“We get ten percent of the total sum,” Ethne said. “So yes – you can tell us once you know.”
Sameena smiled. Ethne had taught her a great deal about contracts, including safety clauses intended to prevent one party from charging right through a loophole and violating the intent – if not the written letter – of the contract. One loophole she’d pointed out would have allowed Ethne to sell the bottles of mead to herself at a very low rate, then sell them onwards as she saw fit. As she’d said, once Sameena had finished spluttering with indignation, poorly-drafted contracts made a lot of money for lawyers.
Professor Sorrel looked pleased to see her when she entered his office. “You didn't do badly,” he said, once he’d inspected her first set of assignments. “There are a couple of minor problems with your assignment on interstellar law – generally, Imperial Law holds sway when there are parties from two or more star systems, unless all involved parties have agreed to operate under a separate set of laws. You also made a blunder with planetary law.”
He passed her the datapad. “If local law states that something is a crime – and Imperial Law disagrees – the worst the locals can do to any tourist committing such a crime is expel them from the planet,” he added. “Locals, on the other hand, can be held to account by local law.”
Sameena scowled. It had been an understandable mistake, but an embarrassing one.
“I’ll have these properly marked for you by the end of the week,” Professor Sorrel added. “You’ll also have the next set of assignments. Let me know if you want anything more specific.”
“I will,” Sameena promised.
“And she’ll have the uncompleted assignment done in a couple of days,” Ethne said, firmly. “Or I will know the reason why.”
Sameena winced, but said nothing until they were out of the professor’s office and heading back to the ship. “I’m sorry,” she admitted. “It just got away from me ...”
“You weren't expected to have to tend the refugees,” Ethne agreed. “But time management is important.”
She smiled. “You’d better ask Jayne to help you get ready for your date,” she added. “She’d be delighted to help.”
Jayne was, Sameena discovered. It took nearly an hour to get her absolutely ready, trying on all of her dresses to see which one made her look her best. The white dress looked good, Jayne insisted, but Sameena refused to wear it. It just made her look far too much like a bride. In the end, she settled for the green dress and bound her hair into a long ponytail, silently thanking God that she hadn't followed Ethne’s advice to cut it short.
“Just remember what I was saying,” Jayne said, once she had finished admiring her handiwork. “We won't be too far away if you need help.”
Sameena nodded, feeling her legs quivering. It felt strange not to be wearing a shipsuit, even if they were docked with the asteroid. Her nerves kept threatening to overcome her. She’d asked Jayne if she had anything to help with that, but Jayne had flatly refused. Even mild sedatives could have unpredictable or unfortunate effects.
“I think you’ll be alright once you get there,” Jayne assured her. “And good luck.”
Lieutenant Cook was definitely impressed. Sameena saw his eyes go wide when he saw her, even though she was extremely modest and covered up compared to some of the other girls in the restaurant. It gave her an odd thrill as he took her hand and led her towards one of the smaller tables. Was this something she would ever have experienced if she’d stayed home?
“I’ve been told that the steak is very nice,” he said. “They’re all imported from the Lone Star Republic.”
Sameena nodded in understanding. Madagascar didn't produce any food, but algae. There weren't even any hydroponic farms anywhere in the system. The steaks would have to be imported, along with almost everything else. It was something else she would have to look into once she built up her funds.
“I’ll stick with the fish,” she said. “And yourself, Lieutenant?”
“The steak,” Cook said. “And please call me Jamie. I’m off duty.”
Sameena listened as he gave their orders to the waiter, trying hard to hide her amusement when he ordered two glasses of Firewater Mead. He shrugged at her expression and confessed that he had almost nothing to spend his paycheck on, not while he was stationed at the naval base. The Imperial Navy, he admitted, picked up the tab for food, drink and recreational activities.
“Tell me about yourself,” she said. Jayne had told her that men liked to brag about their accomplishments, given half a chance. “How did you end up here?”
