B00BFVOGUI EBOK Read online

  Another billion dollars. Bam. Bam.

  Jamie knew what he was doing, and he knew it wasn’t at all fair. Known by the giggle-inducing nickname “whirlibangs,” the five interdimensional transit stations orbiting Venus received thousands of containers — known even more provocatively as “bangboxes” — from Signatory worlds every day. By a fluke of twenty-second-century physics, there was no way to know what the containers held until they arrived in normal space. Like artificial gravity, instantaneous communication was still the stuff of science fiction.

  And so Venus had remained the combined customs office, immigration stop, and quarantine for the Solar System. Its orbit was near the “sweet spot” where the circular tracks that hurled ’boxes through the dimensional ether functioned best. That wasn’t so sweet for humanity, which resided inconveniently on the next planet over — but it was delectable opportunity for Jamie. By keeping a watch on the whirlibangs from Ops Station, Quaestor and the other outfits on the curved floor of the bourse had a three-to-seven-minute jump on Earth’s markets. Even if their individual expeditions hadn’t brought back the goods from afar, they could certainly trade based on what the markets would do with the new information.

  It was an ancient game. By the time the nineteenth-century West Coast newspapers reported what European ships in Boston Harbor held, the markets of the East had already acted. That advantage vanished in later years, with shipping manifests cabled or radioed in advance and computerized trading programs angling for a millisecond’s edge on pricing.

  But interstellar trading had been going on since the 2110s, and even now, nobody had a clue what was coming through the portals next. It had always flabbergasted visitors to Ops Station. Conveniently named for both the goddess of abundance and its function, Ops was the Solar System’s eye on galactic commerce. And yet no one there had any idea what would arrive next. One ’box might carry home a Girl Scout troop, the next ten metric tons of Arcturan lymer guano.

  It was no way to run a space railroad.

  The saving grace was that the Ops traders got to see the produce of the Orion arm firsthand — and that gave them here a chance to alter their firms’ holdings before Earth’s market reacted. It was enough to lure young MBA Jamie to enter Quaestor’s training program — and, later, to overcome his stark raving terror at space flight long enough for the mercifully brief transit. He’d feigned the flu during the flight in, sedating himself for the whole trip. The meds for the return were already in his briefcase.

  He’d be loopy but happy. And rich beyond measure.

  The confirmation chime from Earth sounded. “You beat the Praetor guys,” Selena said.

  “So what else is new?” He grabbed the cowbell under his chair and gave it a triumphant jangle. Down the line, a broker for their largest competitor swore. Jamie responded with a loud raspberry.

  He’d grown to hate these people over the last few months — which was only fair, given the number who’d hated him immediately. It didn’t matter. It had never mattered. He hadn’t come for the companionship, and certainly not for the coffee. All the targets Quaestor had set for him, all the bonus thresholds? Just a game, designed to waste his youth and talent. It took other traders years to realize that. Jamie had figured it out — and acted.

  It was all going to be worth it. Let someone else have Trader of the Year. Sometime tonight, the deal of the millennium would close. His deal. He’d be able to buy his own coffee farm.

  Or maybe even Colombia.

  Jamie stood and checked the glistening digital figures imprinted on his palm. The time display generated by the nanoids implanted his skin was keyed, as always, to New York. He looked nervously outside to Charlie, the closest of the transit hubs, motionless in its wider Venusian orbit. The whirlibang’s giant wheel of girders sat silent, exterior lights on the rocket roller coaster blinking as it sank past the transparent pane. There was nothing more futile than watching for a shipment to arrive. Yet he was powerless to do anything else.

  Jamie slumped back into his chair.

  Why wasn’t it here?

  * * *

  Jamie woke with a start when the chime sounded. He didn’t know how long he’d been sleeping at his station; he’d collapsed there so many times in the past that the caterer had started bringing his breakfast directly to the trading desk. But he knew what this particular chime meant: he’d programmed it to sound whenever a single ’box arrived from Altair.

  This was it. He stood, heart pounding, and reached for his binoculars.

