by Peter Grant
Caitlin Ross wiped her lips delicately with her napkin, and sighed in repletion. “That may be the best tournedos de boeuf I’ve ever tasted. The truffles and paté seasoned the meat to perfection.”
“Our planet may not be a major center of interplanetary cuisine, but Marano does its best to entertain our valued clients,” her host assured her, ogling her openly.
She restrained a sudden impulse to slap his leering face in public. “I’m sure it weakens your customers’ negotiating ability, if they’re too busy digesting to think straight.”
Guido Gaspari guffawed. “I fear you have seen through my nefarious plot. However, I assure you, our business will be as fulfilling to your needs as the food was to your appetite.” He waved to a waiter, who cleared the table, served coffee, then left them in peace.
Ross waited until they were alone once more. “Signor Gaspari, you’re going to have to sharpen your pencil. You quoted us three million per. You know very well that’s far above market prices. We can get equivalent units from Medusa for one-point-eight million.”
“Not at all! Their hardware is technically inferior, far behind ours. If you buy their mines, you’ll never be sure whether or not they’ll work.”
“That’s not what other customers of theirs have said. My principals have undertaken a good deal of research into available alternatives. Your products are well thought of, and admittedly a little – a little – more advanced than Medusa’s, but no more so than those from several other planets.”
“Ah… well, there is the matter of confidentiality, and lack of formalities. We can be rather more discreet than other vendors, thanks to our more relaxed approach to such things.”
“Yes, but since my principals can offer a valid, verifiable end user certificate, that’s not of such great importance as it might otherwise be. We value confidentiality, but we want value for our money, too.”
“But your order is not very large. Only fifty nuclear space mines? Our customers usually order them in multiples of a hundred at a time.”
We’d be ordering only a dozen, if we thought we could get away with it, she thought, but no planet or serious buyer would ever order so few. We’ve got to make this look convincing. “We’ll do the same in future, if we’re satisfied with what we get,” she temporized. “This first order is in the nature of a test. My principals will employ the mines as point defense for a single installation. If they prove satisfactory after six months to a year, including testing their stealth characteristics and their ability to adopt a randomly changing pattern, to prevent potential intruders from pinpointing them, you can expect a larger order. If they don’t prove satisfactory, then that order will go elsewhere.”
“I see.” The arms dealer’s face sobered. He was all business now. “I have overheads of my own, which I must cover, but I understand the need for flexibility in a situation like this. Shall we say two-point-five million apiece for the first order? That’s the best I can do for so small a quantity.”
“I don’t think you were listening to me, Signor Gaspari. You know what we will have to pay elsewhere.”
“But you want them right away, without delay. That means I must draw them from stocks manufactured to meet other orders, which will then have to be made up in a hurry. There is naturally a premium for immediate availability.”
I’m willing to bet you have no other orders, she thought cynically to herself. You’re probably getting them from Marano government stocks. “Perhaps you have a point. Shall we say two million apiece?”
Gaspari looked despairingly up at the ceiling, as if pleading with his guardian angel to provide succor. “You are trying to ruin me! I could not possibly supply them at so low a price. Two-point-four million!”
They went back and forth and around and around for ten minutes. At last he sighed. “Very well. Two-point-two million, payable in cash. Half in advance, the balance as soon as they are loaded aboard your ship.”
“Agreed. The Handelsbank of Neue Helvetica has a branch right here on the space station, to expedite transactions such as ours. I’ll go there with you tomorrow morning, and have them pay you the first half of the price. After that, we’ll supervise the loading of the mines. As soon as they’re all aboard and my technical specialist has certified that they’re in order, you and I will return to the bank, and I’ll have them pay you the balance. I have the end user certificate with me, of course.”
“Very well.” Gaspari rose from the table, and pulled back her chair as she stood. “You are a tough negotiator. It has been interesting doing business with you. I hope and trust there will be more orders to follow.”
“That depends on how well your mines perform, Signor. If they do, we shall probably see each other again.”
“I shall look forward to it.”
ROUSAY
“I wish Caitlin was here to brief you, Captain,” Lachlan said with a frown. “Intelligence is her bailiwick, not mine.”
“Unfortunately, I had to send her on another very important mission, so we had to rope you in. What have you got for me? Start with the theft of the satellites.”
“All right. Our ship found the monitoring station where you’d suspected, on one of Four’s moons. They downloaded a copy of the memory module, leaving the original intact. I ran it through Caitlin’s analyzer. It shows that there are other sensors on moons around other planets, keeping an eye on the system and feeding back their information to the monitoring station. It’s sending everything it gathers to a communications satellite outside the system boundary. I’m guessing NOE sends a ship now and then to download everything from the satellite. It’ll tell them who’s been in the system, and roughly where they’ve gone while they were there.”
“Do we know where that satellite is?”
“Not exactly, Captain. We know its bearing from the monitoring station, but it’s over a billion kilometers out. It’s probably also stealthy, because we couldn’t pick it up on radar.”
“All right. So, the monitoring station will have reported our ship’s visit?”
“Yes.”
