S andrew swann hostile.., p.1
S. Andrew Swann - Hostile Takeover 01, page 1
Profiteer
[Hostile Takeover 01]
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
Klaus Dacham—Colonel, TEC. In command of the Blood-Tide and Operation Rasputin.
Mary Hougland—Corporal, Occisis marines. Attached to the Blood-Tide.
Eric Murphy—Second Lieutenant, Occisis marines. Attached to the Blood-Tide.
Kathy Shane—Captain, Occisis marines. Attached to the Blood-Tide.
Webster—Alias used by informant for Col. Dacham.
BAKUNIN
Flower—A birdlike alien. Expert on the Confederacy Military.
Cy Helmsman—VP in charge of operations for Godwin Arms and Armaments.
Ivor Jorgenson—Pilot and smuggler.
Johann Levy—Demolition expert and proprietor of Bolshevik Books.
Tjaele Mosasa—Electronics expert and proprietor of Mosasa Salvage.
Dominic Magnus—Ex-Colonel, TEC. Ex gunrunner. CEO of Godwin Arms and Armaments.
Kari Tetsami—Freelance hacker and data thief.
Random Walk—An artificial intelligence device. Mosasa’s “partner.” Mariah Zanzibar—Chief of security for Godwin Arms and Armaments.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE: Politics as Usual
1: Secret Agenda
2: Freedom Fighters
PART ONE: Leveraged Buyout
3: The Military-Industrial Complex
4: Industrial Espionage
5: The Underground Economy
6: Coup d’État
7: Criminal Justice
8: Mergers
9: Insurance Fraud
10: High-Risk Investments
11: Depreciation
PART TWO: Fellow Travelers
12: Book Value
13: War Crimes
14: Executive Session
15: Silent Partners
16: Golden Parachute
17: Loyal Opposition
18: Glass Ceilings
19: Leaks
20: Executive Action
21: Foreign Relations
22: Family Values
23: Controlling Interest
24: Press Conference
25: Conflict of Interest
PART THREE: Covert Action
26: Media Exposure
27: Crossing the Rubicon
28: Loopholes
29: Securities Exchange
30: Capital Expenditures
31: Contingency Plans
32: Liquid Assets
33: Counterinsurgency
34: Loose Cannon
35: Zero-Sum Game
36: Extreme Prejudice
37: Market Crash
EPILOGUE: Economic Indicators
38: Closing Costs
39: Propaganda Victory
40: Plausible Denial
APPENDIX A: Worlds
PROLOGUE
Politics as Usual
“In politics, as in high finance, duplicity is regarded as a virtue.”
—Mikhail A. Bakunin
(1814-1876)
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CHAPTER ONE
Secret Agenda
“Foreign policy is dictated by powerful men’s prejudices.”
— The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.”
—Thomas Hobbes
(1588-1679)
For a hundred million years the two-kilometer-long Face had stared impassively up at the Martian sky. Dimitri Olmanov had only been visiting it regularly for the past century.
The first time he had seen it, Dimitri had needed a pressure suit and the sky had burned a hostile red. Today he survived wearing only a heavy parka. Today his breath fogged beneath an infinity of crystal blue that was only slightly tinted by clouds of engineered microorganisms.
His doctor would curse him for not using a respirator. Dimitri, he’d say, your new heart has quite enough trouble with the stress of your job. Don’t burden it with a too-thin atmosphere.
His general staff would object to him being out in the open like this—even with the omnipresent Ambrose. Too much risk in his job without inviting assassins.
The Confed publicists wouldn’t like to have it public knowledge that Dimitri— the Dimitri—had a sentimental streak. They made much of the mythical Iron Man at the head of the TEC.
He could ignore them with impunity.
The Face, Dimitri could not ignore.
He was the most powerful human being in the Confederacy. He needed to remind himself that there were things bigger than he was.
Dimitri turned to look at his bodyguard-companion. Ambrose appeared unmoved by the alien structure filling a third of their horizon. But, then, he never was. Ambrose stood at parade rest, wearing less covering than Dimitri did, breath hardly fogging the Martian air. Ambrose was two and a half meters tall, hairless and tan, and stared out at the world from behind black irises that nearly swallowed his pupils.
“Ever wonder why they died out?” Dimitri swung his cane in the general direction of the dome that supposedly protected the ancient artifact from the oxygenating atmosphere.
“No, sir.” Ambrose shook his head.
Sometimes Dimitri wondered how much cognition really went on behind Ambrose’s dark eyes. Most of Ambrose was construct. Only a quarter of his original brain was left. Ambrose’s conversation had more to do with the computer programs that maintained the other three-quarters of his mind. Despite the brain damage, Ambrose was loyal, somewhat intelligent, efficient, and perfectly programmable—all without violating the Confederacy’s taboos on AIs or genetic engineering.
