The Longest Con: A Family of Grifters Tale

by Bill Patterson

He thought furiously. He couldn't hide it. Bussone would be meeting with the Purser in the morning to set a price. What if he had an accident? Space was a dangerous place. Could the Stables be burgled? Why not both? His mind spun out of control, scheme after scheme, each more fantastic than the rest. He looked over at Hannon. There was a stooge he could use to take the blame.

  It wasn't really perceivable as sound. It was more like a solid wave of pressure. The wall above the cashier's cage peeled open from the outside and an immediate roar began.

  Blowout!

  Khan's reflexes operated at a level below thought. He found himself in the corridor outside the Augean Stables VIP area, with the pressure door just sliding shut.

  He slid down the wall until he was sitting on the steel deck. Safe now, he processed the last few seconds his eyes had seen.

  Pia, her gown being sucked off her body, one nipple showing light pink, her earrings winking green at him.

  Hannon, down on the ground.

  A tornado of scrip and an aluminum case full of Green Diamonds swirled out a rent in the wall.

  Eskil vanished. Same with Bussone. Khan hoped they were sucked out into space, to die with all that money in sight but out of reach.

  “Come on, sir, we have to clear the corridor,” said one of the feared Hornets. “Damage Control is coming in.”

  Khan wanted to race back, to save Pia. He struggled in their grip, reaching for the entrance.

  “Sorry, sir, anyone left in the VIP lounge has to be dead. No air.” Khan looked around. He wasn't the only one in finery. Even one of the guards had escaped. He searched the scene, but there was no hint of a sea-green gown. He slumped, and the Hornets ended up carrying him back home in a scooter.

  “That was a blast,” said Carow, picking himself up off the floor of the cage.

  “Huh?” said Albert, knocking himself on the head with his hand. “Gotta get these earplugs out.”

  Maria was rearranging her clothing. “I should have used more tape. Gave Eddie here a free show!”

  Eddie stood up and brushed himself off. “Any scrip left? I have a ticket to cash in.”

  “Fat chance,” said Albert, laughing. “We're closed for good.” He looked around the empty lounge. “Looks like everyone got out but us. Excellent.”

  The four of them gathered in the cage. “Eskil, that was perfect placement. Dad would be proud.”

  “High praise, but shouldn't we be getting out of here? That launch window for the Hesperian Argosy opens in four hours, and I intend to be on that ship.”

  ***

  The disaster in the Augean Stables had spooked everyone with a return ticket. The boarding area was jammed.

  Fortunately, the Conners had assembled early and were aboard, if not entirely comfortable. Three of them had somehow acquired months-long facial hair, the fourth had a substantial tan and a wig. To complete the transformation from their Station lives, they reverted to their regular names.

  As soon as they boarded, they entered the cramped lavatory and made some quick, effective changes to their appearances. Maria had the most complex job to do, but she was expert at altering her appearance. When they finally sat down in their assigned seats in Third Class, they looked nothing like their boarding photos. They also looked nothing like themselves, either. Security had been drummed into them at every turn by their parents.

  Luggage inspection was especially thorough. The Connors boarded separately, so they didn't have time to compare notes, but they all suspected the target was diamonds. Albert said he had everything in hand, so they relaxed and went through the detailed inspection with innocent looks on their faces.

  With seventy sweaty, frightened, old, rich people crammed aboard a rocket designed for fifty, things were a bit cramped, not to mention smelly. Eddie, for one, didn't quite relax until he felt the first press of the departure rockets.

  ***

  Khan hadn't gone home yet. Until he did, he didn't have to face the music within the family. He was down in his office near the diamond vault, wondering how he could cover up the missing diamonds.

  “Final Call. This is your final boarding call for the Hesperian Argosy torch rocket service to Highport, Earth Orbit.”

  That was the rocket that was to take Pia home, he thought with a heavy heart. What was it about that woman? Why did she stick in his mind when he couldn't remember any of the dozens he’d had during his Vegas days?

  Security took images of each passenger as they boarded, he knew. Maybe she had lived through it and was able to get aboard her ride home. He idly flipped through the images. Old, old, old… The rocket better have extra stocks of adult diapers on hand.

