by John F. Carr
“It can’t be that bad, can it?” he remonstrated. “Don’t you get a price break on Essential Raw Materials, as well as reduced taxes?”
“TAXES!” the word came blaring out like a rarely heard obscenity. “The miscarrying Parliament can’t raise taxes fast enough to keep up with the devaluation of the mark. Any tax breaks’ll be too late. The state-subsidized mines have already cut their production in half during the past year; the workers make more by stealing the ore and selling it on the black market to privateer furnaces. Where do you think I’ve been getting my cobalt and tungsten?”
“Sell the factory, then,” Steele said, with a chill in his voice, “before you lose it.”
“To whom? And for what?” The only thing left that has any real value is land. Who’s crazy enough to sell that to buy a factory guaranteed by the government to lose money? They’ve already taken over half the factories in the city. The only ones that are still running are staffed with conscripts guarded by troops.”
“I’ll buy your factory,” Steele said.
Hamilton saw Whakley’s face turn bright red and his hands ball into fists as he tried to rise up out of his seat. Morgan’s hand pinned him to his chair.
“Hear him out” Morgan ordered.
Whakley subsided and shriveled under Steel’s glare.
“I mean it,” Steele continued. “I can use the loss as a tax write-off.”
Lately Steele had been buying bankrupt plantations and farms for just that reason. Behind his back, people were calling him “Loot, Pillage and Steele,” and other things less polite. I wonder how long it’ll be before they start calling him King Steele? That sobering thought turned his attention back to the man himself.
“…all things considered,” Steele continued, “five billion marks seems a reasonable price for the plant, including land, building, computers, inventory and all the records, including software.”
“Five billion! It’s worth ten times that much right now; probably ten times that by tomorrow morning. John, you were out this morning changing currency. What’s the mark going for today?”
“A hundred and twenty-thousand to one crown. Or, at least it was an hour ago.”
“You see?” Whakley stormed. “You’re trying to ruin me!”
Steele laughed. The hard edge to that laugh told Hamilton he’d played his last “friendly game of cards” with the man. It was beginning to look as though he never should have played the first hand.
“You’re already ruined, Whakley,” Steele sneered. “I’m just offering you a raft off your sinking ship. Whether you take it or not is up to you. I’m sure the new owners will be more amenable to reason.”
It was no secret that Steele owned a good part of Parliament. It was greedy-guts like Steele who were driving the economy right into the pavement.
This time Whakley’s struggles to rise almost knocked his chair over, until Morgan whispered into his ear. Then he turned white and slumped back down.
Hamilton wondered what Morgan’s hold was over Whakley; probably he held the notes on his factory. Whatever it was, it had turned the man’s spine to jelly. A man with a wife and four children, one of whom needed constant medical care, had too many things to fear during times like these. Hostages to fortune, came to mind.
Morgan turned to Steele. “If you make that offer in Imperial crowns, you might have yourself a factory.”
Steele scratched his chin, then fumbled with his pipe and its fixings. “Hmm. Fifty thousand crowns—that’s my final offer.”
Hamilton looked at the dejected Whakley and felt his gorge rise. “Don’t sell, Howard. I’ll loan you fifty thousand crowns. Use it to play the currency market and keep your factory afloat. You can pay me back when things return to normal.”
Whakley sat up, his eyes overflowing, like a man who’d just heard his death sentence commuted. “Do you mean it, John?”
“I certainly do. You have my word.”
“You might want to reconsider,” Steele said, his words blanketed with menace. “You and the Baron aren’t that far from Whakley’s porch, if you get my meaning. Unless you’ve got a license to print the damn stuff?”
John felt his blood chill. The last thing they needed were hostile eyes turned toward the state of Hamilton finances. And Steele’s would be hostile. The man was much more ambitious, not to say ruthless, than he’d ever believed. The Baron had said as much a year ago, but he hadn’t listened. Too late for regrets now; the damage was done.