But Ambrose would never be a great conversationalist.
Dimitri hobbled forward on his cane. “Was it a natural flaw? Some inherent weakness?”
“I wouldn’t know, sir.”
“They achieved so much …”
The Face was one of only a handful of remnants of a civilization that flourished and died before any of the known intelligent races achieved sentience. Humanity had originally called them Martians, believing the Face to be the product of a dead Martian race—
That was before humans had discovered a carved starmap that led them to Dolbri. Dolbri was an inhabitable planet that absolutely could not have evolved naturally. It was only the first example of extraterrestrial terraforming. Mars, it seemed, was an example of a similar effort.
However, Mars—unlike Dolbri—had stalled halfway. The biosphere never took, the atmosphere thinned, and the water froze or evaporated.
It seemed that the ancient Dolbrians had died out at their zenith, and no one could figure out why.
“Is there a problem, sir?”
Dimitri realized he had trailed off in mid-sentence. “No, no.” I’m just thinking, Ambrose.
Not having a stroke. “It’s just the Dolbrians reached such a point—may have been gods compared to us—and still destroyed themselves. What chance have we got?”
“Do you know that, sir?”
Dimitri smiled bitterly. “It’s the nature of thinking animals to create Evil. And Evil is what destroys us.”
Ambrose stared at him.
“You should realize that, Ambrose,” Dimitri said. “We wade through it every day. Or I do.
One hundred and sixty years of humanity’s collective Evil. “That’s what I am.”
“If you say so, sir.”
“Someday you may have to disagree with me, Ambrose.” Dimitri bent down and pulled a strand of green-webbed demongrass from the dirt. It came reluctantly, trailing chunks of partially-dissolved rock and some of the engineered symbiotes that supported its simple ecosystem. He rolled the strand between his fingers, crushing tiny white insects. “What would you do if I tried to kill myself?”
A pained look crossed Ambrose’s face. “Sir—”
“That would give you some problems. You’d have to leapfrog that programming of yours and use whatever judgment you have left.”
“Don’t.” Ambrose seemed to have trouble talking.
Dimitri let the strand tumble from his fingers. “Don’t worry. I’m cursed with the knowledge of what a succession battle would do to this Confederacy I’m supposed to protect. I will not allow myself to die.” Not until I know that my replacement isn’t going to be worse than myself.
The look of pain on Ambrose’s face seemed to fade somewhat.
“The nature of the beast. The head executive is going to be a monster. But the monster has to have a scrap of a soul.”
Ambrose had f
“Perhaps, sir.”
Dimitri sighed and started walking back to the aircar. He had seen enough of the Face.
“Do you remember Helen, Ambrose?”
“No, sir.”
“You wouldn’t. It isn’t relevant to you, is it? You don’t retain anything that isn’t relevant, do you?”
“No, sir.”
“Helen was before your time, anyway. When I knew her personally, that is. I dealt with her fifteen years ago, and now I’m going to have to deal with her twins.”
“Sir?”
They reached the aircar and Dimitri leaned on the hood. He decided that he probably should have brought a respirator. “The propagation of Evil, Ambrose. Sins of the fathers and so on—” Dimitri paused and caught his breath. In a few seconds he was racked with painful coughs that made him dizzy.
Ambrose was at his side before Dimitri could say, “Back!” He warded Ambrose off with his cane. “I’m fine! No doctors this week. They’ll only replace another organ.”
“Are you sure, sir?”
Dimitri nodded, even though his head was spinning. The aircar door was open and Dimitri slipped inside. Ambrose took the driver’s seat and the door closed. Dimitri felt better when the car repressurized.
He looked out the window at the Face and realized that it was probably the last time he would see it. Whether he managed to create a successor or not, his doctors could keep him alive for only so much longer.
Dimitri didn’t want to live any longer. He had lived too long already.
He had lived through the rise and fall of the Terran Council and the forced depopulation of the Earth. He had seen the wormhole network superseded by the first tach-drive starships and the subsequent explosion of mankind across the sky. Humans had founded colonies on fifty separate worlds since his birth, most of them in the last century. In his lifetime the Martian atmosphere had been made breathable and the majority of mankind had moved to the stars.
It was too much history for one man.
He was the head executive of the Terran Executive Command, the secret police, army, and enforcement arm of the eighty-three planet Confederacy. Dimitri and the TEC represented the only centralized authority over all of those eighty-three planets. Eighty-three independent governments that would gladly tear the Confederacy apart if it weren’t for the thin diplomatic glue holding the whole thing together.
Sometimes it was nearly too much to bear.
And, speaking of diplomatic glue.
“Let’s go, Ambrose. We have a meeting.” As the vehicle lifted off, Dimitri added,
“Someday you’ll make me late for my own funeral.”
