The bar’s atmosphere was subdued, heavy with anticipation. It was long past the time the band were usually jamming on stage,
but tonight they were drinking back in the kitchen, resigned to a blown gig.
“Captain AndrÉ Duchamp,” Oliver Llewelyn said. “Owner of the
Villeneuve’s Revenge
.”
Terrance shook hands with the smiling round-faced captain. There was some contradiction in his mind that such a jovial-seeming
man should want to join a military mission. “I need starships capable of landing a scout team on a ter-racompatible planet,
then backing them up with tactical ground strikes,” he said.
AndrÉ put his wineglass down squarely on the table. “The
Villeneuve’s Revenge
has four X-ray lasers and two electron-beam weapons. Planetary bombardment from low orbit will not be a problem.”
“There could also be some anti-ship manoeuvres required from you. Some interdiction duties.”
“Again, monsieur, this is not a problem from my personal position; we do have combat-wasp launch-cradles. However, you would
have to provide the wasps themselves. And I would require some reassurance that we will not be involved in any controversial
action in a system where Confederation Navy ships are present. As a commercial vessel I have no licence to carry such items.”
“You would be operating under government licence, which allows you to carry any weapons system quite legitimately. This entire
mission is completely legal.”
“So?” AndrÉ Duchamp gave him a quizzical glance. “This is excellent news. A legal combat mission is one I will welcome. As
I say, I have no objection to conducting anti-ship engagements. May I ask which government you represent?”
“Lalonde.”
AndrÉ Duchamp had a long blink while his neural nanonics almanac file reviewed the star system. “A stage one colony world.
Interesting.”
“I am negotiating with several astroengineering companies with stations here at Tranquillity for combat wasps,” Terrance Smith
said. “There will also be several nuclear-armed atmospheric-entry warheads to be taken on the mission. Would you be prepared
to carry and deploy them?”
“Oui.”
“In that case, I believe we can do business, Captain Duchamp.”
“You have yet to mention money.”
“I am authorized to issue a five hundred thousand fuseodollar fee for every ship which registers for Lalonde naval duty, payable
on arrival at our destination. Pay for an individual starship is three hundred thousand fuseodollars per month, with a minimum
of two months’ duty guaranteed. There will be bonuses for enemy starships and space-planes destroyed, and a completion bonus
of three hundred thousand fuseodollars. We will not, however, be providing insurance cover.”
AndrÉ Duchamp took a leisurely sip of wine. “I have one further question.”
“Yes?”
“Does this
enemy
use antimatter?”
“No.”
“Very well. I would haggle the somewhat depressing price…” He cast a glance around the crowded room, crews not quite watching
to see what the outcome would be. “But I feel I am not in a strong bargaining position. Today it is a buyer’s market.”
From his table on the other side of the bar Joshua watched AndrÉ Duchamp rise from Terrance Smith’s booth. The two of them
shook hands again, then AndrÉ went back to the table where his crew were waiting. They all went into a tight huddle. Wolfgang
Kuebler, captain of the
Maranta
, was shown to Smith’s booth by Oliver Llewelyn.
“That looks like five ships signed up,” Joshua said to his crew.
“Big operation,” Dahybi Yadev said. He drained his beer glass and sat it down on the table. “Starships, combat-boosted mercs,
enhanced troops; that’s a long, expensive shopping list. Big money involved.”
“Lalonde can’t be paying, then,” Melvyn Ducharme said. “It doesn’t have any money.”
“Yes, it does,” Ashly Hanson said quietly. “A colony world is a massive investment, and a very solid one if you get in early
enough. A healthy percentage of my zero-tau maintenance trust-fund portfolio is made up from development company shares, purely
for the long-term stability they offer. I’ve never, ever heard of a colony failing once the go-ahead has been given. The money
may not be floating around the actual colonists themselves, but the amount of financial resources required simply to initiate
such a venture runs close to a trillion fuseodollars. And Lalonde has been running for over a quarter of a century, they’d
even started an asteroid industrial settlement project. Remember? The development company has the money; more than enough
to hire fifteen independent traders and a few thousand mercenary troops. I doubt it would even cause a ripple in their accountancy
program.”