“I was born on Terra Nova,” Cook – Jamie – said. “My family has always been in the Navy, so it wasn't hard to choose my career. I graduated from the Academy as a Lieutenant and was sent out here. I think I must have annoyed the wrong person.”
Sameena wasn't so sure. Paddy, once he’d unbent a little, had told her quite a bit about junior officers who had no real experience – and were utterly unaware of what they lacked. Jamie might have been sent to Madagascar in the hopes of picking up the experience without placing the station or a starship in serious danger. Besides, Madagascar was a good place to make contacts among the merchant traders.
“Tell me about yourself,” Jamie said, when he'd finished. “How did you end up here?”
“I ran away from home,” Sameena said, which was technically true. “Ended up on a freighter ship and went on from there.”
“Good choice,” Jamie said. “Business may be picking up over the next few years.”
The waiter returned with their food before Sameena could ask him what he meant. Her fish was cooked in cream, garlic and a herb she couldn't quite identify, although it was vaguely familiar. Her mother’s cooking had been better, but that wasn't a surprise. There were times when she dreamed of being home, tasting the curry her mother had taught her how to make. But her mother might well be dead by now.
Jamie reached over and touched her hand. “Are you all right?”
“I just ... I just remembered home,” Sameena said. She pushed the sudden sense of loss aside, firmly. “I’m sorry.”
She took a sip of her mead and smiled as the taste exploded on her tongue. It was easy to see why the cartel had managed to keep the price so high; it tasted absolutely fantastic, without any sense of guilt that came from drinking alcohol. She had to force herself to put the glass back down and finish her dinner. Uncle Muhammad had been right. The berries were worth a fortune to the off-worlders.
Jamie was easy to talk to, she discovered. He chatted happily about moving between his ship and the station, then about plans for hiring more freighters to service the Imperial Navy. She wasn't sure how to probe for details, but it seemed that the Imperial Navy was having supply problems too. In fact, the price of spare parts seemed to have jumped upwards again since her last visit to Madagascar. It crossed her mind that her plan might have formed too late, but she pushed that thought aside too. She had to try.
“There haven't been enough replacement crews too,” Jamie continued. “We should have had several thousand new officers and crewmen heading out here. Instead, we get nothing, which forces us to keep the old ones in place. It isn't doing morale any good at all.”
He scowled. “Chances are that we will have to abandon Sungai Buloh and a handful of other worlds,” he added. “Even with freighters helping, we’re stretched too thin. They’re already warning us that we might have to give up our Marines. And that will force us to arm crewmen and use them for boarding parties.”
Sameena listened, realising – to her surprise – that Jamie wanted to talk, yet there was almost no one he could approach. His superiors wouldn't listen and he wasn't allowed to talk about his frustrations with his subordinates. There were times, she suspected, when he was crossing the limits of what he should be talking about, but he hadn't told her anything she couldn't have figured out for herself.
It boded ill for the Empire, she thought, numbly. If the Imperial Navy could no longer meet its obligations, what
would happen to the isolated star systems along the Rim?
“I’m sorry for boring you,” Jamie said, finally. “I just ...”
“Don’t worry,” Sameena said. “I do understand.”
The waiter came back, took their plates and offered the dessert menu. Sameena considered it briefly, then shook her head. Jamie smiled and nodded in agreement, then passed the waiter his credit coin. He didn't seem inclined to let Sameena help pay for the meal.
“I pay for the next one,” Sameena said, firmly.
Jamie smiled. “I’ll walk you back to your ship,” he said. He hesitated, then took the plunge. “Do you want to see me again?”
“Yes,” Sameena said. She’d enjoyed herself more than she’d expected. “And besides ...”
She passed him the datachip, which he pocketed without comment.
“I’ll have to send the money to your account later,” he said. “You don’t want to be accepting money here.”
“Understood,” Sameena said, feeling her face heating up. “And thank you.”