Far away from Dimitri’s aircar, in a Martian rock formation that could have been a Dolbrian artifact, or simply a weathered crest of rock, a lone figure lowered his binoculars. The man knew it was a risk to be this close to Dimitri, especially with that creature, Ambrose, hanging around.
In fact, he was just remembering how much of a risk it was. He had almost forgotten about Dimitri’s pet golem.
Not forgot, just another thing I didn’t want to remember. The man looked at the dull chrome cybernetic hand at the end of his right arm. The hand was scarred and pitted by years of use, and he walked on a leg that was similarly tarnished. The old man has a habit of making people over in his own image.
He backed down the rock, away from Dimitri’s aircar. He was risking too much. Dimitri, the Confederacy’s chief executive, was a white-hot nova of unwanted attention.
Once he was out of view of Dimitri’s aircar, he put the optical binoculars back into their case.
He stayed immobile past the point where Dimitri’s car should have disappeared beyond the Martian horizon. He maintained as low a profile as possible. It helped that they weren’t looking for him.
No one was looking for him.
No one knew he existed.
He had spent nine years making sure that he had as little impact on the world around him as possible. It was very necessary that no one knew he was here. He was an anomaly, a temporal hiccup that could destabilize the events he was here to correct.
So much could be disrupted if he was discovered, if his crystalline caverns were discovered—and still, despite the need for caution, despite his fabricated—and all-too-real—nonexistence, he still made his pilgrimages to see the Face. He had braved this hive of academics many times over the past nine years, just to get a good look at the alien structure.
The Face reminded him of home.
He now knew the other reason he’d done it.
He had hoped to see Dimitri.
He had known about the old man’s obsession with the Dolbrians and the Face. Deep down, despite his efforts to remain unobserved, he had wanted to look upon the man who was responsible for everything. He wanted to see his former commander, a man he had respected at one time.
Now, at the Face this last time, he’d finally seen Dimitri as well. This close to exile’s end, it had been an unexpected shock.
And when he had finally seen Dimitri standing on the Cydonia plain, all he could think of was how easy it would be to kill the old man.
Even after nine years of self-imposed isolation, his hatred of the man who would give the orders was un-dimmed. Worse. If his sacrifice was to mean anything, he had to let that old man give the orders. To have a chance of saving anything, he had to wait until the orders had been given, wait until they had nearly been carried out.
Wait until it was nearly over.
But he had waited nine years; he could wait four more months.
At least, very soon, he could ship himself to Earth without changing anything. He had always wanted to see Earth.
After a long pause, when Dimitri and Ambrose were long gone, he started the long walk back to his camp, a crystal structure as impressive in its own way as the ancient polyceram of the Face. Unlike the Face, it was only nine years old and hidden underground.
Dimitri’s meeting was a dozen kilometers away from the Face, in one of the abandoned academic stations clustered around the alien structures known as the City. The station was buried at the root of one of the ten-kilometer-high atmosphere towers, one of the more spectacular artifacts of the human terraforming effort. The atmosphere towers, built by intelligent self-replicating machines back when mankind felt safe using such things, dotted Mars like gigantic albino dandelions.
Dimitri liked thinking of the Terran Executive Command meeting under the roots of a weed. The metaphor gave one a sense of place in the universe.
The meeting room itself, chosen by Dimitri, was twenty meters underground. He had chosen it as much for security—all the TEC-commandeered structures on Mars were secure, by definition—as for his own convenience. Dimitri hadn’t wanted to alter his trip to Mars, and it was easier to have the TEC meeting on Cydonia than it was to reschedule it.
Such was bureaucracy.
Dimitri was the last one to arrive. The five delegates were already seated at the table, waiting for him. Five delegates, two distinct sides. Dimitri went through the pro forma greetings, shaking hands and nodding.
On one side of the table were Pearce Adams for the Alpha Centauri Alliance and Kalin Green for the Sirius-Eridani Economic Community. The Centauri and Sirius arms almost always acted together in Confed policy matters. Their capital planets of Occisis and Cynos were nearly as rich and central as Terra herself.
On the other side of the table were Robert Kaunda, Sim Vashniya, and Francesca Hernandez. Kaunda represented the smallest arm of the Confederacy, the Union of Independent Worlds. Vashniya represented the largest, the Protectorate of Epsilon Indi. Hernandez represented the insular Seven Worlds and was the first delegate to appear from that arm of the Confederacy in at least two decades.
Hernandez also wasn’t human.
Dimitri had to hold his breath when he held his hand out to her. She was a bipedal feline creature who stood taller than any human in the room. Her cat-face was totally unreadable.
The Confederacy would’ve liked to forget the past that the worlds beyond Tau Ceti represented. No one liked to think that humans once played around with genetics, creating intelligent creatures.
