by Diane Duane
The office was windowless. Upper Director UU563 56VIW Sander Ranulfsson could have had a real window if he'd wanted one, but there had been times when a view would have distracted him from what he should have been doing. That was not something he could afford at the moment. It would have suggested a desire to be seen exercising his power: a weakness, a self-indulgence, likely to prove provocative to the numerous spy and non-spy underlings who were watching his every move out here so closely. That kind of suggestion was something that, right now, UU563 56VIW did not need. Later it would be useful and would put exactly the wrong idea into exactly the right heads. Then, in the fullness of time, heads would roll. But right now the suggestion of that particular weakness would be premature and would mean that some other bait would have to be substituted.
So for now Sander sat in the windowless office with its softly glowing white walls and glanced up at the far wall, momentarily showing a view down on the muddy, ruddy splendor of Hydrocus as it turned and shone in the light of the F2 sun Corrivale. The green secondary planet Grith climbed over the limb of its parent, making UU563 56VIW frown. Miserable mudball, Sander thought, eyeing those parts of Grith where he knew the trouble lay. It just went to show you how much could go wrong with even the purest vision of the future, how even the best laid plan could develop complications that no one had ever expected.
Like this last week, for example.
He glanced at the watch on his finger. Another hour until Himself called. Just as well. Sander very much wanted that extra time to get his thoughts in order. The day had been good for him so far, but this discussion was likely to be a little rugged, for matters had very much gotten out of hand. UU563 56VIW stopped himself from even thinking the name. Not that anyone around here was a mindwalker, of course not. "Rogue" loose-mind talents like that tended not to go with the VoidCorp mindset, or if they turned up they were winnowed out, encapsulated, or the contractees' contracts terminated in short order. But some of the new software that was being mooted in the less crowded division meetings, lately-well, it made you think. Or rather it made you stop thinking and start watching very closely what for a long time had been the last bastion of privacy. Well, UU563 56VIW thought as he leaned back in his chair, privacy's an overrated state, anyway. If you're in private, how can anyone check on you to see that the work's getting done?
The Mudball rotated serenely "beneath" him, a virtual view from one of the Company's communications satellites. It had been a pleasure for VoidCorp to see to it, years back, that this system finally got a stable platform for the eyes it wanted to have looking down on Grith and other worlds in the Corrivale system. This also gave the Company its all-important "overhead." You could do very little in this world without adequate intelligence.
Sander began to sweat just slightly, since that was most likely what would be the main concern of this morning's conversation with Himself.
Now it was true that WX994 and so on was probably no more cruel to UU563 56VIW than he was to anyone else with lower digits, better than acceptable performance, and a slow but steady motion upward in the corporate scheme of things. He would normally be watching Sander closely, as Sander in turn watched closely the S's and T's milling around below him in this particular arena of operations. And maybe "arena" was a better word than usual in this context. The only difference from the games of ancient times was that there was no cheering crowd, or rather, no one whose function was specifically to be entertained by the furiously enacted antagonisms taking place in the board rooms or out "in the field." There was some entertainment in watching the mighty above you fall, of course, or the inept below you being torn out of comfortable positions by their own underlings, but you dared not laugh too hard. Between one breath and another, someone might decide to make an example of you, since after all we were all supposed to be one big happy corporate Family. It simply did not do to betray too much division or antagonism where outsiders might just possibly see. Pull together or be pulled apart separately. It was a fact of life, and in some cases, of death.
Sometimes the death did not happen, and that could prove troublesome unless you had a quick excuse ready. Sander had been working on this one for the past several days with the intention of putting old WX off his tail for a while. Others had not been watching their own tails closely enough and were about to pay the price.
