Profiteer

Though, perhaps he had a right to be a little nervous. The Prometheus was a Hegira Aerospace C-545—a damn big cargo ship. It had contracted one of the biggest sales Godwin Arms & Armaments had ever contemplated, on-planet or off.

 

The order was big enough for Dom to have forgone some of his normal caution. In the ten years he had spent building GA&A, Dom had played the corporate game more conservatively than most, more conservatively than anyone who did business on Bakunin. The lawless atmosphere of Bakunin bred corporations that seemed to thrive on risk.

 

Not Dom, not GA&A.

 

Not until now, anyway. Dom still had a few contacts in the Confederacy from his days after the TEC. He heard little from them nowadays. Not until one of his old intel sources close to the Terran Congress sent a tach-comm warning him that the Prometheus was a Confederacy front-job.

 

* * * *

 

A few years ago that would have been enough for Dom to trash the whole megagram deal. However, during the past year Dom had winded an instability in the air, the sense of a storm on the horizon. Nothing concrete, but the paranoia was enough for him to sink a large chunk of capital into a mountainside bolt-hole. Even his chief of security, Mariah Zanzibar, thought that purchasing the virtually unknown commune wasn’t the best financial move—even if it was an admirable precaution.

 

Ironically, after sinking the money into that commune, he wasn’t in a position to refuse the Prometheus. Dom had to force himself to ignore his last disastrous involvement with the Confederacy, if not to forget it. Past was past, and Dom doubted that anyone in the Executive Command still knew his name—with one exception.

 

Dom slid a drawer out from his desk and contemplated what kind of sidearm he should carry into the deal.

 

The suit he wore was tailored for either a shoulder holster, or one on the hip. He chose both. On the hip he holstered a cartridge weapon, a slugthrower with nine-millimeter projectiles. It would do nothing against even halfway-decent body armor, but it was the custom on Bakunin to go into business dealings visibly armed. The chromed antique would be both expected and non-threatening.

 

However, because he had a Bakuninite’s distrust of the Confederacy, he wore a considerably more effective weapon in the concealed shoulder holster. A GA&A random-pulse variable-frequency antipersonnel laser was built to play hob with a personal field.

 

An Emerson field—force field was an unfortunate misnomer, since the Emerson effect dealt with energy, not fields of force—could suck up a considerable amount of energy at its target frequency. However, only the very high-end military models had processors able to compensate fast enough to defeat a laser that changed frequency at random microsecond intervals.

 

Once he was properly armed, he told his onboard computer to activate the observatory. He wanted to see the Prometheus land. The computer wired into his skull sent a coded pulse to the hemispherical white walls of his office, and they vanished from view.

 

His desk was on a raised dais in the center of the room, so he could sit behind it and get a panoramic view of the GA&A complex.

 

In the high-backed chair he could look down on the whole complex. The blinding glare reflecting off the landing quad splashed white light off of the mirrored U-shaped office complex. The smaller of Bakunin’s two moons was rising behind the concrete tower of GA&A air traffic control, above the offices.

 

A slight heat shimmer above the perimeter towers obscured the Diderot Mountains beyond. The shimmer was a side effect of the defense screen generators in the towers, housed below the antiaircraft batteries.

 

Dom sat on top of the twenty-story residence tower. The deal he’d worked with the owner of the Prometheus would bring an influx of income that would not only compensate for his purchase in the mountains, but would be enough to give every one of the 1500 employees living below him a ten-percent bonus this year.

 

It was almost too good to be true.

 

The ten-minute klaxon sounded five minutes ahead of schedule.

 

Dom turned the chair away from the quad and faced west. It was a nice sunset. The ruddy orb of Kropotkin dominated the horizon, larger than either of Bakunin’s moons. An awesome sight, a reminder that, in the cosmic scheme of things, life should not exist on this planet.

 

But then, Bakuninites had a habit of bucking the natural order of things.

 

Dom squinted. The ship was on its orbital approach. It would come over the city of Godwin to make its landfall. He’d see it in a few minutes.

 

A different klaxon sounded. The heat shimmer around the perimeter towers disappeared in a sheet of electric-blue light, the St. Elmo’s fire from the defense screens’ excess charge. The field had deactivated for the Prometheus’ approach.

 

Something was wrong. He hadn’t heard the all-clear first.