Morgan had a Cheshire cat grin on his face, but Whakley was still reeling. His voice trembled as he spoke: Thank you, Lord John. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Cecilia’s back in the hospital again… you’ll never know how much this means to me…”
“I think ye may be makin’ a huge mistake, m’lord,” Steele said, deliberately shifting into Lowtown patois to remind everyone of how he’d clawed his way up from poverty and the underclass.
Their little ruckus was now being observed by everyone in Dupars. A cliff lion could have stalked into the room and no one would have noticed.
Personally, Hamilton wanted to kick himself in the arse. He’d been drinking and playing cards—yes, and probably letting secrets slip out—for years with a man who secretly hated and despised him. He pushed his chair back and rose, to stand with his feet wide apart and his hands clenched into fists. “Steele, get the Hell out of here before I turn you inside out and hang you out to dry! And don’t ever come within five meters of this table again. You’re no friend of mine, or anybody else at this table.”
Whakley nodded, but Morgan rose up: “You’ve got that wrong, Hamilton. Steele is a good friend and business partner. You’re going to live to regret this insult.”
“You two have made a big mistake,” Steele said with a snarl. “You’ll live to regret this; I promise you.” He strode out of Dupars with Morgan in tow, and the eye of everyone in the dining room.
Haverstill, shaking his head, made his way over to their table. “You two have just made yourselves a bad enemy. Steele hates to be embarrassed and you’ve done that in spades.”
“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Hamilton said. “I’d like to buy a round of drinks for the house.”
That cheered the room up, but Haverstill left shaking his head.
Whakley called the waiter over and ordered a bottle of Tabletop bourbon, probably the last one in the house since no one knew when another trading ship would arrive in-system. “A toast,” he offered. “To friends and good companions.”
The bourbon went down smooth, but it didn’t take the chill out of John Hamilton’s blood, nor make him forget Steele’s parting glare. He opened his belt pouch, taking out five hundred crowns. He handed them to Whakley, saying, “I’ll have the rest for you next dimday.”
“Christ, John…I don’t know how to thank you. I really don’t…”
“Then don’t try. I know how much that factory means to you; I’m just glad I could help. Now, I have to go and tell the Baron what just happened.”
“You don’t think he’ll be mad—?
Hamilton shook his head, knowing that he’d made the right decision. His grandfather would have done the same thing.
Whakley held the bottle up and asked, “Another drink before you leave?”
“No, thanks. I want to get to the market while there’s something left to buy. I’ll see you soon.”
II
David Steele sat at his desk, slamming things down. He picked up a crystal vase that had once adorned an Earth home and smashed it into the wall. I’ll kill them all, the entire Hamilton family, he fumed.
There was a timid knock at his door.
“Come in!” he shouted.
His personal assistant, Emil Proxmyer, came rushing into the office. He was a little man with wet eyes, a round face and his sparse brown hair styled in a bad comb-over.
“What is it, sir?”
“Pour me a glass of my best New Aberdeen Scotch.”
The small man scampered over t
o the large bar and filled a thick tumbler with his favorite single-malt Scotch. Behind Proxmyer’s meek and ingratiating manner, rested an encyclopedic memory, a finely-honed legal mind and an easily fanned resentment against anyone taller, richer or more handsome—which included just about every male inhabitant of Castell City.
“Tell me everything you know about the Hamiltons,” Steele demanded.
Proxmyer’s gray eyes darted up into his head and he seemed to go into some sort of trance. Steele was used to his assistant’s peculiar tics and mannerisms and waited impatiently for his response.
“The Hamiltons are one of Haven’s oldest families. Edwin Albert Hamilton was originally born in Alberta, Canada. Records about his early days are sketchy but he attended Mount Royal University in Calgary, but left—due to gambling charges—without obtaining an undergraduate degree in geology. After three years at the university, it appears he worked at a number of itinerant jobs, including that of a prospector. He was busted in Alberta for fraudulent sales of mining stocks to abandoned mines that had been salted to gullible investors. He quickly migrated to the United States where he used his financial knowledge for outright fraud and confidence games.
