaxies, it was a belch of matter.  But, for some reason, it looked good to him.  He’d picked it for two reasons.  First, because they would never guess a man desperate for a big find would come here.  Second, because they would never expect him to visit some of their friends.
    He replayed the recording, again.
    He punched in a course and fifteen minutes ship time later popped out between a distant blue-white and a closer red giant that was doubled with a dwarf white.  He zeroed the dwarf in on the navigation scope and, ping, he was there.  Yup, a planet.  Better than a third of all the suns had them. 
    He jumped to the neighborhood.  It was an odd, deformed lump that reminded him of Phobos.  His nose for ore was working.  He didn’t need his instruments to tell him that.  A quarter of the continent now drifting by was a giant open pit mine.  From four light seconds out, he could see the signs optically.
     Who?  IMC, his company, was the only mining outfit in space, as far as he knew.  Aliens?  From where?   Certainly not this planet.  The dwarf didn’t kick out enough energy to cook a trout.  His instruments suggested that there probably wouldn’t be pools of liquid hydrogen on the planet.  Not at noon, at any rate.  He brought up the red giant on the screen.   From twenty light years out, he counted three planets; black dots passing in front of the rusty sun. 
     A dwarf white star was a sun late in the HR diagram.  Sol would one day turn into one, but first it would expand into something like that red giant over there.  In the end would come a collapse that would result in either a white dwarf or a black hole.
    Okay.  They were mining here, but they lived over by the giant.  They were mining a planet of their binary.  Who were they?  And, what were they after?

    He punched the radio receiver into scan, sending it searching across every frequency from five hundred kilohertz to 1.6 gigs.  He heard them at seventy centimeters, clear as a bell.
They were human, which dumped most of his figuring into a cocked hat.  What the hell was going on here?
    The computer had no difficulty with the language.  It was German.  He could have told it that, himself.  “Yavol, Mein Herr” and “Vas is los,” were phrases even he understood.  What the hell was going on here?
    He reached for the mike switch, then paused.  He pulled his hand back.  This required a stiff scotch.  That was no problem since, being a cautious man, the first thing he had done after receiving his check for the Chelonidae deal was stock up the ship liquor cabinet. 
    He put a quarter of a gee thrust on the ship’s landing jets, then bounced over and filled a shot glass and a separate water back.  Back to the pilot chair feeling like he was walking in a dream.  He stuffed both in their dash slots, each cup-shaped hole lined with billiard table felt.  He tested each.  They slid out of their little tubes perfectly.
    German.

                                       III

    Their EVA suits were the same as his.  He wasn’t worried about being discovered, as long as he didn’t enter their living quarters, and he had smeared some black dust where his swastika should be.  The ship’s computer handled the translation perfectly, and he knew the lingua franca.  It was a mining operation, after all.  Man, was it a mining operation!  At first, the scans had confused him.  These guys were working only one side of the planet.  Then, he discovered why.
    One half the planet was a gold mine.  Literally, a gold mine.
 It took him a bottle of scotch to make sense of it – or at least to come up with an explanation he thought made sense.  Whether the physicists would or not was unimportant at the moment. 
    In a proverbial nutshell, which was an appropriate cliché in this case, this planet had been a gasser.  He was standing on its former core.  White dwarves were the remnants of exploded red giants.  This rock had been protected by one of those planetary lineups the Sol system had from time to time.  Everything from this system’s Mars all the way out had been lined up when their sun went. 
    The blast had fried every one of them, including this one, but being in the shadow of other planets, this one had received some protection.  Even so, what had once been a gasser the size of Jupiter had had its entire covering stripped away, down to the rock at the center.  And, then, in the last wave from the nova, had had its sun-side surface painted with heavy elements cooked in the explosion.
    One side of this deformed glob was ten miles thick with a layer of, among other things, gold.

