by Rolf Nelson
The delivery coordinator inhaled slowly as he watched Tajemnica descend to the loading pad. He was used to much sleeker, smaller, more discreet-looking ships with their nature, and defensive armaments, well concealed. Seeing a ship with so many guns and missile pods it almost looked cartoonish, when everyone above him was freaking out, was just too funny. The loading area was a modest sized amphitheater with well-hidden and armored gun emplacements that could uncover and fire on any unauthorized ships at a moment’s notice, but for the first time he wasn’t convinced he had more firepower at his command than the ship he faced did. In fact, as he counted turrets and missile pods, he was near certain firing first was tantamount to suicide. When the ramps crashed down, two squads of marines, powered assault armor festooned with weapons at the ready, dispersed from ends and side ramps with an alacrity he hardly thought possible. They took positions near doors, anything resembling cover, and various points well away from the ship where its destruction would leave them alone to return fire, confirmed his opinion. Perhaps not professional money transporters, but they were absolutely serious professionals.
All but one of the marines totally ignored him as he walked out to greet the small group in civilian attire standing next to the machine mounted on the lowered ramp. Extending his hand to the man that appeared to be the leader of the group he introduced himself. “Mike Lee, delivery coordinator. I assume all the paperwork has been taken care of properly?”
Helton shook the hand firmly with a warm smile. “Pretty sure you’d have fired on us already if it weren’t. So, you have it all lined up for us?”
“Mostly. We-”
“Mostly?!”Bipasha cut him off.
Mike nodded unapologetically. “We had very short notice of your arrival, and some of the metal is in the deepest vaults. Our systems are designed for security, not maximum loading efficiency. As we load and verify materials, contracts, serial numbers, and all the rest, I’m sure the remainder will catch up to us. Our lifts can only move so much at a time. No need to worry.”
Satisfied with the answer, Helton forestalled any further objections from his crew with his businesslike reply. “Let’s get started, then, shall we? Any order you have it in is fine.”
Mike Lee waved toward one of the dozen armored doors at the edge of the amphitheater. A small powered cart with a covered plastic pallet on the back rolled out, and over toward them, covered the whole way by several guns and eyes. Stopping at foot of the ramp, the driver and his assistant hopped off and uncover the pallet, revealing a stack of ten kilogram gold ingots that gleamed in the sunlight. One of the white-gloved assistants picked up an ingot and set it carefully into the feed tray of the MPCIC2800, where it was smoothly pulled in and carefully checked. A side-screen lit up with the relevant statistical data, beeping politely and giving visual confirmation that the bar was genuine and one of the contracted ingots from its serial number. As it rolled out the back end and another was fed in behind it to be evaluated, a side-panel in the cargo bay lit up with an arrow indicating which of the many pallets that are set up and ready to receive the metal it should go on. A waiting crewman, one of the recently former conscripts, hefted it with a big grin on his face before he hustled off to stack it, making room for the next man ready to carry and ingot that was already being loaded in.
Each piece took only a couple of seconds to handle and verify, and the first pallet load with its metric ton of gold was rapidly loaded aboard, and the cart rolled away to be quickly replaced by a second one that approached from a different amphitheater door. The drivers and their assistants handled the metal on the cart, Mike Lee oversaw and orchestrated their actions, and Tajemnica’s crew handled the metal once it was determined to be genuine and proper.
The marines watched the perimeter and non-crew personnel, silent sentinels-statues of steel to any external observer.
It wasn’t until the eighth cartload was almost empty that the MPCIC2800 blared loudly and rejected a bar, pushing it back out the loading gate with a red flashing light and several failed criteria. “Density mismatch! Sound conduction velocity mismatch! Micro X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy mismatch!” To the naked eye, the ingot looked like any other except that it didn’t have a serial number stamped into all six sides. Mortified, eyes wide, one of the loading assistants tossed the bar he was about to load back onto the nearly empty pallet and grabbed the rejected ingot before it crashed to the ground. Having caught it, he froze, looking back and forth from a silent Mike to the impassive Helton. Nobody else moved.
