by M. J. Locke
“It would be a big help.”
“Zap Marty the names and addresses, and copy me.”
He nodded, and scribbled with his finger in midair. She scanned the list as it came across her waveface. As she had suspected, two of last night’s callers were on the list. “What about the driver?” she asked. “Any more details on how it happened, or why?”
That angry look moved onto his face. “The police are investigating Kovak’s background. I’m meeting with Jerry and getting a full briefing at noon.” The chief of police, Jerry Fitzpatrick, was a good friend of Sean’s.
“What do we know?”
“Apparently he was in a group marriage. A month ago his partners ran off with each other and the children. He’d been on antidepressants and seeing a spiritual guide.” Great, a religious nut. Jane sighed. “It appears he killed himself with an overdose,” Sean finished. “Why he chose to take his coworkers out with him.…” He hunched his shoulders.
“It may not have been a deliberate act—”
“It might as well have been,” he snapped. “Suicide-murder. If he were still alive I’d kill him myself. Space the fucker.”
Jane pinched her lip, observing him. Finally she couldn’t help herself. “None of us saw this coming, Sean.”
“Don’t patronize me!” He slammed a palm down, making them all jump and sending himself into a slow backward spiral. He righted himself. “I watched a kid die while we were trying to get the doors open. It’s Kovak’s doing. He deserved to go out a lot more slowly and painfully than he did.”
There was a tense silence. Tania and Aaron exchanged looks.
“Are we done? I need to get back to the warehouse.”
“We’re not done. Sit down.”
Sean glared at her, an intimidating hulk of a man. Jane glared back. She wondered if he was going to disobey her. But his military training took hold, and he settled back onto his seat. The only evidence of his agitation was his fingers drumming a beat on the table.
Jane said, “Tania.”
Tania Gravinchikov was a short, plump woman in her early sixties. Her red hair and clothes were rumpled, and her pale grey eyes were as bloodshot as Aaron’s and Sean’s. But this crisis did not weigh on her as it did for Aaron or Sean; for her it was like surfing a tidal wave. She flashed Jane a smile. “We’ve been running checks on life support, and something odd was definitely going on.”
“Odd?” Jane frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I mean the life-support computer systems suffered a mini-nervous breakdown in response to the crisis. You know those doors in Warehouse 2-H? Well, my code jockeys tell me they stayed open longer than they should have. Much longer. And they were big doors. The influx of air from the maintenance tunnels kept the dome temperature from dropping as rapidly as it should have. If the doors had closed when they were supposed to, according to our projections, the bugs would have frozen per the design specs, before they chewed through the warehouse walls, and the damage would have been much less severe. The release wouldn’t have reached the lake, and only Kovak, the driver, would have been killed—the bugs would likely not have destroyed the emergency life-support lockers before Carl Agre could get to them.”
Jane pondered that. “Have you isolated the problem yet?”
“Not yet. We’re working on it. We’ve combed through about ten million lines of code so far. Imagine, Jane, some of our life-support tech goes back to the first lunar base! You should see the stuff we’ve dug up!” Tania spoke with an enthusiasm only a software designer could feel. “I’m finding all sorts of ancient oddities,” she went on. “Did you know we’ve got chunks of code written by Pater de Felice and his monastic or—”
Jane cleared her throat pointedly.
“Anyw-a-a-ay…” Tania continued, “we’re closing in on the problem code, but there won’t be much to report until we actually corner the bug, or bugs, that caused the problem. We’ve been able to replicate many of the conditions that caused the failure, though—in simulation, of course,” she added hurriedly, seeing their looks of alarm, “and we’re getting interesting results.” She gave Jane a meaningful look. “I fully expect to have answers by this afternoon and be able to present you with some options for next steps.” Jane got Tania’s meaning: she expected to know how it had happened by the time of their offline meeting at one-thirty. Perhaps even how to fix it? Jane did not want to get her hopes up.
“Anything else? Comments?” No one replied. “Very well. Use the eyes-on list for any new developments. Let’s get to work.”