“Thank you,” Jamie said, as he offered her his hand. “You may have done us a very important service.”
It was almost unknown for a woman and a man to walk hand-in-hand on Jannah – normally, the woman would walk two or three steps behind the man – but Sameena discovered that she liked it. She was almost disappointed when they finally reached the airlock and he let go of her, then leaned forward and kissed her cheek. Part of her wanted to run; the rest of her wanted to kiss him back. She couldn’t quite decide what to do.
“I’ll see you again,” he promised. “Soon.”
Sameena stepped through the airlock and stopped, trying to reconcile her conflicting impulses. It was almost a relief when the airlock hissed open again and Paddy and Jayne entered, both wearing surprisingly decent clothes. But then, they had been keeping an eye on her.
“That seemed to go well,” Jayne said, as Paddy nodded to her and headed off towards the bridge. “How are you feeling?”
“Strange,” Sameena admitted. She absently touched her cheek, where his lips had touched her. “Is that normal?”
“Yep,” Jayne said. She gave Sameena a brilliant smile. “Get some sleep. Mum will be forced to resort to extreme measures if you don’t get your assignment completed before we find a new contract.”
Sameena nodded. “I will,” she promised. “And thank you for being there.”
Chapter Sixteen
But this booming cycle was matched by a busting cycle that deflated the economy whenever it moved too far beyond what it could reasonably support. These events wreaked economic havoc because unhealthy businesses often took down healthy businesses with them. An otherwise healthy business, for example, might be crippled by an association with a failed business.
- Professor Leo Caesius. The Science That Isn’t: Economics and the Decline and Fall of the Galactic Empire.
“Not too bad a set of sales, I suppose,” Ethne said, three days later. “You’re a rich young woman.”
Sameena studied the credit coin, feeling a sense of genuine accomplishment. Her father must have felt the same, she knew, when he’d made his first sale. This was something he'd loved – and she loved too, now that she knew what it was like. If only she’d been able to do it for him, while he’d been alive. But that had never been a real possibility. She would have had to ensure that Abdul received all the credit.
The Firewater Mead, sold over two days, had brought in a staggering amount of cash. It would be sold onwards by other freighters, probably passing through several sets of hands before it was drunk. No one had asked questions when offered such a valuable cargo. In the end, Sameena had been almost disappointed.
“The children will have their education,” Ethne said. “And the women can open their eatery. And you still have a lot of money.”
Sameena hesitated. Money was important, her father had taught her, but it also needed to be invested. The Prophet, canny merchant that he had been, would have understood that long before he’d first encountered an angel. It dismayed her to realise just how few Islamic colony worlds embraced that particular aspect of the Prophet’s life. But then, trading brought in ideas from all over the universe, ideas that would upset the status quo.
“I have plans,” she said. “I think we should discuss them with your husband.”
Talking to Captain Hamilton wasn't easy. Respect for the elderly – male and female – had been hammered into her on Jannah; it was difficult not to think of the Captain as yet another elder. If she hadn't known how often her elders could be wrong, she would have felt compelled to obey him in everything. That was something that she’d never dared admit to anyone else.
But there was no alternative. She needed his help.
The Captain smiled at her as he joined them in the schoolroom. “You brought us luck,” he said, cheerfully. “Ten percent of the profits will keep the old girl ticking a while longer.”
“Sameena wishes to talk about her plans,” Ethne explained. “You might want to listen to her.”
Sameena nodded, carefully formulating her thoughts. “The price of spare parts is going up,” she said. “And they’ve been going up slowly, but steadily for years. Even the Imperial Navy is having problems keeping their ships in working order. Half of the ships at the naval base have been cannibalised to keep the rest going.”
“That’s a known problem,” the Captain said, after a long moment. “Prices are going up everywhere.”