He looked down again at Grith as it circled Hydrocus and shook his head. The place had been a nuisance to the company for a hundred and fifty years or so now, since burgeoning powers like the Hatire and the StarMech Collective turned up in the Corrivale system and tried to take its advantages right out from under the Company's nose. As if mere prior claim was good enough reason to exploit something! There had been a more rugged time, when the CA 319 had come swaggering through the system, first of the great VoidCorp freebooters, and had bombed the Hatire settlement at Diamond Point on Grith back into the stone age which it had barely exited. Those were the days, Sander thought rather longingly. When you could roam the spaceways and take whatever you were strong enough to take. Life had settled down a bit since then. With the Concord starting to walk high and wide all over the Verge, with the great stardriver Lighthouse likely to turn up at any moment full of Concord Administrators with itchy gavels and Concord marines with itchy trigger fingers, and with heavy cruisers of who knew which stellar nation likely to pop in to see what they might extract from the local yokels, well, the time of freebooting was done. Now VoidCorp had to manage its corporate affairs in ways that did not attract quite so much attention.
It was hard to do this, though, when so many others played unfair, especially the company's own employees. For no sooner had the first of the Concord ships, Monitor, come back to this space a few years ago than the initial surveys found a bloody great colony of goggly, eight-eyed sesheyans living on Grith. Worse yet, they claimed that they'd always lived there, brought there by the alien race whose ruins were still to be found scattered through the moon's jungles.
Now this was patently nonsense, because the Compact had been negotiated with the sesheyans right back in 2274, and it said perfectly clearly that in exchange for the benefits of technology and the ability to leave their own planet, the sesheyans became VoidCorp Employees in perpetuity. You could not ignore that kind of language in a contract just because you were a mere thousand light-years away! It was ridiculous even thinking about it. But here was a colony of a hundred thousand sesheyans sitting on Grith and defying their rightful employers. And the Concord actually bought the ridiculous story about an alien transfer in the deeps of time. It should have been obvious to anyone with even the brains of a weren that the Grith-based sesheyans had somehow taken advantage of the chaos of the Second Galactic War to elope from their contracts and set up here as scions of a fake alien civilization. But Ari Madhra, the Concord Administrator ruling on the case, bought into the myth and declared the colony independent, an "indigenous race." It obviously wasn't an independent or unbiased judgment. Sander often wondered who had gotten to her and for how much. Someone should have outbid them, ideally the Company. The knowledge that they had not done so made UU563 56VIW think the unthinkable, that someone at a very high level had messed up.
But now Sander sat looking down at Grith and keeping himself busy with the company's business here, which was to find a way to bring these runaway sesheyans back into the fold. The company's long-term strategy indicated perhaps fifty to a hundred years of slow pressure exerted both on Grith itself and on the planets trading with it, wherever they might be, as well as more concrete pressure on the Concord, on Administrators old and new, and on the higher reaches of power in all stellar nations to rescind the old decision or to "re-evaluate" the situation with an eye to making a new one. Slow and steady would win this race. The point was to do nothing too precipitate, to let the sesheyans toughing it out here learn that conditions were much better for their brothers who were in the blessed state of Employment and that attempting to make a go of it by themselves in this system where
there was so much competition from other sources just wasn't going to work for them. Time would make the difference, and the Company had plenty of that.
In the meantime, Sander was allowed some leeway to implement short-term solutions that were estimated to have a better than two percent chance of increasing the speed of the fifty-to-a-hundred year plan without otherwise being of detriment to it. The Company saw no reasons why the non-Employee sesheyans on and near Grith shouldn't experience personally how difficult, how foolish it was, to attempt to take on a stellar nation single-handed, especially when they were in the wrong. The "free implementation" exercises also gave local Employees a chance to demonstrate their usefulness and resourcefulness to the Company.
Or for them to help shake themselves out if they're incompetent, UU563 56VIW thought. Well, that was one thing he definitely was not. This present business was sticky, but he would find his way through it and out the other side. And when he did-
"Sir," his assistant's voice came out of the air, "QI440 76RIC is waiting to speak to you." "Let him wait a few minutes," Sander said, almost in a growl, as he settled himself back in his chair. "He's lucky I don't have him sent to Iphus with nothing but a pail and shovel and let him find his own beach chair."