“Edwin first met up with Bill Castell, the founder of the Church of New Harmony, in Colorado. The two of them made a small fortune selling phony gold mining stocks to medical men with cash to hide. They were quite successful; Bill Castell used some of that money to found his new church while Edwin lost most of his fortune playing poker in Las Vegas, Nevada.
“When Edwin was unable to pay his gambling debts, one of the gaming outfits—I believe it was the Stardust Syndicate—put a price on his head. As with most compulsive gamblers, he’d set aside enough cash to bribe Bill Castell, who was desperate for funds, into providing a one-way ticket to Haven. The story is that once he arrived on Haven in 2038, he quickly left the Harmony Compound behind and went prospecting.
“For the next few years the story is light and there are many rumors as to what happened next. From the evidence, it appears that Edwin was the first man to discover the shimmer stones. Some say he killed and stole them from another prospector. Regardless, Edwin quickly realized that he had something very special and valuable. He somehow made his way back to Earth—no easy matter in those early colonial times—and made an exclusive deal with Dover Mineral Development to provide them with the sole location of the stones. Edwin had covered his tracks very well and the Bronson family, which owned majority stock in Dover, provided Edwin with a very generous cash settlement and royalty for providing them with his knowledge of which planet the shimmer stones were from.
“DMD had an exclusive monopoly on the shimmer stone market until 2052 when they were rediscovered by Sergei Pulatov. Erhenfeld Bronson, the former head of Dover, was exiled to Haven as governor because he hadn’t been ruthless enough to keep the secret of their location from the competition. Edwin fell out of favor as well and retired to Haven where he had Whitehall castle removed stone by stone from Scotland. He claimed that it was the Hamilton ancestral home, Bothwell Castle. The castle had been in ruins for centuries so it’s debatable as to how much of the current building was actually transported from its ancestral home in Scotland.
“His claim of being related to the Ducal House of Hamilton is unproven. No one was ever able to verify or deny his claim. In his defense, the Hamilton family was part of the Norman force that conquered England in 1066 and were well-rewarded with estates in the British Isles. Edwin traces his ancestry back to the Thirteenth Century to William de Hamilton (third son of Robert de Beaumont, third Earl of Leicester) and Mary of Strathearn and Bothwell Castle. According to his own words, Edwin was a direct descendant of the Irish branch of the Hamilton family, in particular Lord Claude Hamilton of Lock Nee, the only lock in Ireland—”
“Enough of the family history,” Steele interrupted. One of Proxmyer’s issues was that he tended to take orders literally and would continue the family history for however long it took to recite every bit of information in that round head of his.
“To sum it up,” Proxmyer continued, with a pained tone, “the Hamiltons have continued to manage their ancestral estate and have flourished through the First Empire and up to today. The family is currently reduced to just four members: Baron Albert William Hamilton, John Claude Hamilton III, Matilda Hamilton and Roger Douglas Hamilton, who is a member of the Imperial Space Navy. It is doubtful that Roger will be returning, since there hasn’t been an Imperial warship landing on Haven since the Seventy-seventh and the Imperial Governor departed. The Hamiltons have done better in the current economic downswing than most of their peers. According to rumor, the estate contains a hidden cache of specie and Imperial currency; this, however, has not been verified.”
“I know young Hamilton has been exchanging Imperial credits for Haven marks on the Black Market,” Steele said. “I want you to dig into the Hamiltons finances and learn where they’re getting their money.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Proxmyer said. “You might want to talk to your friend at First National; he could probably tell you more than I’ll be able to learn.”
“I have,” Steele snarled. “Apparently, he knows very little. The Hamiltons closed their safe deposit box a decade ago and do very little banking there, or anywhere else. Yet, they always have enough hard currency, more than enough to bail out friends.”