  It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. From across the void, it looked like any other container: cold, gray, and metallic. Seventeen meters long, five meters across, and five meters high. One of countless bangboxes whipping around the Orion Arm.

  But this one had forty billion dollars inside.

  Jamie sat down and breathed deeply. He’d planned this all along. In seconds, the container, now in normal space, would broadcast its contents across a secure channel to Ops Station. Logistical operators would order a robotic space tug to latch on to the ’box. On receiving orders from the container’s owner aboard Ops, they’d direct the tug to a waiting rocket transport already connected to a cluster of other containers bound for Earth. The “last kilometer” would take far longer than the trip across deep space.

  After sneaking a look at the rest of the trading floor, Jamie returned his attention to screens. Activating an interface he’d never used before, he spoke his identifying code and the serial number of the ’box. “Owner, Cowbell Capital Investments. Sturm, Jamison P., proprietor. Destination for this container: receiving yards, spaceport of Johannesburg. Container contents…”

  He stopped.

  He lifted the binoculars again. No, that’s not right.

  He tapped the microphone attached to his collar. “Logistics?”

  “Yeah,” a male voice responded.

  “This is Ja…I mean, this is the owner of the box just in from Charlie. Your tug should be taking it to the Nördlingen, right?” He tried not to let his voice waver.

  “Not unless you want your passengers dead, sir. That transport has no life support hookups.”

  Jamie goggled. “Passengers?”

  “Yep. We’re clipping on a taxi shell to bring them to Ops.”

  That was exactly what was happening, Jamie saw. He was almost afraid to ask the next question. “Why here?”

  “Because they want to see you.”

  3

  Jamie had a theory about his professors back at NYU. Whether they lectured in person or on isopanel, every one of them got dressed directly out of the laundry basket. And in the dark. But the man who now exited the elevator into the receiving area looked as though he’d gone through the tumble dry along with his clothes.

  Zero gravity was rough on the fashionable: Jamie knew that well. Arrivals to Ops entered through the despun docking port at the center of the torus. Then they went from zero gee to the point-eight of the rotating habitation rings in a leisurely lounge car ride. Unless, that is, the passenger was in a hurry, in which case the elevator ride was the equivalent of an Apollo splashdown. A professional bearing seldom survived. This guy looked as if he’d never had one in the first place. The gray-haired man in his fifties blew his nose into a crumpled handkerchief. Red eyes looked up. “Jamison Sturm?”

  “Present.”

  “Leonid Falcone,” he said, wiping his brow with the rag.

  “Leo,” Jamie said, not sure whether to offer his hand.

  “That’s Mr. Falcone,” came the gruff reply. Falcone looked back inside the lift. “These guys are with me.”

  Jamie looked up at the man’s companions, both enormous. He wondered for a moment whether the Cowboys had scheduled an exhibition game in the commissary before recognizing the dress khakis of Quaestor’s security detail. “You brought an escort?”

  “This is Corporal O’Herlihy and Private Dinner, from my expedition’s security detail.”

  “Private Dinner?” Jamie co
uldn’t help but laugh. “What, no one else showed up?”

  The looming Hawaiian glared down at him and growled. “That’s right. Make fun of my name.”

  “Sorry.” Flustered, Jamie looked back at Falcone. “I’m sorry. What’s this about? You came from Altair?”

  “Were you were expecting something from Altair, Mr. Sturm?” Bleary eyes glared at him.

  Jamie stammered. “Well, I…”

  Falcone began walking. “I’m the administrator of the Altair Sunward Product and Equipment Center.”

  “ASPEC,” Jamie said. “I’ve heard of it.” Prodded by the men-mountains, he followed. They passed through the main receiving lounge, and Jamie felt the stares of people he’d lived with but whose names he’d never learned. Falcone was indifferent to them. “We need to talk.”

  “Yes, but I don’t have an office—”

  “Forget it,” Falcone said, waving his hand past a wall-mounted electronic reader. A door snapped open, and Falcone led Jamie into an area he’d never been in before. The trading companies had offices for debriefing arrivals from deep space here, but Falcone walked past the Quaestor rooms toward one normally reserved for independent traders.

