Exile-and Glory

by Jerry Pournelle

  "Hush." She put a finger gently on his lips, then bent to kiss him again.

  "I miss her," Aeneas said.

  "I have missed her terribly from the day she decided to go to Earth," Laurie Jo said. "But I'm proud of her."

  "And so am I. Laurie Jo, I feel so helpless! Someone knows. If they tried to kill her once, they'll try again. Before she even left Earth! And she didn't tell us."

  "Because we would have stopped her."

  "It doesn't make sense," Aeneas said. "They tried to kill her before she ever got to the ship. And they tried to stop the ship from landing on Ceres. That makes no sense at all! We hadn't expected trouble before she got to Ceres. They need that cargo as much as we do—"

  "My darling husband," Laurie Jo said. "Use your brains. You're letting this be too personal—"

  "How could it be otherwise?"

  "—and you're making mistakes because of that. Someone wants to stop the ship from landing. They tried. Perhaps it was Pacifico—have you asked for his dossier?"

  "Presently. Not yet."

  "More likely someone else," Laurie Jo said. "But whoever it was didn't want Wayfarer to land at all. We hadn't expected that."

  "No." Aeneas leaned back in his high-backed chair and pressed the tips of his fingers together. His eyes half closed, and his hands pressed gently together, drew apart, pressed together again.

  Laurie Jo smiled as she watched him. This was more to her liking. This was the man who had brought down a President.

  "So there's another group working in the Belt," Aeneas said.

  "You don't sound surprised."

  "With billions at stake, I would not be surprised if everyone in the Belt were corrupt," Aeneas said. "How many can resist that kind of temptation? When it is quite feasible to offer bribes in the millions and still make fabulous profits? I expect this was done by the Africans. They don't fancy competition from asteroid mines."

  "I don't much blame them," Laurie Jo said. There was sadness in her voice. "They don't have anything to sell except their minerals, and we're driving the price down and down."

  Aeneas nodded. They'd discussed all this before. Ruin for the African bloc meant prosperity for the rest of the world; cheap iron and steel and copper and aluminum, the basic stuff of industrial civilization, would let billions live well who now had no hope at all. Eventually it would mean prosperity for the Africans themselves, but not soon, and not for those who now controlled the African bloc.

  "So we are facing two sets of enemies," Laurie Jo said.

  "Probably more. At least two. One group wishes to stop the shipments altogether. I doubt they have finished. They'll keep trying, but they won't have many allies in the Belt. It's the others I worry about—and George Lange is dead. She won't have his help." Aeneas leaned back again, his hands moving slowly and gently.

  Laurie Jo waited. "VALKYRIE STATUS REPORT." The words formed in her head with no accent, but she always knew when she heard Aeneas speak to the computer, although she could not have told how that was different from hearing the computer report to her.

  "READY FOR DEPARTURE IN FIVE HUNDRED HOURS," the computer told them.

  "EARLIEST POSSIBLE ARRIVAL TIME ON CERES?"

  "ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY DAYS FROM PRESENT TIME."

  "With Lange dead, we'll have to send someone else," Aeneas said.

  "Who? There's no one we can trust with something this important. And neither of us can go. Nothing has changed, Aeneas. We're needed here. If we lose control now, there's no point to any of this. We'll lose everything we've worked hard for."

  "I know. We can only trust ourselves. Or the boy. Or we could give it all up."

  "Neither of us will."

  "No. Neither of us will."

  She didn't care for the tone he had used, and she looked at him sternly. He was leaning back again, his fingers moving in the familiar pattern that she knew meant he was lost in thought; and she was frightened even before he spoke again.

  "There's a better way," he said. "The boy's more valuable here."

  "No." Her voice rose. "I lost you for sixteen years once! And then almost lost you again, when we'd just found each other. I will not be separated from you again. I will not."

  "Laurie Jo." His voice was very calm now. "You can manage the finances. You're better at it than I am, and you must stay here; but I've outgrown my usefulness."

  "That's not true, you're the base commander—"

  "A function that Kit Penrose can fill as well as I can," Aeneas said. "And Kit can train young Aeneas, who will be far more useful here than floundering around out in the Belt. He's not ready for this, Laurie Jo. I don't think our daughter was ready either, but I know our son isn't. He can help you, yes. He understands boardroom tactics, and he's becoming a better engineer than Kit, but he does not know intrigue and corruption. Not yet."

  "Nor do you!" she shouted.

  "Now really, Laurie Jo—"

  "Aeneas, it has been twenty years since you were Solicitor General—"

  "Laurie Jo." His voice was quiet and his tone calm.

  "And I won't lose you again—"

  "I am still a very careful man," Aeneas said. "There is not much risk to me—and I am less valuable than our son. We cannot risk both heirs. If it is a choice between myself and young Aeneas, there is no choice at all, nor would I be—" He stopped, because her face had changed.

  She had lost her anger. Now her expression held only sadness.

  "You know I'm right," he said. He was not insisting; he merely stated a fact they both understood. She nodded; then buried her face against his shoulder.