Steele cursed a blue streak before adding, “Young Hamilton embarrassed me in public. No one gets away with that! Especially if I stand to make a profit on the side.”
Chapter Two
“Thank you, Shaw,” said the tall man wearing the uniform of the Haven Volunteers.
The butler bowed himself out. Albert Hamilton, Baron of Greensward, turned and offered a seat to Brigadier Gary Cummings.
The two aging men might have been cast in the same mold, then customized by hand. The Baron carried just over ten kilos of fat over solid muscle; his complexion was ruddy from open-air life. Cummings carried no spare weight, but his tanned face was furrowed with worry lines and his eyes red from too many sleepless nights.
“Since you’re in uniform, I expect this is not a social call,” the Baron said.
“Quite right, Baron.”
“Christ on a stick, Gary! We’ve known each other long enough to drop that kind of court nonsense. You know my Christian name.”
“All right, Albert.”
“Al, to my friends.”
Cummings’ stern face broke into a grin. “You win, Al. We’ve got problems.”
“Personal, or does ‘we’ include the militia and the Shangri-La Valley?” the Baron asked.
“Everything. We had to decommission another regiment last week. That leaves us with exactly two understrength regiments for the entire Valley.”
“That’s ridiculous, Gary!” the Baron sputtered. “That scum—raiders, pirates or whatever you want to call them—hit us hard this spring. You’d think those politicians in the Assembly would be looking after our defenses, not undermining them—the incompetent bastards! Rapscallions; all of them. Another series of raids like those and civilization on Haven will be tumbling downhill with no brakes. Is this the Provos at work again?”
“For once, no. It’s this damned inflation; it’s killing the militia, Al. We barely have enough marks to keep the troops fed, much less trained and equipped!”
“Why doesn’t the government just print more money? The Chamber of Deputies has done that for less worthy causes in the past.”
Gary’s face puckered, as if he had just sucked on a lemon. “Oh, they’ve tried, but the value of their currency drops so fast that it’s practically worthless by the time my men get off the base. They’re lucky to be able to buy anything. Before much longer all the legal markets will be completely bare. After all, who wants to produce anything when they get less money for their final product than what they paid for the raw materials?
“The government steps in, of course. We escort the workers to their plants—and �
�escort’ is putting it politely. But what do we do when there’s nothing there for them to work with? The fabricators have had to run the iron ore down from the Atlas Mountains in convoys because bandits were hijacking the ore trucks and selling them and their contents.
“I swear, everything is going to the black market. I could do a better job for my troops if I just declared myself Warlord and started looting supplies!”
The Baron shrugged. “Why don’t you? The way the economy is going, it’s going to come to that sooner or later. Either that, or you turn your command over to some Provo hack, like that Steele fellow. We both know what that will mean….”
Brigadier Cummings grimaced. “Another socialist-workers’ hell, like Stalin. Ever seen it, Al?”
“No, but I’ve been on Diego.”
“Hereditary serfdom isn’t nearly as bad as what they had on Stalin. I don’t know why the Empire never got around to cleaning up that viper’s nest; maybe they were keeping it around as a horrible example of politics gone rotten. If we let one of these home-grown tyrants, like Steele, take charge, that’s how we’ll end up. If it’s not already too late.”
“Do you think it’s gotten that bad, Gary?” the Baron asked.
“It’s too close to call. The barbarians are already inside the gates, and it’s too late for housecleaning. But I’ll be damned if I join the barbarians. I gave my oath to this so-called planetary government; even if it doesn’t know a horse’s ass from its ear.”
That was a door closed politely, but firmly, in the Baron’s face; very much as he’d expected. To change the subject, he shrugged and said, “I suppose it’s too late for the Chamber of Deputies to do much about it now, even if they wanted to. They would have had to start even before the Imperial Marines left Haven. For us, that was like the last of the Roman Legions leaving Britain. After that, it was uncertainty—first bandit raids, then civil war and invasion. We’ve gotten as far as the bandits; my money is on civil war coming next.”
