by S MacDonald
Alex glanced at his coffee, which he’d already drunk half of. It had been provided by the duty rigger without being asked for, like an offering to placate an angry god. The fact that Rangi had authorised it surplus to the rationed allowance indicated that he, too, felt the need to soothe the skipper.
‘Uh huh,’ said Alex, with the wary manner in which he always engaged in discussions about Davie’s world, the world of intersystem corporations and high finance.
‘We’re both happy with that,’ Davie pursued, ‘and in fact, I trust your judgement so much that I’ll value my own cup of tea – thanks,’ he smiled briefly at the rigger who’d provided that as if on cue, though in fact Davie had seen it coming, ‘based on your valuation of your coffee, so as long as you keep saying your coffee is worth a dollar, I’ll value my tea at, say, eighty nine cents. But then, see, for whatever reason you like – you’ve had another drink of it, it’s gone a bit cold – you decide that your coffee isn’t worth a dollar any more, only, say, ninety nine cents. So you could say that a cent has gone missing, see? You took it, when you devalued your coffee, though it isn’t, obviously, a real cent that you could take from the mug and put in your pocket. Anyway, the fact that your coffee is not worth quite as much makes me have to rethink how much my tea is worth now, and whatever decision I make about that, whether I drop the value in line with your move or think that my tea is now worth more in comparison, whatever happens, there’s likely to be some kind of adjustment, yes?’
Alex nodded, with just a shade of impatience because he felt he already understood economics to a considerably higher degree of sophistication than that.
‘Now, here’s the thing,’ Davie said. ‘You’re in a room with a load of people who all have different kinds of drinks and are busily figuring out all the time how much they’re all worth in relation to each other, and all at once a whole bunch of people knock a cent off the value of their drinks simultaneously. If you know that those people are all part of the same coffee-import company, that isn’t a problem, you can see that it’s a corporate decision, no problem with that, nothing hinky about it, business as usual. If, on the other hand, you get a whole bunch of people who are apparently nothing to do with one another all making the same call at the same moment, that does look hinky, doesn’t it, like they’ve got together and agreed to do that, working the market for their own advantage. Which is, if it needs saying, illegal. So when the relevant authorities on Mandram are told that forty seven separate companies have dropped 0.012% of their stock values at the same time that clearly is not a coincidence. Assumption one would be that the companies themselves had done that, conspiring in an illegal cartel. Investigation, however, would soon reveal that the companies had no involvement with one another and that none of them, apparently, had made the decision to drop their stock values that afternoon, as far as they were concerned it had just happened. So that means, obviously, that someone else must have done it, in which the assumption is clearly that that third party had accessed systems unlawfully and worked the thing for their advantage. The cybercrime squad are smart enough to recognise, of course, that the half million that dropped off the value of those stocks that afternoon is not money that can be converted into cards or gemstones and smuggled off the planet, but still, they have this fundamental and really superstitious belief that if money has been taken then it must have ended up in someone’s pocket. So they’re looking for who benefited from the drop to the tune of half a million or beyond, robbery by fraud, and since the only person who could have done that without leaving any trace of it would be a computer genius, they’ve bagged onto a computer genius who was in the area and who has a criminal record for a hacking offence. I can see the logic that took them there, step by step. But it is silly, of course – yes, okay, outrageous, if you prefer. But wrong, however you want to put it. Though not, perhaps, entirely their fault – they’re missing a key piece of information to make sense of that non-coincidental drop in value. Going back to our analogy, say, suppose it turned out that the forty seven people who’d called out the same devaluation at the same moment were actually not the owners of the coffee mugs they had at all, just holding them for somebody else, and that the real owner had asked all the people holding mugs for him to drop their value on his behalf.’
‘Ohhh.’ Enlightenment dawned. ‘You mean…?’
‘Uncle M and Aunt Q,’ said Davie, with a regretful note. ‘Notorious amongst the Families, I’m sorry to say. Legend has it that Uncle M bought a steelworks for Aunt Q as a wedding present and that she promptly sold off her car manufacturing… sorry,’ he stifled his chuckle under Alex’s basilisk glare. ‘Family joke,’ he explained. ‘I won’t try to explain, it’s only funny if you understand why corporations are corporations. But you do need to understand that whatever companies we own under a corporate umbrella are joined up, working as one entity. Uncle M and Aunt Q just don’t seem to have the hang of joined-up thinking, their holdings are all over the place and their handling of those holdings lacks, shall we say, sophistication. I’d need access to files on the Stepeasy to lay down full evidence, but the last time I looked at Family holdings across the League, which was last year, forty one of these companies were in Uncle M/Aunt Q’s portfolio, so I have no doubt that it was them. I can hazard a guess, too, at the reason for the devaluation, which I have no doubt was well intentioned even if the methodology employed was deplorable.’
Alex was glowering at him with a glacial stare, by then, but Davie seemed undaunted.
