S andrew swann hostile.., p.7
S. Andrew Swann - Hostile Takeover 02, page 7
“So you’re interested in buying the Lady?”
Tetsami nodded without saying that the Lady looked more like an old dowager.
“Mind if I look—” Tetsami noted the way Jarvis was caressing the hood “— her over?”
“Go ahead. She’s seen a lot of use, but she’s in top shape.” As Tetsami started going over the car, Jarvis extolled its virtues. “The chassis is a Royt design for planetary exploration. It’s rated for three Gs, fifteen atmospheres, and class five terrain.”
Tetsami looked out from under the front fender. “Where do you drive this thing?”
“I did a lot of prospecting in the mountains. Dolbrian artifacts. Of course she’s overengineered for a simple off-roader, but the Lady here can take anything—including full submersion.”
“Find any?” Tetsami asked.
Jarvis chuckled. “Dolbrian artifacts?”
Tetsami nodded. She was intrigued, since part of the elaborate plan she’d developed for Dom’s raid on GA&A—it seemed ages ago now—involved a story to cover their digging activity. The cover was the search for traces of the Dolbrians on this planet.
The Dolbrians had died out a hundred million years ago and might—or might not—have terraformed Bakunin.
Circling Kropotkin was certainly a weird place to find a relatively Earthlike planet.
Jarvis was shaking his head. “If I’d ever found so much as a rock touched by the Dolbrians, I wouldn’t need to come out of retirement.” Would be one hell of a meal ticket.
She walked around the car, noting the array of lights on the front. They were matched by a rack of lights on the top of the car as well as a few swivel-mounted beams on either door. “The cabin’s contained?”
“Up to three atmospheres, like I said. I’ve added a kill-switch to the environment control. Without the recycler you can add a week’s running time to a full charge.”
“A week?” Tetsami had pulled a side panel exposing the engine’s inards. One look and she wished Ivor was here with her.
“She’s a Royt exploration vehicle. It runs the axles on a power plant rated for a contragrav. You can get a month standard out of the onboard power before a recharge.” Tetsami arched an eyebrow. “How fast can it go?”
“Believe me, you’ll roll her before you find out.” He grinned. “I’m asking ten K.” To her eye the Lady was probably a bargain at that price. “So why you selling her?”
“Decided my retirement was premature, but with the new job it was a choice between selling her or scrapping her.”
Tetsami looked at Jarvis. He could be a merc type.
She asked, “New job? What?”
“Nothing you’d want to be involved in.” The voice was suddenly hard. She saw a man she didn’t want to push.
Jarvis was part of the whole strangeness swamping Proudhon. And he was right, she didn’t want to be involved in it.
“I’ll buy her,” Tetsami said. “Will you accept off-world credit?”
“Of late, I prefer it.”
The way Jarvis said that made Tetsami glad she had transferred her twenty megagrams to an off-world bank. Even if the interest rate sucked.
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CHAPTER TEN
Kill Ratio
“The future strikes with blinding speed. The past takes its time and aims.”
— The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“Even God cannot change the past.”
—Agathon
(ca. 448-cg. 400 B.C.)
Deep in the heart of the mountains sat the conference room of the Diderot Holding Company, a hemisphere of mirrored black rock ten meters in diameter. Its centerpiece was the circular conference table, with seven chairs. The table was one of the few finished-looking objects in the whole mountain.
Only five of the chairs were filled. The room felt empty to Dom.
She’s gone, he told himself. Just another mistake that you can’t recover.
Dom felt numb. He hadn’t slept last night. He’d stayed awake, wondering what he could have said to her. And when that effort had lost the ability to wound him, he had spent the night mentally replaying events from his past.
Now, as dawn broke on the eastern face of the Diderot Mountains, he was supposed to brief his board on the coming takeover of Bleek Munitions. It seemed an empty process.
As he collected his thoughts, he felt the others staring at him. Zanzibar, Mosasa, Ivor—even Flower seemed to stare at him with its reptile-avian eyeless face.
To have something to say, he spoke to the remaining board member present. “Are you recording, Random?”
