The Stones of Silence_Cochrane's Company_Book One

by Peter Grant

  Cousins relaxed, visibly relieved. “Thank you, sir.”

  “As for the mines, I had an interesting visit to Marano. I went to the same brokerage we’d used before, but refused to deal with the man who’d given Caitlin a hard time – and I told them why. He had a fatal car accident within twenty-four hours. I think, when it comes to multi-million-franc repeat orders, they don’t like people who don’t stay focused on the money.”

  Cousins whistled softly. “Looks that way. Did they do anything else to apologize?”

  “Yes, they did. They gave me a hundred and fifty warheads for the price of a hundred. That’ll allow Sue to rebuild the mines she dismantled, and upgrade the rest of the missiles she’s restored to working order. I also bought another fifty mines, since they offered them at a very good price to ‘rebuild trust’, as they put it. Fortunately, the second payment from Barjah had come through, to add to NOE’s three hundred million, so I could afford them. You’ll be able to deploy some around Mycenae Primus Four, as well as in the asteroid belt.”

  “That’s great, sir! When are you delivering the next shipment of asteroids?”

  “Within the week. We badly need the money to refill our bank account. I think I’ll take one of those prospector robots with me. The people at Barjah may be able to identify it. Asteroid mining is their business, after all.”

  “Good idea, sir.”

  “I’ll leave you in charge here, to load the next two patrol craft as soon as they’re refurbished, and help Sue transfer equipment and supplies from Colomb to the New Westray depot ship. The sooner that’s finished, the better, because we need to send Colomb to Medusa in part trade for our own repair ship.”

  “I’m surprised you haven’t scrapped the depot ship yet, sir.”

  “We don’t have enough storage space here yet, so we’re using her as an orbital warehouse until our new freighters get here. I transferred most of the asteroids to her as well, so that I could take the leased freighter to Marano, and now to Barjah. Once our new freighters are up and running, we’ll return the leased one and scrap the depot ship.”

  Cochrane stretched wearily. “Sue’s in transports of delight over Colomb’s equipment. Apparently there are very high-end tool sets for space mechanics and electronics techs, with every conceivable piece of equipment they could need, all of it manufactured to the highest possible standards. They sell for well into six figures apiece. Colomb had ten of each, installed as part of her refurbishment. Sue’s ripped them all out, and a bunch of other gear besides, and plans to put them on our own repair ship when it gets here. It’ll be empty, of course, and almost twice the size of Colomb, so it’ll have room for all the depot ship’s equipment as well as Colomb’s. She reckons it’ll take her six months to a year to set it up properly, even with the shipyard’s help.”

  “I bet she’s enjoying every moment of it, sir, even while she’s bitching like mad at all the work you’re loading on her back.”

  “I see you know her.”

  “Not that well, sir, but I know gearheads!” They grinned at each other. “If I may, sir, I have another suggestion.”

  “Of course you may. You’re my second-in-command, after all. What is it?”

  “Well, sir, you’ve mentioned that a lot of planets that really need space security, can’t afford to pay for it. If we get bigger and better warships, as you hope to do in due course, we’re going to have to charge a very high fee to pay for them and cover their operating expenses. On the other hand, if we offer some low-end patrol craft as well, which may be all a lot of planets can afford to hire, we won’t be able to charge enough for their services to cover our overall costs.

  “It occurred to me, sir; what if we charge mostly in asteroids, rather than in cash? We can ask for enough money to cover our immediate expenses. On top of that, in return for a lower up-front fee, clients would give us the right to cherry-pick some asteroids out of their asteroid belt. If we can figure out the algorithm those Cyrillic bots are using, we can program our own prospector robots to pick out high-grade asteroids very quickly, assuming they’re there. In time, we might even be able to afford our own refinery ship to process them, so we can keep all the proceeds instead of sharing them. We’ll make enough money to more than compensate for lower cash fees.”

