The Longest Con: A Family of Grifters Tale

by Bill Patterson

  “But there's a slow boat out next week, and Maria and Albert are on it,” said Hans. “They'll get to Venus in two months, right around the same time you and Sandro are due,” said Cole. “Fast boats are expensive, and we could only afford one ticket for Mr. Playboy Eddie here.”

  “That's 'Hannon Vult' to you, sir!” said Eddie. “Sandro's going to get a new friend in exile. I'm going to be that friend, and rope him in like a little calf to the slaughter. Well, better get some sleep. The morning bird to Vegas and Sandro's entourage lifts off at an outrageously early hour.” He raised the brandy snifter up high. See you in The Augean Stables, two months from now!”

  STEP 4 – The Fix

  The accommodations on board Aphrodite Station were basic, unadorned, and provided only to keep people from sleeping in the corridors. Maria and Albert were squeezed into a metal box that would be banned in most prisons back on Earth. The occupant could fold down the desk, or the bed, but not both at once. Still, the lighter gravity of the Station made it seem less oppressive, somehow.

  Albert picked up the wallet that rested on the thin mattress. Maria turned up her music player to cover their conversation from anyone passing by in the corridor.

  “Really, Maria, you have to stop this unseemly crime wave,” said Albert, as he fingered the contents of a man's wallet. “We don't want the Hornets on us.” The burnt orange uniforms of the Station's Security Force had quickly led to the unfortunate nickname among the crew.

  “It's 2144, you would think that misogyny would stay where it belongs, back in the twenty-first century,” she said. “When Mister,” she plucked a card from the wallet, “Mohanty damn near shoved me into a wall, simply because I was a woman who was in his way, well, he gave up the right to be left alone.” Her eyes brightened. “How much?”

  “Just scrip,” said Albert, referring to the money local to the Station. “But in nice large denominations.” He rapidly emptied the wallet of all valuta. “I'll take care of dropping this someplace plausible. How's the bank?”

  Maria turned carefully and manipulated a ceiling plate. A small case dropped out, and she caught it on its slow, lazy descent. Opening it on the bed, she thumbed through the stacks of scrip. “We're about two-thirds of the way to goal,” she said. “I figure another two weeks.”

  “Getting tight,” Albert said. “The second of May is only four weeks away.”

  “We'll make it. There's always the Golden Apples Casino, if we get stuck. I'm sure you could take some of the poker players, if you wished.” She stashed the extra scrip and secured the case back in the ceiling tile over her bed.

  “When do we all meet up again?” she asked.

  “Soon. Better start acting the part, make it a part of you. Your name?”

  “Pia Chiarella, lost her parents about a year ago, and now I'm just trying to find myself. I don't want to be rich, I just want Mommy and Daddy back.” She sobbed a little, tears glistening in the corners of her eyes.

  “Teach you how to suck eggs,” he said with a smile. “I'll show myself out, Pia,” he said, lazily floating over to the door.

  ***

  Carow paused in his many labors. He had been aboard the Aphrodite Station for two months now, and sometimes he just marveled at it.

  Aphrodite Station was not your typical Earthbound space station. Venus was much closer to the Sun, and lacked a planetary magnetic field. The planet received almost twice the energy per square foot from the Sun than the Earth did. The need to screen the station from incoming heat and light as well as all other forms of radiation required innovative design. Fortunately, Lunar aluminum was easily catapulted to Venus, so a unique design was possible.

  It began as a small 'can' with an umbrella of thin aluminum spread above it. From this construction base, a large hemisphere of solid aluminum plate was fashioned, one hundred meters in diameter. The entire hemisphere was filled with slag, catapulted from the Moon.

  From the top center of the shield, a thick pipe tracked downward. One hundred and fifty meters further down the pipe, Aphrodite Station depended.

  The Station proper was a cylinder some twenty-five meters in radius and one hundred meters long. The need for an extensive radiation shield and the availability of Lunar materials meant that the Station could derive gravity from orbital tides, instead of centrifugal force. With Deck One closest to the shield, with each deck 'downward', the gravity increased, until in the engineering spaces it was an appreciable fraction of Earth normal, without disorienting Coriolis effects.