“Of course,” came the response from the holo projector buried in the table’s center.
To think he’d been looking forward to this.
He now had to justify a massive investment all six of these people had risked their lives for.
He had to make good a debt to twelve hundred employees. Twelve hundred people he had evacuated from Godwin Arms, alive despite his brother’s best efforts. Dom owed those people a new living.
It just seemed so useless now.
He started tapping his fingers idly. “During my trip to Godwin I confirmed that Bleek Munitions is our best target for a friendly takeover. It requires a debt load. But one we can handle.”
It was hard to ignore how dead the air in this room felt.
He told the assembly about Ezra Bleek and his ungrateful children. He told them about the rumors of Ezra’s confinement, and the possibility that—given escape as an incentive—Ezra might be a willing participant in the takeover of his own company.
Ungrateful children.
That phrase resonated. He recited dry statistics, figures on stock manipulation, transactions that should give them control of Bleek Munitions. As he spoke the words fed to him by his onboard computer, another, older, part of his brain fed him other violent images.
Styx.
Styx, a colony over a century and a half old, orbited Sigma Draconis in one of the narrowest parts of the Centauri Alliance. Sigma Draconis was a star dimmer than Sol, and despite the planet’s close orbit, Styx was cold as hell. Its oceans were locked under ice sheets, the depths only kept liquid by submerged volcanoes. Its atmosphere was clouded by smoke from eruptions. The ground was covered by black, tarlike snow.
A half billion people called it home.
A TEC Colonel by the name of Jonah Dacham was responsible for the deaths of thirty-five thousand of them, and the destruction of their capital city, without ever setting foot on the hellish place.
That wasn’t me, a small part of Dom’s mind argued. You aren’t Jonah Dacham. No, the cold part of his mind answered. You ‘re not Jonah now. But you were him, then.
Zanzibar said, “The kids will fight.” And it was like listening to a voice from another era.
Dom answered by rote. “The kids will fight. But it’s still a friendly takeover. We’ll have the stock. The kids only have position. Once Ezra’s blood and retina-print are on a stock transfer and it’s filed with Lucifer Contracts, we’ll have controlling interest. Even the unions won’t interfere.”
Flower gestured for attention. Its long neck-—a third of its three-meter height, rising from the midst of a forest of leaflike feathers—bobbed its saurian head about a meter closer to Dom. The head was smooth and only marked by black Rorschach patterns over a yellowish skin. When it talked, the jaws opened the bony beak a crack, and remained immobile.
Its voice was nasal and deliberately phrased. “Bleek, he is a dispersed operation, is he not? He will force us to disperse also? Our small force cannot secure buildings scattered all over the city of Godwin. He would be no easy task for a moderate-sized army. The best we can manage is a small assault team.”
“We have to make sure that all of Ezra’s kids are in one place. Bleek isn’t a closed operation like GA&A was. Anyone not responding directly to the board is going to sit back and watch the management change.”
“A bloodless coup,” said Ivor Jorgenson.
Even as Dom nodded his agreement, the word “coup” brought him more memories of Styx. The Styx of fifteen standard years ago.
Colonel Jonah Dacham had received a blip on the comm of his scout-craft as soon as it had achieved a Stygian orbit. The message had come from the rebels holding Styx traffic control.
The holo accompanying the voice had shown a large weary-looking man, red-haired and red-bearded. “Incoming craft. This is your only warning. We have control of the planetary defense network. You will not be allowed to enter the lower atmosphere.” The Stygian rebels had held all of Perdition City, the central spaceport there, and the extraplanetary defenses, blockading the entire world. With the exception of the planet-based tach-transmitter in the government Citadel, Styx was isolated from the rest of the Confederacy. The Citadel stood in the middle of the capital city, Perdition.
Dom remembered his response to the rebels’ challenge. “I am Colonel Jonah Dacham, TEC, here on behalf of the Confederacy.”
“We know who you are.” The red-bearded man gazed out from the holo with icy blue eyes. “This is an internal Stygian matter. Any Executive meddling will be dealt with harshly.”