  Jamie pointed behind him. “Don’t you want to use — ”

  Falcone stood with the door open. “I don’t think either of us want the company to hear about this.” He stepped inside and took a seat behind a desk.

  O’Herlihy and Dinner grabbed Jamie by both arms and slammed him into the chair across from Falcone. Smarting, Jamie looked up, aggravated. “Look, I don’t know what this is about, but I don’t have to take this!”

  Falcone ignored him. He took a portable isopanel from his pocket. “Sturm, your job isn’t to move product, is it?”

  “I — what?”

  “You’re a hedger for the company,” Falcone said. “When you see that a supply of something is about to hit the Earth market, you make sure it doesn’t bite Quaestor in the ass.”

  “It’s more complicated than…” Jamie began to object. Feeling the eyes of the beefy guards on him, he calmed down. “Yeah, basically. Quaestor’s got expeditions across the Orion Arm, but we’re not the only ones. What we don’t bring in ourselves, we need price protection against. So the firm buys, sells and holds everything known to man — and a bunch of stuff known only to your bug-eyed-monster friends.” He looked up at the guards. “No offense.”

  “None taken, smartass,” O’Herlihy said. Dinner just smirked.

  “So you deal with Quaestor’s earthly holdings.” Falcone looked up from the isopanel, suspicious. “But you’re not tipping anybody to the goods we’re about to ship through the whirlibangs ourselves.”

  “Tipping?” Jamie straightened. “Of course not. That’d be illegal. Not to mention physically impossible!”

  “Hmm.”

  Jamie didn’t like where this was going. Falcone knew something. Or rather, he knew Jamie knew something. Yes, there wasn’t any dimensional shortcut for information — no ethereal way of sending information instantaneously across trillions of kilometers. Only matter could make the trip, and only a specific amount of that. But while Quaestor didn’t have contact with its traders in deep space, those reps all had their orders. Sure, a licensed Quaestor merchant dispatched to send back iridium from Regulus might send back kegs of Lehosian soup instead; dealers had to be able to make decisions on the spot. But more than likely, she’d send back iridium. And like all the Quaestor hedgers, Jamie had a good idea of what the company was searching for at any moment.

  Well, better than a good idea.

  “Let’s cut the crap,” Falcone said. “I think you’re in the trading business for yourself.”

  Jamie rose. “I don’t have to take—”

  Falcone slapped the isopanel on the table. “Son, I think you’d better have a look at that.”

  Sweating, Jamie read. Destinations. Cargos. Account numbers. Instructions. After just a few lines, Jamie’s heart was in his shoes.

  “You’ve been playing a shell game, my young friend,” Falcone said. “You’re moving product out there, beyond the whirlibangs. Our company’s product — back and forth, from star to star. You’ve been doing it for months.”

  Jamie shook his head. “No, no. I told you, I’m just a market specialist—”

  “Some specialist.” Falcone snatched back the electronic manifest. “Somehow, you got into the Altair expedition’s requisitioning system — my expedition — and ordered a bunch of material for the security team’s warehouse.” He nodded to Dinner and O’Herlihy. “These guys’ place.”

  They glared at Jamie.

  Falcone continued. “You had containers of excess supplies shipped into Surge Altair’s warehouse. But then you ordered them shipped back out again. Regulus. Porrima. All over. As soon you heard here where the demand was out there, you sent the goods — and the sell orders — to our merchants on the scene. They conducted those trades like any other business. And you…” Falcone paused. Jamie’s elbows were on his knees. “You all right, son?”

  Jamie wheezed. “No, it’s okay. I just think I might be hyperventilating a little bit.”

  Falcone rolled his eyes. “You couldn’t do it with our usual trading goods. Our officials here know everything we’ve got for sale. But the supplies the surge teams receive aren’t on those books.” He eyed Jamie. “After a few months of this shell game, you must have run up quite a profit.”

  Jamie looked green. There was no sense denying it now. He mumbled something.

  “What?”

  “Forty percent,” Jamie said. “On a hundred billion dollars in goods. Forty billion dollars.”

