There were four of them this time, three guys and a girl. All young and fit. What was more, they clearly knew their way around. Their settlement was just a few days old, but they"d already built three huts out of branches and vines.

They had also made clothes - shifts made out of cow skin. There was a lively fire burning in front of the huts, with meat cooking on the flat stones arranged in a circle around the dancing flames. They definitely had a lot of meat to cook: the two cow carca.s.ses some distance away still had plenty of flesh left on the bones. A couple of cows grazed right next to them, seemingly unconcerned.

Worst of all, the new arrivals already had stone tools, and weapons. Amanda saw one of the guys use a crude knife to sharpen the point of a wooden spear. The knife was basically a flat, sharp-edged stone mounted in the cleft of a short, thick stick. But it worked, and the spear looked like it would work, too.

This was too much, simply too much. The Amazons had already fought a dozen battles and skirmishes with new settlers arriving on the land claimed by the Amazon Empire. A lot of people had taken items from the cube in the Wolf Tree Nature Area, located in Seattle"s Discovery Park. And it looked as if most of them had decided to give the New World a try.

The first couple of skirmishes consisted of throwing a few stones at single, naked, shivering guys that ran from the attacking Amazons. No one really got hurt, and it was a lot of fun.

Then, three days into their adventure - a month by the New World calendar - the Amazons met resistance. The two guys that they attacked obviously spent a lot of the time at the gym back on Earth. They were bulging with muscles and full of confidence. They dodged the flying stones and actually attacked the five Amazons.

It was lucky that Sharon had scored a good hit on one of the charging guys - her stone hit him right in his eye. He"d shouted out and stopped and instantly two more stones. .h.i.t him, one on the head. He began to retreat, screaming oaths.

The other guy had managed to reach Betty. Betty Blue - the Amazons" keyboard player - was the weakest link in the chain. She hesitated instead of smashing the stone she held into the guy"s unprotected t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es.

"I couldn"t even SEE them," she tearfully stated later on, when Amanda gave her a hard time about it. "I guess they shrank so much from the cold that basically they just disappeared."

Betty was punished for her indecision. The guy swung a practiced fist and knocked her out cold. He was about to turn on Linda when Fiona hit his head with a stone. He shouted and raised his arms to cover his head and that was when Linda did what Betty had failed to do. He screamed horribly and began to run away, too.

At this point Ace, the Alsatian they had taken from the pet store, finally decided to join the fray. He ran out from behind the bushes where he had been hiding, barking and growling like he meant business. The two guys ran away, screaming imprecations and promising to return for revenge. The guy that had knocked Betty out must have established a world speed record in running with one hand clasped to his b.a.l.l.s.

The Amazons gave chase, but gave up fairly quickly. They were tired: they had already spent many hours in the New World without food or rest when they ran into the two men.

The two guys did not show up again in the Amazon area of operations. But others did, with increasing frequency. The Amazons attacked again and again, and drove them away. But they were getting tired of it all. Founding the settlement had been very hard work. Initially, all they did was constantly look for food and anything that could be used as a tool.

They"d slept huddled together under a blanket of dead leaves, and woke up tired and stiff with cold. They were almost constantly hungry. It took them a month to build a large, narrow hut they called the Hall. Getting the roof up was the hardest part of all.

They had a lucky break with stones: they"d found several that struck weak sparks when hit against each other. They also found plenty of flat stones near the sea sh.o.r.e, and Sharon proved to be expert at making stone blades. She would stand a stone on its end on a flat rock and hit it with another stone and the flat stone would split into sharp-edged halves.

They also found a way to catch fish, which were plentiful and very stupid. The Amazons built a three-sided fence in shallow water with sticks pressed into the seabed. Then they painstakingly wove a gate out of thin, elastic branches. They found that sprinkling some chaff on the water in their makeshift cage was enough to attract fish. Then they would slam the gate down and catch the trapped fish. Their hands were soon covered with scratches and wounds from the fins.

But it was worth it. They were all sick of eating rabbits and guinea pigs. They"d replicated a few chicken, but Ace and Ara - the two Alsatians they got from the pet store, a dog and a b.i.t.c.h - killed the chickens, and ate most of them too.

All in all, the dogs were a disappointment. They were hungry all the time and failed miserably as attack dogs. On a couple of occasions they"d even approached some newly-arrived settlers with their tails wagging!