‘Going back to our analogy,’ he said, ‘suppose that the owner of those forty seven mugs could see that the situation in the room was getting a bit out of hand, arguments breaking out, people making claims for the value of their drinks which were pushing up other people’s valuation of theirs, a heated inflation. If the owner has his representatives call out ‘mine’s not worth quite as much as it was’, that has a cooling effect, pushes re-valuation back into a more stable discussion. It’s known as altruistic devaluation – my corporations do it too, and it is altruistic, knocking value off your own company as a stabilising move on the wider economy. It is, if I have to say it again, legal, legitimate and ethical, entirely within the parameters of clean and green operation. So I have no doubt that Uncle M and Aunt Q meant only to steady an unstable economy, and with more detailed information on what was happening at the time and afterwards, I daresay I could show that they did. But their methods…’ he shook his head. ‘So crude,’ he lamented. ‘Slapping identical devaluation across unconnected companies – it wouldn’t have taken a great deal of thought, would it, to adjust that slightly so that one company gave a little more and another a little less so that the average achieved the percentage needed to cool the markets. But that’s Uncle M and Aunt Q for you – slap, bang, wallop.’
‘So…’ Alex’s tone was arctic, ‘you are telling me that an innocent man has been accused of a crime that never even happened, because of your family’s interference in Mandram’s stock markets.’
‘It isn’t interference,’ Davie said mildly. ‘It’s management of our own property in the service of and for the benefit of the League, which is what my people have been doing for the League since before it was the League. But do, by all means, feel free to vent your prejudices about my relatives and corporate activity in general.’
There was a short silence, during which their eyes held one another and nobody else even seemed to be breathing. Then the moment passed.
‘Sorry,’ said Alex, who accepted that he could sometimes be unreasonable on this subject. ‘But,’ he went on immediately, ‘in all the months that this has been under investigation, couldn’t somebody have told the cyber-crime unit that it was the owners of the companies themselves who’d dropped their value?’
‘Ah – getting into tricky territory, there,’ Davie admitted. ‘I mean yes, of course, obviously, that would seem to be the sensible and responsible thing to do. If the police were looking into any aspect of the conduct of any of my own corp
orations, of course, that wouldn’t be an issue, full disclosure is a core tenet in clean and green operation – that disclosure, obviously, being made under confidentiality agreement to protect my own rights to privacy. But not all of my relatives, as you know, are on board with the ‘clean and green’ philosophy, some are more paranoid about privacy than others, some are of the view that they have every right to do what they want with their own property and don’t need to justify that to anyone else when they haven’t done anything illegal, and others feel very strongly that it isn’t right to have quiet words with the police and get them to drop investigations, however unfounded their suspicions might be, because along that route lies the temptation to feel that we are in some way above the reach of law, which is not and must never be the case. In Uncle M and Aunt Q’s case, their thinking is so muddled that it’s probably a combination of all of the above. But I agree; it isn’t right that innocent people should be harassed and accused because my well-meaning but not very competent uncle and aunt have messed up again. And yes, sorry, again. Not all the generations of the Founding Families are shining examples of shrewd intellect and financial acuity. I can – with your permission – write to my cousin and ask her to sort out the mess. She’s their daughter, and has fortunately not inherited their slap-bang approach to business affairs. She is on-side with clean and green, too, so you need have no ethical concern about involving her.’
‘Oh,’ said Alex, and having taken another drink of his coffee while he thought about this, ‘No – thank you, Mr North, I appreciate your clarification about this and your offer to be of assistance, but it is, I feel, properly something that should be dealt with through official channels.’
‘No problem,’ said Davie, who’d known what his answer would be even before he’d made the offer, but had made it anyway simply to give Alex the opportunity to state his position on record.
Jok Dorlan, as it turned out, was also keen to state his position on record, and was undeterred from that even when the skipper informed him that they were now as sure as they could be at this distance that the alleged crime had never even happened in the first place. He still, he said, wanted to make a statement, both for the Mandramian police and for Internal Affairs.
In this, he was demonstrating rather more political ability than Alex. Internal Affairs was ultimately under the command of the Third Lord, a post currently held of course by Cerdan Jennar. He was not supposed to involve himself in any case directly, his role being a more general one of directing and ensuring that IA worked across the Fleet according to established policy. Where the Fourth was concerned, though, any case involving them would go straight to his desk. Alex knew very well that by refusing to comply with a judicial request to interview a suspect he was laying himself open to investigation for misconduct. The fact was that he didn’t care, standing ready to fight that one out as ferociously as it took to protect his crewman. Jok, though, was just as concerned to protect the skipper. So, having discussed the matter with Jonas, he stood firm and made a sworn statement, right there on the command deck.
