Profiteer

“A Great Power doesn’t ask if it should dominate lesser nations. If it’s a Great Power, it can, and it does.”

—Boris Kalecsky

(2103-2200)

 

 

It had been a month and a half since the intel briefing on Mars. The diplomatic invasion of Earth had begun.

 

Dimitri Olmanov had participated in every Terran Congress since the drafting of the Charter. The coming Congress was number eleven, the first one of the Confederacy’s second century.

 

The Congress would convene in a little over two standard months. The politicking had started in earnest.

 

The Congress had three functions: rewriting the political boundaries of the Confederacy, admitting and promoting member planets and, most importantly, modifying the Confederacy Charter, the document that made the whole shebang run.

 

The most important dynamic was the number of prime seats in the Congress. Dimitri was reminded of that every time he thought of Bakunin. Primes consisted of forty-three seats out of seventy-five—or eighty-three if you counted the probationary members admitted in the last Congress.

 

Sirius and Centauri, between them, had twenty-two of those prime seats. They’d controlled a majority of primes since the founding of the Confederacy. That meant that, for a century, the two wealthiest and—as the other three arms were fond of pointing out—most European arms of the Confederacy had dominated the Congress.

 

Nothing lasts forever.

 

The 11th Congress might see the power shift. Promoting planetary seats was a basic function of the Congress. A planet usually rose through the ranks—probationary, nonvoting, voting, full, and, finally, prime.

 

Conventional wisdom had it that six planets would jump from full to prime. Two from the Alpha Centauri Alliance, one from the Sirius Community, three from the remaining arms of the Confederacy. If conventional wisdom held, that meant that Cynos and Occisis would retain their one prime majority, the slimmest majority they’d ever had, but still a majority.

 

The problem with conventional wisdom was that it was usually wrong.

 

Dimitri walked through the diplomatic compound with Ambrose. It was the first time he’d been out of Confederacy tower since his return from Mars. The building rose behind the two of them, nearly a kilometer into the Australian sky. The spire was a monument to hubris, a large proportion, Dimitri knew, his own.

 

“Another sin,” Dimitri said, swatting the landscaping with his cane.

 

“Sir?” Ambrose said.

 

Dimitri shook his head. “Pride. I wonder if the Dolbrians were as proud of their Face as we are of our government.”

 

“I wouldn’t know, sir.”

 

“Of course you don’t. No one does. That’s the beauty of it. A hundred million years and this will all be so much dust. All this so-important bean counting.”

 

Dimitri saw the plaintive nonexpression that usually meant that the remains of his companion’s brain had lost the thread of the conversation. The literal-minded Ambrose was probably picturing the counting of beans.

 

Dimitri sighed.

 

The secure diplomatic compound huddled around the foot of the tower, as if in worship. The area was landscaped within an inch of its life. Every single speck of gravel had been hand-placed and was monitored by security. Bushes, fountains, and flowers were everywhere.

 

The scene was about as natural as Ambrose.

 

The knowledge that every second bush held monitoring equipment deadened the garden for Dimitri even more. It was a much more concentrated form of the same maniacal human control that was strangling Mars.

 

Eventually he walked into a utilitarian building inside the Centauri compound. The unpretentious building was unmarked. It could have been a storehouse or gardener’s shack.

 

In fact, it housed the offices of the second most powerful man in the Confederacy.

 

Dimitri was here to see Pearce Adams, Archeron representative to the Terran Congress, Centauri Alliance delegate to the Terran Executive Command, vice-president in charge of security for the Centauri Trading Company, and the head man of the Centauri intelligence community.

 

Ambrose followed Dimitri down stairs that led underground and into an office complex three times the size of the building above. Dimitri pressed no buttons, used no keys, and talked to no guards, but the secure doors opened for him anyway.

 

In the security-blanketed area around the tower, Dimitri doubted that there was a single door that wouldn’t.

 

When Dimitri walked into Adams’ Terran office, the first thing he noted was that Adams had the temperature down to its lowest setting. Adams sat at his desk, in shirtsleeves, and still looked uncomfortably hot. Dimitri didn’t shed his jacket. The cold brought back joint aches he remembered from Mars.

 

Dimitri wondered whether Adams was homesick or simply trying to irritate him.

 

The only decoration in the office was a holo on the wall, an image of low-gravity mountains gripped in an endless sunlit blizzard. Occasionally the virtual ice caught the double sun and cast multiple rain—actually ice— bows.

 

Dimitri decided that Adams was homesick.