“What for, though?” Sarha Mitcham asked. “What couldn’t the sheriffs handle by themselves?”
“The Ivet riots,” Joshua said. Even he couldn’t manage any conviction. He shrugged under the sceptical looks the others gave
him. “Well, there was nothing else while we were there. Marie Skibbow was worried about the scale of the civil disturbance.
Nobody quite knew what was happening upriver. And the number of troops this Smith character is trying to recruit implies some
kind of ground action is required.”
“Hard to believe,” Dahybi Yadev muttered. “But the actual mission objective won’t be known until after they’ve jumped away
from Tranquillity. Simple security.”
“All right,” Joshua said. “We all know the score. With Parris Vasilkovsky backing us on the mayope venture we have a chance
to make macro money. And at the same time, with the money we made from the Norfolk run we certainly don’t need to hire on
with any mercenary fleet.” He looked at each of them in turn. “Given the circumstances, we can hardly take
Lady Mac
to Lalonde ahead of the fleet. I’ve heard that Terrance Smith has ordered a batch of combat wasps from the McBoeing and Signal-Yakovlev
industrial stations. He’s clearly expecting some kind of conflict after they arrive. So the question is, do we go with him
to find out what’s happening, and maybe protect our interest, or do we wait here for news? We’ll take a vote, and it must
be unanimous.”
Time Universe’s Tranquillity office was on the forty-third floor of the StCroix starscraper. It was the usual crush of offices,
studios, editing rooms, entertainment suites, and electronic workshops; a micro-community where individual importance was
graded by allocated desk space, facility size, and time allowance. Naturally, given the make-up of the habitat’s population,
it had a large finance and commerce bureau, but it also provided good Confederationwide news coverage.
Oliver Llewelyn walked into the wood-panelled lobby at ten thirty local time the day after the
Gemal
had docked. The receptionist palmed him off on a junior political correspondent called Matthias Rems. In the composite-walled
office Matthias used to assemble his reports he produced the flek Graeme Nicholson had given him and named a carriage fee
of five thousand fuseodollars. Matthias wasn’t stupid, the fact that the
Gemal
’s captain had come direct from Lalonde was enough to warrant serious attention. By now the entire habitat knew about the
mercenary fleet being assembled by Terrance Smith, though its purpose remained unknown. Rumour abounded. Lalonde was immediate
news; plenty of Tranquillity residents would have LDC shares sleeping in their portfolios. First-hand sense-vises of the planet
and whatever was happening there would have strong ratings clout. Ordinarily Matthias Rems might have hesitated about the
shameless rip-off fee (he guessed correctly that Llewelyn had already been paid), especially after he accessed the company
personnel file on Graeme Nicholson; but given the circumstances he knuckled under and paid.
After the captain left, Matthias slotted the flek into his desktop player block. The sensevise recording was code-locked,
so Graeme Nicholson had obviously considered it important. He pulled Nicholson’s personal code from his file, then sat back
and closed his eyes. The Crashed Dumper invaded his sensorium; its heat and noise and smell, the taste of a caustic local
beer tarring his throat, unaccustomed weight of a swelling belly. Graeme Nicholson held the fragments of a broken glass in
his hand, his arms and legs trembling slightly; both eyes focused unwaveringly on a tall man and lovely teenage girl over
by the crude bar.
Twelve minutes later a thoroughly shaken Matthias Rems burst in on Claudia Dohan, boss of Time Universe’s Tranquillity operation.
The ripple effect of Graeme Nicholson’s flek was similar to the sensation Ione’s appearance had caused the previous year,
in every respect save one. Ione had been a feel-good item: Laton was the antithesis. He was terror and danger, history’s nightmare
exhumed.
“We have to show a sense of responsibility,” a twitchy Claudia Dohan said after she surfaced from the sensevise. “Both the
Confederation Navy and the Lord of Ruin must be told.”
The AV cylinder on her desktop processor block chimed. “Thank you for your consideration,” Tranquillity said. “I have informed
Ione Saldana about Laton’s reappearance. I suggest you contact Commander Olsen Neale yourself to convey the contents of the
flek.”
“Right away,” Claudia Dohan said diligently.
Matthias Rems was glancing nervously round the office, disturbed by the reminder of the habitat personality’s perpetual vigilance.