 His helmet speaker was talking to him.  He suddenly realized he had been too immersed in his thoughts to realize the man in front of him was speaking.
     “Yes … sir?” he said.
     “What’s wrong with you?” came the voice, harshly.
     “Uh … sorry … sir,” said Jock.  “It … uh … seems warm.”
     “Turn around.  I’ll look at your cooling fins.”
     Jock shuffled in a circle.
     “They are fine,” said the voice.  There was a hint of suspicion in it. “What is your name and rank?”
     Jock duck-waddled back to face the man.  His shoulder lamp illuminated the swastika on the right side of the man’s chest.  A mix of anger and disgust washed through Jock.  They were standing between two stacks of girders.  Frame members for a new temporary structure.  Nobody was around, so Jock chinned his suit mike off and leaned forward and touched faceplates.
     “Jarvis is the name you Nazi bastard,” he said.  “And it’s the last name you’ll ever hear.”
    He brought up his hand sharply.  The wrench in it pierced the man’s EVA suit just below the helmet.  There was a brief hissing sound that he could hear through his faceplate, and the man’s face exploded as he watched.  He left him crumpled and frozen next to a stack, and walked off toward his ship, some two miles to the east.  He didn’t know everything, but he now knew a lot.  And, he didn’t like one damn bit of what he knew.  Later, a half a million klicks out, he laid back on his bunk and closed his eyes.
    Nazis!  That was a military operation down there.  They were Nazis!
    It was so outrageous that he didn’t have a drink.  Later, still trying to puzzle it all out, he finally drifted into a troubled sleep.  A dream came to him while he slept. 

    Men made of black steel marched past.  Their number was endless, stretching from horizon to horizon, and the column was a thousand men wide.  Their precise cadence should have deafened him, but there was no sound but the breath emanating from their metallic lips.  It, too, was visible like the breath of a runner on a cold morning, but instead of being white, it too was black.
    Someone was speaking far away.  He had a harsh voice, full with hate and anger.  Jock turned round, but could not see him.  The voice said that unbroken discipline would be required of all.  The marching men raised their arms to an upward angle, their palms flat and fingers together, pointing into the red sky just above the black horizon.
   “Zig heil!” the marchers roared in unison.
     Jock looked up.  The sun in the blood red sky was white, and as he looked, all the sunspots on its surface coalesced into a swastika.
    “Zig heil!” roared the marchers.

    He came awake, sweating.
    He pushed off from the bunk and floated over to the pilot’s chair.  Strapping himself in, he activated the ship’s navigation system, centered the red giant sun in the crosshairs and punched a button.  He popped back into real space ten minutes ship time later, some fifty AUs out from the crimson star and an AU above the plane of the ecliptic.
    The planet that was populated was the closest to the star.  It was half an AU from its surface.  Blue suns were hot.  Yellow suns were midrange.  Red suns were cold.  This planet had been far away from its primary for billions of years.  Now, it was close to the surface of its primary.  Any life there had to be introduced .  It couldn’t be an Europa with seas beneath a frozen surface, kept fluid by internal heat generated by the tidal affect of a nearby planet.  There was no nearby planet.
    He jumped down to within a hundred million klicks, hiding inside this system’s asteroid belt.  The planet, had an albedo like that of Venus, and there was a substantial ozone layer in its upper atmosphere.  The density of it was many times that of Earth’s.  This was a homemade job, then. 
    He jumped in close.  There was a moon.  One side remained facing the planet just like Earth’s moon.  He dropped the ship into a crater full of rubble.  When the dust settled, his ship looked like just another boulder.  He broke out a bottle of scotch and sat staring at the scene before him.  It was beautiful beyond belief..  The red giant filled most of the sky.  The planet, being much closer, was nearly as large.  At the moment it was a pale ruby scimitar cutting across the deep scarlet of its primary. 

