Profiteer

With Klaus out there, tins commune really wasn’t safe. Klaus was behind a systematic targeting of GA&A personnel. If he became aware of the location of Dom’s commune, he would eradicate it. Klaus would need only a fraction of the force he had used against GA&A.

 

Dom needed some way to make things more defensible.

 

He nodded to himself and started leading Desmond back to the fusion generators and the elevator to the commune. “Yes, Desmond. I think I have a solution, something I should have thought of earlier.”

 

He spent a few hours drafting a plan, organizing an engineering detail and a construction squad, getting the ball rolling. That done, he delegated authority and satisfied himself that things would run fine without him again.

 

When he took the aircar—contragrav, not vectored thrust—Bakunin had settled deep into a moonless night.

 

Dom lifted off from a snow-dusted carpool on the fringe of the commune building. He let the computer handle the initial trajectory of his craft as he watched the commune recede.

 

The building was a massive, white, truncated pyramid with a skirt made by the hydroponics greenhouses. The structure filled the floor of this nameless valley. The craft rose, and there was a shimmer as he passed through the defensive screens of the commune. The force field dome here was not designed to block lasers or plasma, or to fry the delicate electronics of a missile—the building didn’t have power systems that could cope with that. This field was designed with more passive thoughts in mind: reducing the stray infrared and EM signature of the commune town to that of the rest of the mountain around it.

 

There was another shimmer, and suddenly the commune vanished as Dom’s craft passed through the floor of the holo screen. A dozen independent projectors ringed the valley, raising the image of the valley floor above the top of the commune. From this close it was obviously a projection, but from an overflight, another peak, or a satellite, the commune would be invisible.

 

Sadly, both the holo and the defense screens were jury-rigged measures that took two full Bakunin days to implement. Dom didn’t want to leave until both were operational. They were last-minute compensations for the fact that he had never planned for the commune to be a target. The commune was housing for displaced refugees. Corporate wars almost never extended to targeting employees. Corporate battles were battles for assets.

 

Dom hadn’t anticipated Klaus.

 

As the dead snow-capped peaks receded behind him, he hoped his late measures would be enough to hide his people.

 

He should have anticipated this. The whole commune should have been built underground, with adequate ground-air defensive weaponry.

 

Dom turned away from the mountains and decided it was too late for regrets.

 

* * * *

 

Dom flew his contragrav in a wide circle around Godwin, above the hardwood forest that camped in the shoulder of the mountains. The forest seemed an afterthought, a result of the congruence of the equatorial “heat” and the chain of mountains blocking the moisture blowing off of Bakunin’s world-ocean. It seemed almost providential.

 

The people who believed in Dolbrian intervention on Bakunin pointed to this as a sign of their intervention. They also pointed to the fact that, by all rights, Bakunin should be an iceball, but a combination of its proximity to its weak star, an infinitesimal axial tilt, and a thick moisture-laden atmosphere made the equator on the planet’s one continent fairly comfortable. One side of the mountains was lush, one side desert, and the dead tectonics of the planet meant that it had been this way—except for the slow erosion of the mountains—almost since the Dolbrians existed.

 

Dom shook his head. He was still thinking of ancient civilizations.

 

It was Dimitri. Dolbrians were one of Dimitri’s little obsessions. And, unless one of Dimitris’ annual medical procedures—this year a kidney, the next his liver, nerve grafts, bone marrow—had gone wrong recently, Dimitri was in charge of the TEC mission that had cost Dom GA&A.

 

In fact, Dimitri would have to be personally overseeing something like this.

 

Dimitri.

 

Dom wanted to kill him almost as much as he did his brother.

 

The warehouse Dom had rented from Bleek was in the northwest corner of Godwin, sitting right on top of the gentle northward curve of the ill-fated Godwin-Proudhon commuter tube. That’s where he was headed. A direct route straight for the warehouse from the commune would have saved him several hours and given him less of an opportunity for reflection, but it also would have carried him over the GA&A complex, as well as East Godwin. Those were two risks he wasn’t ready to take. So his contragrav aircar had started north, away from everything, turned west over the white synthetic marble of Jefferson City, and turned around so he merged with east-bound air traffic from New Paris.