  “On a hundred billion dollars of company property that was never supposed to be out there.” Falcone looked keenly at Jamie. “Wait. That’s what you were expecting today instead of us, wasn’t it? Your profits!”

  The administrator was right, but Jamie didn’t say anything. He simply stared at the desk.

  “Jesus,” Falcone said. He looked up at O’Herlihy. “Can you believe this guy?”

  “I sure can, sir,” O’Herlihy said, cracking his knuckles. “We’ve caught us a pirate in our home port.”

  Startled by the term, Jamie leaned forward and pointed at the manifest. “Wait, wait. I didn’t steal anything! I traded the company’s goods, sure. But you know how big the warehouses are for the security details. They always oversupply the grunts!”

  “We’re protecting the traders’ asses!” Dinner snarled.

  “And I’m sure you do a fine job. But there’s excess capacity. With the billions we spend making you guys into walking death machines, nobody paid attention to me rotating in some goods that other civilizations actually wanted.” He punched the desk beside the manifest. “But it’s all back there, Falcone. I’m done. I put the principal into replacing all the goods in the warehouse. Go look. It’s all there — and my profit is, too.” He looked around, his lip curling. “Er…is that coming later, or what?”

  Falcone laughed hard, setting off a coughing fit. Jamie’s attempt at a smile vanished as Falcone caught his breath. “You need to see this for yourself,” the administrator said. “We’re taking you back to Altair.”

  “Altair?” Jamie laughed. “I’m going home soon!” He gulped, considering the prospect of the trip. “I’m a desk-trader. You guys can strap your asses into a shoebox and get shot across the galaxy if you want—”

  “You don’t get it, Sturm!” Falcone said. “You’re slick, I’ll grant you that. But something’s happened you don’t know about, and this thing is about to blow up on everyone, me included!” Falcone shook with anger. “I don’t have time to explain. I have to check around here to see what the company already knows.” He pointed angrily at Jamie. “But in the meantime I need to get you off this station, to where I can keep an eye on you. That means Altair!”

  Altair! Jamie slipped in his chair. His expensive shoes suddenly interested him, and he took a closer look. It was nearly seventeen light years to
Altair, or about a forty-five-minute transit; whirlibang travel wasn’t instantaneous for those in the passenger ’boxes. He doubted there was enough sedative on Ops to keep him from an embolism.

  Falcone looked over the desk. “You all right, Sturm?”

  “No, that would be me hyperventilating again,” Jamie said. He looked up, green, as Dinner and O’Herlihy grabbed for his arms. “Can you get me a paper bag, or something?”

  “To breathe into?” O’Herlihy asked.

  “That’d be one reason.”

  4

  “…and when the time comes,” the solemn voice said, “remind yourself: nothing is more important than being right. They will tempt you, try to lure you away from the cause. But they will have nothing to offer you, my listeners — because you have all you need: the truth!”

  The deep voice rose, talking faster into the communicator on the lectern. “Freedom? I’d rather have the truth. Power? I’d rather be right. Our people, the Xylanx, have been wrong for far too long. I will not add to their failings — and neither should you. We are the Severed. We live apart now, but we will lead our people back!”

  Now, the speaker slowed again, his manner humble, his cadence respectful. “These are the words of Kolvax, descended from Forrah Glay. These are the words of truth. Speak the words, my followers — until next time.”

  Across the makeshift chapel, Kolvax’s assistant gave the signal. “Message transmitted.”

  “Until next time, another waste dump out the airlock,” Kolvax said. The hulking biped in black let loose with a ripping fart, audible even outside his high-tech environment suit. That was what his sniveling followers really deserved to hear. Kolvax turned toward his office and threw his parchment script over his shoulder. Tellmer scrambled to catch it. “Incinerate that,” Kolvax snarled.

  Tellmer blanched, horrified. “But it is a holy writ—”

  “I wrote it on the commode. Send it back to from whence it came.” Kolvax shook his head. Tellmer was still a believer. Were any of his listeners? He didn’t know — or much care.