“I expected that. What about sensors in the asteroid belts?”
“There’s something odd going on there, Captain. The NOE told you they don’t have any sensors or satellites out there; but our ship picked up small gravitic drive signatures and other emissions from three places in Mycenae Primus’ asteroid belt. It sent cutters to investigate all three. In each area, it found several dozen prospector robots. They were bigger than usual, independent units with gravitic drives, able to move from asteroid to asteroid under their own power. They appear to be targeting S-type and M-type asteroids – the kind that contain a lot of metal – and analyzing them in detail. They haven’t marked many of them for recovery; just a few dozen in each area. They’ve deployed beacons on them, which can be activated by signal.”
“Do we know the signal?”
“The ship brought some of the beacons aboard from each field, and read off their chips before putting them back in place. We know how to make them respond if we want to.”
“Good. Do we know what it is about those asteroids that makes them worth marking?”
“They were all on the small side, and a quick gravitometer analysis showed them to be extremely dense. I reckon NOE is looking to raise as much money as it can, as quickly as it can, to fund its operations. If I were in their shoes, I’d be looking for asteroids rich in gold and platinum-group metals, and perhaps rare earth elements. At a guess, that’s what these are.”
“You make sense,” Cochrane said thoughtfully. “I recall reading about one asteroid in the Mannerheim system. It was only about a thousand tons of rock and ore, but it yielded more than four tons of gold and over seven tons of platinum-group metals. Its value to the finder, after refining fees and all the rest, was almost ninety million Lancastrian Commonwealth credits.”
“Sounds about right. He’ll have gotten a quarter of its value as a free-lancer. The refinery would take a quarter share, the planet
owning the asteroid belt would take a quarter, and the rest would go to the company that grubstaked him. That’s the way most independent asteroid miners work.”
“So, he lost three-quarters of its value, but still made a small fortune? I must remember that. How many asteroids had been marked with beacons, and how big were they?”
“The ship we sent located a total of ninety-seven at the time of its visit. There may be a few more by now. They’re all small, five hundred to five thousand tons. That makes sense, of course; they’d be more easily maneuvered for capture. Bigger ones are probably out there, but they’ll need space tugs to lay hold of them. Smaller ones can be towed in by a cutter, or loaded into a cargo shuttle; and they’ll fit into a ship’s holds, where a big one might not.”
“I see. Will NOE’s sensors have detected our ship looking around the asteroid belt?”
“I don’t know, Captain, but I’ll be surprised if at least some gravitic drive signature radiation wasn’t picked up and logged. However, with those satellites gone, their sensors may not have been able to relay that to the monitoring station. There’s another question, too. Were those robotic prospectors NOE’s at all, or were they put there by some other outfit?”
“That’s a very good question, particularly because NOE’s data didn’t mention those areas.”
“That doesn’t mean they weren’t NOE’s. They may have decided that what they’d found there was so valuable, they didn’t want anyone knowing about it – not even you.”
“That might be so, even though it would make our security job more difficult. All right, let me think about that. What about the ship that stole those satellites? What records did the monitoring station have of it?”
“It didn’t appear on sensors until after the satellites had been loaded aboard a cargo shuttle. It must have come in without using its gravitic drive at all, from a long way outside the system, to avoid being detected.”
“That’s a common tactic. Go on.”
“The shuttle went back to the ship and docked; then the ship activated her drive and headed straight for the system boundary at max cruise. There are two interesting things about that. First, her gravitic drive signature was disguised using a frequency modulator. I’ve only heard of warships, pirates or smugglers using them. Because of that, we can’t read her signature well enough to identify her. Second, she reached a much higher cruise speed than the average freighter. They move at point-zero-eight to point-one Cee. She hit point two Cee on her way to the system boundary.”
“A fast freighter could reach that speed and more, but she wouldn’t normally be fitted with a frequency modulator. That makes the most likely suspect a military auxiliary; a depot ship, or a repair vessel, or something like it. They’re big and heavy, but built to travel faster than merchant vessels of the same size, to keep up with the warships they’re supporting. What was her course?”
“That’s another interesting thing, Captain. It was on a direct line for Callanish.”
Cochrane’s eyebrows shot up. “Callanish? What the hell?”
“I thought that, too, but then I did some checking. Callanish’s System Patrol Service operates a repair ship, called the Colomb. It’s three hundred thousand tons or thereabouts. It was built a century ago for the Lancastrian Commonwealth Fleet. They sold it fifty-odd years ago, because it had grown too small for their needs. It’s passed through several owners and planets since then. It’s being refurbished and modernized right now. The hull’s still in good shape, of course; after all, there’s nothing in space to wear it out. They’ll replace or upgrade her systems, workshops and accommodation. She has the usual auxiliary warship systems, including a more powerful gravitic drive to reach higher speeds, and an electronic warfare suite. That can be used to disguise her gravitic drive signature, which would fit what the monitoring station saw in Mycenae.”
“Why does Callanish need a ship like that?”
