All in Good Time

by Mackey Chandler

  “Whatever you want to do,” April said. “I’m kind of obsessed with Irwin right now. Do what makes sense to you and take them for everything you can get. Hopefully, I’ll be done with getting Irwin free and available to help by the time you actually need to do a swap.”

  “Yes, this isn’t something I want to hand off to paid help to do,” Jeff said.

  “I agree. If for no other reason than we know how treacherous they are and won’t take any chances. Paid crew might think – ‘Oh I need to get this done.’ – and get suckered.”

  “I’ll start the ball rolling on their machine then,” Heather said.

  “I have a project for you,” Heather informed Mo the next day. “Hand whatever you need to off on somebody else, but the design work can’t be put off on Earth sources. We need a simple robust mobile platform to harvest moisture from Martian soils. What they have now is at least ten years out of date and we don’t want to research the details of how it works for security reasons. You need to design it from scratch.”

  “How fast do you want this?” Mo asked.

  “A few months to your final design, please. If you need samples of Martian soil or to take the machine there to test I can arrange that,” Heather said.

  * * *

  “You were right. They didn’t even attempt to intercept any of my rods,” April told Chen.

  “No surprise. If they aren’t aimed at anything on their list of probable targets then it takes a human decision to intercept them. By the time that can be done, it’s too late. Of course, this may make them do a new analysis and expand their target list.”

  “Is Dan working the market for you? Did he agree to do that?” Chen asked.

  “He is. He decided it was too complicated to do individual equities so he is just buying index funds after they take a dump and some currency trading. He’ll sell them on recovery. You placed a few bets of your own didn’t you?” April asked.

  “Just be sure to tell him before you target them again,” Chen advised, ignoring the personal question. “He might try to hold too long if they are still showing gains. Are you announcing the next round of targets?”

  “I’m going to ask them nicely to release Irwin again, and just add that I will continue to damage them until they do so. Since none of the targets require evacuation why tell them?”

  “That may put greater pressure on them,” Chen decided. “Every time you do this you ratchet up internal pressures and conflicts. Besides blaming you, each time they are going to blame their own people for failing to stop you. It doesn’t matter that it would be almost impossible to do so. Politicians blame everyone but themselves. I’m so glad I don’t work for them anymore.”

  April took that for a kind endorsement.

  * * *

  Ted Scott wasn’t exactly a trader. His software did the trading faster than any human could possibly do. What he actually did was partly prediction and a bit more of influencing the markets. He could orchestrate a sequence of trades. As a bonus, he could do that from a pleasant little town in western Virginia, because the decision loop between him and the data center in New Jersey didn’t have to be as fast as the one from New Jersey to Manhattan. What he did wasn’t exactly insider trading, since he wasn’t on the inside. However, it worked pretty much the same. One could exert a tremendous amount of influence on what happened to any one company given the scale of assets his bank had at their disposal. He didn’t earn money making or breaking a firm. Certainly, nothing that would generate objections. He just reliably moved values up and down a small percentage, repeatedly

  The computer could see what happened a millisecond ago but no AI developed yet was able to see what would happen five minutes in the future. Ted could statistically beat a random guess which made him a star of his department. He watched the ebb and flow and read the tempo and tenor of the news better than any expert program. He watched the news on three screens and the equities and commodities on four more. If you’d asked him how he could follow and integrate the shape of the charts and the mood of the market to decide if a slight upturn would grow or falter he couldn’t have explained it. The process didn’t operate on a fully conscious level. It was subjective and emotional.

  The trend on a major oil company looked solid to him. He set up a straddle that would pay much better on the call side and then set a purchase of futures contracts to influence the stock within a few seconds. He programmed a separate delayed buy and sell on another exchange with the buy order to be withdrawn faster than his merely human reflexes could key in and enter. The supposedly unrelated commodity contract buy was by the Chicago office of the firm under a different trading name.

  The chance of any regulator connecting them was infinitesimal. Even if they did, the fine would be smaller than what they made. If it all went right he’d make the company about fifty million before this trend line petered out in the next ten or twelve minutes. That would be a decent morning and take the pressure off him for the afternoon. There was a fair chance he’d just break even but very little possibility of a significant downside.

  Ted looked at the sequence of trades. He had about a thirty-second window to decide but he felt certain and hit enter in less than two seconds. He leaned back in his chair which rippled under him to massage his thighs and keep him from getting blood clots from sitting too long. The trend lines continued as he expected and he smiled.

  The computer entered his orders on the New York exchange. A scant millisecond later it would have killed one side of the trade after it had influenced the other computers that made the market, but before it could be executed. However, the base of the New Jersey microwave tower and the associated feeds vanished in a flash as a rod directed by April smashed it. Ted’s one screen went blank and he just had time for his nostrils to flare and start to suck in a deep horrified gasp when the commodities feed from Chicago went dead too.