* * *
Her heads-up reminded her with an increasingly urgent graphic that the “Stroiders” privacy costs were stacking up, so she approved the cancellation of the privacy screen. The “Stroiders-live” icon lit up her waveface, and a handful of miniature rovers crept into the room, along with a wave of motes, as her staff left.
Jane called up her staff’s reports. Ogilvie & Sons, eh? An awful hunch took shape. She summoned her analytical sapient, Jonesy, and had it pull all available shipping logs for Ogilvie & Sons and its subsidiaries, going back eighteen months. Jonesy tossed them into a space-time mapping program, and plotted the ships’ trajectories, while Jane sat back and watched. The tiny dots—Ogilvie & Sons shipments—crawled around the solar system at 10x speed.
She had to rerun it several times to be absolutely sure.
Ogilvie & Sons had a fleet of about sixty ships it owned or leased. Before about ten months ago, they all moved around the outer solar system in a random shipping pattern—dropping cargo here, stopping for repairs and new orders there. But starting late last year, two dozen of those ships—only the owned ones; and always their newest, fastest, and best-armored models—began a complicated dance that (a) involved a trip to Mars, and (b) thereafter, zigzagged their way to various points in the asteroid belt within about a million kilometers of 25 Phocaea, where (c) at some time within the past two weeks, they docked for repairs or temporary decommissioning.
One last thing to check. Upside-Down may not have their cameras shoved up your asses, she thought at the Ogilvies, but I have other ways of finding out what you’re up to.
She sent Jonesy out onto the Solar wave, and in a while it brought her reams of Mars imagery—all online and available for free. She studied various tourists’ and satellite photos of the docks where those ships had landed, for a range of dates surrounding when the ships had touched down. What she found was every bit as bad as she had feared. Jane had Jonesy gather all these images, do some calculations for her, and organize the rest of the data for her presentation. Then she sat for a moment, pressing palms to her eyes.
She did not want to dredge up her long-buried memories of her stint on Vesta, and what the Ogilvies had done there. But Benavidez had never taken the Martian mob very seriously. If he failed to this time, Phocaea would be lost. She changed into a clean suit and then lofted herself up the Easy Spokeway to the prime minister’s offices.
An angry mob of ships’ captains and owners clogged the entry to the prime minister’s antechambers. Their vessels had just been confiscated—she had heard it on the news. The faces she recognized among them might as well have been strangers’.
Security made a path for her. Her bad-sammy bar crept upward as she moved through, a growing red stain at the right-hand side of her vision. Shouts of “Who do you think you are?” “Fascists!” and “When do I get my ship back?” accompanied her. The air was thick with mote glamour.
In open public spaces, particularly when the event had a high enough newsworthiness quotient, Upside-Down Productions dispersed spy motes in mass quantities. The first time Jane had seen them, she had thought they were beautiful. Now they filled her with loathing.
Then she passed through the prime minister’s “Stroiders” barrier: a curtain of moist, floral-scented air that expelled the choking clouds of “Stroiders” motes. She drew a deep, relieved breath.
Benavidez was one of only six people who lived in a bubble perpetually
protected from “Stroiders” scrutiny, and all his support staff benefited, at least during their workday. She envied them that.
Jarantillo, one of Benavidez’s senior administrative staff, greeted her. “It’s getting ugly out there.”
“Sure is.”
He preceded her from the entryway into the antechamber itself. A famous hand-blown glass sculpture, Beatnik Jesus, showed Jesus wearing swimming trunks and an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt made of stained glass that rippled out behind him in an unseen breeze. He balanced on his toes, arms joyfully outspread, hair whipped around his face as he looked back at the blue-green wave that broke over him. It had been a gift from the president of the Christian Federation of American States, on Benavidez’s election. Above the executive assistants’ cubbies, a Ceren upside-down plant spread willowy, orangy green tendrils across the ceiling, its roots sprouting purple flowers heavy with yellow pollen; a collection of Jovian lightning-bulbs crackled and flashed, bobbing in a convective column of colored gas, against one wall. Beyond it was a honeycomb of small offices and cubicles, where people crouched over screens at their workstations, shifting anxiously, exchanging whispers.