  "I love you," she said. Then she tried once more, but only because she had to: "Couldn't Kit go? Or—"

  "He couldn't, and there is no one else. Not for this. Is there?"

  "No. You or our son."

  "And thus me." He kissed her gently. "We have twenty days. And when I return, we'll have many more. I'll come back, Laurie Jo. I always have."

  "Yes," she said, and she turned away from him quickly so that he would not see the glistening tears in her blue eyes.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Henri Stoire was a satisfied man, and what's more, he was certain he had every right to be pleased with himself. Since he'd come to Ceres as Interplanet's resident general manager, the output of the mines and refineries had tripled. The enormous Mylar plastic mirror, over two kilometers in diameter, hung in synchronous orbit 760 kilometers above the asteroid, providing heat and light for the colony twenty-four hours a day (he still thought of days as having twenty-four hours even though Ceres rotates once each nine hours, five minutes). More miners arrived each month, the capacity of the refineries continued to expand, and a prospecting party had found a large vein of nearly pure water-ice deep under the surface, thus insuring both drinking water and reaction fuel for the nuclear ships like Wayfarer.

  Henri Stoire was satisfied, but his superiors were not. His production goals were set in Zurich by men who knew nothing of the conditions on Ceres, but who knew a lot about international competition, manipulation of commodity futures, and always about banking and money; the goals they set were high. Of course, Henri thought when he tried to be fair, the costs of the Ceres operation were very high as well. It took eleven new francs to get one kilogram from Earth's surface to Earth orbit, a hundred more to get it to Ceres, and Ceres required thousands of metric tons of supplies, food, equipment, and men, always more men. The return had to be high or the investment couldn't be justified.

  Henri met their ever-increasing production goals, but his costs were always higher than estimated. No incentive bonuses for Stoire, not this year. Perhaps when a full cargo from the Belt reached Earth orbit . . . even iron ore delivered to Earth orbit would be highly valuable for more orbital factory construction. Iron in orbit would sell for almost Fr. 12,000 a metric ton, and Henri had ten thousand tons to ship, along with one thousand tons of tin (Fr. 6,720,000), fifteen hundred tons of nearly pure silver (Fr. 315,000,000) and a few hundred
million francs' worth of assorted other metals. The total value of the cargo he would shortly send down would be considerably more than half a billion francs; a respectable sum indeed. Now he had only to get the shipment to Earth. The incentive bonuses would follow.

  Actually, Interplanet's bonuses interested Henri far less than his employers—or at least most of them—knew. True, Henri had enormous debts, the result of unwise speculations: had he known as much about the international commodity market as the men who set his production goals did, Henri would never have come to Ceres in the first place. His debts were further increased by Henri's unfortunate addiction to chemin de fer and roulette, and his even less fortunate tendency to borrow money from any source available. He had been born a rich man, of a great and wealthy family, and he had lost everything. He needed money.

  Although Zurich's bonuses were not small by normal standards, Henri needed far more money than could be acquired by ordinary means. Had his employers known just how much money Henri owed, they would never have sent him to Ceres, or anywhere else; but his creditors were careful men who never advertised the names of those who borrowed from them; and they had many suggestions for Henri. There was no way, bonuses or not, that Henri could earn what he owed; but with any luck he would leave Ceres with his debts paid and more money than he had ever had in his life. If all that was merely a small part of the profits his creditors would make from his work, Henri was not an avaricious man. He truly believed that he asked for no more than he was entitled to and certainly he had high abilities.

  Henri was a small man, very neat in appearance. Even on Ceres he looked neat, and that was often very difficult. His small size was no handicap in space. In many ways it was a decided advantage. In low gravity, long legs were mostly good for running into hard objects and otherwise getting in the way.

  Though small, Henri was no weakling. He exercised daily and he was always willing to give the men a hand with a tough job. Henri could do the job of nearly any man in his employ; he took great pride in that, and it was certainly a useful ability. Some of his latest activities, those in favor of his creditors and unknown to his employers in Zurich, could not have been accomplished if Henri had not understood every detail of the automated refinery operation, known how to construct conveyor systems, dig out chambers in rock with explosives. . . .

  Those skills, though needed, were not the key to his plan for resuming his place among the idle rich in Monte Carlo. More important than any of them was the study he had made of computer operations. That was the key to it all, and it had gone so smoothly that had Henri been a superstitious man, he might have been frightened.

  Sometimes he was appalled by what he was doing. He felt no guilt about betraying the Directors of the Interplanet combine; if they paid him what he was worth, he would not have to resort to embezzlement. (Henri preferred to think of it as misallocation of company resources, or even as a legitimate perquisite to his office.) He felt no guilt, but he was sometimes disturbed by the sheer magnitude of the operation. Not only was something like one hundred million francs involved—and that was a large enough sum to impress even Henri Stoire—but also the follow-up implications would be even larger. Mankind had never succeeded in getting nuclear fusion to work on a commercial scale. Fission worked fine and had since the 1950s, but the far more valuable and efficient fusion process continued to be too expensive, too difficult; and the result was a continuing energy crisis that affected nearly every nation on Earth. Fertilizer prices depended on energy prices, which meant that energy prices controlled how much the poor would eat. Cheap fusion would bring cheap food—and Henri was turning fusion over to a gang of international criminals.