  “That’s an almost indecently brilliant suggestion,” Cochrane said slowly. “I can see a number of potential problems, but none that can’t be dealt with. The biggest will be existing contracts. A lot of planets have sold exclusive rights to one or more companies to exploit their asteroid belts. They won’t like it if we take some of the best asteroids out from under their noses. On the other hand, they need security to operate, so they’ll understand the need to pay for it. Let’s bounce this idea around some more, just between the two of us. If we can refine it, and make it workable, you might just have given us a business model for the long term. Well done, Dave!”

  Cousins flushed slightly. “Thank you, sir.”

  “All right. Let’s go and see Sue. You two need to coordinate your movements and activities over the next few weeks. I’ll be leaving for Barjah by the weekend. By the time I get back, I guess you’ll have headed for Mycenae, to deliver the next two patrol craft and relief crews for the first two, and take the prisoners back to Callanish.”

  “When do you think we’ll have a chance to sit down and discuss where we are, sir? I mean, all the leadership team together?”

  “I don’t know, but I hope it’s soon. We’re coping at present, but it’s not good that I’m the only person who knows everything that’s going on, with you as my backup – and not fully informed, at that. We need to start pulling together, rather than separately. Trouble is, I don’t see how we’re going to do that with so much happening in so many places at once. We don’t have enough trustworthy deputies to delegate a lot of the workload.”

  “You’re right, sir. We need more officers. Most of those we’re hiring are spacers and senior NCO’s. They’re good, but they’re not command material. The few officers we’ve managed to hire show promise, but there aren’t enough of them.”

  “True, but how do we find more of the kind we need? There are lots of applicants, but some of them couldn’t pour piss out of a boot even if the instructions were written on the heel. We need trained military officers, and leaders whom our spacers will follow, and people we can trust with our secrets. Right now, most candidates meet one or two of those criteria, but hardly ever all three.”

  Cousins grinned tiredly. “I guess it’s like the old construction quandary, sir. Speed, high quality, and low cost. Pick any two.”

  “The engineers never did find a way around that, did they?”

  “No, sir, but don’t tell Sue McBride that!”

  CALLANISH

  “But who the hell were they?” Scott’s voice was shrill with outrage as he glared around the boardroom. Outside the twentieth-floor windows, offering a panoramic view of downtown Achmore, capital city of Callanish, gray clouds spread a gloom to match that inside the boardroom.

  “I can only think of one possibility,” Dunsinane growled. “Who else but those bastards at Rousay? They must have figured out somehow that we took their satellites. This must be their way of retaliating.”

  “But how could they possibly get away with it, Mr. Chairman? In fact, how do we know they did? Their people may have been arrested when they tried to take delivery of our ships!”

  For a moment, several of the members of the board brightened at the thought, but Dunsinane shot down their hopes. “Don’t bet on it. Whoever they hired did a very professional job, removing our passage crews from their hotel on Durres with no-one the wiser, and hiding them out in the country while they took their place at Goheung. We’ve sent an urgent inquiry there, but it’ll take weeks for a reply to reach us. I daresay our new ships will be long gone by the time we get it.”

  “We may as well be back on Earth in the sailing ship era,” Pentland observed bitterly. “Back then, a signal from a di
stant colony or naval base would take weeks or even months to reach the mother country, and just as long for a reply to get back. Dammit, battles were sometimes fought because those involved hadn’t got word in time that the war was already over!”

  “You’d better brace yourselves for another problem,” Dunsinane said quietly. Every head turned to look at him. “The System Patrol Service told me this morning that Colomb’s expected window of arrival was between the twenty-third and the thirtieth. She hasn’t shown up. If the New Orkney Enterprise arranged to steal our new freighters, might they also have arranged for something to happen to her in the Mycenae system?”

  There was a frozen silence for a moment, then an outburst of angry shouts and bitter curses. The Chairman let it continue for a few moments, then held up his hand, and waited for the hubbub to die down. It took a while.