“Not my bar, not my problem,” Helton said evenly. “I assume you have others.” Mike and the loading assistants breathed a sigh of relief as the bar was tucked into a bag and placed back on the cart, quite distinctly not on the pallet it came from.
Pallet ten had two rejected bars that received the same bland response. Though they didn’t know it, John Fredrix was watching progress on a screen in his office, pacing fast, smoking hard, sweating profusely, and trying to not drink any more than he already had as he watched his vault slowly be emptied to a level it hadn’t experienced since it was built. On a muted wall screen a pretty young news reader he’d met last week was angrily reporting the action on the market melt-ups, melt-downs, and problems, under the story banner of Who’s Responsible?
When cart twelve showed up, progress slowed as the gold bullion was no longer in large ingot form. One kilo bars, 250 gram bars, 25 gram bars, and various round medallions and coins made up the majority of it, though a few packages of tiny 5 gram rounds looking like nothing more than glittery sequins passed through the machine. Finally, all the contracted gold was accounted for and loaded aboard, pallets covered and secured firmly to the deck.
Then the silver started flowing, starting with the 25 kilogram rough-cast ingots, each stamped with actual weight and purity assay numbers, being independently verified by the machine before being manhandled into position in one or another of the cargo bay side storage compartments. Only four of the ingots from the one hundred and thirty metric tons of silver were rejected for unacceptable impurity. After the first twenty five tons were loaded, it started being less exciting and more like work, and casual comments slowly turned into quiet labor.
Watching as another pallet was emptied, Mike asked Helton what he knew about it. “Not much. Filling some sort of Plataean manufacturing contract. Might be batteries, might be electronics. Maybe preparing ammo for a werewolf apocalypse. All I know is they take their contracts seriously-” he tipped his head to indicate the powered armor statues around them “-and pay well.”
It took a while to load, and they were down to the last few bags of beautifully-minted ten-gram round medallions before it was completed under the bright white lights, unseen stars, and silent gaze of marine guards and Tajemnica’s guns.
While the men and women on the trading floor were mostly not dealing with it directly, they were intensely aware of the nearby activity, and were unusually terse and focused as they watched prices climb, orders flow in, metal flow out, and the situation becoming more and more impossible to unwind gracefully. Margins had been pumped up higher than ever before, but few weak hands were selling out, the stock market was falling, bond yields were climbing as their prices fell, and they all knew part of the picture but were forbidden from doing anything other than their jobs by the insider-trading laws (though not all of them were keeping their hands off their personal and highly secure coms to help out a friend or two). Most of them were starting to experience the first ulcers of their lives.
While the last few bags of silver coins were being verified, a ragged-looking Fredrix had his pacing interrupted by his secretary sticking her head in his door. “Excuse me, sir-” She dodged the whiskey tumbler thrown at her that smashed on the door.
“Don’t bother me I said!” John screamed at her.
But the shaken secretary pressed on. “I tried to buzz you. There is a minister Akwara Diallo on the line.” John looked at her uncomprehendingly. “He says he’s overhead rig
ht now requesting clearance to land. He’s here to personally oversee the delivery of his nation’s contracted gold repatriation transfer order. All nine tons.”
John sat, heavily, in his chair. Impossible, he thought. Simply inconceivable. A sovereign order delivery now? There was no way out. The vault were empty of virtually all genuine metal. There was nothing to deliver. He doubted there was even enough bank cash to give the exchange an emergency loan with to cover a buyout, there was no way to avoid proper accounting for that large a transaction with the auditing board, and even then the press would be positively horrible. If he had more time, a few weeks for the next load to come in, or time to send a message to Earth to get a loan. He took a long drag on his heavily laced cigarette, exhaling slowly as he reached for the scotch bottle. Suddenly he froze, ignoring the buzzing of his secretaries words. Time. He needed time. Maybe… Just maybe…
He exploded into action as he saw the last cart driving away from the ramp, the ship’s crew turning to go up the ramp. Hitting a button and yelling, his voice echoed across the concrete and steel amphitheater, raspy from smoking and crackling with desperation. “WAIT!”