  Still, he felt no guilt. If food was dear, it was because people were cheap. If the fools wished their children to eat well, let them either work to earn enough money or have fewer children. It was no concern of Henri's what happened to children in India, Bangla-Desh, Africa, South America. . . .

  Nor was he worried about being caught. As manager for Interplanet he controlled the only police force on Ceres. The company guards worked for him and took his orders. The accountants reported to him and could only gain access to the computer through him. They could ask Interplanet's computer questions as long as they liked; even if they knew the real questions they should ask, it would not tell them without his authorization, and they didn't know anyway. Besides, in a few weeks it would all be over, and there would be no record of what Henri had done.

  Henri Stoire sat at his desk, the only real desk on Ceres and a mark of his importance, and despite his satisfaction with himself and his work, he frowned as he read the report brought to him by Captain Greiner.

  Wayfarer had arrived with cargo intact; excellent. But someone had tried to prevent the ship from coming to Ceres, and that was not. Wayfarer's cargo was the key to everything. Without it they would never get all that iron and copper and tin and silver to Earth. Who had done this?

  It took him only moments to dismiss Pacifico. The lawyer had been sent by Zurich, and was rumored to be a clever accountant as well. He would have been a nuisance, and it was as well that he was dead; but he had almost certainly not been responsible for nearly crippling Wayfarer. No. It was very likely that Pacifico's part was exactly what he had said it was, a frightened man trying to keep Captain Greiner from taking high risks with the ship.

  Nor was it likely that the missing George Lange had been the saboteur. The Daedalus Corporation had far too much at stake, and they hired carefully. Daedalus was responsible for getting Henri's cargo safely back to Earth; the loss of one of their senior engineers would be inconvenient, possibly worse than that. All true. But Daedalus had a deeper role in this game. Henri's creditors had warned him that Daedalus, supposedly owned by other Zurich bankers and itself one of the stockholders in the consortium that created Interplanet, had its nose in far too many places. His creditors suspected that Daedalus worked for very powerful interests indeed—possibly even for MacKenzie and Hansen; that Daedalus engineers were often spies reporting to Interplanet stockholders, and whenever they were around, Henri should be careful. The warning was appreciated but not needed; Henri was always careful. But it made it unlikely that Lange had tried to sabotage Wayfarer. Far more probably Lange had been snooping around and had caught the saboteur, and was put outside the ship for his trouble.

  So who might it be? Henri scanned the passenger and crew lists. Anyone might be an African sympathizer—Henri had already concluded the African bloc was the most likely sponsor of the sabotage—and that would not necessarily show in the kind of resumes sent out with passengers. Or the saboteur could be working for money. He lifted a microphone.

  "READY," the computer said.

  "I WANT COMPLETE DOSSIERS ON ALL PASSENGERS AND CREW ARRIVING ABOARD WAYFARER. HIGHEST PRIORITY REQUEST TO ZURICH HEADQUARTERS. JUSTIFICATION: NECESSITY TO IDENTIFY SABOTEUR."

  "ACKNOWLEDGED."

  He returned to his scrutiny of the passenger list. He read names and specialties, paying no particular attention to what he saw, until he came to "Norsedal, Jacob. Computer Specialist. To be supervisor of computer operations, Interplanet."

  He read it again, then cursed. Zurich had not told him of this! True, he had requested a new programmer, but he was satisfied with his computer staff and its acting head. He had certainly not sent for any experts to take control; under his present arrangement Henri himself was the real supervisor of computer operations, and he liked it that way.

  This could be bothersome, especially now. Did Zurich suspect something? He would have to be very careful with this Norsedal. Was Norsedal curious? An agent of Zurich? He must be watched closely. Henri continued to scan the list.

  MacMillan, Ellen. Engineer, no employer. Henri smiled at that. Every ship brought two or three unemployed single women, and most claimed to be some kind of engineer. They might very well have their degrees, but generally they made a great deal more money in a far older occupation. He wondered where the MacMillan girl would go.
To one of the established houses, or would she prey on the miners and prospectors and refinery workers from her own quarters? From curiosity he lifted the microphone again, "I WANT A PHOTOGRAPH OF ELLEN MACMILLAN, PASSENGER ON WAYFARER."

  "ACKNOWLEDGED."

  A few seconds later the facsimile emerged from a slot at the side of his desk. He looked it over, smiling at the blonde hair and blue eyes, pug nose; a pretty girl, young, one who would command a high price, for a while. Then the smile faded. Was there something familiar about the face? Where might he have seen it before?

  No. He was certain he had never seen the girl. But she reminded him of someone. He did not know who, but it was disturbing. She reminded him of someone he feared. He laughed to himself, because he feared no one; but he kept the photograph and put a tick mark against her name on the list to remind him to take some care with her dossier when it arrived.

  Henri Stoire was a careful man indeed.