“They use her to maintain their patrol craft – they operate a squadron of them, all old boats – plus the asteroid mining ships in their system. That’s another thing, Captain. An asteroid mining consortium based in Callanish is contesting NOE’s claim to Mycenae. They’ve lodged a formal protest at the United Planets, saying they were there first. They’ve offered no evidence to prove that, and it’s my professional opinion that they’re lying. They probably want NOE to pay them to go away. NOE isn’t about to do that, of course, or they’d have more claimants coming out of the woodwork, all demanding money.
“If the Callanish people wanted to add to NOE’s worries, and make a stronger case to be bought off, wouldn’t it make sense for them to steal those satellites? I reckon they have enough influence with Callanish’s government that they could borrow Colomb to do that. She’s the only interstellar vessel operated by its System Patrol Service, and she’s got all the engineering facilities she’d need to analyze the satellites on the way home. What’s more, they could use her warship-grade sensors and systems to get a closer look at parts of the Mycenae system on her way in and out. If they wanted to locate a few spots to send their own prospectors, to skim off the cream before NOE gets its rights finalized and moves in, that would be a good way to start.”
“That makes sense. It may affect our plans to do the same thing.”
“That’s what I thought, Captain.”
“When do you think the Callanish people might send in their own prospectors?”
“I don’t know. They aren’t there yet – at least, when our ship visited there a few weeks ago, there were no ship gravitic drive signatures or other emissions anywhere in the system. I think they still don’t know where to look. That may be one of the reasons they wanted those satellites; to learn what NOE had found, so they could steal as much as they could before NOE could exploit it. From what NOE told you, the satellites scrubbed their memory modules every day, as soon as they’d uploaded their data to the monitoring station. I’m guessing the Callanish consortium didn’t learn much from them. I reckon they’ll either have to mount their own survey mission, like we’re doing, or plan to steal the next batch of satellites as soon as they’re installed. While they’re doing that, they’ll probably steal the monitoring station as well, now they know it’s there, and download its accumulated data. If I were in their shoes, that would be the simplest and cheapest way to do it.”
“How long will Colomb be in refit?”
“I don’t know, Captain, but I presume at least three or four more months. Even with robotic shipyard construction equipment, and new systems lined up ready to install, you can only work so fast on a complete refurbishment like that.” He gave a short laugh. “As a matter of fact, it won’t surprise me if the Callanish consortium is paying for her modernization. They’ll be the most likely candidates to use her, after all, and I doubt the government there has enough money to pay for an expensive upgrade like that. It’ll be a lot cheaper for the consortium to upgrade her than to buy a new repair ship of their own.”
Cochrane nodded. “So, the new satellites will be operational just as Colomb returns to service. I think… no, we’ll have to see how other elements of our operations work out. If they do, we might be able to… never mind.”
Lachlan grinned. “Planning a nasty surprise for them, Captain?”
“Something like that.”
“I look forward to it. Oh – one more thing. I heard just yesterday that the Callanish consortium has bought two brand-new fast freighters from a shipyard in Goheung. It was building them for another customer that defaulted on payment. The consortium has already paid the arrears, plus the balance owed, by selling some sort of spacecraft at Medusa – details weren’t provided. They’ll send passage crews to take delivery of the ships in a few months.”
“What do you know about the ships?”
“They’re a million gross register tons capacity, and can cruise at point two five Cee, about three times as fast as most ships their size. That means their turnaround at planetary stops can be cut in half, or even less.
They can also hyper-jump three times in one day, unlike most merchant ships that are limited to twice a day, so they can cover interstellar distances that much faster.”
“What sort of passage crew will Callanish send to collect a ship like that?”
“A couple of dozen spacers and engineering hands, plus four or five officers – enough to stand three watches for the delivery trip. They don’t need enough to handle cargo as well.”
“How will the crews get to Goheung? What’s the usual routing from Callanish?”
“They’ll take the weekly ferry from Callanish to New Stornoway, the main planet of the New Hebrides Cluster. From there, they’ll take the monthly freight run to Durres. The ship carries a personnel pod for passengers, usually spacers or asteroid miners. There’s regular service from Durres to Goheung, part of a circular route around a dozen planets.”
“I see. Please keep a weather eye on that consortium from now on, as closely as you can. In particular, I want to know when they plan to send their passage crews, and their routing, as far in advance as you can manage it. Oh – one more thing. I need you to dry-lease a freighter for me, about half a million tons capacity. She should not have visited the New Orkney Cluster before, so no-one here will be familiar with her beacon or gravitic drive signature, and there must be no traceable connection between her and us. I want her ready within thirty days, if possible. I’ll have a crew for her by then, or soon afterwards. We’ll need her for at least six months, with her lease renewable for another three to six months if necessary. She should have two cargo shuttles, plus her normal complement of cutters.”
“That’ll need a deposit of about half a million francs, plus quarterly payments, Captain.”
“I’ll cut you a bank draft as soon as you give me the name of the ship’s brokers.”
As Lachlan watched the Captain leave the room, he pondered, What’s going on in that shrewd, sly head of yours? I don’t know whether it’s always safe to be around you, Captain, but it’s sure as hell interesting!
