The Razor's Edge

by Seanan McGuire

  “… No. We need funds to fight the Principate,” the voice admitted. “Building an army has material costs. We’re looking to find a way to jump-start our capital, ideally in a self-sustaining manner. A rapid gain up front, from which we can pull interest to fund the on-going struggle for freedom.”

  “Now,” I said, “you’re talking to the right planet. We can help you with this.”

  I walked the unknown person through the basics of setting up a 3117(g) investment portfolio—it only took a couple of hours. For one of the rebellion’s meatheads, the caller was sharp. It was a rare thing to find rebels cool enough to talk stocks. Usually, freedom fighters only concerned themselves with blowing up infrastructure. They rarely ever thought ahead to the days after the war was won. Scarce few considered how to reach that day in the first place.

  At the end of the marathon session, the individual signed a couple of small moons over to the Syndicate as collateral. “They’re good for mining,” she or he said, “and the Principate doesn’t know about the transilicate deposits yet. They’re worth your while. But be advised that if you betray us, we—”

  “The Syndicate does not betray,” I answered. “And your group can access funds this very minute. The account is currently keyed to your biometrics, but you can send the identifiers of other individuals by holocube.”

  “You don’t need them in person?” he or she asked.

  I shook my head at the screen. “Only when one signs in blood. Otherwise, no one ever comes here. We prefer it that way.”

  The individual’s avatar nodded. “Makes sense. And what does the Syndicate get out of this? Besides your cut of the profits, I mean.”

  “We’re mathematisynthetes,” I said promptly. “My people are like plants: we produce our own food by doing long-running calculations. Your success will, in a way, care for our children.” I shook a gray tentacle at the screen and said, “Good day to you, honored client.”

  “Good day, Marsis of Ambyt Seven.”

  The connection terminated. I breathed, “And welcome to the Portfolio.”

  Liraxa raised one of his eye-tentacles over the top of his cube-pen. “Was that another resistance fighter?”

  “Of some sort,” I admitted. “The Second Spark, or some such.”

  “Did you tell her that we also handle all of the Principate’s accounts?”

  “That sort of thinking,” I replied, “would be bad for business.”

  Liraxa cleared one of his throats. He wasn’t going to voice it, but I knew what he was thinking. Syndicate Logistics Guideline 412F. Turning away customers for idealistic reasons would injure the Portfolio, but losing the trust of long-term clientele was far worse. Still, I’d run the numbers. The upcoming rebellion could only make us money. And, no matter who thought they ruled the galaxy at the end of it, we’d be earning a tidy sum from their investments. The Portfolio would grow by leaps and bounds. If played right, we’d make enough math to feed ourselves for a generation to come.

  So I pulled the graphs for him. “That’s the growth we’re expecting.”

  The eye-tentacle blinked. “I didn’t think numbers went that high.”

  “See? We’d be fools not to ride this out.”

  The throats in the other cube-pen cleared in harmony. “Something doesn’t feel right. If the Principate finds out—”

  “They won’t find out,” I assured my colleague. “Trust me.”

  * * *

  “We have word,” the Principate representative said, “that you’re collaborating with the Second Spark.”

  I could feel Liraxa send a telepathic I told you so as loud as corporate policy allowed. It caused a few other heads and eye stalks along the floor to jerk up in surprise; it was rare for one of us to be chastised like that. Normally, we stuck to the rules and did the job.

  Which was what I intended to do.

  “Honored Representative,” I said, “you understand that the Syndicate of Ambyt Seven has been in business for two hundred generations, yes?”

  “I’ve read the promotional literature, yes, and—”

  “So you understand,” I continued, “that we’ve bankrolled your governmental predecessors for years beyond measure. Republics, empires, monarchies, the occasional galactic commune. Yes?”

  “I don’t need a history lesson, Marsis, I—”

  “Clearly you do,” I said, my voice rising. “The Syndicate is not in the business of politics. We are in the business of business. You might say we are the business of business. We handle ultraviolet accounts, including your own, with the utmost discretion and caution. Because we wouldn’t want the free press to pick up news of your doomsday device, would we?”

  The representative’s connection went quiet so long I thought I’d lost it. Finally, she or he said, “You know about this how?”

  “We trade in more than money,” I said. “Technology, influence, information. But do you know what our most prized possession is?”

  “What?”

  “Trust. If our contracts cannot be trusted, then they are null and void. We have a botnet of lawyer intelligence routines analyzing every single incoming contract for the merest whiff of a conflict of interest. And yes, that includes conflicts against an institution such as yours.” I inhaled slowly, then exhaled. Let the words sit there for a moment. Finally, I added, “We’ve done right by you for the past seventy-eight years, have we not?”

  “You have,” the representative admitted.

  “Do you trust we’ll continue to do so?”

  “We do. Though if we hear anything to the contrary, that you’ve betrayed us somehow—”

  “You won’t,” I assured him. “Good day, representative.”

  A silence fell over the floor after the call ended. My colleagues would not be so gauche as to whisper. They were all telepathic; they wouldn’t have to. Private conversations, however, were cropping up throughout the entire building. I could feel them humming like rude electricity in the back of my head.