  Furball, old, old, fur, old, young, but brown, old, old, waaait! He scrolled back towards the young woman he had seen. He ignored the wig and the coloration, looked at her cheekbones, chin, and the color of her eyes.

  It had to be her! The population of Aphrodite Station was large, but it wasn't that large. He knew every young female aboard the Station, and he was sure that there was nobody like the image on his screen. Pia, in disguise! But why? Khan froze her image on the screen and kept scanning through the passengers. Something was odd here. Something…

  Fur.

  Everyone shaved in space. Oh, some kept moustaches, but nobody grew a beard—it made getting a space helmet on nearly impossible, not to mention the itching that can happen after a few hours in the fishbowl.

  Rich tourists might have beards, but they kept them short. These beards looked two months old, at least. Miners on the surface of Venus never grew them more than a few days’ worth. Khan scanned back.

  That was Hannon, no doubt about it. Those twinkly, irreverent eyes. He was right behind Pia, too. Bastard! Khan imagined him sneaking her into the bathroom all the way back to Earth and his hands gripped the counter hard enough to make the tough plastic bend under them.

  Khan looked at the other two. That was Eskil, and that one had to be Mr. 'call me Jim' Bassoon the Sixth, or whatever he called himself.

  He had been played! I bet they are laughing about what a fool I am, even now! His rage mounted, a white-hot, incandescent rage that needed an outlet. He cast about, searching for some way to salvage his reputation before the family found out.

  ***

  “Aphrodite has slipped beyond the radio horizon, Captain,” said the communications officer.

  “Thank you,” said the Captain of the Hesperian Argosy. He toggled the seatbelt sign briefly off, then on, causing a tone to sound throughout Third Class. One by one, the four Connors stood up and hurriedly made their way to the engineering spaces of the ship. There, they donned spacesuits, and cycled out of the Hesperian Argosy and into the deep blackness of space. The ship was on the night-side of Venus. Albert was equipped with a cold-gas gun and a length of line. Soon, everyone was tied together.

  “Twenty minutes to pickup,” said Albert. “Enjoy the view.”

  “How long to sunrise?” asked Eddie. “I don't fancy a suntan this close to the Sun.”

  “Relax, we've got an hour's leeway,” said Albert. They floated, relaxed, and caught up on the past three months.

  “You gonna chat out there all day?” asked a voice in their radios, “Or are you going to come inside?”

  A light blinked and a rectangle formed against the blackness of the planet. Dim red lights were all the illumination the four needed to squeeze into the space and cycle the door closed. Air rushed into the space with a roar.

  “Welcome aboard the Blue Ground,” said a voice from the speaker grille. “Just pop off those helmets and come on inside. I wouldn't get too comfy, you're going right back outside as soon as I get behind the shield. Four hours, max, so if you gotta go, let me know, and I'll turn on the head.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” called Carow, but the voice cut him off.

  “Don't thank me until you're out of my hair. And don't go poking around in there, either. Your suitcase is 'crowed to the deck just inside the airlock. Don't forget it. Freaking Hor
nets are going to be all over my ship when I dock, I won't have any time to tidy up none. Just sit down, hang onto something, and don't make a mess. Acceleration in thirty seconds.”

  They floundered a bit in zero gravity, but pulled themselves onto the deck plates and hugged equipment stanchions for the next several hours. They didn't talk much, aware that there could be ears on this strange ship.

  ***

  Khan strode into the office of the Chief of Security with a well-formed plan. “I have reason to believe that Green Diamonds have been smuggled aboard the Hesperian Argosy. We must intercept them now, before they get too far away!”

  “Mr. Contriole! What is this?”

  Khan laid out his case, leaving out his part in actually handing the diamonds over to the smugglers. The debris hit? A small bit of explosive. The tremendous wind? The cargo space behind the cage had been in vacuum, but the VIP lounge never lost all of its air, said the computer. The cubic crammed with plebs never lost air, but was evacuated as a precaution. Nobody died—he had checked with medical. All of the scrip and diamonds he had seen spinning out the hole were retrieved and were now on the way to Earth.

