The Weapon - Apocalypse - part 13
By Diana the Valkyrie
Wendy visits the Chancellor of the Exchequer



I suddenly had a mental picture of Wendy walking past the bobby at the door of
Number Ten Downing Street, straight through the wooden door, through the
locked and armoured steel door behind it that you don't usually see, past the
armed police whose bullets wouldn't do enough damage to her to even slow her
down, and into the Cabinet Room, where she would rapidly teach the old men
around the table the advantages of saying "Yes, Wendy". She would, too. They
were threatening her babies. There's no stopping her when she decides to
protect her babies.

"No, wait Wendy ..." I started to explain that this wasn't an emergency that
had to be fixed right this minute, but she interrupted me. She leaned over the
desk towards me, and put her hand on my chest. I saw her other hand clench
into a fist, and she growled at me, teeth bared. "Tell me. Where and when.
Tell me right now, Duncan."

Now I know she isn't going to hurt me. I mean, I know this intellectually. But
there's something a lot deeper than intellect. We all have something inside us
that decodes body language, so that we can read the emotions of people around
us, and my decoder was telling me that I was in the presence of someone about
to explode into violence, my intellect was adding the fact that she could
explode in an especially violent way, and my sphincter was saying that now
would be a good time to get empty. With a great effort of will, I told my
sphincter to hang on for a couple of minutes, and with an even greater effort,
I stood up to face her.

Well, I tried to. I was let down by my knees, which didn't seem to be up to
the job. "Wendy. We need a plan." "No. I need to break things. I want to
threaten people. I want to tell them what to do, and what will happen if they
don't." "There's no point in breaking things if that doesn't get what we
want." "True, but it'll make me feel better."

I grinned. She smiled back at me. I held out a hand. She picked me up and
squeezed me. "Alright, Duncan, I guess that's why you're the Wielder and I'm
just the Weapon. So what do we do?" "I have a plan ..."

First of all, I got the attention of Her Majesty's Government. I did that by
explaining to our tax collector that he was in danger of losing a billion
pounds of revenue, and I needed to talk to someone in charge, in order to
avert this disaster. He referred me to his boss, and then we started the long
tedious climb through the hierarchy, with each functionary avoiding taking the
responsibility for a decision by referring me further up the food chain. Until
eventually, I was talking to the Permanent Secretary himself. And from there,
it was a very short step to the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

He sat behind his big, antique desk on a modern office chair. We sat on cheap
wooden chairs. The idea was to stress his importance and our impotence. But we
weren't going to play his game.

"So what's this about losing a billion in revenue? You do realise that you're
obliged to pay the taxes assessed on you?" he explained. "Yes, of course, and
I will. But I have to admit, my own salary isn't exactly fulsome; indeed it's
somewhat less than your own £117,979. And I shall certainly continue to pay
all the taxes required on that. No, the problem, from your point of view, is
the taxation of Pretty Flamingo. That's what you may be about to lose. But why
don't you hear this from The Weapon." He looked like he'd just bitten into a
lemon. He'd been trying very hard to ignore Wendy; I don't think she fitted
neatly into his view of the world.

I shut up. Wendy stood up. She was wearing her white-and-gold, her cape
flaring out behind her dramatically, rippling as if there was a wind in the 
office. She continued upwards after she stood, until she was hovering several 
inches above the ground. From this vantage point, she was able to look down 
on people and intimidate them more effectively. It also helped that her ability 
to hover in mid-air reminded them of her awesome power. And I'd persuaded her 
that, for this meeting, she should leave both of the babies at home.

Of course, standing up when you're addressing someone who is seated, is
breaking one of the social conventions. And when someone does that, the person
who is seated feels at a considerable disadvantage.