  It took seconds to determine his proprietary feed was down. The longer delay as he sat staring at his dead screens was because he had no idea what to do next. His trades were executed or not and he had no way to know how and in what order. That was past worrying about. If it was just the link from New Jersey to him it might not be so bad. If the fast link from New Jersey to New York when down then there was no telling how his trades ended. There could be a significant loss. Ted called the New Jersey data center and expected the video call to bring the head of IT up on his screen. Instead, it said: “This service is not currently available.”

  The tower that held their link to the exchange also hosted a dish connecting them to commercial communications too. There was a fiber landline for voice-only telephones to a limited number of places like the front gate, and to things in the building like the copier and soda machine to report when they needed to be serviced. That was too slow and narrow a pipe for Ted and his peers to use even if it had been connected to them.

  Ted pulled up the New Jersey facility number from his contacts and keyed it in his personal pad to call. When all the circuits were busy and it invited him to try later, that’s when he really started to worry. He checked the public news feeds thatwere on his phone and as he watched they started scrolling special news bulletins about an orbital strike and chaos in the financial markets. The index funds dove like a plane with its wings ripped off. His little trade macro was only going to be one of thousands of trades interrupted. That was bad for the firm, and for all the big firms who did high-speed trading, but good for him. His loss would be a drop in the bucket among all the others. He wouldn’t be singled out to blame for a loss. If it was bad enough, they might even cancel the trades that occurred in the minutes before a suspension. It never occurred to him he might not have a job tomorrow.

  * * *

  “The attack cost three hundred billion dollars in market cap yesterday,” the Commerce Secretary told President Wiley. “My people tell me it will be a week before they have temporary towers in place and three weeks before we can build replacements beside them. The only plus I can report i
s that a lot of the loss will be to the benefit of smaller North American firms. It will just be an internal shift in assets not a loss to foreigners. But the larger firms are critical to us politically. We have to do something about these spacers. The bridges were bad enough. They hurt business and allowed the Texans to take advantage, but this hits right at the people we depend on for support. What was Treasury thinking to grab this fellow? Did they clear it with you?”

  “There was a long laundry list of agencies involved,” Wiley said. “In the time it took for the hyper to glide in the Secret Service, IRS, Customs, and a whole bunch of local law enforcement were all waiting to go aboard and arrest him. Nobody thought it constituted a diplomatic problem about which they should consult with State or higher. Let’s be honest. They had every firm legal basis to have done so. We could have quietly requested prosecutional discretion beforehand, but we never envisioned the circumstances arising that they would act before we knew what was happening. We can hardly just back down and hand him back now.”

  “Then we need to attack them if this girl keeps attacking us,” The Secretary said. “We can’t just sit and take blow after blow. That looks as bad as handing him back.”

  “The military assures me if we provoke the Home Assembly to declare war again they are going to, I quote, ‘Hand us our ass on a platter.’ We are on the wrong end of the gravity well and the Homies don’t have any Texans waiting for them to make a mistake. They have expanding resources and we have declining resources and allies that aren’t all that much less hostile than the Texans,” Wiley said. “I am told they have three main armed factions. Home governed by the Assembly, which has a militia of some capability. Almost every commercial vessel flagged to Home is armed and part of that militia. Then there is Central, which is sworn to Home as an ally and of almost unknown capabilities. Remember however that the Chinese nuked Central dead on. They ate that and are still there and the Chinese lost every ship in that action. What we are dealing with at the moment is actually a partnership, a business. There are three partners one of whom is the Moon Queen who already shrugged off being nuked. The spox for the business in this action is the same young lady who destroyed Vandenberg when they fired on her other partner. They have a business relationship with the banker. Perhaps more than a business relationship, given their response. I was warned that if Vandenberg was unable to defend itself no other location has any chance of doing so except maybe the Japanese. Since they don’t seem inclined to have an adversarial relationship with the spacers we’ll probably never know what they could do.”

  “That they avoid confrontation tells you enough,” the head of Space Forces muttered. “Home took over the habitat and then took it beyond the Moon and they are fine with it.”

  “So we just have to take it? That will be the political death of us if it goes on much longer,” the Secretary warned. “The Mexican states cut off from us are restive and may come to an accommodation with Texas if not petition to join them outright. They have zero interest in pressing them from the other side. The damned Quebecois are itching to cause trouble at our back and as long as the Texans have us tied up we can’t reestablish control over California and the Baja. We could secure New Mexico and Arizona if we weren’t tied down in the east. Frankly, neither of us cares about them a great deal right now, except as a barrier to Mexico.”

  “I am not unaware of these things. The army pretty much agrees with your analysis. We do have to just ‘take it’ for a while. They are an irritant and an embarrassment, but given our population and size, we can ‘take it’ a great deal longer. I’m told the spooks are working on something they won’t read me in on for deniability, but it is one of those operations that depend on opportunity, and the right circumstances just haven’t presented themselves yet.”

  “You have my support,” the Secretary assured him. “Others may not be so steadfast. Don’t let this drag on too long to test them. At least she hasn’t bombarded anything today. Maybe she is taking a day off.