  There were two reasons to even bother undertaking such an expensive project, and “because it's there” was not one of them.

  The first and most easily understood were the Green Diamonds of Venus. For reasons scientists could neither understand nor replicate, pure diamonds with a vivid green hue existed on the surface of Venus, under a crushing atmosphere of carbon dioxide over ninety times Earth's atmospheric pressure and a temperature of over nine hundred degrees Fahrenheit. That they existed at all was amazing, but ability to retrieve them and ship them back to Earth was nothing short of miraculous. The fantastic wealth lying around, waiting to be picked up, was enough to justify the Station.

  A second reason, far more prosaic, was the one that led the actual construction of Aphrodite Station. The problems inherent in mining fossil fuel in all of its forms were bad enough, but the political success of environmentally sensitive political parties across the globe led to virtual halts in all forms of fossil fuel extraction. Deprived of easy-to-use carbon-based feedstock, the emerging technologies of carbon nanotubes and graphene were suddenly left adrift.

  The world of advanced composite materials ground to a halt as they struggled to adapt to manufacturing with completely inadequate plant-based feedstocks. Then someone noticed an entire world swathed in carbon dioxide that got as close as twenty-six million miles at times, and before you could blink, a consortium of chemical firms contracted with the Contriole family's space-based industries to build Aphrodite Station.

  The Station controlled the actual manufacturing plants for carbon nanotubes and graphene manifolds, operating far closer to the upper radiation shield, in the microgravity zone. The plants were fed in two ways: first by daredevil pilots operating ramscoop vehicles that would dip into Venus's atmosphere and compress the atmosphere into onboard tanks before blasting back into space. The failure rate of this form of carbon dioxide mining was fearsomely high, but not nearly as high as the early failures encountered with ground-based harvesting.

  It was during ground-based harvesting when the first Green Diamond was picked up. The watch engineer wasn't really sure what he was looking at, only that it glowed in the ultraviolet sensors on board the drone he was remotely driving around the ground outside of his return rocket. It was only when the rock was brought aboard, and the watch engineer suddenly requested rotation back to Earth that the Contrioles found out they had a lucrative monopoly that surpassed DeBeers of South Africa.

  Word got out, as it often does. The few kilograms of diamonds that the Contrioles made available to the gem cutters of Amsterdam were instantly sold out. The Queen of Italy, the third of her line since the Restoration, received a pear-sized Green Diamond for her scepter, presented by Mario Contriole himself. Tourists soon flocked to Aphrodite Station, intent on getting a Green Diamond of their own by any means possible.

  Tourists demanded entertainment, particularly when they were occasionally stuck aboard Aphrodite when the Sun flared or while waiting for their launch window back to Earth. The Contrioles did the rational thing: they set up the first extraterrestrial gambling den, the Golden Apple Casino.

  ***

  “How do they get gravity to work in here?” wondered Maria. “The Station isn't spinning.”

  “The upper radiation shield is the key,” said Albert, counting the casino chips and answering her question at the same time. “The Station isn't in the center of the configuration, you know. The upper shield is like an enormous rock. We 'hang' from the ce
nter of mass and the sunshield 'hangs' sunward of the center. The whole effect is we experience about one-third gravity, because we're constrained to orbit slower than we 'should' at our orbital height. Good thing, too. I can't imagine the dice paths if we were on a rotating space station. Roulette would have to be electronic. Throwing chips isn't a good idea, either; they'd take three times as long to come down in this gravity.”

  Albert felt a tug on his arm, and looked carefully around. Carow was walking easily through the crowd. It was good to see his friend after three months, but Albert and Maria knew better than to call out. Carow stopped to talk with one of the floormen. The crowds flowed around him.

  “Good. We'll send him a note tonight.” He felt another tug.

  “Emm, 'ay, Are, Kay,” breathed Maria, nodding towards a tall, swarthy man in an elaborate costume. The man threw a pair of dice into a craps pit, and immediately started berating the crew working the table. “That's my cue,” she said, making her way over to the newest mark.