Jarantillo shook his head. “I saw two of my neighbors out there. What if they attack us on our way home? Val”—the security chief—“said he couldn’t give my people escorts.”
“Don’t worry,” Jane said. “They’re just caught up in the initial shock. Val’s people will get them dispersed soon enough.”
He nodded, but didn’t look any less worried. “I’ll let the prime minister know you’re here.”
A few moments later, Benavidez’s chief of staff, Thomas Harman, ushered her into Benavidez’s office, along with Val Pearce, head of Security, and Emily Takamoro, his chief media strategist. Val was tall, balding, and stout; Emily short and slim, with a pretty face and a streak of white in her dark hair. As the door shuttered closed, she saw that Benavidez was lounging in the conference room webbing. He was big and muscular, with olive skin and dark brown hair and eyes. Usually his affect was cheerful and easy, but not tonight.
Benavidez rubbed his eyes. “Let’s get started. Jane, I’ve asked Val and Emily to join us: Val because of the obvious security implications, and Emily because of the public relations angle.”
“Very good, sir.”
“Have you had a chance to prepare the latest resource report?”
“I have.” She called up her interface and tied them all in. A series of tables and charts unfolded in the space between them.
“Phocaea normally uses fifteen to eighteen thousand tons of mixed methane and water ice per day. I can crank that down to about twelve thousand with strict rationing, and we’ve already taken the necessary measures. We’ve got three hundred nineteen thousand tons. I’ve created a countdown clock.” She transmitted the app. “It’ll load permanently onto all your interfaces as soon as you activate it. It’s set at twenty-six days, four hours, and”—she checked the time—“two minutes. That’s our best current estimate of how much time we have left.”
“Three and a half weeks?” Benavidez said.
“That may change a little, as we improve our inventory numbers. The clock will be automatically updated as new information comes in. Mr. Prime Minister, I’d like to transmit this clock to the rest of your staff as well. It’ll be important to their emergency response efforts.”
Benavidez pondered for a moment. “We’re going to keep the precise time under wraps, for now, and simply tell folks that we have several weeks. I want us to have space to come up with alternatives. Speaking of which…”
Jane nodded, drew a breath. Here it came. “I’ve just learned that Ogilvie & Sons has an off-ledger shipment hitting Jovespace soon.”
The look of relief that washed over Benavidez’s face was so intense that Jane had to suppress a wince. “My God! Why didn’t you tell us this before you started talking about how we only have three weeks to live?”
“Because, sir, with all due respect, this does not save us. Ogilvie & Sons is a grave threat.”
He looked irritated. “Yes, yes; Ogilvie & Sons has connections with the Martian crime syndicate. But what can they do? If they try to impose unrealistic conditions or constraints in the contract for the ice, we simply declare sovereign immunity from their claims. If they make trouble with our shipping contracts later in retaliation, we come up with strategies at that time to protect ourselves. We are not without allies, Upside or Down.”
“They are not just connected with the Martian mob. They are the mob. Philo Ogilvie, chairman of Ogilvie & Sons’ board of directors, paid for a hit on a Downsider judge. He can never set foot on Earth again without facing charges for racketeering, tax fraud, and conspiracy to commit murder. He’s confined to a few hundred square kilometers in the Libertarian Free Zone on Mars. His sons are running the company, and they may not have been convicted, but they are as thuggish as he ever was. His elder son, Morris, is reputedly responsible for the Vestan coup, and his younger son, Elwood, by all reports is eager to outdo his brother to vie for mob boss.
“Furthermore, I’ve become convinced the warehouse disaster was no accident. Ogilvie & Sons is responsible for it.”
All four of them stared at her. Benavidez asked, “You have proof?”
