S andrew swann hostile.., p.1
S. Andrew Swann - Hostile Takeover 02, page 1
Partisan
[Hostile Takeover 02]
By S. Andrew Swann
Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
CONFEDERACY
Pearce Adams—Confederacy representative for Archeron. Delegate to the TEC from the Alpha
Centauri Alliance.
Ambrose—Dimitri Olmanov’s bodyguard.
Kalin Green—Confederacy representative for Cynos. Delegate to the TEC from the Sirius-Eridani
Economic Community.
Francesca Hernandez—Confederacy representative for Grimalkin. Delegate to the TEC
from the
Seven Worlds. Nonhuman descendant of genetically engineered animals.
Robert Kaunda—Confederacy representative for Mazimba. Delegate to the TEC from the Trianguli Austrailis Union of Independent Worlds.
Dimitri Olmanov—Head of the Terran Executive Command. The most powerful person in the
Confederacy.
Sim Vashniya—Confederacy representative for Shiva. Delegate to the TEC from the People’s
Protectorate of Epsilon Indi.
OPERATION RASPUTIN
Gregory Arcady— Chief of security and CEO of the Proudhon Spaceport Development Corporation.
Klaus Dacham—Colonel, TEC. In command of the Blood-Tide and Operation Rasputin.
Mary Hougland—Corporal, Occisis marines. Prisoner of Dom Magnus’ Diderot Holding Company.
Bhipur Gavadi—Mercenary in the employ of Proudhon Spaceport Security .
Alex Jarvis— Mercenary in the employ of Proudhon Spaceport Security.
Michael Kelly— Mercenary in the employ of Proudhon Spaceport Security.
BAKUNIN
Ezra Bleek— CEO and founder of Bleek Munitions.
Flower—A birdlike alien. Expert on the Confederacy Military. Partner in the Diderot Holding Company.
Ivor Jorgenson—Pilot and smuggler. Partner in the Diderot Holding Company.
Tjaele Mosasa—Electronics expert and proprietor of Mosasa Salvage. Partner in the Diderot
Holding Company.
Dominic Magnus—Ex-Colonel, TEC. Ex gunrunner. Partner in the Diderot Holding Company.
Kathy Shane— Ex-Captain, Occisis marines. Partner in the Diderot Holding Company.
Kari Tetsami—Freelance hacker and data thief. Partner in the Diderot Holding Company.
Random Walk—An artificial intelligence device. Partner in the Diderot Holding Company.
Mariah Zanzibar—Security expert. Partner in the Diderot Holding Company.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE: Black Budget
1: Friendly Fire
2: Tactical Retreat
3: Factions
PART FOUR: Laissez Faire
4: Embargo
5: Preferred Risk
6: Fact-Finding Mission
7: Just Cause
8: Brain Drain
9: Durable Goods
10: Kill Ratio
11: Conscientious Objector
12: Target of Opportunity
13: Grandfather Clause
14: Collateral Damage
15: Disclosure
16: Checks and Balances
17: Think Tank
PART FIVE: Caveat Emptor
18: Gunboat Diplomacy
19: Prisoners of War
20: Intelligence Analysis
21: Security Risk
22: High-Level Source
23: Diminishing Returns
24: Hard Target
25: Frozen Assets
26: Displaced Persons
27: Demographics
28: Acceptable Losses
PART SIX: Destabilization
29: Cold War
30: Ivory Tower
31: Eminent Domain
32: Arms Race
33: Debriefing
34: Silent Majority
35: Downsizing
36: Civil Defense
37: Search and Destroy
38: Dirty Tricks
39: Preemptive Strike
40: Damage Control
SECOND EPILOGUE: Mid-Season Corrections
41: Lines of Secession
42: Restructuring
APPENDIX A: Worlds
PROLOGUE
Black Budget
“All the armed prophets conquered, all the unarmed ones perished.”
—Niccolo Machiavelli
(1469-1527)
CHAPTER ONE
Friendly Fire
“One can watch everything and see nothing.”
— The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“Life happens to us while we are planning other things.”
—Robert Celine
(1923-1996)
“You bastard!”
The shout from behind caught Dominic Magnus completely off guard. He turned away from the four board members he’d been addressing, to face a fifth, Kari Tetsami.
“Excuse me?” Dom said to her.
Tetsami stood, blocking the doorway. Her normally pale skin was flushed a bright pink, her nostrils were dilated, and her hands were balled into fists. Dom could almost see her small body vibrate.
“Who the hell do you think you are>” she said.
Dom turned to the others in the meeting room. Mariah Zanzibar, his chief of security, was standing, arms folded behind her, avoiding eye contact with him. Mosasa, their resident electronics expert, was seated, working at one of the terminals set into the conference table.
He stared at the terminal while, from the side of his bald head, the eye of his dragon tattoo stared at Dom. Dom had no way to tell where the nonhumans were looking. Random Walk, Mosasa’s contraband AI, was in the wiring and could be watching out of any of the cameras in the room, or not. And Flower, their military strategist, had no eyes in its bullet-shaped head, only black Rorschach patterns over leathery yellow skin.
