Prison Planet (THE RIM CONFEDERACY Book 3) Read Free

conduits carried more than enough power to run all of Andros and Max Island and had never been much of a problem in and of themselves. Power went were you sent it, Billy thought, and that's just the way things worked.
    Once a live volcano, it had lain dormant for what was believed to have been more than a hundred thousand years as it rose from the bottom of the sea on the continental shelf. Around it grew the place now called Max Island, a small roughly circular landmass less than three miles in diameter, which held the large domed penitentiary with almost 2,000 maximum security convicts.
    The only other facility on the island, besides the penitentiary and the VolPower Plant, was the EL Pod plant where the convicts were the labor force who built the pods used on Halberd and sold throughout the RIM. It was hard work but it kept the felons busy and working and kept the costs of the pods low enough for the plant to be successful. Max Island was a hub where power was used to both house criminals and build pods ... ends that obviously justified the means.
     
    #
    The gavel pounded over and over. The chaos didn’t stop even though Chairman Gramsci had three gavels in three of his hands, and he smacked the sound blocks on the Council table as hard as he could.
    Tossing the gavels in front of him, he leaned back in his chair and watched the furor around him. The Baroness was standing up at her station well around the U-shaped Council table, leaning on one hand, as she pointed at his Vice Chairman seated beside him and shouted “shame” over and over. Sharia al Dotsa, the Caliph of Neria, was the RIM Council member who was receiving that abuse, but he too was standing and waving his arms as he said over and over, “Not going to happen, Baroness—not going to happen!”
    Halfway across the table, the Duke of d’Avigdor was arguing with the Faraway member who was trying once again to call for a Point of Order, and the Leudi representative had his neck snake coiled around his head as it hissed at them all.
    Not to be outdone, the DenKoss contingent was doing some kind of a stereo clicking through their gills as they argued with all of the members near their wet seating, and the Ttseens barked so loudly that they sounded like a pack of wolves.
    The Chairman let it go on for a full minute more and then began to bang the three gavels once more, making the smacks on the sound blocks into a pattern ... and soon it quieted the Council members down. With another hand, he quickly motioned for them to all be re-seated, and with his last two hands, he picked up the Agenda and waited for full quiet.
    “Council members, please ... remember that we represent our citizens of the RIM, more than one hundred billion souls, and we have sworn to work together to manage our affairs. Manage being the active word in that sentence, members ... and I believe that we were ah, interrupted at the point that the Vice Chair was making, so let’s resume right there, shall we? But with some decorum, please,” he said and held up a hand to quiet the Baroness who was starting to rise again.
    She sank back down into her chair. Tossing her long blonde hair back behind her shoulders, her face was locked into a grimace that anyone would call unattractive even though she was normally a stunning woman. Stunning looking but sly, he thought and turned to his side to hear the speaker resume.
    “Chairman, yes, thank you,” the Vice Chairman said and nodded to the alien on his left, “I believe I was trying to make the motion that we should simply wait for the planet Throth to fully assimilate itself within the Barony—before we entertain any reassessment of our current Council standings.”
    Behind him, in the first row of staff seats, Admiral McQueen nodded to himself and wondered why it had taken so long for this to come to a head. Throth had been settled by the Ikarians during the past six months or so, having accepted the world for their race as a gift from the