‘I wish to say, on record,’ he said, once the legal preliminaries had been accomplished, ‘that I have no knowledge of the alleged cyber-fraud, was unaware of it at the time and have had no knowledge of it since. I have never taken the slightest interest in the stock markets of Mandram or any other planet, never had any involvement in economics or finance, and hold no shares, myself, of any kind. If I had any knowledge or expertise in that field I would be more than happy to answer whatever questions were asked and to assist the investigation in any way possible. Having viewed the points and questions requested, however, I can confirm that the answer to every one of them is the same, that I know nothing whatsoever about it. I would like to clarify, too, that the offence for which I was convicted had no element of fraud or financial gain whatsoever. It was an ill-judged prank rewriting certain parts of a document along the lines of altering names, for instance, from McFarrel to McFarty. As I accepted at the time of my court martial, this was an immature, irresponsible act, compromising the security of classified files and abusing the trust placed in me as a member of the Fleet. Upon discharge from prison I re-joined the Fleet under conditions of continuing service, under the terms of which I was posted to the Minnow on a rehabilitation programme. I had already at that time made an absolute commitment that I would never again access any file unless I had authorisation to do so. That commitment holds. I have never violated even the smallest level of security firewall, either Fleet or civilian, unless under operational orders to do so. And in that, under the orders and supervision of officers who understand exactly what I am doing. My visit to Mandram was entirely private, on shoreleave, I undertook no operational duties there of any kind and certainly did not commit any criminal offences, not this, nor of any other kind. I don’t believe, on that basis, that the police had sufficient grounds to apply for a warrant to have me detained for questioning, so I will be putting in an appeal to the Supreme Court on Mandram. I have requested Internal Affairs support in this and am grateful to Commander Sartin for advising and assisting me in that matter.’ A slight pause and the slightest of nods from Jonas. ‘I think that’s all,’ said Jok, and looked back at Alex. ‘Thank you, sir.’
Alex looked at Jonas, who gazed back placidly. It was dawning on Alex that there were other ways to deal with outrageous injustice than to charge back at it like an enraged mammoth. It was dawning on him too that Jonas would handle this a great deal better than he would himself.
‘Ah.’ He said. Then, after a silence which conveyed all the complexities of what he would have liked to say, he encapsulated it all with a simple, ‘Thank you.’
‘Only doing my job, skipper,’ said Jonas, with a limpid innocence in his eyes that you would need to know him very well to recognise as laughter.
Alex relaxed a little after that, satisfied that the matter was in capable hands and that Jok Dorlan was handling it well, himself, going back to work after no more than a cup of tea and some comforting support from his mates. This being the Fourth, it wasn’t long before that support was taking the form of wondering what other imaginary heists their criminal mastermind might have pulled off, and it wasn’t long after that that Jok himself was cracking up laughing as the suggestions became increasingly absurd.
Even so, those suggestions were murmured and passed hand-to-hand, the mood on the ship remaining one of ostentatious brisk efficiency in which nobody wanted to draw down even the smallest rebuke from the skipper. They were right, too, in their understanding that for all his apparent return to calm good humour, tensions were still simmering beneath.
Arak noticed that himself, when he called Alex a little later on. It was, as was usual with him, a casual call. It was morning on his island and Arak was just calling to wish Alex good morning, to chat about the weather and ask what he and his people would be doing today. Alex appeared to be just his usual self, comparing their forecast with what the state of the seaweed on the wind tree was predicting and agreeing that it was going to be a lovely day, but Arak soon detected that all wasn’t well.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, and when Alex assured him that there was nothing, that he was fine, Arak shook his head. ‘I can hear you’re upset,’ he said – in another culture, that might have been see you’re upset, but as they already understood, culture and physiology combined, here, to make Carrearranians far more sensitive to nuances in tone of voice than they were to facial expression. ‘What’s the matter?’ Arak was starting to look concerned, himself, and went immediately to his own biggest fear, ‘Have your Senate refused to agree that we’re human?’
‘No, no – nothing like that,’ Alex assured him, ‘We won’t hear from them for another four weeks at least, and I’m confident that will be fine, anyway. It’s nothing to do with Carrearranis, really – just a matter involving one of my crew. Some people on another world have accused him of doing something wrong…’ since theft was not part of Carrearranian thinking, he expl
ained in terms that they would understand, ‘something as bad as smashing a boat. But he didn’t do it, and it turns out that the boat wasn’t even smashed at all, just broke while other people were trying to repair it.’
‘Oh.’ Arak promptly lost interest. ‘You’d better tell them they made a mistake, then,’ he advised, and moved straight on, the matter clearly of no importance. ‘You should go for a swim,’ he told Alex. ‘You spend too much time sitting in the same place.’
Alex couldn’t help but laugh, since he did indeed spend more time in that chair on the command deck than was altogether good for him.
‘You’re right,’ he said, and though he didn’t go for a swim, he did take himself off for a walk around the ship. It was meant to stretch his legs and settle him down, but the little flurry of preparation ahead of him, the rigid politeness while he was there and the sighs of relief when he’d gone made it look like the more ferocious kind of skipper’s inspection. And if there’d been any doubt about how ferocious Alex’s feelings still were under that pleasant smile, there wasn’t after his encounter with Jen Jennet. She was on a mess deck when he passed through. Alex saw, out of the corner of his eye, that she was doing one of her empath-training exercises, closing her eyes and directing her attention towards him. He had no objection to that in principle, but turned his head with a look of apology.
‘I wouldn’t,’ he advised. ‘Not right now.’
Too late, though. She was already breathing hard and staring at him with horror. After he’d gone – and he went quickly, not wanting to expose her to any more discomfort – all she would say, gasping, was, ‘Like knives…’ Then Silvie arrived to take her in charge, staying right out of Alex’s way herself while anger was still flashing out of him in jagged sparks.