  “We know exactly where they are, Mr. Contriole. When the Hesperian Argosy docks at Highport, we'll just have the Captain hold everyone there until our people go through the entire ship.”

  “No, we have to catch them now! Who knows what they can do with the diamonds?”

  “Mr. Contriole, even if I scrambled our fastest ship, you're talking about running down a torch rocket. The Security vehicles cannot operate far out of Venusian orbit. They do not have the delta-V, consumables, or range to even make it to Mercury, let alone Earth.”

  “I'm not talking about Earth, I'm talking about a rocket that left less than an hour ago! Get moving, man, every second adds to their speed!”

  “It's already too late,” said a voice from the doorway.

  Khan spun around, although he knew that voice.

  “Father.”

  “Your mother would like to have you home for dinner. Thank you, Chief. Come, Sandro. Or should I call you 'Khan'?”

  ***

  The freighter was pitted and stained. The inside was worse. No matter how well they were packaged, carbon nanotubes had the annoying tendency to work their way out of even the most hermetically sealed packaging. Both manufacturer and customers had long despaired of finding a way of cleanly shipping the substance.

  The four Connors floated out of the Blue Ground and over to the Dawn Bringer, a Venus-to-Earth freighter. It was tricky, to make the transfer completely in shadow and away from the prying eyes of Aphrodite Station Traffic Control, but they did it.

  “Stay in your suits until we can get you through decontamination. And for god's sake stay grounded!” The voice over the intercom was jumpy, nervous. “Just sit down and hold on. We've got to boot during the launch window. This tub has to hit it precisely. We’re not exactly packing on extra fuel here.”

  “That makes me wonder,” said Eddie, once everyone was secured. “Just how do they make fuel around here? It's not like they've got a lake nearby, but everything I've seen is running on LOX and LH2.”

  “They always show Aphrodite as hanging from a thread on the inside of the forward radiation shield, right?” said Carow. “I've seen it. It's not a thread, it's an aluminum pipe, a mile long. There's a Bussard Ramjet on the underside of the shield, and the magnetic field extends up through the aluminum dome.

  “It does several things: it gathers up the solar wind, shields the station from particle radiation, and acts as a hydrogen collector. The dome is one gigantic solar cell. After they scoop off the valuable ions like Helium 3 and hydrogen, they fire up the last half mile of the pipe, beyond the bottom shield. It accelerates the ion flow and shoves it out the bottom about fifty times faster than it comes in. The thrust isn't much, only a few hundred pounds, but it serves to keep Aphrodite in the air. Otherwise, the station would spiral into Venus in a dozen years.”

  Maria lightly punched his arm. “You've developed a brain here in Oz.”

  “Funny,” he said, punching her back. “What happened to your ruby slippers, or were they diamond earrings?”

  Albert motioned for the two of them to knock it off.

  Eddie jumped in. “Okay, so that works for the hydrogen. But the oxygen?”

  Carow nodded. “You should see the crawlers when they bring them up from the Venusian surface. Always looking half-melted. But they are chock full of supercritical CO2. It's weird stuff, not a liquid, and not a gas. Super dense. They run it through a pipe and blast it with a specially tuned laser. The gas breaks down into oxygen and free carbon atoms. Do it in freefall, with some finicky magnetic and electric fields, and you've got yourself all these nanotubes and graphene flakes and lots of oxygen gas.”

  Maria stretched in the cramped suit. “Can we do without The Science Hour for a bit? I'm beat, and I can't wait for the Captain to finish his burn and come get us out of this hold.”

  STEP 11 – The Faceoff

  “They kicked ass, Hans.” Eileen was mixing something cold and alcoholic at the wet bar in the sitting room. “'Millions in stones' is quite a haul, you have to admit.”

  Hans smiled. “They did us proud. But how much was on their own? How much would have happened no matter what the con?”

  Cole snorted. He had a leg slung casually over the arm of a two-hundred-year-old chair that had once belonged to Al Capone. “You just don't want to let them go, Hans, and you know it.”