Everyone on the ramp froze, then slowly turned around, making no sudden motions. Turning off the PA system, he yelled to the cringing woman in the doorway to get him a direct secure line to the ship’s captain right that second, and she scurried to comply while Helton and the rest stood uncertainly on the ramp, looking to the delivery coordinator, the still-closed doors around the edge, and the defensive emplacements higher up.
After several tense seconds tick by, the com unit on Mike’s belt buzzed. Putting it to his ear silently, he listens a moment, then handed it to Helton with a perplexed expression. “For you.”
Helton listened for a minute, face revealing no emotion, with everyone watching him expectantly. “How much?” He said finally. After another long pause he shook his head, “Nope,” and handed the phone back. The cursing coming from the com may not have been distinct, but the emotion the noise carried was. Lee held the com at arm’s length, as though it was a snake giving him the eye, not sure what to do with it. Holding somewhat closer to his ear so he could understand the words, a moment later he handed it back, motioning to Helton that Fredrix wanted to continue to negotiate.
Again everyone watched, unclear as to what was happening or why, as Helton listened. He glanced at a price chart going parabolic on a nearby screen. “Not my problem, Mr. Fredrix…. Possession is nine-tenths of the law, and I’m pretty sure the other tenth and the heavy weapons are both on our side, too…. No, I seriously doubt you could stop us if you wanted to…. Oh, are you sure about that? Still having an issue understanding that whole not my problem concept, eh? The only reason you’d want to do this is if you needed to fill a contract that has an even higher penalty than ours… So that means you have a national contact that you’d default on at treble current market price in penalties, and an utterly ruined reputation. That’s pretty steep. Make one more offer. If it’s not good enough, we take off and your issue of selling things you don’t have stays your problem. If it’s worth my trouble to figure out a way to make up the nine tons elsewhere before I have to make delivery within eighteen days, I’ll help you out.”
The tone of the voice coming from the com turned from angry to cajoling to wheedling to begging in short order. At last Helton nodded curtly. “Agreed. One point three billion in cash. No bonds, receipts, transfers, counter-contracts, or other negotiables. All cash for nine tons of the serialized ingots. We unload when you have the cash at the foot of the ramp, if you can do that within the hour.”
Helton handed the com back to the delivery coordinator before calling back up the ramp to the men, now hot and tired from a long day moving heavy ingots of precious metal. “Change of plans. We’re selling some of it back. Nine tons.” He was rewarded by groans all around.
While they start removing the tie-downs securing it, Mike was receiving instructions. A short while later a cart with a pallet of neatly bundled, stacked, and plastic-wrapped hundred-notes on the back arrives from one of the loading doors that hadn’t been used before. Taj’s mechanical arm, now with a normal fork-lift attachment on it, snaked out from a side-hatch and plucks it smoothly from the back of the cart and deposited it on the cargo deck.
Looking at it in wonder, Lee asked, half fearing the answer, “Want to count it?”
Helton’s reply drew wry chuckles from the assemblage “Why, no plans for this evening? We’ll get to that. Bring the rest up.” A half-hour later there are a dozen more pallets of cash sitting on the deck, each having been briefly opened and spot-checked, and nine tons of gold had been returned to the vaults.
Lifting
John Fredrix watched, cursing softly to himself while trying to drown his sorrows, as the ramp rose, hoping it wasn’t sealing his fate as it flew away with money that wasn’t his to use. The Nigerian was headed down to pick up the gold, leaving the vaults all but empty. Further, Security informed him that a number of ships were inbound or had already gathered overhead at high altitude, but most of them were not being very informative about their entry into controlled space over such a sensitive location. Nothing overtly hostile, but it was one too many coincidences to be comfortable with. In normal times it would have made him very cautious. But now? He didn’t have anything left to steal. He really hoped nothing else went astray, because everything would have to come together perfectly for him to have any chance of coming through it.