    Greenhouse gasses.  Limited plant life.  Methane was up there.  Animals.  That heavy ozone picked off cosmic radiation and took some of the heat, as did the water vapor.  With those clouds, far less than the Earth’s ration of heat reached the surface. This place got maybe twenty percent of that, but wouldn't let much of it radiate back into space..  It all added up. Close to a cool sun, the inhabitants of this planet were managing their atmosphere, at least in part by managing their biosphere.  Global warming with a rheostat.
    That told him everything he needed to know about the politics of that planet.  It was a complete tyranny.  A total dictatorhip.  Republics were too messy, too loose for a planet-wide control system like that.
    This was indeed a Nazi world.

     The best place to hide is in the middle of a crowd.  Jock found a junkyard of old ships and dropped down into it, in the middle of the “night.”  Night on this planet was a darker shade of pink since the proximity of its giant sun was such that the atmosphere was infused with so much illumination that it was like trying to see stars from earth when you were close to the glow of a big city’s lights.
    A lackadaisical fellow in an ill-kempt uniform had wandered out after he grounded.  Just the type Jock had expected at an operation like this – far from the frontline brass.  He eyed Jock as he got out.  He said something in German.  Jock waved at him and walked over, glancing back at the ship several times like an angler admiring his catch.  Up close to the man, he gave a half-salute, said “Zig heil,” then cold-conked him with a single punch.  He took his clothing, then stuffed the fellow in a locker.
     There was a small town nearby.  There were always small towns near military bases.  This one was just as sleepy as the base.  He walked into a shabby restaurant.  It was almost empty, but even if it had been full, nobody would have paid any more attention to him than they would have if this had been a roadside hamburger joint in Idaho.  He settled in to a back corner booth that was twenty feet from the nearest customer.  A waiter walked up and said something in terribly accented German.
    “Sorry,” said Jock.  “I don’t speak German.” He winked and stretched his finger vertically across his pursed lips.  “How’s the coffee on this planet?” 
    The man glanced at the insignia on Jock’s uniform.
    “I borrowed it,” said Jock, thumbing the lapel.  “I’m not one of them.  You aren’t, either, are you?”

    The waiter lived in a trailer park a short walk from the restaurant.  They sat on his tiny couch/bed, staring at each other through the pink rays slanting in through the window.  Outside, the only sounds on the road came from passing military vehicles.  Jeeps and large trucks mostly.  Not one of the trailers in the park had a parking space, let alone a vehicle.   The man’s name was William Walker. He was one of those men who are taller than they look.  Something about his posture.  His face was broad, and unthreatening. 
    “How’d you know I was safe?” he asked Jock in a shaky voice that was almost a whisper.  His eyes darted to the window frequently, as if he were watching for the Gestapo.
    “Some things never change,” answered Jock.  “You weren’t in uniform and fascists never wash their own dishes.  They let their slaves do that sort of task.  It was a good risk.  Plus, restaurants are logical meeting places for anti-government types.  Going to one is a normal activity.  Talking to people in one is not a de-facto suspicious activity, either.  Casual conversations are the order of the day in a place like that – and take place based on ancient human greeting rituals.  Every revolution in history began in a café.”
    “Who are you?” asked Walker.
    “Jock Jarvis is the name.  I’m a prospector for the Interstellar Mining Corporation – at the moment in need of a big find.”
    “In need?”
    “I am in some difficulty with the tax people on Earth,” said Jock.  “You’re from Earth, aren’t you?” 
    The man’s English was current. 
    Walker nodded, but didn’t answer.  Some strange emotions were going on inside him, based on the perturbations of his facial muscles. 
    “I’ve never heard that there was human settlement in the Triangulum,” Jock went on, watching the man closely.  Something odd was going on here.  “Since it is a Nazi settlement, I’m not surprised it was kept quiet.  What’s this all about?”  He waved his hand at the world around them.
    “You don’t know?” said Walker.
    “I don’t know,” said Jock.
    “Then why are you here?” asked Walker
    The question didn’t make any sense to Jock.  “I told you.  I’m looking for a mineral find that can bail me out of some trouble with the IRS.  They were after me, so I ducked off to a quiet corner of the Local Group to see if I could hit paydirt.”  He paused.  “Why are you here?”
    “The IRS,” said Walker.  When he spoke them, the letters sounded like they were made out of fresh dung.
    “What?” said Jock, now completely confused.
    “You don’t know?” said Walker.
    “Know what, dammit!” said Jock.
    “This planet is IRS.  The Nazis are the IRS.”