“I’ve come here in good faith, alone, to negotiate some sort of settlement.”
“I thought the Confederacy didn’t deal with terrorists?” My friend, Dom remembered thinking, back when he was Jonah Dacham, we deal with terrorists all the time. What we don’t do is negotiate with them.
Something Mosasa said tore him free of the evil memory. It took an effort to keep his voice level. “Other problems?”
“That’s what I said,” replied Mosasa. Mosasa was looking even more like a pirate than he usually did. In addition to being tall, black, hairless, and adorned with a profusion of gold earrings, he wore a red silk blouse open to the waist, allowing Dom to see more of Mosasa’s massive dragon tattoo than usual. The head of the dragon curled around Mosasa’s left ear to give him an off-kilter three-eyed stare, the third eye being the dragon’s.
“Communications has detected some disturbing air traffic.” While Mosasa spoke, Random took over the holo in the table. The holo fuzzed to life with a scrambled video signal. The speakers came on with digital gibberish. Occasionally the holo would resolve into something almost comprehensible. The display froze on a blurred color-negative picture of someone’s face.
“This is from three days ago, after a group of twelve ships tached in from the direction of Epsilon Eridani. We can’t unlock the scrambling—”
“But?” said Dom.
“But,” Mosasa continued. “We’ve IDed the source of the signal.” Random played with the holo and the frozen signal shrank to one corner of the display, revealing video of a gigantic spaceship floating against a starry background. “The SEEC ‘Freighter’ Daedalus, and escort. Thank Flower for the graphic.”
“That’s what tached in?” A military Confed ship? Proudhon air-traffic control should be going ape.
Mosasa nodded. “The signal intercept was an accident. It was supposed to be tightbeamed to somewhere in Proudhon.”
Dom felt as if control had finally slipped from his grasp. His own handle on events was one of the few anchors he had in his life. Suddenly he’d been knocked adrift.
Proudhon had a stranglehold on orbital traffic around Bakunin, and a stranglehold on information about orbital traffic. He was hearing about Daedalus indirectly, and that meant that Proudhon was screening information about the nature of the ship.
Ships, Dom corrected himself.
Ivor said something, and Zanzibar began to argue with him. Dom ignored them. He needed to understand this new development. The myriad threats he’d been juggling since he’d come to Bakunin had been tolerable because he understood them.
He even understood his brother, after a fashion: Helen had been on Styx.
But why, suddenly, this? Did anyone here realize what this could mean?
What are SEEC ships doing out of the Sirius-Eridani Economic Community? Dom thought desperately, furiously. His fingers drummed a machine-gun rhythm on the table while pointless debate orbited him.
Ships like the Daedalus—a tach-capable carrier holding dozens of dropships for planetary and ship-to-ship assault— were technically not supposed to exist. The Confederacy Charter forbade tach-capable warships in hands other than those of the Terran Executive Command. Ten years in the TEC had taught Dom the futility of the non proliferation provisions of the Charter.
Every arm of the Confederacy owned its own private fleet of “trading vessels,”
“scout-ships,” and “heavy freighters.” The fraud was so accepted that “trading vessel” was a Confed euphemism for warship. The Alliance military arm was still called the Centaurian Trading Company, after its original function.
The deception was accepted as long as the fleet stayed within its own borders.
Any warship venturing out into disputed Confed space was an invitation to all-out war.
Mosasa described four other small vessels that had parked at the Lagrange points fore and aft of Schwitzguebel, Bakunin’s largest moon. “Random hacked this video from a Proudhon air-traffic control sat. Flower has IDed them as ships from the TEC Terran Defense Force.”
That captured Dom’s attention. He stared at the holo, hand stilled.
He stared at a smear of a holo that was supposedly looking at Schwitzguebel’s L-5
point. The ships were hard to make out but Dom knew what they were. “Six ships,” Dom said.
“We only detected four,” Mosasa said.
“TEC observation platforms,” Dom explained, feeling more tendrils from his past digging into his brain. “If the other two don’t want to be seen, they won’t be. They’re probably orbiting directly opposite Schwitzguebel.”