"Your taxation is becoming confiscation," she began. "When you were taking
60%, we could tolerate it. Your proposal to take 92% is not acceptable to us,
and we will not pay." The Chancellor looked up at her. "Can pay, must pay," he
said. "I'm not a British Citizen," she said, "and I have no particular reason
to stay here." "Irrelevant," said the politician, "the taxation is of Pretty
Flamingo, not you personally." "We can move Pretty Flamingo offshore." "No you
can't." "We can wind up the company, and start a new one. The UK Pretty
Flamingo will then make no income, so you can tax nothing." "We'll tax the
asset transfer to the new company. You'll have to sell the oilfields, and
we'll tax that." "The oilfields are worthless, we won't bother to sell them,
we'll just close them." "The value of the oilfields is the oil in them" "There
isn't any. They all just ran dry."

The Chancellor glared at Wendy. Wendy is pretty good at glaring, and she gave
as good as she got. There was a "who will blink first contest" going on. He
didn't stand a chance.

He looked down, pretending to consult his papers, but actually he needed to
get away from her hostile stare. "They can't be dry, I know exactly how much
they're producing." "That was yesterday. Today, they all ran dry. That's
unfortunate. It means that Pretty Flamingo is now worthless - no assets, no
revenue. Tax that, bozo."

"You must have another oilfield, otherwise you won't be able to fund your
schools and orphanages," he pointed out. "I'm glad to hear you know where the
money is going." "Yes, but that doesn't change things. You're sending the
revenue out of the country; we could be using it here instead." "It isn't your
money, it's ours." "It belongs in this country." "It belongs where we feel it
can do the most good. There's not many diseased and starving babies here,
that's why we're taking it out of the country."

This wasn't getting anywhere. It was just two dogs snarling at each other.
Time to drop the first bomb. I pulled a piece of paper out of my briefcase,
and tossed it across the table. "What's this?" "That's Plan B," said Wendy.
"We start a new company, based in the USA where we get a new exhausted
oilfield, and we work that instead. There's nothing in the UK for you can tax,
except Duncan and his personal salary, which, as he pointed out, is somewhat
less than your own and won't be enough to pay the salary of your
under-secretary's assistant secretary."

The Chancellor smirked. "You think I hadn't thought of this?" He laughed an
evil chuckle. I don't think I've ever heard one of those before, apart from in
James Bond films, of course. I looked down at his lap. No white persian cat
there. "We've got an agreement with our cousins across the pond. You'll just
be paying them the tax instead of us. You'll still lose just as much, it isn't
worth the upheaval." He sat back in his chair, looking smug.

I pulled another piece of paper out of my briefcase, and skimmed it over to
him. He picked it up. "Plan C," explained Wendy, "Like plan B, only New
Zealand."

He glanced at the paper, and leaned back in his chair. "Is that the best you
can do? A week from the time you start up there, they'll tax you too. Because
they also want the revenue you're creating. You see, we've found out what
you're up to."

He had? Wow. Pretty neat. Not even I knew what we were up to. As far as I
could tell, we were trying to do a bit of good while we waited for the
intergalactic war to arrive here. "What are we up to?" I asked, genuinely
curious about what he thought we were doing.

"You aren't discovering oil. You're synthesising it. Out of air and water. And
what we want you to do, is make a whole lot more than you are right now. It'll
make this country great again."

"No," said Wendy, flatly.

I looked up at her. She was staring at the Chancellor, her arms folded, and
frowning at him. I knew the mood she was in, it was her "immovable object"
mood. And I'm not surprised - he wanted her to be a "national resource", but
Wendy belongs to no-one. She's The Weapon, the Guardian of Humanity, not of
any one country. "It's your patriotic duty, Miss Weapon."

She frowned some more. "No," she repeated, staring at him in a very hostile
way.

There was a long silence while each of them waited for the other to crack. I
grinned to myself. Wendy wasn't going to crack this side of hell freezing
over.

"See, if you produce five times as much as you were, then you'll be back to
where you were on income."