    All revolutions begin in cafes, but after that they are organized in backrooms, attics and basements.  The leaders of this revolution, however, were all cleanup people.  Folks who worked the night shift, sweeping the floors, emptying the wastebaskets and washing the windows of the businesses and offices for the next day’s work.  They had a reason to be out at night, plus access to empty buildings.  The IRS didn’t even bother to lock up their radio gear.  A message sent from one would take 200 million years to reach Earth.
    “I’ve got a ship,” Jock told the assembly, “but it’s not a warship.  That junkyard where I landed is full of military vessels, but I couldn’t repair most of them even if you could steal the parts.  And, without free access to training facilities, I couldn’t train the pilots we’d need.”
    Walker stood up.  “We shouldn’t need that,” he said.  “We can shut down this planet by throwing a single switch.  The power is centralized.  The whole grid is controlled from a complex just outside Hitler City.  If you can get that, we will hit the weapons storage buildings and get the small arms we need.”
    Jock nodded.  “What kind of defensive systems do they have at the power complex?”
    “Almost none,” said Walker.  “They don’t expect an attack from space.  You’re proof of why.  Nobody outside the IRS knows about this operation.  All they have to do is guard against us – against a revolution by ground forces made up of cowed, unarmed slaves.  We’ll lose some people going in, but we’ll make it.  If you take out their power, we’ll make it.”
    “Don’t they have backup power?” said Jock.
    “We clean the buildings where those systems are located,” said Walker with a grin.  The smile transformed his face from a slave to a warrior. 

    So, that was that.  They gave Jock a detailed plan of  the central power complex, then took him back to his ship.   The soldier Jock had stuffed into a compartment left with Walker and his friends.  Jock got to work on the plans.
    The power complex was exactly what one would have expected from Nazi accountants.  Perfectly symmetrical, about as imaginative as road kill and as internally congenial as a rabbit warren.  Without space defenses to worry about, he should be able to take it out with his landing thrusters … and that is exactly what he did.
    After decades of total control marred by nothing more than an occasional fistfight, the IRS had developed a soft underbelly.  Like all tyrannies, even the approved citizens lacked access to guns.  Only soldiers on duty had those.  There was no Navy required here, so none of the Earth-based battlewagons were to be found in the entire galaxy.  The Army itself had no weapon more powerful than a machine gun or a flame thrower.  And, as with all tyrannies, the slaves outnumbered the masters.  It was over in four days.
    “Two ships ducked into hyperspace when they saw the handwriting on the wall,” said William Walker.  They were sitting at the same table Jock had selected the first time he had visited the café.  “They had a half a dozen of them, but two were grounded for servicing.  They were courier vessels, and brought the brass in to look over things from time to time.”
    Jock nodded.  “I’ve seen them.  They’re built for comfort, not combat.”  Four out of six accounted for.  The other two were probably on Earth.
    “Will they send in the heavy hardware?” asked Walker.
    “They’ve got lots of it,” said Jock.  “But it’s spread out all over the place, enforcing collections.  They’ll have to send messages to the fleet in person.  This isn’t  a situation they’d want to become common knowledge.”
    “How long?”
    Jock thought for a moment.  “Four months.  Maybe longer.  If they think I was just one of you locals who learned how to fly a ship well enough to hover over the power complex, they won’t feel hurried.  They know that hyperspace operational control systems would be a mystery to any of you.  No, if they don’t know about me, they’re in no hurry.  They’ll take their time.”
    “But, they will come,” said Walker.
    “Yup,” said Jock.
    “So, this was a waste of time?”
    Jock grinned.  “Nope,” he said.

