Profiteer

On the floor of the van she opened the case and powered it up. A holo globe began to rotate above the groundstation, and lights carved out the tracks of the orbital flotsam that surrounded Bakunin. Tetsami tapped in a few code sequences, and tracks began falling out of the picture. By the end of her key sequence, only one glowing yellow track remained, pacing Bakunin’s equator as the planet turned.

 

Tetsami looked up at Zanzibar, who had finished with the weapons. “Zanzibar, I’m going to fugue out for a few minutes while I talk to the sat. Keep tabs on Ivor in case something ugly happens.”

 

Zanzibar nodded wordlessly. Tetsami didn’t like the expression Dom’s sergeant wore. Zanzibar had never been enthusiastic about this mission, despite her loyalty to Dom. In fact, with the exception of Dom, she didn’t seem to fully trust anyone else on the team.

 

Despite Dom’s assurances, Tetsami understood the feeling. Attacks by Confed marines on two separate occasions made everyone a little nervous. However, Dom had assured everyone—Tetsami and Zanzibar included—that he was in control of the situation.

 

Besides which, they had a very narrow window in which to pull this off, leak or no leak.

 

Tetsami looked off, past Zanzibar and Flower, and at Dom.

 

You’re hiding something. You’re always hiding something.

 

Tetsami jacked into the groundstation and felt the shell software take over her senses. It was a high-class shell she’d written herself. It grabbed the whole sensorium in order to get the biggest shitload of info across in the shortest possible time. Every sense—vision, hearing, smell, kinesthetic—meant something.

 

She felt herself shoot through black space, a virtual universe that had every distraction edited out. There were only two things here. Her, and the commsat.

 

A glowing yellow dot appeared and, as she focused, shot toward her. In Tetsami’s time-dilated world its approach was majestic, even though its appearance and orientation took only a fraction of a second.

 

It resembled a golden spider. Its body was a spherical golden shell made of geodesic hexagons, its legs beams of yellow light flying off to infinity. Tetsami skimmed the surface of the geodesic, a tiny fly darting through its web, looking for the hole.

 

Millions of command structures shot by her, glowing, golden, venomous. The defenses on this sat were active and waiting for her to take a single misstep so they could entangle her and suck her dry.

 

However, Troy Broadcasting wasn’t quite as worried about the integrity of their transmission command set as they were about the integrity of the sat itself, or the content of their broadcast. It wasn’t a major weakness, but it was enough for her. Her fly landed on a control node right next to one of the golden lasers, and she leeched on to the control driver for the sat’s broadcast antenna.

 

The sat’s whole instruction set shuddered as her commands rippled through it. It tried to poison the data, but she had venom of her own—and since the sat’s first priority was to survive and its second to keep broadcasting no matter what, Tetsami’s little fly finally melded into the structure of the spider.

 

Tetsami unhooked herself from her subprogram and slipped away from the sat’s command structure. The golden sphere had changed. There was a black dot, a speck really, glued to its surface. Tetsami’s program.

 

And now the legs were moving. They were brightening and slowly converging on a new leg that had sprouted below the sphere. One of those glowing legs of light passed by her like a searchlight, and she had a brief full-sensory image of a melee going on in TBC’s gladiatorial stadium. An ax was swinging right at her as the contact was broken.

 

Mission accomplished.

 

She allowed herself a silent mental chuckle at the expense of Troy Broadcasting. It might not be a suitable payback for the death of her parents, but her little program might permanently lock up the sat’s command structure and cost TBC a few megagrams in lost revenue and hardware.

 

Of course, all that was secondary.

 

Tetsami jacked out. The time was now 6:47.

 

“No problems?” she asked Zanzibar.

 

Zanzibar shook her head.

 

Tetsami got on the comm to Ivor. “We got the sat.” Tetsami waited until the minute rolled over. “Two minutes to zero.”

 

<>

 

* * * *

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

 

Crossing the Rubicon

 

 

“Anyone who doesn’t fight for his own self-interest has volunteered to fight for someone else’s.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

 

“Every war, at its root, is a war of trade.”

—Robert Celine

(1923-1996)

 

 

06:50:00 Godwin Local

 

“... Two ... One ... Now!”

 

Ivor’s voice, coming from the midst of the scaffolding below, was muffled by the helmet on Shane’s modified armor. At his command, she activated the computers on the three mining robots that surrounded her.