Ah. Now we were getting to the heart of the matter. Wendy glanced over at me.
"Duncan - tell him." Because this was about money, and she was out of her
depth. But of course, we didn't want this greasy politician to know that, so
she was gracefully passing the baton to me. "Mr Chancellor," I began, not
really sure how one addresses scum like this, but I was fairly sure I
shouldn't call him 'Mr Scum', "it's blindingly obvious to all three of us
here, that if we up production fivefold, then that's shown you how wise you
were to increase the taxation, and that you will reluctantly yield to pressure
to increase the taxes again, to force us to up production again. You know the
saying, if you pay the Danegeld then you never get rid of the Dane. So, we
won't pay your Danegeld, and we'll move our corporate base outside this
country."

"But we have an agreement with other countries, you'll still get the same tax
burden. No, Mr McCrae, you're stymied. Whichever door you open, we get in
first." And he leaned back in his expensive office chair, triumphantly. Again.

"No," said Wendy. And she looked at me to continue.

"Not quite, Mr Chancellor," I said, thinking that what I really wanted to call
him was 'You Bastard'. "Let's look at this from your point of view. You put up
our tax rate to 92%, way above what everyone else is paying." "Right, but
that's because you're producing the oil in a completely different way from
everyone else. We'll have this Oil Revenue Tax on every company that
synthesises oil from water and air. So it's perfectly fair, you see? And by
the way, we've consulted all the other oil companies, and they agree that it's
a perfectly fair and fiscally sound measure." And he smirked. Yes. I can just
see Imperial Oil and the rest of the Seven Sisters being entirely happy with a
measure that pretty much wiped out our competitive advantage, and didn't
affect them in the slightest. You Bastard.

"Shut up," said Wendy in her soft and menacing tone of voice. She held her
fists out to the side, and in front of her, clenched hard, looking like two
sledgehammers of destruction. "We haven't finished threatening you yet."
"W-w-what? P...p...please ... I'm too young to d..." said the Chancellor.
"Quiet." she said. She stamped her foot on the floor, and I felt the whole
building shake. He shut up.

"Mr Chancellor, don't be absurd, she isn't going to kill you. Are you, Wendy?"
I asked her. Wendy glared at him, looking like she was about to explode.
"Kill?" she said. She tilted her head to one side and thought about it for a
few seconds. "No, I don't think so," she said. "I see you're wearing red nail
varnish today?" I prompted her. She looked at her fingers. "No, that's the
blood of the last person who made me angry by trying to steal from my babies."

She paused and gave him her basilisk stare. "Here's the deal, scumface. I
won't kill you. I will find out what you love, and take that away from you,
for ever."

There was a pause.

"I'm not threatening you Mr Chancellor, I'm explaining what will happen if you
proceed with this iniquitous tax idea. Let me continue to lay this out for
you," I continued. "With the higher tax rate, Pretty Flamingo shuts down oil
production, immediately. Your tax revenues fall from a billion dollars to
whatever you can tax out of my modest salary, which would probably be about
twenty thousand. The Prime Minister finds out about this, then the Cabinet,
then the House of Commons, the newspapers and the electorate. After they've
finished the witch-hunt for the person who smart-arsed this country out of a
billion dollars in revenue, the scapegoat will never hold an elected post
again. And guess who is the prime candidate for the scapegoat in this sorry
scenario, Mr Chancellor, sir."

He looked at me. He looked at Wendy, who smiled sweetly at him. "Moo," she
said. "That's a cow," I told her. "Oh. Mehhh?" "Yes. That's a goat."

He sat glaring at us. We waited for his response. He glared some more, he was
obviously trying to find a way out of the hole he'd dug for himself. "Maybe we
can negotiate on this," he suggested. "Good idea," I said. "Why don't I leave
you and Wendy to sort out the details? She knows everything she needs to on
taxes and finance." Wendy smiled sweetly at him, and ran her fingers through
her hair. "Uh" he said. I got up and left. She'd know what to do, and if she
didn't, she could call me on her telephone-emulation system.