  ***

  Sandro idly tossed a pair of dice onto the thin bed in his cramped compartment. They drifted lazily in the one-tenth gravity of the torch drive of the Peregrine. Venus. All he did was lose a million or two at the casinos. Against the fifty-billion-dollar valuation of the Contriole family enterprise, it was less than peanuts. They paid more in electrical bills for their various mansions throughout the worlds. Exile, that's what this was. Pure and simple. The old bastard wanted an embarrassment out of his hair for awhile, so Sandro was shuffled off to Aphrodite Station. Well, it could be worse, he mused. The old man had hinted at sticking him on the helium-3 harvesting project on the Moon. That was truly the bottom of the barrel.

  Sandro retrieved the dice and lofted them again. Snake eyes. He sighed. Even if Aphrodite wasn't the worst place to end up, it was run by his father and mother. On the one hand, at least he'd be able to eat Mom's cooking again. On the other hand, he'd be under a microscope, with everything relayed to that smug bastard back on Earth.

  Toss. Seven. That's more like it. What the hell, at least the Station had a casino. Run by your sister, a nasty voice in his head reminded him. Remember how often she ratted you out to Mom?

  He resisted the urge to hurl the dice at the wall. Instead, he throttled it back, and lobbed the dice again. Six. Again: Nine. He smiled, slipping back into the memory of that last, great, blowout party before his departure.

  ***

  Eddie, strike that, 'Hannon Vult' was two decks away, in the 'rich, but prudent' area. He winced at the price of his ticket, but was determined to make it pay. After all, the purpose of him riding the same ship was to establish Vult as someone rich enough to take a torch rocket to Venus. Well, show time, he thought. Three hours after takeoff might just be enough to bore Sandro out of his cabin, no matter how luxurious. Eddie knew for a fact that Sandro had not been able to smuggle one of his women aboard. Gate agents were easy to bribe for info, but certainly not stowaways, no matter who your grandfather was.

  Eddie parked himself in the small space laughingly called the 'bar', where he could oversee the entrance, sipping a Scotch on the rocks, although they were now little more than pebbles. The bartender seemed familiar, somehow.

  The man smiled as he slipped Eddie a fresh drink. “How's the Squad?” he asked.

  “The what?” said Eddie, looking up. He ignored the sudden rush of adrenaline into his gut. “Got the wrong guy.”

  “Naw, you look like old man Hans, in the flesh. I helped them run The Rag on a few marks. See, I really am a bartender, which comes in handy at private parties. Don't worry about your drink, it's just pay-me, colored water. I keep it around for some of the girls. I don't suppose…”

  “Nope. Pure body, pure mind, I say,” said Eddie. “No rental girls for me this trip.”

  “I'll pass the word. Anyone in particular you looking for? I have Mr. Finn around, if needed.”

  “This seems awfully convenient. Hans put you here?” Eddie asked. He wouldn’t put it past his father. “I thought this was our own job, no outside interference.”

  “Breaking out, I gotcha,” assured the bartender. “Truth is, I haven't seen the Squad in ten years. That's why I took so long to come over—I had to be sure it was you.” The man sighed. “Going solo?”

  “No, got a crew. I'm alone, this leg,” said Eddie. He growled under his breath.

  “I tell you, I'm here on my own,” said the bartender. “No Hans, no Squad. I swear on the Code. I just wanted to let you know if you need anything, you've got me, okay?”

  “Yeah, okay.” Eddie looked him dead in the eye. “No progress reports. No 'helping', okay? Not unless I ask. No 'friendly advice', either. We want to do this on our own.”

  “I won't even ask what 'this' is. Good luck,” the man said, drifting back to the bar.

  It sure looks like Scotch, thought Eddie. What the hell, the man may be just who he says he is. Still, the thought that his dad might be keeping track of him rankled.