Claudia Dohan broke the news on the lunchtime programme. Eighteen billion fuseodollars was wiped off share values on Tranquillity’s
trading floor within quarter of an hour of the sensevise being broadcast. Values crept back up during the rest of the afternoon
as brokers assessed possible war scenarios. By the end of the day seven billion fuseodollars had been restored to prices—mainly
on astro-engineering companies which would benefit from armaments sales.
The Time Universe office had done its work well, considering the short period it had in which to prepare. Its current affairs
channel’s usual afternoon schedule was replaced by library memories of Laton’s earlier activities and earnest studio panel
speculation. While Tranquillity’s residents were being informed, Claudia Dohan started hiring starships to distribute copies
of Graeme Nicholson’s flek across the Confederation. This time she had a small lever against the captains, unlike Ione’s very
public appearance; she had a monopoly on Laton’s advent and they were bidding against each other to deliver fleks. By the
evening she had dispatched eighteen starships to various planets (Kulu, Avon, Oshanko, and Earth being the principals). Those
Time Universe offices would in turn send out a second wave of fleks. Two weeks ought to see the entire Confederation brought
up to speed. And warned, Claudia Dohan thought, Time Universe alone alerting the human and xenoc races to the resurgent danger.
A greater boost to company fortunes simply wasn’t possible.
She took the whole office out to a five-star meal that night. This coup, following so soon after Ione, should bring them all
some heady bonuses, as well as boosting them way ahead of their contemporaries on the promotion scale. She was already thinking
of a seat on the board for herself.
But it was a hectic afternoon. Matthias Rems (making his debut as a front-line presenter) introduced forty-year-old recordings
of the broken Edenist habitat Jantrit, its shell cracked like a giant egg where the antimatter had detonated. Its atmosphere
jetted out of a dozen breaches in the five-hundred-metre-thick polyp, huge grey-white plumes which acted like rockets, destabilizing
the cylinder’s ponderous rotation. The wobble built over the period of a few hours, until it developed into an uncontrollable
tumble. On the outside, induction cables lashed round in anarchic hundred-kilometre arcs, preventing even the most agile void-hawks
from rendezvousing. Inside, water and soil were tossed about, acting like a permanent floating earthquake. Starscrapers, weakened
by the blast, broke off like rotten icicles, whirling away at terrific velocities. And all the while their air grew thinner.
Some people were saved as the voidhawks and Adamist starships hurtled after the spinning starscrapers. Eight thousand out
of a population of one and a quarter million. Even then utter disaster might have been averted. The dying Edenists should
have transferred their memories into the habitat personality. But Laton had infected Jantrit’s neuron structure with his proteanic
virus and its rationality was crumbling as trillions upon trillions of cells fell to the
corruption every second. The other two habitats orbiting the gas giant were too far away to provide much assistance; personality
transference was a complex function, distance and panic confused the issue. Twenty-seven thousand Edenists managed to bridge
the gulf; three thousand patterns were later found to be incomplete, reduced to traumatized childlike entities. Voidhawks
secured another two hundred and eighty personalities, but the bitek starships didn’t have the capacity to store any more,
and they were desperately busy anyway, chasing the starscrapers.
For Edenists it was the greatest tragedy since the founding of their culture. Even Adamists were stunned by the scale of the
disaster. A living sentient creature thirty-five kilometres in length mind-raped and killed, nearly one and a quarter million
people killed, over half a million stored personality patterns wiped.
And it had all been a diversion. A tactic to enable Laton and his cohorts to flee without fear of capture after their coup
failed. He used the community’s deaths as a cover; there was no other reason for it, no grand strategic design.
Every voidhawk, every Confederation Navy ship, every asteroid settlement, every planetary government searched for Laton and
the three blackhawks he had escaped with.
He was cornered two months later in the Ragundan system: three blackhawks, armed with antimatter and refusing to surrender.
Three voidhawks and five Confederation Navy frigates were lost in the ensuing battle. An asteroid settlement was badly damaged
with the loss of a further eight thousand lives when the blackhawks tried to use it as a hostage, threatening to bomb it with
antimatter unless the navy withdrew. The naval flotilla’s commanding admiral called their bluff.