His assistant broke carrier without saying anything further. Wise, for Sander was in a foul mood about QI140. It would have been such a subtle piece of work, UU563 56VTW thought bitterly. Subtlety was somewhat out of fashion at VoidCorp, mostly for lack of anyone in the place who would recognize it if it ran up and bit him or her in the knee while wearing a T-slick reading FIRST GALACTIC CONCORD SUBTLETY IDENTIFICATION CHALLENGE. That the work probably would not have been recognized for what it was for a year or two didn't bother Sander overly. He had enough other projects in hand to keep him busy, and then he could have been pleasantly "taken by surprise" by the praise and advancement that would inevitably have followed. Instead he would have to duck and cover and pretend that none of it had ever happened, but that was unavoidable. Nothing was worse than failure, except for the identification of failure and the publicizing of it afterwards.
And why shouldn't he have a little? UU563 56VTW thought furiously. "All right," he said to the air, "put him through."
A human shape appeared in the air before him, standing slightly off the floor. Sander resolved one more time to have the engineering people up to do something about the projector's focus. He was tired of having to compensate for it. The hologram hovered there looking somewhat uncertain. The figure was in shadow, probably in a private booth, and his face was indistinct because of the lighting and its combination with the cryptography programming.
"Well?" UU563 56VIW said. "What haye you got to say for yourself?"
"The asset you were concerned about has been neutralized," said the man hanging in the air.
"Will you speak in language that other human beings can understand for a change?" Sander said. "For
'Corp's sake, what's all this hardware and software for if we can't communicate securely? What do you want to do, scribble it on a notepad and send it to me by some passing infotrader? Did you kill the asset, or what?"
"No," said the man, "but he's dead all the same." "If you didn't kill him, who did?" "He had an accident."
"I'm not going to tell you again, if you don't just say-"
"That's what I'm trying to tell you, he had an accident," the other man said, just briefly furious, or as much so as he dared to be. "Nothing prepared. Something to do with his e-suit."
"What?"
"His e-suit gave out on him. There was an accident aboard the ship, some kind of explosive decompression. He either suited up too fast and missed a gasket somewhere, or the e-suit just failed from lack of maintenance. They're still investigating it."
"Are they?" Sander said, sitting up a little straighter at that. "Any unusual attention to the matter from up above?"
"Nothing that our sources were able to identify."
"All right." Sander sat back. "Maybe it's for the best. Anyway, it might throw them off. It sure throws me off. Meanwhile, what about our others aboard? Any news from the lost lamb?" "Not a word. He took his discharge chit and walked, apparently." "Alone?"
"No. He's with a fraal." "What fraal?"
"No one knows. They're trying to work up some intelligence now."
Sander sat tight-lipped for the moment and considered the likelihood that intelligence was the one thing these people would never work up, no matter how much information they managed to find. "What's he doing? He leave the system yet?"
"Just sitting there at the moment. Probably in shock, they say."
"Huh. He would've been a lot more shocked if he'd kept going the way he was going," Sander said. "No matter. I want to make sure that he stays well away from you know where. In particular, I want to know the minute he leaves the system. One move toward Corrivale and I want to know all about it. It might seem harmless, might be just a transit, but I don't want anyone second-guessing me until he actually leaves Corrivale system for somewhere else. And even then I want him tagged and trailed for a good long time, him and his fraal both. Who is that fraal? Has someone sent him help we don't know about?" "They're working on it."
Sander wanted to growl again, but restrained himself. "There's only one other thing I want from you, and probably I'm not going to get it. Did he actually find out anything useful for us?"
"One thing. Just one. The last thing we sent him for. The first two were no-shows."
"One out of three," Sander said reflectively. "Not that bad for a throwaway, I guess. Did he make anything of it? Did he say anything to anyone?"