“But this is going to cause major problems, if it hasn't already,” Sameena said. “As shipping prices rise, demand falls because people cannot meet the prices. But if shipping prices don’t rise, freighter crews will be unable to pay their debts and they’ll lose their freighters. Either way, shipping in this sector becomes sharply reduced.”
The Captain shared a long glance with his wife. “Go on,” he said, shortly.
“But shipping isn't the only problem,” Sameena continued. “We need a steady supply of spare parts to keep the cloudscoops functioning and shipping to move the HE3 from its source to destination. If both of them happen to be sharply reduced, the supply of HE3 will be reduced too – either because they can't get it to where it’s needed or because the cloudscoops are breaking down. The price of HE3 will go upwards sharply. And that will be devastating.”
“Almost everything is powered by HE3,” Ethne said, quietly. “It’s why hardly anyone fired on the cloudscoops during the wars.”
“True enough,” Captain Hamilton said. There was a hint of challenge in his tone. “And what will happen then?”
“The lights will go out,” Sameena said. It had taken her several days to work out the whole scenario and she wasn't sure of the precise details, but she was sure she had the general idea right. “The only worlds that will be marginally untouched will be the ones that don’t depend on HE3 – or have the facilities to build and maintain new cloudscoops. For everyone else, interstellar trade will just wither away and much of the Empire will fall back to barbarism.”
“It will be worse than that,” Ethne predicted. “There will be civil war. Officers who feel slighted by the Grand Senate will see its grip weakening and make a grab for power. Worlds that were brought into the Empire by force will see their chance to try to regain their independence. Loyalists will see their support bases crumbling around them – God alone knows what will happen on Earth when the food shipments stop coming in from the Core Worlds.”
“There are eighty billion people on Earth,” Captain Hamilton said. “Eighty billion.”
Sameena couldn't even begin to comprehend such a number. Jannah’s population was just under a billion people, assuming that the census was accurate. The thought of so many people crammed onto a single world was terrifying. How could they possibly be fed and watered? They’d be eating each other within the week.
“It will be the end,” Ethne said, simply.
The Captain cleared his throat. “I think that many of us know that you’re right,
” he said. “What do you propose to do about it?”
Sameena lifted the datapad she’d used to make her calculations. “There are quite a few pieces of industrial machinery dumped in the system,” she said. “All outdated, by the Empire’s standards, but still usable with a little work. I could start buying it, along with a really old colonist-carrier that was placed into mothballs hundreds of years ago. Then we’d have a mobile factory that could produce spare parts.”
“Given time, you could create a much larger industrial base,” Captain Hamilton mused. “But it would be vulnerable ...”
“Not if it was mounted on a starship,” Sameena insisted. “The carrier remains in Phase Space, or outside the Phase Limit; smaller ships bring raw materials and HE3 to the mobile yard. I was thinking that we could start supplying spare parts to the freighters and cloudscoops, keeping the prices low. Apart from a handful of weapons systems, nothing we need has been patented.”
“There will be complaints,” Ethne observed. “Most spare parts are produced by corporations in the Core Worlds. Planets that try to set up their own space-capable industries either have to sign agreements or get stomped on, hard. It’s not technically illegal, but ...”
“Jamie hinted that the Imperial Navy might have to withdraw from Sungai Buloh,” Sameena said. “How long are they going to stay in the rest of the sector?”
“It’s Jamie now, is it?” Ethne asked. She grinned as Sameena flushed. “Glad to know that you had a good time.”
Her husband smiled. “A contact with the Imperial Navy might help you,” he said, seriously. “But you’re right. They may well withdraw ... in which case there would be no one to do the corporation’s dirty work.”
Ethne and her husband shared another long look. It struck Sameena, not for the first time, that they not only loved each other, but they understood each other. They had an easy companionship that Sameena’s parents had never shared, even after twenty years of marriage.
“You have a source of income,” Ethne said, finally. “You could probably build it up into a small industrial base.”
The Empire's Corps: Book 05 - The Outcast Page 15