Profiteer

“Don’t do something stupid, Klaus. Not when I’m about to hand it all over to you.”

 

Klaus’ hand stopped halfway to the disconnect button.

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“What do you think I mean? Why did you hire me?”

 

“All of them?”

 

“One thousand three hundred and eighty-seven as of last count. Plus Dominic, plus Shane, plus a handful of others.”

 

“Where?”

 

“No.”

 

Klaus was silent for a long time.

 

Finally, he spoke, his voice barely in control. “What do you mean, ‘no?’ “

 

Webster chuckled. “I wish you had your holo’s video pickup switched on, just to see your face.”

 

Klaus grabbed both sides of the holo, stood up, and shook it as if he could throttle Webster by remote control. “What do you mean, ‘no’?”

 

“I mean that I have to be compensated for the risk I’m taking.”

 

“What risk?”

 

“Believe me, you don’t want to know. But you’re going to have to quadruple the balance on my account before I hand you anything.”

 

“You don’t know what you’re asking.”

 

“I know exactly what I’m asking. I’ve got a monitor on the account active right now, and I’ll talk once I see numbers change.”

 

“Right now?”

 

“Unless you want a nasty surprise or two in the morning.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“Pay.”

 

Klaus debated a moment, only a moment, before he went to the main terminal on his desk and began to transfer funds. It only took a few minutes to do. With his account at TEC, his finances for discretionary spending were effectively unlimited. If he hesitated at all, it was because it galled him to be dictated to.

 

If he ever found out who Webster was, he was a dead man—

 

Or woman.

 

“There, you have your money.”

 

“Very good, Klaus. For a minute there, I thought you were going to let your pride screw you up again.”

 

“Talk, damn you.”

 

“There are two pieces to this, and you better take notes because I’m not going over this again. First, there’s the coordinates of a particular mountain valley you’ll find interesting—”

 

Klaus stored the location of Dom’s little commune on the computer in his desk.

 

“Next, if you want Dominic himself, you’re going to have to make a few modifications to your ship before oh-six-hundred tomorrow morning....”

 

<>

* * * *

 

 

PART THREE

 

Covert Action

 

 

“Whatever is not nailed down is mine. Whatever I can pry loose is not nailed down.”

—Collis P. Huntington

(1821-1900)

 

 

<>

 

* * * *

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

 

Media Exposure

 

 

“Most of life is sitting around waiting for the shitstorm to start.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

 

“Property is theft.”

—Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

(1809-1865)

 

 

06:30:00 Godwin Local

 

“Twenty minutes, people. Get your shit together.” Tetsami’s voice echoed through the tunnel even though she was whispering into a tight-beam LOS communicator. Down the tunnel, Ivor’s contragrav was invisible but for the red warning lights glowing through the digging equipment’s scaffolding.

 

Mosasa, Shane, and Random were up there waiting for the signal to make the punch through to the surface.

 

Tetsami was under more scaffolding at her end. Above her, a trio of mining robots hugged the walls of a triangular hole. The hole went up at a steep angle to end facing a scarred concrete ceiling thirty meters away. From Tetsami’s position she could barely see the concrete underside of the GA&A complex, lit by the targeting lasers from the robots.

 

In an hour that concrete ceiling wouldn’t exist.

 

“Shane’s made it into position,” came Ivor’s voice over the communicator.

 

The ground team would be up the hole. Shane and company were another thirty meters closer to the surface than GA&A’s subbasement. They had to weave through a lot more scaffolding. The hole under the woods traveled through fifteen meters of clay, soil, and mulch after it left the rock that housed the maglev tube. Keeping the hole from caving in required a lot of scaffolding—and the last five meters would have no support.

 

Eventually, Ivor would have to get his contragrav van up that hole—he was the only person Tetsami would trust with that job.

 

“Tell the team to prep for the signal.”

 

“Will do,” Ivor replied. Shane and company were out of direct RF contact because of rock and soil. At the moment, Ivor was Tetsami’s only link to them. Once the job started, the only comm they’d have would be the clock.

 

A clock that read 6:35. It was time to grab the sat.

 

Tetsami opened the back of the maglev van parked next to her hole. Inside, Zanzibar was checking the charge on their weapons. Beyond the front of the van, Dom and Levy were making final checks on their equipment. Flower’s feathery form sat in the passenger seat in the van. It had insisted on coming, even though it had done its job during the planning stages. It wanted to see the operation personally, and right now it was watching everything with its serpentine, eyeless face.

 

Tetsami pulled a case containing the portable groundstation and attached it to a loose cable that was lying on the floor of the tunnel. The cable led off to the west, where it led to a surface sat antenna.