                                      IV

    The IRS cruiser found  him as he was leaving Earth.  Jock sat quietly in his pilot’s chair and watched the blue dot  that was Schmidt’s personal launch drift across the swirl of the Milky Way.  A few minutes later, he heard the clank as the launch docked with his ship.  The door cycled and Schmidt floated  up from the equipment bay.  He had a lean and hungry look about him.  Jock waved him to the second’s chair. 
    “Let’s hear it,” said Schmidt as he strapped himself in.
    “It’s simple,” said Jock. “Except for me, nobody outside the IRS knows the truth about the Triangulum.  But, the Navy will be heading that way pretty soon.  Two press cruisers have already gone.  And, even Nazis can’t wipe out a planetary population of slaves that fast.  Some of them, a lot of them are already in hiding.  The press may not find them, but the Navy sure as hell will.  They’ll come out for the Navy.”
    Schmidt actually ground his teeth.  The sight of that was deeply satisfying to Jock.  “I’m guessing,” Jock went on, “that you would like to concoct a story.  The Triangulum is a dastardly plot by IRS defectors who tried to take over your shop here, failed, then made a run for it.   They are an evil bunch that was responsible for all sorts of bad things done to people in the core systems.  But, you whipped them, and have been looking for them ever since.  That’s the spin you’re putting on it, isn’t it?”
    Schmidt paled.  His skin looked like stained parchment dried over a skull.
    “Get to the point, Jarvis.” He said through thin lips.
    “Well, I’ve got a deal for you,” said Jock.
    “And, that is?”
    “It’s the reason why I didn’t mention your organization when I talked to the press --.   why I just said your bunch is Nazis.  They’ll find out the rest soon enough, but by leaving that part out, I’ve given you time to cut your losses a bit.  I’ve given some of you time to pack up and head for the sticks.”
    “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t kill you right now.” hissed Schmidt.
    Jock grinned.  “Well, I can give you four.  That many attorneys, selected at random, have the full story in sealed envelopes in their safes.  They don’t know what is in those packages, but they do know that if they don’t hear from me on a certain day, they’re to hand them to the people whose names are written on the outside.  The dates are one week apart.  If you kill me now, the first one will be delivered before you can pack your bags.   Since I am not going to call the fourth one, at all, you have one month  to make your getaway.”
    Jock leaned toward Schmidt.  In a soft voice he said, “It will take four weeks for the Navy to assemble a fleet, get to the Triangulum and get back.  You can’t both kill me and get away.  Not if you want to take any of your friends or family, or any of that wealth you have stashed in offshore banks.  Now get off my ship so I can decontaminate the chair you’re sitting on.  I don’t like the stain crap like you leaves on the upholstery.”

    As the IRS cruiser bolted toward Sol, Jock put a half a gee on the thrusters, bounced over to the bar and poured himself a well-earned scotch.  He felt good.  In a couple of months, he would head back to the planet circling the dwarf, the IRS Nazis’ former motherlode, and stake out sixteen thousand square miles of a planet. that was littered with ten ton boulders of pure gold.  His company would be pleased about that.  And IMC would be pleased about something else, as well.  The rest of that golden hemisphere would be the property of former slaves who knew how to work there.  People who were very grateful to the company because of Jock Jarvis.
    And, after he got his bonus, he would return to Hawaii and buy the U.S.S. Missouri.  She was good for forty knots.  More than fast enough to water ski behind.  He finished his drink, centered Sol on the navigation scope and programmed in a jump.  An hour later, floating serenely above Earth, he called his attorney.
    “So I lied,” he said to the departed Schmidt..  Then, into the microphone, he said, “You remember that package I left with you?  Deliver it today.”
  Then, discretion being the better part of valor, for the next few weeks he got the hell out of the solar system.