From his bridge on Montserrat in orbit high above, Captain Nomon watched in slightly puzzled bemusement at the odd gaggle of ships congregating above a very interesting location on the planet’s surface below. Three small older liners, a pair of heavily modified cargo haulers, fifteen private space yachts in various states of repair, a garish chartreuse microbus that was broadcasting live sermons, and three ships that could be Orion variants… or perhaps Tajemnica itself. They’d been watching the landing closely with passives and occasional active measures as well, and the normal news channels of course, but they saw no signs of anything other than a normal, legal, landing and business transaction. The business news channel had a lot to say, but nothing that was entirely unexpected. Still, he wondered just what the rest of the plan Helton had could possibly be.
Looking around the bridge, the steady routine of monitoring on-board systems and universe beyond her hull continued as always. There had been a lot of rethinking of tactics, orders, methods, and pretty much everything in the last week. He was both happier and less certain about anything than he’d ever been, and it was an odd feeling. A blinking light over at the tactical console caught his attention.
Incoming transition detected. Preliminary profile analysis indicated it was likely a Geminorum carrier group, even though they were not expecting any. Fifteen minutes later two more incoming carriers transitioned into the system, and five minutes later another. He considered the possibilities, and they all looked bad for Tajemnica. Even with her incredible acceleration she’d be spending a lot of time running more or less toward one of them given their positions and preliminary acceleration vectors. They were heading inbound at maximum power, each flinging out a wide net of cruisers and interceptors. The carriers must know Tajemnica was here, and were going balls to the wall to nail her in open space after being made fools of on the ground. He knew the feeling well, but had gotten over it, knowing what he now knew. The XO and the rest let him be with his thoughts, knowing well he was conflicted about it. They all were.
“Lifting.” The terse word could only mean one thing: a resolution of some sort was at hand. Everyone not immediately occupied with other duties studied the various sensor and tactical feeds intently. Tajemnica’s acceleration vector was pretty modest. Sedate, even. Certainly not acting like she was aware that multiple carrier fleets were inbound. But then… he, of all people, knew that Taj and her crew had more tricks up their sleeves than an eight-armed card dealer, and he was glad he didn’t have to try and second-guess what they
would do now. But watching them slow to match velocities with the odd cluster of ships would not even be on his fifth or sixth string of guesses.
Going for a space-walk to every nearby ship was even less likely. But apparently it was scheduled, and what happened. He silently agreed with the several crew members who expressed in various ways a fundamental sense of what the hell? about what they were watching.
All the while the hard-pushed carrier fleets continued their headlong drive in-system not saying anything on the radio, but clearly indicating their deadly intent by their actions. Further out on the periphery of the system the remaining upgraded Orions transitioned closer in-system to a pre-designated assembly point as the EM signature of the incoming fleets reached them hours after it happened. But, much to the surprise of those aboard the military personnel watching, once together they didn’t start vectoring to intercept any of the four carrier fleets, appearing to be content to wait and watch.
On board Tajemnica there was only slightly less skepticism among the crew as a dozen men in spacesuits with independent maneuvering units rapidly exited and spread out to make a quick visit to each of the assembled ships. Upon reaching a designated ship, the spacewalking men attached a set of small, streamlined devices packed with sensors and other electronics around the ship before entering through the airlock to drop off some other equipment with the crew inside. The whole process took nearly two hours to complete and for the crew to return.
On Tajemnica’s bridge Helton, Quiritis, and Kaushik tried to explain to the other captains and pilots what the plan was, and Taj monitored the sensor placement and control integration, but didn’t bother notifying anyone but Helton about the inbound carriers; it would just worry them, and it wouldn’t make anything get done faster.