“Perhaps you should excuse us for a moment—” Dom said to them.
“Let them stay. Why shouldn’t they hear this? They’re in on everything, aren’t they?” Tetsami stepped into the meeting room and jabbed Dom with her finger. “Unlike some of us!”
I’ve done it again, Dom thought. He only wished he knew exactly what it was he’d done.
“Me and Mosasa have to check the security perimeter,” Zanzibar said, snagging Mosasa’s elbow. Mosasa glanced up, as if suddenly realizing that there was a situation in here. He let Zanzibar lead him out of the room.
Flower stood on its multijointed legs, draping its wings about it like a cape. Its long serpentine neck appeared to be growing from some strange avian bush. “Observation of the defensive perimeter. He will give some opportunity to see static weaponry. He should be studied most closely, not?”
Even the alien can see it, Dom thought.
Flower glided out of the room, leaving Dom and Tetsami alone with the possible exception of Random Walk, silent in the wiring.
Tetsami paid no attention to the sudden exodus. “What the hell am I, Mr. Magnus?
Some little twitch for hire whose usefulness has expired?” Hearing her say “Mr. Magnus” chilled Dom’s gut. For a confused second he couldn’t figure out why. Everyone called him “Mr. Magnus.” But not Tetsami. Never Tetsami. They had been to hell and back together, through more life-threatening bullshit in the past five local weeks than any five lifetimes—even lifetimes spent on the anarchic planet of Bakunin.
Tetsami had never called him “Mr. Magnus.” His employees called him “Mr.
Magnus.”
“No—” Dom began a belated response.
She wasn’t waiting for an explanation. “After all this shit! After I planned the whole op for you—great! Now that you have your money, you don’t give a shit about your pet hacker anymore?”
“What—”
Tetsami jabbed him again. “How many times have you held out on me, Dom? Where the hell are you going?”
Tetsami’s anger shot into focus for Dom. “I was going to tell you when I got the whole board together.”
She just stared at him, as if his skin had suddenly gone transparent. Dom had to raise his hand slightly to make sure that it hadn’t. His hand was fine, olive-colored and natural looking. Dom felt a vibration begin in his cheek, and he lifted his hand to cover it.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” she said quietly.
Her sudden calmness was as disturbing as the anger of a few seconds ago. Dom hated seeing her like this, and he wanted desperately to fix whatever was wrong. “Just tell me what you want me to do,” he said.
She shook her head. “I don’t think you’d understand, Dom. You certainly don’t act as if you would.” She turned toward the door.
Dom felt a sinking in his chest. “Please. What’s wrong?” She stopped on the way to the door, her back toward him. He watched her head nod and her back shake. It could have been laughter. Or sobs. Maybe both.
“What’s wrong? Wrong?” Tetsami sighed. “What’s wrong is, after all we’ve been through with each other, I’m just another fucking stockholder.” He walked up and tried to put a hand on her shoulder. She shrugged out from under it and left him there, hand in midair. As he stood there, staring at his hand, he heard her say from down the hall, “Don’t wait up for me.”
Dom paced the loading dock, waiting for the techs to finish tuning the contragrav he was going to fly into Godwin. As he waited, he tried to will away the cold dread that clutched at his gut.
Dom’s curren
megagrams worth of liquid assets from Godwin Arms….
Tetsami.
She was why Dom was depressed, even though, by all the standards that should have mattered to him, he should have been pleased with the operation. Her increasingly unpredictable reactions to him clouded any optimism Dom might have had. She should have been pleased with the way things were going.
It was becoming a mantra, counting the reasons why he shouldn’t feel as if the world was crumbling around him.
The main reason was the fact that he, and most of the employees from GA&A, had survived to form a base of operations in the mountains. They had managed this despite the fact that Colonel Klaus Dacham, Dom’s brother, had led the takeover of GA&A in what appeared to be a personal vendetta against Dom. A vendetta that might be over, now that Klaus had to believe Dom and his people were all dead. There certainly had been no more militaristic activity out of Godwin Arms since Dom’s raid into his old company to steal back his own money. Tetsami had planned that raid….
“Cold in here,” Dom said, watching his breath fog.
The loading dock was a cavernous hollow in the rock, high up the side of the Diderot Mountain Range. The entrance, at the moment, was open to the air. It gave Dom a view of purple sky, wispy cirrus clouds, and the fat orb of Kropotkin that did little to warm the biting wind.
There were other reasons he should have been pleased. Kathy Shane, who had suffered extensive injuries in that raid, was going to live. She was still bedridden, but the doctors had managed to replace the damaged limbs with cybernetics.
That brought shadowy memories, too. Dom felt his cheek twitch.
Maybe he shouldn’t leave.
He’d had the same thought dozens of times, ever since Tetsami had confronted him.
Things were going well. He didn’t need to go to Godwin. He could stay here and—
“And what?” Dom asked.
He walked to the edge of the cavern opening. The sky unfolded and suddenly he wasn’t in the mountain. He was standing on the edge of a precipice, a vertical drop of two hundred meters or so, and then a rock slope tumbling down for hundreds more. Below and away, the weathered mountains gave way to rolling hills, and eventually disappeared under the chaotic sprawl of Godwin. The city of Godwin hogged a good part of the horizon.