“Are you sure?” asked Ivor.
Ivor, I took a stealth ship just like one of those and laid waste to the capital city of Styx. I know them well.
“I know TEC procedure. They wouldn’t leave a sixty-degree slice of the planet uncovered.” As he answered, Dom thought, I know you, too, Ivor.
Dom remembered flying one of those fatal little craft.
He remembered negotiating the landing with the red-haired man, Commander Robert Elision, airborne division of the Stygian Presidential Guard, the man who was in charge of the Stygian coup. “You know why I’m here, Commander,” Dom had said. “You’ve known I was coming for at least nineteen days. I doubt you would have called me personally if you hadn’t already made up your mind.”
Elision’s lopsided grin didn’t touch those ice-blue eyes. “You’re right. I’ve made up my mind, though I have trouble believing the TEC offer to send a single negotiator. Not your style.”
Jonah Dacham shrugged in response.
“I’ve got confirmation from our intel sats, that crate you’re riding could hold five guys at best. Be assured that your welcoming committee will be ten times that.”
“I have clearance to land?”
“Yes, you have your damn clearance. Deviate from your approach and you’ll be shot down. Another ship tachs in and you’ll be shot down. I’ll talk to you, but I want you to remember, this situation doesn’t make me happy.”
“I’ll remember, Commander,” Jonah said as he maneuvered his craft for an orbital approach to the city of Perdition.
By all accounts, Commander Elision had a very strong position. With the exception of a few members of the Presidential Guard, his coup had been bloodless. He had the support of most of the Stygian military, nearly a hundred thousand troops. Perdition was an armed camp. The only spot of ground on the planet Elision did not hold was a circle of about a kilometer’s radius around the Citadel, right in the center of the city.
There were almost no civilians left in central Perdition. That wasn’t just due to the revolt—there’d been very little actual shooting, despite the twenty thousand troops ringing the Citadel—the retreat from Perdition was due to the loss of the dome on the city. While it was barely possible to live on the surface of Styx without environmental control, it wasn’t pleasant.
The small observer-craft slid into a preprogrammed approach toward Perdition and the spaceport. Jonah watched the planet out the forward observation port. There was nothing for him to do. Everything was in the ship’s computer. The maneuvering the craft was about to do required microsecond timing and allowed nothing for human error.
Jonah watched the dirty gray-and-black-streaked ball of Styx. Jonah couldn’t see beyond the eternal smog, but the TEC observer was a spy craft. While he had talked to the Commander below him, Jonah’s craft had measured and quantified the area around Perdition to the last centimeter. Behind him, in a space that used to be crew’s quarters, Jonah’s technical package was refreshing its own database with that information, assuring it that its current trajectory programming would place its contents on target.
As the craft began to kiss the lower atmosphere, the technical package was satisfied.
Dom forced himself back to the present. Stealth craft, Dom thought. If Random hacked a Proudhon sat to see them, then Proudhon knows they’re there. Proudhon is burying all this.
“They want to be seen by the Daedalus,” Dom said, massaging his temple.
The babble around the room ceased. Everyone looked at him, and the most disturbing look was Ivor’s. It wasn’t Ivor’s expression that chilled him. It was the depth of his eyes, blue, cold, staring out as if through a blizzard. Dom continued gazing at Ivor and feeling a tightness in his chest. “Those SEEC ships aren’t supposed to be here. Bakunin’s in disputed space. The Economic Community could claim we’re in their space, but so could the Indi Protectorate, same for the Union, the Centauri Alliance, even the Seven Worlds at a stretch.
“The Daedalus being here isn’t just threatening to Bakunin, but to four-fifths of the Confederacy. Anything aggressive might start an interstellar war.” A long silence filled the room. After a while it was broken by Random’s voice from one of the speakers. “See, Tjaele, I told you the shit was about to hit the fan.” Ivor stared back into Dom’s eyes, reflecting none of the recognition Dom felt. “You’re saying that those TEC ships are here to prevent the Daedalus from doing anything?” There’s no possible way Ivor could be …