"Not that we were able to discover. We got the trial transcripts at the same time everyone else did. Nothing in them made any sense in terms of-"
"Don't say it," said UU563 56VIW hurriedly. "That far, not even I trust the encryption. Well, good. Make sure the poor fool gets out of the system and stays out. These minimal assets," Sander said, "you have to wonder why we acquire them. Still, when the recruitment's stale, or as a throwaway . . ." He shrugged. "All right. Go on, go back to work. Where are they posting you next?" "The scuttlebutt says Aegis. We have to go pick up some other hotshot Administrator."
"Yeah, well, be more careful with this one." UU563 56VIW chuckled, more to himself than to the other, and broke the connection.
He leaned back again and sighed. It was very sad in its own way. Subtlety, wearing its T-slick and doing a little dance, was fast retreating into the wilderness. Oh well. Six months' work, what's that? I'll think of something else. And not depend on them this time.
Meanwhile ... He waved his hand over the desk to see what it would list and said to the air, "Anything new for me?"
"Those files you asked for."
"All right, bring them in. And get QI140's pay file sorted out too. I suppose he's due the usual pittance for that report."
A few seconds later his assistant came in with a pile of carts and a much smaller one, a 3D crystal "chip" of the kind that the Company used for nondenominational payoffs. UU563 56VIW picked the chip up, stuck his thumbnail in it, read out the past payment codes and amounts and keyed one new one in. Then he tossed the chip back at the assistant.
"You still here?" he said, for now that the moderately enjoyable duty had been taken care of, already the tension was beginning to build toward the one that would not be so enjoyable. "Don't just stand there vaguing out on me like some damned Inseer."
His assistant looked shocked. Sander let her. Officially these days VoidCorp denied the very existence of the treacherous rogue division that had declared its independence and somehow even managed to get itself instated as a stellar nation. After the colossal crime of crashing the VoidCorp main Grids and practically-Sander stopped himself. Too much thinking about what might have happened in that terrible hour was potentially dangerous, possibly even heretical. Never mind. The Corporation had survived, but their enemy still lurked out in the dark of space, busying itself with cyberwarfare that was still
unfinished, leaping from ambush every now and then to foil some important VoidCorp strategy, or even to do something as petty as kill an executive or two. Their pettiness itself betrayed them. They had no grasp of the importance of the great Company goal, but instead went wittering off about independence and the search for ultimate knowledge and other mystical blather. It was laughable. They didn't have the vaguest idea of what real freedom was. ''Service is perfect freedom," one of the ancient sages had said. No matter that he hadn't worked for the Company and probably hadn't even known what he meant. He was right.
"Never mind that," UU563 56VIW said. "Just go sort out QI140's payoff account, and then don't disturb me for an hour."
She went, ducking deferentially to him as she closed the door.
Sander sighed and sat back again, looking up just briefly at the Mudball and the green jewel sailing around it. A slow enough orbit, once every fourteen days. Sometimes the thought occurred to him that one could interfere with that orbit. There were newish technologies that one might exploit. Of course, there was the problem of the Hatire who had been recolonizing the planet. Busybodies. What business had the StarMechs selling them that colonization contract in the first place, anyway? And the various other rogue humans scattered around the place. No. It was an inelegant solution. Better not to waste the time thinking about it.
But what a mess local space and further space both had become. All the stellar nations interleaving and interweaving, all sticking little tendrils of influence into one another's territory. It was all very disorganized and untidy. They needed someone to tidy it up for them.
If the Company got its way, it would eventually see to that tidying, no matter what the other nations might have to say about it. That day would be worth waiting for.
Sander sighed and picked up the other reports, knowing what he would see there before he even looked, the monthly output numbers for Iphus Mining Division and the usual report from RC094 29KIN Faren Reaves. Like its author, the report was unimaginative stuff but reliable. Nothing there was of real interest. But right now Sander's-