“And what?” Dom repeated in a breath of fog. Icy wind tore the words away.
He could see no purpose a delay might serve. He shouldn’t rearrange his business decisions to suit his personal problems.
He didn’t even like to admit that his difficulty with Tetsami was a personal problem.
He didn’t like admitting that, despite his efforts to be fair to all his partners equally, he might be treating her differently. Treating her differently because of what he felt about her.
What do I feel about her?
“Too much,” he answered himself. “I have over a thousand people I need to worry about right now. I can’t delay things just because I think she—”
“Sir,” came a voice shouting over the wind. “Your car’s ready.”
“Thank you,” Dom said as he walked back to the waiting contragrav.
Business first, Dom thought. I have to lay the groundwork to acquire another arms company. Take care of my people. Then I’ll take care of myself.
The setup was only going to take a week, two weeks at most. He’d figure some way to patch things up when he got back.
<
CHAPTER TWO
Tactical Retreat
“We are the least qualified people to judge ourselves.”
— The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“The world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.”
—Horace Walpole
(1717-1797)
A week after Dom’s departure, a handful of thirty-two-hour Bakunin days, Tetsami sat alone in her room, one utilitarian cube among hundreds. The only difference between her quarters and hundreds of similar places in the tunnel warren under the mountains was the fact that her alleged status in the Diderot Holding Company rated her a solo room.
I rate a rough-hewn cave all to myself, but not any consideration from Dom.
“The man is blind, or he really doesn’t give a shit.” She forced the thought away as she tried to read her atlas. She touched the sensitive parts of the cyberplas, changing the display, paging through the seventy-five official planets of the Confederacy, along with the eight probationary members. The atlas was a Confed import she’d picked up in Godwin.
She and Ivor had flown into the city of Godwin, to pick up a physically rebuilt Kathy Shane. Shane’d been in the Stemmer Facility, a very expensive—and closemouthed—
hospital serving the moneyed corporate wheels in Central and West Godwin. In three weeks, and sixty kilos, Stemmer had managed to replace her legs and most of her skin.
Sixty kilos was a lot of cash, more than Shane’s weight in gold. Tetsami was glad that she hadn’t lost her appreciation for such numbers, despite keeping company that tossed around megagrams.
She and Ivor had picked up a quiet, but ambulatory, Shane from the hospital’s loading dock, something Tetsami had looked forward to. She needed to see Shane okay.
She felt responsible for Shane’s injury. But despite Shane’s recovery, two things cast an ambivalent cloud over everything.
First, Shane didn’t cooperate by taking her survival well. Her mood had been dark and sullen all the way back to the mountain. Tetsami had tried to talk to her and all she got was a cold stare that she couldn’t, or just didn’t want to, interpret.
Second, there had been no sign of Dom.
They’d been in the same God-banging city as Dom was, and he didn’t even make a token showing. Tetsami knew he was undercover, and that he didn’t want to risk attracting his brother Klaus’ attention—even though, by now, Klaus had probably convinced himself that he had killed everybody involved in the original Godwin Arms organization. Everything that had been a part of GA&A was either occupied by Klaus’ forces or was reduced to gravel to a depth of ten meters.
But the bastard could have left her a message.
Once it’d been clear—during their wait to check Shane out of Stemmer—that Dom’d be a no-show, she had done a little shopping. She had managed it even with Ivor playing his father role full bore. Ivor hadn’t wanted her to go into Godwin alone, but he’d been torn between staying with Shane through the Stemmer bureaucracy and accompanying her on her hop through central Godwin.
In the end, she’d convinced him that a large white-haired Slav accompanying a petite Asian woman was going to attract more attention than the petite Asian woman alone. Not to mention that the petite Asian could take care of herself.
She had spent an hour, picking up the atlas, and conducting some financial maneuvers in one of Godwin’s few banks with off-planet connections.
“You should have talked to me, Dom,” she said to herself.
One of the most depressing things about this atlas, complete as it was, was the fact that the planet Bakunin—the planet she was born on, the planet she had lived all her life on, the planet she was contemplating abandoning—wasn’t even listed.
The atlas listed Kathiwar, an airless ball of rock out on the extreme fringes of the Indi Protectorate. Kathiwar orbited Beta Pictoris, and had a population of less than a million. It was inhabited only to put a way station between the Confederacy and Tau Puppis, the one contact with the Volera Empire, the only alien spacefaring species the Confederacy had come across since its founding over a century ago.
They gave a listing for an airless wasteland that barely justified its own existence by providing a stepping stone to Flower’s species. That damn rock was listed, but not Bakunin.
A rock with less people than some communes, but not a planet of over a billion that was snuggled in close to the heart of the Confederacy. Bakunin sat just over fifteen lightyears from Earth, swimming close to the head of the Confederacy like a minnow next to a five-armed octopus.
Does it matter? I’m searching for alternatives to Bakunin. I already know this place as much as I want to. Don’t need some Confed cartographer telling me specifics on what I’m leaving.