  Scott jumped in. “Look at us. When you three took me in, I couldn't tell a tale if my life depended on it. At some point, they're going to take off on us, whether we want it to happen or not. Why not be gracious about it?”

  “That's not why I wanted to talk before they get here. How much do we tell them? About how this evolved? Will it hurt or help them? I am inclined to tell them, but I want to hear your thoughts first.” Hans sat back and stared into the depths of his afternoon brandy. The fumes always seemed to concentrate his mind.

  The four traded ideas back and forth for over an hour before everyone agreed on a plan. The Connors were summoned. They, too, had been having discussions about just how much to divulge about their escapades on Aphrodite Station.

  With just five chairs in the sitting room, there was not enough room for everyone to sit, so Albert and Carow pulled chairs from the office to seat everyone. The Conners would not be made to stand like naughty school children. Not anymore.

  Hans raised an eyebrow at the change. Albert returned the gaze calmly. That much, at least, was different. Six months ago, they were hesitant, unsure. Now, though, they were their own persons.

  “I would say 'report', but I think that would entail a certain amount of disrespect,” said Hans. “But we are all dying to hear the story from your point of view.”

  “That implies that you've heard it from other points of view,” said Albert. “We'll talk about that later. For now, though, I can say that the plan worked almost exactly as outlined. Oh, there were the usual details that changed once we were in place, but the broad outlines didn't change at all. 'The Wire' was well and truly run, and it cannot be run in the same form for another five hundred and eighty days, more or less. I am sure that the Contrioles will always be on the lookout for that one.”

  “That just means that you put together a great plan. I want to stress how unusual it is for a plan this complex to work without something going wrong,” said Hans.

  “Yes, that bothered me, Dad,” said Eddie. “I kept waiting for something to fail. Nothing ever did. I keep looking for the joker, though. We still haven't been paid, I know that. So maybe that is the joker.”

  “Eddie,” said Albert. “Let's not jump the gun.” He turned and faced the parents. “The Wire is such a wonderful con, but it needs everything to go right for it to work. It seemed strange how much of it went right, all the time. The Contrioles own Aphrodite, they could have stopped us at any point. We got The Augean Stables up and running
on the first try. That seemed suspicious—no problems with the Casino? Why didn't they try to grab the idea for their own, instead of letting another company set up a rival operation?”

  Albert looked at Hans, who returned his gaze with a level stare.

  “Where are you going with this?” he asked.

  “Long ago, various nations would agree to hold limited wars. Very limited wars. Skirmishes over borders or proxy conflicts with allies. The idea was to keep their officers and sergeants sharp in the art of making war. Sure, some people got killed and maimed, but the cost was considered acceptable as long as the result was a better military.”

  Eileen raised an eyebrow. Scott settled back in his chair, his steepled fingers holding his glass of Scotch. Cole made an indistinct noise and went to get his own drink. He glanced around in an implied offer to serve the others, but they all shook their heads.

  “Interesting. Go on,” said Hans. “I want to see where this leads.”

  “The Contrioles were facing a problem that many of their generation were facing: not enough children. The latest generation, the ones that would be taking over the family assets—Elisabetta in the Casino, or Sandro in Diamonds—were unknown quantities. They had not yet been 'blooded'. Sure, there are about a dozen other children moving up the ranks, but Sandro was currently the front-runner. They needed a test for him. A Rule One test.”

  Cole spoke from the bar. “Rule one of the con,” he intoned, to which all four of the children responded:

  “You cannot cheat an honest man.”

  Albert smiled thinly. “The Contrioles needed to test Sandro while keeping their own hands clean. My guess is that they set up The Wire with the only long con crew they thought could pull it off: Swen's Squad. I also think that you had a comparable problem: how do you know the status of your own children? This was a perfect chance to get the two forces on the board and see which one prevailed.

  “So, they got out of the way, and ordered everyone else to do so as well. We got the cubic we required to set up The Stables with the absolute minimum of red tape. The Hornets left us alone. The family agreed to buy stones from the cage, with no questions. The Dawn Bringer was not searched when we got to Highport. Lots of little things that should not have worked, did.