  “We don’t know for sure, but I put it to you that it’s at least a possibility. If Colomb isn’t back by the end of another week, I fear it’ll approach certainty. That means we’ll have lost our two new freighters – although we paid for those with NOE’s satellites, so it won’t come out of our pocket – and Colomb too. That will hit us in the wallet. We just paid a quarter of a billion francs to have her refurbished. Our contract with the SPS specifies we have to repair or replace her, at our expense, if anything goes wrong while she’s working for us. She’s covered by insurance, but not to her full refurbished value, and not against acts of war. Even if we can convince the insurers to pay out, another repair ship, even a used one, will cost at least half a billion francs, fully equipped. We’ll have to finance whatever share of that the insurers won’t cover.”

  “The banks are going to eat us alive on the interest rate,” Scott grumped.

  “Of course they are. If our positions were reversed, we’d do the same. That’s business.”

  “Can we get the Defense Minister to lean on them? We’re buying him a ship, after all, so he owes us – and we paid him enough under the counter to let us use Colomb!”

  “We can try, but the banks can get the Finance Minister to have a word with him. They pay her under the counter, too, remember? If push comes to shove, they can afford more and bigger bribes than we can.”

  Pentland asked, “What about tracing the ships? If NOE’s behind their loss, surely they’ll want to use them? If we have someone check the Rousay system periodically, looking for their names in the system log or their gravitic drive signatures, we can have them seized as stolen vessels.”

  Dunsinane looked at him pityingly. “You’ve never dealt much with the interplanetary freight market, have you?”

  “Not personally, no.”

  “Look up what happens to stolen or pirated ships. There’s maybe half a dozen planets where you can sell them to crooked dealers for a quarter to a third of their value, in cash, no questions asked, or trade them for other ships at half their value. The dealers will put them through a shipyard, to disguise every emission they make and change their appearance. They’ll bribe a local government official to issue false registration papers, then they’ll resell the ships under different names to buyers on the far side of the settled galaxy. Even if you see them again, you’ll never recognize them.”

  “And you think that’s happened to our ships, and Colomb?”

  “If it hasn’t already, I daresay it will before long.”

  “So… what are we going to do? We can’t just sit back and let them get away with it!”

  “What do you suggest?” Dunsinane’s voice was biting. “We thought it would be easy to steal their satellites and plant our robotic prospectors in Mycenae’s asteroid belt; but the ship that did both for us has vanished. If NOE didn’t know what we were doing before, I’ll bet they know now. If they took Colomb intact, they’ll have interrogated her crew and examined her navigation records. They’ll figure out what she’s been up to, and find our robots in the asteroid belt. That’s what makes me most angry – the fact that they’ll get the benefit of all the asteroids our bots had beaconed for Colomb to collect on this trip. For all we know, they may have been worth billions!”

  “But you said they didn’t have any armed ships. How could they have captured Colomb?”

  “We thought they didn’t have armed ships. If Colomb doesn’t turn up soon, we’d better revise that opinion.”

  “What if they destroyed her?”

  “They might have; but if I’d been in their shoes, I’d have wanted her intact, for the information her crew could give me, and the money I could get for her. Repair ships cost a lot, so their used value is much higher than a freighter, even at stolen ship prices. Remember, NOE has just paid out over three hundred million for new satellites. They’ll want to recover that, any way they can.”

  “And you’re saying that Colomb, and our two freighters, have let them do that?”

  “Can you think of any other explanation?”

  The directors stared gloomily at one another. Their silence spoke volumes.

  10

  A New Threat

  BARJAH

  Cochrane was once again expected. This time the maître d’hôtel escorted him personally to the private suite of the Royal Golden Dragon restaurant, bowing and scraping profusely. He reflected, grinning inwardly, that while he wasn’t used to all this fawning attention, it had its points.

  Huang and Hsu rose to greet him as he was shown into the private dining room. With them was a third person, a woman of about Cochrane’s age, slim and trim, dressed in a plain, almost severely cut business suit. “This is Lu Hui,” Huang introduced him. “She is a weapons specialist. She will address the questions you raised during your first visit.”

