Sometimes it seemed like Grace spent most of her time trying to teach her pilot how to act like he was the son of the president of Dixie. The problem was that he loved to party, and he loved to dance. And since Grace was born to complement him, so did she. Now when I say party, I mean serious dancing affairs with real live bands and some of the best Ozark beers I’ve ever tasted. And the dancing is the kind of stuff that would curl the toes of your typical Northern Minnesotan. I loved it. Daniel was a real good dancer, but Grace was a master. I could have watched her dance for hours. Come to think of it, I probably did. They ran a lot of really amazing parties during The War. To keep our morale up. Total mission accomplished there.
Some of you may remember that I had health insurance before Obamacare. It was 100 dollars a month, and paid for the first 1,000 dollars worth of treatment for each year. So I could do my yearly checkups and get any prescriptions the doctors said I needed. But it didn’t cover my absolute need to be protected from Ovarian cancer and all the other things Obamacare said had to be covered for males like me. Gender is fluid after all, and one never knows when I may decide to identify as female, so the plans that didn’t take that into account had to disappear. The replacement plan was three times as much, and lacked the 1,000 dollar a year coverage, so I did without.
Then last year my appendix exploded for some 40,000 dollars and some guy in a car pulled out in front of me on my motorcycle for another 20,000 in bills. His insurance paid for that, but I still had the other bill. After charity, I’m down to only paying 200 bucks a month on the loan to cover the medical care, and 50 bucks a month to Gold Cross Ambulance for taking me in.
At which time, I decided I had to get Obamacare. It didn’t matter how expensive it was, I had to find some way to afford it. The government wouldn’t let me sign up until the end of the year, which is why I didn’t have it when the accident hit me, but I did sign up in November when they finally graciously allowed me to sign up for the health care they were penalizing me for not having beforehand. The dozens of options from numerous insurance providers are gone now, replaced by three plans from one company. The one I picked was the 700 dollar a month plan. I could have gotten the 360 dollar a month plan, but that one is basically useless. And the other plan was over 1,000 dollars a month. So I got the 700 dollar plan, and set aside several thousand dollars of the accident settlement fund to allow me to pay for the plan. For a time.
And now I’ve been to the Mayo Clinic again for checkups and sleep tests and stuff like that. Seems they think I have a number of issues that need working on. And of course the new 700 dollar Obamacare plan doesn’t cover everything. Over 3,000 dollars of this year’s bills are uncovered, meaning I have to pay for them too. So I’m paying 100 dollars a month to work them down. On top of the 250 dollars a month for last year’s health care bills.
The total is more than my house payment. This is life under Obamacare. And this is why many of those in Washington are there. They were sent to fix the problem, and they need to. Because life under Obamacare is something that millions of my fellow citizens cannot endure. We either don’t have it all and are being penalized for it, or we are running our budgets deep into the red to get it. Either way, our money will soon run out. This is unbearable.
This is life under Obamacare.
And if the government we sent to Washington doesn’t fix the damage that Obamacare has done, we will send someone else to do the job.
Because we refuse to live a life under Obamacare.
Daniel Freemon grew up the son of an actor with no political aspirations, but the Shang attack and an emergency election changed that for both of them. Daniel volunteered to serve in the military, while his father volunteered another form of service. He won the election and became the President of Dixie. Daniel graduated from flight school, convinced a cybernetic intelligence to choose him as a partner, and became a Cowboy. That was quite the accomplishment for a self-proclaimed party animal and dancing queen. His words, not mine. Some of his musical choices were…questionable to my ears, and the less said about Swedish pop rock the better. But there is no denying that he had a gift for planning morale boosting parties. It was a gift he used many times over the years to our benefit.
We had an amazing number of rich and powerful people in the Cowboys when we started. And slackers like me. The fact is that nobody expected us to deploy anywhere, so some strings were pulled to get people into our sleepy little reserve Marine squadron. Boy, were those stringpullers in for a surprise. I asked Grace once if she’d known what was coming. She just smiled and said she picked Daniel because he was a fighter. I asked if she would have still picked him if she knew everything that would happen and she smiled again. She chose the son of a president as her partner and she always worked to bring dignity to his role. Knowing Daniel like I do, she had a long and hard road when it comes to that. But she was always a very patient partner.
“All fighters are fully operational and ready to engage the enemy, Jack. Shall we?”
“We shall,” Jack answered as over one hundred point defense lasers opened fire on the incoming missiles. The freighter’s attack evaporated far short of Jack’s thirteen Avengers. “But let’s try to take her intact. They were nice enough not to shoot up our cargo pods. Let’s return the favor.”
“Yes, Jack,” Betty and Jasmine said in perfect unison, and the Avenger shuddered as her missile arrays deployed from their main fuselage. Covers rolled back to reveal the many small tubes, the arrays spun back and forth to test their range of motion, and then they finally locked onto the freighter and his displays began to flash red with multiple target locks.
Jack smiled and passed his hand over a control that started his favorite music. One had to have the right soundtrack playing when you made the bad guys pay, after all. The very best singing duo in all the worlds, in Jack’s completely biased opinion, began to sing about bad boys and Jack chuckled.
“Fire,” Jack ordered to the tune of T&J’s screaming guitars and all thirteen Avengers spat scores of tiny missiles towards the freighter.
…
The Gemini Affair is a short story written for An Atlas to Time, Space, and Bonfires. There’s a kickstarter for it right now in case you’re interested in seeing a couple dozen stories by different authors. And this one, of course.




Forge of War on Amazon
Angel Flight on Amazon
Angel Strike on Amazon
Angel War on Amazon
Wolfenheim Rising on Amazon
Wolfenheim Emergent on Amazon