  My only worry was the danger of escalation. The fools around me weren’t dangerous. But if the Chiefs didn’t like my math, that was it. I’d lose any cut of the growth; my labyrinthine report chain would absorb it all instead. That would be intolerable. After all—there was no point in fomenting civil war if one wasn’t going to profit from it.

  * * *

  A cycle of interstellar struggle came and went. The Spark’s capital output grew beyond expectation as they struck military installations in their home sector. The Principate’s own bundles maintained a more stable and steady rate, even as they razed Spark-infected worlds to their cores. The doomsday device they’d funded—which was to say, the one we’d helped them fund—was on the move. The Second Spark had no means to stand against it. Lone plucky fighter pilots tried and failed, repeatedly, to destroy the damn thing.

  It had an effect on their recruitment efforts. At current projected rate, I estimated the survivors would pull their remaining funds and go into hiding within the next six cycles. Which was better than dying, for them at least, but it wasn’t what they really wanted.

  So far, I’d only realized a small portion of their market potential. The low-risk strategy would be to let them die and invest the remnants in the next rebellion. The Chiefs would like that idea. The Spark made too many decisions based on their emotions. They took too many chances. They could inspire others, but they weren’t a long-term investment. Which was a shame: a sustained galaxy-wide war would escalate our returns into exponential territory.

  If the Spark survived that long.

  I placed an outbound call. Liraxa perked up immediately. One of his mouth-stalks came up over the cubicle and mouthed, What are you doing? I ignored it. Liraxa wasn’t a thinker. That’s why his body had budded appendages in dull and predictable ways: he had no creativity. The Spark needed someone who could take decisive action. More importantly, their 3117(g) needed it in two cycles or their rebellion was doomed. The Principate would stomp them out of existence.

&nb
sp; The conflict had reached the point where a decisive win would cause a market depression. The Chiefs would blame me for the losses. Therefore, I needed to sow war without end—for everyone’s sake.

  The problem was, I might put Ambyt Seven itself at risk. Accidents happened in conflict, after all, but the Principate wouldn’t hesitate to bomb us if they felt slighted. However, I calculated only a 4.0875% chance of invasion during the next century. This was higher than the Chiefs’ preferred threshold … but the returns would be worth it

  The call went through easily enough. Part of enrolling with the Syndicate involved the signature of biometric wavelengths that prefixed outgoing messages. The channel that opened could only be opened by someone on Ambyt Seven. It lent no small amount of comfort to our clientele and prevented any embarrassing mishaps with mistaken identities.

  The blurry figure stepped in front of the vid screen. “Marsis? Is that you?”

  “It is. I am sorry to interrupt.”

  “It’s not a good time, if I’m honest. War’s not going well.”

  “I know. That’s why I’m calling.”

  The pause was palpable. “You’re not dropping us, are you? I know there needs to be a certain percentile that goes back to the Syndicate, you’re not working for free, but—”

  “Not that at all. In fact—there’s an opportunity.”

  Another pause. This was uncharted territory for her or him. For me as well, though the rep had no way of knowing this. The call might as well be telemarketing in the middle of galactic assault. The voice asked, “What opportunity?”

  “In the interest of preserving your investments and assuring continued growth, the Syndicate is prepared to offer you a Black Hole Converter.”

  I was afraid, before calling, that the rube wouldn’t know what that was. I shouldn’t have been. The Second Spark had used nearly every weapon it could find in its war for independence. It would have heard rumors of darker, stranger devices. Rather than words, a low whistle came across the encrypted wire. In its way, that was answer enough.

  I continued, “If the Syndicate doubles the current percentile we’re pulling, this would justify the transfer of one such device to your organization. Does this sound like a fair trade to you?”

  It wasn’t a fair trade and I’m sure the spokesperson knew it. But time was of the essence—the Spark was planning a last stand at Sigma Sagittarii, in the heart of the Principate. Finding a black market trader with a Converter at less than a 500% markup was statistically impossible. That said, a Converter could cause massive damage to the doomsday device. The math made the choice inevitable.

  “It does. Signature incoming.”

  I had it moments later. The saps. I sent the location of the Converter in response, then terminated the connection. At this point, I decided, it wasn’t on me anymore. If they couldn’t fight a reasonable one-hundred-year war with that kind of equipment, then they didn’t deserve my help.

  * * *

  A few days later, Liraxa found me by the water trough. “You heard about Sigma Sagittarii?”

  I hadn’t, in fact, and I shook a trunk to that effect.

  “The Principate fleet was damn near wiped out.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really,” Liraxa said, unamused. “News wave said the Second Spark opened up a black hole at the center of the fleet. It took out a planet of five billion life forms, too. Place wasn’t uninhabited.”

  “A pity,” I answered. “Did we have any customers there?”

  “No.” Liraxa’s mouths twisted as he said, “Just family, Marsis.”

  “I’m sorry for your—”

  “Not my loss, idiot. Yours.” My coworker sloughed off toward his cube-pen.