  There he was! Eddie felt a rush of adrenaline through his veins, and quickly got into the character of Hannon Vult. Both with Swen's Squad and Coffey's Conners, Eddie had done his share of roping rich marks. He was too young, and he knew it, to fool anyone older than thirty-five or so. They'd look at him and see someone who looked fresh out of college, wet behind the ears, and not believe a thing he would say. For someone like Sandro, though, the reverse was true. He would doubt anyone over thirty, convinced that they were spies for the family. Now, how to approach him…

  Eddie didn't have to worry. Sandro looked around the tiny bar, with about a tenth of the passengers aboard, and fastened immediately on Hannon. He carefully made his way over in the one-tenth gravity field, and drifted into the spindly chair Hannon held out for him.

  “You look familiar,” Sandro said. “I know I've seen you before. Right now, that's not a good place to be. So, talk.”

  “I don't know what you want me to say, Khan,” Eddie said. “I'm Hannon Vult, and we met at a party in Vegas.”

  “Yeah. Vegas. How long ago?”

  “Last night. When you found out I was going to Venus, you came over—wow, you were really wasted—and asked all kinds of questions. I told you then what I'm telling you now. Khan, the only thing I know about Venus is what they put in the travel brochures, and I don't believe any of those.”

  “I wouldn't either. Why are you going, uh, Hannon?”

  “Made a killing in the stock market. Bought some stock in some kind of exotic carbon stuff, and when the Contriole folks gave them an open allocation, bang, the stock shot up like a rocket. Heh, rocket.”

  Sandro quirked his lips. “So, you made a bucket of money. Why Venus?”

  “Hey, I'm twenty-two. Before I know it, I'll be tied down with a wife and kids, and I'll never get out here. Why not Venus?”

  The man made a twisted kind of sense. Wait, Khan? How did he know that name? “Where did you hear the name Khan?”

  “Easy enough, you were demanding we all call you that. What the hell, if you buy me a drink, I'll call you the Queen of Sheba if you want.”

  “Did I say why?”

  “I don't remember. But then, I was drinking too.”

  Sandro probably didn't say why. He'd have to have been pretty drunk to say that. He was Genghis Khan, come to conquer Contriole Enterprises all for himself.

  “Well, what are you having?” asked Hannon. “It's a long trip.”

  ***

  There was a note under her door when she awoke. “Deck D, Compartment D-4, 10am,” it said. Linked C's indicated it was from one of Coffey's Conners.

  She was the last one to arrive. “You have no idea how hard it is to be rid of some of these men,” she said. “I had to threaten one of them before he would leave.”

  Eddie, Carow, and Albert smiled at her. It was the first time in three months all of the Conners were together, and there was a short interlude of hugging and back slapping.

  Albert cleared his throat a bit loudly. “If we m
ight get started,” he said. “Before anyone wonders why four twentysomethings are gathered in a cargo hold.”

  “Don't worry, it's safe,” said Carow. “My buddy showed me how to jiggle the sensor system. As far as the Station knows, this space is unoccupied.”

  “Still, best be done quickly. Let's go over the plan, and the status. I've talked with each of you individually, but let's have it all out. Eddie, since you have first contact with the mark, start us off.”

  “Sandro, aka 'Khan', is settling into his role as Napoleon in Elba, plotting revenge. He's busily amassing a store of Green Diamonds, mostly by confiscating the ones the miners manage to smuggle up from the surface. You really have to hand it to these guys, they're hungry and desperate. Sandro absolutely hates it here, and can't wait to get out by any means necessary. I'm Hannon Vult, his sometimes-drinking buddy, drunken confidant, and I play up the little brother angle pretty well. So far, according to plan. Maria?”

  “I've been able to establish myself as an aloof but theoretically available young woman, Pia Chiarella, touring the system after a terrible tragedy took my parents, but left me rich. I have one vice, a love for horse racing, which I try to indulge as often as I can. The Golden Apple does not run an Off-Track Betting operation, so I have to content myself with watching the television feeds in the casino, and trying to phone in bets to my bookie on Earth before the races run. Carow? You're next.”

  “While you all have been on vacation, I'm busier than a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest. Okay, let's see, the engineer on Mercury has the comm rig up and running, we're getting good signal. Most everything else is ready.” He frowned deeply. “I had to rent the cubic for The Augean Stables legitimately.”

  “Oh, no!” gasped Maria. “Will you burst into flames?”