Back at Amanda"s house in Seattle, the implanted canines were also providing reasons for worry. They"d been replicated well over thirty times each; the Amazons in the New World were all wearing dog fur. The dogs in Amanda"s home were exhibiting symptoms of canine schizophrenia. They barked and bit and howled for no reason at all. It looked as if they"d have to be put down.

In summary, Amanda really had plenty of things to worry about even before she discovered the new settlers. As she retreated from her observation point and walked back to the Amazon settlement, she glumly decided to call a general meeting at her house to discuss this new development.

She was home in less than half an hour: there was no way she would tolerate another settlement so close by. But she knew her girls had lost much of their enthusiasm for fighting, and so had she.

It was because of that last skirmish they"d fought, against a young couple - a guy and a girl. They"d had to kill both of them. The guy had the misfortune to split his head open on a rock when he fell down, and the girl just went crazy. They had to kill her, or she would have killed them all, one by one.

The hut, the Hall was empty. All the girls were gone to attend to various tasks, and they had taken the dogs with them. But they had left a message scrawled with a stick in the soft bare ground near the hut entrance:

SHEILA AND MARY WANT OUT

Sheila and Mary were the two sisters that Betty had recruited right at the start. Amanda saw now that had been much too soon. Feeding an extra couple of mouths had been a great burden. So was providing them with clothes and rudimentary tools. Worst of all, the two sisters were softies. They balked at slaughtering the pretty little bunnies and the cute guinea pigs. And they almost had a nervous breakdown after that last battle which ended with two deaths.

So now they wanted out. They wanted their implants removed, they wanted to live a single life. Amanda frowned: she had the feeling this was somehow connected to the return to normalcy in the city. Water had come on again a couple of days earlier. And the previous day, a cop came by and gave them all handbills that contained plenty of shocking new announcements. As a result, they spent a frenzied six hours hiding the items taken from the cube as well as they could.

It was very, very lucky Amanda had answered the door for the cop with her beanie covering the implant in the center of her forehead. The handbills enumerated many penalties for unauthorized New World colonization. Amanda didn"t give a flying f.u.c.k about losing her guaranteed minimum income and she said right away she"d personally cover her girls" losses, too. But she could see that the handbills" message had damaged the morale of her crew.

The message that had sapped their morale more effectively than any penalty was a message of promise. It promised a government-run, legal colonization scheme under which colonists would be given supplies upon arrival in the New World. These supplies would include clothing, food, and tools - metal tools.

Of course, there was a price to pay. The new colonist automatically lost the right to minimum income payouts, or any other benefit schemes. A trading license was required to cash in on resources and goods imported from the New World. The license had to be renewed and paid for annually.

That wasn"t all. Colonists were to charge a tax of 100% percent on all New World goods that they traded, and submit monthly tax and trade reports along with any owed money to their local branch of the Colonial Office. If they did not comply, they stood to lose their trading license. If they still failed to comply, they would lose their license to colonize in the New World.

Unauthorized, illegal colonies in the New World would be subject to seizure by the governor of the relevant colonial district.

Amanda looked at the message scrawled on the ground for a long time. Yes, it was high time they all got together at home in Seattle for an honest conversation.

Whatever transpired, she wasn"t to give up. She"d tell them that right at the start. She had no objection to legalizing her status as a colonist. They could all do that, and she"d help out with the money if anyone was short.

But there was no way she would abandon building the Amazon Empire in the New World. Once the food and clothes situation was completely sorted out, she would be recruiting many, many new people.

She bit her lip and put her foot in its crude furry shoe on top of the message. As she rubbed it out, she heard a dog bark not very far away. She wondered how long it would take the new settlers to find the Amazon settlement. They"d hear one of those f.u.c.king dogs or smell smoke sooner or later.

Would her girls fight and kill them? Sharon would Fiona would. Linda would. The rest - maybe. Maybe not.

And then she had the thought: why not move the settlement?

It was pretty obvious that people who lived close enough to take items from the cube in Discovery Park would replicate nearby, in the New World. Moving the settlement a dozen kilometers up or down the coast might make a big difference.

And they could also move the settlement inland: there was copper and silver and gold in the hills and mountains of the Okanagan Range to the east. It would also be there in the New World.

There were plenty of choices available, many possible moves they could make. The Amazons wouldn"t be giving up on the New World. She"d make sure of that.

Ace appeared from between the trees surrounding their settlement. He saw her and came running, pink tongue flying around. He stopped right next to her and looked up at her face with happy, crazy eyes.

She bent down to pat his head.

"You stupid dog," she said.

NOTICE

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