  I thought for a moment. I wasn’t aware that any of my family had moved to Sigma Sagittarii. I’d been too busy working. How was I really going to keep up with all their movements when they flooded the galactic net with minutia? Market analysis was one thing. Sifting through the white noise of that many lives for one piece of informational transilicate was a fool’s errand.

  I made a mental note to send a sympathy card to whomever deserved it.

  When I returned, one of the Syndicate Operators was waiting on the platform centered between the cube-pens. When she saw me enter, she motioned for me to hurry back to my cube. Easier said than done; I’d added quite a bit of bulk since the war began.

  She cleared her throat and told us all, “I have good news and bad news.”

  As always, we asked for the bad news first. Markets always rebounded. No sense in creating a bubble.

  “The Principate is pulling their funding.”

  This was bad news indeed. They weren’t our largest customer, but when one has a controlling stake of 67% of the known galaxy, as well as a foothold in the one next door, the assets requiring management were vast. The account team representing them had paroxysms of delight every time they called with a plan to subjugate a new world. And the excess mathematical energy produced powered half our planet. What would this mean for us?

  And the good news? Liraxa sent out in a telepathic blurt.

  “More rebel groups have been in touch with our office. Sigma Sagittarii changed the face of the galaxy. Business is booming. We may not even need the Principate anymore.”

  My brows knitted together in a way that would be obscene on some worlds. “I haven’t had any calls, Operator. And I was handling the Spark account.”

  “We know, Marsis.” She let the words hang there for a moment, then added, “Your creativity was exemplary in this case. However, the Chiefs decided to take an active hand in the next phase. With the various factions apt to be at odds with one another, your … particular brand of assistance may not be best suited for what we have in mind.”

  Oh. Those jerks. They were cutting me out.

  “On the plus side,” she added, quite literally beaming out of her forehead aperture, “you’ve consumed so much math that you can scarcely fit in your cube.”

  The light laughter all around felt like chastisement. I waved a lone tentacle in acknowledgement. This was okay, I told myself. I could still rise above this. All I had to do was make sure the Second Spark seized power at the end of the long and bloody scramble.

  The market would thank me later.

  * * *

  Another cycle passed before I was summoned to the corner offices of the Chiefs. Statistically, I wasn’t worried. Personally, I wasn’t certain what would happen. While the office gossip around me, both aural and telepathic, had had me at Senior within the next two cycles, the gambit with the Second Spark had cut both ways. I had made the Syndicate a lot of money by engineering a galactic civil war. I was too important to lose. But I had gone behind their backs to do it. I was too risky to leave unsupervised. And on Ambyt Seven, the only thing worse than murder was creating unacceptable risk in the portfolio.

  The Chiefs stared down at me, their many eyestalks and nose follicles wobbling in a tropical breeze. Benefit of having an outside office with windows that opened, I supposed. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought one of them might be wearing a little white hat. Though perhaps that was another eyeball.

  “Marsis,” a voice pronounced from the crowd, “you need a new project.”

  I moved my mouth in a facsimile of a smile and said, “Your graces, the galactic civil war has me entirely occupied.”

  “I should hope not,” the first voice said. “The war between the Principate and the Second Spark is over.”

  I did a doubletake. “Over?” I spluttered. “They were set to war for decades yet. How?”

  “The way such matters always do,” a second voice said. “Market pressures could not tolerate their erratic behavior. Our other clients complained. We made some adjustments to our predictive model and both groups were destroyed.”

  “The Second Spark has been scattered to the galactic wind,” a third voice mentioned, “and their accounts locked on our order.”

  “The Principate’s home world,
” another added, “was eaten by a quantum singularity opened nearby. Strange, terrible matter—and a poor business practice. If one of ours had encouraged such a tactic, we’d have them divided by zero.”

  “Disintegrated slowly and painfully,” the first voice confirmed. “Would you know anything about that?”

  My species didn’t sweat, but this felt like an opportune time to learn. “Certainly not,” I bluffed. And I didn’t. The Spark hadn’t told me what target they’d intended for the black hole converter and I hadn’t done a projection on it. I’d assumed they would attack the doomsday device again. Not that it wasn’t easy to guess in retrospect.

  “Be that as it may, you were their account representative. This means you’re partially responsible for the deaths of forty-one trillion, five billion, one hundred seventy-six million and three life forms,” the second voice dictated. “A non-trivial number of these were also our clients, either as general investors or as a part of our operational wing. What do you say to this?”

  “Their long-term outlook was poor?” I hated that doubt was creeping into my voices. It wasn’t a question. Of course it was poor: they were dead. And the Syndicate, I thought hard at them, should know better than to invest in high-risk resources. How many times did we learn this with the Principate?

  “True,” the third voice admitted. “Though they were at least predictable.”

  The second voice said, “You should be aware that, now that the war has ended, a bubble is forming. We have seen a thousand-fold increase in the market since. Especially in stellar real estate.”

  “A proverbial gold rush,” the first voice concluded, “as all these worlds now need new masters.”