  “I’m honored to meet you, Ms. Lu,” Cochrane said, shaking the woman’s hand.

  “Actually, it’s Captain Lu,” she said in a low, musical voice, surprising him with the strength of her grip. “I’m an officer of the same rank as yourself, in the fleet of the planet you carefully didn’t name during your first visit.” He knew that would be Qianjin, the almost fabled and very secretive planet that was widely whispered to be the headquarters of the Dragon Tong.

  “Then I’m doubly honored, Captain. You’re the first officer from that planet that I’ve had the privilege to meet.”

  “Actually, I’m not the first, Captain. Mr. Hsu is a Reserve officer in our forces. He chose to pursue a civilian career, but he rendered excellent service to our Fleet, and remains a valued colleague.” Hsu had the grace to look abashed at her compliments as they sat down.

  “I invited Captain Lu to join us tonight, so she could hear more about our overall activities,” Huang noted. “She will meet with you privately tomorrow to discuss your questions.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Should I order for you once again?”

  “Please do, thank you. I’m afraid my knowledge of your cuisine hasn’t improved since my last visit.”

  After they’d settled down to the first course, Hsu remarked, “Captain, you’ve presented us with a unique problem, in my experience. Those asteroids you’ve brought are so valuable that we don’t have enough in the way of local resources to pay you your quarter share in advance, as agreed. I have two possible solutions. One is that you stay a few days, enough for us to refine some of them and pay you with the gold we’ll get from them. The other is that you take some of them with you when you leave, along with the quarter-payment for those we can afford, and bring them back with your next shipment.”

  “I can stay a few days, Mr. Hsu, particularly if I’m going to be allowed to pick Captain Lu’s brain over some other issues.”

  “That’s good news. I can see we’ll have to retain our share of this shipment here, rather than forward it to… to its destination, so that we’ll have enough to pay you when you bring the next shipment. You don’t mind payment primarily in gold?”

  Lu interjected, “You should know, Captain, that in the market for warships, particularly where discretion is required, payment in gold is highly prized, bec
ause it’s virtually untraceable. You’ll get better prices if you offer it.”

  Cochrane inclined his head to her in thanks. “In that case, Mr. Hsu, let’s deal in gold. I’d prefer to have a reasonable sum in cash, too, in the various major currencies, because not all vendors deal in gold; but I daresay you won’t have any trouble accommodating that.”

  “Not at all, provided it’s within reason. I meant what I said about us retaining our share of this shipment locally. I’m sure our superiors will understand, once they see the sums involved. Once we’ve built up adequate reserves to be able to pay you as agreed, the rest of the funds will flow through our channels in the normal way.”

  Cochrane smiled. “On that subject, I’m pleased to be able to tell you that we recovered more asteroids. Our security agreement allows us to keep recovered stolen property like that to fund our operations, so there’ll be at least half a dozen more shipments, and possibly more than that. I have a question for you, though. We’ve run into an intruder in the Mycenae system, a rogue operator who’s deployed prospector robots in part of the asteroid belt. I know that’s hardly surprising – there are smugglers and claim-jumpers throughout the galaxy – but these robots explode if we get too close.”

  Hsu and Huang jerked upright in their chairs. They glanced at each other, then back at him as he continued, “Their computers and memories seem to have been deliberately slagged down, rather than allow them to be captured intact. The manufacturer’s plates on the robots are in Cyrillic script. We recovered a few plates from their remains, but there are no serial numbers. Have you run into anything of the kind before?”

  “We certainly have!” Huang’s voice was terse, clipped, angry. “They’ve been deployed in a couple of asteroid belts where we have… let’s say, ties to the companies that mine them. They’ve tried to collect some for analysis, but they’ve always self-destructed in the same way that you report. Other clues make us think we know who’s behind it – an offshoot of an Albanian Mafia family from Earth, the Bregijas. They have operations on several planets. In some ways they’re not unlike the Dragon Tong, but they’re much smaller, much quicker to resort to violence if crossed, and less discreet about their operations. Basically, they’re thugs.