  “Your point is well taken,” Wiley agreed, “thank you.”

  * * *

  “Thank you, Chen, that was inspired,” April said.

  “It created a bigger disturbance than I anticipated,” Chen admitted. “I didn’t think they would suspend trading. That amounts to admitting about a dozen firms are the market.”

  “Do you think it was expensive enough to keep the pressure on them?” April asked.

  “Yes, but more than that, it drove home the uncertainty of what you will do next. They had to have decided they could lose any number of bridges and deal with it. This struck right at the basic institutions that support their governance. There wasn’t that much actual loss in the values of equities, but the money flowed to all the wrong players yesterday. The damage was continued in foreign markets too. The biggest harm was self-inflicted when they decided to suspend trading for the rest of the day.

  “They’ve done a marvelous job of reconnecting their data centers,” Chen said. “All but one were back up by noon today. They brought in rented cranes and lifted some antennas to replace the towers. That was brilliant. One put a drone up orbiting between Manhattan and a new ground station in Jersey. I’m surprised they could come up with cables and antennas overnight. I’m sure money was no object in getting back up. They have to be very aware you can hit the same spots to take their cranes out if you decide to. My instincts say that it would be better to move on to different targets to keep them off balance.”

  “Oh, I totally agree. I need to come back to Home for just a couple of days. I’m keeping it quiet for the sake of security. I’m just telling a few close associates like you. I’m taking a private shuttle and using the industrial docks. I’ll think about it and make some notes. By the time I get back, I hope to have some ideas to run past you.”

  “May I suggest you have Gunny meet you at the dock?” Chen worried. “You are making an awful lot of people unhappy with you, not just governments. Some of these businesses can be as dangerous to have as enemies as any government.” He wanted to ask what couldn’t be done by com, but it wasn’t his place.

  “That’ll make him get up awfully early, but yeah, I’ll do that,” April promised.

  “That makes me feel better,” Chen said. Nevertheless, when they ended the call Chen called Home Security to let Jon know April would be returning. He didn’t feel he had to ask permission to advise Jon. That was after all his job and April had made clear on a number of occasions that he was an ally. He had no specific reason to be worried. His job was intelligence and he might know of things going on in the station Jon didn’t but it never hurt to enlist help.

  Right now, there were twenty-three foreigners on Home by the public entry logs. A few were medical tourists with appointments, several were business persons with long verifiable relationships with their companies and some had been to Home before. One, he was certain was an industrial spy from Korea. That was really none of his business since he wasn’t employed by either side. There were two Europeans of which he was not certain at all and two Texans. As far as he knew they were the first Texans to visit home since it separated from North America. Both claimed business interests and had looked at cubic to rent or buy. Given the change in governments, business records were not as extensive or as available in Texas as North America, so verifying that wasn’t easy. Given the fact that everything April was doing tended to help Texas, he couldn’t imagine them being a hazard to April. He was just very cautious and protective of April beyond what was required for business.

  * * *

  Eileen and Vic hadn’t planned on integrating a new member into their family. That Alice was polite and clean helped. She wasn’t quick to argue or demand attention. She was even fairly quick to volunteer when things needed to be done. If they had been looking to adopt she’d have been a wonderful choice. That just wasn’t their plan. Now that Eileen had the implant they were more like newlyweds going on their honeymoon than an older couple looking to adopt. They were however decen
t people who couldn’t rationalize away the debt of saving their lives.

  Despite some loss of privacy from having Alice with them she hadn’t come beating on their door or intruded on their privacy in any way to require setting boundaries or laying down rules. The unexpected hitch came when the end of the week rolled around. The weather was warm enough for a couple of days that they could have dressed warm and got in a day of gold panning and using the rocker.

  Vic had the neighbors well trained not to expect anyone at home if they went around seeking to visit after church on Sunday. Vic had established that well before they married. They all minded their own business and didn’t inquire where else a single man wanted to be on Sundays. If anyone came around after they were married expecting a change of custom they found the shutters closed and the door locked.

  They could hardly leave Alice alone with no explanation where they were going. Not only would it be insulting and a huge display of distrust but there was no way they could load up all their equipment and leave without her seeing it.

  Vic suggested it was late in the year and maybe they should just let it go until spring.

  “Are you planning on sending her off to live with somebody else?” Eileen asked.

  “No, but that at least puts it off until the next warm weather,” Vic said. “We should put out a drop target and make a windsock for Cal anyway. We can do that Sunday.” He thought about it a little and revealed something else. “When I was talking privately with Mr. Mast I asked him to arrange for us to buy some more staples before the snow sets in. I’m going to get some cornmeal and hopefully some other things if he can arrange it. I may have to hunt more too. I did that pretty much acknowledging she would be with us for at least the winter.”

  “And if she’s still with us in the spring?” Eileen insisted.

  “Then we’ll tell her, but we’ll know each other better and we’ll have had all winter to think about how to tell her and offer her shares, if she wants to work at it with us.”