“Look at the facts. One: there has never been a gap as long between major ice shipments as the one we are currently facing, in over a hundred years of recordkeeping. Nor as lean an inventory in any of the trans-Jovian clusters or parking zones. How likely is it that this disaster would happen at such a time? Two: my technology executive is telling me that the life-support systems failed in a highly unusual way, which caused the disaster to be much worse than it should have been. We can’t rule out the possibility that our systems were hacked.
“Three, and worst of all.” She called up her waveface and pinged them. Her research spread out before them. “Within the past ten months, two dozen of Ogilvie & Sons’ ships have made an unscheduled trip to Marspace. A sort of mobster’s mecca. What you are looking at right now is a series of satellite photos of one of those stops.”
Val leaned forward, and whistled—a sharp note. “Those look like military-issue shuttles they’re loading. Equipped with armored plating and missiles,” he elaborated, at Benavidez’s look. “And—”
“And those are military troops, to all appearances, boarding the ships. Yes. I’ve checked seven of the other twenty-three so far, during their Martian docking period, and satellite photos show the same thing.” Jane flipped through the images. Benavidez and the others stared, slackjawed.
“According to my analysis,” she said, “if the pattern holds for all twenty-four, they’ve amassed between seven and eight thousand mercenaries. Each of the carrier ships is docked within a week or two’s travel from here.” She froze on a picture of the troops boarding one of the ships. The shot was blurred, but from the shadow angles, it was clearly mid-afternoon, and the helmeted heads and rifles were easy to distinguish.
The whites of Thomas’s eyes gleamed. Emily looked sick; Val grim. Benavidez’s face could have been carved in granite.
“The Ogilvies have amassed a private army,” Jane finished. “It’s clear that they are going to do to us what they did to Vesta, Mr. Prime Minister. They are going to use this disaster to force you to abdicate in all but name. You—all of us—will become their puppets. And if we resist, they’ll send in the troops to ‘restore order.’ Maybe they plan to send them in regardless.”
A tense silence settled over them.
“A week away?”
“That’s correct,” Jane said. “Seven to ten days.”
“When are they likely to launch?”
Val pondered this. “Most likely they’ll launch to arrive with the ice. They’ll probably say that they are there to help distribute supplies and help shorthanded security staff.”
Benavidez turned to Val. “How many personnel do we have trained? Who would be qualified to fight if called?”
Val ran
through his lists. “If we include the Zekeston, Portsmouth, and Pikesville police forces, perhaps as many as a thousand experienced fighters. We could muster five times that, but they’d be inexperienced, and going up against military-grade weaponry with hammers and lengths of pipe.” He rubbed his mouth. “Sir, it’d be a slaughter.”
Benavidez looked at Jane. “Suggestions?”
“Stall for time. They have us in a bad place. But we have strengths that Vesta didn’t, besides our advance knowledge of their military capacity.”
“Like?”
“Well, ‘Stroiders,’ for one. They can’t afford to come into the open and be revealed as the thugs they are. They’ll have to be more underhanded than they were in Vesta. It makes it harder for them.”
“Why?” Emily asked. “Why do this to us? They already have Vesta.”
“Basic astropolitics,” Benavidez said. “We are the only major unaffiliated shipping locus between the outer planets and the inner system. Eros is tied up by two or three major mining corporations, Vesta is locked into Ogilvie & Sons and the Downside majors, who can afford to pay their exorbitant fees. The co-ops and independents can only ship through us. The Ogilvies want to shut them out. Weaken them.”
“Right,” Jane said. “And there is more to it than that. Major construction is planned in Earth and Venus orbit. They want a seat at that table. But in order to do so, they not only need to trounce their shipping competitors—they have to do it sneakily, otherwise Downsider sentiment will turn against them.” Jane turned to the prime minister. “Here is what I propose. Give me till Friday. By then, if they are guilty of this sabotage—and I’m sure they are—I should be able to prove it. Then you can negotiate a deal we can live with, and threaten them with the fact that if they even think about sending those troops here, you will hold a press conference and reveal their involvement in the disaster.”
Benavidez said nothing. Jane and the others waited.
